I’m learning German for a trip this spring. Last week, I found out about the book, Fluent Forever [affiliate link] by Gabriel Wyner, which I really love. He also has an app with the same name—it’s fine, but very buggy. It’s hard to recommend the app, but I am convinced his process is going to work for me, and the app is better than trying to his process without it. I bought it after trying it out—despite the bugs. If you read the book, and want to do the process, then you should consider the app.

One reason Wyner’s process resonates with me is because it is centered on Spaced Repetition flash cards, which I already use for other things. I use Anki for spaced repetition practice, but his process isn’t easy to implement in Anki.

Wyner recommends building very custom flashcards that don’t use translation. So, I wouldn’t put an English word on one side and the German translation on the other. Instead, he recommends using an image in place of an English word. He wants you to associate the new language with an image so that you map the word directly to a concept, and don’t have to mentally translate through your native language. Since, I am thinking about how to Apply Program Language Learning Techniques to Learn a Foreign Language, and I never translate between programming languages, this makes sense to me.

Each card in his system is personal to you. He doesn’t supply pre-made cards—he wants you to build them. Building them is part of the process. For example, when I made the card “Großmutter,” I spent at least 10 minutes looking at pictures of my grandmother before I found the perfect one. To represent a concept, sometimes I need to combine several images. That time helps cement the concept before I have even tested my memory with the card. Also, I know what I mean by the image—this would be hard to do with someone else’s images.

The Fluent Forever app helps you build cards, implements a spaced-repetition algorithm, speaks the words (to teach pronunciation), and has many other helpful features. Like I said, if you want to learn this way, the app is better than trying to replicate it with Anki or paper (although the book does show you how to do it). It’s also cheaper than the popular language learning apps. The book, though, is worth a read if you want to learn a language.

Yesterday, I wrote about how I use Swimming as Meditation. The extreme solitude afforded by the sensory depravation and the rhythmic repetition of strokes, kicks and breaths keep my mind in the present. Usually I try to think about nothing, but sometimes I decide to use the time to solve a problem.

I start the swimming session with a question. I will keep asking myself the question over and over. It’s similar to Natalie Goldberg’s suggestion in Writing Down the Bones to start your writing practice by repeatedly finishing the sentence “I remember…” She is using this as a prompt to keep you writing. I am using a question as a prompt to generate ideas.

One I use often is “What should I blog about today?” The last time I swam, since I am trying to learn German, I asked myself to name German words I know. The questions that work best can be repeatedly asked and answered—meaning, they prompt me to make a list. It’s hard to have a complex string of thoughts that I can remember without being able to write anything down.

Because I can’t write them down, if I have any good ideas, I have to just keep repeating them to myself until I am done swimming. I try to come up with mnemonics that will make sure I remember them. I number them and incorporate them into my stroke counting. That’s usually good enough to keep it top of mind until I can get to my phone.

It seems like it might be hard to swim and think, but actually it’s easier. If I am doing a 30 minute swim, then I will definitely think for 30 minutes. There is literally nothing else to do.

I don’t have a regular mediation practice, but I’ve started to think of my swimming sessions as one. When I go into the pool with this frame, it gives the meditation more purpose and the exercise extra meaning. I have intrinsic motivation to do each, and it gets combined.

Before swimming, most of my meditation has been guided by an app. I learned how to do it with Headspace, and then moved onto the Apple Watch Breathe app for lighter guidance. But, I do need some prompt to direct my thoughts. Swimming has that built-in because I need to refocus on the parts of my technique constantly.

Whenever I notice that my thoughts have drifted, I count my strokes, kicks, or breaths—or concentrate on their polyrhythmic interplay. I have a cadence of each I am trying to meet, so counting them makes it more likely that I will do it correctly. I also have a target stroke count per lap, so counting is already a part of my swimming. It incidentally keeps me in a meditative zone.

It also helps that the pool is a sensory depravation chamber. I wear non-corrective goggles and earplugs, so my vision and hearing are dulled to start, and being in the water gives me nothing to see or hear anyway. It’s the only workout I do without any distraction, and so I have been avoiding underwater headphones to keep it that way. This may be the only waking part of my day with extreme/literal solitude.

I picked up swimming again because it’s the central metaphor of my book on tech debt. This meditation frame also applies to coding. When I’m in a coding flow, I must stay present to extend it. Like swimming, the interplay of the purpose of my work and enjoyment of meditation makes me want to keep going.

I’m an “expert” in learning programming languages. Just counting languages that I have worked with professionally for at least 5 years, I know more than a dozen and I am 4 years into adding TypeScript to that list. But, I only speak and read one non-programming language, English, proficiently.

Learning traditional languages has not been easy for me. I learned French in school just enough to pass my statewide tests and didn’t retain enough for practical use. I tried DuoLingo for Spanish a few years ago, but felt like I got caught in a rut of naming farm animals.

But now I am planning on going to Germany for vacation this year, and I would like to know more than I do now. I know a little tourist-level German from having to travel there for work regularly in the early 2000’s. Not enough for even a simple interaction, though

Since nothing I have done has ever worked, I want to do something different this time—perhaps building on my programming language learning experience. The easy thing to see is that put serious time and energy behind learning a traditional language. I don’t have that problem with learning programming languages. I usually spend several hours a day using them when I want to learn them. Also, I have external motivation: when I got a .NET job with 0 .NET experience, I needed to learn C# fast, but I was paid to do it.

My motivation will be to have fun experiences when I am in Germany. Most of the time I will be able to use my phone to translate written text (e.g. a menu). If I need to know something quickly, it will likely be because something is being spoken to me. I might want to interact a little better with people in hotels, restaurants, and other tourist attractions (where taking out my phone would be awkward). This means more of a focus on listening exercises.

Finally, when I learn a programming language, I usually start to make something practical early into it. I can do this because I can program already, but for novices, I recommend starting with whatever canonical language book was written by the designer and to generate focused exercises that use only what you know. I’m a novice, so that’s the approach that I think I should take.

So, here’s the skeleton of my plan

1. Allocate serious time to it.
2. Convert some of my random YouTube and podcast consumption to German audio content.
3. Find or generate exercises beyond DuoLingo so that I can practice remembering more vocabulary.