That's a reason why many language learning apps or methods recommend a period of "immersion" (i.e., just watching shows or listening to music) and no speaking. Just listen and get used to the sounds before trying to produce it awkwardly yourself. This is popular in the https://refold.la language learning community where they don't even recommend to speak until you can fully understand an entire TV show without subtitles (which sounds a bit extreme to me). https://languagelearningwithnetflix.com is commonly used.
I'm going to shamelessly plug my project in case it might be useful for anyone here. A webapp to learn a language if you're in a relationship and learning it because you have a partner or spouse that speaks that language. It's still early, but I've been learning a third language as an adult for a while, and it helps to make use of a native speaker who is around you all the time. They can help train the ear as well. https://learncoupling.com
I learned conversational French, German, Russian and Spanish as an adult. The method that worked best for me is similar to what you mentioned. I watched as many shows as I could in the various languages. I listened to native language programming and attempted to read as much material in the languages as possible. While I was doing this, I was also working through Rosetta Stone, which worked well for me. I also went to language MeetUps and just absorbed the sounds and patterns of conversation.
When I did decide to join the conversation, I took on a philosophy of fearlessness and just went for it. Sure, many mistakes were made, but I had zero negative feedback from my attempts. When I later travelled, I adopted this same attitude. I knew I was going to make mistakes, but I generated a lot of goodwill for my attempts. Sometimes I got corrections, sometimes I had to repeat myself, sometimes I would get an answer back in English, whatever! No one ever shamed me and my skills continued to improve.
> Sometimes I got corrections, sometimes I had to repeat myself, sometimes I would get an answer back in English, whatever! No one ever shamed me and my skills continued to improve.
Whenever I'm traveling abroad I always make an attempt to learn a few hundred words, some phrases, and how to sting together simple sentences. With very few exceptions, the attempt is usually greeted with amusement and a polite response. People were down right thrilled in Hungary, and the Portuguese are in my experience quite happy to suffer through you attempt.
Interestingly in Hong Kong, they will go to hell and back to divert the conversation to English if they see you aren't a native speaker. You literally have to say "I can't speak English" if you want to keep it in Cantonese.
Yeah, sometimes that will happen in countries where people have strong English language skills. I'll respect their wish to speak in the language they want to communicate in.
It also happens in places where people want to practice their English. In Vietnam I once told my taxi driver that I can't speak English, but then ended up having to have a conversation with him in Vietnamese. (I told him I didn't speak English because I wasn't feeling up for a conversation, but then tricked myself into one)
Same experience in Singapore when practicing speaking Malaysian... steer back to English, although I get the occasional person who's genuinely amused with my attempts.
Yeah, the method is very appealing because speaking requires interaction with other people. People are very content to learn passively via watching movies because speaking does require that fearlessness.
Your project looks amazing. I am in the same situation where I am learning Cantonese because my partner and her family speak it (actually Taishanese, but Cantonese is close enough).
Love the Yale romanization for your included Cantonese flash cards! Definitely going to check this out.
As for listening before speaking: It has been incredibly hard for me to pick out specific vocabulary with colloquial Cantonese in movies and other videos. Native speakers talk too quickly for me right now. I did watch a lot of French movies when learning French and that seemed to help more with comprehension later. I likely just need to spend more time with Cantonese since it is more different to my native tongue than French.
Yeah, very hard to learn Cantonese since it's tonal, but you can do it! For movies, I find it a lot easier to reinforce once I've gotten used to the language a bit. Lot of good Stephen Chow and Jackie Chan films to learn with.
There are podcast packs in the app to get you introduced to Cantonese. I'll keep in touch to see how it goes!
Awhile back on here someone made a good point that if you learn a language via an opposite sex partner, you generally end up learning a manner of speaking that is typified by that sex.
So relational training does work to a point, but if you want to be a man who speaks immersively and culturally like a man (and so forth) it's worth remembering that digesting telenovelas and practicing with your Colombian girlfriend will train you in a certain direction.
That's a good point. It's not necessarily learning directly 100% from a partner, but more using them for feedback, reinforcement, and motivation. I'm curious what the context of that conversation was!
I learned Spanish immersed in the street life of working-class Venezuelans in the 1990s. Ultimately, my command of the language was good enough that native Venezuelans detected an accent, but assumed I was from a different, unfamiliar part of Latin America. When I tried to speak Spanish in Barcelona years later, folks really got a kick out of my accent and idiomatic expressions.
I picked up a hitchhiker in Denmark once that had been an exchange student in New York. He spoke English with the most delightful Brooklyn accent. Just enough Bugs Bunny to be hilarious coming from a Dane.
I have friends from Europe who studied architecture in the UK and they say that after the 7 years of studying and working it takes to become an architect they would struggle a bit to have an intellectual conversation about architecture at the same level in thier native language; they didn’t have the vocabulary or an understanding of the zeitgeist in thier own country. They still spoke thier own language mostly like they had when they had just left school.
I struggle speaking about programming, IT, mathematics and economics in my native language, because I studied and worked in the UK. I always end up using English technical words and expressions.
>I still sound a bit like an extremely out-of-date teenager.
I don't think it's surprising that the way you speak hasn't changed much when you stopped using the language. Your peers were mostly teens at the time and that's the manner of speech you picked up. Had you stayed in Germany and continued to speak with peers your age it surely would have developed along the way.
I learned Spanish with a combination of Google Translate and Spanish language music. People often tell me that I speak Spanish like I'm singing and that my grammar seems like Google Translate.
This phenomenon of talking like the other gender or a cartoon character etc happens often but indicates somewhat low proficiency, even if the speaker is “fluent” in the literal sense of speaking smoothly without halting. Really learning a complex modern language (as an educated adult) involves having understaning of multiple registers like slang, casual conversation, news, formal, ceremonial, poetic language etc. So if you can’t recognize “I’m speaking like a girl” and stop doing it you have a long way to go I would argue.
Sounds like a lack of exposure to me. With enough experience you should have no trouble to tell if others are speaking in a certain manner that is associated with male, female, child, teen, boss, subordinate, etc. etc. If you can tell you should have no problem talking correctly, or at least the way you want to be perceived by others.
If you can't tell the difference in how others use the language in stereotypical ways, you've basically not yet mastered the language.
I know from learning Japanese a bit myself. People often say using sources like anime and manga will make you sound like an anime character, which I think is ridiculous. Even in anime there are characters that talk quite normally (in fact a lot of them do, depending on what you watch, taking into account their age, gender, who they talk to, occupation and status, etc.) and it's easy enough to tell how actual usage in real life differs in real life by using some other sources, too. But even with only anime and manga as source, just use your brain and don't talk like friggin Naruto and you'd sound pretty normal. Given enough input variety at least.
I would kindly disagree and say that it's better to learn the pronunciation rules and practice producing them. There is a lot of research around learning that production and testing are better for learning (and also why is easier to understand than speak). Specifically, to train pronunciation, the anki decks from the author of the book Fluent Forever are incredible.
Source: Learned a romance language for my SO and everyone I've met in the native country tells me I have a very natural accent and clean pronunciation.
Thanks! Yeah, I definitely think immersion listening can really help and I've used it a bit (subs2srs and audio books), but sometimes it can be used as a crutch to avoid speaking. Your app looks really cool and love that you incorporated SRS. Anecdotally, the hardest thing I've seen with my SO and I is that we end up switching back to english as we aren't disciplined when practicing together (even when in the other country itself lol)
> learning a third language as an adult for a while, and it helps to make use of a native speaker who is around you all the time
in Japan, men and women speak slightly differently, apparently, the women speaking in a higher register for example. There was a funny article I saw in a major publication about an American in Japan who learned Japanese primarily through his Japanese girlfriend, but she broke up with him because he ended up talking "like a girl"
That's funny. I hope to avoid that myself! People should use partners as one of many resources (especially for motivation and feedback), but should not be the sole resource to mimic.
Thank you for sharing this. My girlfriend is fluent in Korean, I was when I lived there for a year while in 2nd grade, and I've been trying to learn Korean again. I'll definitely be checking out your app!
Please do! It has some growing pains. While it supports 100+ languages, Korean is one of few that has first-class support (just based on cross-cultural relationship statistics). I may reach out to you over email if you sign up.
Oh I was wondering where refold.la came from, since I've never seen it before (which would be unusual for me)
Turns out it's the result of the partnership breakup between Matt and Yoga who used to run Mass Immersion Approach. I was reading the (incomplete guide) and realized it looked familiar.
> the age-old question of why it’s so difficult to learn a second language as an adult
This immediately jumped out at me, the rest of the article notwithstanding. My hot take is that there are at least two strong reasons why it's so difficult:
1. You're not serious about it.
There's a man in my weekly French meetup who when I joined was a little bit better than me (which wasn't saying much -- I was horrible). Since then, his French has improved almost none. He can't conjugate, he can't pronounce, he can't even stay in the language: stumbling halfway through a simple sentence, he just gives up and switches to English. He's not serious about trying to improve. For him, I think, he just likes the social aspect of the group.
2. You worried about failing.
Far too many people I've seen want to be fluent to the detriment of becoming fluent. When in conversation, they think very carefully about what they say, practice pronunciation in their head, etc. Saying something embarrassing or even just slightly off is seen as a hindrance to their goals, but it's just the opposite: you have to make mistakes in order to get better.
Not to say that it's not hard to learn a language, but I've talked with so many people who just say, "Learn Spanish? At my age?! Impossible." But I can get by pretty well by myself in France with patient native speakers, and I'm self-taught. It's not as hard as people think.
I think people often forget how much time kids actually spend learning their mother tongue. They don’t go to a night class a few times a week, they spend hours each day for several years, both at home and then later at school, before becoming “fluent”. How many adults truly do that, and can’t speak the language afterwards? Brain plasticity is definitely a thing but it’s not as big of a dealbreaker as people often make it out to be.
It's this. Anything else is mostly copium, you can probably learn a new language faster as an adult. But you can't do it if you only have 1h each week.
There has been and continues to be a lot of research behind that cope. The effortless mastery over e..g. phonology that children emerge with is very difficult to replicate in adulthood, even after decades of speaking.
You're right, and kids are so successful because they simply have so much time into it. (And literally everyone around them is a free language teacher, correcting mistakes.)
Adults don't have those luxuries; however, we can be taught and easily comprehend rules that kids don't get. Since I'm familiar with French, one such rule might be that you use a pronoun before the verb but a noun goes after. « J'aime ma femme » compared with « Je t'aime ». The contractions here, too, are things that you are likely to very easily understand (je + aime = j'aime; te + aime = t'aime, and 'je' isn't contracted).
> Far too many people I've seen want to be fluent to the detriment of becoming fluent. When in conversation, they think very carefully about what they say, practice pronunciation in their head, etc. Saying something embarrassing or even just slightly off is seen as a hindrance to their goals, but it's just the opposite: you have to make mistakes in order to get better.
I was confronted in Japan with the choice of putting my crappy Japanese into practice and being thought a jerk, or attempting to speak English to the locals and removing all doubt. I gained considerable facility with the Japanese language in those two weeks. Still not within spitting distance of fluent, but a whole lot better than I was when I boarded the plane.
Learning a language requires a lot of motivation. A few hours a week is not enough. In my case I started studying russian one year ago. I promised myself to spend at least one to two hours per day on learning new words and grammar. I watch YouTube videos of random russian people. Write down all sentences and repeat them till I fully understand them. I don't use any apps. But I do have two times per week a session with a private teacher. She pushes me to the limit. Without her I would have given up long time ago. She gives me the essential motivation to practice the language practically every day.
Now after this year I am able to hold basic conversations at a B1-2 level. By far not enough. But slowly getting there. Another 3 years and I would be at a similar level of my English (not native as well)
I don't think that's a bad level of proficiency after one year of self study. Sure, you'd do better if you were in an environment where you had to listen to and speak Russian all day, but, that's not practical for everyone.
1. Learning a language is not an academic exercise, it's a social one. If you're an introvert, learning a second language is (IMHO) going to be extremely difficult because the activities most likely to make that happen aren't ones you're likely comfortable with. Worse, you'll be less inclined to do those activities because you'll feel hamstrung by your inability to communicate. It's difficult to get to a point where you have a sufficient vocabulary to understand what's said or say what you want; and
2. This is particularly difficult for English speakers for two reasons. First, so many speak English or are learning that it's hard to be in a situation where you can't revert to English. This makes progress more difficult. The second reason most other languages will have integral concepts that will be difficult for you to acquire because there's no English equivalent. Some examples:
- Gender of (non-person) nouns;
- Declension of words by gender, case, article and/or number;
- Agreement of adjectives;
The above is rather Indo-European centric of course. Asian languages tend to have different characteristics that make them difficult:
- The writing system;
- The importance of tone;
- Replacing grammar with context.
