25 ms·

I used the internet to painlessly relearn a foreign language

214 points by robertwiblin 6y ago

stanrivers 6y ago
I think the most important part here is for those who learn a language and wish to maintain it. I failed here. Don't fail like I did. Make sure, once you have learned a language, to turn part of your life into a world operating in that language. Choose something - news, movies, books, internet - just pick something. Do that thing only in your new language once you can. Once that becomes a habit, what you have learned you will not forget. And you will get better over time as well as your brain painlessly absorbs and deeply programs in the target language. Second most important part - It takes a lot of work and consistency. Say that with me - consistency. Show up every day. If you don't, you will fail. That's one of those terrible truths about learning, and it is especially true about learning a language.
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > It takes a lot of work and consistency. Say that with me - consistency. Show up every day. If you don't, you will fail. That's one of those terrible truths about learning, and it is especially true about learning a language. William Buckley was lost for more than 30 years among Australian aborigines. By the time he heard of whites in the vicinity, he was unable to speak to them, having forgotten how to produce English. But, assuming you believe his memoirs, when they spoke to him, he regained his English within a day.
  - legerdemain 6y ago
    And his son went on to become a preëminent conservative intellectual and author!
  - fouc 6y ago
    I can see that happening. For example he could've been mentally stuck in a "Australian aborigine" language mode, and experienced some sort of "cat got his tongue" situation where he temporarily couldn't even think or summon english to speak with. So until they started interacting and he was able to wake up those neural pathways then it would come back. So he probably somewhat felt like he was re-learning the language at an accelerated pace since he already had the neural wiring for english.
    - gibs0ns 6y ago
      Do you know of, or can recommend, any studies on this "waking up the neural pathways" effect? I'm wondering what is happening here, surely it's more than simply firing those pathways as I'd imagine that to happen within seconds as opposed to the day or so it took him to recover. Thanks
      - mantap 6y ago
        IANAN but I think "waking up neural pathways" can be understood to mean making new synaptic connections, a process that is not instant and could potentially take a day if the existing connections were intact.
        sammorrowdrums 6y ago
        Often requiring sleep too I believe, with specific brain activity that simply doesn't occur while awake.
    - hanoz 6y ago
      My English (my first and only natural language) definitely takes a while to recover from a single day spent programming, so I can definitely see that happening.
    - kwhitefoot 6y ago
      > experienced some sort of "cat got his tongue" situation where he temporarily couldn't even think or summon english to speak with. Something like that happens to me sometimes. I get stuck for a word in Norwegian and suddenly find that I can't summon the English word either (English is my mother tongue but I have been living and working in Norway since '86). I am now capable of being tongue-tied in two languages simultaneously! But of course it all comes back to me quickly once I switch back to speaking only English.
      - thaumasiotes 6y ago
        > I get stuck for a word in Norwegian and suddenly find that I can't summon the English word either (English is my mother tongue but I have been living and working in Norway since '86). Side note: this is one of many points sufficient to disprove the popular idea that words are the medium of thought. Thought is not linguistic.
  - spaetzleesser 6y ago
    “But, assuming you believe his memoirs, when they spoke to him, he regained his English within a day.” I think this works if the language is your native language or if you have immersed yourself. I used to be ok with French but after a few years of not using it there is not much left.
    - barry-cotter 6y ago
      You’d be amazed how fast it comes back. I hadn’t used French in over a decade last time I went to France. In the taxi to our hotel I could barely string two words together. Ten days later in the one to the airport I was having a real conversation, if with terrible grammar and poor vocabulary.
    - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      When I was coming back to Denmark I did some reading on academic studies related to relearning languages, one study I found said that if someone has spoken a language for 8 years (or the first 8 years of their life as it was focused on childhood language being relearned in adulthood) then they will never lose that language - unfortunately I spoke Danish the first 6 years of my life and when I came back I started to remember German which occupied the part of my mind focused on non-English language.
  - keiferski 6y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Buckley_(convict) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Buckley_(convict) For anyone else who wasn't familiar with this story.
    - pdm55 6y ago
      From the Wikipedia article: " ... his significant first meeting with a group of Wathaurong women, [occurred] several months after his escape [in 1803]. Buckley had taken a spear used to mark a grave for use as a walking stick. The women befriended him after recognising the spear as belonging to a relative who had recently died and invited him back to their camp. Believed to be the returned spirit of the former tribesman, he was joyfully welcomed and adopted by the group. ... Buckley also recounted information about warfare among Aboriginal people. According to Buckley he was a central part of life among the Australian hunter-gatherers. He had often witnessed wars, raids, and blood-feuds. This information was uniquely important ... " The Wikipedia article links to John Morgan's interesting account of William Buckley's life, written in 1852: https://archive.org/details/lifeandadventur00morggoog/page/n6/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/lifeandadventur00morggoog/page/n...
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    I have lived abroad for about 20 years now, when I am back home it is always a painful exercise to remember some Portuguese slang and street expressions. Naturally after a couple of days I am back home. It isn't worse, because thanks to Internet I am able to keep in touch with my native tongue still. So yeah, I do believe his memoirs.
  - robaato 6y ago
    I learned French, German and Italian to a good level at school and then by working there in my early 20s. Some decades later, I don't speak them that often but sometimes at work with customers. I am still pretty good in all 3, and a day or two in country polishes off the rust, e.g. on holiday, though of course not back to my highest level. I later tried to learn Spanish - (similar to French/Italian) but couldn't get it to the same level - easy come, easy go. Long term interest in Aikido lead my to attempting Japanese - but again it's never stuck. At university took a course in Russian - made good progress for a year and then left it - all gone! So for me it's a combination: - learning to a sufficient level, - with consistent effort at the time (some level of immersion) - it is easier when brain is younger!
- wccrawford 6y ago
  I started learning Japanese a while back, and studied slowly for a few years. Then I fell off studying, but kept using it recreationally. I didn't pick 1 medium and insist on it because I have a wife that doesn't speak Japanese at all and that just doesn't work. But I do still use it occasionally for games, anime (with English subs), manga, and sometimes live TV. It's pretty seldom, but it happens. After a few years of that, I rejoined a Japanese meetup group locally for reading a Manga with them that's above my level. I'm realizing that I'm basically where I was when I stopped studying. I haven't really lost anything. My point is that I don't think you need to be extreme to maintain. Just casual usage across different media is enough.
AmericanChopper 6y ago
I can speak a couple of languages that I don't use very often, I personally just make sure I watch a movie/tv show/the news (the news is the least helpful tbh) in those languages once or twice a week. The article suggests Netflix, but if you're not dealing with one of the more common languages, I've found that a lot of countries have their own streaming services you can use.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  I find news helpful for weak languages: read strong languages first, and then there's already known context for the major stories when approaching the weak languages.
  - AmericanChopper 6y ago
    The languages I speak have pretty big differences between the formal and the actually spoken language, so watching the news in them has never been that helpful, because I pretty much never need to speak the language spoken by newscasters. My problem is also just that I need to keep up my exposure to the language so that I don’t forget, which requires a bit less effort than the OP went to.
dhosek 6y ago
For Spanish, I use the General English-Spanish dictionary for iOS from https://www.wordmagicsoft.com https://www.wordmagicsoft.com (they also have Android and desktop apps, apparently). It's fantastic: it lets you look up conjugated verbs and has full conjugation tables as well. I can generally read a fair amount without consulting the dictionary (I'm working my way through Hija de la fortuna by Isabel Allende right now), but every so often I need it, especially when I get into some area of unusual subject matter. Last month I read Federico García Lorca's Romancero Gitano which really gave the dictionary a workout. His use of language is so inventive I found myself looking up words I knew because I would be thinking "does that make sense?" an awful lot. I may have to read García Lorca annually just because it expanded my mind so much.
- jobigoud 6y ago
  If you are at the point of reading a book (upper intermediate) you chould probably be using a normal Spanish dictionary with the definitions in Spanish.
  - dhosek 6y ago
