The article (not the NYT one, which is just typical whiney urban cat lady trash) has a lot of the components of a marketing submarine. Particularly obviously as .... well, who is this person?
I do think apps are pretty helpful in stuffing vocab in the brain. Mixed bag though. Duolingo is shit for me; they don't have continental Portuguese (Memrise does). The rest of it rings true as well (I listen to Portuguese radio at home to work on my understanding when I'm not being a slug).
That NYT article is an example of someone basically failing at learning a language, to put it quite bluntly. Learning a language as an adult entails hard work for years and years.
Living in France will not teach you French, besides "survival French" and probably "minimal conversational French". Even having a French partner won't help at all, unless you both commit to speaking French (and then your partner is put into a weird position where they're your partner but have to constantly correct you)...
Acquiring Superior/Distinguished [0] level vocabulary basically entails dense vocabulary study, daily. And then putting it into practice with usage and recognition (i.e. reading French books). Anything else is far too slow.
> When I try to tell a story in French, I sense that the listener wants to flee.
The hardest part of learning any language is just accepting that you're going to make mistakes. Maybe French people are more snobbish about French (I have no idea) but generally speaking... people understand that you're taking the time and effort to learn and speak their language.
s/French/<Your Desired Language>/g
I know people who have lived in Korea for 5, 8, 10 years and are frankly still terrible at it. Some of these people own businesses there! Having a bilingual Korean partner is probably the worst thing that I noticed, because you end up always speaking the language that's more convenient, i.e. English.
Funny, one my best friends lives in Korea and is terrible at it. I don't think he ever put any effort into it though. I thought about joining him and put a little effort into learning with a Korean friend: the alphabet made a lot of sense anyway!
I have a low opinion of NYT columnists. As you say, you really have to work at it. Reading the peregrinations of someone who admitted they didn't actually work at it, larded with excuses from psychologists (who are measuring people who also didn't work at it) isn't real edifying or useful; we already know how people manage not to do it. Enough people succeed in learning new languages as adults, I'd rather hear from them.
Whenever I read posts like this I'm much more impressed with the person's desire, motivation, determination, and strength to go an entire year focusing on one a single goal, not necessarily their learning ability.
So many people, me especially, go through spurts of wanting to learn something new or complete a project, reach a goal, and yet I always seem to fizzle out because in the end, why bother?
I'll argue it's incredibly rare for people to set goals, work continuously towards them, and consider it a success more so than what they can now do.
Learning a second language is a goal for many people.
It’s pretty cool to learn a second language and travel. I learned Spanish and backpacked from Guatemala to Buenos Aires over 9 months. I spent the first 3 months learning Spanish in Guatemala.
I feel like the number one motivating reason is having a significant other who has a different native language. This also makes it a lot easier to make progress because you basically have your own tutor who is also motivated to patiently listen to your struggles.
There's a Spanish saying that goes something like: the best way to learn a language is in the bed or the crib.
Nothing is quite as motivating to learn a language than dating someone (or, more likely, trying to) who doesn't speak English very well or is willing to refuse to speak it.
Author here. I considered including this but didn't want to ramble on longer than I already had. Plus, the story isn't really that interesting. Unlike what some commenters below suggested might be possible, I don't have a French-speaking significant other.
I started learning very casually sometime in November using the Duolingo mobile app. After a while I switched to the desktop version of Duolingo and felt myself making pretty good progress. I enjoyed learning French enough to keep at it, and after a couple months I got the idea to move to France after finishing up my master's program. That probably won't be the case anymore, but for most of 2019 I had the motivation to become fluent enough to do pretty well in case I ended up moving to France.
I don't have any French speakers among my non-acquaintance friends, and absolutely 0 French-speaking family. So, there has never been anyone in "real-life" for which I was motivated to learn French. However, wanting to move to a foreign country was definitely enough to motivate me for the better part of a year.
“I am so thoroughly convinced that if we don’t set goals in our life and learn how to master the techniques of living to reach our goals, we can reach a ripe old age and look back on our life only to see that we reached but a small part of our full potential. When one learns to master the principles of setting a goal, he will then be able to make a great difference in the results he attains in this life.”
How do you see this quote relative to your real life observation ?
I always wonder why people post out of context quotes without commentary, when arguably their interpretation is the most interesting part. I care a lot more about what you think than what that religious leader says.
> I personally suspect it's an attempt to "sell" the religion
You can think whatever you want. It's a quote that I enjoy that came to mind while reading the parent comment. I was going to leave the name out because inevitably anything Mormon on the internet gets bombarded with comments like yours, although yours is fairly benign compared to most. I decided it was odd to quote someone and leave out the citation.
That's fair. My Dad always taught me that life is a series of distractions. A few years ago when I was single and college age I would always approach him with opportunities to change my major or accept some cool job. He'd never tell me what to do, but instead would have me write down (or review) my goals in life. And then ask myself, "does this fit within my goals?"
In following this philosophy I turned down many opportunities that seemed too good to be true because they didn't fit my life goals.
This is the main benefit I see in the quote, goals help with stretching yourself, sure. But I think it's far more valuable to stick to something instead of chasing every distraction that comes your way.
That’s great of your dad, and it seems it was well fitting with your personality. Did you ever want to change your goals based on opportunities, once you got out of school and your dad had less influence ?
I rarely met people that had actually viable goals while in school (not that their goal was unrealistic, just missinformed and ill fited for them), and we all took our first years out of school as a discovery period to find something that was working for us.
I am a 50 year old dude. Used Java in 1998-2002, but more as a JSP writer than anything serious. Then none till 2016. Then job changed and now I was expected to know Java. Tried to learn in 2017. Did not work out. Tried to learn in 2018. Did not work out. Then I enrolled in a community college. My job changed again and now I was not expected to know java. But I spent the 6-9 months to complete the courses and came out with much better understanding.
Why did it not work in 2017 and 2018 despite motivation? Distractions. Some external, but mostly internal.
Why did it work in 2019 without motivation? Committed to put in that effort in a non-distracting environment. Well phones are everywhere to alert us, but the constant deadlines and exams keep you grounded.
I think we all have the same issues.And if you/we have a wandering personality (In 2020, we all do thanks to our devices and subscriptions), we need some external tools to keep keep us focussed.
Do find something similar. For myself, I am thinking of 3 months on, 3 months off kind of learning in a formal setting (need not be college) so as not to be overwhelmed.
> So many people, me especially, go through spurts of wanting to learn something new or complete a project, reach a goal, and yet I always seem to fizzle out because in the end, why bother?
For this reason, I'm relatively reluctant to start new things unless I feel that I can actually commit to getting to the level of competency that I want.
> yet I always seem to fizzle out because in the end, why bother?
This has frequently been my problem. I think maybe I'll learn enough to know it's not relevant or helpful outside some curiosity.
Languages are really hard. As an American speaking English I really get no use from knowing another language. Over my life I've learned, Spanish, Hebrew, French and Japanese. Enough to make sentences, and I forgot them all and never used them except for a trip. Everyone in foreign countries speaks English anyway.
Not everyone speaks English, far from it, but I totally understand the sentiment. In any case, even if you're visiting a place and you're awful at a language, it still means a LOT to the native speakers.
Yeah that's true it might be appreciated, though i'll add on and say i think its unreasonable to expect Americans to learn the local language when they travel. If i wanted to visit europe and go to 3 countries in 10 days, (i dont think thats an unreasonable trip) It would be crazy to do dedicated months of learning for that. Anything beyond, hello, good bye, excuse me and thank you is really too much and not a real good use of time.
There is a the real problem. There are too many languages in the world. All are nice in their own way, but nobody knows even 1% of all languages that are currently spoken. When I was in Germany nobody tried to talk to me in Spanish, if I met somebody who didn't speak English I just assumed communication was impossible even though Spain was only a couple hours drive away. I probably came off as a mono-lingual American even though I knew some Spanish.
Its an interesting idea, ive actually been to two in that top 20, morocco and costa rica. I did know a little bit of spanish for the costa rica trip, my high school spanish came back slightly and google translate was helpful enough. Moroccan arabic is really a niche language and found english took me pretty far, i actually didn't bother to learn any arabic for that trip.
Every classical musician who has learned to play his instrument well has done exactly this. Even more, he/she must continue exerting effort and dedication to maintain those hard-earned skills.
(I say classical here not to exclude others, but because this is the area I know first hand.)
Isn't the intended audience of the article non-french speakers? So he writes it in a "universal" language so you could apply it on "how to learn <X> in 12 months" where X is your non-native tongue.
Je suis l'auteur. Je pensais à écrire une version française, mais il y a 9000 mots dans l'article ! Ce serait un tache énorme et probablement pas la meilleure façon de passer mon temps, car j'écris bien moins vite en français qu'en anglais. De plus, j'imagine que la grande majorité de gens qui vont lire cet article sont anglophones.
(For those who don't (or do) speak French, I tried to write this: "I'm the author. I thought about writing a French version, but there are 9000 words in the article. This would be an enormous task and probably not the best way to spend my time, since I write significantly slower in French than in English. Furthermore, I imagine that most people who are going to read this article are English speakers.")
Can understand the main ideas of complex text on both concrete and abstract topics, including technical discussions in their field of specialization.
Can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party.
Can produce clear, detailed text on a wide range of subjects and explain a viewpoint on a topical issue giving the advantages and disadvantages of various options.
CEFR Estimated time required to academically learn B2 level French: 560-650 hours
For a frame of reference, I also started doing DuoLingo daily about 12 months ago and am still at ~A1 proficiency, as far as speaking or writing. I might be at A2 listening, or even B1 reading comprehension. I definitely spend less than two hours a day on it and don't converse with native speakers, which doesn't help.
