CityReads│Fluent Forever: How to Learn and Retain a Language

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Fluent Forever: How to Learn and Retain a Language

Fluent Forever is a journey into the language learning process, which provides tips, guidelines and research into the most efficient methods for learning and retaining foreign languages.

Gabriel Wyner, 2014. Fluent forever: how to learn any language fast and remember it forever, New York: Harmony Books.

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The greatest challenge to learning a foreign language is the challenge of memory; there are just too many words and too many rules. For every new word we learn, we seem to forget two old ones, and as a result, fluency can seem out of reach.

Fluent Forever tackles this challenge head-on. The author, Gabriel Wyner, is an opera singer and polyglot. In the midst of his busy life as an opera singer, he needed to learn German, Italian, French, and Russian. Out of those experiences, he found the underpinnings for this book. His methods are the results of an obsessive need to tinker, research, and tinker again. His language-learning toolbox has, over time, turned into a well-oiled machine that transforms fixed amounts of daily time into noticeable, continuous improvement in his languages and in the languages of every person he has taught. In his book, Wyner deconstructs the learning process, revealing how to build a foreign language in your mind from the ground up.

Fluent Forever summarizes three basic keys to language learning:

1. Learn pronunciation first.

2. Don’t translate.

3. Use spaced repetition systems (SRSs).

In the course of mastering the sounds of a language, our ears become attuned to those sounds, making vocabulary acquisition, listening comprehension, and speaking come much more quickly.

The second key, don’t translate. 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.

The third key is the spaced repetition systems(SRSs).

Spaced repetition is an extraordinarily efficient learning method whereby you learn something and then wait a few days to review it. If you still remember, then you wait even longer before your next review. By studying in this way, you push memories deeper and deeper into your long-term memory.

SRSs are automated to-do lists for flash cards that monitor your progress and tell you which flash cards to study on which days to maximize efficiency. Based upon your input, they create a custom study plan that drives information deep into your long-term memory. They supercharge memorization.

At its most basic level, a Spaced Repetition System (SRS) is a to-do list that changes according to your performance. If you can remember that pollo means “chicken” after a two-month delay, then your SRS will automatically wait four to six months before putting pollo back on your to-do list.

By learning the sounds of your language, you gain access to words. By learning words, you gain access to grammar. And with just a little bit of grammar, you gain access to the rest of your language. This is the language game.

Gabriel Wyner’s language learning method relies on four stages: Begin by learning your language’s sound and spelling system, then learn 625 simple words using pictures. Next, use those words to learn the grammatical system of your language, and finally play, by watching TV, speaking with native speakers, reading books and writing.

Fluency 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.

Why is so difficult to remember and so easy to forget words and grammars?

We can use five principles of memory to remember more in less time : make memories more memorable; maximize laziness; recall not review; wait, wait! Don’t tell me! And rewrite the past.

Combined, they form a system that can insert thousands of words and grammar rules so deeply into your mind that you’ll be able to recall them instantly. Most attractively, this system can take what little spare time you have and steadily turn it into a usable foreign language.

Our brain is a sophisticated filter, which makes irrelevant information forgettable and meaningful information memorable. Foreign words tend to fall into the “forgettable” category.

We can get around this filter and make foreign words memorable by doing three things: learn the sound system of your language; bind those sounds to images; bind those images to your past experiences.

We will do it by adding four types of connections: structure, sound, concept, and personal connection. These are the four levels of processing. These are the four levels of processing. They were identified in the 1970s by psychologists who created a curious questionnaire with four types of questions and gave it to college students:

Structure: How many capital letters are in the word BEAR?

Sound: Does APPLE rhyme with Snapple?

Concept: Is TOOL another word for “instrument”?

Personal Connection: Do you like PIZZA?

After the questionnaire, they gave the students a surprise memory test, asking which words from the test they still remembered. Their memories were dramatically influenced by the question types: students remembered six PIZZAs for every BEAR.

