10 ms·

When do people learn languages? (2002)

72 points by hwayne 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
JohnCurran 5y ago
> Concentrate on learning words, not on grammar I have to disagree with this. If you focus on just learning words in a target language, you just become a foreign language dictionary. Knowing how to say "train station" in Spanish doesn't help when you can't use it properly in a sentence. I think Michel Thomas has a fairly succinct take on the topic: “If you know how to handle verbs you know how to handle the language. Everything else is just vocabulary”. Although he is a somewhat controversial figure in regards to claimed past achievements, his system for language learning works well. Don't worry about amassing large amounts of vocabulary at the outset, just use words like "it" (Where is it / What is it / I can do it). You can swap out "it" for any other noun you learn later on.
- yosito 5y ago
  For sure! When I learn a langauge, I find word frequency list "100 most common verbs", "100 most common nouns", etc. You really don't need more vocabulary than that. You can find a way to commumicate anything with a relatively small vocabulary. Once you have a base vocabulary, you can start practicing grammar and actual usage, and your vocabulary will naturally skyrocket without any additional vocabulary memorization.
  - somewhereoutth 5y ago
    Verbs become a bit tricky when they are heavily inflected, with the most common having the most irregularities. Collisions become a problem too, it's almost as if a heavily inflected language, with a fairly consistent root vocabulary, quickly runs out of distinct syllable combinations. E.g. Portuguese, and presumably the other romance languages. Compare the past perfect of 'to go' and 'to be' in Portuguese - they are identical for all persons. Getting the wrong inflection ruins any sense you're trying to make!
  - BossingAround 5y ago
    > You really don't need more vocabulary than that. What do you want to do with the language? Do you want to be able to book a hotel? Because if that's your goal, then you're probably correct. Then again, you can probably do that in English anywhere in the world. However, if your goal is to communicate, you won't be able to get by with 200 words. Just try to watch an episode of Friends with a non-native speaker. > "Just a pinch!" A: "What is a pinch"? B: "A little" A: "Ah! They should say little!" (Though the conversation above is highly contrived since you wouldn't be able to understand the vast majority of Friends with at the very least 2000 - 3000 words)
    - louhike 5y ago
      Exactly and that’s the big problem when people talk about learning a language. For some, to learn a language is to be able to get by on a trip. Sure you can do that on 3 months. But being able to have conversations on advanced topics, read books or watch movies? Good luck, unless you spend 6 hours everyday, immerse yourselves and use good ressources. And you’ll actually probably be at the level of a middle schooler. Really learn a language is quite hard (pitch accent, new sounds, specific grammar, concepts which can’t be translated). And even experts spent years to master one.
    - yosito 5y ago
      Fair, you're not gonna give a speech with 200 words, but if it's the right 200 words (the most used ones) you can find a way to communicate almost anything. My point is that with memorizing just 200 words, there are creative ways to express everything and you can use that as a good base to start using the language and your progress will grow exponentially from there with minimal memorization. With 200 words of English, you might not know what "a pinch" is, but you know enough to have the conversation and figure it out even if the person you're talking to only speaks English.
  - throwaway55421 5y ago
    This is true for speaking but listening is impossible. The vast majority of people do not speak using the simple terms that are in those 100 top lists. As an example - I would guess that from my previous sentence, "vast", "majority", "simple", "terms", "lists" and possibly more would not be present, and that's in only one relatively simple sentence. I can "speak in" probably ten languages, but I'd only say I can really _speak_ bidirectionally in one or possibly two.
    - yosito 5y ago
      > The vast majority of people do not speak using the simple terms that are in those 100 top lists. It really depends who you're talking to. I've seen claims, and I believe them, that in many languages the average person has about a 500 word vocabulary that they're using on a daily basis. Someone who is more educated than the average person is likely to use a larger vocabulary, but they're also more likely to be able to simplify their speech to accomodate you and make it possible for you to communicate with them.
      - throwaway55421 5y ago
        Yes, but this is really distinct from understanding a language. You might be able to have a very basic one on one conversation with someone who is speaking directly to you. Now sit in the corner at a bar, party, in a conference, lecture hall, or even watch a movie without subtitles, and try to understand anything at all. In most if not all languages that's impossible with a 500 word vocab.
  - chalcolithic 5y ago
    My Spanish is like that - my vocab is about a hundred words and I'm very comfortable using it but native speakers are not amused and there have been cases when I literally was asked to speak any other language
    - yosito 5y ago
      But the point is, if you were to find yourself in the countryside of a Spanish speaking country with only Spanish speakers around, you could find a way communicate what you need to survive. And 2-3 months in that environment, with no English, and you'd be fluent enough to keep up socially.