    True, it's largely laziness that keeps me using it. And there are occasional brain freezes where this dictionary really helps (the one that I remember most clearly was when I was reading a B. Traven story in Spanish and was stumped by alitas (this was back when I still used a paper dictionary while reading). Obviously it's the diminutive of alas, but I just couldn't see it. Fortunately, I was on vacation in Mexico at the time and the tour guide was able to point out my dumb problem. My wife who is fluently bilingual (she's a native Spanish speaker and speaks English without any trace of an accent and has a book credit writing in English) (and actually, she's trilingual, she also speaks French. Makes me feel pretty stupid beside her) uses the same dictionary although much less than I do, for the occasional gaps in her vocabulary (which is often broader than my own, see http://www.dahosek.com/susurrus/ http://www.dahosek.com/susurrus/ )
adyer07 6y ago
One suggestion I didn’t see in here was video games! I switch my Switch to a second language to play Animal Crossing. I’ve found it to be a fun and intuitive way to pick up a little more colloquial language and vocabulary. I’ve had similar good luck with other text-heavy games like the Sims. Plus, the short format makes it relatively painless, even when your reading comprehension is a little slow. Novels and news were always a slog to me, but a few lines of text feels more manageable. (And less daunting if you have to grab the dictionary.)
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  You may also consider playing MMO games like WoW. While I never learned English properly, WoW is what allowed me overcome my language barrier and helped me to start communicating with people. Unfortunately I still didn't invest time to properly learn all the grammar, but it was enough for my practical needs.
mellowdream 6y ago
Of course the methods listed should be effective regardless of the language as they simulate immersion, but it will not be so "painless" the further away you move from the European language families which share many similarities.
candeira 6y ago
Someone I follow on Twitter has found a very good sweet spot for improving her second/nth language: she follows online courses in her field (art and design) in her target language. In her case, the target language is Spanish, so she does courses from Domestika: https://www.domestika.org/ https://www.domestika.org/
werber 6y ago
The biggest helper that wasn’t mentioned is keeping or making new friends who are strong in your target language and weak in your strong tongue. That has helped me more than anything
- seszett 6y ago
  I've found that the problem with this most of the time is that we end up just speaking English because it's less frustrating (simply because most people are better at it because of exposure) than trying to use each other's tongue.
  - 082349872349872 6y ago
    C'est en forgeant qu'on devient forgeron. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23591488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23591488
  - pessimizer 6y ago
    This just mean that they're beating you in the contest of getting the most language learning out of your interactions. Your frustration in speaking is causing you to bail, or your perception of their frustration in understanding is causing you to bail, so you're instead always returning to a language where you can be comfortable speaking and you're not worried about frustrating your friend with your attempts. From my pov, that just means that you'd rather exercise your patience than the target language, because you you have control over your patience and kindness, and you don't have control over the target language (it's a scarier position to be in.)
  - werber 6y ago
    I've fallen into that SOO many times. And it's a bit transactional to ask people to lower the intellect of the conversation to help you out for a portion of the time you talk together
- rimliu 6y ago
  Learning foreign language is way easier than "making new friends".
arxanas 6y ago
Thanks for posting. I set my phone to Polish and it's already really helping with my vocabulary. I also recommend Flowlingo for reading practice. It lets you visit websites or read e-books with tap-to-translate. The killer feature is that every word you tap gets entered into a spaced-repetition deck for later review. It's a great way to build and maintain your higher-register vocabulary with words you wouldn't ordinarily use in everyday speech.
ablekh 6y ago
My understanding is that these methods work well, when the learner has already reached at least a basic level of fluency in the target foreign language. But what about those just beginning the journey as well as those who have already started and still are moving toward that basic level goal? I assume that traditional approaches (textbooks, courses, sprinkled with some live conversations with native speakers and watching some movies/TV) remain the right ones. If so, I'm curious about what, if any, might be the optimal strategy for achieving that goal, in other words, what is the approximately optimal ratio between efforts using relevant methods (say, 50% textbook, 30% course X, 10% live conversations, 10% watching movies) and whether such strategy's ratio depends on specifics of the target language (say, Spanish vs. Chinese).
- jonathanjaeger 6y ago
  I do daily 30-60 minute conversations with native Brazilian speakers on Italki. That can add up in price quickly, but I would recommend at least 1-2 lessons per week to start after getting the basics down on something like Duolingo/Rosetta Stone. It was a world of difference between year 1 only using Duolingo/YouTube etc. and actually having Brazilian teachers correct my grammar, pronunciation, and add vocabulary for very context-specific situations that came up in conversations. Not to mention slang, idioms, etc.
  - ablekh 6y ago
    I see. Thank you for your prompt comment. Just one clarification ... When you are saying "getting the basics down on something like Duolingo/Rosetta Stone", do you mean that "basics" here includes all levels (as far as I know, solid courses like Rosetta Stone or Fluenz - as opposed to Duolingo and similar apps - have multiple levels, where higher levels are pretty advanced) or you are talking about first 1-2 levels?
    - joshvm 6y ago
      Duolinguo is a poor substitute for human interaction. It's a good tool to support other methods, but it encourages pattern matching rather than actual memorisation and there simply isn't enough variety in the examples to help you with translating unseen phrases. It's also not sufficient for speaking practice, but at least you can hear the text-to-speech. There are some positives. The community is very active and helpful. They've done a lot better with the lessons. Japanese, for example, is much improved. It used to be that you'd get exercises in hiragana with no context at all. I agree with the other post, you'll get much more out of a two hour class once a week than doing ten minutes of duolinguo a day. The claim that x hours is equivalent to a university semester is nonsense. Your question was about optimality. It doesn't take much classroom time to get good - maybe two or three courses? (say 60 hours to A2/B1) That gets you enough of a baseline that you can start watching TV, reading papers. For example in our B1 lessons for Spanish, we'd actually read El País as an exercise.
ilaksh 6y ago
Maybe I'm just old and stupid, but I don't feel like I am really learning a lot watching movies in a foreign language. I should probably try to do it more though. I grew up in San Diego and took like four Spanish classes and even some in college. But never really learned verbal skills and did not use it since school. I moved to Playas de Tijuana a few years ago to save money. For more than a year I made really minimal efforts to practice my Spanish though. It was not usually necessary since a lot of the people here speak okay English. I usually just take an Uber and it wasn't very important. And since my Spanish was horrible, often it felt counterproductive to try. But the last several months I have been making a deliberate modest effort to practice. And I feel like I am slowly getting less hopeless. But I would say if you are going for the immersion route and are lazy (practical?) like me, you might actually have to go somewhere kind of far (definitely not right next to the border) to find a place where you really need to use it a lot due to lack of English in the population. Here it is a little too easy to find people who are fluent in English. Part of the challenge for me is that I didn't want to sound like an idiot. I decided to just accept that and now I pretend that verb tenses don't exist (I was pretty good at them in high school but that was like 25 years ago) and it makes it much easier. Lol.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  There are very few things which one can eventually do well without initially doing poorly. Fosh wowk gutegow natim. Im gut kowltim. Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFNuGjqjyQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFNuGjqjyQo
sarink 6y ago
https://entend.io https://entend.io
- eps 6y ago
  ^ Spanish and Italian verb conjugation training with the UI that's broken on mobile.
wizzwizz4 6y ago
Anki isn't free for the iPhone; just Desktop, Android and Web. It's worth buying the app, though.
stone-monkey 6y ago
Right now is probably the best time in history to learn a language. The sheer amount of resources available to you via the internet compared to the year 2000 is exponentially greater. The volume of content in your target language available on youtube alone is enough to last you a lifetime. Not to mention all the channels specifically catered to teaching the language. Then the online tutoring marketplaces - you can be directly connected to a tutor from a country that speaks your language natively and remotely schedule 1:1 lessons at your convenience via video conferencing software. Plus the availability of language partner sites to practice if you're on a budget. The biggest problem in my opinion is people struggling with self directed learning, more than anything. A college level course is likely going to be objectively worse than self directed study with targeted goals, but many people dont have a clear goal of what they're trying to achieve in their target language other than a vague sense of fluency, myself included. If your language goal is to become fluent in a language, that's a goal with no defined end in sight.
- woile 6y ago
  > The volume of content in your target language available on youtube alone is enough to last you a lifetime *if you are an English speaker. Otherwise you have to do an extra hop. native -> English -> target but I agree it's still the best time in history to learn a language.
  - jobigoud 6y ago
    He's talking about the volume of native content in the target language, it's independent from your base language.
- encom 6y ago
