9 ms·

I've found that the main difficulty in learning a new language is not so much in picking up structure, but vocabulary! This book seems to address the first, but

I've found that the main difficulty in learning a new language is not so much in picking up structure, but vocabulary! This book seems to address the first, but not so much the second. I happen to be learning German and Latvian right now. The way I'm approaching them is to find easy-level texts (https://www.nachrichtenleicht.de https://www.nachrichtenleicht.de for German, children's books for Latvian), and reading a couple of paragraphs. Whenever I find a word I don't know, I use Google Translate, and add it to a custom Anki deck. Then I practice vocabulary every day. This is a slightly more structured way of how I learned English back in the day (my English improved tremendously by playing Monkey Island, especially trying to understand the pirate insults).

jeffwass 7y ago
Out of curiosity, how do you find learning two languages at once?
- ggambetta 7y ago
  They don't really interfere much. Good question, though; I thought they would. My girlfriend (Latvian, and the reason I'm learning the language) says there's a lot of Latvian words adapted from German (due to long occupations over time), but I haven't really found them yet. Maybe being native in the language makes a difference? My native language is Spanish, and I can get a decent sense of meaning from texts in Portuguese and Italian. We went to the Louvre last year, and I could also understand some French. My girlfriend, however, couldn't understand a word, despite being fluent (but not native) in Spanish.
  - xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago
    >Maybe being native in the language makes a difference? Often two languages share a word, but it's much less common (or even obscure) in one of them and it's unlikely that non-natives know it. For example, "die Kartoffel" means "potato" in german, while in in polish it's "ziemniak", so they aren't similar at all. However, polish also has "kartofel" which is a word that every native speaker knows, but you won't find it in e.g. newspapers.
    - ggambetta 7y ago
      That makes a lot of sense. I can think of examples in which I can associate a new German word to a perfectly valid, though less common, English word. And I'm not even a native English speaker.
  - ascar 7y ago
    >Maybe being native in the language makes a difference? I think this is similar to understanding dialects. My native language is German and I can make sense of most German dialects (some are really hard tho' like Platt or Niederbayerisch). On the other hand, my English is proficient (CEFR C1/C2), but I regularly trip over dialects and even strong accents (Irish is especially hard). My personal guess is that you have memorized a much larger "network" of similar words (in meaning or sound) in your native language than in any language you learned in a structured/artificial way based on top of your native language. Fun fact: At least here in Bavaria, we often say German is our first foreign language and our dialect is our actual native language. So we already organically learned two similar languages as child.
    - yorwba 7y ago
      Both Low German (Platt) and Bavarian are classified as separate languages from Standard German in ISO 639-3, with language codes nds and bar, respectively (as opposed to deu). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-3
      - ascar 7y ago
        That did sound interesting at first, but my native dialect Franconian [1] also has an ISO 639-3 language code (vmf) and while the pronounciation from high german differs, the words and grammar are basically identical (with very few exceptions). E.g. we pronounce "t" as "d" and "k" as "g" and some "g" as "ch", but the words remain the same. (This means I learned to pronouncations for every word as a child.) The ISO 639-3 seems to actively categorize dialects and not just "languages". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Franconian_German https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Franconian_German
        yorwba 7y ago
        There has been an attempt to remove vmf from the standard (reason: such a language does not exist) in 2010, but it was rejected for formal reasons https://iso639-3.sil.org/request/2010-012 https://iso639-3.sil.org/request/2010-012 ISO 639-3 does aim to classify languages and not dialects, but that means the classification needs to change as the linguistic evidence is reinterpreted. For the time being, there's a test Wikipedia: https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/vmf https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/vmf I tried reading some articles, and while it mostly feels like Standard German with fantasy spelling, there were some words I didn't understand, e.g. in the article about cows: https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/vmf/Kou https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/vmf/Kou
- ploika 7y ago
  For a while in secondary school I was learning three languages at once - French, German and Irish (Gaelic). I'm Irish, native English speaker, in case it wasn't obvious. In general I think it helped to learn them in parallel rather than in sequence. It made it easier to pick up the more fundamental grammatical/linguistic things. I wouldn't do it outside of full time education though. It was a lot of work.
  - bayesian_horse 7y ago
    Learning languages in parallel is usually the right strategy. The problem is that it not only takes hands-on time to build the mental infrastructure, but also calendar-time. In general, if you learnt a certain Word X time ago, you have a good chance of forgetting it after X further time. There clearly is a distribution, but this general rule of thumb does generally hold. I know I could learn a few hundred words in a day to remember them the next day, if I really wanted to (using mnemonics). But they would fade within days, or weeks at the most.
- bayesian_horse 7y ago
  At the moment I am working on 5 languages, though with varying effort.
romes 7y ago
