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> Think about listening to a language unknown to you, one with different words, grammar and prosody. You will be at an utter loss to identify its words, let alo

> Think about listening to a language unknown to you, one with different words, grammar and prosody. You will be at an utter loss to identify its words, let alone their meaning. My experience learning French basically. I'd say understanding where one word ends and another starts was much easier for English and German. On paper I was able to grasp the rough meaning very quickly thanks to vocabulary shared with English and Latin, but listening took a year: I was facing a solid wall of sound, no cracks.

konschubert 2y ago
My strategy is to keep listening to the same recording on repeat. 1000 times if needed. It is good if it is a high-quality recording. After a while, my brain starts picking out the word.s
j_bum 2y ago
This has always been my struggle with French as well. I have never quite able to crack the aural/listening component of the language. How did you overcome the “wall”?
- alexey-salmin 2y ago
  It clicked after a year of practice, the change was quick and noticeable. I started learning after moving to France and it helps a great deal even though at work it's English. Not sure how long it would take if I was learning it elsewhere.
  - yurishimo 2y ago
    It definitely takes longer if you don't live in an environment where it's spoken. Before I moved to NL from the US, I did duolingo every day for 3 months (from the time I accepted the offer to moving) and by the time I got on the plane, I had moved from the beginner module to the intermediate one. After landing and getting settled, I ventured out to really test my skills at the local supermarket and I was completely and utterly useless. Perhaps the only thing I could recognize was the total at the end that I needed to pay. We take for granted regional dialects when speaking our own language and in some languages, dialects can be a huge component of the language. Being able to just go outside and sit on a bench and listen to people speak in the language you want to learn is a huge advantage. Every day, you will passively pick up some words from the context of passers-by. You'll also start to subconsciously figure out what words are "common" in a different way that the lists of "1000 most common words in X langauge" can convey. You also learn how to put them together in context and how some words travel together within a certain context. If I was tasked with learning a language abroad, I would spend 2-4 hours a day consuming native content and make it a priority to speak with a coach online 1-2 times a week, trying to work my way up to holding a conversation for an hour straight. After living here for almost 2 years now, I can just barely get to 1 hour when speaking to my boss (super grateful btw!) but I'm really drained mentally by the end of it. With each meeting it gets easier though and now I can somewhat even make out the local dialect. Learning a language is a numbers game and the reason we often attribute superior language learning skills to kids is simply due to the fact that they have so much free time to listen, absorb, speak, and make mistakes without people judging them because they're kids. I'm fully convinced that adults can learn just as fast or faster, but our own egos often get in the way to putting in the work to learn.
- magneticnorth 2y ago
  I'm not the person you asked, but I'm in the process of learning French. I'm a native English speaker who had a much easier time with listening comprehension for Spanish and German, my other languages. What I find helps me to make progress is two things: 1) prioritize vocabulary (you need to know a word to have any hope of recognizing it in speech) 2) listen to "comprehensible input" at your level. I like this guy: https://www.youtube.com/@FrenchComprehensibleInput https://www.youtube.com/@FrenchComprehensibleInput who has levels labeled for his vids, I also like https://www.youtube.com/@wanderingfrench https://www.youtube.com/@wanderingfrench because I'm interested in Canadian French and I find her especially clear and easy to understand, as well as charismatic.
  - haspok 2y ago
    I respectfully disagree wrt the prioritization of vocabulary. Yes, you do need the basics covered (a few thousand words). But what I realized is that if I am listening or reading a sentence with an unknown word in it, in most cases I just figure out from the context what that unknown word means (I check it against a dictionary and 9 times out of 10 I'm close enough). Obviously this does not work if too many words in the sentence are unknown. And I'm not saying not to learn new words. But it is far more important in my opinion to read / listen so much that you get faster and faster. Especially if you are listening to speech, where you can't pause / rewind, and if you spend too much time on one thing you just get left behind entirely. Don't know a word - just skip it / ignore it and concentrate on the whole stream.
- Dalewyn 2y ago
  Personally as an English/Japanese bilingual speaker and a programmer (programming languages!), I think the most important thing is incentive. Why do you want or need to learn that language? Is it important? Is it valuable? Is it fulfilling? As I've found, the biggest "wall" to learning languages is convincing yourself that learning the language is worth the immense hassle and effort.
  - yurishimo 2y ago
