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The Best Method to Master a Foreign Language, Guaranteed
- ugh 16y agoI blame the web for understanding (writing?) English as good as I do. I dabbled along in school, getting a lot of Cs, being not really all that bad but also not really all that great in my English classes. Then came the web. The German speaking part of the web to me seemed utterly boring, nearly all of the interesting stuff was happening on English websites. The cool thing was that I could just read English, certainly with some difficulty at first, but something I learned in school actually proved to be useful in the real world. I read quite a lot on the web and suddenly something snapped. I never again had to learn anything for my English classes again, no vocabulary, no grammar and the As just kept rolling in. Writing essays, reading texts and discussing them was fun. (I even managed to get a Cambridge Certificate in Advanced English [1] – grade A – without any preparation on my part.) It’s the strangest thing – I started to ‘feel’ English like I ‘feel’ German. Constructing sentences with the right grammar turned from a painstaking conscious process into something automatic and unconscious. That’s not entirely a good thing, though. I cannot feel something I don’t care about and I really don’t care about commas, which is why I suck at placing commas in English as well as in German. Besides commas there are also other problems with this method of learning. Since I just stopped rote learning of vocabulary at some point and picked up words as I read more and more on the web my vocabulary is extremely detailed when it comes to some topics and lacking when it comes to other topics. It’s basically badly deformed. Don’t try to talk with me about food or cooking. I bet that only a few trips to supermarkets in English speaking countries could correct that but I have regrettably never been to any such supermarket. Now, three years after I left school, I also really fear for my ability to speak English. In school we spoke English five days a week for at least thirty minutes every day. I feel like preserving this ability is really hard. Listening, conversely, is no problem. I watch tons of English stuff on the web and at this point understand pretty much everything you could throw at me. Ah, and I should maybe mention that writing comments here is my humble attempt to preserve my writing abilities. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_in_Advanced_English http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_in_Advanced_English
- js2 16y ago> I blame the web for understanding (writing?) English as good as I do. s/good/well/ http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/good.html http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/good.html http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/good-versus-well.aspx http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/good-versus-well.aspx :)
- ugh 16y agoI feared walking into a trap like that. I should have listened to the words of the great thinker Tracy Jordan: “Nah-uh. Superman does good, you’re doing well. You need to study your Grammar, son.” :) That said, those little quirks are another problem with feeling yourself into a language. I was constantly misusing the German „wie“ – “like” – when making comparisons. I would say something like „Pasta ist besser wie Pizza!“ (“Pasta is better like Pizza!”), not „Pasta ist besser als Pizza!“ (“Pasta is better than Pizza!”) because it just sounded correct to my ears. I would never ever misuse “like” and “than” in English but I quite happily confused their German equivalents for quite some time. Which made a lot of people squirm and caused them visible pain so I dropped it. That in itself wasn’t all that easy. Since no automatic red flag was raised when I misused “wie” I consciously had to search everything I said for “wie” and consciously detect whether I used it correctly. Which, in the beginning, was quite hard. I would blurt out a sentence with a blatant misuse, pause a second and hastily add “Oh! ‘Als’ not ‘wie’! ‘Als‘ not ‘wie’!” But I was successful in the end.
- gahahaha 16y agoRe: Wie For Norwegians learning German we have a similar problem. The Norwegian "som" can be translated into "wie", "als", "der", "die", "das", welcher", "welches" or "welche".
- barry-cotter 16y agoAt a guess you're from S. Germany right? Ich habe gesessen oder Ich bin gesessen? I would be very, very grateful if you could email me (barry.p.cotter@gmail.com). I just moved to Germany and want to find out about doing vaguely computery or programming Praktika or news.yc equivalents in German.
- pook 16y agoMind you, the Korean loves America. The Korean practically writes a love song to America every chance he has. But there are certain things about contemporary America drives the Korean crazy, and this is one of them: the idea that the process of learning is somehow supposed to be fun. Just drop it. Forget it. What is fun is the result of learning – the infinite amount of fun when you finally put the finished product to use. And truly, that applies to second language acquisition as well as anything else. Your horizon will expand beyond the limit of your imagination. You will gain perspectives that you couldn’t have even dreamed of. Don’t be a whiny bitch. Your sacrifice will be worthwhile. This should be shouted, at top volume, to everyone entering university. Great advice.