  >The volume of content in your target language available on youtube alone is enough to last you a lifetime. Not if your target language is danish. Danish YouTube somehow never evolved beyond clickbaity reaction videos and Minecraft letsplays. There are good danish YouTubers[1][2], but they present their material in english. Your best bet for danish content that won't cause acute brain rot, is probably music and film clips, or VPN'ing your way to the danish state broadcaster www.dr.dk. It's like BBC, but with more rødgrød. Such as (no affiliation): [1]https://www.youtube.com/user/brainiac75 https://www.youtube.com/user/brainiac75 [2]https://www.youtube.com/user/SirNetrom1 https://www.youtube.com/user/SirNetrom1
mathieuh 6y ago
There is no mention of grammar here. I’m not sure how it is in the US, but in the UK we don’t even get taught the grammar of English. No one knows grammatical terms, like preposition, person, the name of tenses, the subjunctive, or even simple ones like verbs, adjective, adverbs and nouns. When you don’t even know formally how your own language is structured, it is very difficult to learn another language. For example, my mother (native French-speaker) gives private French lessons. She finds that instead of saying “ok today we’re going to learn about the subjunctive mood, the root is the third person plural of the indicative mood of the verb with the following endings”, she spends most of her time having to explain what those terms mean. I realise that there may be other ways that are less formal to learn languages, but at the end of the day, grammars follow rules, and if you don’t even understand the rule book in your own language you’re already at a huge disadvantage in my opinion. All these online articles claiming “don’t worry about grammar, that will come later” are missing out on what I think is the most important tool in language learning.
- diarmuidc 6y ago
  Playing devils advocate, if you were able to learn your native language with out an understanding of the grammar, why can't you learn a foreign language?
  - moooo99 6y ago
    I was forced to choose a third foreign language back in school. I ended up with Latin (bad idea btw, completely useless), so I had my usual German lessons (native language), English lessons (since 5th grade) and Latin (6th grade). When you constantly switch between those languages in terms of grammar, you realize how different those languages are. I didn't realize that in the beginning and I still have a habit of translating sayings from German into English that just don't make any actual sense. If you really want to learn a language, you need to learn the grammar, even if it isn't any fun.
    - sweetdreamerit 6y ago
      I'd love to learn Latin <3
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
guerrilla 6y ago
Don't forget all Eutopean countires have freely available public broadcasting (similar to NPR or BBC) whose websites have news articles, radio and TV. Usually the news is all free but sometimes you need a VPN for other stuff (if you're ethically oksy with that.) The more casual input you get,the faster it will go. Also a fun thing to to is read the Bible in multiple languages since it is translated into nearly everything and has free high quality audiobooksnfor everything but this can sometimes teach you arcane grammar and useless vocab but I find it useful anyway since you get side by sife comparison and can read along and have a massive corpus which probably infpunced the modern culture a lot. Try reading a language you just learned next to the next one you're learning, skipping your mother tongue.
fomine3 6y ago
YouTube's great auto sub for English really helps me to understanding and learning English. I wish such quality is available for other langs.
remarkEon 6y ago
Are the any professional linguists in this thread? Reason I ask is I have become very interested in the origin of languages over the last year or so (partially because of Covid). I've been learning German and French for a while now and I find the most difficult parts of learning these languages to be the grammar. I'd like to find a hierarchy of grammar for related languages, and see if there are some patterns that filter down through the child languages. I have a Latin textbook (probably need to dust that off), and am very interested in how these languages (Romance and Germanic) are all stitched together.
- unhammer 6y ago
  You may find The World Atlas of Language Structures https://wals.info/chapter/s1 https://wals.info/chapter/s1 interesting then.
- silverpepsi 6y ago
  you should be checking out the classic work The Loom of Language
giorgosera 6y ago
Almost a year ago I decided to start learning Russian so that I can talk with my girlfriend in her native language (the things we do for love ) Initially I tried the usual things like Duolingo, Babbel and some other apps. Out of those things the only one I found useful was Duolingo because it can get you started pretty quickly. However, I got stuck after that. I couldn't see myself making any progress. Then I stumbled upon the Comprehensible Input theory and TPRS and since then I've been studying Russian using a method that loosely follows these. Here's what I do: - I find short stories, news articles, social media posts etc online. - I read those texts and mark down the new words as I learn them. I add those words in a flashcard app and I practice them using SRS. I use an app called Ulangi. - I ask my girlfriend (a native speaker) to ask me short questions about the text and I have to answer in my target language. - Once I feel comfortable with that text I repeat the process with the next one. And it works (at least for me). I grew my vocabulary immensely, I can acquire grammar rules naturally (like I did with my native language) and I get to actually speak the language from day 1. As an added bonus I get to learn a lot about the culture of my target language. However, translating and saving words in my vocabulary became tedious so I decided to automate this whole process. So I started building a tool for me. I, then, realized that this might be useful for others so I made it public. You can use it for free at Talkabl.com
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- OJFord 6y ago
  That looks great! Definitely warrants its own submission in my opinion. What do you have to do in order to support extra languages? Perhaps ensure font support if loading from web, and the dictionary comes from Wiktionary so you do need to know what language it is, but other than that should 'just work', anything else?
  - giorgosera 6y ago
    Hey thanks :) I didn't submit it yet in HN but tried to do so in more relevant communities such as /r/languagelearning etc. Buuuut, HN surely has a lot of people interested in language learning too so I will submit it at some point :) Regarding new extra languages - good question :) Thankfully because of the way the code was written, not a lot of work is needed to support a new language. I went from just 1 language (Russian) to the ones I support now in just 1-2 days worth of work. Having said that, some languages are trickier. For example, Japanese needed more work on how the tokens (words/characters) are parsed and split in the UI (to be honest I'm still not sure about how well it works). Also, not all languages are created equal according to Wiktionary. Some languages have way more Wiktionary entries than others (e.g. Korean has fewer entries than Russian). Also, I use some NLP libs for tokenization and lemmatization which vary in accuracy depending on the language. The whole idea of the project is to experiment with how much can language learning be automated. Can we enable more people to learn a new language if they do not have access to native speakers or teachers? So automating some parts might need some sacrifices in the quality of the material but quite frankly from my own experience the benefit outweighs the occasional wrong word here and there :)
KingOfCoders 6y ago
Didn't learn English in 7 years at school. Learned English from reading Comics and watching e.g. Fawlty Towers in the end.
jakub_g 6y ago
> Which audio and subtitles you have access to depends on the show and which country you’re in. I could get some shows in Spanish in the US, but not the UK AFAIR it depends not on physical country you're in, but on Accept-Language sent by your browser. You can edit your browser's preferred langs and you'll get a different suggestions of languages. I saw it explained (maybe even here on HN) by someone from Netflix as "it's a feature™ to prevent having too long list of languages in UI".
- Stevvo 6y ago
  I haven't tried using Netflix in the browser, but in the Windows desktop app it does depend on which country you are in. Or rather, which country the app thinks you are in; using a VPN can unlock audio and subtitles in different languages.
spicyramen 6y ago
When I moved to the US one of the biggest problems I had was listening. It was hard for me to keep conversations going with colleagues, because It was hard for me to understand. I used to go every Friday to Blockbuster and rent movies which I listened with english subs. Then I ended up watching Godfather II every other week and it definitely helped.
kalonis 6y ago
I really agree to all the points in the article. But I would add another one: Today it is so much easier to find someone online to speak to in your target language. There are many facebook groups (and certainly other ways) to find people interested in a language tandem via Jitsy/Zoom/Skype etc. Surely, it is nicer to meet someone in person in a café or bar, but it is much easier to meet online, especially when you are working a full time job and have to integrate these meetings in an already tight schedule.
markvdb 6y ago
My strategy for Latvian was roughly as follows: - Go mad because you don't understand a word of what's happening around you for the first time in your life. - Decide to do something about it. - Take a three week university summer introductory course. Erasmus courses area great idea. - Always actively speak the language when in native company. - Pick up at least the basics from news broadcasts. - Read childrens' books and written press. - Study five common new words a day from my actual use (speaking, listening, reading) using a spaced repetition algorithm. The article mentions ankiweb. It's stellar. Picking from your own use tailors to your needs and interests. It also makes finding example phrases easier. That worked rather well for me getting to CEFR[0] C1 in Latvian. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...
- vortegne 6y ago
  Cheers from Latvia!
- nullsense 6y ago
  I find childrens books full of all kinds of weird, bizarre phrases and plays on words, made up words and nonsensical stories.
  - OJFord 6y ago
