This is actually a really cool article. I'm fascinated that we can learn languages this way. Immersion is definitely the avenue I'd seek but, often, that is not possible. The time table the author kept was amazing.
One thing caught my eye as it brought back some fun memories: Verlan is equivalent to our Pig Latin. The biggest difference is, many places in France actually use it! Here in the States, we tend to use Pig Latin around small children when we don't want them to understand what we're saying.
> 11/18: Complete beginner (A0) excluding basics like “hello, do you speak English?”
OP: please clarify what the above means. When you say you did "A0", I'm presuming it's a level in the French proficiency measurement system. Is it just the exam that you completed, or was there accompanying course material as well? If the latter, please point me to the actual course material you used.
I've been learning French for a few years now (Michel Thomas method). I'd conjecture that this was the most helpful (considering you weren't in an immersion situation to help you): iTalki
A huge Duolingo fan and I play every day, but I wonder whether it's actually helping me to learn anything. I've been using it to study mandarin characters for the 3rd year now, but when I actually see Chinese text there's barely anything I recognize.
Admittedly, I spend maybe 5-15 minutes per day on average and most of that I do in a rush, but the expectation still sounds fair -- reading would be relatively passive knowledge too.
It can be very hard to perceive the progress you’ve made if you aren’t actually putting it into practice.
Speaking from personal experience, if you’ve actually put in substantial time in the last year, you’ll find that a lot of that practice will demonstrate itself over the course of a few conversation classes with a teacher.
You’ve certainly learned something, but at the level of commitment it’s going to be less than if you put more time into it (yes I’m captain obvious here).
One thing that you will notice is that even if you can’t utilize it fluidly now, if you were to jump into more immersive methods now, you’ll realize that it’s all there under the surface - you’ll very likely make very rapid progress.
I’m studying too mostly on my own for about 2.5 years. I can read a most characters I see in the wild, though that still leaves enough that understanding the text is hard or impossible. OverallI find reading much easier to study than listening. I haven’t used DuoLingo and would recommend HelloChinese instead. But that’s only a few months to half a year of material; you have to move on. After that I used an Anki deck of HSK vocab.
Are you reading anything? Find graded readers like from Mandarin Companion and read those (start with ones that seem too easy).
Have you learned to write any of the characters? I don’t think you need to learn to write all of them, but learning at least 50 or so got me to understand and recognize the characters better in my reading as well.
The Pleco app is a nice reader letting you look up words just by tapping on them. Also turn off pinyin in any study apps you’re using, just use characters (except for in answers to verify you’re right).
Doing Duolingo every day makes you good at Duolingo.
There aren't any tricks IMO. You have to practise the thing you actually want to be able to do. You wouldn't expect to get good at playing guitar by tapping an app every day, why would it help you learn a language?
I’ve successfully used duolingo to learn multiple languages.
I’ve used it as the way to get started and build a base of vocabulary and grammar, allowing me to comfortably jump into immersion with audio/video/speaking etc.
Duolingo is quite effective at what it advertises, it never claims it will bring you to full fluency.
I like to say Duolingo is a slow way to learn a language, but it's infinitely faster than not learning it at all.
The main benefit of Duolingo is the streak. Gotta keep the streak going, so I use it every single day.
Is it working? I can read French news articles for the most part, filling in the blanks from context. I have trouble listening at normal talking speeds to French youtube videos. For speaking, I'm sure I could order a croissant and get a hotel room, but beyond that...
Still, it's much better than looking for perfection and learning nothing.
Yeah, that's reasonable. It's incredibly good, but Duolingo alone isn't enough to become fluent. As a way to introduce yourself to a language it's brilliant though.
Then I bought a bunch of french books for my daughter and learnt I knew nothing.
Was it really the case that you didn't know anything in the books? That would be very surprising. At the very least you'd expect to recognize vocabulary you've encountered before, even if the sentences weren't familiar. I'd have thought after 500 * 15 minutes you'd be able to figure some things out.
As it is though, even if the books were completely unfamiliar, I don't really know how you'd measure or test that Duolingo had had no impact on you. Obviously if a book has vocabulary in it that you've not encountered on Duolingo then you're not going to know what it means, but how could you know that you aren't picking up new things faster because you've worked through Duolingo first?
My experience of it has been very different. I work through Duolingo courses for languages I build software in. I've not spent anywhere close to 500 days on any language yet, but I've found I am able to work with languages better having done a few months of Duolingo courses. When I've been working on German and Spanish websites I've actually understood much more of the text than I could with websites I haven't learnt any of. I mean, I couldn't drop in to Madrid and have a chat with someone, but it definitely has made a difference.
You need to do a certain amount of learning grammar, DuoLingo will teach you very little. Do read the tips for every exercise on the DuoLingo website (they are not in the app). Those are great!
>You need to do a certain amount of learning grammar, DuoLingo will teach you very little. Do read the tips for every exercise on the DuoLingo website (they are not in the app). Those are great!
Honestly, probably not fluent in any language except python. I probably need to put significantly more effort into learning the language than I was doing.
I hate the gendered nature of french. I love quebecois over the french academy crap.
And i have been studying for 3 years by my self and no where near to be able to say i "know" french. Some people just are better at learning stuff than others.
Yeah. I had four years of high school French and was in maybe the top 25% of the class (barely). But I've never spent any appreciable time in France and, even when I was at my best, was maybe "OK" for written French and thoroughly mediocre for spoken French. So the idea that it just takes a bit of dedicated effort to get very good is not true broadly.
I realized on my last trip to Paris with a friend that I know a lot more than someone who has never studied the language at all but it's still pretty bad.
I managed to get from A1.2 (started there from having a few holidays in France, having listened to a Michel Thomas audiobook once) to B2.4 in two years before moving to France.
The InnerFrench podcast helped a lot - I had french courses twice a week, 2 hours each, and the podcast kept french in my mind on weekends/days off.
That being said, after moving here it still took 3-4 months to get comfortable with just how bloody fast they speak French in real life.
That's the big thing with me as well. I would comfortably say I'm at a B2 level, but the french from native speakers in casual conversation is so fast sometimes. It gave me a new appreciation for how fast I probably speak english.
I took 5 years of french in high school and really loved it, so I leaned into it heavily and read novels in French, etc. I felt pretty confident in my vocab and grammar, and I even had a decent time reading some of the Old French stuff from classic novels (I disliked my English teacher and loved French, and since English class at that point is less about the language and more about literary analysis, I asked if I could read the books (where the original was in French) in their native language, and she could hardly refuse such a reasonable and intellectually curious request! So anyway I read Madame Bovary and L'Etranger and a few other older books whose titles escape me).
And on the more modern side, I could read French newspapers quite well too.
But at no point could I ever reliably make out more than the gist of what an actual French speaker, speaking normally, said. We have two Belgian exchange students and I struggled to understand them, and just watching French video content, similar struggles there.
I don't know if it's like this for every language where native speakers just talk really fast and there's a large gulf in comprehension speed for learners to close, or if it's something specific to French, but I know your pain here.
In my experience with other languages (can't say for French since that's my native language), it's normal. I'd say that for someone at your level who has extensive vocabulary and good reading comprehension, just staying a month or two in France would be enough for you to get to the point where you wouldn't have issues understanding French speakers speaking normally.
Also, once you do understand French speakers, you might not understand other accents. For example, even as a native French speaker, I struggle with Québécois.
As an English speaker who learned French, Spanish, and German I'd say that of the three, French has the biggest gap between written, formal language and spoken language, especially in informal contexts (e.g. conversation among friends and family). I would also say that for all languages, reading comprehension and and listening comprehension are two different but complementary skills.
Reading and conversing are really almost like two different skills.
A lot of learning how to speak a language is ear-training. With French, I started much more with speaking so now I can make out a lot of what people say. But, the big challenge with French is that, like in English, native speakers "break" the rules or use subtle turns of phrasing that are very culturally specific, usually they're collocations that don't exactly translate (but luckily for English they actually commonly do thanks to the Norman mixing in English).
It gets even more complicated when French has different formal and casual registers that are much more distinct than in English. So when you're reading Le Monde, or Flaubert, you're getting the literary, fancy, French. Most people speak in a much more argot mixed way.
Now add onto that different regional dialects like Quebecois (really really fast, distinct, french from them), Belgian, Swiss, different parts of France, etc...and it's even more difficult. (Personally I find Parisian French, ou francais standard to be the easiest to understand).
The best solution is just immersion. And constant use. Language is used, and use is the best method for improvement. You can't really think of it like a logical code. It's more like behavior for communicating. You have to learn the right rules in the language game for things to "make sense".
Learning Morse Code it's tempting to start slow. The problem is you get skilled at "slow Morse" and it's hard to speed up, since the sounds and feel change. An alternative is to learn with fast Morse characters or words from the beginning but with long gaps between them for thinking time. Then as you need less thinking time you can shrink the gaps and be fast.
I haven't seen online discussions of this idea for language learning, but I wonder if the same technique could be used? Hear snippets of fast French, words or short phrases, with long gaps for you to think what they said. Then as you understand quicker, need less thinking time, shrink the gaps. ?
Maybe even as simple as a "press space for next sentence when ready, or R to repeat".
[It's also an interesting thing about language comprehension / artificial intelligence. After hearing a thing in English I have awareness of whether or not I understand it, and can correct small misunderstandings without further input, only time and imagination, e.g. "it makes no sense in context, maybe they said this instead" or "I just realised that someword said in their accent would sound like that. It might be someword they said"].
Interesting line of thought! For French I'd say definitely go for gaps between full sentences, because sentences because single words have almost as little to do with spoken French as single letters.
Which is my pet peeve with French: when I feel particularly bad at talking English (I'm German), it feels natural to fall back to a sequence of separate words that isn't a sentence but gets some message to the receiver (while making me sound like the imbecile that I might be, but it does the job and sometimes that's worth this cost). For French, I feel like there's no alternative to trying to form a sentence. And on my level, that works worse than the English "words no sentence" fallback would (and if it does not work it will certainly also fail to make me seem anywhere close to competent in the language)
R to repeat would be an amazing vlc plugin. If an audio file was annotated, having a repeat button that jumps back to the last tag, and double tapping goes back to the previous previous tag.
Not entirely true, liaisons---and the rules around them---make part of any half-decent French curriculum. But liaisons are only one part of the "dropping/concatenating" in spoken French, the other part being accents. Accents can obfuscate speech terribly, but detecting accents can only come by with practice and exposure [in the wild] to regional varieties of FR.
The thing that made liaisons much more clear for me was bucketing them by: optional, forbidden, and required.
I came across the Michel Thomas Method[0] on some comments here some time ago, and I've been thoroughly enjoying it!
When I first started learning French I took a "school" approach to it, get a dedicated notebook, buy books, buy cards to make my own flash cards, schedule 1 hour a day... needless to day that I failed, not just that but I hated it all!
So I decided to make it fun (the way I learn programming or other things that I enjoy) and the Michel Thomas was super fun for me :-) It my motivation to mow the lawn since mowing the lawn is my french listening time.
The other day I got a random marketing email with some french in it trying to be fancy, and I was so happy when I could understand everything it said before having to read the english translation!
I'm not affiliated with them in any way, I just really enjoy his approach to teaching languages
I second this. Michel Thomas french CD's are awesome. I don't like the other languages they offer as much, but the french lessons by Michel himself are the BEST language program I've ever heard.
The slight challenge for me was seeing the words, because french words don't sound like one would think!
But after getting a few rules in my mind like "oi" sounds like "wah" in english and the ending of the french words are mostly not pronounced, it was easier for me going from the sound and meaning (concept) of the word to the reading part.
But the most important thing is that it is fun, and it's a lot easier to stick to fun things!
1. Focus on learning the accent and intonation before you focus on learning vocabulary
2. Speaking to a native speaker daily will bring far more proficiency than studying will
The author criticizes the way we teach languages in schools but I’m not sure you can do much better when most of the class is only there because they have to be there. Frankly, I think it’s remarkable how well schools do.
This is my experience as well. If you're just there to fulfill your credit hour obligations, you can squeak through managing to shield yourself from truly learning much of the language at all.
I think much of the value, though, is in the opportunity it affords people who find a passion in it. I really loved French in high school, and the combination of the support/resources it offered (a book, a teacher) and the regimen (I think French was either 3 or 5 times per week? I can't recall) was just right to let me learn as much as I wanted to, and also enough regimen to keep me coming back to it even if I wouldn't have otherwise necessarily felt like it if left to my own devices.
I don't know how the tests are structured and therefore what those levels mean in practice, but simply from the description on Wikipedia[1] I'd consider B2 quite enough of an achievement when it comes to learning a language:
Can understand the main ideas of complex text on both concrete and abstract topics, including technical discussions in their field of specialisation.
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.
That's closer to mastery of a language than merely having 'learned' it. To me something like B1 is a much more important threshold, since it's the point where you start to be able to use a language in an uncontrolled environment. Obviously becoming more practised and fluent is important but to me that's a less important difference than being able to use the language for more than some predefined scenarios. If only because it allows you to learn unsupervised.
It really depends on what your goals are with the language. If your goal is to "be able to communicate basic needs while visiting Paris for five days" then A2 is likely sufficient. If your goal is to "converse on a range of subjects with locals while living in France for a month" you're probably needing closer to a B2.
I agree, and people should probably ignore advice from people who haven't reached it, unless they'd be content with being b2, which is a lower level than I think people realize.
> 2/19: Started lessons on Italki, roughly once a week
For anyone hoping to learn a language I think this step is the key. Probably worth the same as doing everything else on the list put together. 2 hours a week will probably get you from A1 to B1 in 3-6 months
Isn't individually targeted comprehensible input a large part of a 1-on-1 class? I would expect a good teacher to speak a lot during those 2 hours, and to properly adjust his speech so that's always pushing the boundaries of what the student can understand.
That approach feels intuitively wrong to me[1]; people who watch sports don't automatically become good athletes. People who look at pictures don't automatically become good at drawing. People who read don't automatically become good authors. People who watch cooking shows on TV don't automatically become good at cooking. Students who watch programming videos notoriously don't automatically become able to code anything the compiler accepts. Reviewing study notes by re-reading them is one of the less effective study strategies, compared to flashcards which prompt you to recall and generate answers from your memories.
Surely yes you need to adjust to the sound of a foreign language, but with no feedback loop of trying to speak and having another person feedback, how do you adjust?
Listening to hours of completely foreign language won't make you understand what the words are or what they mean, so "comprehensible" input includes weasel words that require you to already know the language before you can learn it. It's all over a bit weird.
Don't people say some of the most effective ways to learn are the immersion courses where you go to a retreat and speak only that language for weeks at a time, studying and learning 8 hrs+/day and then there are people who spend years reading or listening but aren't confident to speak anything. But are there people who spend years speaking with fluent speakers who still report they don't know the language?
[1] inb4 "hurr think you know better than professional linguists"
It seems unreasonable to me to expect to be B1 in 6 months with 2 hours of class per week.
I've been learning German 2 hours a week + homework for 2 years and I'm not yet B1 in German. We are 4 students with one teacher and, from what I understand, we are not particularly slow.
Maybe German is really harder to learn than other languages, but probably not 2x or 4x as French (I'm French).
People talk of "difficult" languages in absolute terms, but there is always the question of where one is coming from.
English shares a significant amounts of structure and words with French, so French ends up being relatively straightforward to learn for a motivated English speaker - the only real difference is the amount of tenses, which OP unsurprisingly still struggles with. I bet you, as a French speaker, would grasp Italian very quickly - much faster than most Chinese likely ever will.
German ended up sharing much less with Romance languages, so it stands to reason that it would take 2x-3x the effort of going from English to French.
I'm probably C2 comprehension, C1 speaking in German. I self-taught to high B2 (based off placement into that level in a Goethe Institut Intesivkurs) in 15 months of 2 hours a day. I studied 1-2 hours per day on average and did not miss a single day.
2 hours a week to B1 in German as an English speak seems totally impossible. I was probably B1 in 6 months at the level of study I described. I studied 5 years of Latin prior to starting so the case system wasn't an additional learning curve. Your pace honestly seems standard.
I think language classes are in itself slow. Duolingo is a lot faster. After Duolingo you should read texts in the language (B1-B2 maybe) and then you will start being able to listen to arbitrary native speakers (which I don't think is practicable before C1).
French has plenty of difficulty in orthography and some in grammar. Maybe the grammar is slightly less complex than German, but only slightly. But I'd say for someone from another language that is easily overshadowed by prior experience in English or Spanish or similar.
I'm on week 8 of a weekly 90 minute Italian course. My wife and I both are in it, 8 other students and the class is held over Zoom. I've actually been pleasantly surprised with my progress. We study a bit outside of class and there is some casual homework but I'm excited to see after taking a few more levels with the teacher.
I do wish the class was twice a week for more forced cadence of practice but that's an adult problem.
I know someone who augmented his English study by spending more time on the bus than necessary and sitting near old ladies who were chatting amongst each other. They tend to speak slower and with more clarity. Tactics like these really helped him master his English accent. This was back in the 1980s.
When you happen to be around parents interacting with their toddler age children, you almost can't not learn the language. Only on toddler level, but that can't be the worst start.
I don't know what that is but according to wikipedia[1] Anpanman has a higher total revenue than MCU, Harry Potter, Transformers, Spiderman, Barbie, etc
It's insane that the only one I don't recognize is so high up on the list
My Japanese improved significantly by reading the Crayon Shin-chan comics. The advantage of comics aimed at young people is that they have phonetic characters (hiragana) written above the Chinese characters (kanji), so you don't have to deal with the hell of written Japanese (early Christian missionaries described Japanese as being a language "from the devil", and I am sure they were referring to the written version).
