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

by Gabriel Wyner

The fastest route to fluency is also the least convenient: intensive immersion programs will provide twenty-plus weekly hours of class time, ten to twenty weekly hours of homework, and a strict no-English policy.

Playing with timing in this way is known as spaced repetition, and it’s extraordinarily efficient. In a four-month period, practicing for 30 minutes a day, you can expect to learn and retain 3600 flash cards with 90 to 95 percent accuracy.

It is an impossible thing, a word.

We are never more fully alive, more completely ourselves, or more deeply engrossed in anything, than when we are at play. —Charles Schaefer

The real question my students are asking is “Why doesn’t grammar make sense?” 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.

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 more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.

Fluency, after all, isn’t the ability to know every word and grammatical pattern in a language; it’s the ability to communicate your thoughts without stopping every time you run into a problem.

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous. —Carl Sagan

projected growth. If translation’s not your thing, you might want to consider secret agent. Seriously. If you’ve learned a so-called mission critical language—Arabic, Chinese, Dari, Korean, Pashto, Persian, Russian, or Urdu—then the CIA will eagerly snap you up and hand you $35,000 per language as a hiring bonus on your first day, not to mention additional monthly “language maintenance” bonuses. Every time I’ve been to an immersion program at Middlebury College, the CIA recruiters are always there in their crisp suits and snappy haircuts, putting on recruitment seminars. They’re desperate for multilingual people.

And you can only meet that side of yourself in a foreign language.