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My personal magic trick is learning to speak almost fluently in a second language (Russian) in about a year. However, when people ask me how I do it, they quick

My personal magic trick is learning to speak almost fluently in a second language (Russian) in about a year. However, when people ask me how I do it, they quickly get turned off when they realize it's just a grind. You need to know about 20,000 words in any language to sound fluent, and there is just no way around brute-force memorization. And if you're serious about learning, you need to keep track of how many words you know, and add new words every day, and have a system for review (Anki). Although memorization alone won't teach you a language, it is a necessary but not a sufficient condition. In the beginning it is poring through grammar books and practicing basic concepts until they become second-nature. During the intermediate stages it is taking thousands of native-spoken complete long sentences with audio and building Anki card decks and memorizing them. Yup, memorizing complete sentences with audio. For advanced stages it is laboriously poring over classical literature (Dostoevsky) while having a repertoire of academic dictionaries on hand, manually recording every new word and brute-forcing every sentence, until one day the language opens up to you like magic.

WhateverHappns 6y ago
> You need to know about 20,000 words in any language to sound fluent Are you sure about this? AFAIK the use of words in a language isn't distributed evenly, but according to a Pareto distribution. Thus, you can speak _okay_ knowing only ~500 words, I believe. It won't sound perfect but you'll speak and understand pretty decently. I once wrote a python script which read words from a .txt file full of french words with their english counterparts and then displayed the french word, waiting for you to type your guess. It gave instant feedback which I thought important for learning anything. The file contained the 500 most used french words according to large book surveys. This was in my last year of school and it saved me during tests where I had to write coherent sentences in french. Edit: Here it is! Zipf's law is what it's called.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law) and here's an interesting video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE

WhateverHappns 6y ago

> You need to know about 20,000 words in any language to sound fluent Are you sure about this? AFAIK the use of words in a language isn't distributed evenly, but according to a Pareto distribution. Thus, you can speak _okay_ knowing only ~500 words, I believe. It won't sound perfect but you'll speak and understand pretty decently. I once wrote a python script which read words from a .txt file full of french words with their english counterparts and then displayed the french word, waiting for you to type your guess. It gave instant feedback which I thought important for learning anything. The file contained the 500 most used french words according to large book surveys. This was in my last year of school and it saved me during tests where I had to write coherent sentences in french. Edit: Here it is! Zipf's law is what it's called.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law) and here's an interesting video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCn8zs912OE