Fluent Forever

here's a true story over 10 years ago I was in a bookstore remember those and I was just browsing the language shelves because of course I was and I see this book called fluent forever now even in 2014 there were YouTube polyglot grifters in fact that was probably their apy and even then I was skeptical of outrageous claims like learning a language in 3 months so I pick up this book ready to just rip it apart I was expecting a mix of linguistic na over confidence and just general confidence man paum I open it to

a random page and he's talking about how important it is to learn the sounds of your target language and how the International Phonetic Alphabet can actually help you do that okay I think even the conmen have to have a nugget of Truth to give legitimacy to their lies but surely there's something to tear apart here so I flipped to another page and it's a great example of how to think about syntax and morphology in a useful way okay fine but then when I flip the page something I've never seen before surely this will be where

I catch them but actually wait a minute this is really good long story short I bought the book and it had a pretty strong effect on how I think about language learning so imagine my reaction when I get an email out of the blue offering me a free copy of the updated second edition it'd be nice if you gave it a review but there's no strings attached I was curious what update there were and curious to revisit it 10 years at a PhD in linguistics later and it turns out it's still really good in fact

I had to wait to make this video not just because I was making a failed foray into ASMR for an audience that hates ASMR even more than I do but also because I lent the book to a friend who was toying with the idea of revisiting their Spanish so today I'm going to talk about what I got out of fluent forever in 2014 what's different and interesting in the new edition and of course what Gabriel Wier gets right and what he maybe gets a little wrong if you're new to the channel I'm Dr Taylor Jones

I have a PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania and I love learning languages and sharing the insights of linguistics today instead of debunking hyperpolyglots ridiculous claims we're going to see what one polyglot does right and what we can learn from him I'm Dr Taylor Jones and this is language [Music] Jones weap surprisingly this video is not sponsored but I do want to give a special thanks to Jonathan at penguin random House's Harmony books imprint for thinking of me and for sending me the new addition I'd been meaning to revisit the original book and

this gave me the motivation to revisit it and some new content so who is Gabriel Wier honestly if you read the preface to the new edition and I won't post spoilers here it seems like he's also been asking that question a lot lately seriously read the prefaces and acknowledgements and forwards to to things if you want to piece together some hot Goss Gabriel I'm happy for you and it sounds like you had a hell of a journey anyway for our purposes what you need to know is that Wier was an aspiring opera singer who had

failed at language learning in the classroom but caught the language bug with an experience at midbury the famous language school where you take a pledge to speak nothing but your target language for a few months and you live in Residence and they kick you out if you slip up he tells a great story in his book about a in for the wrong level in French and faking his way in of course he realized that part of his cramming to fake learning was actually just making use of more effective methods with a lot of motivation and

a specific goal but I digress he became obsessed with learning effectively and did a ton of research like actual research and used himself as a language learning guinea pig now a a brief note here is important being motivated to study lots of languages and even having success achieving a high level in those languages does not mean that you know anything about how to teach those languages or even how to succeed at effective and quick learning most of the hyperpolyglots I see on YouTube have succeeded to the extent that they have despite themselves and they pedal

bad advice so that's basically what I was expecting the first time I picked up this book but instead what I got was somebody who when he wrote about Linguistics wrote knowledgeably and correctly when he talked about learning and memory he drew on current research Arch and he put it together in a way that made connections I hadn't yet made on how to actually apply the linguistic side of things and the learning and memory s side of things to efficiently effectively learn now this video is not sponsored but I can say that the original book was

fantastic and the new edition is also great clearly expanded and was a blast to read if you want to order a copy I will have a link in the description so I'm not going to go over all of it because that would be like a 5-hour video but I will tell you some key points and some things that surprised me and that I have added to my language learning routines and if you want more check out his stuff and maybe buy the book his main argument basically boils down to three things that you didn't really