Most of the corrections she/he received are not justified at all. Like using the work "crédits" is totally fine in this context. I can't get why they corrected some connectors like "à" or "pour", as the usage of these in the text seem at least as correct to me.
Yeah basically half the "mistakes" in that text aren't even wrong. I mean perhaps some annoyingly pedant French teacher, grammarian or Académicien would find something to say about things like using à une salle de sport vs. dans une salle de sport but like 99.9% of French speakers wouldn't notice anything wrong.
It's a typical side-effect of writing anything online. I've had this experience with nearly everything I've ever posted (also: a lot of great comments too). Whenever you want to share knowledge about X: out of the woodwork crawl out the little pests who have nothing to do except hold you to the highest level of scrutiny they can imagine, and they'll word it like they want to crucify you for the slightest infraction.
It doesn't mean anything except that there's a lot of people who are situationally deficit of social skills and anxiously trying to prove they're even smarter than the original poster.
My pet theory is that these jeklers want acceptance and a sense of community, but don't know how to do it.
I don't usually point out mistakes in non-native speakers' writing because I know most people will perceive it the way that you do. However, I always wish that people would correct me when I make a mistake in a foreign language. So part of me always wants to point things out to help people like me.
Like most complex interactions in life, it really comes down to just feeling when the time's more appropriate. Sometimes people explicitly ask you to correct what they just said ("was that right?"), sometimes they halt in the middle of a sentence and look at you expectantly so you just finish/reword it for them, etc. But generally speaking you shouldn't try to correct people too much unless it really impedes proper understanding, it can really undermine people's confidence in their speaking ability even when they are otherwise fluent. And when you do correct them, only do so with respect to grammar or improper choice of words; correcting pronunciation can be a minefield given how it can change widely within a native population, what with accents and suchlike. (Some people, especially in such a centralized language featuring very normative institutions, will argue that they don't have an accent and everyone else does, but they're wrong.) It should only be corrected when it would otherwise lead to misunderstandings.
out of the woodwork crawl out the little pests who have nothing to do except hold you to the highest level of scrutiny they can imagine
You say, with derision and personal insults to those people who dared not meet your standards for perfect corrections and perfect judgement of feedback desirability.
I don’t fundamentally disagree - but there is another way to look at it. Sometimes someone spends a huge amount of time learning something as deeply as possible, and they can be genuinely excited to share that knowledge. It’s hard to find a situation that isn’t stigmatized so the choice is to never try to share this knowledge (disappointing) or just decide to power through it, understanding that sometimes people will take offense or think less of you because of it.
I think in this case, the point of the website the OP posted their passage to is to receive highly critical feedback to ensure 100% accuracy and learn from mistakes. I doubt the person correcting them was doing so with the spirit you describe here. Also, word choice is a bit subjective and perhaps the disagreement with the other poster you're replying to is regional or something else.
Poor corrections indeed. Using "dans" is less correct than the original "a". It's like saying to register "inside" a gym in English. Not the greatest choice of word unless you're really trying to point out the location.
In fact, the only correct correction among all that red is to replace "gym" by "salle de sport". Not to be confused with "gymnasium", it's similar but not the same thing.
The 4th line is misusing the future tense. Should have been pointed out.
> I initially preferred native French speakers, but after taking lessons with non-native speakers, I found that I couldn’t really tell the difference between natives and non-natives.
I'm also a native speaker (France's French if that makes a difference). "Crédits" was replaced by "bons", which means vouchers. In the context that would indeed be the likely correct option (and I never heard "crédits" used that way...)
It's grammatically incorrect to write "s'inscrire à une salle de sport" and should indeed be "dans une salle de sport" and so it was warranted to correct that.
The other corrections are similarly warranted.
I'm a bit worried if you guys all think the original text was fine... ;)
Interesting points! Thanks.
I didn't know "inscrire" is a transitive verb, so indeed "s'inscrire à" is grammatically incorrect.
As often with french it raises the question of "does this rule make sense regarding usage". A quick google search for "s'inscrire à une salle de sport" shows a lot of results, even from people specializing in sport. And many native speakers were fooled by this rule.
As for the "crédit", the dictionnary definition seem to state it is correct (even though "bon" would be a bit better).
https://larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/cr%c3%a9dit/20314...
Crédit: Autorisation de dépenses accordée par les autorités qui établissent, votent ou règlent les budgets ; somme ainsi allouée : La bibliothèque dispose d'un crédit de dix mille euros.
Both "s'inscrire à" and "s'inscrire dans" exist. The trick is to pick the right form. Both may be correct in some cases, but not in others.
Sometimes the meaning changes as well. For example "s'inscrire à l'école" and "s'inscrire dans une école". The latter means "to register with a school" but the former is more "to register to start school" in the sense that it is 'school' in general.
As for "crédits", indeed the meaning is basically the same as in English and the original sentence is correct in the language. But it's not something anyone would say. The terms used would most likely be either "bon" (voucher) or "forfait" (inclusive special rate), or perhaps "chèque" (cheque) instead of "bon" if it was given by your employer as a benefit.
Transitivity is not an issue: "obéir à ses instincts" and "suivre ces instincts".
So "s'incrire à" is not incorrect per se, e.g. "s'inscrire à des cours de danse". Even, you must say "s'inscrire à la mairie" (e.g. for poll lists) and not "s'inscrire dans la mairie".
I think that what is technically correct is to use "à" when you talk about where you sign in or register (usually a one-time action) and "dans" when you talk about signing in to perform a recurring activity.
That little à word derives from the Latin words "ab" and "ad", which you can find in words ("adjacent", "adverb", "addition", "adventure"... hemmm I mean *aventure"; sometimes English is more Latin than French) which tell the idea of proximity or direction.
Also, the guy clearly makes the sentences in his head in English and then translate them. Everybody does it. It's just blatant. Fluency makes it go away.
Source: Am a quebecer (fr). I do it mostly when i speak English.
No one would bat an eye if you used crédits instead of bons in that context, nor would anyone do so if they said s'inscrire à une salle de sport instead of s'inscrire dans une salle de sport. Maybe they're gramatically incorrect for an académicien, but no one but pedants really cares about what the Académie has to say.
Also a native speaker, "à une salle" is correct. The academy may disagree, but language is made by users, not a body of old farts chosen by politicians.
> It's grammatically incorrect to write "s'inscrire à une salle de sport" and should indeed be "dans une salle de sport" and so it was warranted to correct that.
I'm not even sure. If you consider a "salle de sport" is an activity rather than a place, it becomes correct. You would say "s'inscire à la piscine" (for swimming-pool) for instance because "piscine" is considered an activity rather than a place, in this context.
Except, of course, "salle de sport" is not an activity, and if you want to be perfectly correct about activities you should say "s'inscrire à la natation" not "à la piscine". "Piscine" (swimming pool) is the place, "natation" (swimming) is the activity.
It's fine to say "s'inscrire à la salle de sport/piscine" if you are talking about a specific one.
Also, many people here are kind of missing the point. The OP posted that for the express purpose of receiving corrections and feedback. People are criticizing the corrector for performing the task that was requested of them — likely on a website dedicated to this practice of written correction...
For a while, I used to hang out in a subreddit for people who are learning Spanish to give advice (I'm a Spaniard).
You wouldn't believe the amount of times I was "corrected" with suggestions that were clearly, blatantly wrong if I didn't outright say that I was a native speaker.
I think it was mainly Americans from Spanish speaking immigrant families who were overconfident on their skills, but it was funny nonetheless.
How many of those were folks correcting you were Spanish? I wonder if the folks correcting you just learned a different dialect.
For those not familiar, American Spanish diverged significantly from "mainland" Spanish. Even then Mexican Spanish is quite distinct in its own "charming" way from nearly every other Spanish speaking American country. It's not just the vocabulary, even the verb tenses are used differently in different countries. Case in point, the only time I've heard vosotros used outside of school was in a La Polla Records song (ya ahora que?). Or looking for the baños in the Barcelona airport…. The differences are significant enough it's possible you're both right.
Whenever I've seen language discussed online lots of people come out of the woodwork defending their own niche regional variations. The comments section on Vanity Fair's Slang School series of youtube videos is a particularly obnoxious example. The videos themselves are great IMO. It's not always that bad though. I was trying to figure out how to differentiate between a banana and a plantain in Spanish (yay spanishdict forums) and I didn't realize just how many different ways there are to say banana/plantain. It's like Eskimos and snow.
Nah, I am aware of how broad the Spanish language is, but these were basic mistakes that wouldn't be correct in any dialect. Kinda like how Americans might not know British English vocabulary, yet they know at a glance that "me will spoke English afternoon this" is not correct anywhere.
Yikes, that would be pretty grating. And, yeah, folks love to be pedantic on the intertubes.
To be properly obnoxious I'll wonder if that's how those folks were taught to speak/write. In my mind the analogous English situation is when British speakers use me in place of my.
I hope you’re kidding.
The initial text isn’t good, the corrections are maybe not perfect and some are more a matter of taste but definitely better than the original wordings.
“y dédier du temps” is closer to the original formulation and equally good for instance.
I noticed that most of native speakers of any language are not that good actually in their mother tongue.
For someone who’s learning the best disservice is to not point their mistakes out.
And sorry it’s not being pedantic to ask people to be precise enough to not spend my time guessing what they maybe were thinking.
>I noticed that most of native speakers of any language are not that good actually in their mother tongue.
That doesn't make any sense. Maybe they're not good according to the normative institutions attempting to control the language, but that doesn't have any bearing on the ability of billions of people to communicate with their peers using their mother tongue. Just because an institution says a certain form is "incorrect" doesn't mean people are going to stop using it and make themselves understood with that form.
If these institutions attempt to control it, then they’re not normative.
It does make perfect sense when the improper use of tenses or grammar break the temporality, spatiality or relationships of the narrative.
Eg. The obvious ones in french: ce/se, ça(cela)/çà/sa... etc. A bit less obvious: “après qu’il ait”, subjunctive after stating a fact or is the subjunctive intended and it wasn’t a fact... etc.
And sometimes it becomes poetic “à l’insu de leur plein gré” when both forms are correct but with completely different meanings.
Except the subjunctive almost completely lost its initial semantic value of expressing the hypothetical or fictious in French, and in most cases has been replaced by the indicative. (Contrast with languages like Italian or Spanish that did retain the subjunctive in these cases, and look at the (many) situations where the indicative is used in French and the subjunctive is used in Italian/Spanish). These days, the subjunctive is mainly used in clauses where an infinitive could be used (pour qu'il ait/pour avoir, sans qu'il ait/sans avoir, etc.) In that sense, après qu'il ait, on top of feeling more "natural" due to the symmetry with avant qu'il ait, isn't as outrageous an error as académiciens would have you believe, it simply follows this very handy rule of thumb.
Generally speaking, proper use of tenses and moods is overrated; it is inconsistent across Romance languages yet speakers of either have no difficulty making themselves understood, or learning others' systems. Many non-Romance languages dispense entirely with this system and yet their speakers don't encounter any difficulties expressing the same shades of meaning as they would in French.
> Except the subjunctive almost completely lost its initial semantic value of expressing the hypothetical or fictious in French
That’s definitely not true, and what follows is thus complete bs sorry. Where does this come from to begin with? I even miss Spanish’ subjunctive future in French!
It’s not only a mistake wrt the language rules but also a logical one, if intended initially to state facts.
> Generally speaking, proper use of tenses and moods is overrated
Wiping your butt after pooping is overrated too, you should try the opposite.
To order a coffee maybe, but there is definitely something more interesting in (not only) french.
That’s what makes a language more or less concise and elegant. You can express countless shades of meanings in pure arid arithmetic too, but yet...
>That’s definitely not true, and what follows is thus complete bs sorry. Where does this come from to begin with?
Alright I have my trusty Grammaire espagnole (Beschrelle) at hand, and here are the differences in use of the subjunctive. The following cases involve the indicative in Spanish and the subjunctive in French:
-A concessive clause, whose opposition relies on a reality-grounded fact (aunque està lloviendo/bien qu'il pleuve)
-A relative clause after a superlative or similar adjectives expressing the idea of "first", "unique", uses the subjunctive in French. The comparison point being grounded in reality, Spanish always uses the indicative. (la mejor secretaria que hemos tenido/la meilleure secrétaire que nous ayons eue).
Conversely, here are cases where Spanish uses the subjunctive and French uses the indicative:
-Expressing a condition, hypothesis or hypothetic comparison after si (si vinieras conmigo/si tu venais avec moi)
-Expressing a supposition (quiza ella esté al tanto/peut-être qu'elle est au courant)
-Temporal clauses in the future (Cuando venga/Quand il viendra)
I can go on if you like. Very clearly, Spanish's use of the subjunctive very closely follows the hypothetical/unrealized aspect of the content, whereas French's use is less consistent with that aspect, and mostly depends on the locution being used.
>I even miss Spanish’ subjunctive future in French!
And yet I'm sure you don't have any problems expressing the hypothetical and/or fictious in Spanish, do you? At least hundreds of millions of Spanish speakers don't.
>Wiping your butt after pooping is overrated too, you should try the opposite.
Seeing how mood use is inconsistent from one Romance language to the other, I guess Spanish and Italian speakers aren't wiping their butts according to your point of view (and you aren't wiping yours according to them). Or...we could just stop adopting such a normative attitude and admit usage changes across countries and time periods without anything being reprehensible about it?
>That’s what makes a language more or less concise and elegant. You can express countless shades of meanings in pure arid arithmetic too, but yet...
Are you seriously arguing that languages that lack the tense and mood system of Romance languages are somehow less elegant and concise, or less able to express countless shades of meaning somehow?
> I can go on if you like. Very clearly, Spanish's use of the subjunctive very closely follows
Oh yes go on please.
But you were originally stating that subjunctive in French lost its semantic value. Now you making it narrow and added "compared to Spanish".
> I guess Spanish and Italian speakers aren't wiping their butts according to your point of view
I think you missed the point. It was meant to say that misuse of tenses and moods may alter causality and in general events chaining is not commutative (poop o wipe != wipe o poop).
> And yet I'm sure you don't have any problems expressing the hypothetical
> Are you seriously arguing that languages that lack the tense and mood system
By the very definition of "concise", yes.
I said you can do it in any language, but the formulation at some point will become cumbersome.
>But you were originally stating that subjunctive in French lost its semantic value. Now you making it narrow and added "compared to Spanish".
I said almost lost, and I'm choosing to believe out of charity that you didn't notice the extra word.
> But you were originally stating that subjunctive in French lost its semantic value. Now you making it narrow and added "compared to Spanish".
Yes, that's the crux of my argument, comparing use cases in French with that of other Romance languages in order to show how far the subjunctive use cases in French drifted from their original purpose and meaning. How else am I supposed to demonstrate it without a couple of reference points to compare with?
> It was meant to say that misuse of tenses and moods may alter causality and in general events chaining is not commutative (poop o wipe != wipe o poop).
I did take your point a little too literally, sorry. Still, the fact that mood and tense use across Romance languages is inconsistent, yet:
-People who speak either Romance language have no trouble distinguishing the actual from the hypothetical within their language, and
-People who speak multiple Romance languages have no trouble switching from one mood to the other according to the use case/language combination at hand,
shows how unlikely your "poop o wipe" situations are in practice. People "misuse" tenses and moods all the time (which is the prescriptive way of saying tense and mood usage evolves all the time) yet they still manage to communicate clearly somehow. This shows that these are not actually central to convey meaning and there are other avenues that do not use this system (context, adverbial cues, etc.).
>I said you can do it in any language, but the formulation at some point will become cumbersome.
Do you have any evidence for this? Like, can you showcase foreign languages that do not feature this system and whose formulation of the hypothetical would prove consistently more cumbersome and verbose than that of Romance languages? I'm not sure if you realize how far-reaching that statement is.
I co-supervised a British PhD student once who did his PhD at a Spanish university. Not only was he a native speaker, but he also wrote very clear - no passive sentences, clear structure in thinking and writing, very good. He had a paper reviewed by someone who only saw his university on that paper (blind review) and wrote 'paper could do with review by a native speaker'. Why? No idea. I knew who the reviewer was (small world) and he wasn't even a native speaker himself.
My theory: when you ask someone to correct language, and they know the author isn't a native speaker, they'll nitpick on things that native speakers wouldn't be corrected on; but the corrections will be much more about the idiosyncrasies of the corrector than the level of the author (when that author has reached a certain level of proficiency of course).
Honestly learning french was incredibly easy when I did it in school. I just was too lazy to actually put in the effort. To learn vocabulary all I did was write down the french word and based on that say the translated word and then do the opposite. That's it. It just stuck in my head. Then when I decided to use Anki I added 350 words it didn't even take me a week to learn them. It was so incredibly easy that I just did 150 words per day. I can't say the same about Asian languages. Those refuse to stick even at a moderate pace of 30 words per day.
I find the timeline believable but I’m impressed (and happy!) to see this worked with self-study. I lived abroad for a while and found I was able to pick up the local language pretty quickly because I was fully immersed in it, by 6 mo. I was comfortably conversational for day to day things. However, I would also caution for anyone wanting to learn a language at home, it’s a muscle and it does fade when you don’t use it. After a decade back in the states I’ve lost the majority of the language I learned since there’s no one around to use it with.
It’s still much tougher to come by that one might think. For one thing, European networks don’t care about distributing their content outside of Europe, even in exchange for actual money. For another, a huge proportion of the content is dubbed from English, which isn’t ideal. Even pirating the stuff’s pretty hard, since there’s (apparently) little interest in it.
Japanese may be a pain in the ass to learn but it’s hard not to be jealous of the resources and media available to Japanese learners, as someone learning most any other language (though, in the US at least, Spanish media’s pretty easy to get ahold of)
IF you can find them. Also you have no idea about quality. I've watched several videos in my TL where the plot was 1 here is what I'm going to do, then 10 minutes silently doing it, then 1 minute of reflection. There are a lot of videos of one guy doing something without talking. Note that the above is probably a reflection on my tastes.
I've also watched several videos and concluded after a while that it wasn't my TL but a related language.
Best way to start is watching tv news. Hosts have very clear pronuntiation, it's their job after all.
I first research what tv channels are more popular in the country, then search YouTube with that info. YouTube doesn't seem to offer a lot of search options, but it's possible to do the search from Google or DuckDuckGo and later select "videos" tab.
DuckDuckGo has a dropdown menu that allows search localization, so the first results are the most relevant to the selected country. Once you find a handful of interesting channels, you're set up.
The only thing I disagree with is best. Best is subjective, I find most news boring an irrelevant (a lot of gossip about people I don't care about) so while it is great if you can stand it, I tend to get mad about the subjects they consider worth covering and turn it off.
This is a reflection on me of course - you should have your own opinions.
OK, let's say that it's a good way to learn the language, not so much as entertainment. Actually I agree with you about how little of what we see in the news is worth covering.
Anyway, if there's a channel with lots of contents, it's still possible to select only interesting topics. Maybe it's easier for me, because the language I'm most interested in is English :) Usually I don't even need YouTube, just setting Netflix language to English.
For other languages, I'm mostly interested in listening to specific words pronuntiation, usually names.
