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Comment by imtringued | Hacker News Reader

It's just a matter on how much time you spend learning the language.

Even if you only consider the time you spent in school merely learning your own native language those school lessons will add up to thousands of hours.

How many adults, who have already "learned" a foreign language, dedicate 6 hours per week purely on further improving their skills in that language for 12 years?

If you are worried about not knowing certain rare words then using a spaced repetition system with a word deck that contains the first 20000 or even 40000 words should help a lot. You will quickly rush through the words you already know. I can do 50 reviews in less than two minutes if I have memorized the words but 50 unknown words will take me at least 20 minutes. At a rate of 30 new words per day you can do 10000 words per year + half a year at the end to make sure every card reaches maturity.

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In college Mandarin courses we were required to learn 30 words a day. That was a nearly impossible task for 20 year old me and required three hours of study a day on top of the 1:20 or 1:50 long daily class. To think a person more than twice that age can learn 30 words a day is, to my aged brain, ludicrous. Maybe it’s just me, but my learning ability is now vastly below what it was in my teens or even college.

Surely the words per day one can learn correlates with the difficulty of the language, and mandarin is amongst the hardest for English speakers to learn. So it is probably meaningless to argue about the absolute number of words per day a person can reasonably expect to learn without specifying the foreign language and the learner's native language.

So, it isn't actually.

I did a short foray into learning Morse Code, and I ran into what I found to be the biggest barrier to learning new languages. The bloody lookup table phenomena.

What happens is your mental representation maps the Morse sequence->your primary language character->whatever the message then actually means.

This is a very high overhead mental process, and one specifically advised against by fluent Morse keyers. What you want is to map the Morse pattern->it's representative concept.

Example:

First mental impl would look like ... -> S --- -> O ... -> S Then you mentally reparse that string to get semantic meaning.

Trying to do this for more complex messages blows. Case and point.

..-. --- .-. ....... ... .- .-.. . .-.-.- ....... -... .- -... -.-- ....... -... --- --- - .. . ... .-.-.- ....... -. . ...- . .-. ....... .-- --- .-. -. .-.-.-

Imagine that coming over a line at about 13 to 25 wpm.

You don't have time to decode and reparse. You need realtime streaming and recognition of word units->meaning. No decode phase, just "oh, that's 'blah'"

Same thing applies with other languages. Language is used to nominatively stand in for forms of life. N'est ce pas? In any other language is still indicative of the same form of life/confluence of characteristics, 'is it not?'

It's seems easier when you're younger because you aren't fighting the lookup table phenomena because you're still learning your primary language.

It's why when learning a new programming language, an escalating series of higher complexity Hello World's you've implemented in other languages can be a godsend in getting up to speed.

That's true, yet you have to go through a lot of Morse -> letter before it becomes automatic enough to advance to the stage where you can go from Morse -> meaning. There's no alternative really, you can't just wish yourself into automatically divining the meanings, you have to put in the hours of incremental training before it all becomes second nature.

Oh my days. That's the saddest (as in - imparting of sadness) morse code message in the world. :'(

I studied German in college, and I have been studying Korean for almost 2 years and I would say you're spot on.

The hardest thing about learning a new language is learning to think in that language, not 1. think in native language 2. transcode to target language. Not only is this quite slow, it leads to very unnatural language. English and Korean have different idioms and ways of structuring sentences.

Since I've been studying Korean for a while now I have certain thoughts I can innately express in Korean and actually have difficulty directly mapping to English.

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However, one has to start somewhere. I can't really learn a concept in Korean without it being explained in English.. until I'm advanced enough to understand Korean grammar and word explanations in Korean.* One just has to remember that things don't map neatly although textbooks pretend like they do. Over time and exposure, you get a sense for how and when things are really used.

So the real answer is you need to just use the target language as much as you can. The only way to innately grasp a concept is by seeing it and using it.

* It's a bit like bootstrapping a compiler, isn't it?

I vividly remember the moment I first thought in French. It was about a year ago, I was 31 years old and walking along the beach after hanging out with a French couple for a few hours. I don't have a clue what I thought, but I remember idly musing about some subject in my head for a few seconds, suddenly realizing that the musing was in French.

