How to Learn Any Language in

3 Months
Written by Tim FerrissTopics: Language
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The Okano Isao judo textbook I used to learn Japanese grammar.

Post reading time: 15 minutes.

Language learning need not be complicated.

Principles of cognitive neuroscience and time management can be applied to attain conversational fluency
(here defined as 95%+ comprehension and 100% expressive abilities) in 1-3 months. Some background on
my language obsession, from an earlier post on learning outside of classes:
From the academic environments of Princeton University (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian) and the Middlebury
Language Schools (Japanese), to the disappointing results observed as a curriculum designer at Berlitz International
(Japanese, English), I have sought for more than 10 years to answer a simple question: why do most language
classes simply not work?
The ideal system — and progression — is based on three elements in this order…
1. Effectiveness (Priority)
2. Adherence (Interest)
3. Efficiency (Process)
Effectiveness, adherence, and efficiency refer to the “what”, “why”, and “how” of learning a target
language, respectively. In simple terms, you first decide what to learn, based on usage frequency
(priority); you then filter materials based on your likelihood of continued study and review, or adherence
(interest); lastly, you determine how to learn the material most efficiently (process).

Let’s cover each in turn. This post will focus on vocabulary and subject matter. For learning grammar, I
suggest you read this short article. For “reactivating” forgotten languages — like high school Spanish
— this sequence will do the trick.
Effectiveness: If you select the wrong material, it does not matter how you study or if you study –
practical fluency is impossible without the proper tools (material). Teachers are subordinate to materials,
just as cooks are subordinate to recipes.
Adherence: Review, and multiple exposures to the same material, will always present an element of
monotony, which must be countered by an interest in the material. Even if you select the most effective
material and efficient method, if you don’t adhere with repeated study, effectiveness and efficiency mean
nothing. In other words: can you persist with the material and method you’ve chosen? If not, less effective
materials or methods will still be better. The best approach means nothing if you don’t use it.
By analogy, if sprinting uphill with bowling balls in each hand were the most effective way to lose body fat,
how long would the average person adhere to such a program?

If you have no interest in politics, will you adhere to a language course that focuses on this material? Ask
yourself: Can I study this material every day and adhere until I reach my fluency goals? If you have any
doubt, change your selection. Oftentimes, it is best to select content that matches your interests in your
native language. Do not read about something that you would not read about in English, if English is your
native language (e.g. don’t read Asahi Shimbun if you don’t read newspapers in English). Use the target
language as a vehicle for learning more about a subject, skill, or cultural area of interest.

Do not use material incongruent with your interests as a vehicle for learning a language – it will not work.

Efficiency: It matters little if you have the best material and adherence if time-to-fluency is 20 years. The
ROI won’t compel you. Ask yourself: Will this method allow me to reach accurate recognition and recall
with the fewest number of exposures, within the shortest period of time? If the answer is no, your method
must be refined or replaced.
An Example of Effectiveness (80/20) in Practice

Pareto’s Principle of 80/20 dictates that 80% of the results in any endeavor come from 20% of the input,
material, or effort.
We can adapt this principle and prioritize material based on its recorded likelihood and frequency of usage.
To understand 95% of a language and become conversational fluent may require 3 months of applied
learning; to reach the 98% threshold could require 10 years. There is a point of diminishing returns where,
for most people, it makes more sense to acquire more languages (or other skills) vs. add a 1%
improvement per 5 years.

To see exactly how I deconstruct the grammar of new languages, I suggest you read “How to Learn (But
Not Master) Any Language in 1 Hour”. Now, on to the meat and potatoes of communication: words.
If you were a student of English (though the list can be adapted to most languages), the following words
would deliver the greatest ROI per hour invested for the initial 1-3 weeks of study:

The 100 Most Common Written Words in English

1. the
2. of
3. and
4. a
5. to
6. in
7. is
8. you
9. that
10. it
11. he
12. was
13. for
14. on
15. are
16. as
17. with
18. his
19. they
20. I
21. at
22. be
23. this
24. have
25. from
26. or
27. one
28. had
29. by
30. word
31. but
32. not
33. what
34. all
35. were
36. we
37. when
38. your
39. can
40. said
41. there
42. use
43. an
44. each
45. which
46. she
47. do
48. how
49. their
50. if
51. will
52. up
53. other
54. about
55. out
56. many
57. then
58. them
59. these
60. so
61. some
62. her
63. would
64. make
65. like
66. him
67. into
68. time
69. has
70. look
71. two
72. more
73. write
74. go
75. see
76. number
77. no
78. way
79. could
80. people
81. my
82. than
83. first
84. water
85. been
86. call
87. who
88. oil
89. its
90. now
91. find
92. long
93. down
94. day
95. did
96. get
97. come
98. made
99. may
100. part

The first 25 of the above words make up about 1/3 of all printed material in English. The first 100 comprise
1/2 of all written material, and the first 300 make up about 65% percent of all written material in English.
Articles and tense conjugations that can often be omitted in some languages or learned for recognition
(understanding) but not recall (production).

Most frequency lists are erroneously presented as the “most common words” in English, with no distinction
made between written and spoken vocabulary. The 100 most common words as used in speech are
considerably different, and this distinction applies to any target language.

The 100 Most Common Spoken Words in English

1. a, an
2. after
3. again
4. all
5. almost
6. also
7. always
8. and
9. because
10. before
11. big
12. but
13. (I) can
14. (I) come
15. either/or
16. (I) find
17. first
18. for
19. friend
20. from
21. (I) go
22. good
23. goodbye
24. happy
25. (I) have
26. he
27. hello
28. here
29. how
30. I
31. (I) am
32. if
33. in
34. (I) know
35. last
36. (I) like
37. little
38. (I) love
39. (I) make
40. many
41. one
42. more
43. most
44. much
45. my
46. new
47. no
48. not
49. now
50. of
51. often
52. on
53. one
54. only
55. or
56. other
57. our
58. out
59. over
60. people
61. place
62. please
63. same
64. (I) see
65. she
66. so
67. some
68. sometimes
69. still
70. such
71. (I) tell
72. thank you
73. that
74. the
75. their
76. them
77. then
78. there is
79. they
80. thing
81. (I) think
82. this
83. time
84. to
85. under
86. up
87. us
88. (I) use
89. very
90. we
91. what
92. when
93. where
94. which
95. who
96. why
97. with
98. yes
99. you
100. your

Individual word frequency will vary between languages (especially pronouns, articles, and possessives),
but differences are generally related to frequency rank, rather than complete omission or replacement
with a different term. The above two lists are surprisingly applicable to most popular languages.

Content and vocabulary selection beyond the most common 300-500 words should be dictated by subject
matter interest. The most pertinent questions will be “What will you spend your time doing with this
language?”
If necessary, the most closely related rephrasing would be “What do I currently spend my time
doing?” It bears repeating: do not read about something that you would not read about in your native
language. Use the target language as a vehicle for learning more about a subject, skill, or cultural area of
interest. Poor material never produces good language.
Feed your language ability foods you like, or you will quit your “diet” and cease study long before you
achieve any measurable level of proficiency.

As a personal example, I used martial arts instructional manuals to compete effectively in judo while a
student in Japan. My primary goal was to learn throws and apply them in tournaments. To avoid pain and
embarrassment, I had tremendous motivation to learn the captions of the step-by-step diagrams in each
instructional manual. Language development was a far secondary priority.

One might assume the crossover of material to other subjects would be minimal, but the grammar is, in
fact, identical. The vocabulary may be highly specialized, but I eclipsed the grammatical ability of 4 and 5-
year students of Japanese within 2 months of studying and applying sports-specific instruction manuals.

The specialization of my vocabulary didn’t present a single problem in communication, it is important to

note, as I was spending 80% of my free time training with people who also used judo-speak and other
vocabulary unique to sports training and athletic development.

Once the framework of grammar has been transferred to long-term memory, acquiring vocabulary is a
simple process of proper spaced repetition, which will be the subject of a dedicated future post.
In the meantime, don’t let languages scare you off. It’s a checklist and a process of finding material you
enjoy with a good frequency ROI.

Ganbare!

How to Learn (But Not Master) Any

Language in 1 Hour (Plus: A Favor)
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Written by Tim FerrissTopics: Filling the Void, Language

Deconstructing Arabic in 45 Minutes

Conversational Russian in 60 minutes?

This post is by request. How long does it take to learn Chinese or Japanese vs. Spanish or Irish Gaelic? I
would argue less than an hour.

Here’s the reasoning…

Before you invest (or waste) hundreds and thousands of hours on a language, you should deconstruct it.
During my thesis research at Princeton, which focused on neuroscience and unorthodox acquisition of
Japanese by native English speakers, as well as when redesigning curricula for Berlitz, this neglected
deconstruction step surfaced as one of the distinguishing habits of the fastest language learners…
So far, I’ve deconstructed Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, German,
Norwegian, Irish Gaelic, Korean, and perhaps a dozen others. I’m far from perfect in these languages, and
I’m terrible at some, but I can converse in quite a few with no problems whatsoever—just ask the MIT
students who came up to me last night and spoke in multiple languages.

How is it possible to become conversationally fluent in one of these languages in 2-12 months? It starts
with deconstructing them, choosing wisely, and abandoning all but a few of them.

