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

Any time you have a lot of trouble with a word or grammatical rule, just make a few new cards on a closely related theme, and it’ll become much easier to remember.

You can do better, by searching for your words in your target language.

• 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.

Programs like Rosetta Stone can provide decent original experiences for words like ball and elephant, 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 have to make those connections for yourself,

When you create something, it becomes a part of you. If, instead, you simply copied someone else’s notes, you wouldn’t benefit nearly as much.

Words are, after all, our communal brain. As a group, we point at things and say corresponding words until our minds and brains tune to each other—an orchestra of minds so immense that the violist in Los Angeles can’t possibly hear the violinist in Pennsylvania, and yet here we are, playing in perfect harmony and perfect rhythm all the same. It is

How do we combine the five principles? 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,

When you research a word using Google Images, you’re playing the Spot the Differences game; you’re looking for the difference between what you expect to see, and what you actually see. The game is a lot of fun; the Internet is full of weird, funny pictures in all sorts of languages.

KEY POINTS • 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.

To play the Memory game, you’ll spend a few seconds looking for any memory about your word that comes to mind. It could be your childhood cat or your friend’s T-shirt. Try to keep the new word in mind rather than the translation. You’ll make some weird English-French hybrid sentence like “The last time I saw my grand-mère (grandmother) was last wee