So the 4070 rule was the decision making rule created by a man named Colin Powell. So Colin Powell was a former US Secretary of State in America at one point, he used this rule to help him to make more effective and optimal decisions. So the rule states that 40% is the least amount of information you need to know, to make an effective decision. And 70% is the most amount of information that you need to know to make an effective decision. So we can use this rule to help us to determine when to speak when it comes to language learning. So looking back on French, Spanish, Italian, I have now come to the conclusion that party percent was the least amount of information I needed to know to speak.
And 70% was the most amount of information that I needed to know to speak. So when I was learning French, I wasn't aware of this. When I was learning Spanish and Italian I was a little bit more of an artist. So when I was learning French, I had a tendency to have it in my head that I speak French when I'm about 7080 90% fluent, and then I can speak to French natives. In reality, it doesn't work that way. So I found that 40% is the most you want to delay it to.
That way you get to practice and repetition and a lot earlier and you get better at the language quicker. If you're waiting till about 70 80%. You don't really know how to measure that. are you measuring that by 70% of 20,000 words? are you measuring that by 70% of 2000 words, it's very arbitrary. So I found my day to day now, now that I know French, Spanish, Italian to different varying degrees or levels.
I can also understand a lot of Portuguese without ever learning it is the similarities between the languages. What I can do now is focused on words and keywords and verbs and a few conjugations that would help me to start speaking in Portuguese, so I want to start shifting more to proactive vocabularies and passive vocabulary. So that's the decision making rule. That's how it can help you to start speaking quicker looking Back in my university days as well, I was always wondering why the a mark was about 75%. I always thought that was a bit low. But now it makes sense if you apply it to the real world, whenever I'm in the conversation, if I know about 8075, to maybe 85% of what's being said in French, that's, that's good, you can still get the basics of the language or the interaction, you will understand the meaning we have to ask confirmation questions, you'll be able to interact effectively.
When it comes to Spanish and Italian, sometimes it could be as little as 40%, or 50%, or 60%, that I'll understand, but I'll still be able to find figure my way out of different things. So that's basically the 4070 rule. I hope this shed some light on when to speak. So basically, the quicker you speak, the better. You don't even have to wait 40% it's all dependent on your confidence levels and whether maybe this is your first language or not. But the faster you speak, the better in general.
So that's the party 70 rule. In the next video, we're going to talk about AD 20 principle as it applies to language learning, so see you in the next video