My Journey to a Better Language Learning System
chatterbug.com
chatterbug.com
I have been using the method's described in Fluent Forever[1] and they have been working extremely well for me. I have a speaking partner that I speak with 3-5 times a week for 1 hour each time (If you want to learn italian email me, he is awesome), and I keep track of literally everything I cant say, and after the lesson make cards, insert them into Anki, repeat.
I can understand 80% of our conversations perfectly, and we talk for the full hour, rarely breaking into english. Am I speaking perfect italian - no, but I have absolutely no problems communicating. I was recently in Sicily with my family and hanging out with a family that spoke no English and was translating for 8 people in both directions with no problems.
This is the first new language I have learned but it seems the key to me is described in the book
1) start with pronunciation and spelling (Gabe created pronunciation trainers for most languages) 2) Learn some basic verbs (I need, I want, may I, to go, to take, etc) 3) Building up a large list of nouns 4) Start using iTalki with a partner very soon into your journey and keep track of what you dont know.
The state departments says it takes around 400 hours to learn the latin based languages, I believe that seems fairly accurate.
I started learning French maybe 6 months ago and have done ~20 hours of iTalki sessions. You'll sound terrible when you start, but that's okay — you're paying them to hear your terrible French/German/Spanish/etc. It's all gets better.
400 hours of practice is a pretty good rule of thumb I think, but that's deliberate practice, not just physically being awake in a country that speaks the language. You need to be engaging in conversation and actively processing things for those 400 hours. Plus it has to be at a practical level. Watching TV in Japanese when you don't know any Japanese doesn't make you much better at the language - your brain isn't really processing anything.
Or to make a music metaphor, you can't really just play with a violin for hundreds of hours and be good. You need a tutor, someone to challenge you at your level and help you make small steps so you slowly get better. Anders Ericsson has done some fascinating research on excellence and the important difference between doing something and deliberate practice at it.
Also, don't mistake being in a country with language immersion. When I was in Paris and knew some French, I would maybe be able to do a few hours a day at best, if I was really trying to engage. Even in English in America, I probably only really talk or engage in conversation for a few hours a day on average. I was in Germany last year for a few weeks when I was around an A1 level and I barely progressed, because the immersion is very surface-level at that stage. You have encounters but it's not really practice - most interactions are too high-level and don't help you because you can't process them.
Academically, I've only failed two things. Typing and Spanish. Today, I'm fluent in Spanish - though a bit slower than natives.
Why? I spent a whole lot of time with my pidgin Spanish below the border. Eventually, I just learned. I did make an effort to learn a few things every day, but I ended up actually learning more than that and doing so without even realizing it.
I can't write Spanish, but I can read it. I can write it well enough so that I could probably pass for a mentally handicapped third grader. But, I can speak the language.
Other than some basic phrases, it's the only other spoken language I'm even remotely fluent. (I also sign, ASL specifically, which has been surprisingly handy.)
So, if someone really wants to learn a language, go visit the country where it is spoken and don't hang out with tourists. Learn a few phrases (ordering beer and where is the bathroom are good starters) and you'll pick up the rest.
As near as I can tell, people are very happy to help. I'm not sure if there is some psychological thing to it, but people seem really helpful when you're making a legitimate effort to learn their language.
By fluent, I mean able to understand and convey what is needed and not sound too silly. I'm sure I'm not always using proper Spanish.
"Mí nescito habla Español, no Englais por favor."
That got me started along my journey of Spanish speaking. I'd say I was okay after two weeks. Okay enough to get get around. I was not bad after a month. I was actually able to have a full conversation, without much thought, after about three months.
Also, I'm not sure...
Here's a puzzle for you people into psych stuff.
During my immersion, I would sometimes dream in Spanish. Except, in my dreams, I was fluent. As in, I would prattle on and converse in Spanish - fluently. Except, at the time, I wasn't actually fluent.
What language was I really speaking in my dream?
Another would be when I am out and about and I notice someone who is deaf. I'm not the least bit bashful, so I'll wave and get their attention to let them know that I can sign. This leads to a conversation, pretty much every time.
It's not like they have a wide variety of people to converse with. So, they are usually quite happy to do so.
I also used to work with municipalities and there were a number of occasions where a contact person would actually be deaf. Municipalities are generally more open to hiring people who have hearing issues. So, it has actually sped things up as opposed to their usually method of writing down what they want to say and then reading your lips.
I am pretty outgoing, so it comes in handy. I haven't actually had anybody show outright displeasure, they always seem happy to find someone that signs. The closest would be a grumpy old man who was curt. He lived in the same neighborhood but would continue and we finally became friends and drinking buddies.
My dreams frequently claim I am a master composer, and that this tune is wonderful, or that I've written a really clever joke, or that they've told me something important. None of the things I've ever dragged up to the waking world have ever even remotely panned out as the dream promised. (If I may anthropomorphize for convenience.)
I've come to the conclusion that that is the dream, in some sense. You dream that you were fluent in Spanish, but not just that you abstractly believed in it but that you had the experience. But what language were you speaking? Nothing. Nothing comprehensible, and possibly literally nothing at all; simply the empty experience of fluency without any concrete referent.
Which makes the Dunning-Kruger effect more comprehensible, if it is possible to experience the feeling of "competence" divorced from almost anything concrete. Dunning-Kruger IMHO happens when the competence is firing and the person in question has no counterbalancing reasons to suppress it. So one of the keys of true competence is to be sure to eschew that feeling, in favor of seeking out the ways in which you are not competent. That is another way of looking at "deliberative practice", where you are always practicing just a wee bit beyond your capability. If you don't do that, it's too easy to rest on your laurels and feel soooper confident and awesome that you've really licked this Twinkle Twinkle Little Star tune, so now you really know what you're doing.
However, in those nearly eight years, my wife and I visited Italy at least three or four times, for a total of maybe three weeks.
I swear to $DEITY that I learned and used more Italian in those three weeks than I did French for the entire time I lived in Belgium.
For me, there are just some languages that are harder than others, and are unlikely to ever stick. But maybe that’s just me.
While I recognize that the only way to gain conversational skills is to actually have conversations, they terrify me. Engaging in small talk with strangers in my native language is hard enough. Trying to do it in a second language seems impossible. Even watching the demo video from the link, all I could think was "this is awkward".
I would almost rather there be a sort of script or game around the conversations, so they're not relying on my ability to be interesting while also trying to do it in a different language.
They have instructions, you can advance at any time, there is always an explicit task or situation or game to play. Sometimes the tutors read a story and then ask you questions about it, sometimes there are word games, sometimes there are situations where you're told what you need to do and you just try to role play. Always after you've at least minimally learned the vocab and grammar needed to do it.
Nowadays I will sometimes wander and just have a random conversation with a tutor, but when it's finished, I just click 'Next' and get a new thing to try. It can be a little scary at first, as any in-person meeting or class environment often is the first time, but it becomes fun and comfortable pretty fast. You really aren't expected to be interesting (as many of my tutors can attest, I rarely am :) )
The compilation video (is just from the video feeds, but I removed the actual exercises we were doing. It's entirely guided. These were just sort of random conversations that I happened to venture into as an aside from the main curriculum as I got more familiar with the tutors as a way to illustrate how my spontaneous conversational skills improved over time.
It can be done. I used to get nervous in a private business meeting with more than two people. Through practice and pushing myself I've made it all the way to speaking in public in front of hundreds of people on many occasions. Tackle your fear of these conversations first because it's an important life skill. I'm not saying you have to make it all the way to public speaking. But at least get very comfortable with small talk among a few people. There are even courses for it. Then learn a new language after.
I'm learning Czech now just for fun for about a year and tried to find tandem partners with an app called Tandem. I had some chat partners but they were text only as I find it much easier to have a conversation this way. Of course this didn't go very well. Most of them stopped responding after a while.
So right now I'm not sure what to try next. I definitely need some “hands on“ experience but don't know how. There really should be more offerings for introverts. I'm sure there's a big market for that.
How'd I move past it? I started small (I was still rather young) and performed in a band. Eventually, I'd even sing. I am a classical guitarist but played rock, mostly.
Anyhow, I used to vomit and shake. I used to be truly afraid. I used to be scared of failure and of making errors.
So, I first started playing for people. It'd be a while before I was in a band and on stage. The first stage was small and had maybe 50 people in the audience. I threw up and made it onto the stage.
Over time, I realized that most audience members aren't accomplished musicians and won't actually notice a small error. Learning to play through the errors helped.
Eventually, I could walk out on stage, sing, talk to the audience, and actually put on a show instead of standing off to the side and concentrating on my playing.
What I'd suggest, and they are just suggestions, is hitting up something like an open mic night, a comedy club that has such, an open mic poetry reading, etc...
It will not be easy, but these days I'm outgoing and will talk to most anyone. I don't have any social anxiety and, if I do, I now have the confidence to just bluff it.
That same confidence has helped in many areas. It certainly helped with dating and in business. I've played in front of some large crowds and have spoken in front of some pretty large groups of people.
What it took was starting small and building up the confidence. What it meant was being able to interact with people at a much greater level.
I've since learned to be an active listener, which really helps. Open-ended questions about things they kno about is a great way to interact with people. It does require that one listens and give the others a chance to speak.
But, yeah... It made me toss my cookies, sweat a bunch, and I even fainted once. However, confidence grew quickly. It is absolutely not easy.
I don't know if that will work for everyone, and I assume it won't, but it worked for me. You have to make yourself do it the first times.