The Koch method of learning morse code addresses that by never introducing an intermediate visual representation of the dits and dahs.

Instead, you listen to audio sequences and transcribe them directly to the characters of your language. So instead of learning the language visually, you learn to understand the sounds which is far more natural.

There's a great free site that teaches morse code in this fashion if you ever decide to give it another go: https://lcwo.net/

Thanks. I'll have to check it out!

Learning morse code directly from audio is absolutely essential. Once you have learned all the characters by sound, I found it helpful to listen to code at a faster level than you can handle. You will miss characters, but I found it speeds up your ability to copy well. For example, back when I was taking morse code tests for licenses, I would listen to code at 20 wpm to prepare for the 13 wpm test and 30 wpm to prepare for the 20 wpm test. The tests seemed easy. BTW, I cannot read morse code without making the sounds in my head from the visual representation.

I pasted that Morse code into Google fully expecting they'd have an automated translation to text. I was surprised when that failed.

Telegraph and radio operators used to write down the messages, character by character, as soon as they heard each character in Morse, and only once the entire message had been received attempt to read or interpret it. There are artifacts of this even in modern voice radio usage; e.g., "do you copy?" meant originally, did you successfully copy down my message?

You can’t do that above 25 wpm (unless you are a fast typist). You have to transition to hearing entire words.

Telegraph never exceeds 300bpm, which corresponds to 40wpm on average.

Have you ever tried the method of spaced repetition? It's astounding how efficient it can be as a tool for memorization.

https://apps.ankiweb.net/

Anki may very well be one of the best applications ever made.

I have been using it for about a year and a half for Korean, and now I'm memorizing kanji characters with it. My goal is to memorize 2,136 kanji within 4-5 months and I fully believe it's possible with Anki if I don't miss a day of reviews.

However, anki is the most useless app ever if you miss reviews. 1-2 days is fine, but you're hurting yourself otherwise.

My suggestion is to change the default deck setting to order review cards first. The default is to mix new cards + review cards, but sometimes I don't have the energy to learn new the cards, leading me to skip doing the reviews.

Also the decks are very customizable, since you can add custom properties, change what shows on each front/back, and style them with css.

I plan on doing a full writeup of anki at some point.

I had not previously heard of Anki. In briefly looking at the site it sounds very interesting.

Can you describe what your daily routine is like in using it?

Let me first describe my initial routine, and how it spiraled into me quitting anki entirely. Then my current routine which actually works.

When I started learning Korean, I grabbed anki + Evita's 5k words deck. It's a pretty good deck, but lacks sentence samples. I use the mac osx app at home and the ios app on the go. The ios app is $20 but you can use ankiweb.net to do reviews. The android app is free.

For about six months I did anki just about every day, @ 20 new words/day. This took me anywhere from 30-50 minutes depending on my focus. It always took longer if I missed the previous day, because then I would have to re-do the newly-learned words (1-3 days interval). I had to commute on the bus every day so I was able to easily knock out anki as I just forced myself not to use reddit/HN before doing anki.

However after a certain point I had missed a few days, which made the next anki cycle take longer. It was frustrating, and caused me to miss more days.. Eventually I had so many reviews piled up that I didn't even want to open anki at all.

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How did I fix this? For starters, I used a custom session to knock out all the 400+ backed up review cards at once. It took me a good 3 or 4 hours. Next, I reduced the new daily card limit to 10. I think 20 is unsustainable unless you are consistently studying at least 3-4 hours daily. Since I work and also study Korean grammar/resources it was just too much.

Next, I changed the default system from "mixed review" (new cards + review cards) to "review cards first". This way even if I don't have the time or energy, I can still knock out the daily reviews. If done right it can be as short as 5-10 minutes depending on how many reviews you have for that day. It's not ideal but still far better than you backsliding on your learned words.

For beginners you can use premade decks, just make sure they have good reviews, and are ordered so you learn words like "mom" before you learn "diplomacy". If you google anki + $language deck, there are recommended ones on reddit usually. That's how I found the core2k japanese deck, which may be the best I've used so far.

