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Ask HN: What's the Smartest and Quickest Way to Learn a New (Spoken) Language?

2 points by sean_patel ↗ HN
I've decided I'm going to learn a brand new language as my "Personal Challenge" for 2017.

Candidates are German, Spanish, and last preference Gujarati (my Dad's native language).

How do I go about this as an Adult? I want to learn fast, and efficiently. Are there any proven "Language learning Hacks"? I saw Ankhi or Ankha cards mentioned on some forums. Not sure that will work for me.

Please, give me some hacks or tricks you've used personally to successfully learn -- to read and speak -- a new foreign (to you) language. Also timelines - i.e. how many hours or days or months of time investment to see noticeable results, which would be that I understand someone speaking in that language, and also am able to respond / speak back my response in the same language.

2 comments

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soc
Regardless of hacks to make real progress you will need to spend a lot of time. Here's some quick tips...

    1. Move most of your media consumption over to the new language.  Movies/books/internet/twitter/etc..

    2. Plan on an hour a day of active study
(can be 30mins morning/night). And atleast an hour of non active study (listening to some dialogue, media consumption, etc)

    3. Learning phrases is much more effective than learning words, although eventually you will need to do both

    4. Learning by audio is much better than reading
atleast in the beginning (for an advanced learner reading would make more sense to get more advanced content)

5. My suggestion is after you get 200 or so basic vocab and phrases down then make some short dialogues of things you want to know how to say / converse. Get those translated or checked by a native (lang-8, etc). Create an audio recording of those and listen and repeat over and over every day till you have deeply learned them. They will become automatic and you will be "fluent" at those.

6. Rinse / Repeat.