6 ms·

> 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" sit

by 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.

kevinstubbs 5y ago
Any grammar is surmountable, but the languages that are truly hard are ones which have sounds or consonant clusters that your native language(s) don't. For example, learning Georgian as a native English/Italian speaker.. I could hardly even say basic words like "forest" (t'ke), "water" (tsqali), or "frog" (baqaqi) for the first few months. Look up the ყ letter, or listen and judge for yourself ბაყაყი წყალში ყიყინებს (the frog cries in the water) Hear natives speak it: https://forvo.com/word/%E1%83%91%E1%83%90%E1%83%A7%E1%83%90%E1%83%A7%E1%83%98/#ka https://forvo.com/word/%E1%83%91%E1%83%90%E1%83%A7%E1%83%90%... The one by shaburgiorgi is the most faithfully enunciated, while the others are what you would more likely hear casually/in conversation.
- dheera 5y ago
  > I could hardly even say If I may take the liberty to nitpick, that's a thing only an adult would say. A 5-year-old would just try.
  - kevinstubbs 5y ago
    That's a pretty unforgiving interpretation of what I wrote. Sounds came out of my mouth and people didn't understand what I was trying to say.
    - dheera 5y ago
      > Sounds came out of my mouth and people didn't understand what I was trying to say. Right, and as a 5 year old who wants your pencil back, you find another way to say it. If you don't know how to say "backpack" you say "bag". If you don't know how to say "foyer" you say "that place near the door". If you don't know how to say "pencil" you say "pen" or "writing stick". I realize it was an unforgiving interpretation. That was directed at the topic and not you personally. That's kind of my point. If you have a sink-or-swim attitude or situation you will learn it.
  - bsder 5y ago
    > A 5-year-old would just try. And a 5 year old would be cut a lot of slack for screwing it up. One of the issues with learning anything as an adult is that other adults are viciously unaccommodating. Foreign language learning turns that up to 11. Personally, I think this is the primary issue with adult learning. You have to be a very strong personality to have an intrinsic motivation that will cause you to put in long hours of work because you aren't going to get any external motivation for a very long time.
    - dheera 5y ago
      Interesting take. Are they? I know adults in the US are often sadly viciously unaccomodating of broken English, but I feel that isn't the case in most of the (especially non-English-speaking) world, where any attempts to speak the local language are usually very much welcomed. There are some places where the locals tend to speak good enough English that if they realize you speak English better than their language they'll viciously insist on speaking English to get business done, but that is sometimes mitigated if you place yourself in a more rural area or less cosmopolitan city where English isn't common.
      - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
        It depends how racist the country/situation is. Many countries will give English-speakers a break because many English speakers don't even try. So just being able to say something - anything - in the language counts as a plus. Anything after that is a bonus. Even in English-speaking countries, you can screw up the grammar badly and still be comprehensible. US and British people may decide you're an idiot - and treat you accordingly - but they will mostly understand you. So my personal ordering of importance is vocab, grammar, and finally accent/voice coaching. You will definitely need the latter for most languages, because even supposedly non-exotic ones like French require a novel set of mouth movements. Most lesson systems underemphasise this. My working assumption as an adult is that it will take three months to learn basic conversation with full immersion and minimal distractions, and five years of constant practice to reach reasonable fluency in speaking, listening, and writing. This is actually less time than it takes kids to learn a language, so the idea that kids are especially malleable or open is clearly wrong. Of course kids are learning language in general - and more - at the same time, so timings aren't absolutely comparable. But similarly adults are having to do a lot of distracting adult things at the same time, so it more or less evens out.
- Tomte 5y ago
  Even listening is hard. I spent quite some time with the Swedish retroflex fricative, and always heard something else than my teacher described. I finally settled on learning it by IPA, i.e. learning where exactly the tongue needs to be. Even harder are Russian consonants for me: I can try as much as I want, but I will probably never be able to distinguish Russian hard and soft consonants, even with a Russian speaker saying them slowly and in contrast (and with lots of "you're kidding me, right? Those sounds are nothing alike").
  - kevinstubbs 5y ago
    I can completely relate to everything you wrote haha. I never mastered ш (which I guess is retroflex fricative?) vs щ and I've completely given up on hard vs. soft sounds in Russian because this >and with lots of "you're kidding me, right? Those sounds are nothing alike" Is too true. With practice and listening, my pronunciation is naturally improving over time, but I really don't know how to improve it in a faster way. Do you think learning and practicing IPA would do the trick, like you did with Swedish?
    - john-aj 5y ago
      Learning about phonetics absolutely helps. It provides an accurate way of precisely describing how sounds are pronounced. Do keep in mind, though, that the IPA classifications that you find on Wikipedia are sometimes rough estimates. With particularly difficult sounds, it may be a good idea to look at multiple phonetic descriptions. Begin with the sounds of your own native language, which you already know how to pronounce, and try to describe them phonetically. A tip for learning to feel where your tongue is, is to pronounce the sounds without tone, i.e. whisper them, or even without air, i.e. simply mouth them.
