Fluent Forever

Written September 19 2025

I finished Gabriel Wyner’s Fluent Forever today. I originally read it because my girlfriend and I started learning Japanese and I wanted to figure out how to learn more efficiently or effectively. My first impression was pretty good, but I’ve since changed my mind a bit. Like, there’s still some good advice in the book, especially if you don’t know anything about (language) learning, but now I’d probably give it more of a 3/5.

Fluent Forever starts out by giving you a basic rundown of memory and learning. You don’t just learn by pushing facts into your brain, but by making associations, creating connections between new experiences and the things you already know. You can use this to your advantage by associating whatever you want to learn with some kind of sensory, e.g. visual, experience, such as a picture, or with a memory that you already possess. In practical terms that means, if you want to learn vocabulary, don’t just stick the word on one side of a flashcard and the translation on the other, but try to add an image that you yourself selected or write down some kind of cue for an associated memory. Here, Wyner also points out the benefits of spaced repetition systems (SRS), such as Anki.1 They basically space out quizzing you on your flashcards in ever greater intervals, which really helps with memory retention.

So far, so good. I can basically attest to the effectiveness all of those claims that Wyner makes here. I’ve been using Anki for a couple of years now and have used it seriously for the past year, mostly using it to study for university exams and refreshing my Latin vocabulary. I have not really used pictures (some voice inside my head tells me that’d look garish), but I do use quite a lot of examples for all of my exam prep cards, which really does help with learning. It is so much easier to remember some dry fact, if you can connect it to an actual example. Case in point, I have a much easier time remembering Latin words that I know a direct English or German (mostly English) equivalent to. It is much easier to remember contemplāre, when you know that it’s related to the English word to contemplate, than it is to remember dare (˜to give), which doesn’t really have any similar sounding equivalents in English.2

Wyner also gives some pretty solid advice on how to practically go about learning your target language. Practice the sounds and pronunciation, learn some basic vocabulary, study the grammar with lots of examples. He somewhat started to lose me here, though. For example, he wants you to learn the grammar of your target language simply by repeatedly learning example sentences in a ‘fill in the blank’ sort of manner, e.g. ‘Yesterday, my dog _____ (to eat) my homework.’ To me, that seems tedious and not very constructive. As a child, you can easily pick up a whole language’s worth of grammar within a relatively short time frame of a couple of years just by doing basically this, yes. That is because children get thousands upon thousands of hours free examples everywhere they go. If you’re learning another language as an adult, unless you live in or move to a place where most people speak that language, you won’t get this kind of constant input. If you want to pick up all verb conjugations just by what amounts to, in my admittedly amateurish opinion when it comes to language learning and acquisition, personalized Duolingo, then you’re gonna have a bad time. I just opened up my Japanese grammar book to the page for the particle ga/が and found five pages worth of explanations on how to use it correctly. Will you ever pick up when to use ga/が and when to use wa/は just by repeating example sentences over and over? In my estimate, probably not. You’re likely better off if you get a good textbook and a decent, not too short grammar to help you out and just work your way through the textbook, supplementing your knowledge with the grammar wherever necessary and turn those bits of grammar into cards themselves, i.e. not just learning via examples, but also (sic!) learning the actual grammatical rules. I do the exact same thing when I study for university and it works. Sure, you’ll also want to be able to recall the actual application of these rules in a pinch, rather than just become a walking grammar tome, but these things reinforce each other. Here I’d look to the monitor model for a bit of guidance. You’ll want to have the actual knowledge when to use which particle for example and not just be able to maybe guess because you did a lot of examples. The little supervisor in your brain that monitors what you say needs be told the rules so she can help you out more quickly. Language input is very important, but so is active study.

And then there’s the question of how to get those example sentences. He does give some pretty solid advice here too, such as using language exchange forums or a tutor, if you can afford one. Then he tells you to use ChatGPT. That’s where he lost me. I don’t care to discuss it here, but I don’t like the whole ‘AI’ hype and I’d rather people stop using chatbots like ChatGPT to do everything for them. Generating example sentences might be okay, since these models are trained to produce plausible sounding text, i.e. there will probably not be many spelling mistakes or grammatical errors in it. Asking a chatbot to correct your written text is going to be tricky. ChatGPT is notoriously sycophantic and extremely unreliable when it comes to providing factual or even just logically consistent information. Will ChatGPT be able to tell you which particle to use in what context? Maybe. But only because OpenAI scraped the whole internet and stole a whole bunch of books, including websites and books on grammar. I know this is a book on language learning, but I’d expect someone who works with language everyday and made it their job to be a bit more critical of the technology they use.

Wyner also recommends a whole bunch of his own products, which I can’t really fault him for. It’s his job, after all. I’ll stick to Anki instead of switching to his own app, though. He also offers some free materials. I was curious, so I downloaded his example deck of cards. These include card templates, so you can make your own Fluent Forever-approved flashcards. They don’t look great. I can understand why Wyner called Anki’s interface unintuitive and ugly at some point; he must think HTML is some kind of arcane, esoteric programming language that only arch wizards are capable of wielding safely.

Despite all these criticisms, the appendix of the book is pretty valuable. The list of basic vocabulary that you should learn first is pretty nice and his language learning resource recommendations do also seem pretty solid I own some of the books he recommends for Japanese and I’m pretty happy with them, but then again they are also the top recommendations anywhere if you google3 around for a bit. The tutorials for what to put on your flashcards and what to prioritize also seem pretty solid (except for grammar, as pointed out above).

Overall, this is a solid book. I’ll try to put some of it into practice and see where that lands me. Maybe I’ll even report back with any interesting results, although I can already tell that some, such as putting pictures on your cards to help with memory retention, are definitely going to be helpful.

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