Greetings, SuperFriends, and welcome to this week’s show!

Today, we have a special treat for you, especially if you enjoyed our episode with language learning expert Benny Lewis. Today’s guest is the guru I turn to when I have difficult language learning questions. His book, Fluent Forever, completely changed the way I approach learning a language, and his extremely detailed, in-depth blog on the subject was an invaluable resource to me when I was learning to use some of the tools that have become so central in my learning toolkit. He also has tons of incredible products, from pronunciation guides, to comprehensive word lists ranked in order of importance, and much, much more.

If you’ve ever wanted to learn a language – or 4 – and want to do it in months rather than years, keep listening.

In this episode, we geek out pretty hard on the nitty gritty techniques to hack language learning. From how to learn vocabulary, to what words to learn, to hacking grammar, and much much more. …. we geek out on Russian, using it as an example of a really difficult language to learn… and because as you guys know it’s a passion of mine. This was a really enjoyable conversation and I think you’ll see just how much my guest and I see eye to eye on so many things.

This episode is brought to you by SuperLearner Academy – home of my exclusive masterclasses. Check out a free trial using the link above today!

In this episode, we discuss:

• Who is Gabriel Wyner, what does he do, and why am I such a big fan of his?
• A short explanation (and then some more explanation) of how Russian grammar works
• How did Gabriel Wyner go from a hobbyist to a bestselling author, blogger, and entrepreneur
• What languages does Gabriel speak, and at which levels?
• How exactly does Gabriel's methodology work?
• Are kids better or worse at learning languages than adults – and why is this important?
• What is the #1 golden rule of Gabriel's method, that he never violates?
• How does Gabriel recommend learning grammar?
• Where did Gabriel Wyner learn the neuroscience behind what he teaches?
• How do you learn grammar – even difficult grammar – much more fluidly?
• What are frequency lists, and why are they so powerful?
• The different numbers of words that you'll need for different languages

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• Gabriel's viral article on LifeHacker
• Gabriel's book (also on the iBookstore)
• Gabriel's course on CreativeLive
• Gabriel's products
• Anki Spaced Repetition software
• iTalki.com
• Gabriel's website
• Gabriel on Twitter

Favorite Quotes from Gabriel Wyner:

Transcript:

Introduction: Welcome to the Becoming SuperHuman Podcast. Where we interview extraordinary people to bring you the skills and strategies to overcome the impossible. And now here's your host. Jonathan Levi.

Jonathan Levi: Greeting Superfriends. And welcome to this week's show you guys today we have extra special treat for you, especially if you've enjoyed our previous podcast on language learning with Mr. Benny Lewis. That's because today's guest is the guru that I turn to when I have difficult language learning questions.

That's because his book Fluent Forever, completely changed the way I approach learning a language and his extremely, extremely detailed and in-depth blog on the subject was an invaluable resource to me when I was learning to use some of the tools that have become so central in my learning toolkit and learning how to adapt those tools towards the subject of language learning, which if you've ever tried to learn a language, you know, is it's one of the most.

Difficult challenges. One of the largest learning challenges that we face. And yet it's one of those things that unlocks so many doors. If you can learn languages, you can open any door. And as Nelson Mandela said, if you speak to a man in your language, you speak to his head. But if you speak to him in his language, You speak to his heart and that's why I'm so excited about today's guest you guys because he has so much incredible information.

He's put out so many incredible products from pronunciation guides to comprehensive word lists and so, so much more. So if you guys have ever wanted to learn a language. Or maybe four languages. And you want to do that in months rather than years keep listening. But even if you don't want to learn a language, listen to this episode, because I think it's going to inspire you.

And it's going to convince you of something that my guest and I both believe, which is languages are power, their power to influence people, their power, to communicate with new groups of people and understand new cultures. And that's just a beautiful thing. So in this episode, we do geek out pretty hard.

You guys, on the nitty-gritty techniques to hack your language learning, we go from how to learn vocabulary to what vocabulary to learn all the way to hacking grammar. And so, so, so much more. I have to apologize to you guys that we geek out pretty hard on Russian language. And we use that as our example of a really hard language to learn, because as you guys know learning Russian is a passion project of mine. So I think you can tell that both my guests and I are really passionate about it in any case, this was a very interest, valuable conversation. And I think you guys will see just how much this guest and I see eye to eye on so many things. And so without any further ado, nice little French word for you there, Mr. Gabriel Wyner

Gabriel Wyner, it is such a pleasure to meet you. My friend, I am such a huge fan of your work. 

Gabriel Wyner: Cool. It's a pleasure being here. Thanks for inviting me. 

Jonathan Levi: Yeah, I'm really, really excited. You know, there were. A list of people that I wanted to get on the show when we started out. And, uh, you were definitely on it.

So I do appreciate you making the time. And, uh, I guess probably where we should start for those who are not huge fans of your work, as I am, is maybe to share your story with our audience and tell them a little bit about what it is that you do.

Gabriel Wyner: Well, let's see, I was an opera singer. I don't have time for singing anymore.

I was an opera singer. I had engineering background, but I sort of fell into opera and really liked it and wanted to pursue it as a career. And for that, I needed to learn a bunch of languages. And I was sort of a problem because I was not very good at that. I had taken seven years of Hebrew as a kid and left there with the alphabet.

Wow. That was about it. Maybe like 40 words. I did five and a half years of Russian in high school. I had a lot of fun with that. I mean, I really enjoyed the class and I enjoyed the, my peers. I enjoyed my teachers. I took the class because I liked the teacher. So this wasn't what, like, I think a lot of people have these language stories where they're like, yeah, there's a terrible Spanish teacher.

