Практика Shadowing: Fluent Forever - Изучайте разговорный английский по видео

Here's a true story.

Over 10 years ago, I was in a bookstore.

Remember those?

And I was just browsing the language shelves.

Because, of course I was.

And I see this book called Fluent Forever.

Now, even in 2014, there were YouTube polyglot grifters.

In fact, that was probably their apogee.

And even then, I was skeptical of outrageous claims like learning a language in three months.

So I pick up this book, ready to just rip it apart.

I was expecting a mix of linguistic naivete over confidence and just general confidence man pablum.

I open it to a random page

and he's talking about how important it is to learn the sounds of your target language

and how the international phonetic alphabet can actually help you do that.

Okay, I think.

Even the con men have to have a nugget of truth to give legitimacy to their lies

but surely there's something to tear apart here.

So I flipped to another page, and it's a great example of how to think about syntax and morphology in a useful way.

Okay, fine.

But then when I flip the page, something I've never seen before.

Surely this will be where I catch them.

But actually, wait a minute, this is really good.

Long story short, I bought the book, and it had a pretty strong effect on how I think about language learning.

So imagine my reaction

when I get an email out of the blue offering me a free copy of the updated second edition.

It'd be nice if you gave it a review, but there's no strings attached.

I was curious what updates there were and curious to revisit it 10 years and a PhD in linguistics later.

And it turns out it's still really good.

In fact, I had to wait to make this video, not just because I was making a failed foray into ASMR for an audience that hates ASMR even more than I do,

but also because I lent the book to a friend who was toying with the idea of revisiting their Spanish.

So today I'm going to talk about what I got out of Fluent Forever in 2014, what's different and interesting in the new edition,

and of course what Gabriel Weiner gets right and what he maybe gets a little wrong.

If you're new to the channel, I'm Dr. Taylor Jones.

I have a PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania, and I love learning languages and sharing the insights of linguistics.

Today, instead of debunking hyperpolyglot's ridiculous claims, we're going to see what one polyglot does right, and what we can learn from him.

I'm Dr. Taylor Jones, and this is Language Jones.

Perhaps surprisingly, this video is not sponsored, but I do want to give a special thanks to Jonathan

at Penguin Random House's Harmony Books imprint for thinking of me and for sending me the new edition.

I'd been meaning to revisit the original book, and this gave me the motivation to revisit it and some new content.

So who is Gabriel Weiner?

Honestly, if you read the preface to the new edition, and I won't post spoilers here, it seems like he's also been asking that question a lot lately.

Seriously, read the prefaces and acknowledgements and forewords to things if you want to piece together some hot DAS.

Gabriel, I'm happy for you and it sounds like you had a hell of a journey.

Anyway, for our purposes, what you need to know is

that Weiner was an aspiring opera singer who had failed at language learning in the classroom

but caught the language bug with an experience at Middlebury, the famous language school where you take a pledge to speak nothing

but your target language for a few months and you live in residence and they kick you out if you slip up.

He tells a great story in his book about applying for the wrong level in French and faking his way in.

Of course he realized

that part of his cramming to fake learning was actually just

making use of more effective methods with a lot of motivation and a specific goal, but I digress.

He became obsessed with learning effectively and did a ton of research, like actual research, and used himself as a language learning guinea pig.

Now, a brief note here is important.

Being motivated to study lots of languages

and even having success achieving a high level in those languages does not mean

that you know anything about how to teach those languages or even how to succeed at effective and quick learning.

Most of the hyperpolyglots I see on YouTube have succeeded to the extent that they have, despite themselves, and they peddle bad advice.

So that's basically what I was expecting the first time I picked up this book.

But instead, what I got was somebody who, when he wrote about linguistics, wrote knowledgeably and correctly.

When he talked about learning and memory, he drew on current research, and he put it together in a way

that made connections I hadn't yet made on how to actually apply the linguistic side of things

and the learning and memory side of things to efficiently effectively learn.

Now this video is not sponsored but I can say

that the original book was fantastic and the new edition is also great, clearly expanded, and was a blast to read.

If you want to order a copy, I will have a link in the description.

So I'm not going to go over all of it because that would be like a five -hour video.

But I will tell you some key points and some things

that surprised me and that I have added to my language learning routines.

And if you want more, check out his stuff and maybe buy the book.

His main argument basically boils down to three things that you didn't really need Gabriel Weiner to tell you.

Learn sounds first, don't translate, and use spaced repetition software.

But there's a lot to unpack in that alone, and the book itself covers so much more.

And for what it's worth, he's part of the reason that those three things feel obvious to people interested in language learning and on YouTube right now.

Let's unpack those three quickly, though.

