Fluent Forever summary

We all know that awful feeling of cramming for an exam. We go over the material until our heads feel ready to explode and then hopefully, we pass. But how much of what we learned do we remember after a week? A month? A year?

The truth is your memory is worse than you think and increasing repetition isn’t the best way.

We know that our long term memory doesn’t exactly perform at the level we want, so what can we do about it? We can use good timing. When acquiring a new language, timing is everything.

Surprisingly, the more difficult a word is to remember, the longer it will stick around in your long term memory.

As adults, it feels like such a chore to remember new words in another language, yet children seem to pick them up effortlessly. Why?

Children learn languages by listening, not by studying. If you really listen to a language, you will not only learn words, but grammar, too. This way is also more fun than poring over grammar books.

Okay, so learning sounds makes remembering easier. But there’s still a problem. Once you know the sounds, how do you use words effectively while making sure they stay in your head? Simple. By playing word games.

A great game is Spot the Difference and all you need is Google Images.

Imagine you had a device inside your head that could take sounds and other input and transform them into what we understand as language. Well, we already have one; it’s called the Language Machine. But it’s rather particular about the order it does certain things.

Every language has a unique order of development.

One incredibly frustrating part of learning a language is that nouns, verbs, adjectives and other words come in many different forms.

A lot of languages have complex patterns of word endings, with rules that are difficult to decipher and exceptions to those rules! But don’t panic: there’s a better and more fun way to learn them than by repeatedly wading through long lists of endings.

When we’re learning a new language, our knee-jerk reaction is to translate all words into our native language to understand exactly what they mean. While that’s tempting and seems sensible, dropping the need to translate is essential if you want to speed up your progress.

First, try using monolingual dictionaries, as doing so builds vocabulary faster.