6 ms·
So what's the hack? I'm guessing there isn't one? Asking as it's "hacker news" after all, I remember reading how North Korean agents would watch shows like Fri
by jmkni 1y ago
So what's the hack? I'm guessing there isn't one?
Asking as it's "hacker news" after all, I remember reading how North Korean agents would watch shows like Friends for hours on end to become familiar with English, is that a hack?
- qingcharles 1y agoI have Dutch friends who swear they learned all their English simply by watching Friends on BBC in the Netherlands.
- golemiprague 1y agoThose two languages are very close, if he had to learn Japanese or Arabic he won't be able to do it.
- kabes 1y agoYou don't need to watch BBC for that. Not a lot of tv shows, even child programs are dubbed on Dutch tv. So you get accustomed to it early on. Combined with the fact the languages are closely related means the Dutch usually have a reasonable grasp of English before it's being taught in school.
- qingcharles 1y agoYeah, IIRC they mentioned most movie releases in the cinema are also in English too.
- draven 1y agoI learned english at school in France, and we're notoriously bad at teaching foreign languages. The approach is way to academic and mainly based on reading. That's why our accents are often atrocious. I was good at written tests, but what allowed me to actually get fluent (as in being able to think in english and convert my thoughts to speech in real time) was watching tv series in english with subtitles in english (no translation involved.)
- stevesimmons 1y agoThen they're lying... (Friends was on Veronica, Net5 and Comedy Central, not BBC :)
- barrenko 1y agoFor me in Croatia it was The Simpsons.
- wizardforhire 1y agoProbably traveling to the local and living there.. ie full immersion. If I were to wager and riff off ya ;)
- byearthithatius 1y agoYou would still need to study or this would be super slow. When I went to China even after I did DuoLingo for two years I understood only super basic sentences and sometimes I even missed those because of accents. I couldn't learn "new" words or concepts or grammar through immersion, it only gave me the question to ask my wife so I could learn it through study.
- nemomarx 1y agoThat's part of immersion or comprehensible input, yeah. Watching lots of hours of something in a language works so long as you know at least enough vocab and grammar to mostly understand it. To get there stuff like spaced repetition seems good but the "hack" comes down to putting in hours doing all that and doing the groundwork too, essentially. you can only speed it up so much
- summarity 1y agoImmersion and transferring patterns you already know from other languages. Language Transfer is a good completely free resource: https://www.languagetransfer.org https://www.languagetransfer.org
- TheAmazingRace 1y agoThis looks quite good! Thanks for the recommendation.
- byearthithatius 1y agoIts in the article itself.... Nothing wrong with coming straight for the comments but this is what the author recommends as an alternative lol
- Alex-Programs 1y agoLanguage Transfer is great. On the topic of immersion, I made https://nuenki.app https://nuenki.app in my gap year. It estimates the difficulty of sentences in webpages and translates the ones at your knowledge level into the language you're learning.
- vintermann 1y agoThe danger here is that you're not learning German - you're learning machine German. Even if the app makers have structured the machine translation so that it's smart about taking context into account, it will be at best subtly different from actual German, and at worst you'll pick up nonsense and think it's good German. The safe way to use this would be in reverse. You shouldn't be browsing English pages and get 1 in 10 translated into German. You should be browsing German pages and get 9/10 translated into English. You'll still get machine translation artifacts, but they're much less likely to interfere with your learning, and you'll be much better equipped to spot them.
- ileonichwiesz 1y agoTransferring patterns only really works when the language you’re learning is similar to ones you already know. I’m learning Chinese, and to my Western mind it feels like an alien language.
- hungryhobbit 1y agoAs others have said, immersion is the only way that you have control of. If you could de-age yourself, becoming a child would also help immensely, as child brains are much better at learning languages.
- academia_hack 1y agoI hear this a lot (that children learn languages faster, or the corollary from various app ads that the best way to learn a language is to do so like a baby does), but is it actually true? It takes children a very very long time to learn a language and they're quite bad at it for many years. I've even met some teens/young adults who are only borderline literate in their native language after years of schooling and immersion.
