Fluent Forever

Never settle for safe when you can have fun instead. Your language will become a constant companion, living in your head. If you like your language, then you’ll have fun studying it, and when you have fun, you learn faster. You have many resources at your disposal.

Deeper still than abstract concepts are concrete, multisensory concepts. If I tell you that my upcoming birthday party will take place in a paintball arena, after which we’ll eat a cookies-and-cream ice-cream cake and then spend the rest of the evening in a swimming pool, you’ll tend to remember those details much better than you’ll remember the month of the event.

Grammar is amazing in its complexity, but it is utterly awe inspiring in its simplicity. All of grammar’s infinite possibilities are the product of three basic operations: we add words (You like it Do you like it?), we change their forms (I eat I ate), and we change their order (This is nice Is this nice?). That’s it. And it’s not just English. Every language’s grammar depends upon these three operations to turn their words into stories.

KEY POINTS • You use certain words much more frequently than others. Learn those first. • In Appendix 5, I give you a list of 625 simple, common words. These words are easy to visualize, and so you can learn them with pictures instead of translations. This will give you the foundation you need to easily learn abstract words and grammar in the next two chapters.