Maybe I missed it but this doesn't state how to find French speakers to converse with. If I, say, live in England, how do I find people who will happily help me practise my French? In my experience speakers that you meet would rather just speak English than help you understand them.
Many years ago I studied French intensively and got to the stage I could read and write quite well and understood some fairly advanced grammar. But I couldn't even make the most spoken basic requests, let alone have a conversation, because I had no exposure to the spoken language. I had done a lot of what the author suggests here in terms of listening (some French films are excellent, by the way), but it's not enough.
One thing I'm quite certain about is techniques that treat you like a baby are really inefficient. That includes Rosetta Stone, Duolingo etc. It's just way more convenient to learn much of the grammar using your existing language skills. Practice with people who can speak your current language and your target language, as the author suggests, is ideal as you can get them to explain what they meant in your language. There are certain fixed phrases and figures of speech which would take a long time to learn like a baby, plus the faux amis will trip you up if you're not careful.
In the first paragraph he says "without any formal programs or immersion" and a couple of lines below says "by spending lots of time talking with fluent French speakers". Isn't this the best type of immersion someone can use?
As a big believer in immersion I don't think there is any other way of learning languages other than immersing yourself in it..
I suspect they spoke on Zoom. I've come across quite a few entrepreneurs basically running sites that pair international people together to converse in different languages.
(As opposed to traveling to a country and living in it.)
Also note that they switched their phone over to French.
2/19: Started lessons on Italki, roughly once a week
along with doing this:
1/19: Started occasionally watching Peppa Pig in French (yes, really)
2/19: Changed my phone language to French
is what he could be considering "immersion"
For those that don't know, iTalki is a platform where you can talk to native language speakers. You can join either as a teacher or learner. You can get actual lessons from people or just join to have discussions to improve/maintain your language
> As a big believer in immersion I don't think there is any way of learning languages other than immersing yourself in it
Immersion outside of a classroom context, as an adult, is a terrible way to learn a language on its own. Your exposure to comprehensible context is lower than in traditional language learning methods.
In a classroom setting it can be highly effective, but is still best paired with traditional approaches. Grammar is difficult to teach through immersion, and there's no obvious benefit in doing so. You can spend hours going through various combinations of "y" and "en" pronouns hoping to make it stick. Or you could take a quick pause and explain that, roughly, "y" replaces "à + noun", "en" replaces "de + noun", and move back to immersion for practice.
People often seem to have done reasoning along the lines of "children learn languages through immersion, children learn languages faster than adults, therefore learning is faster with immersion." But that's obviously flawed logic. It's just that people rarely make their argument explicit.
I'd like to point out to OP that most of his/her listed limitations are also limitations most french native speaker have. Cultural differences from one area to another influence the way french people speak a lot (I guess it's true in a lot of countries though). I sometimes don't understand half what my in-laws say, and we were born like 100km away from each other. This goes beyond colloquial speak like argot (which is mostly parisian anyway) or verlan. It's basically words from local dialects (like provençal, basque or breton) that became part of some kind of accepted local french variant which is for everyone involved just french and nothing more. The local variant aspect is not really blatant until someone from outside points out he/she doesn't understand a word that until then sounded very...basic to everyone else. The word for "mop" for example has like its own variant in every region.
My point is: your limitations are a proof that you understand french almost as well as a native speaker that never really left his/her hometown. Which is impressive.
I guess yes, for some examples, but sometimes the new words meaning are not even "guessable". Maybe you can see it as what you could experience as an american visiting the UK.
Pimsleur isn't cheap, but if you have an Audible subscription you can (could? haven't checked in a while) get them at a steep discount compared to list price (through Pimsleur or any other source). When I bought the Spanish lessons a few years ago, buying the whole set via Audible this way (even considering the subscription cost, and combined with their credits) basically cut the cost in half (I actually did price it out because I nerd out with spreadsheets sometimes, but I don't recall the exact figures anymore).
Also, check your local library. They may have access for you for free.
I learned Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Polish, I knew English and Hebrew.
Every day I would usually repeat the previous day's lesson, and do a new lesson.
For languages such as Japanese and Chinese, you'd probably need to repeat it more than that. It's recommended that you know about 80% of the answers before moving on to the next lesson.
It worked for me when I studied Japanese, German and Russian, even though the language of instruction is English, which is not my native language. The trick is that you have to follow the instructions, not just "listen to some tapes". The Japanese course consists of 3*30 units, the recommendation is one 30 minute unit every day. Do that, no more, no less. It's not magic, even if you master all 90 units, that's just a very basic spoken proficiency. But it gives you that result reliably.
They added another 2 units for Japanese, it is a good method, certainly teach you the basics and how to get by if you are in Japan. You get to learn all the important patterns and many common words, the last 2 units add more casual speaking which is very important since people use it a lot, even in formal situations. My only grief with them is that they try to push Japanese culture and therefore use words that are not that common or useful, like "embroidery". It would be much better if they used the most common words of the language rather than not very useful vocabulary for a beginner.
After a month or so on Pimsleur Mandarin as a total beginner, I was feeling pretty good about myself so I posted some voice recordings to get feedback. The feedback I got was along the lines of “uhh yeah we can’t really understand you bud”.
That forced me to actually go learn Pinyin and learn about the j/q/x consonants. It took me about 2 months of obsessive practice to fix all the wrong pronunciations I taught myself from 1 month of Pimsleur.
I think for any non Western European language, it’s much better to learn the basics the old fashioned way, especially the writing system and all the phonetic aspects of the language that don’t exist in English.
The flip side is many people learn bad pronunciation habits because of reading. Things like Chinese tones for native English speakers or L/R for native Japanese speakers are always going to be hard and no single textbook, tape or app will fix that.
I should be clear that I was watching YouTube videos as much as reading over those two months. And I was aware from my experience taking Spanish classes that a letter in English probably sounds different from the same letter in $LANGUAGE2.
To be honest it’s hard for me to understand the “Pinyin teaches you wrong pronunciation” line of thinking. It so commonly repeated by so many people that there must be something to it, but not for me.
This is a good place for an early intervention. I had u and the consonants explained to me around lesson 2-3, and I did fine. I practiced them every time, comparing myself to the speaker.
I got railroaded on the difference between i and e. My chi and my che sound basically the same. This is little enough that people seem to understand well enough, but it's sometimes a bit awkward.
Yeah. I would’ve saved a lot of time if I got feedback after the very first lesson instead of waiting a month. I might have been productive continuing to use Pimsleur in that case.
Pimsleur Chinese is excellent, but it takes patience to get into it, especially if you know a little bit already. There's a spaced repetition schedule, and you're not aligned when you start. Caveats:
1) You don't see spaced repetition working until a few weeks in, once you're on a schedule.
2) You can't have gaps, so you can't just start in the middle.
3) If you know stuff, you need to keep with it until it gets into new stuff.
From there, it has to be done daily. If you miss 2-3 days, it's a chore to get back onto the schedule. I did it when I had a commute, so investing 30 minutes per day was easy. It added no time to my day, and by the end of 3 months, I knew /a lot/ of Chinese for not a lot of time invested. I was on-par with people who had roughly 2 years of college classes for speaking (but not reading or writing, which Pimsleur doesn't touch on). My accent was better too.
Once I finished, there was nowhere to go. Nothing else was nearly as efficient. I kind of plateaued. There are better tools now; this was many years ago.
I did the library/CDs route, so it was free.
I highly recommend the same path.
I haven't found anything good for writing Chinese. Does anyone have recommendations? Ideally, it'd leverage a pen tablet or iPad pencil or similar.
The best I've found for learning to write Chinese characters has been Skritter (https://skritter.com/)
If you are following a textbook, you can probably find pre-made decks of characters for that textbook.
The poster completely missed an incredible resource: Discord! The Reddit r/French has a fantastic Discord community where you can engage in written and spoken communication.
I've been learning French since I was 9 and when I moved where French is dominant, I can barely communicate French to the locals and would usually quickly switch to English.
I learned Spanish, too, in about 12 months to dogfood my new app for learning vocabulary (which I just recently launched) [0]
Even though I made an app that helped me along the way to learn words, I don't believe in a single app/book/approach for learning a language. You need to expose yourself to A LOT of different language materials.
I was learning for about 2h a day, 6 times a week. I would read articles, books, websites in Spanish. I would watch YouTube videos [1]. I would read news, initially for beginners [2] and later regular [3]. And most importantly, I would have 4-5h a week itakly conversations.
After 6 months I understood quite a lot, but couldn't speak almost at all. Then magic happens and 6 months later, I was having a normal conversation (though still with some errors) about any range of topics: politics, global warming, travel, engineering etc.
I believe the key for me was to read a lot of books which were interesting to me. For example I read Bill Gate's book "How To Avoid A Climate Disaster" in Spanish, as well as about ~8 others in the first 12 months.
Oh wow I've been after something like this for a long time. It's awesome because it's relevant content (news) but at a pace that beginners can follow. I don't know Spanish but knowing French, I could follow along the super slow mode and not feel lost.
Going to look for this in German and Chinese, I wonder if there's something similar.