Languages are spoken, first and foremost.

We're bracketing sign modalities here.

So sounds are the building blocks.

Learning the sounds of your target language first and using all

and only the sounds of your target language is a tremendous piece of advice.

It will give you a good accent.

It will help your listening comprehension.

It will help prevent mixing up similar languages like Spanish and French, because while a lot of the words look similar on the page,

under the hood, they're totally different.

And the sounds are the building blocks of morphemes and in turn words, phrases, and sentences.

Morphological and syntactic patterns that could be confusing are just not

when you start with the sounds and get a handle on what's actually going on.

Similarly, don't translate seems like either obvious advice or completely impossible and unhinged when you're first starting out.

But the idea is basically just to map those sounds that you've learned to concepts, ideally circumventing the process of translating through your L1.

The benefits are well documented and include faster comprehension, recall, and production.

And more importantly, you start to train both phonological and semantic priming in line with your target language.

He gives an example in the book of a textbook claiming girl in English is девушка in Russian.

Technically true.

But a Google image search turns up results that are, shall we say, very different depending on the language.

And it's like this for, well, every word.

Otherwise, languages would just be code and not, you know, different languages.

And lastly, he kind of folds all of his memorization advice into use spaced repetition software

and then just has a lot of details on how to optimize that.

But of course, the devil's in the details.

He gives so many excellent tips, it's hard to remember them all, ironically.

100

So spaced repetition software, or SRS, is basically just a software -optimized approach to surfing the forgetting curve.

101

I've talked about this at length elsewhere, but long -term learning is actually a process of repeatedly forgetting

102

or nearly forgetting something and then strengthening all the neural networks it connects with in the act of remembering, trying to remember, or being reminded.

103

So in service of these big three ideas, he has chapters or sections of chapters on learning and memorization, the importance of sound and how to approach it.

104

This is what got me hooked.

105

Words and vocabulary building, sentence structures and how to memorize them, stress minimization, and a lot of other good stuff.

106

I'm just going to share a few of the things that really stood out to me.

107

First was his game of spot the differences, which we've already seen with девушка.

108

This is surprisingly fun and extremely helpful.

109

Second was his use of action mnemonics for memorizing grammatical category things like gender or case marking.

110

I talk on my channel a lot about what I call naughty mnemonics, but he's got a masterclass on how to maximize their impact and why they work.

111

Basically, anything that kicks your animalistic hindbrain into gear, things like violence and sex and strong emotions,

112

are things that are implicated in memory circuits and the formation of vivid, long -term memories.

113

I'm pretty sure I still remember his examples from German from reading the first edition in 2014.

114

So there's maybe something to be said for this kind of amygdala hacking.

115

But the main two things that really stood out to me in reading the new edition were his approach to

116

simplifying learning grammatical rules and pick a thing.

117

His approach to grammar is so totally diametrically opposite to my training as a linguist

118

and yet it's also just another way of saying the same thing.

119

He suggests learning grammatical structures by referring to a good grammar, where have you heard that before,

120

and picking an example sentence or two or three and then just breaking that sentence apart into multiple flashcards using closed deletion.

121

That's a fancy term for fill in the blanks.

122

The way he recommends is to have one for new words, one for new forms of a word, and one for any kind of surprising word order.

123

So he gives the example of learning pacifization by taking a sentence like, my homework was eaten by my dog,

124

and giving yourself an image of a dog along with multiple cards.

125

One would be like, my homework was eaten blank my dog.

126

You can do that or you can try to memorize

127

that by is the preposition that introduces the optional agent in a passive construction.

128

But honestly, that technically correct linguistic description is basically just another way of saying

129

that the word by goes there in that sentence.

130

Similarly, he might have a card with my homework blank to eat by my dog, and he'd have to supply was eaten.

131

So you get really, really good at a few specific sentences, but they're sentences that teach you all aspects of the structure that you're learning.

132

And then when you learn a new word, you can easily fit it into those structures.

133

I thought this was brilliant.

134

And an even brillianteer addition was to underspecify agreement and other hints, meaning basically something like, my homework was eaten by A slash N blank,

135

if you were memorizing dog.

136

This way you don't narrow down the search space by having the word A indicate you're looking for a noun

137

that starts with a consonant.

138

Pick a thing was another great trick that's a simplification of the memory champion technique of person, action, object.

139

He gives the example of needing a mnemonic for multiple different German plurals.

140

There's like six different ways that German pluralizes things.

141

How do you know if words pluralize with S or EN or something else entirely?

142

In general, you have to just memorize that.

143

So the brilliance of his approach is its unashamed laziness.

144

Ends with an S, that's just like English, so treat it as the default.