And I'm like, whatever. And like, I didn't have that story. I like really liked my teachers and I did well in the class and still, by the end of it, I couldn't speak Russian. And I had like, I don't know. When I came back to Russia and later I figured like, okay, I'm definitely gonna remember some stuff from high school.

Right. And the stuff that came back was like, I don't know 80 words, something like that under a hundred, I believe. Wow. And of the six cases, I had the nominative case down. 

Jonathan Levi: Oh yeah. And the nominative case is super memorable. 

Gabriel Wyner: Yeah. That's, you know, that's got to have one case and then like, I think the propositional case I had like.

Remembered it wrong. Those are my two cases of the six was one and a half was listening in the audience.

Jonathan Levi: The nominative case, Russia has a case system whereby depending on your relation between the subject and the object, words, change their decline and the nominative cases, what you find in the dictionary.

So it's kind of like the most basic case that you would remember.

Gabriel Wyner: She has nothing to do. Like you haven't done anything. Thinks of the word. And so I was not particularly good at this thing. I didn't think I was, seemed to be good at it at alphabets. I could totally pick up those alphabets, you know, and pronunciation was also something I was actually gifted at that's I had a good year, but then this opera degree came in and I was like, Oh no, I need to know German, French and Italian.

And so. A friend of mine recommended I go to an immersion program. These are really intensive programs where you sign up and you sign a contract that says, if I speak one word does not German. I'm going to get kicked out, no refund, which are insane and great. And I did that and I learned German like really fast.

I could carry on conversations in seven weeks. I went back the next summer, and these are summer programs. I went back to get to fluency. I then moved to Austria. And at that point, I had really started liking this whole language thing. It was really exciting to think in a new language. And so I moved to Austria in 2007 to get my master's degree in song and opera.

And in 2008, I went to Italy and did the six-week course there. And Lynn learned good conversational Italian. And then I wanted to do the French immersion thing and I cheated on a French test to do it because I didn't want to be in level one. And I cheated too well. And I got stuck in a situation where I had three months to learn like a year's worth of French and not embarrass myself.

Right. And that's sort of where all my stuff comes from. I developed a system for learning languages really, really fast. It sort of blew me away as to how well it did in the sense that I was studying for basically an hour a day, and then a whole bunch on Sundays. For three months. And I showed up in that program and I could speak French.

Wow. And I was sort of like, uh, what, I mean the first time I spoke French in my life was at the interview for that program. And the first day to test my placement and they said, Oh, well, you're not an intermediate, you're an advanced speaker. And they bumped me up one more level. Oh my gosh, it was nuts. And so I left that summer fluent in French, the same level that I got my German two after two summers of intense immersion.

And I thought, you know, this is something important. And so since then, I started writing about that. I wrote an article for life hacker that went viral, that turned into a book. The book took me two and a half years to write, and also gave me two and a half years to research what was going on here? Why did this work so well, which is awesome to have that time?

And since then I did a Kickstarter to make some pronunciation training apps to go along with the book because pronunciation resources are so limited and that went nuts. That raised 10 times the amount or nine and a half times the amount I was aiming to raise. And so now my whole life has been making these pronunciation training apps.

That's been my life for the last two years. 

Jonathan Levi: Wow. Incredible. So I didn't realize, I thought the majority of what you were doing is the book. And I know you're also teaching online courses on a creative life. I didn't realize that you're also doing a really a tech solution around this as well.

Gabriel Wyner: That's been my main, main, main time sake right now.

And I had no idea how much work it would take. I predicted that I would finish everything in six months and it's looking like it's going to take me two and a half years to finish everything brilliant. 

Jonathan Levi: And what is the language app or the pronunciation app called. 

Gabriel Wyner: It's just the fluent forever pronunciation trainers.

Everything's fluid forever. That's the name of the book and the name of the apps and the name of the word lists. Like all my stuff has just bloomed forever. 

Jonathan Levi: You're so much more clever than me. I've got like, Become a SuperLearner, Becoming SuperHuman, Become a Speed Demon. I've got like seven different brands I'm trying to manage.

Gabriel Wyner: Super is like a theme here. It's become 

Jonathan Levi: It's become super. That's what I'm trying to say. Yeah, they can do stuff better. That should just be my brand. That's a good brand. So, Gabriel, I'm trying to keep up here. You speak Russian, German, French, Italian English. Did I miss any.

Gabriel Wyner: Hungarian right now, is that a good conversational level?

And, um, The Japanese is in its early stages. I'm starting to be able to form my own sentences, which is cool, but I wouldn't call myself fluent in Japanese by any measure yet. 

Jonathan Levi: Very cool. So I know my audience is itching to know because a lot of the audience does come from accelerated learning classes and, you know, I've recommended your book to everyone.

It's almost required reading in my courses. I love it that much. And so, yeah. I want to get into your book. I want to get into the strategies a little bit, but first I want to say that one of the things that struck me so much is really on that note, how consistently your methods agree with the methods that we teach in our class.

And those go from the visual memory hacks to the space, repetition techniques, and so much more. So for those who aren't familiar. With either of our works, maybe you could go into those major principles of how the method works and, you know, feel free to go into as much geeky detail as you want because this is something that our audience definitely goes nuts for.

Gabriel Wyner: I mean, I'm not surprised that this would line up with the stuff in your courses. Language learning is like learning anything else. It's a memory burden. I think people come into this thing, thinking that like languages are special. You have to be smart and blah, blah, blah, and special gene languages are.

We're actually really, really good at learning languages. So there's a thing I sort of start out most of my talks with this myth that kids are really good at this thing. And that you lose that gift. And if you look at the research, kids are actually not as good as adults. It's a sort of, I don't know, an optical illusion.