Consider a new language like a new sport.

There are certain physical prerequisites (height is an advantage in basketball), rules (a runner must touch
the bases in baseball), and so on that determine if you can become proficient at all, and—if so—how long it
will take.

Languages are no different. What are your tools, and how do they fit with the rules of your target?

If you’re a native Japanese speaker, respectively handicapped with a bit more than 20 phonemes in your
language, some languages will seem near impossible. Picking a compatible language with similar sounds
and word construction (like Spanish) instead of one with a buffet of new sounds you cannot distinguish
(like Chinese) could make the difference between having meaningful conversations in 3 months instead of
3 years.

Let’s look at few of the methods I recently used to deconstructed Russian and Arabic to determine if I
could reach fluency within a 3-month target time period. Both were done in an hour or less of conversation
with native speakers sitting next to me on airplanes.

Six Lines of Gold

Here are a few questions that I apply from the outset. The simple versions come afterwards:

1. Are there new grammatical structures that will postpone fluency? (look at SOV vs. SVO, as well as noun
cases)
2. Are there new sounds that will double or quadruple time to fluency? (especially vowels)

3. How similar is it to languages I already understand? What will help and what will interfere? (Will
acquisition erase a previous language? Can I borrow structures without fatal interference like Portuguese
after Spanish?)
4. All of which answer: How difficult will it be, and how long would it take to become functionally fluent?
It doesn’t take much to answer these questions. All you need are a few sentences translated from English
into your target language.

Some of my favorites, with reasons, are below:

The apple is red.

It is John’s apple.
I give John the apple.
We give him the apple.
He gives it to John.
She gives it to him.
These six sentences alone expose much of the language, and quite a few potential deal killers.

First, they help me to see if and how verbs are conjugated based on speaker (both according to gender
and number). I’m also able to immediately identify an uber-pain in some languages: placement of indirect
objects (John), direct objects (the apple), and their respective pronouns (him, it). I would follow these
sentences with a few negations (“I don’t give…”) and different tenses to see if these are expressed as
separate words (“bu” in Chinese as negation, for example) or verb changes (“-nai” or “-masen” in
Japanese), the latter making a language much harder to crack.

Second, I’m looking at the fundamental sentence structure: is it subject-verb-object (SVO) like English and
Chinese (“I eat the apple”), is it subject-object-verb (SOV) like Japanese (“I the apple eat”), or something
else? If you’re a native English speaker, SOV will be harder than the familiar SVO, but once you pick one up
(Korean grammar is almost identical to Japanese, and German has a lot of verb-at-the-end construction),
your brain will be formatted for new SOV languages.

Third, the first three sentences expose if the language has much-dreaded noun cases. What are noun
cases? In German, for example, “the” isn’t so simple. It might be der, das, die, dem, den and more
depending on whether “the apple” is an object, indirect object, possessed by someone else, etc.
Headaches galore. Russian is even worse. This is one of the reasons I continue to put it off.

All the above from just 6-10 sentences! Here are two more:

I must give it to him.

I want to give it to her.
These two are to see if auxiliary verbs exist, or if the end of the each verb changes. A good short-cut to
independent learner status, when you no longer need a teacher to improve, is to learn conjugations for
“helping” verbs like “to want,” “to need,” “to have to,” “should,” etc. In Spanish and many others, this
allows you to express yourself with “I need/want/must/should” + the infinite of any verb. Learning the
variations of a half dozen verbs gives you access to all verbs. This doesn’t help when someone else is
speaking, but it does help get the training wheels off self-expression as quickly as possible.
If these auxiliaries are expressed as changes in the verb (often the case with Japanese) instead of separate
words (Chinese, for example), you are in for a rough time in the beginning.

Sounds and Scripts

I ask my impromptu teacher to write down the translations twice: once in the proper native writing system
(also called “script” or “orthography”), and again in English phonetics, or I’ll write down approximations or
use IPA.

If possible, I will have them take me through their alphabet, giving me one example word for each
consonant and vowel. Look hard for difficult vowels, which will take, in my experience, at least 10 times
longer to master than any unfamiliar consonant or combination thereof (“tsu” in Japanese poses few
problems, for example). Think Portuguese is just slower Spanish with a few different words? Think again.
Spend an hour practicing the “open” vowels of Brazilian Portuguese. I recommend you get some ice for
your mouth and throat first.

The Russian Phonetic Menu, and…

Reading Real Cyrillic 20 Minutes Later
Going through the characters of a language’s writing system is really only practical for languages that
have at least one phonetic writing system of 50 or fewer sounds—Spanish, Russian, and Japanese would all
be fine. Chinese fails since tones multiply variations of otherwise simple sounds, and it also fails miserably
on phonetic systems. If you go after Mandarin, choose the somewhat uncommon GR over pinyin
romanization if at all possible. It’s harder to learn at first, but I’ve never met a pinyin learner with tones
even half as accurate as a decent GR user. Long story short, this is because tones are indicated by spelling
in GR, not by diacritical marks above the syllables.
In all cases, treat language as sport.

Learn the rules first, determine if it’s worth the investment of time (will you, at best, become mediocre?),
then focus on the training. Picking your target is often more important than your method.

[To be continued?]

How to Resurrect Your High School

Spanish… or Any Language (Plus: Be
on the CBS Early Show!)
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Written by Tim FerrissTopics: Filling the Void, Language, Mini-retirements, Travel

Oktoberfest is good for reactivating German but bad for livers. ((c) Dave77459)

How can you possibly maintain fluency in two foreign languages — let alone five or six — if the
opportunities to use them are months or years apart?
In 20 minutes, I leave from JFK for Iceland, then Scotland, and then a circle in Europe that will include
Oktoberfest in Munich. Germany is strategic, as I want to “reactivate”my German before the media tour
there.
Few topics provoke more anxiety and depression in language lovers than the prospect of forgetting a hard-
earned language. After you return to your English-dominated homeland, how do you maintain your
newfound skills, which seem to have yogurt-like expiration dates? Having juggled close to a dozen
languages — keeping some and losing others — and having suffered the interference that goes it all, my
answer now is simple: you don’t.

It is easier, and much more time-efficient, to catch up versus keep up.

Why struggle to maintain a foreign tongue in the US, for example, when you most often gain nothing more
than bad habits? If you acquire the language in a native environment and attain an intermediate or
advanced level of fluency, you can reactivate your language skills in four weeks or less when approached
methodically. Would you rather spend four hours per week on your new language, only to see it get sick
and bloated with a distinctly foreign-sounding twang, or spend two hours per day for 1-3 weeks and be
right back at your fluency level from years prior?

I began reactivation of irretrievable German just over a week ago and can already hold a decent
conversation. This is not a testament to my ability, but to the efficacy of a process that begins with
massive passive exposure and avoids time-consuming review from square one:

1. Days 1-7: German films with English subtitles for at least two hours each evening for one week.
2. Days 3+: 10-20 pages of dialogue-rich manga (Japanese comics, here translated into German, that can
be ordered in most languages from comic stores in your target country) for 30 minutes each morning and
prior to bed. I’m a big fan of One Piece.
 3. On the plane: Read a phrasebook in its entirety for active recall practice of common phrases (45
minutes of study alternated with 15 minutes of rest — this takes advantage of what is called the “primacy
and recency” effect).
4. Upon arrival: Continue with manga and grammar reference checks as needed, using an electronic
dictionary to reactivate vocabulary from conversation that is familiar but not understood.
5. Weeks 2-3: Thirty to sixty Vis-Ed flashcards daily. This seems like a lot, but most will have been
covered in steps 1-3 using active recall (English to German). Vis-Ed compiles its sets of flashcards from
word frequency lists and includes sample phrases for usage. I begin flashcards after three or four days in-
country.
The sooner you decide to reactivate languages when needed, instead of maintaining them for an
unspecified time in the future, the more leisure time you will have and the less diluted your language
abilities will be when you need them.

Don’t fear losing languages if you’ve attained real fluency. They’re just in temporary storage with the
covers pulled over them.

###

Odds and Ends: Please vote for me, and be on the CBS Early Show!
There are only 24 hours left… if you haven’t, please vote for my panel at the SXSW conference! It takes
about 30 seconds and will allow me to pull together some of the best entrepreneurial minds in the world.
Check out all of the panels and vote here.
ASAP: Would you like to be on the CBS Early Show? They are doing a segment on personal
outsourcing and are looking for fun case studies in New York City (or people willing to travel there). If you
are in/near NYC and have a good success story of using personal outsourcing, please share them in the
comments here and I’ll pass your e-mail address to the producers!

 Accelerated Learning and Mentors – My Personal Story

 The Top 10 Most Popular Blog Posts

 TRIBE OF
MENTORS — Sample Chapter and a Taste of Things to Come

 The Return of the Money Shot

 Cool Tools for Travel – Tim Ferriss and Kevin Kelly

Posted on: September 20, 2007.