golemiprague 5y ago
Depends on your native language there are harder and easier languages for sure. It is much easier for a Chinese to read and understand Japanese comparing to someone who don't know the symbols and need to learn it from scratch. It is easier to learn other languages from the same group, like learning a different latin language, germanic language or semitic language if you know one of them already. There are other factors also like similarities in grammatical structure, in variations of the language around situations which require more politeness or formality like in Japanese, written vs. spoken language like in Arabic and many other factors.
jcranmer 5y ago
There's a variety of factors that make language easier or harder to learn. Broadly speaking, you can divide them into writing, grammar, vocabulary, and phonology. So there's languages that are hard to read and write. People love to talk about how poor English is when it comes to correspondence between written letters and sounds, but honestly, it's not close to the head of the pact. There are some Southeast Asian languages today where the gap between written word and speech is very much akin to writing Latin but speaking French. Japanese kanji is a moderately different level of burden, as every kanji has multiple different pronunciations, and it's at the point where--even for native speakers--it's not particularly expected that you can read someone's name and know how to pronounce it. Of course, for those of who use Latin scripts, any language that also uses Latin script is going to be easier to learn than one that doesn't. Phonology can be a challenging aspect, because several languages don't have the same phonotactics as English does (or insert whatever native language here). There are multiple Slavic or Chinese sounds that my ears would process as "sh" and yet would be considered different consonants. Some phonemes are legitimately more difficult to pronounce--pronouncing click consonants literally scars your vocal tract. Some languages demand that you pay attention to tones, creakiness, breathiness, or aspiration, none of which is phonologically relevant to English or most Indo-European language. Grammar and vocabulary are, as you imply, pretty mild concerns at the end of the day. They're not difficult enough to impede language acquisition, but there is actually some evidence to suggest that a language that becomes a major second language in the process goes through stronger grammatical simplification than their closest linguistic relatives--consider how much simpler English, Swahili, Malay, or Persian are compared to "normal" languages in their respective families.
- dheera 5y ago
  So yes, I'm aware of analysis like this. I think my point is, even "polluting" your brain with analysis like this of a language will make it actually hard. For example > Japanese kanji is a moderately different level of burden If you didn't read this, you wouldn't actually go into it thinking of it as a burden, and it would turn out to not actually be a burden. The fact that "even" native speakers from time to time have to ask how to pronounce something is just a fact of life, and not a difficulty of the language, but observers have come to think of it as a burden for some reason. But now that you've read that it is a burden, it will be a burden to you. I have pretty firm conviction that "hard" is very much influenced within some range by how hard you a priori think it is, and that logic is not the way to approach this. Rather, being blissfully unaware of any logical or linguistic experts' arguments around how hard others think something is will actually help you learn the language much faster and more efficiently. > going to be easier to learn than one that doesn't. > There are multiple Slavic or Chinese sounds > Some phonemes are legitimately more difficult to pronounce > literally scars your vocal tract > demand that you pay attention to Without any intent to personally attack you, because a LOT of people have logical arguments such as the above, it's quite literally even hearing such logical descriptions of languages which may make something extremely hard. We aren't fully logical creatures, the languages we invented aren't designed to be logically analyzed.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Aerroon 5y ago
Experience is king. Language is used at a pace where it has to be intuitive. No amount of learning rules is going to give you that. As you use a language you build up intuition on it and you learn the patterns (combos) that go well together. It's actually quite similar to how you learn so many other things from mathematics to video games. One thing that does set languages apart though is that they involve learning to listen and to speak. With other activities we don't usually have to learn to listen to a new audio pattern to start distinguishing it from noise. Even less frequently do we have to learn to make new sounds with our mouth. In fact, I bet most people couldn't even describe what they do in their mouth to produce the sounds of different characters in their languages that they can speak. (Think of the difference of French R and English R and how you produce them.) Learning those can be quite a new experience, especially if you're still learning up distinguish the sound from noise.
BossingAround 5y ago
> 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. This is the problem in language learning. What you said could be true in certain contexts but is wildly misconstrued. As is, what you said is "bro science" without proper methods, context, and caveats. Finally, while immersion in a language is amazingly useful, you can't do much in 3 months. Sounds like a recipe for burnout and total isolation in a foreign country.

