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I'm looking forward to meeting all you guys here at the art of charm Today we're talking with Gabriel Weiner author of fluent forever how to learn a language fast and never forget it We're gonna talk about what it means to be fluent in a language Whether some people have a language gene and whether adults can actually learn languages better than children contrary to popular belief We're also gonna talk about how language learning actually makes us smarter Not only for real but also appear smarter depending on which one you think is more important and of course language learning tips and strategies how to build a foundation in a language without Translating how to learn certain things first in the right order to maximize language learning and a couple more language hacks That'll help you get fluent faster and what's actually involved in learning pronunciation and ear training and what it does for you in the long run Both in terms of efficiency and informing connections with the people that you talk to in your new language So enjoy this one with Gabriel Weiner So here with Gabriel Weiner now you're an author and an opera singer and you speak multiple languages And it's funny because right when I read that I thought oh well operas in a bunch of different languages So that makes sense. Is that what got you interested in languages? I mean, how did that start? Yeah, I mean one of the things actually I liked most about opera was it was like this great excuse to learn a bunch of languages Like you actually do need them. There's not much other than you know opera singer diplomats by and Maybe a handful of other careers where you can really justify spending all that time Yeah, that's true. I mean, I'm definitely not an opera singer So I'm one of the other ones according to most of my audience Basically, I mean, how did you start to learn because I know that we talked before we started recording here And it was like I was a terrible language student in high school and middle school I'm one of the worst and then I moved to Germany had better German than any other exchange student move to Serbia Learned Serbo Croatian move to Mexico Panama learn Spanish, you know learning Mandarin Chinese now for fun It's just I'm a good language learner But school school was the wrong way for me to do it So I hated it and I got seasoned really easy languages like French I think school is the wrong way for most people I mean, I think it's a very rare person who picks up a language from their high school experiences It's a little less rare, but still pretty damn rare for someone to pick up something from their college language experiences I mean, I think the last I checked the bilingualism rate at the US is 19% the number of people who come into the US with a non-English native language is 18% and So you look like 1% of the US population that is succeeding at learning another language when they aren't trying to just learn English Oh, wow. Yeah, that is terrible And it also shows you that they're actually gonna have an advantage if they can also get education and trade skills on top of that that Regular born in Michigan can only speak English type folks aren't necessarily gonna have Absolutely, so how did you start getting into languages? I mean if you were bad at languages in high school like me and Then what you start opera suddenly you're fluent in Italian and German and then what there's a couple of dots You know missing steps in the process now you just decided to be an opera singer poof you could speak them all Would be nice I took Russian in high school took five and a half years of it And it was sort of middle school high school and got the end of it. I got good grades Actually, I was like a good language student in the sense of I got all the tests done But at the end of it, I couldn't speak any Russian. I got the alphabet down I was about it. I think when I came back to Russian in 2012 I figured okay I'm gonna remember something like this was five and a half years of my life And I ended up remembering around 40 words. It was just pitiful Wow, that's like 10th of a percent retention rate. Oh, it's just it's horrible is like what did I waste all that time doing I? Went to Hebrew school as a kid. I took like seven years of whatever elementary school Hebrew No, that's not gonna be good language anyway, but still I left that thing and at this point I think I know like five words a Hebrew like That has not succeeded. I mean again like I picked up the alphabet and that's about it My first successful thing at language learning was in 2004. I signed up to be an opera singer I was I was actually double majoring. I was doing I always wanted to be an engineer and so I was a mechanical engineer and then I Just decided, you know, I kind of like this singing thing Why not make it into more than a hobby and so I double majored in voice and I Knew that okay now. I'm supposed to learn, you know rudimentary German Italian and French and The Russian that I had from high school was enough to sing and I guess I Had a friend who basically just said hey if you really want to learn German go to Middlebury I was like, well, what's that? He's like well this is this program where you show up and you sign a contract and it says if I speak one word That isn't German this summer. I'll get kicked out. No refund. That's amazing. It's intense It's awesome. I love these programs and so I and they had a specific German for singers program It was a program where you show up during the summer You'd have voice lessons in German you'd have master classes in German They'd ship out people from Vienna and teach you stuff is all in Vermont like this is this crazy school in Vermont And so I went to this thing and I showed up there with no German I think I had a 30-minute session with a friend of mine who spoke German I was like, what do I need and he's like, okay, this is how you say my name is this and this is how you say I'm sorry like that was about basically all I came in with I Signed this pledge saying I'm not gonna speak anything. God didn't German and then up for seven weeks I learned German ridiculously quickly and by the end of it. I Could speak in decent conversations. I was the European levels I like them a lot in terms of really grading where you are the language because like what is fluent? What is conversational? Yeah, I was gonna ask you that because I don't know really what's fluent Fluent doesn't mean anything. It's just it's this idea we have of like, okay I'm gonna go into a cafe and I'm gonna feel comfortable and I ask is people go Oh, I'm fluent in German, too And