Nowadays most native English speakers do not know any grammar. Like at all. Ask the average high school graduate what a noun is and you're more likely than not to get a confused look.
To me this is a strength of English because you can obviously learn the language, including reading and writing, without "cruft". For example, word order in English is stricter than, say, German because in German you can denote case by declension and you can't do that in English. Likewise Spanish typically drops the subject because it's obvious from the conjugation of the verb.
So, what happens if you destabilize your brain a bit via psychedelics? There is some good research out there showing that certain psychedelics increase neuroplasticity, so it would be interesting to see what the effects on language learning would be.
Children aren't trying to learn a language. They are trying to communicate their needs and language is the way you do that.
If you need to communicate in a particular language, you learn it. If you just kind of think it would be nice to know another language, you probably won't really become fluent.
Of course, there will always be exceptions.
Having said that: Any tips for brushing up on my college French?
We usually ignore that a child learns to say simple sentences at 3, can express simple original thoughts at 6 and is able to have a quasi-adult conversation at 15. An adult doesn't have 15 years to become half-fluent in French.
I started with Duolingo, Harry Potter, Coffee Break French, etc., and within a year, I felt comfortable enough to go to a meetup. Even when I was just quietly listening, I improved so much, to the point that after only one year of practicing in-person (plus the year solo), I could get by in rural France.
I'm guessing that no matter how rusty your college French is, you'll improve by leaps and bounds when you're with people.
Most casual language learners underestimate the time and effort required to get anywhere close to fluent in a language.
"Casual" will never get you there.
If you're seeking functional fluency, expect to spend 2-3 hours a day for 1-3 years at least. Most of those hours should be spent consuming content in the target language.
Check out a system like Refold for an idea of the effort required and how to plan your study https://refold.la/roadmap
I've only learned one foreign language so far, Spanish, and I started 10 years ago in highschool.
I made the greatest leaps in my ability when I spent 2-3 months at a time spending time like this:
- living in Spanish-speaking country
- reading and watching YouTube (10-20 hours/week)
- taking private lessons (1-3 hours/week)
- using spaced repetition systems (3-4 hours/week)
Living in a country where your target language is spoken makes learning opportunities more accessible, but without focused effort you won't just "pick up the language" unless it's already very close to a language you speak.
All that said, anyone can learn a language if they put the effort in. It's mostly "hard" only in the sense that it takes a lot of time. Most of your study time could be watching TV, reading books, talking to friends, or playing video games as long as they're in your target language and near your limit of comprehension. It should be as much as 80% fun stuff/20% studying to keep yourself motivated.
Yes. First bootstrap yourself with enough vocab and grammar that you understand the majority of the words (due to Zipf's law that will be a relatively small number of words).
Then talk to native speakers, for hours a day, so that you internalize it all and can consume and produce sentences without thinking.
There are categories for the level of difficulty for each language according to the State dept, the fifth level for example is for the most difficult ones: Arabic (Levantine, Iraqi), Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Pashto- you will need 64 weeks, while for French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish 26 weeks will do.
1. Read or listen to something in your target language.
2. Work out the meaning of a word you don't know (using a dictionary, teacher, context clues etc).
Do this 1000 to 10,000 times and you'll have a formidable knowledge of your target language.
Of course, the first thing people do is say: "Aha, I can optimise this! I'll make a list of all the words and just learn that!". Instantly you've removed all context, grammar and likely pronunciation (if the list is written only) from the language. Making an enormous word list is kind of taking the language out of the language.
That's a good one, especially if you pair with SRS. Just have to be careful with songs, they often don't use conversational speech or do funky things with the language.
I will say, the older I get, the more I find I need chemical help when I need to learn a new skill fast. I especially rely on Paxil, which I will take for a month if I need to learn something fast that month.
As I get older I want to teach, and perhaps this is natural, to want to teach more and more as we get older, but sometimes that actually gets in the way of learning. It's as if I spent decades putting knowledge into my brain and now I want to pour that knowledge out of my brain. If you've ever read my blog, you know I like to write about things I've learned during my tech and consulting career.