    Yes! This for sure plays a huge role as well. How many times have we as programmers picked up a new language, done the 'Hello World', and then set it down and went back to one we already know? Spoken languages are much the same. They all include various concepts that are shared (verbs, nouns, adjectives, grammar concepts, loops, variables, functions, etc) but the actual process of putting them together in the idiomatic order is the hard part. But without the carrot at the end of the stick, it's unlikely you'll be disciplined enough to stick to it. A new job is a natural place for many people to pick up a new programming language because everything else is also new. For languages it is no different. Can you learn a language outside of the country where it's commonly spoken? Sure, but it's going to be 100x more difficult and you have to generate all of the discipline yourself. If you can crack that problem and build the discipline, then you've basically won the war if you can hold in there "long enough for your enemy to starve." :D
- FranzFerdiNaN 2y ago
  Listen a ton and then some more. For the first couple hundred hours or so preferably with subtitles, there will come a point where you realize you rely on the subtitles less and less. That’s the point where you can start to turn them of. Audiobooks also work. And work on your grammar and vocabulary. Listening gets easier if you intuitively know what you should hear (tenses, conjugations, plural or singular words etc).
- jstanley 2y ago
  I find it's sometimes quite difficult to tell where the word boundaries are when a person with a strong French accent is speaking English. I think the difficulty is because French encourages the emphasis to be in completely different places to English.
- materielle 2y ago
  Unfortunately there’s no trick. You get better at listening by listening a lot. Most people just severely underestimate the amount of work it is. You probably need 1,000 hours of listening to be decent, and 2,000 to be strong. If you practice 30 minutes a day, that will take 11 years. So the only “trick” is that you need to find things that you genuinely enjoy doing in French. So that you can practice for multiple hours each day without burning out. I’m a native English speaker who has a very high level in Spanish. It takes a long time for your brain to figure out how to decode the type of mumbling people use in casual speech. Yes, practice vocabulary, practice grammar, read. But you’re probably already doing this. You just need to listen to a ton of stuff right at the edge of your abilities and you’ll notice improvements every few months. My one final tip would be to not get in your head so much. Literally everyone who has learned a language will tell you that if you review vocab, do grammar exercises, and listen to the language for 1-3 hours every day, you’ll learn it. But it happens so slowly that it doesn’t feel like it will work while you’re on the journey. It’s sort of like the gym: if you lift every day and eat healthy, you will have muscles in a year or two. But it’s really demotivating because you won’t notice a drastic difference even after 3 months.
- anal_reactor 2y ago
  Aside from my native language I speak three foreign languages, and I just started learning the fourth one. Besides that, I wasted a lot of time on another language that did not stick, so I kinda know what works and what doesn't. 1. Consistency. Make sure you practice a little every day. For example, I use an app that tells me every day what vocabulary I should practice that day. It takes ten minutes of my day, and does wonders. 2. Communication. Start talking to someone as soon as possible. If you're learning a Germanic or Romance language, after 6 months you should be able to find someone online to chat with. Of course it's going to take you 15 minutes with a dictionary to understand the other person's message and another 15 minutes to write the reply, but it truly does wonders because it allows your brain to see the language as a language. 3. Fun exercise: try vocalizing your internal monologue in foreign language. Don't focus on correctness at all, it's about familiarizing yourself with the language. 4. Find some interesting media in your target language. It's going to be difficult because most important stuff is available in English, but for example you might try movies or YouTube channels. Especially the latter is great because YouTube videos rarely ever have English translation, so you know that either you watch it in your target language or not at all. There are apps that allow you to listen to foreign radio stations. Why not doomscroll in your target language. 5. Don't give up until you reach level B2 and you can talk without consciously thinking about it. 6. Understanding native speakers talking naturally to each other is literally the hardest part, so don't treat it as a benchmark until you reach fluency. 7. A common mistake is to treat the whole thing as a "sequence to sequence" task and think about the target language in the context of your native one. Your actual goal of learning the word X is to have your brain understand the abstract concept behind it. 8. It's going to suck and you'll hate it. There's no way around it. Keep practicing and adjusting your techniques to your liking. One day something will "click" and you'll actually "feel" the language.
- konschubert 2y ago
  Here is my trick: I take a recording of a conversation in the language, one that's made for language learners. Then I listen to it until I know it BY HEART. Usually that takes about 100 listens. Every time I listen, I understand a bit more. Sometimes I look at the transcript to understand a section that evades me. I don't move on until I can recite the whole thing BY HEART. Then, I take the next dialogue.
  - yurishimo 2y ago
    This is next level! Thinking back to my language textbooks, this would be brutal for me on a mental level. Do you think it could work as well with a short story or novella? Perhaps one of the books by Olly Richards? I find the dialogues in textbooks absolutely mind numbing most of the time and while easy books for learners aren't that interesting anyway, at least it's a full story and not people ordering lunch or a trip to the doctor for the 99th time!