I'm like cool and I'll say something like where'd you learn German and they're like what was that and I'm like, okay You're not fluent in German, buddy. I'm totally fluent in Mandarin I can tell a taxi, you know where my hotel is and I'm like, I'm pretty sure that's not what fluent means I think the more you study a language the less you're convinced that you're fluent Yeah, I would agree with that because people go are you fluent in German and I'm like well Yeah, I mean I can watch movies and stuff and you know But I couldn't like write a good paper in it or and you know, I've trouble with the news sometimes Yeah, you're right You ask another person who's three years into German and can you know order at a restaurant? They're like, I'm fluent in German and I'm like, I'm pretty sure our definitions are quite different This is why like the European scale the European scale doesn't they have Letter grades basically because they need them that I mean you need to with the number of languages They have in each country you need to know exactly how fluent someone is because you need to know whether you can hire them You know, if you have a job offering in Germany and someone from whatever Hungary comes in and says, oh, I speak German fluently That's not enough. They need to know exactly how fluent they are and so the Europeans they grade this in levels a b and c There's a one which is basically I can like say my name A two is like I can basically say some simple identifying things about myself and get a little bit of grammar in there be one Is I can kind of start talking about some fixed things like I can order in a restaurant. This is the oh, yeah, I'm fluent Let's let's be one b2 is really I can have some in-depth conversations c1 is kind of where I set fluency And c1 really means that for one you're allowed to teach in a university in a German university It's where I think most people if you really came down and said, okay Is this person fluent or not if they're actually fluent they're speaking to c1 And then c2 is really pretty intense it that means you really you can write that German paper and it is really good style And and you can talk about really complicated things and philosophy and handle the news and that kind of thing that's c2 And so at the end of my seven-week immersion with German I ended up being around b1 b2 I could have some conversations news would just kick my ass You know, I could write a decent paper, but not a great paper like I knew some German and so I Did the next academic year? Normally I didn't touch German at all and then I went back For a second summer and reached c1 fluency with the short, you know certification and all that like I was fully fluent in German At the end of that second something So that was the first success I had I was like, okay, well immersion works as you've seen I mean Yes, it does work. It's awesome. But no one has time for that In 2008 2007 I moved to Vienna For my master's studies Um 2008 I went to a summer program in Perugia, Italy to learn Italian again immersion sort of thing Although less strict you cannot find something as strict as you'll find in the u.s Like the Italian strictness means like all right, we're going to be Italian only except when we're now. Yeah So I learned Italian probably up to like b2 level I could have decent conversations at that point because I learned German it started getting easier because I started knowing how to Learn basically right patterns and languages, especially romance languages Same alphabet and you're going oh, okay You know, this is Germanic slash romance like there's a lot of similarity. There's cognates This is how you change your voice when you need to for accents stuff like that And yeah, you don't have to relearn how to pick up a language Yeah, and so do you save a lot of time that way? So you're working on an app slash book now fluent forever how to learn a language fast and never forget it Which is awesome. A lot of people always ask me. Oh, you know, you haven't forgotten that much German and I'm thinking that's weird I haven't Or maybe I have But I know a lot of other people that went to Germany with me and they cannot speak at all And so there's this weird rate of deterioration that let me know what you think I've always been meaning to ask somebody this if you hit a language and you reach a certain level Is it that then you sort of retain it or do some people's brains just remember language is better I mean, I think there are differences between people I don't think they show up as often as people think I think people think that okay If you know a language then therefore you have the language gene and I think that's Bullshit, honestly, I think there are people out there. You get these news stories of like 17 year old in britain speak 700 languages and You just think fuck Yeah, it's like a savant Yeah, can't tie his own shoes though Usually those guys like can't literally have to like be fed by someone else. So they make a huge mess No, I mean, I think maybe these people exist I think some of these cases are going to be hoaxes, but I think in some cases. They're really there like people have real gifts But I mean, we've all picked up English A really hard language like there's no chinese kid who wakes up or who suddenly like Hits the age of eight and is like oh shit. This is a really hard language. I just can't learn this one like We all have this ability to pick up whatever language we're exposed to And it's not something you lose And you really look at the studies actually adults end up being better than kids at learning languages, which is really Right, that's the other myth, right? It's like, oh, I didn't learn it before age 18 So I guess my brain is you know, I can't teach an old dog new tricks The science says this is going to be harder for me and it's like, I don't know I'm learning mandarin as an adult I'm not a grown-up, but I am an adult and it's going along pretty well to be quite frank I mean I hate that quote-unquote scientific fact because it's based on nothing The actual science is that if you look at an adult and you look at a kid and you expose them to the same amount of a language Which is where it all goes wrong You're always comparing yourself to this little french kid who's had 20 000 hours of french And you've had your little hundred hours in your classroom and you're like, oh, there's kids so much better than me It's not fair like right kids studied it 200 times more than you But when you really control for the amount of time each person's been exposed to adults learn better every time We're smarter than kids. Like we know how to learn things, you