You're looking at a kid with 15,000 hours and you don't think that they've put any work in because they're kids, but they put in 15,000 hours into French, they speak better friends than your a hundred hours of French. Yeah, no joke. And you correct for that. If you have kids with 500 hours of exposure and adults with 500 hours of exposure, the adults are better every time. Like, yeah, we're better at this. 

Jonathan Levi: You have so much more stuff to grab onto so many more memories and neurons and sounds that they can just link up to.

Gabriel Wyner: Yeah, that's absolutely the case. And it's adults also have better strategies. They can do things like a Superlearning course and get somewhere, or you give a four-year-old kid that they're like, ah, stop it.

Right. And so we're really good at this thing. The issue is that we don't have time. Like we have jobs and family and the things to do. And so, and languages, in particular, are something that are so much data that you need to cram into your head and keep there that the time burden is the thing that kills us all.

Yeah. And the fact that you're constantly forgetting things. And so if you don't have a method for retaining the things that you're picking up, then by the time you've done, you know, two years of French, you've forgotten the first year. Well, and so figuring out how to tackle the memory burden of language learning is basically is what I do.

And so let's see how much detail to go into, I, I can do this for like 18 hours for the creative lab course. Yeah. Basically, I break the language learning process up into steps. I generally deal with not generally, I always deal with pronunciation first, because if you can't hear what you're trying to learn, you cannot remember it.

I mean, you were at a, such a disadvantage. And so I always give this example of I'm getting work for cameras, feeding Cape as Wiki. Yeah. And it's like, okay, whatever you just said, is that okay? And it's not something you can hold on to because you don't know the sounds yet. Whereas if I said the word for camera in some random languages, like blip blop, you're like, okay, blip, blop.

I know that those are all familiar. Sounds sure. And so you need to make the languages sound familiar. The sounds need to become as easy to hear as blip blop, right? So that's the first burden. That's the first barrier to memory. But at that point, then you can start pulling in a spaced repetition program, which how many of your listeners are gonna already know what that is?

Jonathan Levi: I would hope if you know, there are good little boys and girls, I would hope that it's about 70, 80%, but we have so many people kind of joining who've. No going, of course. So let's call it 60% know about inky and how it's the best thing since the matrix plugging into the back of the brain. 

Gabriel Wyner: Totally agree.

I guess the short, short version of spaced repetition is that their flashcards on steroids, they're flashcards. You can put whatever you want on them. And so you can have audio and video. Well, you can do video. I mostly do audio and pictures, but they'll show you a picture today or a flashcard today. You'll test you on it.

And depending upon your response, You know, I got this right. I don't got this. It will hold back from showing you that flashcard again for a few days. And then again, it will show it to you in, let's say four days, they'll ask you like what's a cat. And if you remember it, then it will say, okay, well, if you handled four days, let's try seven.

Right? And if you can handle seven, let's try 10. If you can handle 10, let's try, you know, 15, let's try 25, let's try 40. And they keep pushing how the delay between how much when it's going to test you. And it's keeping the test challenging. And that makes learning much more efficient. Right? 

Jonathan Levi: I think a lot of people misunderstand that, you know, they think that if you know something and you really know it, it's not going to go anywhere, but given enough time, you'll forget anything.

I mean, given enough time without using it, you'll forget anything. Yeah, anything at all. And so, you know, you're not likely to forget your name, cause you're not likely to go seven years without using it. But if you did, you might forget 

Gabriel Wyner: it. It's absolutely true. Yeah. Although some trace will always remain, which is super interesting that if you take these tests, I've had a friend who did this, who was doing my stuff and Italian, and then life came in the way and he couldn't do it for like five months.

And then he started it back up again. He's like, wait, I still remember it. It's at this stuff. Like, and it's all sort of coming back and as he continued doing it for a week or two, he was like, everything came back. 

Jonathan Levi: Yeah. Super crazy. I had that experience in Dominican Republic two weeks ago. Like, wait a minute, I still speak Spanish. Where did that come from?

Gabriel Wyner: They get to a really high level and I think it's gone and it's like, it's not gone and just needs to bring it back. 

Jonathan Levi: Right. Okay. So pronunciation, spaced repetition. And no translation.

Gabriel Wyner: And that would be a pretty central thing is that I do not use English on my flashcards. It's like, like the golden rule, no English on flashcards.

And at that point, it means that you're going to be building the language as opposed to building the ability to translate. And so I start with really simple words that you can learn, just pick up, like that's a table that's chair. I have a list of what we frequent words that can be learned using pictures.

I start with those and then once I have a vocabulary, then I can start stringing them together into sentences. If I have a dog and cat and chase. Now I can make a certain it's like the dog chases, the cat. Now there's all this other data in there, like word order, which is telling me who's chasing whom and chases as opposed to chase, like, why is it, why, why are we switching?

And all these bits of data that can also be learned using the same flashcard program can also be learned using pictures now, like what does chases look like? Will chase this look like this story. There's a dog in there and there's a cat. So that's where I start broadening out to grammar. And at that point, you can build the whole language in your head.

Jonathan Levi: Sure. No, that's actually a really nice segue because I, as someone who has the memory down and I can use very, very similar techniques to memorize the vocab very quickly. The main reason I turned to your book was you have a really good system for learning grammar without having to learn grammar. Tell us a little bit about that.

Gabriel Wyner: I think people look at grammar and it's terrifying because it's like this crazy mathematical system and it's different in every language and all that. But ultimately grammar is a thing that lets you tell a story. It lets you combine words like chase dog and cat into this story about dogs, chasing cats, right.

Or cats chasing dogs. Like the grammar is there to give you additional information about what are the characters doing in the story and who are they doing it to? You know, the cat chases, the dog on a treadmill, like, okay, well now there's a treadmill. The story is the treadmill chasing the dog is the treadmill chasing the cat, is the dog chasing the treadmill.