You're right! The book does not address the second difficulty at all. I agree that vocabulary is important, and reading a couple of paragraphs is in fact really productive (thank you for the link suggestion btw), however, in my opinion, having the gramatical understanding of the language will prove really helpful in reading. There are subtle changes in words depending on what role they fulfil in the sentence; trying to "just" memorize them without correlating it with the sentence aspects will be harder than to understand the wholeness of the process. Also, understanding how German builds much of its vocabulary leads to learning more vocabulary faster!
- ggambetta 7y ago
  I generally agree. To be fair, my goal is to understand and be understood, not necessarily to express myself correctly - not at first, at least. I suppose it's similar to the way children learn?
dorchadas 7y ago
My biggest issue with this is my dislike towards Anki. I really just don't like flascards, and I can never regularly study with Anki. It's quite sad, as my vocabulary in my second language (Irish) is easily the worst part. I've found that reading does help, though, even if not making it into flashcards on Anki.
- rwnspace 7y ago
  I love the idea of anki but immediately tire of the execution. There are naturalistic ways to achieve the effects of spaced repetition, fortunately, like reading the works of a particular writer or playing games of a certain genre in the target language.
  - dorchadas 7y ago
    Yep. Sadly Irish is so small that I'm not going to find many games in it, but I'm at a comfortable B2 level (passed the exam twice, actually) and am reading just fine. I just wish there was a good way to incorporate specific words into all that.
  - jldugger 7y ago
    Honestly, the problem with Anki is manifold: 1. It needs parameter tuning. If you get everything right, you were re-shown cards too quickly. There's a variety of ways to tune how that happens, some by showing you cards further apart, and some by introducing more cards. Either way is fine for language learning, IMO. 2. Users hate the experience when the parameters are tuned correctly. It should be something of a struggle, and you should be failing about 20 percent of cards you see. When every card you see is on the cusp of forgetting, each card is legitimately cognitively taxing. 3. Flashcards don't really fit into society. College classes tend to be a series of topic focused exams, and once the exam has passed, any time spent on retention of knowledge gained competes with time for acquiring knowledge for the next exam. Also, folks tend not to like the idea of failing 20 percent of their exam questions due to forgetting.
  - bayesian_horse 7y ago
    In my opinion SR apps should not compute the repetition interval by themselves but rather ask the user. After revealing the answer you should be able to say "repeat this soon, later, much later". A different kind of app shouldn't use time at all but rather a queue of all words/cards and then put cards back a certain number of positions, depending on level and user input. The queue system works a lot better with different timescales (practicing over short or long terms), and it doesn't tell you how much time you have to put in at any given day. It also takes less parameters, I think.
FabHK 7y ago
> This book seems to address the first, but not so much the second. As the introduction states, the book assumes that the student works with a dictionary. So, it explicitly does not address vocabulary.
superplussed 7y ago
I built a website (and soon an app) for learning German, that has a focus on both grammar and vocabulary. We have a frequency list with the top 5000 German words. And we are a video-driven site, so each word has a video. And most words also have sentences (also each with a video). This is good for getting a feel for the spoken language, and hearing the vocabulary used in context. You can check it out here: http://www.seedlang.com http://www.seedlang.com
- MobileVet 7y ago
  I started with German about a year and a half ago via Mango Languages. I love the app because it approaches languages via phrases and conversations instead of vocabulary (like Duolingo) Your site looks really promising... I will definitely give it a shot! What was your driver for creating it? Language is a very competitive space these days.
  - ggambetta 7y ago
    I used Duolingo for a couple of languages, got pretty far in Italian and tried some German. I found it either too slow, or too beginner-ish; I didn't feel like I was learning much, and it didn't help me read news websites / novels much. While I do like the approach - specifically, the use of words in context, and the variety in exercises - it didn't really do it for me (Severin, if you're reading this - sorry, man!)
    - bayesian_horse 7y ago
      Duolingo starts at the beginning. If you think a skill is too easy, try testing out of it to get to a higher level or advance faster. Duolingo says they don't currently aim too teach beyond A2/B1, so you may already be past that. Having learnt a few languages with and without duolingo, I think you will usually need 2000+ words in a language, and close to 90% of the grammar to read native texts well. Duolingo can get you quite close to, but not past that mark.
  - bayesian_horse 7y ago
    Duolingo is based on sentences. It builds both vocabulary and grammar skills, though it may look like it's "only" translating.
mistahenry 7y ago
Too true. I self taught German to a low C2 in 2 years or so as a native English speaker. I got to a very high level of grammar in a matter of months, but since vocabulary took far longer to acquire, I was left having most conversations sound like “I would have ___ if only I had known ____ was ____ing ____.
CHsurfer 7y ago
I have been reading German novels on Kindle. If I don't understand a word, put my finger on it and in a few seconds I get a definition. Admittedly, only about 50% or the words I check are in the built-in dictionary, but it allows me to keep reading without too much time loss. What would be amazing is to automatically generate anki cards from this. Anyone?
odiroot 7y ago
From my own experience learning German for 8 years, I have to say grammar is absolutely the biggest challenge. Vocabulary is easy to learn by consuming a lot of media. Finally pronunciation may be the next hurdle, especially if you're not used to germanic languages.

