The Best Method to Master a Foreign Language, Guaranteed
askakorean.blogspot.com
askakorean.blogspot.com
This should be shouted, at top volume, to everyone entering university. Great advice.
I suppose the gripe I have is not "wrong; humans can learn languages by immersion!" but "why the societal crosslink between deliberate learning, and not-fun?".
Is there no way to learn 30,000 words by any motivation other than fearing for your life from a disappointed father?
The line blurs more when he says "Immersion doesn't work" then describes his learning method which is ... (wait for it) ... completely submerging himself in the language he is learning for hours and hours, reading it, writing it, speaking it, paying attention to it - all in a country and in a school where everyone spoke it ... immersing himself in it.
I cite: http://www.fluentin3months.com/studying-will-never-help/
"""Studying will never help you speak a language, but (as long as you do it right) studying will help you speak a language better.
Most people don’t see the difference here. That one crucial word changes absolutely everything you need to take into consideration.
If you already speak but your conjugations aren’t great or you need to quickly increase your store of vocabulary about a specific topic, then by all means study. Need to pass a test in school? Sure, study for it. When the goal is to pass a test or improve your grasp on something specific, then study is the way to go.
But if you don’t speak the language confidently right now, then it’s time someone broke this news to you: studying is not the way to get this confidence!"""
(But they are aiming at slightly different targets - Benny aims to be conversationally fluent in 3 months, The Korean to gain college level mastery in two years).
More importantly, being immersed provides an emotional reward for learning. If I learn these words, I can express these ideas and talk to people! This is different from just learning at school.
Edit: One thing I find odd about your post is the emphasis on confidence. It sounds like a correlation/causation fallacy.
I've made both of these mistakes myself (overestimating the value of immersion and slacking off study when not immersed). When I first went to Korea, it was a huge ego boost since it felt amazing to actually be using the language. Because of this ego boost, I felt that "book-study" was suddenly beneath me and stopped. After a few months of immersion, though, I realized I was learning more slowly than just going through flash cards, so I picked them up again. Even though immersion was useful for me, it was really only effective as a compliment to other study.
It's like cold fusion. It doesn't work, but it really would be damn handy if it did, so we keep on trying to get it to work.
Many philosophers have taken contrary views. Ayn Rand is not a whiny bitch for criticizing sacrifice. David Deutsch is not a whiny bitch for applying Karl Popper's epistemology to education (http://takingchildrenseriously.com/), or for saying in his TED talk that problems are soluble (soluble means without suffering, and problems includes the problem of how to learn something). And so on. Criticism of their position would be interesting, but calling them bitches isn't.
Do you remember how Roark interacted with his school?
Besides, my point was that there are several sorts of 'sacrifice' and 'suffering'. The kind that Rand criticized is altruistic suffering - suffering to take the load from someone else. She has no qualms with 'suffering' in a physical sense or even in the sense of prolonged delay of self-realization or gratification if that is required to remain true to one's moral values.
Do you think the people in Galt's Gulch suffered in their education? As I recall, they did things like voluntarily attend Galt's lectures (and pay for it, I think). No suffering in sight...
The German speaking part of the web to me seemed utterly boring, nearly all of the interesting stuff was happening on English websites. The cool thing was that I could just read English, certainly with some difficulty at first, but something I learned in school actually proved to be useful in the real world. I read quite a lot on the web and suddenly something snapped. I never again had to learn anything for my English classes again, no vocabulary, no grammar and the As just kept rolling in. Writing essays, reading texts and discussing them was fun. (I even managed to get a Cambridge Certificate in Advanced English [1] – grade A – without any preparation on my part.)
It’s the strangest thing – I started to ‘feel’ English like I ‘feel’ German. Constructing sentences with the right grammar turned from a painstaking conscious process into something automatic and unconscious. That’s not entirely a good thing, though. I cannot feel something I don’t care about and I really don’t care about commas, which is why I suck at placing commas in English as well as in German.
