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My Journey to a Better Language Learning System

397 points by troydavis 9y ago

djb_hackernews 9y ago
Language learning apps are step 5 in the ten step process of achieving programmer hubris nirvana. 1) I'm in college and I'm going to build an app to easily buy and sell books 2) Off campus housing is hard, I'm going to build an app to find roommates 3) Splitting bills with roommates is hard, I'm going to build an app for cost splitting 4) All my previous apps sucked because they weren't social, I'm going to build a social network app 5) I'm bored partying with my new friends, I'm going to level up and build an app to learn a new language 6) I'm lonely, I'm going to build a dating app to find a mate 7) I found a mate and the whole engagement/wedding industry is a fraud, I'm going to make an app to make it easier to navigate 8) My children are awesome, I'm going to build apps to manage their time/friends/eating/sleeping/learning 9) Technology is a waste of time, I'm going to spend my time on other hobbies and my family 10) I've been working 20 years in a boring industry and I see an opportunity to write boring software that solves boring problems that businesses will actually pay for. Jackpot. Edit: As others pointed out, should have included: ToDo app, Blog App, and a travel app. Travel should probably be 5 with language at 6.
- bcherny 9y ago
  Wow, this is remarkably accurate..
- Swinx43 9y ago
  Absolutely love it!
- bpicolo 9y ago
  Don't forget static blog engines
  - theDoug 9y ago
    You gotta support that Markdown or else you're nothin'!
  - newsbinator 9y ago
    Here's a new JS framework that's exactly like Vue, but with much less functionality, making it faster to learn.
    - da02 9y ago
      I'm guilty of this. Hopefully, the experience will teach me a few things. Like how some actors have to get their bad acting years out of their system to move to the next level.
- loarabia 9y ago
  That's awesome. It just seems to need a todo app sprinkled in somewhere. Maybe somewhere around 1st job?
- miguelrochefort 9y ago
  This is a tragedy. Why do people keep reinventing the wheel like that? Why don't we just have one system/app that does everything (buy/sell books, find roommates, cost splitting, etc.)? Hopefully what I'm suggested is not step 11: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- the_af 9y ago
  Excellent. You forgot that each step must be announced on HN with a title like "Walking my dog was hard. So I wrote this app."
- newusertoday 9y ago
  while i enjoyed the rant ;-) please also share the list of boring problems that business will actually pay for..
  - xeromal 9y ago
    Build them a website, an API, and a couple of services.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  You say this snarkily, but I don’t see what is wrong with someone growing up and wanting to try to use coding to solve problems relevant to their stage of life. It turns out some problems are complex, but so what? I’ve been working on “programming interfaces for beginners” for 12 years and still haven’t succeeded. That’s not because I’m dumb, nor is everyone who thought it would be easy and failed. It’s because there are building blocks that don’t exist yet, so when you try to make the thing you end up getting distracted making a building block—or eight—and then your schedule gets shot and this kills the project. But there’s no shame in that. If we’re lucky, you made a new building block which will eventually mature, in one form or another, maybe just in conversations with other devs who are closer to cracking that low level problem. And then guess what... time is ripe for a hubristic person, young or old, to step up and try their hand at your original problem, now with one more building block. There’s now a 5% higher chance of success. Eventually someone will hit a threshold. Is your post meant to be more than classic HN stop energy?
  - djb_hackernews 9y ago
    Not meant to be snarky at all. Though I do wish my comment wasn't the top voted one. People, please upvote the other on topic comments or have the mods bury it. FWIW this is basically my path. I've done pretty much all of them to some degree and a few in earnest. In fact I'm working on my own language learning "tool" while I wait around for #10.
    - avn2109 9y ago
      Any discussion of computerized language learning is woefully incomplete without a mention of [0], which has an interesting combination of properties. It is: * A) run by people who suck at SEO and marketing * B) technologically and graphic-design wise really janky * C) harder and less fun than e.g. Duolingo * and D) drastically, overwhelmingly more effective than every other system I've ever seen at actually teaching you a language (for people with almost all common linguistic-cognition neurotypes aka nearly everyone) The first 3 attributes mean that almost nobody has heard of it/uses it. The downside is that for most languages they didn't build out enough curriculum to get you to fluency. It'll take you roughly a third of the way there. I'm building an open source clone (with longer curriculum) for the other two thirds of the way. Also, L101 should be paired with Yabla, which will train the skill of listening-and-understanding in your target language. I'm not affiliated with [0] in any way other than by being a happy customer and by the fact that I'm writing an open source clone of their stuff. [0] https://language101.com/ https://language101.com/
- slaymaker1907 9y ago
  You alao missed dog walking app. I'm pretty sure there has been some variation on that for the past 3 years as a senior project at my university.
- avip 9y ago
  Could you add expected stage half-life? I'm stack @8 and would like to advance to 9 ASAP.
  - schacon 9y ago
    Yes, getting a better overview of what your progress and work left to do in each level is on our short list. For now, you can always contact us with the Intercom button in the bottom right if you have issues like this and we can see if something is weird or manually advance you. Thanks!
- panglott 9y ago
  Learning a language (or any skill) will always take a lot of personal work and commitment. But this is a problem where we need better tools and solutions, even as our tools and solutions have been improving rapidly. More people trying to innovate in this space will only improve them further. Look, 100 years ago we only had dry books with conjugation tables for mostly classical and European languages. Most of the world's languages were barely described, we barely had adequate tools to describe them, and most policy was bent on eradicating them. Move forward to the mid-20th century, and we learning tools like the FSI courses and Pimsleur courses, which are at least getting decent audio out there. Then the Internet occurred, which has completely transformed our ability to access authentic spoken and written material in major target languages. Online dictionaries and apps are better than ever. You can look up a page in Wikipedia and see the target language version, which reveals so much more than a dictionary can. Machine translation helps you see how words are strung together. Now we have Duolingo and things like Anki and Tofugu.com, which of course do not take you all the way, but are still a huge improvement over the tools we had before. Even better is coming.
- yannick 9y ago
  you forgot laundry. Mom doesn't do my laundry anymore; doing laundry sucks; the world desperately needs an uber-for-laundry app.
nileshtrivedi 9y ago
Personally, I would love to learn a language by watching movies/videos with 3 subtitle tracks: (1) What they are speaking - IN their script (this is called SLS: Same-Language-Subtitling and has been quite successful for literacy programs for one's own language) (2) What they are speaking - IN my script (3) What they MEAN - IN my language (i.e. translation) Data for (1) is easy to find. (2) could theoretically be generated from (1). It's (3) which requires a lot of deliberate manual effort.
- GEBBL 9y ago
  Are there video players like VLC that allow the displaying of more than one sub/srt file at a time?
  - shard 9y ago
    I use KM Player, which allows up to 3 subtitles at a time, although the 3rd subtitle is placed right in the middle of the video (the first is on the bottom and the second is on the top, which works very well).
- austinl 9y ago
  This is the way FluentU works (https://www.fluentu.com/ https://www.fluentu.com/). They have content with 2-3 subtitle tracks that can be toggled on and off. Then you can click on specific words in the subtitles that you don't know, it'll show a definition, and you can add it to a list of words to review. They've got several TV series (although they might not be your favorite series), depending on the language.
- dilap 9y ago
  Netflix will give you (1) and (3) for a bunch of their newer stuff
  - schacon 9y ago
    A tip on Netflix - in the US, it's often nearly impossible to get foreign language dubbing or subtitles. I've found that I can watch Friends in German by using TunnelBear or another VPN to get a German IP and then downloading them offline and watching them in airplane mode.
misiti3780 9y ago
I have spent the last 10 months learning italian, spending a total of 7 weeks in the country, 150 hours studying, and 85 hours speaking on iTalki. I have been using the method's described in Fluent Forever[1] and they have been working extremely well for me. I have a speaking partner that I speak with 3-5 times a week for 1 hour each time (If you want to learn italian email me, he is awesome), and I keep track of literally everything I cant say, and after the lesson make cards, insert them into Anki, repeat. I can understand 80% of our conversations perfectly, and we talk for the full hour, rarely breaking into english. Am I speaking perfect italian - no, but I have absolutely no problems communicating. I was recently in Sicily with my family and hanging out with a family that spoke no English and was translating for 8 people in both directions with no problems. This is the first new language I have learned but it seems the key to me is described in the book 1) start with pronunciation and spelling (Gabe created pronunciation trainers for most languages) 2) Learn some basic verbs (I need, I want, may I, to go, to take, etc) 3) Building up a large list of nouns 4) Start using iTalki with a partner very soon into your journey and keep track of what you dont know. The state departments says it takes around 400 hours to learn the latin based languages, I believe that seems fairly accurate.
- austinl 9y ago
  +1 for iTalki and Fluent Forever. There are so many apps out there that give you the illusion of progress (e.g. the author's "74% fluent") but with nothing to show for it. There is no way you can get around practicing speaking and listening if your end-goal is to speak and listen. I started learning French maybe 6 months ago and have done ~20 hours of iTalki sessions. You'll sound terrible when you start, but that's okay — you're paying them to hear your terrible French/German/Spanish/etc. It's all gets better.
- drharby 9y ago
  What's a typical going rate for a speech partner?
  - misiti3780 9y ago
    7-15/hour for non "teachers"
primitivesuave 9y ago
I highly recommend trying the app. The user interface is beautiful and the approach seems effective. I could actually see this being used in a German language school to supplement the curriculum, unlike pretty much every language app I've seen so far. I find Pimsleur to be a highly effective spoken language acquisition tool, but the writing/reading aspect is abysmal and quite demotivating. Chatterbug seems to be doing spaced repetition, and does it much better than Pimsleur audiobooks because I can zoom through the things I remember and get as much time as I need to repeat questions and think about the answer.
- chillacy 9y ago
  I can also vouch for the effectiveness of Pimsleur, especially when used in combination with Duolingo to take care of reading/writing and vocab. I had a much easier time when I landed in France because of all the time I put in listening/speaking along the recordings, which is frankly amazing because it's just a fixed set of 30 minute audio lessons, not customized at all!
- ThinkingGuy 9y ago
  Another vote for Pimsleur, at least for quickly acquiring a basic set of phrases and words for travel purposes. I've used 5 different Pimsleur courses (Turkish, Italian, Greek, Russian, and Dutch) in preparation for various international trips. I've found going through just the first 8 or 10 lessons is enough to get the necessary survival phrases firmly embedded in my memory. Pimseur also offers lessons intermediate and advanced courses that can take you to greater fluency, but I've never pursued any courses that far. If I really wanted to work toward fluency in a language, I'd probably start out with a different method. As others have pointed out, Pimsleur is oriented strictly to the spoken language, so if you need to be able to read the language, it would make sense to supplement it with separate written course materials, especially if the orthography of the target language is particularly different than your own (e.g., Greek and Mandarin). On a side note, I also find doing a 30-minute Pimsleur course to be a great mental exercise. Recalling the phraes and responding to the prompts, I literally feel like rarely-used parts of my brain are getting a workout.
  - 9y ago
gramie 9y ago
I have been using http://www.languagetransfer.org http://www.languagetransfer.org to learn Spanish, and it is the best language system, aside from total immersion, I have ever used (I speak five language with varying degrees of fluency). It is a series of audio files, typically about 10 minutes each, and all you do is listen to them, answering questions when the instructor asks. German, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Swahili, Spanish, and others. It's a labour of love by Mihalis, who asks for donations but otherwise does it all for free! I haven't tried Chatterbug, but I am completely sold on Language Transfer, because it sidesteps the rote memorization that so many other systems use.
- rahimnathwani 9y ago
  I just went to the site. From the description, it sounds like a similar method to that used in the Michel Thomas CD courses. I'll definitely try it!
  - KGIII 9y ago
    I have zero experience with it, but I've heard many good things about the Rosetta Stone software. As in, I know real life people who have used it and gush about it it. I'm not able to judge their fluency, but some of them have been using it to learn a variety of different languages. The lady that lives at the neighboring farm speaks at least a dozen languages and she's learned all but two of them with the software. She speaks passable French and Spanish (and English, of course) so I can vouch for the Spanish and the missus is fluent in French.
  - bababooey 9y ago
    I think it's actually better than Michel Thomas, but you're right that it's the same system. Fun fact, this system was first pioneered not by Michel Thomas, but rather by Margarita Madrigal. She has a book called the Magic Key to Spanish. You can also find her Magic Key to French and German online since those are out of print.
- bababooey 9y ago
  I've been supporting Language Transfer for years. I believe that the program suffers a bit when it branches out into languages with grammatical case more complex than English. But the courses are all free of charge. Please recommend them to friends or family to spread the word! I can especially endorse the Spanish course.
deleted 9y ago
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Shank 9y ago
I'd love to see more tools go into the space of learning what I consider to be the farthest thing from English. That's like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. There's a lot more that goes into learning these languages due to differences in pronunciation, characters, and sentence structure. I know the demand is often placed on the romance and germanic languages, but they're often easy enough. You can usually bring along your own character set, which dramatically eases the transition into something new.
- schacon 9y ago
  We will absolutely tackle these languages. We're releasing German for English speakers currently in order to learn better how more customers respond to the methods we're using, and German is more complex grammatically for English speakers than romance languages. Also, I didn't speak any German and I think it's important to use your product yourself. Personally I want very much to return to Japanese myself some day. As I mentioned in the post, I studied it for several months. It is an interesting question of how best to approach learning kana and kanji, since that's a pretty difficult thing to get fast at. Memorizing a few hundred symbols isn't super hard, but getting so good at them that you can sight-read takes a lot of time and can be frustrating. I would disagree that learning any language is easy enough, with or without learning a new writing system. That's sort of like saying that learning the piano is easy enough compared to the violin, just because it's always on key. It's still a lot of work before anyone wants to listen to you play. No matter what language you learn, if you want to become somewhat fluent, you need to memorize several thousand abstract words, new sounds, new grammar rules, etc. It's always a lot of work in absolute terms. I only bring this up because I feel that it's somewhat harmful to say learning a language can be "easy". It often results in people trying to learn, inevitably finding out that it's still a lot of work and then giving up while blaming themselves for being "bad at languages".
  - BronSteeDiam 9y ago
    You should have a mailing list. I would like to be notified when my target language becomes available.
pmoriarty 9y ago
I'm a fan of a method of language learning called TPR (Total Physical Response).[1][2][3] It is by far the fastest and easiest way I know of learning vocabulary and grammar. In a nutshell, with TPR the teacher gives the student a command in the target language, demonstrates the action the command is asking for, repeats the command and finally the student copies the action. For example, if English was the target language, the teacher could say "sit down", then sit down themselves, then once again say "sit down" and the student would copy the action by sitting down. This can then be repeated for "stand up", for "pick up the fork", or any other arbitrarily complex and sophisticated command. As you've no doubt noticed, the commands are given in grammatically correct sentences, in context. Grammar is not explicitly taught, however. It is implicitly taught and implicitly learned. What makes this method work really well is that when you learn words and grammar, you're not doing it with just your mind and maybe some visual cues, you're using your body and doing so in a specific physical context (the place where you're learning), associating what you're learning with parts of that place. It's somewhat analogous to using a memory palace to learn, only without any extra effort of constructing the palace or imaging placing things you want to learn there. With TPR you actually physically interact with the things you learn in that space. Another great thing is that a TPR teacher need not have any special training in education or really even in the method. TPR takes maybe a minute or two to explain to anyone, so you can recruit helpers from any friends or acquaintances you have who know the target language and are willing to help, though if you want consistent lessons and dedication you'll probably want a professional tutor or teacher anyway. TPR focuses on learning to understand, in emulation of the first step of a child's language learning process. Children first learn to understand, then to speak, then to read, and finally to write. TPR helps with the first part. TPR has its limits, and it can't be used for all aspects of language learning, but it's fantastic for getting your language learning bootstrapped really quickly. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_physical_response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_physical_response [2] - http://tola.maf.org/collect/missionb/index/assoc/HASH01da.dir/LEAVALON.pdf http://tola.maf.org/collect/missionb/index/assoc/HASH01da.di... [3] - http://tola.maf.org/collect/missionb/index/assoc/HASH0162.dir/KICKSTAR.pdf http://tola.maf.org/collect/missionb/index/assoc/HASH0162.di...
- schacon 9y ago
  I've read a lot of TPR(S) and also Krashen, whose research I believe the system is based on. It is somewhat difficult to use some of this theory over video, but we often discuss what we can take from ideas like this to help beginning speakers when they don't have a wide vocabulary they can access. I'm curious if using TPR(S) helped you learn a language? I own a few books on it, but I haven't seen it actually widely implemented.
andy_wrote 9y ago
I've done the Duolingo Spanish tree, and my feeling was the same as the author's regarding "% fluency," which I thought was kind of a joke. Especially for speaking and listening, there's really no substitute for immersion and real-life regular interactions. But I do feel that Duolingo was honestly pretty good about helping me to read and write. In NYC there's a little ambient Spanish everywhere and I went into it not with the goal of being fluent, but just being able to read signs and understand a little bit here and there. (I haven't kept up with it and now I've forgotten a good chunk, but I'd say that's a different issue.) At least in my case, it's also been a good entry point because it's free and convenient. I'm actually working on Duolingo's in-beta Czech tree (significant other's family is partially Czech) and it's actually been an inspiration for me to inquire about in-person classes, especially knowing that if I ever want to hold conversations, I will need to have real-life speaking experience. I probably wouldn't have done this if I hadn't started off on Duolingo and had some fun with it!
