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

THE THREE KEYS TO LANGUAGE LEARNING

Learn pronunciation first.
Don’t translate.
Use spaced repetition systems.

Language Books

A good grammar book will walk you through your language’s grammar in a thoughtful, step-by-step manner.1 On the way, it will introduce you to a thousand words or so, give you a bunch of examples and exercises, and provide you with an answer key. You will skip 90 percent of the exercises in the book, but having them around will save you a lot of time once we begin to learn grammar.
A phrase book is a wonderful reference, as it’s difficult to find handy phrases like “Am I under arrest?” and “Where are you taking me?” in a dictionary. Phrase books from the Lonely Planet company are cheap and come with a tiny, extremely practical dictionary in the back. We’ll use this dictionary when we learn our first words, because it’s a lot easier (and faster) to skim through than a real dictionary.
A frequency dictionary typically contains the most important five thousand words of your target language, arranged in order of frequency.
A pronunciation guide will walk you through the entire pronunciation system of your language, with the help of recordings and diagrams of your mouth and tongue.

Tutors and Programs

If you need faster results and have some funds to spare, you can speed up your learning with private tutors (who are extremely affordable at italki.com) or intensive programs at home and abroad. The fastest route to fluency is also the least convenient: intensive immersion programs will provide twenty-plus weekly hours of class time, ten to twenty weekly hours of homework, and a strict no-English policy. You’ll leave with a comfortable proficiency in your language of choice in exchange for two months of your life and a wad of cash.

Upload: Five Principles of Memory

Make memories more memorable.
Maximize laziness.
Don’t review. Recall.
Wait, wait! Don’t tell me!
Rewrite the past.

PRINCIPLE 1: MAKE MEMORIES MORE MEMORABLE

Your brain is a sophisticated filter, which makes irrelevant information forgettable and meaningful information memorable. Foreign words tend to fall into the “forgettable” category, because they sound odd, they don’t seem particularly meaningful, and they don’t have any connection to your own life experiences. You can get around this filter and 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

PRINCIPLE 2: MAXIMIZE LAZINESS

Rote repetition is boring, and it doesn’t work for long-term memorization.
Take the lazy route instead: study a concept until you can repeat it once without looking and then stop. After all, lazy is just another word for “efficient.”

PRINCIPLE 3: DON’T REVIEW. RECALL.

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

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.

DIY Deck Building

Our most effective weapon against forgetting is spaced repetition. 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.

The card construction process is one of the most fun and satisfying ways to learn a language. Content in the knowledge that every detail will become a permanent memory, you become the architect of your own mind.

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.

Anki’s website is Ankisrs.net. There you’ll find download links and installation instructions. Once you’ve installed Anki, you’ll need to learn how to use it.

Time Commitments and Your Language Habit

Take a moment to plan out your budding language habit. You will have two customizable time commitments: creating your flash cards and reviewing those flash cards. Your flash card reviews should be regular; ideally, you’re looking for a slot in your schedule that you can maintain on a daily basis. If you can connect your review time to another regularly recurring event in your life (e.g., breakfast or your daily commute), you’ll have an easier time establishing a new language habit.

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.

There’s one more time commitment—card creation—and it can be much more sporadic than card reviews. I tend to go on card creation binges once a month, sitting for absurd numbers of hours in front of my computer and making hundreds upon hundreds of cards in a weekend. I get obsessive when I’m having fun. You may prefer a more moderate approach. You’ll find that it’s a nice way to spend a long Sunday afternoon, and if your schedule demands something more regular, then twenty minutes every day should do the trick.

Sound Play

Rock and lock are classic members of a special group of words known as minimal pairs. These are pairs of words that differ by only one sound, and every language is full of them. I’ve tortured quite a few of my Austrian English students on the differences between minimal pairs like thinking and sinking, SUS-pect and sus-PECT, and niece and knees. These pairs get right to the heart of the hearing problem in a language, and practicing them with feedback provides the best way to train our ears and rewire our brains. You’ll be able to find the essential minimal pairs in your language at the beginning of many grammar books with CDs (and definitely throughout all pronunciation books), and I’m making it a personal mission to provide minimal pair tests on my website in as many languages as I can find. These tests are as basic as they get—they play a recording (“lock”) and then ask you what word you heard (“rock” or “lock”?)—but what they lack in panache they make up for in results. I used them to learn the (obnoxiously difficult) sounds of Hungarian in twenty minutes a day for ten days. They’re also a lot of fun; you can feel your ears changing with each repetition.

