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

CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Stab, Stab, Stab
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
Americans who travel abroad for the first time are often shocked to discover that, despite all the progress that has been made in
the last 30 years, many foreign people still speak in foreign languages.
—Dave Barry
L
anguage learning is a sport. I say this as someone who is in no way qualified to speak about sports;
I joined the fencing team in high school in order to get out of gym class. Still, stabbing friends with
pointy metal objects resembles language learning more than you might think. Your goal in fencing is to
stab people automatically. You spend time learning the names of the weapons and the rules of the
game, and you drill the proper posture, every parry, riposte, and lunge. Finally, you play the game,
hoping to reach that magical moment when you forget about the rules: Your arm moves of its own
accord, you deftly parry your friend’s sword, and you stab him squarely in the chest. Point!
We want to walk up to someone, open our mouths, forget the rules, and speak automatically. This
goal can seem out of reach because languages seem hard, but they’re not. There is no such thing as a
“hard” language; any idiot can speak whatever language his parents spoke when he was a child. The
real challenge lies in finding a path that conforms to the demands of a busy life.
In the midst of my own busy life as an opera singer, I needed to learn German, Italian, French, and
Russian. Out of those experiences, I found the underpinnings for this book. My methods are the results
of an obsessive need to tinker, research, and tinker again. My language-learning toolbox has, over
time, turned into a well-oiled machine that transforms fixed amounts of daily time into noticeable,
continuous improvement in my languages and in the languages of every person I’ve taught. In sharing
it, I hope to enable you to visit the peculiar world of language learning. In the process, you’ll better
understand the inner workings of your mind and the minds of others. You’ll learn to speak a new
language, too.
B
EGINNINGS
So far, my favorite moment of this crazy language-learning adventure took place in a Viennese
subway station in 2012. I was returning home from a show when I saw a Russian colleague coming
toward me. Our common language had always been German, and so, in that language, we greeted and
caught up on the events of the past year. Then I dropped the bomb. “You know, I speak Russian now,”
I told her in Russian.

The expression on her face was priceless. Her jaw actually dropped, like in the cartoons. She
stammered, “What? When? How?” as we launched into a long conversation in Russian about
language learning, life, and the intersection between the two.
My first attempts to learn languages were significantly less jaw dropping. I went to Hebrew school
for seven years. We sang songs, learned the alphabet, lit lots of candles, drank lots of grape juice, and
didn’t learn much of anything. Well, except the alphabet; I had that alphabet nailed.
In high school, I fell in love with my Russian teacher, Mrs. Nowakowsky. She was smart and
pretty, she had a wacky Russian last name, and I did whatever she asked, whenever she asked. Five
years later, I had learned a few phrases, memorized a few poems, and learned that alphabet quite
well, thank you very much. By the end of it, I got the impression that something was seriously wrong.
Why can I only remember alphabets? Why was everything else so hard?
Fast-forward to June of 2004, at the start of a German immersion program for opera singers in
Vermont. At the time, I was an engineer with an oversized singing habit. This habit demanded that I
learn basic German, French, and Italian, and I decided that jumping into the pool was the only way I’d
ever succeed. Upon my arrival, I was to sign a paper pledging to use German as my only form of
communication for seven weeks, under threat of expulsion without refund. At the time, this seemed
unwise, as I didn’t speak a word of German. I signed it anyway. Afterward, some advanced students
approached me, smiled, and said, “Hallo.” I stared at them blankly for a moment and replied,
“Hallo.” We shook hands.
Five insane weeks later, I sang my heart out in a German acting class, found a remote location on
campus, and stealthily called my girlfriend. “I think I’m going to be an opera singer,” I told her in
whispered English. On that day, I decided to become fluent in the languages demanded by my new
profession. I went back to Middlebury College in Vermont and took German again. This time, I
reached fluency. I moved to Austria for my master’s studies. While living in Europe in 2008, I went
to Perugia, Italy, to learn Italian. Two years later, I became a cheater.
C
HEATERS
O
CCASIONALLY
P
ROSPER
: T
HE
T
HREE
K
EYS TO
L
ANGUAGE
L
EARNING
This book would not exist if I had not cheated on a French test. I’m not proud of it, but there it is.
First, some background. The Middlebury Language Schools offer five levels of classes: absolute
beginner, “false” beginner (people who have forgotten what they’ve learned), intermediate,
advanced, and near fluent. At the time of the test, I was an absolute beginner in French, but I had
already learned a Romance language, and I wanted to be with the “false” beginners. So, for my third
stint at Middlebury, I cheated on the online placement test, using Google Translate and some grammar
websites. Don’t tell Middlebury.
A month later, I received my regrettable results. “Welcome and congratulations!” it began. “You
have been placed in the intermediate level!” Shit. I had three months to learn a year’s worth of French
or look like an idiot at the entrance interview. These interviews are serious business. You sit in a
room with a real, live French person, you chat for fifteen minutes about life, and you leave with a
final class placement. You can’t cheat; you can either speak French or make sad faces and wave your
hands around like a second-rate Parisian mime.
As I was in the middle of completing master’s degrees in opera and art song, the only free time I