know, that's one of the benefits of being older You were asking me earlier about Whether there's something that makes people retain languages longer like whether there are differences between people And I think it's that if you hit a certain level at a language Like you were saying you were basically the best person in your exchange program And you could actually speak it at the end, right? Yeah If you reach that level where you're actually speaking it you're actually thinking in german Oh, yeah, instead of trying to translate things You're storing this in a way that is actually applicable to your life You're storing it in a way that your brain likes to hold on to And so this is going to be something that you retain for a while now you're still going to forget stuff But it's going to be stuff that you can get back pretty quickly. Uh in my own experience. I um For my blog you have to write make your street cred video where you you show like look Because because these languages and so you make the video like it's required for language blogs And I started doing this and suddenly I realized that I'd forgotten my french negotiate And so I spent a month watching 24 Dubbed into french like seasons three four and five dubbed into french And that's all I did. I didn't study any grammar. I didn't study any vocabulary And after about two weeks of watching 24 and you watch it I mean it's 24 you have to watch it like hours at a time and just binge binge watch it I found that after basically an hour of watching it. I could understand it again And then after like two weeks of watching this show and watching like one or two seasons compulsively I was dreaming in french again Interesting, so it's all about exposure. Yeah, it's exposure in it. It's very easy to bring this stuff back once you've built it I mean once it's really there in your head It's not hard to to bring it back I think it's when you haven't really built it when you're sort of working on translations And it's all piecemeal in your head, but the thing could just kind of fall apart and fade away That makes sense. It's all duct tape and bubble gum in people's brains But once you get a real competency for it you can reactivate it It sort of sits in hibernation like oh, I guess you're not going to use german And then I'll get on the phone or I'll even just chat with a tourist in german And then like that night I'm eating schnitzel and you know back in chemistry class in my high school in germany Yeah, just like it was yesterday I remember when I was learning german I would wake up in the middle of the night And I would be having a dream in german and I would wake up because I didn't know the word for the thing I was going to say and I was like wait And that's when I was like wait, I'm dreaming How do I not know the word for this item that I use like her Cell phone or something and you know you wake up and then you're like Ah, so eventually I started keeping a dictionary right next to my bed with a little book light And I would wake up look up the word and go immediately back to sleep And there I would write it down in a journal so that I could practice it later And I noticed later that there were several nights where I'd wake up Write down a new word and the definition go back to sleep and wake up and have no memory of it And the only evidence I have that I even did it was that I had this journal And I was like those words were not here like in terrible handwriting No, those words were not here last night and so I must have written them You know and essentially almost like still sleeping That is hilarious now I I remember having dreams my first time in middlebury my first time in this immersion program where I'm I'm learning from nothing. I mean I have nothing But you still you start dreaming in a language if you're not allowed to speak in english You start dreaming in a language. It doesn't matter if you don't know anything in like two three weeks And so I'm sitting there having these dreams with three weeks of german And they're the stupidest dreams in the world. I'm just like hi. My name is gabriel. Hi I'm gabriel like this is the whole game. This is the whole dream, right? It's just just an idiot. You're just an idiot while you're sleeping. That's great It's it's really fun though to like when you finally wake up and you go Oh, that whole thing was in another language. You you really feel a sense of accomplishment I mean aside from little giggles about dreaming in other languages and stuff like that. Why should we bother learning a language? I mean you and I talked about before language learning is It's up there with like see the pyramids or whatever, but most people just never do it It's up there with writing a book I should say most people never do it because they've already tried it in high school and college and like totally Sucked at it decided they don't have the language gene They don't have the talent for this and they're like i'm gonna learn spanish But it's kind of like right after I build my own house with my bare hands, you know It's never gonna happen. Why is it important to scratch it off the bucket list and actually do it? What are the benefits I guess of learning a second language? Language learning there's this feeling we have in our culture that if you know language, you're smarter than everyone else I agree with that That there's actually a numerical thing to that. I mean generally if you know a second language You're going to be paid more. You're going to be paid or I think it's 10 to 20 more Simply by knowing another language and not Because you're using that language at your job You may never use Spanish at your job But because you have Spanish on your resume on average you're going to get paid more And the reason for this is that your employer thinks you're smarter Thinks you're a better candidate for whatever you're doing And it turns out they're actually right And that's what's really cool is that language learning It's not that if you are smart you can learn languages It's the other way around is that if you learn languages It actually makes you smarter. Uh, you get better at problem solving you get better at math You get better English you get better at creativity Measurably you are smarter after learning a second language. There are health benefits to that too I mean you push back Alzheimer's by four to five years with just one more language And it goes further if you know two languages three languages you push back dementia What's going on behind there is actually is really neat It's that once you've actually built a real language in your head where you can actually think in German or think