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

If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart. —Nelson Mandela

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. Anyone can learn "bawn-JURE" in a few seconds. To learn how bonjour fits your companion's mouth and tongue; to learn how to manipulate the muscles, the folds, and even the texture of your throat and lips to match your companion's -- this is an unmistakable, undeniable, and irresistable gesture of care.

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.

Language learning is one of the most intensely personal journeys you can undertake. You are going into your own mind and altering the way you think.

Our capacity for visual memory is extraordinary; we only need to learn how to take advantage of it.

To paraphrase Rousseau, when we learn an accent, we are taking on the soul of that language. This isn’t work; it’s communion.

The difference between false memories and true ones is the same as for jewels: it is always the false ones that look the most real, the most brilliant. —Salvador Dalí

There is no such thing as a "hard" language; any idiot can speak whatever language his parents spoke when he was a child.

Das Aussprechen eines Wortes ist gleichsam ein Anschlagen einer Taste auf dem Vorstellungsklavier. Uttering a word is like striking a note on the keyboard of the imagination. —Ludwig Wittgenstein

The thread between these two goals—remembering now and remembering later—starts small and grows rapidly. 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.

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? Can you even remember the test itself? 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.

Not only does your brain get stronger, it gets healthier, too. Bilingual brains are more resistant to the wear and tear of age. Studies show a marked delay in the onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease for bilinguals. On average, elderly bilinguals will show symptoms of dementia five years later than monolinguals, and if they’ve learned more than two languages, then the effects are even stronger.

By learning a language, you permanently change structures in your brain. Bilingual brains are measurably different from monolingual brains—certain brain regions are more developed—and recent studies show that you don’t need to be bilingual from birth to show these telltale signs of bilingualism. You just need to learn a language and maintain it; the better you learn it and the longer you maintain it, the more your brain will change. How does this affect you in your daily life? When you learn a language, you permanently improve your memory—you’ll be able to memorize faster and easier. You’ll multitask better. Bilingual people are better at focusing on tasks and ignoring distractions. They’re more creative. They’re better problem solvers. Bilingual students beat monolinguals in standardized tests of English, math, and science. All these advantages—collectively known as the bilingual effect—aren’t the result of natural, inborn intelligence. Most bilinguals never choose to be bilingual; they just happen to grow up in bilingual families. The bilingual effect is a kind of learned intelligence, and by picking up a new language, you’ll get it too.

I’ve heard that hard work never killed anyone, but I say why take the chance? —Ronald Reagan

you won’t need Republican to learn Russian,

As long as I could connect every new thing I learned to this universe, I had an easy time with math. And 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