    Yeah, I thought it was a great idea, but when I actually started looking for a couple in Hindi (using Amazon's 'look inside' preview) it seemed like they give you pretty complex grammar relative to the uselessly basic vocabulary. Which does make sense for children, in English for example learning as a first language 'and on the dog's log, a cat was sitting gracefully' (mental block for a more basic adverb than 'gracefully' here) might be perfectly natural and simple, but for an adult ESL learner... it's not great. At the point where an adult's learning vocabulary like 'dog', 'log', (which er.. actually I don't know in Hindi) and 'cat', they don't want awkward grammar like past continuous 'was sitting', less common adverb position, subordinate clauses. Better would be 'a cat gracefully sat on the dog's log' grammar, but with more interesting vocabulary. Not because you won't ever say dog or cat, but because by the time you're reading to advance your second language you already know those words. It's easier to learn a different language for an idea you already know a way of communicating than it is for a child to comprehend meaning at the same time as learning the word. And also more simply, they're targeted at children, and not interesting. It would be great if there were easy-reading second language books aimed at adults (in terms of subject matter / story line, and vocabulary as above) - but I suppose it's just too niche, especially for less popular second languages.
matsemann 6y ago
> As a result I can now speak vastly better than I could 12 months ago, All the things he lists are consuming the language though (reading/listening), not speaking it. Which is a great start, don't get me wrong, but having to find the correct words and form a sentence is something else than understanding one.
kashyapc 6y ago
Another approach that can be interesting for advanced learners, i.e. you have taken classes for a couple of years[+] and are living in the target language country: If you've enjoyed a non-fiction book in English, for example, pick up the equivalent translation in your target language. It lets you compare and contrast; and the experience can also be richer. This definitely requires good discipline, but it is rewarding :-) [+] using the reference "B2" or "C1" from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...
- eequah9L 6y ago
  I heard that people used to use the Bible for this purpose. I pulled this trick with The Hobbit. Be wary though, not all translations are created equal, there might be errors or divergences. I remember the Russian version translated "I will go so far as to send you on this adventure" incorrectly as "I went all this way because of you" or some such. (And a number of other blunders of this sort.) Also one of the Stephenson's Baroque Cycle books had "men-of-war" translated to Czech as literally "warriors". It's a good approach overall though.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    The Bible is commonly used because some Christians consider it a duty to ensure everyone everyone can read the word of God. That means they need to translate the Bible and make it available to people who often don't have money. If you want to learn one of the languages everyone else is learning (this is different in different parts of the world) there is no problem, but outside of that set of 5 there are few resources and many are bad. You can always count on a reasonable good Bible translation no matter what your target language is though. For the vast majority of languages (which are rare languages only used by a small number of people) the Bible is the only option.
    - Symbiote 6y ago
      Nowadays, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone should be a good option, with about 78 translations. There are often audio books too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_in_translation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_in_translation
dddddaviddddd 6y ago
I'm surprised the author doesn't cover services that help you interact with native speakers. My favorite is iTalki, which connects you with tutors on Skype.
newcoders 6y ago
Learning softwares are also good stuff
surfsvammel 6y ago
I had to learn french a couple of years ago. And I had three months to do it. It was perfectly doable, but my method did cost a bit of money. I did all the things described in the article, more or less. This was my approach: 1. I had a 1h lesson with a private tutor over Skype (via italki.com) every single day. This was the part which cost me most money. But private tutors from italki is fairly cheap. 2. Listened to the news every day in easy french (RFI has a great short podcast). 3. I watched LOTR (the only one I had available where I could change language and subtitles to be the same) first with English audio and french subtitles, and then french audio and french subtitles and lastly only french audio no subtitles. 4. Listened to french kids books as audiobooks. 5. I read kids book in french. 6. I finished the 3 months with a week of immersive french course in France and then spent another week travelling France alone, committed to only speak french. 7. During this whole time I added 10 words per day into my Anki deck. I also added any other words that I learned along the way. This was quiet a lot of work. 8. During the three months I also went through the Duolingo French course. After three months of hard work I passed the fluency test for french. It took quiet a lot of time and quiet a lot of money. But it got the result I was after. Ps. My tutor also wrote a nice review for me on LinkedIn which I’m very proud of and look at every now and again: “Xxx has learned French with my company. He became fluent in 3 months in has now reached a level close to B2 on the European Framework of Reference, starting from scratch. He has been an extremely hard-working and committed student, with classes every day at 6.30am.”
- TsomArp 6y ago
  Impressive. But which one is your mother tongue?
  - surfsvammel 6y ago
    Mother tongue is Swedish, and I had done some school Spanish when I was younger. However I feel the Spanish was more in the way than actually helping me at the time. I think french is estimated to require about 600h of study, or something like that, for an English speaker, and that is probably a bit more than what I did. But it seems ball-park right. Edit: Na, thinking about it, I think I did do about 600h, maybe even a bit more.
person_of_color 6y ago
Whuch language has the best ROI?
- bluGill 6y ago
  English, because you have already learned it and have used it on at least one forum. (even if you only used it to ask what many think is a stupid question, or perhaps you are a troll) If you learn something else you might never use it as much as you have used English above. If your personal experience puts you in an experience where a different language is needed, knowing that language will have a large ROI. Knowing a language tends lead you to experiences where knowledge of that language is useful, even if the language is useless to the rest of us.
endori97 6y ago
Other resources: http://radio.garden http://radio.garden for international radio, language frequency dictionary
lengjai 6y ago
I have learned Cantonese for over a year to be able to communicate with my girlfriend's family. As a native spanish speaker, this was task that seemed insurmountable at first given how little learning materials exist out there. The Internet is flooded with Mandarin learning materials, courses, books, and content yet Cantonese learners are far fewer. Went from not knowing how to say a simple greeting like 你好 (neih5 hou2) to knowing 2500 characters, speaking conversationally with her mom, and being able to write 500 word short stories. Here's what helped me get over the hurdle of lack of learning materials: 1. 1h lesson every Sunday with a professional Cantonese teacher from italki.com (native speaker from Hong Kong) 2. Focus on pattern recognition of character radicals, write with pen and paper 30 new vocab words per week. Starting on Monday, I would prepare the words of the week, focusing on utility. Then, I would write each word every morning 10-15 times. Thankfully, my memory would never forget a character after doing this approach. 3. Focus on listening and reading advanced content with an OCR translator handy, even if it was very uncomfortable, difficult, I would not stop until I 100% understood a paragraph down to its nuances 4. Keep a handy grammar book or resource cheat sheet, covering particular grammar edge cases 5. Conversation practice every day with my girlfriend, with the goal of pushing myself into uncomfortable territory by trying to express complex ideas and not just talk about the weather 6. Native speaking intonation practice every Saturday, focusing on all the different phonemes and listening to various native speakers pronounce sounds I had a hard time enunciating, such as the `ng` sound or `j` vs. `ch` in Cantonese. Cantonese has 6 tones in HK and 9 tones in the regional variants in Guangdong, so it's important to master them and understand all the nuances of their pitch differences. 7. Write, write, write. Attempt to gather thoughts first in my native tongue, then try my best to translate a paragraph using my Cantonese vocab so far and learn new words in the process. It's worth noting this takes up the majority of my free time, essentially being my major "hobby" as I have a goal of fluency within the next few years. It's a tough world out there for anyone learning a Chinese language that isn't Mandarin. Overall, I learned there _are_ indeed resources and people are more than willing to help. If anyone is learning Cantonese, please DM me and I'd be happy to share more information.
- philsnow 6y ago
  My hat's off to you for learning Cantonese, it's not easy both on the surface (more tones than Mandarin, traditional vs simplified characters), but also for the paucity of Canto-specific resources, as you point out. Finally, it really is a dying language and I myself struggled with squaring the effort I was putting in with the perceived benefit I would get from it -- it was largely an attempt at filial piety, so that I could speak with my wife's grandparents and also demonstrate respect, but then they passed away. Nowadays I hear that Cantonese isn't even taught in schools in Hong Kong. The writing is on the wall for the language. I was amazed that the local community college in my hometown had Cantonese for a long time (before finally giving up and shuttering it about 7 years ago). http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/ http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/ is a great resource for anybody learning Cantonese.
krebs_liebhaber 6y ago
This comment section looks like a guerrilla marketing campaign for various language-learning web apps.
tomcooks 6y ago
Use Tandem to talk with natives, have audio and video chats. This alone will considerably improve your target language comprehension, especially when it comes with common expressions, slang and small talk

