[the notes from the book were retrieved with kobogarden, with the purpose of aiding to create a map of the ideas the book left me. The full list of book highlights can be found here.]

This book fell into my lap as I was looking for more language learning resources. It probable arose out of a disappointing moment that happened sometime in the past few months: I noticed that whenever I tried to speak Greek, my mind would traverse the same mental territory that I use to speak Danish. It feels like there was an overwrite in process...and I have a suspicion as to what that might be. Gabriel Wyner states his three key fundamentals to language learning:

1. Learn pronunciation first.

2. Don’t translate.

3. Use spaced repetition systems.

The idea of not translating had already been present in Language Transfer. In fact, my bidireccional Anki flashcards consist of English/Danish, whereas in the past they were English/Greek, and I suspect I might have programmed myself to start the thought process in English, and then move onto the target language. This served me well with only one language; with two, there are lots of collisions...and it's possible that this process can be nevertheless enhanced.

One of the fundamental ideas is to rely more upon images than words (and, thus, to avoid the translation trap). The author bases this stance on a very impressive study. I had to check whether it actually existed, as the results seem outlandish!

Images are apparently very strong for memory recall, and one can also take into account the four levels of processing — structure, sound, concept, and personal connection, where the fourth level of processing elicits stronger recollection than the first.

The key insights to generating better flashcards are, then,

• to associate words with sounds;
• and then use images to illustrate the concepts;
• to top it off, they should refer to personal experience.

However, the necessity of personal experience could be substituted by something like extreme novelty; on The Art of Memory, there is an example of creating strong mental images.

There is a particularly surprising subchapter (The Grammatical Genius of Adults) in which the author argues that the progress one makes through speaking a language is predictable, almost deterministic. There are also some important ideas around the importance of listening, and comprehending different sounds (as a good example from the book, the difference between “my cat Stan” and “my cat’s tan”). It is now well established that in very early infancy there is a small window of opportunity to tune our ears to the mother language's subtle sounds; however, it is not necessarily so that one cannot learn how to recognize new sounds, and there is a whole chapter dedicated to that.

The PAO system is also introduced as one of the mnemonic tools for grammar structure.