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

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.

Playing with timing in this way is known as spaced repetition, and it’s extraordinarily efficient. In a four-month period, practicing for 30 minutes a day, you can expect to learn and retain 3600 flash cards with 90 to 95 percent accuracy. These flash cards can teach you an alphabet, vocabulary, grammar, and even pronunciation. And they can do it w

Here, fun is serious business. If you get bored, your mental filters will turn on, and all of your precious work will leak out of your ears. So take a moment to have fun; it’s much more efficient.

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

Some people have a way with words, and other people … oh, uh, not have way. —Steve Martin

Go to Appendix 3 and pick your poison. If you choose to use a Leitner box, then you have some supplies to pick up and a calendar to fill in. If you go for Anki, then download it, install it, and follow the video tutorials until you understand how to use it.

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 ca

A frequency dictionary typically contains the most important five thousand words of your target language, arranged in order of frequency. (The number one word in English, the, shows up once every twenty-five words.) These books are amazing, with lovingly picked examples and translations. They’ll save you tons of time and they take so much work to c

YOUTUBE A source for pronunciation advice and information. While it can be somewhat unreliable, many of the tutorials you’ll find there (if you search for, say, “How to trill an r ” or “the Arabic A’yn”) have been created by native speakers and can help you hear and produce new sounds. If you’re going to start somewhere, start with my series (linke

The second key, don’t translate, was hidden within my experiences at the Middlebury Language Schools in Vermont. Not only can a beginning student skip translating, but it was an essential step in learning how to think in a foreign language. It made language learning possible. This was the fatal flaw in my earlier attempts to learn Hebrew and Russia