- Escapado 1y agoI keep hearing this but sometimes I am not 100% sure if they are _much_ better so asking honestly: Is there any reputable quantitative analysis of this in the context of language learning? For example: I have spent the last two years in japan (I am in my 30s) and just got back to my home country. Went to a language school in the mornings there, immersed myself in the language a little but did not go all out on studying at home except for some Anki and the homework we got. I would spend 1 or 2 evenings per week talking to japanese people in my apartment building for practice. I just took the N2 exam before I left and just failed by 1 point, without any extra studying specifically for it. I could have conversations with people in my apartment complex, make phone calls to get stuff done and get the gist of most news I heard if they were not hyper-specific and I can read easy novels. If I open the NHK news website I am still lost on a bunch of stuff and have to look up a lot. But again, that was 2 years and I was neither particularly good nor bad compared to the other fellow students and I did not go all out full immersion - lots of my interactions were still with foreigners in the afternoon. Anyway, I for sure know more kanji than a 2nd grade elementary school student. I also can say more than a two year old kid. I know of course children learn to navigate a language without explicit study in their first years of life but the point still stands. If time spent studying was equal, how much of a difference remains?
- 1y ago
- themightyquinn 1y agoHad a friend in college learn Ukrainian by switching his phone language settings and watching only Ukrainian reality tv… and then he also spent a summer in Ukraine
- xormapmap 1y agoComprehensible input does seem to be the most effective way. i.e. get a lot of input that is only slightly beyond your current level (i+1). I'm learning Ukrainian and there is a podcast "Ukrainian Lessons Podcast". Seasons 4-6 are not so much lessons but more just discussions about life, history, culture in 100% slow comprehensible Ukrainian. In one of the episodes Anna talks about how she spent most of her life getting English lessons at school and university, but still couldn't use the language freely. Finally, she watched Friends and by the time she'd finished every season, she felt she at last had a good command of English. Sitcoms are good because they depict a lot of everyday situations, are rich in dialogue (i.e. real language people use daily), and there is a lot of slang and cultural references. Of course, you first need to develop enough of a base in the language to understand what's going on.
- koakuma-chan 1y agoWhy are you learning Ukranian?
- entropie 1y agoWhy is it important?
- skinkestek 1y agoFor me it was because I dabbled in Russian before, but recent events have led me to avoid anything that could be seen as supporting Russia in any way, including culturally. I also learned that a number of things I thought was Russian was in fact Ukrainian.
- luckydata 1y agoIn an immersion context I can get to conversational fluency in about 3 months and to complete mastery in a year. I've done it twice, once for Spanish and once for English. A few things in my approach helped me move quite a lot faster than my peers: 1. I would carry a mini-dictionary with me EVERYWHERE. Anytime there's a new word, I would ask a local to teach me how to pronounce it and then make sentences with it while I was walking around. CONSTANTLY. 2. accent and good basics help more than a vast vocabulary: when I went to spain for the first time I would hear in the metro the famous male and female voices saying "proxima parada... something something" and I would repeat that sentence trying to imitate the pronunciation and rythm to get used to "sounding spanish". That helped a lot. 3. date a local: in spain I was dating this girl that was a journalist and from a pretty conservative family. She was very afraid that I would put off her family by being a foreigner and not being able to pronounce things correctly or making grammatical mistakes so she would correct me on the spot EVERY TIME I said something wrong. I dind't mind it and it worked like a charm. Years later I met my American wife that wasn't nearly as concerned about my pronunciation in English so my accent is not nearly as good as in Spanish, but I definitely learned the language, went from being barely understandable to business meeting in about 4 months. 3. Watch tons of movies with the original subtitles (for example spanish movie with spanish subtitles) to understand how people pronounce certain words. DO NOT limit yourself to learner materials, you won't learn a thing. Find something you enjoy and just dive in, you'll learn a lot quicker that way. Dedication and systematic work is all you need to move pretty quickly, the human brain is wired for language, if you feed it what it needs it will do the work for you.