- cgag 5y ago
  Anyone who learns enough vocabulary to be something resembling fluent (say, can comfortably watch tv shows or read books in that language), will be good at grammar far before they learn the 10k+ words they need to know. You can't consume enough of the language to acquire that kind of vocabulary and not have a decent intuition for the grammar. I don't advocate ignoring grammar, but you really just need awareness of the basics, not to spend time doing drills or filling in blanks.
  - aix1 5y ago
    What really jumped out at me in your comment is that its definition of fluency (watch tv shows, read books) focuses on comprehension and appears to completely ignore being able to produce anything in the target language.
- viburnum 5y ago
  When learning languages I used to focus on the grammar because it was most interesting to me (and words you can always look up in a dictionary). But for the most recent language I’ve attempted I’ve focused on just learning a ton of vocabulary and it’s made a huge and positive difference. Simply knowing a lot of words means you can read newspapers and twitter or whatever and allows you more chances to see the grammar in action.
yosito 5y ago
I've learned two languages other than my native language (English), and use both actively. I'm probably categorized as a "language nerd" because I wasn't required to learn either. But I do agree with almost everything in this article, especially that kids aren't any better at learning languages than adults. I will say that one of the biggest keys for me in learning a new language is to start using it as soon as possible, and to do as much as I can in the target language. I think most languages could be learned in this way with very few formal classes. In essence, you trick your brain into thinking that the language is necessary, even though the reality might be that you could get by without it, and your brain will just start picking things up seemimgly through osmosis.
BossingAround 5y ago
There has been so much written on this topic. I don't think people actually agree on what's the best way to learn a foreign language, and that includes language teachers. Various methods I have encountered include: * Focus on reading text and vocabulary. Grammar will follow naturally from the text. * Focus on grammar. Vocabulary is a detail. * Focus on speaking. Speaking is the key to fluency. Speak to as many natives as possible. (Note: this can be incredibly annoying to said native speakers) * Focus on writing. This is the best way to retain both vocabulary and grammar. Speaking will follow when you have vocabulary and grammar memorized. * Focus on listening/hearing. Understanding is the key to communication. Remembering grammar and vocabulary will follow naturaly, e.g. from TV shows, games, movies, songs, etc. in the target language. I could go on and on and on. Seriously. My advice is two-fold: * Stick with a language. Whatever your method is, don't give up. * If your method doesn't work for you, change it. If your teacher doesn't work for you, change it (e.g. textbook, school, course, TV show, whatever the "teacher" is). It's that simple. Truth to be told, learning a language is mostly hard work. There is no secret. There is no "aha, you've been doing it wrong, you could have learned Chinese in 3 months!" method. For example, using Anki might be useful, and you might find it fun, but it will not magically make you remember anything. And, even if you remember something in the context of Anki, you might not recognize it in the wild (e.g. in a text, song, or a game). Alternatively, you might not be able to produce it (e.g. passive recollection is very different from active production of the language). I think the best one can do when learning a language is to simply stick with it. In the grand scheme of things, whether it will take you 4 years, 5 years, or 6 years to feel fluent is fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. It will, most likely, be years though.
- dheera 5y ago
  > aha, you've been doing it wrong, you could have learned Chinese in 3 months! Honestly there kind of is, you just have to put yourself in a "sink or swim" situation as the article says. You'll be surprised how far you can get in 3 months if you are in such a situation. Also, don't believe any crap when someone tells you "X language is hard". This is perhaps the biggest myth I have ever seen. It's only hard if you think it is, and if you try to learn everything by rules and flashcards, which native speakers don't generally do. You can also try to make anything look hard that actually isn't. I find people in the US especially love to talk about how hard Chinese (and also Japanese and a few others) is but it isn't particularly different in difficulty than English or any other major world language. 5-year-olds can handle it, they just weren't told it's hard, they just needed to speak it if they wanted to argue and get their stolen pencil back.
somewhereoutth 5y ago
As an English person living in Portugal, this article makes a lot of sense. The Portuguese (well those under about 45 years old anyway) speak excellent English, and seem as comfortable in it as a native speaker. They will quickly default to English when they want to communicate with me - understandable, but it does make practicing harder. The half and half conversations (like the Russians and Americans on the ISS) are common (and trippy). Verb inflections are a nightmare, you can't simply cram a bunch of stem words together quite like you can in English. Peruse a verb conjugation reference to get a sense of the combinatorial explosion going on there. The most common verbs are the most irregular, and there are collisions everywhere. Listening comprehension is the hardest part. I do wonder that as a native English speaker I'm used to ESL speakers, so naturally slow down and speak more clearly. Perhaps native Portuguese speakers are not so used to their language being used as a second language, so don't instinctively do that in quite the same way. Hilariously even the most proficient Portuguese English speaker cannot understand a word I say when I turn and converse with a fellow Brit, or an American. I don't notice any difference, but I guess my perfectly enunciated Queen's English turns into incomprehensible gibberish.