in Serbian or whatever You have now permanently implanted This little German guy who's talking at the same time that you're thinking in English At every single moment even if you're not thinking about it There is something in your head saying everything in German thinking in German And that is extremely Difficult it's a sort of this distractor that is always there which sounds like a bad thing Sounds like a sort of schizophrenia or something right and what that does is it gets like strength training for your brain It forces you to learn how to ignore that voice and focus on English or ignore the English voice and focus on German And that forces you to learn how to hold attention better And it actually makes you smarter, which is Awesome. I mean, I'm not aware of any other way to actually make yourself smarter than learning a foreign language I mean, they're all these sort of Lumosity and these sorts of like brain games that you can change your working memory by like one place or something like that But in terms of across the board, I am better at life Language learning as far as I know is it. I mean, I'm not I don't know of anything else Excellent. So it makes us smarter and it makes other people think we're smarter and pay us more money. That's good It's pretty good. Yeah, I think I like that fact. I like this idea that you can make yourself better with language learning but personally I find the biggest reward in learning a language is The experience of thinking in another way If you I'm a different person when I'm speaking French or Italian or German like these are all different People I can talk about things certain things more easily in French. I mean I could talk about, you know Difficult things that have been happening in my, you know, relationships or family life or things like that in French Much more easily than I can talk about that in English because French is somehow A distant language for me. It's like this thing that you can talk about philosophy and art and it's like this distance thing You know, Italian, I feel happy when I speak Italian You see these different parts of yourself and you only get to meet these parts By actually doing it by actually going through this process of learning how to think in a new way And it's like how do you really get to meet other sides of yourself? In that kind of really intimate like visceral way So that's for me. That's the big payoff for me. I think that's just an amazing thing that you just can't get elsewhere Yeah, I think that's probably really true. A lot of people tell me my voice change is completely different When I speak German different sort of personality comes out Um, I'm sure the same thing happens in Serbia and I haven't really asked about it and definitely I mean mandarin. I'm still a child, right? So so that happens with that too, but that is extremely Interesting. You do get to meet another side of yourself your brain. It's just using different stuff When you communicate that way and of course it's also associated with experiences that you had in that place and The people that you're around the most of the time in that place and things like that You probably in Italy probably do a lot of drinking and hanging out, right? So you feel relaxed and social when you speak it versus if you studied Japanese at academic, you know in a science lab, you might feel really focused when you speak Japanese I can definitely see that. So what about People who are bad at memorizing things. What role does memory play In language learning? How do we use the science of memory to learn languages efficiently? Um, it's all about memory. Ultimately, we're actually really really good at taking in grammar We're good at assembling language. I mean we take in input And then it just sort of turns into language on its own problem is really the memory part It's just there's thousands of words to memorize. There's thousands of grammar rules. There's new alphabets. There's if you're learning Chinese or Japanese. There's kanji kanji. That's like the real bitch like yeah It's a huge memory burden. Generally people don't have good memories for these things I certainly don't I have a terrible memory. I can't remember anything Except if I do it in the methods that I've started developing because it's one of the reasons I've developed these methods because I can't remember anything Language learning is tricky for a few reasons What's going on is that if you're trying to learn a word for instance a word has Like a word like dog This word has a lot of parts to it on one level you're talking about the sort of Structure of this word, you know, how do you spell like how many letters are on the word dog? Okay three and you're like which letters and what do those letters look like? Like this is sort of a structural spelling component of this word That's totally abstract and totally forgettable On another level above that that's starting to become a little more memorable is actually the sound of the word dog You know, it has an awe in it. It starts with a dud rhymed with bog like this kind of thing That sound is there and that sound is there in a way that is more familiar to you in English than it is in let's say Hungarian if I say that the word for dog is culture It's going to be much more forgettable Then if I say the word for dog in some other random languages Buck buck like okay, those are familiar sounds, but cool shows is already weird sounding and therefore very forgettable And it gets worse. I mean Hungarian the the word for cameras fincape as a keep And it's like it's a word that you will forget instantly. Yeah, that's terrible. It's yeah, it's it's awesome And so your first challenge in learning a language is how do you get through that barrier? That sound barrier, how do you make it so that at the very least this is you're attempting to learn familiar sounding words instead of crazy sounding weird shit like like fincape as we keep You want to train your ears as your very very first step I think a lot of people they push pronunciation really really late They say, okay, I'm gonna become basic. I'm gonna learn some vocabulary and learn grammar and learn how to say things And then once I'm like basically comfortable. I'm gonna work on you know getting my accent right And it ends up being you're doing it backwards Because if you work on hearing the language first if you work on really being able to process each of the sounds in that language You're gonna have a much easier time remembering each of those words and each of those grammar Sometimes you're talking about mixing up word order and things like that to boost vocabulary and I found that to