Ask HN: Learning a foreign language

Immersion seems to be the best way. Just use the foreign-language all the time.

Those of us who have gone along the foreign language route seem to find that it takes a short but definite time-lag within the brain when 'switching out' the foreign-language and 'switching-in' the native-language. And then the same thing happens with the reverse, you have to 'switch-out' the native-language, and 'switch-in' the foreign-language. Consequently, by continuing to use the native-language, you never get out of the habit of thinking in your native-language.

On the other hand, when never having to 'switch-in' the native-language during immersion, the brain gets much more acclimated to the foreign-language and after a few days to a week, some thinking in the foreign-language occurs. The down-side to this is that you feel a bit like you're living in a bubble, because you don't get to speak freely (easily) to anyone else while you're in immersion, and it just feels so relieving when you finally get to speak to someone else in your native-language.

Good Luck. And if you go travelling to places where that foreign-language is spoken, try not to go with a spouse or friend that only speaks your native-language. They will prevent you from learning the other one.

I suspect you might have heard of him but I found Bennie Lewis' blog to be really good in my own language learning:

http://www.fluentin3months.com/home/

My wife who speaks a couple of languages says that to really ingrain it you must think in the language, don't think in english and then translate.

My basic strategy is that component composition gives you more leverage than memorizing individual words. Most languages have some degree of composition for vocabulary, like root-words, prefixes/suffixes, or individual chinese characters (and the radicals they're built up from) for CJK languages. Learning those root-words/components and how to put them together into compound words, or learning how to compose words into sentences by learning grammar gives you the most leverage, once you have a small base vocabulary to practice with - it doesn't just let you build more words, it also gives you bits and pieces you can look for to help you parse out meaning of things you don't know. For vocabulary, focus memorization on verbs and their conjugation - nouns and adjectives tend to be easier to look up (and not conjugated as much as verbs, and so easier to identify), and tend to be easier to infer from context if you don't know them - if you don't know a noun in conversation, you or they can usually point to it.

I also listen to music in whatever language I'm learning - I used to use it to switch my brain between languages on the way from one language class to another. For memorization, the best way really is to just write it and repeat it a dozen times, so putting a song on repeat is really useful for refreshing your memory on commonly used words, practicing pronunciation, and even occasionally picking up new words by looking up lyrics, etc. Nothing beats immersion, though, just because, on top of practice (inherently prioritized by common usage), it gives you all the extra context to infer or reinforce meaning - memorizing words or working from a textbook means you have no extra information to go off of but what's written there. If you want to get those benefits of immersion without actual immersion, find things that mimic those qualities (extra context, prioritized by common usage, repetition), like music, kids TV shows, comic books, conversation, etc.

Read some of the research by Paul Nation into how people actually learn languages. http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/about/staff/paul-nation-pubsd...

In particular this research on how much vocabulary you will need to read and converse. http://www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/about/staff/publications/paul...

For vocabulary I did the following.

1. Learn a few thousand words from scratchcards. (4000-9000 words is ideal, use a memory technique such as linkwords.)

2. Buy a kindle and install the foreign language dictionaries.

3. Start reading simplified books. (Not children's books, they have a surprisingly large vocabulary. i.e. a 6 year old has around 6000 words of his native language.)

4. After this start reading 'normal' books, i..e hunger games. You may have to fetch a few samples from amazon to find authors with a simple writing style.

When you get to step 4, the vocabulary acquisition becomes fun.

Forget the Bennie Lewis guy, his stuff is pay for bollocks.

Memorize the 2000 or so most common words via spaced repetition with Anki or Super Memo using pictures.

Learn the grammar.

Start reading simple books / websites about stuff that interests you, accompanied with a dictionary website, as you'll need to look up a shitload of words.

Once you can read well enough, interact with people via forums or web chats in the language, which will improve your skills further.

If you want to sound like a native you'll need lots of speaking practice until your brain adapts.

Some people will sound like Arnold Schwarzenegger for life though.