- geocrasher 5y ago
  Hilariously even the most proficient Portuguese English speaker cannot understand a word I say when I turn and converse with a fellow Brit, or an American. I don't notice any difference, but I guess my perfectly enunciated Queen's English turns into incomprehensible gibberish. As a native English speaker, it's easy to underestimate how nuanced and even culture specific our language is, even compared to other English speaking countries such as NZ or AUS. For example, I have learned that when I'm communicating with folks in India, who speak wonderful English, that I can't use common American colloquialisms such as "shooting yourself in the foot" or other similarly colorful language. It has no context for them, and the point is lost.
  - presentation 5y ago
    I notice that when I speak to Japanese people (I live in Tokyo) that I subconsciously simplify and slow down my English, and even occasionally imitate their English errors; but when I speak with other native English speakers I naturally pull out loads of slang and speed up significantly. I also notice that my friends don’t always do that naturally, and so my Japanese friends confide that they didn’t understand much of what my friends were saying. I wonder if I’m more attuned to that since my own parents weren’t native, 100% fluent English speakers (I definitely dumbed things down for them, too).
ineedasername 5y ago
Computational Linguist here (by training, though not frequent practice) so I had to work through Language Acquisition courses in the process. Children learn language by necessity. They cannot translate needs and desires into meaningful results if they don't. Once they have the basics, they learn a lot more from peers (preschool) than parents: Adult speech patterns differ too much from the simpler language model of young children so it is their interactions with other young children where they learn pieces of each others' models. Pieces that they don't easily receive from their parents' speech patterns. Vocabulary explodes when they hit preschool even though parents and older siblings may speak to them just as much. This is first-language acquisition, and I hope it's obvious that this is an extremely simplified and incomplete explanation. As a side note, COVID is really screwing with this process for young children who are now far behind in this process. Research has shown that language delay can have lifelong impacts. SLA (second language acquisition) has many interesting aspects beyond what I can explain here, but I will say that the ease of learning-- all else being equal (a very important caveat)-- source language and target language play a large part. Languages that share similar phonemes tend to be a little easier, ditto for syntactic structure. It makes the exercise a bit more about mapping lexical entries in one language to another, along with learning declinations. Going from a non-tonal language to a tonal language is harder, though interestingly musicians may have an easier time. Conversely, tonal to non-tonal may be easier. Also interesting-- speakers of tonal languages tend to have higher rates of perfect pitch. True bilingualism-- learning two languages from birth-- is its own separate category of language acquisition. It's not uncommon for the learner to never quite learn either language as well as a single language learner. However the process, and learned facility for code switching, carries it's own cognitive advantages. Once again though, all of this is a highly simplified and incomplete explanation. There are plenty of very important factors that I'm leaving out here-- my comments here are probably biased towards those aspects of language acquisition that I find most interesting.
- icouldbebetter 5y ago
  > True bilingualism-- learning two languages from birth-- is its own separate category of language acquisition. It's not uncommon for the learner to never quite learn either language as well as a single language learner. However the process, and learned facility for code switching, carries it's own cognitive advantages. This is an interesting point indeed as it pertains to my experience. I believe I learned both English and Arabic from birth, however, my Arabic skills have atrophied and my English is definitely stronger but it could use some improvement. However, Levantine Arabic phonemes not found in English at all come naturally to me and when immersed in my home country I would be able to pick up vocabulary quickly and to some degree reading skills although I have very little education in that aspect.
JimTheMan 5y ago
We waste a lot of time trying to teach teenagers languages in high school. I learnt French, very poorly. Have retained almost nothing to this day, what a waste of time. I believe Latin is still offered in my high school system... A guaranteed waste of time. I truly believe study of foreign language should almost be reserved for people who will be living in a country with that tongue. Using it everyday and getting good returns on all that grind. More generally, we should be be more economical with our effort and time. "Why am I learning this? " Should be asked more often. I feel the cultural pull for pointless learning on other subjects. I am sure we all do. "I should study some physics. Read Feynman's lectures." But to what end, I don't know. My life will not be appreciably better for learning more about electro-magnetism. There's a yearning in us that pointless education must satisfy. A dream of a better life that you can pretend to be working towards.
