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

• 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

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

memorization software on my smartphone to get the French into my head, and I made sure that none of my flash cards had a word of English on them. I began making flash cards for the pronunciation rules, added a bunch of pictures for the nouns and some verbs, learned the verb conjugations, and then built up to simple French definitions of more abstra

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.

4. Read your first book while listening to an audiobook. 5. Watch a full season of a dubbed TV show, reading episode summaries in your target language ahead of time. 6. 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 t

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

when you’re not sure about the way your language sounds, you’re stuck learning two languages instead of just one.

Any time you encounter some frustrating group of irregularities you “just have to memorize,” you can create a mnemonic image. You can even make images for spelling—if ch is for chat (cat), then that cat can ride on top of your cheval (horse). We’ll cover more advanced uses in chapter 5. (I use this game for all sorts of nasty things: verb conjugati

You learn a word today and then shelve it for a while. When it comes back, you’ll try to recall it, and then shelve it again, on and on until you couldn’t possibly forget. While you’re waiting for your old words to return, you can learn new words and send them off into the future, where you’ll meet them again and work them into your long-term memor