Unusual, evidence-based ways to get better at a new language | Hacker News Reader

Unusual, evidence-based ways to get better at a new language

digest.bps.org.uk

250 pointsEndXA159 comments

> Evening learning probably isn’t ideal for teenagers either. In a study published in 2012, Johannes Holz at the University of Freiberg, and colleagues, found that 16- and 17-year-old girls performed better on tests of factual memory if they’d learned the material at 3pm than at 9pm.

> However, another study, published in Psychological Science in 2016, suggests that evening learning can be beneficial – especially if you follow it with a decent night’s sleep, and a follow-up session the next morning.

In other words, we have directly conflicting results, because this is all a bunch of p-hacked complete fucking bullshit.

Also why bother with microoptimizations? Just sound like easy ways to justify excuses — “Welp my 3pm window passed, maybe tomorrow!” The best method is the one you actually do.

Took me song long to realize this. Just * do it is so often a more effective/efficient methodology than "optimize first". Once I have a strong understanding of scope, marginal adjustments carry more weight when starting something new.

Yep. This applies to so many things. Watching your diet? Lifting weights? Learning to code? People will emphasize so many tips, micro-optimizations, recommendations, etc. that can be intimidating and add a ton of work to your plate. But simply showing up every day is 95% of what matters.

Just do it™

> The best method is the one you actually do.

Doesn't apply to languages. I studied French for years "actually doing it" but using a typical traditional methodology with teachers, grammar, forced word repetitions, etc. It's like it didn't even happen. But using a very different methodology for English took me just about six months to go from understanding nothing to understanding almost everything.

Can you expand on your "very different methodology"?

Sure. I was watching tv shows with english subtitles and was looking up every word I didn't understand in a dictionary for an hour or more every day. Some days much more, if the show was interesting to me, so it was kind of motivating. At the beginning pausing video and switching between media player and dictionary proved to be a bit too exhausting, so I also wrote a tiny program that did that with a single hotkey before I really started doing all this. A few months later I got to comfortable enough level to start reading a book, it was a bit harder with a book, because not only there was much more new words, you also need to listen to pronunciations to make sure you don't learn the words incorrectly with your own pronunciations, luckily my dictionary program had that built in. That's about it.

> At the beginning pausing video and switching between media player and dictionary proved to be a bit too exhausting, so I also wrote a tiny program that did that with a single hotkey before I really started doing all this.

That sounds like a great idea for a service to help learn languages: subtitled videos with links from each word (or idiomatic phrase) in the subtitles to dictionary definitions.

I'll try to find the name of the program - but this already exists and made rounds a while back for Japanese learners where looking up words in a dictionary isn't always as straight forward as it is for latin-based languages.

(a few minutes of sitting on this post later...) And... found it! Or at least, a very similar idea.

https://github.com/juliango202/jijimaku

For anyone interested in Japanese (and anime), there is a website called animelon that does this.

My website, www.captionpop.com, does this with YouTube videos. It allows you to watch videos with multiple subtitles at once, look up individual words, and built interactive flash cards out of video snippets.

There are also Chrome extensions that do similar things for Netflix. For example, Subadub.

Next to interacting with native speakers, I think consuming a ton of media is the best way to learn a language.

Do you know the names of any of the extensions for Netflix?

Yes, Subadub. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/subadub/jamiekdimm...

> subtitled videos with links from each word (or idiomatic phrase) in the subtitles to dictionary definitions.

I'm not sure having a easy link is necessarily a good thing. The act of typing the characters and opening up the page, especially multiple times (it's rare you'll remember a word after looking it up one time), form a strong anchor in memory. This is the similar effect to having google maps vs. looking up direction before driving on remembering your route.

Yabla

I believe it's even better to watch dubbed shows that you already know very well. I greatly increased my spoken German comprehension by watching dubbed episodes of the Simpsons. I had seen most of them a dozen times in English and knew much of the dialogue by heart. It can also help with your pronunciation if you speak along with the dialogue, but you have to be careful you're not mimicking a "substandard" accent. You don't want to end up sounding like Cleetus when talking to business partners.

Well English has very limited inflections so most of the work in learning English goes into vocabulary, pronunciation and idioms. Thus, just experiencing it and looking up words when you need to is a really easy way to learn the language. Not so with highly inflected languages.

Is it "comprehensible input" method? https://youtu.be/NiTsduRreug

I guess it is. Interesting that people knew about in the eighties already, but time wasting teaching methods are still dominant.

> The best method is the one you actually do.

Totally agree. I've been trying to learn new languages after getting inspired by youtube polyglots (1 year of Spanish, 1 1/2 years of Thai). I basically do at least 10 minutes a day, no exception. I don't have a fixed method, it varies overtime. Grammar, flashcards, listening, writing, talking with native speakers, translating things, playing with apps and so on. I think it doesn't really matter. That being said, I don't put too much pressure on myself. I just find it rewarding to learn something new, and the process of learning is actually enjoyable. I noticed that focusing on something helps to clear one's mind after a day of work.

Because it’s a publishable result.

Well, you're discounting this entire article based on one point out of five. It's useful information, regardless. And they are upfront about it. So I don't particularly understand the problem, and calling it "complete fucking bullshit" seems a bit overboard, to me.

The follow-up feature is critical to why that 2nd study might have found different results. The delay-review step is very important for cementing learning. So no, its not all bs when different protocols have seemingly opposite results. Its not some simple question that can be answered glibly in one sentence.