- CogitoCogito 5y ago
  > We waste a lot of time trying to teach teenagers languages in high school. I learnt French, very poorly. Have retained almost nothing to this day, what a waste of time. Does that mean the learning was in vain? I’ve probably forgotten 90% of what I learned in high school other than math. Does that mean most of my education was a waste of time?
  - maxwell_xander 5y ago
    >Does that mean the learning was in vain? I’ve probably forgotten 90% of what I learned in high school other than math. Does that mean most of my education was a waste of time? Did the things you learn change you in some other fundamental way, that only learning those things could (ie you could come to a conclusion and forget the exact process that brought you to that conclusion, and thus the process was worth learning even though now forgotten)? If not, then that learning must have been in vain, almost per the definition of vain, right?
  - guy98238710 5y ago
    > Does that mean most of my education was a waste of time? Yes.
999900000999 5y ago
I think languages are great to learn, as long as it's an elective. I legitimately had to go to a less prestigious college since I couldn't pass French at Community College. In hindsight I really should of took Spanish and practiced with people in my neighborhood. Unless you had a childhood which provided you opportunities to study languages it's very hard to pass a language class. That said, I take private Chinese lessons and it's been very fun. I even went out with a girl because of it( she's not Chinese, but she found it very interesting!).
guy98238710 5y ago
The article is a bit too pessimistic about bilingual homes. Most people in the world are bilingual. That would not be the case if people quickly forgot one of their native languages. Language death is not that fast. It is however true that utterly useless languages, especially those taught in schools, are abandoned as soon as the teaching stops. Success rates would be higher if we limited ourselves to one local and one global language, English being the obvious global language.
mnemotronic 5y ago
Damn. I like learning languages, skeet-shooting AND Ska. Is there a bumper-sticker or tee-shirt for me?
cupcake-unicorn 5y ago
Wow, great to see this site on there. When I was a teenager the Language Construction Toolkit is what got me into Linguistics and completing a degree in it: https://www.zompist.com/lckbook.html https://www.zompist.com/lckbook.html When I say I have a degree in linguistics inevitably I'm asked "How many languages do you speak?" which is a question that I think most people with linguistic degrees roll their eyes at. Linguistics is very, very different than learning a language and even applied linguistics is just a subcategory of it. What I typically say is that I'm awful at learning languages. I believe very strongly from both the research that I've seen and anecdotally that someone's aptitude for learning a language has a hell of a lot more to do with someone being an extrovert who likes new experiences and doesn't have anxiety. I am bad at learning languages because I am awkward and asocial. My favorite language to learn was Sanskrit because it felt like "decoding" something versus the social/anxiety producing "production" aspect of languages. With the skills I do have though, depending on how much work I put into it, I can probably get better at comprehension in reading more quickly than most people because I like the "decoding" aspect.
throwaway984393 5y ago
The US military has a school that teaches people languages very quickly: https://www.dliflc.edu/ https://www.dliflc.edu/ . It's very interesting how they teach, in that there are multiple methods, categories, and amounts of training depending on both the language itself and what it's going to be used for. They have an impressive track record and work very fast.
josefrichter 5y ago
One method that works wonders is Michel Thomas’ method. I have no affiliation with them, just personal experience. The method feels weird initially (old man’s audiotapes), but if you had slightest interest in neuroscience, you’d see it’s absolutely brilliant way of tailoring the learning to how the brain works. I can read newspaper or have a brief conversation in a restaurant or shop in ~6 languages. You can acquire that skill easily in ~20 hours of audio (per language). But the course stops at certain level, and getting to active speaking is still very difficult next step.
- brendyn 5y ago
  It's great but can be very irritating when he pronounces sentences in a contrived way instead of just saying them naturally and clearly.
presentation 5y ago
I’m an expat in Japan - I wonder if there are effective ways to get your kids to have separate friend groups in different languages so that they end up learning to a high level of proficiency from peers in either group, like classmates speak English at some international school or something + all Japanese in some Kendo club or some kind of hybrid multilingual school. Maybe religious groups have been a good source of local/foreign language peer groups in this sense?
- bluGill 5y ago
  Only if there is no other common language, otherwise they will all speak English when they realize they know it anyway. (Or perhaps Japanese in your example )
  - presentation 5y ago
    Yeah that’s what I’m thinking - I wonder if there’s a natural way to have one’s children end up with peer groups that really are dependent on separate languages.

