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

by Gabriel Wyner

The world’s languages contain roughly 800 phonemes (six hundred consonants and two hundred vowels). Most languages choose around 40 of these to form their words,

You can’t easily hear the distinctions between the ten t’s because you’ve learned to ignore them.

We tend to think of r and l as two distinct sounds, but they are not. Each consonant is a group of sounds that are roughly similar.

It is not that he misinterprets what he hears; he literally cannot hear the difference between these two sounds.

I’m making it a personal mission to provide minimal pair tests on my website in as many languages as I can find (Fluent-Forever.com/chapter3).

How does ear training cause all of this to happen? You’ve given yourself the ability to recognize individual sounds, but that’s not the end of the story. Because you’ve spent time focusing on those sounds, you’ll be aware of the subtle changes that occur when you string those sounds together. This gives you two superpowers: you can hear sound rules, and you can hear when those rules are broken.

If your ears are sensitive to each new sound in your language, you will notice when there’s a strange sound rule afoot, and every time you notice it, you’ll get closer to internalizing it.

If you can hear all of the sounds in your language, then you might get surprised by the spelling of a word but never by the sound of a word.

KEY POINTS • Your brain is hardwired to ignore the differences between foreign sounds. To rewire it, listen to minimal pairs in your target language—similar sounding words like niece and knees—and test yourself until your brain adapts to hear these new sounds. • By practicing in this way, you’ll be better equipped to recognize words when they’re spoken, and you’ll have an easier time memorizing them on your own.

Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care. —Theodore Roosevelt

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.

To learn how bonjour fits into your companion’s mouth and tongue; to learn how to manipulate the muscles, the folds, and even the texture of your throat and lips to match your companion’s—this is an unmistakable, undeniable, and irresistible gesture of care.

People with strong foreign accents are frequently treated as less adept at the language (and less intelligent as a person) than they are.

We all go a little nuts when we don’t feel understood.

I’ve frequently heard that it’s impossible to perfect an accent after the age of twelve. But this can’t be true; actors and singers do it all the time, and we’re not any smarter or better than the rest of humanity.

We pick up an awareness of the everyday movements of our tongues and lips, and we combine them in a few new ways.

Now what? Each of the sounds isn’t particularly hard, but how do you get your tongue to jump through so many hoops in a row? Go backward. Say the end of the word, and then add one letter at a time until you can say the whole thing.

Tongue Tricks Back-chaining is, incidentally, the cheat code for tongue twisters. You can use it to combine words in the same way you would use it for letters.

This is called back-chaining, and it’s an old singer trick that can work tongue-related miracles.

While your tongue can’t handle eight new movements at once, it can handle a single new combination of two familiar sounds.

By making the end of a word as easy and familiar as possible, you’ll never get lost on the way there.

KEY POINTS • Impressions matter, and your accent makes your first impression in any language. A good accent can make the difference between a conversation that starts in French and ends in English, and a full conversation in French. • Improve your accent by learning the raw ingredients—the tongue, lip, and vocal cord positions—of every new sound you need. You can find that information in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). • If you run into difficult combinations of sounds, back-chain them together until your tongue performs automatically.

There is only one prerequisite to learning a new pattern: we need to notice it when it passes by.

sometimes we need to be told what we’re hearing before we can truly hear it.

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

When I learn a language, I tend to use a combination of recordings and a phonetic alphabet, at least until the little French man in my head starts sounding very French.

By learning more, you’ll work less.

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.

The key is relevance. If you see something as useful, then it’s worth learning.

KEY POINTS • Every language contains a pattern of connections between its spelling and its sounds. If you can internalize that pattern and make it automatic, you’ll save yourself a great deal of work. • The easiest way to internalize those patterns is to use your SRS. Create flash cards to memorize every spelling pattern you need. • In the process, approach foreign sounds and complex patterns from as many angles as you can—from their spellings to their sounds, even down to the individual mouth positions used for each sound. You’re taking advantage of one of the stranger quirks of learning: the more bits and pieces you learn, the less work it takes to learn them.

Sound is the way we connect our thoughts to our bodies.

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

If your grammar book comes with recordings, it likely contains a series of pronunciation lessons scattered through the book. Ignore all the vocabulary and grammar in your book and jump to each pronunciation section.

FREE RESOURCES ESSENTIAL TOOL!—Forvo.com (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.

There’s no reason to become fluent in a badly pronounced language, because no one will speak it with you.

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.

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 instructions for any weird sound in your target language.

ONLINE DICTIONARIES (Wiktionary.org): Wiktionary is turning into a great resource for many languages, with pronunciat...

In the last chapter, we learned how to hear a language’s sounds, but we haven’t yet learned to hear its music.

A word in your brain contains within it every neural pattern it’s ever connected. Your “dog” contains a fragment of every dog you have ever seen, heard, or read about. It’s shaped by thousands of experiences that you and I have never shared, and yet we can talk about “dog” and our brains light up in mostly the same way.

Words are, after all, our communal brain.

All of these pieces—the bits of grammar, the sounds, the spellings, the meanings and the connected words—are contained within the immense symphony known as “dog.” And the moment I tell you that sobaka is the Russian word for “dog,” that whole symphony collapses into a single, out-of-tune horn solo. Bwaaaap.

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

English has at least a quarter of a million words. But if you only knew the top hundred words in English, you’d recognize half of everything you read. We get a lot of mileage out of our most frequent words.

With only a thousand words, you’ll recognize nearly 75 percent of what you read. With two thousand, you’ll hit 80 percent.

KEY POINTS • You use certain words much more frequently than others. Learn those first.

Use Small Dictionaries Lonely Planet Phrasebooks and glossaries at the end of grammar books are great resources, because they only contain the most basic words. A big dictionary might give you ten synonyms for “house.” You only need one right now, and you’ll find it easily in your glossary or phrase book.

To create a deep, multisensory memory for a word, you’ll need to combine several ingredients: spelling, sound, meaning, and personal connection.

But Google Images will tell you a much more nuanced (and weird) story. Nearly every devushka on Google Images is a close-up chest shot of an eighteen-year-old girl in a bikini. You look at this, and you think “Hm!” And this “Hm!” is exactly what we’re after. It’s the moment you realize that Russian words aren’t just funny-sounding English words; they’re Russian words,