I'm overwhelmed by all the options out there. Duolingo, pimsluer, classes, books, etc. What did you do to become fluent in another language? How long did it take you?
IME I needed both. I moved to an English-speaking country in my early teens, knowing virtually no English at all. Naturally I needed remedial classes, but IIRC I wasn't progressing very quickly, for I wasn't sufficiently motivated, and would have likely needed to take them throughout secondary school. That is until I got interested in computers. I devoured all magazines, books, etc. on computing I could get my hands on, and within that school year I "graduated" from the remedial classes. So I needed both to become fluent in English.
I've got another example where I had motivation but not necessity. A few years later I became interested in manga / anime, back when translations of either were scarce. So I signed up for Japanese classes, and eventually even went to Japan as an exchange student for a summer. I continued to take lessons in college, until I'd essentially run out of classes to take. Having done all that, I would say my Japanese proficiency was merely functional. I probably could have passed JLPT N1 had I tried, but I didn't bother since I wasn't planning on working or studying in Japan. In this case, IMO I was reasonably motivated, but since the necessity component was missing, I never made it over the hump and became fluent.
Finally, the kpop craze got me somewhat interested in learning Korean, but I barely know how to say hello / goodbye. I'll blame that on my brain plasticity though. :-P
Live in another country, and in an environment where English wasn't an option 80%+ of the time.
But when there (here) structured learning in the form of a few books to round-off vocabulary/grammar and a few lessons mainly to track progress and give feedback helped hugely in going from basic to intermediary. Pleco dictionary and flashcards for 1-2 hours per day also very useful.
also, class + studying while immersed. it's helpful to do both. and watching tv or listening to the radio ..
.. so essentially i'm saying "do everything you can think of, especially living in an immersive environment" b/c that's what i did for a couple years .. and i'm still not exactly fluent.
of course the experience of living in a different social mileu is awesome for reasons connected but not equivalent to language fluency, like broadening cultural perspectives.
I lived in the US for 20 years — came here when I was 10. I'm still not completely fluent in English. A lot of the learning came from interacting with others who mainly spoke in English, but in some occasions I still have to make an effort in order to get pronunciation and grammar correct.
In retrospect, what helped me the most in the early days were reading children's books and copying them down on separate piece of paper, and memorizing the most basic vocabularies that all native speakers naturally learned during their childhood years. These alone seemed to have improved reading comprehension and writing skills from level zero to the basic level. At first, try to write down the words in your native language next to the foreign words you are trying to memorize in order to make that initial connection, and later, try to memorize the definitions in the foreign language itself. I was using just pencil and paper throughout this process — I wasn't even aware that I could've used computers to do this at the time.
Fast forward to teenage years and up to early 20s, listening to podcasts and audio-based grammar courses helped with refining speech. I used to repeat after every sentence and even respond to questions that the hosts asked their guests in some radio shows as if the hosts were asking me the questions.
In regards to expanding my knowledge of vocabularies, I used to spend hours every week memorizing SAT vocabularies, but nowadays I try to use the new vocabularies that I come across as soon as possible in real conversations.
For now, I think you should focus on memorizing words for the things that you encounter most frequently every day, in addition to learning conversational speech rather than diving deep into the nuances of grammar and trying to cram all the vocabularies you can get your hands on into your brain. It's a long and arduous process — yet very rewarding, and IF you're a coder, you might know that there's a narrative by Peter Norvig — to set a long-term goal (up to 10 years) in learning a programming language — I think the same goes for spoken languages albeit it may take much longer to achieve an adequate level of fluency. Good luck.
Children's books are very helpful, and give you a kind of fluency with the low-level stuff that you will never get from SAT lists, etc. I think exposure to children's rhymes, poems, and nursery stories is useful if you really want to be fluent and probably necessary to get to a native-like level.
I'm still learning but my recommendation is a lot of repetition. I learn primarily by trying to read a book in the foreign language with a translation available.
Only I repeat and repeat each sentence, each paragraph, and then each page, until I can read it out loud quickly with good pronunciation (I have a reader with TTS in the foreign language), where I can construct the meaning in my head on the fly. Until I get to that point, I don't consider the sentence, paragraph, whatever, learned.
My theory of language learning is that you need a strong root of a few sentences before you can branch off into new words and grammar constructs.
Too many language courses try to pack in the material as fast as possible. To me, that's a mistake. Like etching a lot of faint scratches into stone, you have a lot of information there, but it's difficult to read any specific thing and they wear away quickly. So, basically go for a few deep marks over a bunch of small light ones.
Everyone I know who has advanced skills in a foreign language spent one or more years in their target country where they had to speak the language daily, combined with a structured language course or class.
Otherwise it is extremely difficult to get the necessary amount of daily exposure to new and novel situations where the language you want to study is used. You can try by watching a lot of foreign TV series and movies, reading books, but those are not necessarily representative of the vocabulary useful in real life.
If you are a US citizen I think the only language you could get fluent in without leaving the country would be Spanish.
Native in Kirundi, I've learnt English, and French at school and by watching movies in those languages. No need to go in a foreign country. And now I work for a NGO, using them in my professional life.
The key is not only to read, understand, practice but also not to fear to make mistakes and get corrected. That's my experience. I've lived in Tanzania for 4 years, when I was young but with a fear of speaking Swahili the wrong way. Now I can understand and read Swahili, but responding back is so painfull. I'm waiting someone who can correct me while I speak it.
I mostly use English. Never been to the U.S. and not in a country where it's spoken. I've never "studied" English except in school. I just wanted to learn about Neuro-Linguistic Programing and all the good stuff was in English. I have a few replies on Reddit about how I acquired languages. I'm on mobile right now and I'm not accustomed to it (xorg isn't talking to me). hjugurtha on reddit.
Check out Stephen Krashen, he basically describes how I and a lot of people have acquired languages.
An old-fashioned method, but it works: start dating someone who speaks the language you'd like to learn.
Outside of that, watch children's television shows in the language you want to learn, with english subtitles. The language is simple and will help get it in your ears.
I'm fluent in German, English. I'm living in Japan and am almost fluent in Japanese and quarter fluent in Korean. I also recently started Hungarian and Spanish.
The most important part in my opinion is to live in a country that speaks the language you want to learn. You have to immerse yourself as much as possible with the culture and language.
Also very important that you aren't afraid to try to use what you learned. Even though it's very basic, you learn a lot by actively trying to understand and use the language. It might be tiresome and frustrating at first, but you will learn crazy fast. What I mean with that is: Change your OS to that language and accept that you don't understand anything at first.
Make internet friends and refuse to use English with them even though you have to translate every second sentence. Every time you see something you don't know, try to understand why it's written that way.
