7 ms·

Errors in learning a foreign language, 2 years in

63 points by saint_angels 6y ago

gotodengo 6y ago
I was mostly treading water in my Portuguese practice for the past few years, before getting remotivated this year and making some decent progress. I agree with many of TFA's points > To learn a lot from reading, you need to read a lot, and for that you have to understand at least the gist of what you are looking at. Reading was huge for me. After "speaking" the language for 5 years I finally read a full novel. I immediately noticed improvements in my writing and understanding. A few weeks later I finished reading a second novel and am now on to the third. (I really recommend The Martian by the way, it seems like it's been translated a ton, and it's written in a mostly first person diary style so the tenses are fairly simple while being more engaging than kid's books)
- saint_angels 6y ago
  after finishing first 2 novels, did you see if your writing style became more similar to the books style(not just more correct)? Some of first novels I finished when learning English was A Song of Ice and Fire series, which made me use some veery outdated lingo
StavrosK 6y ago
In my experience, learning a foreign language is strictly a data game. Get as much input data as possible (hopefully with some sort of translation or aid), and keep at it. Textbooks don't help because you don't learn a language as a list of rules, being afraid of making mistakes doesn't help because it gets in the way of getting more data, and any sort of "quality over quantity" is the wrong approach. Consume as much of the language as possible, as fast as possible, while still roughly understanding what you're reading. Don't do it so quickly that you have no idea what you're reading, but don't spend time trying to memorize each and every word and concept.
- soldehierro 6y ago
  I think textbooks do help, immenesly, atleast for me, with the caveat that they are not there for you to help understand a language, learning to speak comes from understanding. Sure, you can learn without a formal grammar, but being an adult gives you an advantage over babies, who have to learn everything de novo.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    How did textbooks help you? They help with giving you texts to read at your level, giving and translating examples, and with exercises, but I've found the "formal grammar" sort of rules entirely useless.
    - Jtsummers 6y ago
      For me they shortened the time needed to actually learn the language. Admittedly I couldn't speak Italian now if my life depended on it, but a quick run through a textbook (personal emphasis was on conjugation rules and tenses) before spending more time on vocabulary made my trip to Italy much better because on hearing or reading a new verb I could identify the stem and work towards the meaning much faster than if I just heard a random conjugation of the verb without any idea of how to derive that stem. Even if I didn't have to look it up (could derive meaning from context), I could identify that it was a verb, what it's probable conjugations were and start using it much more rapidly than if I'd had to infer these rules from exposure. Especially on a short 2-week trip like I had. There are textbooks that sit somewhere between "Baby's First Italian Reader" and "A First Course in Italian Grammar". A high school or college freshman text can be worked through pretty quickly by a motivated individual and are often more practical than the sort of textbook a pedantic grammarian might seek out, but faster than (only) trying to infer the rules from a participatory experience that isn't always easy to get.
    - nickkell 6y ago
      How do you expect to pick apart a sentence without understanding the grammar? It would look like word soup.
cosmodisk 6y ago
I had two foreign languages at school: English and Russian. English went pretty well because there were the internet, books, films, etc. Russian was like having an anchor attached to your body when swimming. It was so painful. I hated it and couldn't see why would I ever need because I know English ( the naivety of the young). A few years after the school, I went abroad and the circumstances brought me and a few Russians with no command of English under one roof. It was even more painful. Even basic things,such as 'this is raw meat' was almost impossible.. Months went by, the vocabulary improved. I could discuss wider topics and eventually it became pretty easy and we used to talk for hours. I learned more in one year than during 6 years at school. Even now, I'd love to learn Spanish,or maybe French but the first thing you get after buying any book is 500 grammar rules before the first word is shown. It's like learning how to drive by reading books on mechanical engineering and oil industry.
- bumbada 6y ago
  I recommend you the book "fluent forever". I have learned several hard languages since I bought the book and started using anki. Now that I speak several languages is easier and easier to learn a new one. I am native Spanish speaker. You don't learn by reading and understanding anything, you learn by practicing every day until it becomes automatic. For learning Spanish or French you can use Michel Thomas audio lessons and using Anki for learning it. Someone told me there are torrents out there.
  - BuckRogers 6y ago
    Thanks for mentioning these things. If I put some effort into it on the side I think I can turn the tide on my long term goal of learning Spanish fluently. While I’d always be interested in learning the native language of any country I may reside in, Spanish is the only language I’m interested in learning regardless of where I live. I studied it in college and the written form is just so regular that it’s really the gold standard for languages. I love how knowing the formal rules that I can accurately spell words I’ve only heard, and do it consistently correctly. It’s under appreciated.
- soldehierro 6y ago
kevinstubbs 6y ago
I was self-studying Russian for quite some time, with decent progress. But when I came to Seoul and ran into some native Russian speakers, I discovered that I could barely put my sentences together in real-time. I made some changes to my approach and a year later was able to conversate, read articles, and watch movies without any aid. The "one weird trick" to it was to spend literally hundreds of hours one on one with tutors online. It's not an option for everybody, of course, but if you can do it - do it. Studying with flash cards and apps helps too, but your brain more importantly needs to practice understanding strings of words and putting them together yourself in real-time.
- saint_angels 6y ago
  did you try language exchanche apps like Hellotalk? If so, how would you compare it to online tutors? Paid tutors are probably much more focused on your progress than random natives, but is there something else?
  - kevinstubbs 6y ago
    I did try Hellotalk actually - and it lead to spending a week with a Russian family in Sochi during the World Cup in 2018! The thing about Hellotalk if you're serious though, is that it will take _twice_ the amount of time to get practice in than dedicated tutors, because if you spend 30 minutes practicing another language, then your partner will want to spend 30 minutes practicing your native language. Either way, you will have to try different partners/tutors out until you find a few that really click with you personally & also teaching style-wise.
axiosgunnar 6y ago
Whenever I am abroad with the goal of learning a language, I simply pretend to not speak English. I feel a little bad about doing this, since it‘s akin to „lying“ and using your conversation partner, but it has gotten me extremely far with several languages, so I'm really sorry but will continue doing so.
- KMag 6y ago
  When I first arrived in Hong Kong, I asked some colleagues about learning Cantonese. They told me that people in Hong Kong tend to be very hard-working, and you have one or two sentences to convince them that speaking with you in Cantonese is just as efficient use of their time as speaking to you in English. I have a friend who was born here, looks local, but spent her formative years in Canada. She has been back in Hong Kong for more than 15 years now, but still isn't happy with her Cantonese conversational skills because she speaks with a bit of a Canadian accent and people usually force her to speak English after hearing her speak a couple sentences of Cantonese. It's fair enough; my friend isn't paying these people to be speaking partners, and is trying to extract a bit of a knowledge tax from them. On the other hand, when I run into people whose English isn't particularly good, they are very willing to stumble through a very rough mixture of Mandarin and Cantonese with me when it's the most efficient way for us to communicate. In these cases, it's not uncommon for people to continue to speak Mandarin at my wife, after I've told them in Mandarin "She's Thai overseas Chinese; she can only speak Thai and English". My wife has learned to break eye contact to discourage them from continuing to talk at her, and to avoid giving the impression she secretly understands Mandarin. I don't think the people even realize they're speaking at my wife and getting responses from me; some people just seem to find it more awkward to speak Mandarin with a white person than to speak Mandarin at a Chinese-looking person who's clearly not paying attention.
- saint_angels 6y ago
  did you ever slip and reveal your ability to speak English? If so, how did people react?
- scpedicini 6y ago
  Heh, I can speak rudimentary Italian, so I used to do the same thing when I was studying Chinese. Percentage of people I knew in Taiwan who could speak English: 40% Percentage of people I knew in Taiwan who could speak Italian : 0%
nullsense 6y ago
Errors and successes in learning foreign languages, 12 years in. Japanese - Fluent (3 years study) This was a resounding success, but actually set me up to fail my next 3 languages. Successes were 1) finding Anki and the AJATT method, and just totally embracing it. 2) Choosing early on to locate high quality materials on grammar and Anki 3 to 4 sentences per grammar point and front load virtually all Japanese grammar in around 4 months. 3) after grammar study was done dropping sentences and instead inputting only single words into Anki 4) Finding regular conversation partners, and language exchange clubs with the many Japanese people in my area 5) being somewhat unfairly ruthless in pretty much only speaking Japanese Korean - I can understand bits and pieces, after 2 separate and serious attempts each lasting 3 to 6 months Successes were 1) repeating all of the input/grammar stuff and consuming native media I had done with Japanese as understanding was coming along well Errors were 1) not having much utility for the language outside simply just enjoying it for its own sake, while this was true with Japanese also in a way, Japanese gave my life a purpose and direction at a time I had none thus the utility from that standpoint while abstract was huge. Same just didn't apply to Korean. 2) Not finding any speaking partners. Right at the end of my second attempt I did start to remedy this, but then I started a family and settled down and because Korean had no actual utility in my life it was dropped. Mandarin - still some limited level of understanding and can speak some basic phrases. 2 serious attempts each lasting 3 months Successes were 1) first attempt I did all the same things with Anki and native media 2) first attempt was actually taking it a semester of it in university which gave a structure I had previously dismissed as inferior but actually found had its merits, most of which was actually practicing output in a controlled manner 3) second attempt was 3 months in China on a business trip, and I managed to get access to Chinese equivalents of Spotify/Netflix and this massively boosted my native media game 3) second attempt being in China meant the language had massive utility so I studied very hard and can still remember how to order Carl's Junior haha. Errors were 1) When learning it at University I never found suitable conversation partners outside the classroom as everyone also speaks fluent English 2) When studying it in China I never found suitable conversation partners because all the people I worked with had better English than my Mandarin and I tried somewhat to go out and meet people but I was just too painfully shy and my Mandarin too low level. 3) After 2nd attempt upon returning home Mandarin lost all it's utility and given I had no functional speaking ability, though I could understand a lot and passed HSK3, I couldn't converse with any of my Chinese co-workers back home, so I dropped it almost instantly French/Spanish/Italian/German - I understand words and phrases here and there from listening to music in these languages, but never actually intended on properly learning them Successes were 1) Again with native media, only music for these languages as that was the drawcard, just finding cool new songs and learning to sing along Errors were Well, no errors really, I was just having fun Portuguese - currently 3 months into this! Understanding is getting decent, and speaking ability is starting to develop This time around I'm putting all the lessons from my successes and errors into practice as follows. 1) Anki/Grammar, and native media! This has always been stunningly effective at increasing understand very fast 2) hiring a tutor! I realised this was the mistake I made after 2nd attempt at Mandarin. My speaking ability is really starting to pick up now 3) making sure the language has utility! I'm learning BJJ and my coach is Brazilian and doesn't speak much English.