145

Even if linguists would argue about whether that is structurally or statistically accurate.

146

For an English speaker, it's the closest to expected, so for our learning process, it's the easiest and therefore the default.

147

Ends with EN.

148

Can you remember that without additional effort?

149

No action needed.

150

But let's say you can't.

151

The example he gives is struggling to remember that it's not students, but in German it's Studenten.

152

So, pardon my accent by the way.

153

So he thinks about a thing related to students.

154

In this case he settles on a backpack.

155

He adds a backpack to the card.

156

And then to every card that he makes for a word that has an en plural.

157

He goes on to explain something like an envelope might be better since it triggers phonological associations.

158

So what about something like nation, which also takes EN?

159

Well, you're going to imagine multiple nations wearing backpacks.

160

That's it.

161

I started doing this with my memorization, and holy shit, you guys, to give context, I'm super lazy.

162

And Duolingo Hebrew is actually one of the better things out there if you supplement with Anki.

163

That's a space repetition software.

164

But of course, I went with pre -made Anki decks as a time saver.

165

So I've been adding pictures to my deck, but often it's just of, you know, something evocative of the concept.

166

And I have words that I struggled with because I just kept getting them wrong or confusing them.

167

Exam and frying pan, for example.

168

That's mifkan and makvat.

169

I had a bunch of words like this.

170

I started adding more mnemonics, phonological cues, or even just partial phonological cues, or both.

171

Phonological cues and mnemonics and holy shit.

172

Literally the process of even just trying to do that got some of these words locked in.

173

For a frying pan, I added a chef shrugging and asking a question.

174

The question, of course, is do you want I should machvat?

175

For peilut, activity, I had a bunch of kids bouncing on balls.

176

That wasn't working for me.

177

I've added pay and loot.

178

It's absolutely ridiculous how effective this is.

179

It's so freaking stupid, but it really, really works.

180

And if you speak a bunch of languages, you're not limited to English for the priming.

181

I finally memorized importing, which I used a picture of a container ship at a port for by adding bees to it.

182

It's mais à b.

183

Get it?

184

Mais à b.

185

Anyway, it works for me and that's all that matters.

186

If you use mnemonics, leave me a comment with your craziest one.

187

Oh, and one more thing.

188

He has an approach for memorizing grammar paradigms without just brute forcing it like we did in French class.

189

Je mange, tu mange, il allon mange, nous mangeons, vous mangez, il mange.

190

Not knocking that method, but I'm excited to try his version,

191

which is basically to use closed deletion flashcards with interesting stories for each of the forms.

192

Something unexpected and engaging like le médecin mange son stethoscope.

193

The last thing that I want to say he gets really, really right is a chapter on stress management and goal setting.

194

Insert joke here about the state of the world such that this wasn't in the 2014 edition of the book.

195

There's tons of other good stuff in the book, and he writes in a clear and engaging fashion, and there's only 153 pages of appendices and how -tos.

196

Seriously, it's pages 220 through 373.

197

It's got all sorts of information on flashcards, and of course the list of your 625 first words to learn that he's famous for.

198

I will say there are some flaws, but nothing that I think really detracts from the overall benefit of the book.

199

First, he doesn't really have much to say about how to learn under -resourced languages.

200

He has a ton of information on resources, but a lot of this is just assuming that you're learning something like Spanish or French or Russian or Japanese,

201

which, frankly, is statistically a safe bet.

202

And while he does have some on using AI, I was surprised not to see much discussion of AI image generation,

203

which I applied to make mnemonics based on what he had written elsewhere in the book.

204

For instance, ma guiche is serving, so I made geese who are servers as a mnemonic.

205

It works for me.

206

Meat Gaber is overcoming, so I made a mnemonic about a bear who overcame the world telling him

207

that he couldn't be a Lady Gaga impersonator in a meat dress.

208

Meat Gaber.

209

But on the whole, the book is great, and I'm grateful that Harmony Press sent me a copy.

210

Like I said, I immediately loaned it to a friend.

211

Said friend is now fired up to improve their Spanish because it feels more achievable.

212

That's the main thing that he's selling.

213

Of course, the other thing that he's selling is an app, which purports to simplify a lot of the process for you,

214

reducing your data entry time and allowing you more time for memorization and learning.

215

I think that's totally fair.

216

And if you have the money to throw at the problem, why not?

217

He says as much as well.

218

If you want to snatch a copy of the book, I'll have an Amazon affiliate link in the description.

219

I definitely think it's worth the asking price.

220

I'm probably going to try to implement all of his suggestions when I go back to Persian, which has been a struggle for me to retain, compared to French and Spanish and so on.