Like we need grammar to sort all of these characters out and all the actions out into an actual story. Sure. And tell us when it happened, all that. So that's where that grammar is coming in as an additional storytelling device. And so that's in some sense, it, in the sense that we have a story. There's vocabulary telling us who's like the characters in that story.

And then those grammar telling us what happened. And so the first thing you need to do is have a story, talk chases, the cat, right? And then you need to figure out a way, how do you get those little data points into your head of how is grammar telling you who's doing what? And so ultimately all languages do this in three ways.

Which is really cool that all of the languages we have can only do three things. And those three things are, they can add words, meaning that if the dog chases the cat on the treadmill, That word on it doesn't really mean anything, except it's telling us what to do with the word treadmill. Right. It's a very, very abstract concept.

What does on look like? Well, on it looks like this weird story of a dog and a cat and a treadmill, right? 

Jonathan Levi: It sets the scene if you will. 

Gabriel Wyner: Yeah. So if you have a sentence like the dog chasing the cat on a treadmill, you can also have a sentence, the dog chases, the cat blank, the treadmill, and you have a picture of a dog and get on a treadmill, right?

And that's what, on his, on his, that picture on his, that sentence with the blank in it, like, that's what on his, and so language is add in inwards. They have these special functional words to give you grammatical information and some languages will use those more English. Use those a lot. Some languages will use that less Russian uses it less than yeah.

Jonathan Levi: Which is so difficult.

Gabriel Wyner: Yeah. And so that's one thing that we have is we can add in words to give us her medical information. The other thing we can do is change word order. The dog taste of the cat, the catchiest to the dog. Okay. Yeah. And so what that looks like is this same story, another picture of dogs chasing cats or whatever, except that let's say you remove the word dog and you're like, okay.

Or you remove the word dog and cat and you say, okay, just chases. And you're like, which one goes where. So I put the dog chases, the cat, the cat chases, the dog. How do I rearrange the sentence? That's how you're storing word order. That's one way to memorize word order. Right? And the last thing that that languages do is they change the form of the word.

So chase goes to Chase's right in this particular sentence. And Russian uses this in spades, for instance, declension.

Jonathan Levi: Yeah, so much fun. 

Gabriel Wyner: It can get fun. I kind of like rushes. And so it feels like a chess game. Like every time you use the word, it has to be different. 

Jonathan Levi: Exactly what it is. And I loved your example in the book that Russian dogs are not your friends.

It's like, and I feel like Russian grammar is not my friend because Russian being under the table is somehow. An instrument, whereas being on the table is not an instrument, you know, instrumental case. Like why is it pods though? Like put stolen pods stolen. 

Gabriel Wyner: Right. I think the question of like, why is this happening?

Is it just, is it just, is that's the thing that you have to come to peace with languages is that they're manmade and we're crazy. And there's a, a drive. We have to make things less logical. Because if it's our own crazy little logic like there was this great example of an irregular verb in English that it was only one of its type.

I don't know if I'm remembering, but like we have all these irregular verbs in English. Like, it's not like I eat it. 

Jonathan Levi: Yeah. It's I ate and saw.

Gabriel Wyner: Yeah, there's a ton of them and they always come in groups. And so like I bought, but I also taught and I caught and I saw it and like, there's all these verbs that sort of clumped together in groups.

And those groups grow because we don't like having these little single groups of irregularities. Sure. And so they take perfectly great regular verbs and they make them irregular just cause we don't want to have a single irregularity. Sure. And so there's this drive to create more and more and more regularities in English.

And this happens in every language. And so this is like one of these reasons. It's like, why is it what's the loan it's like, because.

Jonathan Levi: Because you know, it's an exercise in acceptance.

Gabriel Wyner: Yeah. And then it's also an exercise of Kenya develop tools that help you remember that kind of thing.

Jonathan Levi: Yeah, Gabriel. I want to ask you because my story is I had the very great privilege and fortune of meeting two people who taught me a lot of this stuff in one-on-one coaching about how the brain works and how visual memory works.

And so I want to ask you, how did you come upon all these techniques? Because in your book, you deal really with a lot of pretty heavy neuroscientific concepts. And before I have you answer that question, I'm just going to really quickly cut over and let our audience know about this episode's sponsor.

This episode is brought to you by the Become a SuperLearner Masterclass. Now, I've been telling you guys about the masterclass for a few weeks now, so I'm actually just going to take a step back and let a good friend of mine. Tell you guys about his opinion on the masterclass. That was four-time USA memory champion, and a huge fan of the SuperLearner Masterclass.

“You know, when I started memory techniques years ago, you know, I wish that I had had all the resources that are available on this course. Jonathan does a great job teaching it, and it's a fantastic course and I highly recommend it. It'll take you, you just, as far as I am, without as much time that I have to put in. So enjoy it, get into it and, uh, keep your memory active”. 

Jonathan Levi: To learn more, to sign up for a free trial with no credit card required or to redeem an exclusive discount for podcast listeners only please visit jle.vi/learn or visit becomeasuperlearner.com. All right. We are back with Mr. Gabriel Wyner.

Who's going to let us know how he discovered all of this heavy neuroscientific stuff, all this content and how he learned about it on his own without, I mean, you didn't have private coaches teaching you this stuff. 

Gabriel Wyner: Did you? I know I didn't, this I'm a mixture of things. I would say this method has been developing over the last few years.

It looks different now. She is a lot different now because Japanese came in and screwed up everything. It looks very, very different now than it did when I was first learning French. The basic concepts are the same, the idea of pronunciation support and no English is important. Spaced repetition is important, but a lot of the little hacks, the visual memory stuff, and things like that have been coming in over the years as I've dealt with various challenges like Russian brought in an enormous number of challenges.