63 points by saint_angels 6y ago

I was mostly treading water in my Portuguese practice for the past few years, before getting remotivated this year and making some decent progress. I agree with many of TFA's points > To learn a lot from reading, you need to read a lot, and for that you have to understand at least the gist of what you are looking at. Reading was huge for me. After "speaking" the language for 5 years I finally read a full novel. I immediately noticed improvements in my writing and understanding. A few weeks later I finished reading a second novel and am now on to the third. (I really recommend The Martian by the way, it seems like it's been translated a ton, and it's written in a mostly first person diary style so the tenses are fairly simple while being more engaging than kid's books)

saint_angels 6y ago
after finishing first 2 novels, did you see if your writing style became more similar to the books style(not just more correct)? Some of first novels I finished when learning English was A Song of Ice and Fire series, which made me use some veery outdated lingo

StavrosK 6y ago

In my experience, learning a foreign language is strictly a data game. Get as much input data as possible (hopefully with some sort of translation or aid), and keep at it. Textbooks don't help because you don't learn a language as a list of rules, being afraid of making mistakes doesn't help because it gets in the way of getting more data, and any sort of "quality over quantity" is the wrong approach. Consume as much of the language as possible, as fast as possible, while still roughly understanding what you're reading. Don't do it so quickly that you have no idea what you're reading, but don't spend time trying to memorize each and every word and concept.

