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Comment by ggambetta | Hacker News Reader

I've found that the main difficulty in learning a new language is not so much in picking up structure, but vocabulary! This book seems to address the first, but not so much the second.

I happen to be learning German and Latvian right now. The way I'm approaching them is to find easy-level texts (https://www.nachrichtenleicht.de for German, children's books for Latvian), and reading a couple of paragraphs. Whenever I find a word I don't know, I use Google Translate, and add it to a custom Anki deck. Then I practice vocabulary every day.

This is a slightly more structured way of how I learned English back in the day (my English improved tremendously by playing Monkey Island, especially trying to understand the pirate insults).

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I built a website (and soon an app) for learning German, that has a focus on both grammar and vocabulary. We have a frequency list with the top 5000 German words. And we are a video-driven site, so each word has a video. And most words also have sentences (also each with a video). This is good for getting a feel for the spoken language, and hearing the vocabulary used in context. You can check it out here: http://www.seedlang.com

I started with German about a year and a half ago via Mango Languages. I love the app because it approaches languages via phrases and conversations instead of vocabulary (like Duolingo)

Your site looks really promising... I will definitely give it a shot!

What was your driver for creating it? Language is a very competitive space these days.

I used Duolingo for a couple of languages, got pretty far in Italian and tried some German. I found it either too slow, or too beginner-ish; I didn't feel like I was learning much, and it didn't help me read news websites / novels much. While I do like the approach - specifically, the use of words in context, and the variety in exercises - it didn't really do it for me (Severin, if you're reading this - sorry, man!)

Duolingo starts at the beginning. If you think a skill is too easy, try testing out of it to get to a higher level or advance faster.

Duolingo says they don't currently aim too teach beyond A2/B1, so you may already be past that.

Having learnt a few languages with and without duolingo, I think you will usually need 2000+ words in a language, and close to 90% of the grammar to read native texts well. Duolingo can get you quite close to, but not past that mark.

Duolingo is based on sentences. It builds both vocabulary and grammar skills, though it may look like it's "only" translating.

Great website! Much better than memrise and duo.

I'll check it out! The frequency list sounds like a very valuable thing.

Too true. I self taught German to a low C2 in 2 years or so as a native English speaker. I got to a very high level of grammar in a matter of months, but since vocabulary took far longer to acquire, I was left having most conversations sound like “I would have ___ if only I had known ____ was ____ing ____.

You're right! The book does not address the second difficulty at all. I agree that vocabulary is important, and reading a couple of paragraphs is in fact really productive (thank you for the link suggestion btw), however, in my opinion, having the gramatical understanding of the language will prove really helpful in reading. There are subtle changes in words depending on what role they fulfil in the sentence; trying to "just" memorize them without correlating it with the sentence aspects will be harder than to understand the wholeness of the process. Also, understanding how German builds much of its vocabulary leads to learning more vocabulary faster!

I generally agree. To be fair, my goal is to understand and be understood, not necessarily to express myself correctly - not at first, at least. I suppose it's similar to the way children learn?

> This book seems to address the first, but not so much the second.

As the introduction states, the book assumes that the student works with a dictionary. So, it explicitly does not address vocabulary.

My biggest issue with this is my dislike towards Anki. I really just don't like flascards, and I can never regularly study with Anki. It's quite sad, as my vocabulary in my second language (Irish) is easily the worst part. I've found that reading does help, though, even if not making it into flashcards on Anki.

I love the idea of anki but immediately tire of the execution. There are naturalistic ways to achieve the effects of spaced repetition, fortunately, like reading the works of a particular writer or playing games of a certain genre in the target language.

Yep. Sadly Irish is so small that I'm not going to find many games in it, but I'm at a comfortable B2 level (passed the exam twice, actually) and am reading just fine.

I just wish there was a good way to incorporate specific words into all that.

Honestly, the problem with Anki is manifold:

1. It needs parameter tuning. If you get everything right, you were re-shown cards too quickly. There's a variety of ways to tune how that happens, some by showing you cards further apart, and some by introducing more cards. Either way is fine for language learning, IMO.

