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.

In the course of mastering the sounds of a language, our ears become attuned to those sounds, making vocabulary acquisition, listening comprehension, and speaking come much more quickly.

The second key, don’t translate, was hidden within my experiences at the Middlebury Language Schools in Vermont. Not only can a beginning student skip translating, but it was an essential step in learning how to think in a foreign language. It made language learning possible

I was practicing translation instead of speaking. By throwing away English, I could spend my time building fluency instead of decoding sentences word by word.

The third key, use spaced repetition systems (SRSs), came from language blogs and software developers. SRSs are flash cards on steroids. Based upon your input, they create a custom study plan that drives information deep into your long-term memory. They ...

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.

As long as language learning is hard, we’ll run into the same problems. Who enjoys drilling grammar and memorizing word lists? Even if I promise you Fluency in 30 Seconds a Day, you’re going to have a hard time sticking to it if it’s unpleasant.

A good grammar book will walk you through your language’s grammar in a thoughtful, step-by-step manner.1 On the way, it will introduce you to a thousand words or so, give you a bunch of examples and exercises, and provide you with an answer key.

If the book gives you “Englishy” pronunciation for each word (Bonjour: bawn-JURE, Tschüss: chewss), I give you permission to burn it and find a different one.

There are two pitfalls here to avoid. First, avoid books systematically detailing every single solitary rule and detail and exception, all at once, in an uncontrollable torrent of grammatical despair.

Second, be wary of most classroom books, especially those without an answer key.

A phrase book is a wonderful reference, as it’s difficult to find handy phrases like “Am I under arrest?” and “Where are you taking me?” in a dictionary. Phrase books from the Lonely Planet company are cheap and come with a tiny, extremely practical dictionary in the back.

A frequency dictionary typically contains the most important five thousand words of your target language, arranged in order of frequency.

A pronunciation guide will walk you through the entire pronunciation system of your language, with the help of recordings and diagrams of your mouth and tongue.

You also want to find two dictionaries. It is up to you whether you find them online or in print. The first is a traditional bilingual dictionary (e.g., English-French/French-English), with accurate pronunciation listed for every word. Again, if you see “bawn-JURE,” burn it. If you see funny symbols (e.g., [bᴐ̃.ʒuʁ]), keep it.

The second is a monolingual dictionary (e.g., French-French), which has actual definitions (e.g., in French) rather than translations.

You may also want a thematic vocabulary book. These books arrange the words in your language by theme: words about cars, words for food, medical words, and so on.

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.

These patterns of connections form in an elegantly simple, mechanical process: neurons that fire together wire together. Known as Hebb’s Law, this principle helps explain how we remember anything

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. They were identified in the 1970s by psychologists who created a curious questionnaire with four types of questions and gave it to college students: • Structure: How many capital letters are in the word BEAR? • Sound: Does APPLE rhyme with Snapple? • Concept: Is TOOL another word for “instrument”? • Personal Connection: Do you like PIZZA?

To count the capital letters in BEAR, you don’t need to think about brown furry animals, and so you don’t. You’ve activated the shallowest level of processing—structure—and moved on. On the other hand, you activate regions throughout your brain to determine whether you like PIZZA.

Do you like PIZZA?––can simultaneously activate all four levels of processing. These four levels will fire together, wire together, and form a robust memory that is six times easier to remember than that BEAR you’ve already forgotten.

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.

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.

You’ll start by learning the sounds of your language and which letters make those sounds, because if you begin with sound, you’ll have a much easier time remembering words.

Sound is the land of rote memorization.

the more accurately we learn its pronunciation, the better we’ll remember it.

We prioritize and store concrete concepts because they engage more of our brains, not because they’re necessarily any more important than other information.

We have no problem naming things; nouns comprise the vast majority of the 450,000 entries in Webster’s Third International Dictionary.5 It’s when those names aren’t tied to concrete concepts that we run into trouble with our memories. Our goal, and one of the core goals of this book, is to make foreign words like mjöður more concrete and meaningful.

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.

Our capacity for visual memory is extraordinary; we only need to learn how to take advantage of it.

Since we need to learn words, not pictures, we will use combinations of words and pictures. Such combinations work even better than pictures alone.

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

If you connect gato to a picture of some cute cat, you will have an easy time remembering that word. But if, in addition, you can connect gato with a memory of your own childhood cat, that word will become practically unforgettable.

In this book, we’re going to learn vocabulary in two main stages: we’ll build a foundation of easy, concrete words, and then we’ll use that foundation to learn abstract words. Throughout, we’ll use levels of processing to make foreign words memorable.

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

The right side of his curve is encouraging: even years later, Ebbinghaus could expect old random gobbledygook to take him measurably less time to learn than new random gobbledygook. Once he learned something, a trace of it remained within him forever. Unfortunately, the left side is a disaster: our memories rush out of our ears like water through a net. The net stays damp, but if we’re trying to keep something substantial in it—like telephone numbers, the names of people we’ve just met, or new foreign words—we can expect to remember a paltry 30 percent the following day.

Extra repetition is known as overlearning, and it doesn’t help long-term memory at all. Can you remember a single fact from the last school test you crammed for? Can you even remember the test itself? If we’re going to invest our time in a language, we want to remember for months, years, or decades. If we can’t achieve this goal by working harder, then we’ll do it by working as little as possible

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 “

Notice how studying twice (i.e., overlearning) helps for a few minutes and then screws you in the long run. Oddly enough, a blank sheet of paper will help you much more than additional study time. You’ll remember 35 percent more in a week.

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.

Molaison had his hippocampus surgically removed in an attempt to cure his epilepsy. His illness was cured, but the surgery left him with severe amnesia. He retained most of his old memories, but without his hippocampus, he lost his ability to store new ones. Molaison could recall his distant past because the map of those memories had spread throughout his brain. In losing his hippocampus, he lost the ability to make and access new maps and thereby lost his ability to form new memories.

The hippocampus’s nut-shaped dance partner is the amygdala, and it tells the hippocampus what to keep and what to throw out. It does this by translating our emotions into chemicals, causing our adrenal glands to send out bursts of memory-enhancing hormones according to the situation. If we encounter emotionally arousing input—“Look, a tiger! Ow, my arm!”—then the amygdala will strengthen that memory. If not—“Look, a pencil. I’m hungry”—then it won

Our blank page, however, changes everything. At the moment where your performance is judged, your brain realizes that it had better get its act in gear. As a result, every memory you recall gets a squirt of memory-boosting chemicals. Those memories are reactivated, your amygdala calls for hormones, your hippocampus maps out the involved networks, and your neurons wire tightly together. Every time you succeed at recalling, the reward centers in your brain release a chemical reward—dopamine—into your hippocampus, further encouraging long-term memory storage. Your blank sheet of paper has created a drug-fueled memory party in your brain. Your boring word list never stood a chance.

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.

We can think, we can repeat, we can recall, and we can imagine, but we aren’t built to memorize. Rather, our brains are designed to think and automatically hold on to what’s important.

We will get bored if we spend our days incessantly asking ourselves whether we still remember our friend Edward’s name. It’s too easy, it’s tedious, and it doesn’t work very well. If we wait longer—until we’re just about to forget—then remembering Edward’s name becomes a stimulating challenge. We’re aiming for the point where a dash of difficulty will provide just the right amount of spice and keep the game interesting. If we can find it, we’ll get twice as much benefit for our time, and we’ll have much more fun in the process.