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

by Gabriel Wyner

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.

When we remember, we don’t just access our memories; we rewrite them.

This rewriting process is the engine behind long-term memorization. Every act of recall imbues old memories with a trace of your present-day self. This trace gives those memories additional connections: new images, emotions, sounds, and word associations that make your old memory easier to recall. Once you’ve rewritten these memories enough times, they become unforgettable.

In practicing recall, we are striving to continuously rewrite our memories. We create a memory for gato, and we build upon that memory with every recall until it is as unforgettable as an ad slogan.

We need a way to restore our forgotten memories, and we’ll find it in immediate feedback. Feedback is a simple concept with dramatic results. If we encounter our gato flash card and get stumped, then we can simply look at the back side of the card and see a picture of a cat. We have just given ourselves immediate feedback, and as a result, one of two things happens. If our memory of gato has vanished, then we start over. We form a new, “original” experience at the moment we got stumped and looked at the answer. This is not as good as remembering our actual original experience, but it’s still very effective. Our brains are primed and ready to create a new memory.

Feedback allows us to resuscitate forgotten memories and get the most out of our practice sessions.

KEY POINTS • 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.

How do we combine the five principles? We want our original memories to be as deep and multisensory as possible (1: Make memories more memorable). We want to study as little as possible (2: Maximize laziness), and practice recall as much as possible (3: Don’t review. Recall). We want our recall practice to be challenging but not too hard (4: Wait, wait! Don’t tell me!). Last, when we practice, we want to nearly forget those original experiences but not forget them completely. When we do forget, we want immediate feedback to put us back on track (5: Rewrite the past).

For students trying to remember something for six months, the immediate practice session (which produced a 27 percent final score) is not bad at all. But as the delay increases to twenty-eight days, the students’ scores double. This pattern appears in numerous studies, although the ideal delay changes depending upon the final test date. There is a complex balance between the advantages of nearly forgetting and the disadvantages of actually forgetting, and it breaks our forgetting curve in half:11

Here’s the final leap: if immediate recall practice is good, and delayed practice is better, and if one session is good and many sessions are better, what happens if you delay your recall practice many times?

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.

For the extreme long term, you’ll get the best efficiency if you wait years between practice sessions, but that won’t help you in the short term at all. Moreover, your practice sessions would be extremely frustrating. After such a long delay, you’d have forgotten almost everything. On the other hand, if you practiced all the time, you’d be able to remember almost everything, but your old words would come back so often that they would bury you in hours of daily work.

The thread between these two goals—remembering now and remembering later—starts small and grows rapidly. You’ll begin with short intervals (two to four days) between practice sessions. Every time you successfully remember, you’ll increase the interval (e.g., nine days, three weeks, two months, six months, etc.), quickly reaching intervals of years. This keeps your sessions challenging enough to continuously drive facts into your long-term memory. If you forget a word, you’ll start again with short intervals and work your way back to long ones until that word sticks, too. This pattern keeps you working on your weakest memories while maintaining and deepening your strongest memories.

You’ll spend a fixed amount of time every day learning new words, remembering the words from last week, and occasionally meeting old friends from months or years back. By doing this, you’ll spend most of your time successfully recalling words you’ve almost forgotten and building foundations for new words at a rapid, steady clip. 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.

Spaced repetition is a godsend to memory intensive tasks like language learning.

At its most basic level, a Spaced Repetition System (SRS) is a to-do list that changes according to your performance. If you can remember that pollo means “chicken” after a two-month delay, then your SRS will automatically wait four to six months before putting pollo back on your to-do list. If you’re having trouble remembering that ropa means “clothing” for more than two weeks, your SRS will put ropa on your list more frequently until it sticks for good.

SRSs come in two main flavors: on paper or on computer.

A paper SRS accomplishes the same feat using a flash card file box, a carefully designed schedule, and a few simple instructions. It’s basically a simple board game. The game contains seven levels, which correspond to seven labeled sections in your file box (i.e., level 1, level 2, etc.). Every card starts on level 1, and advances to the next level whenever you remember it. If you forget, the card falls all the way back to level 1. Whenever a card gets past level 7, it has won its place in your long-term memory.

Every time you play with your paper SRS, you’ll consult your schedule and review the levels of the day (e.g., December 9: Review levels 4, 2, and 1). This is your daily to-do list, and it adapts to your performance because of the way your cards gain and lose levels. By following the rules of the game (see Appendix 3), you create a primitive, paper computer program. This program is just as effective and fun as a computerized SRS and is satisfying in an “I did this by myself” sort of way.

Flash cards are fantastic at reminding you about your original experiences, but they’re not particularly good at creating memories in the first place.

Have you ever studied for a test by writing out a summary of your notes? It worked fairly well, didn’t it? When you create something, it becomes a part of you. If, instead, you simply copied someone else’s notes, you wouldn’t benefit nearly as much.

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.

And 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.

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.

The problem with uncertainty in your flash cards is that it makes your daily reviews more difficult, which translates to added time and added forgetting (which also adds time). The original experience that you’ll remember with every review will become “WHAT does this MEAN? I don’t have TIME for this $#*@!” which can quickly become frustrating.