It seems to work worldwide: I watch it from Japan. Interestingly most of the commercials are not displayed from here, instead we get the rolling presentation of the channel.
If you're interested in french podcast I can highly recommand the French public radio network Radio France. I'm pretty sure they're available anywhere in the world and they produce tons of contents (music, news, science, cultural podcasts) and all of it is available on replay for free.
France Inter is the main radio station, France Culture the "intellectual" one and France Info the live news radio.
It isn't nearly as effective. I've done both - I was an exchange student to Germany, (Landed with 1 year of US highschool German, maybe 150 words.), and was thinking in German in about 10 months. (I was also 17/18 years old, which makes a huge difference.) For the last few months, I've been trying to get more functional than my "taqueria Spanish", and have shifted to listening/watching mostly Spanish-language media.
It helps, but is nowhere nearly as effective as not being able to escape it. In Germany, I remember going to bed exhausted with a headache quite a bit for a period of months, roughly the phase from when I was barely functional to when I was able to take part in class in non-stupid ways.
Watching TV for a couple hours is nothing like that.
I think it's essential if you're serious about learning. For Spanish at least you can find people $4-$6 an hour which can fit into some seriously lean budgets. I think it's one of the best ways to spend an hour.
I currently chat with my teacher every morning on my bluetooth headphones while exercising in my backyard (of course, confirming first that this wouldn't annoy her). Most productive hour of my day, and I she likes the certainty of me committing to a daily time slot.
Cool way to build friendships too. In April I'm visiting her in Venezuela. Though I recommend using a service like https://www.conversationexchange.com/ for a more overt way to meet different people while practicing language.
Author here. Italki is a wonderful tool and is undoubtedly what brought me from being to formulate rote Duolingo sentences to being able to have conversations for hours on end. I think Italki or some suitable replacement that gets you 1-on-1 attention for long periods of time speaking is absolutely essential if you want to have extended conversations with people.
Nice article, but just a headsup: The website certificate of runwes.com is only valid for the following names: www.github.com, * .github.io, * .githubusercontent.com, * .github.com, github.com, github.io, githubusercontent.com.
Everyhing is alerts and warnings when clicking the link.
The problem is because you're using GitHub Pages to host your website on a custom domain. When someone accesses your website via HTTPS, they get a certificate that is only valid for GitHub domains. Of course the HN submission is an HTTP link, so the person you're replying to probably has their browser configured to use HTTPS everywhere.
Very impressive progress. I think it speaks to the author's commitment and dedication, as adding 50 new cards per day is a lot. Most people will burn out pretty quickly at that rate. I recommend something like 10-20 per day. I'm also one of those people that say you should make your own cards from material you're immersing in. When going through a predefined list of words like that I think you're bound to end up learning a bunch of words that you'll never encounter (at least not for a long time), and a bunch of words that you'll have no idea how to use correctly.
I wrote an article[0] about my own method for language learning, focusing mainly on the spaced repetition aspect.
Author here. It was a lot, but seeing the number go down rapidly was a nice motivator. Keep in mind that these are just pre-made 1-word cards, so they're much faster than the full-sentence cards people suggest, which are likely more effective though also more time-consuming. Furthermore, French has an unexpectedly (for me) large number of cognates with English, so many of those words were freebies for me. If I was learning Mandarin, for example, 50 cards a day would require an absolutely enormous amount of effort, most of which would likely be wasted.
You are correct in that a decent chunk of the words are relatively useless, and I forgot many of them already after stopping Anki for a few months. There were also some words that I had no idea how to use, as you said. However, I did some extra looking-up of difficult words, and the deck included example sentences for many of the words. Also, I definitely claim that your method is more effective, but clearly this one at least worked well enough to do what I did.
It reminds me a little of how I learnt English myself. Out of high school I was really bad and really wanted to change that. I switched all my video games to English, started watching 4 to 5 hours of TV shows/movies in English a day, reading books in English, etc etc. I definitely wasn't as intense as the author, but I think it worked pretty well considering that now I live in the US as a US citizen :)
I have achieved the same results in Chinese (HSK 5), but it took me 5 years. The resource I see that is missing is HelloTalk, with lots of opportunities to converse for free, and post your writing practice to receive corrections. Can also post your voice.
If you live in Canada or Quebec, it makes sense to learn French. Note that conversational French only uses half of the 14 or so verb tenses, and people expect you to use the correct grammar and gender.
If you plan to write French for a living, that will be tough for a non-native writer.
But if you live in the USA, Spanish is more useful and you'll have the opportunity to practise it.
French isn't that hard. Lots of words are the same as English, grammar is a bit different but once you 'get' it, it's way more consistent than English which makes it easier for the most part.
I learned it at school as a kid. Not long. But I've taught others, seen adults pick it up. Like most other skills, it just requires work and practice. Immerse yourself in it, want to learn and you will. Most people simply take an intro course, don't talk to anyone then complain it's hard.
French is hard even for people who speak it on a daily basis.
I am neither a linguist nor an historian (so google it and find reliable sources for more information) but AFAIK, it was designed and reformed to be an "elitist" language (for political reasons), there are gazillions of special cases that do not make any sense (both in the written and spoken language) and there are heated debates about what should be kept or removed (in the perspective of teaching it for instance).
Couple remarks on the author's alleged "weaknesses":
>Understand strongly accented speech. I understand essentially all the “standard” French without subtitles, but very little of the Quebecois.
Most European French speakers have trouble understanding Québecois as well, especially if it delves into slang, so I wouldn't fret much. High level (and written) speech should be ok though.
>Understand very slang-heavy speech. I know a good chunk of argot but there are still plenty of informal vocab words and expressions I don’t know. Especially that damn verlan.
Again, seeing how most people over 35 don't understand any of that stuff either I wouldn't worry too much. Especially because this stuff evolves like crazy and new slang/verlan words keep popping up all the time. I'm in my late 20s and can already feel the divide in the slang I and friends in their early 20s use.
>Write error free text. I can get the message across pretty well without relying on a dictionary, but I often phrase things a bit unnaturally and make minor grammatical errors.
Like I and another poster said, most of the mistakes aren't really mistakes. Only the most extraordinary pedant would object to these.
>Quickly use less common verb tenses. While I know how to construct the past conditional and future perfect, I still can’t use them very fluidly.
>Recognize all the weird literary tenses. Imperfect subjunctive? Yuck.
Yeah no one uses these. In fact if you did attempt to use these in a normal conversation there's a good chance you wouldn't be understood. Even in writing, modern authors are more and more switching to present and past perfect. Even tenses like the future are getting increasingly uncommon, people instead use the present and rely on contextual clues or markers, like in German (" we'll meet tomorrow" -> "we meet tomorrow").
What I mean to say from all of this is that even native French speakers are not completely at ease with these pain points so it's no use worrying about them too much.
Do you happen to be from Quebec? I'm Canadian by birth and have wanted recently to learn Quebecois French, but have struggled with finding practical resources (as everyone seems to agree most French resources and learning programs are going to give you a rather half-baked understanding of Quebecois French).
I’m Québécois. Honestly, I’m not aware of any Quebec-specific online resources. If you’re still living in Canada, there’s a good chance that you can get night classes at a University that would be taught by a Quebec expat. Otherwise, I wouldn’t agree that other resources will give you a half-baked understanding. It’s mostly a question of training your ear for the accent, which you can do by watching shows, for example. Differences in vocabulary are well-documented and easy to memorize (probably, as someone who’s done the reverse and learned the France equivalent).
Mango languages app offers Canadian French/Québécois - I find their approach to language learning much better than Duolingo. Plus it comes free with your library card if you’re in Ontario!
> The future perfect is very much used both orally
The past conditional, maybe. The future, really? Do you actually say things like nous nous verrons demain or il l'aura fait avant in casual speech? Well I don't know if you do, but the vast majority of French speakers would say something like on se voit demain et il l'a probablement fait avant. Instead of using specific verb forms to convery meaning people instead rely on context and adverbial cues, as do the speakers of the dozens of languages that do not use the byzantine tense and mood system of the Romance languages (see: Japanese, Chinese, etc.) and are certainly not the worse for it.
>I've noticed that the subjunctive is used less in writing since some change to 'simplify' (i.e. dumb down) the language.
You're aware that the argument you're making about the language getting "dumbed down" is literally millennia old, right?
I've always been interested in languages and over the years I've tried many.
Apps certainly help but I find nothing sticks. I can easily read words of the language in front of me. But I can't think of example sentences on my own.
For French I was amazed at how much of it is condensed. Like English some people jokingly may say "jeet" for "did you eat". In French there are a surprisingly large amount of examples like that.
Congratulations to the author! They achieved a level where having a conversation with them is not painful, for either side of the conversation.
For anyone who is bored of learning yet another programming language, learning a human language will challenge you and humble you and reward you if you keep going at it.
Just please give up on self-imposed deadlines, and as this article states, there is no magic bullet, no magic method to learning a language, despite what SEO-driven blogs and videos will tell you.
I found DuoLingo interesting, but it didn't really help me to learn Spanish. I had a lot more success (I just came back from a trip to Panama where I had to interact with people who spoke little no no English) using https://www.languagetransfer.org (it also has courses for Greek, French, German, Arabic, Turkish, Italian and Swahili).
The courses are sets of MP3 tracks that are free to download, but if you find them useful, please donate!