Or those to experiments simply measure completely different things.

One is time of day, the other is review + good sleep.

I know I directly relate to both findings as they're explained in the article. In the morning I can process information more easily, but when prepping for tests I've found that reading the material at night and reviewing my notes the next morning is really impactful.

This pessimistic comment made me link directly to the article, instead of linking to HN as I usually do, when I now sent the article to someone looking to learn a new langauge.

Exactly. The only somewhat sensible advice in the article is not to focus on grammar.

My feeling is that you need an incredible amount of repetition. I never really learned Spanish well until I took immersion classes in Guatemala then continued on backpacking through South America for several months. A decade later I still struggle to retain what I learned.

I’ve built many language learning Android and iPhone apps over the years. I still don’t have a great formula but I think my latest iPhone apps are simple and focused enough to help get people started.

Hundred Words: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hundred-words/id1469449237

Language Pairs: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/language-pairs/id1438817614?...

Pictures and Words: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pictures-and-words/id1459560...

Word Search: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4labs-word-search/id1311744...

There is a learning method called Spaced Repetition, which involves repeatedly quizzing yourself, with a decreasing frequency as you learn them. So, if you always know the word for dog, you'll get that one less frequently than the one for cat that you have more trouble remembering.

I use Anki with Yomichan to study Japanese and find it very effective.

I built an iOS app for studying Japanese called Manabi Reader. It collects interesting short-form reading materials, has one-tap dictionary lookups, and lets you add words to flashcards.

I'm currently working on extending it with word tracking functionality, so that you can see which words in an article are new to you, can track your progress through kanji by reading, etc.

https://reader.manabi.io

How do you solve the problem that almost all interesting material is copyrighted? I use texts from https://www.aozora.gr.jp/ but most of those are somewhat old-fashioned, except for a few modern Japanese translations of foreign public-domain literature.

The app is a dressed-up RSS reader

This app does this exceptionally. It does limit you to 5 minutes a day though, but at times does offer you more time. https://languagedrops.com/

This makes sense. The act of recalling it is what cements your 'knowledge' of it, and repeating that recollection makes it easier to draw that connection each time.

It's not really how we learn new things. We see, hear, experience them in context many times, not force ourselves to recall them. Forced repetition is one of the worst most inefficient approaches to language learning.

I've found spaced repetition a great way to increase the size of my vocabulary whilst learning a language. You're right that it's unnatural, but a large unnaturally-learned vocabulary can then be polished by practice in more natural contents, and I feel like the net result is more efficient than using the natural contexts alone. This is especially true since I do not have easy access to native speakers for half an hour every day, but I can practice with the Anki app whilst on public transport during that time.

Last time I learned a language (German), a small vocabulary was my perpetual weakness. Now I'm learning a different language (Spanish) with a different approach that makes heavy use of spaced repetition, and vocabulary is no longer my weakest point. Instead, listening comprehension is now my weakness. But with a decent vocabulary, I am now working on improving the listening comprehension using podcasts. If my vocabulary were weaker, this would be much more difficult as I would need access to a native speaker who would considerately restrict themselves to mostly use vocabulary I know.

One thing that’s helped a lot with my listening comprehension is following along in a printed book with an audiobook reader. Especially when it’s a translation of a story I already know, I can usually more or less follow the plot and let the language information seep into my unconscious.

Thanks for the tip! That's one thing that hadn't occurred to me to try. I've tried the same thing with TV/movies, but the subtitles are usually not identical to the spoken dialog - they tend to be simplified and paraphrased to be shorter - but eBooks should be very faithful to their written counterparts.

From my experience, spaced repetition is only really useful as a trigger to recall prior meaningful experiences. The really tricky part of using spaced repetition well is writing the cards: you need to work with new material until it feels obvious, and only then make cards that will recall that experience of it being obvious.

For language learning, there’s one other wrinkle: you need to be working with material written in the target language, rather than written about the target language. Most of my language cards are Cloze deletions from novels I’ve read or museum captions, for instance.

The idea that scheduling recall repeatedly is a poor and inefficient approach to learning is directly contradicted by all available research on learning and memory.

See [0] for a review of the research on spaced repetition.

[0] https://www.gwern.net/Spaced-repetition

My feeling on learning a language is that you break down a language barrier to find an even more difficult cultural barrier.

That's what I always told my friends when I was an expat. You can learn your girlfriend's language, but you'll never get her jokes. :)

it's not just repetition, it's use in context. I learned both spanish and english that way, and I did it extremely quickly. Whenever you encounter a new word, work it in a sentence, then use it with someone else in a real situation. I guarantee your gains are going to be measurable day by day.

I learned how to turn a stream of nonsense (from my perspective) into words by listening to hundreds of hours of Spanish TV that I didn't understand. Spanish audio + Spanish subtitles (to figure out how to parse sound, and to map sound to writing), and then Spanish audio only (prevent reliance on reading). Surprisingly effective. Incomprehensible input appears to be quite valuable.

At some point I'll try applying my methods to learning a different language to see if I can generalize (for me and my ability to pick up a language, at least).

Just bear in mind that there's a huge difference between being able to get the gist of something spoken in a foreign language and being able to convey your thoughts effectively in that language. Even after man-years of study I still sound like an idiot when trying to speak English in conference calls, even though I can understand nearly 100% of written and spoken English.

I obviously can't judge your spoken English, but your written English is fine. If you hadn't stated otherwise, I would have assumed from your writing that English was your native language.

