8 ms·

Language Learning is Broken

82 points by kumarski 14y ago

GiraffeNecktie 14y ago
"Flashcard systems don't work" No one tool is going to do everything. Flashcards are actually pretty good for acquiring masses of vocabulary. But it doesn't help you put those words together coherently or even enable you to comprehend what you hear. Language acquisition is all about growing a set of extremely complex interconnections between brain cells. You need to grow a massive number of interconnections between many areas of the brain (including to sensory and emotional areas) and you need to strengthen those connections by repeated firing. Software, books, audio and video can play a supportive role but there's a big chunk of the brain development that is only going to come from struggling to express your own mind and to interact with real people in real time.
- dpapathanasiou 14y ago
  "Flashcards are actually pretty good for acquiring masses of vocabulary. But it doesn't help you put those words together coherently or even enable you to comprehend what you hear." In my experience with Japanese, using flashcards for kanji doesn't really help with long-term memory acquisition. I agree with your latter point about context; it's better to find an unknown word in a sentence and look up its meaning, then you tend to remember the word longer b/c you understand how it's used.
  - da3da 14y ago
    Have you tried using Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji"? I have never tried to learn Japanese, but I have heard very good things about using this book to learn the Kanji.
    - dpapathanasiou 14y ago
      I've heard of Heisig, but only recently. My method for learning kanji was to count the strokes (it's relatively simple to figure the stroke count for any character: http://infohost.nmt.edu/~armiller/japanese/strokeorder.htm http://infohost.nmt.edu/~armiller/japanese/strokeorder.htm) then use that number to look them up in a dictionary. But everything I looked up was in the context of a sentence, while trying to read a report at work, e.g.
    - oftenwrong 14y ago
      For anyone using "RTK" I recommend using http://kanji.koohii.com/ http://kanji.koohii.com/ . I also recommend that you actually write the kanji out (on paper, or even just tracing it out with your finger in the air) when reviewing, and only consider a kanji remembered when you can render it properly, with the correct stroke order.
  - riffraff 14y ago
    how did you use flashcards? I.e. did you use some "refined" form of spaced repetition or just moved a card at the end of the pile? IMHO the difference in the quality of learning varies greatly across the paper flashcard/supermemo-ish software continuum.
    - dpapathanasiou 14y ago
      I don't remember which set I tried, but their characters seemed disjointed/random and, worst of all, unrelated to anything I was doing at work. I just found it better to try to read the reports and memos being passed around at the office, and once I looked up kanji I didn't know, I would tend to remember them, since I'd read them in the context of a sentence.
      - wahnfrieden 14y ago
        You can use flashcards to learn kanji. The problem is trying to learn them without context and by learning their readings rather than by learning the reading via learning vocabulary which use the kanji you want to learn.
- kumarski 14y ago
  "No one tool is going to do everything." Why not? Isn't it something they should strive for?
  - kd0amg 14y ago
    I think in a lot of cases, effort can be better spent by accepting a combination of tools (e.g. for dealing with screws in my glasses and screws in my kitchen table, having multiple screwdriver heads is probably a lot simpler than designing one that can handle both).
- hmbg 14y ago
  Agreed; flashcards have worked quite well for me for learning lots of words. Also for me, vocabulary is normally the limiting factor, while Getting grammar an pronounciation up to a usable level is a lot easier. I guess that differs from individual to individual. Trying to work with flashcards without a context (Learn the 1000 nost common words!), however, doesn't work at all. The words need to belong in a context with which I'm familiar, such as a book, film, or recurring conversation topic. My attempt at vocabulary training (shameless plug, you call it): http://vocabulous.net http://vocabulous.net. But that's pretty much only vocabulary, still on the drawing board on the rest of the components. That said, the most important thing for the next big thing in language learning is that it's fun. Very few users will stick with it on willpower alone. Good thougts on this is at http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com. If I ever get the idea to learn japanese I'd check his stuff out.
tokenadult 14y ago
From the submitted blog post: "I believe the holy grail of language learning is the ability to learn a language outside the country that speaks it, to a level of fluency that puts the user within 30 to 45 days of advanced reading, speaking, and vocal comprehension fluency once they are in the country." That sounds like an ambitious, but reasonable, goal. The author notes, while writing in English, "I’ve independently studied the following languages and achieved varying levels of fluency. By competency: 1. Spanish 2. French 3. German 4. Swahili 5. Russian 6. Hindi 7. Farsi 8. Arabic 9. Afrikaans 10. Polish" That list is heavy on Indo-European languages (with Swahili in the highest place for a non-Indo-European language) and rather heavy on closely cognate languages within the Indo-European language family that share many mutual literary influences. Learning Japanese or learning Tamil for someone who already knows those languages would be a good test of a new method. AFTER EDIT AS EDIT WINDOW IS ABOUT TO EXPIRE: Yes, Arabic too is a non-Indo-European language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages and as a Semitic language in the Afroasiatic language family different language family is quite a differennt language from Swahili (a language from the Niger-Congo language family). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swahili_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swahili_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger%E2%80%93Congo_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger%E2%80%93Congo_languages My (partial but suggestive) list of languages studied before appears in my Hacker News user profile.
- dpapathanasiou 14y ago
  I'm tackling Japanese, but from a reading and writing perspective: http://macaronics.com/ http://macaronics.com/ It's not for beginners, though, and there's no emphasis on pronunciation (yet).
  - ghc 14y ago
    I just want to emphasize, for anyone hoping to learn writing this way, that you can't effectively learn to write Japanese by typing. It truly isn't for beginners. Some Kanji are so similar that the only real difference is the stroke type and stroke order. Anyone wanting to learn how to write Japanese should, after mastering Hiragana and Katakana (both of which don't take long), pick up an engineer notepad, a brush pen and a modern Kanji learning book like "Let's Learn Kanji", and proceed to practice. Within a few months of daily practice you'll have mastered 250 Kanji, all of the Kanji components and learned a lot of new vocabulary as well. Just don't attempt to learn Kanji in the order Japanese school-children do. They learn it in the order of conceptual difficulty, not difficulty of writing or frequency of use. Adults should learn Kanji by commonality and difficulty of writing, since our brains have already learned to grasp difficult concepts in our native tongue.
alex_c 14y ago