Lastly, if you have time and money: Do a 6 months ~ 1 year intensive every-day language course in the country that speaks the language you want. By doing that every day AND surrounding yourself with the culture + language, you will be able to speak after 6 month and become very good with it after 1 year.
On languages from a similar family (speak: English <-> German <-> French <-> Spanish || Japanese <-> Korean), you can get pretty far by buying books or doing internet courses.
For words, I prefer the spaced repetition method of tools like Anki. Important here is that you only create flashcards for words that you personally encountered to allow your brain to make connections to where you saw that word. Don't learn from wordlists.
Strongly agree that wordlists are useless (beyond the first few hundred that you are going to see constantly anyway) and making connections is key to retaining vocabulary.
Another tip is to pull vocabulary lists from reading material, and then to review them you just re-read that text until it becomes easy.
I think wordlists and learning tons of vocabulary through deliberate study are generally underrated. However, I do agree that once you've got a good foundation, pulling words from texts is a great idea.
I think the ideal thing to do is to get a list of words from a text before you read it, then prime yourself on them, and then really solidify them by reading the text. I think it makes the text a lot more enjoyable.
I actually just put together a prototype of a tool for doing this and wanted to polish it more before posting it, but I'd love any feedback / ideas from people who are into language learning here: https://langtools.curtis.io/
You can test it out with a guest account: guest@example.com, password "guest". Or just sign up, I don't validate your email or anything.
It's pretty rough but I think the basic idea of uploading a text, and seeing which lemmas are unknown to you so that you can pre-learn them is a good one.
I wanted to remove the login (or set up a dedicated demo page) when I planned on posting it in a week or so but this seemed like an opportune time to drop a link.
I assumed someone just changed the guest password, but it appears the database got in some strange locked state over night. It's sqlite since I want this to be as self-hostable as possible. Not sure if I somehow created a deadlock.
It should be fixed now. I'd never seen this lextutor site, I find it very interesting, it looks like its they've got very similar ideas, I found this on the research page: "One ineresting use of VP (I believe the main one for users of online VP) is to evaluate the suitability of reading texts for various levels of learners.".
That's basically what I'm doing at the moment. I'd also like to add an estimate of how many of the unknown lemma's i'm showing that you'd need to learn to get your comprehensions to 98% (or something like that) so that you'd know how much pre-studying might be worthwhile before diving into the text.
I haven't done much research into it but the 98% number gets through around a lot as an ideal place to be to pick up the remaining words through context.
edit: ah, just a few sentences down: "As a rule of thumb, learners can not do much with a text if they know fewer than 90% of its words. From 90% to 95% the text can be used intensively (for dictionary work, contextual inference, re-reads, etc.). From 95% to about 98%, the text can be used for fluency building. Above 98% the text can be used for 'reading to learn' rather than 'learning to read.'"
Only because...the textbook definition and the colloquial definition differ. I think generally when people say 'fluent' they mean 'native speaker level at reading, writing and speaking language X', whereas fluent actually means you can speak without hesitation on a range of topics.
Just a clarification, not an attack!
Edit: Plus, I wouldn't knock wordlists. I started trying to make wordlists only out of words I had some connection to, but you end up spending an inordinate amount of time making cards, and also then it's tempting to keep interrupting your reading to make new flashcards.
I am 'fluent' in mandarin, and use HSK6 wordlists as a base. I learn a bunch of random words and then suddenly, when I'm reading an article, there's the word I learned a month ago. I don't need to interrupt my reading flow, and the connection has been made. Sometimes at advanced levels, you won't see a word that often, so it's wasteful to see it once, make a flashcard, and then never have another chance to see the word in a real world context for another 6 months.
I also have a problem with the word "fluent". Ok you say you're fluent, here's a simple self-check: Explain to someone in the language you claim to be fluent in how you'd go about making a fire without any matches. (hint: you need to use words like tinder, kindling, flint, etc.). If you can't do this, or grapple with the fact that you don't have a repertoire of these words in your vocabulary, you might want to reconsider your definition of "fluent".
There are different fluencies, all context dependent. A woodsman who knows all about kindling and flint would be bemused in an office environment where KPIs and stakeholder deliverables are core terms. In a programming environment they'd be utterly lost regarding the detail, even if they grasp basics like who's in charge. Or a chemistry lab, a surgical theatre, etc.
This is why there are courses in "business" versions of languages, for example.
So someone can be functionally fluent in the contexts they typically encounter, while being non-fluent outside them. I doubt any native speaker can be fully fluent in all possible contexts.
To be fair, there's a lot of native English speakers who can't explain how to make a fire with any matches, and wouldn't know what tinder and kindling are.
That is a reasonably specific domain of knowledge.
Problem is that I'm not sure I'd be able to convey that message to someone even in my native language (it's a Romance one). I'd probably use two archaisms for "smaller pieces of wood" (probably the "tinder" and "flint" words you mention) and then I'd use "small rock" and "rub the thing between your hands until you get tired of it and then use a lighter".
There's lots of words in my native language of which I know the meaning of, technically, but practically speaking they might as well be Greek to me.
There are all of these types of flowers, trees, countryside-related mechanical terms (my peasant brother knows the names of all the pieces of which his wooden-made carriage is made of, I have no such knowledge) which might as well be from a foreign language to me. They sound right but I don't know exactly what they represent.
I'd say that you can call yourself fluent in a language once you can express feelings like anger, love, nostalgia etc. and can understand and make jokes in said language.
> Explain to someone in the language you claim to be fluent in how you'd go about making a fire without any matches. (hint: you need to use words like tinder, kindling, flint, etc.)
I wouldn't be able to do this in my own native language (aside from "stone" and "stick", I'm clueless about the tools involved), let alone in a foreign one. I think this is way too specific to be a good test for fluency.
The problem is not (quite) with the concept of "fluency", it's that we we confuse it with being good at a language.
Given your situation, I would just launch into a German explanation complete with the bit where I say I don't know the real German words. Then I will muck about with hand gestures and phrases like "smaller bits of would" etc until they get it.
I would do all of this while screwing up my declensions and conjugations. And I would do most of the screwing up fluently. Less fluently if I notice the error.
You don't need to use direct translations of those words to express their purpose in the process. After all, if you're explaining what tinder, kindling, and flint are you wouldn't use those words in their definitions.
The thing with fluency isn't that you know all of the language or can explain everything. A person can be considered fluent and not be able to explain that sentence - mostly because that is pretty far outside a situation most folks find themselves in. Heck, in English I'd not use words like tinder and kindling. You might not know obscure words for some things, and you get to words you don't know.
Fluency means that most of the time you understand the conversations around you, about a wide range of topics. You can understand not only the local dialect, but others as well, and communicate effectively. You understand slang. When you don't understand, it is usually just a subject that is new to you or the usage is wrong.