214 points by robertwiblin 6y ago

I think the most important part here is for those who learn a language and wish to maintain it. I failed here. Don't fail like I did. Make sure, once you have learned a language, to turn part of your life into a world operating in that language. Choose something - news, movies, books, internet - just pick something. Do that thing only in your new language once you can. Once that becomes a habit, what you have learned you will not forget. And you will get better over time as well as your brain painlessly absorbs and deeply programs in the target language. Second most important part - It takes a lot of work and consistency. Say that with me - consistency. Show up every day. If you don't, you will fail. That's one of those terrible truths about learning, and it is especially true about learning a language.

thaumasiotes 6y ago
> It takes a lot of work and consistency. Say that with me - consistency. Show up every day. If you don't, you will fail. That's one of those terrible truths about learning, and it is especially true about learning a language. William Buckley was lost for more than 30 years among Australian aborigines. By the time he heard of whites in the vicinity, he was unable to speak to them, having forgotten how to produce English. But, assuming you believe his memoirs, when they spoke to him, he regained his English within a day.
- legerdemain 6y ago
  And his son went on to become a preëminent conservative intellectual and author!
- fouc 6y ago
  I can see that happening. For example he could've been mentally stuck in a "Australian aborigine" language mode, and experienced some sort of "cat got his tongue" situation where he temporarily couldn't even think or summon english to speak with. So until they started interacting and he was able to wake up those neural pathways then it would come back. So he probably somewhat felt like he was re-learning the language at an accelerated pace since he already had the neural wiring for english.
  - gibs0ns 6y ago
    Do you know of, or can recommend, any studies on this "waking up the neural pathways" effect? I'm wondering what is happening here, surely it's more than simply firing those pathways as I'd imagine that to happen within seconds as opposed to the day or so it took him to recover. Thanks
    - mantap 6y ago
      IANAN but I think "waking up neural pathways" can be understood to mean making new synaptic connections, a process that is not instant and could potentially take a day if the existing connections were intact.
      - sammorrowdrums 6y ago
        Often requiring sleep too I believe, with specific brain activity that simply doesn't occur while awake.
  - hanoz 6y ago
    My English (my first and only natural language) definitely takes a while to recover from a single day spent programming, so I can definitely see that happening.
  - kwhitefoot 6y ago
    > experienced some sort of "cat got his tongue" situation where he temporarily couldn't even think or summon english to speak with. Something like that happens to me sometimes. I get stuck for a word in Norwegian and suddenly find that I can't summon the English word either (English is my mother tongue but I have been living and working in Norway since '86). I am now capable of being tongue-tied in two languages simultaneously! But of course it all comes back to me quickly once I switch back to speaking only English.
    - thaumasiotes 6y ago
      > I get stuck for a word in Norwegian and suddenly find that I can't summon the English word either (English is my mother tongue but I have been living and working in Norway since '86). Side note: this is one of many points sufficient to disprove the popular idea that words are the medium of thought. Thought is not linguistic.
- spaetzleesser 6y ago
  “But, assuming you believe his memoirs, when they spoke to him, he regained his English within a day.” I think this works if the language is your native language or if you have immersed yourself. I used to be ok with French but after a few years of not using it there is not much left.
  - barry-cotter 6y ago
    You’d be amazed how fast it comes back. I hadn’t used French in over a decade last time I went to France. In the taxi to our hotel I could barely string two words together. Ten days later in the one to the airport I was having a real conversation, if with terrible grammar and poor vocabulary.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    When I was coming back to Denmark I did some reading on academic studies related to relearning languages, one study I found said that if someone has spoken a language for 8 years (or the first 8 years of their life as it was focused on childhood language being relearned in adulthood) then they will never lose that language - unfortunately I spoke Danish the first 6 years of my life and when I came back I started to remember German which occupied the part of my mind focused on non-English language.
- keiferski 6y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Buckley_(convict) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Buckley_(convict) For anyone else who wasn't familiar with this story.
  - pdm55 6y ago
    From the Wikipedia article: " ... his significant first meeting with a group of Wathaurong women, [occurred] several months after his escape [in 1803]. Buckley had taken a spear used to mark a grave for use as a walking stick. The women befriended him after recognising the spear as belonging to a relative who had recently died and invited him back to their camp. Believed to be the returned spirit of the former tribesman, he was joyfully welcomed and adopted by the group. ... Buckley also recounted information about warfare among Aboriginal people. According to Buckley he was a central part of life among the Australian hunter-gatherers. He had often witnessed wars, raids, and blood-feuds. This information was uniquely important ... " The Wikipedia article links to John Morgan's interesting account of William Buckley's life, written in 1852: https://archive.org/details/lifeandadventur00morggoog/page/n6/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/lifeandadventur00morggoog/page/n...
- pjmlp 6y ago
  I have lived abroad for about 20 years now, when I am back home it is always a painful exercise to remember some Portuguese slang and street expressions. Naturally after a couple of days I am back home. It isn't worse, because thanks to Internet I am able to keep in touch with my native tongue still. So yeah, I do believe his memoirs.
- robaato 6y ago
  I learned French, German and Italian to a good level at school and then by working there in my early 20s. Some decades later, I don't speak them that often but sometimes at work with customers. I am still pretty good in all 3, and a day or two in country polishes off the rust, e.g. on holiday, though of course not back to my highest level. I later tried to learn Spanish - (similar to French/Italian) but couldn't get it to the same level - easy come, easy go. Long term interest in Aikido lead my to attempting Japanese - but again it's never stuck. At university took a course in Russian - made good progress for a year and then left it - all gone! So for me it's a combination: - learning to a sufficient level, - with consistent effort at the time (some level of immersion) - it is easier when brain is younger!
wccrawford 6y ago
I started learning Japanese a while back, and studied slowly for a few years. Then I fell off studying, but kept using it recreationally. I didn't pick 1 medium and insist on it because I have a wife that doesn't speak Japanese at all and that just doesn't work. But I do still use it occasionally for games, anime (with English subs), manga, and sometimes live TV. It's pretty seldom, but it happens. After a few years of that, I rejoined a Japanese meetup group locally for reading a Manga with them that's above my level. I'm realizing that I'm basically where I was when I stopped studying. I haven't really lost anything. My point is that I don't think you need to be extreme to maintain. Just casual usage across different media is enough.

AmericanChopper 6y ago

I can speak a couple of languages that I don't use very often, I personally just make sure I watch a movie/tv show/the news (the news is the least helpful tbh) in those languages once or twice a week. The article suggests Netflix, but if you're not dealing with one of the more common languages, I've found that a lot of countries have their own streaming services you can use.

082349872349872 6y ago
I find news helpful for weak languages: read strong languages first, and then there's already known context for the major stories when approaching the weak languages.
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
  The languages I speak have pretty big differences between the formal and the actually spoken language, so watching the news in them has never been that helpful, because I pretty much never need to speak the language spoken by newscasters. My problem is also just that I need to keep up my exposure to the language so that I don’t forget, which requires a bit less effort than the OP went to.

dhosek 6y ago

For Spanish, I use the General English-Spanish dictionary for iOS from https://www.wordmagicsoft.com https://www.wordmagicsoft.com (they also have Android and desktop apps, apparently). It's fantastic: it lets you look up conjugated verbs and has full conjugation tables as well. I can generally read a fair amount without consulting the dictionary (I'm working my way through Hija de la fortuna by Isabel Allende right now), but every so often I need it, especially when I get into some area of unusual subject matter. Last month I read Federico García Lorca's Romancero Gitano which really gave the dictionary a workout. His use of language is so inventive I found myself looking up words I knew because I would be thinking "does that make sense?" an awful lot. I may have to read García Lorca annually just because it expanded my mind so much.

