Learn Languages Fast: Free Resources

Gabriel Wyner

June 10, 2016
2:51 pm

Linguistics

Below are my top recommended resources for language learning. Hopefully this serve as a helpful complement to the Fluent Forever book and our other paid tools.

Below are my top recommended resources for language learning.

The First Chapter of the Fluent Forever Book

First things first, I’d love to share with you the first chapter of my book free. It’s a quick read and it should give you a clear sense about what all of this Fluent Forever stuff is about. Scroll down on our Book page to sign up for your free chapter.

The Fluent Forever Member Community

A community forum to discuss specifics on applying some of the techniques described in Fluent Forever and everything in between. Visit the FF Member Community

If you questions about language learning with Anki, go to the Anki Language Learning Reddit Forum.

Anki/SRS-Related

I recommend a free flashcard tool called “Anki”. It can be a bit tricky to set up and use, so I’ve made a collection of tutorials to make it a bit easier: Learn about Anki and check out more helpful Anki Language Learning resources.

Anki itself (Download link)
The iPhone App (iTunes App Store)
The Fluent Forever App

Flash Card Gallery

A guide to the flashcards that will teach you your language. This page is designed as a supplement to my book. To that end, I’m going to show you some of the basic flashcard designs for each part of the language learning process, and then show you precisely how to make those flashcards in Anki, using a model flashcard deck that I’ve designed. View the guide

Pronunciation / Ear Training

This is a series of 3 videos on English pronunciation that will teach you about what’s going on in your mouth when you pronounce English words. Watch the videos.

Also, check out our shop which has some minimal pair cards. There are also other pronunciation flashcards in foreign languages ready-made for you, if that helps. But if you want to make the pronunciation or minimal pair flashcards on your own, then this post and the resources in it should help you get started. The Forvo and Rhiospike websites are super helpful too when it comes to learning pronunciation.

Vocabulary-Related

I’ve made a base vocabulary list of 625 words for any language. I’ve also commissioned and compiled a professional translations of this list for several languages, which you can find on the Word Lists page, and you can order them here.

This would be a good place to start your vocabulary before you move on to a frequency list, chats with native tutors, and other flashcard types. To research words, check out these handy bookmarklets to quickly search multiple websites at once. They can save you a lot of time. You might also want to check out pre-made Anki decks for vocab in foreign languages, which can save you time, too.

Fluent Forever Tutoring App Beta

This Fluent Forever app creates a private chat room to help you record sentences and words when working remotely with your tutor. The app makes this process way easier. Learn more here

Image Search Tools

If you set it up right, Google Images can turn into an extraordinary resource for language learning: You can search for any word and find millions of captioned illustrations showing that word in use. Here’s a guide to setting that up: View the guide

Multi-Search

When learning new words and creating flashcards, it can be extremely useful to search multiple websites for pictures, audio recordings, dictionary entries and example sentences. This page will show you how to automate those searches and save you time: View the guide

Japanese / Chinese

Learning a language like Japanese and Chinese requires a few modifications to my methods. This page is here to show you how to do that: Learn more

Additional Resources

Here you’ll find language book reviews, websites, audiobooks, and anything else I can collect for your language needs.

Individual recommendations for the following languages:

Make Your Flashcards Faster

If you want to save yourself ~30-60 minutes of time making your first Anki flashcards, then check out our shop which has a number of resources you can use to speed up the process. There are also other ready-to-use Anki flashcards in various languages that you can check out. The Anki language learning Reddit community also has tips to make cards faster, as well as this Anki language blog. Don’t forget that we also have our Fluent Forever mobile app, which doesn’t use Anki, but can be way faster.