had was an hour on the subway every day and all day on Sundays. I frantically turned to the Internet to
figure out how to learn a language faster. What I found was surprising: there are a number of
incredibly powerful language-learning tools out there, but no single program put all of the new
methods together.
I encountered three basic keys to language learning:
1. Learn pronunciation first.
2. Don’t translate.
3. Use spaced repetition systems.
The first key, learn pronunciation first, came out of my music conservatory training (and is widely
used by the military and the missionaries of the Mormon church). Singers learn the pronunciation of
languages first because we need to sing in these languages long before we have the time to learn them.
In the course of mastering the sounds of a language, our ears become attuned to those sounds, making
vocabulary acquisition, listening comprehension, and speaking come much more quickly. While
we’re at it, we pick up a snazzy, accurate accent.
The second key, don’t translate, was hidden within my experiences at the Middlebury Language
Schools in Vermont. Not only can a beginning student skip translating, but it was an essential step in
learning how to think in a foreign language. It made language learning possible. This was the fatal
flaw in my earlier attempts to learn Hebrew and Russian: I was practicing translation instead of
speaking. By throwing away English, I could spend my time building fluency instead of decoding
sentences word by word.
The third key, use spaced repetition systems (SRSs), came from language blogs and software
developers. SRSs are flash cards on steroids. Based upon your input, they create a custom study plan
that drives information deep into your long-term memory. They supercharge memorization, and they
have yet to reach mainstream use.
A growing number of language learners on the Internet were taking advantage of SRSs, but they
were using them to memorize translations. Conversely, no-translation proponents like Middlebury and
Berlitz were using comparatively antiquated study methods, failing to take advantage of the new
computerized learning tools. Meanwhile, nobody but the classical singers and the Mormons seemed
to care much about pronunciation.
I decided to use all of these methods at once. I used memorization software on my smartphone to
get the French into my head, and I made sure that none of my flash cards had a word of English on
them. I began making flash cards for the pronunciation rules, added a bunch of pictures for the nouns
and some verbs, learned the verb conjugations, and then built up to simple French definitions of more
abstract concepts. By June, in my hour a day on the subway, I had learned three thousand words and
grammar concepts. When I arrived at Middlebury, I waited in a room for my entrance interview in
French. This interview was meant to ensure that I hadn’t done anything stupid, like cheat on my online
placement test. It was the first time I had ever spoken French in my life. The teacher sat down and
said, “Bonjour,” and I responded right back with the very first word that came into my brain:
“Bonjour.” So far, so good. As our conversation evolved, I was amazed to find that I knew all the
words she was saying, and I knew all the words I needed to respond. I could think in French! It was
halting, but it was French. I was stunned. Middlebury bumped me into the advanced class. In those
seven weeks, I read ten books, wrote seventy pages’ worth of essays, and my vocabulary grew to