- mercer 9y ago
  I've been doing about 30 XP of Spanish on Duolingo for more than year now. 30 XP is about 10 minutes of practice, so very little. One day I was watching a show or movie that had many scenes in Spanish, and to my surprise I could actually follow much of what was said! I didn't realize how (relatively) effective even those 10 minutes a day can be.
  - andy_wrote 9y ago
    Awesome! I did notice when doing the Spanish tree that I recognized a lot of words just from seeing them around the city, especially from ads and public service announcements on the subway.
- cloverich 9y ago
  I think Duolingo's main issue w/ Fluency is its just too easy to pass lessons. You can repeatedly miss a phrase, click on every word in the phrase (to get the translation), get it correct once, and now you've passed. You can get the entire tree Gold without actually _knowing_ the words. So if you want to get the most out of Duolingo, imho, you have to really force yourself to do your own review, and only consider it learned if you can repeatedly get through without missing any in a row or looking up any words. Its still got an upper limit, but I feel like (in Japanese) I"m learning it much faster than I was before.
schacon 9y ago
I'm curious who else in the community here learned a new language to either comfort or fluency and how they did it.
- FeteCommuniste 9y ago
  Starting at age 27 I learned French, Spanish, and Italian to a pretty good level: I can understand movies and usually communicate with native speakers without asking them to slow down or switch to English. I used a combination of Assimil (a book + cd series), reading news, listening to the radio, and taking some lessons on italki. I focused on French only for the first ~two years (at the time I was interested only in French and had no ambitions of being "multilingual" or anything). After that Spanish and Italian were much simpler to pick up thanks to shared vocabulary and grammar. I had no background in linguistics or learning languages apart from (almost entirely forgotten) high school Spanish and a bit of classical Greek in college.
- dudul 9y ago
  I studied English at school from 8yrs old to 18, and I was really bad at it. After graduating high-school I decided to work on it (I wanted to work in IT, and english was a must-have). That was around the time when DVDs were really taking over, and it was now really easy to watch movies in original version (as opposed to the dubbed versions). So I started watching movies in English. Like a lot. I'm talking 3 to 5 movies a day every day for months. I took a year off between high school and college. After that, I was fluent in listening, I moved to an english speaking country and started working on the speaking part. I was less intimidated since I could understand perfectly so I wasn't shy about speaking and exercising my pronunciation. I'm now fluent in English and live in the US. Most natives I talk to have no idea I'm a foreigner. Usually after an hour of conversation they start wondering which part of America I'm from and they're always surprised to hear I'm from Europe.
- lazyant 9y ago
  I learned 80% of my current (high) level of English when I was about 14 in about a year, besides the 3 or so hours at school I tried to immerse myself in the language any way I could, and I achieved a good reading, writing and listening level (spoken came with practice later), I did: - listen to songs and follow the lyrics - read simplified books or children's books - watch movies with subtitles in English - listen to American radio - read computer British magazines Picture dictionaries and regular English dictionaries helped too. Extremely important, as in anything you want to learn is motivation, I was really motivated to learn. My only "pro tip" is not to memorize vocabulary using isolated words, but complete sentences. This was before the Internet, now I don't know what the excuse would be...
IgorPartola 9y ago
I learned English when I was 12-14. I got to the point where I could converse in it in roughly 9 months between 13 and 14, after doing a 2x a week class with roughly 12 people. Yes, age is a huge factor, but the class was a part of a school that had multiple concurrent tracks, and ours was doing better than others. Age groups were all mixed and I was the youngest there. The keys to success for me were: 1. Teacher who didn't waste time. We plowed through the course material at a pace of roughly two chapters per lesson. This was double the speed of other tracks. 2. Teacher who wasn't a native English speaker. This was huge. A native speaker of English, even a professional teacher, can't usually explain to you things like the difference between past perfect and present perfect tense. Or how conjugation of pronouns works. Or the rules and exceptions of conjugating verbs in different tenses. She was able to explain this because she had to learn it in a structured way. 3. English is a very structured language. Unlike Russian (my first language), it discourages run-on sentences. It also has a specific order of verbs and nouns. It also has a pretty simple system of taking the same sentence through all nine tenses with mostly modifier verbs (be and have). This all maps really neatly into handy charts that are very quick to memorize. By contrast in Russian you have three tenses, so the difference between "I am walking" and "I walk" is up to the reader to discern. 4. English is simpler than Russian when it comes to conjugation. There is no conjugating verbs, adjectives, or adverbs by gender. The only conjugation you do is by tense. "Exception" verbs suck (be, am, was, will/shall). But aside from the most common ones (be, have, go), they fall into one of several patterns(think/thought, bring/brought, ring/rung). Less conjugation is better, and since English requires complete sentences (you don't generally see sentences like "gone" and have to infer who just left, he or she, etc.) no additional information is conveyed by conjugation. Can you tell I hate conjugation? Basically going from Russian to English felt sort of like going from Python to Basic: you have a lot fewer paradigms to worry about, while already being familiar with the paradigms Basic uses. 5. Lots of memorization of words. Once you figure out how to say "Today after work I am going to get dinner with friends" you can easily substitute drinks for dinner, date for friends, school for work, etc. So I made my goal learning the structure of the language and learning enough words to make substitutions. Once I conceptually knew how to use all nine tenses, the rest was simple memorization and usage. 6. Lots of conversations and not being afraid of my bad accent. You know what's great about talking to other students? They don't give a shit that your accent sucks. Native speakers, especially ones outside the classroom might be nice about it, but you are always keenly aware that you don't sound like them. 7. Finally, after I was able to hold conversations in English, emersion helped. Side note: try not to move your kids to a completely new country and send them straight to high school a few months later. It's brutal. On the other hand, I have failed to learn any other languages since. Part of it is lack of time and motivation since I don't have a specific need for them. Part is that I am in fact older. I am about to take up Japanese and after that maybe get back to French. To this day I have failed to teach any of my past or present partners Russian.
nicpottier 9y ago
I've been going through the process of learning Spanish for the past year or two (with various levels of dedication) and I have also thought about starting yet another language learning app. I used RosettaStone and DuoLingo for a while and they both provided a lot of value, but for sure the greatest benefit came from doing 1 on 1 lessons with native speakers. Lots of progress then. One thing I've noticed with all the language learning apps though is that they are generalized methodologies that are then applied to lots of languages. IE, duolingo in French and Spanish and German are basically the same track, just in different langauges. Same with Rosetta Stone (even more consistent there). That seems to really be leaving a lot on the table. Every language has its quirks and most importantly every language has a few shortcuts you can learn to really give yourself a ton of utility with little work. But because the software is built to be generalized you get the lowest common denominator instead of the fastest possible path to fluency and speaking. Not sure which approach chatterbug is taking, but at first blush and by the way they talk about it I'm guessing it is yet another generalized approach, but I suppose we'll see.
- schacon 9y ago
  Our curriculum is all designed from scratch by our linguistics team in house, so it will certainly be specific to each language. However, I'm sure that as we do several languages, we will reuse patterns and exercises that transfer well. A situation to practice shopping or numbers can work the same in Japanese or German without having to reinvent it. Certainly all of our grammar drills and exercises will be customized to each language, though. I think it's pretty important to remember as well that one of the main things here is the a lot of your time in the system is spent talking to a real human. You can get the exact same live exercise several times and still have it be pretty different if you have different tutors. It's not really possible for that large part of our system to be really "generalized" in this way. Our system is very human, not just technological.
foobaw 9y ago
I speak three languages fluently and I can attest to Chatterbug's methodology. However, there's still much research to be done in the field. I participate in a lot of linguistic research since my case is a slightly more unique than others. Also, I'm curious if they're hiring and/or have plan to scale. There are so many features they could add.
- schacon 9y ago
  We aren't currently hiring, but we would love to talk to you for future reference. We have many plans to scale. :) I agree that there are a lot of features we can and will add. This is only the very beginning of what we can do to improve this process, I think. I would love to hear any ideas.
coffee91 9y ago
I used to use Anki Flashcards but I actually found that online tutoring is a lot better now. I use Verbling which solves a lot of the issues mentioned in the OP blog. The video system is all in the browser, no Skype as others have mentioned with iTalki and my teacher shares PDFs directly on the site. It also tells me what page she is on so I can be in sync, and we draw notes etc on top of the whiteboard.
nnd 9y ago
