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As a language learner, there are other activities that are better bang for buck than Duolingo. Duolingo is good for low-effort practice through gamification (wh
by wenc 3y ago
As a language learner, there are other activities that are better bang for buck than Duolingo. Duolingo is good for low-effort practice through gamification (which is useful for keep a language alive in your head), but it's not meant to teach a language.
The key to learning a language is comprehensible input, and repetition. Our brains are statistical machines and it naturally retains things that are repeated a lot (and spaced).
Of course there are some frequent and stubborn words/phrases that don't stick, in which case, I put them Anki and SRS them. I don't recommend Ankifying everything -- you'll never have enough time to practice and will get demotivated -- but it's very useful to Ankify stubborn words that don't seem to stick, and practice those only.
For instance, in English there are phrases that all seem alike but have very multiple and different meanings, like "put up", "put out", "put in", "put into", "put down". As English speakers we instinctively know what these mean in context, but for a non-native speaker it's super hard to tell the difference, and the key is just to memorize them in context ("put up the curtains", "put up with Joe's habits", "put up a fight"). Anki is super helpful for this.
- Tijdreiziger 3y agoCan you share your strategy for learning languages? I want to get more serious about Japanese, and I'm pretty interested in input-based methods.
- wenc 3y agoI don't know that I have a strategy per se, but just things I've learned by trial and error. 1. Forget Duolingo 2. Pursue comprehensible input in context (there are hundreds of ways to do this, you have to find your own way). Polyglots like Steve Kaufmann and Alexander Arguelles have a few recommendations if you google them. 3. Also, try not to learn words. Learn phrases in context. 4. Ankify phrases that just won't stick. 5. Practice speaking and writing from the get go. 6. Leverage languages you already know to help you learn new languages (e.g. if you already know a Romance language, learning another is easier. Japanese unfortunately is a language isolate, but folks who know Chinese characters are able to pick up the written language faster, and folks who know a language with a similar grammar like Korean are able to pickup the grammatical structures faster -- finding those connections early give you a superstructure to map new ideas to). Consistency is key, and even the very best language learners take about a year to become reasonably familiar with a new language. Disbelieve anything that promises you fluency in 3 months (even Spanish speakers need more than 3 months to be fluent in Portuguese, a closely related language).
- yurishimo 3y agoMatt vs Japan on YouTube is probably your best resource. Go watch all of his videos (paying attention to how he shifts over the years) and when you’re done binging, get started! I think you can get through most of his videos in 20-30 hours on 2x. If you’re a native English speaker, that should be doable.