Idiomatic usage ("bear in mind") and register ("gist") even came off as native, without running into common give-aways like incorrect or technically-OK-but-not-quite-right prepositions. Nice.

You can't rely on it as the only means of learning, but it makes for the foundation. Conversation is hard to begin with, but conversation when you don't understand what is spoken quickly enough to begin to form a response is impossible.

I sound like an idiot when trying to speak English and I'm a native speaker.

I don't know what my conclusion is; maybe speaking is difficult.

Ability to communicate effectively, especially in public, is an extremely valuable skill. Much more valuable than, say, knowing how to program.

Unless English is an easier language to understanding all broken up, nearly 100% of the time I can figure out what someone who claims to be "bad" at it is saying. English speakers, particularly in the US seem to be pretty tolerant of it. While other countries seem to be dismissive of anyone attempting their language, as if they can't POSSIBLY understand a single word you're saying.

tldr: I'm sure you sound fine, and we can all understand you.

English speakers have contact or familiarity with a huge variety of foreign speakers, enough that we can categorise French accents, Swedish accents, Hindi accents etc etc. And we simply get heaps of practice with non-native English speakers. I don't think the same thing occurs so strongly in other languages.

English has a massive variety of vowel sounds within its different accents, as well as other variations in length, emphasis, consonants etc. Native English speakers have a subtle ear for a massive range of vowel sounds (and plenty of people can reproduce them when speaking in an accent). A Spanish person can be confused if you substitute or mispronounce a single vowel in my experience.

nah, the man is right. I learned english that way, it works surprisingly well, but only if paired to "use in context". Every time you learn something, you gotta use it, otherwise it won't stick. You gotta use that new word to get something done you actually need, because your brain is very reward oriented and it will fix the memory if it leads to a positive outcome.

Yeah, language is all about input. I'm learning Spanish now and it's going super fast. it's the second foreign language I've tried to learn (which I think helps, especially as they both have conjugated verbs, which is not really a thing in English), and it is much easier than the first (definitely helps).

Anyway, my method is:

0. Learn the grammar rules but don't fixate, just enough to get oriented. Occasionally review them.

1. I listened to this person who said something in Spanish then the same thing in (this case) the first foreign language I leanred, and does this over and over, occasionally adding new elements with an explanation, but mostly just brute-force repetition.

2. After a few hours of this (which is pretty boring), started watching 'Easy Spanish' videos on youtube, where they ask people questions on the street and have subs in Spanish and English. Watch these on repeat.

3. Start watching other Spanish youtubers who speak in that youtube manner (where everything is EXCITING!) - I have been watching Luisito Communica (or something like that, my Spanish is still bad).

4. (This is mostly how I learned my first language - Russian) - Listen to podcasts, but read the transcription first. For Spanish i am using radio Ambulente

5. Listen to full albums on youtube and follow along with the lyrics on genius.

I hope that soon I can just watch movies and stuff in Spanish without subs. Once you can get to the point where you can do that it's not even work to get better.

This is my experience in learning Japanese. At first, it was kind of an accident haha but you sort of link the general meaning of things after months worth of content. For me though, there was definitely an upper limit (not to mention this does very little for learning how to speak--at least in my experience) and because of that I've started on more concrete methods of learning.

I also feel the process has given me a kind of a boost in my studies as certain words and phrases have already been ingrained into memory.

I still do consume audio/video content primarily in Japanese (mainly because that's what I'm interested in--which definitely helps the learning process) and it's gotten easier and easier to listen/watch without subtitles lately.

Well that's pretty much how you learned your first language already! You didn't even need subtitles.

Keep in mind the brain's disposition to learn changes depending on age. And as an adult your brain will struggle for many different reasons: stressful day, lots of other information streams, far less time for learning, decreased flexibility, etc.

As a kid I learned 3 languages (including the native one) with relative ease. As an adult I really struggled to learn the fourth using what I think are the same techniques. Given the factors above the reality may be that it's almost impossible to learn in the same conditions.

Yes, but they had to teach me how to read later in life. This is a two-for-one strategy, because the reading skill transfers much more easily.

My technique was to pick a TV show that I basically knew all the lines to (Friends, in this case), and then watch it in Spanish with Spanish language subtitles.

This way I already know what the English meaning is, and I can also map the sounds to the written script.

"German volunteers learning Dutch who’d drunk enough vodka to achieve a blood alcohol level of 0.04 per cent (approximately equivalent to just under a pint of beer for a 70kg male) were rated by independent Dutch speakers as speaking the language more proficiently during a short-test"

Based on my limited exposure to Dutch, this sounds about right; drunken German.

Edit: "Als vliegen achter vliegen vliegen, vliegen vliegen vliegensvlug."

We generally say if you shout Dutch it sounds German (especially if you do it in a certain way). So I guess the reverse also holds true somewhat. Though I think in general people who've had a drink or two speak more 'fluently' in foreign languages. Mostly because they don't think too much about what they're trying to say.

Also translation: "If flies fly behind flies, flies fly flight speed" (in general the translation for vliegensvlug is 'as fast as lightning' which isn't really accurate and I suppose a better translation is "a bird's flight(speed)" than lightning)

As soon as a word has three (or more) meanings you can suddenly create silly long sentences with one word in dutch:

Als in bergen bergen bergen bergen, dan bergen bergen bergen in bergen.