    - konschubert 2y ago
      The thing is, the dialogue has to be short to really stick to your brain! Like, less than a minute. Repetition is key, and if the text is too long, it’s not repeated enough. To me, it’s not mind-numbing until I can “sing along” because I know it by heart. And then I move on to the next, slightly harder, text. You don’t have to always listen to it actively, you can put it in while doing other work. Some language self-learner books are better than others.
      - yurishimo 2y ago
        Ah okay. I think most of the dialogues from the books I'm thinking of were between 3-5 minutes. Something shorter might work better, indeed.
      - maxquinn 2y ago
        I'd really like to give this method a go. I'm trying to learn French and struggling with the listening component. Do you have any sources for dialogues that you used?
- numpad0 2y ago
  I've never had a French class or any language courses in English so I just don't know; do foreign language classes in general not start with phonetics? Vowels, consonants, syllables, then words. From there is a long road ahead but that should lets you(at least seemed to let my small brain) break down pure stream of audio in TVs and media content into spaced syllables that occasionally forms into words.
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beaeglebeachedd 2y ago
They seem to teach it pretty fast to any idiot in the French Foreign Legion from what little I know. I have a feeling people learn fast with the 'right' incentives.
- freddie_mercury 2y ago
  90% of recruits fail, so I wouldn't say they've got some awesome fool proof method.
  - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
    What % fail due to lack of language skills? Or did you really mean 90%. Source?
- samus 2y ago
  They also actively teach it to them. They are immersed around the clock, using other languages is forbidden (recalcitrant recruits used to get hazed in the past), and they put in efforts to teach it in a practical and conversational way.
katzenversteher 2y ago
I can speak German, English and Dutch (which are very close Germanic languages) and also understand a bit of French and Italian. I guess I could learn their basics relatively quickly if I tried hard enough. However, I actually need to learn Croatian, a Slavic language. This is extremely difficult for me and I make hardly any progress. The vocabulary is so different from everything else I know, I just can't remember the words. The grammar is quite challenging as well.
- alexey-salmin 2y ago
  I did give some thought whether your native language makes it easier or harder to learn others, but all I have is anecdotal cases from my life. I wonder if there are any scientific studies on the topic. E.g. a curious thing I noticed is the frequent complaint about Latin being very hard to learn because of the seven grammatical cases, three genders and morphology -- words just don't stay the same. As native Russian speaker I find these things absolutely normal and easy to understand, but I can image this must be a nightmare after English. Slavic languages you mention are very curious in how different yet how similar they all are. One of the most impressive thing I saw with respect to learning languages is the Interslavic language [1]. Apparently if you speak any of Slavic languages you can understand it quite well, even though you usually are completely lost with most of the other Slavic languages. You still need to learn to speak it, but the fact that you understand foreigners with zero training just blows my mind. Feels like you awakened the memory of your ancestors of something. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NztgXMLwv4A&t=122s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NztgXMLwv4A&t=122s
  - ajuc 2y ago
    I'm Polish, I've never learnt any foreign Slavic languages, but I can mostly understand Ukrainian, Belarusian and Slovak from passive exposure on a few trips. The experience is weird - when I first went to Ukraine I couldn't understand almost anything. After a few days it suddenly "clicked" and I realized how the most common sounds and word endings relate between Polish and Ukrainian - and since that moment I basically got all the words with the same roots for free (which is like half the language). It also gave me Belarusian as a side effect :) Of course it's not actual language speaking, I'm just understanding every other word and connecting the dots. With Slovak it was even quicker, but somehow it hasn't given me Czech - their pronuciation is just too weird, despite the fact it's almost the same in writing :). I'm not sure Interslavic provides much value. For me it's basically Slovak, so if you come from East Slavic language you'd probably get the same benefit spending that time learning some Slovak, and you'd then know some actual language instead of an artificial one.
vitro 2y ago
Shameless plug: try Latudio - https://www.latudio.com/ https://www.latudio.com/ - we have a listening-only approach, but you can pause sentence anytime and tap on words to see the translation. I'd say give it a try and let me know if that works for you, I'd be happy to hear.
- russum 2y ago
  fyi one of the App Store screenshots misleadingly shows "German" language in "Preview" when in reality it doesn't seem to be available at all
  - vitro 2y ago
    Oh, thanks for letting me now, we'll fix it with our next update. German is in preparation but not ready for preview yet, unfortunately.
jasonkester 2y ago
