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

by Gabriel Wyner

My neural network for cookies involves sight, smell, and taste. There are audio components—the sound of the word cookie and the sound of milk pouring into a glass.

My cookie is memorable because it contains so many connections. I can access cookie in a thousand different ways. I will remember cookies if I read about them, hear about them, see them, smell them, or taste them. The word is unforgettable.

structure, sound, concept, and personal connection. These are the four levels of processing.

The four levels of processing are more than a biological quirk; they act as a filter, protecting us from information overload. We

To create a robust memory for a word like mjöður, you’ll need all four levels of processing. The shallowest level, structure, allows you to recognize patterns of letters and determine whether a word is long, short, and written in English or in Japanese.

Your first task in language learning is to reach the next level: sound. Sound connects structure to your ears and your mouth and allows you to speak.

Sound is the land of rote memorization. We take a name, like Edward, or a pair of words, like cat–gato, and we repeat them, continuously activating the parts of our brain that connect structure to sound.

We need a way to get through this filter, and we’ll find it at the third level of processing: concepts. Our college students remembered twice as many TOOLs (synonym for instruments) as APPLEs (Snapples).

Deeper still than abstract concepts are concrete, multisensory concepts.

But if we’re in a bar together, and I hand you a flaming drink with a dead snake in it, and tell you, “This—mjöður! You—drink!” you won’t have any trouble remembering that word.

PRINCIPLE 3: DON’T REVIEW. RECALL.

In school we learn things then take the test, In everyday life we take the test then we learn things.

If it’s hard to remember, it’ll be difficult to forget.

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.

In that single act of recall, your gato network has doubled in size.

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.

We need a way to restore our forgotten memories, and we’ll find it in immediate feedback.

If our memory of gato has vanished, then we start over. We form a new, “original” experience at the moment we got stumped and looked at the answer. This is not as good as remembering our actual original experience, but it’s still very effective.

Alternatively, we may still have access to our original memory of gato. This memory will burst into life—“Oh, yeah!”—at the moment we see that picture of a cat.

Thanks to a simple act of immediate feedback, we’ve regained our rewrite. Feedback allows us to resuscitate forgotten memories and get the most out of our practice sessions.

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).

They make unpredictable connections to everything we experience or imagine.

They lose pieces of our past and gain pieces of our present.

can enhance or suppress our key-rela...

I can’t count the number of times that I’ve memorized some word, only to have some new, similar-sounding word come along and screw everything up months later. We can’t accurat...

However, we can make predictions about a group of memories. Take a gaggle of college students and teach them obscure triv...

This pattern appears in numerous studies, although the ideal delay changes depending upon the final test date.

While you’re waiting for your old words to return, you can learn new words and send them off into the future, where you’ll meet them again and work them into your long-term memory.

this is the most efficient way to memorize large amounts of information permanently.

In Search of the Perfec...

You want to remember as much as possible now, later...

practice, you have to balance efficienc...

but your old words would come back so often that they would bury you in hours of daily work.

The thread between these two goals—remembering now and remembering later—starts small and grows rapidly.

Every time you successfully remember, you’ll increase the interval (e.g., nine days, three weeks, two months, six months, etc.), ...

If you forget a word, you’ll start again with short intervals and work your way back to long ones until that word sticks, too.

You’ll spend a fixed amount of time every day learning new words, remembering the words from last week, and occasionally meeting old friends from months or years back.

Playing with timing in this way is known as spaced repetition, and it’s extraordinarily efficient.

In a four-month period, practicing for 30 minutes a day, you can expect to learn and retain 3600 flash cards with 90 to 95 percent accuracy. These

Why not? Flash cards are fantastic at reminding you about your original experiences, but they’re not particularly good at creating memories in the first place.

Under these circumstances, you’ll be hard-pressed to form a deep, multisensory memory while you’re busily studying on the way to work.

One of the reasons why language programs and classes fail is that no one can give you a language; you have to take it for yourself. You are rewiring your own brain.

but eventually, you need to deal with words like economic situation.

Abstract words like these require complex, personal connections if you’re ever going to use them comfortably while speaking.

You also need to retain the connections you’ve made, even when you’re busy learning new words. This is a lot to do at once, so you might as well use the best tools for the job.

And since we need deep, memorable experiences to get the most out of spaced repetition, we might as well get them in the process of making our flash cards.