I've done a Spanish course in my early 30s. I went to Spain, did a two week course there, four hours a day, very basic. The afternoon was free, although we had to prepare homework, which could be quite a lot if you wanted to commit to it.

Before going there I learnt some basic stuff: conjugations of being, having, doing, most prepositions, basic counting (1-100), some emotions and words like walking, seeing, right/left etc. The first morning they had a basic test and I could skip the first course because of my preparation. The first week was quite boring, just like being in high school, with stupid stories etc.

The second week on wednesday night we had a Sangria-tour around town. After several beers and sangrias I started speaking Spanish. Up til then my Spanish was mostly impaired by fear of failure, afraid to make mistakes. My teacher was there and I spoke to her for a half hour, of course with lots of help, searching for the right words, making many mistakes, but suddenly the fear was gone.

Russia: do the vodka tour! ;-) Laugh a lot and don't care about what they think. Listen to their English and compare that to your Russian.

I stayed in an appartment with other foreign students. Among eachother we didn't speak Spanish. You could stay with a Spanish family, and they don't speak English in general, so then you have to find a way. That will help a lot.

After these two weeks I've done two courses in my home town, and left it at that. Now when I'm in Spain I can speak Spanish after several days. I can manage in hotels and shops, have very basic conversations. My French has improved incredibly since then as well.

Disclaimer: in High School we had English, German, French, and even Latin and classic Greek, so I had a good basic knowledge and knew how to learn a language. It takes a lot of effort. After finishing high school my languages were bad and clumsy. After going on holidays I suddenly got to enjoy it. Doing a study where all books were English it all started to change.

Long story short: it takes a lot of effort. Do it all - traditional and pragmatic. Going to Russia is probably most effective.

If there was a short-cut, wouldn't everyone take it?

Here are some tips:

* Finding a Russian-speaking buddy you could go out with shouldn't be too hard look. Look around for local ex-pats - at least Russian-speakers are everywhere. No need to actually go to Russia.

* Drink a small amount of alcohol when practising speaking - its called a social lubricant for a reason. Or do things you enjoy - find a buddy you could talk with about your hobbies in Russian.

* There is a false dichotomy between practical and formal learning - they complement each other. Unless you are 5, learning a language only from practising can form bad habits and learning only in a classroom means you cannot apply your knowledge.

Желаю Удачи!

Попробуйте учить на память русские детские стихи. Аналогично тому как это делают дети в детстве, когда они учатся говорить.

Из авторов рекомендую: Михалоква, Маршака, Чуковоского и Барто (http://deti-online.com/stihi/)

Try to learn by heart Russian poems for children. In the same way as they do it in childhood, when they learn to talk.

I recommend to start from the the authors: Mihalokv, Marshak, Chukovoskiy and Barto (http://deti-online.com/stihi/)

Learning a language requires constant effort and practise and finding a method that works for YOU. For me what works ( I am learning Korean):

* 1 lesson a week on cafetalk.com (not related to them, great/easy website). We sometimes do grammar/vocab or just free talking

* 1 book. There is a great one for korean called: Magic Korean which has a very good learning style. I have tried another 3-4 books but they did not click

* Podcasts while at the gym . I listen to "talk to me in korean" which has over 1000 lessons recorded and still going

* 3 hours studying a week. I usually do it during commute. This includes homework for the online lesson and studying the book

* Live group lessons every Saturday morning. I did these for 10 weeks and stopped due to no availability of lessons at the appropriate level

So in total:

* 1.5 hours of podcasts at the gym

* 1 hour lesson

* 3 hours homework and learning

* (I used to do 2 hour sessions with a group but stopped)

Total: 5.5 hours a week

Also, going to Korea yearly for 1-2 weeks has helped.

Good luck!

Ah I'm learning Russian too right now (about 30 days in). I'm bilingual, native English, became fluent in Italian in my 20s after spending a few years living in Italy (fluent to the point of thinking and dreaming in Italian). I'm finding the process of learning a third language to be really interesting in the sense that all sorts of "patterns" are bubbling up now that I have two under the belt, akin to what one experiences after having learned a few programming languages.