Rational was the one I did after French and it forced me to develop things. Hungarian came in and forced me to refine things further. The book came in was a huge change where after spending a year researching the neuroscience, really, I started seeing things where it was like the way I've tried this, this, and this.

I've tried. These three things. The science is researching four things, right? The insight, for instance, I talk about levels of processing this idea that if you understand the concept based on its spelling like I asked you how many letters are in the word bear. You'll generally forget that. I asked you that question.

If I ask you to just bear rhyme with pear, then you'll remember twice as much. You will remember the fact that I asked you about bears twice, as much as if I asked you the number of letters in bear. So if you start processing the sound of a word that you can remember twice as much, but still it's not very well.

You'll generally forget words like that. If I ask you about what rhymes with what rhymes look like. If I ask you is bear kind of a animal and you have to think about what is a bear actually, what is it? Then you'll remember that twice as much as sound and four times as much as spelling. Sure. And so I was playing around with this concept of his bear and animal.

And the way I do that is by using pictures, as long as you're testing yourself on pictures instead of translations, then you're testing yourself on actual concepts. So I have a picture of a bowl and I'm like, what is this thing? It's like, just sort little. Okay, well, in that case, then you're actually testing yourself on the concept.

What is the concept? And so this kind of thing was working for me very well. And then the science came in and said, okay, yeah, but there's one more category. That's 50% more effective than even that, which is personal know, do I like bears bingo? And I was like, Oh, that's I haven't tried that. And so I added that into Hungarian.

Jonathan Levi: Brilliant. So you were just researching scientific publications, psychology today. I mean, kind of whatever was available to you to figure this stuff out. 

Gabriel Wyner: I was trying to figure out why this was working because I fell into the French thing. I did not quite in, I went online and was just like, what are people doing here?

Right. And so I found people talking about Anki and I was like, Oh, that's cool. And I knew from my own background, I came in there with some background because of the opera stuff. And I was like, okay, well I know that me knowing the French pronunciation has been helpful here. And also I had the background on going to this immersion program and seeing how well that worked and being like, Oh, English is not useful here.

Me knowing translations is absolutely not helpful. It's the opposite. And so I saw that people were doing online and, and bounce that off of my own experiences. And that was sort of the seed of this thing. And then once I started working really well, it started becoming this search of like, well, why is this working so well? And that's what led me to other things. 

Jonathan Levi: Fantastic. So a bit of a self-serving question, because you mentioned again, Russian and how it presented unique challenges. Give us an example of how you went about tackling the notoriously difficult Russian grammar system. 

Gabriel Wyner: Okay. So Russian, as we talked about already has their case system basically means that every now and changes form, the ending will change.

You'll stick on an odd sound or you'll get rid of it on a sound or you'll put on a yes. Sound at the end or you'll mess, or you put on an own sound at the end you'll mess with the ending. And that messing with the ending tells you whether the dog is chasing the cat or the cat is chasing the dog, right.

Or if there's a mouse on top of the cat, like all these things, the Russian tells you, who's doing what by playing around with the ending of the noun. And the other tricky part is that it's not like it does it in a regular manner. No way. And that's the thing that really is challenging is that if it was the case that you were just learning, okay.

Every single time that it's the dog doing the chasing. Then you keep it the same and every time the dog is being chased or the cat's being changed, anyone's being chased. You just add an OU, like, that'd be great if that was the case, but it's not right, depending upon the noun. And depending upon a completely abstract from a bit of information that is not necessarily related directly to the spelling of the word.

It's just something you have to know that you have to know something about that now. Meaning is it masculine, feminine, or neuter? Sure is it type one type two type three within masculine, the ending will be different. And so some masculine things will just end, you know, we'll end in OU and it's being chased and some masculine things will not, we'll just end in their normal ending.

Right. And that's really challenging to figure out well, which one is which, how do you sort all this stuff out? Absolutely. And so you tackle them sort of one by one, you say, okay, well, for one, I want to learn one form. I'm learning about dogs and everything that looks like a dog. Meaning it has the ending of dog.

It takes the same endings as dog. And you start telling stories about dogs and you learn them using these flashcards where basically you're saying the cat, Chase's blink picture of a cat running after Don. And you learn these ones by one in stories, and you do this really meticulously. You get every little bit of this single example of dog-like nouns.

Sure. And then the next time you run into a new noun. And you see in the dictionary, it tells you what's formed. This is, and it's like, no, this is the one that's conjugated. That's you mess with it in exact same way as doc, then you use it in the moniker. You use an image to connect that new noun. Let's say it's a table to the one you already did dog.

And so you can even use dog. I mean, if your first example has always been dog, you can play around with dogs and you can just say, okay, you have a dog and it eats a table. And you have this very, very striking image in your mind of this dog. Just chomping down on his table and eating it too, like completely destroying this table.

Right? And now you don't need to go through this whole giant meticulous process with table. You're like, no, that's a dog. Like now that one just it does you do the same thing? It's the one works exactly like I did with dog and dog. I really know. Well now, you know, table really well. And so you do this with all the dogs, like ones, you do this with all the cats, like ones which are different.

Those are the feminine ones with endings. When you do this with each category and suddenly you have this visual toolbox. Where anytime you would hit a new noun. You're like, Oh wait, which category this is fallen into, is this the dog category? Is this the cat category? And that allows you to sort things and keep things in your head in a manner that is useful because you knowing a conjugation chart, you knowing this giant declension chart of just like endings everywhere, that's really abstract.

But you knowing how to put dogs into stories and then baking that association like, Oh, I know how to use the dog in a sentence to tell stories, to do something useful. Now I know. So know how to do it with tables. That's useful information, that's information that you can actually use on the fly. Cause I think a lot of people are trying to piece together Russian and basically do this like a math problem.