I've been using Babbel to learn Spanish. Anyone have suggestions for where to go after maxing resources like Babbel and Duolingo? I feel like I hit a wall somewhere and the next steps aren't so clear. Some of the steps the author used look helpful like changing phone language and heavy use of anki
Lingvist [0] has been useful to me for vocab building post-Duolingo. The mobile apps are thoughtfully designed -- you can use text or speech input fairly easily -- and they're rolling out (for Spanish and French so far; I'd expect German will come soon, but Russian seems to be a ways off) the ability to generate domain-inspired personalized courses using sample text you input. I'm mainly practicing my German right now, so I haven't tested it much, but this might be very powerful in combination with Project Gutenberg texts, etc. I also appreciate that they have Spanish courses for both Latin America and Spain.
Italki Italki Italki, nothing has been better for that. I use my flashcards I made on Quizlet, listen to videos/podcasts, re-practice Duolingo, etc., but 3-6 hours per week talking to native Speakers on Italki (or any equivalent service) will work wonders.
I think reading young adult books is one of the best bangs for the buck early on. Most people agree that they procrastinated it for too long because they thought it would be too hard, myself included.
Bonus) Play a MUD in Spanish. http://www.balzhur.org/ is the biggest one I know of with 10-25 people online. It's a 1-to-1 translation of Realms of Despair. Even if you are too bad at Spanish to interact with people, it's a fun interactive way to get used to common verbs. And you can go at your own slow pace, reading the description of each room.
This is an awesome post. The one thing I wish it included was context around their lifestyle during this time period. How many hours a day did they devote? Were they working full time? If so doing what? What other responsibilities / life things got in the way.
It's one thing to imagine yourself doing this given six months of dedicated time (not that they claimed to have had this) and another to get a real sense of how one might fit this into one's life. Anyway, great, detailed article and an impressive accomplishment.
Author here. I don't work full time but I'm a master's student. I had a decent enough chunk of free time to dedicate to this without too many serious obligations. It's hard for me to estimate time per day, as there were some week-long periods where I did very minimal study when particularly busy, and other periods where I'd spend 20+ hours a week of solid effort on it. I think achieving this is probably outside the scope of someone who isn't extremely abnormally self-motivated and efficient and who has a family, long working hours, etc. That being said, I think most people can find the time to reach a moderate conversational level in a year without too much trouble, assuming they work efficiently.
Ikenna learned (conversational?) French in 6 months. It's quite an inspiring video. After watching a few of his videos now, it definitely plays a part in continuing to motivate me learning Japanese.
Author here. Indeed, I linked to this video in one of the sections. Starting off every few weeks or so I'd watch the video again to remind myself that this is possible and "keep my eyes on the prize." His level in the video isn't incredible or anything but definitely something to be proud of after 6 months of study. I can confirm such is possible because I was around his level after 6 months too, from what I can tell.
Just in case the author stops by HN: I want to echo the sentiment that this post was awesome, informative, and motivating. Thank you for posting, and please continue with your blog!
> Started consistently covering 50 new words a day on Anki
For anyone here who has used anki, that's a huge number. This person is really dedicating their time at this point, because 50 new cards/day very quickly snowballs and you're doing 300+ reviews daily.
I did 20 reviews/day for ~6 months straight for Korean, and that took me 30-60 minutes, every day. Thinking about 50/day sounds utterly exhausting.
It's a good thing a french 5k deck exists also, as they saved a lot of time on not having to make cards manually. On average a word entry takes ~1-2 minutes (I have to query 3 dictionaries), so that comes down to only ~45 words per hour...
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> I firmly believe that learning languages in school, especially in the United States, is generally extremely inefficient.
This, so much this. Classes provide rigidity but having a tutor + finding people to talk with helps you out significantly more. I went to a language exchange that wasn't bad* where I was able to speak for 1 hour with 1 korean person, a teacher, who would point out my mistakes and write down words when I had to dip into English. My conversational ability improved dramatically after doing that for ~1 month.
* Most language exchanges are shit. Because they're unstructured. People randomly filter in/out and a lot of people are shy or aren't sure what to do. It often devolves into a) "Any korean questions??" or just general conversation. Great for making friends, terrible for seriously practicing Korean.
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> As much as Duolingo likes to tell you this, 5 minutes a day of fumbling around with the mobile app isn’t going to make you fluent.
I get why duolingo does this. At the same time, I hate them for advertising themselves as "the world's best way to learn <Language>". Not only is this not true, their Japanese and Korean courses were (still are?) notoriously terrible compared to their Spanish and French courses. Not that a language can be learned from 1 resource, anyways.
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> On the other hand, since I spent so many hours just casually talking with people, I got pretty good at having generic conversations.
This is where I got after ~12-15 months as well. I can quite easily converse about basic things like me, my hobbies, work, etc for hours but as soon as the conversation delves into a niche like politics or just more advanced discussion, I falter pretty hard. Also describing things beyond a basic level is rough: "I like this, that" vs "The mood of the film was twisted but exhilarating".
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What I find interesting here is how far one can progress in only 12 months with a language like Spanish or French (with a mother tongue of English). For Korean, I wasn't even remotely close to understanding things like news articles at 12 months of study. I'm still not, because that vocabulary is quite advanced and not really used in regular conversations that much.
The simple truth for learning a language is as the author here mentioned: consistent and diligent studying, with humility. There is no shortcut, no one app that does it all. You just have to study, and be able to honestly evaluate yourself and your mistakes. (Recording yourself speaking the language greatly helps here).
How's your Korean now? Any other tips for Korean? I spent 4 months in Korea and really want to learn the language, but it seems impossibly difficult. 감사합니다 :(
Well, the good news is that its not impossibly difficult! Just very difficult. ;-) As the Koreans say, 화이팅! (Fighting!)
Korean isn't that different from other languages, really. It's difficult for English speakers because there aren't really any commonalities besides random loanwords. And it uses the SOV (subject object verb) pattern instead of SVO. Hangeul was designed to be easy to learn, so unlike Japanese, you'll always be able to read/pronounce any Korean text... even if you don't know what it means.
In some ways Korean is actually easier than, say, German (der/die/das tables, anyone?). The only thing I would say is make sure you focus on good pronunciation. Korean is very particular about mouth shapes and tongue positions. Many Americans especially come off with an accent because they neglect to put their tongue in the right spot. TalkToMeInKorean has a video course for ~$10, highly worth it.
Also, do not romanize! Only use 한글. For example, ㄱ is NOT g/k, it's simply ㄱ. Those are only meant as reference points for brand new learners. Romanizations will only impede your progress for pronunciation.
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I would say I'm intermediate in speaking, high intermediate in writing/reading, low intermediate in listening. That is to say, I can converse in Korean somewhat easily for a few hours as long as the topics are relatively basic. Like my occupation, hobbies, what I like, and so on. Listening is still very difficult for "real" conversations, because of dialects, abbreviations/contractions, slang, etc. I can listen to textbook conversations and drama dialogues much more easily. I pretty much only text my friends in Korean.
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There are 3 major players for korean learning resources right now, and a few smaller ones:
1) Go!Billy Korean. This guy is really good at korean and IMO is the best at explaining things in a clear manner. He has a youtube channel [0] as well as a website [1] with free PDFs of his lessons. He does a livestream every sunday, but he takes those ~2h videos and condenses them into shorter videos as well. He also has a textbook series which many people like.
2) HowToStudyKorean.com. This is mainly what I used when I started. This guy (over)explains sometimes but there is an incredible amount of material here. The only issue is the lesson order is kinda wack sometimes. I followed it linearly, but I read ahead if I wanted to learn that specific grammar point. I.e. how to say "because", etc.
3) TalkToMeInKorean.com. They have a youtube channel [2] and publish books. I have spent like $130+ on their books so feel free to ask a question about a particular one. The Beginner/Intermediate Korean Conversations books are really good.
Aside from these main resources, I recommend the Korean Grammar In Use textbooks. The beginner one has a good selection of grammar points. However, the main resources I mentioned pretty much cover the same beginner grammar points for free, so this book isn't strictly necessary. IMO the advanced one is worth it.
Other youtube channels I like: Dingo Story [11] has drama clips, around 10-15 minutes. WBKT Yujin [12] does lessons and listening practice, around intermediate+ level.
Apps: ignore duolingo/lingodeer, they have issues with spacing and teaching formality levels. Sejong Beginner Grammar (세종 문법 초급) is good, it has audio as well [3]. It supports android & ios.
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Dictionaries: endic.naver.com and krdict.korean.go.kr are the main dictionaries. krdict is better but a bit slower.
There's also a hanja dictinoary at hanja.dict.naver.com, but as a beginner do not start studying that stuff. It'll only complicate things. Once you're at least intermediate or so, howtostudykorean also has a hanja course [17].
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Vocab: use Anki [4]. Anki is a spaced repetition flashcards app. The pc/mac/android apps are free, the ios app is $20, which supports the developer. I cannot recommend anki enough for brute-for...
Author here. You are right, that was a lot of cards, but doing it in French is several times easier and faster than doing it in English due to the massive number of cognates and near-identical alphabet. The 5k deck was also, as you say, a massive time saver, if not less effective than making your own deck.
I learned french in 3 months aprox. while living in France. Ive arrived there without much knowledge of the language. First weeks I was feeling like an alien. Then I started to understand but couldn't speak. Then I started to use translate and dictionary to build some phrases beforehand to be able to be polite and ask the questions I wanted. After 3 months something clicked during a talk I was watching, I not only began to understand without having to think but was able to ask questions to the French guy on my side about the talk (it was about a ML algorithm). I am a native speaker of a Latin language (Portuguese).
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 270 ms ] threadThe article (not the NYT one, which is just typical whiney urban cat lady trash) has a lot of the components of a marketing submarine. Particularly obviously as .... well, who is this person?
I do think apps are pretty helpful in stuffing vocab in the brain. Mixed bag though. Duolingo is shit for me; they don't have continental Portuguese (Memrise does). The rest of it rings true as well (I listen to Portuguese radio at home to work on my understanding when I'm not being a slug).
