How to Become “Fluent Forever”
This will make you a better language learner
Learning should be fun, not heart-breaking.
How do successful language learners stay motivated?
Do they use better learning strategies and techniques?
On my language learning journey, I came across Gabriel Wyner and his incredible book about language learning, Fluent Forever — How to learn any language fast and never forget it.
Is the book perfect? No.
Does perfection exist? No.
Is Fluent Forever an awesome book? Yes.
I highly recommend Fluent Forever to anybody who’s currently learning or thinking of learning a new language — it’s a fun, practical book filled with useful, actionable knowledge.
Here are my notes.
Enjoy.
The three basic keys to learning any language
1. Learn pronunciation first.
2. Don’t translate.
3. Use Spaced Repetition Systems.
There is no such thing as a hard language
No hard language? That’s crazy!
Or is it?
All around the world, people successfully learn their native language(s). They don’t worry about how easy or difficult their language is.
Their language is just part of their life.
When I was learning my native language (Cantonese), I didn’t worry about the six different tones in Cantonese. I didn’t worry about Cantonese grammar, vocabulary, or pronunciation. I didn’t even worry (too much) about how to read or write those complicated Chinese characters.
If I were born in a different country, I’d speak a different native language.
Are any of the world’s 7117 languages “easy” or “hard”? No.
A language is hard because it’s different from what I know — Because it’s unfamiliar to me.
The first language I learned was Cantonese, because that’s the language my family spoke at home. My second language was English — because that’s the language I used at school.
Many people say Cantonese is a difficult language to learn for English speakers. Many people say English is a difficult language to learn for Cantonese speakers — I didn’t care, I never thought about it.
I just wanted to play football, skip my homework, and eat snacks.
Cantonese and English were both a part of my normal, boring life.
I used Cantonese at home and English at school. The languages weren’t special. They weren’t “harder” or “easier” than each other.
They were just different languages that I used in different contexts.
It is possible to learn any language in the world — we are all human, and yet 7,783,778,068 people on Earth speak different languages every day!
Five principles to end forgetting
I used to think that I had a terrible memory.
I would learn someone’s name and then forget it within 10 seconds. Fluent Forever taught me how to re-think my memory.
My memory is fine, I just didn’t know how to remember things effectively.
Principle one: Make memories more memorable
“Neurons that fire together wire together.”
Our brains are powerful, sophisticated filters. They are great at forgetting irrelevant information. They are also great at remembering meaningful things.
I often forget foreign words and new vocabulary because my brain doesn’t think that these new words are meaningful or important. These new words sound strange. They aren’t connected to my personal life experiences.
To make new vocabulary more memorable, I must do three things:
- Learn the sound system of my target language.
- Connect sounds to images.
- Connect images to my own past experiences.
Principle two: Maximize laziness
“Lazy” is just another word for “efficient.”
— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever
I’m lazy.
Luckily, I can use laziness to my advantage.
Rote repetition is boring. According to Fluent Forever, rote repetition isn’t effective for long-term memorization.
Nice!
Instead, Wyner recommends that I study a concept until I can repeat it once without looking and then stop. Repeating it more times for no reason will not make the concept more memorable — it’s just a waste of time.
Principle three: Don’t review. Recall.
“In school we learn things then take the test.
In everyday life we take the test then we learn things.”
— Admon Israel
Recall is powerful.
When I’m speaking with someone in my target language, I don’t have time to take out my beautiful colour-coded notebooks, detailed vocabulary lists, or my perfect grammar rules.
Every time I try to recall something from memory, a chemical party blasts off in my brain, helping me remember things better.
Reviewing doesn’t help me much because it’s not meaningful or realistic. Looking at something in my notebook over and over again does not mean that I’ve actually learned it.
Reviewing gives me the illusion that I’m “studying” — but in a real-life situation, recall is more effective.
In my notebooks and textbooks, I can review the information that might be on the test.
But real life is not a textbook.
In real life, I won’t know in advance what vocabulary or grammar I will need.
By practicing recall, I will always be ready for the unexpected.
Wyner suggests creating and using a spaced repetition system (SRS) to learn vocabulary effectively — use flashcards that test recall, pronunciation, or grammar construction.
Fluent Forever emphasizes that these flashcards must be linked with images and personal connections to be effective.
The best way to use spaced repetition systems is to make them myself.
“Creating your own deck is the most effective way to learn a complex subject.