If mountains hide mountains in bergen (a place name) then mountains hide mountains in bergen.

And similarly:

Als zeven zeven zeven zeven, dan zeven zeven zeven zeven

If seven sieves sieve sieves, then seven sieves sieve sieves. (this one works surprisingly well in english too)

This is true of all languages. The biggest barrier to learning a language is fear of embarrassment.

This has probably to do with the inhibition factor that many but not all learners of a foreign language have.

No, "Als achter vliegen vliegen vliegen, vliegen vliegen vliegensvlug."

At least for Christians a good way to learn a foreign language is to read the Bible in that language, because

(1) they are probably used to read a chapter or two on a daily basis (thus, the routine is already there),

(2) and they probably remember some passages in their native tongue (thus, already having a translation of the text).

This helped me. YMMV.

This is good advice, but

> they are probably used to read a chapter or two on a daily basis

This sounds mental. Reading the Bible on a daily basis? I’m pretty sure that this is not the norm for the vast majority of (devout) Christians (at least in Western/Central Europe).

I'd argue that it definitely is a norm for devout Christians in the US. Bible chapters are a lot shorter than you think (if you're not familiar with the Bible), though.

It's a bit of a No True Scotsman, but a lot of people who claim they're devout don't really read the Bible at all, just make public judgments about people. The actually devout people I know usually have a copy of the Bible near the bed, often with an issue of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Daily_Bread on top of it (A daily devotional.)

Very long-time atheist here.

Is it really that much of an ordeal to spend 10-20 minutes with the words of the creator and lord of your universe every day? IMO if that sounds tough, then the belief can't be serious. If you have a favorite 1 hour weekly TV show, that's almost the same amount of time committed.

I don't know about Protestant denominations but my mother grew up extremely Catholic (in the US) where every single part of life revolved around church. The family was about as devout as you could possibly get, including not practicing birth control. However, individual Bible reading wasn't practiced. In fact, individual Bible reading was actually discouraged by the nuns.

I'd bet the tradition isn't the same in Catholicism (which I have no experience with.) Protestantism is largely an outgrowth of insisting that the Bible be distributed, and in a language that the locals could understand. The Roman churches expected you to be dependent on the priest's communications of what the Bible said.

The catholic church in general is, incredible as this may sound, more open to evolution. It just takes a very, very long time, but there have been dogma updates and clarifications throughout the centuries, and even admissions of being in the wrong. I fully expect the church's stance on some highly divisive issues of today to further evolve in the coming decades.

Rather than insisting stories from millennia ago written by humans (even if you believe them to be divinely inspired) are forever perfect and right for an evolving secular civilization, it makes more sense to me if those stories are put into context by what are, in the end, educated professionals who have spent years studying them and other associated texts.

I've heard a lot of sermons from catholic priests who were good at their job (caveat: I've also heard priests who were terrible at their job...) that I would consider interesting and thought-provoking even for atheists. I'm particularly fond of jesuit priests (such as the current pope), who are more scientifically minded and more likely to speak "my language", in my experience.

>The catholic church in general is, incredible as this may sound, more open to evolution.

Of course it is. The whole idea of protestantism was going "back to the roots", to the "initial sources". As such it is a fundamentalist creed.

Catholic, orthodox etc are much more socially and historically developed.

> It just takes a very, very long time, but there have been dogma updates and clarifications throughout the centuries, and even admissions of being in the wrong.

Clarifications, yes. Changes in dogma, no. Catholic doctrine has not changed since the death of the last apostle, John. It has developed, in the sense of being expounded upon for an increase in understanding (clarification), but it hasn't changed. Clarification often occurs in response to attempts at changing doctrine or promoting something which is contrary to doctrine.

> If you have a favorite 1 hour weekly TV show, that's almost the same amount of time committed.

Right, but very few people watch the exact same episode/series over and over, at the exclusion of everything else. And people who do that are generally seen as more than just devoted. It also means that you have one hour less to discover something new. The Bible is a big book, but it’s limited. I’ve read all of it, and I’ve read parts multiple times (it is, after all, a central part in Western culture). But reading it again and again every day means I’d lose time in which I could be reading (and learning!) other things.

A commenter below mentions quiet time. This is a perfectly fine concept but those Christians (both Catholics and Protestants) that I know don’t spend it rereading the same text over and over. They spend it introspecting. Anyway, I don’t want to disparage the concept: All things said and done even if I’d consider this time completely wasted you’re right that it’s fairly short. I just found it hard to believe because, as mentioned, it doesn’t match my experience at all due, presumably, to cultural differences.

just because it doesn't align with what you've observed doesn't mean it's "mental". that's rude. please be constructive.

I think he means it's mental to imagine Christians actually doing that. I agree.

No judgement in if you do that, good for you. However the point is not that it's too much reading or w/e, but rather that it's far more than the typical christian cares to do. To assume christians actually do that is the mental part, but you choosing to do; if that makes sense.

edit: To the downvote, do you honestly think the majority of christians in America, some self proclaimed 70% of Americans iirc, read several passages a day? Really?

Of that 70% is a large chunk who never even attend church, who claim to be Christian for reasons unclear to anyone.

It turns out about 27% of Americans[0] read their Bible several times per week, with more than half of those reading it daily.

[0] https://www.barna.com/research/state-of-the-bible-2018-seven...

TBH I'm actually impressed it's even that high. I'd speculate that the 27% (if self reported) ~~is~~ would be far lower if consistency over a period of time was checked. Regardless, I feel the need to reinforce, this is just human nature, not a comment against christians.