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.
Impressions matter, and your accent makes your first impression in any language. A good accent can make the difference between a conversation that starts in French and ends in English, and a full conversation in 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.

When I learn a language, I tend to use a combination of recordings and a phonetic alphabet, at least until the little French man in my head starts sounding very French. Then I stop with the recordings and rely on my phonetic alphabet. If my language is very friendly, phonetically speaking, I’ll phase out my phonetic alphabet once I’m feeling (over)confident about my pronunciation.

Every language contains a pattern of connections between its spelling and its sounds. If you can internalize that pattern and make it automatic, you’ll save yourself a great deal of work.
The easiest way to internalize those patterns is to use your SRS. Create flash cards to memorize every spelling pattern you need.
In the process, approach foreign sounds and complex patterns from as many angles as you can—from their spellings to their sounds, even down to the individual mouth positions used for each sound. You’re taking advantage of one of the stranger quirks of learning: the more bits and pieces you learn, the less work it takes to learn them.

Learn Your Language’s Sound System

There are two basic paths through pronunciation: the standard route and the off-road route. The standard route uses published resources: either a grammar book with a CD or a special book/CD combo dedicated exclusively to pronunciation. If your grammar book comes with recordings, it likely contains a series of pronunciation lessons scattered through the book. Ignore all the vocabulary and grammar in your book and jump to each pronunciation section. There, listen to and mimic the recordings and then move on to the next pronunciation lesson until you’re done. If your grammar book is text only, then consider buying a dedicated pronunciation book with CD and working through it from cover to cover. If you need help remembering a given sound or spelling, then you can pick and choose whichever flash cards you need from the Gallery. The off-road route takes the tools we’ve found—minimal pair tests for ear training, the IPA for mouth instructions, and our SRS for getting it all into our heads—and builds a pronunciation trainer out of them. These trainers test your ears until you can hear your new language’s sounds, connect those sounds to the spelling patterns in your language, and dump that information into your head through your SRS. I’ve tried to make your job easier by doing as much of the grunt work as possible; I’m creating trainers as fast as I can in as many languages as I can. If I’ve done one for your language, then grab it. These trainers are cheaper than a pronunciation guidebook, and they should do a much better (and faster) job than the standard route. If you use these, you won’t need to make any flash cards now; just download them, install them, and within a few weeks, you’ll have pronunciation mastered.

Resources

Forvo.com (FREE RECORDINGS OF WORDS): First things first. Get acquainted with Forvo.com. Free, native-speaker recordings of more than 2 million words in three hundred languages. Once you start making flash cards, Forvo will become your best friend. If you’re using Anki, put recordings from Forvo into your flash cards.
italki.com can get you in touch with native speakers, who will talk with you or train you for very small amounts of money or in exchange for an equal amount of time speaking in English. You can spend an hour going through words with them and asking them to correct your pronunciation, which can help immensely.

Any effort you put in now will speed up your progress for the rest of your journey. It’ll also ensure that native speakers actually speak to you instead of switching to English at the earliest opportunity.

Word Play and the Symphony of a Word

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.

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.

Sentence Play

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.
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.

Grammar is amazing in its complexity, but it is utterly awe inspiring in its simplicity. 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), and we change their order (This is nice Is this nice?). That’s it. And it’s not just English. Every language’s grammar depends upon these three operations to turn their words into stories.

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.

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.

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.

Creating Your Own Sentences

Writing is your proving ground. It’s where you can play around with the words and grammar rules you’ve learned and see what you can create with them.

Any time you have a question—“How do I say x?” “Can I do y?”—just write out a few sentences, submit them for corrections, and get your answers. If you have absolutely no idea how to write something, use Google Translate to get yourself in the ballpark. Then submit your sentences for corrections and see what the native speakers say. After you get your corrections, turn them into new-word / word form / word order flash cards.

