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We arrived in the small college town we still call home on 14 July 2004, twenty years ago today.

Charlotte Brontë and Gabriel Wyner on Pronunciation and Efficient Language Learning

Notice the emphasis on (1) conversation, (2) memorizing texts not just isolated vocabulary, and (3) pronunciation in this passage from Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Jane Eyre:

Fortunately I had had the advantage of being taught French by a French lady; and as I had always made a point of conversing with Madame Pierrot, as often as I could, and had, besides, during the last seven years, learnt a portion of French by heart daily—applying myself to take pains with my accent, and imitating as closely as possible the pronunciation of my teacher—I had acquired a certain degree of readiness and correctness in the language, and was not likely to be much at a loss with Mademoiselle Adela. - Jane Eyre (Oxford World Classics), 102 

Polyglot Gabriel Wyner has “learn pronunciation first” as the first in his list of “three keys to language learning.” Why?

• “[W]hen you’re not sure about the way your language sounds, you’re stuck learning two languages instead of just one” (54).
• “If you can build a gut instinct about pronunciation, then every new word you read will automatically find its way into your ears and your mouth, and every word you hear will bolster your reading comprehension. You’ll understand more, you’ll learn faster, and you’ll spare yourself the hunt for broken words” (57)—words that we think are “pronounced one way, but [that are] actually pronounced a different way. These words can’t be shared between the written language and the spoken language, and as a result, they break up our little circle of friends” (55).
• Quotations from Gabriel Wyner, Fluent Forever: How to Learn Any Language Fast and Never Forget It (New York: Harmony, 2014).

Substitute your preferred dead language (Greek, Hebrew, Latin) for French, and carry on.