There are many, many social pressures applied in most protestant churches, which contributes to the high percentage. From childhood, kids are told, "read your Bible and pray every day." Human nature is what it is, so even the "every day" crowd likely misses days here and there, but anecdotally, people take this very, very seriously.

Not a downvoter, but you're probably being downvoted because it's clear that "mental" IS being used to mean "crazy", and quite obviously so.

I mean, imo he very clearly meant the frequency was mental; I guess I just interpret his reply to someone saying that Christians read that frequently as mental, rather than it being mental itself to read that frequently.

For what it’s worth the comment you’re replying to is completely right about what I meant. I see that my phrasing invites misunderstanding, and the distinction is subtle.

I think he means that it's "in your mind", not that it's crazy.

When I was in high-school and college I did this a few times for several months. Pattern I usually fell into is reading a chapter of Proverbs or Ecclesiastes in the morning (to get my boost for this weird spiritual nihilistic stoicism) and a Psalm in the evening (that felt like more of a human connection)

I had friends who had that as a stable morning and evening ritual for years, complete with bible-studybook-journals e.t.c

Even if you don't normally read daily, you probably know the meaning of most verses. Most Christians know the creation myth by heart, and are pretty familiar with the sermon on the mount and the passion stories, so they can probably pick up a lot of vocabulary from context.

Yes: As mentioned, I think this is excellent advice.

It is not a norm. Even in very devout households attending multiple masses every week. (I'm not saying there aren't people doing actual mindful reading every day, but the generalisation to "Christians" in this case is bad)

I believe (without linkable evidence) that Roman Catholics are far less likely to engage in daily reading that protestants, but 27% of Americans[0] read their Bibles several times a week or daily.

[0] https://www.barna.com/research/state-of-the-bible-2018-seven...

I tried to get to some research on this topic, but it's pretty hard to find anything really independent. There are a few surveys, but there are issues: they're sponsored by Christian/evangelical groups, and I think their respondents are going to be a bit skewed:

> Persons in selected households are then invited by telephone or by mail to participate in the web-enabled KnowledgePanel

I have opinions on how biased this can be...

Is that based on self reporting?

first time i am using a throwaway account lol. but, hey, i do read the bible on a daily basis or at least try to. i don't consider myself the most "devout" tbh. but reading the bible daily is very easy!

i mean everyday readings comes in my email along with a bunch of other newsletters. i read all that stuff every morning, so it is definitely not hard.

"mental"?

In rural areas of central Europe you'll quite often find the Bible in hotel rooms for your nightly bible lecture.

Because they're supplied by specific organisations (mostly Gideons International) in large quantities to hotels. You'll also find them in hotel rooms in central Sydney. It's neither a rural nor European thing.

(Literally their main goal listed on the site: https://www.gideons.org/about)

In the US too. Doesn't mean "christians" actually do that. Christians in my experience largely just like the label, very few follow through with a life of learning and loving.

edit: I should be clear, I'm just referring to christians by label; not anyone specifically. If you are christian and you read daily, put in effort to learn and love, more power to you. I appreciate you. That however seems abnormal in my experience. People tend to be lazy, and christians are after all people.

That's because an organization called the Gideons put them there, not necessarily because anyone asked for them, wants them, or reads them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gideons_International

It's called a "quiet time". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_Time

Or family worship among us stodgier Protestants. It also includes a family praying together and singing psalms and/or hymns.

Using the bible is... contentious I'd say because there's a lot of differences between even English translations. I mean I guess the gist of it and the stories are roughly the same but it's definitely not a 1:1 translation between languages.

There's no such thing as a real 1:1 translation between languages anyway. Some words may map that way, but languages as a whole reflect their cultures. A common example from the New Testament is that English has just one word for "love" whereas Greek has several. We compromise by adding some adjective, like "brotherly love".

When learning a language, I've heard its best to not learn a direct mapping to a word in your original language but instead to, for example, place the word for "lamp" on a sticky note and stick it to a lamp in your house. This way you more directly associate the word with the object rather than the name in your original language, because you'll otherwise grow to rely on using your original language as a go-between from ideas to the foreign language, which will make fluency more difficult.

English has plenty of words for "love" too, even if the distinctions it makes aren't quite the same ones that ancient Greek does. For instance: Liking, caring, lust, enjoyment, admiration, friendship, attraction, affection, worship, loyalty, infatuation. All of them are aspects of things we could refer to as "love", just as much as ἀγάπη, φιλία, στοργή, and ἔρως are in Greek.

(I'm not denying that it's enlightening to look at another culture's words and see how they divide the world up differently from ours, and direct attention to things ours might miss. But I get the impression that ever since C S Lewis's "Four Loves" many people think that the ancient Greeks had a richer variety of understanding of human affections than we do because they had four words for "love" and we have only one, and I think that's all wrong.)

I agree with you not every word being a 1:1 translation, but e.g. the KJV 1611 and Luther 1998 are very alike. That's probably true for most/all Textus Receptus based Bibles.

This also helped me learn Chinese, along with translated worship music.

For English speakers learning Chinese:

https://pingtype.github.io/bible.html#_home

For Chinese speakers learning English:

https://pingtype.github.io/bibleEnglish.html#_home

Songs:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwKrKHi_rqtAjt0eIvhEB...

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwKrKHi_rqtBNfDESXQuk...

