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We want to walk up to someone, open our mouths, forget the rules, and speak automatically.
You’ll have to determine for yourself whether your image of fluency includes political discussions with friends, attending poetry readings, working as a secret agent, or lecturing on quantum physics at the Sorbonne.
Successful gym rats learn to find the joy (and endorphins) in grueling daily workouts.
this book, we’re going to addict ourselves to language learning.
neurons that fire together wire together. Known as Hebb’s Law, this principle helps explain how we remember anything.
Extra repetition is known as overlearning, and it doesn’t help long-term memory at all.
After all, lazy is just another word for “efficient.”
Henry Molaison.
The same one as in deep work?
If it’s hard to remember, it’ll be difficult to forget.
Rock and lock are classic members of a special group of words known as minimal pairs. These are pairs of words that differ by only one sound, and every language is full of them.
A QUICK TOUR OF THE PRONUNCIATION TOOL SHED (LINKS AT Fluent-Forever.com
Some people have a way with words, and other people … oh, uh, not have way.
Each language has its own frequency list (the best frequency dictionaries are published by Routledge),
In Appendix 5, you’ll find a list of 625 words (in English)
Check later
You’ll want to build new, meaningful associations into every word you learn. Finally, you’ll want personal connections. While your new words may not line up perfectly with their English translations, they will line up with your own experiences.
First you learn the instrument, then you learn the music, then you forget all that s**t and just play.
Le génie n’est que l’enfance retrouvée à volonté. Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will. —Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays
Kids don’t learn their language from just any kind of language input. The only input that seems to matter is input that kids can understand. In linguistic circles, this is known as comprehensible input.
In contrast, you can’t teach a kid Japanese by merely showing him Japanese TV shows, even if you sit him in front of the TV for hundreds of hours. TV just doesn’t make enough sense; it’s missing that universal translator—real cookies and real interactions—and so it’s not comprehensible input.
Self-directed writing is the ultimate personalized language class. The moment you try to write
about your upcoming vacation without the word for “vacation” or the future tense, you learn precisely what bits of language you’re missing.
The problem with subtitles is that reading is easier than listening. We learn with our eyes
Which TV series should you watch? Choose whatever you like, as long as it’s not comedy. There is nothing quite as terrible as listening to a long
German joke, reaching the end, and realizing that you don’t understand the punch line, because it’s a crappy pun on some rare word that only exists in some ridiculous German dialect. Don’t do this to yourself.
Fluency, after all, isn’t the ability to know every word and grammatical pattern in a language; it’s the ability to communicate your thoughts without stopping every time you run into a problem.
Suppose you’re learning the word chèvre (goat). You could make one flash card that asks “What’s a chèvre?” and another flash card that asks “What’s this?”