need Gabriel wer to tell you learn sounds first don't translate and use spaced repetition software but there's a lot to unpack in that alone and the book itself covers so much more and for what it's worth he's part of the reason that those three things feel obvious to people interested in language learning and on YouTube right now let's unpack those three quickly though languages are spoken first and foremost we're bracketing SCI modalities here so sounds are the building blocks learning the sounds of your target language first and using all and only the sounds of your

target language is a tremendous piece of advice it will give you a good accent it will help your listening comprehension it will help prevent mixing up similar languages like Spanish and French because while a lot of the words look similar on the page under the hood they're totally different and the sounds are the building blocks of morphemes and in turn words phrases and sentences morphological and syntactic patterns that could be confusing are just not when you start with the sounds and get a handle on what's actually going on similarly don't translate seems like either obvious

advice or completely impossible and unhinged when you're first starting out but the idea is basically just to map those sounds that you've learned to con ceps ideally circumventing the process of translating through your L1 the benefits are well documented and include faster comprehension recall and production and more importantly you start to train both phonological and semantic priming in line with your target language he gives an example in the book of a textbook claiming girl in English is dushka in Russian technically true but a Google image search turns up results that are shall we say very

different depending on the language and it's like this for well every word otherwise languages would just be code and not you know different languages and lastly he kind of folds all of his memorization advice into use spaced repetition software and then just has a lot of details on how to optimize that but of course the devil's in the details he gives so many excellent tips it's hard to remember them all ironically so space repetition software or SRS is basically just a software optimized approach to surfing the forgetting curve I've talked about this at l elsewhere

but long-term learning is actually a process of repeatedly forgetting or nearly forgetting something and then strengthening all the neural networks it connects with in the act of remembering trying to remember or being reminded so in service of these big three ideas he has chapters or sections of chapters on learning and memorization uh the importance of sound and how to approach it this is what got me hooked words and vocabulary building sentence structures and how to memorize them stress minimization and a lot of other good stuff I'm just going to share a few of the things

that really stood out to me first was his game of spot the differences which we've already seen with gka this is surprisingly fun and extremely helpful second was his use of action pneumonics for memorizing grammatical category things like gender or case marking I talk on my channel a lot about what I call uh naughty pneumonics but he's got a master class on how to maximize their impact and why they work basically anything that kicks your animalistic hindbrain into gear things like violence and sex and strong emotions are things that are implicated in memory circuits and

the formation of vivid long-term memories I'm pretty sure I still remember his examples from German from reading the first edition in 2014 so there's maybe something to be said for this kind of amydala hacking but the main two things that really stood out to me in reading the new addition were his approach to simplifying learning grammatical rules and pick a thing his approach to grammar is so totally diametrically opposite to my training as a linguist and yet it's also just another way of saying the same thing He suggests learning grammatical structures by referring to a

good grammar where have you heard that before and picking an example sentence or two or three and then just breaking that sentence apart into multiple flash cards using Clos deletion that's a fancy term for fill the blanks the way he recommends is to have one for new words one for new forms of a word and one for any kind of surprising word order so he gives the example of learning pacif isation by taking a sentence like my homework was eaten by my dog and giving yourself an image of a dog along with multiple cards one

would be like my homework was eaten blank my dog you can do that or you can try to memorize that by is the preposition that introduces the optional agent in a passive Construction but honestly that technically correct linguistic description is basically just another way of saying that the word by goes there in that sentence similarly he might have a card with my homework blank to eat by my dog and you'd have to supply was eaten so you get really really good at a few specific sentences but there's sentences that teach you all aspects of the

structure that you're learning and then when you learn a new word you can easily fit it into those structures I thought this was brilliant and an even brillian addition was to underspecified and other hints meaning basically something like my homework was eaten by a/n blank if you were memorizing dog this way you don't narrow down the search Space by having the word a indicate you're looking for a noun that starts with a consonant pick a thing was another great trick that's a simplification of the memory Champion technique of person action object he gives the example

