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

by Gabriel Wyner

I encountered three basic keys to language learning: 1. Learn pronunciation first. 2. Don’t translate. 3. Use spaced repetition systems.

I made sure that none of my flash cards had a word of English on them. I began making flash cards for the pronunciation rules, added a bunch of pictures for the nouns and some verbs, learned the verb conjugations, and then built up to simple French definitions of more abstract concepts.

We need to make your mjöður just as unforgettable, and we will do it by adding four types of connections: structure, sound, concept, and personal connection. These are the four levels of processing.

Your brain uses levels of processing to judge which input is important and which should be thrown out.

To keep you sane, your brain consistently works at the shallowest level of processing needed to get the job done.

In this way, levels of processing act as our great mental filter, keeping us alive and tolerable at parties.

Your first task in language learning is to reach the next level: sound. Sound connects structure to your ears and your mouth and allows you to speak.

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

We recall images much better than words, because we automatically think conceptually when we see an image. Image-recall studies have repeatedly demonstrated that our visual memory is phenomenal.

You will remember a concept with a personal connection 50 percent more easily than a concept without one,

Rote repetition is boring, and it doesn’t work for long-term memorization. • Take the lazy route instead: study a concept until you can repeat it once without looking and then stop. After all, lazy is just another word for “efficient.”

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.

Acts of recall set off an intricate chemical dance in your brain that boosts memory retention. • To maximize efficiency, spend most of your time recalling rather than reviewing. • You’ll accomplish this goal by creating flash cards that test your ability to recall a given word, pronunciation, or grammatical construction. Coupled with images and personal connections, these cards will form the foundation of a powerful memorization system.

Our brains fly into a wild, almost desperate search for the missing piece of our minds, frantically generating S words and throwing them out when they don’t match what we’re looking for. Your amygdala treats these searches as matters of life and death, for surely if you don’t remember the actor who played Matt Damon’s therapist in Good Will Hunting, you will leap out of the nearest window.9 You experience such relief at finally finding your goal that the word becomes nearly impossible to forget.

Memory tests are most effective when they’re challenging. The closer you get to forgetting a word, the more ingrained it will become when you finally remember it. • If you can consistently test yourself right before you forget, you’ll double the effectiveness of every test.

Every time you successfully recall a memory, you revisit and rewrite earlier experiences, adding bits and pieces of your present self to your past memories. • You’ll make the best use of your time when practicing recall if your earlier experiences are as memorable as possible. You can accomplish this by connecting sounds, images, and personal connections to every word you learn. • When you do forget, use immediate feedback to bring back your forgotten memories.

Start with a small number of new cards (fifteen to thirty) per day; you can always decide later if you want to go crazy with your flash cards. As mentioned earlier, you can learn thirty new cards per day and maintain your old cards in exchange for thirty minutes a day.

By going backward, you practice the end of the word every time you add a letter. This makes it easier and easier to finish the word correctly and automatically. Because of this, you only need to focus your attention for a brief moment at the very beginning (H… ), and you can let your tongue go on autopilot for the rest of the word (…öchstgeschwindigkeitsbegrenzung!).

The key is relevance. If you see something as useful, then it’s worth learning. If not, then not.