8 ms·

How to learn a new language in 90 days

23 points by oscardelben 16y ago

majak 16y ago
I didn't realise it wasn't about learning new computer language until the 4th paragraph:-). But I think these points are also valid for learning new computer language.
Maro 16y ago
AAAh I'm such a nerd. I read the whole think before I realized it's about learning a new human language, not programming language. I thought he's going to make some ingenious connection to programming languages at some point.
riffraff 16y ago
"how to learn <programming language> in <short time> days", and "how to lose <weight> in <short time>" are commonly considered dumb slogans. Apparently, though, the intertubes are still very keen on "how to learn <natural language> in <short time>". If someone has a good explanation or theory I'd be really interested in learning it.
- iheartmemcache 16y ago
  Peter Norvig on this topic: http://norvig.com/21-days.html http://norvig.com/21-days.html
DrJokepu 16y ago
One thing that is often gets unmentioned in "how-to-learn-x-in-y-days" discussions (whether x is a programming language or a "human" language) is that learning an (n+1)th language is a lot easier than learning your first (or in the case of human languages second) language. Not just because you discover patterns but also because you sharpen your methodologies - with human languages you'll know which is the best way for you to get a vocabulary (reading books? watching television? memorozing the dictionary?) etc., just like with a computer language you'll know which approach works the best for you (write a game? solve the problems on Euler Project? read the specification? or a book? or a combination of these?). Point is, if you know 10 programming languages well, you can definitely learn your 11th programming language in 90 days. Just like if you speak English, French, Spanish, Latin and German, you'll find learning Japanese a lot easier even though it doesn't resemble these languages at all.
- ErrantX 16y ago
  A friend of mine is learning his 12th and 13th languages right now; he'd probably call bunk on you're last paragraph. Or, rather, it is a lot easier to learn extra languages. But 90 days is not really possible if you want to learn the language to any useful degree. Certainly picking up Japanese would be hard in 90 days if all you had was romance languages. (note; there is a subset case of this where you can pick up a language that quickly by living in the country and being forced to learn it)
  - DrJokepu 16y ago
    Yes, for "human" languages, it is probably more than 90 days. More like a year or two. (Learning a second language well can easily take 6-7 years.) I meant 90 days for programming languages. In my experience with foreign languages, first you struggle for a while and one day it unexpectedly "kicks in", suddenly you're able to comfortably use the language albeit not perfectly yet while the week before you was struggling to form simpler non-trivial sentences. Depending on your experience with foreign languages and the time you spend on learning the language, this can take from half a year to several years.
- splat 16y ago
  This is very true, and I think it's one of the reasons that Esperanto works so well as one's first second language. (I recall seeing one study where a group of students who learned Esperanto for one year and then French for three years ended up knowing French better than a group of students who studied French exclusively for four years straight. Not conclusive by any means, but suggestive.) By eliminating the complicated grammatical idiosyncrasies of natural languages, someone learning Esperanto can focus on learning how to learn a foreign language. If you've never learned a second language before, it's easy to memorize vocabulary and obscure grammatical rules, but it's extremely hard to make the transition from reading prose word-by-word to reading it fluently.
  - tokenadult 16y ago
    it's one of the reasons that Esperanto works so well as one's first second language. The parent comment to your comment expressed the idea that ANY previous language aids learning the next language. This has been my experience, after learning elements of about a dozen languages, with proficiency in Chinese such that I can support myself through interpreting Chinese into English or the other way round, or translating from Chinese into English. For scientifically based information on Esperanto, see http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/ http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
quant18 16y ago
The whole "once I land in a foreign country I'm going to stop speaking my native language" advice is only applicable to people with very specific personality types and life situations. To the rest of us, it's not inspirational, it's demoralising to the extent that many people living abroad simply never acquire any good command of their host society's language. You can easily find American bankers in Shanghai who speak poor Chinese, or Korean shopowners in Sydney who speak poor English, or whatever. And you can deride them as lazy immigrants who refuse to assimilate, or arrogant expats who are only there because they failed in New York, or whatever. Or you can try to help them. The best advice I ever heard for learning foreign languages is: treat your brain the way it likes to be treated. This doesn't mean being lazy, but it does mean not putting yourself in situations that go against your personality type. And it means using learning methods that don't continually expose you to a sense of failure you hate feeling. Because otherwise your brain will just hate you later for putting it under stress, and take revenge by shutting down. That means you give yourself the kind of intellectual, social, or physical stimulation that you need to feel happy during the time that you do devote to your target language, and ignore the people who think you are "stupid" for doing this. Read a book in your native language, talk with people in your mother tongue, eat food from your homeland every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This is doubly important if you are learning your target language not because you LOVE LANGUAGES (like 100% of people who write language learning blogs) but because you need it for specific purposes. And finally, if you are the kind of person who is very sensitive to embarassment, then you do not have an "inhibition" to be "overcome", you have an extremely good system for detecting when you are violating social norms --- and knowing social norms is just as important as conjugations & vocabulary. No one wants to communicate with a guy who is fluent in their language but rude and uncouth by their cultural standards. Don't deliberately try to suppress your embarassment just so you can get 10 minutes of horrid conversation practise with the impatient cashier at your local supermarket while the line builds up behind you.
c00p3r 16y ago
It might be not so difficult to learn Spanish if you know French or English. Try to learn some language from the different family (non Latin), like Hindi, Nepali, Tibetan, or even Japanese at least in one year. =) btw, to know a language doesn't mean that you've memorized some basic phrases and most used words. I, for example, can read and translate on the fly to my native language some scientific books on subjects with which I'm familiar, but speaking and writing are extremely difficult to me. It is already an issue of the age.
- dragonquest 16y ago
  Not to nitpick, but I think you meant Hindi (the language) as opposed to Hindu (the religion). :)
  - c00p3r 16y ago
    Thanks! =)
ecaradec 16y ago
"How I Learned French in One Year" : http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/29/15258/287 http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/29/15258/287 is a very insighful article on how to learn language without going to the country. Advices are not specific to french. The best advice I retained is that commute time are your friends when learning a language.
- c00p3r 16y ago
  There are more self-praise than real stuff. To learn French to appropriate level, that native speakers could understand you without a pain takes a whole life, especially when started not so young. It is just a cognitive stuff - it is very difficult to distinguish where the one vowel ends and next one starts when you're listening to a native speaker and almost impossible to articulate correctly such difficult and beautifully sounded language if you started to learn after 25-30 years old.
  - ecaradec 16y ago
    I'm french, so I may miss in what way the language is difficult. I agree, there is a lot to learn to speak a language correctly. I was very average at english at school, but I improved by reading and recently listening everyday. I'm not going to write novels, I'm interested at communicating with others and as long as I can do that, I'm fine.
GiraffeNecktie 16y ago
In 90 days, you can certainly memorize X number of useful words and phrases. If you are actually living in an immersive environment (and you have a reasonably outgoing personality) you'd probably become pretty fluent within the small domain of that X number of words and phrases. But as for mastering a language, there's no situation, tool or technique that will do more than get you started on your journey within three months. Having foreign words and phrases available in your memory is very different than having those words on your tongue as part of your ingrained language. It's a bit like the difference between off-line tape backup and RAM. Yes the data is there somewhere and you can get to it eventually but you probably can't pull it up fast enough to be useful.