forty-five hundred words. By the beginning of August, I was fluent in French.
T
HE
G
AME
P
LAN
What is fluency? Each of us will find a different answer to this question. The term is imprecise, and it
means a little less every time someone writes another book, article, or spam email with a title like “U
Can B FLUENT in 7 DAY5!1!” Still, we maintain an image of fluency in our minds: a summer
afternoon in a Parisian café, casually chatting up the waitress without needing to worry about verb
conjugations or missing words in our vocabularies. Beyond that café, we must decide individually
how far we wish to go.
I would confidently describe myself as fluent in German. I’ve lived in Austria for six years and
will happily discuss anything with anyone, but I certainly needed to dance around a few missing
words to get out of a €200 fine for my rental car’s broken gas cap. (Apparently, the word for “gas
cap” is Tankdeckel, and the words for “I don’t give a damn if I’m the first person to drive this car, the
spring holding the gas cap closed was defective” start with “Das ist mir völlig Wurst …” and go on
from there.) You’ll have to determine for yourself whether your image of fluency includes political
discussions with friends, attending poetry readings, working as a secret agent, or lecturing on quantum
physics at the Sorbonne.
We struggle to reach any degree of fluency because there is so much to remember. The rulebook of
the language game is too long. We go to classes that discuss the rulebook, we run drills about one rule
or another, but we never get to play the game. On the off chance that we ever reach the end of a
rulebook, we’ve forgotten most of the beginning already. Moreover, we’ve ignored the other book
(the vocabulary book), full of thousands upon thousands of words that are just as hard to remember as
the rules.
Forgetting is our greatest foe, and we need a plan to defeat it. What’s the classic language-learning
success story? A guy moves to Spain, falls in love with a Spanish girl, and spends every waking hour
practicing the language until he is fluent within the year. This is the immersion experience, and it
defeats forgetting with brute force. In large part, our proud, Spanish-speaking hero is successful
because he never had any time to forget. Every day, he swims in an ocean of Spanish; how could he
forget what he had learned? I learned German in this way, given an opportunity to leave my job, move
to Vermont, and cut off all ties to the English-speaking world for two full summers. Immersion is a
wonderful experience, but if you have steady work, a dog, a family, or a bank account in need of
refilling, you can’t readily drop everything and devote that much of your life to learning a language.
We need a more practical way to get the right information into our heads and prevent it from leaking
out of our ears.
I’m going to show you how to stop forgetting, so you can get to the actual game. And I’m going to
show you what to remember, so that once you start playing the game, you’re good at it. Along the way,
we’ll rewire your ears to hear new sounds, and rewire your tongue to master a new accent. We’ll
investigate the makeup of words, how grammar assembles those words into thoughts, and how to
make those thoughts come out of your mouth without needing to waste time translating. We’ll make the
most of your limited time, investigating which words to learn first, how to use mnemonics to
memorize abstract concepts faster, and how to improve your reading, writing, listening, and speaking
skills as quickly and effectively as possible.

I want you to understand how to use the tools I’ve found along the way, but I also want you to
understand why they work. 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. If you’re going to spend
months or years working at that goal, you’ll need to believe in these methods and make them your
own. If you know how to approach the language game, you can beat it. I hope to show you the shortest
path to that goal, so that you can forget the rules and start playing already.
After I learned German, I thought, “Ach! If I could just go back in time and tell myself a few things,
I would have had a much easier time with this language!” I had precisely the same thought after
Italian, French, Russian (which I finally learned in 2012), and Hungarian (2013’s project). This book
is my time machine. If I squint my eyes just right, then you are monolingual me from nine years ago,
and I’m creating a time paradox by helping you avoid all of the pitfalls and potholes that led me to
make my time machine in the first place. You know how it is.
H
OW
L
ONG
D
OES
F
LUENCY
T
AKE
?
To estimate the time you’ll need, we’ll need to consider your fluency goals, the language(s) you
already know, the language you’re learning, and your daily time constraints. As I said earlier, there is
no such thing as a hard language. There are, however, languages that will be harder for you to learn,
because they aren’t in the same family as the language(s) you already know. Japanese is difficult for
English speakers to learn for the same reason that English is difficult for Japanese speakers; there are
precious few words and grammatical concepts that overlap in both languages, not to mention the
entirely different alphabets involved. In contrast, an English speaker learning French has much less
work to do. English vocabulary is 28 percent French and 28 percent Latin. As soon as an English
speaker learns proper French pronunciation, he already knows thousands of words.
The US Foreign Service Institute ranks languages by their approximate difficulty for native English
speakers (see 
Appendix 2
). In my experience, their estimates are spot-on. As they predicted, Russian
(a level 2 language) took me nearly twice as much time as French (a level 1 language), and I suspect
that Japanese (a level 3 language) will take me twice as much time as Russian. I reached a
comfortable intermediate “I can think in French and use a monolingual dictionary” level in three
months, working for an hour a day (plus weekend binges), and a similar level for Russian in six
months at thirty to forty-five minutes a day (plus weekend binges). I then used seven to eight weeks of
intensive immersion to bring both of those languages to advanced “comfortable in a cafe, comfortable
chatting about whatever, somewhat uncomfortable describing car problems” levels. I’ve seen similar
results with my students. Without an immersion program, I suspect advanced French would take five
to eight months, working for thirty to forty-five minutes per day on your own. Level 2 languages like
Russian and Hebrew should be twice that, and level 3 languages like Chinese, Arabic, Japanese, and
Korean should take four times as long as French.
These harder languages do take time, but there’s no reason you can’t learn them. You’ve already
met the only prerequisite: you’re interested. Think about exercise for a moment. To succeed in an
exercise routine, we need to enjoy it or we’ll drop it. Most of us don’t have six-pack abs or fit into a
size 2 dress. I’ve certainly tried for the abs (I gave up on the size 2 dress long ago), but I never
succeeded, because I rarely enjoy exercise. Those of us who do, succeed. Successful gym rats learn
to find the joy (and endorphins) in grueling daily workouts. The rest of us can push ourselves into the

