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

by Gabriel Wyner

3 keys to language learning: 1. Learn pronunciation first. 2. Don’t translate. 3. Use spaced repetition systems. • Make memories more memorable. ** structure ** sound ** concept *** abstract *** concrete ** personal connection * Make foreign words more concrete and meaningful. * Make foreign words memorable by doing three things: ** Learn the sound system of your language ** Bind those sounds to images ** Bind those images to your past experiences • Maximize laziness. • Don’t review. Recall. • Wait, wait! Don’t tell me! • Rewrite the past. * study a concept until you can repeat it once without looking and then stop. * Acts of recall set off an intricate chemical dance in your brain that boosts memory retention. * To maximize efficiency, spend most of your time recalling rather than reviewing. * You’ll accomplish this goal by creating flash cards that test your ability to recall a given word, pronunciation, or grammatical construction. Coupled with images and personal connections, these cards will form the foundation of a powerful memorization system. PRINCIPLE 4: WAIT, WAIT! DON’T TELL ME! * Memory tests are most effective when they’re challenging. The closer you get to forgetting a word, the more ingrained it will become when you finally remember it. * If you can consistently test yourself right before you forget, you’ll double the effectiveness of every test. PRINCIPLE 5: REWRITE THE PAST This rewriting process is the engine behind long-term memorization. Every act of recall imbues old memories with a trace of your present-day self. This trace gives those memories additional connections: new images, emotions, sounds, and word associations that make your old memory easier to recall. Once you’ve rewritten these memories enough times, they become unforgettable. * Every time you successfully recall a memory, you revisit and rewrite earlier experiences, adding bits and pieces of your present self to your past memories. * You’ll make the best use of your time when practicing recall if your earlier experiences are as memorable as possible. You can accomplish this by connecting sounds, images, and personal connections to every word you learn. * When you do forget, use immediate feedback to bring back your forgotten memories. We want our original memories to be as deep and multisensory as possible (1: Make memories more memorable). We want to study as little as possible (2: Maximize laziness), and practice recall as much as possible (3: Don’t review. Recall). We want our recall practice to be challenging but not too hard (4: Wait, wait! Don’t tell me!). Last, when we practice, we want to nearly forget those original experiences but not forget them completely. When we do forget, we want immediate feedback to put us back on track (5: Rewrite the past). Spaced Repetition System (SRS) Spaced repetition systems (SRSs) are flash cards on steroids. They supercharge memorization by automatically monitoring your progress and using that information to design a daily, customized to-do list of new words to learn and old words to review. * 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. 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. APPENDIX 4: THE INTERNATIONAL PHONETIC ALPHABET DECODER IPA for 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 you run into difficult combinations of sounds, back-chain them together until your tongue performs automatically. * 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. To create a deep, multisensory memory for a word, you’ll need to combine several ingredients: * spelling * sound * meaning * personal connection. The Connections: Sound, Spelling, Meaning, Personal Connection (and Gender) * 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 a moment to find a link between each word and your own experiences. * 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. * Building the connections —the sounds, images, spellings, and memories in each word. * 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. * 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) ** we change their order (This is nice Is this nice?). ** Do you see any new words here? ** Do you see any new word forms here? ** Is the word order surprising to you? * 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. * 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. * 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. * 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. * Break Each Sentence into New Words, Word Forms, and Word Order - put them in flash card with picture * Creating Your Own Different Sentences for conjugation, any variation - put them in flash card with picture * Using Google Images to provide you with example sentences for any word and any grammatical construction. * By learning the sounds of your language, you gain access to words. By learning words, you gain access to grammar. And with just a little bit of grammar, you gain access to the rest of your language. KEY POINTS * To learn vocabulary efficiently, begin by learning the top thousand words in your target language. * If you’re aiming for a high degree of fluency, then keep going until you know the top fifteen hundred to two thousand words. * Once you’re done building a foundation, choose additional words based upon your individual needs. You can find these words by skimming through a thematic vocabulary book and finding key words for every context you need—travel, music, business, and so on. * Use Google Images to find quality example sentences and pictures for your words. It’s fast, it provides clear examples, and the combination of images and sentences is easy to memorize. * If you run into problems or you’re away from your computer, write out your own example sentences and definitions for new words. Get them corrected and use those corrections to learn both grammar and vocabulary. * Once you have enough vocabulary under your belt, add a monolingual dictionary to your toolbox. When you do, you’ll gain the ability to learn every word in your target language, and as a bonus, your passive vocabulary will grow every time you research and memorize a new term. * Reading without a dictionary is the simplest, easiest way to grow your passive vocabulary. On average, a single book will teach you three hundred to five hundred words from context alone. By reading just one book in your target language, you’ll make all future books and texts of any kind much easier to read. * By reading in conjunction with an audiobook, you’ll have a much easier time moving through a long text, and you’ll pick up invaluable exposure to the rhythms of your language in action. This will improve your pronunciation, your listening comprehension, your vocabulary, your grammar; in short, it will provide a huge boost to every aspect of your language. * Listening is a fast-paced skill that can sometimes feel overwhelming. Take baby steps, and gradually ramp up the challenge until you can handle the fastest and hardest of listening challenges (radio, podcasts, ridiculous garbled train station announcements). • * Start with an interesting foreign TV (24 Heures Chrono) or dubbed American TV series without subtitles. You can dial down the difficulty by reading episode summaries ahead of time, in order to prepare yourself for the vocabulary and plot twists of each episode. * As your comfort level grows, wean yourself off of summaries and begin watching and listening to more challenging media. First Stage: 1. Sound Play: Learn how to hear and produce the sounds of your target language and how spelling and sound interrelate. 2. Word Play: Learn 625 frequent, concrete words by playing Spot the Differences in Google Images, finding personal connections, and if needed, adding mnemonic imagery for grammatical gender. 3. Sentence Play: Begin turning the sentences in your grammar book into flash cards for new words, word forms, and word order. Use written output to fill in the gaps missing from your textbook. Second Stage: 1. If you haven’t already done so, learn the first half of your grammar book. Make flash cards for everything you find interesting. 2. Learn the top thousand words in your target language. Write out definitions and examples whenever you’re not entirely sure what a word means. About halfway through, you’ll find that you can understand a monolingual dictionary. Use it to help you learn the rest of your words. 3. Go back to your grammar book, skim through it, and grab any remaining bits of information you’d like. 4. Read your first book while listening to an audiobook. 5. Watch a full season of a dubbed TV show, reading episode summaries in your target language ahead of time. 6. Get a ton of speech practice. Get as much as you possibly can, either through an immersion program, a language holiday abroad, or through teachers on italki.com. If you get a private teacher, talk about the next thousand words from your frequency list and add specialized words for your particular interests. Together with your teacher, create example sentences and enter them into your SRS.