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Why Language Classes Don't Work:

How to Cut Classes and Double Your
Learning Rate (Plus: Madrid Update)
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Written by Tim FerrissTopics: Language, Travel

Coffee shops vs. classrooms – who wins? (Photo: eye2eye)

This is one of several articles planned as supplements to the original “How to Learn (But Not Master) Any
Language in 1 Hour.” This piece focuses on acquisition of new material; for reactivating “forgotten”
languages and vocab, I recommend also reading “How to Resurrect Your High School Spanish… or Any
Language.”
Let us begin…

From the academic environments of Princeton University (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian) and the
Middlebury Language Schools (Japanese), to the disappointing results observed as a curriculum designer at
Berlitz International (Japanese, English), I have sought for more than 10 years to answer a simple
question: why do most language classes simply not work?
After testing the waters with more than 20 languages and achieving conversational and written fluency in
6, I have identified several cardinal sins that, when fixed, can easily cut the time to fluency by 50-80%…
1. Teachers are viewed as saviors when materials are actually the determining factor.
Teachers are merely conduits for the material and sequencing.

By analogy, it is better to have a decent cook with excellent easy-to-follow recipe than a great cook with
terrible recipe. It is the material that will restrict or elevate the teacher, and a good teacher forced to
follow bad material will hinder, not hasten, learning progress. I don’t sit in on classes or otherwise consider
a school until I’ve reviewed both hand-out materials and text books.

Judge materials before you judge teachers, and no matter what, do not begin with classes or texts that
solely use the target language (e.g., Spanish textbooks in Spanish). This approach reflects a school’s
laziness and willingness to hire monolingual teachers, not the result of their search for the ideal method.

2. Classes move as slowly as the slowest student.

Seek a school with daily homework assignments that eliminate—effectively fire—students from the class
who don’t perform.

The school should have a strict curriculum that doesn’t bend for a minority of the class who can’t cope.
Downgrading students is only possible in larger schools with at least five proficiency levels for separate
classes—beginner, intermediate, and advanced is woefully inadequate. Students can only be moved if the
jumps between classes are relatively small and there are a sufficient number of students at each level for
the school to justify paying separate teachers.

At the Hartnackschule in Berlin, Germany, where I studied for 10 weeks after evaluating a dozen
schools, there are at least 20 different skill levels.
3. Conversation can be learned but not taught.
Somewhat like riding a bike, though unfortunately not as permanent, language fluency is more
dependent on practicing the right things than learning the right things. The rules (grammar) can
be learned through materials and classes, but the necessary tools (vocabulary and idiomatic usage) will
come from independent study and practice in a native environment.
I achieved fluency in German in 10 weeks using a combination of grammatical practice at the
Hartnackschule (four hours daily for the first month, two hours daily for the second) and daily two-person
language exchanges with students of English.
Grammar can be learned with writing exercises in a class of 20, whereas “conversation” cannot be learned
in anything but a realistic one-on-one environment where your brain is forced to adapt to normal speed
and adopt coping mechanisms such as delaying tactics (“in other words,” “let me think for a second,”
etc.).

Separate grammar from conversation practice. I recommend choosing one school for grammar and several
native books or comics to identify sticking points, which are then discussed in one-one-one language
exchanges, where your partner provides examples of usage and does not explain rules.

Getting into trouble in Greek and Chinese in Athens with the help of Stefanos Kofopoulos, ouzo, and wine.

4. Teachers are often prescriptive instead of descriptive.

Many teachers take it upon themselves to be arbiters of taste and linguistic conservationists, refusing to
explain slang and insisting on correct but essentially unused grammatical constructions (e.g., “with whom
were you speaking?” versus “who were you speaking to?”).

Progress will be faster when you find a teacher who describes rather than prescribes usage. They should
be able and willing to explain, for example, how Konjunktiv II is generally used in place of Konjunktiv I in
German, even though it is technically incorrect. They should also be able to save you time by explaining
what to practice based on actual frequency of use, not inclusion in a grammar text. For example, the
simple past is almost always used in place of the perfect tense in Argentina, but some teachers still spend
equal time on both.

To avoid those who act as defenders of language purity, it is often easier to target 20-30-year old teachers
and those who are good at teaching inductively (providing examples to explain principles). Ask them to
explain a few common colloquial grammatical constructions before signing up.

In conclusion—the learner is the problem (what?)

The above sins certainly inhibit the speed of learning, but the principal problem is the learner his or
herself, who—more often than not—uses classes as a substitute for, and not supplement to, real ego-
crushing interaction.

Classes are easily used to infinitely postpone making the thousands of mistakes necessary to achieve
fluency. In boxing, they say “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.” Well, in language
learning, we could just as easily say that “everyone has the perfect conversation in mind until they speak
to a real native.”

Don’t waste time on more than learning more than a handful of conjugations for primarily first-person
singular (I) and second-person singular (you) in the past, present, and future tenses, along with common
phrases that illustrate them. Throw in a few auxilaries (to want to V, to need to V, to like to V, etc.) and
jump on a plane before learning any more of what you’ll just need to relearn anyway. Even after you land,
you do not need more than two months of classes in-country, and remember that, like training wheels, the
goal is get off of them as quickly as possible.
Don’t go to classes because you have no social network outside of class, or because you want the illusion
of progress with a coddling teacher who understands your Tarzan attempts at her language. If you are
taking classes because they are enjoyable, fine, but understand that you are better off spending time
elsewhere.

Make it your goal to screw up as often as possible in uncontrolled environments. Explicitly ask friends to
correct you and reward them with thanks and praise when they catch you spouting nonsense, particularly
the small understandable mistakes. I was able to pass the Certificado de Espanol Avanzado, the most
diffucult Spanish certification test in South America, in eight weeks, which is said to require near-native
fluency and years of immersion. How? By following the above fixes and making more mistakes in eight
weeks than most make in eight years.

“An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes which can be made in a very narrow field,” or so
said Physicist Niels Bohr. Luckily, you don’t need to be a rocket scientist to use his advice. Choose schools
carefully and then, once they’ve served their purpose, abandon them.

The real world is where mistakes are made, weaknesses are found, and fluency is achieved.

###

How to Learn Any Language in Record

Time and Never Forget It
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Written by Tim FerrissTopics: Language, Mental Performance, Science

Preface from Tim

Back in 2012, Gabriel Wyner wrote an article for Lifehacker detailing how he learned French in 5 months
and Russian in 10, using mostly spare time on the subway. That article went viral.
But don’t run off! That was nothing but version 1.0. This post gives you version 2.0 and more.
He’s spent the last two years refining his methods and putting them on steroids. Kevin Kelly, founding
editor of Wired, was the one who told me, “You have to check this guy out. His new book is amazing.”
Keep in mind that I’d previously told Kevin that I thought most books on language learning were garbage.
I took his endorsement seriously, and I wasn’t disappointed.
This post gives you Gabe’s new blueprint for rapid language learning:

 A revised and updated version of his original post

 New techniques from the last two years of experimentation
 How he learned 6 languages in just a handful of years
 Tips and tricks you won’t find anywhere else
The “and never forget it” in the headline was Gabe’s idea. Read the article and let me know what you
think. Is it possible? I, for one, hope it is.

And speaking as someone who’s studied 10+ languages as an adult, I can tell you: you’re much better at
learning languages than you think.
Enjoy!

Enter Gabriel — An overview of what this is and why it works

Two Foreign Words
Let’s compare two experiences. Here’s the first one: you come into a language class, and your (Hungarian)
teacher writes the following on the board:

Kitchen cabinet – konyhaszekrény

She tells you that this is going to be on your vocab quiz next week, along with forty other words you don’t
care much about.

Experience two: You and your most adventurous friend are sitting in a bar, somewhere in Scandinavia. The
bartender is a grey-bearded Viking, who places three empty shot glasses in front of you in a line. From
behind the counter, he pulls out a bottle labeled Moktor and pours a viscous, green liquid into the three
glasses. He then grabs a jar and unscrews the lid. It’s full of something that looks and smells disturbingly
like slimy, decaying baby fish, which he spoons into each shot glass. He then pulls out a silver cigarette
lighter and lights the three shots on fire.
“This – Moktor,” he says, picking up one of the glasses. The locals in the bar turn towards you and your
friend. “Moktor! Moktor! Moktor!” they all begin to shout, laughing, as the bartender blows out the flame
on his shot glass and downs the drink. Your friend – your jackass friend – picks up his glass, screams
“Moktor!” and does the same. The crowd goes wild, and you, after giving your friend a nasty look, pick up
your glass and follow suit.
As a result of this experience, you are going to remember the word “Moktor” forever, and if you still
remember the Hungarian word for kitchen cabinet, you’re likely going to forget it within a few minutes.
Let’s talk about why this happens. Your brain stores memories in the form of connections. Moktor has a
(bitter, fishy) taste, which connects with its (rotting) smell. That taste and smell are connected to a set of
images: the green bottle, the jar of rotting fish, the grey-bearded barkeep. All of that, in turn, is connected
to a set of emotions: excitement, disgust, fear. And those emotions and images and tastes and smells are
connected to the writing on that green bottle and the sound of that chanting crowd: Moktor.

