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

by Gabriel Wyner

ITALKI.COM can get you in touch with native speakers, who will talk with you or train you for very small amounts of money or in exchange for an equal amount of time speaking in English. You can spend an hour going through words with them and asking them to correct your pronunciation, which can help immensely.

We want to speak our minds without thinking about grammar or translations, and the key to this ability lies beneath the surface of every word.

We’ll discuss which words to learn first and how to learn them easily. You’ll learn how to skip translating and think in a new language from the very beginning.

Beyond twenty or so dog definitions, there is a multitude of kindred words. When “dog” enters your brain, a thousand of these words spring to the ready and ten thousand unrelated words recoil in retreat. A dog barks, but it doesn’t yell or shout. You can pursue someone doggedly, but you usually don’t doggedly eat a sandwich, even if it’s a very large sandwich. Words go together automatically, and you instinctively know which ones fit and which ones don’t. All of these pieces—the bits of grammar, the sounds, the spellings, the meanings and the connected words—are contained within the immense symphony known as “dog.” And the moment I tell you that sobaka is the Russian word for “dog,” that whole symphony collapses into a single, out-of-tune horn solo.

You have multilayered instincts built into your “dog,” and you lose those instincts the moment you translate that word into another language. Why? Because translations strip the music out of words.

You can’t learn the music in your words before you know which words to learn. How can you know where to start? Not all words are created equal; we use certain words far more often than others. English has at least a quarter of a million words. But if you only knew the top hundred words in English, you’d recognize half of everything you read. We get a lot of mileage out of our most frequent words.

To be fair, many of these words are so-called function words—old standbys like be and of, in, and on—and they behave differently in every language, so you can’t start with them. You’ll need a few nouns before you can put something “in” them or “on” them. Still, even if you set function words aside for a moment, you’ll find a small group of useful, simple words that you use all the time. These words are an excellent place to start a language, because you’ll see them everywhere.

You’re seventy-nine times more likely to talk about your mother than your niece. Why not learn mother first and niece later? Grammar books and language classes don’t follow this principle, in part because it’s easy to plan lessons around themes like “family” and “fruit.” As a result, you’ll find niece and mother in the exact same place in your grammar book, regardless of their relative utility. In language classes, you’ll learn words for apricots and peaches when your time would be much better spent learning about laptops, medicine, and energy. These are the words of our lives. Why not learn them first?

Enter the word frequency list. Researchers take a giant mass of text—millions of words from TV scripts, novels, newspapers, the Internet, news broadcasts, academic papers, and magazines—and jam it all into a computer. The computer counts the words and spits out gold: the words of a language in order of their importance. It’s an extraordinary tool. With only a thousand words, you’ll recognize nearly 75 percent of what you read. With two thousand, you’ll hit 80 percent.

In practice, they’re also extremely weird. You gain an ability to talk about complex topics before you can do the “simple” language tasks found in textbooks.

Each language has its own frequency list (the best frequency dictionaries are published by Routledge), and they are fascinating, both because of the words they include and the words they don

Unfortunately, these lists can be cumbersome. At least in the beginning, you’re looking for words that are easy to visualize—words like bus and mother. You could find them in your language’s frequency list, but you’d have to root through hundreds of function words like the and abstract words like society. This can get tedious, which is why I’m giving you a shortcut.

Despite the differences between languages, there is a fair amount of overlap in every language’s most frequent words. We’ll use that overlap to save us time. In Appendix 5, you’ll find a list of 625 words (in English) to start with. These words are practical, easy to visualize, and quick to translate—words like dog, school, car, and city. I’ll show you how to turn them i...

Because your flash cards won’t have any English on them, you’ll learn to see a dog and immediately think about the corresponding word in your target language. There’s no pesky translation step to get in the ...

First, you’ll solidify the pronunciation foundation you built in ...

Second, you’ll also get used to connecting sounds to images and concepts.

Third, you’ll often learn key prefixes and suffixes without even trying—your language’s equivalents of the -er in teacher, or the -tion in train station—which will make future words with the same prefixes and suffixes easier to remember.

Finally, when you get to grammar and abstract vocabulary, you’ll already know most of the words you need.

KEY POINTS • You use certain words much more frequently than others. Learn those first. • In Appendix 5, I give you a list of 625 simple, common words. These words are easy to visualize, and so you can learn them with pictures instead of translations. This will give you the foundation you need to easily learn abstract words and grammar in the next two chapters.

In Chapter 2, we talked about our mental filters, and how they save us from information overload. To learn vocabulary efficiently, we’ll need to overcome those filters, by creating memorable, interesting experiences with our words.

Use Small Dictionaries Lonely Planet Phrasebooks and glossaries at the end of grammar books are great resources, because they only contain the most basic words. A big dictionary might give you ten synonyms for “house.” You only need one right now, and you’ll find it easily in your glossary or phrase book.

You can accomplish these goals through a series of quick games, which you’ll play whenever you learn new words. The first will show you what your words really mean, and the se...

To create a deep, multisensory memory for a word, you’ll need to combine several ingredients: spelling, sound, meaning, and personal connection.

Google Images as a Storybook To find stories in Google Images, search for a word and scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page. There you’ll see the link Switch to Basic Version. Every image will now show up with its corresponding caption.

When you research a word using Google Images, you’re playing the Spot the Differences game; you’re looking for the difference between what you expect to see, and what you actually see.

