Home > Work > Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It
1 " 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 werestruggling with connections. They were trying to memorize equations, but no one had successfullyshown them how those equations connect with everything they had already learned. They weredoomed "
― Gabriel Wyner , Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It
2 " 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 "
3 " 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. "
4 " Our capacity for visual memory is extraordinary; we only need to learn how to take advantage of it. "
5 " 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. "
6 " To paraphrase Rousseau, when we learn an accent, we are taking on the soul of that language. This isn’t work; it’s communion. "
7 " 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 "
8 " 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. "
9 " 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. "
10 " 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. "
11 " 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 "
12 " 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 Dal "
13 " flu, "
14 " you won’t need Republican to learn Russian, "