Subjects like languages and the sciences can’t be understood simply by memorizing facts — they require explanation and context to learn effectively.
Furthermore, inputting the information yourself forces you to decide what the key points are and leads to a better understanding.”
— Damien Elmes, the creator of the SRS program Anki
Wyner adds,
“The card creation process is a lot of fun, too.
You get to spend time by yourself and for yourself, learning, discovering, and creating.”
— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever
Principle four: Wait. Wait! Don’t tell me!
According to Wyner, there is no such thing as “memorizing”.
My brain can think, repeat, recall, and imagine, but memorizing isn’t actually a function of my brain.
The best way to “memorize” a new word or concept is to make my target language part of my everyday life.
I shouldn’t stress. I don’t need to review everything every day.
I need to wait until I almost forget it… and then I have to test myself.
If I test myself right before I forget something, I will double the effectiveness of that memory test.
If that memory test is challenging and interesting, it will be even more effective.
Principle five: Rewrite the past
“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.”
— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever
Every time I successfully recall a memory, I revisit and rewrite earlier experiences. I also add parts of my present self to my past memories.
I make that memory even stronger by adding new components and connections.
The most effective way to learn a new language is to make everything I learn as memorable as possible. Every time I learn new vocabulary, grammar, or a language concept, I must try to make it memorable.
How?
I can make memories memorable by connecting sounds, images, and personal connections to every word and concept that I learn.
The more memorable (and the more fun I’m having) while learning a new language, the better I will learn.
If I forget something, I can use immediate feedback to bring back those forgotten memories. After struggling and trying to recall the word (no cheating!), I’m allowed to look at the answer if I really can’t remember.
This gives me an opportunity to start again and try to make that word more memorable the second time around.
Sound-play
I love how Fluent Forever focuses on learning sounds and pronunciation.
One of the biggest reasons why I want to learn new languages is to be able to speak, communicate, and have conversations with people from all around the world.
I want to make new friends, think differently, and have great experiences.
To do that, I need to learn how to listen and speak a language. I can’t just read and write. Knowing how to read and write is great for passing an academic test or a language exam, but it won’t help me speak with a real human being!
“The better you internalize good pronunciation habits in the beginning, the less time you’ll waste hunting down broken words.
If you can build a gut instinct about pronunciation, then every new word you read will automatically find its way into your ears and your mouth, and every word you hear will bolster your reading comprehension.
You’ll understand more, you’ll learn faster, and you’ll spare yourself the hunt for broken words.
Along the way, you’ll have an easier time memorizing, you’ll make better impressions upon native speakers, and you’ll speak more confidently when you’re ready.”
— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever
Fluent Forever explains the three biggest language challenges when it comes to sound:
- Ear training — learning how to hear “foreign” sounds.
- Mouth training — learning how to pronounce “foreign” sounds.
- Eye training — learning how to see the connection between the “foreign” sounds and the “foreign” spelling.
Ear training (rewiring my brain)
The world’s languages contain around 800 phonemes (six hundred consonants and two hundred vowels). In other words, there are over 800 different sounds that exist in all of the world’s languages.
Most languages use around 40 phonemes to form words.
Babies can easily hear all of these different phonemes.
As I grew older and learned my native language (when I was six months old to one year old), my brain started grouping and organizing those phonemes according to the sounds used in my native language.
My brain learned to filter out different sounds.
I learned to ignore foreign sounds and phonemes that aren’t used in my native language.
This is normal.
“If you can hear all of the sounds in your [target] language, then you might get surprised by the spelling of a word but never by the sound of a word.
This helps you learn faster because your memory doesn’t need to struggle to store some indescribable new sound…
Because of this, you’ll be able to memorize the pronunciation of new words accurately, which will allow you to recognize them when they’re spoken by a native speaker.
Poof — you’ve just given your listening comprehension a massive boost from the start.
If you have better listening comprehension, you’ll gain more vocabulary and grammar every time you hear someone speak your [target] language.
Poof — you’ve just boosted your vocabulary and grammar knowledge for the rest of your life.”
— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever
I have to rewire my brain and train it to hear foreign sounds that don’t exist in my native language.
One technique I can use is to listen to minimal pairs (words that sound similar) in my target language.
For example in English, “niece” and “knees” sound similar, but are slightly different.
I can listen and test myself with minimal pairs until my brain learns to recognize the different sounds.