be true I sort of took that one for a test drive and I shuffled a lot of my vocab It was like oh, I'm doing really well with mandarin and it's like I learned all these numbers and all these colors and stuff So I mixed all of those in Numbers are a little bit easier, but I mixed all the colors in with other words And I was Unpleasantly surprised at how I just instantly forgot all the colors And then I got them back and now when I see the colors together I'm like, oh, this is a color thing But it sucks when you're learning black white green yellow And then you're like, oh this other thing is a color because I'm learning colors So it's got to be oh, this one's purple, right? But when you see purple and then you see train tracks It's gone all that context all those other little clues Your brain is giving you that make you think you're really nailing it are gone and you find yourself like Like you've never seen it before I think that's something that is challenging to convince people of to some extent because Everyone's had this experience of going to language classes and like today we're going to learn the colors And tomorrow we're going to learn the professions and now we're going to learn members of the family And it's like a really comfortable way to learn things Because you feel like you've accomplished something you're like today I successfully learned the colors of Mandarin like yes, I've accomplished something Whereas if you just learn like I'm going to learn red today at the same time as I learned apple And at the same time as I learned to eat You've gotten a little cluster of words and they're sort of related You're like, okay, red apple eat like you see the relationships But you don't feel like you've accomplished something you've just learned three words You haven't succeeded at learning the colors But when you look at the data Just go in random order compared to learning all the colors at once. You're boosting your retention by 40% I mean, it's huge If you don't do random order if you do really sort of thematic groups where you say, okay, I'm going to learn apple I'm going to learn red. I'm going to learn to eat. I'm going to learn lunchbox. I'm going to learn lunch I'm going to learn whatever teacher That's going to push you another 10 higher. And so you're looking at real serious Gains in terms of how quickly you can learn these words Because when you learn things all together when you learn all the colors together, for instance, your brain Is storing them all in sort of one lump And so when you go back later and you say okay train track And I need to say how that these train tracks are black or that these train tracks are silver colored or something You go back and you think okay. Well, where's that word for silver? Let's see. I uh, I learned that last week when I learned all the colors Like great that that narrows it down to all the colors. You're like, all right. Well, it's a color word Well, that narrows it down to all the colors again And you got you have nothing to narrow it down with there's nothing like you you can't you can't use the time You learned it to figure out which word it was you can't use the category word to narrow it down And so ultimately it's just going to be confused Yeah, that's interesting. And of course somewhat disheartening as well How so? Well, I mean it's just it's that much more work, you know, like when you learn, oh, there's this big hole in my learning Right, but actually you're right. It does make it easier to learn in the long run Because now that we know That these things are almost set up improperly for us in terms of learning it we can sort of go, okay I've learned a bunch of stuff It's not necessarily going to stick because here's the thing. It's really easy to get discouraged When you learn a unit of colors and then a week later or not even a week later You're learning a bunch of food and you can't do the colors anymore. You think I'm never going to get this I was supposed to already have learned this according to the book I should already have mastery over this area when really You got an intro to it and it's going to take you 700 more repetitions to get it without fail That's it's a good point I think I think one of the things that that might take away from a bit of that sort of language despair Is that as once you start making that shift and you start saying, okay, well, you know screw this I'm not going to learn them in groups I'm going to learn them just sort of either randomly or I'm going to learn them in thematic groups Where all the words are related but not the same like, you know green at the red apple instead of red yellow um You find that you Learn the words a lot faster. I mean a lot faster And so everything and I'm learning it faster and it's I think that can start making up for the fact that you're like Oh, shit. I was doing this wrong before. Yeah, absolutely. I agree with you All right guys now I want to take another time out for a sec a lot of people think the art of charm live training programs are just about picking up girls And honestly, yeah, there's some of that a week with us. You're going to be rocking out in that department I definitely promise you that but as a guy it is very important to be awesome as well as well Rounded and I don't just mean awesome with girls. I mean great at work Great at home great with your friends and family. You need to step it up everywhere That's why we call our company the art of charm It's that special something that gets you results wherever you go and you guys can trust me the results are real Every day I get emails and calls from the guys who decided to take our live training programs In fact, I'm going to share some of those with you guys really really soon We're getting those lined up So you don't have to listen to me talk about boot camps anymore But you can listen to actual aOC alumni and what I hear is simply amazing weeks after graduating they land a promotion They've got a new wolf pack. They start a new business or they even find a partner It's essentially a new life and it's not an accident If you guys are listening to the art of charm, you're the type of person who's already interested in improving themselves There's a lot of options out there today I think you guys have already decided if you want to discuss your options for improving your relationships career prospects And your entire life for that matter Send me an email jordanh at the art of charm.com or call the number at the top of the website When we can schedule a call to help sort you out. Hope to hear from you guys soon. Enjoy the rest of the show I think once you start to hack it a little