Living in France will not teach you French, besides "survival French" and probably "minimal conversational French". Even having a French partner won't help at all, unless you both commit to speaking French (and then your partner is put into a weird position where they're your partner but have to constantly correct you)...
Acquiring Superior/Distinguished [0] level vocabulary basically entails dense vocabulary study, daily. And then putting it into practice with usage and recognition (i.e. reading French books). Anything else is far too slow.
> When I try to tell a story in French, I sense that the listener wants to flee.
The hardest part of learning any language is just accepting that you're going to make mistakes. Maybe French people are more snobbish about French (I have no idea) but generally speaking... people understand that you're taking the time and effort to learn and speak their language.
s/French/<Your Desired Language>/g
I know people who have lived in Korea for 5, 8, 10 years and are frankly still terrible at it. Some of these people own businesses there! Having a bilingual Korean partner is probably the worst thing that I noticed, because you end up always speaking the language that's more convenient, i.e. English.
[0]: https://www.languagetesting.com/actfl-proficiency-scale
I have a low opinion of NYT columnists. As you say, you really have to work at it. Reading the peregrinations of someone who admitted they didn't actually work at it, larded with excuses from psychologists (who are measuring people who also didn't work at it) isn't real edifying or useful; we already know how people manage not to do it. Enough people succeed in learning new languages as adults, I'd rather hear from them.
So many people, me especially, go through spurts of wanting to learn something new or complete a project, reach a goal, and yet I always seem to fizzle out because in the end, why bother?
I'll argue it's incredibly rare for people to set goals, work continuously towards them, and consider it a success more so than what they can now do.
It’s pretty cool to learn a second language and travel. I learned Spanish and backpacked from Guatemala to Buenos Aires over 9 months. I spent the first 3 months learning Spanish in Guatemala.
Nothing is quite as motivating to learn a language than dating someone (or, more likely, trying to) who doesn't speak English very well or is willing to refuse to speak it.
I started learning very casually sometime in November using the Duolingo mobile app. After a while I switched to the desktop version of Duolingo and felt myself making pretty good progress. I enjoyed learning French enough to keep at it, and after a couple months I got the idea to move to France after finishing up my master's program. That probably won't be the case anymore, but for most of 2019 I had the motivation to become fluent enough to do pretty well in case I ended up moving to France.
I don't have any French speakers among my non-acquaintance friends, and absolutely 0 French-speaking family. So, there has never been anyone in "real-life" for which I was motivated to learn French. However, wanting to move to a foreign country was definitely enough to motivate me for the better part of a year.
- M. Russell Ballard
I always wonder why people post out of context quotes without commentary, when arguably their interpretation is the most interesting part. I care a lot more about what you think than what that religious leader says.
But the quote is sort of bland and not that insightful anyway.
You can think whatever you want. It's a quote that I enjoy that came to mind while reading the parent comment. I was going to leave the name out because inevitably anything Mormon on the internet gets bombarded with comments like yours, although yours is fairly benign compared to most. I decided it was odd to quote someone and leave out the citation.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
In following this philosophy I turned down many opportunities that seemed too good to be true because they didn't fit my life goals.
This is the main benefit I see in the quote, goals help with stretching yourself, sure. But I think it's far more valuable to stick to something instead of chasing every distraction that comes your way.
I rarely met people that had actually viable goals while in school (not that their goal was unrealistic, just missinformed and ill fited for them), and we all took our first years out of school as a discovery period to find something that was working for us.
Why did it not work in 2017 and 2018 despite motivation? Distractions. Some external, but mostly internal.
Why did it work in 2019 without motivation? Committed to put in that effort in a non-distracting environment. Well phones are everywhere to alert us, but the constant deadlines and exams keep you grounded.
I think we all have the same issues.And if you/we have a wandering personality (In 2020, we all do thanks to our devices and subscriptions), we need some external tools to keep keep us focussed.
Do find something similar. For myself, I am thinking of 3 months on, 3 months off kind of learning in a formal setting (need not be college) so as not to be overwhelmed.
For this reason, I'm relatively reluctant to start new things unless I feel that I can actually commit to getting to the level of competency that I want.
This has frequently been my problem. I think maybe I'll learn enough to know it's not relevant or helpful outside some curiosity.
Languages are really hard. As an American speaking English I really get no use from knowing another language. Over my life I've learned, Spanish, Hebrew, French and Japanese. Enough to make sentences, and I forgot them all and never used them except for a trip. Everyone in foreign countries speaks English anyway.
Maybe you'll find an interesting travel destination where that's not the case by sorting this list by percent English speakers, ascending: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_English-s...
(I say classical here not to exclude others, but because this is the area I know first hand.)
(For those who don't (or do) speak French, I tried to write this: "I'm the author. I thought about writing a French version, but there are 9000 words in the article. This would be an enormous task and probably not the best way to spend my time, since I write significantly slower in French than in English. Furthermore, I imagine that most people who are going to read this article are English speakers.")
According to CEFR link in article, a B2 level:
Can understand the main ideas of complex text on both concrete and abstract topics, including technical discussions in their field of specialization.
Can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party.
Can produce clear, detailed text on a wide range of subjects and explain a viewpoint on a topical issue giving the advantages and disadvantages of various options.
CEFR Estimated time required to academically learn B2 level French: 560-650 hours
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...
Most of the corrections she/he received are not justified at all. Like using the work "crédits" is totally fine in this context. I can't get why they corrected some connectors like "à" or "pour", as the usage of these in the text seem at least as correct to me.
It doesn't mean anything except that there's a lot of people who are situationally deficit of social skills and anxiously trying to prove they're even smarter than the original poster.
My pet theory is that these jeklers want acceptance and a sense of community, but don't know how to do it.
You say, with derision and personal insults to those people who dared not meet your standards for perfect corrections and perfect judgement of feedback desirability.
In fact, the only correct correction among all that red is to replace "gym" by "salle de sport". Not to be confused with "gymnasium", it's similar but not the same thing.
The 4th line is misusing the future tense. Should have been pointed out.
In this case, 'dans' is at the very least 'more correct' than 'à'.
I know it sounds absurd, but maybe the corrections weren't made by native speakers.
> I initially preferred native French speakers, but after taking lessons with non-native speakers, I found that I couldn’t really tell the difference between natives and non-natives.
It's grammatically incorrect to write "s'inscrire à une salle de sport" and should indeed be "dans une salle de sport" and so it was warranted to correct that.
The other corrections are similarly warranted.
I'm a bit worried if you guys all think the original text was fine... ;)
As for the "crédit", the dictionnary definition seem to state it is correct (even though "bon" would be a bit better). https://larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/cr%c3%a9dit/20314... Crédit: Autorisation de dépenses accordée par les autorités qui établissent, votent ou règlent les budgets ; somme ainsi allouée : La bibliothèque dispose d'un crédit de dix mille euros.
Sometimes the meaning changes as well. For example "s'inscrire à l'école" and "s'inscrire dans une école". The latter means "to register with a school" but the former is more "to register to start school" in the sense that it is 'school' in general.
As for "crédits", indeed the meaning is basically the same as in English and the original sentence is correct in the language. But it's not something anyone would say. The terms used would most likely be either "bon" (voucher) or "forfait" (inclusive special rate), or perhaps "chèque" (cheque) instead of "bon" if it was given by your employer as a benefit.
So "s'incrire à" is not incorrect per se, e.g. "s'inscrire à des cours de danse". Even, you must say "s'inscrire à la mairie" (e.g. for poll lists) and not "s'inscrire dans la mairie".
I think that what is technically correct is to use "à" when you talk about where you sign in or register (usually a one-time action) and "dans" when you talk about signing in to perform a recurring activity.
That little à word derives from the Latin words "ab" and "ad", which you can find in words ("adjacent", "adverb", "addition", "adventure"... hemmm I mean *aventure"; sometimes English is more Latin than French) which tell the idea of proximity or direction.
Source: Am a quebecer (fr). I do it mostly when i speak English.
I'm not even sure. If you consider a "salle de sport" is an activity rather than a place, it becomes correct. You would say "s'inscire à la piscine" (for swimming-pool) for instance because "piscine" is considered an activity rather than a place, in this context.
It's fine to say "s'inscrire à la salle de sport/piscine" if you are talking about a specific one.
You wouldn't believe the amount of times I was "corrected" with suggestions that were clearly, blatantly wrong if I didn't outright say that I was a native speaker.
I think it was mainly Americans from Spanish speaking immigrant families who were overconfident on their skills, but it was funny nonetheless.
For those not familiar, American Spanish diverged significantly from "mainland" Spanish. Even then Mexican Spanish is quite distinct in its own "charming" way from nearly every other Spanish speaking American country. It's not just the vocabulary, even the verb tenses are used differently in different countries. Case in point, the only time I've heard vosotros used outside of school was in a La Polla Records song (ya ahora que?). Or looking for the baños in the Barcelona airport…. The differences are significant enough it's possible you're both right.
Whenever I've seen language discussed online lots of people come out of the woodwork defending their own niche regional variations. The comments section on Vanity Fair's Slang School series of youtube videos is a particularly obnoxious example. The videos themselves are great IMO. It's not always that bad though. I was trying to figure out how to differentiate between a banana and a plantain in Spanish (yay spanishdict forums) and I didn't realize just how many different ways there are to say banana/plantain. It's like Eskimos and snow.
To be properly obnoxious I'll wonder if that's how those folks were taught to speak/write. In my mind the analogous English situation is when British speakers use me in place of my.
I noticed that most of native speakers of any language are not that good actually in their mother tongue.
For someone who’s learning the best disservice is to not point their mistakes out.