Konyhaszekrény, in comparison, just doesn’t stand a chance. In English, “kitchen cabinet” may
evoke all sorts of multi-sensory memories – over the course of your life, you’ve probably seen hundreds of
cabinets, eaten wonderful foods in their presence, and assembled your own cabinets from IKEA –
but konyhaszekrény has none of these things. You’re not thinking about IKEA’s weird metal bolts or bags of
Doritos when you see konyhaszekrény; you’re just associating the sound of the Hungarian word (which
you’re not even sure how to pronounce) with the sound of the English words ‘kitchen cabinet.’ With so few
connections, you don’t have much to hold on to, and your memory for the Hungarian word will fade
rapidly. (For a more in-depth discussion about memory and language learning, check out this
video excerpt)
In order to learn a language and retain it, you’ll need to build Moktor-like connections into your words. The
good news is that if you know what you’re doing, you can do this methodically and rapidly, and you don’t
even need to travel to Scandinavia.
The Components of a Memorable Word
If we strip a word down to its bare essentials, a memorable word is composed of the following:

 A spelling (M-o-k-t-o-r)
 A sound (MAWK-tore, or ˈmɑk.toʊɹ, if you want to get fancy)
 A meaning (A viscous green drink, served on fire with dead, baby fish in it.)
 A personal connection (Ick.)
If you can assemble these four ingredients, you can build a long-lasting memory for a word. So that’s
exactly what we’re going to do. In addition, we’re going to use a Spaced Repetition System. This is a
flashcard system that automatically quizzes you on each of your flashcards just before you forget what’s
on them. They’re a ridiculously efficient way to push data into your long-term memory, and we’ll take
advantage of that, too.
My language learning method relies on four stages: Begin by learning your language’s sound and spelling
system, then learn 625 simple words using pictures. Next, use those words to learn the grammatical
system of your language, and finally play, by watching TV, speaking with native speakers, reading books
and writing.

Keep in mind that different languages will take different amounts of time. The Foreign Service Institute
makes language difficulty estimates for English speakers, and I’ve found their estimates are spot on – in
my experience, Russian and Hungarian seem to take twice as much time as French, and I expect that
Japanese will take me twice as long as Hungarian. For the purposes of this article, I’ll assume that you’re
learning a Level 1 language like French, and you have a spare 30-60 minutes a day to dedicate to your
language studies. If you’re studying something trickier or have different amounts of spare time, adjust
accordingly.
Here are the four stages of language learning that we’ll go through:

Stage 1: Spelling and Sound: Learn how to hear, produce and spell
the sounds of your target language
1-3 weeks
One of the many reasons that Moktor is easier to memorize than konyhaszekrény is that Moktor looks and
sounds relatively familiar. Sure, you haven’t seen that particular set of letters in a row, but you can
immediately guess how to pronounce it (MAWK-tore). Konyhaszekrény, on the other hand, is completely
foreign. What’s “sz” sound like? What’s the difference between “é” and “e”? The word is a disaster when it
comes to spelling and sound, and it gets even worse if you were looking at Russian’s кухонный шкаф, or
Mandarin’s 橱柜.
Before you can even begin assembling memories for words, you’re going to need to create a spelling and
sound foundation upon which you can build those memories. So spend your first 1-3 weeks focusing
exclusively on spelling and sound, so that the foreign spellings and sounds of your target language are no
longer foreign to you.
To break down that process a bit, you’re learning three things:

 How to hear the new sounds in your target language,

 How to pronounce the sounds, and
 How to spell those sounds.
We’ll tackle those in order.

How to hear new sounds

Many people don’t think about hearing when they approach a new language, but it’s an absolutely
essential first step. When I began Hungarian, I discovered that the letter combinations “ty” and “gy”
sounded basically identical to my ears.
Tyuk:
Audio Player
00:00
00:00
Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.

Gyuk:
Audio Player
00:00
00:00
Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.

If I had rushed ahead and started learning words and grammar immediately, I’d have been at a severe disadvantage
whenever I learned words with those letter combinations, because I’d be missing the sound connection when trying to
build memories for those words. How could I remember a word like tyúk (hen) if I can’t even hear the sounds in it, let
alone repeat them aloud?
There are a few different ways to learn to hear new sounds, but the best that I’ve seen comes from a line
of research on Japanese adults, learning to hear the difference between Rock and Lock.
I’ve made a little video summarizing these studies, but here’s the short version: to rewire your ears to hear
new sounds, you need to find pairs of similar sounds, listen to one of them at random (“tyuk!”), guess
which one you thought you heard (“Was it ‘gyuk’?”), and get immediate feedback as to whether you were
right (“Nope! It was tyuk!”). When you go through this cycle, your ears adapt, and the foreign sounds of a
new language will rapidly become familiar and recognizable.
For Hungarian, I built myself a simple app that performs these tests. In the end, it took me ten days at 20
minutes a day to learn how to hear all of the new sounds of Hungarian (of which there are quite a few!). It
is a ridiculously efficient way to learn pronunciation; after experiencing it myself, I made it my personal
goal to develop pronunciation trainers for 12 of the most common languages, a goal that – thanks to
Kickstarter – is coming to fruition. These trainers will walk you through ear training tests and teach you the
spelling system of your target language in ~2 weeks. As I finish them, I’ll be putting them on my
website, here. But if I’m not covering your language yet, or if you prefer to do things on your own, I have
an article on my site explaining how to make them yourself for free.
How to pronounce new sounds
With your ears out of the way, you can start mastering pronunciation. But wait! Is it even possible to
develop a good accent from the start? I’ve long heard the claim that developing a good accent is only
possible if you’ve been speaking a language before the age of 7, or 12, or some other age that has long
since past.
This is simply not true. Singers and actors develop good accents all the time, and the only thing special
about them is that they’re paid to sound good. So yes, you can do this, and it’s not that hard.
Once your ears begin to cooperate, mastering pronunciation becomes a lot easier. No one told you, for
instance, how to pronounce a K in English, yet the back of your tongue automatically jumps up into the
back of your mouth to produce a perfect K every time. Most of the time, your ears will do this for you in a
foreign language, too, as long as you’ve taken the time to train them. That being said, there may be
occasions when you can hear a foreign sound just fine, but it just won’t cooperate with your mouth. If that
happens, you may benefit from a bit of information about where to put your tongue and how to move your
lips. I’ve made a Youtube series that walks you through the basics of pronunciation in any language. Check
it out here. It’ll teach your mouth and tongue how to produce tricky new sounds.
This gives you a few super powers: your well-trained ears will give your listening comprehension a huge
boost from the start, and your mouth will be producing accurate sounds. By doing this in the beginning,
you’re going to save yourself a great deal of time, since you won’t have to unlearn bad pronunciation
habits later on. You’ll find that native speakers will actually speak with you in their language, rather than
switching to English at the earliest opportunity.
How to spell new sounds
Spelling is the easiest part of this process. Nearly every grammar book comes with a list of example words
for every spelling. Take that list and make flashcards to learn the spelling system of your language, using
pictures and native speaker recordings to make those example words easier to remember.

Those flashcards look like this:

 Spelling Flashcard 1
(Trains individual letters and letter combinations)

Spelling Flashcard 2
(Connects a recording of an example word to the spelling system of your language)
And I have a guide to building them on my website.
Author’s note: For Japanese and the Chinese dialects, you’re going to be learning the phonetic alphabets first – Kana
(Japanese) or Pinyin (Chinese). Later, when you get to Stage 2, you’ll be learning characters. You can find an article on
modifying this system for those languages over here.
Stage 2: Learn 625 Basic Words: Learn a set of extremely common,
simple words using pictures, not translations
1-2 months
To begin any language, I suggest starting with the most common, concrete words, as they’re going to be
the most optimal use of your time. This is the 80/20 Rule in action; why learn niece in the beginning when
you’re going to need mother eighty times more often?
On my website, I have a list of 625 basic words. These are words that are common in every language and
can be learned using pictures, rather than translations: words like dog, ball, to eat, red, to jump. Your goal
is two-fold: first, when you learn these words, you’re reinforcing the sound and spelling foundation you
built in the first stage, and second, you’re learning to think in your target language.
Often, when someone hears this advice, they think it’s a good idea and try it out. They pick up a word
like devushka (girl) in Russian, and decide to learn it using a picture, instead of an English translation.
They go to Google Images (or better, Google Images Basic Mode, which provides captions for each word
and more manageably sized images), and search for “girl.” Here’s what they’ll see:
 Google Images search for “girl” (Using Basic Mode)
It’s exactly what you’d expect. They look like girls, and you could pick out a couple of these images, slap
them on a flashcard, and teach yourself devushka within a few seconds. Unfortunately, you’d be missing
out on the most interesting – and most memorable – bits of the story. You already know what
a girl is. What happens if you search for “девушка” (devushka) instead?

Google Images search for “девушка” (Using Translated Basic Mode)

Russian devushki tend to be 18-22 year old sex objects. Devushka is not a word you’d use to describe your
Russian friend’s 3-year-old daughter (That word is ‘devuchka’). And while knowing the difference
between girl and devushka may keep you out of trouble with your Russian friends, it’s also a thousand
times more interesting than simply memorizing “devushka = girl.” By searching for images in your target
language, and by looking for the differences between a new word and its translation, you’ll find that the
new word suddenly becomes memorable.
Devushka is not some random exception; it’s the rule. Nearly every new word you encounter will be subtly
(and sometimes, not-so-subtly) different from its English counterpart. So your first step when learning a
new word is to search for it on Google Images, look through 20-40 pictures, and try to spot the differences
between what you see and what you expect to see. This experience is the learning process for your
word. It’s the (often exciting) moment when you discover what your word actually means. Once you’ve
had that experience, grab 1-2 images and put them on a flashcard to remind you of what you saw.
Note: This is why you can’t just download some flashcards and successfully learn a foreign language. If you do this,
you miss out on the actual learning experience. The flashcards aren’t particularly effective, because they’re not
reminding you of anything you previously experienced.
Armed with an image or two from Google Images, you’ve now managed to connect a spelling (k-o-n-y-h-a-
s-z-e-k-r-é-n-y) and a sound (“konyhaszekrény!”) to a meaning (really old-fashioned looking kitchen
cabinets).

At this point, the only thing separating konyhaszekrény from Moktor is a personal connection, and
fortunately, you have plenty of personal connections to choose from. When’s the last time you
encountered a particularly old-fashioned kitchen cabinet? Search your memories, and you’ll find that for
nearly every word you learn, there is at least some experience you’ve had with that concept. In my case,
my grandmother’s old house definitely was full of konyhaszekrények. Find your own personal connection
with each new word, come up with a short reminder of it – in my case, I’d choose my grandmother’s
name, Judith – and stick that on the back of your flashcards as well. When you include personal
connections, you’ll remember your words 50% better.
Once you’ve built these connections, start making your flashcards (guide here)
Tip 1 – Regarding Word Order
When learning words, never learn them in the standard order you see in grammar books, where similar words are
grouped together: days of the week, members of the family, types of fruit, etc. When you do this, your words will
interfere with each other (is ’jeudi’ the word for ‘Tuesday’ or ‘Thursday’?), and on average, you’ll need 40% more time
to memorize them, and they’ll last 40% less time in your memory compared to a randomized group of words. You can
find more information about the effects of word order over here.
Tip 2 – Mnemonics for Grammatical Gender
If any of you have studied a language with grammatical gender, you know how much of a pain it can be trying to
remember whether chairs are supposed to be masculine, feminine or neuter. Some of the friendlier languages may
give you clues – perhaps masculine nouns usually end in ‘o’ – but those clues aren’t always trustworthy. So what can
you do?
There’s a simple way to make abstract information like grammatical gender stick. Use mnemonic imagery, and for this
particular case, use vivid, visualizable verbs. Make your masculine nouns burst into flame, your feminine nouns melt
into a puddle, and neuter nouns shatter into a thousand razor-sharp shards. You’ll find that mnemonic imagery like
this makes gender extremely easy to memorize, right from the start.
Stage 3: Learn the grammar and abstract words of your language
2-3 months
Now it’s time to crack open your grammar book. And when you do, you’ll notice some interesting things:

First, you’ll find that you’ve built a rock-solid foundation in the spelling and pronunciation system of your
language. You won’t even need to think about spelling anymore, which will allow you to focus exclusively
on the grammar. Second, you’ll find that you already know most of the words in your textbook’s example
sentences. You learned the most frequent words in Stage 2, after all. All you need to do now is discover
how your language puts those words together.
Grammar’s Role
So let’s talk about what grammar does, and how you should learn it. Grammar is a story telling device. It
takes a few actors and actions – you, your dog, eating, your homework – and turns them into a story: Your
dog ate your homework. This is a tremendously complex operation; not only can grammar tell you who’s
doing what and when they’re doing it, but it can simultaneously tell you what the speaker thinks about the
story. By switching from “My dog ate my homework” to “My homework was eaten by my dog,” for
instance, we move from a story about a bad dog to a story about a sad, sad homework assignment.
In every single language, grammar is conveyed using some combination of three basic operations:
grammar adds words (You like it -> Do you like it?), it changes existing words (I eat it -> I ate it), or it
changes the order of those words (This is nice -> Is this nice?). That’s it. It’s all we can do. And that lets
us break sentences down into grammatical chunks that are very easy to memorize.
How do you learn all the complicated bits of “My homework was eaten by my dog”? Simple: Use the
explanations and translations in your grammar book to understand what a sentence means, and then use
flashcards to memorize that sentence’s component parts, like this:

New Words (Front Side) – [Guide to construction]

New Word Forms (Front Side) – [Guide to construction]

Word Order (Front and Back

Sides) – [Guide to construction]
You can memorize any grammatical form using this approach, and this has a few advantages over the
standard sort of grammatical drills you’ll find in your textbook. For one, you’re learning each grammatical
form in the context of a story, which allows you to connect images to abstract words. This makes them a
lot easier to remember. What’s a “by” look like? For this story, it looks like a guilty dog.
Second, you’re learning grammar with the help of a Spaced Repetition System, which will provide you with
the exact amount of repetition you need to definitively memorize any grammatical form. This lets you skip
over the hundreds of grammar drills in your textbook. Instead, you can take just one or two examples of
every new grammatical form and move on to the next section of your book. This lets you move very, very
fast, and devour a textbook worth of information within a couple of months. It’s also a lot of fun; without
getting bogged down with boring grammatical drills, you’re constantly learning new ways to express
yourself.
Other Sources of Example Sentences
Occasionally, your textbook won’t give you the example sentences you need. Instead, it’ll throw a bunch of
verb conjugations at you – I am, you are, he is – and tell you to simply memorize the forms. When this
happens, you can turn to two wonderful, free resources to produce example sentences: Google Images and
Lang-8.
On its surface, Google Images is a humble image search engine. But hiding beneath that surface is a
language-learning goldmine: billions of illustrated example sentences, which are both searchable
and machine translatable. If you mess with it just right (Instructions here), you get this (I’m searching for
French’s ’peuvent’ ([they] can)):

And if you mouse over the text, you get this:

Google Images Basic Mode, jammed into Google

Translate
(Mouse over to reveal original text)
Yup, that’s an effectively unlimited source of illustrated, translated example sentences for any word or
word form in your target language. It’s the largest illustrated book ever written, and it’s both searchable
and free. Gold.
Alternatively, you can write your own example sentences. Naturally, you’ll make mistakes, but with Lang-
8.com, you can get those mistakes corrected for free by native speakers, in exchange for correcting
someone else’s English. You can then take those corrected sentences, break them down into flash cards,
and use them to memorize even the most complex of grammatical forms. I really like writing my own
flashcard content. It makes my flashcards a lot more personal, it gives me practice using the words I
already know to express myself, and the corrections show me exactly where I need additional flashcards to
help push my grammar in the right direction.
Using these tools, you can easily memorize any word or grammatical concept you’d like to learn. I’d
recommend using these tools to accomplish two things:

 Memorize the first half of your grammar book, since it’s the half that typically contains all the
meaty, useful bits. (The second half often contains specialized stuff like reported speech, which you
might not need.)
  Learn the top 1,000 words of your language. By this point, you’ve already learned many of these
words from the original 625, and with your newfound ability to learn abstract words, you can learn
the rest of them.
This part of the process is a lot of fun. You can feel your language growing in your head, and since you’re
never using translations on your flashcards, you’ll frequently find yourself thinking in your target language.
It’s a particularly weird and wonderful experience.
And by the end of this stage, you’re ready to start playing.

Stage 4: The Language Game

3 Months (or as long as you want to keep playing)
This stage is extremely flexible, and in many ways, obnoxiously simple. Want more vocabulary? Learn
more words. Want to be more comfortable reading? Read some books. But there are some efficiency
tweaks you can do here that will help you transition more easily from an intermediate level to full fledged
fluency.

Vocabulary Customization:
Learning the top 1000 words in your target language is a slam-dunk in terms of efficiency, but what about
the next thousand words? And the thousand after that? When do frequency lists stop paying dividends?
Generally, I’d suggest stopping somewhere between word #1000 and word #2000. At that point, you’ll get
better gains by customizing. What do you want your language to do? If you want to order food at a
restaurant, learn food vocabulary. If you plan to go to a foreign university, learn academic vocabulary. Get
a Thematic Vocabulary Book, a book that lists vocabulary by theme (food, travel, music, business,
automotive, etc.), and check off the words that seem relevant to your interests. Then learn those words
using the methods from Stage 3.
Reading:
Books boost your vocabulary whether or not you stop every 10 seconds to look up a word. So instead of
torturously plodding through some famous piece of literature with a dictionary, do this:
 Find a book in a genre that you actually like (The Harry Potter translations are reliably great!)
 Find and read a chapter-by-chapter summary of it in your target language (you’ll often find them on
Wikipedia). This is where you can look up and make flashcards for some key words, if you’d like.
 Find an audiobook for your book.
 Listen to that audiobook while reading along, and don’t stop, even when you don’t understand
everything. The audiobook will help push you through, you’ll have read an entire book, and you’ll
find that it was downright pleasurable by the end.
Listening:
Podcasts and radio broadcasts are usually too hard for an intermediate learner. Movies, too, can be
frustrating, because you may not understand what’s going on until the very end (if ever!).

