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

For your very first book, try to find a familiar story—a translation of something you’ve already read or a book that’s been turned into a movie you’ve seen—and read it along with an audiobook. The audiobook will carry you along and help you read faster

625 WORDS A list of extremely common, concrete English words that are easy to visualize and simple to translate. If you learn them, they’ll reinforce the pronunciation work you did in Chapter 3, and they’ll provide a solid vocabulary foundation for when you’re ready to approach grammar in Chapter 5.

• 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 p

It’s uncomfortable to speak with someone when you

If you have better listening comprehension, you’ll gain more vocabulary and grammar every time you hear someone speak your language. Poof—you’ve just boosted your vocabulary and grammar knowledge for the rest of your life. You gain all this at the expense of a few hours of minimal pair study.

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,

FREQUENCY LIST Ranging from the 625 words introduced in Appendix 5 to the free lists available at en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists, these lists of words are arranged in order of frequency and usually don’t come with translations (so you need to do that step

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.

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. When we try to suss out the difference between a bar and a pub, for instance, we invariably get caught up in long discussions