However after that point you really ought to be making your own decks. Through your study you should be finding new words; write these down and add them to anki but be prudent about it. I made the mistake of learning advanced and niche words before learning "circle" and "foggy", which are way more useful to know. Also, add sample sentences. It's not really helpful to know a word but not the context when it is used.

In anki you can add custom fields for card types, so I added ones for grammar type, notes, sample sentences, and hanja. I also made a color card with custom html and css styling to let me practice memorizing color words. You can look into cloze deletion cards, I have heard they're good but have not used them myself.

Tip: You can bulk import anki cards from csv files. I maintain a spreadsheet and add them every so often.

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Nowadays I use 2 decks: my personal korean one @ 5 words/day and nihongoshark kanji @ 20 kanji/day. The reason being I am focusing more on memorizing 2k kanji right now. I do the korean one while taking the bus home from work and then I do the kanji one right away at home or at a cafe.

Hopefully this clarified things, otherwise let me know if you have any questions. Anki's manual documentation is actually very good so I recommend reading that.

What benchmark do you use for marking a kanji card as known in Anki? Do you just memorize the meaning of each kanji, or memorize the readings too? I'm looking to get back into studying japanese myself.

I'm following this method: https://nihongoshark.com/learn-kanji/

I'm not learning the readings yet since a lot of them have multiple readings, some less common than others. My thought process was to learn the kanji, then the readings as I learn daily vocabulary through Genki 1 / TaeKim's grammar guide.

I don't know if this is actually the best way to start learning Japanese but I thought it would be fun just as a personal goal to learn the 2,200 kanji before anything. Studying Korean takes up the lion's share of my time so I haven't started studying Japanese grammar much yet.

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I just follow the default progression of anki. 1 day -> 2 days -> etc. If it takes me zero effort to remember, I grade it as Easy. If it takes me more than 3-4 seconds to remember it, I grade it as Hard. If it takes more than 10-15 seconds I reset the card and start learning it again.

So far the only resets have been on similar looking characters and some newly-learned ones from the day before if I was a bit distracted.

You can see my progress from April 2nd until now:

https://i.imgur.com/yyHvgf9.png

Some are much easier than others, I marked kanji like 林 (grove) as Easy pretty quickly, as well as commonly used ones like 見.

Also a Korean learner who uses Evita's 5k word deck. She has a sentence deck with 2k sentences (most with recordings). I started it after doing 2k words in the vocab deck.

I honestly think that's the missing piece for people learning, learn vocab, but then start reading sentences. I love children's books for this.

If you learn a language through memorization of words you're being very, very inefficient. Very.

Learning a language requires next to no effort (compared to 30 words per day) and can be done at any age within six months. The strange thing is that nearly everyone does language learning wrong. I think it's because schools set everyone up for failure by teaching how to learn a language in a way, that's just so very inefficient.

If you care for the easier way: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0yGdNEWdn0

You can redefine fluency to be something that is achievable with dedicated study in six months, but most people probably wouldn't call themselves fluent with the very limited vocabulary you can acquire in that time. Elementary school children know in excess of 20k words. I really don't believe that you can remember over a hundred new words every day without forgetting a single one.

No dedicated study. Basically zero effort on your part is required, you just need to spend some time on it everyday. Your vocabulary will build itself over time if you keep engaging with the language. It takes ten years to mastery, just like with everything else. Six months until you can communicate in the new language. English is my second language and I speak from experience.

It's hard for native Mandarin speakers too. Lots of educated Chinese can't write some of the characters anymore, especially as handwriting becomes less important.

>It's just a matter on how much time you spend learning the language.

I'm not sure if you're making a personal observation that's unrelated to the specific findings in the research paper. That's fine but it may inadvertently make people think that's what the paper concludes.

The particular paper[0] says that when testing for grammar accuracy in a 2nd language, the years of experience is not as predictive as age of of first exposure. The same dropoff of learning grammar happens to immersion as well as non-immersion older learners.

The authors don't claim to know why that happens but nevertheless noticed the patterns.

[0] found a full pdf in amazon s3: https://s3.amazonaws.com/l3atbc-public/pub_pdfs/JK_Hartshorn...

What website/application would you recommend for spaced repetition of vocabulary?