But occasionally I need to still put knowledge into the brain, and fast, and chemicals like Paxil are very helpful there. SSRI drugs are known to increase the flexibility with which new neuronal connections are made. And I suspect that is very helpful when trying to learn a new skill fast.
i would personally recommend trying something like idra-21, I've found there aren't many chemicals more useful than it for lubricating the joints so to speak, and considering it has a very small dose and a fairly long half life, it's fairly easy to a regimen around it that has legs and keeps going, and I find it doesn't necessarily come with any horrendously negative side effects. none that I have consistently experienced either
I also personally recommend memantine, but that's because it helps me clear out the brain fog and anxiety that normally keeps me from doing basically anything successfully, and it has the same benefit of small dose, MASSIVE half life (60+ hours), and a proven track record of facilitating improved cognitive functioning
I'm nearing the end of a PhD and the most difficult classes I took were the totally-unrelated-to-my-study-and-research semesters of Japanese. The classes were really intense, sometimes meeting twice in a single day, but were invaluable for my months-long stint there. I continued classes after I came back, but eventually realized that activities for class (e.g. essay writing, grammar worksheets) were less useful than consuming native material.
It was also a refreshingily daunting experience to throw myself at something I quickly realized I had no talent in and to really writhe and struggle, but to stick through it, motivated not by any external party or marketable skill, but by earnest interest in the topic.
Language classes should be thought of as dessert rather than the main course. They are useful if you need to answer questions, for example to clarify the difference between two words or an aspect of grammar, but do not help much for the main task of getting words and sentences into your head, as memorisation is a probabilistic process that is unique to the individual and needs to be done individually.
Immersion is key, but classes provide the bootstrapping required to know what questions to ask, and are a tremendously useful resource when immersion is not possible. I think the ideal learning scenario is what many of my expats-in-Japan friends undertook: live in the country and take classes at the same time.
It also helps if you look foreign enough to where natives don't expect you to know their language, and are shocked when you can say even just "hello my name is..."
I truly believe some people have more brain faculty for language acquisition than others. You could reply they just try harder, but I believe there is an innate language ability, and there is an innate maths ability, and abstract reasoning, and things like music and colour and smell and vision, but its simply not true that we develop all of these things, equally, as individuals.
Mother language aside, some of us have to work harder to acquire passing fluency in another tongue.
I don't. I used to be bad at languages. And now I'm not. What changed? I learned the appropriate metacognition skills for learning languages.
It's commonly known in the language learning community that your 1st new (adult) language is the hardest and every language from there gets easier. Because the first time you have to also build the "library" of metacognition appropriate for learning languages. The next time you do it, you already have that library in place and the process is much faster.
I can believe your personal experience. But, I think your metacognition may be a sign you invested more, to unpack your higher functional capability here.
Remember, there's a lot more monoglots out there. You're testing this as a small self-assessed group.
It would be cheating, but I might add: maybe you have better than average metacognition brain function?
I think it also helps picking up a language when you already know a few (unless the new language is significantly different from the ones from you know). Learning a few languages exposes one to a variety of patterns (bonus points if you know both tonal and non-tonal languages) and that helps in finding commonality with the new language.
Reminds me of how Jack Ma said that between 40 and 50 years old, you should do things you're already good at. He covers other decades, too: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DByuo1UBiW0
One of the best decisions I made with respect to my language learning was to give up on fluency.
Oh, I can muddle through pleasantries and transactions when traveling and I continue to enjoy learning new words and phrases. But when I finally let go of my aspirations to become fluent it was as if a major weight was lifted off my shoulders after decades of beating myself up about being such a poor language learner.
You can only have so many top priorities in your life so it's perfectly fine to choose to learn a language recreationally for fun rather than seriously for fluency.
Leonard and Yi think this may explain why some people pick up the sounds much more easily than others, as each unique brain strikes its own balance between maintaining the stability of the native language while calling on the plasticity required to learn a new one.
Probably just bad journalism but this quote just says “each brain strikes its own balance”. They don’t go so far as to say some people have more plasticity and whether there are other tradeoffs with that.
For example I’ve always felt I’m a fairly slow but deep learner- like my brain takes longer than average to be productive at complex new tasks as it is rewiring but I learn things at a fairly deep level, so I wish they had shed light on that.
- this is an study into a mechanism that might be related learning to discriminate sounds;
- it's 10 subjects, and two, yes two, syllables;
- during a very short period of time.
This is not about learning a new language. And the title "blame it on your stable brain" falls in the wave of neuro-feel-good writing: you don't have to blame yourself, it's your bloody brain! Well, who are you, if not your brain?