by dheera 5y ago

kevinstubbs 5y ago

Any grammar is surmountable, but the languages that are truly hard are ones which have sounds or consonant clusters that your native language(s) don't. For example, learning Georgian as a native English/Italian speaker.. I could hardly even say basic words like "forest" (t'ke), "water" (tsqali), or "frog" (baqaqi) for the first few months. Look up the ყ letter, or listen and judge for yourself ბაყაყი წყალში ყიყინებს (the frog cries in the water) Hear natives speak it: https://forvo.com/word/%E1%83%91%E1%83%90%E1%83%A7%E1%83%90%E1%83%A7%E1%83%98/#ka https://forvo.com/word/%E1%83%91%E1%83%90%E1%83%A7%E1%83%90%... The one by shaburgiorgi is the most faithfully enunciated, while the others are what you would more likely hear casually/in conversation.

dheera 5y ago
> I could hardly even say If I may take the liberty to nitpick, that's a thing only an adult would say. A 5-year-old would just try.
- kevinstubbs 5y ago
  That's a pretty unforgiving interpretation of what I wrote. Sounds came out of my mouth and people didn't understand what I was trying to say.
  - dheera 5y ago
    > Sounds came out of my mouth and people didn't understand what I was trying to say. Right, and as a 5 year old who wants your pencil back, you find another way to say it. If you don't know how to say "backpack" you say "bag". If you don't know how to say "foyer" you say "that place near the door". If you don't know how to say "pencil" you say "pen" or "writing stick". I realize it was an unforgiving interpretation. That was directed at the topic and not you personally. That's kind of my point. If you have a sink-or-swim attitude or situation you will learn it.
- bsder 5y ago
  > A 5-year-old would just try. And a 5 year old would be cut a lot of slack for screwing it up. One of the issues with learning anything as an adult is that other adults are viciously unaccommodating. Foreign language learning turns that up to 11. Personally, I think this is the primary issue with adult learning. You have to be a very strong personality to have an intrinsic motivation that will cause you to put in long hours of work because you aren't going to get any external motivation for a very long time.
  - dheera 5y ago
    Interesting take. Are they? I know adults in the US are often sadly viciously unaccomodating of broken English, but I feel that isn't the case in most of the (especially non-English-speaking) world, where any attempts to speak the local language are usually very much welcomed. There are some places where the locals tend to speak good enough English that if they realize you speak English better than their language they'll viciously insist on speaking English to get business done, but that is sometimes mitigated if you place yourself in a more rural area or less cosmopolitan city where English isn't common.
    - TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
      It depends how racist the country/situation is. Many countries will give English-speakers a break because many English speakers don't even try. So just being able to say something - anything - in the language counts as a plus. Anything after that is a bonus. Even in English-speaking countries, you can screw up the grammar badly and still be comprehensible. US and British people may decide you're an idiot - and treat you accordingly - but they will mostly understand you. So my personal ordering of importance is vocab, grammar, and finally accent/voice coaching. You will definitely need the latter for most languages, because even supposedly non-exotic ones like French require a novel set of mouth movements. Most lesson systems underemphasise this. My working assumption as an adult is that it will take three months to learn basic conversation with full immersion and minimal distractions, and five years of constant practice to reach reasonable fluency in speaking, listening, and writing. This is actually less time than it takes kids to learn a language, so the idea that kids are especially malleable or open is clearly wrong. Of course kids are learning language in general - and more - at the same time, so timings aren't absolutely comparable. But similarly adults are having to do a lot of distracting adult things at the same time, so it more or less evens out.
Tomte 5y ago
Even listening is hard. I spent quite some time with the Swedish retroflex fricative, and always heard something else than my teacher described. I finally settled on learning it by IPA, i.e. learning where exactly the tongue needs to be. Even harder are Russian consonants for me: I can try as much as I want, but I will probably never be able to distinguish Russian hard and soft consonants, even with a Russian speaker saying them slowly and in contrast (and with lots of "you're kidding me, right? Those sounds are nothing alike").
- kevinstubbs 5y ago
  I can completely relate to everything you wrote haha. I never mastered ш (which I guess is retroflex fricative?) vs щ and I've completely given up on hard vs. soft sounds in Russian because this >and with lots of "you're kidding me, right? Those sounds are nothing alike" Is too true. With practice and listening, my pronunciation is naturally improving over time, but I really don't know how to improve it in a faster way. Do you think learning and practicing IPA would do the trick, like you did with Swedish?
  - john-aj 5y ago
    Learning about phonetics absolutely helps. It provides an accurate way of precisely describing how sounds are pronounced. Do keep in mind, though, that the IPA classifications that you find on Wikipedia are sometimes rough estimates. With particularly difficult sounds, it may be a good idea to look at multiple phonetic descriptions. Begin with the sounds of your own native language, which you already know how to pronounce, and try to describe them phonetically. A tip for learning to feel where your tongue is, is to pronounce the sounds without tone, i.e. whisper them, or even without air, i.e. simply mouth them.

