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

by Gabriel Wyner

Any flash cards you create will be a dim reminder of the colorful mass of memories you assemble. When you review them, they’ll bring back a fragment of those memories, and your brain will supply the rest in a sudden rush of color, feeling, and music. Then you’ll move on to the next card. It’s an intense, unforgettable experience.

TRANSLATIONS (SPELLING): Appendix 5 is a list of 625 English words that show up frequently in every language: dog, car, city, and so on. You’ll want to find translations for all of these words in your target language. You could use Google Translate, but you’ll usually get a lot of weird, messed-up translations. Machine translation isn’t that good, especially when you’re translating lists of words, rather than sentences.

If you use a standard dictionary, you may find too many results; you don’t need ten synonyms for house. Here’s your chance to use that pocket phrase book you bought.

Alternatively, if you’re studying a relatively common language, you can probably find a professional translation of the 625 words on my website. Go to Fluent-Forever.com/Appendix5

SOUND: You’ll find recordings of your words at Forvo.com. Listen to them, particularly in the beginning, when your connections between sound and spelling are still wobbly. You’ll have an easier time understanding what you hear if you also use phonetic transcriptions of your words. You may find these in your glossary, but if not, you’ll find them in your favorite dictionary and/or Wiktionary.org.

Option 1 (Basic Version): When you go directly to images.google.com, you can find pictures, but you won’t see the best part—the captions. Let’s turn them on.

Step 1: Search for a word (any word). Here we’ll search for cheval (horse). • Step 2: Scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page. • Step 3: There you’ll see the link Switch to Basic Version. Click it. • Step 4: Bookmark this page, so you don’t have to do steps 1–3 every time. Alternatively, just go to TinyURL.com/basicimage, and bookmark that page.

Option 2 (Basic Version, Automatically Translated): These captions are great, but they’re all in your new language, and you don’t speak that language yet. What if all of those little captions were machine translated into English? You can stick this page into Google Translate. Now, instead of twenty captioned images in French, you’ll see this:

I can’t imagine a better resource than this for investigating words. You’ll find a guide on my website to setting this up (it takes a few minutes to get it working) at Fluent-Forever.com/chapter4

We’re breaking one of my cardinal rules here—no translation, but that’s okay; you won’t remember those translations for long. While your first exposure to cheval might be in English, your second exposure won’t be. When you step from Google Images to your flash cards, you’ll wipe out every trace of English (and leave the images). In time, you’ll forget the original English sentences, and remember only the pictures and the stories they told about your cheval.

To determine when translation will help you and when it will hurt you, you can use this rule of thumb: if you put it on your flash cards, it’s not in English. As long as you follow that rule, you’ll be okay.

When you run into problems, you have two options. If you’re sure you know what your word means (perhaps you can’t find a good picture, but you’ve seen a few clear sentences with the word), then you can search for a suitable picture in English. You’ll be able to find something “cute” within a few seconds (or if you’re drawing your pictures, then you can come up with your own “cute”). If you can’t tell what your word means (perhaps the sentences and pictures you’ve found don’t seem to make any sense), then skip it. The word you’re investigating may be more complex and multifaceted than you can handle right now, and there are plenty of other words to learn. Move on.

Instead of asking about the last time you saw your mother, ask about the last time you saw your mère. Even when the words sound almost the same (timid/timide), you’ll create more useful connections when you mentally hear those words in the accent of your new language:

Concrete Nouns: When’s the last time I saw my mère (mother)? Concrete Nouns: When’s the first time I encountered a moto (motorcycle)? Abstract Nouns: How has the économie (economy) affected me? Adjectives: Am I timide (timid)? If not, do I know someone who is? Adjectives: What do I own that’s rouge (red)? Verbs: Do I like to courir (run)? Do I know someone else who does? Answer one of these questions and write down a little reminder for yourself on the back of your flash cards.

Whenever possible, stick to names of people and places—they don’t violate our no-English rule—but if an errant English word or two like last Christmas creeps in, the language police probably won’t catch you. Just don’t make it a habit.