And "stable brain" is interpreted in the article as non-plastic, which is thinly veiled language for "bad at learning". So, if you're struggling to learn a new language, it's because you're a bad learner.
It's like a battle in your head and the odds are in the favour of your native language, unless you speak the language you are learning more than your native language. Then you can turn the tables.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 150 ms ] threadI'm going to shamelessly plug my project in case it might be useful for anyone here. A webapp to learn a language if you're in a relationship and learning it because you have a partner or spouse that speaks that language. It's still early, but I've been learning a third language as an adult for a while, and it helps to make use of a native speaker who is around you all the time. They can help train the ear as well. https://learncoupling.com
I learned conversational French, German, Russian and Spanish as an adult. The method that worked best for me is similar to what you mentioned. I watched as many shows as I could in the various languages. I listened to native language programming and attempted to read as much material in the languages as possible. While I was doing this, I was also working through Rosetta Stone, which worked well for me. I also went to language MeetUps and just absorbed the sounds and patterns of conversation.
When I did decide to join the conversation, I took on a philosophy of fearlessness and just went for it. Sure, many mistakes were made, but I had zero negative feedback from my attempts. When I later travelled, I adopted this same attitude. I knew I was going to make mistakes, but I generated a lot of goodwill for my attempts. Sometimes I got corrections, sometimes I had to repeat myself, sometimes I would get an answer back in English, whatever! No one ever shamed me and my skills continued to improve.
Whenever I'm traveling abroad I always make an attempt to learn a few hundred words, some phrases, and how to sting together simple sentences. With very few exceptions, the attempt is usually greeted with amusement and a polite response. People were down right thrilled in Hungary, and the Portuguese are in my experience quite happy to suffer through you attempt.
Love the Yale romanization for your included Cantonese flash cards! Definitely going to check this out.
As for listening before speaking: It has been incredibly hard for me to pick out specific vocabulary with colloquial Cantonese in movies and other videos. Native speakers talk too quickly for me right now. I did watch a lot of French movies when learning French and that seemed to help more with comprehension later. I likely just need to spend more time with Cantonese since it is more different to my native tongue than French.
There are podcast packs in the app to get you introduced to Cantonese. I'll keep in touch to see how it goes!
So relational training does work to a point, but if you want to be a man who speaks immersively and culturally like a man (and so forth) it's worth remembering that digesting telenovelas and practicing with your Colombian girlfriend will train you in a certain direction.
They tell me I still sound a bit like an extremely out-of-date teenager.
I picked up a hitchhiker in Denmark once that had been an exchange student in New York. He spoke English with the most delightful Brooklyn accent. Just enough Bugs Bunny to be hilarious coming from a Dane.
>I still sound a bit like an extremely out-of-date teenager.
I don't think it's surprising that the way you speak hasn't changed much when you stopped using the language. Your peers were mostly teens at the time and that's the manner of speech you picked up. Had you stayed in Germany and continued to speak with peers your age it surely would have developed along the way.
Do you hear that often?
It makes sense like the feminine speaking if a guy learns from their girlfriend.
If you can't tell the difference in how others use the language in stereotypical ways, you've basically not yet mastered the language.
I know from learning Japanese a bit myself. People often say using sources like anime and manga will make you sound like an anime character, which I think is ridiculous. Even in anime there are characters that talk quite normally (in fact a lot of them do, depending on what you watch, taking into account their age, gender, who they talk to, occupation and status, etc.) and it's easy enough to tell how actual usage in real life differs in real life by using some other sources, too. But even with only anime and manga as source, just use your brain and don't talk like friggin Naruto and you'd sound pretty normal. Given enough input variety at least.
Source: Learned a romance language for my SO and everyone I've met in the native country tells me I have a very natural accent and clean pronunciation.
https://fluent-forever.com/product/fluent-forever-pronunciat...
Personally, a two-week period or so just absorbing and practicing pronunciation by yourself sounds good before trying with other people.
Congrats on successfully learning your SO's language!
in Japan, men and women speak slightly differently, apparently, the women speaking in a higher register for example. There was a funny article I saw in a major publication about an American in Japan who learned Japanese primarily through his Japanese girlfriend, but she broke up with him because he ended up talking "like a girl"
Turns out it's the result of the partnership breakup between Matt and Yoga who used to run Mass Immersion Approach. I was reading the (incomplete guide) and realized it looked familiar.