soldehierro 6y ago
I think textbooks do help, immenesly, atleast for me, with the caveat that they are not there for you to help understand a language, learning to speak comes from understanding. Sure, you can learn without a formal grammar, but being an adult gives you an advantage over babies, who have to learn everything de novo.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  How did textbooks help you? They help with giving you texts to read at your level, giving and translating examples, and with exercises, but I've found the "formal grammar" sort of rules entirely useless.
  - Jtsummers 6y ago
    For me they shortened the time needed to actually learn the language. Admittedly I couldn't speak Italian now if my life depended on it, but a quick run through a textbook (personal emphasis was on conjugation rules and tenses) before spending more time on vocabulary made my trip to Italy much better because on hearing or reading a new verb I could identify the stem and work towards the meaning much faster than if I just heard a random conjugation of the verb without any idea of how to derive that stem. Even if I didn't have to look it up (could derive meaning from context), I could identify that it was a verb, what it's probable conjugations were and start using it much more rapidly than if I'd had to infer these rules from exposure. Especially on a short 2-week trip like I had. There are textbooks that sit somewhere between "Baby's First Italian Reader" and "A First Course in Italian Grammar". A high school or college freshman text can be worked through pretty quickly by a motivated individual and are often more practical than the sort of textbook a pedantic grammarian might seek out, but faster than (only) trying to infer the rules from a participatory experience that isn't always easy to get.
  - nickkell 6y ago
    How do you expect to pick apart a sentence without understanding the grammar? It would look like word soup.

cosmodisk 6y ago

I had two foreign languages at school: English and Russian. English went pretty well because there were the internet, books, films, etc. Russian was like having an anchor attached to your body when swimming. It was so painful. I hated it and couldn't see why would I ever need because I know English ( the naivety of the young). A few years after the school, I went abroad and the circumstances brought me and a few Russians with no command of English under one roof. It was even more painful. Even basic things,such as 'this is raw meat' was almost impossible.. Months went by, the vocabulary improved. I could discuss wider topics and eventually it became pretty easy and we used to talk for hours. I learned more in one year than during 6 years at school. Even now, I'd love to learn Spanish,or maybe French but the first thing you get after buying any book is 500 grammar rules before the first word is shown. It's like learning how to drive by reading books on mechanical engineering and oil industry.

bumbada 6y ago
I recommend you the book "fluent forever". I have learned several hard languages since I bought the book and started using anki. Now that I speak several languages is easier and easier to learn a new one. I am native Spanish speaker. You don't learn by reading and understanding anything, you learn by practicing every day until it becomes automatic. For learning Spanish or French you can use Michel Thomas audio lessons and using Anki for learning it. Someone told me there are torrents out there.
- BuckRogers 6y ago
  Thanks for mentioning these things. If I put some effort into it on the side I think I can turn the tide on my long term goal of learning Spanish fluently. While I’d always be interested in learning the native language of any country I may reside in, Spanish is the only language I’m interested in learning regardless of where I live. I studied it in college and the written form is just so regular that it’s really the gold standard for languages. I love how knowing the formal rules that I can accurately spell words I’ve only heard, and do it consistently correctly. It’s under appreciated.
soldehierro 6y ago

kevinstubbs 6y ago

I was self-studying Russian for quite some time, with decent progress. But when I came to Seoul and ran into some native Russian speakers, I discovered that I could barely put my sentences together in real-time. I made some changes to my approach and a year later was able to conversate, read articles, and watch movies without any aid. The "one weird trick" to it was to spend literally hundreds of hours one on one with tutors online. It's not an option for everybody, of course, but if you can do it - do it. Studying with flash cards and apps helps too, but your brain more importantly needs to practice understanding strings of words and putting them together yourself in real-time.

saint_angels 6y ago
did you try language exchanche apps like Hellotalk? If so, how would you compare it to online tutors? Paid tutors are probably much more focused on your progress than random natives, but is there something else?
- kevinstubbs 6y ago
  I did try Hellotalk actually - and it lead to spending a week with a Russian family in Sochi during the World Cup in 2018! The thing about Hellotalk if you're serious though, is that it will take _twice_ the amount of time to get practice in than dedicated tutors, because if you spend 30 minutes practicing another language, then your partner will want to spend 30 minutes practicing your native language. Either way, you will have to try different partners/tutors out until you find a few that really click with you personally & also teaching style-wise.

axiosgunnar 6y ago

Whenever I am abroad with the goal of learning a language, I simply pretend to not speak English. I feel a little bad about doing this, since it‘s akin to „lying“ and using your conversation partner, but it has gotten me extremely far with several languages, so I'm really sorry but will continue doing so.