To put it into perspective, children learn their native language through ~10 years of complete immersion, so of course they speak it incredibly well. Very few adult learners will ever have the opportunity to be immersed in a foreign language that thoroughly over such a long time, but if they did we would expect them to speak that language excellently as well (albeit perhaps with a slight accent).
I’m in my early thirties and similarly learned French from 0 to a conversational level in a bit over a year. (Though I was already pretty strong in Spanish so that helped significantly)
The age thing is mostly a myth imo. If you put in the time and effort you’ll get a lot back.
The biggest issue is the concept of fluency. A lot of people believe they have to be 100% perfect or they don’t “know” the language. In reality, from the moment you start you will continually become more and more comfortable in an asymptotic manner (no one knows 100% of a language, ie what percentage words in the dictionary do you know).
The biggest piece of advice - get comfortable in dealing with ambiguity, and don’t try to force constructs from your primary language onto the one you are learning. Meaning: don’t say X word means Y word in my native language, therefore I can use it exactly the same (it’s a different word, VERY likely with different connotations).
You've hit the nail on the head! Being comfortable with ambiguity and not knowing something 100% is crucial. I've observed many language learners over the years and if someone has a habit of translating every word they see into their native language before they are satisfied then they usually make slow progress learning a second language.
A corollary to this is that this is the reason why memorizing flash cards/massive lists of words can be counter productive. A degree of that is helpful to start, but you really need to see words in proper context, repeatedly.
“ don’t try to force constructs from your primary language onto the one you are learning.”
That’s super important. This also applies to translated texts. Something somebody in Iran says may sound crazy when translated straight but may just be a normal thing in their language.
As a German it took me a long time to understand that when an American says “we should have a beer someday “ that this means that you most likely will not have a beer with that person.
I am almost out of my 40s. In the past year, I've gotten three AWS certifications and learned new hobbies from scratch (ex: electronics component-level repair).
I haven't seen evidence that my ability to learn things has slowed down yet. I think a lot of "age-related" problems are more related to lifestyle until about 60.
When you're 20, you can eat sugar, fat and salt all day long while sitting on a couch and get along pretty well. When you're 40, you'll get fat and your body will atrophy.
There's a solution though: eat healthful foods, exercise, manage stress, pursue important goals, be active socially.
I'm just dieting down for a second time, and I'll attest to this. Both times what got me to take diet seriously again was recognizing how sluggish I'd gotten, and cleaning my diet up again has a remarkably rapid effect.
The ability to learn things slow down dramatically when you get older, it's probably even more true for languages. It's fairly obvious when you look at kids. They can learn in the 5 first years of their life, without even thinking about it, to speak a language as well (at least accent wise) as any adult would do in 20 years of pretty intense studying.
I'm sure it does, but you put me in a house, with 2 adults, house, feed and clothe me for 5 years that i don't have to worry about going to work and i guarantee you i will speak whatever language they speak a whole lot better than some 5 year old.
Hey i'll even throw in another language and still be able to fight the 5 year old. With one hand.
Scientists used to think that brain connections developed at a rapid pace in the first few years of life, until you reached your mental peak in your early 20s. Your cognitive abilities would level off at around middle age, and then start to gradually decline. We now know this is not true.
If people spoke to me using using baby level words, then took great delight when I learned and re-produced sound, and steadily upped the sophistication of what they said, I'm sure I'd learn super quickly as well.
People can be weird with non-native adult speakers.
I tried to learn my wifes family language - mother in law seemed a bit embarrassed with how to deal with a non-native speaker, and mumbles short things very quickly. My father in law is better, he'll just talk and talk, reasonably clearly and slowly, and I've conversed way more with him (even if it's not at all fluent and involves a lot of dictionary pauses and trying to explain things).
While this myth is repeated often, I don’t find it true or obvious at all, I’m not sure where it comes from and I don’t see any actual evidence for it. You need to compare the hours spent learning, not years, in order to compare effort.
What seems “obvious” to me is that the opposite is true - language learning accelerates for people who learn multiple languages; learning a second language takes less time than the first, if you measure the number of hours spent on it. A third one often goes even faster, especially for related languages. The main problem people have is they don’t put in the hours, and that may indeed get harder to find the motivation to do as we age.
Accent is not a metric for proficiency, understanding and communication is. 5 year old native speakers have good accents but have been immersed 100% and often don’t have the vocabulary for adult conversations. The article is someone reaching B2 level from scratch in 1 year, without full immersion. (B2 is the requirement for a foreigner to start a university degree, for example.) It doesn’t take 20 years of intense studying to learn a language, older adults learn them to proficiency in a year or two all the time.
Think of the hours again, a 5 year old has spent 8-16 hours a day (56-112 hours/week) immersed for 5 years, while the author here did like maybe 10-15 hours a week (which is indeed pretty intense and aggressive). Read his notes - ~100 hours of conversation to reach B2, where a 5 year old will have definitely had more than 1,000 hours of conversation and likely closer to ~5,000 hours of conversation. That’s more than 10x, plausibly much more, so it seems clear that in this case the author’s learning is far more efficient than childhood language learning.
It is true that learning extra languages makes it easier and easier, but that just makes the learning capacity of babies even more impressive: they are not even learning a language, they are leaning what is a language, what does it mean to make sound with their mouth, etc etc.
Several comments seem to suggest babies are learning to speak full time, but it's very far from it, they have to learn to walk, eat, read physical expression, draw, etc etc, all kind of things we don't even realize. They are just awesome learning machines, which I find fascinating to watch.
Older second language learners have a harder time, but I don't think it's because of some kind of "weakening of the brain" with age. I think the real reasons are:
* Older people can't remember the difficulty of learning their first language. They've been using it comfortably for years.
* Older people have bigger vocabularies so the gap between their first and second language is even larger.
* The discomfort of learning new things is less familiar for older peoples
I agree. Maybe there's some truth in the whole "brain plasticity" talking point but how long does it take a child to become fully comfortable with speaking and writing a language? 8 years? Longer? Compared to an adult who can accomplish that in about a year. And that is when the child has no choice but to use that language, since they know no other.
Learned a few things like violin art and other stuff as a way to spend time with my kids. turns out I learn much faster than they do.
The only difference is I’ve seen is I’m much more focused but they have much more free time. An hour of my focus learning is probably worth a week of their efforts.
Strangely missing: older people (40s) usually take care of X pretty small kids + N pretty declining elders while having Y hours of work + Z hours commute daily.
“Studies comparing the rate of second-language acquisition in children versus adults have shown that although children may have an advantage in achieving native-like fluency in the long run, adults actually learn languages more quickly than children in the early stages (Krashen, Long and Scarcella, 1979.)”
“Adults are quite strategic in their learning, compared with children. They are generally self-motivated, use time effectively, and can apply themselves to lengthy tasks.”
My personal opinion is that the #1 block to fluency as an adult is the concentration on written resources and trying to apply rules. Children learn by mimicry, but adults learn by resources, which creates errors. You can tell by listening to people that have learnt English as a second language, and understanding the source of the errors they make.
“I was learning for about 2h a day, 6 times a week. I would read articles, books, websites in Spanish”
If you put in that much time you will learn no matter your age. Same for children. They are supposed to be better at language learning but in the end they spend a lot of time that adults often don’t have or don’t want to invest.
I’m in my late 30’s and learning Chinese and Japanese simultaneously. The age thing is almost entirely a myth. There are three factors in which age matters:
1. Older people get set in their ways, and learning a language requires rethinking how you think. This limitation is purely psychological and not biological and you can avoid it merely by giving it an honest attempt. Learning a foreign language can be a great way to to keep your mind fresh.
2. TIME. Learning a language requires thousands of hours of commitment. Young people have time to commit to it. Older people with work and careers do not, and so often don’t make as much progress. But if you chart progress vs. hours studied, age disappears as a factor. (There are studies of this, but I’m on mobile right now and can’t pull them up.)
3. Truly young people (under the age of 12) still have the ability to hear sounds not used in their mother tongue. This is why transplanted kids can speak fluently and pass as natives, but adults and even teens develop heavy accents. Older people still have enough neural flexibility to retrain their ear, but it takes much more time and conscious effort. This is the only truly biological age-related factor, and countering it just requires a bit more time and conscious attention.
If you are learning a languages as a busy adult, the key is to find ways to immerse yourself in the language, even if it is just passively listening to things on a loop while you do your day job, listening to audiobooks during your commute, and always having a study book or flash cards at hand everywhere you go. You need to study not 10 minutes a day, but 5-10 hours a day—but if you’re smart, that time will double dip for other things and you can get away with just 1 hour a day of real committed study, and the rest is various forms of background practice throughout the day.
This is crucial. Watching movies in a foreign language can be difficult because of how fast the dialog is, but if you use subtitles in your language, you will always be thinking in your language first, then translating to the target language. Put subtitles on in the target language so that you can catch words that you wouldn't catch from the audio only, but you are still immersing yourself completely in that language.