This immediately jumped out at me, the rest of the article notwithstanding. My hot take is that there are at least two strong reasons why it's so difficult:
1. You're not serious about it.
There's a man in my weekly French meetup who when I joined was a little bit better than me (which wasn't saying much -- I was horrible). Since then, his French has improved almost none. He can't conjugate, he can't pronounce, he can't even stay in the language: stumbling halfway through a simple sentence, he just gives up and switches to English. He's not serious about trying to improve. For him, I think, he just likes the social aspect of the group.
2. You worried about failing.
Far too many people I've seen want to be fluent to the detriment of becoming fluent. When in conversation, they think very carefully about what they say, practice pronunciation in their head, etc. Saying something embarrassing or even just slightly off is seen as a hindrance to their goals, but it's just the opposite: you have to make mistakes in order to get better.
Not to say that it's not hard to learn a language, but I've talked with so many people who just say, "Learn Spanish? At my age?! Impossible." But I can get by pretty well by myself in France with patient native speakers, and I'm self-taught. It's not as hard as people think.
There has been and continues to be a lot of research behind that cope. The effortless mastery over e..g. phonology that children emerge with is very difficult to replicate in adulthood, even after decades of speaking.
Adults don't have those luxuries; however, we can be taught and easily comprehend rules that kids don't get. Since I'm familiar with French, one such rule might be that you use a pronoun before the verb but a noun goes after. « J'aime ma femme » compared with « Je t'aime ». The contractions here, too, are things that you are likely to very easily understand (je + aime = j'aime; te + aime = t'aime, and 'je' isn't contracted).
I've seen ESL make serious progress in a few months after moving to the US and starting a new job. Immersion really works.
a) constantly needing to interact with native speakers in their language to accomplish goals (obtain food, get them to stop screaming at you), and
b) those native speakers attempting to figure out what you want and telling how to say that.
I suspect that the supposed greater ease with which children learn languages is mostly explained away once you control for those factors.
I was confronted in Japan with the choice of putting my crappy Japanese into practice and being thought a jerk, or attempting to speak English to the locals and removing all doubt. I gained considerable facility with the Japanese language in those two weeks. Still not within spitting distance of fluent, but a whole lot better than I was when I boarded the plane.
1. Learning a language is not an academic exercise, it's a social one. If you're an introvert, learning a second language is (IMHO) going to be extremely difficult because the activities most likely to make that happen aren't ones you're likely comfortable with. Worse, you'll be less inclined to do those activities because you'll feel hamstrung by your inability to communicate. It's difficult to get to a point where you have a sufficient vocabulary to understand what's said or say what you want; and
2. This is particularly difficult for English speakers for two reasons. First, so many speak English or are learning that it's hard to be in a situation where you can't revert to English. This makes progress more difficult. The second reason most other languages will have integral concepts that will be difficult for you to acquire because there's no English equivalent. Some examples:
- Gender of (non-person) nouns;
- Declension of words by gender, case, article and/or number;
- Agreement of adjectives;
The above is rather Indo-European centric of course. Asian languages tend to have different characteristics that make them difficult:
- The writing system;
- The importance of tone;
- Replacing grammar with context.
Nowadays most native English speakers do not know any grammar. Like at all. Ask the average high school graduate what a noun is and you're more likely than not to get a confused look.
To me this is a strength of English because you can obviously learn the language, including reading and writing, without "cruft". For example, word order in English is stricter than, say, German because in German you can denote case by declension and you can't do that in English. Likewise Spanish typically drops the subject because it's obvious from the conjugation of the verb.
If you need to communicate in a particular language, you learn it. If you just kind of think it would be nice to know another language, you probably won't really become fluent.
Of course, there will always be exceptions.
Having said that: Any tips for brushing up on my college French?
Find a local meetup and practice.
I started with Duolingo, Harry Potter, Coffee Break French, etc., and within a year, I felt comfortable enough to go to a meetup. Even when I was just quietly listening, I improved so much, to the point that after only one year of practicing in-person (plus the year solo), I could get by in rural France.
I'm guessing that no matter how rusty your college French is, you'll improve by leaps and bounds when you're with people.
"Casual" will never get you there.