Learning a language is simple. Immerse yourself in the environment where everyone speaks the language (travel to that country) and force yourself to speak that language only at all times. This is the key. I’ve learned German like that in two months.
- schacon 9y ago
  I would argue that immersing yourself in a native environment is hardly a simple thing. It's expensive - often in money, but always as an impact to your life. If you have a job, or spouse, or kids or pets, how does this work. I've actually done this and each one of these things is a huge problem. If you're a young, single person who can work remotely or doesn't need a job, then maybe, but that's not most people. If you do need a job, getting a visa to work in a new country is also non-trivial and often impossible. It's also not just on you to "force yourself to speak a language". You need someone to listen to you. When you know 20 words of a language, cornering anyone to practice with is difficult and somewhat unfair. You need to know or meet some people who care enough about you to have some really horribly slow and boring conversations for a very long time while you improve. If you're not paying them for that time or otherwise reciprocating, then it can be a somewhat selfish thing to ask them to do that for a long time. It's also very hard to pick up vocabulary implicitly from conversations unless you have some base. My German is good enough now that if I don't understand a word I can ask them to rephrase it using other words and I can often get it. Children can do so just from environmental and contextual input often, but it takes them _years_. So you still have to spend a lot of time studying and building vocab on your own in order to try out. This method certainly can work, as I did mention in the blog post, but it's far from simple.
  - nnd 9y ago
    > I would argue that immersing yourself in a native environment is hardly a simple thing. It's expensive - often in money, but always as an impact to your life. If you have a job, or spouse, or kids or pets, how does this work. I've actually done this and each one of these things is a huge problem. If you're a young, single person who can work remotely or doesn't need a job, then maybe, but that's not most people. If you do need a job, getting a visa to work in a new country is also non-trivial and often impossible. Too many ifs, sorry but those sound like the same excuses people say when they explain why they can't travel (more). You have to figure out what your priorities are, and if you really want something you'll find a way. >It's also not just on you to "force yourself to speak a language". You need someone to listen to you. Easy. Just go buy some food. You don't need much language skills for that task and it's a start. Or if you are single, go on a date with someone who doesn't speak your language (this was personally the most efficient way for me personally). You overcomplicate things. Your rate of learning a language is proportional of how uncomfortable you want to be. I've seen people studying in language schools for years until they get everything perfect and they can't even maintain a basic conversation. Overall this idea applies to all learning: "to become a master you should be willing to be a fool", i.e. make mistakes. > It's also very hard to pick up vocabulary implicitly from conversations unless you have some base. My German is good enough now that if I don't understand a word I can ask them to rephrase it using other words and I can often get it. Children can do so just from environmental and contextual input often, but it takes them _years_. So you still have to spend a lot of time studying and building vocab on your own in order to try out. Most of the information is communicated via non-verbal channels: body language and intonation for example. Using your intuition is crucial here. The rest is basically pattern matching. A single word you can understand from the context. Once you understand > 50% words in a sentence, you can derive the rest from the context and then it becomes a self-reinforcing learning system. Well, children also don't have the same intellect as an adult and cannot apply more sophisticated learned cognitive techniques.
casey_lang 9y ago
I've always wanted to be fluent in a second language and have tried in the past, but I always end up with the same problem. While I recognize that the only way to gain conversational skills is to actually have conversations, they terrify me. Engaging in small talk with strangers in my native language is hard enough. Trying to do it in a second language seems impossible. Even watching the demo video from the link, all I could think was "this is awkward". I would almost rather there be a sort of script or game around the conversations, so they're not relying on my ability to be interesting while also trying to do it in a different language.
- schacon 9y ago
  This is the problem I always had with tandems and some tutors as well. One of the things I like about using our system is that all the exercises are guided. They have instructions, you can advance at any time, there is always an explicit task or situation or game to play. Sometimes the tutors read a story and then ask you questions about it, sometimes there are word games, sometimes there are situations where you're told what you need to do and you just try to role play. Always after you've at least minimally learned the vocab and grammar needed to do it. Nowadays I will sometimes wander and just have a random conversation with a tutor, but when it's finished, I just click 'Next' and get a new thing to try. It can be a little scary at first, as any in-person meeting or class environment often is the first time, but it becomes fun and comfortable pretty fast. You really aren't expected to be interesting (as many of my tutors can attest, I rarely am :) ) The compilation video (is just from the video feeds, but I removed the actual exercises we were doing. It's entirely guided. These were just sort of random conversations that I happened to venture into as an aside from the main curriculum as I got more familiar with the tutors as a way to illustrate how my spontaneous conversational skills improved over time.
  - casey_lang 9y ago
    Thanks for the clarification! I've signed up to be notified when Spanish is added and will give it a shot
- tchaffee 9y ago
claimred 9y ago
How does one learn Mandarin Chinese though
eric_bullington 9y ago
@schacon Interesting post. I agree that language-learning is more of a marathon than a sprint. As someone who speaks several languages[1], it was interesting to read about your perception of how polyglots learn languages. You picked up on some good things (flashcards and these days spaced repetition learning programs since vocab is critical, multiple different tools and books, online tutors) but you didn't mention a characteristic that most polyglots I know share[2]: an excellent foundation in the grammar of their own language, and the inclination to spend the time necessary to build a good foundation in the grammar of whatever language they are learning. I'm sure there are exceptions to this rule, but it seems to be enough of a trend that it's worth mentioning. Some people promote the idea of learning a language "naturally" through an immersive environment. Although immersing yourself in the language is critical once you've picked up a strong foundation, I've personally known very few people who have learned a language to near-native fluency as an adult by simply jumping into a new language environment. Kids do this all the time, but the way most adults successfully learn a new language is different from the way children do it. I've watched some people waste a lot of time trying to speak to native speakers of a language they're learning without having any kind of foundation in vocabulary and grammar. They would have done well to spend at least a portion of that time picking up a basic vocab through flashcards and learning grammar fundamentals of the foreign language in question. And although I'm sure there are exceptions to this rule, most polyglots I know are fascinated by grammar, in addition to having a strong interest in phonology and speech/accents. So to anyone who has tried and failed to learn a foreign language as an adult and is thinking of giving it another try, I recommend picking up both a review book on the grammar of their native language, as well as a basic but complete grammar of the language they are targeting. Spend some time with these books along with Anki and the language-learning apps, and then go out and immerse yourself in another language environment, either through online language communities, or living/traveling abroad. And one last type for new language learners: be sure to study idioms and phrases when you use Anki or whatever flashcard program, and not just simple words. Having a good stock of idioms is critical to fluent conversation. 1. At one time, fully fluent in 4 languages, now 2 are rusty but I'm picking them and another back up. I've also enjoyed an intermediate level of fluency in an additional 5-6 languages at one time or another. (I've also worked as a professional interpreter (2 years) and translator (10 years)) 2. The only exceptions to this rule have been people who have learned 3-4 languages as children, but even they have a much better knowledge of grammar than most Americans I know.
bsaul 9y ago
That video convinced me and was ready to give you all my money since I have some time right now. But unfortunately the two languages i’d like to learn ( mandarin and hebrew) aren’t there. Anyone could recommend me a system for Chinese or Hebrew ?
- ximeng 9y ago
  skritter.com is good for Chinese writing.
- barry-cotter 9y ago
  This is not how I got past basic Mandarin but I’m fairly confident it would work. Get the paid version of Pleco, the best Chinese dictionary app. Turn on spaced repetition in flash cards and download the HSK 1-6 flash cards. Learn the HSK 1 cards _with sound_ so you get started on pinyin. Buy the Chinese Breeze graded reader books, leve 1. Listen to the audio version on the cds a few times then try and read the books. Repeat by HSK level until you run out of Chinese Breeze graded readers, move on to other graded readers, move on to using italki.com for conversation and native texts loaded into pleco’s reader functionality for reading. Duolingo has Hebrew for what that’s worth. Good luck.
- redthrow 9y ago
  "The future of Chinese language learning is now" by Prof Victor Mair http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11580 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11580
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mezuzi 9y ago
C'est la langue la plus difficile, plus difficile en fait, que l'Allemand et l'Arabe. N'est-ce pas?
- schacon 9y ago
  Quelle langue, Allemand?
jinushaun 9y ago
Reminds me of my own experience. I "beat" Duolingo French, but not conversational at all. I can ask the perfect question, but can't understand the answer. Most of the time, no one can even understand my pronunciation.

