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

by Gabriel Wyner

You’ll be able to find the essential minimal pairs in your language at the beginning of many grammar books with CDs (and definitely throughout all pronunciation books), and I’m making it a personal mission to provide minimal pair tests on my website in as many languages as I can find (Fluent-Forever.com/chapter3

When you use minimal pair testing at the beginning of your language journey, you’ll learn much faster in the long run. You’ll have an easier time remembering new words, because they no longer sound foreign. You’ll also understand native speakers better, because your ears are in sync with their speech. Instead of wasting your time correcting bad pronunciation habits, you’ll be able to spend your time consuming language at breakneck speed.

Because you’ve spent time focusing on those sounds, you’ll be aware of the subtle changes that occur when you string those sounds together. This gives you two superpowers: you can hear sound rules, and you can hear when those rules are broken.

Languages are full of complex sound rules, and we’re very good at picking them up if we can hear them

If your ears are sensitive to each new sound in your language, you will notice when there’s a strange sound rule afoot, and every time you notice it, you’ll get closer to internalizing it.

Your second superpower allows you to notice when words break those rules. In English, we have lots of pronunciation rules: a k is always pronounced like “k” (as in kick), except when it’s not (knife). The nice thing about rules and exceptions is that even when they’re as maddeningly complex as English (and lucky for you, they are nearly always simpler in other languages), they never create new sounds.

If you can hear all of the sounds in your language, then you might get surprised by the spelling of a word but never by the sound of a word. This helps you learn faster because your memory doesn’t need to struggle to store some indescribable new sound.

Because of this, you’ll be able to memorize the pronunciation of new words accurately, which will allow you to recognize them when they’re spoken by a native speaker.

If you have better listening comprehension, you’ll gain more vocabulary and grammar every time you hear someone speak your language. Poof—you’ve just boosted your vocabulary and grammar knowledge for the rest of your life. You gain all this at the expense of a few hours of minimal pair study.

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.

An accurate accent is powerful because it is the ultimate gesture of empathy. It connects you to another person’s culture in a way that words never can, because you have bent your body as well as your mind to match that person’s culture. Anyone can learn “bawn-JURE” in a few seconds. To learn how bonjour fits into your companion’s mouth and tongue; to learn how to manipulate the muscles, the folds, and even the texture of your throat and lips to match your companion’s—this is an unmistakable, undeniable, and irresistible gesture of care.

But you will see this everywhere. People with strong foreign accents are frequently treated as less adept at the language (and less intelligent as a person) than they are.

You currently speak the most common language on earth. If you’re trying to speak French and French people prefer to speak to you in English, you won’t get the language exposure you need.

This is where myths like the twelve-year cap on accent learning come from; it’s hard to unlearn bad habits. If, instead, you work on your accent early, then you will tend to pronounce all of your new words correctly. With every new word you learn, you’ll reinforce good pronunciation habits, and those habits will last you a lifetime.

I’ve made a series of YouTube videos to help you get the pronunciation information you need (Fluent-Forever.com/chapter3). Watch them. They take thirty-five minutes, and at the end, you’ll understand how your mouth does what it does.

In those videos, I go over a tremendously valuable tool known as the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). It was created, naturally, by the French, who needed some way to deal with the fact that four of the five letters in haies (hedges) were silent (it’s pronounced “eh”). The phonetic alphabet they developed does two awesome things: it turns languages into easily readable sounds, and it tells you exactly how to make each of those sounds. In English, there are ten ways to spell the “oo” sound in the word too. In IPA, there is only one, always: u.

Every IPA letter is not only a sound but also a set of instructions on how to make that sound.

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

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.

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.

Go backward. Say the end of the word, and then add one letter at a time until you can say the whole thing.

Tongue Tricks Back-chaining is, incidentally, the cheat code for tongue twisters. You can use it to combine words in the same way you would use it for letters. For a real challenge, enjoy this Czech classic: Strcč prst skrz krk (which means, naturally, “Stick your finger through your throat

While your tongue can’t handle eight new movements at once, it can handle a single new combination of two familiar sounds. If you split long, difficult words into small, easy chunks, you’ll find that your tongue is capable of remarkable acrobatic feats.

You may wonder why we’re going backward. After all, we could start with “v” and progress to “vz,” “vzd,” “vzdr,” and so on. Indeed you can, but in my experience, it doesn’t work as well. By going backward, you practice the end of the word every time you add a letter.

This makes it easier and easier to finish the word correctly and automatically. Because of this, you only need to focus your attention for a brief moment at the very beginning (H… ), and you can let your tongue go on autopilot for the rest of the word (…öchstgeschwindigkeitsbegrenzung!). By making the end of...

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...

Now wait a second. What if you only want to speak? Kids learn languages without first learning to read. Why can’t adults? We can, but it’s time consuming and expensive. Kids learn languages by listening and watching adults for thousands upon thousands of hours. Adults do this for free for their own kids, but those same adults will tend to charge you a lot of money.

The problem with written resources is the danger of broken words—our Dekart and Descartes—and this is the problem we must overcome.

Even in Chinese, a language where single characters refer to whole words rather than sounds, you’ll find that the characters often contain pronunciation hints, a feature that allows Chinese native speakers (and advanced Chinese students) to predict the pronunciation of new characters. Every language has its patterns, and we make our job much easier if we can get those patterns into our heads.