- subscribed 1y agoThis is how I learned English myself. Good enough to pass a phone interview with the mumbling Dutch softie, and then it was easier. (motivation, I guess, plays a role too)
- elil17 1y agoI'm urgently trying to learn a language and I've done a lot of research on this. There's no one hack, but here are my top three: - Anki - Focus on producing speech over everything else, it's the hardest part 90% of the time. Practice production enough and everything else will follow. - Work on your accent much earlier than you think you should. If your accent is better than it should be, native speakers will naturally push you to the limits of your abilities when you talk to them. There's not really strong evidence to support "comprehensible input," but it may work well for some people. However, it severely under-trains speech production. You must combine it with speech practice if you are going to make it work. Highly recommend Language Jones on YouTube, great resource for language study best practices.
- Roxo 1y ago> There's not really strong evidence to support "comprehensible input," but it may work well for some people. Except, there is? Comprehensible input is how you've learned your native language, and how any human learns their first language(s). After all, you can't output (produce) what you haven't first learned (gotten as input).
- elil17 1y agoWhat I really mean to say is that there's no strong evidence that CI is more efficient than other language learning methods. It is certainly a way to learn a language. But is it a good way to learn a language? You are smarter than a baby and you can learn a language faster (e.g. with fewer hours of study) then a baby.
- adriand 1y agoThere are some new AI apps out there that I would put in the “hack” category for being a lot more effective than all the stuff I used in the past (which also included Duolingo, Anki, etc). The one I used the most over three months to refresh my Spanish is Langua (bad name with too much competition, but I put the link below). This app, and I’m sure others, is a polished “overlay” of sorts on top of one LLM or another, but it’s very well done. By far the best way of learning a language is conversation with a native speaker. This puts 90% of that in your pocket on demand. You can chat (out loud) on various topics, or any topic, and this is augmented with various tools, way to save words to a vocabulary list with a flash card UI, etc. After each conversation you get an evaluation. I found it a lot more fun, and a lot more effective, than anything else I’ve tried. https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/langua-ai-language-learning/id6737520234 https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/langua-ai-language-learning/id...
- teiferer 1y agoThe hack is immersion. Move to a country where the language is spoken, and have a girlfriend/boyfriend native in the language whom you move in with. That's it.
- flurdy 1y agoIt is so often dismissed how important the second part is. Many think that just moving to a country is enough, and you will pick up the language. Maybe the basics, but not if you don't speak and think it 24/7, however uncomfortable that is at the start. You see this clearly with the people who move with their family vs the single person. The family person will speak English or whatever their native language is at home every day, will never really speak fluently, whilst the single guy/girl will often become fluent very fast. Though this also depends on who their new friends are, so if they only hang out with people from their home country or just groups of international friends who all speak English with each other, then that learning journey will take a lot longer. This is hard, though. But when I moved to the UK I decided not to try to find the student groups from my home country, and mostly had English only friends and I got an local English accent super quickly. On the other side years later when my GF and me moved back to Norway for a few years she struggled to get non-international friends and didn't loose the accent.
- teiferer 1y agoA native-language workplace helps too, but that's step 2. Step 1 is getting to a level that allows you to switch from english to local language at the workplace.
- lawn 1y agoImmersion as others have said. But you can speed up the process by simply getting better at memorizing words to give you a much wider vocabulary. There are various hacks to memorize things such as decks of cards or long sequences of numbers and similar techniques can aid you here too.
- mtalantikite 1y agoThe hack is there isn't really one thing, it's using multiple tools like I mentioned in my original comment. If I were to start again with a new language I'd do 1) A full Assimil course 2) comprehensible input and 3) an iTalki tutor 3x per week. Anki is helpful too, so if you had time to add that in every day I'd do that as well.