Yeah, no kidding that’s rough. “est-ce qu'il y a”…. Three syllables, representing six words. We taught both kids French by dropping them unprepared into the local village school at age 6. Whatever part of their brain taught them English as infants kicked back in and did the same thing for a second time. Amazing to watch. I wish I could do that.
- Sharlin 2y ago
  Yep, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_immersion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_immersion. There are schools and kindergartens that specialize on this, though the degree of immersion varies.
boffinAudio 2y ago
Native English-speaker here, moved to a German-speaking nation 20 years ago and have become a fluent German speaker as a result. Just want to add my 2c about that wall of sound .. At the beginning I found it very difficult to parse German as I heard it on the street and in general life circumstances. It wasn't until I rigorously started looking up words I 'thought' I heard, with a dictionary, and gained about 100 of these, before I could accurately parse a spoken sentence. I think its very important to use a dictionary when learning another language. It wasn't until I got a massive English/German dictionary that I felt I stood a chance. Another thing that really helped was using sub-titles and watching TV, even if it was a show I wasn't interested in - it taught me so many words that I had heard, but not recognized.
alex_duf 2y ago
I was facing the same issue when I learned English (I'm French), and I found that watching TV Shows with the subtitles helped a lot. So you get to hear that wall of sounds, but you get the words spelled out under the picture.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  YouTube has a lot of informal conversational content in all sorts of languages, too. Podcasts etc.
- ErigmolCt 2y ago
  Helps to understand the language easier
madaxe_again 2y ago
The good news is that now that you’ve cracked French, you’ll find Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese easy. They’re all basically the same language with divergent dialects, but practically identical grammars and structure.
- namaria 2y ago
  Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, Italian, are all in a cluster together and a bit apart from French. I can read French, but I think it's equidistant from the Iberian/Italic language cluster and English. So the first language in that cluster after French won't exactly be "easy". Easier than without French yeah but the subsequent ones will be much easier and on the same level of difficulty from one to another as then you mostly just change the ending of the words and the most used connectives.
  - madaxe_again 2y ago
    I’m a native English speaker, and French (and some very rusty Latin) was my bridge into that cluster - they’re absolutely heaving with common cognates and structures from my experience. What I will say is that my French has become much harder to access since - I will find myself lapsing into a creole for the first few days when I switch from one to the other.
    - namaria 2y ago
      That makes sense given that a huge chunk of modern English is derived from Norman French.
maxcan 2y ago
This may come off as a little inappropriate but one thing I think about when learning another language is the usual mistakes or quirks that native speakers of that language display when speaking English. It turns out that quite often those are reflective of the correct form in their language. It's helped me sound more natural in Japanese and Hebrew.
- wvh 2y ago
  I speak a bunch of languages, and this is especially helpful when learning languages that have a specific own idiomatic sentence structure. You get a pretty good insight into how people form sentences in their native language based on how they garble English. You can often derive where people are from based on those typical mistakes, even in a few sentences on an online forum.
bunderbunder 2y ago
A big problem here is that slowed-down "teacher talk" does French learners an incredible disservice. The classroom version of the language is at least a little bit different from natural, connected speech in every language I've studied. But classroom French is effectively a completely different dialect from the everyday spoken language.
wvh 2y ago
I think French is notoriously difficult to understand from speaking language because they tie together so many words and sounds. Contrasted with a language such as Finnish, which is hard to learn, but relatively easy to understand and write because both pronunciation and spelling are just what you'd expect.
- bunderbunder 2y ago
  This may be a hot take, but I'd argue that there is no such thing as a language that's easier or harder to understand. Just languages that are more or less different from the one you grew up speaking. If they're more similar, then the learner can repurpose skills they already had from their native language. But that's not ease, per se, it's getting a head start. To take French phonology as an example: objectively speaking, enchainement is an aid to comprehension, not an impediment. Now that I'm used to it, I find non-native speakers who don't do it to be harder to understand because they've effectively dropped an entire information channel from the language. Which isn't to say I didn't have a hard time getting used to it when I was learning. I absolutely did. But that's not because enchainement is inherently difficult; it's because I first had to un-learn some assumptions about the structure of language and how spoken word morphology works that I was bringing with me from my native language. And because I was being hindered by pedagogical methods that, in effect, try to hide the problem instead of solving it.
ErigmolCt 2y ago
I can't imagine what was happening to my brain when I, an English speaker, started learning Korean. It was tough.

