Praise for Fluent Forever

"Aspiring polyglots of the world, take note: this book will help you pick up any new language in record time. If you’re looking for a practical, brain-friendly, field-tested approach to language learning, search no more: you’ve found your guide."

—Josh Kaufman, bestselling author of The First 20 Hours: How to Learn Anything…Fast

"Never before have I seen a language-learning method—or method for learning anything!—that syncs up so perfectly with our current scientific understanding of how memory works. I now understand why my past attempts to learn other languages (Spanish, German, Latin) have left me with little more than a smattering of near-random vocabulary words, and I’m inspired to try again. Fluent Forever promises a fun, personalized learning regimen that is sure to wire a new tongue into your brain with speed and simplicity. And Wyner’s sharp wit will keep you entertained along the way! I’ve never been so excited to challenge my mind."

—Karen Schrock Simring, contributing editor at Scientific American Mind

"Fluent Forever is the book I wish I had had during my numerous failed attempts at learning different languages. It’s a refreshingly fun and engaging guide that shows you how to language hack your brain. Wyner’s done all the hard work so that the reader can actually enjoy the process of becoming fluent in a language quickly!"

—Nelson Dellis, 2011 and 2012 USA Memory Champion

"Fluent Forever more than meets the daunting challenge of learning a new language by giving the reader a solid game plan based on how people actually learn and memorize information. From the first chapter, I couldn’t wait to get started using Wyner’s techniques and tons of resources. His writing is engaging, smart, and conversational, making learning a real joy. If you’ve ever wanted to become fluent in another language, do yourself a favor and start reading Fluent Forever now."

—Melanie Pinola, contributing writer for Lifehacker.com and author of LinkedIn in 30 Minutes

"This is the book I’d use next time I want to learn a new language. It employs an intelligent mix of the latest methods for learning a language on your own using the Web, apps, and voice-training tips in an accelerated time frame."

—Kevin Kelly, senior maverick at Wired and author of What Technology Wants

"I know what you’re thinking: But learning a new language is soooo hard! The solution? Stop being a whiner and start reading Wyner. This book is a winner! Guaranteed to rewire your brain in as many languages as you’d like."

—Joel Saltzman, author of Shake That Brain!: How to Create Winning Solutions and Have Fun While You’re at It

"An excellent book…Wyner writes in an engaging and accessible way, weaving in his personal language journey. His method, proven by his own achievements, is clear: focus on pronunciation, avoid translation, and use spaced repetition extensively. And he offers lots of specific techniques to make sure you’ll never forget what you’ve learned. I’d recommend this book to anyone who is serious—not just aspiring but really serious—about becoming fluent in a foreign language."

—Kevin Chen, cofounder of italki.com

"Mash up the DNA of Steve Jobs and Aristotle and add training in engineering and opera, and you get Gabriel Wyner, whose ingeniously elegant system helps us knuckleheads learn not just foreign languages but, well, everything. Autodidacts rejoice!"

—Jay Heinrichs, author of Thank You for Arguing and Word Hero

"Americans refuse to realize that all languages are foreign—yes, including English. It’s time we learned how to speak like the rest of the world: in more ways than one. This book is a hilarious toolbox that helps you get a head start. Pick a foreign language (yes, including English) and voilà: el futuro es tuyo. High-five to Gabriel Wyner!"

—Ilan Stavans, author of Dictionary Days: A Defining Passion

Copyright © 2014, 2024 by Gabriel Wyner

Penguin Random House values and supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader. Please note that no part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Harmony Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

Harmony Books is a registered trademark, and the Circle colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

Originally published in different form paperback in the United States by Harmony, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, in 2014.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wyner, Gabriel, author.

Title: Fluent forever / Gabriel Wyner.

Description: Revised edition. | New York, NY: Harmony, 2024. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024018732 (print) | LCCN 2024018733 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593797495 (trade paperback; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780385348102 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Fluency (Language learning) | Communicative competence. | Language and languages—Study and teaching. | Multilingualism.

