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Fluent Forever (Revised Edition)

How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It

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About this listen

At thirty years old, Gabriel Wyner speaks six languages fluently. He didn’t learn them in school—who does? Rather, he learned them in the past few years, working on his own and practicing on the subway, using simple techniques and free online resources—and here he wants to show others what he’s discovered.

Starting with pronunciation, you’ll learn how to rewire your ears and turn foreign sounds into familiar sounds. You’ll retrain your tongue to produce those sounds accurately, using tricks from opera singers and actors. Next, you’ll begin to tackle words, and connect sounds and spellings to imagery rather than translations, which will enable you to think in a foreign language. And with the help of sophisticated spaced-repetition techniques, you’ll be able to memorize hundreds of words a month in minutes every day.

This is brain hacking at its most exciting, taking what we know about neuroscience and linguistics and using it to create the most efficient and enjoyable way to learn a foreign language in the spare minutes of your day.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2014, 2024 Gabriel Wyner (P)2024 Audible Inc. Communication & Social Skills Language Learning Linguistics Memory Improvement Personal Development Social Sciences Celebrity
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I was recommended this book for being one of the best language learning books that focus on professional memorisation and learning techniques and it doesn’t disappoint. Within the first chapter I’d already noted down a dozen points that will help me in my language learning journey and several points will help me on my next one.

For example:
If you don’t learn to pronounce written words, you end up learning two languages as most words don’t look like they sound, especially to non-native speakers. If you do learn it first, every input from that language will improve your skills and it will compound over time.

Try it out, I promise it will have something in it you’ll find useful. Halfway through and I already have enough points to save me weeks of work.

Incredible!

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Interesting bookk. Gives good tips. Too bad it focusses so much on visual aids and imagery. For the 2 to 4% of the population whose brains can’t do visualisation and have no visual memory more than half of this book is useless. However the rest is definitely worth reading.

Interesting

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If you have never tried learning a language and have no idea where to start, I can see how this book could have some useful things for you. But it is painfully simplistic in its approach, relying almost entirely on flashcards of one kind or another, which I found extremely tedious to listen to again and again. I found myself rolling my eyes quite a few times as I went through, at the frankly ridiculous statements that are casually made, which indicate the author's own superficial knowledge of languages he claims fluency in. Specifically, when he talks about Japanese and Chinese (both of which I have learnt as an adult and teach at the postgraduate level), he often says things flippantly that are just silly, especially about the writing systems.
On a stylistic level I suspect the author thinks he's being relatable in his tone. But the casual flexing that pops up through the book didn't make him feel like someone I'd ever want to talk to, for fear he'd never finish self-promoting (Ankihub is his company, and it comes up a lot). It's also a bit unfortunate that he does things like going to some lengths to tell us an anecdote about a classmate who mispronounced a French philosopher's name once, although he himself unironically pronounces Foucault as foo-kaltt at one point in the book's narration.
It's not a terrible book by any means. It has some basically useful stuff if you really have no idea about language learning. I suppose it fills a gap, in that there are not many similar resources out there that are language-neutral. But if you're hoping for some kind of new method or philosophy for language learning, this is definitely not it.
There are many ways of defining being "fluent" in a language. So it really depends what you mean by that word. For this author, I didn't get a sense that it meant much beyond having memorised loads of stuff on flashcards. I don't know that most people would find that very rewarding, especially when they are confronted with having to try and dredge up the knowledge from their flashcards in the totally different context of actually speaking to a person and finding they're painfully slow at putting it all together to form a sentence. So if you're looking for a VERY granular explanation of flashcard usage, then I'd say you'll love this book. But if you've ever actually learnt a language in the past, I doubt very much that you'll find it very ground-breaking.

Flashcards Forever

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