They're like, okay, well let me get all the translations in my headline, all the things. And then we go to the conjugation chart on my head at all the endings. And you need almost reflexive sense of just, I know how to use dawg and sentences. I know how to tell stories about dogs, tables to say, okay, great.

Now I can tell stories about tables, right? 

Jonathan Levi: I think what the method gets at is that our brains are naturally wired to use grammar, not to analyze it. I mean, how many English speakers can tell you what the. Past perfect participle is. I don't remember what that is, but you know, I clearly speak fluent English.

And so most Russians when I ask them like, Oh yeah, it's very hard. You know, the whole pub G thing they go, what the hell is the G you know, the, what the hell is by the age, the cases, right. Oh, yeah. I remember something about that from grade school. It's the one with the questions. Cause you know, they learn it differently.

Yeah. What question is this piece of information going to answer? And so it's like, just let your brain do what it's meant to do, which is implicitly deduce these rules based on tons and tons of examples that you've played with. 

Gabriel Wyner: We can do that. And we're really, really good at that. One of the interesting things about adults is that actually knowing this stuff in a way that the Russians don't mean your actual knowledge of these cases will make you learn it slightly faster than the Russians, than someone who's just getting it implicitly.

Jonathan Levi: Exactly. And that's why I built actually a very, very complex memory palace wherein each of the windows if you look left, You're asking, you know, Khumbu and you look right. You're asking, uh, Chimel. And it's like, I have basically a different event that happens with the different characters in the different rooms.

And different bedrooms are represented by different cases. It's like a really, really bizarre system that I kind of developed for myself, but it makes it super, super easy with the exceptions to say, well, you know, if that's happening, In the kitchen it's accusative because, you know, whenever the female looks in the oven, she goes, Ooh, whereas the man would go, ah, because he eats it immediately.

You know? So I have this like very sophisticated memory palace that literally in an afternoon, I was able to say, okay, unless it's a very, very weird exception, like a yacht Dorma, which I still don't understand how that works. Yeah. I can pretty much nail it down. Yeah. Just Izzy just puts the Lum. So I'm glad we did, uh, an entire podcast on Russia.

And I appreciate you humoring me and tell us about frequency lists and why they're so important and why they play such a major role in your method. 

Gabriel Wyner: Sure. There are words that you'll see in most grammar books at the beginning where it'll be like, we're going to learn all the fruits today. And you learn about grapes.

You don't know about apricots and peaches and things, and you will never use those words, like in your yeah. 

Jonathan Levi: Persimmon. I know the word for persimmon in seven languages. 

Gabriel Wyner: It's like, why? Like things that are common, like peaches, like, are you really going to the store and getting peaches? And do you need that bit of vocabulary?

Like yes. If you are totally like a peach feed like a thing I want in my life is a good peach. You should learn that that word, but for everyone else, there's so many more useful words to learn. And so you can make your time much more efficient by learning the most common words first. And those are different from language to language.

Some of them are the same, and that's kind of where I have this list of 625 words that I start my day by that I have at the end of my book and all my word lists that I sell online. And these are words that are pretty common, pretty much anywhere. I basically took a couple of English lists and went through and was just like, I threw out all this stuff that was English.

So you don't need to know Democrat and Republican, even though there's a super common word because you don't need those words in Russian, you don't need those words. 

Jonathan Levi: No, you certainly don't need them in Russian. 

Gabriel Wyner: No, you don't. So, so you can basically knock out a bunch of words and then you get to this list of things that are really core things that we talk about.

We talk about dogs, we talk about tables. We talk about mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters. You don't talk about nieces that much, right? Mealtimes, stuff like that. 

Jonathan Levi: Yeah. 

Gabriel Wyner: Lunch, dinner, breakfast, like those are really important things. And so that's a list that if you know, all those words, you don't have to talk about a lot of things.

Sure. You have a lot of the characters in these sentences. A lot of the actions, you know, we run, we walk, we talk and so you can do a lot of things. And at that point, that's a nice place to build your grammar. At that point. If you learn those words, first, for instance, you can go into a grammar book and you'll find your know most of the words that are important.

And you can look at sentences and be like, ah, I don't need peaches. Like, I'll skip that sentence or I'll skip that example. But if you're learning only frequency, I mean, I did this with restaurant, which was really a fascinating experience. I learned directly from the Russian frequency list. This is before my 625 existed.

And so I learned the top thousand words in Russian and I showed up to a Russian immersion program. And so I didn't know. Most of the words that other people knew. Like we were sitting at the table, I got bumped all the way up to like level six out of seven. Wow. Cause I could speak Russian, but I didn't know the vocabulary in terms of like, I hadn't gone through all these grammar books that everyone else had gone through.

And so he would sit at the table and everyone would know the words for like.

Jonathan Levi: Oh yeah, I definitely don't know that one in Russia. 

Gabriel Wyner: Yeah. Plate and things like this. And I didn't have a lot of these words cause they didn't show up in that frequency list, but I could talk politics. And it was really weird.

And so like even the, the original placement tests, for instance, those tests, they had us write essays and they had four essays to write in the first one. It was just like, you're going to the market. Can you please write a shopping list? And I had nothing. I was just like a bread and meat. I'm going to lots of bread and meat.

And I started making phrases with that. And I was just like, I should do like meat and bread. I'm going to get some vodka too. And beer vodka is definitely like was number 300 on the list. Yeah. 

Jonathan Levi: It comes up pretty quickly, real quick. 

Gabriel Wyner: And so I felt like an idiot with this first question. The second one was like, you have a friend, can you please describe him?