This is a problem worth talking about. The good news is there's a lot of innovation in the field, and language learning in a few more years will be completely different than it was, say, 10 years ago. I mostly agree with the author's four points - I've tried a number of the well-known systems over the years, and none of them really worked for me. I mean, sure, you can brute-force your way through them, but I can probably just pick up a dictionary and do it on my own with about the same level of success. The first service I've used that has actually worked for me is http://www.memrise.com http://www.memrise.com. I've been using it the last few months to bash my head against the wall that is Mandarin, with surprising (for me) success so far. The 1.0 "launch" removed some very useful features from the beta, but overall it's still pretty good. Incidentally, I guess it's a counter-example to "flashcard systems don't work" - they can, if done right. Recently I found http://www.fluentu.com/ http://www.fluentu.com/, which I'm also very excited about. I don't think by itself it can get anyone very far in a language, but once I'm at an intermediate level it should be a great addition. Did I mention both those sites are free? (bye bye #4, excessively boring costly systems). My point is I'm gradually cobbling together a system from multiple parts that works for me. There's a lot of innovation in the field, and more and more new options will become available. I don't know if we'll ever find a "holy grail" that works for everyone at the same time, but there's no reason why it can't be achieved for anyone by combining several free or low-cost resources. Edit: one of the biggest problems is how boring most of the systems are. Starting a new language from scratch is difficult enough on its own, but it doesn't NEED to be boring. Look at children's cartoons compared to any typical adult learning video...
- kumarski 14y ago
  I don't know if that means bye bye #4. Those 2 solutions are flash card systems. It might be worth testing fluentu by spending a considerable amount of time on the system and then talking to a native speaker. Just because it's free, doesn't mean it's free, especially if it doesn't get you closer to the holy grail. I think innovators should strive to get to the holy grail. The potential upside would be huge.
  - alex_c 14y ago
jfaucett 14y ago
"holy grail of language learning is the ability to learn a language outside the country that speaks it, to a level of fluency that puts the user within 30 to 45 days of advanced reading, speaking, and vocal comprehension " As someone who has learned several languages to near native fluency and majored in linguistics at the University, I think the OP is right on in his estimate of the goal. But the biggest problem software in this area is facing is that language learning is not a one way street. You can't memorize thousands of words in all the contexts in which they occur and expect to be able to have any competency, at least for speaking & vocal comprehensione. Even when the software provides dialoges and attempts to simulate conversations (ie. "Pimsleur" and others), it fails because its the same over and over, mostly outside of real world contexts, where background noise, dialects, and other tasks are involved. A new language learner has to be able to respond rapidly and fluidly in spoken conversation over a variety of subjects if he/she wants to be able to function at the level the OP is talking about, and current software simply doesn't provide the degree of realism in these types of situations. IMHO, in order for any software to be able to achieve the above stated goal, I think it would need to first have a very good humanlike AI. why? So you can have a "human partner" in conversations over a variety of subjects, where the learner is forced to quickly respond and interact with the partner/software. Otherwise, you're left with all the current options which are at best subpar in comparison to actually living and interacting with native speakers in the said country.
- lprubin 14y ago
  I had a friend move to Argentina and in order to improve his Spanish, he found a group that pairs fluent Spanish speakers learning English with fluent English speakers learning Spanish for one-on-one conversations. It was pretty informal in that the pair could meet wherever and whenever they wanted. Half the time they spoke in English, half the time they spoke in Spanish. Perhaps software that scheduled live video chats of similar conversations between learners could help with the problem you bring up? Given that most language software aims at multiple languages anyway, seems like the only challenge is technical with the video chat (latency might be a problem although audio is pretty good too) and the scheduling interface. And I suppose enough users in each language willing to do such conversations.
gamegoblin 14y ago
Something I have always been interested in is developing videogames with the idea of teaching another language as a goal. Imagine a game such as Skyrim, a rather large and open world, but designed such that its goal was to teach you another language as you played the game. Of course one can just change the language of the actual game Skyrim, and this is decent for learning new medieval themed vocabulary, but imagine if the game were designed with the concept of language learning in mind. At the beginning of the game, the characters would speak clearly and with simple vocabulary. Perhaps with subtitles of written text in the same language. Maybe even with an English (or whatever your native language is) subtitle if you are really having trouble with a task. The vocabulary used would go along the same pattern of reinforcing while slowly building more. I think it might be a neat concept to explore, to learn a language passively while playing a fun game.
- dougk16 14y ago
  Totally. I did this with the Diablo games et al. to aid in learning Polish, and it was very effective, even though language learning was probably as far from Blizzard's mind as you can get. The problem is that you need the really high production values of AAA games to keep people engaged. A studio prioritizing language learning to any degree will have a very hard time putting on the polish (not Polish...joke!) required to retain players. I've thought a lot about this problem as well, and the best I can think of is to create mods, so you have the solid game engine and story already in place, and can then solve the language learning problem on top of that.
  - gamegoblin 14y ago
    Mods are indeed a good idea. I have played through Skyrim in both French and German and, even though I already spoke those languages with a decent amount of competency, it really helped with various grammar and vocabulary aspects.
- tszyn 14y ago
  I've been thinking about this for years. Recently, I tried to persuade Double Fine to introduce some English-learner-friendly features in their upcoming adventure game, but I got the feeling that it's a very low priority issue for them. Here's a blog post I wrote about this topic: http://www.antimoon.com/blog/2012/06/making-adventure-games-english-learner-friendly/ http://www.antimoon.com/blog/2012/06/making-adventure-games-...
deleted 14y ago
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createmenot 14y ago
Students of language are always looking for the best way to learn, but there isn't any "best way" in my experience. Each person learns differently. Personal motivation is without a doubt the largest factor in whether a person successfully learns a language. To that end, I think the goal of any classroom or learning system should be to maintain a high level of learner motivation. There is a strong correlation for students of foreign languages (i.e. a language that is not spoken in the country where it is being learned) who are strongly interested in the culture of the language they are learning and their success at learning that language. This is because their motivation to learn, driven by their desire to experience the culture more completely, remains high throughout the learning process. Students who take language courses as part of a compulsory education curriculum, or who are studying out of casual interest, lose motivation quickly regardless of the learning system. As a language teacher, I try to expose my students to as many learning techniques as possible. Some students successfully increase their vocabulary using word lists and flashcards, others require the pressure of real communication to acquire new words. There will never be one "best way" to learn, so my advice to any learner is to try as many learning systems as possible, expose yourself to as much media in that language as possible, and constantly change it up so that you don't lose motivation. I wouldn't say that language learning is broken, but rather that students who begin learning a language have misguided expectations about how difficult and time consuming it actually is. If you, as an adult learner, can learn just one foreign language fluently in your lifetime, you are doing well.