The magic of these questions lies in a peculiar mental trick. To count the capital letters in BEAR, you don’t need to think about brown furry animals, and so you don’t. You’ve activated the shallowest level of processing—structure—and moved on. On the other hand, you activate regions throughout your brain to determine whether you like PIZZA, which activates all four levels of processing. These four levels will fire together, wire together, and form a robust memory that is six times easier to remember than that BEAR you’ve already forgotten.

Therefore, if we strip a word down to its bare essentials, a memorable word is composed of the following: a spelling, a sound, a meaning and a personal connection. If you can assemble these four ingredients, you can build a long-lasting memory for a word.

To create a robust memory for a word, you’ll need all four levels of processing. Our goal is to make foreign words more concrete and meaningful.

Forgetting is a formidable opponent. We owe our present understanding of forgetting to Hermann Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist who spent years of his life memorizing lists of nonsense syllables. He recorded the speed of forgetting by comparing the time it took him to learn and then later relearn one of his lists.

The curve reveals how rapidly we forget and what remains once we’ve forgotten. The right side of his curve is encouraging: even years later, Ebbinghaus could expect old random gobbledygook to take him measurably less time to learn than new random gobbledygook. Once he learned something, a trace of it remained within him forever. Unfortunately, the left side is a disaster: our memories rush out of our ears like water through a net. The net stays damp, but if we’re trying to keep something substantial in it, we can expect to remember a paltry 30 percent the following day.

How can we do better? Our instinct is to work harder; it’s what gets us through school tests and social occasions. Extra repetition is known as overlearning, and it doesn’t help long-term memory at all. Can you remember a single fact from the last school test you crammed for? If we’re going to invest our time in a language, we want to remember for months, years, or decades. If we can’t achieve this goal by working harder, then we’ll do it by working as little as possible.

Rote repetition is boring, and it doesn’t work for long-term memorization. Take the lazy route instead: study a concept until you can repeat it once without looking and then stop.

The closer you get to forgetting a word, the more ingrained it will become when you finally remember it. If you can consistently test yourself right before you forget, you’ll double the effectiveness of every test.

The way to end forgetting is spaced repetition. 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 memory.

You’ll begin with short intervals (two to four days) between practice sessions. Every time you successfully remember, you’ll increase the interval (e.g., nine days, three weeks, two months, six months, etc.), quickly reaching intervals of years. This keeps your sessions challenging enough to continuously drive facts into your long-term memory.

Our most effective weapon against forgetting is spaced repetition. You’ll spend a fixed amount of time every day learning new words, remembering the words from last week, and occasionally meeting old friends from months or years back. By doing this, you’ll spend most of your time successfully recalling words you’ve almost forgotten and building foundations for new words at a rapid, steady clip. Playing with timing in this way is known as spaced repetition, and it’s extraordinarily efficient.

Flash cards are the most important tools of SRSs. We can use flash cards to learn an alphabet, pronunciation, vocabulary, grammar, and writing. It can be on paper. It can also be computerized. Fluent Forever recommends ANKI. Computerized flash card programs are a massive shortcut to memorization. These developers were searching for a way to learn the thousands of symbols of Japanese Kanji and found their solution hiding in the works of a 19th century German psychologist, Hermann Ebbinghaus. They combined his theories with software management and produced a revolutionary set of memorization tools.

One of the reasons why language programs and classes fail is that no one can give you a language; you have to take it for yourself. You are rewiring your own brain. To succeed, you need to actively participate. Each word in your language needs to become your word, each grammar rule your grammar rule. Start making your own flash cards.

Beyond all the economic and mental benefits of language learning lies the greatest treasure of all: language learning is good for your soul. It connects you to new people and a new culture in ways you could never imagine. 

You even get to see different sides of yourself. In learning that language, you can create a new mind and a new personality for yourself. And you can only meet that side of yourself in a foreign language.

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