221

If you like what I'm doing with the channel, you know, except that one attempt at ASMR, then please like and subscribe and leave me a comment.

222

I've said it before, but comments feed the algorithm and the algorithm feeds my family.

223

You can also support the channel with super thanks, or over on patreon .com slash languagejones.

224

Until next time, happy learning!

📺 Тот же канал

Are we WRONG about most FAMOUS LINGUISTICS experiment??

IELTS PrepTOEFL PrepCambridge Exam Prep

Uncovering a conspiracy

Daily ConversationUniversity StudentsWorking Adults

✨ Рекомендуемое видео

273 предложений

Сценарий: знакомство с книгой о выучке языков

В видео рассказывается о реальной ситуации: автор случайно находит книгу «Fluent Forever» в книжном магазине, скептически подходит к ее утверждениям, но постепенно убеждается в полезности ее советов. Эта история показывает, как даже опытный лингвист может открыть для себя новые подходы к выучке языков, что особенно важно для тех, кто учит английский и хочет улучшить произношение английского.

Полезные выражения и сочетания

To browse the shelves — листать книги на полках. Пример: «I was browsing the language shelves» (Я листал книги на полках с языковыми пособиями).
Outrageous claims — дерзкие утверждения. Как в видео: «skeptical of outrageous claims like learning a language in three months» (скептически относился к дерзким утверждениям, например, о выучке языка за три месяца).
To rip apart — разобрать на кусочки (критически). Автор хотел «rip it apart» (разобрать книгу на кусочки), но не нашел причин.
No strings attached — без обязательств. В видео: «no strings attached» (без каких-либо обязательств).
To toy with the idea — раздумывать над идеей. Пример: «a friend who was toying with the idea of revisiting their Spanish» (друг, который раздумывал о возвращении к испанскому).

Твоё задание: shadowing-упражнение

Чтобы улучшить произношение иритмику, попробуй shadow speech (или shadowing английский). Выбери короткий отрывок из видео (например, фрагмент о знакомстве с книгой), включите запись, и повторяй за автором сразу же, стараясь копировать его интонацию и темп. Сначала делай это медленно, потом ускоряйся. Для тренировки можно использовать shadowing site (ресурс для shadowing), но даже обычная запись подойдет. Проведи 5–10 минут каждый день — результат не заставит себя ждать! Помни: shadow speak — это эффективный способ сделать твое произношение более естественным.

Грамматика в этом видео

Конструкции, которые говорящий использует чаще всего, с точными словами из видео:

Конструкция	В видео
Пассивный залог be + причастие прошедшего времени — важно, что происходит, а не кто это делает	is not sponsored · Being motivated · are spoken
Present Perfect have/has + причастие прошедшего времени — прошлое действие, важное сейчас	I've never seen · have succeeded · have added
Придаточные определительные who / which + предложение — уточнение о человеке или предмете	friend who was · Persian, which has

Что такое техника Shadowing?

Shadowing — это научно обоснованная техника изучения языка, изначально разработанная для подготовки профессиональных переводчиков и популяризированная полиглотом доктором Александром Аргуэльесом. Метод прост, но эффективен: вы слушаете аудио на английском от носителей языка и немедленно повторяете вслух — как тень, следующая за говорящим с задержкой в 1–2 секунды. В отличие от пассивного прослушивания или грамматических упражнений, Shadowing заставляет мозг и мышцы рта одновременно обрабатывать и воспроизводить реальные речевые паттерны. Исследования показывают, что это значительно улучшает точность произношения, интонацию, ритм, связную речь, понимание на слух и беглость речи — что делает его одним из самых эффективных методов для подготовки к IELTS Speaking и реального общения на английском.

Техника шедоуинга: читать полное пошаговое руководство →

Практика Shadowing: Fluent Forever - Изучайте разговорный английский по видео

Are we WRONG about most FAMOUS LINGUISTICS experiment??

Uncovering a conspiracy

How I Learn Languages Fast (I speak 7+)

The Secret to Speaking Fluent English

Why Studying More Isn't Making You Fluent

To get fluent in a language… find another interest

Why I Quit Learning Languages

How polyglots learn languages | The book that changed my life

How to use Dreaming Spanish

Why Some People Become Fluent — and Others Stay Stuck

Want Better English? Stop Trying So Hard!

How I Started Thinking in English 24/7 (Without Translating)

Think faster and speak 🗣️

This 10-Minute Video Will Save You 10,000 Hours Of Language Learning

Сценарий: знакомство с книгой о выучке языков

Полезные выражения и сочетания

Твоё задание: shadowing-упражнение

Грамматика в этом видео

Что такое техника Shadowing?