- jaimebuelta 14y ago
  Learning a different language is very difficult, and IMO, a certain personal sense of necessity is necessary. That necessity could be to be able to comunicate with others, living in a foreign land; or to be able to understand cultural products (like songs, books, movies, etc.), but I think if it's not present, or it's just a "I'd like/love to" level, is almost impossible to achieve a fluent level. Think of an English speaker that gets a lot of people just speaking to her in English, instead on their own different languages. It is too easy just to give up.
- purplelobster 14y ago
  Very good answer in my opinion. However, it doesn't mean that technology can't help motivated students on the way. Many motivated students might be turned away because they don't know where to begin, or the learning curve is too difficult. By using the right tools you might make better use of your time. But ultimately you need intrinsic motivation.
tokenadult 14y ago
Here's a new comment, based on the other comments that have come up in this thread now that discussion is active. As I learned Mandarin Chinese up to the level that I was able to support my family for several years as a Chinese-English translator and interpreter, I had to tackle several problems for which there is not yet a one-stop-shopping software solution. For ANY pair of languages, even closely cognate pairs of West Germanic languages like English and Dutch, or Wu Chinese dialects like those of Shanghai and Suzhou, the two languages differ in sound system, so that what is a phoneme in one language is not a phoneme in the other language. http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhoneme.htm http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Wha... But a speaker of one language who is past the age of puberty will simply not perceive many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the target language (the language to be learned) without very careful training, as disregard of those distinctions below the level of conscious attention is part of having the sound system of the speaker's native language fully in mind. Attention to target language phonemes has to be developed through pains-taking practice. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032 It is brutally hard for most people (after the age of puberty, and perhaps especially for males) to learn to attend to sound distinctions that don't exist in the learner's native language. That is especially hard when the sound distinction signifies a grammatical distinction that also doesn't exist in the learner's native language. For example, the distinction between "I speak" and "he speaks" in English involves a consonant cluster at the end of a syllable, and no such consonant clusters exist in the Mandarin sound system at all. Worse than that, no such grammatical distinction as "first person singular" and "third person singular" for inflecting verbs exists in Mandarin, so it is remarkably difficult for Mandarin-speaking learners of English to learn to distinguish "speaks" from "speak" and to say "he speaks Chinese" rather than * "he speak Chinese" (not a grammatical phrase in spoken English). Most software materials for learning foreign languages could be much improved simply by including a complete chart of the sound system of the target language (in the dialect form being taught in the software materials) with explicit description of sounds in the terminology of articulatory phonetics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics with full use of notation from the International Phonetic Alphabet. http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html Good language-learning materials always include a lot of focused drills on sound distinctions (contrasting minimal pairs in the language) in the target language, and no software program for language learning should be without those. It is still an art of software writing to try to automate listening to a learner's pronunciation for appropriate feedback on accuracy of pronunciation. That is not an easy problem. After phonology, another huge task for any language learner is acquiring vocabulary, and this is the task that most language-learning materials are most focused. But often the focus on vocabulary is not very thoughtful. The classic software approach to helping vocabulary acquisition is essentially to automate flipping flash cards. But flash cards have ALWAYS been overrated for vocabulary acquisition. Words don't match one-to-one between languages, not even between closely cognate languages. The map is not the territory, and every language on earth divides the world of lived experience into a different set of words, with different boundaries between words of similar meaning. The royal road to learning vocabulary in a target language is massive exposure to actual texts (dialogs, stories, songs, personal letters, articles, etc.) written or spoken by native speakers of the language. I'll quote a master language teacher here, the late John DeFrancis. A couple years ago, I reread the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). In other words, vocabulary can only be well acquired in context (an argument he develops in detail with regard to Chinese in the writing I have just cited) and the context must be a genuine context produced by native speakers of the language. I have been giving free advice on language learning since the 1990s on my personal website, http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html and the one advice I can give every language learner reading this thread is to take advantage of radio broadcasting in your target language. Spoken-word broadcasting (here I'm especially focusing on radio rather than on TV) gives you an opportunity to listen and to hear words used in context. In the 1970s, I used to have to use an expensive short-wave radio to pick up Chinese-language radio programs in North America. Now we who have Internet access can gain endless listening opportunities from Internet radio stations in dozens of unlikely languages. Listen early and listen often while learning a language. That will help with phonology (as above) and it will help crucially with vocabulary. The third big task of a language learner is learning grammar and syntax, which is often woefully neglected in software language-learning materials. Every language has hundreds of tacit grammar rules, many of which are not known explicitly even to native speakers, but which reveal a language-learner as a foreigner when the rules are broken. The foreign language-learner needs to understand grammar not just to produce speech or writing that is less jarring and foreign to native speakers, but also to better understand what native speakers are speaking or writing. Any widely spoken modern language has thick books reporting the grammatical rules of the language, http://www.amazon.com/Mandarin-Chinese-Functional-Reference-Grammar/dp/0520066103/ http://www.amazon.com/Mandarin-Chinese-Functional-Reference-... http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar-Grammars/dp/0415150329/ http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar-Grammars... http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-Language/dp/0582517346/ http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-Language... http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/0521431468/ http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/... and it is well worth your while to study books like that both about your native language(s) and about any language you are studying. P.S. I'm puzzled about the pattern of upvotes and downvotes on my first comment in this thread (which was the first comment posted, when it wasn't clear whether this story would move from the new page to the main page here on HN.) I'm not aware of any factual mistakes in the first comment I posted here, which was a response to the submitted article, nor anything about it that violates the Hacker News guidelines.
melling 14y ago