Besides commas there are also other problems with this method of learning. Since I just stopped rote learning of vocabulary at some point and picked up words as I read more and more on the web my vocabulary is extremely detailed when it comes to some topics and lacking when it comes to other topics. It’s basically badly deformed. Don’t try to talk with me about food or cooking. I bet that only a few trips to supermarkets in English speaking countries could correct that but I have regrettably never been to any such supermarket.
Now, three years after I left school, I also really fear for my ability to speak English. In school we spoke English five days a week for at least thirty minutes every day. I feel like preserving this ability is really hard. Listening, conversely, is no problem. I watch tons of English stuff on the web and at this point understand pretty much everything you could throw at me.
Ah, and I should maybe mention that writing comments here is my humble attempt to preserve my writing abilities.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_in_Advanced_English
s/good/well/
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/good.html http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/good-versus-well.aspx
:)
I should have listened to the words of the great thinker Tracy Jordan: “Nah-uh. Superman does good, you’re doing well. You need to study your Grammar, son.” :)
That said, those little quirks are another problem with feeling yourself into a language. I was constantly misusing the German „wie“ – “like” – when making comparisons. I would say something like „Pasta ist besser wie Pizza!“ (“Pasta is better like Pizza!”), not „Pasta ist besser als Pizza!“ (“Pasta is better than Pizza!”) because it just sounded correct to my ears.
I would never ever misuse “like” and “than” in English but I quite happily confused their German equivalents for quite some time.
Which made a lot of people squirm and caused them visible pain so I dropped it. That in itself wasn’t all that easy. Since no automatic red flag was raised when I misused “wie” I consciously had to search everything I said for “wie” and consciously detect whether I used it correctly. Which, in the beginning, was quite hard. I would blurt out a sentence with a blatant misuse, pause a second and hastily add “Oh! ‘Als’ not ‘wie’! ‘Als‘ not ‘wie’!” But I was successful in the end.
For Norwegians learning German we have a similar problem.
The Norwegian "som" can be translated into "wie", "als", "der", "die", "das", welcher", "welches" or "welche".
I would be very, very grateful if you could email me (barry.p.cotter@gmail.com). I just moved to Germany and want to find out about doing vaguely computery or programming Praktika or news.yc equivalents in German.
Good is good enough. I understand what he means.
Foreign learners shouldn't worry about proper English the way native speakers do.
The average native speaker regularly makes this mistake, so I wouldn't say it's a big deal at all.
At least, as a foreigner, it never ceases to amaze me that these things are even issues at all.
Why not? Positive action? As a foreign learner, I don't want to be judged by lower standards. That would label me as "the French man"[1]. That would be a form of exclusion. That would lose me credibility.
Moreover, I am not judged by lower standards. In most contexts, people don't even know that I'm not native. They will judge me by natives' standards like I do you.
The catch is, I am not a native speaker. So, the only way to catch up is to worry more than native speakers. So I should. So I do.
[1] I once was told that unlike the Merovingian, Lambert seldom have a French accent, if at all. That he was upset when he was asked to fake it.
Sadly, in my experience that worked for the first language, but not for the second. I guess my mind simply is not good enough anymore.
But: There is no silver bullet. Take The Korean too with a grain of salt (but there is a lot of truth there)
I see the age thing as something that should ease the process of learning a new language, a well educated adult should have the right mindset needed to try to optimize his learning experience leveraging available material and new techniques. I don't see why someone younger should have a easiest way while studying a new language... AFAIK the myth of languages being learned faster by kids has been debunked a decade ago.
And btw, if you are into mandarin, take a look into Michel Thomas audio-only course.
I feel you, and also the German web ist full of grammar nazis, which is, admittetly, kinda funny. (Plus the mods in most forums seems to be on some sort of power trip)
Don't. Like you, I seldom speak English for more than a year, now. (I do read, write in, and listen to English almost every day.) The only possible difference is that I often proofread myself aloud (well, whispering, actually).
Two days ago, I had surprise phone conversation in English. Switching my speech to "English mode" took me 5 second. After that, I was fluent again.
This happens in many fields where the method of thought is unnatural. I think it happens when we finally "grok" something.
If you're learning a language at age 16, like the author was, then yes, the most effective way is to smash your face against the brick wall until it crumbles. 10,000 hours, as they say.
