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

by Gabriel Wyner

Extra repetition is known as overlearning, and it doesn’t help long-term memory at all.

If you want to get better at recalling something, you should practice recalling it.

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

“If I had four hours to prepare for a date with a Cambodian supermodel, what would be the best use of my time?” Here’s my answer: learn to say one phrase—any phrase—really well. Sit on YouTube or Wikipedia for a few hours, look at pictures of mouth positions, and mimic recordings until you can sound like a native speaker for three seconds. It will Blow. Her. Mind.

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.

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. Dog chunks splatter all over the ceiling and floors. You wipe bits of fur and gore from your forehead. Make your images as vivid as you can stomach. Feminine nouns should catch fire. Your nose spews fire out of it like a dragon, a flaming cat sets fire to your bedroom. Feel the heat of each image; the more senses you can involve, the better. Neuter items should shatter like glass. Jagged, brown-red, sparkling shards of horse spread across the floor, as does your broken heart (sniff). Take a moment to imagine the remaining images yourself: an exploding mouth and neck (masculine), a burning hand and tree bud (feminine), a shattering leaf and knee (neuter).

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.

After all, the Internet is mostly in English;

The second thousand words will give you a 5 percent boost to your reading and listening comprehension—you’ll understand 90 percent of what you hear and 80 percent of what you read.20

You can accurately measure your English vocabulary at TestYourVocab.com.

DVDs of movies and TV shows often come with subtitles in English or your target language. Don’t use them. The problem with subtitles is that reading is easier than listening. We learn with our eyes more than our ears, and so when subtitles are present, we don’t improve at listening.

Fluency, after all, isn’t the ability to know every word and grammatical pattern in a language; it’s the ability to communicate your thoughts without stopping every time you run into a problem.

That is the dearest gift of language learning—you get to meet a new you.

Forvo.com

Then you can submit that translation to a language exchange website like Lang-8 and get it corrected by native speakers.