Even so, no doubt Russian is difficult for a native English speaker. :-) The State Department classifies it as a "Category II" in terms of difficulty, meaning it is no walk in the park.

By far the most troublesome issue has been casing (nominative, dative, genitive, accusative, instrumental, prepositional). So I've been spending some extra time learning how the vocabulary changes according to each case. On the bright side, word ordering really isn't an issue because of this, unless you would like to stress a particular aspect of the phrase.

I use the free Chegg Flashcards app for iOS, it's great and there are tons of Russian vocabulary flashcards. I also purchased a paper Russian-English dictionary; it's far more convenient than constantly tabbing over and typing a word in, particularly since I don't have a Russian keyboard.

Additionally, I write out vocabulary and phrases every day, basically pretending like I'm taking a middle school quiz. It's tough and tedious, but this is how I most effectively commit things to memory.

Finally, every single evening I spend time "reading" http://www.pravda.ru/ and http://izvestia.ru/, dictionary in hand, looking up word after word and then trying to find repeat occurrences of the word in the page. This has been hugely beneficial.

Finding a Russian interested in learning English is on the TODO list, so we can help each other out. Fortunately here in Ohio there is a large Russian speaking population.

Bottom line: learning another language is tough, but also a lot of fun. It is hugely satisfying to actually start understanding a phrase here and there in the newspapers, and over time, phrases will become sentences, and sentences, paragraphs.

xaybey I'd love to talk to you further via email, my address is in profile. -Jason

I can tell you the steps I used to learn German -- it took about 6-8 months until my only remaining hurtles were sheer vocabulary. Granted, I have a background in Ancient languages, so learning an inflected language like German (or Russian) is much easier for me than it would have been, already understanding gender and case and such. BUT, the methods I used to learn Classical languages did not work for German. I was not a believer in the "practical methods", but they really do work if you do them right, in my opinion.

1. Started with Duolingo. I did not find it useful whatsoever.

2. Started reading Harry Potter in German. At first it took me like an hour to get through a page, I would just look at the English if a sentence was too complicated to figure out with the dictionary. I started to notice patterns, and would read grammar blogs and help sites for stuff that was reoccurring, (e.g. looking for "relative pronouns" on mydailygerman and german language stack exchange). After making it through about 20 pages in HP, the improvement was dramatic. Reading is most important for thinking in a foreign word order. Now people tell me that I use some very sophisticated words and constructions, and it's definitely because I learned German from reading. I've read three books in german now, and can read HP-level stuff without a dictionary.

Btw, I got a kindle for this purpose, but I think that part of the slowness of having to type the word out yourself in an online dictionary helps with memorization. Also, translations are never 1:1, so often the kindle dictionaries are not very helpful. I would go to the park and use my phone to look up words.

Also -- translated books are way easier to read than books originally written in a foreign language. Natively written stuff has too many idioms or strange constructions for a beginner. So reading translations of books you already know is much, much easier (you can also follow the story and not miss an important detail because you don't understand a sentence and have to skip it).

3. Did Memrise for vocab, 1000 Elementary German words. This is huge for speaking confidence (and therefore, speed) -- that you know the gender of the word you are using. They also have sets that teach you which cases and prepositions verbs take, etc. (e.g. In german, you say "I am proud ON you <you in the accusative>". These are hard to learn from just reading) The important thing is to say it out loud, just like the example. Eventually, you'll just use the right gender without even thinking about it! (Something I thought was impossible)

4. Watched all the Harry Potter moves dubbed in German, with German subtitles. Twice. First time, I paused when I didn't know a word, and used google translate to translate the sentence. So it would take me like 5+ hours per movie. But, this was one of the most dramatic things that helped my listening comprehension. In the two week period where I did nothing but vocab and watched these movies, I would say my german understanding at least doubled. I also re-watched the movies without subtitles (understanding much less), because it forces comprehension speed and really listening. But the subs are important at first so you know how to spell things ;)

Now I watch movies in German, and always have German subtitles on if the channel has them. If there is Russian Netflix, you can use a VPN and watch your favorite movies subbed/dubbed. You just really have to get high-quality productions, or the subs are too different to be helpful. The news is good non-subbed because they enunciate very clearly. Nature documentaries are also great, because they speak slowly and clearly. Never be afraid to pause/repeat/look up a word!