You’ll store your memories of this game into your flash cards. Every time you encounter a “Hm!” moment, you’ve gone through a rich, multisensory experience with a new word. You’ll want your flash cards to bring those experiences back. You’ll choose one or two images that you found particularly telling—perhaps one of the grandmothers that seemed especially German—and you’ll put them in your flash cards.

You can make your word memories even more distinct by adding a personal connection. You’re playing the Memory game: What’s your grand-mère’s (grandmother’s) name? Which chat (cat) comes to your mind first? You’re looking for any memory that you can connect with your new word. If you can find one, you’ve just made your word 50 percent more memorable. Even if you can’t, the process of searching for a memory gives you a major boost.

To play the Memory game, you’ll spend a few seconds looking for any memory about your word that comes to mind.

As you make your flash cards, you’ll write down a little reminder of this memory—the city you were in last weekend, the name of a friend you were with, and so on.

Later, when you review your flash cards, you’ll play the same game. You’ll see a cat, scan your memory for anything that connects, and if you get stumped, you’ll find a helpful reminder on the back of your flash card. These connections aren’t your main focus—you want to see a cat and think chat—but they can make your job easier, by making your chats and grand-mères more relevant to your own life and therefore much more memorable.

KEY POINTS • You can make your words more memorable in two ways: • By investigating the stories they tell • By connecting those stories to your own life • When you create flash cards, use the best storytelling tool ever invented: Google Images. • Then spend...

Eventually, we got sloppy with our grammar and forgot the grammatical differences between dogs and cats, but many languages didn’t. In any of these languages, you need to memorize each noun’s grammatical group in order to build a sentence successfully. This is known as grammatical gender, and it’s a pain in the neck.

We did this to catched several hundred years ago, putting it into a group with taught, bought, and thought, and we’ll probably turn “dragged” into “drug” before the next century is up. We like to have groups of words that follow patterns, even when those patterns—our irregular verbs, in this case—don’t really make sense.

Does Your New Language Use Gender? Probably. Gender was a prominent feature of Proto-Indo-European, a language spoken in the fourth millennium BCE by a nomadic tribe living in southwestern Russia. Their language gave birth to most of the languages spoken in Europe, the Americas, Russia, and the Indian Subcontinent. There are three billion native speakers of languages in the Proto-Indo-European family, so there’s a good chance you’re learning one of these languages, and therefore need to learn gender. If you’re not sure, check here: TinyURL.com/wikigender.

Each of your words has a gender, and these genders don’t make any sense.

Unfortunately, in any of the languages with genders, you have to know a word’s gender before you can do anything with it, which is why your grammar book starts with a long tirade about gender in the first or second chapter.

Game 3—The Mnemonic Imagery Game: How to Memorize Nonsensical Bits of Grammar

You might be able to memorize these by rote repetition, but not for more than a few minutes. We’ll try something a bit more interesting (and long lasting) instead. I want you to imagine all of the masculine nouns exploding. Your tree? Kaboom, splinters of wood everywhere. A branch gets embedded in the wall behind you.

Feminine nouns should catch fire. Your nose spews fire out of it like a dragon, a flaming cat sets fire to your bedroom.

Neuter items should shatter like glass. Jagged, brown-red, sparkling shards of horse spread across the floor, as does your broken heart (sniff).

Mnemonic images work for reasons you might already surmise: we’re really good at remembering images, particularly when those images are violent, sexual, funny, or any combination of the three. While “gender” can conjure up some images—you can probably imagine a male dog—it falls flat on others (a neuter knee—meh). Vivid, action-packed verbs are much more memorable.

To play the Mnemonic Image game in your language, you’ll need to come up with images for the nonsensical grammatical groups in your new language. Since we’re restricting ourselves to noun genders for the moment, then you’ll need two to three particularly vivid verbs (these combine well with nouns).

Later, when you’re making your flash cards, you can use mnemonic imagery as needed. If a man is masculine in your target language, you probably don’t need imagery for that word. But if you’re making a flash card for a maiden (neuter), then take a few seconds to shatter her into a thou...

As you learn more, you’ll find that this tool can come in handy everywhere. Any time you encounter some frustrating group of irregularities you “just have to memorize,” you can create a mnemonic image. You can even make images for spelling—if ch is for chat (cat), then that cat can ride on top of your cheval (horse).

We’ll cover more advanced uses in chapter 5. (I use this game for all sorts of nasty things: verb conjugations, prepositions, noun cases, and irregular plurals, to name a few.)

KEY POINTS • Many languages assign a nonsensical grammatical gender to each of their nouns, which is a standard source of trouble for language learners. • If your language has grammatical gender, you can memorize it easily if you assign each gender a particularly vivid action and then imagine each of your nouns performing that action.

In this stage, you’re learning to connect sounds and spellings to meaningful words. This is a huge leap past what we’ve all done in language classes. You’re learning to associate a new word—gato—to images, feelings, and sounds of cats found throughout your memories. Rather than translating your gatos into cats, you’re learning to put music into your words.

We’ve already discussed sound and spelling in the previous chapter. These are the special pieces of a word that allow us to imagine an image—a unicorn, for example—and send that image to another person.

Next comes meaning. You’ll want to discover what your words actually mean, rather than what their translations seem to mean. What do Russian devushkas (girls) wear, and what do the French eat for déjeuner (lunch)? You’ll want to build new, meaningful associations into every word you learn.

Finally, you’ll want personal connections. While your new words may not line up perfectly with their English translations, they will line up with your own experiences. We’ve all met devushkas and eaten déjeuner. We need to bring out these memories and remember when they happened, how we felt, what we heard, and what we saw.