konschubert 2y ago

My strategy is to keep listening to the same recording on repeat. 1000 times if needed. It is good if it is a high-quality recording. After a while, my brain starts picking out the word.s

j_bum 2y ago

This has always been my struggle with French as well. I have never quite able to crack the aural/listening component of the language. How did you overcome the “wall”?

alexey-salmin 2y ago
It clicked after a year of practice, the change was quick and noticeable. I started learning after moving to France and it helps a great deal even though at work it's English. Not sure how long it would take if I was learning it elsewhere.
- yurishimo 2y ago
  It definitely takes longer if you don't live in an environment where it's spoken. Before I moved to NL from the US, I did duolingo every day for 3 months (from the time I accepted the offer to moving) and by the time I got on the plane, I had moved from the beginner module to the intermediate one. After landing and getting settled, I ventured out to really test my skills at the local supermarket and I was completely and utterly useless. Perhaps the only thing I could recognize was the total at the end that I needed to pay. We take for granted regional dialects when speaking our own language and in some languages, dialects can be a huge component of the language. Being able to just go outside and sit on a bench and listen to people speak in the language you want to learn is a huge advantage. Every day, you will passively pick up some words from the context of passers-by. You'll also start to subconsciously figure out what words are "common" in a different way that the lists of "1000 most common words in X langauge" can convey. You also learn how to put them together in context and how some words travel together within a certain context. If I was tasked with learning a language abroad, I would spend 2-4 hours a day consuming native content and make it a priority to speak with a coach online 1-2 times a week, trying to work my way up to holding a conversation for an hour straight. After living here for almost 2 years now, I can just barely get to 1 hour when speaking to my boss (super grateful btw!) but I'm really drained mentally by the end of it. With each meeting it gets easier though and now I can somewhat even make out the local dialect. Learning a language is a numbers game and the reason we often attribute superior language learning skills to kids is simply due to the fact that they have so much free time to listen, absorb, speak, and make mistakes without people judging them because they're kids. I'm fully convinced that adults can learn just as fast or faster, but our own egos often get in the way to putting in the work to learn.
magneticnorth 2y ago
I'm not the person you asked, but I'm in the process of learning French. I'm a native English speaker who had a much easier time with listening comprehension for Spanish and German, my other languages. What I find helps me to make progress is two things: 1) prioritize vocabulary (you need to know a word to have any hope of recognizing it in speech) 2) listen to "comprehensible input" at your level. I like this guy: https://www.youtube.com/@FrenchComprehensibleInput https://www.youtube.com/@FrenchComprehensibleInput who has levels labeled for his vids, I also like https://www.youtube.com/@wanderingfrench https://www.youtube.com/@wanderingfrench because I'm interested in Canadian French and I find her especially clear and easy to understand, as well as charismatic.
- haspok 2y ago
  I respectfully disagree wrt the prioritization of vocabulary. Yes, you do need the basics covered (a few thousand words). But what I realized is that if I am listening or reading a sentence with an unknown word in it, in most cases I just figure out from the context what that unknown word means (I check it against a dictionary and 9 times out of 10 I'm close enough). Obviously this does not work if too many words in the sentence are unknown. And I'm not saying not to learn new words. But it is far more important in my opinion to read / listen so much that you get faster and faster. Especially if you are listening to speech, where you can't pause / rewind, and if you spend too much time on one thing you just get left behind entirely. Don't know a word - just skip it / ignore it and concentrate on the whole stream.
Dalewyn 2y ago
Personally as an English/Japanese bilingual speaker and a programmer (programming languages!), I think the most important thing is incentive. Why do you want or need to learn that language? Is it important? Is it valuable? Is it fulfilling? As I've found, the biggest "wall" to learning languages is convincing yourself that learning the language is worth the immense hassle and effort.
- yurishimo 2y ago
  Yes! This for sure plays a huge role as well. How many times have we as programmers picked up a new language, done the 'Hello World', and then set it down and went back to one we already know? Spoken languages are much the same. They all include various concepts that are shared (verbs, nouns, adjectives, grammar concepts, loops, variables, functions, etc) but the actual process of putting them together in the idiomatic order is the hard part. But without the carrot at the end of the stick, it's unlikely you'll be disciplined enough to stick to it. A new job is a natural place for many people to pick up a new programming language because everything else is also new. For languages it is no different. Can you learn a language outside of the country where it's commonly spoken? Sure, but it's going to be 100x more difficult and you have to generate all of the discipline yourself. If you can crack that problem and build the discipline, then you've basically won the war if you can hold in there "long enough for your enemy to starve." :D
FranzFerdiNaN 2y ago
Listen a ton and then some more. For the first couple hundred hours or so preferably with subtitles, there will come a point where you realize you rely on the subtitles less and less. That’s the point where you can start to turn them of. Audiobooks also work. And work on your grammar and vocabulary. Listening gets easier if you intuitively know what you should hear (tenses, conjugations, plural or singular words etc).