If I want to be better at recognizing spoken words and memorizing new vocabulary, I must train my brain to hear and recognize those new foreign sounds that exist in my target language.
Mouth training (understanding pronunciation)
“Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.”
— Theodore Roosevelt
Many people think that it’s impossible to speak with a “good accent” in their target language because they’re too old.
Wyner says that this isn’t true — actors and singers learn accents and use different accents all the time.
If actors and singers can learn accents when they are adults, I can too.
“Half of a good accent is simply a matter of timing.
Singers learn pronunciation first, and as a result, we don’t have to fight years of bad habits.
We learn to parrot words accurately before we have any idea what they mean, so that we can get onto a stage without embarrassing ourselves.
You should do the same.”
— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever
Fluent Forever discusses the raw ingredients for improving pronunciation — the tongue, lip, and vocal cord positions.
More pronunciation information can be found on Wyner’s website.
I must be aware of where these different parts of my body are (are my lips shaped like a circle? Is my tongue out? etc.) when I produce a new sound.
Back-chaining is a great pronunciation technique I can use.
When I see a very long and difficult word in a foreign language, I don’t have to cry. All I have to do is go backward.
Start with the end of the word and go backward, one letter at a time, for example:
“ Let’s try the Russian word for “flinch” (as in “I flinch whenever I see this word”), vzdrognu.
…nu
…gnu
o…gnu…ognu
r…ognu…rognu
d…rognu…drognu
z…drognu…zdrognu
(this one’s tricky: buzz like a bee — “zzzzz” — and then say “drognu.” Zdrognu!)
v…zdrognu…vzdrognu
(same story: “vvvvzzzzzz-drognu.” Say that ten times fast.”)
This is called back-chaining.
You’re using muscle memory to trick your tongue into doing things it wasn’t able to do before.”
— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever
I don’t need to have a “perfect” accent — Perfect accents don’t exist.
Even native speakers of any language speak differently depending on where they’re from and how they grew up.
I must remember that having (or not having) an accent is not about intelligence.
An accent simply shows where I’m from, and maybe what other languages I might speak.
So if I don’t need to have “perfect” pronunciation to communicate in a new language, why should I improve my accent or pronunciation when I learn a foreign language?
Because accents and pronunciation help me communicate and connect better with other people.
“An accurate accent is powerful because it is the ultimate gesture of empathy.
It connects you to another person’s culture in a way that words never can, because you have bent your body as well as your mind to match that person’s culture.”
— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever
Eye training (connecting sounds with spelling)
The connection between spelling and pronunciation in every language is different.
Some languages are consistent, while others (like English), are notorious for the differences between its spelling and pronunciation.
But plenty of native English speakers manage to read and speak English, even when the spelling and pronunciation don’t match.
How do they do it?
“Every language has a pattern of connections between its spelling and its sounds.
If you can internalize that pattern and make it automatic, you’ll save yourself a great deal of work. “
— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever
How can I internalize these patterns if they are so difficult to see?
Wyner suggests approaching foreign sounds from as many angles as possible. Spellings, sounds, individual mouth positions for each sound… Everything!
“You’re taking advantage of one of the stranger quirks of learning: the more bits and pieces you learn, the less work it takes to learn them.”
— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever
A map of connections between spelling and sound is more effective than memorizing individual rules.
Wyner explains this phenomenon when he compares his approach to learning mathematics (which he enjoyed) versus his classmates who struggled:
“I noticed that classmates who had problems with math weren’t struggling with math; they were struggling with connections.
They were trying to memorize equations, but no one had successfully shown them how those equations connect with everything they had already learned.
They were doomed.
At some point along their path, the interconnected math universe had shattered into fragments, and they were trying to learn each piece in isolation — an extremely difficult proposition.
Who could possibly remember the formula for the volume of a hexagonal prism?
How could you make yourself care enough to actually remember?
It was so much easier if you could see how all the pieces interrelated.”
— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever
Relevance is the key.
Wyner emphasizes that I must find language learning techniques that work best for me.
There is no “best learning method”.
Everybody has their own preferred learning methods.
My job is to find the methods that work best for me.
Wyner suggests using an SRS to create flashcards for learning spelling patterns.
One free resource that Wyner highlights is Forvo: the pronunciation dictionary.
Forvo has native-speaker recordings of more than 2 million words in three hundred languages — and it’s free!