2. Users hate the experience when the parameters are tuned correctly. It should be something of a struggle, and you should be failing about 20 percent of cards you see. When every card you see is on the cusp of forgetting, each card is legitimately cognitively taxing.

3. Flashcards don't really fit into society. College classes tend to be a series of topic focused exams, and once the exam has passed, any time spent on retention of knowledge gained competes with time for acquiring knowledge for the next exam. Also, folks tend not to like the idea of failing 20 percent of their exam questions due to forgetting.

In my opinion SR apps should not compute the repetition interval by themselves but rather ask the user.

After revealing the answer you should be able to say "repeat this soon, later, much later".

A different kind of app shouldn't use time at all but rather a queue of all words/cards and then put cards back a certain number of positions, depending on level and user input.

The queue system works a lot better with different timescales (practicing over short or long terms), and it doesn't tell you how much time you have to put in at any given day. It also takes less parameters, I think.

The way I used to learn a lot of words in many languages (mostly English) is to figure out what they mean in context and only if I really can't figure it out (because they are very broad or very specific) look it up and maybe try to remember the next time I encounter them.

That also has the advantage that you'll understand the common words first instead of what someone considered to be a sensible order (one of the first words I learned in French was the French word for parrot, which I have used exactly never since except for joking around with people who learned from the same textbook).

Some duolingo courses have funny "priorities" too.

But in general, by learning and repeating any words in a language you build the mental infrastructure to learn more words easier.

It is almost scary to me how easily I can memorize new Chinese vocabulary compared to a few years ago. You could say my brain was pre-trained as an autoencoder!

Out of curiosity, how do you find learning two languages at once?

They don't really interfere much. Good question, though; I thought they would.

My girlfriend (Latvian, and the reason I'm learning the language) says there's a lot of Latvian words adapted from German (due to long occupations over time), but I haven't really found them yet.

Maybe being native in the language makes a difference? My native language is Spanish, and I can get a decent sense of meaning from texts in Portuguese and Italian. We went to the Louvre last year, and I could also understand some French. My girlfriend, however, couldn't understand a word, despite being fluent (but not native) in Spanish.

>Maybe being native in the language makes a difference?

Often two languages share a word, but it's much less common (or even obscure) in one of them and it's unlikely that non-natives know it.

For example, "die Kartoffel" means "potato" in german, while in in polish it's "ziemniak", so they aren't similar at all.

However, polish also has "kartofel" which is a word that every native speaker knows, but you won't find it in e.g. newspapers.

That makes a lot of sense. I can think of examples in which I can associate a new German word to a perfectly valid, though less common, English word. And I'm not even a native English speaker.

>Maybe being native in the language makes a difference?

I think this is similar to understanding dialects. My native language is German and I can make sense of most German dialects (some are really hard tho' like Platt or Niederbayerisch). On the other hand, my English is proficient (CEFR C1/C2), but I regularly trip over dialects and even strong accents (Irish is especially hard). My personal guess is that you have memorized a much larger "network" of similar words (in meaning or sound) in your native language than in any language you learned in a structured/artificial way based on top of your native language.

Fun fact: At least here in Bavaria, we often say German is our first foreign language and our dialect is our actual native language. So we already organically learned two similar languages as child.

Both Low German (Platt) and Bavarian are classified as separate languages from Standard German in ISO 639-3, with language codes nds and bar, respectively (as opposed to deu). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_639-3

That did sound interesting at first, but my native dialect Franconian [1] also has an ISO 639-3 language code (vmf) and while the pronounciation from high german differs, the words and grammar are basically identical (with very few exceptions). E.g. we pronounce "t" as "d" and "k" as "g" and some "g" as "ch", but the words remain the same. (This means I learned to pronouncations for every word as a child.) The ISO 639-3 seems to actively categorize dialects and not just "languages".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Franconian_German

There has been an attempt to remove vmf from the standard (reason: such a language does not exist) in 2010, but it was rejected for formal reasons https://iso639-3.sil.org/request/2010-012

ISO 639-3 does aim to classify languages and not dialects, but that means the classification needs to change as the linguistic evidence is reinterpreted.