I studied Spanish for 10 years taking courses at Berlitz (not recommended), The Spanish Institute (http://spanishinstitute.org/ http://spanishinstitute.org/ - pretty good), a private tutor (a lot more enjoyable) and finally immersion at a language school in Antigua, Guatemala (http://www.spanishschoolplfm.com/ http://www.spanishschoolplfm.com/). I found immersion to be orders of magnitude better. After a few months in Antigua I probably learned as much as the prior several years. You get so much more out of spending your day just talking in another language. I remember when I stopped trying to translate from English to Spanish and just spoke in Spanish. It's quite a trip to speak so much Spanish that you find yourself hunting for words in English when you switch back. Spanish sometimes came first. Unfortunately, you'll lose it quickly. My weekend project is to take what I learned and put it on the iPhone and iPad for both myself and others. Shameless plug: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id388918463 https://itunes.apple.com/app/id388918463 I've got more content that I used to create a rather ugly website, which I'm about to turn off that I will eventually put in the app. I'll spare everyone that link. :-)
sakopov 14y ago
Language-learning is broken and remains to be a VERY complex problem. There are so many factors involved - language complexity, understanding of culture, student's age & ability to learn... I'm convinced that learning a language without complete immersion in culture is doable for easy languages such as English, French, Spanish, but almost impossible for Mandarin, Russian, Polish and others. I'm a native Russian speaker and i can confidently tell you that 70% of native Russian speakers cannot speak proper Russian, mangle vocabulary and sentence structure. I'd say something like 90% cannot use proper grammar. This is after 11 consecutive years of taking Russian in elementary, middle and high schools. This got really bad after the collapse of Soviet Union, which took Russia's impressive Soviet-era education system with it. Obviously, the older you are the worse it gets. I took English lessons for 4 years in Russia. In the end, i could barely put a sentence together. After immigrating to the US, I picked up English at 14 in less than a year and got to the point of losing any kind of identifiable accent. If i tried to learn it today i would likely never reach the level of fluency i'm enjoying now. Having said that, I've only ran into one American who actually spoke Russian possibly better than I did (my Russian is significantly worse now than at 14). It was an intelligence agent who interviewed my father when we came to the US 14 years ago. So our government likely has a few tricks up their sleeves.
jtheory 14y ago
Most of this is beyond me; but I have a domain name originally for a translation site that could be useful to someone looking to solve these problems (depending on approach) -- scatterlang.com. Let me know if anyone's interested.
johnwatson11218 14y ago
I just want to add that I recently took the plunge and bought levels 1-5 Rosetta Stone for both Spanish and German. I know there are a lot of criticisms about this system, mostly in terms of cost but I have found it to be a huge improvement over any other self study course. Unless you are able to take off time and go live in the other country I think Rosetta Stone is the best option. I would go so far as to say that it is better than taking a night course at a local community college. I do think the system has it flaws but it is definitely a big improvement over everything that has come before. I think the future of language learning will resemble Rosetta Stone but that it will use machine learning to be more dynamic and adapt itself to things that you are having trouble with, perhaps it will seem more 'croudsourced'. Before Rosetta Stone I was making zero progress with German, after one year using a CD/Book approach I was continually forgetting vocabulary, unable to pronounce things, etc, etc. There is something about Rosetta Stone that is almost like falling into hours of mindless gaming. It never seems too hard to get stuck but it just keeps on pushing what I know little by little. I think that they should use photoshop to make their pictures more cheaply. Also, the milestone segments seem pretty worthless. Sometimes it would be nice to see the grammar of a practice sentence diagrammed so that I could go and read an analytic description of the grammar point. For German more than for Spanish I'm finding it helpful to treat the Rosetta Stone as a supplement to other approaches especially as the grammar confuses me a great deal. So while the program is expensive (I paid $500 for Spanish on disks and $329 for one year of online only access to the German) it is the only thing I have found worth spending money on short of immersion. If you have a 9-5 job then most likely Rosetta Stone will be a good time vs cost trade off. That has been my experience so far.
doctorpangloss 14y ago
I think flashcards are popular because they're a good way to prepare the night before the exam. Language learning schools are popular because they're in fun places with lots of other interesting young people. Watching a YouTube video kind of sucks the fun out of language learning worse than flashcards do. Not that language learning in and of itself is fun to begin with.
ollysb 14y ago
I've been trying to learn Spanish for a year now, I'm struggling and I even live in Spain! Here's the list of things I've tried: Rosetta Stone - probably spent about 2 months working my way through this. Language school - 6 weeks, spent most of it feeling utterly confused and wondering why they were trying to teach me Spanish, using fluent Spanish... Pimsleur - this did really improve my accent and some of the words I'd been using along the way started to become second nature. Still a long way from conversational though, did this for about 4 weeks. Michelle Thomas - by far the best of the bunch for learning grammar, by the end of the basic and advanced courses I pretty much knew the various past/future tenses. Great base, but conversation still isn't happening... Memrise - yeah actually, this really did help my vocabulary, spent about a month using it before christmas, learnt a lot and I can see me using this in the future to expand my vocab. Duolingo - a good base for getting started, not sure how much if sticks though, it has the "lack of context" problem. Private tutor - this is hands down the winner. I've only had a few lessons but I find this really works for me. The big difference is you can have conversations with complete understanding of every word that is said by either of you i.e. if you don't understand a word they say, they can write it down for you, explain what it means (falling back to english if necessary but generally avoided) and then move on. Likewise, if you make an error in something you've said it's corrected on the spot, often going off on tangent to explain some grammar before continuing the conversation. If you want to learn at a consistent pace I think a private tutor is really the only way to go. You're trying learn to converse in a foreign language, until computers can do the conversation bit the other approaches are all going to fall short of the mark. That's not to say they don't have value, and they're obviously far cheaper than a private tutor but without the conversation part they're never going to be enough to get you speaking fluently.
inspiredworlds 14y ago
Sorry, bit late to this discussion. Took me a while to read through all of it. I think there is no one system that can teach languages fluently. As a language learner, I currently use a variety of ways - from speaking to native speakers, watching movies, using flashcards, playing games and listening to podcasts. I'm also the founder of language startup called http://www.nativetongue.com http://www.nativetongue.com If you are interested check us out. We combine language learning with gaming, to make it fun and addictive. We have the following apps available: - Learn Chinese with Mandarin Madness http://itunes.apple.com/app/mandarin-madness/id494800742 http://itunes.apple.com/app/mandarin-madness/id494800742 - Learn Spanish with Spanish Smash https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/learn-spanish-spanish-smash/id524637598?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/learn-spanish-spanish-smash/... I think the ultimate would be learning like Neo in Matrix. Just plug a cord into the back of your head and upload the mandarin lesson module, and absorb it in seconds!