gym with willpower, but if we don’t find it enjoyable, we’re unlikely to continue for the six to
twenty-four months we need to see results. Fitness plans keep shrinking in time—30-Minute Fitness,
the 10-Minute Solution, Ultimate Physical Fitness in 5 Minutes, the 3-Minute Workout—in an attempt
to make something that’s difficult seem more palatable. But no matter what, we’re still going to be a
sweaty, achy mess at the end of it, and getting ourselves fired up to do it every day is hard in the short
term and harder in the long term.
As long as language learning is hard, we’ll run into the same problems. Who enjoys drilling
grammar and memorizing word lists? Even if I promise you Fluency in 30 Seconds a Day, you’re
going to have a hard time sticking to it if it’s unpleasant.
We’re going to drop the boring stuff and find something more exciting. The tools I’ve assembled
here are effective. Much more important, they’re fun to use. We enjoy learning; it’s what addicts us to
reading newspapers, books, and magazines and browsing websites like Lifehacker, Facebook,
Reddit, and the Huffington Post. Every time we see a new factoid (e.g., “In AD 536, a dust cloud
blotted out the sun over Europe and Asia for an entire year, causing famines that wiped out
populations from Scandinavia to China. No one knows what caused it”), the pleasure centers of our
brains burst into activity, and we click on the next link. In this book, we’re going to addict ourselves
to language learning. The discovery process for new words and grammar will be our new Facebook,
the assembly process for new flash cards will be a series of quick arts-and-crafts projects, and the
memorization process will be a fast-paced video game that’s just challenging enough to keep us
interested.
There’s no coincidence here; we learn better when we’re having fun, and in looking for the fastest
ways to learn, I naturally ended up with the most enjoyable methods. My favorite thing about language
learning is this: I can basically play video games as much as I like without suffering deep, existential
regret afterward (e.g., “I can’t believe I just wasted six hours of my life playing stupid games on
Facebook”). I spend thirty to sixty minutes a day playing on my smartphone or watching TV. (The TV
series Lost is awesome in Russian.) I get a language out of it, I feel productive, and I have fun. What’s
not to like?
Let’s learn how to play.
D
O
T
HIS
N
OW
: T
HE
P
ATH
F
ORWARD
An organizational note: over the course of this book, I’m going to introduce you to a lot of tools and
resources. If you ever forget which one is which, you’ll find them all in the Glossary of Tools and
Terms at the end of this book, along with a brief explanation. With that said, let’s get started.
I intend to teach you how to learn, rather than what to learn. We can’t discuss every word,
grammatical system, and pronunciation system that exists, so you’ll need some additional resources
specific to your language of choice. Speaking of which, you should probably begin by choosing a
language to learn.

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