And sorry it’s not being pedantic to ask people to be precise enough to not spend my time guessing what they maybe were thinking.
It’s already hard enough when well written.
That doesn't make any sense. Maybe they're not good according to the normative institutions attempting to control the language, but that doesn't have any bearing on the ability of billions of people to communicate with their peers using their mother tongue. Just because an institution says a certain form is "incorrect" doesn't mean people are going to stop using it and make themselves understood with that form.
It does make perfect sense when the improper use of tenses or grammar break the temporality, spatiality or relationships of the narrative.
Eg. The obvious ones in french: ce/se, ça(cela)/çà/sa... etc. A bit less obvious: “après qu’il ait”, subjunctive after stating a fact or is the subjunctive intended and it wasn’t a fact... etc.
And sometimes it becomes poetic “à l’insu de leur plein gré” when both forms are correct but with completely different meanings.
Generally speaking, proper use of tenses and moods is overrated; it is inconsistent across Romance languages yet speakers of either have no difficulty making themselves understood, or learning others' systems. Many non-Romance languages dispense entirely with this system and yet their speakers don't encounter any difficulties expressing the same shades of meaning as they would in French.
That’s definitely not true, and what follows is thus complete bs sorry. Where does this come from to begin with? I even miss Spanish’ subjunctive future in French!
It’s not only a mistake wrt the language rules but also a logical one, if intended initially to state facts.
> Generally speaking, proper use of tenses and moods is overrated
Wiping your butt after pooping is overrated too, you should try the opposite.
To order a coffee maybe, but there is definitely something more interesting in (not only) french.
That’s what makes a language more or less concise and elegant. You can express countless shades of meanings in pure arid arithmetic too, but yet...
And people don’t understand nor agree with each other generally speaking: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermeneutics
Alright I have my trusty Grammaire espagnole (Beschrelle) at hand, and here are the differences in use of the subjunctive. The following cases involve the indicative in Spanish and the subjunctive in French:
-A concessive clause, whose opposition relies on a reality-grounded fact (aunque està lloviendo/bien qu'il pleuve)
-A relative clause after a superlative or similar adjectives expressing the idea of "first", "unique", uses the subjunctive in French. The comparison point being grounded in reality, Spanish always uses the indicative. (la mejor secretaria que hemos tenido/la meilleure secrétaire que nous ayons eue).
Conversely, here are cases where Spanish uses the subjunctive and French uses the indicative:
-Expressing a condition, hypothesis or hypothetic comparison after si (si vinieras conmigo/si tu venais avec moi)
-Expressing a supposition (quiza ella esté al tanto/peut-être qu'elle est au courant)
-Temporal clauses in the future (Cuando venga/Quand il viendra)
I can go on if you like. Very clearly, Spanish's use of the subjunctive very closely follows the hypothetical/unrealized aspect of the content, whereas French's use is less consistent with that aspect, and mostly depends on the locution being used.
>I even miss Spanish’ subjunctive future in French!
And yet I'm sure you don't have any problems expressing the hypothetical and/or fictious in Spanish, do you? At least hundreds of millions of Spanish speakers don't.
>Wiping your butt after pooping is overrated too, you should try the opposite.
Seeing how mood use is inconsistent from one Romance language to the other, I guess Spanish and Italian speakers aren't wiping their butts according to your point of view (and you aren't wiping yours according to them). Or...we could just stop adopting such a normative attitude and admit usage changes across countries and time periods without anything being reprehensible about it?
>That’s what makes a language more or less concise and elegant. You can express countless shades of meanings in pure arid arithmetic too, but yet...
Are you seriously arguing that languages that lack the tense and mood system of Romance languages are somehow less elegant and concise, or less able to express countless shades of meaning somehow?
Oh yes go on please. But you were originally stating that subjunctive in French lost its semantic value. Now you making it narrow and added "compared to Spanish".
> I guess Spanish and Italian speakers aren't wiping their butts according to your point of view
I think you missed the point. It was meant to say that misuse of tenses and moods may alter causality and in general events chaining is not commutative (poop o wipe != wipe o poop).
> And yet I'm sure you don't have any problems expressing the hypothetical > Are you seriously arguing that languages that lack the tense and mood system
By the very definition of "concise", yes. I said you can do it in any language, but the formulation at some point will become cumbersome.
I said almost lost, and I'm choosing to believe out of charity that you didn't notice the extra word.
> But you were originally stating that subjunctive in French lost its semantic value. Now you making it narrow and added "compared to Spanish".
Yes, that's the crux of my argument, comparing use cases in French with that of other Romance languages in order to show how far the subjunctive use cases in French drifted from their original purpose and meaning. How else am I supposed to demonstrate it without a couple of reference points to compare with?
> It was meant to say that misuse of tenses and moods may alter causality and in general events chaining is not commutative (poop o wipe != wipe o poop).
I did take your point a little too literally, sorry. Still, the fact that mood and tense use across Romance languages is inconsistent, yet:
-People who speak either Romance language have no trouble distinguishing the actual from the hypothetical within their language, and
-People who speak multiple Romance languages have no trouble switching from one mood to the other according to the use case/language combination at hand,
shows how unlikely your "poop o wipe" situations are in practice. People "misuse" tenses and moods all the time (which is the prescriptive way of saying tense and mood usage evolves all the time) yet they still manage to communicate clearly somehow. This shows that these are not actually central to convey meaning and there are other avenues that do not use this system (context, adverbial cues, etc.).
>I said you can do it in any language, but the formulation at some point will become cumbersome.
Do you have any evidence for this? Like, can you showcase foreign languages that do not feature this system and whose formulation of the hypothetical would prove consistently more cumbersome and verbose than that of Romance languages? I'm not sure if you realize how far-reaching that statement is.
My theory: when you ask someone to correct language, and they know the author isn't a native speaker, they'll nitpick on things that native speakers wouldn't be corrected on; but the corrections will be much more about the idiosyncrasies of the corrector than the level of the author (when that author has reached a certain level of proficiency of course).
Japanese may be a pain in the ass to learn but it’s hard not to be jealous of the resources and media available to Japanese learners, as someone learning most any other language (though, in the US at least, Spanish media’s pretty easy to get ahold of)
https://mobile.twitter.com/yggtorrent_com?lang=en
There's also the option of buying DVDs on Amazon
I've also watched several videos and concluded after a while that it wasn't my TL but a related language.
Best way to start is watching tv news. Hosts have very clear pronuntiation, it's their job after all.
I first research what tv channels are more popular in the country, then search YouTube with that info. YouTube doesn't seem to offer a lot of search options, but it's possible to do the search from Google or DuckDuckGo and later select "videos" tab.
DuckDuckGo has a dropdown menu that allows search localization, so the first results are the most relevant to the selected country. Once you find a handful of interesting channels, you're set up.
This is a reflection on me of course - you should have your own opinions.
Anyway, if there's a channel with lots of contents, it's still possible to select only interesting topics. Maybe it's easier for me, because the language I'm most interested in is English :) Usually I don't even need YouTube, just setting Netflix language to English.
For other languages, I'm mostly interested in listening to specific words pronuntiation, usually names.
It's a typical 24/7 news channel but that's real, everyday French and, well, the latest news.
France Inter is the main radio station, France Culture the "intellectual" one and France Info the live news radio.
Also the best music in the world is on FIP.
> It’s still much tougher to come by that one might think.
You could try Arte: https://www.arte.tv/
It's a joint French-German project based on public TV programming from both countries, approximately half of the content is in French.
It helps, but is nowhere nearly as effective as not being able to escape it. In Germany, I remember going to bed exhausted with a headache quite a bit for a period of months, roughly the phase from when I was barely functional to when I was able to take part in class in non-stupid ways.
Watching TV for a couple hours is nothing like that.
I currently chat with my teacher every morning on my bluetooth headphones while exercising in my backyard (of course, confirming first that this wouldn't annoy her). Most productive hour of my day, and I she likes the certainty of me committing to a daily time slot.
Cool way to build friendships too. In April I'm visiting her in Venezuela. Though I recommend using a service like https://www.conversationexchange.com/ for a more overt way to meet different people while practicing language.
Everyhing is alerts and warnings when clicking the link.
You can fix this by enabling HTTPS in GitHub pages, so that a valid certificate is served. See GitHub's troubleshooting information: https://help.github.com/en/github/working-with-github-pages/...
I wrote an article[0] about my own method for language learning, focusing mainly on the spaced repetition aspect.
[0] https://mochi.cards/blog/using-spaced-repetition-to-learn-a-...
You are correct in that a decent chunk of the words are relatively useless, and I forgot many of them already after stopping Anki for a few months. There were also some words that I had no idea how to use, as you said. However, I did some extra looking-up of difficult words, and the deck included example sentences for many of the words. Also, I definitely claim that your method is more effective, but clearly this one at least worked well enough to do what I did.
If you plan to write French for a living, that will be tough for a non-native writer.
But if you live in the USA, Spanish is more useful and you'll have the opportunity to practise it.
French is hard even for people who speak it on a daily basis.
I am neither a linguist nor an historian (so google it and find reliable sources for more information) but AFAIK, it was designed and reformed to be an "elitist" language (for political reasons), there are gazillions of special cases that do not make any sense (both in the written and spoken language) and there are heated debates about what should be kept or removed (in the perspective of teaching it for instance).
>Understand strongly accented speech. I understand essentially all the “standard” French without subtitles, but very little of the Quebecois.
Most European French speakers have trouble understanding Québecois as well, especially if it delves into slang, so I wouldn't fret much. High level (and written) speech should be ok though.
>Understand very slang-heavy speech. I know a good chunk of argot but there are still plenty of informal vocab words and expressions I don’t know. Especially that damn verlan.