23 points by oscardelben 16y ago

majak 16y ago

I didn't realise it wasn't about learning new computer language until the 4th paragraph:-). But I think these points are also valid for learning new computer language.

Maro 16y ago

AAAh I'm such a nerd. I read the whole think before I realized it's about learning a new human language, not programming language. I thought he's going to make some ingenious connection to programming languages at some point.

riffraff 16y ago

"how to learn <programming language> in <short time> days", and "how to lose <weight> in <short time>" are commonly considered dumb slogans. Apparently, though, the intertubes are still very keen on "how to learn <natural language> in <short time>". If someone has a good explanation or theory I'd be really interested in learning it.

iheartmemcache 16y ago
Peter Norvig on this topic: http://norvig.com/21-days.html http://norvig.com/21-days.html

DrJokepu 16y ago

One thing that is often gets unmentioned in "how-to-learn-x-in-y-days" discussions (whether x is a programming language or a "human" language) is that learning an (n+1)th language is a lot easier than learning your first (or in the case of human languages second) language. Not just because you discover patterns but also because you sharpen your methodologies - with human languages you'll know which is the best way for you to get a vocabulary (reading books? watching television? memorozing the dictionary?) etc., just like with a computer language you'll know which approach works the best for you (write a game? solve the problems on Euler Project? read the specification? or a book? or a combination of these?). Point is, if you know 10 programming languages well, you can definitely learn your 11th programming language in 90 days. Just like if you speak English, French, Spanish, Latin and German, you'll find learning Japanese a lot easier even though it doesn't resemble these languages at all.