Think about what age people understand children to be fluent in a language. Most folks by 14 or 15 (in English) have enough vocabulary to get by without learning more the rest of their life, but won't know specialty terms such as the one in your firestarting example.
I've not personally reached fluency in my second language, I just can see the goal. My spouse is fluent in English, though, and has a wider English vocabulary than I do. Lots of work on his behalf and years more practice and an interest in archaic terms. He still gets stumped, forgets a word here or there, has an accent, and all that, however, and likely reached complete fluency some time back.
> hint: you need to use words like tinder, kindling, flint, etc.)
My language doesn't have a word for "kindling". If you want to translate it, you would use something like "material used to start the fire". So, by you reasoning, for someone from my country to be fluent in English, they also have to know that concept of "kindling" exists and has a name?
Thinking about it, I can't say I disagree. You have to know about the way people reason about stuff, not just words to name them.
Is tinder a real word? I thought it was just a made up word for an app? I can't be expected to explain such words in another language when I can't explain them in my native language. But I think if you said spark instead that would be more reasonable such you need to rub two pieces of wood together and create a spark and then a fire starts.
Well the way I learned it, you kindle fires by igniting the kindling. The kindling then ignites tinder (an intermediate stage), which then ignites the real fuel.
But I also often hear the two-step usage where tinder is includes kindling.
Kindling is actually a verb, as in, the act of 'kindling' a fire, even though it's also used to describe the material used to kindle a fire. Tinder is just the material.
Perhaps you are complaining that gerunds (which are already nouns) can grow extra meanings over time. But all languages do this kind of stuff.
German has exactly the "problem" you are talking about, only worse. Depending on capitalisation, "Essen/essen" can be the noun "food" or the the verb "to eat", But when used as verb, it is usally used in the sense of the English gerund "eating".
To me it's just the opposite. It's why the concept of a tinderbox makes sense (it contains grass or paper or something else easily ignited by a spark or small fire).
While I know the word kindling in English (which is a second language for me), I don't even know it in my native language... So, I don't think that's a good test.
I'd say that someone is fluent when he starts thinking in the language and is able to have everyday conversations with other people at normal speed without the native interlocutors feeling that they need to simplify their speech.
I mostly agree with you. I might not know every English word but I won't consider myself fluent until I can understand and use my second language at the same level as my first.
In other words I should be able to easily explain anything I can explain in my 1st language whether it's how to drive, how to change a tire, what the parts of a bicycle are (wheels, spokes, chain, gears, handlebars, tire, kick stand, peddles, brakes, )etc. Any native 8 yr old can name all those things.
Similarly describing a car. The stick shift, clutch, odometer, glove compartment, engine, seat belts, arm rest, windshield, wheel well, windshield wipers, reat view mirror, antenna, etc.
Any native speaker will know all those words. I'm still at the "explain with smaller words" phase like "antenna" would be "metal stick that receives radio waves".
Well, yeah that's why I have trouble with it. At least in Mandarin Chinese, which I have experience with, I've seen people describing themselves as 'fluent' when in reality they are either (a) lying or (b) meaning that they can speak conversationally.
My real world rule of thumb is that if I wrote "Fluent in Mandarin" on my CV, but then in the interview I couldn't read or write decent responses to emails or something like that, then most people wouldn't consider that as fluent (despite the dictionary definition).
I am native speaker/reader/writer fluent in my 2nd language, and I don't know the word for kindling. I am reasonably certain there is one, but would have to look it up, and so would any other native speaker that wasn't a linguist.
In fact, if I did happen to know the word and used it, no native speaker would understand me without an explanation.
The way I (and practically any other native speaker) would describe that portion of the task would be to say something like "use a small amount of paper, twigs, sawdust, dry leaves, or any other easily ignited material as a starter".
I used to get very frustrated at all the English words that didn't have direct equivalents, such that I found the 2nd language rather limiting in it's expressiveness.
In fact, I am pretty sure that the way most native speakers would approach the 'explain how to make fire' task would to say "here, let me show you how to do it."
Example: there exist equivalents to the words shiny, glittery, sparkly and most other common variations on the concept (some translate to the same word), but if you want to express 'pearlescent', the best you could do is 'lustrous like a pearl'.
Worse yet, often if I did find an obscure equivalent word and used it no one else would recognize it, and even if they figure it out from context they would still think I was weird or trying to score points with my vocabulary.
Further, in the 20 years since I actually lived there, using English loan words has become rampant, so much so that by not using them my speech comes across as rather affected, stuffy, and snobbish (eg. the word for upgrade (noun or verb) is for all intents and purposes 'upgrade', even though a perfectly understandable equivalent does actually exist).
One test of fluency would be to have the person watch a modern film in the language of interest and ask them to transcribe the dialogue into text and also describe in own words (in language of interest) what is going on in the movie.
You can then put that person on a scale from 0 to 100 by comparing the score by a random sample of "known" native speakers.
This test is nice because it probes many aspects of language: listening, speaking, and writing (but not reading), which can vary greatly between people.
If you're interested in probing reading, then I suggest asking the person to explain meanings of songs or poems.
Movies are, in my humble opinion, not the best "standard" yard stick to measure fluency. First thing is that films most often use quite limited vocabulary, and it's wildly different vocabulary than, say, found in newspapers, technical writing or in business language. Moreover films present a wide variety of communication styles. It's much easier to understand James Bond than South Park, because humour is actually quite high and demanding register of speech.
It really depends on the film though. There are family dramas I can understand 100% but I watch a movie with lawyers or science or high level government or military meetings and I'm lost.
Interesting. When watching movies in English as a native Spanish speaker it's the other way around, at least for me. It's much easier to understand a movie with plenty of scientists, intellectuals or government officials than one with average people, as those tend to use slang, colloquial expressions and Americanisms that they don't teach you in courses. In fact teenage flicks are probably the hardest genre to understand...
There's that too. And that's more evidence I'm not fluent. In English if someone uses new slang on me I understand it almost immediately from context. In my 2nd language I'm lost
I don't know about other languages, but the French government actually does have tests of French fluency (DELF/DALF exam), which test you in a range of ways (oral comprehension - usually a radio emission, written comprehension - usually a news article, writing on a choice of subjects and speaking - presenting a view on a subject and then debating), at a variety of levels. I took one of these tests (I'm fluent, yay!), and it certainly was testing. But it seemed fair and appropriate, also seemed to correlate with my experiences speaking to French people in France.
As a guy who grew up in French immersion schools in Canada, I consider myself to be fluent in French, although my grammar isn't quite perfect. I don't mentally translate it to English in order to understand it, at any rate.
