Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It by Gabriel WynerMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
An excellent book, and the best I've encountered thus far for learning a new language.
His main three points:
1. Work on your pronunciation first.
2. Don’t translate.
3. Use spaced repetition.
Some of my (quick) notes:
- Find a good grammar book. Don't go through it in order, but keep it for practice.
- Spaced repetition - use Anki, with images and (possibly) recordings
- Minimal pairs (this was superb. I know in Chinese there are plenty of sounds I just couldn't notice the difference between, while native speakers found them obvious. Using minimal pairs at the outset would have been extremely useful to me).
- Forvo.com and Rhinospike are great websites. Check them out.
- Apparently children will ALWAYS learn "Mommy working" before "Mommy works". Interesting.
I can't say I agreed with his emphasis on the IPA. This is pretty darn difficult to learn, especially if you're just starting out, and seems like it would just add to the complications.
Also, while there is a lot of emphasis on how to deal with languages that have masculine/feminine/neutral etc. (and some great methods for doing so), it was lacking quite a bit for languages like Chinese and Japanese, using characters. And some of his advice ("use pinyin in this scenario") seems a tad simplistic. Actually, I'd love for him to tackle Chinese, and then see what methods he develops for dealing with it (the tones, the characters, measure words, etc.)
And finally, toward the end his Spaced Repetition card recommendations got way too complicated for me. Probably because I'm not dealing with any elementary-level languages right now. But regardless, it seems like a lot of extra work. Still, if it's fun, all the better...
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