Fluent in 3 Months: How Anyone at Any Age Can Learn to Speak Any Language from Anywhere in the World

How to Learn Thousands of Words Quickly
If you don’t have the memory of a supercomputer, don’t worry.
This chapter explains why we forget things and teaches a much
more efficient—and fun—way to remember foreign words.
O
ne of the most intimidating aspects of learning a language is the huge
amount of vocabulary that lies ahead of you. Depending on how you count
them, a language could have as many as a half a million words. Surely
that’s too many for someone without a savant’s memory to handle.
Well, considering that over half the population of the planet speaks
more than one language, this of course can’t be true. There are several
shortcuts and tricks to help you absorb many words a lot more quickly than
you think you’re able to, even if you’re the kind of person (like me) who
still forgets where he left his keys!
In this chapter, I want to focus exclusively on making sure you have no
trouble quickly accessing the many words and phrases required to speak a
language, and that you never again use the excuse of having a “terrible
memory.”
Rote Rehearsal: Why the Memorization We’re Taught in School
Doesn’t Work
One thing that, to this day, still boggles my mind is that we learn so many
facts in school, but we never really learn how to learn.
In ancient Greece, the idea of memorizing through associative
techniques (like mnemonics) was actually quite normal, but this was
replaced in modern times with . . . well, nothing really.
Ancient Greeks had fantastic memories, because there were no
textbooks or notepads to take home with them. Most people were illiterate
and, regardless, “paper” was very expensive. Lectures were oral, and people

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came up with clever ways of remembering poems, stories, and any long
spoken passages.
Later, the widespread availability of books meant that anyone could
look up something in print whenever he or she needed to, so memorizing
became less common and less relevant. We have an even more pronounced
version of this nowadays: many people end up not learning, or even
memorizing, any facts, since they can always Google them in an instant.
This is unfortunate, as it doesn’t push our minds to their fullest
potentials. We no longer seem able to efficiently hold information in our
memories but instead refer to a printed or online source.
What replaced the mnemonic techniques of the ancient Greeks was
basically a system of repetitive exposure to information with the
presumption it will eventually “sink in.” For instance, when I was learning
German in school and came across a new word, such as der Tisch (meaning
“the table”), since I didn’t know what else to do, the only way I saw to
assimilate this word was through rote memorization. That is to say, I
repeated over and over in my head: “der Tisch, the table, der Tisch, the
table, der Tisch, the table.” After saying it a few dozen times, it would kind
of sink in, and I’d remember it a little. But the next day, or a few days later,
it would be gone. What was “table” in German again?
I find that rote memorization is somewhat useful for recognizing words.
So after a few dozen—or a few hundred—repetitions, I might (for a short
period) remember what der Tisch is, if I were to read it. But it’s not
symmetrical (meaning, it’s not a word I can both recognize and produce), so
I’m out of luck if I want to produce words myself, and the speaking part of
language acquisition is much harder for most of us than simply recognizing
words spoken or read. This is another reason my “speak from day one”
suggestion seems absurd to so many people.
Even for recognizing words, rote memorization doesn’t burn a word into
your memory as you might think it would. What really keeps it there? We
make memories by association. Sights, smells, strange and powerful
images, stories, and the like are what make the most memorable events in
our lives stand out. Repetition works too, but it’s only effective when you
have a lot of repetition, and that can get incredibly tedious when you deal
with so many words on an individual level.
So scrap rote rehearsal, and let’s have a look at two approaches that
have been more effective for many language learners.

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