bit, you can see rapid progress and is there a specific order We should go in. I mean, I find when I learn language is obviously I understand More than I can speak and that's true for every language. Most people go. Oh, yeah, me too, but that's think about it That's true even in your native language, right? You can always understand more than you can speak or write But what do we start with do we start with pronunciation? Because in Mandarin you have to because there's a bunch of different sounds and later on you just have symbols So you have to learn sounds train your ear. Is that a good way to start or is that also flawed? No, no, that's a great way to start. I mean, I think It's nice with the language any of the harder languages at least harder for english speakers Like mandarin like russian this kind of thing Generally the textbooks are arranged in a more sensible way than what some of the easier languages For english speakers again like spanish or french like generally the mandarin books will start directly with pronunciation Just the way they should Whereas a french book is just going to dump you straight into high. My name is, you know, Jacques or something like this Right, sure. But yes, generally what I recommend is that you spend two weeks at least two three weeks just Nailing down pronunciation training your ears to hear the new sounds and nailing down the at least the phonetic spelling system of the language So for mandarin you're going to be learning pinion for japanese You're going to be learning the kana what you want is to be able to represent All of the sounds in the language using the spelling system that the language uses That's first two three weeks We'll talk about a modification I do for japanese and chinese in a sec Because I think they're a little special with the fact that they use with their character system But for most other languages, I run straight into Concrete simple frequent vocabulary I don't use a grammar book. I go straight. I have a list of 600 words basically that I learned first These are words like like mother father ball Dog the colors Some of the numbers like just things that you could look at a picture of and you know exactly what that thing is You don't need a word of english. You don't need english to do this And so you can memorize the words without any english, right? You can just map it without translating You can do even what's really neat about about the time we live in Is that you can figure out what makes these words different from what you expect them to be What makes them different from the translations? I do this demo in my workshops where I tell people okay learn your words using images and you come up on this word like in russian diebushka, which means girl and Generally what people we tempted to do is they'll go to google images. They'll type in girl They'll find exactly what they expect to see they'll find little girls older girls Whatever the whole range of girl in english. They'll pick whatever one looks like girl to them They'll stick it on a flash card and they'll learn diebushka And this is fine like this works. It's okay It's kind of boring because you know exactly what you expect to see But yes, you will learn something and it will be faster and it'll be better than learning the translation that diebushka means girl It's much better to learn that diebushka means this picture but If you search google images instead of searching for girl You search for diebushka in russian And you search russian websites for what russians think of when they say diebushka You will find that 90 of those girls are in bikinis. This would save search on Yeah, I was going to say I just did that in Cyrillic Yeah, not even you know, latinized and it's like 50 porno. It's porn. I mean, it's like diebushka is a sex object It is not girl. It is not a word you use for your niece It is not a word you use for like the five-year-old girl is going to kindergarten Diebushka does not mean that They have there's another word diebushka which which is used for little girls the diminutive and so Yes, you can learn that diebushka means girl But it's so much more memorable and so much more interesting and so much more useful To learn that diebushka means this completely new concept This idea of this sex object Like that aside from like just the visuals of it It's so much more We're good at remembering things that are new I mean knowing that diebushka is some copy of some other information that I have is boring Knowing that diebushka is something completely new. This is a new word. I can use to describe, you know these girls That is much more memorable much more interesting and so for those first 600 words I'm always searching in the target language On google images and i'm finding exactly what they think of when they see each of these concepts because it will always be different Interesting and you get to look at a little bit of porn while you do your language studies So there you go, and it's too motivated. Yeah useful. You're actually learning something There you go So what this does for us a long run in terms of learning efficiency and forming connections with the people that we talk to is We're starting to think more like them Because we're looking in their native language, which is the way that they the language in which they think Absolutely, it's like That's the goal anyway. I mean that's what we think of influence is like can I think in a way someone else thinks and like Why not start there? So I do I mean I start right there. I pick up these words and then at that point Once I have a 600 word vocabulary And I've built all these image associations and I've tested myself on spelling to the point where I can really like spelling is not an issue Pronunciation is not an issue. This stuff is second nature And it's second nature to look at things and just immediately think the word In whatever language i'm learning. I don't have to go through English and be like, oh, what is this? This is a cup the hungarian word for cup is poha and then like no I just look at this thing and I say poha like I think it immediately Then you crack up in your grammar book And what you'll find is that because you started with the most frequent words You know most of the words in every sentence Like if you come across a sentence like the dog chases the cat You know dog already you know cat already you know to chase already And then the idea of okay now i'm gonna learn what chases means Well, that's something you can actually do now in a pretty easy way I mean you have the dog blank the cat in parentheses you have to chase and then you have a picture of a dog chasing