The impact it had elsewherein my life is amazing. I'm now very able to just converse with strangers. I now initiate conversations with people. In fact, I'm pretty much the polar opposite of how I used to be. I was a shy introvert who was unable to make many friends and didn't like to be social. These days, I'm a freakin' social butterfly!
So, maybe they can take something from that and try it?
> conversations, they terrify me
It is awkward! But that's why you should do it. Because, it doesn't matter. You have to stretch yourself. You have to get comfortable with being bad.
Everyone feels embarrassed and weird when learning a second language. They feel embarrassed that they are bad. But, of course they're bad, they never learned. It doesn't mean you're stupid. In fact, if you can force yourself to do something hard and you can force yourself through the awkwardness in the pursuit of a goal, to me that's a high indicator that you are smarter than average.
For me, learning a second language was so important in terms of the humility (being as a child again, accepting being bad, being the foreigner, being "that one weird guy"), then the recognition that the foreign culture & foreign people are so very similar to my own, and then the ability to see my own culture from another perspective. It's so good for your brain and there are so many fascinating little details, just the poetry of the foreign language and its words ... the way the words echo English in some ways and then in other ways are different.
In a practical sense it would be hard to point to specific things that the foreign language did for me, but in another sense it was one of the deepest, most soul-expanding things I could have done. Gave me courage, a lot of perspective, many friends, and many good times. Anyone who wants more specific advice feel free to write me: good luck, go for it, it's worth it!
In other words, find media you enjoy in your target language (books movies series music YouTube etc) and spend as much time as possible consuming that media.
The guy who wrote AJATT (All Japanese All The Time) had earphones playing Japanese audio 24 hours a day for almost 2 years. Along with learning the writing system, after 18 months of this method he aced a phone interview (got mistaken for a native speaker) and got a job at Sony. And he's pretty introverted / shy.
Might be worth checking out!
But I do feel that Duolingo was honestly pretty good about helping me to read and write. In NYC there's a little ambient Spanish everywhere and I went into it not with the goal of being fluent, but just being able to read signs and understand a little bit here and there. (I haven't kept up with it and now I've forgotten a good chunk, but I'd say that's a different issue.)
At least in my case, it's also been a good entry point because it's free and convenient. I'm actually working on Duolingo's in-beta Czech tree (significant other's family is partially Czech) and it's actually been an inspiration for me to inquire about in-person classes, especially knowing that if I ever want to hold conversations, I will need to have real-life speaking experience. I probably wouldn't have done this if I hadn't started off on Duolingo and had some fun with it!
One day I was watching a show or movie that had many scenes in Spanish, and to my surprise I could actually follow much of what was said! I didn't realize how (relatively) effective even those 10 minutes a day can be.
It is a series of audio files, typically about 10 minutes each, and all you do is listen to them, answering questions when the instructor asks.
German, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Swahili, Spanish, and others. It's a labour of love by Mihalis, who asks for donations but otherwise does it all for free!
I haven't tried Chatterbug, but I am completely sold on Language Transfer, because it sidesteps the rote memorization that so many other systems use.
I'm not able to judge their fluency, but some of them have been using it to learn a variety of different languages. The lady that lives at the neighboring farm speaks at least a dozen languages and she's learned all but two of them with the software.
She speaks passable French and Spanish (and English, of course) so I can vouch for the Spanish and the missus is fluent in French.
Fun fact, this system was first pioneered not by Michel Thomas, but rather by Margarita Madrigal. She has a book called the Magic Key to Spanish. You can also find her Magic Key to French and German online since those are out of print.
But the courses are all free of charge. Please recommend them to friends or family to spread the word! I can especially endorse the Spanish course.
I find Pimsleur to be a highly effective spoken language acquisition tool, but the writing/reading aspect is abysmal and quite demotivating. Chatterbug seems to be doing spaced repetition, and does it much better than Pimsleur audiobooks because I can zoom through the things I remember and get as much time as I need to repeat questions and think about the answer.
As others have pointed out, Pimsleur is oriented strictly to the spoken language, so if you need to be able to read the language, it would make sense to supplement it with separate written course materials, especially if the orthography of the target language is particularly different than your own (e.g., Greek and Mandarin).
On a side note, I also find doing a 30-minute Pimsleur course to be a great mental exercise. Recalling the phraes and responding to the prompts, I literally feel like rarely-used parts of my brain are getting a workout.
Repetition is the key to mastery!
Repetition is the key to mastery!
I know the demand is often placed on the romance and germanic languages, but they're often easy enough. You can usually bring along your own character set, which dramatically eases the transition into something new.
Personally I want very much to return to Japanese myself some day. As I mentioned in the post, I studied it for several months. It is an interesting question of how best to approach learning kana and kanji, since that's a pretty difficult thing to get fast at. Memorizing a few hundred symbols isn't super hard, but getting so good at them that you can sight-read takes a lot of time and can be frustrating.
I would disagree that learning any language is easy enough, with or without learning a new writing system. That's sort of like saying that learning the piano is easy enough compared to the violin, just because it's always on key. It's still a lot of work before anyone wants to listen to you play.
No matter what language you learn, if you want to become somewhat fluent, you need to memorize several thousand abstract words, new sounds, new grammar rules, etc. It's always a lot of work in absolute terms. I only bring this up because I feel that it's somewhat harmful to say learning a language can be "easy". It often results in people trying to learn, inevitably finding out that it's still a lot of work and then giving up while blaming themselves for being "bad at languages".
Also, I hope you try some immersion Japanese again. :D
I followed this thread:
https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/6q4h6a/a_...
What I have done so far:
1. one chapter of Genki Elementary I 2. 60 Kanji via memrise and "remember the kanji" 3. Given up on Duolingo till I read Genki 4. Use an app called LingoDeer, it is awesome. 5. Started watching Japanese anime. Haven't understood anything but "thank you" and "good morning" yet.
(1) What they are speaking - IN their script (this is called SLS: Same-Language-Subtitling and has been quite successful for literacy programs for one's own language)
(2) What they are speaking - IN my script
(3) What they MEAN - IN my language (i.e. translation)
Data for (1) is easy to find. (2) could theoretically be generated from (1). It's (3) which requires a lot of deliberate manual effort.
They've got several TV series (although they might not be your favorite series), depending on the language.
I would assume it's better for English because so much is produced in English, so there aren't two different teams on audio and text. I would try to find more German language stuff, but due to a lot of media region restrictions, it's insanely difficult to get foreign language material if you're in America. I've been known to pirate content just so my daughter can have French cartoons to watch. So frustrating...
I found https://github.com/oaprograms/lingo-player, but it seems to have a broken dependency.
For (1), I have considered using https://cloud.google.com/speech/ because it's so cheap. I am learning Cantonese, and Cantonese subtitles virtually don't exist – frustratingly, everything is in Mandarin.
Subtitles in your own language will actually slow you way down. You'll stop hearing the words in the foreign language and just read your native language.
At first it will seem very difficult to have only the foreign language subtitles, but once you start seeing the repeated phrases and see the context in which it happens, you'll pick up new phrases very quickly.
It does take a leap of faith, because at first you'll understand almost nothing and it might be a bit boring or frustrating. If you stick with it, it's pretty powerful.
How long before things started clicking? Almost immediately. You recognize what you've recently learned from your other resources and you get to hear different pronunciations, accents, and even slurring. But to learn new things from context takes longer. It's very hard to say. I'm not keeping track of how many times I hear a slang phrase or some other common phrase before it sinks in. I would guess hundreds of times. But that's why this method works so well. The most common phrases and words will be repeated over and over even in one movie. So you are automatically getting more exposure to the most common words.
One thing I've noticed with all the language learning apps though is that they are generalized methodologies that are then applied to lots of languages. IE, duolingo in French and Spanish and German are basically the same track, just in different langauges. Same with Rosetta Stone (even more consistent there).
That seems to really be leaving a lot on the table. Every language has its quirks and most importantly every language has a few shortcuts you can learn to really give yourself a ton of utility with little work. But because the software is built to be generalized you get the lowest common denominator instead of the fastest possible path to fluency and speaking.
Not sure which approach chatterbug is taking, but at first blush and by the way they talk about it I'm guessing it is yet another generalized approach, but I suppose we'll see.
However, I'm sure that as we do several languages, we will reuse patterns and exercises that transfer well. A situation to practice shopping or numbers can work the same in Japanese or German without having to reinvent it. Certainly all of our grammar drills and exercises will be customized to each language, though.
I think it's pretty important to remember as well that one of the main things here is the a lot of your time in the system is spent talking to a real human. You can get the exact same live exercise several times and still have it be pretty different if you have different tutors. It's not really possible for that large part of our system to be really "generalized" in this way. Our system is very human, not just technological.
1) I'm in college and I'm going to build an app to easily buy and sell books
2) Off campus housing is hard, I'm going to build an app to find roommates
3) Splitting bills with roommates is hard, I'm going to build an app for cost splitting
4) All my previous apps sucked because they weren't social, I'm going to build a social network app
5) I'm bored partying with my new friends, I'm going to level up and build an app to learn a new language
6) I'm lonely, I'm going to build a dating app to find a mate
7) I found a mate and the whole engagement/wedding industry is a fraud, I'm going to make an app to make it easier to navigate
8) My children are awesome, I'm going to build apps to manage their time/friends/eating/sleeping/learning
9) Technology is a waste of time, I'm going to spend my time on other hobbies and my family
10) I've been working 20 years in a boring industry and I see an opportunity to write boring software that solves boring problems that businesses will actually pay for. Jackpot.
Edit: As others pointed out, should have included: ToDo app, Blog App, and a travel app. Travel should probably be 5 with language at 6.
Hopefully what I'm suggested is not step 11: https://xkcd.com/927/
It turns out some problems are complex, but so what? I’ve been working on “programming interfaces for beginners” for 12 years and still haven’t succeeded. That’s not because I’m dumb, nor is everyone who thought it would be easy and failed.
It’s because there are building blocks that don’t exist yet, so when you try to make the thing you end up getting distracted making a building block—or eight—and then your schedule gets shot and this kills the project.
But there’s no shame in that. If we’re lucky, you made a new building block which will eventually mature, in one form or another, maybe just in conversations with other devs who are closer to cracking that low level problem.
And then guess what... time is ripe for a hubristic person, young or old, to step up and try their hand at your original problem, now with one more building block. There’s now a 5% higher chance of success. Eventually someone will hit a threshold.
Is your post meant to be more than classic HN stop energy?
FWIW this is basically my path. I've done pretty much all of them to some degree and a few in earnest. In fact I'm working on my own language learning "tool" while I wait around for #10.
It is:
* A) run by people who suck at SEO and marketing
* B) technologically and graphic-design wise really janky
* C) harder and less fun than e.g. Duolingo
* and D) drastically, overwhelmingly more effective than every other system I've ever seen at actually teaching you a language (for people with almost all common linguistic-cognition neurotypes aka nearly everyone)
The first 3 attributes mean that almost nobody has heard of it/uses it.
The downside is that for most languages they didn't build out enough curriculum to get you to fluency. It'll take you roughly a third of the way there. I'm building an open source clone (with longer curriculum) for the other two thirds of the way.
Also, L101 should be paired with Yabla, which will train the skill of listening-and-understanding in your target language.
I'm not affiliated with [0] in any way other than by being a happy customer and by the fact that I'm writing an open source clone of their stuff.
Don't get me wrong, this is a very common problem for engineers (I'm an engineer and I fall into that trap every now and then). But from the post, what's lacking is actually talking and working head-head with teachers and linguists and people doing language learning research, because, you know... these people have actually spent their whole life trying to teach other people languages. So they might know a thing or two, that an engineer trying to teach himself a language might be missing.
I studied linguistics in college and one of my cofounders got her degree in linguistics from Harvard. Another of our employees is a computational linguist from Cambridge.
Additionally, all of the curriculum and much of the course methodology itself was designed by teachers who have been teaching languages both online and in the classroom for years.
We have additionally consulted active linguists and educational psychology researchers to see if there is anything else we should be looking at in their fields that we can apply.
This post was about how my understanding of the product I felt I wanted as a customer was formed. Linguists and teachers built the curriculum and work with the engineers here to see how we can apply the ways they want to teach.
But a lot of language learning is about keeping up motivation and finding ways to access and practice the target language more often, to bring down the barriers to using and communicating in the language. Good software tools can help there, because we can't all afford personal tutors at $30/hour.
Look, 100 years ago we only had dry books with conjugation tables for mostly classical and European languages. Most of the world's languages were barely described, we barely had adequate tools to describe them, and most policy was bent on eradicating them. Move forward to the mid-20th century, and we learning tools like the FSI courses and Pimsleur courses, which are at least getting decent audio out there. Then the Internet occurred, which has completely transformed our ability to access authentic spoken and written material in major target languages. Online dictionaries and apps are better than ever. You can look up a page in Wikipedia and see the target language version, which reveals so much more than a dictionary can. Machine translation helps you see how words are strung together. Now we have Duolingo and things like Anki and Tofugu.com, which of course do not take you all the way, but are still a huge improvement over the tools we had before. Even better is coming.
Mom doesn't do my laundry anymore; doing laundry sucks; the world desperately needs an uber-for-laundry app.
Also, I'm curious if they're hiring and/or have plan to scale. There are so many features they could add.
I agree that there are a lot of features we can and will add. This is only the very beginning of what we can do to improve this process, I think. I would love to hear any ideas.
In a nutshell, with TPR the teacher gives the student a command in the target language, demonstrates the action the command is asking for, repeats the command and finally the student copies the action.
For example, if English was the target language, the teacher could say "sit down", then sit down themselves, then once again say "sit down" and the student would copy the action by sitting down. This can then be repeated for "stand up", for "pick up the fork", or any other arbitrarily complex and sophisticated command.
As you've no doubt noticed, the commands are given in grammatically correct sentences, in context. Grammar is not explicitly taught, however. It is implicitly taught and implicitly learned.
What makes this method work really well is that when you learn words and grammar, you're not doing it with just your mind and maybe some visual cues, you're using your body and doing so in a specific physical context (the place where you're learning), associating what you're learning with parts of that place. It's somewhat analogous to using a memory palace to learn, only without any extra effort of constructing the palace or imaging placing things you want to learn there. With TPR you actually physically interact with the things you learn in that space.
Another great thing is that a TPR teacher need not have any special training in education or really even in the method. TPR takes maybe a minute or two to explain to anyone, so you can recruit helpers from any friends or acquaintances you have who know the target language and are willing to help, though if you want consistent lessons and dedication you'll probably want a professional tutor or teacher anyway.
TPR focuses on learning to understand, in emulation of the first step of a child's language learning process. Children first learn to understand, then to speak, then to read, and finally to write. TPR helps with the first part.
TPR has its limits, and it can't be used for all aspects of language learning, but it's fantastic for getting your language learning bootstrapped really quickly.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_physical_response
[2] - http://tola.maf.org/collect/missionb/index/assoc/HASH01da.di...
[3] - http://tola.maf.org/collect/missionb/index/assoc/HASH0162.di...
I learned from a French professor friend who trains all her second language acquisition grad students in TPR and TPRS. One of her students has had great success teaching elementary, middle, and high school students French using these methods.
I've seen a few non-teachers who have learned TPR/TPRS to teach their languages in the US; languages like Tamil.
I had no background in linguistics or learning languages apart from (almost entirely forgotten) high school Spanish and a bit of classical Greek in college.
After that, I was fluent in listening, I moved to an english speaking country and started working on the speaking part. I was less intimidated since I could understand perfectly so I wasn't shy about speaking and exercising my pronunciation. I'm now fluent in English and live in the US. Most natives I talk to have no idea I'm a foreigner. Usually after an hour of conversation they start wondering which part of America I'm from and they're always surprised to hear I'm from Europe.
- listen to songs and follow the lyrics
- read simplified books or children's books
- watch movies with subtitles in English
- listen to American radio
- read computer British magazines
Extremely important, as in anything you want to learn is motivation, I was really motivated to learn.
My only "pro tip" is not to memorize vocabulary using isolated words, but complete sentences.
This was before the Internet, now I don't know what the excuse would be...
My technique: - I started with children's books with audio, but ensured I read for at least 1 hour every day - I did Anki religiously every day - I changed my smartphone, laptop, etc to French - I only tried to make French friends - I only listened to French music - I only listened to French (tech) podcasts - I bought a book on how to pronounce all the French sounds
I have to say that the first 3 months were very lonely. After that, I could talk, interview, and eventually joke in French.
I'm now fluent.
What could I have done better? I should have focused more on listening and speaking than reading. I love fantasy novels, and hence had a brilliant vocabulary on esoteric words (like different types of swords, etc) that were practically useless day to day.
It's also not just on you to "force yourself to speak a language". You need someone to listen to you. When you know 20 words of a language, cornering anyone to practice with is difficult and somewhat unfair. You need to know or meet some people who care enough about you to have some really horribly slow and boring conversations for a very long time while you improve. If you're not paying them for that time or otherwise reciprocating, then it can be a somewhat selfish thing to ask them to do that for a long time.
It's also very hard to pick up vocabulary implicitly from conversations unless you have some base. My German is good enough now that if I don't understand a word I can ask them to rephrase it using other words and I can often get it. Children can do so just from environmental and contextual input often, but it takes them _years_. So you still have to spend a lot of time studying and building vocab on your own in order to try out.
This method certainly can work, as I did mention in the blog post, but it's far from simple.
Too many ifs, sorry but those sound like the same excuses people say when they explain why they can't travel (more). You have to figure out what your priorities are, and if you really want something you'll find a way.
>It's also not just on you to "force yourself to speak a language". You need someone to listen to you.
Easy. Just go buy some food. You don't need much language skills for that task and it's a start. Or if you are single, go on a date with someone who doesn't speak your language (this was personally the most efficient way for me personally). You overcomplicate things. Your rate of learning a language is proportional of how uncomfortable you want to be. I've seen people studying in language schools for years until they get everything perfect and they can't even maintain a basic conversation. Overall this idea applies to all learning: "to become a master you should be willing to be a fool", i.e. make mistakes.
> It's also very hard to pick up vocabulary implicitly from conversations unless you have some base. My German is good enough now that if I don't understand a word I can ask them to rephrase it using other words and I can often get it. Children can do so just from environmental and contextual input often, but it takes them _years_. So you still have to spend a lot of time studying and building vocab on your own in order to try out.
Most of the information is communicated via non-verbal channels: body language and intonation for example. Using your intuition is crucial here. The rest is basically pattern matching. A single word you can understand from the context. Once you understand > 50% words in a sentence, you can derive the rest from the context and then it becomes a self-reinforcing learning system.
Well, children also don't have the same intellect as an adult and cannot apply more sophisticated learned cognitive techniques.
> Too many ifs, sorry but those sound like the same excuses people say when they explain why they can't travel (more).
That's a really narrow way to call it an "excuse". It might be easy for you but it's not a case for everyone. You were privileged to be able to do this -- acknowledging this instead of calling it an excuse would be nice.
> Using your intuition is crucial here. The rest is basically pattern matching. A single word you can understand from the context.
I'd agree to this. I learned English as my second language through this approach.
I am now trying to learn French and this is where it gets complicated a bit, unless someone can correct you. If you take the template for "I am ..." which translates to "Je suis ..."; plug in some word -- say, "I am sorry" for "Je suis desole" it works. But it can't always be expanded. You'd expect "Je suis excité" to mean "I am excited" but it translates to "I am horny". Point being -- pattern matching and cognitive techniques can only get you so far. Linguistic connotations are complicated.
>Too many ifs, sorry but those sound like the same excuses people say when they explain why they can't travel (more). You have to figure out what your priorities are, and if you really want something you'll find a way
If re-arranging your life and integrating yourself with a foreign society is simple, then we must have our definitions mixed up.
Anyone could recommend me a system for Chinese or Hebrew ?
Get the paid version of Pleco, the best Chinese dictionary app. Turn on spaced repetition in flash cards and download the HSK 1-6 flash cards. Learn the HSK 1 cards _with sound_ so you get started on pinyin. Buy the Chinese Breeze graded reader books, leve 1. Listen to the audio version on the cds a few times then try and read the books. Repeat by HSK level until you run out of Chinese Breeze graded readers, move on to other graded readers, move on to using italki.com for conversation and native texts loaded into pleco’s reader functionality for reading.
Duolingo has Hebrew for what that’s worth.
Good luck.
1. Teacher who didn't waste time. We plowed through the course material at a pace of roughly two chapters per lesson. This was double the speed of other tracks.
2. Teacher who wasn't a native English speaker. This was huge. A native speaker of English, even a professional teacher, can't usually explain to you things like the difference between past perfect and present perfect tense. Or how conjugation of pronouns works. Or the rules and exceptions of conjugating verbs in different tenses. She was able to explain this because she had to learn it in a structured way.
3. English is a very structured language. Unlike Russian (my first language), it discourages run-on sentences. It also has a specific order of verbs and nouns. It also has a pretty simple system of taking the same sentence through all nine tenses with mostly modifier verbs (be and have). This all maps really neatly into handy charts that are very quick to memorize. By contrast in Russian you have three tenses, so the difference between "I am walking" and "I walk" is up to the reader to discern.
4. English is simpler than Russian when it comes to conjugation. There is no conjugating verbs, adjectives, or adverbs by gender. The only conjugation you do is by tense. "Exception" verbs suck (be, am, was, will/shall). But aside from the most common ones (be, have, go), they fall into one of several patterns(think/thought, bring/brought, ring/rung). Less conjugation is better, and since English requires complete sentences (you don't generally see sentences like "gone" and have to infer who just left, he or she, etc.) no additional information is conveyed by conjugation. Can you tell I hate conjugation? Basically going from Russian to English felt sort of like going from Python to Basic: you have a lot fewer paradigms to worry about, while already being familiar with the paradigms Basic uses.
5. Lots of memorization of words. Once you figure out how to say "Today after work I am going to get dinner with friends" you can easily substitute drinks for dinner, date for friends, school for work, etc. So I made my goal learning the structure of the language and learning enough words to make substitutions. Once I conceptually knew how to use all nine tenses, the rest was simple memorization and usage.
6. Lots of conversations and not being afraid of my bad accent. You know what's great about talking to other students? They don't give a shit that your accent sucks. Native speakers, especially ones outside the classroom might be nice about it, but you are always keenly aware that you don't sound like them.
7. Finally, after I was able to hold conversations in English, emersion helped. Side note: try not to move your kids to a completely new country and send them straight to high school a few months later. It's brutal.
On the other hand, I have failed to learn any other languages since. Part of it is lack of time and motivation since I don't have a specific need for them. Part is that I am in fact older. I am about to take up Japanese and after that maybe get back to French. To this day I have failed to teach any of my past or present partners Russian.
One interesting thing that comes to mind is that most of the recent research I've read says somewhat counterintuitively that the age factor is not as big of a deal as you might think[1]. I was taught at University that there is a critical period age after which it becomes much more difficult to acquire a language, but there is actually little evidence for this.
Aside from accent acquisition, which does seem to be linked pretty tightly with age of exposure, the biggest difference generally between adults and children in language acquisition is the amount of time they have to learn it. Some studies even suggest that children are worse at some aspects of acquisition[2]. As you said, adults are busier, which is the biggest difference.
[1] Hakuta, Bialystok 2003 [2] Ferman, Karni 2010
Some people promote the idea of learning a language "naturally" through an immersive environment. Although immersing yourself in the language is critical once you've picked up a strong foundation, I've personally known very few people who have learned a language to near-native fluency as an adult by simply jumping into a new language environment. Kids do this all the time, but the way most adults successfully learn a new language is different from the way children do it. I've watched some people waste a lot of time trying to speak to native speakers of a language they're learning without having any kind of foundation in vocabulary and grammar. They would have done well to spend at least a portion of that time picking up a basic vocab through flashcards and learning grammar fundamentals of the foreign language in question.
And although I'm sure there are exceptions to this rule, most polyglots I know are fascinated by grammar, in addition to having a strong interest in phonology and speech/accents.
So to anyone who has tried and failed to learn a foreign language as an adult and is thinking of giving it another try, I recommend picking up both a review book on the grammar of their native language, as well as a basic but complete grammar of the language they are targeting. Spend some time with these books along with Anki and the language-learning apps, and then go out and immerse yourself in another language environment, either through online language communities, or living/traveling abroad.
And one last type for new language learners: be sure to study idioms and phrases when you use Anki or whatever flashcard program, and not just simple words. Having a good stock of idioms is critical to fluent conversation.
1. At one time, fully fluent in 4 languages, now 2 are rusty but I'm picking them and another back up. I've also enjoyed an intermediate level of fluency in an additional 5-6 languages at one time or another. (I've also worked as a professional interpreter (2 years) and translator (10 years))
2. The only exceptions to this rule have been people who have learned 3-4 languages as children, but even they have a much better knowledge of grammar than most Americans I know.
We try in our system to teach grammar through the same spaced repetition system - presenting a rule and then giving you a cloze test and spacing it the same as vocab. So we can know, for example, that your second person plural conjugation is weak and often missed, but your first person singular is strong because you always nail it. Then we can try to show you exercises that make you practice the weaker thing when you're in a live session, to reinforce it in a different environment and make sure you can produce it orally too.
Most recent research that I've seen, and the linguistics researchers that I've talked to, seem to conclude that there is little difference between being implicitly and explicitly taught grammar. That you don't need be explicitly explained the rule to use it consistently, but that the important thing is that your focus is brought to mistakes in form and you make an effort to improve those mistakes. There are a hundred studies on this and they all seem to come out slightly differently and generally not very significantly. That said, learners often like to know the rules, even if it's not significantly helpful for long term retention and production.
I would caution against recommending that people pick up a grammar book unless it's an incredibly good one. Most are dry and difficult and assume you know the vocabulary of linguistics, which most people don't. As we said, language is a marathon and it's hard to stick with if you're immediately and mind-numbingly bored, which grammar books are good at. I personally prefer to get communicative and work on fixing my grammar as I go, since it gives me momentum.
I like the middle ground that Chatterbug has taken. The grammar testing is interactive and you can reinforce good patterns when talking with human beings in a spaced way. I know my grammar is in many cases wrong when speaking in German, but most people don't seem to find the mistakes I make at my level particularly problematic, and it gives me time and confidence to focus on the forms that I'm getting wrong.
What's really funny to me is that watching my own videos right after I do a lesson, I notice many of my own grammar errors, because I'm hearing them and have time to think about them, but I don't always have time to pull stuff properly when in the heat of trying to formulate and speak a sentence in real time. But I belive that helps me improve faster and stay motivated.
> I would caution against recommending that people pick up a grammar book unless it's an incredibly good one. Most are dry and difficult and assume you know the vocabulary of linguistics, which most people don't.
I strongly disagree. First, grammar books very rarely use any linguistics vocabulary. And learners can find totally adequate basic grammars in the back of introductory language learning books and textbooks. They do assume you know a little grammar vocab, but not linguistics (which is, of course, a field of study completely separate from language learning). For Indo-European languages, that includes things like "indirect object", "relative pronouns", "demonstrative pronouns", etc. And for declined languages like Russian and Greek, they may use terms like "nominative" and "accusative". But they often explain these terms first, and if not, that's why I recommend people first pick up a basic book on English grammar.
And yes, if your goal is simply to get by in a language, like to the level of a serious tourist, making frequent grammar mistakes is not a big deal.
But if your goal is to learn a language fluently, and particularly if your goal is to learn more than one language fluently, you should ask yourself if it's worth the initial investment of learning the basics of grammar, to the level that you're able to follow a basic introductory grammar. For most people reading HN, I'd think this is something they could pick up in several weeks part-time, or maybe a month or two if they have absolutely no background (like, you have no idea what the subject of a sentence is, or what verb tenses refer to). And then, based on my past multi-decade experience learning, teaching, and speaking multiple languages, I'd be willing to bet that things will "click" much more than if they had no idea what these things refer to.
Finally, I do agree that grammar should not be a major focus of foreign language learning -- maybe 10-20% of the time. But that 10-20% has the potential to make the other components of your language learning voyage much, much easier.