If it does, open your grammar book, find the introductory discussion on gender, and read it. You’ll learn how many genders there are and whether your language has any predictable patterns (perhaps nearly all feminine words end in a).

Create a mnemonic image for each gender you need. They can be anything. I like to use relatively violent verbs for noun genders;

When forming images, it helps to have a dirty mind. Evolution has programmed our brains to find two things particularly interesting, and therefore memorable: jokes and sex—and especially, it seems, jokes about sex.

Be aware that you’ll need to get creative when it comes to abstract nouns. A burning tennis ball may prove easier to imagine than a burning year, but both are possible (and a burning year is still much easier to remember than a masculine year).

You’ll learn to break down the most complex of grammatical constructions into easy-to-learn pieces, and memorize those pieces using your SRS.

With the help of new online tools that can connect you with native speakers, you’ll convert those stories into a custom, self-run language class that provides all the instruction you need without wasting a second of your time.

There are two sorts of grammar that we encounter in our lives: the spoken grammar we acquire as kids, and the written grammar we learn in school.

Kids don’t learn their language from just any kind of language input. The only input that seems to matter is input that kids can understand. In linguistic circles, this is known as comprehensible input. The basic idea is this: kids need to understand the gist of what they hear in order to learn a language from it.

In contrast, you can’t teach a kid Japanese by merely showing him Japanese TV shows, even if you sit him in front of the TV for hundreds of hours. TV just doesn’t make enough sense; it’s missing that universal translator—real cookies and real interactions—and so it’s not comprehensible input.

the only way to teach a kid a new language is by finding a real person to speak with them in that language.

the subject of raging linguistic debate—perhaps kids possess a language machine or perhaps it’s a language + everything else machine—but both sides agree that kids have some sort of awesome, pattern-crunching machine in their heads. Every kid can take in sentences from their parents, chew them up, and automatically spit out perfect grammar by their sixth birthdays. And fortunately for us, the machine in their heads never stops working. If we want to learn a new language, we just need to learn how to use it.

When kids learn languages, they follow a series of predictable stages.

If you look at the sentences produced by adults learning a second language, you wouldn’t expect to see any patterns whatsoever. After all, where kids always learn language from their families and friends, adults learn languages in all sorts of ways. Some take structured classes, some move to foreign countries and immerse themselves, some read books, and some fall in love and learn from their boyfriends or girlfriends.

Yet if you monitor adults learning a second language, you find something completely mystifying. That German woman with her English textbook follows the exact same developmental stages as that Japanese guy with his American girlfriend. The German might progress through her stages faster—German, after all, is fairly similar to English—but she won’t skip any of them. Not only that, but both of these English students will follow developmental stages that closely resemble the development of child speech.

These results are baffling, in part because they don’t have anything to do with the order of language textbooks and classes.

They can successfully learn to use a late-stage rule—he + eat = he eats—in the slow-paced world of homework and tests, but they invariably forget that same rule whenever they try to speak. Speech is too fast, and students just don’t have enough time to apply their grammar rules consciously.

As far as researchers can tell, this is simply the order with which the human brain picks up English, period.

While the developmental stages look different from language to language, every language has a particular developmental order, which children and second language learners alike will inevitably follow on their way to fluency.

Kids seem to succeed at language learning where adults fail, but that’s only because they get much more input than we do. In a kid’s first six years of life, they’re exposed to tens of thousands of hours of language. In our few years of language classes in school, we’re lucky to hear more than a few hundred hours, and many of those hours are spent talking about a language rather than talking in a language. It’s no wonder our language machines don’t seem to work; they’re starving for input.

This is where you’ll start using two abilities you’ve learned as an adult: the ability to find and use translations and the ability to learn grammar rules. We’ve discussed in depth the problems with translations—they’re hard to memorize and they aren’t great at giving you the whole picture—but they do a fine job of giving you the gist of an unfamiliar sentence.