82 points by kumarski 14y ago

"Flashcard systems don't work" No one tool is going to do everything. Flashcards are actually pretty good for acquiring masses of vocabulary. But it doesn't help you put those words together coherently or even enable you to comprehend what you hear. Language acquisition is all about growing a set of extremely complex interconnections between brain cells. You need to grow a massive number of interconnections between many areas of the brain (including to sensory and emotional areas) and you need to strengthen those connections by repeated firing. Software, books, audio and video can play a supportive role but there's a big chunk of the brain development that is only going to come from struggling to express your own mind and to interact with real people in real time.

dpapathanasiou 14y ago
"Flashcards are actually pretty good for acquiring masses of vocabulary. But it doesn't help you put those words together coherently or even enable you to comprehend what you hear." In my experience with Japanese, using flashcards for kanji doesn't really help with long-term memory acquisition. I agree with your latter point about context; it's better to find an unknown word in a sentence and look up its meaning, then you tend to remember the word longer b/c you understand how it's used.
- da3da 14y ago
  Have you tried using Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji"? I have never tried to learn Japanese, but I have heard very good things about using this book to learn the Kanji.
  - dpapathanasiou 14y ago
    I've heard of Heisig, but only recently. My method for learning kanji was to count the strokes (it's relatively simple to figure the stroke count for any character: http://infohost.nmt.edu/~armiller/japanese/strokeorder.htm http://infohost.nmt.edu/~armiller/japanese/strokeorder.htm) then use that number to look them up in a dictionary. But everything I looked up was in the context of a sentence, while trying to read a report at work, e.g.
  - oftenwrong 14y ago
    For anyone using "RTK" I recommend using http://kanji.koohii.com/ http://kanji.koohii.com/ . I also recommend that you actually write the kanji out (on paper, or even just tracing it out with your finger in the air) when reviewing, and only consider a kanji remembered when you can render it properly, with the correct stroke order.
- riffraff 14y ago
  how did you use flashcards? I.e. did you use some "refined" form of spaced repetition or just moved a card at the end of the pile? IMHO the difference in the quality of learning varies greatly across the paper flashcard/supermemo-ish software continuum.
  - dpapathanasiou 14y ago
    I don't remember which set I tried, but their characters seemed disjointed/random and, worst of all, unrelated to anything I was doing at work. I just found it better to try to read the reports and memos being passed around at the office, and once I looked up kanji I didn't know, I would tend to remember them, since I'd read them in the context of a sentence.
    - wahnfrieden 14y ago
      You can use flashcards to learn kanji. The problem is trying to learn them without context and by learning their readings rather than by learning the reading via learning vocabulary which use the kanji you want to learn.
kumarski 14y ago
"No one tool is going to do everything." Why not? Isn't it something they should strive for?
- kd0amg 14y ago
  I think in a lot of cases, effort can be better spent by accepting a combination of tools (e.g. for dealing with screws in my glasses and screws in my kitchen table, having multiple screwdriver heads is probably a lot simpler than designing one that can handle both).
hmbg 14y ago
Agreed; flashcards have worked quite well for me for learning lots of words. Also for me, vocabulary is normally the limiting factor, while Getting grammar an pronounciation up to a usable level is a lot easier. I guess that differs from individual to individual. Trying to work with flashcards without a context (Learn the 1000 nost common words!), however, doesn't work at all. The words need to belong in a context with which I'm familiar, such as a book, film, or recurring conversation topic. My attempt at vocabulary training (shameless plug, you call it): http://vocabulous.net http://vocabulous.net. But that's pretty much only vocabulary, still on the drawing board on the rest of the components. That said, the most important thing for the next big thing in language learning is that it's fun. Very few users will stick with it on willpower alone. Good thougts on this is at http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com. If I ever get the idea to learn japanese I'd check his stuff out.

tokenadult 14y ago

From the submitted blog post: "I believe the holy grail of language learning is the ability to learn a language outside the country that speaks it, to a level of fluency that puts the user within 30 to 45 days of advanced reading, speaking, and vocal comprehension fluency once they are in the country." That sounds like an ambitious, but reasonable, goal. The author notes, while writing in English, "I’ve independently studied the following languages and achieved varying levels of fluency. By competency: 1. Spanish 2. French 3. German 4. Swahili 5. Russian 6. Hindi 7. Farsi 8. Arabic 9. Afrikaans 10. Polish" That list is heavy on Indo-European languages (with Swahili in the highest place for a non-Indo-European language) and rather heavy on closely cognate languages within the Indo-European language family that share many mutual literary influences. Learning Japanese or learning Tamil for someone who already knows those languages would be a good test of a new method. AFTER EDIT AS EDIT WINDOW IS ABOUT TO EXPIRE: Yes, Arabic too is a non-Indo-European language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages and as a Semitic language in the Afroasiatic language family different language family is quite a differennt language from Swahili (a language from the Niger-Congo language family). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swahili_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swahili_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger%E2%80%93Congo_languages http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger%E2%80%93Congo_languages My (partial but suggestive) list of languages studied before appears in my Hacker News user profile.

dpapathanasiou 14y ago
I'm tackling Japanese, but from a reading and writing perspective: http://macaronics.com/ http://macaronics.com/ It's not for beginners, though, and there's no emphasis on pronunciation (yet).
- ghc 14y ago
  I just want to emphasize, for anyone hoping to learn writing this way, that you can't effectively learn to write Japanese by typing. It truly isn't for beginners. Some Kanji are so similar that the only real difference is the stroke type and stroke order. Anyone wanting to learn how to write Japanese should, after mastering Hiragana and Katakana (both of which don't take long), pick up an engineer notepad, a brush pen and a modern Kanji learning book like "Let's Learn Kanji", and proceed to practice. Within a few months of daily practice you'll have mastered 250 Kanji, all of the Kanji components and learned a lot of new vocabulary as well. Just don't attempt to learn Kanji in the order Japanese school-children do. They learn it in the order of conceptual difficulty, not difficulty of writing or frequency of use. Adults should learn Kanji by commonality and difficulty of writing, since our brains have already learned to grasp difficult concepts in our native tongue.