of needing a neonic for multiple different German plurals there's like six different ways that German plural izes things how do you know if words pluralize with s or or something else entirely in general you have to just memorize that so the Brilliance of his approach is its unashamed laziness ends with an s that's just like English so treat it as the default even if linguists would argue about whether that is structurally or statistically accurate for an English speaker it's the closest to expected so for our learning process it's the easiest and therefore the default ends

with can you remember that without additional effort no action needed but let's say you can't the example he gives is struggling to remember that it's not students but in German it's student so pardon my accent by the way so he thinks about a thing related to students in this case he settles on a backpack he adds a backpack to the card and then to every card that he makes for a word that has an in plural he goes on to explain something like an envelope might be better since it triggers phonological associations so what about

something like naon which also takes Ian well you're going to imagine multiple Nations wearing backpacks that's it I started doing this with my memorization and holy you guys to give context I'm super lazy and dualingo Hebrew is actually one of the better things out there if you supplement with Ani that's a space repetition software but of course I went with pre-made an decks as a timesaver so I've been adding pictures to my deck but often it's just of you know something evocative of the concept and I have work words that I struggled with because I

just kept getting them wrong or confusing them exam in frying pan for example that's M and I had a bunch of words like this I started adding more pneumonics phonological cues or even just partial phonological cues or both phonological cues and demonics and holy literally the process of even just trying to do that got some of these words locked in for a frying pan I added a chef shrugging and asking a question the question of course is you want they should but for pay loot activity I had a bunch of kids bouncing on balls that

wasn't working for me I've added pay and loot it's absolutely ridiculous how effective this is it's so freaking stupid but it really really works and if you speak a bunch of languages you're not limited to English for the priming I finally memorized importing which I'd used a picture of a container ship at a port for by adding bees to it it's mayab get it may AB anyway it works for me and that's all that matters if you use pneumonics leave me a comment with your craziest one oh and one more thing he has an approach

for memorizing grammar paradigms without just brute forcing it like we did in French class not knocking that method but I'm excited to try his version which is basically to use Clos deletion flash cards with interesting stories for each of the forms something unexpected and engaging like the last thing that I want to say he gets really really right is a chapter on Stress Management and goal setting insert joke here about the state of the world such that this wasn't in the 2014 edition of the book there's tons of other good stuff in the book and

he writes in a clear and engaging fashion and there's fully 153 pages of appendices and how-tos seriously it's pages 220 through 373 it's got all sorts of information on flash cards and of course the list of your 625 first words to learn that he's famous for I will say there are some flaws but nothing that I think really detracts from the overall benefit of the book first he doesn't really have much to say about how to learn underresourced languages he has a ton of information on resources but a lot of this is just assuming that

you're learning something like Spanish or French or Russian or Japanese which frankly is statistically a safe bet and while he does have some on using AI I was surprised not to see much discussion of AI Imaging generation which I applied to make pneumonics based on what he had written elsewhere in the book for instance Mish is serving so I made geese who are servers as a neonic it works for me mid gab is overcoming so I made a neonic about a bear who overcame the world telling him that he couldn't be a Lady Gaga impersonator

in a meat dress meat gab but on the whole the book is great and I'm grateful that Harmony press sent me a copy like I said I immediately loaned it to a friend said friend is now fired up to improve their Spanish because it feels more achievable that's the main thing that he's selling of course the other thing that he's selling is an app which purports to simplify a lot of the process for you reducing your data entry time and allowing you more time for memorization and learning I think that's totally fair and if you

have the money to throw at the problem why not he says as much as well if you want to snatch a copy of the book I'll have an Amazon affiliate Link in the description I definitely think it's worth the asking price I'm probably going to try to implement all of his suggestions when I go back to Persian which has been a struggle for me to retain compared to French and Spanish and so on if you like what I'm doing with the channel you know except that one attempt at ASMR then please like And subscribe and

leave me a comment I've said it before but comments feed the algorithm and the algorithm feeds my family you can also support the Channel with super thanks or over on patreon.com language Jones until next time happy learning