golemiprague 5y ago

Depends on your native language there are harder and easier languages for sure. It is much easier for a Chinese to read and understand Japanese comparing to someone who don't know the symbols and need to learn it from scratch. It is easier to learn other languages from the same group, like learning a different latin language, germanic language or semitic language if you know one of them already. There are other factors also like similarities in grammatical structure, in variations of the language around situations which require more politeness or formality like in Japanese, written vs. spoken language like in Arabic and many other factors.

jcranmer 5y ago

There's a variety of factors that make language easier or harder to learn. Broadly speaking, you can divide them into writing, grammar, vocabulary, and phonology. So there's languages that are hard to read and write. People love to talk about how poor English is when it comes to correspondence between written letters and sounds, but honestly, it's not close to the head of the pact. There are some Southeast Asian languages today where the gap between written word and speech is very much akin to writing Latin but speaking French. Japanese kanji is a moderately different level of burden, as every kanji has multiple different pronunciations, and it's at the point where--even for native speakers--it's not particularly expected that you can read someone's name and know how to pronounce it. Of course, for those of who use Latin scripts, any language that also uses Latin script is going to be easier to learn than one that doesn't. Phonology can be a challenging aspect, because several languages don't have the same phonotactics as English does (or insert whatever native language here). There are multiple Slavic or Chinese sounds that my ears would process as "sh" and yet would be considered different consonants. Some phonemes are legitimately more difficult to pronounce--pronouncing click consonants literally scars your vocal tract. Some languages demand that you pay attention to tones, creakiness, breathiness, or aspiration, none of which is phonologically relevant to English or most Indo-European language. Grammar and vocabulary are, as you imply, pretty mild concerns at the end of the day. They're not difficult enough to impede language acquisition, but there is actually some evidence to suggest that a language that becomes a major second language in the process goes through stronger grammatical simplification than their closest linguistic relatives--consider how much simpler English, Swahili, Malay, or Persian are compared to "normal" languages in their respective families.

dheera 5y ago
So yes, I'm aware of analysis like this. I think my point is, even "polluting" your brain with analysis like this of a language will make it actually hard. For example > Japanese kanji is a moderately different level of burden If you didn't read this, you wouldn't actually go into it thinking of it as a burden, and it would turn out to not actually be a burden. The fact that "even" native speakers from time to time have to ask how to pronounce something is just a fact of life, and not a difficulty of the language, but observers have come to think of it as a burden for some reason. But now that you've read that it is a burden, it will be a burden to you. I have pretty firm conviction that "hard" is very much influenced within some range by how hard you a priori think it is, and that logic is not the way to approach this. Rather, being blissfully unaware of any logical or linguistic experts' arguments around how hard others think something is will actually help you learn the language much faster and more efficiently. > going to be easier to learn than one that doesn't. > There are multiple Slavic or Chinese sounds > Some phonemes are legitimately more difficult to pronounce > literally scars your vocal tract > demand that you pay attention to Without any intent to personally attack you, because a LOT of people have logical arguments such as the above, it's quite literally even hearing such logical descriptions of languages which may make something extremely hard. We aren't fully logical creatures, the languages we invented aren't designed to be logically analyzed.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Aerroon 5y ago

Experience is king. Language is used at a pace where it has to be intuitive. No amount of learning rules is going to give you that. As you use a language you build up intuition on it and you learn the patterns (combos) that go well together. It's actually quite similar to how you learn so many other things from mathematics to video games. One thing that does set languages apart though is that they involve learning to listen and to speak. With other activities we don't usually have to learn to listen to a new audio pattern to start distinguishing it from noise. Even less frequently do we have to learn to make new sounds with our mouth. In fact, I bet most people couldn't even describe what they do in their mouth to produce the sounds of different characters in their languages that they can speak. (Think of the difference of French R and English R and how you produce them.) Learning those can be quite a new experience, especially if you're still learning up distinguish the sound from noise.

BossingAround 5y ago

> 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. This is the problem in language learning. What you said could be true in certain contexts but is wildly misconstrued. As is, what you said is "bro science" without proper methods, context, and caveats. Finally, while immersion in a language is amazingly useful, you can't do much in 3 months. Sounds like a recipe for burnout and total isolation in a foreign country.