Classification: LCC P53.4115 .W96 2024 (print) | LCC P53.4115 (ebook) | DDC 418.0071—dc23/eng/20240621

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2024018732

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2024018733

Ebook ISBN 9780385348102

HarmonyBooks.com | RandomHouseBooks.com

Book design by Diane Hobbing, adapted for ebook

Illustrations on this page, this page, this page, this page, this page, and this page by Mapping Specialists, Ltd.; all other illustrations by Robert Bull

Cover design: Irene Ng

Cover art: GraphicsPond/Adobe Stock

ep_prh_7.1_151760820_c0_r1

Contents

Dedication

Author’s Note to Second Edition

1: Introduction: Stab, Stab, Stab

Beginnings

Cheaters Occasionally Prosper: The Three Keys to Language Learning

The Game Plan

How Long Does Fluency Take?

Do This Now: The Path Forward

The Path Forward

2: Upload: Five Principles to End Forgetting

Principle 1: Make Memories More Memorable

Principle 2: Maximize Laziness

Principle 3: Don’t Review. Recall.

Principle 4: Wait, Wait! Don’t Tell Me!

Principle 5: Rewrite the Past

Timing Is Everything: The End of Forgetting

Do This Now: Learn to Use a Spaced Repetition System (SRS)

3: Sound Play

Train Your Ears, Rewire Your Brain

Train Your Mouth, Express Your Care

Train Your Eyes, See the Patterns

Do This Now: Learn Your Language’s Sound System

4: Word Play and the Symphony of a Word

Where to Begin: We Don’t Talk Much About Apricots

Learning the First 625: A Bunch of Simple Words

Games with Words

The Gender of a Turnip

Do This Now: Learn Your First Hundred Words, Music and All

5: Sentence Play

The Power of Input: Your Language Machine

Simplify, Simplify: Turning Mountains into Molehills

Story Time: Making Patterns Memorable

On Arnold Schwarzenegger and Exploding Dogs: Mnemonics for Grammar

The Power of Output: Your Custom Language Class

Do This Now: Learn Your First Sentences

6: The Journey to Fluency

How and What to Learn: Your Backpack of Resources

The Budget Tool Kit (Fluent Forever 2014)

The Mid-level Tool Kit

The Luxury Tool Kit

How to Keep Yourself Motivated: A Crash Course on the Psychology of Motivation

7: Fine-Tuning and Reaching Advanced Levels

Words About Words

The Science of Stress Overload

Reading for Pleasure and Profit

Listening Comprehension for Couch Potatoes

Speech and the Game of Taboo

Do This Now: Explore Your Language

8: Epilogue: The Benefits and Pleasures of Learning a Language

The Toolbox

The Gallery: A Guide to the Flash Cards That Will Teach You Your Language

The Art of Flash Cards

The First Gallery: Do-It-Yourself Pronunciation Trainers

The Second Gallery: Your First Words

The Third Gallery: Using and Learning Your First Sentences

The Fourth Gallery: One Last Set of Vocabulary Cards

A Glossary of Terms and Tools

Appendices

Appendix 1: Specific Language Resources

Appendix 2: Language Difficulty Estimates

Appendix 3: Spaced Repetition System Resources

Appendix 4: The International Phonetic Alphabet Decoder

Appendix 5: Your First 625 Words

Appendix 6: Utility Phrases and Taboo Strategies

Appendix 7: How to Use This Book with Your Classroom Language Course

One Last Note (About Technology)

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

About the Author

_151760820_

To the thrill of the journey

Author’s Note to Second Edition

I finished the manuscript for Fluent Forever more than a decade ago, in 2013. That year marked the end of one life and the beginning of another. I ended a decade-long opera career, moved back home from Europe to Los Angeles, and ended a marriage. I launched my first Kickstarter campaign and began a journey toward becoming the CEO of an educational technology company. I began coming out of closets, learning to accept who I was. I did so much therapy.

Looking back at the first edition of my book, I see the thirty-year-old that I once was. I see a brilliant young man in love with efficiency, in love with learning, an engineer with an obsessive work ethic that he applied to crafting both his learning methods and his prose. Fluent Forever was a love story to language and the art of learning.

Today, I continue to love learning, and yet I’ve learned to love many things. In the last decade, I became a leader, a public speaker, a CEO, and a product owner. I raised and spent millions of dollars on language learning tools, I toured the world discussing my book, and I built products that touched hundreds of thousands of lives.