Grammar rules, too, are worth learning; studies show that you’ll learn a language faster when you learn the rules. You don’t need to drill them—as we’ve discussed, grammar drills won’t help you skip over any developmental stages—but a passing familiarity with grammar can help you logically break down complex sentences into chunks you can understand, and the more sentences you understand, the faster you’ll learn.

This is a subtle point. If every sentence you understand brings you closer to fluency, then what’s the problem with grammar drills? Don’t they count as comprehensible input? Indeed they do. They’re just not particularly interesting.

But if you’re not a grammar nut, you don’t need to do workbooks full of grammar exercises. Instead, you can use your grammar book as a quick guided tour through your language. You’ll read the explanations, learn an example or two, and skip over the (often monotonous) drills and exercises. The examples you learn will help you remember each grammar rule, and they’ll serve as comprehensible input at the same time,

You can skip those exercises completely. Just pick out an example or two that you find particularly interesting (I’m a fan of pizze and gelati myself), make a flash card for them (I’ll give you suggestions later in the chapter), and poof, you’ll have that grammar rule memorized forever. You can move on to the next section.

KEY POINTS • You’ll learn fastest if you take advantage of your language machine—the pattern-crunching tool that taught you the grammar of your native language. This machine runs off of comprehensible input—sentences that you understand—so you’ll need to find a good source of simple, clear sentences with translations and explanations. • Take your first sentences out of your grammar book. That way, your sentences can do double duty, teaching you every grammar rule consciously while your language machine works in the background, piecing together an automatic, intuitive understanding of grammar that will rapidly bring you to fluency.

Grammar creates infinite possibilities out of a finite collection of words. It’s an impossible kind of magic, and yet we use it on a daily basis without the slightest thought or effort.

Grammar is amazing in its complexity, but it is utterly awe inspiring in its simplicity. All of grammar’s infinite possibilities are the product of three basic operations: we add words (You like it Do you like it?), we change their forms (I eat I ate), and we change their order (This is nice Is this nice?). That’s it. And it’s not just English. Every language’s grammar depends upon these three operations to turn their words into stories.

To learn a new grammatical form, all you have to do is find an example from your grammar book, understand the gist of the story in that example—you’ll use your grammar book’s explanations and translations—and ask yourself three questions: • Do you see any new words here? • Do you see any new word forms here? • Is the word order surprising to you? Then you’ll make flash cards for any information you’d like to learn:

Can we use this strategy for every word? Almost. For functional words like of and what, this strategy works every time. These words don’t mean much outside of their contexts, and so any examples can tell you precisely how to use them. Of is the word that fits into I’d like a glass _____ water, and what is the word that fits into _____’s your name?

But when you do run into a problematic word, just skip it. As soon as you have a little more grammar under your belt, you’ll be able to leave your textbook behind and seek out your own example sentences on the Internet, a strategy we’ll discuss in the next chapter.

By taking example sentences from your grammar book and breaking them down into new words, word forms, and word orders, you get an enormous amount of mileage from every example you choose.

KEY POINTS • Use your grammar book as a source of simple example sentences and dialogues. • Pick and choose your favorite examples of each grammar rule. Then break those examples down into new words, word forms, and word orders. You’ll end up with a pile of effective, easy-to-learn flash cards.

You’re starting to get a feel for grammar, when suddenly you run face-first into the dreaded declension chart—an imposing mass of data that shows us the twelve forms of a Russian noun, the sixteen ways to decline a German adjective, or sixty-five ways to conjugate a French verb. Now what? You could find sixty-five example sentences for your French verb, but what about the next verb? And the verb after that? Verb declension charts can literally fill books; I own three 550-page volumes of French, German, and Italian verb charts. If you tried to memorize every conjugation of every verb, one by one, you would be sitting in front of your textbook for a very long time. We need a route through this madness.

As we’ve discussed, the only input that can feed our language machines is comprehensible input. We need stories, and sixty-five ways to say “to be” (I am, you are, he is…I was, you were, he was…) just won’t cut it.