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

by Gabriel Wyner

Chomsky’s device explains two phenomena:

Europeans have made most linguistic observations, and that they’ve overlooked the tremendous diversity of non-European languages.

No amount of drilling a particular grammar rule … will enable a student to skip a developmental

On average, adults learn languages faster than kids do:

output:

While you can learn to comprehend a language very well using input alone, you need output to learn how to produce it well. (You also need to care about the quality of your output; there’s a fascinating case study in Ortega’s book in which a Japanese

man is perfectly happy speaking in broken English, so he never improves, even though he’s hanging out with English native speakers all the time and speaking in English constantly.)