And I was like, Oh, I don't know my friend, Nick. He has a black hair. Yeah. He's a real swell guy. Yeah. And then the next one was like, Hey, can you describe your day? And I was like, yeah, I can describe my day. And so I started talking about my day and the last one was like, can you please talk about the idea that the teachers should be paid according to the accomplishments of their students and whether that's a good idea or not.

And I wrote this like four-page essay about how I was like, this is ridiculous. And I can't believe that politicians would do this, like this huge thing, because that's where my vocabulary was. That's what people actually talk about. People talk about shopping lists. 

Jonathan Levi: That's so interesting. And do you think that there's interest in the fact that different words come up more in different languages?

But I think also one of the things I've encountered is, you know, modern Hebrew is known as a pretty, actually poor language in terms of its vocabulary. I think there's about 18,000 words total, whereas, you know, Pushkin used 50,000 words. So I think it's interesting that. You can get by in English and sound fluent with 1200 words, whereas 1200 words, won't cut it in Russian and it'll be plenty in Hebrew.

What are your thoughts on that? 

Gabriel Wyner: I wouldn't be surprised if all in all, you're looking at similar things from language to language, in terms of the amount of data you need in your head. Right? I think one of there's a tricky thing here in terms of also like, what is a word like is to be. One word meaning is, is the same is, was, is this were, is, are like, is that all one word?

Yeah. And counting that in English is really hard and counting that in other languages is also just as hard if not harder. And so that gets tricky. Like in Russian, for instance, there's a lot of roots words that have stems and things that are reused and a bunch of other words. Right. And so is that root a word?

Is everything that uses that rude word, or are you talking about every single word that uses that route? Because that's a whole bunch of words.

Jonathan Levi: Sure. And also words that are reused, you know, like we have way too far or this is the way. 

Gabriel Wyner: Yeah. I like the word set in English has I think 463 definitions.

Jonathan Levi: Wow.

Gabriel Wyner: Do you know that word when, you know, one of those definitions are all 463? Yeah. That's a really great point. These are really hard questions to answer. I think all in all the amount of data is similar. I mean, people start talking as kids at similar times. It's not like it is, I'm not aware of any languages where kids just are like, ah, this is too hard.

And then they only start talking when they're eight. Right. So I think we're talking about things that are of comparable difficulty. And then it just becomes a matter of how distant is this from the languages that you speak. If you're an English speaker, Hebrew is going to be twice as hard as French and actually have similar difficulty to Russian and Arabic is going to be twice as hard as that.

And Japanese is gonna be twice as hard as that. 

Jonathan Levi: Sure. And so Japanese speaker you're shit out of luck, no matter what. 

Gabriel Wyner: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And it's like, I have friends who are Japanese. I have one friend who was my pianist and conservatory and she was like, I don't know why you're so good at this. Like, you know, all these languages, and I was struggling, struggling, struggling.

I'm like, dude, If I was learning Japanese for every one of these languages, I would be in the same spot. You were sure. 

Jonathan Levi: Just a really, really kind of lousy sound library, like whereas the French or the Germans, they have so many sounds. The Russians have so many sounds, you know, there are so few in Japanese that getting out the pronunciation of almost any other languages.

It's hard. Yeah. 

Gabriel Wyner: Yeah, that's a real challenge. 

Jonathan Levi: Yeah. Yeah. So, Gabriel, I wanna always, in every episode giveaway one major takeaway that the audience can actually implement into their daily lives immediately. And I have to say you're at a disadvantage because on a previous episode, you know, we had Benny Lewis who agrees with you very much that you need to speak from day one and avoid English.

So I think that one is already out the door, unfortunately, but what tip would you give our audience that today they can implement into their lives and be better language learners. 

Gabriel Wyner: Sure. I think there's a really neat hack you can kind of do with most of the common languages and by common, I mean, languages that have a strong internet presence, which is going to be the majority of language learners.

There's many, many more people trying to learn French or Spanish than there are trying to learn. I don't even know what Icelandic good example. Yes. And so. Otherwise landing, probably it does have enough of an internet presence. I was teaching a workshop up in Canada and Mohawk and I was like, okay, you guys can't do this trick, but if it language has an internet presence, then you can learn words using pictures, as I was saying, and let's say, you're trying to learn Russian and you want to learn the word now in most English dictionaries, it will tell you that that word means girl.

And so you can go search for girl on Google images and you will find a whole bunch of pictures of girls. Exactly. When you would expect there's five-year-old girls at seven-year-old girls, there's 18-year-old girls, this whole range of girls. Right. And you can learn that with a picture in that works fine.

Do you have a schoolgirl that you've done or you can go to Google images and you can search for JavaScript and just type it in, Russian. Right. And you will find that basically, every picture is an 18-year-old girl in a bikini. 

Jonathan Levi: Right. And you suddenly understand something about the word. 

Gabriel Wyner: You suddenly understand that has something to do with girl, but is a completely new concept, and completely new concepts are something that we are really good at remembering.

It is way more interesting to think. Okay. Do you ever Skype, is that. Yes. I just saw Google images. Then the average is a copy of something I already know. 

Jonathan Levi: Yeah. Particularly if you're an 18-year-old gentlemen. 

Gabriel Wyner: Sure. But even not even if you look at that and you're like, I am offended at these pictures. Great. That's memorable too. 

Jonathan Levi: Totally. I'm going to search Debo Scott and Google images. Right. As we speak. 

Gabriel Wyner: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's like, those kinds of differences are what makes languages interesting. Because just knowing that like this language is a copy of my language, who cares? Why learn it? Right. This shows up, not just with you, it was good.

You have this because it kind of really, but it's a very good one.

Jonathan Levi: As I'm seeing, it's quite different from girl, but they're all different. 

Gabriel Wyner: Everything is slightly different. And that's where you find that the words sort of come alive where you're like, Oh, I'm learning something new here. I'm discovering something.