Learning grammar is an improvisatory dance at every level. As you encounter texts in your grammar book or elsewhere, you’re constantly asking yourself the same question: “Does this sentence contain something new?” Do you know all the words? Have you seen those word forms before? Is the word order surprising? Use your flash cards to take whatever you find interesting. Your SRS will make sure that you never forget it. In the beginning of the next chapter, we’ll discuss using Google Images to provide you with example sentences for any word and any grammatical construction. Since you have a bit of vocabulary and grammar already under your belt, you can start using that tool immediately. A note about writing: if you’re trying to refresh a language you’ve forgotten, writing is one of the best ways to reactivate those old memories. Write as much as you possibly can, and turn all of the corrections you receive into flash cards. There’s no better review for grammar and vocabulary.

Be careful not to get too reliant upon Google Translate for your writing. Eventually, you’ll need to make new grammatical constructions on your own if you want them to stick, so if you roughly know how to say something, then try to do it without Google’s help. Remember, you have access to native speakers to help turn your mistakes into new, useful flash cards.

The Language Game

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.

I like to write whenever I’m stuck on a long commute. I’ll finish my daily flash card reviews and then begin writing example sentences and definitions for new words. It’s an endless source of portable entertainment.

Self-Directed Writing

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 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.
With the advent of ubiquitous, high-speed Internet connections, you can get quality speech practice anywhere.
Whenever and wherever you practice, follow the golden rule of Language Taboo: no English allowed. By practicing in this way, you’ll develop comfortable fluency with the words and grammar you know.

Verbling.com is an instant gratification machine. You tell it what language you’re learning, and it pairs you up with someone who speaks your target language and wants to learn your native language. You chat for five minutes in one language, a bell sounds, and then you chat in the other language. It’s language learning in the style of speed dating, and it’s a nice way to meet and chat with real, live native speakers. You can make some friends, play a bit of language Taboo, and generally have a good time. Verbling is great because it’s fast; you don’t need to spend time finding language exchange partners and arranging times to chat. You get a lot of exposure to wildly varying accents, which can help you understand those accents in the future.

Italki.com brings money to the table, which changes the game dramatically. It can connect you with native speakers and professional teachers, who are willing to chat with you exclusively in your target language. This cuts the English out of your practice sessions and makes them much more efficient. Since these teachers get to work in the comfort of their own homes, they usually charge very little. This arrangement gives you a lot more control over your learning. Once you’ve tried out a few people and found a good match (most teachers offer cheap, thirty-minute intro sessions), you can schedule regular meetings and plan out conversation topics in advance. If you’re aiming for efficiency, then pull out a word frequency list and discuss every word you don’t know in order. This is what I do with my private English students, and it always provokes interesting, fun conversations.

Take notes on everything you learn. This is your chance to pick up all the slang that’s missing from your textbook. If you want, you can even work with your tutor to generate example sentences for new flash cards. In the process, you’ll run into new grammar and new vocabulary, all while speaking in your target language. It’s a great use of time and money, and it’s one of the best ways to practice speaking at home.

Explore Your Language

Over the previous three chapters, I’ve suggested the following:

Sound Play: Learn how to hear and produce the sounds of your target language and how spelling and sound interrelate.
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.
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.

Here’s what I suggest you do next:

If you haven’t already done so, learn the first half of your grammar book. Make flash cards for everything you find interesting.
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.
Go back to your grammar book, skim through it, and grab any remaining bits of information you’d like.
Read your first book while listening to an audiobook.
Watch a full season of a dubbed TV show, reading episode summaries in your target language ahead of time.
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. Then rinse and repeat as desired.

Note: even when you’re focusing on a book or TV show, never stop doing flash card reviews. Your flash cards get more and more useful the longer you use them. I like to review my flash cards for a full year before I stop completely. That way, I’ll have an easier time retaining all my words and grammar, even without doing any maintenance later. Also, never entirely stop creating and learning new cards. In the past, I’ve run into situations where I wanted to maintain one of my languages without learning anything new. I did my daily reviews, but I stopped learning new flash cards. It got boring fast. At least in my experience, flash card reviews are only fun when you’re learning new things at the same time. So make sure you always have something new to learn—even just a couple of new words a day makes a huge difference.

Epilogue: The Benefits and Pleasures of Learning a Language

At times, a foreign language can feel like a mask. It’s a game of make-believe. You’re playing the role of Some French Guy, and you’re acting out a conversation with some friends. In these moments, you occasionally catch yourself saying things you never would have said in English. You’re more open. You speak more freely. After all, it’s not really you; it’s just a game. But that’s not quite true. It is you. And you can only meet that side of yourself in a foreign language.

Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It - by Gabriel Wyner