I've found the changing Windows logon screens quite nice, since every other day or so there's a new beautiful picture along with a few bubbles of text in German, enabling me to learn a few new words (though I'll probably forget most of them).

The answer to basically any spaced repetition question is always going to end up being Anki.

https://apps.ankiweb.net/

This one is pretty good. https://apps.ankiweb.net/

Anki is very powerful, but Memrise is a more user-friendly option that includes ready-made card decks for most popular languages.

https://www.memrise.com/

You don't want ready-made decks except at the very beginning. Once you get past words like "mom" that have very obvious usage, these decks aren't great because they lack examples and structure.

Instead, one should use Anki to make their own decks with words that they find whilst learning the language.

You can, and I have, make your own Memrise courses as well. I'm better at remembering to visit a website than I am at remembering to open a program. It's a silly difference, but I almost always have a browser open and every new tab I open serves as a reminder. I always fail to remember to open/use software. The times I've tried converting to Anki rather than relying that Memrise will continue to be available, my study time per week dropped by about 95%~.

You actually can use anki online, it's ankiweb.net. You can't modify decks on the website but it works for studying daily cards. Otherwise I use the mac osx or ios apps.

I like readlang a lot. They have a very nice browser integration allowing you to read text and get dictionary lookups in-line. It does cost $5/month but it's very well made.

Anki. See my other comments in this thread, but I can vouch for it after using it for almost 2 years for Korean and now Japanese kanji.

The manual documents it well, and I recommend you only use a ready-made deck for about 3 months at the most. After that you should be making your own word decks.

If you want a Spaced Repetition vocabulary quizzing for German, you might try: https://eardoor.com I created it just for listening practice and spaced repetition vocabulary practice: 1 hr/ 1 day/ 1 week. No sign in/sign up required.

I suppose it's hard to learn French when it's the first foreign language to learn. I managed to get a decent level of French (B2) by studying 3 hours per week for 2 years. I was 35+ back then. French was my second foreign language after English.

I actually like speaking French (which is now far not as good as it used to be) when possible. Learning French and the French culture has definitely changed my perception of the world. "Joie de vivre" is a beautiful concept that is sorely lacking in money- and work-obsessed North America (except Quebec).

If you listen to the evening news on TV each night you will easily get up to 6 hours per week. Look up any new words in the dictionary.

10000 hours to proficiency divided by 6 is just 1666 weeks or 32 years. That's ignoring that just listening to the news is not the deliberate practice that is supposed to be accumulated for the proverbial 10000 hours.

I wasn't claiming that 6 hours a week was enough by itself to master a language, the parent comment suggested that people would find it hard to fit this much practice into their life.

I can use myself as an example of doing this kind of thing, when I'm in France I don't watch any english language media, and seeing a big improvement in my French.

In addition to not really being hard science, the "10000 hours" thing is what it takes to achieve mastery, not just proficiency.

Where do you find the words to add to your deck? I add words discovered in lessons - which are great for a proper context - but using words from internet sources (the news, etc.) is time consuming and means I keep seeing words from a few narrow niches (politics, economics, slang) without any understanding of how they'll be interpreted.

> is time consuming

Get used to it. Learning a language is time consuming. Nobody ever learned a language by studying it 30 mins per day.

At a beginner level, one can find words through the grammar textbooks and the like.

At intermediate+, you find words through material that you find. For example, news, tv shows, songs, and the like. It's up to you from here on out.

> I keep seeing words from a few narrow niches

The trick is to vary your resources. Read the news, but also read a short fiction book, watch a comedy tv show and then a drama, etc. You should also find resources at your level. If you are a beginner, don't bother reading the news. Even if you look up all the words, they're usually niche and will not help you that much.

One way to combat this is to find a list of the 2k, 3k, 5k most commonly used words and add them to your anki deck.

What I do is I add unknown words from my daily conversations with native speakers.

> without any understanding of how they'll be interpreted

If you see a word in a sentence from a native source, that's a pretty good way to see how it's used. You can also cross-reference with a dictionary or by asking the native speakers you practice with.

When you add a word to your anki flashcard deck, you need to also add sample sentences. It's borderline useless to learn a niche word without examples of how it's used.

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