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

by Gabriel Wyner

structure, sound, concept, and personal connection. These are the four levels of processing. They were identified in

Sound is the way we connect our thoughts to our bodies. We see an eagle in the sky, we turn to a companion, and our tongue flies

(FREE RECORDINGS OF WORDS): First things first. 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. If you’re using a Leitner box, go through your vocabulary list at least once a week, read your newest words aloud, play their recordings

Boy, those French! They have a different word for everything. —Steve Martin

not as if the chords we play are simple; they contain thousands of notes, connecting sound and spelling to meaning and grammar. The grammar provides the lowest notes: You and I would never talk about “an dog” or “dog,” as we might talk about “an elephant” or “beer.” This is the grammar of a dog, and it vibrates in our skulls—a throbbing, sustained tone from the cello section.

Some people have a way with words, and other people … oh, uh, not have way. —Steve Martin

send that image to another person. They’re the basic substance of each word, and as you learn your words, this substance will

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.

When kids learn languages, they follow a series of predictable stages. In English, for example, they begin with simple sentences that resemble our SLEEP EAT WORK stories from earlier: birdie go (The bird has gone), doggie jump (The dog is jumping). Shortly before they reach three years of age, they begin to use the -ing form of verbs (doggie jumping). Within six months, they’ve added the irregular past tense (birdies went) and is (daddy is big). Then, finally, come the regular past tense verbs (doggie jumped) and the present tense verbs in the third person (Daddy eats). Every English-speaking kid goes through these stages in the same order. According to researchers, you will never find a kid who learns to say “Mommy works” before “Mommy working.”

If we feed our language machines enough comprehensible input, then we will automatically learn our new language’s grammar, just as we did as kids. Kids seem to succeed at language learning where adults

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?). That’s it. And it’s not just English. Every language’s grammar

But all of this complexity is the product of simple operations: There are a couple of new words (was and by), one new word form (ate turned into eaten) and the word order changed.

• Do you see any new words here? • Do you see any new word forms here? • Is the word order surprising to you? Then you’ll make flash

person or an object. For noun patterns, use a person or an action. Adjectives fit well with objects, and adverbs fit well with actions.

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.