Recently, I took a short trip that included a few days in Paris, and I made a point of defaulting to French when starting conversations. However, for the most part, as soon as a French person realizes that French is not my first language, they switch the conversation to English, even if their English is worse than my French (according to my perception).
I wonder if this is unique to the culture of France, or at least Paris, that they do not like to hear their language from a foreigner? Maybe the language is part of a group identity, used to identify locals who can be trusted to follow local customs? It was a little saddening. In Africa and the Middle East however, when I am in predominantly French speaking communities, the locals seem quite happy to have conversations in French, even though our accents differ greatly.
>I wonder if this is unique to the culture of France, or at least Paris, that they do not like to hear their language from a foreigner? Maybe the language is part of a group identity, used to identify locals who can be trusted to follow local customs? It was a little saddening.
I'm sorry to hear that. As a Parisian, I don't think this had anything to do with protecting an identity, rather we're just as happy to practice our (often terrible!) English as you are to practice your French!
No, this isn't unique. If you know English (and I assume everyone here does), that'll likely be one of the highest barriers to clear when trying to learn a foreign language. People will either want to be helpful and speak English, or they'll want to practice English - or both.
Volunteering with exchange students in Norway[1], those that generally learn Norwegian the best in a year here, living in a Norwegian family, going to Norwegian school - are those that either speak little or no English, or those that manage to insist on speaking Norwegian (to the point of pretending not to understand English, even if that's their native language).
A suitable trade-off might be to make a deal with your friends/co-workers - only <native language> on Fridays, or (as you progress) English only allowed after hours Monday through Thursday etc.
For exchange students in the age group 16-18, those that speak a related native language (ie: indo-european), will generally start speak the language after 3 months, reaching fluency after 6 (a little faster for German, Dutch, a little slower for Spanish, French - about in-between for English). For those that don't (eg: Japanese), the bars are moved: starting to speak the language after 6, and fluency after a little less than 9 (slower start, but they tend to catch up).
It's quite refreshing to learn a language by immersion, rather than by tedious school lessons - the same way we all learn as children.
Another tip is to avoid jumping between languages as much as possible - or at least only jump between your native tongue, and the foreign language you're studying. Your brain seem to work better with immersion.
As for my personal experience, I learned English in school, from reading books and magazines, and watching movies and tv programs. While I agree that tv/film production often have overly clear dialogue - watching films first with subtitles, and later without, is great practice (for those that want a challenge in American English, I recommend trying to watch all of HBO's "The Wire" without subtitles).
After years of French in school, I also speak and understand some French, but I would probably have to go live some months in France (or some other place people speak French) in order to attain what I'd call proper fluency.
After spending a year as an exchange student in Japan, I'd say I speak fluent Japanese, but not quite at native level - I'm also somewhat stuck at "high-school" level, so I'm not quite comfortable in a "grown up" work setting. After my year there, it felt like I'd forgotten all my French - but as I've gradually improved my Japanese, my French as "come back".
Finally, I haven't seen singing mentioned here. Singing is a great way to improve pronunciation.
For what it's worth, I've heard people say that learning languages get easier after the fifth one. If I'm not counting Danish and Swedish (which one really shouldn't, as a Norwegian) I guess that means I have one more to go after I manage to brush off my French.
I speak, read and write english (my second language) fluently although not perfectly correct.
I started thinking (when studying) and even dreaming (when I dreamt about programming, that is :-) in English before graduating because most of my books etc where in English.
In addition to reading lots and lots, one of the small things that helped me a lot was 10 years back or so I used to have an FF extension that let me doubleclick on any word on a webpage to get TFD definition of the word highlighted.
This took the effort out of expanding my vocabulary as I could look things up without breaking flow.
I still sometimes look up words that I haven't seen before although not as frequently as before.
(My problem is for a lot of words, esp. those I don't use at work I can read and write them but I might never have heard them.)
I'd say variety is your friend. I don't know any learner who has mastered a language by sticking to a single technique. You would do everything, maybe with varying levels of comittment - read textbooks, take classes, do flashcards, do speech shadowing, talk to native speakers, watch movies and TV programs, etc.
After becoming able to say what I want (more or less), participating online discussions in the topics I care has been useful for me. It taught me how to structure longer chunks of text to express more complex ideas - you would be surprised to see how often sentence-to-sentence translation fails (between Japanese and English, at least).
If you are starting as an adult, native-level pronunciation would be difficult to achieve, even if you invest decades into it. I have almost given up on that front, and instead am focussing on how I can make my pronunciation less misunderstood. Part of that is to pay attention to vowels and consonants I'm not good at (or to use easier-to-pronounce synonyms where possible).
A lot of software to attempt to make the boring repitition-based stuff more fun, for things like grammatical patterns and vocab. Anki (free) is my all-time favourite. Usually use a popular pre-made deck to learn what's recommended, and then have my own one going which I add a new flash-card to whenever I encounter a new word in my daily life. Review them in the evening. Something new I found out recently is that Anki has plugins [0]. AnkiStrategy [1] is currently making sure I get my daily review in.
Duolingo [2] (free) also helps with getting a grasp on basic grammar and vocab, but doesn't support many Asian languages (Vietnamese just got released and Indonesian is in progress).
Memrise [3] (free) is similar to Anki but has more of a modern, community-based app feel. A lot of great user-generated content.
Skritter [4] (subscription, phone app) helped me a lot when I was learning to write and recognise Chinese characters. They also have Japanese Kanji version.
Software-wise, I am currently learning Vietnamese, and for that using my own Anki deck (30-40 cards a day) and 5 duolingo lessons (adding new vocab to Anki). Feel like I'm making fast enough progress, but I think integrating anymore software to my daily revision routine would be too much.
Then you need a lot of interaction with people, using what you have leant in that language to attempt to communicate. I think this is the most important part and where you'll learn the most. You'll be forced to practise your listening, speaking, drawing on vocab and grammar that you know and have to put mould them into an understandable sentence. You'll make mistakes and look like a fool, but that's just part of the learning process. Try to treat it like a bit of fun, and hopefully the people you're talking to will also.
I worked (illegally) as a restaurant dishwasher at a ski resort in Spain. You'll learn fast if you are totally immersed and need to communicate to work. ;)
I learned to speak French starting from scratch in my 30s, while living in the US. I speak it well enough to enroll in an easy college-level course intended for native speakers[a] or to work professionally[b], although either experience would be painful at first.
For me, the process occurred in three phases:
1. Bootstrapping to the point where I could kinda-sorta read books and kinda-sorta carry on conversations. I personally used Assimil for this, which is excellent if you like learning by osmosis and you can spare 20 to 40 minutes a day for 5 months. Nine out of ten "language learning" apps just encourage you to screw around at this level with minimal progress, but if you just focus and get it done, it should only take a couple hundred hours (assuming you already know a vaguely related language—for an English speaker, French is easier than Japanese).