jeffwass 7y ago

Out of curiosity, how do you find learning two languages at once?

ggambetta 7y ago
They don't really interfere much. Good question, though; I thought they would. My girlfriend (Latvian, and the reason I'm learning the language) says there's a lot of Latvian words adapted from German (due to long occupations over time), but I haven't really found them yet. Maybe being native in the language makes a difference? My native language is Spanish, and I can get a decent sense of meaning from texts in Portuguese and Italian. We went to the Louvre last year, and I could also understand some French. My girlfriend, however, couldn't understand a word, despite being fluent (but not native) in Spanish.
- xeeeeeeeeeeenu 7y ago
  >Maybe being native in the language makes a difference? Often two languages share a word, but it's much less common (or even obscure) in one of them and it's unlikely that non-natives know it. For example, "die Kartoffel" means "potato" in german, while in in polish it's "ziemniak", so they aren't similar at all. However, polish also has "kartofel" which is a word that every native speaker knows, but you won't find it in e.g. newspapers.
  - ggambetta 7y ago
    That makes a lot of sense. I can think of examples in which I can associate a new German word to a perfectly valid, though less common, English word. And I'm not even a native English speaker.
- ascar 7y ago
  >Maybe being native in the language makes a difference? I think this is similar to understanding dialects. My native language is German and I can make sense of most German dialects (some are really hard tho' like Platt or Niederbayerisch). On the other hand, my English is proficient (CEFR C1/C2), but I regularly trip over dialects and even strong accents (Irish is especially hard). My personal guess is that you have memorized a much larger "network" of similar words (in meaning or sound) in your native language than in any language you learned in a structured/artificial way based on top of your native language. Fun fact: At least here in Bavaria, we often say German is our first foreign language and our dialect is our actual native language. So we already organically learned two similar languages as child.
  - yorwba 7y ago
    Both Low German (Platt) and Bavarian are classified as separate languages from Standard German in ISO 639-3, with language codes nds and bar, respectively (as opposed to deu). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-3
    - ascar 7y ago
      That did sound interesting at first, but my native dialect Franconian [1] also has an ISO 639-3 language code (vmf) and while the pronounciation from high german differs, the words and grammar are basically identical (with very few exceptions). E.g. we pronounce "t" as "d" and "k" as "g" and some "g" as "ch", but the words remain the same. (This means I learned to pronouncations for every word as a child.) The ISO 639-3 seems to actively categorize dialects and not just "languages". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Franconian_German https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Franconian_German
      - yorwba 7y ago
        There has been an attempt to remove vmf from the standard (reason: such a language does not exist) in 2010, but it was rejected for formal reasons https://iso639-3.sil.org/request/2010-012 https://iso639-3.sil.org/request/2010-012 ISO 639-3 does aim to classify languages and not dialects, but that means the classification needs to change as the linguistic evidence is reinterpreted. For the time being, there's a test Wikipedia: https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/vmf https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/vmf I tried reading some articles, and while it mostly feels like Standard German with fantasy spelling, there were some words I didn't understand, e.g. in the article about cows: https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/vmf/Kou https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/vmf/Kou
ploika 7y ago
For a while in secondary school I was learning three languages at once - French, German and Irish (Gaelic). I'm Irish, native English speaker, in case it wasn't obvious. In general I think it helped to learn them in parallel rather than in sequence. It made it easier to pick up the more fundamental grammatical/linguistic things. I wouldn't do it outside of full time education though. It was a lot of work.
- bayesian_horse 7y ago
  Learning languages in parallel is usually the right strategy. The problem is that it not only takes hands-on time to build the mental infrastructure, but also calendar-time. In general, if you learnt a certain Word X time ago, you have a good chance of forgetting it after X further time. There clearly is a distribution, but this general rule of thumb does generally hold. I know I could learn a few hundred words in a day to remember them the next day, if I really wanted to (using mnemonics). But they would fade within days, or weeks at the most.
bayesian_horse 7y ago
At the moment I am working on 5 languages, though with varying effort.

romes 7y ago

You're right! The book does not address the second difficulty at all. I agree that vocabulary is important, and reading a couple of paragraphs is in fact really productive (thank you for the link suggestion btw), however, in my opinion, having the gramatical understanding of the language will prove really helpful in reading. There are subtle changes in words depending on what role they fulfil in the sentence; trying to "just" memorize them without correlating it with the sentence aspects will be harder than to understand the wholeness of the process. Also, understanding how German builds much of its vocabulary leads to learning more vocabulary faster!