Especially for French, since, like English, the actual pronunciation can be quite unexpected, compared to the text.
I came out of high school with four years of Latin and three years of German.
Being a language expert, I thought I'd try the beginning French course. The first day in class, the professor began rattling off in French, and the other students seemed to have no problem with that, having apparently had several years of high school French. I couldn't make heads or tails of what what going on and quickly dropped the course.
> the actual pronunciation can be quite unexpected, compared to the text.
Not at all. French is over 95% many to one: From a given spelling it's clear how to pronounce it. Of course you need to know the rules and enough practice. Just writing dictations is really hard, because the same pronunciation can be spelled various ways. And it's not even enough to know how to spell the word. You need to understand the meaning of the sentence, because there are endings that are not pronounced, but depend on the grammar.
English is much more many to many. The same letter combinations can have different pronunciations and the other way round. GHOTI is either pronounced fish or completely silent... GH as in enough or in right. And so on for all remaining letter (groups). You can't do that in French.
Well, for me anyway, compared to Latin, German, Japanese and Spanish it's very hard to listen to and write down what's being said, which is why I gave up on the class, because that's what the professor was asking us to do.
You cannot do that instinctively. It requires internalizing the rules which will take a while, a couple of months probably, longer in lower grades at school.
The GHOTI example is rather contrived as it ignores so much context. For instance, you're claiming that "ti" can be pronounced "sh" on the basis of the pronunciation of the Latin-derived suffix "-tion," but in fact "ti" would never, ever be pronounced that way at the end of a word. Same with silent "gh" at the beginning of a word.
The problem with french subtitles is that for many popular series/movies subtitles don't match the actual french speech. Looks like they are just translating English subtitles separately or something.
I used the same method, in addition to going through all of the Rosetta Stone French lessons and the Defense Language Institute material (thanks to the Army.) I also went to a weekly French language Meetup where only French was spoken and any Alliance Française events in the area. It took me eight months, so you were faster than me.
Thank you for sharing this list of resources. I have been studying French since September of 2020 (but only got serious about it in May of 2021). There are some resources here that I was not aware of.
Without https://leconjugueur.lefigaro.fr/ I could not survive. Mostly for writing, but if there e.g. is a weird passé simple or subjonctif also for reading sometimes.
Like for instance, in the US there was once a large tex-mex restaurant chain called Chichi's (long since bankrupt). When I told my friend from Spain this, she was horrified.
That's the least problem I'd say. Spanish is pretty conserved, especially the written language.
Listening comprehension is always the last of the skills to kick in, because it is all-or-nothing. You only understand every word in the sentence or your brain gets overloaded. While reading foreign texts you can easily skip a word you can't understand and still figure out what the rest means. Or at least, more often so, because you don't have to keep everything in short term memory.
> Listening comprehension is always the last of the skills to kick in
Is that actually the case?
I've always found it easier to follow a conversation in a language I am learning than to speak it.
You get an awful lot of context when listening, only need to put a few words in the right place and suddenly what you're hearing makes sense. You can get away without literally translating everything.
Speaking on the other hand, you can't converse properly without being able to find the right word at the right time and in the right place.
> I've always found it easier to follow a conversation in a language I am learning than to speak it
Absolutely not. I have lived abroad half of my life (sometimes with a language reasonably close to my mother tongue and sometimes very far)
Speaking is always easier. I can make my own speed and I never use an unkown word. Sometimes I have to be a bit creative how to explain things if I am lacking a word.
Following discussions is hard. People use words I don't know all the time. Slang, dialects, accents on top of that. And many of them just speak too fast. This can take many many years and might never disappear when certain speakers are involved.
News speakers or documentary movies might be a different story.
Understanding spoken language means building a representation of the current sentence in your mind. For all but the shortest sentences, this can't be done word-by-word or even phoneme-by-phoneme. Humans have a working memory of 7+-2 items, and it gets quickly overloaded that way.
When we know a language well enough, we actually compress the sentence to a mental model that takes a lot less space in that working memory. But this only works when we know every word of the sentence and understand the grammar involved. Even one unresolved word often means the sentence expands from one chunk to at least three chunks.
Of course, your speaking skill also improves all the time. But at least in my case I feel like I can usually speak better than listen, in a new language (and I've had a few).
If you are a native English speaker, the #1 trick is to learn the vowel sounds exactly correctly.
Vowel sounds in words extremely variable in English, but are very rigid in Spanish, even in different countries. In Spanish consonants may change their sound in some countries, but the differences are fixed, and it is easily learnable. Get your pronunciation corrected as soon as you begin learning, otherwise you teach yourself bad habits that are hard to break.
English speakers tend to really screw up the vowel sounds in Spanish, which makes words unintelligible to Spanish speakers. The one-to-one correspondence between written vowels and spoken vowel sounds actually makes Spanish quite easy to pick up.
One other trick is to speak English words using Spanish vowel sounds, because Spanish speakers with a little English will often hear the word if you do that. It also helps if you can hear English words spoken with Spanish vowel sounds by Spanish speakers.
If you are in a hick area then the Spanish language can change in other ways which can be difficult to understand (for example eating S’s, ma o meno).
The rumour is that the grammar is hard to learn, but if you only need conversational Spanish then there is one future and one past tense that is easy for English speakers to learn to speak: Voy a = I am going to, He = I have.
I’m a native Spanish speaker, that’s why I say words can change meaning amongst countries. Also, some sounds are pronounced different in different countries.
My mother tongue is English, and I originally learnt conversational Spanish in Sevilla using my own techniques (months not years).
I have subsequently had little trouble communicating with people speaking 100% Spanish when I have travelled (mostly Cuba, Mexico, Majorca) or at home (Chilean, Argentinian etc).
I agree that some words change, and I agree that there are pronunciation changes, but my experience is that the changes are not too difficult to pick up.
Perhaps I am exceptional or not widely enough travelled, but I can only share what I have experienced.
In my opinion, another thing to beware of for anyone learning Spanish is to avoid learning the "correct" pronunciation (sounding like a madrileño). A "proper" accent sounds like you are stuck-up to many people from other countries, which hinders friendly communication. For example: I use an s sound (not th) for 'hace', and dja (not lya) for 'ella'. Aside: Spanish people responded fabulously to me when I had unintentionally picked up a Cuban accent! I have responded really well to people who have picked up a random English accent when they learnt English (except US accents which mostly sound bad to me). Also if you are learning Spanish and native Spanish speakers think you have a strong English accent, you have been teaching yourself using the wrong methods: instead use more mimicking and less reading.
Oh. Thank you for being up front about the time commitment. That helps. I, too, would like quick results but I don’t feel like I can give it the go that you did so I think I will not do this.
I grew up bilingual (English first language, Italian from my mother) and the "read a book you liked in your first language but translated into your desired language" is an excellent way to get exposure.
For several reasons:
- You liked the book originally so you won't mind reading it again
- You know the story so if you get to a part where you don't understand the language, you can infer the meaning based on the your knowledge of the story
- Because it was translated, it's good to see how a phrase you know well in your primary language was converted into the new language. This is particularly helpful for your own "on the fly" translation when you are speaking.
In my particular case, I knew "family" level Italian very well (e.g. how you would speak to your parents, siblings at home etc). What I didn't know was more formal and inter-adult language grammar. Reading books by one of my favorite English authors translated into Italian was a real game changer.
When I did an exchange in Germany, I picked up Der Kleine Hobbit for that reason. My first week it was mentally exhausting just reading a page or two, but things picked up quickly from there.
That's a pretty cool language learning app concept - you haven't overcooked it. A lot of apps want to make themselves the star of the show - if that makes sense - but really it's a vessel to learn vocabulary, and it looks like yours lets a user add arbitrary vocab, which means it will be relevant.
There is some portion of learning new languages that involves natural ability, which is no different than how people learn math at different speeds. But the overwhelmingly critical factor is motivation.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 280 ms ] threadOne thing caught my eye as it brought back some fun memories: Verlan is equivalent to our Pig Latin. The biggest difference is, many places in France actually use it! Here in the States, we tend to use Pig Latin around small children when we don't want them to understand what we're saying.
OP: please clarify what the above means. When you say you did "A0", I'm presuming it's a level in the French proficiency measurement system. Is it just the exam that you completed, or was there accompanying course material as well? If the latter, please point me to the actual course material you used.
I've been learning French for a few years now (Michel Thomas method). I'd conjecture that this was the most helpful (considering you weren't in an immersion situation to help you): iTalki
https://www.coe.int/en/web/common-european-framework-referen...
Not quite, no. The system is linked in the first paragraph:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...
it begins at A1. So "A0" is just word play for "I know nothing", no exam necessary ;-).
Admittedly, I spend maybe 5-15 minutes per day on average and most of that I do in a rush, but the expectation still sounds fair -- reading would be relatively passive knowledge too.
Speaking from personal experience, if you’ve actually put in substantial time in the last year, you’ll find that a lot of that practice will demonstrate itself over the course of a few conversation classes with a teacher.
