2 ms·

I don't think of myself as being good at learning foreign languages, and I don't know enough of any of them to have any useful conversation, but I kinda disagre

by ufmace 12y ago

I don't think of myself as being good at learning foreign languages, and I don't know enough of any of them to have any useful conversation, but I kinda disagree that just being in a country that speaks that language will get you started. I've spent weeks in Mexico, and my Spanish abilities are barely adequate to order a meal in a restaurant most of the time. I didn't feel like I gained anything at that point by being surrounded by Spanish speech and media. I think that the first hard part or learning a new language is just bridging that gap of memorizing thousands of new words and their meanings. If you haven't done that, any amount of exposure to the language is mostly meaningless gibberish that you don't know where to start at deciphering. I don't see how that helps you learn it. For what it's worth, I learned a lot more from using Duolingo for a while than from immersion. I figure a better way to really get started would be to work at that, and translate newspaper articles by hand for a few hours a day, not that I've tried it.

pbhjpbhj 12y ago
>my Spanish abilities are barely adequate to order a meal in a restaurant most of the time // So you didn't eat out, how did you manage getting your shopping in, buying bus tickets and such without learning any of the local language, just hoped people spoke English?
- ufmace 12y ago
  It was a trip for work, so I was mostly accompanied by people who did speak Spanish.
  - pbhjpbhj 12y ago
    Ah, people speaking other languages around me annoys me enough that I want to know what they're saying!
    - ufmace 12y ago
      Yeah, it could be kind of annoying in a way. I could catch maybe 5-10% of a Spanish conversation. Like I was saying in the original, I think I'd need to boost my vocabulary by at least 10x before listening to spoken Spanish would have much benefit. Trying to listen actually kinda reminds me of learning Vim, where you spend what feels like forever at first totally lost, and doing the simplest edit seems to require so much mental effort that you can't actually think about the code you're working on.

by ufmace 12y ago

pbhjpbhj 12y ago

>my Spanish abilities are barely adequate to order a meal in a restaurant most of the time // So you didn't eat out, how did you manage getting your shopping in, buying bus tickets and such without learning any of the local language, just hoped people spoke English?

ufmace 12y ago
It was a trip for work, so I was mostly accompanied by people who did speak Spanish.
- pbhjpbhj 12y ago
  Ah, people speaking other languages around me annoys me enough that I want to know what they're saying!
  - ufmace 12y ago
    Yeah, it could be kind of annoying in a way. I could catch maybe 5-10% of a Spanish conversation. Like I was saying in the original, I think I'd need to boost my vocabulary by at least 10x before listening to spoken Spanish would have much benefit. Trying to listen actually kinda reminds me of learning Vim, where you spend what feels like forever at first totally lost, and doing the simplest edit seems to require so much mental effort that you can't actually think about the code you're working on.