Long-form TV series are the way to go. They provide 18+ hours of audio content with a consistent plot line,
vocabulary and voice actors, which means that by the time you start feeling comfortable (2-4 hours in),
you still have 14+ hours of content. To make those first few hours a bit easier, read episode summaries
ahead of time in your target language. You can usually find them on Wikipedia, and they’ll help you follow
along while your ears are getting used to spoken content.
Speaking:
Fluency in speech is not the ability to know every word and grammatical formation in a language; it’s the
ability to use whatever words and grammar you know to say whatever’s on your mind. When you go to a
pharmacy and ask for “That thing you swallow to make your head not have so much pain,” or “The
medicine that makes my nose stop dripping water” – THAT is fluency. As soon as you can deftly dance
around the words you don’t know, you are effectively fluent in your target language.
This turns out to be a learned skill, and you practice it in only one situation: When you try to say
something, you don’t know the words to say it, and you force yourself to say it in your target language
anyways. If you want to build fluency as efficiently as possible, put yourself in situations that are
challenging, situations in which you don’t know the words you need. And every time that happens, stay in
your target language no matter what. If you adhere to that rule whenever you practice speaking, you’ll
reach fluency at a steady, brisk pace.
Naturally, you’re going to need practice partners. Depending upon your city, you may find friends,
colleagues, private tutors (Craigslist.org) or large language practice groups (Meetup.com) for speech
practice.
No matter where you are, you can find practice partners on the Internet. iTalki.com is a website designed
to put you in touch with a conversation partner or tutor for free (if you’re willing to chat in English for half
of the time), or for $4-12/hr (if you don’t want to bother with English). It’s a tremendous and affordable
resource.
The more often you speak, the more rapidly you’ll learn. Speech practice pulls together all of the data
you’ve crammed into your head and forms it into a cohesive, polished language.

Learning a foreign language is a fluid process; you’re building a lot of different skills that meld into each
other. The more vocabulary you learn, the easier it will be to speak about a wide variety of topics. The
more you practice speaking, the easier it will be to watch foreign TV and movies. So rather than be strict
and methodical about this (“My reading comprehension skills are lacking; I must read 15 books to
maximize efficiency!”), just do what you find most enjoyable. If you like writing about your day on Lang-
8 and making flashcards out of the corrections, then keep doing that. If you like to chat with your tutor
on iTalki, do that.
There’s a very simple way to figure out if you’re spending your time well: if you’re enjoying yourself in
your target language, then you’re doing it right. In the end, language learning should be fun. It needs to be
fun; you retain information better when you’re enjoying yourself, and the journey to fluency takes too
much time to force yourself through using willpower alone. So enjoy yourself, and play around with new
ways to think about the world. See you on the other side.
###

Links:

 My book, Fluent Forever: How to learn any language fast and never forget it, is an in-depth journey
into the language learning process, full of tips, guidelines and research into the most efficient
methods for learning and retaining foreign languages.
 My CreativeLive Workshop is 18 hours of language learning insanity in video form. I go through
everything I know about the language learning process, with detailed, step-by-step walkthroughs of
every computerized and analog tool I recommend.

How to Learn Any Language in Record

Time and Never Forget It
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Written by Tim FerrissTopics: Language, Mental Performance, Science

Preface from Tim

Back in 2012, Gabriel Wyner wrote an article for Lifehacker detailing how he learned French in 5 months
and Russian in 10, using mostly spare time on the subway. That article went viral.
But don’t run off! That was nothing but version 1.0. This post gives you version 2.0 and more.
He’s spent the last two years refining his methods and putting them on steroids. Kevin Kelly, founding
editor of Wired, was the one who told me, “You have to check this guy out. His new book is amazing.”
Keep in mind that I’d previously told Kevin that I thought most books on language learning were garbage.
I took his endorsement seriously, and I wasn’t disappointed.
This post gives you Gabe’s new blueprint for rapid language learning:

 A revised and updated version of his original post

 New techniques from the last two years of experimentation
 How he learned 6 languages in just a handful of years
 Tips and tricks you won’t find anywhere else
The “and never forget it” in the headline was Gabe’s idea. Read the article and let me know what you
think. Is it possible? I, for one, hope it is.

And speaking as someone who’s studied 10+ languages as an adult, I can tell you: you’re much better at
learning languages than you think.
Enjoy!

Enter Gabriel — An overview of what this is and why it works

Two Foreign Words
Let’s compare two experiences. Here’s the first one: you come into a language class, and your (Hungarian)
teacher writes the following on the board:

Kitchen cabinet – konyhaszekrény

She tells you that this is going to be on your vocab quiz next week, along with forty other words you don’t
care much about.

Experience two: You and your most adventurous friend are sitting in a bar, somewhere in Scandinavia. The
bartender is a grey-bearded Viking, who places three empty shot glasses in front of you in a line. From
behind the counter, he pulls out a bottle labeled Moktor and pours a viscous, green liquid into the three
glasses. He then grabs a jar and unscrews the lid. It’s full of something that looks and smells disturbingly
like slimy, decaying baby fish, which he spoons into each shot glass. He then pulls out a silver cigarette
lighter and lights the three shots on fire.
“This – Moktor,” he says, picking up one of the glasses. The locals in the bar turn towards you and your
friend. “Moktor! Moktor! Moktor!” they all begin to shout, laughing, as the bartender blows out the flame
on his shot glass and downs the drink. Your friend – your jackass friend – picks up his glass, screams
“Moktor!” and does the same. The crowd goes wild, and you, after giving your friend a nasty look, pick up
your glass and follow suit.
As a result of this experience, you are going to remember the word “Moktor” forever, and if you still
remember the Hungarian word for kitchen cabinet, you’re likely going to forget it within a few minutes.
Let’s talk about why this happens. Your brain stores memories in the form of connections. Moktor has a
(bitter, fishy) taste, which connects with its (rotting) smell. That taste and smell are connected to a set of
images: the green bottle, the jar of rotting fish, the grey-bearded barkeep. All of that, in turn, is connected
to a set of emotions: excitement, disgust, fear. And those emotions and images and tastes and smells are
connected to the writing on that green bottle and the sound of that chanting crowd: Moktor.

Konyhaszekrény, in comparison, just doesn’t stand a chance. In English, “kitchen cabinet” may
evoke all sorts of multi-sensory memories – over the course of your life, you’ve probably seen hundreds of
cabinets, eaten wonderful foods in their presence, and assembled your own cabinets from IKEA –
but konyhaszekrény has none of these things. You’re not thinking about IKEA’s weird metal bolts or bags of
Doritos when you see konyhaszekrény; you’re just associating the sound of the Hungarian word (which
you’re not even sure how to pronounce) with the sound of the English words ‘kitchen cabinet.’ With so few
connections, you don’t have much to hold on to, and your memory for the Hungarian word will fade
rapidly. (For a more in-depth discussion about memory and language learning, check out this
video excerpt)
In order to learn a language and retain it, you’ll need to build Moktor-like connections into your words. The
good news is that if you know what you’re doing, you can do this methodically and rapidly, and you don’t
even need to travel to Scandinavia.
The Components of a Memorable Word
If we strip a word down to its bare essentials, a memorable word is composed of the following:

 A spelling (M-o-k-t-o-r)
 A sound (MAWK-tore, or ˈmɑk.toʊɹ, if you want to get fancy)
 A meaning (A viscous green drink, served on fire with dead, baby fish in it.)
 A personal connection (Ick.)
If you can assemble these four ingredients, you can build a long-lasting memory for a word. So that’s
exactly what we’re going to do. In addition, we’re going to use a Spaced Repetition System. This is a
flashcard system that automatically quizzes you on each of your flashcards just before you forget what’s
on them. They’re a ridiculously efficient way to push data into your long-term memory, and we’ll take
advantage of that, too.
My language learning method relies on four stages: Begin by learning your language’s sound and spelling
system, then learn 625 simple words using pictures. Next, use those words to learn the grammatical
system of your language, and finally play, by watching TV, speaking with native speakers, reading books
and writing.

Keep in mind that different languages will take different amounts of time. The Foreign Service Institute
makes language difficulty estimates for English speakers, and I’ve found their estimates are spot on – in
my experience, Russian and Hungarian seem to take twice as much time as French, and I expect that
Japanese will take me twice as long as Hungarian. For the purposes of this article, I’ll assume that you’re
learning a Level 1 language like French, and you have a spare 30-60 minutes a day to dedicate to your
language studies. If you’re studying something trickier or have different amounts of spare time, adjust
accordingly.
Here are the four stages of language learning that we’ll go through:

Stage 1: Spelling and Sound: Learn how to hear, produce and spell
the sounds of your target language
1-3 weeks
One of the many reasons that Moktor is easier to memorize than konyhaszekrény is that Moktor looks and
sounds relatively familiar. Sure, you haven’t seen that particular set of letters in a row, but you can
immediately guess how to pronounce it (MAWK-tore). Konyhaszekrény, on the other hand, is completely
foreign. What’s “sz” sound like? What’s the difference between “é” and “e”? The word is a disaster when it
comes to spelling and sound, and it gets even worse if you were looking at Russian’s кухонный шкаф, or
Mandarin’s 橱柜.
Before you can even begin assembling memories for words, you’re going to need to create a spelling and
sound foundation upon which you can build those memories. So spend your first 1-3 weeks focusing
exclusively on spelling and sound, so that the foreign spellings and sounds of your target language are no
longer foreign to you.
To break down that process a bit, you’re learning three things:
  How to hear the new sounds in your target language,
 How to pronounce the sounds, and
 How to spell those sounds.
We’ll tackle those in order.