5. Writing. If you can get someone to write to, it's great, because you have time to carefully express stuff you would want to say every day. So you effectively learn to write phrases that you will later want to say in conversation, but you have the time to resea...

You're at the foot of Mt. Everest asking if there's a shortcut to the top. Learning a second language is like having a child. It's a life long commitment that will consume much of your time for 10 years or so, assuming you really want to be fluent, and will require maintenance thereafter. Consider learning Russian history and culture instead if it sounds too daunting. That's almost always a better choice for native English speakers, in my opinion.

Don't think about it as "language learning" or "language study". That is not how humans learn languages. Think about it as "language acquisition", something you will pick up over time. There is a bunch of research about this, much of it focused on classroom methods, however. Search for books on "second language acquisition"; but the only popular science book I know of isn't coming out until August: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0262029235/

All humans learn languages by interacting with other speakers, constantly attempting to communicate more successfully ourselves, and trying to understand the communication of other people.

As adults, we have a harder time perfecting the target language's phonology (or perhaps this just tends to fossilize), but we have a huge advantage in learning the grammar/syntax of the target language, because we already know about such things in our own language. We don't have to make the massive cognitive leaps that children do—we've already done that. This is what all the emphasis on grammar exercises is about: trying to supercharge our language learning ability. But it has to be built on a foundation of interaction, comprehensive input, and effective communication.

Learning a language to near-native fluency levels is a years- or decades-long process, and most people will stop at a level that they find "good enough" and let their second language fossilize. And there's nothing wrong with that, it probably is indeed good enough!

It's a question of continually finding new motivations, and motivation over a long period of time, of setting new goals, and especially establishing an identity as a person who speaks that language. Just have fun, keep it interesting, engage in it constantly (or intensively). You'll be more likely to keep at it if you enjoy it and don't look at it as "miles of crawling through the shit".

I've learned several languages in my life, I'm trilingual now, and I've succeeded on some and failed miserably on others. Here's my experience and advice.

First, I guess you could say I learned Spanish, but really I was so young it never even felt like learning it, so I can't give you much advice from that account, just that speaking it was hard for me, I could literally feel things get clogged on the way from my brain to the sounds coming out of my mouth - it was wierd but went away quickly enough. The only advice here is that you should probably be speaking the language a lot to train those brain to mouth muscles :)

The language I really had to learn though was German, it was later in life at around 20 when I started learning it.

From German I think the take away is dedication. You have to be motivated and seriously dedicated in order to learn a language. I literally spent hundreds of hours absorbed in German. I would listen to Deutsche Welle radio all the time and lookup words I didn't know. I would always try to visualize everything in my head for new words and grammatical constructs and it seemed to help. When I saw people running it was "die laufen" not because I had to think about running and then translate it, it was just thats what it was. One thing I didn't do much of was learn grammar I found it terribly boring and just learned whatever people on the radio said that I didn't understand.

I also spoke a ton with native speakers my then girlfriend being one, but in the very beginning I remember that talking with native speakers was very difficult.

What helped a lot in this regard was having a friend who also wasn't a native speaker, we could both easily communicate with each other in German, we didn't use slang and didn't speak very fast, but it helped us get used to it, we'd talk about new words we learned and never spoke in anything besides German. After about 6 months of serious hardcore learning we were both able to carry on fluent conversations with Germans to the point where we didn't annoy them by being too slow and dumb. It was also around this time that things started getting enjoyable, before that it was all work and zero fun, just straining your brain to internalize grammatical rules and meanings of word sounds. After that most improvement just came through reading and learning written formulations since the everyday word-set was more or less mastered, which is another benefit of just learning to speak/understand - the language itself becomes a whole lot smaller.