Wordplay and the symphony of a word
“We are never more fully alive, more completely ourselves, or more deeply engrossed in anything, than when we are at play.”
— Charles Schaefer
Learning languages is hard. It’s tiring and difficult.
That’s normal — but I have to remember that learning a language is also play.
Learning is fun!
After all, language is music.
I learn best when I’m having fun.
I learn best when what I’m learning is meaningful and relevant to my life.
A great way to speed up learning and focus on relevant vocabulary in any foreign language is to use word frequency lists — word lists that are sorted by the word’s usefulness and importance in real life.
“You can’t learn the music in your words before you know which words to learn.
How can you know where to start?
Not all words are created equal; we use certain words far more often than others.
English has at least a quarter of a million words. But if you only knew the top hundred words in English, you’d recognize half of everything you read.
We get a lot of mileage out of our most frequent words…
…With only a thousand words, you’ll recognize nearly 75 percent of what you read.”
— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever
I don’t have to learn all of the “most frequent words”, but it’s a great place to begin if I don’t know where to start.
Each language has a different list of its own most frequent words because every language exists with its own unique culture(s).
I can make new words more memorable in two ways:
- Investigate the stories they tell (create stories).
- Connect those stories to my own life (create personal stories).
One tip for making flashcards: use Google Images in my target language so that I can visually “see” the foreign word.
By connecting new vocabulary words to stories and to my own life, I make the words more memorable, relevant, and interesting to me.
As a result, I remember them better.
Sentence play (the power of comprehensible input)
“First, you learn the instrument, then you learn the music, then you forget all that s**t and just play.”
— Charlie Parker
Grammar is beautiful, and it doesn’t have to kill me.
Fluent Forever reminds me that I actually learned “two grammars” when I was young:
“There are two sorts of grammar that we encounter in our lives: the spoken grammar we acquire as kids, and the written grammar we learn in school.
Most people think of the latter when they hear the word grammar: school days devoted to the proper use of the comma, the removal of prepositions from the ends of our sentences, or the roles of “your” and “you’re” and “which” and “that”.
Many of these rules can be frustrating because they’re based upon a great deal of academic nonsense.
Our ban on prepositions at the end of sentences, for example, is a recent import from Latin, of all places.
The ban snuck into our language when a group of London publishers released a series of competing style manuals and somehow convinced the populace that those rules had always been features of “proper” English.
The written language is, in fact, our first foreign language — a dialect of our native tongue that each of us learns with varying degrees of success.”
— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever
I was great at learning grammar when I was young.
How did I do it? — Comprehensible Input.
“Kids don’t learn their language from just any kind of language input. The only input that seems to matter is input that kids can understand.
In linguistic circles, this is known as comprehensible input.
The basic idea is this: kids need to understand the gist of what they hear in order to learn a language from it.”
— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever
Adults are better than kids at learning languages
Kids are great at learning grammar, what about adults?
Adults are grammar and language machines too.
Kids learn languages so fast not because they’re better than adults, but because they have more time, more practice, and a lot more comprehensible input.
“Kids seem to succeed at language learning where adults fail, but that’s only because they get much more input than we do.
In a kid’s first six years of life, they’re exposed to tens of thousands of hours of language.
In our first years of language classes in school, we’re lucky to hear more than a few hundred hours, and many of those hours are spent talking about a language rather than talking in a language.
It’s no wonder our language machines don’t seem to work; they’re starving for input.
If we had Spanish-speaking adults talking to us for twelve to sixteen hours a day for six years, we would probably speak Spanish at least as well as your average Spanish-speaking six-year old.”
— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever
Wyner admits that kids possess two language learning advantages that also appear in the book Becoming Fluent — How Cognitive Science Can Help Adults Learn a Foreign Language by Richard Roberts and Roger Kreuz:
- Kids are not afraid to make mistakes.
- Kids are good at hearing the sounds of their native language (native accents).
Adults have language learning advantages too:
- Adults are good at spotting patterns.
- Adults have better learning strategies than kids.
If I stop comparing the thousands of hours of comprehensible input that a kid has with the hundreds of hours of comprehensible input that an adult has, I discover something incredible:
“On average, adults learn languages faster than kids do.”
— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever
Another funny thing about grammar—no matter how much I try to consciously memorize grammar rules, I often forget them when I use the language in real-life situations (like speaking to a stranger).
Every language has its own developmental order.
There is a natural order to learning any language, and I can’t skip any of those steps.
