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

• You’ll accomplish this goal by creating flash cards that test your ability to recall a given word, pronunciation, or grammatical
construction. Coupled with images and personal connections, these cards will form the foundation of a powerful memorization
system.
P
RINCIPLE 4
: W
AIT
, W
AIT
! D
ON
’
T
T
ELL
M
E
!
If it’s hard to remember, it’ll be difficult to forget.
—Arnold Schwarzenegger
We’ve all gone through situations in school and work in which we’re supposed to memorize
something, but rarely does someone tell us how to do it. This is not without good reason. There is no
such thing as “memorizing.” We can think, we can repeat, we can recall, and we can imagine, but we
aren’t built to memorize. Rather, our brains are designed to think and automatically hold on to what’s
important. While running away from our friendly neighborhood tiger, we don’t think, “You need to
remember this! Tigers are bad! Don’t forget! They’re bad!” We simply run away, and our brain
remembers for us. The closest mental action that we have to memorizing is practicing recall (“What
was that guy’s name?”). Now we need to investigate precisely what effective recall feels like.
Try to recall the foreign words that have shown up so far in this book. You’ll remember some
words immediately—perhaps the words from the previous section: el tigre, el dentista. If you keep
looking, you’ll find a few more in relatively easy reach—perhaps gato is still lurking about. Last,
hiding in the murky fog of your brain, a few words may reluctantly emerge.
8
 If we were to track your
ability to remember each of these words, we would see a curious result. By next week, you’re most
likely to forget the words you knew best—those words that you remembered immediately. You’re 20
percent more likely to retain the words that took a little more time. But the words that took the most
effort to recall—those you had all but forgotten—will etch themselves deeply into your
consciousness. You’re 75 percent more likely to remember them in the future, and if they spent a few
moments just out of reach at the tip of your tongue, then you’re twice as likely to remember them.
What’s going on here? Let’s look at the most extreme example, a word that dances on the tip of
your tongue before you finally recall it. A word like this is an incomplete memory. You have access
to fragments of the word, but you can’t see the whole picture yet. You can recall that it starts with the
letter s, or that it’s something like a poem or a monologue, or that it sounds like solipsist or solitaire,
but you need time to reach the word soliloquy. More often than not, in these situations, we recall
accurate information. Our word does start with the letter s. Our brains fly into a wild, almost
desperate search for the missing piece of our minds, frantically generating S words and throwing them
out when they don’t match what we’re looking for. Your amygdala treats these searches as matters of
life and death, for surely if you don’t remember the actor who played Matt Damon’s therapist in Good
Will Hunting, you will leap out of the nearest window.
9
You experience such relief at finally finding
your goal that the word becomes nearly impossible to forget.
How do we take advantage of this? Do we even want to? Tricking our brains into a permanent,
desperate chase after missing words sounds stressful. Doing this a hundred times a day sounds like a
recipe for early heart failure. Fortunately, we don’t need to be stressed to remember; we just need to

be interested. We will get bored if we spend our days incessantly asking ourselves whether we still
remember our friend Edward’s name. It’s too easy, it’s tedious, and it doesn’t work very well. If we
wait longer—until we’re just about to forget—then remembering Edward’s name becomes a
stimulating challenge. We’re aiming for the point where a dash of difficulty will provide just the right
amount of spice and keep the game interesting. If we can find it, we’ll get twice as much benefit for
our time, and we’ll have much more fun in the process.

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