I attend church in Cantonese every week with my girlfriend. She is fluent, and I am not at all. Even after a month of services, I can occasionally sing along with bits of songs, especially songs I know in English. Pretty crazy.

As a native speaker, it drives me mad when people try to learn English by reading. They end up training themselves with whacky mispronunciations because they sound out words to themselves, and they can't fix thier pronunciation later because it has becomed so ingrained - especially basic words like "the", "she" etc. I personally have the same issue saying "me" in Spanish, which I still say incorrectly, even though I've been told most of my Spanish sounds good (especially compared against most native English speakers).

Edit: although given how useful it is to read/write English, and how we often find it easier to motivate ourselves by reading, I understand it.

Bible, Thora and Koran are all good for that purpose because even if you don't know them in your own language, you can compare the foreign language version with your native version verse by numbered verse.

So are publications by international bodies like the UN (though those tend to deal less with sex, drugs and rock-and-roll than the religious books).

I'd think that would not be very reliable considering how much variation there is among bible translations even in one language. For instance, if you compare some passages of the Jewish Publication Society translation of the Tanakh with some Christian translations of the OT, you might wonder if they were actually referring to the same original text.

This is true of all translation I think. Apart from the simplest of sentences, there is usually more than one way to phrase something. Different styles of translation account for this differently, e.g. some seek to make literal word for word translations while others try to preserve higher level semantics. So those styles may produce different sentences and they can both be right.

Wouldn't your learn a pretty archaic version of the language? I know that the bible passages I've read were very strange compared to everyday speech.

Depends on the translation you're reading. The original texts are in Hebrew and Greek so everything we read is a translation. You probably read the English KJV version, which was translated in 1611 and is thus the English of that time.

More modern translations such as NIV or ESV will read more like modern everyday speech.

Actually, the language in the KJV was already out of date at the time in was written. The lofty archaisms were intentional.

I’m a Christian: a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to be precise. I served a two-year volunteer mission [1] in Germany, and I read the Bible and the Book of Mormon a lot in both English and German during that time. This helped me tremendously. I now speak fluent German.

It also makes a nice yardstick: you start out having to look at the original text after every verse. Soon you are able to start reading verses, chapters, then entire books without referencing your native language.

[1]: https://www.comeuntochrist.org/belong/meet-missionaries/who-...

I do this, with English, Russian, and Ukrainian. Two suggestions:

- In MyBible[1] you can read multiple translations at once, e.g. English and Ukrainian. Double-tapping a word opens it in your installed dictionaries (which are found under 'Modules' in the app).

- Listen to an audiobook of what you're reading, as well: what you hear more directly influences your speaking skills. Also, too much reading and too little listening isn't good for pronunciation.

- Listening to the same things multiple times (repetition) is like Neo downloading Kung-fu into his brain in the Matrix.

1: https://mybible.zone/index-eng.php

Replace the Bible with any simple book you know by heart

I would actually advise against religious texts as their language is usually more archaic and less common on the day to day

I did this with the first Harry Potter to help me learn German, back when I was re-reading all of the Harry Potter books as each new one came out.

Yes, Harry Potter is especially good because although it's written for younger readers (i.e, not difficult reading) it's well written and enjoyable for all ages. Also, you can find audio for the book as well as text in both languages. Listening to foreign language audio while following along in foreign language text is excellent method.

One problem is that with books like Harry Potter the names tend to be "translated" as well, which will often throw you off.

There are also a fair number of invented words.

I tried to read the first book in Spanish, and ended up owning a number of dictionaries because none of the ones I already had contained an entry for "los muggles." (I had not, obviously, read the English version first).

Yes, but it's a minor problem. You usually know who's it referring to.

When I was a kid in Catholic school, we could get extra credit by going to Spanish language Mass, and I did it a few times as an altar server. Even though I didn't really directly understand much of it, I knew all of my cues, etc, because I'd done it so many times in English.

I just recently started learning Swahili and found some amazing classes from Language Transfer[0]. (I have no connection with them.) I've spent a lot of time learning languages, including tricky ones like Mandarin, and this is by far the best learning method I have ever come across.

The "class" takes the form of a dialogue between teacher and student where the student is an actual learner unfamiliar with the language and you try to learn with them. Each new word is introduced with a short but thorough explanation of how it fits in with everything you have learned so far and sometimes a mnemonic or story to help with recall. You are always prompted to try and construct new sentences yourself with the new words, without being told how, so that you are naturally exploring the grammar and idiomatic structure of the language and building an intuition for it. You are also prompted intermittently to recall previously learned words.

Within just an hour or so, I felt comfortable creating many sentences. I think this style of teaching helps build confidence in the language quickly, which is really important for making progress. They only ask for donations for their content and all of it is on soundcloud and youtube. I really recommend trying it out.

[0] https://www.languagetransfer.org

Immersion still remains the best method. I've tried a plethora of approaches to learn German (not the easiest or most fancy and I swear I'm not masochist) and it's not working. The biggest progress I made came when I was forced to speak it with my gym buddy because that was our common denominator. That said, if you want to learn German, avoid Berlin. Everyone will meet you with English.

Did you try watching German movies or tv shows with German subtitles and translating every word you don't yet understand? It's like immersion but on steroids. It naturally prioritized and trains your brain on all the common words and you get to seemingly impossible levels of understanding in the shortest possible time.