If you're seeking functional fluency, expect to spend 2-3 hours a day for 1-3 years at least. Most of those hours should be spent consuming content in the target language.
Check out a system like Refold for an idea of the effort required and how to plan your study https://refold.la/roadmap
I've only learned one foreign language so far, Spanish, and I started 10 years ago in highschool.
I made the greatest leaps in my ability when I spent 2-3 months at a time spending time like this:
- living in Spanish-speaking country
- reading and watching YouTube (10-20 hours/week)
- taking private lessons (1-3 hours/week)
- using spaced repetition systems (3-4 hours/week)
Living in a country where your target language is spoken makes learning opportunities more accessible, but without focused effort you won't just "pick up the language" unless it's already very close to a language you speak.
All that said, anyone can learn a language if they put the effort in. It's mostly "hard" only in the sense that it takes a lot of time. Most of your study time could be watching TV, reading books, talking to friends, or playing video games as long as they're in your target language and near your limit of comprehension. It should be as much as 80% fun stuff/20% studying to keep yourself motivated.
Then talk to native speakers, for hours a day, so that you internalize it all and can consume and produce sentences without thinking.
1. Read or listen to something in your target language. 2. Work out the meaning of a word you don't know (using a dictionary, teacher, context clues etc).
Do this 1000 to 10,000 times and you'll have a formidable knowledge of your target language.
Of course, the first thing people do is say: "Aha, I can optimise this! I'll make a list of all the words and just learn that!". Instantly you've removed all context, grammar and likely pronunciation (if the list is written only) from the language. Making an enormous word list is kind of taking the language out of the language.
As I get older I want to teach, and perhaps this is natural, to want to teach more and more as we get older, but sometimes that actually gets in the way of learning. It's as if I spent decades putting knowledge into my brain and now I want to pour that knowledge out of my brain. If you've ever read my blog, you know I like to write about things I've learned during my tech and consulting career.
But occasionally I need to still put knowledge into the brain, and fast, and chemicals like Paxil are very helpful there. SSRI drugs are known to increase the flexibility with which new neuronal connections are made. And I suspect that is very helpful when trying to learn a new skill fast.
I also personally recommend memantine, but that's because it helps me clear out the brain fog and anxiety that normally keeps me from doing basically anything successfully, and it has the same benefit of small dose, MASSIVE half life (60+ hours), and a proven track record of facilitating improved cognitive functioning
It was also a refreshingily daunting experience to throw myself at something I quickly realized I had no talent in and to really writhe and struggle, but to stick through it, motivated not by any external party or marketable skill, but by earnest interest in the topic.
It also helps if you look foreign enough to where natives don't expect you to know their language, and are shocked when you can say even just "hello my name is..."
Mother language aside, some of us have to work harder to acquire passing fluency in another tongue.
It's commonly known in the language learning community that your 1st new (adult) language is the hardest and every language from there gets easier. Because the first time you have to also build the "library" of metacognition appropriate for learning languages. The next time you do it, you already have that library in place and the process is much faster.
Remember, there's a lot more monoglots out there. You're testing this as a small self-assessed group.
It would be cheating, but I might add: maybe you have better than average metacognition brain function?
Oh, I can muddle through pleasantries and transactions when traveling and I continue to enjoy learning new words and phrases. But when I finally let go of my aspirations to become fluent it was as if a major weight was lifted off my shoulders after decades of beating myself up about being such a poor language learner.
You can only have so many top priorities in your life so it's perfectly fine to choose to learn a language recreationally for fun rather than seriously for fluency.
Probably just bad journalism but this quote just says “each brain strikes its own balance”. They don’t go so far as to say some people have more plasticity and whether there are other tradeoffs with that.
For example I’ve always felt I’m a fairly slow but deep learner- like my brain takes longer than average to be productive at complex new tasks as it is rewiring but I learn things at a fairly deep level, so I wish they had shed light on that.
- this is an study into a mechanism that might be related learning to discriminate sounds;
- it's 10 subjects, and two, yes two, syllables;
- during a very short period of time.
This is not about learning a new language. And the title "blame it on your stable brain" falls in the wave of neuro-feel-good writing: you don't have to blame yourself, it's your bloody brain! Well, who are you, if not your brain?
And "stable brain" is interpreted in the article as non-plastic, which is thinly veiled language for "bad at learning". So, if you're struggling to learn a new language, it's because you're a bad learner.