What I'm curious about, for personal reasons, is whether learning additional languages early takes away any of the face-smashing in learning additional languages later on. I'm trying to acquire Bulgarian, so I'll get to find out on my own.
[1] During our one-hour-a-day class period, we were allowed to chat in class if we did so in Spanish.
From my own experiene, a definite yes. I learned Polish rather later in life but already had 4 languages under my belt. It went relatively easy, even though I never got the hang of the writing (but then again, there was no need to).
I think it helps for kids to be exposed to many different languages early on. For example, I never learned to speak French fluently, but because I have some background in a latin-based language, I found it easier to learn Spanish.
It's much easier to relate existing words in your vocabulary with new foreign words, than it is to memorize them outright. For example, it's probably easier to learn Russian if you speak Czech already (and to speak it with less of an accent) than it is to learn Korean if you're a Spanish speaker.
<< The following one year of light immersion[1] ...For English speakers learning Romance languages (Spanish, Italian, French), the Michel Thomas tapes are the best. Pimsleur tapes are also very good in almost any language.
I've learnt Spanish during the last 3 years pretty much only by listening and watching TV (mostly listening to podcasts). I haven't really tried to memorize anything, and have above all tried to avoid being bored.
I also avoided reading and writing for quite a long time, trying to focus on spoken language.
I wouldn't say that I "master" Spanish yet, but by now I can enjoy all sorts of films, TV, radio and discussions in Spanish. I still miss the occasional idiom (especially the kind of slang that teenagers use), though, but it seldom bothers me.
Also it turned out that learning to read when you already know how to speak (and can read other languages, I suppose) is actually quite easy. By now I can read novels etc. in Spanish without too much effort.
Maybe I would have been able to learn Spanish even faster by using a more boring method. But then the cost would have been much, much higher for me - being bored for endless hours on end is a very high price to pay.
And I'm pretty sure that I would have given Spanish up a long time ago if I had followed that route.
Spanish is likely an outlier here as it is spelled phonetically. French is more difficult, but not terribly so. However languages that are written with a different script, or in a completely different system like Chinese offer a much larger hurdle. Chinese literacy, in particular, is orders of magnitude harder.
As it turns out I aced the test, and all that study is a big part of why I'm comfortable with reading a newspaper. Still have to look things up from time to time, but for the most part I know how to read the word even if I don't know the exact meaning. In that sense, I agree with the blogger that rote memorisation is key - and not just words, but often whole sentences as that gives context.
As for Spanish, it's cognate in some areas with English, so that's at least one part of why English natives are able to learn latin languages at a faster click than other languages. The blogger will find it easier to learn Japanese.
Thanks.
I started using an audio course from Pimsleur, teaching me to say "Where is the hotel?" etc.
After that, I still needed material of the simpler kind suitable for foreigners. There are a bunch of such podcasts, for example:
http://www.notesinspanish.com (very beginner-friendly, some parts in English)
http://teresasanchez.biz/podcast/ (slightly more advanced, all in Spanish)
http://www.spanishpodcast.org/ (also a bit more advanced)
When you're getting bored with the stuff for foreigners, you'll find a wealth of "normal" podcasts in Spanish. Don't worry if you don't understand every word, as long as you get the basic gist.
When I started I very much enjoyed a podcast on astronomy, at http://universo.iaa.es/
Spain's national radio, RNE, has pretty much all of their programming available as podcasts, at http://rtve.es
The BBC has a rather good daily news podcast at http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/mh/
After a while you'll be ready for something more difficult, for example:
Etcetera podcast is two guys in Buenos Aires philosophizing in a rather entertaining way, at http://etceterapodcast.com/
Pretty much the same, but with three guys in Spain and more swear words, is Kafelog, at http://www.kafelog.com/
His method of learning a new language is to just start out memorizing vocabulary. He is able to achieve a sustained acquisition of about 100 new words per day. Once he has sufficient vocabulary he adds in grammar practice, sample conversations, etc.
I doubt I could accomplish 100 words/day, but I may try his approach anyways.