• Spaced repetition systems (SRSs) are flash cards on steroids. They supercharge memorization by automatically monitoring your progress and using that information to design a daily, customized to-do list of new words to learn and old words to review.

We’ll begin with the sounds and alphabet of your language. This will give you the structure you need to remember new words easily. To accomplish this, I’ll show you old and new tools that can quickly rewire your ears, and we’ll use spaced repetition to rapidly memorize example words for every important letter combination (e.g., gn as in gnocchi). In short order, you will master the sounds of your language.

Armed with your language’s sounds, you can begin to tackle words. I will show you a list of the 625 most frequent concrete nouns, verbs, and adjectives. These words are easy to visualize, which makes them easy to remember. We will insert them into your SRS with a combination of pictures, personal connections, and sounds. In turn, your SRS will quickly insert those words into your long-term memory. In the process, you’ll construct a foundation upon which you can build the rest of your grammar and vocabulary.

Finally, I will show you how to use Google Images to find illustrated stories for every word and grammatical concept in your language. You’ll use these stories to make effective, memorable flash cards for your SRS. Before long, your grammar will become a reflex, and you won’t need to worry about it. Every new word will reinforce that grammatical reflex, and every new piece of grammar will...

The most popular SRSs are computer-based, and my absolute favorite is Anki. First released in 2008, Anki is free, easy to use, and runs on every operating system and smartphone.

The original system uses shorter intervals than we need (one/two/three/four days as opposed to weeks/months), but we can fix that by adding a few more dividers and changing the schedule around. You’ll find detailed instructions and an appropriate schedule for a Leitner box in Appendix 3, along with download links for Anki.

First things first. You can’t make paper flash cards talk. You’ll be learning pronunciation before you learn vocabulary, and it’s much easier to learn pronunciation when your flash cards can talk to you. If you use physical flash cards, you’ll need to set aside time to listen to recordings of your words, and you’ll need to become very comfortable with a phonetic alphabet (a fәnεtık æ

Second, it is extraordinarily easy to get pictures from Google Images into computerized flash cards, and pictures are the most effective way to remember large amounts of information. Even if you use physical flash cards, and even if you’re a terrible artist, you should be drawing pictures for every word you encounter. Your visual memory is too helpful to ignore, and as long as you can tell your cat stick figure from your dog stick figure, you’ll still reap the benefits.

Third, the process of finding images for computerized flash cards is one of the most powerful learning experiences you could ever hope for. Again, your brain sucks in images like a sponge. Just a few seconds browsing through twenty dog images will create a powerful, lasting memory. Even if you’re using physical flash cards, don’t pass up the opportunity to learn your words through Google Images. We’ll cover this process in depth in Chapter 4.

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.

Learn new cards at a rate that you know you can maintain.

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 w...

A Tip for Missed Days When dealing with a bloated review pile, continue learning two to three new words per day. It will spice things up a bit without adding much to your time commitment.

If you miss a day (and you will occasionally), then it’s not the end of the world. The only difficulty is that your reviews will pile up whether you want them to or not. Remember, your SRS is just a fancy to-do list.

Cut back on learning new cards, and spend a few days working at your reviews until they’re back to normal levels.

Additional studies show a 5:1 benefit for testing over studying, meaning that five minutes of testing is worth twenty-five minutes of studying.

All of this goes to crap if we don’t start with pronunciation, because we get stuck with a bunch of broken words. We encounter a broken word whenever we think a word is pronounced one way, but it’s actually pronounced a different way.

These changes occur more quickly in the spoken language than in the written language, so each language eventually splits in half. French is, accordingly, two languages: the written language of Descartes and the spoken language of Dekart.

In those conversations, you’ll hear new words, which will find their way into your writing. Every time you encounter new input, it improves your understanding and fluency in every aspect of your language. This process only works if you can successfully connect the words you read to the words you hear

The better you internalize good pronunciation habits in the beginning, the less time you’ll waste hunting down broken words. If you can build a gut instinct about pronunciation, then every new word you read will automatically find its way into your ears and your mouth, and every word you hear will bolster your reading comprehension. You’ll understand more, you’ll learn faster, and you’ll spare yourself the hunt for broken words. Along the way, you’ll have an easier time memorizing, you’ll make better impressions upon native speakers, and you’ll speak more confidently when you’re ready.

You need a path through pronunciation that quickly teaches you the basics and then reinforces and develops your pronunciation instincts while you’re busy learning the rest of the language.

In this chapter, I’ll break down the three main challenges you’re up against: ear training, mouth training, and eye training.

It is not that he misinterprets what he hears; he literally cannot hear the difference between these two sounds. As far as his brain is concerned, the words rock and lock might as well be spelled the same. In learning English, he is fighting his own brain. How can he possibly hope to succeed?

I’ve tortured quite a few of my Austrian English students on the differences between minimal pairs like thinking and sinking, SUS-pect and sus-PECT, and niece and knees. These pairs get right to the heart of the hearing problem in a language, and practicing them with feedback provides the best way to train our ears and rewire our brains.