I did this with some considerable success. But I found out that it trains different abilities. Naturally, reading a new language and comprehending comes faster than being able to speak it. As far as reading and recognizing words go, it helped. Didn't help much with my speaking ability, which is the real thing I wanted.

I agree, but with some effort you can (mostly) self immerse. Switch all devices to that language, watch media in only that language, make yourself write in that language, find people to speak to in that language.

Someone should edit the title to say "... at a new foreign language"

I'm not sure why your comments are attracting downvotes; from the title I assumed programming language.

I’m not one of the down voters, but it’s likely because adding that word doesn’t really add anything - foreign can mean that something is strange or unfamiliar.

This is a usual bunch of crap thrown together to make another clickbait list for your new tab recommendations feed. In reality, there are numerous ways and tips to improve your language learning process, but there is no single magic one. Some of them will work for you, some will not but you have to figure that out yourself by trial and error. And this process by itself will likely bring a huge benefit.

I strongly recommend watching the video "Ten things polyglots do differently" [1] to get the elaboration of the above. Basically it boils down to this: successful language learners use quite a few methods and techniques. But each learner uses different ones. The main thing they all have in common is that they are actively engaging in the process, not just following some guides and doing tasks from a textbook. A language is not something you can be taught, it's something you need to take yourself. Everything else is far less significant.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROh_-RG3OVg

"Don't pay too much attention to grammar."

Breaking that rule is one of the ways my high school failed to teach much German to most of its students.

Back in the ‘50s or ‘60s, the U.S. government Foreign Service Institute put together a series of language learning courses that covered most of the popular languages at the time. They’re public domain and if you look hard enough, you can find them on the internet - they’re dated, but they’re still accurate (there are some here http://www.fsi-language-courses.net/ but the hosting sucks). I’ve learned Spanish and French well enough to carry on conversations in both from them. One thing about their approach is that they focus on memorizing spoken dialogues. It’s the standard goofy “what time will Mr. Gonzales arrive at the restaurant” type of dialogue, but the idea is that you’re supposed to remember what they say, even if you don’t understand the parts of speech, well enough to recite it from memory. I’ve found that, more than anything else, these memorized dialogues help the most with language recollection - if I want to say something, I scan through my memorized dialogues for something close, substitute a few words, and say it like they said it in the course.

I'm really a fan of rote learning and hate that it gets bad-rapped. It's not intended to teach creativity, it's intended to train reflexes. If you repeat "What time will Mr. Gonzales arrive at the restaurant" 1000 times, you'll immediately know how to ask when Bill will arrive at the restaurant. And later when you learn how to say "restaurant," "arrive," or "at what time", you suddenly know a bunch of stuff. Eventually you will forget about some of the things Mr. Gonzales did, but the reflexes will still exist.

I love the endless FSI substitution drills. They feel like video games. Also the Spanish ones are done so quickly that the instructor almost trips over his own tongue.

edit: also, https://fsi-languages.yojik.eu/, well-hosted labor of love.

You can find much of the FSI material at the Live Lingua Project here [1].

The FSI is not the only US government created language program. There's also the Defense Languages Institute (DLI). Much of their material is also on Live Lingua [2].

[1] https://www.livelingua.com/fsi/

[2] https://www.livelingua.com/dli/

Interesting. The text to go along with the audio includes a phonetic version.

    Good morning.  bwenozdiás [Some marks removed.]  Buenos días.

http://www.fsi-language-courses.net/languages/Spanish/Basic/..., Unit 1 - Useful phrases.

Yes, you find that through the whole Spanish course. I never found it to be very useful, but it's there if somebody wants it.

This reminds me of The Knowledge.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_the_United_Kingdom...

I agree this seems to be the way forward. I'm brushing up on my rusty and useless high-school German as a result of my company's work with a German client lately – it makes everything a bit easier for extended trips. The advice I got from them was basically the same – if your goal is to be able to engage in basic conversational interactions, it's far more important to build up a useful vocabulary that it is to get the correct tenses or genders.

As with most things you want to learn you need both - immersion as well as deliberate practice.

I had a similar experience; my high school teacher and/or textbook seemed to only reluctantly introduce new vocabulary, so that they had some words to construct their grammar exercises out of.

As a kid I would watch english-spoken news without having any understanding of English. Then all of a sudden one day I started understanding the news anchors. It was a weird experience. Shortly after I started on a lessons book and that got me to basic english - enough to understand a tiny bit to get into an American school, but not enough to actually communicate.

>German volunteers learning Dutch who’d drunk enough vodka...were rated by independent Dutch speakers as speaking the language more proficiently during a short-test

I have no horse in this race, but this is brilliant.

(Though they seem to have missed out on an opportunity to determine which alcoholic beverage works best for each language.)

Ok, so the first picture is a lady holding a GIANT glass of wine. Does this mean that the best way to learn a language is to get drunk while doing it?

For those who don't drink wine, that glass probably has about two "servings" and will give anyone who drinks it a small buzz. Large wine glasses like this aren't meant to be filled up, they're meant to help the drinker really swirl the wine. It brings oxygen into the wine which helps release the flavor.

Edit: The amount of alcohol that the lady in the picture is drinking is more than what the article recommends.