Finally, much later I tried to learn Polish and spent about a month on it before giving up because I couldn't motivate myself enough to go through those grueling months again. One thing I remember thinking with Polish, which probably applies to Russian as well is that it would take longer than German did to get to that same level where you start enjoying things. The grammar was extremely difficult and its phonetical system and vocabulary much more different than the western european languages I already spoke.

So in summary, my advice would be the following:

1. Make sure you are really motivated and dedicated to learning it - it sounds like you are :). It will become fun and a really amazing thing that you can read literature and enjoy movies and a completely different culture than your own, but in the beginning its just a lot of hard work so make sure you have the internal motivation to carry you through the rough waters at the beginning.

2. Once you can carry even a broken conversation find someone who's at or slightly above your level that you can talk with and don't fallback to some other language, make yourself use Russian.

3. When you are comfortable communicating without long pauses to think about what word you want to say, find native speakers you can talk with.

4. Listen, listen, listen - radio is the best. You have to concentrate on sounds and their meanings to know whats going on and your brain isn't dumbed int...

Russian's a fun one, that's for sure. Stupid noun declension.

Immersion's still your best bet. If you've got the time and the money to put towards this, I'd recommend a intensive summer program like Middlebury College's Language School - if you're in Silicon Valley, they've also got a similar one in Monterey. For two months they put you in a group of about a dozen with the same level of Russian you've got, make you vow to use Russian and only Russian with each other 24/7, and then put you through an intensive program of classes and cultural activities. It makes your head throb, but it works.

How do we learn to talk when we are toddlers? You point at something and ask what is it, you learn its name, you repeat it out loud (use it in a few phrases, with more or less success). You generally ask something about it, too (what does it do, why is it so big, etc...). So when you are done, you know the name, the use, how does it looks like, what does it do, etc.

You have to understand that just memorising words or phrases won't get you very far. You need to associate these words with something that makes sense to you, to fully understand and integrate them into your brain.

I teach myself languages as a hobby, now and then. I've learnt some Japanese and Chinese, for example (using iKnow [1], great website and apps). I wanted to learn the Russian alphabet but was having a hard time reading the characters until I came across an article [2] which provides cheeky associative method. It's brilliant, I can read any text in Russian now (I can't understand it yet, but hey, it's a first step!).

[1] http://iknow.jp/ [2] http://gadling.com/2009/03/30/gadling-teaches-you-to-read-th...

I actually built a Russian app for my sister to keep up her Russian: https://billfranklin.eu/russian

It was a fork of my German app which was on HN fp a couple months ago. While the app was just to scratch an itch and probably isn't as useful as the many others available (Memrise, Duolingo, etc ad finitum), working on a project that made me use German was great for learning (probably more effective than the app itself).

So my ¢2 - work on something that forces you to use the language. This project was basically an immersion course (of course a very short one).

An interesting thing I've noticed about language learning is that it is different from most skills in that the vast majority of its practitioners are basically expert level. Learning a new language is uncommon enough that I rarely met other people who had spent the same amount of time learning the same language as me. So you end up judging yourself by an internal sense of progress, by the things you can and can't do. This is sort of like if you were learning to play the piano and everyone else but a few dabblers were playing at or near the level of Mozart. Also interesting is that language learners are always a master of at least one other language, so you inevitably compare yourself in that way also. It can really skew your expectations.

Also a lot of times in language learning is sort of all our nothing. Comprehension drops very fast or each additional thing you don't understand in a sentence. So progress can feel very slow and then suddenly you have a big jump in understanding.

Few people reach even simple conversation topics in six month.

Spaced Repition is one of the most succesful systems for memorizing, but learning vocabulary is not enough. Listening and talking is important too.