ErrantX 16y ago
A friend of mine is learning his 12th and 13th languages right now; he'd probably call bunk on you're last paragraph. Or, rather, it is a lot easier to learn extra languages. But 90 days is not really possible if you want to learn the language to any useful degree. Certainly picking up Japanese would be hard in 90 days if all you had was romance languages. (note; there is a subset case of this where you can pick up a language that quickly by living in the country and being forced to learn it)
- DrJokepu 16y ago
  Yes, for "human" languages, it is probably more than 90 days. More like a year or two. (Learning a second language well can easily take 6-7 years.) I meant 90 days for programming languages. In my experience with foreign languages, first you struggle for a while and one day it unexpectedly "kicks in", suddenly you're able to comfortably use the language albeit not perfectly yet while the week before you was struggling to form simpler non-trivial sentences. Depending on your experience with foreign languages and the time you spend on learning the language, this can take from half a year to several years.
splat 16y ago
This is very true, and I think it's one of the reasons that Esperanto works so well as one's first second language. (I recall seeing one study where a group of students who learned Esperanto for one year and then French for three years ended up knowing French better than a group of students who studied French exclusively for four years straight. Not conclusive by any means, but suggestive.) By eliminating the complicated grammatical idiosyncrasies of natural languages, someone learning Esperanto can focus on learning how to learn a foreign language. If you've never learned a second language before, it's easy to memorize vocabulary and obscure grammatical rules, but it's extremely hard to make the transition from reading prose word-by-word to reading it fluently.
- tokenadult 16y ago
  it's one of the reasons that Esperanto works so well as one's first second language. The parent comment to your comment expressed the idea that ANY previous language aids learning the next language. This has been my experience, after learning elements of about a dozen languages, with proficiency in Chinese such that I can support myself through interpreting Chinese into English or the other way round, or translating from Chinese into English. For scientifically based information on Esperanto, see http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/ http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

quant18 16y ago

The whole "once I land in a foreign country I'm going to stop speaking my native language" advice is only applicable to people with very specific personality types and life situations. To the rest of us, it's not inspirational, it's demoralising to the extent that many people living abroad simply never acquire any good command of their host society's language. You can easily find American bankers in Shanghai who speak poor Chinese, or Korean shopowners in Sydney who speak poor English, or whatever. And you can deride them as lazy immigrants who refuse to assimilate, or arrogant expats who are only there because they failed in New York, or whatever. Or you can try to help them. The best advice I ever heard for learning foreign languages is: treat your brain the way it likes to be treated. This doesn't mean being lazy, but it does mean not putting yourself in situations that go against your personality type. And it means using learning methods that don't continually expose you to a sense of failure you hate feeling. Because otherwise your brain will just hate you later for putting it under stress, and take revenge by shutting down. That means you give yourself the kind of intellectual, social, or physical stimulation that you need to feel happy during the time that you do devote to your target language, and ignore the people who think you are "stupid" for doing this. Read a book in your native language, talk with people in your mother tongue, eat food from your homeland every day for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. This is doubly important if you are learning your target language not because you LOVE LANGUAGES (like 100% of people who write language learning blogs) but because you need it for specific purposes. And finally, if you are the kind of person who is very sensitive to embarassment, then you do not have an "inhibition" to be "overcome", you have an extremely good system for detecting when you are violating social norms --- and knowing social norms is just as important as conjugations & vocabulary. No one wants to communicate with a guy who is fluent in their language but rude and uncouth by their cultural standards. Don't deliberately try to suppress your embarassment just so you can get 10 minutes of horrid conversation practise with the impatient cashier at your local supermarket while the line builds up behind you.

c00p3r 16y ago

It might be not so difficult to learn Spanish if you know French or English. Try to learn some language from the different family (non Latin), like Hindi, Nepali, Tibetan, or even Japanese at least in one year. =) btw, to know a language doesn't mean that you've memorized some basic phrases and most used words. I, for example, can read and translate on the fly to my native language some scientific books on subjects with which I'm familiar, but speaking and writing are extremely difficult to me. It is already an issue of the age.

dragonquest 16y ago
Not to nitpick, but I think you meant Hindi (the language) as opposed to Hindu (the religion). :)
- c00p3r 16y ago
  Thanks! =)

ecaradec 16y ago

"How I Learned French in One Year" : http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/29/15258/287 http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/29/15258/287 is a very insighful article on how to learn language without going to the country. Advices are not specific to french. The best advice I retained is that commute time are your friends when learning a language.

c00p3r 16y ago
There are more self-praise than real stuff. To learn French to appropriate level, that native speakers could understand you without a pain takes a whole life, especially when started not so young. It is just a cognitive stuff - it is very difficult to distinguish where the one vowel ends and next one starts when you're listening to a native speaker and almost impossible to articulate correctly such difficult and beautifully sounded language if you started to learn after 25-30 years old.
- ecaradec 16y ago
  I'm french, so I may miss in what way the language is difficult. I agree, there is a lot to learn to speak a language correctly. I was very average at english at school, but I improved by reading and recently listening everyday. I'm not going to write novels, I'm interested at communicating with others and as long as I can do that, I'm fine.

GiraffeNecktie 16y ago

In 90 days, you can certainly memorize X number of useful words and phrases. If you are actually living in an immersive environment (and you have a reasonably outgoing personality) you'd probably become pretty fluent within the small domain of that X number of words and phrases. But as for mastering a language, there's no situation, tool or technique that will do more than get you started on your journey within three months. Having foreign words and phrases available in your memory is very different than having those words on your tongue as part of your ingrained language. It's a bit like the difference between off-line tape backup and RAM. Yes the data is there somewhere and you can get to it eventually but you probably can't pull it up fast enough to be useful.