ggambetta 7y ago
I generally agree. To be fair, my goal is to understand and be understood, not necessarily to express myself correctly - not at first, at least. I suppose it's similar to the way children learn?

dorchadas 7y ago

My biggest issue with this is my dislike towards Anki. I really just don't like flascards, and I can never regularly study with Anki. It's quite sad, as my vocabulary in my second language (Irish) is easily the worst part. I've found that reading does help, though, even if not making it into flashcards on Anki.

rwnspace 7y ago
I love the idea of anki but immediately tire of the execution. There are naturalistic ways to achieve the effects of spaced repetition, fortunately, like reading the works of a particular writer or playing games of a certain genre in the target language.
- dorchadas 7y ago
  Yep. Sadly Irish is so small that I'm not going to find many games in it, but I'm at a comfortable B2 level (passed the exam twice, actually) and am reading just fine. I just wish there was a good way to incorporate specific words into all that.
- jldugger 7y ago
  Honestly, the problem with Anki is manifold: 1. It needs parameter tuning. If you get everything right, you were re-shown cards too quickly. There's a variety of ways to tune how that happens, some by showing you cards further apart, and some by introducing more cards. Either way is fine for language learning, IMO. 2. Users hate the experience when the parameters are tuned correctly. It should be something of a struggle, and you should be failing about 20 percent of cards you see. When every card you see is on the cusp of forgetting, each card is legitimately cognitively taxing. 3. Flashcards don't really fit into society. College classes tend to be a series of topic focused exams, and once the exam has passed, any time spent on retention of knowledge gained competes with time for acquiring knowledge for the next exam. Also, folks tend not to like the idea of failing 20 percent of their exam questions due to forgetting.
- bayesian_horse 7y ago
  In my opinion SR apps should not compute the repetition interval by themselves but rather ask the user. After revealing the answer you should be able to say "repeat this soon, later, much later". A different kind of app shouldn't use time at all but rather a queue of all words/cards and then put cards back a certain number of positions, depending on level and user input. The queue system works a lot better with different timescales (practicing over short or long terms), and it doesn't tell you how much time you have to put in at any given day. It also takes less parameters, I think.

FabHK 7y ago

> This book seems to address the first, but not so much the second. As the introduction states, the book assumes that the student works with a dictionary. So, it explicitly does not address vocabulary.

superplussed 7y ago

I built a website (and soon an app) for learning German, that has a focus on both grammar and vocabulary. We have a frequency list with the top 5000 German words. And we are a video-driven site, so each word has a video. And most words also have sentences (also each with a video). This is good for getting a feel for the spoken language, and hearing the vocabulary used in context. You can check it out here: http://www.seedlang.com http://www.seedlang.com

MobileVet 7y ago
I started with German about a year and a half ago via Mango Languages. I love the app because it approaches languages via phrases and conversations instead of vocabulary (like Duolingo) Your site looks really promising... I will definitely give it a shot! What was your driver for creating it? Language is a very competitive space these days.
- ggambetta 7y ago
  I used Duolingo for a couple of languages, got pretty far in Italian and tried some German. I found it either too slow, or too beginner-ish; I didn't feel like I was learning much, and it didn't help me read news websites / novels much. While I do like the approach - specifically, the use of words in context, and the variety in exercises - it didn't really do it for me (Severin, if you're reading this - sorry, man!)
  - bayesian_horse 7y ago
    Duolingo starts at the beginning. If you think a skill is too easy, try testing out of it to get to a higher level or advance faster. Duolingo says they don't currently aim too teach beyond A2/B1, so you may already be past that. Having learnt a few languages with and without duolingo, I think you will usually need 2000+ words in a language, and close to 90% of the grammar to read native texts well. Duolingo can get you quite close to, but not past that mark.
- bayesian_horse 7y ago
  Duolingo is based on sentences. It builds both vocabulary and grammar skills, though it may look like it's "only" translating.

mistahenry 7y ago

Too true. I self taught German to a low C2 in 2 years or so as a native English speaker. I got to a very high level of grammar in a matter of months, but since vocabulary took far longer to acquire, I was left having most conversations sound like “I would have ___ if only I had known ____ was ____ing ____.

CHsurfer 7y ago

I have been reading German novels on Kindle. If I don't understand a word, put my finger on it and in a few seconds I get a definition. Admittedly, only about 50% or the words I check are in the built-in dictionary, but it allows me to keep reading without too much time loss. What would be amazing is to automatically generate anki cards from this. Anyone?

odiroot 7y ago

From my own experience learning German for 8 years, I have to say grammar is absolutely the biggest challenge. Vocabulary is easy to learn by consuming a lot of media. Finally pronunciation may be the next hurdle, especially if you're not used to germanic languages.