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

by Gabriel Wyner

As they predicted, Russian (a level 2 language) took me nearly twice as much time as French (a level 1 language), and I suspect that Japanese (a level 3 language) will take me twice as much time as Russian. I reached a comfortable intermediate “I can think in French and use a monolingual dictionary” level in three months, working for an hour a day (plus weekend binges), and a similar level for Russian in six months at thirty to forty-five minutes a day (plus weekend binges). I then used seven to eight weeks of intensive immersion to bring both of those languages to advanced “comfortable in a cafe, comfortable chatting about whatever, somewhat uncomfortable describing car problems” levels. I’ve seen similar results with my students. Without an immersion program, I suspect advanced French would take five to eight months, working for thirty to forty-five minutes per day on your own. Level 2 languages like Russian and Hebrew should be twice that, and level 3 languages like Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, and Korean should take four times as long as French.

FOR THE INTERMEDIATES If you’ve already spent some time studying your target language, adjust your shopping list as follows: First, if you already have a grammar book, make sure that you actually like it and that it’s sufficiently challenging. If not, get a new one that fits your level. Second, if you don’t have a phrase book, they’re worth having. Even if you’re already reading books in your target language, you might not know how to ask about business hours or rental car insurance. A phrase book will let you look up sentences for many day-to-day situations that don’t show up in books. Third, you probably don’t have a frequency dictionary yet, and you’ll use it much earlier than a beginner. Go get one. Last, hold off on a pronunciation book or trainer until the end of Chapter 3. You’ll have a better idea then as to whether you’ll need one.

While we can’t yet upload jujitsu directly into our brains, 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.

Our new friend is named Edward. Simply by thinking “Edward,” we have already reached the second level of processing—sound. If we want to go deeper, into concept territory, we would search for a concrete image for the name Edward, such as the movie character Edward Scissorhands. If we spent a moment imagining our new friend with a pair of scissors for hands, we would have an easy time remembering his name later. This strategy is used by competitive memorizers (yes, there are competitive memorizers) to quickly memorize people’s names, and we’ll discuss it in depth in Chapters 4 and 5. But we’re not done yet. We’ll do even better if we can find a personal connection with his name. Perhaps you still remember watching Edward Scissorhands in a theater, perhaps your brother is named Edward, or perhaps you too have hands made of scissors. As you imagine your new friend interacting with Edward-related images and Edward-related personal memories, you are activating broader and broader networks in your brain.

KEY POINTS • Your brain is a sophisticated filter, which makes irrelevant information forgettable and meaningful information memorable. Foreign words tend to fall into the “forgettable” category, because they sound odd, they don’t seem particularly meaningful, and they don’t have any connection to your own life experiences. • You can get around this filter and make foreign words memorable by doing three things: • Learn the sound system of your language • Bind those sounds to images • Bind those images to your past experiences

KEY POINTS • 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.”

How can taking an identical test three times in a row produce such a large effect? 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. Our blank sheet of paper, which could be replaced by a stack of flash cards, a multiple choice test, or simply trying to remember to yourself, is precisely the type of practice we need. It improves our ability to recall by tapping into one of the most fascinating facets of our minds—the interplay of memory and emotion.

KEY POINTS • 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.

KEY POINTS • 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.

We’ve found the end of forgetting. You learn a word today and then shelve it for a while. When it comes back, you’ll try to recall it, and then shelve it again, on and on until you couldn’t possibly forget. While you’re waiting for your old words to return, you can learn new words and send them off into the future, where you’ll meet them again and work them into your long-term memory. At least until you can upload jujitsu directly into your brain, this is the most efficient way to memorize large amounts of information permanently.