alex_c 14y ago

This is a problem worth talking about. The good news is there's a lot of innovation in the field, and language learning in a few more years will be completely different than it was, say, 10 years ago. I mostly agree with the author's four points - I've tried a number of the well-known systems over the years, and none of them really worked for me. I mean, sure, you can brute-force your way through them, but I can probably just pick up a dictionary and do it on my own with about the same level of success. The first service I've used that has actually worked for me is http://www.memrise.com http://www.memrise.com. I've been using it the last few months to bash my head against the wall that is Mandarin, with surprising (for me) success so far. The 1.0 "launch" removed some very useful features from the beta, but overall it's still pretty good. Incidentally, I guess it's a counter-example to "flashcard systems don't work" - they can, if done right. Recently I found http://www.fluentu.com/ http://www.fluentu.com/, which I'm also very excited about. I don't think by itself it can get anyone very far in a language, but once I'm at an intermediate level it should be a great addition. Did I mention both those sites are free? (bye bye #4, excessively boring costly systems). My point is I'm gradually cobbling together a system from multiple parts that works for me. There's a lot of innovation in the field, and more and more new options will become available. I don't know if we'll ever find a "holy grail" that works for everyone at the same time, but there's no reason why it can't be achieved for anyone by combining several free or low-cost resources. Edit: one of the biggest problems is how boring most of the systems are. Starting a new language from scratch is difficult enough on its own, but it doesn't NEED to be boring. Look at children's cartoons compared to any typical adult learning video...

kumarski 14y ago
I don't know if that means bye bye #4. Those 2 solutions are flash card systems. It might be worth testing fluentu by spending a considerable amount of time on the system and then talking to a native speaker. Just because it's free, doesn't mean it's free, especially if it doesn't get you closer to the holy grail. I think innovators should strive to get to the holy grail. The potential upside would be huge.
- alex_c 14y ago

jfaucett 14y ago

"holy grail of language learning is the ability to learn a language outside the country that speaks it, to a level of fluency that puts the user within 30 to 45 days of advanced reading, speaking, and vocal comprehension " As someone who has learned several languages to near native fluency and majored in linguistics at the University, I think the OP is right on in his estimate of the goal. But the biggest problem software in this area is facing is that language learning is not a one way street. You can't memorize thousands of words in all the contexts in which they occur and expect to be able to have any competency, at least for speaking & vocal comprehensione. Even when the software provides dialoges and attempts to simulate conversations (ie. "Pimsleur" and others), it fails because its the same over and over, mostly outside of real world contexts, where background noise, dialects, and other tasks are involved. A new language learner has to be able to respond rapidly and fluidly in spoken conversation over a variety of subjects if he/she wants to be able to function at the level the OP is talking about, and current software simply doesn't provide the degree of realism in these types of situations. IMHO, in order for any software to be able to achieve the above stated goal, I think it would need to first have a very good humanlike AI. why? So you can have a "human partner" in conversations over a variety of subjects, where the learner is forced to quickly respond and interact with the partner/software. Otherwise, you're left with all the current options which are at best subpar in comparison to actually living and interacting with native speakers in the said country.

lprubin 14y ago
I had a friend move to Argentina and in order to improve his Spanish, he found a group that pairs fluent Spanish speakers learning English with fluent English speakers learning Spanish for one-on-one conversations. It was pretty informal in that the pair could meet wherever and whenever they wanted. Half the time they spoke in English, half the time they spoke in Spanish. Perhaps software that scheduled live video chats of similar conversations between learners could help with the problem you bring up? Given that most language software aims at multiple languages anyway, seems like the only challenge is technical with the video chat (latency might be a problem although audio is pretty good too) and the scheduling interface. And I suppose enough users in each language willing to do such conversations.

gamegoblin 14y ago

Something I have always been interested in is developing videogames with the idea of teaching another language as a goal. Imagine a game such as Skyrim, a rather large and open world, but designed such that its goal was to teach you another language as you played the game. Of course one can just change the language of the actual game Skyrim, and this is decent for learning new medieval themed vocabulary, but imagine if the game were designed with the concept of language learning in mind. At the beginning of the game, the characters would speak clearly and with simple vocabulary. Perhaps with subtitles of written text in the same language. Maybe even with an English (or whatever your native language is) subtitle if you are really having trouble with a task. The vocabulary used would go along the same pattern of reinforcing while slowly building more. I think it might be a neat concept to explore, to learn a language passively while playing a fun game.

dougk16 14y ago
Totally. I did this with the Diablo games et al. to aid in learning Polish, and it was very effective, even though language learning was probably as far from Blizzard's mind as you can get. The problem is that you need the really high production values of AAA games to keep people engaged. A studio prioritizing language learning to any degree will have a very hard time putting on the polish (not Polish...joke!) required to retain players. I've thought a lot about this problem as well, and the best I can think of is to create mods, so you have the solid game engine and story already in place, and can then solve the language learning problem on top of that.
- gamegoblin 14y ago
  Mods are indeed a good idea. I have played through Skyrim in both French and German and, even though I already spoke those languages with a decent amount of competency, it really helped with various grammar and vocabulary aspects.
tszyn 14y ago
I've been thinking about this for years. Recently, I tried to persuade Double Fine to introduce some English-learner-friendly features in their upcoming adventure game, but I got the feeling that it's a very low priority issue for them. Here's a blog post I wrote about this topic: http://www.antimoon.com/blog/2012/06/making-adventure-games-english-learner-friendly/ http://www.antimoon.com/blog/2012/06/making-adventure-games-...

