Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It

by Gabriel Wyner

I encountered three basic keys to language learning: 1. Learn pronunciation first. 2. Don’t translate. 3. Use spaced repetition systems.

we will do it by adding four types of connections: structure, sound, concept, and personal connection. These are the four levels of processing.

To keep you sane, your brain consistently works at the shallowest level of processing needed to get the job done.

You’ll start by learning the sounds of your language and which letters make those sounds, because if you begin with sound, you’ll have a much easier time remembering words.

We prioritize and store concrete concepts because they engage more of our brains, not because they’re necessarily any more important than other information.

We’ll get better results if we skip the English word and use an image instead.

We recall images much better than words, because we automatically think conceptually when we see an image.

Our capacity for visual memory is extraordinary; we only need to learn how to take advantage of it.

You will remember a concept with a personal connection 50 percent more easily than a concept without one, which

If you simply ask yourself, “When’s the last time I saw a gato?” you will add a personal connection and cement your memory of the word. Easy.

Learn the sound system of your language • Bind those sounds to images • Bind those images to your past experiences

Extra repetition is known as overlearning, and it doesn’t help long-term memory at all.

When you study by reading through a list multiple times, you’re practicing reading, not recall. If you want to get better at recalling something, you should practice recalling it.

This rewriting process is the engine behind long-term memorization. Every act of recall imbues old memories with a trace of your present-day self. This trace gives those memories additional connections: new images, emotions, sounds, and word associations that make your old memory easier to recall. Once you’ve rewritten these memories enough times, they become unforgettable.

Feedback allows us to resuscitate forgotten memories and get the most out of our practice sessions.

Learn new cards at a rate that you know you can maintain.

When dealing with a bloated review pile, continue learning two to three new words per day. It will spice things up a bit without adding much to your time commitment.

Accent is the soul of language; it gives language its feeling and truth.

An accurate accent is powerful because it is the ultimate gesture of empathy. It connects you to another person’s culture in a way that words never can, because you have bent your body as well as your mind to match that person’s culture.

We’re looking for a way to see what we’re hearing and, equally important, what we’re not hearing.

But even for those languages, a phonetic alphabet can make your job easier in two ways: it helps you to see and hear whenever a sound rule shows up—when you’re reading wugs but saying “wugz”—and it gives you one more way to look at the same information. Because of the quirky nature of memory, this makes your task easier. By learning more, you’ll work less.

You’re building connections between your ears, your mouth, spelling, and a phonetic alphabet.

If you’re trying to make the “foreign” sounds of your new language familiar, then your easiest, shortest path is to learn as much as you possibly can about those sounds.

As long as I could connect every new thing I learned to this universe, I had an easy time with math. And I noticed that classmates who had problems with math weren’t struggling with math; they were struggling with connections.

Math can be hard for the same reason that languages can be hard. At some point, you miss a connection, and if no one goes back, takes you by the hand, and shows you that connection, then you’re suddenly doomed to memorize crappy formulae.

Every time we can connect two memories, we strengthen both of them—neurons that fire together wire together. If

By adding more pieces to learn, you’re making your job much easier. You’re learning faster, which means less work over time.

If you see something as useful, then it’s worth learning. If not, then not.

On the other hand, if a sound seems foreign and difficult, then go nuts. Learn everything. Learn its spellings, its behavior in your mouth, its relationship to the other sounds you already know. See how your textbook or dictionary notates it. Find some example words. Do whatever you can; the more you do, the less work it will be. It’s magic.

To paraphrase Rousseau, when we learn an accent, we are taking on the soul of that language. This isn’t work; it’s communion.

Get acquainted with Forvo.com. Free, native-speaker recordings of more than 2 million words in three hundred languages. Once you start making flash cards, Forvo will become your best friend. If you’re using Anki, put recordings from Forvo into your flash cards.

Rhinospike.com (FREE RECORDINGS OF SENTENCES): Rhinospike is a handy website for native-speaker recordings. You submit a text and someone will record it for you, usually within twenty-four to forty-eight hours. If your textbook has a list of minimal pairs but doesn’t come with a recording of those words, you can get someone on Rhinospike to record those words for you. It’s also a lovely place to get recordings of full sentences with intonation, so if your textbook has some example sentences, put them up on Rhinospike as well.

ESSENTIAL TOOL!—MY PRONUNCIATION YOUTUBE SERIES (Fluent-Forever.com/chapter3): Go watch these. They take you on a tour of your mouth and the IPA. They make pronunciation understandable, and they give you access to one of the most powerful pronunciation tools available, the IPA.

ESSENTIAL TOOL!—WIKIPEDIA’S IPA FOR SPANISH, IPA FOR FRENCH, AND SO ON is a tool I mentioned earlier. You can copy all of its example words for each sound, and you can use it with Appendix 4 to get mouth i...

Digital dictionaries with pronunciation information are extremely handy if you’re using Anki; you can put in your word, copy the pronunciation information, and paste it directly onto your flash cards in seconds.

THE FOREIGN SERVICE INSTITUTE (fsi-language-courses.org) has forty-one languages’ worth of free, public-domain textbooks online, most of which come with MP3s, and about half of which start with a detailed pronunciation section, complete with minimal pair tests, spelling rules, and the works.

MY PRONUNCIATION TRAINERS (Fluent-Forever.com/chapter3) provide you with minimal pair tests, spelling rules, example words, and enough vocabulary to ingrain the sounds and spelling patterns of your new language in your head. They run on Anki, and over the course of using them, you’ll get a sense for how Anki works (and you’ll be ready to make your own flash cards).

ITALKI.COM can get you in touch with native speakers, who will talk with you or train you for very small amounts of money or in exchange for an equal amount of time speaking in English. You can spend an hour going through words with them and asking them to correct your pronunciation, which can help immensely.

GOOD PRONUNCIATION GUIDEBOOK will come with a CD, provide diagrams of your mouth and tongue, and walk you through the entire pronunciation system of your language. The best of these will include minimal pair tests. These books don’t exist in every language, but they’re extraordinarily helpful when they do.

A word in your brain contains within it every neural pattern it’s ever connected.

It is an impossible thing, a word.

All of these pieces—the bits of grammar, the sounds, the spellings, the meanings and the connected words—are contained within the immense symphony

You have multilayered instincts built into your “dog,” and you lose those instincts the moment you translate that word into another language. Why? Because translations strip the music out of words.

Each language has its own frequency list (the best frequency dictionaries are published by Routledge), and they are fascinating, both because of the words they include and the words they don’t.

When you research a word using Google Images, you’re playing the Spot the Differences game; you’re looking for the difference between what you expect to see, and what you actually see.

You can make your words more memorable in two ways: • By investigating the stories they tell • By connecting those stories to your own life

If your language has grammatical gender, you can memorize it easily if you assign each gender a particularly vivid action and then imagine each of your nouns performing that action.

The written language is, in fact, our first foreign language—a dialect of our native tongue that each of us learns with varying degrees of success.

Grammar creates infinite possibilities out of a finite collection of words. It’s an impossible kind of magic, and yet we use it on a daily basis without the slightest thought or effort.

All of grammar’s infinite possibilities are the product of three basic operations: we add words (You like it Do you like it?), we change their forms (I eat I ate), and we change their order (This is nice Is this nice?).