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

by Gabriel Wyner

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.

KEY POINTS • You can make your words more memorable in two ways: • By investigating the stories they tell • By connecting those stories to your own life • When you create flash cards, use the best storytelling tool ever invented: Google Images. • Then spend a moment to find a link between each word and your own experiences.

I want you to imagine all of the masculine nouns exploding. Your tree? Kaboom, splinters of wood everywhere.

Feminine nouns should catch fire. Your nose spews fire out of it like a dragon, a flaming cat sets fire to your bedroom.

Neuter items should shatter like glass.

we’re really good at remembering images, particularly when those images are violent, sexual, funny, or any combination of the three.

But if you’re making a flash card for a maiden (neuter), then take a few seconds to shatter her into a thousand maidenly pieces. Make your images as vivid and multisensory as you can.

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.

MEANING: Find your word in Google Images. You have a couple options here, the first of which is easy to use (and great), and the second of which takes a bit of initial setup (but is awesome. Use number two!): Option 1 (Basic Version): When you go directly to images.google.com, you can find pictures, but you won’t see the best part—the captions. Let’s turn them on. • Step 1: Search for a word (any word). Here we’ll search for cheval (horse). • Step 2: Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page. • Step 3: There you’ll see the link Switch to Basic Version. Click it. • Step 4: Bookmark this page, so you don’t have to do steps 1–3 every time.

To determine when translation will help you and when it will hurt you, you can use this rule of thumb: if you put it on your flash cards, it’s not in English. As long as you follow that rule, you’ll be okay.

PERSONAL CONNECTIONS: I can’t give you your personal connections, but I can give you questions to help spur your memories. Use them whenever you have trouble finding a good memory for a new word.

Even when the words sound almost the same (timid/timide), you’ll create more useful connections when you mentally hear those words in the accent of your new language:

Concrete Nouns: When’s the last time I saw my mère (mother)? Concrete Nouns: When’s the first time I encountered a moto (motorcycle)? Abstract Nouns: How has the économie (economy) affected me? Adjectives: Am I timide (timid)? If not, do I know someone who is? Adjectives: What do I own that’s rouge (red)? Verbs: Do I like to courir (run)? Do I know someone else who does?

You might write the name of your timide niece, the city where you first rode a moto, or a sad face (I seriously don’t like to courir). These reminders should be short and enigmatic—“Sally”—so when you review them, they prompt a moment of “Sally?…Oh yeah, Sally has a skirt like that.”

When forming images, it helps to have a dirty mind.

Go through the 625 list and separate the words into three categories:

Words you know:

Words you kind of know:

New words:

Skip all the words in category 1. You don’t need to spend time with them. For words in category 2, use the Refresher Track in the Gallery. It will help you dust off your old memories without taking too much of your time. For words in category 3, follow the instructions in the Gallery as if you were a beginner.

First you learn the instrument, then you learn the music, then you forget all that s**t and just play. —Charlie Parker

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

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.

Physical objects, body language, and interaction all serve as a sort of universal translator that helps kids make sense of their first words; it turns these words into comprehensible input.

Speech is too fast, and students just don’t have enough time to apply their grammar rules consciously.

When we learn a second language, we develop like children because we learn like children. 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 fail, but that’s only because they get much more input than we do.

It’s no wonder our language machines don’t seem to work; they’re starving for input.

To be fair, kids do possess some innate advantages over adults: they don’t worry about making mistakes, and by the age of one, their ears are perfectly tuned to the sounds of their native language. But adults possess gifts of their own. We’re very good at spotting patterns and we’ve developed better learning strategies than toddlers and preschoolers.

If we stop comparing kids with thousands of hours of language exposure to adults with hundreds of hours, we’ll see a surprising trend: on average, adults learn languages faster than kids do.

you have a ton of well-made, well-translated sentences just waiting for you inside of your grammar textbook. It’s a gold mine of comprehensible input.

Grammar rules, too, are worth learning; studies show that you’ll learn a language faster when you learn the rules.

you can use your grammar book as a quick guided tour through your language.

You’ll learn fastest if you take advantage of your language machine—the pattern-crunching tool that taught you the grammar of your native language. This machine runs off of comprehensible input—sentences that you understand—so you’ll need to find a good source of simple, clear sentences with translations and explanations. • Take your first sentences out of your grammar book. That way, your sentences can do double duty, teaching you every grammar rule consciously while your language machine works in the background, piecing together an automatic, intuitive understanding of grammar that will rapidly bring you to fluency.

Like all magnificent things, it’s very simple. —Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

Use your grammar book as a source of simple example sentences and dialogues. • Pick and choose your favorite examples of each grammar rule. Then break those examples down into new words, word forms, and word orders. You’ll end up with a pile of effective, easy-to-learn flash cards.

person-action-object (PAO) system,

PAO relies upon a simple premise: the three basic ingredients of a story are a person (Arnold Schwarzenegger), an action (explodes), and an object (a dog).

How do you keep track of all these stories? The same way you keep track of all your words: you can make a couple of flash cards for each of your mnemonic images and let your SRS sort it all out.

KEY POINTS • Languages often have groups of “irregular” words that follow similar patterns. While you can learn each of these patterns easily with the help of illustrated stories, you may still need some way to remember which words follow which patterns. • Any time you run into a tricky pattern, choose a person, action, or object to help you remember. For verb patterns, pick a mnemonic person or an object. For noun patterns, use a person or an action. Adjectives fit well with objects, and adverbs fit well with actions.

Dude, suckin’ at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something. —Jake the Dog, Adventure Time

You’re going to write in your new language, but these aren’t the tiresome essays you were required to write in school. Instead, you’ll write about whatever you want to learn.

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.

Once you have a source for corrections, your goal in writing is to make mistakes. You don’t need to craft a perfect essay, and in fact, you’ll learn more if you write quickly and mess up a few times.

Try to say what you want to say, and if you don’t have the words or the grammar to say it, then use Google Translate (translate.google.com) to help. Once you get your corrections, you’ll figure out precisely where your problems are, and you’ll learn how a native speaker would express the same ideas.

Put every correction you receive into your flash cards.

KEY POINTS • Use writing to test out your knowledge and find your weak points. Use the example sentences in your grammar book as models, and write about your interests. • Submit your writing to an online exchange community. Turn every correction you receive into a flash card. In this way, you’ll find and fill in whatever grammar and vocabulary you’re missing.

Grammar is even more personal than vocabulary. You can’t share any of your grammar cards with friends. These flash cards only mean anything because of the experience you had while creating them.

Any time the position of a word, the form of a word, or the word itself surprises you, then learn it. But if you’re not surprised by it, then skip it and move on to the next sentence.

Lang-8 is free. Register on the site, write out your entry, and click the submit button. Within a day, you should get your corrections.