“If you monitor adults learning a second language, you find something completely mystifying.
That German woman with her English textbooks follows the exact same developmental stages as that Japanese guy with his American girlfriend.
The German might progress through her stages faster — German, after all, is fairly similar to English — but she won’t skip any of them. Not only that, but both of these English students will follow developmental stages that closely resemble the development of child speech.
Like the kids, they start out with “-ing” (He watching television) and only later learn “is” (He is watching).
They master the irregular past tense (He fell) before the regular past tense (He jumped).
Toward the very end of their development, they master the third-person present tense (He eats the cheeseburger)…
These results are baffling, in part because they don’t have anything to do with the order of language textbooks and classes.
English students usually encounter sentences from the last developmental stages — like “He eats the cheeseburger” — within their first week of classes.
They can successfully learn to use a late-stage rule — he + eat = he eats — in the slow-paced world of homework and texts, but they invariably forget that same rule whenever they try to speak.
Speech is too fast, and students just don’t have enough time to apply their grammar rules consciously…
Naturally, it’s not just English.
While the developmental stages look different from language to language, every language has a particular developmental order, which children and second language learners alike will inevitably follow on their way to fluency.”
— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever
Drilling grammar exercises are a waste of time.
It feels like productive work, but it’s only effective for “classroom situations” — I don’t benefit in real life.
Key ideas:
- My age doesn’t matter.
- Comprehensible input is the most important thing.
- Don’t worry about grammar rules in the beginning.
- Learning languages takes time.
- Don’t force myself to learn “faster” — it doesn’t work.
- Relax and have fun with the language every day.
Grammar is simple, people make it complex
“Like all magnificent things, it’s very simple.”
— Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting
Grammar creates infinite possibilities.
This can make learning languages super frustrating — but grammar is also easy.
“Grammar is amazing in its complexity, but it is utterly awe inspiring in its simplicity.
All of grammar’s infinite possibilities are the product of three basic operations:
- we add words (You like it → Do you like it?)
- we change their forms (I eat → I ate)
- we change their order (This is nice → Is this nice?)
That’s it.
And it’s not just English. Every language’s grammar depends upon these three operations to turn their words into stories.”
— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever
To learn new grammar, all I have to do is:
- Find an example (context) — grammar books are great.
- Understand the gist (main idea) of the story in that example.
- Ask three questions:
- Do I see any new words?
- Do I see any new word forms?
- Is the word order surprising?
4. Create flashcards using the SRS method.
Here are Wyner’s examples:
Grammar, stories, and mnemonics
“ Dude, suckin’ at something is the first step towards being sorta good at something.”
— Jake the Dog, Adventure Time
Languages are full of complex patterns.
The most effective way to remember is by embedding these patterns into simple, understandable stories.
I can use a mnemonic device to boost my memory. They are based on associations and can be self-made.
Here are some examples of mnemonics:
How to remember standard tuning on a guitar: EADGBE
(Eat All Day Get Big Easy)
Using our knuckles to remember which months have 31 days:
The order of the cardinal directions (going clockwise, N-E-S-W):
Mnemonics help me learn languages by connecting and associating abstract ideas (such as new vocabulary and grammar) with stories and images.
Here is an example of how Wyner uses mnemonics to learn languages.
The language game
“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.
It’s the moment when a new language unfolds before your eyes and you can choose your own games to play and your own paths to follow.”
— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever
Once the basics are down, I can have fun learning my target language in any way I choose.
What works for someone else might not work for me.
My language goals may be different from others.
There is no “right” or “wrong” way to learn a language — some ways are just more efficient.
Learning vocabulary
To learn vocabulary effectively, start with the top 1000 most frequent words in my target language.
If I want a high level of fluency, aim for the top 1500–2000 most frequent words.
After I build a foundation of vocabulary, I should choose additional words based on my own needs and context. For example, if I want to learn about music, I’ll focus on music-related vocabulary. Or I’ll focus on travel-related vocabulary if I want to learn about travel, etc
Google Images is an amazing place to find images and example sentences in my target language.
After I have a strong foundation of vocabulary, monolingual dictionaries (everything is written in my target language — no translations) are great.
Read better, read for fun
“The more that you read, the more things you will know.
The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.”
— Dr. Seuss, I Can Read with My Eyes Shut!
How did I learn so many words in my native language?
I didn’t spend every day using a dictionary.