When he was learning Japanese I think he memorized the translations to Mandarin rather than English, because those two languages were more similar.
Also, I wonder if he needs to be in an immersive context for that rate to be sustained.
He was learning Japanese while living in Canada, so I'm pretty sure that he doesn't need an immersive context for that rate. However I doubt he could pick up on the finer nuances without being in an immersive context.
I also needed to be able to listen and speak. To develop speaking and listening, I watched at least 3 hours of television every day. God bless the closed caption, and the endless reruns of The Simpsons, Home Improvement and Full House – I had the caption on, and mouthed the word exactly as they sounded like. I said the difficult words over and over again until I got them right. (It took years to get “girl” and “rhythm” right.) I got into the habit of talking aloud to myself to make sure what my speech sounded right. (I still do this often, which initially creeped out my fiancée.)
For my part, I would have happily believed that she spent 2-3 years living and studying an English speaking country.
She might have been lying to me, but it didn't seem like it at the time. All the information is there if you take the time to really study and memorise it.
You're certainly correct about the alphabet though. In my experience, another big challenge for Indonesian speakers of English is correct grammar - Malay-style grammar is quite simple and usage conforms pretty well to its few rules. Although that applies to most people learning English as a second language.
Indonesian has also picked up many new or specific terms from English. I got in trouble with my history professor because I couldn't pronounce "historiography" correctly as "historografi".
(EDIT: Ok, this one might via Dutch. Recently terminology pretty much always come from English, though.)
http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html
(Hmm, it's about time to revise that webpage, but the advice is still good.)
I always thought that two near-monolinguals dating or getting married would be the quickest way to learn a new language, although I never had a chance to test this hypothesis
They have an expression for this in French:
"La meilleure façon d'apprendre une langue est sur l'oreiller"
"The best way to learn a language is on the pillow"
I saw lots of other exchange students improve their French immensely when they started dating a native. My experience was that having that sort of language partner is nice because they're sympathetic to your mistakes and there's lots of built-in incentive to have more interesting conversations.
She was also very helpful as she was a native French speaker, but fluent in English.
Then I started dating an Ecuadorian woman, and my Spanish acquisition just took off, especially when we moved in together. Like the Korean, I put in a tremendous amount of effort, although without flash cards. I did repeat everything over and over, to make sure it stayed in my head. But mostly it was just the endless necessity of communicating on a practical and intimate level about everything.
"Where's my blue shirt?" "Why is your friend angry?" "What's this letter from the electric company about?" "When I was a kid, my grandfather gave me a baseball glove for Christmas." "No, I wasn't looking at that other girl." "There is corruption in the U.S., it's just more sophisticated than in Ecuador."
The other important thing that happened was that I started watching TV with her. She was really into telenovelas and sketch comedy shows.
Let me tell, you telenovelas (spanish soap operas) are awesome for learning the language. First, the characters all have accents that convey their social position, and different novelas are made in different countries. So you get exposed to a lot of variation in pronunciation and vocabulary. On the other hand, this is TV, so everybody enunciates clearly and there's no hemming and hawing. Finally, everything is so dramatic and over-acted that you can tell what's going even without understanding the dialog. I alternated between rolling my eyes and concentrating furiously to catch all the nuances.
After a year, I was pretty much fluent in Spanish, though not quite at the level of the Korean's mastery of English. I have an idea of what kind of effort would be required to get to that level, but since I'm not in Ecuador any more, I haven't bothered. My wife and I speak both English and Spanish around the house, but we try to keep it to one language at a time - not always easy.
So yeah, marrying a Spanish speaker was an enormous aid to learning the language. I don't know if it was the "quickest," but it was definitely faster than doing it on my own, and much more pleasant. ;-)
I wrote an Android app a few months ago to help learn/maintain Spanish.
http://www.appbrain.com/app/com.h4labs.free.spanish_vocab
I've been studying Spanish for several years, including 10 weeks in Guatemala. It's easy to get rusty and I always need a refresher so I wrote this app. Gonna add more grammar and hopefully turn it into a "real" app, including versions for French(started), German, etc.