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createmenot 14y ago

Students of language are always looking for the best way to learn, but there isn't any "best way" in my experience. Each person learns differently. Personal motivation is without a doubt the largest factor in whether a person successfully learns a language. To that end, I think the goal of any classroom or learning system should be to maintain a high level of learner motivation. There is a strong correlation for students of foreign languages (i.e. a language that is not spoken in the country where it is being learned) who are strongly interested in the culture of the language they are learning and their success at learning that language. This is because their motivation to learn, driven by their desire to experience the culture more completely, remains high throughout the learning process. Students who take language courses as part of a compulsory education curriculum, or who are studying out of casual interest, lose motivation quickly regardless of the learning system. As a language teacher, I try to expose my students to as many learning techniques as possible. Some students successfully increase their vocabulary using word lists and flashcards, others require the pressure of real communication to acquire new words. There will never be one "best way" to learn, so my advice to any learner is to try as many learning systems as possible, expose yourself to as much media in that language as possible, and constantly change it up so that you don't lose motivation. I wouldn't say that language learning is broken, but rather that students who begin learning a language have misguided expectations about how difficult and time consuming it actually is. If you, as an adult learner, can learn just one foreign language fluently in your lifetime, you are doing well.

jaimebuelta 14y ago
Learning a different language is very difficult, and IMO, a certain personal sense of necessity is necessary. That necessity could be to be able to comunicate with others, living in a foreign land; or to be able to understand cultural products (like songs, books, movies, etc.), but I think if it's not present, or it's just a "I'd like/love to" level, is almost impossible to achieve a fluent level. Think of an English speaker that gets a lot of people just speaking to her in English, instead on their own different languages. It is too easy just to give up.
purplelobster 14y ago
Very good answer in my opinion. However, it doesn't mean that technology can't help motivated students on the way. Many motivated students might be turned away because they don't know where to begin, or the learning curve is too difficult. By using the right tools you might make better use of your time. But ultimately you need intrinsic motivation.

tokenadult 14y ago

Here's a new comment, based on the other comments that have come up in this thread now that discussion is active. As I learned Mandarin Chinese up to the level that I was able to support my family for several years as a Chinese-English translator and interpreter, I had to tackle several problems for which there is not yet a one-stop-shopping software solution. For ANY pair of languages, even closely cognate pairs of West Germanic languages like English and Dutch, or Wu Chinese dialects like those of Shanghai and Suzhou, the two languages differ in sound system, so that what is a phoneme in one language is not a phoneme in the other language. http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhoneme.htm http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Wha... But a speaker of one language who is past the age of puberty will simply not perceive many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the target language (the language to be learned) without very careful training, as disregard of those distinctions below the level of conscious attention is part of having the sound system of the speaker's native language fully in mind. Attention to target language phonemes has to be developed through pains-taking practice. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032 It is brutally hard for most people (after the age of puberty, and perhaps especially for males) to learn to attend to sound distinctions that don't exist in the learner's native language. That is especially hard when the sound distinction signifies a grammatical distinction that also doesn't exist in the learner's native language. For example, the distinction between "I speak" and "he speaks" in English involves a consonant cluster at the end of a syllable, and no such consonant clusters exist in the Mandarin sound system at all. Worse than that, no such grammatical distinction as "first person singular" and "third person singular" for inflecting verbs exists in Mandarin, so it is remarkably difficult for Mandarin-speaking learners of English to learn to distinguish "speaks" from "speak" and to say "he speaks Chinese" rather than * "he speak Chinese" (not a grammatical phrase in spoken English). Most software materials for learning foreign languages could be much improved simply by including a complete chart of the sound system of the target language (in the dialect form being taught in the software materials) with explicit description of sounds in the terminology of articulatory phonetics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics with full use of notation from the International Phonetic Alphabet. http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html Good language-learning materials always include a lot of focused drills on sound distinctions (contrasting minimal pairs in the language) in the target language, and no software program for language learning should be without those. It is still an art of software writing to try to automate listening to a learner's pronunciation for appropriate feedback on accuracy of pronunciation. That is not an easy problem. After phonology, another huge task for any language learner is acquiring vocabulary, and this is the task that most language-learning materials are most focused. But often the focus on vocabulary is not very thoughtful. The classic software approach to helping vocabulary acquisition is essentially to automate flipping flash cards. But flash cards have ALWAYS been overrated for vocabulary acquisition. Words don't match one-to-one between languages, not even between closely cognate languages. The map is not the territory, and every language on earth divides the world of lived experience into a different set of words, with different boundaries between words of similar meaning. The royal road to learning vocabulary in a target language is massive exposure to actual texts (dialogs, stories, songs, personal letters, articles, etc.) written or spoken by native speakers of the language. I'll quote a master language teacher here, the late John DeFrancis. A couple years ago, I reread the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). In other words, vocabulary can only be well acquired in context (an argument he develops in detail with regard to Chinese in the writing I have just cited) and the context must be a genuine context produced by native speakers of the language. I have been giving free advice on language learning since the 1990s on my personal website, http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html and the one advice I can give every language learner reading this thread is to take advantage of radio broadcasting in your target language. Spoken-word broadcasting (here I'm especially focusing on radio rather than on TV) gives you an opportunity to listen and to hear words used in context. In the 1970s, I used to have to use an expensive short-wave radio to pick up Chinese-language radio programs in North America. Now we who have Internet access can gain endless listening opportunities from Internet radio stations in dozens of unlikely languages. Listen early and listen often while learning a language. That will help with phonology (as above) and it will help crucially with vocabulary. The third big task of a language learner is learning grammar and syntax, which is often woefully neglected in software language-learning materials. Every language has hundreds of tacit grammar rules, many of which are not known explicitly even to native speakers, but which reveal a language-learner as a foreigner when the rules are broken. The foreign language-learner needs to understand grammar not just to produce speech or writing that is less jarring and foreign to native speakers, but also to better understand what native speakers are speaking or writing. Any widely spoken modern language has thick books reporting the grammatical rules of the language, http://www.amazon.com/Mandarin-Chinese-Functional-Reference-Grammar/dp/0520066103/ http://www.amazon.com/Mandarin-Chinese-Functional-Reference-... http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar-Grammars/dp/0415150329/ http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar-Grammars... http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-Language/dp/0582517346/ http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-Language... http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/0521431468/ http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/... and it is well worth your while to study books like that both about your native language(s) and about any language you are studying. P.S. I'm puzzled about the pattern of upvotes and downvotes on my first comment in this thread (which was the first comment posted, when it wasn't clear whether this story would move from the new page to the main page here on HN.) I'm not aware of any factual mistakes in the first comment I posted here, which was a response to the submitted article, nor anything about it that violates the Hacker News guidelines.