KMag 6y ago
When I first arrived in Hong Kong, I asked some colleagues about learning Cantonese. They told me that people in Hong Kong tend to be very hard-working, and you have one or two sentences to convince them that speaking with you in Cantonese is just as efficient use of their time as speaking to you in English. I have a friend who was born here, looks local, but spent her formative years in Canada. She has been back in Hong Kong for more than 15 years now, but still isn't happy with her Cantonese conversational skills because she speaks with a bit of a Canadian accent and people usually force her to speak English after hearing her speak a couple sentences of Cantonese. It's fair enough; my friend isn't paying these people to be speaking partners, and is trying to extract a bit of a knowledge tax from them. On the other hand, when I run into people whose English isn't particularly good, they are very willing to stumble through a very rough mixture of Mandarin and Cantonese with me when it's the most efficient way for us to communicate. In these cases, it's not uncommon for people to continue to speak Mandarin at my wife, after I've told them in Mandarin "She's Thai overseas Chinese; she can only speak Thai and English". My wife has learned to break eye contact to discourage them from continuing to talk at her, and to avoid giving the impression she secretly understands Mandarin. I don't think the people even realize they're speaking at my wife and getting responses from me; some people just seem to find it more awkward to speak Mandarin with a white person than to speak Mandarin at a Chinese-looking person who's clearly not paying attention.
saint_angels 6y ago
did you ever slip and reveal your ability to speak English? If so, how did people react?
scpedicini 6y ago
Heh, I can speak rudimentary Italian, so I used to do the same thing when I was studying Chinese. Percentage of people I knew in Taiwan who could speak English: 40% Percentage of people I knew in Taiwan who could speak Italian : 0%

nullsense 6y ago

Errors and successes in learning foreign languages, 12 years in. Japanese - Fluent (3 years study) This was a resounding success, but actually set me up to fail my next 3 languages. Successes were 1) finding Anki and the AJATT method, and just totally embracing it. 2) Choosing early on to locate high quality materials on grammar and Anki 3 to 4 sentences per grammar point and front load virtually all Japanese grammar in around 4 months. 3) after grammar study was done dropping sentences and instead inputting only single words into Anki 4) Finding regular conversation partners, and language exchange clubs with the many Japanese people in my area 5) being somewhat unfairly ruthless in pretty much only speaking Japanese Korean - I can understand bits and pieces, after 2 separate and serious attempts each lasting 3 to 6 months Successes were 1) repeating all of the input/grammar stuff and consuming native media I had done with Japanese as understanding was coming along well Errors were 1) not having much utility for the language outside simply just enjoying it for its own sake, while this was true with Japanese also in a way, Japanese gave my life a purpose and direction at a time I had none thus the utility from that standpoint while abstract was huge. Same just didn't apply to Korean. 2) Not finding any speaking partners. Right at the end of my second attempt I did start to remedy this, but then I started a family and settled down and because Korean had no actual utility in my life it was dropped. Mandarin - still some limited level of understanding and can speak some basic phrases. 2 serious attempts each lasting 3 months Successes were 1) first attempt I did all the same things with Anki and native media 2) first attempt was actually taking it a semester of it in university which gave a structure I had previously dismissed as inferior but actually found had its merits, most of which was actually practicing output in a controlled manner 3) second attempt was 3 months in China on a business trip, and I managed to get access to Chinese equivalents of Spotify/Netflix and this massively boosted my native media game 3) second attempt being in China meant the language had massive utility so I studied very hard and can still remember how to order Carl's Junior haha. Errors were 1) When learning it at University I never found suitable conversation partners outside the classroom as everyone also speaks fluent English 2) When studying it in China I never found suitable conversation partners because all the people I worked with had better English than my Mandarin and I tried somewhat to go out and meet people but I was just too painfully shy and my Mandarin too low level. 3) After 2nd attempt upon returning home Mandarin lost all it's utility and given I had no functional speaking ability, though I could understand a lot and passed HSK3, I couldn't converse with any of my Chinese co-workers back home, so I dropped it almost instantly French/Spanish/Italian/German - I understand words and phrases here and there from listening to music in these languages, but never actually intended on properly learning them Successes were 1) Again with native media, only music for these languages as that was the drawcard, just finding cool new songs and learning to sing along Errors were Well, no errors really, I was just having fun Portuguese - currently 3 months into this! Understanding is getting decent, and speaking ability is starting to develop This time around I'm putting all the lessons from my successes and errors into practice as follows. 1) Anki/Grammar, and native media! This has always been stunningly effective at increasing understand very fast 2) hiring a tutor! I realised this was the mistake I made after 2nd attempt at Mandarin. My speaking ability is really starting to pick up now 3) making sure the language has utility! I'm learning BJJ and my coach is Brazilian and doesn't speak much English.