There is only one prerequisite to learning a new pattern: we need to notice it when it passes by.

We’ve already encountered one good phonetic alphabet—the IPA—but the particular alphabet is less important than the information it conveys. Hell, you can use “bawn-JURE” if you know exactly what that would sound like in a French person’s mouth.15 We’re looking for a way to see what we’re hearing and, equally important, what we’re not hearing.

When I learn a language, I tend to use a combination of recordings and a phonetic alphabet, at least until the little French man in my head starts sounding very French. Then I stop with the recordings and rely on my phonetic alphabet. If my language is very friendly, phonetically speaking, I’ll phase out my phonetic alphabet once I’m feeling (over)confident about my pronunciation.

Do you need to learn a new phonetic alphabet? Not really, especially if your language has relatively simple and strict spelling rules, like Spanish or Hungarian. You can rely upon recordings instead. But even for those languages, a phonetic alphabet can make your job easier in two ways: it helps you to see and hear whenever a sound rule shows up—when you’re reading wugs but saying “wugz”—and it gives you one more way to look at the same information. Because of the quirky nature of memory, this makes your task easier. By learning more, you’ll work less.

If you’re trying to make the “foreign” sounds of your new language familiar, then your easiest, shortest path is to learn as much as you possibly can about those sounds.

Math can be hard for the same reason that languages can be hard. At some point, you miss a connection, and if no one goes back, takes you by the hand, and shows you that connection, then you’re suddenly doomed to memorize crappy formulae.

The key is relevance. If you see something as useful, then it’s worth learning. If not, then not. In Appendix 4, I give you a decoder for the entire IPA, but if your favorite textbook or dictionary doesn’t use IPA symbols, then don’t memorize IPA symbols (just use them for a reference).16 If you know how to pronounce “ee” already (and you do), then you don’t need to worry about the location of your tongue. On the other hand, if a sound seems foreign and difficult, then go nuts. Learn everything. Learn its spellings, its behavior in your mouth, its relationship to the other sounds you already know. See how your textbook or dictionary notates it. Find some example words. Do whatever you can; the more you do, the less work it will be. It’s magic.

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.

There are two basic paths through pronunciation: the standard route and the off-road route. The standard route uses published resources: either a grammar book with a CD or a special book/CD combo dedicated exclusively to pronunciation.

Ignore all the vocabulary and grammar in your book and jump to each pronunciation section. There, listen to and mimic the recordings and then move on to the next pronunciation lesson until you’re done.

If you need help remembering a given sound or spelling, then you can pick and choose whichever flash cards you need from the Gallery.

The off-road route takes the tools we’ve found—minimal pair tests for ear training, the IPA for mouth instructions, and our SRS for getting it all into our heads—and builds a pronunciation trainer out of them. These trainers test your ears until you can hear your new language’s sounds, connect those sounds to the spelling patterns in your language, and dump that information into your head through your SRS.

I’m creating trainers as fast as I can in as many languages as I can. If I’ve done one for your language, then grab it. These trainers are cheaper than a pronunciation guidebook, and they should do a much better (and faster) job than the standard route. If you use these, you won’t need to make any flash cards now; just download them, install them, and within a few weeks, you’ll have pronunciation mastered.

FREE RESOURCES ESSENTIAL TOOL!—Forvo.com (FREE RECORDINGS OF WORDS): First things first. Get acquainted with Forvo.com. Free, native-speaker recordings of more than 2 million words in three hundred languages. Once you start making flash cards, Forvo will become your best friend. If you’re using Anki, put recordings from Forvo into your flash cards.

If you’re using a Leitner box, go through your vocabulary list at least once a week, read your newest words aloud, play their recordings on Forvo, and if you didn’t sound the same, repeat until you do.

There’s no reason to become fluent in a badly pronounced language, because no one will speak it with you.

Rhinospike.com (FREE RECORDINGS OF SENTENCES): Rhinospike is a handy website for native-speaker recordings. You submit a text and someone will record it for you, usually within twenty-four to forty-eight hours. If your textbook has a list of minimal pairs but doesn’t come with a recording of those words, you can get someone on Rhinospike to record those words for you.

ESSENTIAL TOOL!—MY PRONUNCIATION YOUTUBE SERIES (Fluent-Forever.com/chapter3): Go watch these. They take you on a tour of your mouth and the IPA. They make pronunciation understandable, and they give you access to one of the most powerful pronunciation tools available, the IPA.

ESSENTIAL TOOL!—WIKIPEDIA’S IPA FOR SPANISH, IPA FOR FRENCH, AND SO ON is a tool I mentioned earlier. You can copy all of its example words for each sound, and you can use it with Appendix 4 to get mouth instructions for any weird sound in your target language.

Digital dictionaries with pronunciation information are extremely handy if you’re using Anki; you can put in your word, copy the pronunciation information, and paste it directly onto your flash cards in seconds.

PAID RESOURCES MY PRONUNCIATION TRAINERS (Fluent-Forever.com/chapter3) provide you with minimal pair tests, spelling rules, example words, and enough vocabulary to ingrain the sounds and spelling patterns of your new language in your head. They run on Anki, and over the course of using them, you’ll get a sense for how Anki works (and you’ll be ready to make your own flash cards).