3 ms·

> What are the modern methods It depends on the community, but the current meta among serious (non-casual) language learners is 1) comprehensible input, 2) ext

> What are the modern methods It depends on the community, but the current meta among serious (non-casual) language learners is 1) comprehensible input, 2) extensive reading, 3) sentence mining, 4) spaced repetition + active recall > what's to back up they're better? Unfortunately... just the anecdotal experiences reported by these learners. I've talked with hundreds of successful language learners who reached actual fluency using these methods and I'm also one of them. Unfortunately, as many people online like to point out, these anecdotes are not technically scientific so there is a bit of "faith" you have to put into these methods. (Also, there is some debate in the field of SLA (second language acquisition) as to whether we will ever have a truly scientific model of SLA. If you're interested in this question, I'd recommend checking out the book "Key questions in second language acquistion") In general, my advice to any serious language learner is you're gonna have to experiment a lot to reach fluency. Language learning takes on the order to thousands of hours and requires a vocabulary of over 10,000 base words for functional fluency (don't believe the youtubers who say you only need to know a couple hundred words. I've run the math on this way too many times)

laurentlb 1y ago
I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I agree: focusing on input, especially through comprehensible reading, seems like a solid approach. One resource I like for finding comprehensible input is: https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page One document I found particularly helpful is Paul Nation's "What Do You Need to Know to Learn a Foreign Language?": https://wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/paul-nations-resources/paul-nations-publications/publications/documents/foreign-language_1125.pdf https://wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/paul-nations-resources/pau... It has a lot of practical advice. In particular, he recommends reading graded readers books. Inspired by that, I’ve also been building a free (open-source code + CC-licensed texts), community-driven website for interactive graded readers. Think Choose Your Own Adventure in your target language: you read simple stories, make choices, listen to audio, and check translations only when needed. It’s still early (just a couple of stories so far) and definitely not a full language learning solution, but the goal is to create enjoyable input for learners. Would love your feedback if try it out: https://lingostories.org https://lingostories.org

laurentlb 1y ago

I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I agree: focusing on input, especially through comprehensible reading, seems like a solid approach. One resource I like for finding comprehensible input is: https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page One document I found particularly helpful is Paul Nation's "What Do You Need to Know to Learn a Foreign Language?": https://wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/paul-nations-resources/paul-nations-publications/publications/documents/foreign-language_1125.pdf https://wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/paul-nations-resources/pau... It has a lot of practical advice. In particular, he recommends reading graded readers books. Inspired by that, I’ve also been building a free (open-source code + CC-licensed texts), community-driven website for interactive graded readers. Think Choose Your Own Adventure in your target language: you read simple stories, make choices, listen to audio, and check translations only when needed. It’s still early (just a couple of stories so far) and definitely not a full language learning solution, but the goal is to create enjoyable input for learners. Would love your feedback if try it out: https://lingostories.org https://lingostories.org