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

by Gabriel Wyner

You’ll have to determine for yourself whether your image of fluency includes political discussions with friends, attending poetry readings, working as a secret agent, or lecturing on quantum physics at the Sorbonne.

Language learning is one of the most intensely personal journeys you can undertake. You are going into your own mind and altering the way you think

Someone sat down and spent months (or years, heaven forbid) organizing the information you need, and you can have all of that effort in the palm of your hand for $15–$25. Thank you, Herr Gutenberg.

If the book gives you “Englishy” pronunciation for each word (Bonjour: bawn-JURE, Tschüss: chewss), I give you permission to burn it and find a different one.

When you study by reading through a list multiple times, you’re practicing reading, not recall. If you want to get better at recalling something, you should practice recalling it.

neurons that fire together wire together,

The world’s languages contain roughly 800 phonemes (six hundred consonants and two hundred vowels).

there’s a neat language called Rotokas in Papua New Guinea with only 11 phonemes, and Taa, spoken in Botswana, uses up to 112 (plus four tones!).

An accurate accent is powerful because it is the ultimate gesture of empathy. It connects you to another person’s culture in a way that words never can, because you have bent your body as well as your mind to match that person’s culture.