- jodrellblank 16y agoI suppose you learned everything you know about Emacs by rote memorization and repetition of the manual, and absolutely no exploratory playfulness? I suppose the gripe I have is not "wrong; humans can learn languages by immersion!" but "why the societal crosslink between deliberate learning, and not-fun?". Is there no way to learn 30,000 words by any motivation other than fearing for your life from a disappointed father? The line blurs more when he says "Immersion doesn't work" then describes his learning method which is ... (wait for it) ... completely submerging himself in the language he is learning for hours and hours, reading it, writing it, speaking it, paying attention to it - all in a country and in a school where everyone spoke it ... immersing himself in it. I cite: http://www.fluentin3months.com/studying-will-never-help/ http://www.fluentin3months.com/studying-will-never-help/ """Studying will never help you speak a language, but (as long as you do it right) studying will help you speak a language better. Most people don’t see the difference here. That one crucial word changes absolutely everything you need to take into consideration. If you already speak but your conjugations aren’t great or you need to quickly increase your store of vocabulary about a specific topic, then by all means study. Need to pass a test in school? Sure, study for it. When the goal is to pass a test or improve your grasp on something specific, then study is the way to go. But if you don’t speak the language confidently right now, then it’s time someone broke this news to you: studying is not the way to get this confidence!""" (But they are aiming at slightly different targets - Benny aims to be conversationally fluent in 3 months, The Korean to gain college level mastery in two years).
- Jun8 16y agoExcellent article! There's no "royal road" to learning a foreign language: (i) You have to be willing to put the time to memorize and (ii) you have to be in an immersive environment with some people who are willing to help you. To be able to do (i), there mist be some large incentive for the outcome. I always thought that two near-monolinguals dating or getting married would be the quickest way to learn a new language, although I never had a chance to test this hypothesis
- mpare 16y ago> I always thought that two near-monolinguals dating or getting married would be the quickest way to learn a new language, although I never had a chance to test this hypothesis They have an expression for this in French: "La meilleure façon d'apprendre une langue est sur l'oreiller" "The best way to learn a language is on the pillow" I saw lots of other exchange students improve their French immensely when they started dating a native. My experience was that having that sort of language partner is nice because they're sympathetic to your mistakes and there's lots of built-in incentive to have more interesting conversations.
- jat850 16y agoI learned French almost entirely by helping raise my (now ex) girlfriend's 6 year old son. Best teacher I could have asked for, and he wasn't even trying to teach me :) She was also very helpful as she was a native French speaker, but fluent in English.
- cwp 16y agoI did this. I lived in Ecuador for a year as a kind of sabbatical (though I'm not an academic.) Before I went I took a 6-week Spanish 101 class so I wouldn't starve, and then just muddled along as best I could. After about 3 months I had the basics down. I could ask for and follow directions, buy stuff, read and write business email, and have a conversation with someone. But socializing was hard - a conversation that involved more than one other person left me wondering what was going on, and I couldn't figure out how to say things fast enough to contribute before the the topic had changed. Also, I didn't consume media like TV or newspapers because it was too much work. Then I started dating an Ecuadorian woman, and my Spanish acquisition just took off, especially when we moved in together. Like the Korean, I put in a tremendous amount of effort, although without flash cards. I did repeat everything over and over, to make sure it stayed in my head. But mostly it was just the endless necessity of communicating on a practical and intimate level about everything. "Where's my blue shirt?" "Why is your friend angry?" "What's this letter from the electric company about?" "When I was a kid, my grandfather gave me a baseball glove for Christmas." "No, I wasn't looking at that other girl." "There is corruption in the U.S., it's just more sophisticated than in Ecuador." The other important thing that happened was that I started watching TV with her. She was really into telenovelas and sketch comedy shows. Let me tell, you telenovelas (spanish soap operas) are awesome for learning the language. First, the characters all have accents that convey their social position, and different novelas are made in different countries. So you get exposed to a lot of variation in pronunciation and vocabulary. On the other hand, this is TV, so everybody enunciates clearly and there's no hemming and hawing. Finally, everything is so dramatic and over-acted that you can tell what's going even without understanding the dialog. I alternated between rolling my eyes and concentrating furiously to catch all the nuances. After a year, I was pretty much fluent in Spanish, though not quite at the level of the Korean's mastery of English. I have an idea of what kind of effort would be required to get to that level, but since I'm not in Ecuador any more, I haven't bothered. My wife and I speak both English and Spanish around the house, but we try to keep it to one language at a time - not always easy. So yeah, marrying a Spanish speaker was an enormous aid to learning the language. I don't know if it was the "quickest," but it was definitely faster than doing it on my own, and much more pleasant. ;-)
- Xurinos 16y agoI have been thinking that math is similar. Little substitutes for simply rote memorizing your basic multiplication tables to be able to multiply. You can remember the relationships between various concepts, and it helps to validate and update your memory, but in the end, it is pattern matching. Rote memorization helps you jump straight from A to B without needing the translation step of C in between.
