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How To Learn Any Language Books

Learning a few languages doesn't necessarily mean you know better than others how to learn one. Or you may have grown up in a multilingual environment that made it easier for you to learn others. Or your definition of "fluent" is less stringent than what others use, so you aren't as good as you project.

Still, there are legitimate polyglots who have successfully learned several languages and can properly put that experience into a useful format for others to use. And they may not be the ones that point to themselves the most.

So when looking for such a book, don't necessarily be lured in by a big name with even bigger claims. A lesser-known name just might be the one to give you the insight you need to reach your language goals.

One book that seems to have tackled the "how to learn any language" subject effectively is "Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It" by Gabriel Wyner. It is available from Amazon as both printed and Kindle books.

The book is highly popular with hundreds of reviews and is listed in the top 30 of a few categories. The description says it is a "national bestseller" and is has been praised by publications like The Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today.

Wyner is a polyglot as well as an author and opera singer. He has lived Vienna to obtain a Master's degrees at the Konservatorium Wien in Opera, Lieder and Voice.

He fell in love with learning languages after studying German in the Middlebury Language Schools (one of the United States’s preeminent language learning programs, located in Vermont) and continued his education in Italy, learning Italian. He has also studied French, Russian, Hungarian, and Spanish, and is currently learning Japanese.

The book covers many of the fundamentals of learning a language, many of which may already be known to the dedicated language student, but it also discusses others which you may not know. All of these are pulled together in a comprehensive format.

Wyner needed to learn many of his languages for his singing opera, and he uses his experience with that to highlight how to distinguish between similar sounds and be attuned to small changes in sound when speaking.

A large part of the book is devoted to flashcards and using Spaced Repetition Systems (SRS). For those who have used Memrise or Anki, you are probably familiar with this method already. Wyner puts this into practical use on his website and app, which you can read about below.

The Fluent Forever website expands upon the methods outlined in the book. It has a rich blog covering Anki, flashcards, pronunciation, learning methods, vocabulary, and grammar.

The other main feature of the site is the Fluent Forever app. It uses the flashcard and SRS process discussed in the book. There is a link to download it is on the site.

The flashcards of the program use images instead of words for translation, making it usable no matter what your native language is. This is different from Anki and is more similar to Rosetta Stone.

Find out if the app could be useful to you by visiting the site.

Learning how to learn any language can be genuinely useful, but you still need to do the most important step: selecting a language to learn.

How will you make this decision? There are several factors which can influence this. For example, the availability of resources for a language definitely makes a difference. Trying to learn Rama, for example, will be far harder than trying to learn Japanese because people aren't producing things for Rama.

To help with this, Teddy Nee wrote about six methods you can use to make the choice in our magazine Parrot Time. They include availability, similarity, prestige, and importance.

Use it to select your next language or see how well you picked your last one.

Sometimes it can be easier to choose a new language after sampling a few. We give the reader a chance to learn some basics of some romance languages with Beginner's World Languages Word Searches: Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish

This is a great book for students or kids, with 100 puzzles full of words for the beginner to find.

The words come from a mixture of categories such as animals, food, clothing and family. They can be found horizontally, vertically, or diagonally in any direction in a matrix of letters.

As the title suggests, the languages in this book are Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish.

It is available from Amazon here:
Beginner's World Languages Word Searches: Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish