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Comment by ramblerman | Hacker News Reader

> 1) Don't expect the same results from self-study with a textbook and some subtitled movies.

> 2) Even if you lived there and devoted your entire days to study, it would be difficult to ramp up that quickly.

These are 2 wildly different scenarios. If you stay with a family, immerse yourself and go to class every day you would have an advantage over an FSO officer.

As to not being professionally fluent in that time, that is definitely true. But you should reach a level where you can be independent enough to get around, speak and understand.

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You can do that in a single-digit number of weeks if you're willing to never back down. Never fall back to a different language.

It's a pain for yourself and the people you speak to. You'll have to apologise often. But the locals don't really mind, they approve of your goal.

I wouldn't say they don't mind. People approve of the goal of you learning their language in the abstract, but if you're slowing down their day or worse their line of customers, you're just going to annoy everyone around you in a way that they will be too polite to make explicitly clear, but will be apparent from their tone of voice, their insistence on answering in English and so on.

The real difficulty of learning a language is thus in my view nothing to do with the language itself, but rather, how good at English the speakers of that language tend to be. If you're in a part of the world where they speak an obscure language and thus all learn English from childhood, the chances of you ever getting fluent are close to zero. Nobody really cares enough to struggle through with you.

It's not just that nobody cares enough to struggle through with you, but people actively will try to speak English with you as a way to get more proficient in English.

This is the problem I have in Spain, the few people I know who speak a bit of English use me to practice on.

Yes, people will want that. My stock answer was "thanks, but anyone who lives in <x> should get used to speaking <y>" and that always settled it. That problem is more of an excuse for failing to learn proper <y> than a reason.

(There are a lot of expats among the parents at my children's school and it's easy to tell who persisted and who didn't.)

This. Almost everywhere you go, there will be a lot of people trying to speak English with you.

I used to have this happen when I lived in Germany and was trying to learn German. It would often lead to a funny situation where I would speak German and the German person would speak English. Given that I'm pretty stubborn, usually they would eventually switch back to German...

> they will be too polite to make explicitly clear

Hah, in Denmark this does not apply. If you start in a few words of Danish and then it becomes clear you can't really converse in Danish, (some) people will directly complain that you wasted their time and ask why you didn't just speak English, since everyone can speak it and you obviously can't actually speak Danish. While in other countries it's different, e.g. in France many people prefer if you attempt to start in French even if you can't really speak it, instead of directly launching into English.

I guess Americans are different - I make effort to try to understand immigrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Asian countries as form of bridging the cultural divide and attempting more harmony with others regardless their origin. I guess Danes are too lazy or boorish for this.

Don't Americans mostly have no choice, because most aren't bilingual? If an immigrant from China speaks poor English, it's not like the average American has the option of just switching to Mandarin instead, so the conversation stays in English just due to the lack of any other option, not because the patient American has restrained themselves from switching to Mandarin. (And those few who do speak fluent Mandarin often will switch.) In Denmark most people speak both English and Danish fluently, and most foreigners speak better English than they speak Danish, so English is usually the most mutually comprehended language. I think if you really spoke no English and poor Danish was the only common language for a conversation, people would be more patient in that case; it's only in the case of "why didn't you just use English, which you obviously speak better?" that people get annoyed.

This has been my experience as well. Some places they're thrilled at any attempt to speak their languages, other places they find it annoying if they know you speak English. Unless you can speak it well enough that you're not totally struggling and they think your accent sounds cool.

This makes it hard to master languages similar to your native one.

With a completely foreign language you have to pause and think. With language close to one you already know it's easy to fill in the gaps by switching the language.

You'll also have a hard time really internalizing vocabulary. If you're learning Dutch and you already speak English and German, you can quickly get to a level where you are able to read Dutch texts. This is because half of all Dutch words have very similar German or English counterparts. But since you just understand them effortlessly, your brain doesn't actually learn them. You'll find yourself trying to say something in a conversation and the words just won't come to you, even though you would have no problem understanding them in written text.

If that happens you can always flip a coin and just either dutchify the English or the German translation of what you want to say, but it's not the most elegant solution.

I think results will vary depending on if you've learned another language before. Having to understand a grammar from the outside is a rough exercise the first time. I'm a native english speaker and conjugating verbs in eg Spanish wasn't hard, but really feeling the difference between the indicative and subjunctive moods takes a lot more work.

I found Russian very approachable for a 3rd language. And it's really cool to be able to eg read Pushkin; I can't read Shakespeare without more footnotes than poetry.

A bit offtopic, but can you advise an English language poet with Pushkin style poetry? I'm native Russian language speaker and even though I can easily understand regular English, I have hard time with poetry and find it quite different from Russian.

There are some structural differences (e.g. the lack of using endings to indicate grammatical structure in English) that make creating the sort of "it all rhymes and flows really well" poetry you get a lot in Russian much more difficult in English.

That said, I'd say some of Coleridge's work is in that general vein, in my opinion. And some of Byron's, actually. So maybe try those?

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