Again, seeing how most people over 35 don't understand any of that stuff either I wouldn't worry too much. Especially because this stuff evolves like crazy and new slang/verlan words keep popping up all the time. I'm in my late 20s and can already feel the divide in the slang I and friends in their early 20s use.
>Write error free text. I can get the message across pretty well without relying on a dictionary, but I often phrase things a bit unnaturally and make minor grammatical errors.
Like I and another poster said, most of the mistakes aren't really mistakes. Only the most extraordinary pedant would object to these.
>Quickly use less common verb tenses. While I know how to construct the past conditional and future perfect, I still can’t use them very fluidly. >Recognize all the weird literary tenses. Imperfect subjunctive? Yuck.
Yeah no one uses these. In fact if you did attempt to use these in a normal conversation there's a good chance you wouldn't be understood. Even in writing, modern authors are more and more switching to present and past perfect. Even tenses like the future are getting increasingly uncommon, people instead use the present and rely on contextual clues or markers, like in German (" we'll meet tomorrow" -> "we meet tomorrow").
What I mean to say from all of this is that even native French speakers are not completely at ease with these pain points so it's no use worrying about them too much.
The passé simple is almost never used orally these days, and in writing mostly only in literary texts.
I've noticed that the subjunctive is used less in writing since some change to 'simplify' (i.e. dumb down) the language.
Exotic forms of subjunctive (imperfect subjunctive, anyone?) are hardly used anymore even in contemporary literary texts.
The past conditional, maybe. The future, really? Do you actually say things like nous nous verrons demain or il l'aura fait avant in casual speech? Well I don't know if you do, but the vast majority of French speakers would say something like on se voit demain et il l'a probablement fait avant. Instead of using specific verb forms to convery meaning people instead rely on context and adverbial cues, as do the speakers of the dozens of languages that do not use the byzantine tense and mood system of the Romance languages (see: Japanese, Chinese, etc.) and are certainly not the worse for it.
>I've noticed that the subjunctive is used less in writing since some change to 'simplify' (i.e. dumb down) the language.
You're aware that the argument you're making about the language getting "dumbed down" is literally millennia old, right?
I am a french speaker from Québec and hear both of those often.
Apps certainly help but I find nothing sticks. I can easily read words of the language in front of me. But I can't think of example sentences on my own.
For French I was amazed at how much of it is condensed. Like English some people jokingly may say "jeet" for "did you eat". In French there are a surprisingly large amount of examples like that.
For anyone who is bored of learning yet another programming language, learning a human language will challenge you and humble you and reward you if you keep going at it.
Just please give up on self-imposed deadlines, and as this article states, there is no magic bullet, no magic method to learning a language, despite what SEO-driven blogs and videos will tell you.
I tried to learn Spanish with DuoLingo only, and I couldn't motivate me to do the whole tree. I only did 1/3, but everything to level 5.
The courses are sets of MP3 tracks that are free to download, but if you find them useful, please donate!
comes to mind :)
[0]: https://lingvist.com/
2) Start reading books.
3) Start listening to podcasts in Spanish that are geared towards beginners. Españolistos, Hoy Hablamos (https://www.hoyhablamos.com/), Español con Juan (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCoHJ7PkM6T92LwgJgrnDhWA).
I think reading young adult books is one of the best bangs for the buck early on. Most people agree that they procrastinated it for too long because they thought it would be too hard, myself included.
Bonus) Play a MUD in Spanish. http://www.balzhur.org/ is the biggest one I know of with 10-25 people online. It's a 1-to-1 translation of Realms of Despair. Even if you are too bad at Spanish to interact with people, it's a fun interactive way to get used to common verbs. And you can go at your own slow pace, reading the description of each room.
It's one thing to imagine yourself doing this given six months of dedicated time (not that they claimed to have had this) and another to get a real sense of how one might fit this into one's life. Anyway, great, detailed article and an impressive accomplishment.
Ikenna learned (conversational?) French in 6 months. It's quite an inspiring video. After watching a few of his videos now, it definitely plays a part in continuing to motivate me learning Japanese.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8gno6Uzuo8
For anyone here who has used anki, that's a huge number. This person is really dedicating their time at this point, because 50 new cards/day very quickly snowballs and you're doing 300+ reviews daily.
I did 20 reviews/day for ~6 months straight for Korean, and that took me 30-60 minutes, every day. Thinking about 50/day sounds utterly exhausting.
It's a good thing a french 5k deck exists also, as they saved a lot of time on not having to make cards manually. On average a word entry takes ~1-2 minutes (I have to query 3 dictionaries), so that comes down to only ~45 words per hour...
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> I firmly believe that learning languages in school, especially in the United States, is generally extremely inefficient.
This, so much this. Classes provide rigidity but having a tutor + finding people to talk with helps you out significantly more. I went to a language exchange that wasn't bad* where I was able to speak for 1 hour with 1 korean person, a teacher, who would point out my mistakes and write down words when I had to dip into English. My conversational ability improved dramatically after doing that for ~1 month.
* Most language exchanges are shit. Because they're unstructured. People randomly filter in/out and a lot of people are shy or aren't sure what to do. It often devolves into a) "Any korean questions??" or just general conversation. Great for making friends, terrible for seriously practicing Korean.
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> As much as Duolingo likes to tell you this, 5 minutes a day of fumbling around with the mobile app isn’t going to make you fluent.
I get why duolingo does this. At the same time, I hate them for advertising themselves as "the world's best way to learn <Language>". Not only is this not true, their Japanese and Korean courses were (still are?) notoriously terrible compared to their Spanish and French courses. Not that a language can be learned from 1 resource, anyways.
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> On the other hand, since I spent so many hours just casually talking with people, I got pretty good at having generic conversations.
This is where I got after ~12-15 months as well. I can quite easily converse about basic things like me, my hobbies, work, etc for hours but as soon as the conversation delves into a niche like politics or just more advanced discussion, I falter pretty hard. Also describing things beyond a basic level is rough: "I like this, that" vs "The mood of the film was twisted but exhilarating".
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What I find interesting here is how far one can progress in only 12 months with a language like Spanish or French (with a mother tongue of English). For Korean, I wasn't even remotely close to understanding things like news articles at 12 months of study. I'm still not, because that vocabulary is quite advanced and not really used in regular conversations that much.
The simple truth for learning a language is as the author here mentioned: consistent and diligent studying, with humility. There is no shortcut, no one app that does it all. You just have to study, and be able to honestly evaluate yourself and your mistakes. (Recording yourself speaking the language greatly helps here).
Korean isn't that different from other languages, really. It's difficult for English speakers because there aren't really any commonalities besides random loanwords. And it uses the SOV (subject object verb) pattern instead of SVO. Hangeul was designed to be easy to learn, so unlike Japanese, you'll always be able to read/pronounce any Korean text... even if you don't know what it means.
In some ways Korean is actually easier than, say, German (der/die/das tables, anyone?). The only thing I would say is make sure you focus on good pronunciation. Korean is very particular about mouth shapes and tongue positions. Many Americans especially come off with an accent because they neglect to put their tongue in the right spot. TalkToMeInKorean has a video course for ~$10, highly worth it.
Also, do not romanize! Only use 한글. For example, ㄱ is NOT g/k, it's simply ㄱ. Those are only meant as reference points for brand new learners. Romanizations will only impede your progress for pronunciation.
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I would say I'm intermediate in speaking, high intermediate in writing/reading, low intermediate in listening. That is to say, I can converse in Korean somewhat easily for a few hours as long as the topics are relatively basic. Like my occupation, hobbies, what I like, and so on. Listening is still very difficult for "real" conversations, because of dialects, abbreviations/contractions, slang, etc. I can listen to textbook conversations and drama dialogues much more easily. I pretty much only text my friends in Korean.
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There are 3 major players for korean learning resources right now, and a few smaller ones:
1) Go!Billy Korean. This guy is really good at korean and IMO is the best at explaining things in a clear manner. He has a youtube channel [0] as well as a website [1] with free PDFs of his lessons. He does a livestream every sunday, but he takes those ~2h videos and condenses them into shorter videos as well. He also has a textbook series which many people like.
2) HowToStudyKorean.com. This is mainly what I used when I started. This guy (over)explains sometimes but there is an incredible amount of material here. The only issue is the lesson order is kinda wack sometimes. I followed it linearly, but I read ahead if I wanted to learn that specific grammar point. I.e. how to say "because", etc.
3) TalkToMeInKorean.com. They have a youtube channel [2] and publish books. I have spent like $130+ on their books so feel free to ask a question about a particular one. The Beginner/Intermediate Korean Conversations books are really good.
Aside from these main resources, I recommend the Korean Grammar In Use textbooks. The beginner one has a good selection of grammar points. However, the main resources I mentioned pretty much cover the same beginner grammar points for free, so this book isn't strictly necessary. IMO the advanced one is worth it.
Other youtube channels I like: Dingo Story [11] has drama clips, around 10-15 minutes. WBKT Yujin [12] does lessons and listening practice, around intermediate+ level.
Apps: ignore duolingo/lingodeer, they have issues with spacing and teaching formality levels. Sejong Beginner Grammar (세종 문법 초급) is good, it has audio as well [3]. It supports android & ios.
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Dictionaries: endic.naver.com and krdict.korean.go.kr are the main dictionaries. krdict is better but a bit slower.
There's also a hanja dictinoary at hanja.dict.naver.com, but as a beginner do not start studying that stuff. It'll only complicate things. Once you're at least intermediate or so, howtostudykorean also has a hanja course [17].
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Vocab: use Anki [4]. Anki is a spaced repetition flashcards app. The pc/mac/android apps are free, the ios app is $20, which supports the developer. I cannot recommend anki enough for brute-for...