One of the reasons why language programs and classes fail is that no one can give you a language; you have to take it for yourself. You are rewiring your own brain. To succeed, you need to actively participate. Each word in your language needs to become your word, each grammar rule your grammar rule. Programs like Rosetta Stone can provide decent original experiences for words like ball and elephant, but eventually, you need to deal with words like economic situation. Abstract words like these require complex, personal connections if you’re ever going to use them comfortably while speaking. You have to make those connections for yourself, because no one else can tell you how the current situación económica has affected you.

since we need deep, memorable experiences to get the most out of spaced repetition, we might as well get them in the process of making our flash cards. The card construction process is one of the most fun and satisfying ways to learn a language. Content in the knowledge that every detail will become a permanent memory, you become the architect of your own mind. What breed of dog will you think about when you wish to remember the word dog? Which examples will you choose to form your verb conjugations? What vocabulary is most useful for your own life? Making these decisions forms an exciting part of the learning process and, ultimately, takes very little time. After getting used to your SRS, you can add new cards in a matter of seconds. For most nouns, you can simply type the word once, search for a picture on Google Images, and copy (or draw) it onto your card. This can take less than fifteen seconds. Imagery for more complicated ideas will, of course, take more time to identify—a process that itself gives you the connections you need to make a word your own.

Do note that we’re talking about learning thirty new cards per day, rather than thirty new words. Over the next few chapters, I’m going to show you how to break sounds, words, and grammar into their smallest, easiest-to-remember bits. You’ll memorize each bit individually. As a result, some words may involve a small handful of cards. This may sound like more work (“I have to memorize four flash cards for a single Chinese character?”), but as you’ll see, it’s going to make your life much easier. SRSs give you the ability to retain everything you throw into them. As long as you can review a little bit each day, there’s no end to what you can jam into your head, and as long as your cards are simple and easy to remember, you’ll be able to learn them quickly and easily.

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.

Every IPA letter is not only a sound but also a set of instructions on how to make that sound. This is super useful. When I began Hungarian, I looked up the sounds of that language on Wikipedia. Hungarian has a few odd sounds, including ɟ͡ʝ, which is basically our j as in jar if you keep the front of your tongue touching your bottom teeth. I’ve never spoken to a Hungarian about this, and no one has ever told me to put my tongue in that weird position. The IPA symbols themselves spell it out for me, and they can do it for you, too. There are two barriers in the way: the IPA is usually full of nasty technical jargon and it uses weird-looking symbols. I can’t get rid of the symbols—English uses twenty-six letters for forty-two sounds; a phonetic alphabet needs extra symbols—but I can show you a way around the jargon. In general, you only need three pieces of information to make any sound: you need to know what to do with your tongue, with your lips, and with your vocal cords, and there aren’t that many options. Your vocal cords go on and off. That’s it—it’s the only difference between “ssss” and “zzzz.” When you’re speaking vowels, your lips are basically rounded like “oo” or not. That’s all. The rest of the IPA focuses upon the location and behavior of your tongue.

In Appendix 4, I give you an IPA decoder chart. Any time you come across some weird sound you don’t understand, you can load up the Wikipedia article for your language (e.g., “IPA for Spanish” or “IPA for Swahili”) and compare it to the chart. The chart will tell you what to do with your tongue, your lips, and your vocal cords. You can use this chart as a universal decoder device that translates a word like mjöður into a series of tongue, lip, and vocal cord positions. Coupled with your newly trained ears, you’ll have a much easier time mimicking each new sound in your language.

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.

I have a spelling checker, It came with my PC. It plane lee marks four my revue Miss steaks aye can knot sea. Eye ran this poem threw it, Your sure reel glad two no. Its vary polished in it’s weigh. My checker tolled me sew… —Jerrold H. Zar, “Candidate for a Pullet Surprise” (excerpt)

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.

For the Intermediates Some intermediate language learners get lucky. They studied with teachers who stressed excellent pronunciation habits and, as such, built a solid foundation. They have no trouble hearing the sounds of their target language, they have good pronunciation, and they’ve built an intuitive sense of the connections between sound and spelling. Others aren’t so lucky. You’ll need to do an honest assessment of your abilities. Then you can pick and choose the tools that you need. If you have trouble hearing the differences between similar sounds in your language (say, the difference between roux and rue in French), then you should use minimal pair testing to help. Use one of my pronunciation trainers; it’s what they’re there for.

The most frequent words aren’t the same in every language; you won’t need Republican to learn Russian, and collective Soviet farming community doesn’t show up in Spanish very often. Each language has its own frequency list (the best frequency dictionaries are published by Routledge), and they are fascinating, both because of the words they include and the words they don’t. Unfortunately, these lists can be cumbersome. At least in the beginning, you’re looking for words that are easy to visualize—words like bus and mother. You could find them in your language’s frequency list, but you’d have to root through hundreds of function words like the and abstract words like society. This can get tedious, which is why I’m giving you a shortcut.