397 points by troydavis 9y ago

Language learning apps are step 5 in the ten step process of achieving programmer hubris nirvana. 1) I'm in college and I'm going to build an app to easily buy and sell books 2) Off campus housing is hard, I'm going to build an app to find roommates 3) Splitting bills with roommates is hard, I'm going to build an app for cost splitting 4) All my previous apps sucked because they weren't social, I'm going to build a social network app 5) I'm bored partying with my new friends, I'm going to level up and build an app to learn a new language 6) I'm lonely, I'm going to build a dating app to find a mate 7) I found a mate and the whole engagement/wedding industry is a fraud, I'm going to make an app to make it easier to navigate 8) My children are awesome, I'm going to build apps to manage their time/friends/eating/sleeping/learning 9) Technology is a waste of time, I'm going to spend my time on other hobbies and my family 10) I've been working 20 years in a boring industry and I see an opportunity to write boring software that solves boring problems that businesses will actually pay for. Jackpot. Edit: As others pointed out, should have included: ToDo app, Blog App, and a travel app. Travel should probably be 5 with language at 6.

bcherny 9y ago
Wow, this is remarkably accurate..
Swinx43 9y ago
Absolutely love it!
bpicolo 9y ago
Don't forget static blog engines
- theDoug 9y ago
  You gotta support that Markdown or else you're nothin'!
- newsbinator 9y ago
  Here's a new JS framework that's exactly like Vue, but with much less functionality, making it faster to learn.
  - da02 9y ago
    I'm guilty of this. Hopefully, the experience will teach me a few things. Like how some actors have to get their bad acting years out of their system to move to the next level.
loarabia 9y ago
That's awesome. It just seems to need a todo app sprinkled in somewhere. Maybe somewhere around 1st job?
miguelrochefort 9y ago
This is a tragedy. Why do people keep reinventing the wheel like that? Why don't we just have one system/app that does everything (buy/sell books, find roommates, cost splitting, etc.)? Hopefully what I'm suggested is not step 11: https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
the_af 9y ago
Excellent. You forgot that each step must be announced on HN with a title like "Walking my dog was hard. So I wrote this app."
newusertoday 9y ago
while i enjoyed the rant ;-) please also share the list of boring problems that business will actually pay for..
- xeromal 9y ago
  Build them a website, an API, and a couple of services.
erikpukinskis 9y ago
You say this snarkily, but I don’t see what is wrong with someone growing up and wanting to try to use coding to solve problems relevant to their stage of life. It turns out some problems are complex, but so what? I’ve been working on “programming interfaces for beginners” for 12 years and still haven’t succeeded. That’s not because I’m dumb, nor is everyone who thought it would be easy and failed. It’s because there are building blocks that don’t exist yet, so when you try to make the thing you end up getting distracted making a building block—or eight—and then your schedule gets shot and this kills the project. But there’s no shame in that. If we’re lucky, you made a new building block which will eventually mature, in one form or another, maybe just in conversations with other devs who are closer to cracking that low level problem. And then guess what... time is ripe for a hubristic person, young or old, to step up and try their hand at your original problem, now with one more building block. There’s now a 5% higher chance of success. Eventually someone will hit a threshold. Is your post meant to be more than classic HN stop energy?
- djb_hackernews 9y ago
  Not meant to be snarky at all. Though I do wish my comment wasn't the top voted one. People, please upvote the other on topic comments or have the mods bury it. FWIW this is basically my path. I've done pretty much all of them to some degree and a few in earnest. In fact I'm working on my own language learning "tool" while I wait around for #10.
  - avn2109 9y ago
    Any discussion of computerized language learning is woefully incomplete without a mention of [0], which has an interesting combination of properties. It is: * A) run by people who suck at SEO and marketing * B) technologically and graphic-design wise really janky * C) harder and less fun than e.g. Duolingo * and D) drastically, overwhelmingly more effective than every other system I've ever seen at actually teaching you a language (for people with almost all common linguistic-cognition neurotypes aka nearly everyone) The first 3 attributes mean that almost nobody has heard of it/uses it. The downside is that for most languages they didn't build out enough curriculum to get you to fluency. It'll take you roughly a third of the way there. I'm building an open source clone (with longer curriculum) for the other two thirds of the way. Also, L101 should be paired with Yabla, which will train the skill of listening-and-understanding in your target language. I'm not affiliated with [0] in any way other than by being a happy customer and by the fact that I'm writing an open source clone of their stuff. [0] https://language101.com/ https://language101.com/
slaymaker1907 9y ago
You alao missed dog walking app. I'm pretty sure there has been some variation on that for the past 3 years as a senior project at my university.
avip 9y ago
Could you add expected stage half-life? I'm stack @8 and would like to advance to 9 ASAP.
- schacon 9y ago
  Yes, getting a better overview of what your progress and work left to do in each level is on our short list. For now, you can always contact us with the Intercom button in the bottom right if you have issues like this and we can see if something is weird or manually advance you. Thanks!
panglott 9y ago
Learning a language (or any skill) will always take a lot of personal work and commitment. But this is a problem where we need better tools and solutions, even as our tools and solutions have been improving rapidly. More people trying to innovate in this space will only improve them further. Look, 100 years ago we only had dry books with conjugation tables for mostly classical and European languages. Most of the world's languages were barely described, we barely had adequate tools to describe them, and most policy was bent on eradicating them. Move forward to the mid-20th century, and we learning tools like the FSI courses and Pimsleur courses, which are at least getting decent audio out there. Then the Internet occurred, which has completely transformed our ability to access authentic spoken and written material in major target languages. Online dictionaries and apps are better than ever. You can look up a page in Wikipedia and see the target language version, which reveals so much more than a dictionary can. Machine translation helps you see how words are strung together. Now we have Duolingo and things like Anki and Tofugu.com, which of course do not take you all the way, but are still a huge improvement over the tools we had before. Even better is coming.
yannick 9y ago
you forgot laundry. Mom doesn't do my laundry anymore; doing laundry sucks; the world desperately needs an uber-for-laundry app.

nileshtrivedi 9y ago

Personally, I would love to learn a language by watching movies/videos with 3 subtitle tracks: (1) What they are speaking - IN their script (this is called SLS: Same-Language-Subtitling and has been quite successful for literacy programs for one's own language) (2) What they are speaking - IN my script (3) What they MEAN - IN my language (i.e. translation) Data for (1) is easy to find. (2) could theoretically be generated from (1). It's (3) which requires a lot of deliberate manual effort.

GEBBL 9y ago
Are there video players like VLC that allow the displaying of more than one sub/srt file at a time?
- shard 9y ago
  I use KM Player, which allows up to 3 subtitles at a time, although the 3rd subtitle is placed right in the middle of the video (the first is on the bottom and the second is on the top, which works very well).
austinl 9y ago
This is the way FluentU works (https://www.fluentu.com/ https://www.fluentu.com/). They have content with 2-3 subtitle tracks that can be toggled on and off. Then you can click on specific words in the subtitles that you don't know, it'll show a definition, and you can add it to a list of words to review. They've got several TV series (although they might not be your favorite series), depending on the language.
dilap 9y ago
Netflix will give you (1) and (3) for a bunch of their newer stuff
- schacon 9y ago
  A tip on Netflix - in the US, it's often nearly impossible to get foreign language dubbing or subtitles. I've found that I can watch Friends in German by using TunnelBear or another VPN to get a German IP and then downloading them offline and watching them in airplane mode.

misiti3780 9y ago

I have spent the last 10 months learning italian, spending a total of 7 weeks in the country, 150 hours studying, and 85 hours speaking on iTalki. I have been using the method's described in Fluent Forever[1] and they have been working extremely well for me. I have a speaking partner that I speak with 3-5 times a week for 1 hour each time (If you want to learn italian email me, he is awesome), and I keep track of literally everything I cant say, and after the lesson make cards, insert them into Anki, repeat. I can understand 80% of our conversations perfectly, and we talk for the full hour, rarely breaking into english. Am I speaking perfect italian - no, but I have absolutely no problems communicating. I was recently in Sicily with my family and hanging out with a family that spoke no English and was translating for 8 people in both directions with no problems. This is the first new language I have learned but it seems the key to me is described in the book 1) start with pronunciation and spelling (Gabe created pronunciation trainers for most languages) 2) Learn some basic verbs (I need, I want, may I, to go, to take, etc) 3) Building up a large list of nouns 4) Start using iTalki with a partner very soon into your journey and keep track of what you dont know. The state departments says it takes around 400 hours to learn the latin based languages, I believe that seems fairly accurate.