And like discovery is enjoyable. Like memorizing, not enjoyable, discovering great. And so that's the kind of thing where you can just do that. You can just decide instead of searching for images in English and just finding whatever image I think the word should be, you can look for whatever image the word actually is.

And that ends up being a lot more interesting. It's a lot more fun and all that, that words become much more memorable. 

Jonathan Levi: That is a brilliant take-home point. Gabriel, I want to ask you one last question, which is if you were to build a hundred dollars quick Quickstart kit for learning languages, what would it include?

And I want to caveat that by saying. Definitely include your book or any of your other products. Because like I said, I endorse it fully and it's something that I recommend to all my students, but what would the other say, $80 be or $85 be in that a hundred dollars quick-start kit, right? 

Gabriel Wyner: If you're starting from scratch, then I would get, if it exists, I have covered eight languages so far I'm covering six more now, but I'm not covering everything.

If it exists, I would get a pronunciation trainer and a word list in the language that you're learning. If you're learning Spanish, I would get my Spanish pronunciation trainer, I guess, for Latin America, if you're learning that version of Spanish and then my word list, and I would start with pronunciation trainer and go to the word list once I was done with that, I would get, let's see, I don't know some credit on dot com.

Yes. To get a Spanish tutor. I would get my book. I would start with my book really actually before the pronunciation trainer, just so you understand how this whole process works, and then you used to understand what you're doing so that you understand what you're doing. The better you can do it. So let's say we're talking about book, we're talking about pronunciation, trainer, and word lists.

Now we're at like 30 bucks we've gotten some ice hockey credit. Let's say we're getting 30 bucks a bat or at 60, I would, let's see if you finish the word list and you had some, I talk and stuff.

Gabriel Wyner: I would kind of dump the rest of the money into ice hockey. Yeah. 

Jonathan Levi: What about, uh, you mentioned dictionaries that have the case or tell you your dog or a cat, is that a special kind of dictionary or is that any Russian dictionary should do that?

Gabriel Wyner: Yeah. Any Russian dictionary should give you enough information to tell you which case it should follow? Oh, interesting. I mean, well, it will tell you that with, for the verbs. 

Jonathan Levi: Interesting. I guess I haven't looked at an addiction. 

Gabriel Wyner: I don't know if it will tell you that for the nouns you probably need to do those are online short resources and those are free.

So you don't have to spend money on those. It is not bad to own a good grammar book. It is a neat thing to own a frequency dictionary. So those things are really great resources. So I would probably get those things, grammar book, let's say it runs the 10 frequency dictionary runs. It depends, Russians is 90.

Okay. Everyone else is less. Everyone else is like 20, 30. Russians is 90. It's a great book, but it's like 90 bucks. So I would not do that for Russian, but for the other ones, I'd do that. Yeah. I basically get a couple of good books, a good frequency dictionary, a good textbook. I talked to credit my book and notation trader in the word list.

Jonathan Levi: Maybe spend a few bucks on a coffee shop, find a friend to go talk with. I've found that that's been one of my best resources is sitting over a cup of coffee with a native speaker who wants to learn through or whatever it is. And then, you know, spending 30 minutes with us just talking Russian 30 minutes, just speaking Hebrew.

Gabriel Wyner: So I really liked that idea and every time, so the suggested language exchange I'm like, that seems really cool, but. I talked to you so cheap. 

Jonathan Levi: It's so cheap. It's so the only problem is finding consistency. You know, it's a lot of people I talk to you for people. Well, I don't know, it's kind of a imagine the E-Lance or even eBay of kind of freelance coaches.

And the only problem is a lot of these people do it part-time and they do it to kind of like make ends meet. And so you'll find a really, really great coach. And then they'll save up enough money and go to India for six months. That exact thing has happened to me twice. 

Gabriel Wyner: Yeah, no, I've gotten that too.

Although the, uh, bouncing between coaches is actually really helpful for the language learning thing and that you're getting different content also different sounds true.

Jonathan Levi: Need to get on there and find a new coach Pronto, Mr. Gabriel Wyner. It's been such a pleasure chatting with you and finally meeting you because I definitely look up to your work very, very much.

I wanted to ask you, should we just send people to fluent forever? Do you want to give people your Twitter handle or something like that as well? 

Gabriel Wyner: Sure. I mean, I'm relatively active on Twitter. It's fluid underscore forever, but yeah, that's already on the front page of the website anyway. So yeah, I would go to fluid-forever.com for all this stuff.

And hopefully, within a week we're going to have a big, like, welcome page that just sort of lets people get in and turn and figure out what to do. Cause there's so much content on the site right now.

Jonathan Levi:  So by the time you guys hear this episode, that will definitely be out. Cause we're recording. Pretty good in advance.

Awesome Mr. Gabriel Wyner, it’s a pleasure and an honor.

Gabriel Wyner: Thank you so much. Or I should say awesome.

Jonathan Levi: We'll take care of buck up quicker.

Jonathan Levi: All right Superfriends, that's it for this week's episode, we hope you really, really enjoyed it and learn a ton of applicable stuff that can help you go out there and overcome the impossible.

If so, please do us a favor and leave us a review on iTunes or Stitcher, or however you found this podcast. In addition to that, we are. Always looking for great guest posts on the blog or awesome guests right here on the podcast. So if you know somebody or you are somebody, or you have thought of somebody who would be a great fit for the show or for our blog, please reach out to us either on Twitter or by email our email is info@becomingasuperhuman.com. Thanks so much. 

Closing: Thanks for tuning in to the Becoming Superhuman Podcast. For more great skills and strategies, or for links to any of the resources mentioned in this episode, visit www.becomingasuperhuman.com/podcast. We'll see you next time.