One thing that you will notice is that even if you can’t utilize it fluidly now, if you were to jump into more immersive methods now, you’ll realize that it’s all there under the surface - you’ll very likely make very rapid progress.
Are you reading anything? Find graded readers like from Mandarin Companion and read those (start with ones that seem too easy).
Have you learned to write any of the characters? I don’t think you need to learn to write all of them, but learning at least 50 or so got me to understand and recognize the characters better in my reading as well.
The Pleco app is a nice reader letting you look up words just by tapping on them. Also turn off pinyin in any study apps you’re using, just use characters (except for in answers to verify you’re right).
There aren't any tricks IMO. You have to practise the thing you actually want to be able to do. You wouldn't expect to get good at playing guitar by tapping an app every day, why would it help you learn a language?
I’ve used it as the way to get started and build a base of vocabulary and grammar, allowing me to comfortably jump into immersion with audio/video/speaking etc.
Duolingo is quite effective at what it advertises, it never claims it will bring you to full fluency.
How many characters has Duolingo showed you (if you can get that metric)?
The main benefit of Duolingo is the streak. Gotta keep the streak going, so I use it every single day.
Is it working? I can read French news articles for the most part, filling in the blanks from context. I have trouble listening at normal talking speeds to French youtube videos. For speaking, I'm sure I could order a croissant and get a hotel room, but beyond that...
Still, it's much better than looking for perfection and learning nothing.
Then I bought a bunch of french books for my daughter and learnt I knew nothing.
Was it really the case that you didn't know anything in the books? That would be very surprising. At the very least you'd expect to recognize vocabulary you've encountered before, even if the sentences weren't familiar. I'd have thought after 500 * 15 minutes you'd be able to figure some things out.
As it is though, even if the books were completely unfamiliar, I don't really know how you'd measure or test that Duolingo had had no impact on you. Obviously if a book has vocabulary in it that you've not encountered on Duolingo then you're not going to know what it means, but how could you know that you aren't picking up new things faster because you've worked through Duolingo first?
My experience of it has been very different. I work through Duolingo courses for languages I build software in. I've not spent anywhere close to 500 days on any language yet, but I've found I am able to work with languages better having done a few months of Duolingo courses. When I've been working on German and Spanish websites I've actually understood much more of the text than I could with websites I haven't learnt any of. I mean, I couldn't drop in to Madrid and have a chat with someone, but it definitely has made a difference.
Honestly, probably not fluent in any language except python. I probably need to put significantly more effort into learning the language than I was doing.
I hate the gendered nature of french. I love quebecois over the french academy crap.
I guess I'm not an ideal student by any means.
What! This is revolutionary!
The bullshit heart system is absent?!
I realized on my last trip to Paris with a friend that I know a lot more than someone who has never studied the language at all but it's still pretty bad.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22341983
The InnerFrench podcast helped a lot - I had french courses twice a week, 2 hours each, and the podcast kept french in my mind on weekends/days off.
That being said, after moving here it still took 3-4 months to get comfortable with just how bloody fast they speak French in real life.
And on the more modern side, I could read French newspapers quite well too.
But at no point could I ever reliably make out more than the gist of what an actual French speaker, speaking normally, said. We have two Belgian exchange students and I struggled to understand them, and just watching French video content, similar struggles there.
I don't know if it's like this for every language where native speakers just talk really fast and there's a large gulf in comprehension speed for learners to close, or if it's something specific to French, but I know your pain here.
Also, once you do understand French speakers, you might not understand other accents. For example, even as a native French speaker, I struggle with Québécois.
Americans struggle in Ireland for instance. Or people from the northeast once they get to Louisiana.
A lot of learning how to speak a language is ear-training. With French, I started much more with speaking so now I can make out a lot of what people say. But, the big challenge with French is that, like in English, native speakers "break" the rules or use subtle turns of phrasing that are very culturally specific, usually they're collocations that don't exactly translate (but luckily for English they actually commonly do thanks to the Norman mixing in English).
It gets even more complicated when French has different formal and casual registers that are much more distinct than in English. So when you're reading Le Monde, or Flaubert, you're getting the literary, fancy, French. Most people speak in a much more argot mixed way.
Now add onto that different regional dialects like Quebecois (really really fast, distinct, french from them), Belgian, Swiss, different parts of France, etc...and it's even more difficult. (Personally I find Parisian French, ou francais standard to be the easiest to understand).
The best solution is just immersion. And constant use. Language is used, and use is the best method for improvement. You can't really think of it like a logical code. It's more like behavior for communicating. You have to learn the right rules in the language game for things to "make sense".
I haven't seen online discussions of this idea for language learning, but I wonder if the same technique could be used? Hear snippets of fast French, words or short phrases, with long gaps for you to think what they said. Then as you understand quicker, need less thinking time, shrink the gaps. ?
Maybe even as simple as a "press space for next sentence when ready, or R to repeat".
[It's also an interesting thing about language comprehension / artificial intelligence. After hearing a thing in English I have awareness of whether or not I understand it, and can correct small misunderstandings without further input, only time and imagination, e.g. "it makes no sense in context, maybe they said this instead" or "I just realised that someword said in their accent would sound like that. It might be someword they said"].
Which is my pet peeve with French: when I feel particularly bad at talking English (I'm German), it feels natural to fall back to a sequence of separate words that isn't a sentence but gets some message to the receiver (while making me sound like the imbecile that I might be, but it does the job and sometimes that's worth this cost). For French, I feel like there's no alternative to trying to form a sentence. And on my level, that works worse than the English "words no sentence" fallback would (and if it does not work it will certainly also fail to make me seem anywhere close to competent in the language)
The thing that made liaisons much more clear for me was bucketing them by: optional, forbidden, and required.
Whole words get dropped as well “ne ___ pas” simply becomes “pas” as an obvious example.
This phenomenon happens in spoken English as well. “I am going to go to the store” => “imagotada store”
When I first started learning French I took a "school" approach to it, get a dedicated notebook, buy books, buy cards to make my own flash cards, schedule 1 hour a day... needless to day that I failed, not just that but I hated it all!
So I decided to make it fun (the way I learn programming or other things that I enjoy) and the Michel Thomas was super fun for me :-) It my motivation to mow the lawn since mowing the lawn is my french listening time.
The other day I got a random marketing email with some french in it trying to be fancy, and I was so happy when I could understand everything it said before having to read the english translation!
I'm not affiliated with them in any way, I just really enjoy his approach to teaching languages
[0] https://www.michelthomas.com/
How's your conversational French after having listened to the program?
I won’t say that I could speak fluently from the start, but It gave me a very strong foundation to build on.
But after getting a few rules in my mind like "oi" sounds like "wah" in english and the ending of the french words are mostly not pronounced, it was easier for me going from the sound and meaning (concept) of the word to the reading part.
But the most important thing is that it is fun, and it's a lot easier to stick to fun things!
1. Focus on learning the accent and intonation before you focus on learning vocabulary 2. Speaking to a native speaker daily will bring far more proficiency than studying will
Languages are (best) learned in the cradle or in bed
(no idea where I heard it first)
I think much of the value, though, is in the opportunity it affords people who find a passion in it. I really loved French in high school, and the combination of the support/resources it offered (a book, a teacher) and the regimen (I think French was either 3 or 5 times per week? I can't recall) was just right to let me learn as much as I wanted to, and also enough regimen to keep me coming back to it even if I wouldn't have otherwise necessarily felt like it if left to my own devices.
For anyone hoping to learn a language I think this step is the key. Probably worth the same as doing everything else on the list put together. 2 hours a week will probably get you from A1 to B1 in 3-6 months
(Italki are 1 on 1 language classes)
There are many linguists who think it's more important to get comprehensible input, then produce comprehensible output [0]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwjkqUBztiM
Surely yes you need to adjust to the sound of a foreign language, but with no feedback loop of trying to speak and having another person feedback, how do you adjust?
Listening to hours of completely foreign language won't make you understand what the words are or what they mean, so "comprehensible" input includes weasel words that require you to already know the language before you can learn it. It's all over a bit weird.
Don't people say some of the most effective ways to learn are the immersion courses where you go to a retreat and speak only that language for weeks at a time, studying and learning 8 hrs+/day and then there are people who spend years reading or listening but aren't confident to speak anything. But are there people who spend years speaking with fluent speakers who still report they don't know the language?
[1] inb4 "hurr think you know better than professional linguists"
I've been learning German 2 hours a week + homework for 2 years and I'm not yet B1 in German. We are 4 students with one teacher and, from what I understand, we are not particularly slow.
Maybe German is really harder to learn than other languages, but probably not 2x or 4x as French (I'm French).
English shares a significant amounts of structure and words with French, so French ends up being relatively straightforward to learn for a motivated English speaker - the only real difference is the amount of tenses, which OP unsurprisingly still struggles with. I bet you, as a French speaker, would grasp Italian very quickly - much faster than most Chinese likely ever will.
German ended up sharing much less with Romance languages, so it stands to reason that it would take 2x-3x the effort of going from English to French.
