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

for the word. There’s no movie, no sound, and no story. Under these circumstances, you’ll be hard-
pressed to form a deep, multisensory memory while you’re busily studying on the way to work. This
isn’t the SRS’s fault; it’s in the nature of the language game.
The Power of the Creative Process
Have you ever studied for a test by writing out a summary of your notes? It worked fairly well, didn’t it? When you create
something, it becomes a part of you. If, instead, you simply copied someone else’s notes, you wouldn’t benefit nearly as much.
When you try to memorize someone else’s work, you are fighting an uphill battle with your brain’s filters. Even though gato =
[picture of a cat] is much easier to remember than gato–cat, it still isn’t stimulating enough to store permanently, because
someone else chose it, not you. In contrast, when gato is a cat that you chose, then that choice allows you to sidestep your
mental filters. As a result, you’ll have a much easier time remembering.
One of the reasons why language programs and classes fail is that no one can give you a language;
you have to take it for yourself. You are rewiring your own brain. To succeed, you need to actively
participate. Each word in your language needs to become your word, each grammar rule your
grammar rule. Programs like Rosetta Stone can provide decent original experiences for words like
ball and elephant, but eventually, you need to deal with words like economic situation. Abstract
words like these require complex, personal connections if you’re ever going to use them comfortably
while speaking. You have to make those connections for yourself, because no one else can tell you
how the current situación económica has affected you.
You also need to retain the connections you’ve made, even when you’re busy learning new words.
This is a lot to do at once, so you might as well use the best tools for the job. Until someone puts a
USB port into the back of our skulls, our most effective weapon against forgetting is spaced
repetition. And since we need deep, memorable experiences to get the most out of spaced repetition,
we might as well get them in the process of making our flash cards.
The card construction process is one of the most fun and satisfying ways to learn a language.
Content in the knowledge that every detail will become a permanent memory, you become the
architect of your own mind. What breed of dog will you think about when you wish to remember the
word dog? Which examples will you choose to form your verb conjugations? What vocabulary is
most useful for your own life?
Making these decisions forms an exciting part of the learning process and, ultimately, takes very
little time. After getting used to your SRS, you can add new cards in a matter of seconds. For most
nouns, you can simply type the word once, search for a picture on Google Images, and copy (or draw)
it onto your card. This can take less than fifteen seconds. Imagery for more complicated ideas will, of
course, take more time to identify—a process that itself gives you the connections you need to make a
word your own.
I sincerely wish I could sell my personal flash card decks. If their usefulness were transferable, I’d
make a lot of money and help a lot of people. Instead, I give them away for free on my website with
the disclaimer that no one has successfully used them to learn a language. Of the few thousand people
who have downloaded them, no one has tried to refute that claim, so I feel confident stating here that
my personal decks are useless to anyone but myself. Use them at your own peril.

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