- huherto 16y agoI can't find the reference. But some time ago there was a post in HN about how different subjects require different strategies. It was written by a big shot AI or Math professor. Probably someone from MIT. I can't quite remember.
- fgf 16y agoI want to read that. Do tell if it comes back to you.
- xiaoma 16y agoThat's a good point. The question is, do you stop at 20*20, or do you continue memorizing products of larger and larger numbers? It's definitely the sort of thing where there's an optimum amount of memorization, past which you get diminishing returns.
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- lmkg 16y agoThe point of immersion is not that it's fun. The point of immersion is that pre-puberty, it's still more effective to 'acquire' languages than 'learn' them. The ability to intake languages organically from the environment degrades as you get older, but it's widely believed that there's a qualitative inflection point around age 13. Before that point, immersion is useful. Three years of Spanish instructions gave me the skill to conjugate verbs on a test. The following one year of light immersion[1] is what made me able to assemble sentences in real-time, and think directly in Spanish without having to mentally translate in and out of English. If you're learning a language at age 16, like the author was, then yes, the most effective way is to smash your face against the brick wall until it crumbles. 10,000 hours, as they say. What I'm curious about, for personal reasons, is whether learning additional languages early takes away any of the face-smashing in learning additional languages later on. I'm trying to acquire Bulgarian, so I'll get to find out on my own. [1] During our one-hour-a-day class period, we were allowed to chat in class if we did so in Spanish.
- jacquesm 16y ago> What I'm curious about, for personal reasons, is whether learning additional languages early takes away any of the face-smashing in learning additional languages later on. From my own experiene, a definite yes. I learned Polish rather later in life but already had 4 languages under my belt. It went relatively easy, even though I never got the hang of the writing (but then again, there was no need to).
- mirkules 16y agoEnglish is not my native language, but my elementary school taught French since 1st grade and English since 6th. I immigrated to the US at age 12, and now speak both English and my native language fluently without an accent -- as do my friends with a similar background as mine (the ones that immigrated before 13). I think it helps for kids to be exposed to many different languages early on. For example, I never learned to speak French fluently, but because I have some background in a latin-based language, I found it easier to learn Spanish. It's much easier to relate existing words in your vocabulary with new foreign words, than it is to memorize them outright. For example, it's probably easier to learn Russian if you speak Czech already (and to speak it with less of an accent) than it is to learn Korean if you're a Spanish speaker.
- melling 16y agoShameless plug: I wrote an Android app a few months ago to help learn/maintain Spanish. http://www.appbrain.com/app/com.h4labs.free.spanish_vocab http://www.appbrain.com/app/com.h4labs.free.spanish_vocab I've been studying Spanish for several years, including 10 weeks in Guatemala. It's easy to get rusty and I always need a refresher so I wrote this app. Gonna add more grammar and hopefully turn it into a "real" app, including versions for French(started), German, etc.
- tokenadult 16y agoI've learned a bunch of languages. Learning ANY language as second language helps with acquiring the next language. Here are tips I put on the Web for language learners: http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html (Hmm, it's about time to revise that webpage, but the advice is still good.)
- curtis 16y agoI thought this part was interesting: I also needed to be able to listen and speak. To develop speaking and listening, I watched at least 3 hours of television every day. God bless the closed caption, and the endless reruns of The Simpsons, Home Improvement and Full House – I had the caption on, and mouthed the word exactly as they sounded like. I said the difficult words over and over again until I got them right. (It took years to get “girl” and “rhythm” right.) I got into the habit of talking aloud to myself to make sure what my speech sounded right. (I still do this often, which initially creeped out my fiancée.)