For the time being, there's a test Wikipedia: https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/vmf

I tried reading some articles, and while it mostly feels like Standard German with fantasy spelling, there were some words I didn't understand, e.g. in the article about cows: https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wp/vmf/Kou

Ah, interesting that they tried to remove it. Edit: i just read the proposal to remove it and it was mainly, because vmf was classified as "mainfranconian" and "upperfranconian" spoken west of the city of Mainz. I agree with the proposal, it's nonsense. Mainz isn't part of the Franconian dialect region. It's basically Nürnberg and Würzburg areas and Mainz is west of Frankfurt (which speaks "hessisch" and is west of Würzburg). It's weird that the article about Franconian in Wikipedia links to the vmf language code. Looks like an error.

I guess the words you didn't understand are mostly due to absurd spelling to capture the pronouncuation and the use of colloquial words in Franconian dialect (high german jetzt -> colloquial etz -> Franconian etzadla). I had trouble reading it.

> A Kou (Anschbachisch: Kua, Hoaloisch: Kuâ) is a weiblichs Rind un a Väich as der Familie vo däi Honndräächer. Sie is a Nudzdier un a Milch- un Fleischlieferand. Der wilde Schdammvadder is der Aueroggs. Vor ungfähr 8000 Joahr hams a boarr vo denne eigfangd und an Menschn gweend. Däi Nachgummma davo sin edzadla unsre Käi.

High german (verbatim): Eine Kuh ist ein weibliches Rind und ein Vieh aus der Familie der Hornträger. Sie ist ein Nutztier und ein Milch- und Fleischlieferant. Der wilde Stammmvater ist der Auerochse. Vor ungefähr 8000 Jahren haben sie ein paar von denen eingefangen und an Menschen gewöhnt. Die Nachkommen davon sind jetzt unsere Kühe.

Regarding your fun fact: Same in parts of Switzerland where Swiss German is spoken. Swiss German is a variant of High Allemannic (with some exceptions where Highest Allemannic is spoken). We perceive German as a foreign language that is learned in school and most people are pretty bad at pronunciation (and sometimes at grammar, since some of the tenses and cases are missing in Swiss German.

We usually perceive Swiss German as a different language too and not just a dialect. We usually do learn High German before attending school tho, it's not as a foreign language in school.

I do remember an unfortunate situation during a summer camp in Croatia. I was sitting next to a very attractive girl from Switzerland and I was simply unable to have a conversation with her, because I couldn't understand at least half of what she was saying :(.

For a while in secondary school I was learning three languages at once - French, German and Irish (Gaelic). I'm Irish, native English speaker, in case it wasn't obvious.

In general I think it helped to learn them in parallel rather than in sequence. It made it easier to pick up the more fundamental grammatical/linguistic things.

I wouldn't do it outside of full time education though. It was a lot of work.

Learning languages in parallel is usually the right strategy.

The problem is that it not only takes hands-on time to build the mental infrastructure, but also calendar-time.

In general, if you learnt a certain Word X time ago, you have a good chance of forgetting it after X further time. There clearly is a distribution, but this general rule of thumb does generally hold. I know I could learn a few hundred words in a day to remember them the next day, if I really wanted to (using mnemonics). But they would fade within days, or weeks at the most.

At the moment I am working on 5 languages, though with varying effort.

I have been reading German novels on Kindle. If I don't understand a word, put my finger on it and in a few seconds I get a definition. Admittedly, only about 50% or the words I check are in the built-in dictionary, but it allows me to keep reading without too much time loss. What would be amazing is to automatically generate anki cards from this. Anyone?

From my own experience learning German for 8 years, I have to say grammar is absolutely the biggest challenge.

Vocabulary is easy to learn by consuming a lot of media.

Finally pronunciation may be the next hurdle, especially if you're not used to germanic languages.

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