2. Using the language (as best I could). I read about 2.5 million words and watched about 15 seasons of television shows. This took my comprehension from vague and dodgy to automatic and nearly complete. I also spent many hours speaking, and I wrote a few dozen short texts which I had corrected.
3. Gradual improvement. I speak French every day of my life now, but my rate of improvement has slowed down because I don't currently need to be any better. I mostly talk to the same handful of people. To get better, I'd realistically need to work for a French-speaking company.
[a] I've taken an online statistics course for French speakers, and the language was rarely a problem.
[b] I've had multi-hour technical conversations with French-speaking programmers while debugging code.
Scène de ménage is pretty fun, Golden moustache is a YouTube channel that makes really fun stuff, they even have English subtitles.
A few films are also worth watching: les visiteurs and intouchable. I can't think of anything else now.
Rinse lather repeat.
It took about 2 years before I was confident enough in my German skills to consider myself conversationally fluent at a beginner level. I spent four years of devoted study (yes high school) to get the concepts down, and now I've basically tried to maintain it in the 8 years since. For me it was important to focus on syntax and semantics more than vocabulary. It's super easy to find a translation for concrete concepts like "dog", "cartographer", and so forth, but it's rather difficult to find an elegant translation of advanced concepts like expressing conditional circumstances, and all those fun different tenses and voices. Repetition of vocabulary and all that helps to build up conversational awareness, but I find that it's important to focus on how the pieces are supposed together more than the individual pieces themselves. But hey, ymmv
I'm just overly fond of the procedural and qualitative approach of grammar and syntax first, but I know that runs contrary to how other individuals tend to acquire language. You do have to find some individual pieces beforehand so you can have pieces to put together, so obviously vocabulary itself functions as an important part, but I find that you are more likely to become fluent in a language when you've trained yourself to think with the logical approach that the language you're learning utilizes.
Let's say (for sake of example) that you only speak English, and you are learning some other language.
Several things. The more the better; in combination is best: Physically move to the place. Befriend locals who don't use English. Shun people who do use English. Take classes. Get a job where your coworkers do not use English in the workplace. Use Quizlet or flashcards or some similar tool.
The other comments about speaking the language daily (i.e. living in a country that speaks the language) are dead on. If that is not practical for you, then you can help retain and increase your _vocabulary_ with Anki [1], but it is no substitute for actually speaking.
For Android phones, you can sync Anki with Ankidroid [2].
Did not take any holidays. You need to work on it every day, 365 days per year. Lots of little tricks. Like reading books written for 10 year-olds, by native authors of the language and set in a country where this is the native language. No translations of famous English writers.
Keep track of words you don't kn ow during the day, and look them up in the dictionary every evening. Go out of your way to meet native speakers. When I worked in Silicon Valley, I listened to Spanish language radio stations only, watched only SPanish language TV networks, only read Spanish language newspapers which happened to be free, and only spoke Spanish in stores and restaurants. It helped that 50% of population in SV is hispanic, and I was a foreigner in the USA just like them.
Another trick, after you check the news in English, read it again on the net in your target language. And watch TV series with subtitles in the same language. For instance, I watched Russian TV series with subtitles in Russian. That helped me when my ear could not make out the words. Also, not movies, but TV series because the same characters appear again and again so you get used to their quirks of speech and can learn faster.
Buy a kids encyclopedia in the target language. Don't be afraid to download and read university papers and dissertations in linguistics about your target language.
And finally, get married to someone who speaks the language and raise bilingual kids.
I know English, Spanish and Japanese. I started studying Japanese in college and I live and work in Japan now. Structured lessons were fundamental in becoming fluent but when I was here I sang a ton of Karaoke whenever I could. It really helped my pronunciation and vocabulary. Definitely recommend signing to learn language.
At different points of my life I spoke Thai, Malay, Italian, French and a teeny bit of Mandarin. I would say the ones I became extremely fluent with were the result of total immersion (living in that country - being fully immersed in it for years).
I've known expats who go to Thailand, live in western communities, associate with other westerners mostly speaking English and deal with locals mostly on a limited level don't get very far. I've also met foreigners who come to live among locals in local neighborhoods and interact with the locals on a daily basis get very good at the language.
The writing is super well done by a guy from Africa who moved to the US, and while in the US learned japanese.
He learned how to speak so well that when he took an interview for a software development job, they asked him for his address (assuming he was japanese) and didn't believe that he wasn't from there.
The site is not just for japanese. Most of the info is general (and uses either japanese or chinese as examples). I recommend it to everyone.
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[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 301 ms ] threadI've got another example where I had motivation but not necessity. A few years later I became interested in manga / anime, back when translations of either were scarce. So I signed up for Japanese classes, and eventually even went to Japan as an exchange student for a summer. I continued to take lessons in college, until I'd essentially run out of classes to take. Having done all that, I would say my Japanese proficiency was merely functional. I probably could have passed JLPT N1 had I tried, but I didn't bother since I wasn't planning on working or studying in Japan. In this case, IMO I was reasonably motivated, but since the necessity component was missing, I never made it over the hump and became fluent.
Finally, the kpop craze got me somewhat interested in learning Korean, but I barely know how to say hello / goodbye. I'll blame that on my brain plasticity though. :-P
But when there (here) structured learning in the form of a few books to round-off vocabulary/grammar and a few lessons mainly to track progress and give feedback helped hugely in going from basic to intermediary. Pleco dictionary and flashcards for 1-2 hours per day also very useful.
.. so essentially i'm saying "do everything you can think of, especially living in an immersive environment" b/c that's what i did for a couple years .. and i'm still not exactly fluent.
of course the experience of living in a different social mileu is awesome for reasons connected but not equivalent to language fluency, like broadening cultural perspectives.
In retrospect, what helped me the most in the early days were reading children's books and copying them down on separate piece of paper, and memorizing the most basic vocabularies that all native speakers naturally learned during their childhood years. These alone seemed to have improved reading comprehension and writing skills from level zero to the basic level. At first, try to write down the words in your native language next to the foreign words you are trying to memorize in order to make that initial connection, and later, try to memorize the definitions in the foreign language itself. I was using just pencil and paper throughout this process — I wasn't even aware that I could've used computers to do this at the time.
Fast forward to teenage years and up to early 20s, listening to podcasts and audio-based grammar courses helped with refining speech. I used to repeat after every sentence and even respond to questions that the hosts asked their guests in some radio shows as if the hosts were asking me the questions.
In regards to expanding my knowledge of vocabularies, I used to spend hours every week memorizing SAT vocabularies, but nowadays I try to use the new vocabularies that I come across as soon as possible in real conversations.