- angusgr 16y agoWhen I lived in Indonesia I met a housewife who told me she learned English entirely through diligent application of this method, no formal language education. She told me that I was one of only a few native English speakers she'd spoken to about it (she was really shy about her English, I think the only reason she spoke to me because I spoke fairly poor Indonesian in return!) For my part, I would have happily believed that she spent 2-3 years living and studying an English speaking country. She might have been lying to me, but it didn't seem like it at the time. All the information is there if you take the time to really study and memorise it.
- curtis 16y agoI find it hard to believe that anybody could just accidentally pick up English from TV, but maybe that's where the "diligent application" comes in. On a related note, I think Indonesians might have an advantage over speakers of many other Asian languages when it comes to learning English. The Indonesian standard vocabulary has (IIRC) 10 or 12 thousand words borrowed from Dutch and the language uses a Latin alphabet.
- angusgr 16y agoAnother advantage is that nearly everyone in Indonesia speaks at least two languages, Indonesian being a second language to whatever local language is spoken in your home region. You're certainly correct about the alphabet though. In my experience, another big challenge for Indonesian speakers of English is correct grammar - Malay-style grammar is quite simple and usage conforms pretty well to its few rules. Although that applies to most people learning English as a second language. Indonesian has also picked up many new or specific terms from English. I got in trouble with my history professor because I couldn't pronounce "historiography" correctly as "historografi". (EDIT: Ok, this one might via Dutch. Recently terminology pretty much always come from English, though.)
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- danh 16y agoMy experience is pretty much the opposite. I've learnt Spanish during the last 3 years pretty much only by listening and watching TV (mostly listening to podcasts). I haven't really tried to memorize anything, and have above all tried to avoid being bored. I also avoided reading and writing for quite a long time, trying to focus on spoken language. I wouldn't say that I "master" Spanish yet, but by now I can enjoy all sorts of films, TV, radio and discussions in Spanish. I still miss the occasional idiom (especially the kind of slang that teenagers use), though, but it seldom bothers me. Also it turned out that learning to read when you already know how to speak (and can read other languages, I suppose) is actually quite easy. By now I can read novels etc. in Spanish without too much effort. Maybe I would have been able to learn Spanish even faster by using a more boring method. But then the cost would have been much, much higher for me - being bored for endless hours on end is a very high price to pay. And I'm pretty sure that I would have given Spanish up a long time ago if I had followed that route.
- masterj 16y ago>Also it turned out that learning to read when you already know how to speak (and can read other languages, I suppose) is actually quite easy. By now I can read novels etc. in Spanish without too much effort. Spanish is likely an outlier here as it is spelled phonetically. French is more difficult, but not terribly so. However languages that are written with a different script, or in a completely different system like Chinese offer a much larger hurdle. Chinese literacy, in particular, is orders of magnitude harder.
- redcap 16y agoI'll second that - in addition to my home university studies, I spent a year on exchange in Japan where pretty much all I did was study kanji and vocab - because we had at test on the 1942 kanji called necessary. As it turns out I aced the test, and all that study is a big part of why I'm comfortable with reading a newspaper. Still have to look things up from time to time, but for the most part I know how to read the word even if I don't know the exact meaning. In that sense, I agree with the blogger that rote memorisation is key - and not just words, but often whole sentences as that gives context. As for Spanish, it's cognate in some areas with English, so that's at least one part of why English natives are able to learn latin languages at a faster click than other languages. The blogger will find it easier to learn Japanese.
- treblig 16y agoI believe the area of that graph with a "North" accent is significantly too large. I can tell you that Cleveland, Ohio in no way has the typical "North" accent.
- jackfoxy 16y agoYep, learning another language is hard work, but if you want an advantage, find a sleeping dictionary.
- angusgr 16y agoAlthough I don't disagree with anything specific in this article, there's an uncontrolled variable here that seems pretty crucial: - The Korean was living in America (albeit a fairly Korean-influenced part of America) when studying English, so there was an immersion factor (however negligible) present. - Similarly, in the discussion of other languages The Korean learned in a non-immersion environment, The Korean has only compared their results to other non-immersion students. Not saying that The Korean is wrong about anything, just that it seems like they can be right, and concurrently immersion can also still be a valuable tool when learning a foreign language.