This talk by Chris Lonsdale gives some practical advice on learning new languages fast. Most of it is along the lines of what the article says, but seems to say that the key part is to get a "language parent", whom you can have conversations with and will try to understand and reply to you, no matter what (like parents do with small children):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0yGdNEWdn0

Re: alcohol - in my experience, it depends. For the first year or two of learning German, a beer or glass of wine helped me relax and speak more effortlessly, as suggested. But now, as a fluent speaker -- I've passed a C2 exam, i.e. "mastery" on the CEFR scale, with a good score -- I definitely notice that any amount of alcohol hurts more than it helps. In the same way that any amount of alcohol makes my English worse: I have trouble with recall of even basic words.

That's how I managed to learn spanish: immersion. To watch movies, series, music, jokes, websites, everything in spanish, with my Google Translator buddy by my side.

I speak Spanish fluently as a second language.

> Listen to the language, even if you don’t have a clue what’s being said – and you’re not even paying close attention

I totally agree that this is helpful. Playing Spanish music while I work was one of the things I credited helping me learn so quickly.

> Don’t try too hard with the grammar

This, too. When I first started learning, I tried to remember all of the rules that I was taught in high school, but it was easier to just remember how the words are used in different contexts. Asking native speakers the whys behind the languages usually just results in frustration.

> Have a drink…

My verbal fluidity increases significantly when drinking. This probably has to do with letting go of the worry about sounding "dumb" while conversing in a different language. Most people are very forgiving towards people speaking in their non-native tongue, but it's still hard not being self-conscious. Alcohol helps.

I don't know about the other points, as I learned in an immersive environment by the seat of my pants.

There was a German teacher in Norway who really hated how the Norwegian way of teaching German. In Norway the curriculi focusses a lot on grammar. This teacher decided to ditch all that in favour of speaking the language a lot more, however, and only teach grammar after the pupils had mastered the language reasonably well. This turned out great, and it even made it easier for the pupils to understand the grammar, because instead of using grammar to decipher how the language was supposed to be spoken, the pupils now used grammar as a way to describe what they already could speak. In other words, they didn't use "logic" to try to form sentences, as much as pure intuition.

I created http://masterspanish.today to help with my Spanish.

I receive a daily email, at noon Eastern time, with a Spanish article from El Pais and an English translation.

Good read. I like to think it's just life getting in the way, and if you are in the right circumstances and environment you could achieve respectable level of proficiency in almost anything, even later in life.

It's interesting that the first two - listen even without comprehension, and deprioritize grammar - correspond significantly to advances in NLP on the last few years. Unsupervised language models (that learn to predict text without any labeled task) turn out to be valuable through transfer learning in specific comprehension tasks. And old school NLP methods that focused on grammar tree construction have fallen behind attention and transformer based methods that learn softer, more abstract representations of structure.

It's great to finally have scientific validation of my hypothesis that the Dutch language is pretty much just drunk German :D

I can speak 5 languages but having a drink didn't help me to learn any of them :-) Quite the contrary.

Oddly enough, these things all seem to apply for me when learning to play an instrument (especially the “just listen” one). I do much better in practice when I listen to what I’m practicing than when I don’t.

I work for a language learning company, where I am building VR apps for immersive (in both the VR and language learning sense of the word) language learning.

Japanese company made for learning English?

I had a friend tell me that you're only truly near-native in a foreign language if you can troll online using it.

It's crass, but I like it.

I'm currently learning Japanese and I've only been at it for a month. My tools are :-

1) Pimsleur Japanese [0]

2) Michel Thomas Japanese [1]

3) Creating my own Anki decks [2]

4) Genki Textbooks [3]

5) Remembering the Kanji [4]

Firstly, I know it's going to take at least 2 years to be good at Japanese and I'm intent on just enjoying the journey. I have absolutely no need to rush.

Right now I'm only concentrating on my speaking and listening skills. I'm not at all fussed about pitch accents and will improve that when I get a tutor (think year 2).

My methodology is going to consist of:

- Doing each CD of Pimsleur (there are 5 in total, with 30 lessons each).

- Actively listening and speaking for 30 minutes in the morning, just after lunch and just after dinner. Thus doing 1 hour and a half a day.

- Write down all the newer words for each lesson into a notebook for review later.

- Writing down all the sentences in an excel spreadsheet for the anki deck. So far I have around 900 words and sentences.

My progress is that I have completed the first CD and I have memorised into my long term memory up to lesson 20. Unfortunately my memory starts to fade when reviewing the anki deck past lesson 20 and I get the sentence order incorrect even though I know the words. Of course, I want to get to 100% before moving onto the next CD.

To switch things up a bit. I've now started to do Michele Thomas CDs and listen passively in the background. Michele Thomas isn't as demanding for your attention as Pimsleur.

When I have finished both groups of CDs. I'll go through the Genki textbook and after that start to focus on my writing skills with Remember the Kanji.

After that, that's when I'll go on italki [5] and get a tutor.

Oh and when watching Anime (with Japanese Subs). I understand around 10% so far, in just a month. I do start to laugh though when the subs are not correct.

I can only imagine what I understand, when I have finished all CDs. I hope to get to at least 75% and then start to watch Anime with the subs removed.

Finally, if anyone wants to go the immersion route. Highly recommend Matt vs Japan [6]. I'll be doing this once I finish the CDs and books.

[0]: https://www.pimsleur.com/learn-japanese/pimsleur-japanese-le...

[1]: https://www.michelthomas.com/learn-japanese/

[2]: https://apps.ankiweb.net/

[3]: https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-...

[4]: https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-Japanese-C...

[5]: https://www.italki.com/

[6]: https://www.youtube.com/user/MATTvsJapan

Reply on news.ycombinator.com