72 points by hwayne 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

> Concentrate on learning words, not on grammar I have to disagree with this. If you focus on just learning words in a target language, you just become a foreign language dictionary. Knowing how to say "train station" in Spanish doesn't help when you can't use it properly in a sentence. I think Michel Thomas has a fairly succinct take on the topic: “If you know how to handle verbs you know how to handle the language. Everything else is just vocabulary”. Although he is a somewhat controversial figure in regards to claimed past achievements, his system for language learning works well. Don't worry about amassing large amounts of vocabulary at the outset, just use words like "it" (Where is it / What is it / I can do it). You can swap out "it" for any other noun you learn later on.

yosito 5y ago
For sure! When I learn a langauge, I find word frequency list "100 most common verbs", "100 most common nouns", etc. You really don't need more vocabulary than that. You can find a way to commumicate anything with a relatively small vocabulary. Once you have a base vocabulary, you can start practicing grammar and actual usage, and your vocabulary will naturally skyrocket without any additional vocabulary memorization.
- somewhereoutth 5y ago
  Verbs become a bit tricky when they are heavily inflected, with the most common having the most irregularities. Collisions become a problem too, it's almost as if a heavily inflected language, with a fairly consistent root vocabulary, quickly runs out of distinct syllable combinations. E.g. Portuguese, and presumably the other romance languages. Compare the past perfect of 'to go' and 'to be' in Portuguese - they are identical for all persons. Getting the wrong inflection ruins any sense you're trying to make!
- BossingAround 5y ago
  > You really don't need more vocabulary than that. What do you want to do with the language? Do you want to be able to book a hotel? Because if that's your goal, then you're probably correct. Then again, you can probably do that in English anywhere in the world. However, if your goal is to communicate, you won't be able to get by with 200 words. Just try to watch an episode of Friends with a non-native speaker. > "Just a pinch!" A: "What is a pinch"? B: "A little" A: "Ah! They should say little!" (Though the conversation above is highly contrived since you wouldn't be able to understand the vast majority of Friends with at the very least 2000 - 3000 words)
  - louhike 5y ago
    Exactly and that’s the big problem when people talk about learning a language. For some, to learn a language is to be able to get by on a trip. Sure you can do that on 3 months. But being able to have conversations on advanced topics, read books or watch movies? Good luck, unless you spend 6 hours everyday, immerse yourselves and use good ressources. And you’ll actually probably be at the level of a middle schooler. Really learn a language is quite hard (pitch accent, new sounds, specific grammar, concepts which can’t be translated). And even experts spent years to master one.
  - yosito 5y ago
    Fair, you're not gonna give a speech with 200 words, but if it's the right 200 words (the most used ones) you can find a way to communicate almost anything. My point is that with memorizing just 200 words, there are creative ways to express everything and you can use that as a good base to start using the language and your progress will grow exponentially from there with minimal memorization. With 200 words of English, you might not know what "a pinch" is, but you know enough to have the conversation and figure it out even if the person you're talking to only speaks English.
- throwaway55421 5y ago
  This is true for speaking but listening is impossible. The vast majority of people do not speak using the simple terms that are in those 100 top lists. As an example - I would guess that from my previous sentence, "vast", "majority", "simple", "terms", "lists" and possibly more would not be present, and that's in only one relatively simple sentence. I can "speak in" probably ten languages, but I'd only say I can really _speak_ bidirectionally in one or possibly two.
  - yosito 5y ago
    > The vast majority of people do not speak using the simple terms that are in those 100 top lists. It really depends who you're talking to. I've seen claims, and I believe them, that in many languages the average person has about a 500 word vocabulary that they're using on a daily basis. Someone who is more educated than the average person is likely to use a larger vocabulary, but they're also more likely to be able to simplify their speech to accomodate you and make it possible for you to communicate with them.
    - throwaway55421 5y ago
      Yes, but this is really distinct from understanding a language. You might be able to have a very basic one on one conversation with someone who is speaking directly to you. Now sit in the corner at a bar, party, in a conference, lecture hall, or even watch a movie without subtitles, and try to understand anything at all. In most if not all languages that's impossible with a 500 word vocab.
- chalcolithic 5y ago
  My Spanish is like that - my vocab is about a hundred words and I'm very comfortable using it but native speakers are not amused and there have been cases when I literally was asked to speak any other language
  - yosito 5y ago
    But the point is, if you were to find yourself in the countryside of a Spanish speaking country with only Spanish speakers around, you could find a way communicate what you need to survive. And 2-3 months in that environment, with no English, and you'd be fluent enough to keep up socially.
cgag 5y ago
Anyone who learns enough vocabulary to be something resembling fluent (say, can comfortably watch tv shows or read books in that language), will be good at grammar far before they learn the 10k+ words they need to know. You can't consume enough of the language to acquire that kind of vocabulary and not have a decent intuition for the grammar. I don't advocate ignoring grammar, but you really just need awareness of the basics, not to spend time doing drills or filling in blanks.
- aix1 5y ago
  What really jumped out at me in your comment is that its definition of fluency (watch tv shows, read books) focuses on comprehension and appears to completely ignore being able to produce anything in the target language.
viburnum 5y ago
When learning languages I used to focus on the grammar because it was most interesting to me (and words you can always look up in a dictionary). But for the most recent language I’ve attempted I’ve focused on just learning a ton of vocabulary and it’s made a huge and positive difference. Simply knowing a lot of words means you can read newspapers and twitter or whatever and allows you more chances to see the grammar in action.

