How to Enhance Your Memory (and Never Forget) | Gabriel Wyner

Gabriel Wyner (0:00)

We encounter so much information in our lives. We are immersed in information, even more so now because of all this cell phone stuff and everything like that.

And our brains are rebelling against that. We don't need this much information. And levels of processing is how it makes the choices as to what gets to stay and what gets thrown out actively with violence. Silence.

Michael Gervais (0:30)

Okay, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, and I'm excited to welcome Gabe Wyner. As our guest to this episode, Gabe is the author of the national bestseller, Fluent Forever, how to learn any language fast and never forget it. And Gabe is fluent in eight languages himself, and now teaches tens of thousands of people across the planet using his unique language learning method through the Fluent Forever app.

Gabe, I'm stoked to have you here.

Gabriel Wyner (1:02)

I'm stoked to be here.

Michael Gervais (1:03)

Yeah, I've loved your story and how you've come to be in the position that you're in. And especially because what you've come to understand is something that many of us, meaning me, find really hard to learn language.

And so I just want to explore to you, you know, what you've come to understand about learning itself, certainly about learning a language, and then the insights that you've gathered.

Gabriel Wyner (1:30)

I mean, there's a lot to cover.

Michael Gervais (1:33)

There is.

And so just at the top, like, thank you for being with us. And then maybe we start with you. You had a terrible experience learning languages in high school. Can you just kind of bring us into that fold?

Gabriel Wyner (1:46)

Sure. So my background originally was, I guess my language learning stuff started in elementary school. I went through like seven, seven, eight years of Hebrew.

I now know ten words of Hebrew. That's a lot of years for not a lot of words. And that was upsetting. And so I tried again in high school and junior high with Russian, spent five and a half years working on Russian. I got really good grades. I had really good teachers. I won a silver medal in the Ruskiolympiad, where you walk in and you try to memorize a bunch of phrases and impressive judges.

I left that thing knowing like 50 words of Russian plus a memorized epic poem for kids.

I didn't speak Russian. I don't know. I mean, that was where I left it. I was just like, I don't know how this works. How is it that I can do well ostensibly in a course, but not learn a language at the end of it? Why did I show up here in the first place? Was this just to get a grade? I wanted to learn Russian by the end of that.

The conclusion I landed on was I must be really bad at languages. I must be good at tests and bad at languages. That was my context coming into this whole language learning world.

Michael Gervais (3:10)

Yeah.

That is something that I find myself in, is I sign up for a course or I sign up for something. I see my son is 14 I see it in his life as well, is that there's training to pass the test, and then there's training to really learn. I understand it. I understand it in my life. I know in professional sports that those that stay disciplined in training to really deeply understand something, it's far better than just training for the competition.

Okay, so we're connected on that. Before we go into the insights on best practices that you've come to learn about learning, let's stay on language for just a minute.

Are there two types of languages or are there more?

Gabriel Wyner (3:59)

Tell me more about what you mean by the question.

Michael Gervais (4:02)

I'm a student here, so I don't really know, but I think that there's languages that seem to sound somewhat familiar like the Romance languages.

They sound familiar. Then there's languages that seem to be more consonant driven, where it's more about the way that you hold your mouth and the way that something sounds as opposed to a set of unique words that point to some symbols. I don't know, I'm trying to not lead you down a path, but I'll pause there and I'll explain more if I need to.

Gabriel Wyner (4:39)

No, I follow now. The amount of variation that you're looking at when you're trying to pick up a new language is immense. I would say there's many, many, many categories of languages. I think there's ways of differentiating them mostly based on difficulty, and those difficulties can come from a lot of different places. The best data that I've seen on this ends up being about English speakers learning other stuff and ideally that other stuff is stuff that is relevant to the US military. Surprised, that's where all the data is and where all the money is. There are these lists from the Foreign Service Institute that they're training all of our spies and diplomats and things like that, where they've really come down to the science of this language is this hard for this English speaker and this language is in another category. They have levels 1, 2, and 3