2 hours a week to B1 in German as an English speak seems totally impossible. I was probably B1 in 6 months at the level of study I described. I studied 5 years of Latin prior to starting so the case system wasn't an additional learning curve. Your pace honestly seems standard.
French has plenty of difficulty in orthography and some in grammar. Maybe the grammar is slightly less complex than German, but only slightly. But I'd say for someone from another language that is easily overshadowed by prior experience in English or Spanish or similar.
I do wish the class was twice a week for more forced cadence of practice but that's an adult problem.
When I studied Japanese, watching kid shows was really helpful for ear training with a more simplistic vocabulary.
My preferred weird kid's show for that was Anpanman. Hahihuhehooooo~!
It's insane that the only one I don't recognize is so high up on the list
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media...
Many years ago I studied French intensively and got to the stage I could read and write quite well and understood some fairly advanced grammar. But I couldn't even make the most spoken basic requests, let alone have a conversation, because I had no exposure to the spoken language. I had done a lot of what the author suggests here in terms of listening (some French films are excellent, by the way), but it's not enough.
One thing I'm quite certain about is techniques that treat you like a baby are really inefficient. That includes Rosetta Stone, Duolingo etc. It's just way more convenient to learn much of the grammar using your existing language skills. Practice with people who can speak your current language and your target language, as the author suggests, is ideal as you can get them to explain what they meant in your language. There are certain fixed phrases and figures of speech which would take a long time to learn like a baby, plus the faux amis will trip you up if you're not careful.
It is directly related to the subreddit, with a fantastic and kind community!
It's in there, Italki: https://www.italki.com/
As a big believer in immersion I don't think there is any other way of learning languages other than immersing yourself in it..
(As opposed to traveling to a country and living in it.)
Also note that they switched their phone over to French.
For those that don't know, iTalki is a platform where you can talk to native language speakers. You can join either as a teacher or learner. You can get actual lessons from people or just join to have discussions to improve/maintain your language
Immersion outside of a classroom context, as an adult, is a terrible way to learn a language on its own. Your exposure to comprehensible context is lower than in traditional language learning methods.
In a classroom setting it can be highly effective, but is still best paired with traditional approaches. Grammar is difficult to teach through immersion, and there's no obvious benefit in doing so. You can spend hours going through various combinations of "y" and "en" pronouns hoping to make it stick. Or you could take a quick pause and explain that, roughly, "y" replaces "à + noun", "en" replaces "de + noun", and move back to immersion for practice.
People often seem to have done reasoning along the lines of "children learn languages through immersion, children learn languages faster than adults, therefore learning is faster with immersion." But that's obviously flawed logic. It's just that people rarely make their argument explicit.
My point is: your limitations are a proof that you understand french almost as well as a native speaker that never really left his/her hometown. Which is impressive.
It involves 30 minute audio lessons using spaced repetition where you instinctively and intuitively build fluency over a restricted vocabulary.
https://www.pimsleur.com/
It worked for me, but it's expensive, and requires patience, as it advances somewhat slowly.
Also, check your local library. They may have access for you for free.
I’ve tried listening to some pimsleur tapes for Japanese and Chinese and it is hopeless even if you now a little bit already
Every day I would usually repeat the previous day's lesson, and do a new lesson.
For languages such as Japanese and Chinese, you'd probably need to repeat it more than that. It's recommended that you know about 80% of the answers before moving on to the next lesson.
That forced me to actually go learn Pinyin and learn about the j/q/x consonants. It took me about 2 months of obsessive practice to fix all the wrong pronunciations I taught myself from 1 month of Pimsleur.
I think for any non Western European language, it’s much better to learn the basics the old fashioned way, especially the writing system and all the phonetic aspects of the language that don’t exist in English.
To be honest it’s hard for me to understand the “Pinyin teaches you wrong pronunciation” line of thinking. It so commonly repeated by so many people that there must be something to it, but not for me.
I got railroaded on the difference between i and e. My chi and my che sound basically the same. This is little enough that people seem to understand well enough, but it's sometimes a bit awkward.
1) You don't see spaced repetition working until a few weeks in, once you're on a schedule.
2) You can't have gaps, so you can't just start in the middle.
3) If you know stuff, you need to keep with it until it gets into new stuff.
From there, it has to be done daily. If you miss 2-3 days, it's a chore to get back onto the schedule. I did it when I had a commute, so investing 30 minutes per day was easy. It added no time to my day, and by the end of 3 months, I knew /a lot/ of Chinese for not a lot of time invested. I was on-par with people who had roughly 2 years of college classes for speaking (but not reading or writing, which Pimsleur doesn't touch on). My accent was better too.
Once I finished, there was nowhere to go. Nothing else was nearly as efficient. I kind of plateaued. There are better tools now; this was many years ago.
I did the library/CDs route, so it was free.
I highly recommend the same path.
I haven't found anything good for writing Chinese. Does anyone have recommendations? Ideally, it'd leverage a pen tablet or iPad pencil or similar.
I got Pimsleur for free through my public library. It's even available through various public library apps.
https://discord.gg/french/
Even though I made an app that helped me along the way to learn words, I don't believe in a single app/book/approach for learning a language. You need to expose yourself to A LOT of different language materials.
I was learning for about 2h a day, 6 times a week. I would read articles, books, websites in Spanish. I would watch YouTube videos [1]. I would read news, initially for beginners [2] and later regular [3]. And most importantly, I would have 4-5h a week itakly conversations.
After 6 months I understood quite a lot, but couldn't speak almost at all. Then magic happens and 6 months later, I was having a normal conversation (though still with some errors) about any range of topics: politics, global warming, travel, engineering etc.
I believe the key for me was to read a lot of books which were interesting to me. For example I read Bill Gate's book "How To Avoid A Climate Disaster" in Spanish, as well as about ~8 others in the first 12 months.
[0] https://www.obstino.com
[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/DreamingSpanish
[2] www.newsinslowspanish.com
[3] https://elpais.com
Oh wow I've been after something like this for a long time. It's awesome because it's relevant content (news) but at a pace that beginners can follow. I don't know Spanish but knowing French, I could follow along the super slow mode and not feel lost.
Going to look for this in German and Chinese, I wonder if there's something similar.
The age thing is mostly a myth imo. If you put in the time and effort you’ll get a lot back.
The biggest issue is the concept of fluency. A lot of people believe they have to be 100% perfect or they don’t “know” the language. In reality, from the moment you start you will continually become more and more comfortable in an asymptotic manner (no one knows 100% of a language, ie what percentage words in the dictionary do you know).
The biggest piece of advice - get comfortable in dealing with ambiguity, and don’t try to force constructs from your primary language onto the one you are learning. Meaning: don’t say X word means Y word in my native language, therefore I can use it exactly the same (it’s a different word, VERY likely with different connotations).
A corollary to this is that this is the reason why memorizing flash cards/massive lists of words can be counter productive. A degree of that is helpful to start, but you really need to see words in proper context, repeatedly.
That’s super important. This also applies to translated texts. Something somebody in Iran says may sound crazy when translated straight but may just be a normal thing in their language.
As a German it took me a long time to understand that when an American says “we should have a beer someday “ that this means that you most likely will not have a beer with that person.
I haven't seen evidence that my ability to learn things has slowed down yet. I think a lot of "age-related" problems are more related to lifestyle until about 60.
When you're 20, you can eat sugar, fat and salt all day long while sitting on a couch and get along pretty well. When you're 40, you'll get fat and your body will atrophy.
There's a solution though: eat healthful foods, exercise, manage stress, pursue important goals, be active socially.
Hey i'll even throw in another language and still be able to fight the 5 year old. With one hand.
Here’s a study that found no link between age and a slow down of ability to learn things:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC4552811/#i...
And here’s Harvard’s thoughts on it:
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/how-memory-and-...
Scientists used to think that brain connections developed at a rapid pace in the first few years of life, until you reached your mental peak in your early 20s. Your cognitive abilities would level off at around middle age, and then start to gradually decline. We now know this is not true.
People can be weird with non-native adult speakers.
I tried to learn my wifes family language - mother in law seemed a bit embarrassed with how to deal with a non-native speaker, and mumbles short things very quickly. My father in law is better, he'll just talk and talk, reasonably clearly and slowly, and I've conversed way more with him (even if it's not at all fluent and involves a lot of dictionary pauses and trying to explain things).
What seems “obvious” to me is that the opposite is true - language learning accelerates for people who learn multiple languages; learning a second language takes less time than the first, if you measure the number of hours spent on it. A third one often goes even faster, especially for related languages. The main problem people have is they don’t put in the hours, and that may indeed get harder to find the motivation to do as we age.
Accent is not a metric for proficiency, understanding and communication is. 5 year old native speakers have good accents but have been immersed 100% and often don’t have the vocabulary for adult conversations. The article is someone reaching B2 level from scratch in 1 year, without full immersion. (B2 is the requirement for a foreigner to start a university degree, for example.) It doesn’t take 20 years of intense studying to learn a language, older adults learn them to proficiency in a year or two all the time.