austinl 9y ago
+1 for iTalki and Fluent Forever. There are so many apps out there that give you the illusion of progress (e.g. the author's "74% fluent") but with nothing to show for it. There is no way you can get around practicing speaking and listening if your end-goal is to speak and listen. I started learning French maybe 6 months ago and have done ~20 hours of iTalki sessions. You'll sound terrible when you start, but that's okay — you're paying them to hear your terrible French/German/Spanish/etc. It's all gets better.
drharby 9y ago
What's a typical going rate for a speech partner?
- misiti3780 9y ago
  7-15/hour for non "teachers"

primitivesuave 9y ago

I highly recommend trying the app. The user interface is beautiful and the approach seems effective. I could actually see this being used in a German language school to supplement the curriculum, unlike pretty much every language app I've seen so far. I find Pimsleur to be a highly effective spoken language acquisition tool, but the writing/reading aspect is abysmal and quite demotivating. Chatterbug seems to be doing spaced repetition, and does it much better than Pimsleur audiobooks because I can zoom through the things I remember and get as much time as I need to repeat questions and think about the answer.

chillacy 9y ago
I can also vouch for the effectiveness of Pimsleur, especially when used in combination with Duolingo to take care of reading/writing and vocab. I had a much easier time when I landed in France because of all the time I put in listening/speaking along the recordings, which is frankly amazing because it's just a fixed set of 30 minute audio lessons, not customized at all!
ThinkingGuy 9y ago
Another vote for Pimsleur, at least for quickly acquiring a basic set of phrases and words for travel purposes. I've used 5 different Pimsleur courses (Turkish, Italian, Greek, Russian, and Dutch) in preparation for various international trips. I've found going through just the first 8 or 10 lessons is enough to get the necessary survival phrases firmly embedded in my memory. Pimseur also offers lessons intermediate and advanced courses that can take you to greater fluency, but I've never pursued any courses that far. If I really wanted to work toward fluency in a language, I'd probably start out with a different method. As others have pointed out, Pimsleur is oriented strictly to the spoken language, so if you need to be able to read the language, it would make sense to supplement it with separate written course materials, especially if the orthography of the target language is particularly different than your own (e.g., Greek and Mandarin). On a side note, I also find doing a 30-minute Pimsleur course to be a great mental exercise. Recalling the phraes and responding to the prompts, I literally feel like rarely-used parts of my brain are getting a workout.
- 9y ago

gramie 9y ago

I have been using http://www.languagetransfer.org http://www.languagetransfer.org to learn Spanish, and it is the best language system, aside from total immersion, I have ever used (I speak five language with varying degrees of fluency). It is a series of audio files, typically about 10 minutes each, and all you do is listen to them, answering questions when the instructor asks. German, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Swahili, Spanish, and others. It's a labour of love by Mihalis, who asks for donations but otherwise does it all for free! I haven't tried Chatterbug, but I am completely sold on Language Transfer, because it sidesteps the rote memorization that so many other systems use.

rahimnathwani 9y ago
I just went to the site. From the description, it sounds like a similar method to that used in the Michel Thomas CD courses. I'll definitely try it!
- KGIII 9y ago
  I have zero experience with it, but I've heard many good things about the Rosetta Stone software. As in, I know real life people who have used it and gush about it it. I'm not able to judge their fluency, but some of them have been using it to learn a variety of different languages. The lady that lives at the neighboring farm speaks at least a dozen languages and she's learned all but two of them with the software. She speaks passable French and Spanish (and English, of course) so I can vouch for the Spanish and the missus is fluent in French.
- bababooey 9y ago
  I think it's actually better than Michel Thomas, but you're right that it's the same system. Fun fact, this system was first pioneered not by Michel Thomas, but rather by Margarita Madrigal. She has a book called the Magic Key to Spanish. You can also find her Magic Key to French and German online since those are out of print.
bababooey 9y ago
I've been supporting Language Transfer for years. I believe that the program suffers a bit when it branches out into languages with grammatical case more complex than English. But the courses are all free of charge. Please recommend them to friends or family to spread the word! I can especially endorse the Spanish course.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

Shank 9y ago

I'd love to see more tools go into the space of learning what I consider to be the farthest thing from English. That's like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc. There's a lot more that goes into learning these languages due to differences in pronunciation, characters, and sentence structure. I know the demand is often placed on the romance and germanic languages, but they're often easy enough. You can usually bring along your own character set, which dramatically eases the transition into something new.

schacon 9y ago
We will absolutely tackle these languages. We're releasing German for English speakers currently in order to learn better how more customers respond to the methods we're using, and German is more complex grammatically for English speakers than romance languages. Also, I didn't speak any German and I think it's important to use your product yourself. Personally I want very much to return to Japanese myself some day. As I mentioned in the post, I studied it for several months. It is an interesting question of how best to approach learning kana and kanji, since that's a pretty difficult thing to get fast at. Memorizing a few hundred symbols isn't super hard, but getting so good at them that you can sight-read takes a lot of time and can be frustrating. I would disagree that learning any language is easy enough, with or without learning a new writing system. That's sort of like saying that learning the piano is easy enough compared to the violin, just because it's always on key. It's still a lot of work before anyone wants to listen to you play. No matter what language you learn, if you want to become somewhat fluent, you need to memorize several thousand abstract words, new sounds, new grammar rules, etc. It's always a lot of work in absolute terms. I only bring this up because I feel that it's somewhat harmful to say learning a language can be "easy". It often results in people trying to learn, inevitably finding out that it's still a lot of work and then giving up while blaming themselves for being "bad at languages".
- BronSteeDiam 9y ago
  You should have a mailing list. I would like to be notified when my target language becomes available.

pmoriarty 9y ago

I'm a fan of a method of language learning called TPR (Total Physical Response).[1][2][3] It is by far the fastest and easiest way I know of learning vocabulary and grammar. In a nutshell, with TPR the teacher gives the student a command in the target language, demonstrates the action the command is asking for, repeats the command and finally the student copies the action. For example, if English was the target language, the teacher could say "sit down", then sit down themselves, then once again say "sit down" and the student would copy the action by sitting down. This can then be repeated for "stand up", for "pick up the fork", or any other arbitrarily complex and sophisticated command. As you've no doubt noticed, the commands are given in grammatically correct sentences, in context. Grammar is not explicitly taught, however. It is implicitly taught and implicitly learned. What makes this method work really well is that when you learn words and grammar, you're not doing it with just your mind and maybe some visual cues, you're using your body and doing so in a specific physical context (the place where you're learning), associating what you're learning with parts of that place. It's somewhat analogous to using a memory palace to learn, only without any extra effort of constructing the palace or imaging placing things you want to learn there. With TPR you actually physically interact with the things you learn in that space. Another great thing is that a TPR teacher need not have any special training in education or really even in the method. TPR takes maybe a minute or two to explain to anyone, so you can recruit helpers from any friends or acquaintances you have who know the target language and are willing to help, though if you want consistent lessons and dedication you'll probably want a professional tutor or teacher anyway. TPR focuses on learning to understand, in emulation of the first step of a child's language learning process. Children first learn to understand, then to speak, then to read, and finally to write. TPR helps with the first part. TPR has its limits, and it can't be used for all aspects of language learning, but it's fantastic for getting your language learning bootstrapped really quickly. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_physical_response https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_physical_response [2] - http://tola.maf.org/collect/missionb/index/assoc/HASH01da.dir/LEAVALON.pdf http://tola.maf.org/collect/missionb/index/assoc/HASH01da.di... [3] - http://tola.maf.org/collect/missionb/index/assoc/HASH0162.dir/KICKSTAR.pdf http://tola.maf.org/collect/missionb/index/assoc/HASH0162.di...

schacon 9y ago
I've read a lot of TPR(S) and also Krashen, whose research I believe the system is based on. It is somewhat difficult to use some of this theory over video, but we often discuss what we can take from ideas like this to help beginning speakers when they don't have a wide vocabulary they can access. I'm curious if using TPR(S) helped you learn a language? I own a few books on it, but I haven't seen it actually widely implemented.