yosito 5y ago

I've learned two languages other than my native language (English), and use both actively. I'm probably categorized as a "language nerd" because I wasn't required to learn either. But I do agree with almost everything in this article, especially that kids aren't any better at learning languages than adults. I will say that one of the biggest keys for me in learning a new language is to start using it as soon as possible, and to do as much as I can in the target language. I think most languages could be learned in this way with very few formal classes. In essence, you trick your brain into thinking that the language is necessary, even though the reality might be that you could get by without it, and your brain will just start picking things up seemimgly through osmosis.

BossingAround 5y ago

There has been so much written on this topic. I don't think people actually agree on what's the best way to learn a foreign language, and that includes language teachers. Various methods I have encountered include: * Focus on reading text and vocabulary. Grammar will follow naturally from the text. * Focus on grammar. Vocabulary is a detail. * Focus on speaking. Speaking is the key to fluency. Speak to as many natives as possible. (Note: this can be incredibly annoying to said native speakers) * Focus on writing. This is the best way to retain both vocabulary and grammar. Speaking will follow when you have vocabulary and grammar memorized. * Focus on listening/hearing. Understanding is the key to communication. Remembering grammar and vocabulary will follow naturaly, e.g. from TV shows, games, movies, songs, etc. in the target language. I could go on and on and on. Seriously. My advice is two-fold: * Stick with a language. Whatever your method is, don't give up. * If your method doesn't work for you, change it. If your teacher doesn't work for you, change it (e.g. textbook, school, course, TV show, whatever the "teacher" is). It's that simple. Truth to be told, learning a language is mostly hard work. There is no secret. There is no "aha, you've been doing it wrong, you could have learned Chinese in 3 months!" method. For example, using Anki might be useful, and you might find it fun, but it will not magically make you remember anything. And, even if you remember something in the context of Anki, you might not recognize it in the wild (e.g. in a text, song, or a game). Alternatively, you might not be able to produce it (e.g. passive recollection is very different from active production of the language). I think the best one can do when learning a language is to simply stick with it. In the grand scheme of things, whether it will take you 4 years, 5 years, or 6 years to feel fluent is fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. It will, most likely, be years though.

dheera 5y ago
> aha, you've been doing it wrong, you could have learned Chinese in 3 months! Honestly there kind of is, you just have to put yourself in a "sink or swim" situation as the article says. You'll be surprised how far you can get in 3 months if you are in such a situation. Also, don't believe any crap when someone tells you "X language is hard". This is perhaps the biggest myth I have ever seen. It's only hard if you think it is, and if you try to learn everything by rules and flashcards, which native speakers don't generally do. You can also try to make anything look hard that actually isn't. I find people in the US especially love to talk about how hard Chinese (and also Japanese and a few others) is but it isn't particularly different in difficulty than English or any other major world language. 5-year-olds can handle it, they just weren't told it's hard, they just needed to speak it if they wanted to argue and get their stolen pencil back.

somewhereoutth 5y ago

As an English person living in Portugal, this article makes a lot of sense. The Portuguese (well those under about 45 years old anyway) speak excellent English, and seem as comfortable in it as a native speaker. They will quickly default to English when they want to communicate with me - understandable, but it does make practicing harder. The half and half conversations (like the Russians and Americans on the ISS) are common (and trippy). Verb inflections are a nightmare, you can't simply cram a bunch of stem words together quite like you can in English. Peruse a verb conjugation reference to get a sense of the combinatorial explosion going on there. The most common verbs are the most irregular, and there are collisions everywhere. Listening comprehension is the hardest part. I do wonder that as a native English speaker I'm used to ESL speakers, so naturally slow down and speak more clearly. Perhaps native Portuguese speakers are not so used to their language being used as a second language, so don't instinctively do that in quite the same way. Hilariously even the most proficient Portuguese English speaker cannot understand a word I say when I turn and converse with a fellow Brit, or an American. I don't notice any difference, but I guess my perfectly enunciated Queen's English turns into incomprehensible gibberish.