after a cat Chases is the word that fits in that slot And that's how you start picking up abstract vocabulary is how you start picking up word formations How you start picking up word order is all through stories is all through sentences in context And again, there's no English involved So we can build that foundation In a language without translating learning the pronunciation first like you said then the simple words then the more abstract ones And then we can sort of play around with it and it goes really quickly Once you've reached that point. Yeah Once you've finished those sort of intro words And you're able to start taking in grammar then you can basically just devour your grammar book You just go I mean you don't need drills. Generally. I recommend people use spaced repetition software Like I mostly like this program called Anki. It's free. It's awesome. A N K I These are flashcard programs that basically just efficiently jam information into your head And they drill you just the right amount of drilling Basically, you don't have to sit there doing a hundred, you know, how to make the plural form in german or something You can do like four of those and your your flashcard program Anki will drill you on it just enough Which means that you can look at one page and be like how to form the plural I'm going to grab two of these next page, you know, how to conjugate to be great I'm going to grab these conjugations next page and you can basically just eat your grammar book You don't have to sit there doing drills. You just pick whatever you want take it and then go on And it lets you take in the whole grammar of the language within a really short amount of time I mean depends on how much time you're giving it per day, but within a matter of two to four months You can take in the whole grammar of a language Yeah, that makes a lot of sense I've definitely used programs like that in the past and I use Something similar for chinese called the scritter that follows my book and it's it's not free But it's got all the vocab in there It drills you and say if you get something right a bunch and you tell it, you know Oh, I got this right. I got this right. I got this right. It's like, all right. He knows how to say cell phone Here's another word for you. It's like, you know desk and I'm like, damn, I always forget that So if I say I don't know it or it's so so It'll be like desk and I'm like, damn, I got that wrong and then it's like Microphone and I'm like, oh, I got that one that's like desk and I'm like, I just saw this You know, and then I'll get that and then I might be like, oh, yeah desk And I'll say well so so because it took me a few seconds of thinking and then it's like glass Oh, okay. I know that one wall. Okay. I know that one desk and I'm like, yeah Yeah, desk and then it knows to just sort of like back off a little because I got it Yeah, even then six months later It'll be like I'll be doing a bunch of stuff like airport air china northwest airlines and then it's like desk and I'm like Damn it. I know that that looks familiar Wait, that's desk and then it's like so so it'll show up again 30 words later and then it'll go hide for three months The really interesting thing and one of the things I really love about these types of programs these These spaced repetition programs where they try to wait as long as they can before they give you desk again Is that generally we have this feeling like when we see something When we see like this sort of flashcard and you're like, fuck, what is this word? I can't remember it We have a feeling like you've failed slightly. You're like, oh, I should remember this better Yeah, and when you look at the research in terms of what makes for a successful test What makes for something that is going to ingrain something deeper in your long-term memory And you compare You give some example like airplane or something where you see airplane and immediately you think airplane That's airplane and then you get to this fucking desk and you see like, ah, what is that? And it takes you like four or five seconds. You're like, what is this thing? This thing is desk Desk is now the much more effective test The more you struggle The more effective your test becomes and so if you can get to the sweet spot where you're always kind of like, ah, fuck What is that that ends up being the most effective use of your time something that you remember instantly And comparing that with something that you remember after let's say 10 seconds The thing you remember after 10 seconds where it's just on the tip of your tongue and you're like, ah That one's like the one that starts with the duh and it's like it has like I know it has four letters in it Fuck that's a desk that desk is now twice as deeply ingrained As that first word that you knew easily because you had to put some elbow grease into getting it back in or out Yeah, you've rehearsed the idea of can I find this under stress? Can I find this when it's not easy? Ah, that's interesting. I see that. Yeah, and so that experience of like, oh, I failed like no No, that's the most successful test is when you had a hard time Excellent that makes a lot of sense And I mean there's a lot of strategies in your book That you go into to discuss more about how to sort of hack the language learning process We have this idea like, okay. Well, if I want to become better at, you know, whatever But I want to become better at listening. I should listen more. Yeah, I should want to become better at speaking I should speak more. I want to learn more vocabulary. I should learn more vocabulary. All this stuff is sort of self-evident and kind of dumb to say But with speaking for instance, and there's stuff to do I mean there's stuff even with listening and with vocab and stuff that you can really There's efficiency hacks you can do there, but let's talk about speaking since it's sort of the main Interest for most people You can speak and everything can be easy You can just sort of talk about subjects that you know already and that's all fine And at a certain point you're going to hit a word Or hit a concept or hit a grammatical thing. You just can't handle You show up at the pharmacy and you realize oh crap. I never learned any medical vocabulary and I need a painkiller And I don't know how to say it And so every time you hit one of these circumstances, you always have a choice and your choice is especially if you're an english speaker You always have the choice of switching into english And so you can go into this pharmacy and you can say you want a painkiller They'll understand you because most people speak english and you'll get