jstanley 2y ago
I find it's sometimes quite difficult to tell where the word boundaries are when a person with a strong French accent is speaking English. I think the difficulty is because French encourages the emphasis to be in completely different places to English.
materielle 2y ago
Unfortunately there’s no trick. You get better at listening by listening a lot. Most people just severely underestimate the amount of work it is. You probably need 1,000 hours of listening to be decent, and 2,000 to be strong. If you practice 30 minutes a day, that will take 11 years. So the only “trick” is that you need to find things that you genuinely enjoy doing in French. So that you can practice for multiple hours each day without burning out. I’m a native English speaker who has a very high level in Spanish. It takes a long time for your brain to figure out how to decode the type of mumbling people use in casual speech. Yes, practice vocabulary, practice grammar, read. But you’re probably already doing this. You just need to listen to a ton of stuff right at the edge of your abilities and you’ll notice improvements every few months. My one final tip would be to not get in your head so much. Literally everyone who has learned a language will tell you that if you review vocab, do grammar exercises, and listen to the language for 1-3 hours every day, you’ll learn it. But it happens so slowly that it doesn’t feel like it will work while you’re on the journey. It’s sort of like the gym: if you lift every day and eat healthy, you will have muscles in a year or two. But it’s really demotivating because you won’t notice a drastic difference even after 3 months.
anal_reactor 2y ago
Aside from my native language I speak three foreign languages, and I just started learning the fourth one. Besides that, I wasted a lot of time on another language that did not stick, so I kinda know what works and what doesn't. 1. Consistency. Make sure you practice a little every day. For example, I use an app that tells me every day what vocabulary I should practice that day. It takes ten minutes of my day, and does wonders. 2. Communication. Start talking to someone as soon as possible. If you're learning a Germanic or Romance language, after 6 months you should be able to find someone online to chat with. Of course it's going to take you 15 minutes with a dictionary to understand the other person's message and another 15 minutes to write the reply, but it truly does wonders because it allows your brain to see the language as a language. 3. Fun exercise: try vocalizing your internal monologue in foreign language. Don't focus on correctness at all, it's about familiarizing yourself with the language. 4. Find some interesting media in your target language. It's going to be difficult because most important stuff is available in English, but for example you might try movies or YouTube channels. Especially the latter is great because YouTube videos rarely ever have English translation, so you know that either you watch it in your target language or not at all. There are apps that allow you to listen to foreign radio stations. Why not doomscroll in your target language. 5. Don't give up until you reach level B2 and you can talk without consciously thinking about it. 6. Understanding native speakers talking naturally to each other is literally the hardest part, so don't treat it as a benchmark until you reach fluency. 7. A common mistake is to treat the whole thing as a "sequence to sequence" task and think about the target language in the context of your native one. Your actual goal of learning the word X is to have your brain understand the abstract concept behind it. 8. It's going to suck and you'll hate it. There's no way around it. Keep practicing and adjusting your techniques to your liking. One day something will "click" and you'll actually "feel" the language.
konschubert 2y ago
Here is my trick: I take a recording of a conversation in the language, one that's made for language learners. Then I listen to it until I know it BY HEART. Usually that takes about 100 listens. Every time I listen, I understand a bit more. Sometimes I look at the transcript to understand a section that evades me. I don't move on until I can recite the whole thing BY HEART. Then, I take the next dialogue.
- yurishimo 2y ago
  This is next level! Thinking back to my language textbooks, this would be brutal for me on a mental level. Do you think it could work as well with a short story or novella? Perhaps one of the books by Olly Richards? I find the dialogues in textbooks absolutely mind numbing most of the time and while easy books for learners aren't that interesting anyway, at least it's a full story and not people ordering lunch or a trip to the doctor for the 99th time!
  - konschubert 2y ago
    The thing is, the dialogue has to be short to really stick to your brain! Like, less than a minute. Repetition is key, and if the text is too long, it’s not repeated enough. To me, it’s not mind-numbing until I can “sing along” because I know it by heart. And then I move on to the next, slightly harder, text. You don’t have to always listen to it actively, you can put it in while doing other work. Some language self-learner books are better than others.
    - yurishimo 2y ago
      Ah okay. I think most of the dialogues from the books I'm thinking of were between 3-5 minutes. Something shorter might work better, indeed.
    - maxquinn 2y ago
      I'd really like to give this method a go. I'm trying to learn French and struggling with the listening component. Do you have any sources for dialogues that you used?
numpad0 2y ago
I've never had a French class or any language courses in English so I just don't know; do foreign language classes in general not start with phonetics? Vowels, consonants, syllables, then words. From there is a long road ahead but that should lets you(at least seemed to let my small brain) break down pure stream of audio in TVs and media content into spaced syllables that occasionally forms into words.