For now, I think you should focus on memorizing words for the things that you encounter most frequently every day, in addition to learning conversational speech rather than diving deep into the nuances of grammar and trying to cram all the vocabularies you can get your hands on into your brain. It's a long and arduous process — yet very rewarding, and IF you're a coder, you might know that there's a narrative by Peter Norvig — to set a long-term goal (up to 10 years) in learning a programming language — I think the same goes for spoken languages albeit it may take much longer to achieve an adequate level of fluency. Good luck.
(By the way: "vocabulary" is not countable!)
Only I repeat and repeat each sentence, each paragraph, and then each page, until I can read it out loud quickly with good pronunciation (I have a reader with TTS in the foreign language), where I can construct the meaning in my head on the fly. Until I get to that point, I don't consider the sentence, paragraph, whatever, learned.
My theory of language learning is that you need a strong root of a few sentences before you can branch off into new words and grammar constructs.
Too many language courses try to pack in the material as fast as possible. To me, that's a mistake. Like etching a lot of faint scratches into stone, you have a lot of information there, but it's difficult to read any specific thing and they wear away quickly. So, basically go for a few deep marks over a bunch of small light ones.
Otherwise it is extremely difficult to get the necessary amount of daily exposure to new and novel situations where the language you want to study is used. You can try by watching a lot of foreign TV series and movies, reading books, but those are not necessarily representative of the vocabulary useful in real life.
If you are a US citizen I think the only language you could get fluent in without leaving the country would be Spanish.
The key is not only to read, understand, practice but also not to fear to make mistakes and get corrected. That's my experience. I've lived in Tanzania for 4 years, when I was young but with a fear of speaking Swahili the wrong way. Now I can understand and read Swahili, but responding back is so painfull. I'm waiting someone who can correct me while I speak it.
Check out Stephen Krashen, he basically describes how I and a lot of people have acquired languages.
Gist of it:
- A lot of reading about a lot of topics.
- Exposure to the language (audio video).
Outside of that, watch children's television shows in the language you want to learn, with english subtitles. The language is simple and will help get it in your ears.
The most important part in my opinion is to live in a country that speaks the language you want to learn. You have to immerse yourself as much as possible with the culture and language.
Also very important that you aren't afraid to try to use what you learned. Even though it's very basic, you learn a lot by actively trying to understand and use the language. It might be tiresome and frustrating at first, but you will learn crazy fast. What I mean with that is: Change your OS to that language and accept that you don't understand anything at first. Make internet friends and refuse to use English with them even though you have to translate every second sentence. Every time you see something you don't know, try to understand why it's written that way.
Lastly, if you have time and money: Do a 6 months ~ 1 year intensive every-day language course in the country that speaks the language you want. By doing that every day AND surrounding yourself with the culture + language, you will be able to speak after 6 month and become very good with it after 1 year.
On languages from a similar family (speak: English <-> German <-> French <-> Spanish || Japanese <-> Korean), you can get pretty far by buying books or doing internet courses.
For words, I prefer the spaced repetition method of tools like Anki. Important here is that you only create flashcards for words that you personally encountered to allow your brain to make connections to where you saw that word. Don't learn from wordlists.
Another tip is to pull vocabulary lists from reading material, and then to review them you just re-read that text until it becomes easy.
I think the ideal thing to do is to get a list of words from a text before you read it, then prime yourself on them, and then really solidify them by reading the text. I think it makes the text a lot more enjoyable.
I actually just put together a prototype of a tool for doing this and wanted to polish it more before posting it, but I'd love any feedback / ideas from people who are into language learning here: https://langtools.curtis.io/
You can test it out with a guest account: guest@example.com, password "guest". Or just sign up, I don't validate your email or anything.
It's pretty rough but I think the basic idea of uploading a text, and seeing which lemmas are unknown to you so that you can pre-learn them is a good one.
btw here's some german if you want something to paste into it: http://lpaste.net/267332
Based on what you have said in your text, you might find this old tool to be interesting:
http://www.lextutor.ca/vp/eng/
The lextutor site has quite a bit of interesting information, although the interface and some of the tools are very dated.
I assumed someone just changed the guest password, but it appears the database got in some strange locked state over night. It's sqlite since I want this to be as self-hostable as possible. Not sure if I somehow created a deadlock.
It should be fixed now. I'd never seen this lextutor site, I find it very interesting, it looks like its they've got very similar ideas, I found this on the research page: "One ineresting use of VP (I believe the main one for users of online VP) is to evaluate the suitability of reading texts for various levels of learners.".
That's basically what I'm doing at the moment. I'd also like to add an estimate of how many of the unknown lemma's i'm showing that you'd need to learn to get your comprehensions to 98% (or something like that) so that you'd know how much pre-studying might be worthwhile before diving into the text.
I haven't done much research into it but the 98% number gets through around a lot as an ideal place to be to pick up the remaining words through context.
edit: ah, just a few sentences down: "As a rule of thumb, learners can not do much with a text if they know fewer than 90% of its words. From 90% to 95% the text can be used intensively (for dictionary work, contextual inference, re-reads, etc.). From 95% to about 98%, the text can be used for fluency building. Above 98% the text can be used for 'reading to learn' rather than 'learning to read.'"
Only because...the textbook definition and the colloquial definition differ. I think generally when people say 'fluent' they mean 'native speaker level at reading, writing and speaking language X', whereas fluent actually means you can speak without hesitation on a range of topics.
Just a clarification, not an attack!
Edit: Plus, I wouldn't knock wordlists. I started trying to make wordlists only out of words I had some connection to, but you end up spending an inordinate amount of time making cards, and also then it's tempting to keep interrupting your reading to make new flashcards.
I am 'fluent' in mandarin, and use HSK6 wordlists as a base. I learn a bunch of random words and then suddenly, when I'm reading an article, there's the word I learned a month ago. I don't need to interrupt my reading flow, and the connection has been made. Sometimes at advanced levels, you won't see a word that often, so it's wasteful to see it once, make a flashcard, and then never have another chance to see the word in a real world context for another 6 months.
This is why there are courses in "business" versions of languages, for example.
So someone can be functionally fluent in the contexts they typically encounter, while being non-fluent outside them. I doubt any native speaker can be fully fluent in all possible contexts.
That is a reasonably specific domain of knowledge.
There's lots of words in my native language of which I know the meaning of, technically, but practically speaking they might as well be Greek to me.
There are all of these types of flowers, trees, countryside-related mechanical terms (my peasant brother knows the names of all the pieces of which his wooden-made carriage is made of, I have no such knowledge) which might as well be from a foreign language to me. They sound right but I don't know exactly what they represent.