what you need But your german won't get any better right However, if at that time Instead of making the english choice you decide, okay, well, I know I know the word in english I know I don't know the word in german And i'm just going to screw around until they know what I mean I'm going to force myself to stay into german and i'm going to say hey, um My head hurts and like I need something to make my head not hurt so much It's like a little ball and I stick it in my mouth and my head stops hurting you have that ball Sound like an idiot be careful asking for a ball to put in your mouth in german Fair They'll know what you mean. Yeah, they'll get the thing. They'll they'll sort of laugh at you and they'll tell you the word I mean, they'll tell you what the word you were missing tableta or pillar. My favorite word in german is anti-baby pillar Well, I won't I won't ask you the story behind the anti-baby pillar. No, it's just a hilarious word Anti-baby pill like brilliant But um for when you're surrounded by babies, right you just need an anti-baby pill to run Yeah You go through this process and what happens in your head Is that you have now trained the ability to Think on your feet You've trained the ability to run into a hole in your vocabulary and go completely around it And that ultimately is fluency and it's a skill Like people think that fluency is if I just know all the words and I know all the grammar Uh, I will be fluent in the language and it's like well, you're never going to learn all the words And you're never going to have everything in english you run out of words and you come up with random words to dance around the words You don't know Every time you force yourself to stick to a language when you don't know That's exactly the moment where you start becoming more fluent. That's exactly how you practice fluency that ends up being This really neat learned skill and you can actually practice by just forcing yourself into situations where you're uncomfortable Where things don't make sense and then forcing yourself to come up with a random Junk like the the ball that makes my head stop hurting That's fluency. That's that's your self-practicing fluency. So it's just gonna be one last tape. It would be that one Excellent and that jabs with my experience as well just because I remember Not speaking a word of german for like three months and then just been like screw it I'm gonna speak german period and then I went through and I remember saying like oh, that stinks good And then people would be like, uh, well, okay Things can't stink good. They smell good and I'm like, yeah I mean I knew that but I just knew I'd get corrected that rather than being like, uh And not being able to say it at all I was like and I remember telling my host father once he goes try this ham and I ate it and I went, uh, it tastes Fuckable and the whole room is like a full of like family people and they were like I think you mean delicious and I'm like, yeah But I knew I would get away with that one and that you know You guys didn't know what I meant and it was funny because I use stuff like that all the time even in school Like oh, do you want to go on this ski trip? And I would be like, oh horny and they'd be like, I think you mean that sounds like fun And I'm like, yeah, and then you know just like even just screwing around Doing stuff like that, you know messing with slang and it's funny because even in my school People were like, oh, you know what? It's funny. You play with the language all the time And Even when I didn't mean to some of the stuff started to make perfect sense to other people and they're like Oh, that's a fun way to say that and it caught on which I thought was really funny Pressing through when you don't know something rather than going. Oh, I don't know the word for You know bicycle. I guess I can't ride bikes. You go Let's ride the foot car and they're like, you mean the bicycle and I'm like, yeah Yeah, of course and then you say foot car four or five times and you get corrected four or five times Now you know the word and you won't forget it Those corrections are the ones that you actually remember. I mean the idea of like, oh Just saying what's the word for bicycle and someone's telling it to you That's much less memorable than saying, ah foot car, you know, and someone's like, no, no, no, that's bicycle Right because you can say foot car in your brain and then go. No, it's actually bicycle And then it comes out right the next time and then three or four or five reps later You don't say foot car anymore and you don't have to think about it anymore. Yeah. Yeah Yeah, excellent. Well, thank you very much Gabriel Weiner fluent dash forever dot com We'll have linked that up in the show notes pre-order the book It's coming out at some point pretty soon as well All right, so by the time this is out it'll already be out You can get it online on the interwebs on amazon and can support healthy language learning For yourself and others Thanks so much man. My pleasure. Thank you Hope you guys enjoyed that one. I had a lot of fun recording and I'm a language geek So I understand this might not appeal to everyone But I hope this at least inspired you to either learn a language, you know better Learn a new language if you haven't already and maybe get off the fence if you've been Partner around too long. We talked about what it means to be fluent in language Whether or not there's a such thing as a language gene and now that we know that there's maybe not It can help some of us who think we're bad at those things move forward We also debunk the myth that adults don't learn as fast as kids and that it comes down to hours And of course there's science both ways But I think learning languages as an adult because it's something that I have done has gone much better Than it has as a kid and also of course language learning makes us smarter So if nothing else you can at least get a little bit smarter across the board and those language learning tips and strategies Some of which I'm definitely going to put into use and hopefully you guys too I hope you enjoyed this one as much as I did get fluent and get the book fluent forever How to learn a language fast and never forget it. We'll have it linked up in the show notes Thanks again guys and see you next time Special thanks to you guys for listening show feedback and guest suggestions We rely on you guys to help keep our finger on the pulse So if you know someone who's a good fit for the show, let me know jordan h at the art of charm dot com And of course boot camp details there as well. 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