People will tell you of all sorts of short cuts and immersive methods and learning like a baby. There is no easy way. Children are better learners for 2 reasons: they mind is geared toward language learning and secondly children love repitition.

Matter of fact is, that you need to do category 1 and 2. Yes the Repitition is boring, yes it's terrible to drown in uncharted waters.

Humans have been teaching adults language for thousands and thousands of years, and we still haven't found anything close to a silver bullet.

Not quite giving you any tips, but a word of warning. Avoid learning Russian through Russian-language community sites based on user-submitted content such as comments, posts etc. For the last couple of decades we've been seeing a trend of getting more and more people who are illiterate in writing, with the last three years seeing an explosive epidemic on our hands. It is now very rare to see user-submitted content written with the quality ready for publication. Speaking of reasons, there are many. Young people don't like to study and become smart so they don't read books anymore. Basically they hang out online and learn illiterate language from each other, such that these incorrect forms of speech have now proliferated to every corner of the web, polluting everything and affecting the rest of the Internet users, gradually replacing the correct forms with the wrong ones in their minds.

If I were to take HN community for example, this level of quality writing many display while expressing their thoughts cannot be found on the Russian community sites anymore.

There is also a staggering amount of hate speech and insults of all kinds. Most of it is not moderated as this style of interaction has become the standard way for most users. If it were to be moderated, it would mean wiping out over 90% of the user-submitted content resulting in a substantial drop of traffic, so nobody is doing it.

Many people (myself included) are now ignoring Russian sites seeing them as dumping grounds, preferring to stick with the international community instead.

Read books, not the modern ones, but those from at least 30-40 years ago. That's where you find a rich beautiful language in all its colors and the depth of thought.

I am a language teacher, so factor that into the advice that follows: 1. Find a language teacher that excels at teaching beginners. Tell the teacher that you only want to study 1 hour a week but that you promise to do 6-10 hours a week of homework (for at least 3 months). Ask for a plan from the teacher based on this schedule. A good teacher is much like a good doctor and should be able to give you a good plan. The teacher should be able to fill those 6-10 hours with productive work.

2. Do not evaluate yourself based on what you can produce (say) but rather on what you can understand. Listening in particular is the royal road to language learning. Also, if you can understand slow normal speech you will have personal proof of progress which will reduce self-doubt. Remember communication is not possible without understanding.

3. Make sure that you have mastered all the phonemes in the target language. By doing this first you can avoid many problems later.

Some advice from someone who thought languages were impossible in school and then learnt a second language in adulthood:

Input is much better than output. Reading and listening actually give you new words, new phrases, new connections and new ways of saying things. Speaking and writing only reinforces the things you already know. If you have never heard the word "spatula" once you won't be able to say it.

Also, in a real conversation you only have to be able to say something one way: "Where is the station?" or "How do I get to the station?" are just as good, but you have to understand many different possible answers.

When you are looking for learning materials try to only use things aimed at native speakers. Lots of resources for adults over-simplify to fit their pedagogical idea, whereas even books for very young will children give you a full range of grammatical forms and vocabulary.

Never learn vocabulary as single words. Doing a flashcard that says "dog"=="hund" is just not that useful. Instead, make flashcards of sentences, fragments and phrases. This way you learn which verbs combine together with which nouns and all the unwritten rules.

Don't just blast through x000 flashcards. You will get bored and quit. As you have noticed already, just dumbly repeating words takes a lot of effort to get them to stick. When you are having fun with the language (whether that is watching TV, reading books, playing games or speaking to people) words tend to stick much better. That said, you should still use spaced repetition for these words you find "in the wild".

Be realistic with the amount of time you put in. If you compare yourself to a native speaker you're comparing yourself to someone who has had 24/7 practice in the language for many many years.

Don't get tricked by the vague word 'fluency'. A 6 year old can hold a conversation and knows a great deal of words. He is also easily confused by simple words like "tax" and has very little spelling ability.