We just came across an interesting Kickstarter campaign, Fluent Forever. Fluent Forever is a new take on language learning and education that focuses on pronunciation. The project was created by Gabriel Wyner, an opera singer. As opera is sung in Italian, French, German, English, and Russian, Wyner sought to learn these languages fluently. What he found in his quest for fluency led directly to the creation of his new learning method. According to Wyner: “I started reading books and blogs and whatever else I could find to figure out what methods existed for learning languages faster, and what I found surprised me; there are a number of incredibly powerful language learning methods out there, but no one seemed to be putting them together.”
Wyner has effectively combined all of the four main language teaching/learning styles into one, all-encompassing method. In his own words:
The greatest challenge in learning a foreign language is the challenge of memory. With thousands of words and grammar rules to remember, you need all the help you can get to retain what you learn. This is where an early focus on pronunciation comes in: if you look into the science of memory, you’ll discover that it’s much harder to remember words you can’t pronounce well. And one of the reasons that foreign languages can be tricky is that they’re full of hard-to-pronounce, hard-to-memorize words. You can eliminate that challenge by training your ears from the very beginning… Learning accurate pronunciation takes two main steps: first, you’ll need to train your ears to hear the new sounds of your target language, and second, you’ll need to train your mouth to pronounce them.
Wyner turned his method into a book (available in August 2014) and took to Kickstarter to fund the production of software that utilizes the new method. Essentially, the software component of Fluent Forever is an app that can train your ears to hear the pronunciation of a foreign language in 2 weeks, and thereby make it much easier to learn a language to fluency. Wyner also offers a huge selection of resources and video tutorials on the Fluent Forever website.
The campaign was fully funded in just over two days, and is, at the time of writing, 540% funded. Here is a video explaining the forever fluent method in more detail:
