While we provide guidance on what tasks you can complete daily on the app home screen, if you’re looking for additional pointers on what to do on a day-by-day basis, you’ve come to the right place!

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If you’re an Intermediate/Advanced student, skim through this Beginner guide, knowing that you may be jumping past pronunciation and perhaps even past learning/adding simple words. If you’re a beginner, here’s what your first few weeks will look like: 

Day 1

Get oriented & start learning

On your first day, we mostly just want you to get oriented within the app. You’re going to log in, and then answer some simple questions about your current level in your target language (TL) and how comfy you are with your TL’s pronunciation system. 

The Fluent Forever app will show you two main sections:

  • Today’s Tasks: Here, you will find daily suggestions of what to do next.
  • Practice and Learn More: In this section, you will find all the app’s features in the following order:
  1. Words: Here, you will find pre-made word sets to create flashcards with, and you’ll also be able to search for words to create your own fully-customized flashcards.
  2. Everyday Topics: Learn sentences and phrases by topic (Restaurants, Shopping, Socializing, Transportation)
  3. Pronunciation: Here, you can find pronunciation and spelling lessons.
  4. Add Your Content: Create flashcards with your own custom content (sentences/words)
  5. Review Flashcards: Here’s where you review your flashcards. This will push your language into your long-term memory. 🧠
  6. Videos: Our Method: Here, you will find videos about how the app works and how best to use it.
  7. Grammar: Here, you will find pre-made sentence sets to create flashcards with, and you can also search for other sentences to make customized flashcards.

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Every day, you’ll want to alternate between building flashcards and reviewing those flashcards in the Review Flashcards section.

Let’s head over to the Pronunciation section. If you said you were a beginner in your TL, you’ll see the list of all available pronunciation lessons. For today, we’ll start with Lesson 1.

  1. At the top of this section, there’s going to be a video to watch. On your first day, that’s an intro video – watch it to get started.
  2. Tap on Ear Training 1 and listen to two words. Replay the recordings until you can just barely hear the differences between those words. Hit Test yourself on the difference to practice the sounds you have just heard. Then listen to the next pair of words. Do this until your Ear Training is complete.
  3. You can then watch the rest of the videos in Lesson 1 to complete it and unlock Lesson 2. 🎉

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Now head over to Review Flashcards.

  1. Tap the Review Flashcards button.
  2. You’ll see a flashcard. Answer the question out loud or in your head (feel free to guess if you don’t know), then tap to reveal the answer. If you got it right, swipe right; if not, swipe left. Throughout this process, when you hear a recording, repeat it out loud if you can. That will help ingrain the words. If you’re on public transport, it will convince folks around you that you’re slightly crazy, and they’ll give you extra seating room. Repeat until you’re done with all the flashcards in this set
  3.  Nice job! You’re done for today!
  • (Optional) If you have extra time, tap Review Next Flashcards on the Nice job! screen to keep doing review cycles until you have 0 cards left to study.
  • (Optional) If you have a bunch of extra time, head over to the Pronunciation section, where you will find all the pronunciation lessons available. Do as many as you like!

Days 2–7

Keep at it

At first, just keep focusing on pronunciation, following the steps we laid out for Day 1. Whenever you have extra time, follow the optional steps. If you’re ever not sure what to do next, go to the Today’s Tasks section on the Home screen. We’ll bounce you to the Pronunciation or the Review Flashcards section, as is appropriate for where you’re at.

Day 8ish

Add simple words to the mix

If you’re a beginner, then your top priority should be getting through all those pronunciation lessons. But by Day 8ish, your ears are going to start feeling accustomed to your new language’s sounds, and you’re likely ready to throw in a few simple vocab flashcards. This will add some extra variety to your reviews (more fun = more retention), and it will also get you familiar with more of our app.

So today, we’ll mix things up a bit.

Practice and Learn More section:

  1. Start with Pronunciation, as normal. Do a Lesson (if you still have some left).
  2. Now tap the Words section. You’ll see sets, each containing a list of several words.

    a. If you see a word that you know, swipe right and tap Know It.
    b. If you see a word that you don’t care to know, swipe right and tap Skip it.
    c. If you see a word that you’d like to learn, tap on it!

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     3. Pick 1–4 images for your word. Tap on the + if you’d like to perform a custom search. Then hit Add Images.
     4. On the Flashcard Preview screen, you can preview the cards you’re about to create. This section will get more elaborate when you’re learning grammar. Tap on Add to Deck to add them.
     5. Repeat a few more times. Once you get rid of all words, you will move on to the next set, so you can keep doing this for a loooong time. But for today, just try a few of them.

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Review Flashcards section:

No changes. Do your reviews as normal!

Days 9–21

Keep at it

Keep up with your pronunciation lessons until you’re all done with them. That’ll happen sometime between Day 9 (if you’re learning one of the simpler sound systems, and you’ve been religiously doing 4 pronunciation lessons every day) and Day 45 (if you’re learning one of the more complex languages and/or just doing 0–2 pronunciation lessons per day).

When you don’t have a lot of time, just do a review session and a pronunciation lesson or two.

When you have extra time, here are your priorities:

  • Take care of extra review sessions. These are going to provide the most value for your time.
  • Do extra pronunciation lessons. These will push you through pronunciation faster, but they’ll also give you extra review sessions to do.
  • Learn some basic vocabulary.

Day 22ish

Finish pronunciation and try out grammar

As mentioned above, you’ll be finishing up with your pronunciation lessons at some point during Day 9–45. For the purposes of this guide, let’s say that happens on Day 22. Once you’re done with Pronunciation, your main focus will be on Words, where you’ll be learning simple vocabulary). Learn a couple of sets per day (around 10 words). If you have extra time, learn an extra set or two.

If you’re feeling extra adventurous, you can try out the Grammar section:

  1. You’ll see a list of sets, similar to the Words section. You can swipe on any word if you Know It or want to Skip It. Tap on a word you’d like to learn.
  2. Now you’ll see some example sentences with various difficulty levels. Choose the sentence you’d like to learn. If you’re a beginner, you’ll probably want to stick to the easy sentences for now.
  3. Choose 1–4 pictures for your word. If you tap on the + button, you’ll find a much more sophisticated image search engine that allows you to search for any combination of words from your sentence with just a few taps. Or, you can search for word combinations from the English translation of your sentence. If your chosen word is abstract (e.g. “by” in “My homework was eaten by my dog”), then choose pictures that fit the story in the sentence (e.g. a guilty-looking dog or a chewed notebook).

On the Flashcard Preview screen, you have up to three types of flashcards you can create. You can preview what they look like by enabling them and then tapping on them at the top of the screen. Make whichever ones you think will be interesting to you. We’d suggest the following:

  • Vocab: Always do.
  • Word Order: Only do this if the word you’re learning is in a surprising place in the sentence (e.g. “Norbert es un perro lindo,” or “Norbert is a dog cute”)
  • Dictionary Form: This teaches you when a word (e.g. “teaches”) is different from its dictionary form (e.g. “to teach”). Skip it whenever the dictionary form feels obvious to you.


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      5. Once you’ve made your first flashcards, you’ll have the option of learning more words from the sentence. Say yes. Then swipe on words from the sentence to mark them as known, tap on ones you’d like to learn, and make more flashcards until you’ve really consumed all the meaty bits from the sentence.

      6. Tap on I’m done with this sentence and do a review session.

Day 23 and onward

Keep at it!

At this point, you’ve tried out all the basic tools in the app. If you haven’t finished Pronunciation yet, finish that first. Then, you’ll have to choose between whether to focus on Words or Grammar. We recommend moving to Grammar and staying there as soon as it feels comfortable. For some folks, that may be immediate, and for others, that may take several weeks of working on simple words. This isn’t a race, so choose the path that feels most comfortable for you. That said, do move on to Grammar at some point because it links all your words together and brings life into your language.

Final step

Where do the tutors come in?

There’s a phenomenon Gabe discusses in his book relating to personal connections. The short explanation of that phenomenon is this:

MY DOG’S NAME IS NORBERT ← This sentence is great for learning words like “dog” and “name,” and even abstract stuff like “is” and “my.”

MY DOG’S NAME IS [Your dog’s actual name] ← You can memorize information from this sentence 50–100% faster than the first sentence, and you’ll retain it for 50–100% longer.

In the Grammar section of the app, you’re choosing from our pre-made example sentences. Those sentences are as high quality as we can make them, but they can never be as good as a sentence that relates directly to you. So, if you’re going to use a tutor, you could spend that time chatting about random stuff, and that’s always a great use of your time. But a much more efficient use of your tutoring time is to have your tutor help you create personalized example sentences for the words you’d like to learn (i.e., “My dog’s name is [your dog’s actual name].”) You can even add a picture of your own dog to your flashcard, further enhancing your ability to remember the word!

Fluent Forever Live Coaching

We have been working on our Live Coaching program for a long time, and it’s finally ready! Our users can now make their own example sentences and collaborate on those sentences with a tutor. If you have lots of extra time, try out chatting with one of our tutors and see if you can find someone who’s a good fit for you. Chatting with native speakers is always a good use of your time, particularly when you actually like your tutor. Then, before you know it, you’ll already have a native speaker friend that you know well, and you’ll be able to maximize the efficiency of each tutoring session.

We currently have the following languages available for Live Coaching: Castilian Spanish, Latin American Spanish, French, Japanese, Italian, Mandarin, Russian, Korean, and Portuguese (Brazil).

You can find all the information about our wonderful Live Coaching programs here.

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