I'd say that you can call yourself fluent in a language once you can express feelings like anger, love, nostalgia etc. and can understand and make jokes in said language.
I wouldn't be able to do this in my own native language (aside from "stone" and "stick", I'm clueless about the tools involved), let alone in a foreign one. I think this is way too specific to be a good test for fluency.
Given your situation, I would just launch into a German explanation complete with the bit where I say I don't know the real German words. Then I will muck about with hand gestures and phrases like "smaller bits of would" etc until they get it.
I would do all of this while screwing up my declensions and conjugations. And I would do most of the screwing up fluently. Less fluently if I notice the error.
Fluency means that most of the time you understand the conversations around you, about a wide range of topics. You can understand not only the local dialect, but others as well, and communicate effectively. You understand slang. When you don't understand, it is usually just a subject that is new to you or the usage is wrong.
Think about what age people understand children to be fluent in a language. Most folks by 14 or 15 (in English) have enough vocabulary to get by without learning more the rest of their life, but won't know specialty terms such as the one in your firestarting example.
I've not personally reached fluency in my second language, I just can see the goal. My spouse is fluent in English, though, and has a wider English vocabulary than I do. Lots of work on his behalf and years more practice and an interest in archaic terms. He still gets stumped, forgets a word here or there, has an accent, and all that, however, and likely reached complete fluency some time back.
My language doesn't have a word for "kindling". If you want to translate it, you would use something like "material used to start the fire". So, by you reasoning, for someone from my country to be fluent in English, they also have to know that concept of "kindling" exists and has a name?
Thinking about it, I can't say I disagree. You have to know about the way people reason about stuff, not just words to name them.
Silicon valley has ruined all these words.
Then again, most people don't have to start fires.
But I also often hear the two-step usage where tinder is includes kindling.
This is why English is a clusterfuck, and makes no sense compared to most languages. Imagine if we called food 'eatings', that'd be weird, eh?
http://www.englishpage.com/gerunds/part_1.htm
Perhaps you are complaining that gerunds (which are already nouns) can grow extra meanings over time. But all languages do this kind of stuff.
German has exactly the "problem" you are talking about, only worse. Depending on capitalisation, "Essen/essen" can be the noun "food" or the the verb "to eat", But when used as verb, it is usally used in the sense of the English gerund "eating".
I'd say that someone is fluent when he starts thinking in the language and is able to have everyday conversations with other people at normal speed without the native interlocutors feeling that they need to simplify their speech.
In other words I should be able to easily explain anything I can explain in my 1st language whether it's how to drive, how to change a tire, what the parts of a bicycle are (wheels, spokes, chain, gears, handlebars, tire, kick stand, peddles, brakes, )etc. Any native 8 yr old can name all those things.
Similarly describing a car. The stick shift, clutch, odometer, glove compartment, engine, seat belts, arm rest, windshield, wheel well, windshield wipers, reat view mirror, antenna, etc.
Any native speaker will know all those words. I'm still at the "explain with smaller words" phase like "antenna" would be "metal stick that receives radio waves".
I'm not fluent.
My real world rule of thumb is that if I wrote "Fluent in Mandarin" on my CV, but then in the interview I couldn't read or write decent responses to emails or something like that, then most people wouldn't consider that as fluent (despite the dictionary definition).
I am native speaker/reader/writer fluent in my 2nd language, and I don't know the word for kindling. I am reasonably certain there is one, but would have to look it up, and so would any other native speaker that wasn't a linguist.
In fact, if I did happen to know the word and used it, no native speaker would understand me without an explanation.
The way I (and practically any other native speaker) would describe that portion of the task would be to say something like "use a small amount of paper, twigs, sawdust, dry leaves, or any other easily ignited material as a starter".
I used to get very frustrated at all the English words that didn't have direct equivalents, such that I found the 2nd language rather limiting in it's expressiveness.
In fact, I am pretty sure that the way most native speakers would approach the 'explain how to make fire' task would to say "here, let me show you how to do it."
Example: there exist equivalents to the words shiny, glittery, sparkly and most other common variations on the concept (some translate to the same word), but if you want to express 'pearlescent', the best you could do is 'lustrous like a pearl'.
Worse yet, often if I did find an obscure equivalent word and used it no one else would recognize it, and even if they figure it out from context they would still think I was weird or trying to score points with my vocabulary.
Further, in the 20 years since I actually lived there, using English loan words has become rampant, so much so that by not using them my speech comes across as rather affected, stuffy, and snobbish (eg. the word for upgrade (noun or verb) is for all intents and purposes 'upgrade', even though a perfectly understandable equivalent does actually exist).
You can then put that person on a scale from 0 to 100 by comparing the score by a random sample of "known" native speakers.
This test is nice because it probes many aspects of language: listening, speaking, and writing (but not reading), which can vary greatly between people.
If you're interested in probing reading, then I suggest asking the person to explain meanings of songs or poems.
Recently, I took a short trip that included a few days in Paris, and I made a point of defaulting to French when starting conversations. However, for the most part, as soon as a French person realizes that French is not my first language, they switch the conversation to English, even if their English is worse than my French (according to my perception).
I wonder if this is unique to the culture of France, or at least Paris, that they do not like to hear their language from a foreigner? Maybe the language is part of a group identity, used to identify locals who can be trusted to follow local customs? It was a little saddening. In Africa and the Middle East however, when I am in predominantly French speaking communities, the locals seem quite happy to have conversations in French, even though our accents differ greatly.
Leave the centre of Paris and they'll speak French, leave Paris and they won't speak English at all.
I'm sorry to hear that. As a Parisian, I don't think this had anything to do with protecting an identity, rather we're just as happy to practice our (often terrible!) English as you are to practice your French!
Was this reputation always a myth? Or is it something that used to happen until a cultural change took place?
Volunteering with exchange students in Norway[1], those that generally learn Norwegian the best in a year here, living in a Norwegian family, going to Norwegian school - are those that either speak little or no English, or those that manage to insist on speaking Norwegian (to the point of pretending not to understand English, even if that's their native language).
A suitable trade-off might be to make a deal with your friends/co-workers - only <native language> on Fridays, or (as you progress) English only allowed after hours Monday through Thursday etc.
For exchange students in the age group 16-18, those that speak a related native language (ie: indo-european), will generally start speak the language after 3 months, reaching fluency after 6 (a little faster for German, Dutch, a little slower for Spanish, French - about in-between for English). For those that don't (eg: Japanese), the bars are moved: starting to speak the language after 6, and fluency after a little less than 9 (slower start, but they tend to catch up).
It's quite refreshing to learn a language by immersion, rather than by tedious school lessons - the same way we all learn as children.
Another tip is to avoid jumping between languages as much as possible - or at least only jump between your native tongue, and the foreign language you're studying. Your brain seem to work better with immersion.
As for my personal experience, I learned English in school, from reading books and magazines, and watching movies and tv programs. While I agree that tv/film production often have overly clear dialogue - watching films first with subtitles, and later without, is great practice (for those that want a challenge in American English, I recommend trying to watch all of HBO's "The Wire" without subtitles).
After years of French in school, I also speak and understand some French, but I would probably have to go live some months in France (or some other place people speak French) in order to attain what I'd call proper fluency.
After spending a year as an exchange student in Japan, I'd say I speak fluent Japanese, but not quite at native level - I'm also somewhat stuck at "high-school" level, so I'm not quite comfortable in a "grown up" work setting. After my year there, it felt like I'd forgotten all my French - but as I've gradually improved my Japanese, my French as "come back".
Finally, I haven't seen singing mentioned here. Singing is a great way to improve pronunciation.
For what it's worth, I've heard people say that learning languages get easier after the fifth one. If I'm not counting Danish and Swedish (which one really shouldn't, as a Norwegian) I guess that means I have one more to go after I manage to brush off my French.
[1] http://www.afs.org/
I also took English classes for several years when I was young.
I started thinking (when studying) and even dreaming (when I dreamt about programming, that is :-) in English before graduating because most of my books etc where in English.
In addition to reading lots and lots, one of the small things that helped me a lot was 10 years back or so I used to have an FF extension that let me doubleclick on any word on a webpage to get TFD definition of the word highlighted.
This took the effort out of expanding my vocabulary as I could look things up without breaking flow.
I still sometimes look up words that I haven't seen before although not as frequently as before.
(My problem is for a lot of words, esp. those I don't use at work I can read and write them but I might never have heard them.)
I'd say variety is your friend. I don't know any learner who has mastered a language by sticking to a single technique. You would do everything, maybe with varying levels of comittment - read textbooks, take classes, do flashcards, do speech shadowing, talk to native speakers, watch movies and TV programs, etc.
After becoming able to say what I want (more or less), participating online discussions in the topics I care has been useful for me. It taught me how to structure longer chunks of text to express more complex ideas - you would be surprised to see how often sentence-to-sentence translation fails (between Japanese and English, at least).
If you are starting as an adult, native-level pronunciation would be difficult to achieve, even if you invest decades into it. I have almost given up on that front, and instead am focussing on how I can make my pronunciation less misunderstood. Part of that is to pay attention to vowels and consonants I'm not good at (or to use easier-to-pronounce synonyms where possible).
Duolingo [2] (free) also helps with getting a grasp on basic grammar and vocab, but doesn't support many Asian languages (Vietnamese just got released and Indonesian is in progress).
Memrise [3] (free) is similar to Anki but has more of a modern, community-based app feel. A lot of great user-generated content.
Skritter [4] (subscription, phone app) helped me a lot when I was learning to write and recognise Chinese characters. They also have Japanese Kanji version.
Software-wise, I am currently learning Vietnamese, and for that using my own Anki deck (30-40 cards a day) and 5 duolingo lessons (adding new vocab to Anki). Feel like I'm making fast enough progress, but I think integrating anymore software to my daily revision routine would be too much.
Then you need a lot of interaction with people, using what you have leant in that language to attempt to communicate. I think this is the most important part and where you'll learn the most. You'll be forced to practise your listening, speaking, drawing on vocab and grammar that you know and have to put mould them into an understandable sentence. You'll make mistakes and look like a fool, but that's just part of the learning process. Try to treat it like a bit of fun, and hopefully the people you're talking to will also.
[0] https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-useful-Anki-plugins
[1] https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1494320602
[2] https://www.duolingo.com/
[3] https://www.memrise.com/
[4] https://skritter.com/
For me, the process occurred in three phases:
1. Bootstrapping to the point where I could kinda-sorta read books and kinda-sorta carry on conversations. I personally used Assimil for this, which is excellent if you like learning by osmosis and you can spare 20 to 40 minutes a day for 5 months. Nine out of ten "language learning" apps just encourage you to screw around at this level with minimal progress, but if you just focus and get it done, it should only take a couple hundred hours (assuming you already know a vaguely related language—for an English speaker, French is easier than Japanese).
2. Using the language (as best I could). I read about 2.5 million words and watched about 15 seasons of television shows. This took my comprehension from vague and dodgy to automatic and nearly complete. I also spent many hours speaking, and I wrote a few dozen short texts which I had corrected.
3. Gradual improvement. I speak French every day of my life now, but my rate of improvement has slowed down because I don't currently need to be any better. I mostly talk to the same handful of people. To get better, I'd realistically need to work for a French-speaking company.
[a] I've taken an online statistics course for French speakers, and the language was rarely a problem.
[b] I've had multi-hour technical conversations with French-speaking programmers while debugging code.
Several things. The more the better; in combination is best: Physically move to the place. Befriend locals who don't use English. Shun people who do use English. Take classes. Get a job where your coworkers do not use English in the workplace. Use Quizlet or flashcards or some similar tool.
For Android phones, you can sync Anki with Ankidroid [2].
[1] http://ankisrs.net/
[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.ichi2.anki...
Keep track of words you don't kn ow during the day, and look them up in the dictionary every evening. Go out of your way to meet native speakers. When I worked in Silicon Valley, I listened to Spanish language radio stations only, watched only SPanish language TV networks, only read Spanish language newspapers which happened to be free, and only spoke Spanish in stores and restaurants. It helped that 50% of population in SV is hispanic, and I was a foreigner in the USA just like them.
Another trick, after you check the news in English, read it again on the net in your target language. And watch TV series with subtitles in the same language. For instance, I watched Russian TV series with subtitles in Russian. That helped me when my ear could not make out the words. Also, not movies, but TV series because the same characters appear again and again so you get used to their quirks of speech and can learn faster.
Buy a kids encyclopedia in the target language. Don't be afraid to download and read university papers and dissertations in linguistics about your target language.
And finally, get married to someone who speaks the language and raise bilingual kids.
I've known expats who go to Thailand, live in western communities, associate with other westerners mostly speaking English and deal with locals mostly on a limited level don't get very far. I've also met foreigners who come to live among locals in local neighborhoods and interact with the locals on a daily basis get very good at the language.
I don't think there's any way around it.
this site is incredible.
The writing is super well done by a guy from Africa who moved to the US, and while in the US learned japanese.
He learned how to speak so well that when he took an interview for a software development job, they asked him for his address (assuming he was japanese) and didn't believe that he wasn't from there.
The site is not just for japanese. Most of the info is general (and uses either japanese or chinese as examples). I recommend it to everyone.