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Book review: Fluent Forever by G. Wyner | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| samfrances Groupie United Kingdom Joined 4053 days ago 81 posts - 110 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 9 11 August 2014 at 10:55am | IP Logged | ||
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Book review: Fluent Forever by Gabriel Wyner
Fluent Forever is one of the best books I've read on language learning. Where many language books rely solely on the experiences of the author - “I learned 37 languages, so can you!” - Gabriel Wyner has clearly done a great deal of research into the scientific literature on memory, speech perception etc. The result is that you end up learning a great method for teaching yourself a foreign language, but you also gain a basic understanding why this method works. Wyner's method is fun yet efficient. It revolves around using spaced repetition software (anki) to learn pronunciation, spelling, word meanings and grammar. While he isn't against the use of translations altogether, Wyner argues against *memorising* translations, and provides a really clever method for memorising the meanings of words using pictures, and later monolingual definitions. The best thing about this technique is that you create your own learning materials throughout, using sources such as dictionaries (both bilingual and monolingual), google images, grammar textbooks and your own writing (corrected by native speakers via online language learning communities such as lang8.com). This means that you are not reliant on the content of a particular language course, but can easily customise your practice to learn areas of vocabulary or grammatical forms that particularly interest you. Fluent Forever is available as an ebook for around $10 at the time of writing, and will be available in paperback later this month. It is supported by a fantastic set of resources and articles at Fluent-Forever.com. Gabriel Wyner has also recorded a great video seminar series for Creative Live, which is well worth buying if you have $99 to spare. EDIT: gmatt539 suggested that the review may have given the impression that the book (rather than the related video seminar) costs $99, so I've updated the review to clarify that the book costs around $10. Thanks gmatt539. Edited by samfrances on 11 August 2014 at 1:32pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| gmatt539 Newbie Canada Joined 5096 days ago 3 posts - 4 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Mandarin | Message 2 of 9 11 August 2014 at 1:04pm | IP Logged | ||
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Just a note of clarification. The book is not $99, that price is a bundled package from his website including a lot of products. I paid around $12 on Amazon for the Kindle Edition. I finished the entire book in a day. It really is fantastic and I am going to try to follow his plan in addition to Assimil. The only negative for me is that his pronunciation training product for Chinese will not be available until September. Great book Gabriel!
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| dmaddock1 Senior Member United States Joined 5434 days ago 174 posts - 426 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, Esperanto, Latin, Ancient Greek | Message 3 of 9 11 August 2014 at 8:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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I just finished reading this myself and agree that it is very good. His method is heavily designed around SRS, which is a different sort of approach than you typically find in these kinds of books. As you mentioned, he is very good at citing the applicable research. I particularly enjoyed his discussions on phonetics and effort to make the IPA accessible. Since finishing the book I've been searching for decent lists of "minimal pairs" for my languages and they are frustratingly difficult to find.
So many good ideas here for using Anki effectively. I've been an Anki fan for years, but I realized that I've still only scratched the surface of possibilities for its use. Many of the ideas I have seen in bits and pieces or in other contexts, but Gabriel does a fantastic job of bringing it all together into a cogent whole. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4255 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 4 of 9 12 August 2014 at 12:56am | IP Logged | ||
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I also read this recently, and got quite a lot of valuable advice out of it. Like others have mentioned, the main highlight is that he explains a lot of the motivations for learning things a certain way and the scientific research behind them. So even though I'm not planning on adapting his methodology step by step, it gave me a lot of good ideas for improving my own study routine.
The only portion of the book I had strong disagreement with was his method for learning genders of nouns by finding an image to help remember it. I'm no expert in this area, but I'd think simply including an article that indicates the gender on your anki cards and getting lots of native input would be a lot more natural than thinking up some way to personify every noun as being like a man or a woman. But overall it was quite good. I usually worry that these types of language learning books will be aimed more at people just starting in language learning (Guess what, language classes and Rosetta Stone aren't the best way to learn a language!) and of course there needs to be a bit of that for the book to have mainstream appeal, but I was glad to see that it didn't take up too much space. I'll also echo the previously mentioned sentiments that a lot of info here resembles stuff I've read in bits and pieces on the forum before, but the way he discusses it and the research behind it helped clarify the reasons for doing so quite a bit. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| chokofingrz Pentaglot Senior Member England Joined 5190 days ago 241 posts - 430 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Japanese, Catalan, Luxembourgish | Message 5 of 9 12 August 2014 at 1:45am | IP Logged | ||
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He's calling it Fluent Forever, so what does he have to say about long-term memory and preventing learned languages from going rusty? Should we simply keep using SRS once a week for the next 100 years?
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| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4255 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 6 of 9 12 August 2014 at 3:46am | IP Logged | ||
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He recommends using Anki for over a year, to let everything really sink in. He's only been teaching himself for a few years so he doesn't say a lot about long term memory, but he does write a bit about reviving his French after learning Russian and Hungarian.
Its worth pointing out, so people don't get the wrong impression, even though his method focuses heavily on SRS, a lot of the information in it is applicable outside SRS. He mentions that his preferred method of learning is immersion stays, but he developed his SRS method to be able to learn languages in small amounts of time each day while working, and at later stages his advice is a lot similar to what other people recommend, which is tons of native materials, tutors and writing corrections. I would say what's unique about his book is that he tries to bring a lot of different research proven methods together. So for example, we know about the effectiveness of SRS, but when a lot of people make SRS decks, they completely throw out other important factors for faster learning. And although others have emphasized this before him, he builds a strong case for starting with pronunciation. Edited by YnEoS on 12 August 2014 at 3:47am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7206 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 7 of 9 12 August 2014 at 8:19am | IP Logged | ||
He has a video on how to reactivate a "forgotten" language. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s0fist Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5047 days ago 260 posts - 445 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: Sign Language, German, Spanish, French | Message 8 of 9 12 August 2014 at 5:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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The book's alright. A solid 4/5 imho. Overall I'd recommend it in complement with other books on language learning to beginners.
It covers a decent amount, though by far not everything that pertains to starting learning or continuing/maintaining languages. But what it does cover, it usually backs up by recent (last 50-60yrs) psycho/socio/linguistic studies. It's heavily centered on Anki use: about 100/220 pages are dedicated to Anki and detailed descriptions of the kinds of cards the author likes best, namely image and audio, no L1 on vocabulary, and cloze deletions for sentences. It also spends about 40-50 pages on trying to teach IPA. IMHO the 4 youtube videos on their website do a better job of teaching IPA than all of the book. What I learned, that I didn't know: 1) The fact that every child learns (and/or exhibits correct spontaneous usage of) language grammar in the same set sequence as every other child. Though I wonder how accurate that is. I imagine there's a lot of variation for each specific child but the pattern is true over all children. 2) The fact that adult students of language recapitulate a child's evolution over the course of their learning the language in the same sequence. Again, I wonder how accurate that is. I imagine it's even less stringent, but might be true overall. I also wonder if the sequence of people/children learning L1/L2 languages is the same in other languages. Clearly there must be some differences, since lots of the languages don't even have the same tenses as English. If any evolutionary biologists or language development specialists hang out here, it would be cool if you could elaborate a little on that. Also I don't think this knowledge affects how anyone should approach learning L2s, but if any specialists know of any ways, please do let us know. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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