1) English language media can be found almost anywhere on earth. Many countries not only have English movies, but also local English language radio stations, newspapers and magazines specifically targeted at EFL learners. My current home, Taiwan, has all of these. A modest number of those resources exist for languages such as Mandarin, Spanish or French in various countries around the world. Materials in Taiwanese Hokkien, on the other hand, are very, very difficult to come by in most places.
2) No matter what kind of racial background you have, strangers in the US, UK and other English speaking places will probably assume you speak English. Not so for an American who moves to Korea, Sweden or Egypt.
3) Even when dealing with non-native speakers of English, it could very well be your best language for communication. When non-German speaking Chinese and non-Chinese speaking Germans do business, they'll likely use English.
4) English loan words are common in just about every major world language, except French. However, French learners of English still have a lot of cognates to help them out since English borrowed them from French.
5) In many parts of the world, English is a high-prestige language. This makes it even more likely that locals will want to use it with outsiders. It also makes it possible and even common for multi-decade expats to still be virtually monolingual English speakers.
6) Many people, including the author of this article have been instructed in English since childhood. However poor that instruction may be, it's still a head start.
If he learns a lower-prestige language for which materials are hard to find, I'll be impressed. Blackfoot and Navajo, for example, are both shrinking language communities. Most of their speakers also speak English (and many prefer to with outsiders). Here's an article about language learning from someone who's had success in those circumstances:
http://www.sil.org/lingualinks/languagelearning/essaysonfiel...
A serious language learner can get to a very high level of proficiency in a couple years' full-time effort. Some of them have fun, too!
It would certainly be interesting to hear a sample of the Korean's speech from when he was 18 or 19. However, I think the reason he speaks English like he grew up in the U.S. is because he put a lot of specific effort into getting his pronunciation absolutely right.
A serious language learner can get to a very high level of proficiency in a couple years' full-time effort. Some of them have fun, too!
In general I agree with that. What the Korean did was clearly overkill for what just about anybody would ever need to do. However, I think you could employ the Korean's techniques to a lesser degree and still have fun learning a second language.
- The Korean was living in America (albeit a fairly Korean-influenced part of America) when studying English, so there was an immersion factor (however negligible) present.
- Similarly, in the discussion of other languages The Korean learned in a non-immersion environment, The Korean has only compared their results to other non-immersion students.
Not saying that The Korean is wrong about anything, just that it seems like they can be right, and concurrently immersion can also still be a valuable tool when learning a foreign language.
My take on becoming good at speaking a foreign language: You must make an effort, it will not come to you passively. You must be willing to "forget" what you already know. Listen to yourself. Ask other people to help and/or correct you. Try to learn like a child. Play with the language. Be curious.
(On another note, I also realized that not having an accent got me into fewer conversations since people would not bother asking me where I was from.)
1. Pretend that French is a dead language from an ancient culture. Obtain a bunch of French books and study them, to try to notice patterns and infer rules about the language.
2. Do the same with some other language, such as Spanish.
3. Use the manuals from your TV, microwave, vacuum cleaner, and so on that have the instructions printed in English, French, and Spanish to relate the two "dead" languages to a language you understand (English). The idea is that these manuals are your Rosetta Stone.
WARNING: I have repeatedly found the translations of houseware manuals to be thoroughly broken. I often read the English part even though my native language is French because English is, if not the original language, at least well-supported. The French version has pathetic grammar and lacks many accents and has some in wrong places, with bad grammar.
Curiosity about words/idiomatic expressions you don't know is important tough. But stopping on each single word you don't understand is certainly not the way to go (well except if you have to, as in schoolwork).
No kidding.
Language domination tends to follow political, trade, and economic domination. The "lingua franca" of Europe used to be, as the phrase implies, French. Before that was bastard Latin, after that it was German. More people speak Spanish than English in the New World, and Brazillian is a close third.
The problem with suggesting a default language is that you are also implying worldwide domination. It's not usually a welcome idea. :)
There is a joke about that: air traffic control frequencies are shared, for obvious reasons. Once a Lufthansa flight was coming into Berlin. The pilot asked for clearance in German. The tower responded that he must use English, as that is the rule. The pilot responded: "Why? I am a German, flying a German plane to a German airport. Why must I speak English?" Another pilot cut in-- "because you lost the bloody war!"
