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

by Gabriel Wyner

I encountered three basic keys to language learning: 1. Learn pronunciation first. 2. Don’t translate. 3. Use spaced repetition systems.

The first key, learn pronunciation first, came out of my music conservatory training (and is widely used by the military and the missionaries of the Mormon church). Singers learn the pronunciation of languages first because we need to sing in these languages long before we have the time to learn them. In the course of mastering the sounds of a language, our ears become attuned to those sounds, making vocabulary acquisition, listening comprehension, and speaking come much more quickly. While we’re at it, we pick up a snazzy, accurate accent.

The second key, don’t translate, was hidden within my experiences at the Middlebury Language Schools in Vermont. Not only can a beginning student skip translating, but it was an essential step in learning how to think in a foreign language. It made language learning possible. This was the fatal flaw in my earlier attempts to learn Hebrew and Russian: I was practicing translation instead of speaking. By...

The third key, use spaced repetition systems (SRSs), came from language blogs and software developers. SRSs are flash cards on steroids. Based upon your input, they create a custom study plan that drives information deep into your long-term memory. They ...

“Das ist mir völlig Wurst

We struggle to reach any degree of fluency because there is so much to remember. The rulebook of the language game is too long. We go to classes that discuss the rulebook, we run drills about one rule or another, but we never get to play the game. On the off chance that we ever reach the end of a rulebook, we’ve forgotten most of the beginning already. Moreover, we’ve ignored the other book (the vocabulary book), full of thousands upon thousands of words that are just as hard to remember as the rules.

English vocabulary is 28 percent French and 28 percent Latin. As soon as an English speaker learns proper French pronunciation, he already knows thousands of words.

A frequency dictionary typically contains the most important five thousand words of your target language, arranged in order of frequency. (The number one word in English, the, shows up once every twenty-five words.) These books are amazing, with lovingly picked examples and translations. They’ll save you tons of time and they take so much work to compile that we should be throwing money and flowers at the feet of their authors. There are some online frequency lists, but they’re not as good as the paper versions. Frequency dictionaries don’t exist in every language yet, but if your language has one, you win. Get it.

These patterns of connections form in an elegantly simple, mechanical process: neurons that fire together wire together. Known as Hebb’s Law, this principle helps explain how we remember anything.

These are the four levels of processing. They were identified in the 1970s by psychologists who created a curious questionnaire with four types of questions and gave it to college students: • Structure: How many capital letters are in the word BEAR? • Sound: Does APPLE rhyme with Snapple? • Concept: Is TOOL another word for “instrument”? • Personal Connection: Do you like PIZZA?

The four levels of processing are more than a biological quirk; they act as a filter, protecting us from information overload. We live in a sea of information, surrounded by a dizzying amount of input from TV, the Internet, books, social interactions, and the events of our lives. Your brain uses levels of processing to judge which input is important and which should be thrown out. You don’t want to be thinking about the number of letters in the word tiger when one is chasing after you, nor do you want to be assaulted by vivid memories of cows when you buy milk. To keep you sane, your brain consistently works at the shallowest level of processing needed to get the job done.

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.

We’ll get better results if we skip the English word and use an image instead. We recall images much better than words, because we automatically think conceptually when we see an image.

Our capacity for visual memory is extraordinary; we only need to learn how to take advantage of it. Since we need to learn words, not pictures, we will use combinations of words and pictures. Such combinations work even better than pictures alone. This effect even applies to totally unrelated images: you will remember an abstract drawing with the sentence “Apples are delicious” better than that drawing alone. Faced with an incomprehensible image and an unrelated word, your brain struggles to find meaning, even if there isn’t any. In the process, it automatically moves the word out of the disodium phosphate trash can and into cookie territory. As a result, you’ll remember.

We can go one step deeper than pictures by taking advantage of the last level, personal connection. You will remember a concept with a personal connection 50 percent more easily than a concept without one,

Extra repetition is known as overlearning, and it doesn’t help long-term memory at all. Can you remember a single fact from the last school test you crammed for? Can you even remember the test itself? If we’re going to invest our time in a language, we want to remember for months, years, or decades. If we can’t achieve this goal by working harder, then we’ll do it by working as little as possible.

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.

Our blank page, however, changes everything. At the moment where your performance is judged, your brain realizes that it had better get its act in gear. As a result, every memory you recall gets a squirt of memory-boosting chemicals. Those memories are reactivated, your amygdala calls for hormones, your hippocampus maps out the involved networks, and your neurons wire tightly together. Every time you succeed at recalling, the reward centers in your brain release a chemical reward—dopamine—into your hippocampus, further encouraging long-term memory storage. Your blank sheet of paper has created a drug-fueled memory party in your brain. Your boring word list never stood a chance.

There is no such thing as “memorizing.” We can think, we can repeat, we can recall, and we can imagine, but we aren’t built to memorize. Rather, our brains are designed to think and automatically hold on to what’s important.

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.

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).

That single practice session has made the difference between forgetting nearly everything and remembering quite a bit.

We’ve found the end of forgetting. You learn a word today and then shelve it for a while. When it comes back, you’ll try to recall it, and then shelve it again, on and on until you couldn’t possibly forget. 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. At least until you can upload jujitsu directly into your brain, this is the most efficient way to memorize large amounts of information permanently.

Start with a small number of new cards (fifteen to thirty) per day; you can always decide later if you want to go crazy with your flash cards. As mentioned earlier, you can learn thirty new cards per day and maintain your old cards in exchange for thirty minutes a day.

when you’re not sure about the way your language sounds, you’re stuck learning two languages instead of just one.

You might be able to memorize these by rote repetition, but not for more than a few minutes. We’ll try something a bit more interesting (and long lasting) instead. 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).

These competitions have created a sort of mental arms race, where competitors create new and improved mnemonic imagery techniques that allow them to memorize more and faster. 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).

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.