andy_wrote 9y ago

I've done the Duolingo Spanish tree, and my feeling was the same as the author's regarding "% fluency," which I thought was kind of a joke. Especially for speaking and listening, there's really no substitute for immersion and real-life regular interactions. But I do feel that Duolingo was honestly pretty good about helping me to read and write. In NYC there's a little ambient Spanish everywhere and I went into it not with the goal of being fluent, but just being able to read signs and understand a little bit here and there. (I haven't kept up with it and now I've forgotten a good chunk, but I'd say that's a different issue.) At least in my case, it's also been a good entry point because it's free and convenient. I'm actually working on Duolingo's in-beta Czech tree (significant other's family is partially Czech) and it's actually been an inspiration for me to inquire about in-person classes, especially knowing that if I ever want to hold conversations, I will need to have real-life speaking experience. I probably wouldn't have done this if I hadn't started off on Duolingo and had some fun with it!

mercer 9y ago
I've been doing about 30 XP of Spanish on Duolingo for more than year now. 30 XP is about 10 minutes of practice, so very little. One day I was watching a show or movie that had many scenes in Spanish, and to my surprise I could actually follow much of what was said! I didn't realize how (relatively) effective even those 10 minutes a day can be.
- andy_wrote 9y ago
  Awesome! I did notice when doing the Spanish tree that I recognized a lot of words just from seeing them around the city, especially from ads and public service announcements on the subway.
cloverich 9y ago
I think Duolingo's main issue w/ Fluency is its just too easy to pass lessons. You can repeatedly miss a phrase, click on every word in the phrase (to get the translation), get it correct once, and now you've passed. You can get the entire tree Gold without actually _knowing_ the words. So if you want to get the most out of Duolingo, imho, you have to really force yourself to do your own review, and only consider it learned if you can repeatedly get through without missing any in a row or looking up any words. Its still got an upper limit, but I feel like (in Japanese) I"m learning it much faster than I was before.

schacon 9y ago

I'm curious who else in the community here learned a new language to either comfort or fluency and how they did it.

FeteCommuniste 9y ago
Starting at age 27 I learned French, Spanish, and Italian to a pretty good level: I can understand movies and usually communicate with native speakers without asking them to slow down or switch to English. I used a combination of Assimil (a book + cd series), reading news, listening to the radio, and taking some lessons on italki. I focused on French only for the first ~two years (at the time I was interested only in French and had no ambitions of being "multilingual" or anything). After that Spanish and Italian were much simpler to pick up thanks to shared vocabulary and grammar. I had no background in linguistics or learning languages apart from (almost entirely forgotten) high school Spanish and a bit of classical Greek in college.
dudul 9y ago
I studied English at school from 8yrs old to 18, and I was really bad at it. After graduating high-school I decided to work on it (I wanted to work in IT, and english was a must-have). That was around the time when DVDs were really taking over, and it was now really easy to watch movies in original version (as opposed to the dubbed versions). So I started watching movies in English. Like a lot. I'm talking 3 to 5 movies a day every day for months. I took a year off between high school and college. After that, I was fluent in listening, I moved to an english speaking country and started working on the speaking part. I was less intimidated since I could understand perfectly so I wasn't shy about speaking and exercising my pronunciation. I'm now fluent in English and live in the US. Most natives I talk to have no idea I'm a foreigner. Usually after an hour of conversation they start wondering which part of America I'm from and they're always surprised to hear I'm from Europe.
lazyant 9y ago
I learned 80% of my current (high) level of English when I was about 14 in about a year, besides the 3 or so hours at school I tried to immerse myself in the language any way I could, and I achieved a good reading, writing and listening level (spoken came with practice later), I did: - listen to songs and follow the lyrics - read simplified books or children's books - watch movies with subtitles in English - listen to American radio - read computer British magazines Picture dictionaries and regular English dictionaries helped too. Extremely important, as in anything you want to learn is motivation, I was really motivated to learn. My only "pro tip" is not to memorize vocabulary using isolated words, but complete sentences. This was before the Internet, now I don't know what the excuse would be...

IgorPartola 9y ago

I learned English when I was 12-14. I got to the point where I could converse in it in roughly 9 months between 13 and 14, after doing a 2x a week class with roughly 12 people. Yes, age is a huge factor, but the class was a part of a school that had multiple concurrent tracks, and ours was doing better than others. Age groups were all mixed and I was the youngest there. The keys to success for me were: 1. Teacher who didn't waste time. We plowed through the course material at a pace of roughly two chapters per lesson. This was double the speed of other tracks. 2. Teacher who wasn't a native English speaker. This was huge. A native speaker of English, even a professional teacher, can't usually explain to you things like the difference between past perfect and present perfect tense. Or how conjugation of pronouns works. Or the rules and exceptions of conjugating verbs in different tenses. She was able to explain this because she had to learn it in a structured way. 3. English is a very structured language. Unlike Russian (my first language), it discourages run-on sentences. It also has a specific order of verbs and nouns. It also has a pretty simple system of taking the same sentence through all nine tenses with mostly modifier verbs (be and have). This all maps really neatly into handy charts that are very quick to memorize. By contrast in Russian you have three tenses, so the difference between "I am walking" and "I walk" is up to the reader to discern. 4. English is simpler than Russian when it comes to conjugation. There is no conjugating verbs, adjectives, or adverbs by gender. The only conjugation you do is by tense. "Exception" verbs suck (be, am, was, will/shall). But aside from the most common ones (be, have, go), they fall into one of several patterns(think/thought, bring/brought, ring/rung). Less conjugation is better, and since English requires complete sentences (you don't generally see sentences like "gone" and have to infer who just left, he or she, etc.) no additional information is conveyed by conjugation. Can you tell I hate conjugation? Basically going from Russian to English felt sort of like going from Python to Basic: you have a lot fewer paradigms to worry about, while already being familiar with the paradigms Basic uses. 5. Lots of memorization of words. Once you figure out how to say "Today after work I am going to get dinner with friends" you can easily substitute drinks for dinner, date for friends, school for work, etc. So I made my goal learning the structure of the language and learning enough words to make substitutions. Once I conceptually knew how to use all nine tenses, the rest was simple memorization and usage. 6. Lots of conversations and not being afraid of my bad accent. You know what's great about talking to other students? They don't give a shit that your accent sucks. Native speakers, especially ones outside the classroom might be nice about it, but you are always keenly aware that you don't sound like them. 7. Finally, after I was able to hold conversations in English, emersion helped. Side note: try not to move your kids to a completely new country and send them straight to high school a few months later. It's brutal. On the other hand, I have failed to learn any other languages since. Part of it is lack of time and motivation since I don't have a specific need for them. Part is that I am in fact older. I am about to take up Japanese and after that maybe get back to French. To this day I have failed to teach any of my past or present partners Russian.

nicpottier 9y ago

I've been going through the process of learning Spanish for the past year or two (with various levels of dedication) and I have also thought about starting yet another language learning app. I used RosettaStone and DuoLingo for a while and they both provided a lot of value, but for sure the greatest benefit came from doing 1 on 1 lessons with native speakers. Lots of progress then. One thing I've noticed with all the language learning apps though is that they are generalized methodologies that are then applied to lots of languages. IE, duolingo in French and Spanish and German are basically the same track, just in different langauges. Same with Rosetta Stone (even more consistent there). That seems to really be leaving a lot on the table. Every language has its quirks and most importantly every language has a few shortcuts you can learn to really give yourself a ton of utility with little work. But because the software is built to be generalized you get the lowest common denominator instead of the fastest possible path to fluency and speaking. Not sure which approach chatterbug is taking, but at first blush and by the way they talk about it I'm guessing it is yet another generalized approach, but I suppose we'll see.

schacon 9y ago
Our curriculum is all designed from scratch by our linguistics team in house, so it will certainly be specific to each language. However, I'm sure that as we do several languages, we will reuse patterns and exercises that transfer well. A situation to practice shopping or numbers can work the same in Japanese or German without having to reinvent it. Certainly all of our grammar drills and exercises will be customized to each language, though. I think it's pretty important to remember as well that one of the main things here is the a lot of your time in the system is spent talking to a real human. You can get the exact same live exercise several times and still have it be pretty different if you have different tutors. It's not really possible for that large part of our system to be really "generalized" in this way. Our system is very human, not just technological.

foobaw 9y ago

I speak three languages fluently and I can attest to Chatterbug's methodology. However, there's still much research to be done in the field. I participate in a lot of linguistic research since my case is a slightly more unique than others. Also, I'm curious if they're hiring and/or have plan to scale. There are so many features they could add.

schacon 9y ago
We aren't currently hiring, but we would love to talk to you for future reference. We have many plans to scale. :) I agree that there are a lot of features we can and will add. This is only the very beginning of what we can do to improve this process, I think. I would love to hear any ideas.

coffee91 9y ago

I used to use Anki Flashcards but I actually found that online tutoring is a lot better now. I use Verbling which solves a lot of the issues mentioned in the OP blog. The video system is all in the browser, no Skype as others have mentioned with iTalki and my teacher shares PDFs directly on the site. It also tells me what page she is on so I can be in sync, and we draw notes etc on top of the whiteboard.