I never used Google Translate.
I didn’t use most of the words I knew in everyday speech.
The answer — I learned most of my words through reading. I can do the same thing when learning a foreign language.
“Reading in a foreign language often evokes some ugly associations: hours spent trudging through some excruciatingly long masterpiece of literature, painstakingly looking up every other word in a dictionary.
But we don’t need to torture ourselves.
We possess an extraordinary ability to learn words from context alone, without the aid of a dictionary — this is how we learned most of our English words, after all.
That part of brain doesn’t simply shut down as soon as it encounters a word en français.
Practically speaking, we’ll automatically learn an unknown word 10 percent of the time we encounter it.”
— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever
Reading without translating or using a dictionary is the fastest, simplest, and easiest way to learn vocabulary.
When reading, focus on the story.
Don’t try to understand the precise meaning of every word in every sentence.
- Try to read familiar stories.
- Try to read with audiobooks — it allows me to learn the rhythms of the language and will improve my pronunciation and listening as well.
- On average, a single book will teach me 300–500 new words from context alone.
Listening to real-world speech
“Learning to listen can be tricky.
Out in the real world, speech can come fast, and even familiar vocabulary can sound foreign in someone else’s mouth.
You may learn to comfortably read and write, and even begin thinking in a language, when suddenly you run into a real-life French teenager and realize that you don’t understand a word she’s saying.
Whole fragments of sentences — je ne suis pas (I’m not) — turn into single mumbled words — shwipa — and you’re left scratching your head, wondering if she’s actually speaking French.”
— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever
Listening well is the foundation for speaking well.
If I want to understand “real, spoken language”, I need to listen to “real, spoken language”
But how? — Listening is hard.
The key to improving my listening ability is comprehensible input.
I need context, visual clues, and a good story — Movies and TV are great.
“In [movies and TV], you are listening for the stories, and so you’ll pay very careful attention to everything you hear.
Unlike news radio, you can see the facial expressions and body language of every speaker, and you can see precisely what they’re doing while they speak.
These visual clues can help you understand what you’re hearing. TV and film are just like real life, only a bit more story driven.
They’re perfect for learning how to listen.”
— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever
Should I use subtitles in my target language when watching movies and TV?
Here’s what Wyner suggests:
“Don’t use [subtitles].
The problem with subtitles is that reading is easier than listening.
We learn with our eyes more than our ears, and so when subtitles are present, we don’t improve at listening.”
— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever
Having subtitles in my target language is still useful — it helps me improve my reading ability, but not my listening ability.
I might learn more vocabulary, but it won’t help me when I’m speaking to somebody in real life.
In real life, people don’t talk with subtitles.
More tips:
- TV series are easier than movies.
- It doesn’t matter what I watch.
- Read summaries of TV shows/movies before watching — it will provide context.
The golden rule of speaking
“I can’t do this,” I said. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Say anything,” he said. “You can’t make a mistake when you improvise.”
“What if I mess it up? What if I screw up the rhythm?”
“You can’t,” he said. “It’s like drumming. If you miss a beat, you create another.”
— Paul Smith, Just Kids
It’s okay to make mistakes.
It’s okay to say the wrong thing.
It’s normal — it’s part of the learning process.
“You want to tell your German friend about a baseball game, but you don’t know the word for “baseball.”
Perhaps you don’t even know the German words for “sport” or “game.”
How do you communicate your thoughts to your friend?
Your first tendency will be to switch to English. Your friend probably understands English, and you’ll get your point across.
Unfortunately, your German won’t get any better.
If, on the other hand, you stay in German, a remarkable thing occurs: you begin to improvise.
At that moment, you take a giant leap toward fluency.”
— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever
When I don’t know a word in my target language, I feel stupid.
I wonder if I’m not good enough, not smart enough — but I‘m missing the point.
Fluency is a learned skill. I will get better with practice.
“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.
If you can successfully tell your friend about that baseball game — We were…watching the Dodgers — then you’ve just practiced fluency. You’ve gotten better at using the words you know to express yourself.
If you can do this for every thought in your head, then you’re done.
You’ve won the language game; you’re fluent.”
— Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever
That’s the golden rule:
When I speak in my target language, I will only use that language.
Even if it’s difficult, I will not use my native language or any other languages.
The more I practice, the better I get.
The better I get, the more fun I’ll have.
The more fun I have, the more I’ll learn.