melling 14y ago

I studied Spanish for 10 years taking courses at Berlitz (not recommended), The Spanish Institute (http://spanishinstitute.org/ http://spanishinstitute.org/ - pretty good), a private tutor (a lot more enjoyable) and finally immersion at a language school in Antigua, Guatemala (http://www.spanishschoolplfm.com/ http://www.spanishschoolplfm.com/). I found immersion to be orders of magnitude better. After a few months in Antigua I probably learned as much as the prior several years. You get so much more out of spending your day just talking in another language. I remember when I stopped trying to translate from English to Spanish and just spoke in Spanish. It's quite a trip to speak so much Spanish that you find yourself hunting for words in English when you switch back. Spanish sometimes came first. Unfortunately, you'll lose it quickly. My weekend project is to take what I learned and put it on the iPhone and iPad for both myself and others. Shameless plug: https://itunes.apple.com/app/id388918463 https://itunes.apple.com/app/id388918463 I've got more content that I used to create a rather ugly website, which I'm about to turn off that I will eventually put in the app. I'll spare everyone that link. :-)

sakopov 14y ago

Language-learning is broken and remains to be a VERY complex problem. There are so many factors involved - language complexity, understanding of culture, student's age & ability to learn... I'm convinced that learning a language without complete immersion in culture is doable for easy languages such as English, French, Spanish, but almost impossible for Mandarin, Russian, Polish and others. I'm a native Russian speaker and i can confidently tell you that 70% of native Russian speakers cannot speak proper Russian, mangle vocabulary and sentence structure. I'd say something like 90% cannot use proper grammar. This is after 11 consecutive years of taking Russian in elementary, middle and high schools. This got really bad after the collapse of Soviet Union, which took Russia's impressive Soviet-era education system with it. Obviously, the older you are the worse it gets. I took English lessons for 4 years in Russia. In the end, i could barely put a sentence together. After immigrating to the US, I picked up English at 14 in less than a year and got to the point of losing any kind of identifiable accent. If i tried to learn it today i would likely never reach the level of fluency i'm enjoying now. Having said that, I've only ran into one American who actually spoke Russian possibly better than I did (my Russian is significantly worse now than at 14). It was an intelligence agent who interviewed my father when we came to the US 14 years ago. So our government likely has a few tricks up their sleeves.

jtheory 14y ago

Most of this is beyond me; but I have a domain name originally for a translation site that could be useful to someone looking to solve these problems (depending on approach) -- scatterlang.com. Let me know if anyone's interested.

johnwatson11218 14y ago

I just want to add that I recently took the plunge and bought levels 1-5 Rosetta Stone for both Spanish and German. I know there are a lot of criticisms about this system, mostly in terms of cost but I have found it to be a huge improvement over any other self study course. Unless you are able to take off time and go live in the other country I think Rosetta Stone is the best option. I would go so far as to say that it is better than taking a night course at a local community college. I do think the system has it flaws but it is definitely a big improvement over everything that has come before. I think the future of language learning will resemble Rosetta Stone but that it will use machine learning to be more dynamic and adapt itself to things that you are having trouble with, perhaps it will seem more 'croudsourced'. Before Rosetta Stone I was making zero progress with German, after one year using a CD/Book approach I was continually forgetting vocabulary, unable to pronounce things, etc, etc. There is something about Rosetta Stone that is almost like falling into hours of mindless gaming. It never seems too hard to get stuck but it just keeps on pushing what I know little by little. I think that they should use photoshop to make their pictures more cheaply. Also, the milestone segments seem pretty worthless. Sometimes it would be nice to see the grammar of a practice sentence diagrammed so that I could go and read an analytic description of the grammar point. For German more than for Spanish I'm finding it helpful to treat the Rosetta Stone as a supplement to other approaches especially as the grammar confuses me a great deal. So while the program is expensive (I paid $500 for Spanish on disks and $329 for one year of online only access to the German) it is the only thing I have found worth spending money on short of immersion. If you have a 9-5 job then most likely Rosetta Stone will be a good time vs cost trade off. That has been my experience so far.

doctorpangloss 14y ago

I think flashcards are popular because they're a good way to prepare the night before the exam. Language learning schools are popular because they're in fun places with lots of other interesting young people. Watching a YouTube video kind of sucks the fun out of language learning worse than flashcards do. Not that language learning in and of itself is fun to begin with.

ollysb 14y ago

I've been trying to learn Spanish for a year now, I'm struggling and I even live in Spain! Here's the list of things I've tried: Rosetta Stone - probably spent about 2 months working my way through this. Language school - 6 weeks, spent most of it feeling utterly confused and wondering why they were trying to teach me Spanish, using fluent Spanish... Pimsleur - this did really improve my accent and some of the words I'd been using along the way started to become second nature. Still a long way from conversational though, did this for about 4 weeks. Michelle Thomas - by far the best of the bunch for learning grammar, by the end of the basic and advanced courses I pretty much knew the various past/future tenses. Great base, but conversation still isn't happening... Memrise - yeah actually, this really did help my vocabulary, spent about a month using it before christmas, learnt a lot and I can see me using this in the future to expand my vocab. Duolingo - a good base for getting started, not sure how much if sticks though, it has the "lack of context" problem. Private tutor - this is hands down the winner. I've only had a few lessons but I find this really works for me. The big difference is you can have conversations with complete understanding of every word that is said by either of you i.e. if you don't understand a word they say, they can write it down for you, explain what it means (falling back to english if necessary but generally avoided) and then move on. Likewise, if you make an error in something you've said it's corrected on the spot, often going off on tangent to explain some grammar before continuing the conversation. If you want to learn at a consistent pace I think a private tutor is really the only way to go. You're trying learn to converse in a foreign language, until computers can do the conversation bit the other approaches are all going to fall short of the mark. That's not to say they don't have value, and they're obviously far cheaper than a private tutor but without the conversation part they're never going to be enough to get you speaking fluently.

inspiredworlds 14y ago

Sorry, bit late to this discussion. Took me a while to read through all of it. I think there is no one system that can teach languages fluently. As a language learner, I currently use a variety of ways - from speaking to native speakers, watching movies, using flashcards, playing games and listening to podcasts. I'm also the founder of language startup called http://www.nativetongue.com http://www.nativetongue.com If you are interested check us out. We combine language learning with gaming, to make it fun and addictive. We have the following apps available: - Learn Chinese with Mandarin Madness http://itunes.apple.com/app/mandarin-madness/id494800742 http://itunes.apple.com/app/mandarin-madness/id494800742 - Learn Spanish with Spanish Smash https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/learn-spanish-spanish-smash/id524637598?mt=8 https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/learn-spanish-spanish-smash/... I think the ultimate would be learning like Neo in Matrix. Just plug a cord into the back of your head and upload the mandarin lesson module, and absorb it in seconds!