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beaeglebeachedd 2y ago

They seem to teach it pretty fast to any idiot in the French Foreign Legion from what little I know. I have a feeling people learn fast with the 'right' incentives.

freddie_mercury 2y ago
90% of recruits fail, so I wouldn't say they've got some awesome fool proof method.
- pbhjpbhj 2y ago
  What % fail due to lack of language skills? Or did you really mean 90%. Source?
samus 2y ago
They also actively teach it to them. They are immersed around the clock, using other languages is forbidden (recalcitrant recruits used to get hazed in the past), and they put in efforts to teach it in a practical and conversational way.

katzenversteher 2y ago

I can speak German, English and Dutch (which are very close Germanic languages) and also understand a bit of French and Italian. I guess I could learn their basics relatively quickly if I tried hard enough. However, I actually need to learn Croatian, a Slavic language. This is extremely difficult for me and I make hardly any progress. The vocabulary is so different from everything else I know, I just can't remember the words. The grammar is quite challenging as well.

alexey-salmin 2y ago
I did give some thought whether your native language makes it easier or harder to learn others, but all I have is anecdotal cases from my life. I wonder if there are any scientific studies on the topic. E.g. a curious thing I noticed is the frequent complaint about Latin being very hard to learn because of the seven grammatical cases, three genders and morphology -- words just don't stay the same. As native Russian speaker I find these things absolutely normal and easy to understand, but I can image this must be a nightmare after English. Slavic languages you mention are very curious in how different yet how similar they all are. One of the most impressive thing I saw with respect to learning languages is the Interslavic language [1]. Apparently if you speak any of Slavic languages you can understand it quite well, even though you usually are completely lost with most of the other Slavic languages. You still need to learn to speak it, but the fact that you understand foreigners with zero training just blows my mind. Feels like you awakened the memory of your ancestors of something. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NztgXMLwv4A&t=122s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NztgXMLwv4A&t=122s
- ajuc 2y ago
  I'm Polish, I've never learnt any foreign Slavic languages, but I can mostly understand Ukrainian, Belarusian and Slovak from passive exposure on a few trips. The experience is weird - when I first went to Ukraine I couldn't understand almost anything. After a few days it suddenly "clicked" and I realized how the most common sounds and word endings relate between Polish and Ukrainian - and since that moment I basically got all the words with the same roots for free (which is like half the language). It also gave me Belarusian as a side effect :) Of course it's not actual language speaking, I'm just understanding every other word and connecting the dots. With Slovak it was even quicker, but somehow it hasn't given me Czech - their pronuciation is just too weird, despite the fact it's almost the same in writing :). I'm not sure Interslavic provides much value. For me it's basically Slovak, so if you come from East Slavic language you'd probably get the same benefit spending that time learning some Slovak, and you'd then know some actual language instead of an artificial one.

vitro 2y ago

Shameless plug: try Latudio - https://www.latudio.com/ https://www.latudio.com/ - we have a listening-only approach, but you can pause sentence anytime and tap on words to see the translation. I'd say give it a try and let me know if that works for you, I'd be happy to hear.

russum 2y ago
fyi one of the App Store screenshots misleadingly shows "German" language in "Preview" when in reality it doesn't seem to be available at all
- vitro 2y ago
  Oh, thanks for letting me now, we'll fix it with our next update. German is in preparation but not ready for preview yet, unfortunately.

jasonkester 2y ago

Yeah, no kidding that’s rough. “est-ce qu'il y a”…. Three syllables, representing six words. We taught both kids French by dropping them unprepared into the local village school at age 6. Whatever part of their brain taught them English as infants kicked back in and did the same thing for a second time. Amazing to watch. I wish I could do that.

