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

by Gabriel Wyner

You can create your own stories. Use that declension table to quickly generate a bunch of variations on whatever examples you find in your textbook. You can write She is a doctor and stick that story on a flash card within a few seconds. In contrast with the meaningless (or perhaps philosophical) She is, your “She is a doctor” story is easy to visualize, and it means something quite different than the original example from your textbook, “I am a student.” You’ll have an easy time remembering it, and it’s the sort of clear comprehensible input that makes language machines thrive.

If you make mistakes, then so much the better; you’ll learn even more from your stories. You can generate stories like these to learn all the forms of a single verb. You can even create little fragments of stories (one potato chip, two potato chips) for any adjective and noun forms you encounter.

Kids rely on patterns, and even the most irregular languages are full of patterns. English, for example, is notorious for its irregular past tense forms: go / went / have gone, do / did / have done, have / had / have had. There are hundreds of these, and they drive English students crazy. But hidden within the chaos, there are always patterns—little islands of regularity, like steal/stole/stolen, choose/chose/chosen, and speak/spoke/spoken

This is where declension charts come in handy. While they’re not very good for learning new patterns, they make it very easy to see patterns we’ve already learned.

Even if you’re learning a French verb with sixty-five different declensions, you’ll be able to remember it. After all, you’re not really remembering sixty-five different verb forms at once; you’re just remembering that this verb follows the pattern of some other, more familiar verb.

KEY POINTS • Languages are often full of complex, hard-to-remember patterns. You can learn these patterns easily by embedding them into simple, understandable stories. • Whenever you encounter a confusing declension chart in your grammar book, take the nearest example sentence and use it to generate stories that cover every new form you need. • You’ll turn these stories into illustrated flash cards—the same new word/word form/word order flash cards discussed earlier—and you’ll use those flash cards to learn your target language’s patterns.

Unfortunately, our old mnemonic images won’t work here. They worked fine with nouns—exploding dogs and shattering horses make for memorable stories—but those same images break down if you try to use them with verbs or adjectives.

If you want to use mnemonics to help you learn grammar, you’ll need a way to attach multiple mnemonic images to single words, and you’ll need images that can work with verbs and adjectives.

Person-Action-Object: The Mnemonic Images of Memory Champions Our solution comes from the wacky field of competitive memorization.

One of the core mnemonic weapons in any competitor’s arsenal is known as the person-action-object (PAO) system, and we’re going to use a simplified version of it to attach mnemonic images to our words. PAO relies upon a simple premise: the three basic ingredients of a story are a person (Arnold Schwarzenegger), an action (explodes), and an object (a dog).

PAO can give you the flexibility you need to connect a mnemonic image to any kind of word. If you want to learn the ten ways to make German plural nouns, for example, you can choose ten people to represent them. Then you can use those people whenever you need them. Arnold Schwarzenegger (plural form 1) explodes (masculine gender) a dog is a weird, vivid, and compact story that could tell you the gender and plural form for our poor German dog.

If you wanted to learn that fight/fought, buy/bought, and think/thought all follow the same pattern, you could put those verbs into the “action” slot of a PAO story.

For example, if you choose a mnemonic person—say, Patrick Stewart—you could imagine him fighting something, buying something, or thinking about something. If instead you choose an object—a toaster, perhaps—you could imagine fighting a toaster or buying some fancy toaster.

Adjectives can fit into PAO as well, but they’re rarely complex enough to warrant some elaborate story like Bruce Lee eats a large/cold/happy hot dog. Instead, you can just use a simple mnemonic object.

For example, French has five adjectives—beautiful, new, crazy, soft, and old—that follow a single, irregular pattern. We can connect them with a single object: a beautiful football, a new football, a crazy football—and easily remember the pattern in the future.

you can make a couple of flash cards for each of your mnemonic images and let your SRS sort it all out. Within a week or two, you won’t be able to forget the strange and tawdry escapades of Sir Patrick Stewart and his stack of verbs.

Mnemonics are a handy way to turn unwieldy declension charts into vivid, memorable stories.

You don’t always need mnemonics. In some languages, the spelling of a word may tell its particular pattern, and you don’t need some crazy story involving Patrick Stewart and a baseball bat to remember it.

When you run into trouble, use mnemonics to make confusing irregularities easy and fun to memorize.

KEY POINTS • Languages often have groups of “irregular” words that follow similar patterns. While you can learn each of these patterns easily with the help of illustrated stories, you may still need some way to remember which words follow which patterns. • Any time you run into a tricky pattern, choose a person, action, or object to help you remember. For verb patterns, pick a mnemonic person or an object. For noun patterns, use a person or an action. Adjectives fit well with objects, and adverbs fit well with actions.

You’ve taken a few examples from each chapter of your grammar book, broken them down, and turned them into flash cards. You’ve learned how to learn patterns and how to attach them to new words using mnemonic images. You’re well on your way toward learning the grammatical system of your new language. There’s one last tool at your disposal, and it’s where everything comes together: output. You’re going to write in your new language, but these aren’t the tiresome essays you were required to write in school. Instead, you’ll write about whatever you want to learn.

Self-directed writing is the ultimate personalized language class. The moment you try to write about your upcoming vacation without the word for “vacation” or the future tense, you learn precisely what bits of language you’re missing. Writing also trains you to take the patterns you’ve memorized and actually use them. This is where you learn to take raw information and turn it into language.

