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.

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.

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

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.

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

Stage 4: The Language Game 3 Months (or as long as you want to keep playing)

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

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:

n 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.

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.

To begin any language, I suggest starting with the most common, concrete 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.

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.

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.

Once your ears begin to cooperate, mastering pronunciation becomes a lot easier.

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.

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

Spelling and Sound: Learn how to hear, produce and spell the sounds of your target language

Coughlan

Theoretically interested readers should therefore follow the advice of learning as many languages as possible in such a way that they have at least passive mastery of them and thus can read and understand them.

Training language models to follow instructionswith human feedback

Learning has to be knowledge. 00:10:07 And learning has to be based on understanding. And what you understand you can absorb, internalize and it becomes knowledge. What you know, you don't forget. You can block something that you know, but not forget.

🌟 Highlight words as they are spoken (karaoke anybody?). 🌟 Navigate video by clicking on words. 🌟 Share snippets of text (with video attached!). 🌟 Repurpose by remixing using the text as a base and reference.

Interleaving is a learning technique that involves mixing together different topics or forms of practice, in order to facilitate learning. For example, if a student uses interleaving while preparing for an exam, they can mix up different types of questions, rather than study only one type of question at a time.Interleaving, which is sometimes referred to as mixed practice or varied practice, is contrasted with blocked practice (sometimes referred to as specific practice), which involves focusing on only a single topic or form of practice at a time.

the more effort they had to put into the study strategy, the less they felt they were learning.

New insights on infant word learning

"The idea is that over long periods of time, traces of memory for visual objects are being built up slowly in the neocortex," Clerkin said. "When a word is spoken at a specific moment and the memory trace is also reactivated close in time to the name, this mechanism allows the infants to make a connection rapidly." The researchers said their work also has significant implications for machine learning researchers who are designing and building artificial intelligence to recognize object categories. That work, which focuses on how names teach categories, requires massive amounts of training for machine learning systems to even approach human object recognition. The implication of the infant pathway in this study suggests a new approach to machine learning, in which training is structured more like the natural environment, and object categories are learned first without labels, after which they are linked to labels.

Programmers should be encouraged to understand what is correct, why it is correct, and then propagate.

fact, Woices, iSpeech and Voki can be used for the post-listening stage. You may decide, for example, to have your learners create their own Voki as a response. T

In general, I'm unpersuaded by these arguments (learning curve is determined not just by unfamiliar syntax, but by unfamiliar semantics and APIs as well, and the frameworks in question excel at adding complexity in those areas).

English Teachers' Barriers to the Use of Computer-assisted Language Learning

Modalities of Meaning

Email does not afford synchronous communication in the way that a phone call, a face-to-face conversation, or instant messaging does. Nor does email afford the conveyance of subtleties of tone, intent, or mood possible with face-to-face communication.

The “connected” in connected learning is about human connection as well as tapping the power of connected technologies.

Language, to me, is a mystery because I haven’t studied it but, I know there’s loads of literature out there, and we know in general that kids learn language differently from adults and that people can learn a language by immersion rather than by any direct instruction in grammar or anything. It’s interesting that the term literacies is used with reference to language acquisition, and we use it in digital literacies. One common aspect of literacies which also came up in earlier conversations with Sally, was my belief that digital literacies could only be (really) learned socially, as with language.

In turn, this child’s statement may shift the teacher’s learning and encourage her or him to recreate or extend this same experience to another area of study in the curriculum.

“cult of authenticity.”

Res ear ch often isolates particular pieces of the complex puzzle in order to study them in detail. However useful this may be, it obscures the dynamism of the actual teaching and learning work that goes on, and cannot show the emergent and contingent nature of that work

There must be room in a learning environment for a variety of expressions of agency to flourish.

However, in order to make significant progress, and to make enduring strides in terms of setting objectives, pursuing goals and moving towards lifelong learning, learners need to make choices and employ agency in more self-direct ed ways.

Agency is therefore a central concept in learning, at many levels an in many manifestations. It is a more general and more profound concept than the closely related terms autonomy, motivation and investment. One might say that autonomy, motivation and investment are in a sense products (or manifestations) of a person’s agency.

the multilayered nature of interaction and language use, in all their complexity and as a network of interdependencies among all the elements in the setting, not only at the social level, but also at the physical and symbolic level

any utterance can carry several layers of meaning

“layer ed simultaneity.”

I like to use this image to illustrate that any utterance has a number of layers of meaning. It refers not only to the here and now, but also to the past and the future of the person or persons involved in the speech event, to the world around us, and to the identity that the speaker projects.

and they are dynamic and emergent, never finished or absolute.

ecologically valid contexts, relationships, agency, motivation and identity.

ecological perspective,

bring languages into our schools—our Native languages and many more; it spreads our language around

allowing it to offer dual-language instruction

This deck contains all must-have basic Esperanto rootwords as suggested by the editorial team of the magazine Kontakto.