- btilly 16y agoFor yet another data point, my brother has learned a number of languages. His best language is Mandarin, which he started learning when he was 19. He speaks, reads, and writes at a college level, with no discernible accent. He has varying levels of fluency in a number of other languages including French, Thai, Indonesian and Japanese. His method of learning a new language is to just start out memorizing vocabulary. He is able to achieve a sustained acquisition of about 100 new words per day. Once he has sufficient vocabulary he adds in grammar practice, sample conversations, etc.
- natep 16y agoWhat does he consider "learning" a word? I'm genuinely curious, because it seems like there are so many ways to do this, especially when you are already comfortable with more than one language. Does he memorize the closest translation in his native language? Use a picture? (and if so, does he use the same set of pictures for each language?) I doubt I could accomplish 100 words/day, but I may try his approach anyways.
- btilly 16y agoI believe that when he starts he memorizes the words in another language. After that he starts memorizing definitions involving other words in his target language. When he was learning Japanese I think he memorized the translations to Mandarin rather than English, because those two languages were more similar.
- nopinsight 16y agoYour brother's speed is quite interesting. Could you let us know how many hours he spend learning a new language in a day to acquire that many words? Also, I wonder if he needs to be in an immersive context for that rate to be sustained.
- btilly 16y agoI know he spent serious time on it. I don't know how many hours per day. But it is worth noting that he started with a good memory, had learned several languages before then and has studied mnemonic techniques. I doubt I could sustain a rate anything like his. He was learning Japanese while living in Canada, so I'm pretty sure that he doesn't need an immersive context for that rate. However I doubt he could pick up on the finer nuances without being in an immersive context.
- ethan 16y agotl;dr: flashcards, tv and books
- mkramlich 16y agoOn a related note I think the world should all switch to English as the default standard language. So much less wasted effort, ink, paper, miscommunication, cultural opacity, etc. We might lose some things, but I bet it would be a net win.
- aristus 16y agoI'm not sure if you are joking, but language is highly political. You could say that language is the root of cultural, and thus national and ethnic, identity. Language domination tends to follow political, trade, and economic domination. The "lingua franca" of Europe used to be, as the phrase implies, French. Before that was bastard Latin, after that it was German. More people speak Spanish than English in the New World, and Brazillian is a close third. The problem with suggesting a default language is that you are also implying worldwide domination. It's not usually a welcome idea. :) There is a joke about that: air traffic control frequencies are shared, for obvious reasons. Once a Lufthansa flight was coming into Berlin. The pilot asked for clearance in German. The tower responded that he must use English, as that is the rule. The pilot responded: "Why? I am a German, flying a German plane to a German airport. Why must I speak English?" Another pilot cut in-- "because you lost the bloody war!" This is actually true; if you don't trust the pilots of a former enemy, a good way to keep tabs on them is to make them use your language on the radio. QED.
- ellyagg 16y agoI very much doubt he's joking. It's actually subtly insulting that you think he is. Marilyn vos Savant, for one, agrees with that idea. Not that she has any credentials other than being smart, but there's really no better credential than that for weighing in on this topic, as it's not a matter of expertise but one's assumptions about what's important. Like her, I favor the gradual unforced adoption of a single global language, and English seems the best bet at this point. I think what we lose in diversity we more than gain in standardization. Perhaps more controversially, I happen to think English is objectively the best[1] natural language currently available for this role. It's got by far the biggest vocabulary and is by implication the most expressive. Ayn Rand's native language was Russian, she was fluent in several other languages, and she wrote that English gave her the most freedom and power of expression. [1] Assuming we can agree that a concept such as "best" can exist and we don't degenerate into nihilistic pseudo-philosophical examinations of first principles.
- tzs 16y agoSuppose you wanted to learn, say, French. I've occasionally wondered if you could do it this way: 1. Pretend that French is a dead language from an ancient culture. Obtain a bunch of French books and study them, to try to notice patterns and infer rules about the language. 2. Do the same with some other language, such as Spanish. 3. Use the manuals from your TV, microwave, vacuum cleaner, and so on that have the instructions printed in English, French, and Spanish to relate the two "dead" languages to a language you understand (English). The idea is that these manuals are your Rosetta Stone.
