I think the most important part here is for those who learn a language and wish to maintain it. I failed here. Don't fail like I did.
Make sure, once you have learned a language, to turn part of your life into a world operating in that language. Choose something - news, movies, books, internet - just pick something. Do that thing only in your new language once you can.
Once that becomes a habit, what you have learned you will not forget. And you will get better over time as well as your brain painlessly absorbs and deeply programs in the target language.
Second most important part - It takes a lot of work and consistency. Say that with me - consistency. Show up every day. If you don't, you will fail. That's one of those terrible truths about learning, and it is especially true about learning a language.
Almost a year ago I decided to start learning Russian so that I can talk with my girlfriend in her native language (the things we do for love )
Initially I tried the usual things like Duolingo, Babbel and some other apps. Out of those things the only one I found useful was Duolingo because it can get you started pretty quickly.
However, I got stuck after that. I couldn't see myself making any progress. Then I stumbled upon the Comprehensible Input theory and TPRS and since then I've been studying Russian using a method that loosely follows these. Here's what I do:
- I find short stories, news articles, social media posts etc online. - I read those texts and mark down the new words as I learn them. I add those words in a flashcard app and I practice them using SRS. I use an app called Ulangi. - I ask my girlfriend (a native speaker) to ask me short questions about the text and I have to answer in my target language. - Once I feel comfortable with that text I repeat the process with the next one.
And it works (at least for me). I grew my vocabulary immensely, I can acquire grammar rules naturally (like I did with my native language) and I get to actually speak the language from day 1. As an added bonus I get to learn a lot about the culture of my target language.
However, translating and saving words in my vocabulary became tedious so I decided to automate this whole process. So I started building a tool for me. I, then, realized that this might be useful for others so I made it public. You can use it for free at Talkabl.com
My strategy for Latvian was roughly as follows:
- Go mad because you don't understand a word of what's happening around you for the first time in your life.
- Decide to do something about it.
- Take a three week university summer introductory course. Erasmus courses area great idea.
- Always actively speak the language when in native company.
- Pick up at least the basics from news broadcasts.
- Read childrens' books and written press.
- Study five common new words a day from my actual use (speaking, listening, reading) using a spaced repetition algorithm. The article mentions ankiweb. It's stellar. Picking from your own use tailors to your needs and interests. It also makes finding example phrases easier.
That worked rather well for me getting to CEFR[0] C1 in Latvian.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...
Right now is probably the best time in history to learn a language. The sheer amount of resources available to you via the internet compared to the year 2000 is exponentially greater.
The volume of content in your target language available on youtube alone is enough to last you a lifetime. Not to mention all the channels specifically catered to teaching the language. Then the online tutoring marketplaces - you can be directly connected to a tutor from a country that speaks your language natively and remotely schedule 1:1 lessons at your convenience via video conferencing software. Plus the availability of language partner sites to practice if you're on a budget.
The biggest problem in my opinion is people struggling with self directed learning, more than anything. A college level course is likely going to be objectively worse than self directed study with targeted goals, but many people dont have a clear goal of what they're trying to achieve in their target language other than a vague sense of fluency, myself included. If your language goal is to become fluent in a language, that's a goal with no defined end in sight.
My understanding is that these methods work well, when the learner has already reached at least a basic level of fluency in the target foreign language. But what about those just beginning the journey as well as those who have already started and still are moving toward that basic level goal? I assume that traditional approaches (textbooks, courses, sprinkled with some live conversations with native speakers and watching some movies/TV) remain the right ones. If so, I'm curious about what, if any, might be the optimal strategy for achieving that goal, in other words, what is the approximately optimal ratio between efforts using relevant methods (say, 50% textbook, 30% course X, 10% live conversations, 10% watching movies) and whether such strategy's ratio depends on specifics of the target language (say, Spanish vs. Chinese).
Don't forget all Eutopean countires have freely available public broadcasting (similar to NPR or BBC) whose websites have news articles, radio and TV. Usually the news is all free but sometimes you need a VPN for other stuff (if you're ethically oksy with that.) The more casual input you get,the faster it will go.
Also a fun thing to to is read the Bible in multiple languages since it is translated into nearly everything and has free high quality audiobooksnfor everything but this can sometimes teach you arcane grammar and useless vocab but I find it useful anyway since you get side by sife comparison and can read along and have a massive corpus which probably infpunced the modern culture a lot. Try reading a language you just learned next to the next one you're learning, skipping your mother tongue.
There is no mention of grammar here.
I’m not sure how it is in the US, but in the UK we don’t even get taught the grammar of English. No one knows grammatical terms, like preposition, person, the name of tenses, the subjunctive, or even simple ones like verbs, adjective, adverbs and nouns.
When you don’t even know formally how your own language is structured, it is very difficult to learn another language.
For example, my mother (native French-speaker) gives private French lessons. She finds that instead of saying “ok today we’re going to learn about the subjunctive mood, the root is the third person plural of the indicative mood of the verb with the following endings”, she spends most of her time having to explain what those terms mean.