Sharlin 2y ago
Yep, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_immersion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_immersion. There are schools and kindergartens that specialize on this, though the degree of immersion varies.

boffinAudio 2y ago

Native English-speaker here, moved to a German-speaking nation 20 years ago and have become a fluent German speaker as a result. Just want to add my 2c about that wall of sound .. At the beginning I found it very difficult to parse German as I heard it on the street and in general life circumstances. It wasn't until I rigorously started looking up words I 'thought' I heard, with a dictionary, and gained about 100 of these, before I could accurately parse a spoken sentence. I think its very important to use a dictionary when learning another language. It wasn't until I got a massive English/German dictionary that I felt I stood a chance. Another thing that really helped was using sub-titles and watching TV, even if it was a show I wasn't interested in - it taught me so many words that I had heard, but not recognized.

alex_duf 2y ago

I was facing the same issue when I learned English (I'm French), and I found that watching TV Shows with the subtitles helped a lot. So you get to hear that wall of sounds, but you get the words spelled out under the picture.

HPsquared 2y ago
YouTube has a lot of informal conversational content in all sorts of languages, too. Podcasts etc.
ErigmolCt 2y ago
Helps to understand the language easier

madaxe_again 2y ago

The good news is that now that you’ve cracked French, you’ll find Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese easy. They’re all basically the same language with divergent dialects, but practically identical grammars and structure.

namaria 2y ago
Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, Italian, are all in a cluster together and a bit apart from French. I can read French, but I think it's equidistant from the Iberian/Italic language cluster and English. So the first language in that cluster after French won't exactly be "easy". Easier than without French yeah but the subsequent ones will be much easier and on the same level of difficulty from one to another as then you mostly just change the ending of the words and the most used connectives.
- madaxe_again 2y ago
  I’m a native English speaker, and French (and some very rusty Latin) was my bridge into that cluster - they’re absolutely heaving with common cognates and structures from my experience. What I will say is that my French has become much harder to access since - I will find myself lapsing into a creole for the first few days when I switch from one to the other.
  - namaria 2y ago
    That makes sense given that a huge chunk of modern English is derived from Norman French.

maxcan 2y ago

This may come off as a little inappropriate but one thing I think about when learning another language is the usual mistakes or quirks that native speakers of that language display when speaking English. It turns out that quite often those are reflective of the correct form in their language. It's helped me sound more natural in Japanese and Hebrew.

wvh 2y ago
I speak a bunch of languages, and this is especially helpful when learning languages that have a specific own idiomatic sentence structure. You get a pretty good insight into how people form sentences in their native language based on how they garble English. You can often derive where people are from based on those typical mistakes, even in a few sentences on an online forum.

bunderbunder 2y ago

A big problem here is that slowed-down "teacher talk" does French learners an incredible disservice. The classroom version of the language is at least a little bit different from natural, connected speech in every language I've studied. But classroom French is effectively a completely different dialect from the everyday spoken language.

wvh 2y ago

I think French is notoriously difficult to understand from speaking language because they tie together so many words and sounds. Contrasted with a language such as Finnish, which is hard to learn, but relatively easy to understand and write because both pronunciation and spelling are just what you'd expect.

bunderbunder 2y ago
This may be a hot take, but I'd argue that there is no such thing as a language that's easier or harder to understand. Just languages that are more or less different from the one you grew up speaking. If they're more similar, then the learner can repurpose skills they already had from their native language. But that's not ease, per se, it's getting a head start. To take French phonology as an example: objectively speaking, enchainement is an aid to comprehension, not an impediment. Now that I'm used to it, I find non-native speakers who don't do it to be harder to understand because they've effectively dropped an entire information channel from the language. Which isn't to say I didn't have a hard time getting used to it when I was learning. I absolutely did. But that's not because enchainement is inherently difficult; it's because I first had to un-learn some assumptions about the structure of language and how spoken word morphology works that I was bringing with me from my native language. And because I was being hindered by pedagogical methods that, in effect, try to hide the problem instead of solving it.

ErigmolCt 2y ago

I can't imagine what was happening to my brain when I, an English speaker, started learning Korean. It was tough.