- hugh3 16y agoPossible? Sure! Quick or easy compared to the normal way? Heck no.
- Hexstream 16y ago"Use the manuals from your TV, microwave, vacuum cleaner, and so on that have the instructions printed in English, French, and Spanish to relate the two "dead" languages to a language you understand (English). The idea is that these manuals are your Rosetta Stone." WARNING: I have repeatedly found the translations of houseware manuals to be thoroughly broken. I often read the English part even though my native language is French because English is, if not the original language, at least well-supported. The French version has pathetic grammar and lacks many accents and has some in wrong places, with bad grammar.
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- brown9-2 16y agoSomewhat tangential but: this blog and the author's writing is fascinating. Where did you find it?
- Kilimanjaro 16y agoSomebody told me the best way to learn a foreign language is to date a native speaker for three months or more. No kidding.
- javanix 16y agoApparently his technique does not give one a particularly subtle grasp of nuance when writing blog post titles.
- c00p3r 16y ago"The practice makes a man perfect".
- motxilo 16y ago"The PERFECT practice makes a man perfect".
- rivo 16y agoI moved to Canada when I was 23 and left when I was 25. After those two years, native English speakers frequently wouldn't believe that I was from Germany and that I didn't grow up speaking English. My take on becoming good at speaking a foreign language: You must make an effort, it will not come to you passively. You must be willing to "forget" what you already know. Listen to yourself. Ask other people to help and/or correct you. Try to learn like a child. Play with the language. Be curious. (On another note, I also realized that not having an accent got me into fewer conversations since people would not bother asking me where I was from.)
- norswap 16y agoSame as many, I learned English mostly by reading the web and watching TV show in English (with French subtitles, as I my mother tongue is French). So I firmly reject the notion that learning a language has to be done trough rote memorization. Curiosity about words/idiomatic expressions you don't know is important tough. But stopping on each single word you don't understand is certainly not the way to go (well except if you have to, as in schoolwork).
- jaekwon 16y agoi just got called a soft sack of shit.
- xiaoma 16y agoOf all the languages for an adult to learn, English is the least impressive I can think of. Here's why: 1) English language media can be found almost anywhere on earth. Many countries not only have English movies, but also local English language radio stations, newspapers and magazines specifically targeted at EFL learners. My current home, Taiwan, has all of these. A modest number of those resources exist for languages such as Mandarin, Spanish or French in various countries around the world. Materials in Taiwanese Hokkien, on the other hand, are very, very difficult to come by in most places. 2) No matter what kind of racial background you have, strangers in the US, UK and other English speaking places will probably assume you speak English. Not so for an American who moves to Korea, Sweden or Egypt. 3) Even when dealing with non-native speakers of English, it could very well be your best language for communication. When non-German speaking Chinese and non-Chinese speaking Germans do business, they'll likely use English. 4) English loan words are common in just about every major world language, except French. However, French learners of English still have a lot of cognates to help them out since English borrowed them from French. 5) In many parts of the world, English is a high-prestige language. This makes it even more likely that locals will want to use it with outsiders. It also makes it possible and even common for multi-decade expats to still be virtually monolingual English speakers. 6) Many people, including the author of this article have been instructed in English since childhood. However poor that instruction may be, it's still a head start. If he learns a lower-prestige language for which materials are hard to find, I'll be impressed. Blackfoot and Navajo, for example, are both shrinking language communities. Most of their speakers also speak English (and many prefer to with outsiders). Here's an article about language learning from someone who's had success in those circumstances: http://www.sil.org/lingualinks/languagelearning/essaysonfieldlanguagelearning/LevMAlnCnTYSIMLrnngYrLngg/contents.htm http://www.sil.org/lingualinks/languagelearning/essaysonfiel...
- curtis 16y agoThe point of the Korean's story is not that he learned English but rather how well he learned it and how fast. He estimated that he learned 30,000 words in 2 and a half years, and if you followed the link to the phone interview, the guy has no recognizable accent at all -- he sounds like he learned American English as a child, even though he didn't start really learning the language until he was 16. This is actually fairly remarkable.