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Interesting. I admittedly don't have much experience learning foreign languages; I did K-12 in the US and was only required to take 2 years of Spanish. I'd assu

Interesting. I admittedly don't have much experience learning foreign languages; I did K-12 in the US and was only required to take 2 years of Spanish. I'd assumed from discussions with other students taking, for example German, that it'd be more difficult. Versus programming languages, I've learned, C, C++, C#, Java, Python and Perl (and I supposed a modicum of JS) as well as x86, x64, 68k, MIPS, z80 and Atmel AVR assembly. I've always had an easier time learning a new programming language/assembler than a foreign natural language. Maybe that's just me.

dahart 8y ago
Spoken languages are a lot harder to learn than programming languages. But think about how much faster you learned JS than the time it took to learn C (or whatever your first programming language was.) Don't forget to account for the vast amount of learned information you get to leverage from your first language, even if you have to unlearn a few things or learn a few new things. Even though JS is very different from C, learning JS was much, much faster for me than learning C was, because I already knew a whole lot about the way all languages work just from learning C. I'm learning Icelandic right now, and it only took a few weeks of 30 minutes a day to cover some basic conversational skills, gather maybe 100 or so words of vocabulary, and get an introduction to the basic speech patterns & conjugation. It'll take a lot longer to be fluent, but children take years to get that far, because they're starting from scratch and don't have connections to build on. I see a ton of connections to German and English that kids wouldn't. It's also hard to compare programming to high school Spanish, since it's easy for us to spend 10 hours a day programming, but in high school we topped out at like 3 hours a week of Spanish exposure, and most of that wasn't practicing very hard. I moved to Mexico as a child (during my first grade year), and learned enough Spanish to go to school, play with the kids, etc. I feel like I'm picking up languages faster now than I did then.
- jodrellblank 8y ago
  YouTube anecdotes, but here is Gabriel Wyner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBMfg4WkKL8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBMfg4WkKL8 describing his experience of learning nothing much linguistically in High School or College, but then joining immersion based courses at an adult and making significant progress in a few weeks. and here: is Chris Lonsdale saying adults can learn useful amounts of spoken Chinese in 6 months, with immersion and being able to watch mouths closely and see how speakers move their moouths to pronounce things (IIRC): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0yGdNEWdn0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0yGdNEWdn0 and there's a bunch more; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WLHr1_EVtQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WLHr1_EVtQ and so on

dahart 8y ago

Spoken languages are a lot harder to learn than programming languages. But think about how much faster you learned JS than the time it took to learn C (or whatever your first programming language was.) Don't forget to account for the vast amount of learned information you get to leverage from your first language, even if you have to unlearn a few things or learn a few new things. Even though JS is very different from C, learning JS was much, much faster for me than learning C was, because I already knew a whole lot about the way all languages work just from learning C. I'm learning Icelandic right now, and it only took a few weeks of 30 minutes a day to cover some basic conversational skills, gather maybe 100 or so words of vocabulary, and get an introduction to the basic speech patterns & conjugation. It'll take a lot longer to be fluent, but children take years to get that far, because they're starting from scratch and don't have connections to build on. I see a ton of connections to German and English that kids wouldn't. It's also hard to compare programming to high school Spanish, since it's easy for us to spend 10 hours a day programming, but in high school we topped out at like 3 hours a week of Spanish exposure, and most of that wasn't practicing very hard. I moved to Mexico as a child (during my first grade year), and learned enough Spanish to go to school, play with the kids, etc. I feel like I'm picking up languages faster now than I did then.

jodrellblank 8y ago
YouTube anecdotes, but here is Gabriel Wyner: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBMfg4WkKL8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBMfg4WkKL8 describing his experience of learning nothing much linguistically in High School or College, but then joining immersion based courses at an adult and making significant progress in a few weeks. and here: is Chris Lonsdale saying adults can learn useful amounts of spoken Chinese in 6 months, with immersion and being able to watch mouths closely and see how speakers move their moouths to pronounce things (IIRC): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0yGdNEWdn0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0yGdNEWdn0 and there's a bunch more; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WLHr1_EVtQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WLHr1_EVtQ and so on