Think of the hours again, a 5 year old has spent 8-16 hours a day (56-112 hours/week) immersed for 5 years, while the author here did like maybe 10-15 hours a week (which is indeed pretty intense and aggressive). Read his notes - ~100 hours of conversation to reach B2, where a 5 year old will have definitely had more than 1,000 hours of conversation and likely closer to ~5,000 hours of conversation. That’s more than 10x, plausibly much more, so it seems clear that in this case the author’s learning is far more efficient than childhood language learning.
Several comments seem to suggest babies are learning to speak full time, but it's very far from it, they have to learn to walk, eat, read physical expression, draw, etc etc, all kind of things we don't even realize. They are just awesome learning machines, which I find fascinating to watch.
* Older people can't remember the difficulty of learning their first language. They've been using it comfortably for years.
* Older people have bigger vocabularies so the gap between their first and second language is even larger.
* The discomfort of learning new things is less familiar for older peoples
The only difference is I’ve seen is I’m much more focused but they have much more free time. An hour of my focus learning is probably worth a week of their efforts.
Seriously - I don’t even have 2 hours a day
“Adults are quite strategic in their learning, compared with children. They are generally self-motivated, use time effectively, and can apply themselves to lengthy tasks.”
My personal opinion is that the #1 block to fluency as an adult is the concentration on written resources and trying to apply rules. Children learn by mimicry, but adults learn by resources, which creates errors. You can tell by listening to people that have learnt English as a second language, and understanding the source of the errors they make.
If you put in that much time you will learn no matter your age. Same for children. They are supposed to be better at language learning but in the end they spend a lot of time that adults often don’t have or don’t want to invest.
1. Older people get set in their ways, and learning a language requires rethinking how you think. This limitation is purely psychological and not biological and you can avoid it merely by giving it an honest attempt. Learning a foreign language can be a great way to to keep your mind fresh.
2. TIME. Learning a language requires thousands of hours of commitment. Young people have time to commit to it. Older people with work and careers do not, and so often don’t make as much progress. But if you chart progress vs. hours studied, age disappears as a factor. (There are studies of this, but I’m on mobile right now and can’t pull them up.)
3. Truly young people (under the age of 12) still have the ability to hear sounds not used in their mother tongue. This is why transplanted kids can speak fluently and pass as natives, but adults and even teens develop heavy accents. Older people still have enough neural flexibility to retrain their ear, but it takes much more time and conscious effort. This is the only truly biological age-related factor, and countering it just requires a bit more time and conscious attention.
If you are learning a languages as a busy adult, the key is to find ways to immerse yourself in the language, even if it is just passively listening to things on a loop while you do your day job, listening to audiobooks during your commute, and always having a study book or flash cards at hand everywhere you go. You need to study not 10 minutes a day, but 5-10 hours a day—but if you’re smart, that time will double dip for other things and you can get away with just 1 hour a day of real committed study, and the rest is various forms of background practice throughout the day.
- radio FranceInfo [almost] all the time (when no other structure learning happening)
- TV5 https://apprendre.tv5monde.com
- french movies streaming, with french subtitles (!)
- online magazines: Le Parisian, Libération, Le Figaro, etc.
- book : "Grammaire progressive du français - Niveau intermédiaire (A2/B1) - Livre + CD + Appli-web - 4ème édition"
- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.leconjugue...
- https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais-monolingue
- https://www.reverso.net/orthographe/correcteur-francais/
Last two in browser with strong ad blocking, to avoid distraction.
This is crucial. Watching movies in a foreign language can be difficult because of how fast the dialog is, but if you use subtitles in your language, you will always be thinking in your language first, then translating to the target language. Put subtitles on in the target language so that you can catch words that you wouldn't catch from the audio only, but you are still immersing yourself completely in that language.
I came out of high school with four years of Latin and three years of German.
Being a language expert, I thought I'd try the beginning French course. The first day in class, the professor began rattling off in French, and the other students seemed to have no problem with that, having apparently had several years of high school French. I couldn't make heads or tails of what what going on and quickly dropped the course.
Not at all. French is over 95% many to one: From a given spelling it's clear how to pronounce it. Of course you need to know the rules and enough practice. Just writing dictations is really hard, because the same pronunciation can be spelled various ways. And it's not even enough to know how to spell the word. You need to understand the meaning of the sentence, because there are endings that are not pronounced, but depend on the grammar.
English is much more many to many. The same letter combinations can have different pronunciations and the other way round. GHOTI is either pronounced fish or completely silent... GH as in enough or in right. And so on for all remaining letter (groups). You can't do that in French.
Often I can understand how they shortened it, sometimes I understand only one variant. And of course sometimes everything is just too fast.
Still, the French subtitles are essential for me to understand French movies.
(studied French in school decades ago and semi-actively trying to stop forgetting)
Is this publicly available, or were you in the service?
Listening comprehension is always the last of the skills to kick in, because it is all-or-nothing. You only understand every word in the sentence or your brain gets overloaded. While reading foreign texts you can easily skip a word you can't understand and still figure out what the rest means. Or at least, more often so, because you don't have to keep everything in short term memory.
Is that actually the case?
I've always found it easier to follow a conversation in a language I am learning than to speak it.
You get an awful lot of context when listening, only need to put a few words in the right place and suddenly what you're hearing makes sense. You can get away without literally translating everything.
Speaking on the other hand, you can't converse properly without being able to find the right word at the right time and in the right place.
Absolutely not. I have lived abroad half of my life (sometimes with a language reasonably close to my mother tongue and sometimes very far)
Speaking is always easier. I can make my own speed and I never use an unkown word. Sometimes I have to be a bit creative how to explain things if I am lacking a word.
Following discussions is hard. People use words I don't know all the time. Slang, dialects, accents on top of that. And many of them just speak too fast. This can take many many years and might never disappear when certain speakers are involved.
News speakers or documentary movies might be a different story.
When we know a language well enough, we actually compress the sentence to a mental model that takes a lot less space in that working memory. But this only works when we know every word of the sentence and understand the grammar involved. Even one unresolved word often means the sentence expands from one chunk to at least three chunks.
Of course, your speaking skill also improves all the time. But at least in my case I feel like I can usually speak better than listen, in a new language (and I've had a few).
Vowel sounds in words extremely variable in English, but are very rigid in Spanish, even in different countries. In Spanish consonants may change their sound in some countries, but the differences are fixed, and it is easily learnable. Get your pronunciation corrected as soon as you begin learning, otherwise you teach yourself bad habits that are hard to break.
English speakers tend to really screw up the vowel sounds in Spanish, which makes words unintelligible to Spanish speakers. The one-to-one correspondence between written vowels and spoken vowel sounds actually makes Spanish quite easy to pick up.
One other trick is to speak English words using Spanish vowel sounds, because Spanish speakers with a little English will often hear the word if you do that. It also helps if you can hear English words spoken with Spanish vowel sounds by Spanish speakers.
If you are in a hick area then the Spanish language can change in other ways which can be difficult to understand (for example eating S’s, ma o meno).
The rumour is that the grammar is hard to learn, but if you only need conversational Spanish then there is one future and one past tense that is easy for English speakers to learn to speak: Voy a = I am going to, He = I have.
I have subsequently had little trouble communicating with people speaking 100% Spanish when I have travelled (mostly Cuba, Mexico, Majorca) or at home (Chilean, Argentinian etc).
I agree that some words change, and I agree that there are pronunciation changes, but my experience is that the changes are not too difficult to pick up.
Perhaps I am exceptional or not widely enough travelled, but I can only share what I have experienced.
In my opinion, another thing to beware of for anyone learning Spanish is to avoid learning the "correct" pronunciation (sounding like a madrileño). A "proper" accent sounds like you are stuck-up to many people from other countries, which hinders friendly communication. For example: I use an s sound (not th) for 'hace', and dja (not lya) for 'ella'. Aside: Spanish people responded fabulously to me when I had unintentionally picked up a Cuban accent! I have responded really well to people who have picked up a random English accent when they learnt English (except US accents which mostly sound bad to me). Also if you are learning Spanish and native Spanish speakers think you have a strong English accent, you have been teaching yourself using the wrong methods: instead use more mimicking and less reading.
They have free podcasts available on iTunes for a lot of languages, the Spanish content is absolutely amazing.
For several reasons:
- You liked the book originally so you won't mind reading it again
- You know the story so if you get to a part where you don't understand the language, you can infer the meaning based on the your knowledge of the story
- Because it was translated, it's good to see how a phrase you know well in your primary language was converted into the new language. This is particularly helpful for your own "on the fly" translation when you are speaking.
In my particular case, I knew "family" level Italian very well (e.g. how you would speak to your parents, siblings at home etc). What I didn't know was more formal and inter-adult language grammar. Reading books by one of my favorite English authors translated into Italian was a real game changer.
Same with movies. Watch your fav movies in French lang. for example. You’ll know what yippekayeh mother fudger is!
Any plans to add new languages?