Some of these exchange communities are tremendously helpful; I usually get a detailed correction from the Russians on Lang-8.com within an hour, and after a few hours, I often have five Russians commenting on my little paragraph. Insanity. If you’re uncomfortable correcting someone’s writing, there are other communities—italki.com is one of the best—that can connect you to extremely affordable private tutors. Due to the magic of exchange rates and the allure of working from home, you can hire tutors in any language for extremely low prices.

Once you have a source for corrections, your goal in writing is to make mistakes. You don’t need to craft a perfect essay, and in fact, you’ll learn more if you write quickly and mess up a few times. Try to say what you want to say, and if you don’t have the words or the grammar to say it, then use Google Translate (translate.google.com) to help. Once you get your corrections, you’ll figure out precisely where your problems are, and you’ll learn how a native speaker would express the same ideas.

Put every correction you receive into your flash cards. That way, you’ll never forget a correction. This is one of the best features of SRSs; they give you the ability to remember everything.

KEY POINTS • Use writing to test out your knowledge and find your weak points. Use the example sentences in your grammar book as models, and write about your interests. • Submit your writing to an online exchange community. Turn every correction you receive into a flash card. In this way, you’ll find and fill in whatever grammar and vocabulary you’re missing.

In the beginning, use your grammar book for inspiration. Take each new construction you learn and use it to write something about your life. What do you do for a living? What would you order in a restaurant?

Turn the dialogues and examples in your grammar book into language that you’ll actually use, and see what mistakes and missing words you can find.

In this section, we’ll discuss where to find example sentences and then talk about what to do with the sentences you’ve found. To do this, you’re going to rely upon a single skill: the ability to break a sentence down into tiny pieces. You’ll use this skill over and over until you’ve mastered the grammar and vocabulary of your language.

Find Your Sentences Use your grammar book. It’s there to make your life easier. You’ll find a collection of easy-to-understand example sentences and dialogues, detailed explanations, and our favorite part of all, giant declension charts.

Go through and choose one or two of your favorites from each section. If you miss an important rule or exception (one fish, two fish), don’t worry about it. At this point, you’re just trying to get the basics into your head. You’ll pick up more details as you learn more and more sentences.

Remember, you’re going to be using an SRS, which basically gives you a perfect, photographic memory. You’re going to remember every tiny detail about every sentence you choose.

My name is George. I have a pet monkey. NEW WORDS Your first step: go through the words and see which ones are new. If you didn’t know any of them, you have eight words to learn (George doesn’t count). Next, figure out which of these words lend themselves to simple pictures. Name, I, pet, and monkey all fall under this category (and two of these words—name and I—show up in the 625-word list). You’ll take these words and make flash cards in the same way you did in the last chapter, by playing Spot the Differences with Google Images, adding in personal connections, and using mnemonics for gender (if needed). That leaves you with four more words: my, is, have, and a.

First, you’re going to be finding pictures of George and his monkey, and if George isn’t actively walking or disintegrating that monkey, you’re not going to think about those words. Second, you’re going to turn this monkey story into ten or more flash cards. With that much stimulation, there’s no way you’re going to have trouble remembering the word have

Third, and the most important of all, you’re making these cards yourself. Back when we discussed learning simple vocabulary, I stressed the importance of making your own cards. I pointed out that the real learning occurs when you’re playing Spot the Differences on Google Images, choosing a personal connection, and so on. The flash cards you create are just a tiny reminder of a much bigger experience. And while you could probably share your flash cards with friends and teach them a few simple words (This is a ball, this is a horse), you’re the only person who can get the full benefits from your cards.

Grammar is even more personal than vocabulary. You can’t share any of your grammar cards with friends. These flash cards only mean anything because of t...

Occasionally your grammar book may include terribly vague example sentences, and a sentence like “_____ is a good thing” just isn’t going to do a good job of teaching you the meaning of a word like integrity, no matter how many flash cards you make. In cases like these, just skip those words. You’ll learn them using the tools in the next chapter, when you start to find your own example sentences with Google Images and supplement them with a monolingual dictionary.

Take the word my, for instance. My isn’t really a new word; it’s just a different form of the word I

The only difference between new words and new word forms is that here you’ll give yourself an extra clue (I or to be). This makes your flash cards somewhat easier to remember and links closely related concepts.

WORD ORDER You’ve learned all of your words. Now you just need to remember where to put them. This part’s easy. Remove a word from your sentence: I a pet monkey. Now put it back into the sentence on the back side of a flash card. Where does have go? Do this once or twice in a sentence—I have a monkey (insert pet)—and you’ll have the order of the words memorized for every similarly worded sentence.

Any time the position of a word, the form of a word, or the word itself surprises you, then learn it. But if you’re not surprised by it, then skip it and move on to the next sentence.

Unless you’re using a Leitner box and drawing your pictures, you’ll use Google Images. If you’re not learning new, concrete words, then you don’t need to search for images in your target language. We’re not playing Spot the Differences here, so if you need a picture of a man with a monkey, feel free to search for “man with a monkey.

Try both variants out and see how your brain reacts. I like to use multiple images to highlight different aspects of the sentence.

Any picture will help turn an abstract grammatical idea into a concrete story. As a result, you’ll have a much easier time remembering your sentence.

Deal with declension charts (I am, he/she is, we are, etc.) in the same way you dealt with example sentences; turn them into the same kinds of picture flash cards described above. The only real difference is that your grammar book won’t supply you with every example sentence you need. So make those sentences yourself. Take an example sentence from your grammar book (I am a student) and turn it into a bunch of new sentences (She is an architect, he is a duck inspector). Whenever possible, make each sentence unique; it’s relatively easy to keep track of I _____ a student and She _____ an architect, whereas four nearly identical flash cards for I/he/she/you _____ a student can become confusing.