jobigoud 6y ago
If you are at the point of reading a book (upper intermediate) you chould probably be using a normal Spanish dictionary with the definitions in Spanish.
- dhosek 6y ago
  True, it's largely laziness that keeps me using it. And there are occasional brain freezes where this dictionary really helps (the one that I remember most clearly was when I was reading a B. Traven story in Spanish and was stumped by alitas (this was back when I still used a paper dictionary while reading). Obviously it's the diminutive of alas, but I just couldn't see it. Fortunately, I was on vacation in Mexico at the time and the tour guide was able to point out my dumb problem. My wife who is fluently bilingual (she's a native Spanish speaker and speaks English without any trace of an accent and has a book credit writing in English) (and actually, she's trilingual, she also speaks French. Makes me feel pretty stupid beside her) uses the same dictionary although much less than I do, for the occasional gaps in her vocabulary (which is often broader than my own, see http://www.dahosek.com/susurrus/ http://www.dahosek.com/susurrus/ )

adyer07 6y ago

One suggestion I didn’t see in here was video games! I switch my Switch to a second language to play Animal Crossing. I’ve found it to be a fun and intuitive way to pick up a little more colloquial language and vocabulary. I’ve had similar good luck with other text-heavy games like the Sims. Plus, the short format makes it relatively painless, even when your reading comprehension is a little slow. Novels and news were always a slog to me, but a few lines of text feels more manageable. (And less daunting if you have to grab the dictionary.)

vbezhenar 6y ago
You may also consider playing MMO games like WoW. While I never learned English properly, WoW is what allowed me overcome my language barrier and helped me to start communicating with people. Unfortunately I still didn't invest time to properly learn all the grammar, but it was enough for my practical needs.

mellowdream 6y ago

Of course the methods listed should be effective regardless of the language as they simulate immersion, but it will not be so "painless" the further away you move from the European language families which share many similarities.

candeira 6y ago

Someone I follow on Twitter has found a very good sweet spot for improving her second/nth language: she follows online courses in her field (art and design) in her target language. In her case, the target language is Spanish, so she does courses from Domestika: https://www.domestika.org/ https://www.domestika.org/

werber 6y ago

The biggest helper that wasn’t mentioned is keeping or making new friends who are strong in your target language and weak in your strong tongue. That has helped me more than anything

seszett 6y ago
I've found that the problem with this most of the time is that we end up just speaking English because it's less frustrating (simply because most people are better at it because of exposure) than trying to use each other's tongue.
- 082349872349872 6y ago
  C'est en forgeant qu'on devient forgeron. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23591488 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23591488
- pessimizer 6y ago
  This just mean that they're beating you in the contest of getting the most language learning out of your interactions. Your frustration in speaking is causing you to bail, or your perception of their frustration in understanding is causing you to bail, so you're instead always returning to a language where you can be comfortable speaking and you're not worried about frustrating your friend with your attempts. From my pov, that just means that you'd rather exercise your patience than the target language, because you you have control over your patience and kindness, and you don't have control over the target language (it's a scarier position to be in.)
- werber 6y ago
  I've fallen into that SOO many times. And it's a bit transactional to ask people to lower the intellect of the conversation to help you out for a portion of the time you talk together
rimliu 6y ago
Learning foreign language is way easier than "making new friends".

arxanas 6y ago

Thanks for posting. I set my phone to Polish and it's already really helping with my vocabulary. I also recommend Flowlingo for reading practice. It lets you visit websites or read e-books with tap-to-translate. The killer feature is that every word you tap gets entered into a spaced-repetition deck for later review. It's a great way to build and maintain your higher-register vocabulary with words you wouldn't ordinarily use in everyday speech.

ablekh 6y ago

My understanding is that these methods work well, when the learner has already reached at least a basic level of fluency in the target foreign language. But what about those just beginning the journey as well as those who have already started and still are moving toward that basic level goal? I assume that traditional approaches (textbooks, courses, sprinkled with some live conversations with native speakers and watching some movies/TV) remain the right ones. If so, I'm curious about what, if any, might be the optimal strategy for achieving that goal, in other words, what is the approximately optimal ratio between efforts using relevant methods (say, 50% textbook, 30% course X, 10% live conversations, 10% watching movies) and whether such strategy's ratio depends on specifics of the target language (say, Spanish vs. Chinese).

jonathanjaeger 6y ago
I do daily 30-60 minute conversations with native Brazilian speakers on Italki. That can add up in price quickly, but I would recommend at least 1-2 lessons per week to start after getting the basics down on something like Duolingo/Rosetta Stone. It was a world of difference between year 1 only using Duolingo/YouTube etc. and actually having Brazilian teachers correct my grammar, pronunciation, and add vocabulary for very context-specific situations that came up in conversations. Not to mention slang, idioms, etc.
- ablekh 6y ago
  I see. Thank you for your prompt comment. Just one clarification ... When you are saying "getting the basics down on something like Duolingo/Rosetta Stone", do you mean that "basics" here includes all levels (as far as I know, solid courses like Rosetta Stone or Fluenz - as opposed to Duolingo and similar apps - have multiple levels, where higher levels are pretty advanced) or you are talking about first 1-2 levels?
  - joshvm 6y ago
    Duolinguo is a poor substitute for human interaction. It's a good tool to support other methods, but it encourages pattern matching rather than actual memorisation and there simply isn't enough variety in the examples to help you with translating unseen phrases. It's also not sufficient for speaking practice, but at least you can hear the text-to-speech. There are some positives. The community is very active and helpful. They've done a lot better with the lessons. Japanese, for example, is much improved. It used to be that you'd get exercises in hiragana with no context at all. I agree with the other post, you'll get much more out of a two hour class once a week than doing ten minutes of duolinguo a day. The claim that x hours is equivalent to a university semester is nonsense. Your question was about optimality. It doesn't take much classroom time to get good - maybe two or three courses? (say 60 hours to A2/B1) That gets you enough of a baseline that you can start watching TV, reading papers. For example in our B1 lessons for Spanish, we'd actually read El País as an exercise.

ilaksh 6y ago

Maybe I'm just old and stupid, but I don't feel like I am really learning a lot watching movies in a foreign language. I should probably try to do it more though. I grew up in San Diego and took like four Spanish classes and even some in college. But never really learned verbal skills and did not use it since school. I moved to Playas de Tijuana a few years ago to save money. For more than a year I made really minimal efforts to practice my Spanish though. It was not usually necessary since a lot of the people here speak okay English. I usually just take an Uber and it wasn't very important. And since my Spanish was horrible, often it felt counterproductive to try. But the last several months I have been making a deliberate modest effort to practice. And I feel like I am slowly getting less hopeless. But I would say if you are going for the immersion route and are lazy (practical?) like me, you might actually have to go somewhere kind of far (definitely not right next to the border) to find a place where you really need to use it a lot due to lack of English in the population. Here it is a little too easy to find people who are fluent in English. Part of the challenge for me is that I didn't want to sound like an idiot. I decided to just accept that and now I pretend that verb tenses don't exist (I was pretty good at them in high school but that was like 25 years ago) and it makes it much easier. Lol.

082349872349872 6y ago
There are very few things which one can eventually do well without initially doing poorly. Fosh wowk gutegow natim. Im gut kowltim. Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFNuGjqjyQo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFNuGjqjyQo

sarink 6y ago

https://entend.io https://entend.io

eps 6y ago
^ Spanish and Italian verb conjugation training with the UI that's broken on mobile.

wizzwizz4 6y ago

Anki isn't free for the iPhone; just Desktop, Android and Web. It's worth buying the app, though.

stone-monkey 6y ago

Right now is probably the best time in history to learn a language. The sheer amount of resources available to you via the internet compared to the year 2000 is exponentially greater. The volume of content in your target language available on youtube alone is enough to last you a lifetime. Not to mention all the channels specifically catered to teaching the language. Then the online tutoring marketplaces - you can be directly connected to a tutor from a country that speaks your language natively and remotely schedule 1:1 lessons at your convenience via video conferencing software. Plus the availability of language partner sites to practice if you're on a budget. The biggest problem in my opinion is people struggling with self directed learning, more than anything. A college level course is likely going to be objectively worse than self directed study with targeted goals, but many people dont have a clear goal of what they're trying to achieve in their target language other than a vague sense of fluency, myself included. If your language goal is to become fluent in a language, that's a goal with no defined end in sight.

