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What is fluency? Each of us will find a different answer to this question. The term is imprecise, and it means a little less every time someone writes another book, article, or spam email with a title like“U Can B FLUENT in 7 DAY5!1!”Still, we maintain an image of fluency in our minds: a summer afternoon in a Parisian café, casually chatting up the waitress without needing to worry about verb conjugations or missing words in our vocabularies. Beyond that café, we must decide individually how far we wish to go.
I would confidently describe myself as fluent in German. I've lived in Austria for six years and will happily discuss anything with anyone, but I certainly needed to dance around a few missing words to get out of a €200 fine for my rental car's broken gas cap. (Apparently, the word for“gas cap”is Tankdeckel, and the words for“I don't give a damn if I'm the first person to drive this car, the spring holding the gas cap closed was defective”start with “Das ist mir völlig Wurst …” and go on from there.) You'll have to determine for yourself whether your image of fluency includes political discussions with friends, attending poetry readings, working as a secret agent, or lecturing on quantum physics at the Sorbonne.
We struggle to reach any degree of fluency because there is so much to remember. The rulebook of the language game is too long. We go to classes that discuss the rulebook, we run drills about one rule or another, but we never get to play the game. On the off chance that we ever reach the end of a rulebook, we've forgotten most of the beginning already. Moreover, we've ignored the other book (the vocabulary book), full of thousands upon thousands of words that are just as hard to remember as the rules.
Forgetting is our greatest foe, and we need a plan to defeat it. What's the classic language-learning success story? A guy moves to Spain, falls in love with a Spanish girl, and spends every waking hour practicing the language until he is fluent within the year. This is the immersion experience, and it defeats forgetting with brute force. In large part, our proud, Spanish-speaking hero is successful because he never had any time to forget. Every day, he swims in an ocean of Spanish; how could he forget what he had learned? I learned German in this way, given an opportunity to leave my job, move to Vermont, and cut off all ties to the English-speaking world for two full summers. Immersion is a wonderful experience, but if you have steady work, a dog, a family, or a bank account in need of refilling, you can't readily drop everything and devote that much of your life to learning a language. We need a more practical way to get the right information into our heads and prevent it from leaking out of our ears.
I'm going to show you how to stop forgetting, so you can get to the actual game. And I'm going to show you what to remember, so that once you start playing the game, you're good at it. Along the way, we'll rewire your ears to hear new sounds, and rewire your tongue to master a new accent. We'll investigate the makeup of words, how grammar assembles those words into thoughts, and how to make those thoughts come out of your mouth without needing to waste time translating. We'll make the most of your limited time, investigating which words to learn first, how to use mnemonics to memorize abstract concepts faster, and how to improve your reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills as quickly and effectively as possible.
I want you to understand how to use the tools I've found along the way, but I also want you to understand why they work. Language learning is one of the most intensely personal journeys you can undertake. You are going into your own mind and altering the way you think . If you're going to spend months or years working at that goal, you'll need to believe in these methods and make them your own. If you know how to approach the language game, you can beat it. I hope to show you the shortest path to that goal, so that you can forget the rules and start playing already.
After I learned German, I thought,“ Ach! If I could just go back in time and tell myself a few things, I would have had a much easier time with this language!”I had precisely the same thought after Italian, French, Russian (which I finally learned in 2012), and Hungarian (2013's project). This book is my time machine. If I squint my eyes just right, then you are monolingual me from nine years ago, and I'm creating a time paradox by helping you avoid all of the pitfalls and potholes that led me to make my time machine in the first place. You know how it is.