Gabriel Wyner

website, Fluent-Forever.com.

Phrase books from the Lonely Planet company are cheap and come with a tiny,

Fluent-Forever.com

I encountered three basic keys to language learning:

1. Learn pronunciation first.

2. Don’t translate.

3. Use spaced repetition systems.

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.

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.

While we can’t yet upload jujitsu directly into our brains, we do have technology that can help us learn faster. This technology derives its power from five principles of memory:

• Make memories more memorable.

• Maximize laziness.

• Don’t review. Recall.

• Wait, wait! Don’t tell me!

• Rewrite the past.

In school we learn things then take the test,

In everyday life we take the test then we learn things.

If it’s hard to remember, it’ll be difficult to forget.

You’ll accomplish this goal by creating flash cards that test your ability to recall a given word, pronunciation, or grammatical construction. Coupled with images and personal connections, these cards will form the foundation of a powerful memorization system.