I realise that there may be other ways that are less formal to learn languages, but at the end of the day, grammars follow rules, and if you don’t even understand the rule book in your own language you’re already at a huge disadvantage in my opinion.
All these online articles claiming “don’t worry about grammar, that will come later” are missing out on what I think is the most important tool in language learning.
Someone I follow on Twitter has found a very good sweet spot for improving her second/nth language: she follows online courses in her field (art and design) in her target language.
In her case, the target language is Spanish, so she does courses from Domestika: https://www.domestika.org/
I can speak a couple of languages that I don't use very often, I personally just make sure I watch a movie/tv show/the news (the news is the least helpful tbh) in those languages once or twice a week. The article suggests Netflix, but if you're not dealing with one of the more common languages, I've found that a lot of countries have their own streaming services you can use.
Another approach that can be interesting for advanced learners, i.e. you have taken classes for a couple of years[+] and are living in the target language country:
If you've enjoyed a non-fiction book in English, for example, pick up the equivalent translation in your target language. It lets you compare and contrast; and the experience can also be richer.
This definitely requires good discipline, but it is rewarding :-)
[+] using the reference "B2" or "C1" from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...
I have learned Cantonese for over a year to be able to communicate with my girlfriend's family. As a native spanish speaker, this was task that seemed insurmountable at first given how little learning materials exist out there. The Internet is flooded with Mandarin learning materials, courses, books, and content yet Cantonese learners are far fewer. Went from not knowing how to say a simple greeting like 你好 (neih5 hou2) to knowing 2500 characters, speaking conversationally with her mom, and being able to write 500 word short stories. Here's what helped me get over the hurdle of lack of learning materials:
1. 1h lesson every Sunday with a professional Cantonese teacher from italki.com (native speaker from Hong Kong) 2. Focus on pattern recognition of character radicals, write with pen and paper 30 new vocab words per week. Starting on Monday, I would prepare the words of the week, focusing on utility. Then, I would write each word every morning 10-15 times. Thankfully, my memory would never forget a character after doing this approach. 3. Focus on listening and reading advanced content with an OCR translator handy, even if it was very uncomfortable, difficult, I would not stop until I 100% understood a paragraph down to its nuances 4. Keep a handy grammar book or resource cheat sheet, covering particular grammar edge cases 5. Conversation practice every day with my girlfriend, with the goal of pushing myself into uncomfortable territory by trying to express complex ideas and not just talk about the weather 6. Native speaking intonation practice every Saturday, focusing on all the different phonemes and listening to various native speakers pronounce sounds I had a hard time enunciating, such as the `ng` sound or `j` vs. `ch` in Cantonese. Cantonese has 6 tones in HK and 9 tones in the regional variants in Guangdong, so it's important to master them and understand all the nuances of their pitch differences. 7. Write, write, write. Attempt to gather thoughts first in my native tongue, then try my best to translate a paragraph using my Cantonese vocab so far and learn new words in the process.
It's worth noting this takes up the majority of my free time, essentially being my major "hobby" as I have a goal of fluency within the next few years.
It's a tough world out there for anyone learning a Chinese language that isn't Mandarin. Overall, I learned there _are_ indeed resources and people are more than willing to help. If anyone is learning Cantonese, please DM me and I'd be happy to share more information.
Maybe I'm just old and stupid, but I don't feel like I am really learning a lot watching movies in a foreign language. I should probably try to do it more though.
I grew up in San Diego and took like four Spanish classes and even some in college. But never really learned verbal skills and did not use it since school.
I moved to Playas de Tijuana a few years ago to save money. For more than a year I made really minimal efforts to practice my Spanish though. It was not usually necessary since a lot of the people here speak okay English. I usually just take an Uber and it wasn't very important. And since my Spanish was horrible, often it felt counterproductive to try.
But the last several months I have been making a deliberate modest effort to practice. And I feel like I am slowly getting less hopeless.
But I would say if you are going for the immersion route and are lazy (practical?) like me, you might actually have to go somewhere kind of far (definitely not right next to the border) to find a place where you really need to use it a lot due to lack of English in the population. Here it is a little too easy to find people who are fluent in English.
Part of the challenge for me is that I didn't want to sound like an idiot. I decided to just accept that and now I pretend that verb tenses don't exist (I was pretty good at them in high school but that was like 25 years ago) and it makes it much easier. Lol.
The biggest helper that wasn’t mentioned is keeping or making new friends who are strong in your target language and weak in your strong tongue. That has helped me more than anything
For Spanish, I use the General English-Spanish dictionary for iOS from https://www.wordmagicsoft.com (they also have Android and desktop apps, apparently). It's fantastic: it lets you look up conjugated verbs and has full conjugation tables as well. I can generally read a fair amount without consulting the dictionary (I'm working my way through Hija de la fortuna by Isabel Allende right now), but every so often I need it, especially when I get into some area of unusual subject matter. Last month I read Federico García Lorca's Romancero Gitano which really gave the dictionary a workout. His use of language is so inventive I found myself looking up words I knew because I would be thinking "does that make sense?" an awful lot. I may have to read García Lorca annually just because it expanded my mind so much.