nnd 9y ago

Learning a language is simple. Immerse yourself in the environment where everyone speaks the language (travel to that country) and force yourself to speak that language only at all times. This is the key. I’ve learned German like that in two months.

schacon 9y ago
I would argue that immersing yourself in a native environment is hardly a simple thing. It's expensive - often in money, but always as an impact to your life. If you have a job, or spouse, or kids or pets, how does this work. I've actually done this and each one of these things is a huge problem. If you're a young, single person who can work remotely or doesn't need a job, then maybe, but that's not most people. If you do need a job, getting a visa to work in a new country is also non-trivial and often impossible. It's also not just on you to "force yourself to speak a language". You need someone to listen to you. When you know 20 words of a language, cornering anyone to practice with is difficult and somewhat unfair. You need to know or meet some people who care enough about you to have some really horribly slow and boring conversations for a very long time while you improve. If you're not paying them for that time or otherwise reciprocating, then it can be a somewhat selfish thing to ask them to do that for a long time. It's also very hard to pick up vocabulary implicitly from conversations unless you have some base. My German is good enough now that if I don't understand a word I can ask them to rephrase it using other words and I can often get it. Children can do so just from environmental and contextual input often, but it takes them _years_. So you still have to spend a lot of time studying and building vocab on your own in order to try out. This method certainly can work, as I did mention in the blog post, but it's far from simple.
- nnd 9y ago
  > I would argue that immersing yourself in a native environment is hardly a simple thing. It's expensive - often in money, but always as an impact to your life. If you have a job, or spouse, or kids or pets, how does this work. I've actually done this and each one of these things is a huge problem. If you're a young, single person who can work remotely or doesn't need a job, then maybe, but that's not most people. If you do need a job, getting a visa to work in a new country is also non-trivial and often impossible. Too many ifs, sorry but those sound like the same excuses people say when they explain why they can't travel (more). You have to figure out what your priorities are, and if you really want something you'll find a way. >It's also not just on you to "force yourself to speak a language". You need someone to listen to you. Easy. Just go buy some food. You don't need much language skills for that task and it's a start. Or if you are single, go on a date with someone who doesn't speak your language (this was personally the most efficient way for me personally). You overcomplicate things. Your rate of learning a language is proportional of how uncomfortable you want to be. I've seen people studying in language schools for years until they get everything perfect and they can't even maintain a basic conversation. Overall this idea applies to all learning: "to become a master you should be willing to be a fool", i.e. make mistakes. > It's also very hard to pick up vocabulary implicitly from conversations unless you have some base. My German is good enough now that if I don't understand a word I can ask them to rephrase it using other words and I can often get it. Children can do so just from environmental and contextual input often, but it takes them _years_. So you still have to spend a lot of time studying and building vocab on your own in order to try out. Most of the information is communicated via non-verbal channels: body language and intonation for example. Using your intuition is crucial here. The rest is basically pattern matching. A single word you can understand from the context. Once you understand > 50% words in a sentence, you can derive the rest from the context and then it becomes a self-reinforcing learning system. Well, children also don't have the same intellect as an adult and cannot apply more sophisticated learned cognitive techniques.

casey_lang 9y ago

I've always wanted to be fluent in a second language and have tried in the past, but I always end up with the same problem. While I recognize that the only way to gain conversational skills is to actually have conversations, they terrify me. Engaging in small talk with strangers in my native language is hard enough. Trying to do it in a second language seems impossible. Even watching the demo video from the link, all I could think was "this is awkward". I would almost rather there be a sort of script or game around the conversations, so they're not relying on my ability to be interesting while also trying to do it in a different language.

schacon 9y ago
This is the problem I always had with tandems and some tutors as well. One of the things I like about using our system is that all the exercises are guided. They have instructions, you can advance at any time, there is always an explicit task or situation or game to play. Sometimes the tutors read a story and then ask you questions about it, sometimes there are word games, sometimes there are situations where you're told what you need to do and you just try to role play. Always after you've at least minimally learned the vocab and grammar needed to do it. Nowadays I will sometimes wander and just have a random conversation with a tutor, but when it's finished, I just click 'Next' and get a new thing to try. It can be a little scary at first, as any in-person meeting or class environment often is the first time, but it becomes fun and comfortable pretty fast. You really aren't expected to be interesting (as many of my tutors can attest, I rarely am :) ) The compilation video (is just from the video feeds, but I removed the actual exercises we were doing. It's entirely guided. These were just sort of random conversations that I happened to venture into as an aside from the main curriculum as I got more familiar with the tutors as a way to illustrate how my spontaneous conversational skills improved over time.
- casey_lang 9y ago
  Thanks for the clarification! I've signed up to be notified when Spanish is added and will give it a shot
tchaffee 9y ago

claimred 9y ago

How does one learn Mandarin Chinese though

eric_bullington 9y ago

@schacon Interesting post. I agree that language-learning is more of a marathon than a sprint. As someone who speaks several languages[1], it was interesting to read about your perception of how polyglots learn languages. You picked up on some good things (flashcards and these days spaced repetition learning programs since vocab is critical, multiple different tools and books, online tutors) but you didn't mention a characteristic that most polyglots I know share[2]: an excellent foundation in the grammar of their own language, and the inclination to spend the time necessary to build a good foundation in the grammar of whatever language they are learning. I'm sure there are exceptions to this rule, but it seems to be enough of a trend that it's worth mentioning. Some people promote the idea of learning a language "naturally" through an immersive environment. Although immersing yourself in the language is critical once you've picked up a strong foundation, I've personally known very few people who have learned a language to near-native fluency as an adult by simply jumping into a new language environment. Kids do this all the time, but the way most adults successfully learn a new language is different from the way children do it. I've watched some people waste a lot of time trying to speak to native speakers of a language they're learning without having any kind of foundation in vocabulary and grammar. They would have done well to spend at least a portion of that time picking up a basic vocab through flashcards and learning grammar fundamentals of the foreign language in question. And although I'm sure there are exceptions to this rule, most polyglots I know are fascinated by grammar, in addition to having a strong interest in phonology and speech/accents. So to anyone who has tried and failed to learn a foreign language as an adult and is thinking of giving it another try, I recommend picking up both a review book on the grammar of their native language, as well as a basic but complete grammar of the language they are targeting. Spend some time with these books along with Anki and the language-learning apps, and then go out and immerse yourself in another language environment, either through online language communities, or living/traveling abroad. And one last type for new language learners: be sure to study idioms and phrases when you use Anki or whatever flashcard program, and not just simple words. Having a good stock of idioms is critical to fluent conversation. 1. At one time, fully fluent in 4 languages, now 2 are rusty but I'm picking them and another back up. I've also enjoyed an intermediate level of fluency in an additional 5-6 languages at one time or another. (I've also worked as a professional interpreter (2 years) and translator (10 years)) 2. The only exceptions to this rule have been people who have learned 3-4 languages as children, but even they have a much better knowledge of grammar than most Americans I know.

bsaul 9y ago

That video convinced me and was ready to give you all my money since I have some time right now. But unfortunately the two languages i’d like to learn ( mandarin and hebrew) aren’t there. Anyone could recommend me a system for Chinese or Hebrew ?

ximeng 9y ago
skritter.com is good for Chinese writing.
barry-cotter 9y ago
This is not how I got past basic Mandarin but I’m fairly confident it would work. Get the paid version of Pleco, the best Chinese dictionary app. Turn on spaced repetition in flash cards and download the HSK 1-6 flash cards. Learn the HSK 1 cards _with sound_ so you get started on pinyin. Buy the Chinese Breeze graded reader books, leve 1. Listen to the audio version on the cds a few times then try and read the books. Repeat by HSK level until you run out of Chinese Breeze graded readers, move on to other graded readers, move on to using italki.com for conversation and native texts loaded into pleco’s reader functionality for reading. Duolingo has Hebrew for what that’s worth. Good luck.
redthrow 9y ago
"The future of Chinese language learning is now" by Prof Victor Mair http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11580 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11580

deleted 9y ago

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mezuzi 9y ago

C'est la langue la plus difficile, plus difficile en fait, que l'Allemand et l'Arabe. N'est-ce pas?

schacon 9y ago
Quelle langue, Allemand?

jinushaun 9y ago

Reminds me of my own experience. I "beat" Duolingo French, but not conversational at all. I can ask the perfect question, but can't understand the answer. Most of the time, no one can even understand my pronunciation.