Sabrina Bonfert reviewed Fluent Forever by Gabriel Wyner
How to use Flashcards
3 stars
The confusing title leaves a lot to the imagination, so to set expectations correctly: This book is in essence a do-it-yourself guide to language learning using the flashcards method. It provides a general overview of the science of forgetting and remembering, and it talks about proper habit forming in depth. It presents a learning journey that starts with getting to know the difference between sounds in your target language all the way to reading literature and watching TV. It also includes an introduction into phonology and the International Phonetic Alphabet for those who need it.
The bulk of the book is a guide on what kinds of flashcards to create and how to use them at which step of the learning process. It goes into great detail with countless examples and provides options for beginners, intermediate and advanced learners. True to the do-it-yourself nature of the approach, Wyner gives …
The confusing title leaves a lot to the imagination, so to set expectations correctly: This book is in essence a do-it-yourself guide to language learning using the flashcards method. It provides a general overview of the science of forgetting and remembering, and it talks about proper habit forming in depth. It presents a learning journey that starts with getting to know the difference between sounds in your target language all the way to reading literature and watching TV. It also includes an introduction into phonology and the International Phonetic Alphabet for those who need it.
The bulk of the book is a guide on what kinds of flashcards to create and how to use them at which step of the learning process. It goes into great detail with countless examples and provides options for beginners, intermediate and advanced learners. True to the do-it-yourself nature of the approach, Wyner gives the reader a lot of tools and information and recommends a lot of professionally-edited philological works: he recommends frequency dictionaries to create an initial word list, and monolingual dictionaries for intermediate learners. He provides many different options based on the learner’s personal budget and talks about the importance of connecting with speakers of your language, their culture, and how to effectively spend time with professional tutors. In the current climate of „trust the approach“-style language learning and addictive gamification that aims to take options away from learners rather than present them to them, this is a refreshingly traditional and human-focused approach.
Wyner then proceeds to put his foot in his mouth with his callous admission that, actually, he is using a lot of ChatGPT these days instead of the frequency dictionaries and personal tutors he was just recommending. Several pages of the book are a guide on how to properly prompt your LLM to spew correct-sounding stuff back at you. Volume-wise this advice isn’t very prominent in the book, so you’ve still got a lot of approaches to choose instead, and many of his ideas are good to excellent. If you’ve never successfully learned another language, this book can give you a lot of great tips if the flashcard approach is right for you. But the stench of outsourcing human thinking and craft to codswallop regurgitated by the word machine is a major blemish of Wyner’s work.