Each language has its own frequency list (the best frequency dictionaries are published by Routledge), and they are fascinating, both because of the words they include and the words they don’t.

It’s uncomfortable to speak with someone when you

you can make a couple of flash cards for each of your mnemonic images and let your SRS sort it all out.

Madness. How can taking an identical test three times in a row produce such a large effect? Odd as it is, this follows rules of common sense. 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 sheet of paper,

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

on Google Images, looking at bunches of Hungarian cats. I even remember downloading a recording from Forvo.com and trying to mimic the tricky Hungarian ɒ vowel (a cross between our “ah” and “oh”). Each of these experiences was fun for me, and so my flash card brings back all sorts of enjoyable, macska-related memories. When you review your flash

• 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.

Fluency, after all, isn’t the ability to know every word and grammatical pattern in a language; it’s the ability to communicate your thoughts without stopping every time you run into a problem.

My Italian words aren’t just the everyday words that I’ve used all my life; they’re a distinct set of memories that I formed with my own hands and brain. In learning that language, I created a new mind and a new personality for myself. That is the dearest gift of language learning—you get to meet a new you.