This is actually true; if you don't trust the pilots of a former enemy, a good way to keep tabs on them is to make them use your language on the radio. QED.
Perhaps more controversially, I happen to think English is objectively the best[1] natural language currently available for this role. It's got by far the biggest vocabulary and is by implication the most expressive. Ayn Rand's native language was Russian, she was fluent in several other languages, and she wrote that English gave her the most freedom and power of expression.
[1] Assuming we can agree that a concept such as "best" can exist and we don't degenerate into nihilistic pseudo-philosophical examinations of first principles.
English is pretty good, I agree, though phrasal verbs are the work of the devil. It has a head start in aviation, mathematics, engineering, some television, finance, and computer science. The British did a good job of seeding it everywhere and WWII gave it a large boost. Then again, the dissolution of the empires in the 60s made English and French less fashionable in many areas of the world as nationalism took hold.
Favoring "gradual unforced adoption" is a fine thing. I suppose I favor it too, as a "lingua franca" but not as a single global language. Knowledge of history does, I'm sorry to disagree with you here, qualify one to have a credentialed opinion. Language hegemony has never happened without a lot of people getting killed. I do not favor that, and I trust you don't either. Maybe this time will be different, who knows? America has always had wonderful, astonishing optimism.
But keep in mind that what you are proposing is no less than closing the book on many venerable, vibrant, and (ahem) more populous cultures. They will push back as much as you would push back on being told that English was obsolete.
Just thinking outside the box. Long term.
I happen to disagree that "culture" is a null word or that it can be translated fully. Virtually all multilingual people I know think the same way. It's ok to disagree with, but not dismiss, that opinion.
Where one stands depends largely on where one sits. Would you be willing to give up English --completely, not even teaching it to your children-- for Spanish or Chinese?
I disagree, there are expressions that correspond to modes of thought that get legitimacy/relevance from their connection to the history and identity of your people. The expressions "blood, sweat and tears" or "keep calm and carry on" does not and can not mean the same thing in mandarin, if you never use them in english anymore you will have lost a connection to that particular historic/cultural experience.
http://karolbednarczyk.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/keep_c...
I also doubt that he's joking, but it is not insulting to assume so. The suggestion that "the world should all switch to English as the default standard language" is rather naive and, to many people, downright offensive. Assuming that the suggestion is a joke is actually being generous.
Clearly, my point is that the aforementioned suggestion is not a well reasoned statement.
Suppose I post a comment on HN like "hey, maybe we should physically segregate blacks and hispanics and whites; there will be a few problems on the way but surely the crime rate between races will go down". I'd expect that comment to be regarded either sarcastic or downright trollish. It would not be insulting to consider it as a joke.
(Of course, this example is an exaggeration to make my point clear. I don't mean the original comment is trollish.)
Yes, it's alternatingly irritating and hilarious to find how many animals we know by special names are called some variation of Cat or Bear, and I like to tell this as a joke, topping it off with the Katzenbär, which is both (Catbear). (A katzenbär is a red panda, in case you're wondering.)
But, at the same time, there is a lot of expressiveness in German that has no English equivalent. For example: schadenfreude. This is just one word of hundreds that are special, emotion-capturing words that have no real equivalent in English.
To argue that English is more expressive based on volume is silly.
And considering this, allyagg, i'm not convinced by your argument about vocabulary size, i've always felt the english vocabulary as quite compact (and thus more convenient to use compared to other more complex languages)...
EDIT: allyagg, a bit of googling proved you right :) From what i understand, english vocabulary seems more rich of "technical" terms while some other areas are less developed (i would say related to philosophy/poetry concepts for ger and ita for example ), rendering some words in other languages not directly translatable.
Among adults in Europe, I believe that in every country where English is not the main language at least half the adults speak it as a second language.
English is the standard for aviation and maritime use, by treaty. It's also the de facto standard in computing and most of science. If one is going to deal internationally, and is only going to know one language, English is the best choice.