Fluent Forever (Revised Edition)
How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It
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4.1 • 63 Ratings
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
The bestselling guide to learning a new language and remembering what you learned, now revised and updated
“A brilliant and thoroughly modern guide . . . If you want a new language to stick, start here.”—Gary Marcus, cognitive psychologist and author of the New York Times bestseller Guitar Zero
Gabriel Wyner speaks seven foreign languages fluently. He didn’t learn them in school—who does? Rather, he mastered each one on his own, drawing on free online resources, short practice sessions, and his knowledge of neuroscience and linguistics.
In Fluent Forever, Wyner shares his foolproof method for learning any language. It starts by hacking the way your brain naturally encodes information. You’ll discover how to hear new sounds and train your tongue to produce them accurately. You’ll connect spellings and sounds to images so that you start thinking in a new language without translating. With spaced-repetition systems, you’ll build a foundation for your language in a week and learn hundreds of words a month—with just a few minutes of practice each day. This revised edition also shares fresh strategies that Wyner has refined over years of study. You’ll learn to
• use your interests to curate vocabulary that you’ll actually be excited to study
• fast-track fluency, with a new appendix devoted to conversation strategies with native speakers
• compile the best language-learning tool kit for your budget
• harness the science of motivation and habit building to turbocharge your progress
• find the perfect level of difficulty with reading and listening comprehension to stay engaged and avoid frustration
With suggestions for helpful study aids and a wealth of free resources, the intuitive techniques in this book will offer you the most efficient and rewarding way to learn a new language.
Customer Reviews
Invaluable Resource
This book has given me some new ideas about how to learn additional languages. I feel like it would be so easy for schools to implement this type of program and actually make school foreign language departments useful. This book helped me feel better about how utterly useless Duolingo has been in my efforts to relearn German and French, and learn Irish (even having used the app for nearly a decade).
I think starting with the sounds of the language before moving on to vocabulary building is the most logical way to learn a language. It’s how the brain naturally learns languages. I’ve often wondered through my years of language learning in school why the sounds of the language are the absolute last thing taught, when they’re the first thing native speakers learn.
My only concern with this book is that some of the ideas don’t work for all languages, mainly endangered languages. For languages like Irish, Navaho, Maori and other indigenous languages that need to be preserved for culture’s sake, there aren’t always accessible recordings of native speakers or books/newspapers to read in those languages. Often, these languages don’t have frequency dictionaries either. There is no advice for situations like these, which would be supremely helpful.
I get that as a vocalist, endangered languages aren’t important to the author, but they are important to people, and his readers. He did a survey to see what pronunciation guides his readers wanted most. Irish tied for the number 1 spot. He’s since made pronunciation guides for the entire top 10 languages apart from Irish. I’m actually a little disappointed by that. It’s been years. Clearly it’s not going to be made.
Overall, a solid book, but needs tweaking for some (arguably the most important) languages.
AMAZING BOOK
If you want to learn a new language, get this book. I wouldn't try to learn with any other method!