With every word you learn, you’ll become increasingly familiar with the sound and spelling system of your language. As a result, you’ll find that your words become easier and easier to remember. Second, you’ll also get used to connecting sounds to images and concepts. You’re learning to absorb words into your vocabulary, just as you did as a kid. Back then, you asked your parents about new words: “What’s that?” “A skunk.” “Oh.”

Third, you’ll often learn key prefixes and suffixes without even trying—your language’s equivalents of the -er in teacher, or the -tion in train station—which will make future words with the same prefixes and suffixes easier to remember. Finally, when you get to grammar and abstract vocabulary, you’ll already know most of the words you need. This makes the rest of your new language much easier to learn. It’s easy to manage a sentence like “My dog chased a cat up a tree” when you already know dogs, cats, chasing, and trees. You’ll know the players and actions in your stories, and grammar will simply tell you who’s chasing whom.

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.

Google Images as a Storybook To find stories in Google Images, search for a word and scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page. There you’ll see the link Switch to Basic Version. Every image will now show up with its corresponding caption.

Game 2—The Memory Game: Boosting Meaning Through Personal Connection

You can make your word memories even more distinct by adding a personal connection. You’re playing the Memory game: What’s your grand-mère’s (grandmother’s) name? Which chat (cat) comes to your mind first? You’re looking for any memory that you can connect with your new word. If you can find one, you’ve just made your word 50 percent more memorable. Even if you can’t, the process of searching for a memory gives you a major boost. I’ve tried to find a connection to the number harminckettő (thirty-two) in Hungarian. I can’t. It’s the worst number ever. I don’t think I’ve ever said “thirty-two” in English. Now, whenever I see harminckettő, my first thought is “Oh, that’s thirty-two, the worst number ever.” Mission accomplished.

To play the Memory game, you’ll spend a few seconds looking for any memory about your word that comes to mind. It could be your childhood cat or your friend’s T-shirt. Try to keep the new word in mind rather than the translation. You’ll make some weird English-French hybrid sentence like “The last time I saw my grand-mère (grandmother) was last weekend.” Don’t worry about the lack of French grammar; no one can hear you. As you make your flash cards, you’ll write down a little reminder of this memory—the city you were in last weekend, the name of a friend you were with, and so on. Later, when you review your flash cards, you’ll play the same game. You’ll see a cat, scan your memory for anything that connects, and if you get stumped, you’ll find a helpful reminder on the back of your flash card. These connections aren’t your main focus—you want to see a cat and think chat—but they can make your job easier, by making your chats and grand-mères more relevant to your own life and therefore much more memorable.

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...

And the answer is illuminating: grammar is a mirror to ourselves. It is a living history of our desire to make sense of our words. In English, we’re currently turning sneaked into snuck. To many ears, snuck seems to “sound better,” but that’s not why we’re doing it. We’re doing it because it makes two nonsensical verbs—stuck and struck—seem a little less nonsensical. We did this to catched several hundred years ago, putting it into a group with taught, bought, and thought, and we’ll probably turn “dragged” into “drug” before the next century is up. We like to have groups of words that follow patterns, even when those patterns—our irregular verbs, in this case—don’t really make sense.

Game 3—The Mnemonic Imagery Game: How to Memorize Nonsensical Bits of Grammar

KEY POINTS • Many languages assign a nonsensical grammatical gender to each of their nouns, which is a standard source of trouble for language learners. • If 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.

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?

Go through the 625 list and separate the words into three categories: 1. Words you know: You immediately recall the word, you know how to pronounce it, you know its gender, and you don’t need to waste time relearning it. 2. Words you kind of know: If you looked them up in a dictionary, you’d think, “Oh yeah!” Perhaps you’ve forgotten precisely how to pronounce them, their gender or their spelling, but they definitely seem pretty familiar. 3. New words: You might have learned them at some point, but they don’t seem familiar at all.

intermediate note

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. You’ll use the Normal Track or Intensive Track, depending upon your needs and the trickiness of your target language.

intermediate note

The Two Grammars There are two sorts of grammar that we encounter in our lives: the spoken grammar we acquire as kids, and the written grammar we learn in school. Most people think of the latter when they hear the word grammar: school days devoted to the proper use of the comma, the removal of prepositions from the ends of our sentences, or the roles of your and you’re and which and that. Many of these rules can be frustrating because they’re based upon a great deal of academic nonsense. Our ban on prepositions at the end of sentences, for example, is a recent import from Latin, of all places. The ban snuck into our language when a group of London publishers released a series of competing style manuals and somehow convinced the populace that those rules had always been features of “proper” English. 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.