geocrasher 5y ago
Hilariously even the most proficient Portuguese English speaker cannot understand a word I say when I turn and converse with a fellow Brit, or an American. I don't notice any difference, but I guess my perfectly enunciated Queen's English turns into incomprehensible gibberish. As a native English speaker, it's easy to underestimate how nuanced and even culture specific our language is, even compared to other English speaking countries such as NZ or AUS. For example, I have learned that when I'm communicating with folks in India, who speak wonderful English, that I can't use common American colloquialisms such as "shooting yourself in the foot" or other similarly colorful language. It has no context for them, and the point is lost.
- presentation 5y ago
  I notice that when I speak to Japanese people (I live in Tokyo) that I subconsciously simplify and slow down my English, and even occasionally imitate their English errors; but when I speak with other native English speakers I naturally pull out loads of slang and speed up significantly. I also notice that my friends don’t always do that naturally, and so my Japanese friends confide that they didn’t understand much of what my friends were saying. I wonder if I’m more attuned to that since my own parents weren’t native, 100% fluent English speakers (I definitely dumbed things down for them, too).

ineedasername 5y ago

Computational Linguist here (by training, though not frequent practice) so I had to work through Language Acquisition courses in the process. Children learn language by necessity. They cannot translate needs and desires into meaningful results if they don't. Once they have the basics, they learn a lot more from peers (preschool) than parents: Adult speech patterns differ too much from the simpler language model of young children so it is their interactions with other young children where they learn pieces of each others' models. Pieces that they don't easily receive from their parents' speech patterns. Vocabulary explodes when they hit preschool even though parents and older siblings may speak to them just as much. This is first-language acquisition, and I hope it's obvious that this is an extremely simplified and incomplete explanation. As a side note, COVID is really screwing with this process for young children who are now far behind in this process. Research has shown that language delay can have lifelong impacts. SLA (second language acquisition) has many interesting aspects beyond what I can explain here, but I will say that the ease of learning-- all else being equal (a very important caveat)-- source language and target language play a large part. Languages that share similar phonemes tend to be a little easier, ditto for syntactic structure. It makes the exercise a bit more about mapping lexical entries in one language to another, along with learning declinations. Going from a non-tonal language to a tonal language is harder, though interestingly musicians may have an easier time. Conversely, tonal to non-tonal may be easier. Also interesting-- speakers of tonal languages tend to have higher rates of perfect pitch. True bilingualism-- learning two languages from birth-- is its own separate category of language acquisition. It's not uncommon for the learner to never quite learn either language as well as a single language learner. However the process, and learned facility for code switching, carries it's own cognitive advantages. Once again though, all of this is a highly simplified and incomplete explanation. There are plenty of very important factors that I'm leaving out here-- my comments here are probably biased towards those aspects of language acquisition that I find most interesting.

icouldbebetter 5y ago
> True bilingualism-- learning two languages from birth-- is its own separate category of language acquisition. It's not uncommon for the learner to never quite learn either language as well as a single language learner. However the process, and learned facility for code switching, carries it's own cognitive advantages. This is an interesting point indeed as it pertains to my experience. I believe I learned both English and Arabic from birth, however, my Arabic skills have atrophied and my English is definitely stronger but it could use some improvement. However, Levantine Arabic phonemes not found in English at all come naturally to me and when immersed in my home country I would be able to pick up vocabulary quickly and to some degree reading skills although I have very little education in that aspect.

JimTheMan 5y ago

We waste a lot of time trying to teach teenagers languages in high school. I learnt French, very poorly. Have retained almost nothing to this day, what a waste of time. I believe Latin is still offered in my high school system... A guaranteed waste of time. I truly believe study of foreign language should almost be reserved for people who will be living in a country with that tongue. Using it everyday and getting good returns on all that grind. More generally, we should be be more economical with our effort and time. "Why am I learning this? " Should be asked more often. I feel the cultural pull for pointless learning on other subjects. I am sure we all do. "I should study some physics. Read Feynman's lectures." But to what end, I don't know. My life will not be appreciably better for learning more about electro-magnetism. There's a yearning in us that pointless education must satisfy. A dream of a better life that you can pretend to be working towards.