woile 6y ago
> The volume of content in your target language available on youtube alone is enough to last you a lifetime *if you are an English speaker. Otherwise you have to do an extra hop. native -> English -> target but I agree it's still the best time in history to learn a language.
- jobigoud 6y ago
  He's talking about the volume of native content in the target language, it's independent from your base language.
encom 6y ago
>The volume of content in your target language available on youtube alone is enough to last you a lifetime. Not if your target language is danish. Danish YouTube somehow never evolved beyond clickbaity reaction videos and Minecraft letsplays. There are good danish YouTubers[1][2], but they present their material in english. Your best bet for danish content that won't cause acute brain rot, is probably music and film clips, or VPN'ing your way to the danish state broadcaster www.dr.dk. It's like BBC, but with more rødgrød. Such as (no affiliation): [1]https://www.youtube.com/user/brainiac75 https://www.youtube.com/user/brainiac75 [2]https://www.youtube.com/user/SirNetrom1 https://www.youtube.com/user/SirNetrom1

mathieuh 6y ago

There is no mention of grammar here. I’m not sure how it is in the US, but in the UK we don’t even get taught the grammar of English. No one knows grammatical terms, like preposition, person, the name of tenses, the subjunctive, or even simple ones like verbs, adjective, adverbs and nouns. When you don’t even know formally how your own language is structured, it is very difficult to learn another language. For example, my mother (native French-speaker) gives private French lessons. She finds that instead of saying “ok today we’re going to learn about the subjunctive mood, the root is the third person plural of the indicative mood of the verb with the following endings”, she spends most of her time having to explain what those terms mean. I realise that there may be other ways that are less formal to learn languages, but at the end of the day, grammars follow rules, and if you don’t even understand the rule book in your own language you’re already at a huge disadvantage in my opinion. All these online articles claiming “don’t worry about grammar, that will come later” are missing out on what I think is the most important tool in language learning.

diarmuidc 6y ago
Playing devils advocate, if you were able to learn your native language with out an understanding of the grammar, why can't you learn a foreign language?
- moooo99 6y ago
  I was forced to choose a third foreign language back in school. I ended up with Latin (bad idea btw, completely useless), so I had my usual German lessons (native language), English lessons (since 5th grade) and Latin (6th grade). When you constantly switch between those languages in terms of grammar, you realize how different those languages are. I didn't realize that in the beginning and I still have a habit of translating sayings from German into English that just don't make any actual sense. If you really want to learn a language, you need to learn the grammar, even if it isn't any fun.
  - sweetdreamerit 6y ago
    I'd love to learn Latin <3

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

guerrilla 6y ago

Don't forget all Eutopean countires have freely available public broadcasting (similar to NPR or BBC) whose websites have news articles, radio and TV. Usually the news is all free but sometimes you need a VPN for other stuff (if you're ethically oksy with that.) The more casual input you get,the faster it will go. Also a fun thing to to is read the Bible in multiple languages since it is translated into nearly everything and has free high quality audiobooksnfor everything but this can sometimes teach you arcane grammar and useless vocab but I find it useful anyway since you get side by sife comparison and can read along and have a massive corpus which probably infpunced the modern culture a lot. Try reading a language you just learned next to the next one you're learning, skipping your mother tongue.

fomine3 6y ago

YouTube's great auto sub for English really helps me to understanding and learning English. I wish such quality is available for other langs.

remarkEon 6y ago

Are the any professional linguists in this thread? Reason I ask is I have become very interested in the origin of languages over the last year or so (partially because of Covid). I've been learning German and French for a while now and I find the most difficult parts of learning these languages to be the grammar. I'd like to find a hierarchy of grammar for related languages, and see if there are some patterns that filter down through the child languages. I have a Latin textbook (probably need to dust that off), and am very interested in how these languages (Romance and Germanic) are all stitched together.

unhammer 6y ago
You may find The World Atlas of Language Structures https://wals.info/chapter/s1 https://wals.info/chapter/s1 interesting then.
silverpepsi 6y ago
you should be checking out the classic work The Loom of Language

giorgosera 6y ago

Almost a year ago I decided to start learning Russian so that I can talk with my girlfriend in her native language (the things we do for love ) Initially I tried the usual things like Duolingo, Babbel and some other apps. Out of those things the only one I found useful was Duolingo because it can get you started pretty quickly. However, I got stuck after that. I couldn't see myself making any progress. Then I stumbled upon the Comprehensible Input theory and TPRS and since then I've been studying Russian using a method that loosely follows these. Here's what I do: - I find short stories, news articles, social media posts etc online. - I read those texts and mark down the new words as I learn them. I add those words in a flashcard app and I practice them using SRS. I use an app called Ulangi. - I ask my girlfriend (a native speaker) to ask me short questions about the text and I have to answer in my target language. - Once I feel comfortable with that text I repeat the process with the next one. And it works (at least for me). I grew my vocabulary immensely, I can acquire grammar rules naturally (like I did with my native language) and I get to actually speak the language from day 1. As an added bonus I get to learn a lot about the culture of my target language. However, translating and saving words in my vocabulary became tedious so I decided to automate this whole process. So I started building a tool for me. I, then, realized that this might be useful for others so I made it public. You can use it for free at Talkabl.com

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
OJFord 6y ago
That looks great! Definitely warrants its own submission in my opinion. What do you have to do in order to support extra languages? Perhaps ensure font support if loading from web, and the dictionary comes from Wiktionary so you do need to know what language it is, but other than that should 'just work', anything else?
- giorgosera 6y ago
  Hey thanks :) I didn't submit it yet in HN but tried to do so in more relevant communities such as /r/languagelearning etc. Buuuut, HN surely has a lot of people interested in language learning too so I will submit it at some point :) Regarding new extra languages - good question :) Thankfully because of the way the code was written, not a lot of work is needed to support a new language. I went from just 1 language (Russian) to the ones I support now in just 1-2 days worth of work. Having said that, some languages are trickier. For example, Japanese needed more work on how the tokens (words/characters) are parsed and split in the UI (to be honest I'm still not sure about how well it works). Also, not all languages are created equal according to Wiktionary. Some languages have way more Wiktionary entries than others (e.g. Korean has fewer entries than Russian). Also, I use some NLP libs for tokenization and lemmatization which vary in accuracy depending on the language. The whole idea of the project is to experiment with how much can language learning be automated. Can we enable more people to learn a new language if they do not have access to native speakers or teachers? So automating some parts might need some sacrifices in the quality of the material but quite frankly from my own experience the benefit outweighs the occasional wrong word here and there :)

KingOfCoders 6y ago

Didn't learn English in 7 years at school. Learned English from reading Comics and watching e.g. Fawlty Towers in the end.

jakub_g 6y ago

> Which audio and subtitles you have access to depends on the show and which country you’re in. I could get some shows in Spanish in the US, but not the UK AFAIR it depends not on physical country you're in, but on Accept-Language sent by your browser. You can edit your browser's preferred langs and you'll get a different suggestions of languages. I saw it explained (maybe even here on HN) by someone from Netflix as "it's a feature™ to prevent having too long list of languages in UI".

Stevvo 6y ago
I haven't tried using Netflix in the browser, but in the Windows desktop app it does depend on which country you are in. Or rather, which country the app thinks you are in; using a VPN can unlock audio and subtitles in different languages.

spicyramen 6y ago

When I moved to the US one of the biggest problems I had was listening. It was hard for me to keep conversations going with colleagues, because It was hard for me to understand. I used to go every Friday to Blockbuster and rent movies which I listened with english subs. Then I ended up watching Godfather II every other week and it definitely helped.

kalonis 6y ago

I really agree to all the points in the article. But I would add another one: Today it is so much easier to find someone online to speak to in your target language. There are many facebook groups (and certainly other ways) to find people interested in a language tandem via Jitsy/Zoom/Skype etc. Surely, it is nicer to meet someone in person in a café or bar, but it is much easier to meet online, especially when you are working a full time job and have to integrate these meetings in an already tight schedule.

markvdb 6y ago

My strategy for Latvian was roughly as follows: - Go mad because you don't understand a word of what's happening around you for the first time in your life. - Decide to do something about it. - Take a three week university summer introductory course. Erasmus courses area great idea. - Always actively speak the language when in native company. - Pick up at least the basics from news broadcasts. - Read childrens' books and written press. - Study five common new words a day from my actual use (speaking, listening, reading) using a spaced repetition algorithm. The article mentions ankiweb. It's stellar. Picking from your own use tailors to your needs and interests. It also makes finding example phrases easier. That worked rather well for me getting to CEFR[0] C1 in Latvian. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...

