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

by Gabriel Wyner

A good grammar book will walk you through your language’s grammar in a thoughtful, step-by-step manner.1 On the way, it will introduce you to a thousand words or so, give you a bunch of examples and exercises, and provide you with an answer key. You will skip 90 percent of the exercises in the book, but having them around will save you a lot of time once we begin to learn grammar. If the book gives you “Englishy” pronunciation for each word (Bonjour: bawn-JURE, Tschüss: chewss), I give you permission to burn it and find a different one. Walking into a Parisian cafe and saying “bawn-JURE” is a good way to get ignored indefinitely by the waiter. If your new book comes with a CD, then so much the better.

we do have technology that can help us learn faster. This technology derives its power from five principles of memory: • Make memories more memorable. • Maximize laziness. • Don’t review. Recall. • Wait, wait! Don’t tell me! • Rewrite the past.

Qualsiasi dato diventa importante se è connesso a un altro. Any fact becomes important when it’s connected to another. —Umberto Eco, Foucault’s Pendulum

an elegantly simple, mechanical process: neurons that fire together wire together. Known as Hebb’s Law, this principle helps explain how we remember anything.

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

Memory researchers in the 1960s subjected college students to one of the most terrifyingly-named memory tests ever invented: the Two-Alternative Forced-Choice Test. In it, college students were shown 612 magazine ads (possibly tied to chairs with their eyes held open) and then asked to identify the old pictures when shown a new mixture of images. The students correctly picked the old images 98.5 percent of the time.

if we’re trying to keep something substantial in it—like telephone numbers, the names of people we’ve just met, or new foreign words—we can expect to remember a paltry 30 percent the following day.

Extra repetition is known as overlearning, and it doesn’t help long-term memory at all. Can you remember a single fact from the last school test you crammed for? Can you even remember the test itself? If we’re going to invest our time in a language, we want to remember for months, years, or decades. If we can’t achieve this goal by working harder, then we’ll do it by working as little as possible.

Odd as it is, this follows rules of common sense. 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.

While we can try to trick our brains into getting excited over a list of Spanish words, our brains know better.

Our blank page, however, changes everything. At the moment where your performance is judged, your brain realizes that it had better get its act in gear. As a result, every memory you recall gets a squirt of memory-boosting chemicals.

Your blank sheet of paper has created a drug-fueled memory party in your brain. Your boring word list never stood a chance.

Additional studies show a 5:1 benefit for testing over studying, meaning that five minutes of testing is worth twenty-five minutes of studying.

What wasn’t yet discussed is how terrifying this is for language learning. It is not that he misinterprets what he hears; he literally cannot hear the difference between these two sounds. As far as his brain is concerned, the words rock and lock might as well be spelled the same. In learning English, he is fighting his own brain. How can he possibly hope to succeed?

To be fair, a good accent can occasionally get you in a bit of trouble. A few years ago, I went to Japan and learned a few simple Japanese phrases. I remember walking up to a lady and asking where to find the nearest department store. Her eyes opened wide, surprised by the tall lanky white guy addressing her with a half-decent Japanese accent. Then she exploded into a rapid-fire, paragraph-long answer to my question. I winced, put up my hands, and blabbered something in Japanese on the order of “Japanese! I! No! A little! A little little! Is!” She stopped, laughed a bit, and pointed to the left. All in all, I think developing a good accent is worth the effort, even if it makes people think you know more than you do.

Paris has a particularly bad reputation on this front; as rumor has it, a momentary “bawn-JURE” will spoil your meal in any restaurant.14 But you will see this everywhere. People with strong foreign accents are frequently treated as less adept at the language (and less intelligent as a person) than they are.

the more you can learn about something, the easier time you’ll have mastering it, and the less time you’ll need over the long term. 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. They were trying to memorize equations, but no one had successfully shown them how those equations connect with everything they had already learned. They were doomed.