CogitoCogito 5y ago
> We waste a lot of time trying to teach teenagers languages in high school. I learnt French, very poorly. Have retained almost nothing to this day, what a waste of time. Does that mean the learning was in vain? I’ve probably forgotten 90% of what I learned in high school other than math. Does that mean most of my education was a waste of time?
- maxwell_xander 5y ago
  >Does that mean the learning was in vain? I’ve probably forgotten 90% of what I learned in high school other than math. Does that mean most of my education was a waste of time? Did the things you learn change you in some other fundamental way, that only learning those things could (ie you could come to a conclusion and forget the exact process that brought you to that conclusion, and thus the process was worth learning even though now forgotten)? If not, then that learning must have been in vain, almost per the definition of vain, right?
- guy98238710 5y ago
  > Does that mean most of my education was a waste of time? Yes.

999900000999 5y ago

I think languages are great to learn, as long as it's an elective. I legitimately had to go to a less prestigious college since I couldn't pass French at Community College. In hindsight I really should of took Spanish and practiced with people in my neighborhood. Unless you had a childhood which provided you opportunities to study languages it's very hard to pass a language class. That said, I take private Chinese lessons and it's been very fun. I even went out with a girl because of it( she's not Chinese, but she found it very interesting!).

guy98238710 5y ago

The article is a bit too pessimistic about bilingual homes. Most people in the world are bilingual. That would not be the case if people quickly forgot one of their native languages. Language death is not that fast. It is however true that utterly useless languages, especially those taught in schools, are abandoned as soon as the teaching stops. Success rates would be higher if we limited ourselves to one local and one global language, English being the obvious global language.

mnemotronic 5y ago

Damn. I like learning languages, skeet-shooting AND Ska. Is there a bumper-sticker or tee-shirt for me?

cupcake-unicorn 5y ago

Wow, great to see this site on there. When I was a teenager the Language Construction Toolkit is what got me into Linguistics and completing a degree in it: https://www.zompist.com/lckbook.html https://www.zompist.com/lckbook.html When I say I have a degree in linguistics inevitably I'm asked "How many languages do you speak?" which is a question that I think most people with linguistic degrees roll their eyes at. Linguistics is very, very different than learning a language and even applied linguistics is just a subcategory of it. What I typically say is that I'm awful at learning languages. I believe very strongly from both the research that I've seen and anecdotally that someone's aptitude for learning a language has a hell of a lot more to do with someone being an extrovert who likes new experiences and doesn't have anxiety. I am bad at learning languages because I am awkward and asocial. My favorite language to learn was Sanskrit because it felt like "decoding" something versus the social/anxiety producing "production" aspect of languages. With the skills I do have though, depending on how much work I put into it, I can probably get better at comprehension in reading more quickly than most people because I like the "decoding" aspect.

throwaway984393 5y ago

The US military has a school that teaches people languages very quickly: https://www.dliflc.edu/ https://www.dliflc.edu/ . It's very interesting how they teach, in that there are multiple methods, categories, and amounts of training depending on both the language itself and what it's going to be used for. They have an impressive track record and work very fast.

josefrichter 5y ago

One method that works wonders is Michel Thomas’ method. I have no affiliation with them, just personal experience. The method feels weird initially (old man’s audiotapes), but if you had slightest interest in neuroscience, you’d see it’s absolutely brilliant way of tailoring the learning to how the brain works. I can read newspaper or have a brief conversation in a restaurant or shop in ~6 languages. You can acquire that skill easily in ~20 hours of audio (per language). But the course stops at certain level, and getting to active speaking is still very difficult next step.

brendyn 5y ago
It's great but can be very irritating when he pronounces sentences in a contrived way instead of just saying them naturally and clearly.

presentation 5y ago

I’m an expat in Japan - I wonder if there are effective ways to get your kids to have separate friend groups in different languages so that they end up learning to a high level of proficiency from peers in either group, like classmates speak English at some international school or something + all Japanese in some Kendo club or some kind of hybrid multilingual school. Maybe religious groups have been a good source of local/foreign language peer groups in this sense?

bluGill 5y ago
Only if there is no other common language, otherwise they will all speak English when they realize they know it anyway. (Or perhaps Japanese in your example )
- presentation 5y ago
  Yeah that’s what I’m thinking - I wonder if there’s a natural way to have one’s children end up with peer groups that really are dependent on separate languages.