The nature of this machine has been the subject of raging linguistic debate—perhaps kids possess a language machine or perhaps it’s a language + everything else machine—but both sides agree that kids have some sort of awesome, pattern-crunching machine in their heads. Every kid can take in sentences from their parents, chew them up, and automatically spit out perfect grammar by their sixth birthdays. And fortunately for us, the machine in their heads never stops working. If we want to learn a new language, we just need to learn how to use it.

Yet if you monitor adults learning a second language, you find something completely mystifying. That German woman with her English textbook follows the exact same developmental stages as that Japanese guy with his American girlfriend. The German might progress through her stages faster—German, after all, is fairly similar to English—but she won’t skip any of them. Not only that, but both of these English students will follow developmental stages that closely resemble the development of child speech. Like the kids, they start out with -ing (He watching television) and only later learn is (He is watching). They master the irregular past tense (He fell) before the regular past tense (He jumped). Toward the very end of their development, they master the third-person present tense (He eats the cheeseburger).

Naturally, it’s not just English. While the developmental stages look different from language to language, every language has a particular developmental order, which children and second language learners alike will inevitably follow on their way to fluency. The most plausible explanation for these rigid, unavoidable developmental stages is this: our language machines never turn off. 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.

If every sentence you understand brings you closer to fluency, then what’s the problem with grammar drills? Don’t they count as comprehensible input? Indeed they do. They’re just not particularly interesting. If you’re the sort of person who loves filling out conjugation tables (I sit, you sit, he sits, she sits, it sits, we sit, they sit…) then by all means, go ahead. These are understandable sentences, and they’ll feed your language machine just fine. But if you’re not a grammar nut, you don’t need to do workbooks full of grammar exercises. Instead, you can use your grammar book as a quick guided tour through your language. You’ll read the explanations, learn an example or two, and skip over the (often monotonous) drills and exercises. The examples you learn will help you remember each grammar rule, and they’ll serve as comprehensible input at the same time, feeding your language machine as it pieces together your new language’s grammar in the background.

KEY POINTS • 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.

To learn a new grammatical form, all you have to do is find an example from your grammar book, understand the gist of the story in that example—you’ll use your grammar book’s explanations and translations—and ask yourself three questions: • Do you see any new words here? • Do you see any new word forms here? • Is the word order surprising to you?

KEY POINTS • 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.

KEY POINTS • Languages are often full of complex, hard-to-remember patterns. You can learn these patterns easily by embedding them into simple, understandable stories. • Whenever you encounter a confusing declension chart in your grammar book, take the nearest example sentence and use it to generate stories that cover every new form you need.

Unfortunately, our old mnemonic images won’t work here. They worked fine with nouns—exploding dogs and shattering horses make for memorable stories—but those same images break down if you try to use them with verbs or adjectives. How do you attach exploding—to a verb like catch / caught / had caught? Or shattering to tall? Tall shattering isn’t a vivid, memorable story; it’s a bad e. e. cummings poem.

If you’re already using three mnemonic images for gender, how can you add another ten mnemonics for those plural forms? Our poor exploding dog can’t do two things at once. He’s already exploding; we can’t expect him to swim or sing at the same time.

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.

Self-directed writing is the ultimate personalized language class. 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. Writing also trains you to take the patterns you’ve memorized and actually use them. This is where you learn to take raw information and turn it into language.

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.

This is the point at which your language begins to bloom. By taking words you’ve already learned and using them in sentences, you breathe grammatical life into your words. They aren’t just spellings, pictures, and sounds anymore; they’re language. Find Your Sentences Use your grammar book. It’s there to make your life easier. You’ll find a collection of easy-to-understand example sentences and dialogues, detailed explanations, and our favorite part of all, giant declension charts.