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

by Gabriel Wyner

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.