Overall, I look at the last decade and realize that I grew up during that time. I’ve become a complex, multifaceted individual, and that carries with it both benefits and drawbacks when it comes to writing a revised edition of this book. There is something absolutely magnetic about the single-minded obsession that I once held for language learning. I put everything I had into that topic, into Fluent Forever. As such, one of my goals in writing this revised edition is to maintain that magnetism. There are sections of the book that I’ve left completely untouched, because they focus on timeless themes and capture the simple, beautiful passion that only that earlier version of me could write.

Why, then, update this book at all?

After spending a decade helping people learn languages, I’ve seen that the need for effective language learning strategies has increased over time. We feel more isolated and have shorter attention spans than we ever have before. We live in algorithmic bubbles that we don’t know how to escape, and we’re drip-fed stimulating content in such an effective way that many of us struggle to reach our long-term goals. Language learning provides an escape route from modern isolation, but the route itself has to be more engaging and more effective now than it was back in 2014.

And so it’s time for a revision that takes advantage of modern tools and adapts to modern attention spans. And fortunately, I do have some new tools to share: I’ve used this time to learn an awful lot about what works and what doesn’t. I’ve had a decade to play around with the ideas in this book and iterate on them. I’ve learned Hungarian, Japanese, and Spanish, adjusting my methods along the way. I’ve explored the edges of what technology can bring to the learning experience, and I’ve seen the importance of psychology when it comes to helping or hurting us reach our goals. If the first edition of Fluent Forever was a book built on passion, this second edition is a book built on wisdom. May it inspire you and give you the guidance you need to reach your goals.

With love,

Gabe

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

Language 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 be able 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 to learn, but they’re not. There is no such thing as a hard language; practically anyone can speak whatever language their parents spoke when they were 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.

Beginnings

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 each other 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 could I remember only alphabets? Why was everything else so hard?

Fast-forward to June 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.

Cheaters Occasionally Prosper: The Three Keys to Language Learning

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 result. 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 Reddit 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 the new methods together.

I encountered three basic keys to language learning:

Learn pronunciation first.

Don’t translate.

Use a spaced repetition system.

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. There my beginner classes began entirely in the target language, and I picked up the meaning of my first words through gestures. I discovered that not only can a beginning student learn without translations, 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 a spaced repetition system (SRS), came from language blogs and software developers. SRSs are flash cards on steroids. Based on your input, they create a custom study plan that drives information deep into your long-term memory. They supercharge memorization, but they have yet to become the go-to tool for language learning.

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 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, 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.

The Game Plan

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 subject 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 simply play.

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 each and every one of my languages: Italian and French, Russian and Hungarian, Japanese and Spanish. This book is my time machine. If I squint my eyes just right, then you are monolingual me at twenty years old, and I’m creating a time paradox by helping you avoid all the pitfalls and potholes that led me to make my time machine in the first place. You know how it is.

How Long Does Fluency Take?

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 3 language) took me nearly twice as much time as French (a Level 1 language), and Japanese (an extra-hard Level 4 language) is taking more than twice the 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 café, comfortable chatting about whatever, somewhat uncomfortable describing car problems levels. I’ve seen similar results with my language 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 3 languages like Russian and Hebrew should be twice that, and Level 4 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 HuffPost. 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. I spend thirty to sixty minutes a day playing on my smartphone or watching TV. 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.

Do This Now: The Path Forward

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 Terms and Tools 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.

Choose Your Language

Choose a language based on employment opportunities, difficulty, availability of resources, or number of speakers, but in the end, choose a language that you like. A reader on my website once asked me whether he should learn Russian or French. His relatives spoke Russian, he loved the culture, but he was worried about the difficulty. French seemed like a safe alternative.

Never settle for safe when you can have fun instead. Your language will become a constant companion, living in your head. If you like your language, then you’ll have fun studying it, and when you have fun, you learn faster.

You have many resources at your disposal.

Language Books

Get yourself some books. Someone sat down and spent months (or years, heaven forbid) organizing the information you need, and you can have all that effort in the palm of your hand for $15 to $25. Thank you, Herr Gutenberg. In Appendix 1, I list my favorite picks for the top eleven languages you’re most likely to be studying. If your language isn’t there, hop onto Google and look for best [language name] textbook reddit, and that’ll often lead you to a great