vortegne 6y ago
Cheers from Latvia!
nullsense 6y ago
I find childrens books full of all kinds of weird, bizarre phrases and plays on words, made up words and nonsensical stories.
- OJFord 6y ago
  Yeah, I thought it was a great idea, but when I actually started looking for a couple in Hindi (using Amazon's 'look inside' preview) it seemed like they give you pretty complex grammar relative to the uselessly basic vocabulary. Which does make sense for children, in English for example learning as a first language 'and on the dog's log, a cat was sitting gracefully' (mental block for a more basic adverb than 'gracefully' here) might be perfectly natural and simple, but for an adult ESL learner... it's not great. At the point where an adult's learning vocabulary like 'dog', 'log', (which er.. actually I don't know in Hindi) and 'cat', they don't want awkward grammar like past continuous 'was sitting', less common adverb position, subordinate clauses. Better would be 'a cat gracefully sat on the dog's log' grammar, but with more interesting vocabulary. Not because you won't ever say dog or cat, but because by the time you're reading to advance your second language you already know those words. It's easier to learn a different language for an idea you already know a way of communicating than it is for a child to comprehend meaning at the same time as learning the word. And also more simply, they're targeted at children, and not interesting. It would be great if there were easy-reading second language books aimed at adults (in terms of subject matter / story line, and vocabulary as above) - but I suppose it's just too niche, especially for less popular second languages.

matsemann 6y ago

> As a result I can now speak vastly better than I could 12 months ago, All the things he lists are consuming the language though (reading/listening), not speaking it. Which is a great start, don't get me wrong, but having to find the correct words and form a sentence is something else than understanding one.

kashyapc 6y ago

Another approach that can be interesting for advanced learners, i.e. you have taken classes for a couple of years[+] and are living in the target language country: If you've enjoyed a non-fiction book in English, for example, pick up the equivalent translation in your target language. It lets you compare and contrast; and the experience can also be richer. This definitely requires good discipline, but it is rewarding :-) [+] using the reference "B2" or "C1" from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...

eequah9L 6y ago
I heard that people used to use the Bible for this purpose. I pulled this trick with The Hobbit. Be wary though, not all translations are created equal, there might be errors or divergences. I remember the Russian version translated "I will go so far as to send you on this adventure" incorrectly as "I went all this way because of you" or some such. (And a number of other blunders of this sort.) Also one of the Stephenson's Baroque Cycle books had "men-of-war" translated to Czech as literally "warriors". It's a good approach overall though.
- bluGill 6y ago
  The Bible is commonly used because some Christians consider it a duty to ensure everyone everyone can read the word of God. That means they need to translate the Bible and make it available to people who often don't have money. If you want to learn one of the languages everyone else is learning (this is different in different parts of the world) there is no problem, but outside of that set of 5 there are few resources and many are bad. You can always count on a reasonable good Bible translation no matter what your target language is though. For the vast majority of languages (which are rare languages only used by a small number of people) the Bible is the only option.
  - Symbiote 6y ago
    Nowadays, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone should be a good option, with about 78 translations. There are often audio books too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_in_translation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Potter_in_translation

dddddaviddddd 6y ago

I'm surprised the author doesn't cover services that help you interact with native speakers. My favorite is iTalki, which connects you with tutors on Skype.

newcoders 6y ago

Learning softwares are also good stuff

surfsvammel 6y ago

I had to learn french a couple of years ago. And I had three months to do it. It was perfectly doable, but my method did cost a bit of money. I did all the things described in the article, more or less. This was my approach: 1. I had a 1h lesson with a private tutor over Skype (via italki.com) every single day. This was the part which cost me most money. But private tutors from italki is fairly cheap. 2. Listened to the news every day in easy french (RFI has a great short podcast). 3. I watched LOTR (the only one I had available where I could change language and subtitles to be the same) first with English audio and french subtitles, and then french audio and french subtitles and lastly only french audio no subtitles. 4. Listened to french kids books as audiobooks. 5. I read kids book in french. 6. I finished the 3 months with a week of immersive french course in France and then spent another week travelling France alone, committed to only speak french. 7. During this whole time I added 10 words per day into my Anki deck. I also added any other words that I learned along the way. This was quiet a lot of work. 8. During the three months I also went through the Duolingo French course. After three months of hard work I passed the fluency test for french. It took quiet a lot of time and quiet a lot of money. But it got the result I was after. Ps. My tutor also wrote a nice review for me on LinkedIn which I’m very proud of and look at every now and again: “Xxx has learned French with my company. He became fluent in 3 months in has now reached a level close to B2 on the European Framework of Reference, starting from scratch. He has been an extremely hard-working and committed student, with classes every day at 6.30am.”

TsomArp 6y ago
Impressive. But which one is your mother tongue?
- surfsvammel 6y ago
  Mother tongue is Swedish, and I had done some school Spanish when I was younger. However I feel the Spanish was more in the way than actually helping me at the time. I think french is estimated to require about 600h of study, or something like that, for an English speaker, and that is probably a bit more than what I did. But it seems ball-park right. Edit: Na, thinking about it, I think I did do about 600h, maybe even a bit more.

person_of_color 6y ago

Whuch language has the best ROI?

bluGill 6y ago
English, because you have already learned it and have used it on at least one forum. (even if you only used it to ask what many think is a stupid question, or perhaps you are a troll) If you learn something else you might never use it as much as you have used English above. If your personal experience puts you in an experience where a different language is needed, knowing that language will have a large ROI. Knowing a language tends lead you to experiences where knowledge of that language is useful, even if the language is useless to the rest of us.

endori97 6y ago

Other resources: http://radio.garden http://radio.garden for international radio, language frequency dictionary

lengjai 6y ago

I have learned Cantonese for over a year to be able to communicate with my girlfriend's family. As a native spanish speaker, this was task that seemed insurmountable at first given how little learning materials exist out there. The Internet is flooded with Mandarin learning materials, courses, books, and content yet Cantonese learners are far fewer. Went from not knowing how to say a simple greeting like 你好 (neih5 hou2) to knowing 2500 characters, speaking conversationally with her mom, and being able to write 500 word short stories. Here's what helped me get over the hurdle of lack of learning materials: 1. 1h lesson every Sunday with a professional Cantonese teacher from italki.com (native speaker from Hong Kong) 2. Focus on pattern recognition of character radicals, write with pen and paper 30 new vocab words per week. Starting on Monday, I would prepare the words of the week, focusing on utility. Then, I would write each word every morning 10-15 times. Thankfully, my memory would never forget a character after doing this approach. 3. Focus on listening and reading advanced content with an OCR translator handy, even if it was very uncomfortable, difficult, I would not stop until I 100% understood a paragraph down to its nuances 4. Keep a handy grammar book or resource cheat sheet, covering particular grammar edge cases 5. Conversation practice every day with my girlfriend, with the goal of pushing myself into uncomfortable territory by trying to express complex ideas and not just talk about the weather 6. Native speaking intonation practice every Saturday, focusing on all the different phonemes and listening to various native speakers pronounce sounds I had a hard time enunciating, such as the `ng` sound or `j` vs. `ch` in Cantonese. Cantonese has 6 tones in HK and 9 tones in the regional variants in Guangdong, so it's important to master them and understand all the nuances of their pitch differences. 7. Write, write, write. Attempt to gather thoughts first in my native tongue, then try my best to translate a paragraph using my Cantonese vocab so far and learn new words in the process. It's worth noting this takes up the majority of my free time, essentially being my major "hobby" as I have a goal of fluency within the next few years. It's a tough world out there for anyone learning a Chinese language that isn't Mandarin. Overall, I learned there _are_ indeed resources and people are more than willing to help. If anyone is learning Cantonese, please DM me and I'd be happy to share more information.

philsnow 6y ago
My hat's off to you for learning Cantonese, it's not easy both on the surface (more tones than Mandarin, traditional vs simplified characters), but also for the paucity of Canto-specific resources, as you point out. Finally, it really is a dying language and I myself struggled with squaring the effort I was putting in with the perceived benefit I would get from it -- it was largely an attempt at filial piety, so that I could speak with my wife's grandparents and also demonstrate respect, but then they passed away. Nowadays I hear that Cantonese isn't even taught in schools in Hong Kong. The writing is on the wall for the language. I was amazed that the local community college in my hometown had Cantonese for a long time (before finally giving up and shuttering it about 7 years ago). http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/ http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/ is a great resource for anybody learning Cantonese.

krebs_liebhaber 6y ago

This comment section looks like a guerrilla marketing campaign for various language-learning web apps.

tomcooks 6y ago

Use Tandem to talk with natives, have audio and video chats. This alone will considerably improve your target language comprehension, especially when it comes with common expressions, slang and small talk