> As a result I can now speak vastly better than I could 12 months ago,
All the things he lists are consuming the language though (reading/listening), not speaking it. Which is a great start, don't get me wrong, but having to find the correct words and form a sentence is something else than understanding one.
Of course the methods listed should be effective regardless of the language as they simulate immersion, but it will not be so "painless" the further away you move from the European language families which share many similarities.
Are the any professional linguists in this thread?
Reason I ask is I have become very interested in the origin of languages over the last year or so (partially because of Covid). I've been learning German and French for a while now and I find the most difficult parts of learning these languages to be the grammar. I'd like to find a hierarchy of grammar for related languages, and see if there are some patterns that filter down through the child languages. I have a Latin textbook (probably need to dust that off), and am very interested in how these languages (Romance and Germanic) are all stitched together.
One suggestion I didn’t see in here was video games! I switch my Switch to a second language to play Animal Crossing. I’ve found it to be a fun and intuitive way to pick up a little more colloquial language and vocabulary. I’ve had similar good luck with other text-heavy games like the Sims.
Plus, the short format makes it relatively painless, even when your reading comprehension is a little slow. Novels and news were always a slog to me, but a few lines of text feels more manageable. (And less daunting if you have to grab the dictionary.)
I really agree to all the points in the article. But I would add another one: Today it is so much easier to find someone online to speak to in your target language. There are many facebook groups (and certainly other ways) to find people interested in a language tandem via Jitsy/Zoom/Skype etc. Surely, it is nicer to meet someone in person in a café or bar, but it is much easier to meet online, especially when you are working a full time job and have to integrate these meetings in an already tight schedule.
> Which audio and subtitles you have access to depends on the show and which country you’re in. I could get some shows in Spanish in the US, but not the UK
AFAIR it depends not on physical country you're in, but on Accept-Language sent by your browser. You can edit your browser's preferred langs and you'll get a different suggestions of languages. I saw it explained (maybe even here on HN) by someone from Netflix as "it's a feature™ to prevent having too long list of languages in UI".
Thanks for posting. I set my phone to Polish and it's already really helping with my vocabulary.
I also recommend Flowlingo for reading practice. It lets you visit websites or read e-books with tap-to-translate. The killer feature is that every word you tap gets entered into a spaced-repetition deck for later review. It's a great way to build and maintain your higher-register vocabulary with words you wouldn't ordinarily use in everyday speech.
Other resources: http://radio.garden for international radio, language frequency dictionary
When I moved to the US one of the biggest problems I had was listening. It was hard for me to keep conversations going with colleagues, because It was hard for me to understand. I used to go every Friday to Blockbuster and rent movies which I listened with english subs. Then I ended up watching Godfather II every other week and it definitely helped.
Use Tandem to talk with natives, have audio and video chats.
This alone will considerably improve your target language comprehension, especially when it comes with common expressions, slang and small talk
I'm surprised the author doesn't cover services that help you interact with native speakers. My favorite is iTalki, which connects you with tutors on Skype.
YouTube's great auto sub for English really helps me to understanding and learning English. I wish such quality is available for other langs.
Didn't learn English in 7 years at school.
Learned English from reading Comics and watching e.g. Fawlty Towers in the end.
Anki isn't free for the iPhone; just Desktop, Android and Web. It's worth buying the app, though.
This comment section looks like a guerrilla marketing campaign for various language-learning web apps.
Learning softwares are also good stuff
Whuch language has the best ROI?
I had to learn french a couple of years ago. And I had three months to do it. It was perfectly doable, but my method did cost a bit of money.
I did all the things described in the article, more or less. This was my approach:
1. I had a 1h lesson with a private tutor over Skype (via italki.com) every single day. This was the part which cost me most money. But private tutors from italki is fairly cheap.
2. Listened to the news every day in easy french (RFI has a great short podcast).
3. I watched LOTR (the only one I had available where I could change language and subtitles to be the same) first with English audio and french subtitles, and then french audio and french subtitles and lastly only french audio no subtitles.
4. Listened to french kids books as audiobooks.
5. I read kids book in french.
6. I finished the 3 months with a week of immersive french course in France and then spent another week travelling France alone, committed to only speak french.
7. During this whole time I added 10 words per day into my Anki deck. I also added any other words that I learned along the way. This was quiet a lot of work.
8. During the three months I also went through the Duolingo French course.
After three months of hard work I passed the fluency test for french.
It took quiet a lot of time and quiet a lot of money. But it got the result I was after.
Ps. My tutor also wrote a nice review for me on LinkedIn which I’m very proud of and look at every now and again: “Xxx has learned French with my company. He became fluent in 3 months in has now reached a level close to B2 on the European Framework of Reference, starting from scratch. He has been an extremely hard-working and committed student, with classes every day at 6.30am.”