How to hear new sounds

Many people don’t think about hearing when they approach a new language, but it’s an absolutely
essential first step. When I began Hungarian, I discovered that the letter combinations “ty” and “gy”
sounded basically identical to my ears.
Tyuk:
Audio Player
00:00
00:00
Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.

Gyuk:
Audio Player
00:00
00:00
Use Up/Down Arrow keys to increase or decrease volume.

If I had rushed ahead and started learning words and grammar immediately, I’d have been at a severe disadvantage
whenever I learned words with those letter combinations, because I’d be missing the sound connection when trying to
build memories for those words. How could I remember a word like tyúk (hen) if I can’t even hear the sounds in it, let
alone repeat them aloud?
There are a few different ways to learn to hear new sounds, but the best that I’ve seen comes from a line
of research on Japanese adults, learning to hear the difference between Rock and Lock.
I’ve made a little video summarizing these studies, but here’s the short version: to rewire your ears to hear
new sounds, you need to find pairs of similar sounds, listen to one of them at random (“tyuk!”), guess
which one you thought you heard (“Was it ‘gyuk’?”), and get immediate feedback as to whether you were
right (“Nope! It was tyuk!”). When you go through this cycle, your ears adapt, and the foreign sounds of a
new language will rapidly become familiar and recognizable.
For Hungarian, I built myself a simple app that performs these tests. In the end, it took me ten days at 20
minutes a day to learn how to hear all of the new sounds of Hungarian (of which there are quite a few!). It
is a ridiculously efficient way to learn pronunciation; after experiencing it myself, I made it my personal
goal to develop pronunciation trainers for 12 of the most common languages, a goal that – thanks to
Kickstarter – is coming to fruition. These trainers will walk you through ear training tests and teach you the
spelling system of your target language in ~2 weeks. As I finish them, I’ll be putting them on my
website, here. But if I’m not covering your language yet, or if you prefer to do things on your own, I have
an article on my site explaining how to make them yourself for free.
How to pronounce new sounds
With your ears out of the way, you can start mastering pronunciation. But wait! Is it even possible to
develop a good accent from the start? I’ve long heard the claim that developing a good accent is only
possible if you’ve been speaking a language before the age of 7, or 12, or some other age that has long
since past.
This is simply not true. Singers and actors develop good accents all the time, and the only thing special
about them is that they’re paid to sound good. So yes, you can do this, and it’s not that hard.
Once your ears begin to cooperate, mastering pronunciation becomes a lot easier. No one told you, for
instance, how to pronounce a K in English, yet the back of your tongue automatically jumps up into the
back of your mouth to produce a perfect K every time. Most of the time, your ears will do this for you in a
foreign language, too, as long as you’ve taken the time to train them. That being said, there may be
occasions when you can hear a foreign sound just fine, but it just won’t cooperate with your mouth. If that
happens, you may benefit from a bit of information about where to put your tongue and how to move your
lips. I’ve made a Youtube series that walks you through the basics of pronunciation in any language. Check
it out here. It’ll teach your mouth and tongue how to produce tricky new sounds.
This gives you a few super powers: your well-trained ears will give your listening comprehension a huge
boost from the start, and your mouth will be producing accurate sounds. By doing this in the beginning,
you’re going to save yourself a great deal of time, since you won’t have to unlearn bad pronunciation
habits later on. You’ll find that native speakers will actually speak with you in their language, rather than
switching to English at the earliest opportunity.
How to spell new sounds
Spelling is the easiest part of this process. Nearly every grammar book comes with a list of example words
for every spelling. Take that list and make flashcards to learn the spelling system of your language, using
pictures and native speaker recordings to make those example words easier to remember.

Those flashcards look like this:

Spelling Flashcard 1
(Trains individual letters and letter combinations)

Spelling Flashcard 2
(Connects a recording of an example word to the spelling system of your language)
And I have a guide to building them on my website.
Author’s note: For Japanese and the Chinese dialects, you’re going to be learning the phonetic alphabets first – Kana
(Japanese) or Pinyin (Chinese). Later, when you get to Stage 2, you’ll be learning characters. You can find an article on
modifying this system for those languages over here.
Stage 2: Learn 625 Basic Words: Learn a set of extremely common,
simple words using pictures, not translations
1-2 months
To begin any language, I suggest starting with the most common, concrete words, as they’re going to be
the most optimal use of your time. This is the 80/20 Rule in action; why learn niece in the beginning when
you’re going to need mother eighty times more often?
On my website, I have a list of 625 basic words. These are words that are common in every language and
can be learned using pictures, rather than translations: words like dog, ball, to eat, red, to jump. Your goal
is two-fold: first, when you learn these words, you’re reinforcing the sound and spelling foundation you
built in the first stage, and second, you’re learning to think in your target language.
Often, when someone hears this advice, they think it’s a good idea and try it out. They pick up a word
like devushka (girl) in Russian, and decide to learn it using a picture, instead of an English translation.
They go to Google Images (or better, Google Images Basic Mode, which provides captions for each word
and more manageably sized images), and search for “girl.” Here’s what they’ll see:

Google Images search for “girl” (Using Basic Mode)

It’s exactly what you’d expect. They look like girls, and you could pick out a couple of these images, slap
them on a flashcard, and teach yourself devushka within a few seconds. Unfortunately, you’d be missing
out on the most interesting – and most memorable – bits of the story. You already know what
a girl is. What happens if you search for “девушка” (devushka) instead?

Google Images search for “девушка” (Using Translated Basic Mode)

Russian devushki tend to be 18-22 year old sex objects. Devushka is not a word you’d use to describe your
Russian friend’s 3-year-old daughter (That word is ‘devuchka’). And while knowing the difference
between girl and devushka may keep you out of trouble with your Russian friends, it’s also a thousand
times more interesting than simply memorizing “devushka = girl.” By searching for images in your target
language, and by looking for the differences between a new word and its translation, you’ll find that the
new word suddenly becomes memorable.
Devushka is not some random exception; it’s the rule. Nearly every new word you encounter will be subtly
(and sometimes, not-so-subtly) different from its English counterpart. So your first step when learning a
new word is to search for it on Google Images, look through 20-40 pictures, and try to spot the differences
between what you see and what you expect to see. This experience is the learning process for your
word. It’s the (often exciting) moment when you discover what your word actually means. Once you’ve
had that experience, grab 1-2 images and put them on a flashcard to remind you of what you saw.
Note: This is why you can’t just download some flashcards and successfully learn a foreign language. If you do this,
you miss out on the actual learning experience. The flashcards aren’t particularly effective, because they’re not
reminding you of anything you previously experienced.

Armed with an image or two from Google Images, you’ve now managed to connect a spelling (k-o-n-y-h-a-
s-z-e-k-r-é-n-y) and a sound (“konyhaszekrény!”) to a meaning (really old-fashioned looking kitchen
cabinets).

At this point, the only thing separating konyhaszekrény from Moktor is a personal connection, and
fortunately, you have plenty of personal connections to choose from. When’s the last time you
encountered a particularly old-fashioned kitchen cabinet? Search your memories, and you’ll find that for
nearly every word you learn, there is at least some experience you’ve had with that concept. In my case,
my grandmother’s old house definitely was full of konyhaszekrények. Find your own personal connection
with each new word, come up with a short reminder of it – in my case, I’d choose my grandmother’s
name, Judith – and stick that on the back of your flashcards as well. When you include personal
connections, you’ll remember your words 50% better.
Once you’ve built these connections, start making your flashcards (guide here)
Tip 1 – Regarding Word Order
When learning words, never learn them in the standard order you see in grammar books, where similar words are
grouped together: days of the week, members of the family, types of fruit, etc. When you do this, your words will
interfere with each other (is ’jeudi’ the word for ‘Tuesday’ or ‘Thursday’?), and on average, you’ll need 40% more time
to memorize them, and they’ll last 40% less time in your memory compared to a randomized group of words. You can
find more information about the effects of word order over here.
Tip 2 – Mnemonics for Grammatical Gender
If any of you have studied a language with grammatical gender, you know how much of a pain it can be trying to
remember whether chairs are supposed to be masculine, feminine or neuter. Some of the friendlier languages may
give you clues – perhaps masculine nouns usually end in ‘o’ – but those clues aren’t always trustworthy. So what can
you do?
There’s a simple way to make abstract information like grammatical gender stick. Use mnemonic imagery, and for this
particular case, use vivid, visualizable verbs. Make your masculine nouns burst into flame, your feminine nouns melt
into a puddle, and neuter nouns shatter into a thousand razor-sharp shards. You’ll find that mnemonic imagery like
this makes gender extremely easy to memorize, right from the start.
Stage 3: Learn the grammar and abstract words of your language
2-3 months
Now it’s time to crack open your grammar book. And when you do, you’ll notice some interesting things:

First, you’ll find that you’ve built a rock-solid foundation in the spelling and pronunciation system of your
language. You won’t even need to think about spelling anymore, which will allow you to focus exclusively
on the grammar. Second, you’ll find that you already know most of the words in your textbook’s example
sentences. You learned the most frequent words in Stage 2, after all. All you need to do now is discover
how your language puts those words together.
Grammar’s Role
So let’s talk about what grammar does, and how you should learn it. Grammar is a story telling device. It
takes a few actors and actions – you, your dog, eating, your homework – and turns them into a story: Your
dog ate your homework. This is a tremendously complex operation; not only can grammar tell you who’s
doing what and when they’re doing it, but it can simultaneously tell you what the speaker thinks about the
story. By switching from “My dog ate my homework” to “My homework was eaten by my dog,” for
instance, we move from a story about a bad dog to a story about a sad, sad homework assignment.
In every single language, grammar is conveyed using some combination of three basic operations:
grammar adds words (You like it -> Do you like it?), it changes existing words (I eat it -> I ate it), or it
changes the order of those words (This is nice -> Is this nice?). That’s it. It’s all we can do. And that lets
us break sentences down into grammatical chunks that are very easy to memorize.
How do you learn all the complicated bits of “My homework was eaten by my dog”? Simple: Use the
explanations and translations in your grammar book to understand what a sentence means, and then use
flashcards to memorize that sentence’s component parts, like this:

New Words (Front Side) – [Guide to construction]

New Word Forms (Front Side) – [Guide to construction]

Word Order (Front and Back

Sides) – [Guide to construction]
You can memorize any grammatical form using this approach, and this has a few advantages over the
standard sort of grammatical drills you’ll find in your textbook. For one, you’re learning each grammatical
form in the context of a story, which allows you to connect images to abstract words. This makes them a
lot easier to remember. What’s a “by” look like? For this story, it looks like a guilty dog.
Second, you’re learning grammar with the help of a Spaced Repetition System, which will provide you with
the exact amount of repetition you need to definitively memorize any grammatical form. This lets you skip
over the hundreds of grammar drills in your textbook. Instead, you can take just one or two examples of
every new grammatical form and move on to the next section of your book. This lets you move very, very
fast, and devour a textbook worth of information within a couple of months. It’s also a lot of fun; without
getting bogged down with boring grammatical drills, you’re constantly learning new ways to express
yourself.
Other Sources of Example Sentences
Occasionally, your textbook won’t give you the example sentences you need. Instead, it’ll throw a bunch of
verb conjugations at you – I am, you are, he is – and tell you to simply memorize the forms. When this
happens, you can turn to two wonderful, free resources to produce example sentences: Google Images and
Lang-8.
On its surface, Google Images is a humble image search engine. But hiding beneath that surface is a
language-learning goldmine: billions of illustrated example sentences, which are both searchable
and machine translatable. If you mess with it just right (Instructions here), you get this (I’m searching for
French’s ’peuvent’ ([they] can)):

And if you mouse over the text, you get this:

Google Images Basic Mode, jammed into Google

Translate
(Mouse over to reveal original text)
Yup, that’s an effectively unlimited source of illustrated, translated example sentences for any word or
word form in your target language. It’s the largest illustrated book ever written, and it’s both searchable
and free. Gold.
Alternatively, you can write your own example sentences. Naturally, you’ll make mistakes, but with Lang-
8.com, you can get those mistakes corrected for free by native speakers, in exchange for correcting
someone else’s English. You can then take those corrected sentences, break them down into flash cards,
and use them to memorize even the most complex of grammatical forms. I really like writing my own
flashcard content. It makes my flashcards a lot more personal, it gives me practice using the words I
already know to express myself, and the corrections show me exactly where I need additional flashcards to
help push my grammar in the right direction.
Using these tools, you can easily memorize any word or grammatical concept you’d like to learn. I’d
recommend using these tools to accomplish two things:

 Memorize the first half of your grammar book, since it’s the half that typically contains all the
meaty, useful bits. (The second half often contains specialized stuff like reported speech, which you
might not need.)
 Learn the top 1,000 words of your language. By this point, you’ve already learned many of these
words from the original 625, and with your newfound ability to learn abstract words, you can learn
the rest of them.
This part of the process is a lot of fun. You can feel your language growing in your head, and since you’re
never using translations on your flashcards, you’ll frequently find yourself thinking in your target language.
It’s a particularly weird and wonderful experience.
And by the end of this stage, you’re ready to start playing.

Stage 4: The Language Game

3 Months (or as long as you want to keep playing)
This stage is extremely flexible, and in many ways, obnoxiously simple. Want more vocabulary? Learn
more words. Want to be more comfortable reading? Read some books. But there are some efficiency
tweaks you can do here that will help you transition more easily from an intermediate level to full fledged
fluency.

Vocabulary Customization:
Learning the top 1000 words in your target language is a slam-dunk in terms of efficiency, but what about
the next thousand words? And the thousand after that? When do frequency lists stop paying dividends?
Generally, I’d suggest stopping somewhere between word #1000 and word #2000. At that point, you’ll get
better gains by customizing. What do you want your language to do? If you want to order food at a
restaurant, learn food vocabulary. If you plan to go to a foreign university, learn academic vocabulary. Get
a Thematic Vocabulary Book, a book that lists vocabulary by theme (food, travel, music, business,
automotive, etc.), and check off the words that seem relevant to your interests. Then learn those words
using the methods from Stage 3.
Reading:
Books boost your vocabulary whether or not you stop every 10 seconds to look up a word. So instead of
torturously plodding through some famous piece of literature with a dictionary, do this:
 Find a book in a genre that you actually like (The Harry Potter translations are reliably great!)
 Find and read a chapter-by-chapter summary of it in your target language (you’ll often find them on
Wikipedia). This is where you can look up and make flashcards for some key words, if you’d like.
 Find an audiobook for your book.
 Listen to that audiobook while reading along, and don’t stop, even when you don’t understand
everything. The audiobook will help push you through, you’ll have read an entire book, and you’ll
find that it was downright pleasurable by the end.
Listening:
Podcasts and radio broadcasts are usually too hard for an intermediate learner. Movies, too, can be
frustrating, because you may not understand what’s going on until the very end (if ever!).

Long-form TV series are the way to go. They provide 18+ hours of audio content with a consistent plot line,
vocabulary and voice actors, which means that by the time you start feeling comfortable (2-4 hours in),
you still have 14+ hours of content. To make those first few hours a bit easier, read episode summaries
ahead of time in your target language. You can usually find them on Wikipedia, and they’ll help you follow
along while your ears are getting used to spoken content.
Speaking:
Fluency in speech is not the ability to know every word and grammatical formation in a language; it’s the
ability to use whatever words and grammar you know to say whatever’s on your mind. When you go to a
pharmacy and ask for “That thing you swallow to make your head not have so much pain,” or “The
medicine that makes my nose stop dripping water” – THAT is fluency. As soon as you can deftly dance
around the words you don’t know, you are effectively fluent in your target language.
This turns out to be a learned skill, and you practice it in only one situation: When you try to say
something, you don’t know the words to say it, and you force yourself to say it in your target language
anyways. If you want to build fluency as efficiently as possible, put yourself in situations that are
challenging, situations in which you don’t know the words you need. And every time that happens, stay in
your target language no matter what. If you adhere to that rule whenever you practice speaking, you’ll
reach fluency at a steady, brisk pace.
Naturally, you’re going to need practice partners. Depending upon your city, you may find friends,
colleagues, private tutors (Craigslist.org) or large language practice groups (Meetup.com) for speech
practice.
No matter where you are, you can find practice partners on the Internet. iTalki.com is a website designed
to put you in touch with a conversation partner or tutor for free (if you’re willing to chat in English for half
of the time), or for $4-12/hr (if you don’t want to bother with English). It’s a tremendous and affordable
resource.
The more often you speak, the more rapidly you’ll learn. Speech practice pulls together all of the data
you’ve crammed into your head and forms it into a cohesive, polished language.

Learning a foreign language is a fluid process; you’re building a lot of different skills that meld into each
other. The more vocabulary you learn, the easier it will be to speak about a wide variety of topics. The
more you practice speaking, the easier it will be to watch foreign TV and movies. So rather than be strict
and methodical about this (“My reading comprehension skills are lacking; I must read 15 books to
maximize efficiency!”), just do what you find most enjoyable. If you like writing about your day on Lang-
8 and making flashcards out of the corrections, then keep doing that. If you like to chat with your tutor
on iTalki, do that.
There’s a very simple way to figure out if you’re spending your time well: if you’re enjoying yourself in
your target language, then you’re doing it right. In the end, language learning should be fun. It needs to be
fun; you retain information better when you’re enjoying yourself, and the journey to fluency takes too
much time to force yourself through using willpower alone. So enjoy yourself, and play around with new
ways to think about the world. See you on the other side.
###
Links:

 My book, Fluent Forever: How to learn any language fast and never forget it, is an in-depth journey
into the language learning process, full of tips, guidelines and research into the most efficient
methods for learning and retaining foreign languages.
 My CreativeLive Workshop is 18 hours of language learning insanity in video form. I go through
everything I know about the language learning process, with detailed, step-by-step walkthroughs of
every computerized and analog tool I recommend.