Ep 60 Gabriel Wyner on how to train the accent first when learning a language

Gabriel Wyner is an author, opera singer, and polyglot based in Los Angeles, CA. After not getting anywhere in 5 years of high school language classes, he reached fluency in German in 14 weeks with the help of the immersive Middlebury Language Schools. As a result, he fell in love with the process of language learning. Searching for ways to bring the immersion experience into the home, he began to develop a system that rapidly builds fluency in short, daily sessions. In 2010, his efforts paid off. He learned French to fluency in 5 months, and then Russian in 10 months. He recently funded a Kickstarter to develop a language learning app, about which Business Insider reported“This Could Be One Of The Best Language-Learning Apps We've Ever Seen.” His book on language learning – “Fluent Forever: How to learn a language fast and never forget it” In this episode we talk about the process Gabriel went through before finally arriving at this method of learning languages. We talk about how he cheated his way into his current life and method learning languages. He recommends looking through the google images for the words that you are learning that way you learn the actual meaning instead of just a translation. This can have drastic effects sometimes as the associations can be vastly different. Finally he has very good advice for learning an accent such as I will need to do while learning Hindi in India. His joke "There is a costume party at a college and there's two germans exchange students and the host invites the students to dress as emotions, so one comes in blue as sadness and one comes in red as anger, and both germans come naked, the first one with his penis in a pudding jar and says I am fucking disgusted, and the other one with his penis in a bear says and I am deep in dis bear"