How to train your brain to flip to a new language | Hacker News Reader

How to train your brain to flip to a new language

bitesizeirishgaelic.com

119 pointsmise70 comments

I moved to a German speaking country about a year ago. I'm not brilliant at languages, but I've made great progress and most people are surprised to find out how little German I spoke a year ago. Here are some of my tips:

1) Use Mnemosyne every day. It is computerized flash cards based on the SuperMemo algorithm. Do not skip days. At around 2000 words memorized (9 months) the 'switch flipped'. At 2000 words you can have conversations with about anyone. Business is still hard, but smalltalk easy.

2) Read trashy literature - People, In Touch, Celebrity Rags... these are all written so 10 years olds can read it. Newspapers use bigger words and don't have pictures. Reading about celebrities is a hassle, but it helps and it an appropriate level.

3) Got kids? Turn the Wii and Cartoons to the foreign language. This makes your play time also a learning process.

4) Do Not turn your computer to a foreign language. This will cripple your productivity. I am forced to work in German on a Windows box now and it is really awful and frustrating. Not recommended at all. Not one bit.

5) German Tuesday - Deutsche Dienstag - Every Tuesday was German Tuesday. Anyone caught speaking English to me had to pay a Franc into a Jar. If I spoke English then I paid. This make my German a fun game in the office. Plus we had Bier Freitag at the end of the week. I stole this idea from an outsourcing company I worked with where Tues and Thur were English only days.

UPDATE: For those learning German, the Mnemosyne flash cards on the website are mine. If you have any issues I am glad to update or help.

Does anyone know of a tool like Mnemosyne for the iPhone/touch/pad?

I use Anki (http://ankisrs.net/).

The app store version is $25, but the desktop version is free. There's also a free web app that can be used from handheld devices with internet access and a free Android app. You can sync across multiple devices via the web app.

The iPhone version has drastically increased my use of Anki.

I do most of my Anki revision through my iPhone: I can use it anytime I have 30 seconds to spare. Such as waiting for the dentist, waiting at a pedestrian crossing, waiting for breakfast to cook, waiting in line for lunch... etc.

I'm a very patient person as I'm extremely happy to wait for things now :)

I have used Supermemo for five years and learned thousands of Japanese words, and now I'm working through Chinese. Use whatever program you want (Anki, Mnemosyne, Supermemo, etc.), but stick with whatever you are doing, and use SRS to save your progress.

Thanks for mentioning Mnemosyne, looks really useful!

Anki is also worth checking out (an app similar to Mnemosyne, available on Win/Mac/Linux/FreeBSD/iPhone).

Anki is indeed very nice. It's based on the same algorithm as Mnemosyne, but has made considerably better progress, IMO.

KDE have several desktop apps for language training - http://edu.kde.org/applications/language - including a couple of flash-card based memorisation apps.

KDE can now be installed on MS Windows in addition to the usual 'nix installs.

I like to read Harry Potter in various languages - works great for learning to read well.

Also, I created a website where you can practice vocabulary and verb conjugations: http://inglua.com

You're definitely not alone - "read your favorite (series of) book(s)" is an old trick.

That's a great idea, because you already know the story, so you can sort of figure out the words you don't know due to your knowledge of the story.

This also works if you pickup a series halfway through, having read the first half in your native language, and then finishing it in the new language. I've done this with Harry Potter. Before moving to Canada at 14, I read the first 4 in Romanian and the 5th and/or 6th in English. Since many of the terms were found in previous books, or since i knew them from the movies (example quidditch which the translators decided to translate. Still not sure how they got with the Romanian term from quidditch)

I just spent 30 minutes on your advanced section of your website, I like how it gets competitive with strangers, very compelling!

Reading a book you've already read is definitely a good idea. Seeing the grammatical forms you might have heard, and even tried to use, written out (and well-edited!) was for me immensely helpful.

It also helps that you already know what happened: if you don't understand a passage, no big deal. Just skip over it. It beats checking the dictionary many times per page. There's some truth to the notion that you can figure out what words mean from context, but it's often not possible. However, if a word is used over and over, as many important to the text you're reading are, you might get enough context to work out what they mean. If you can't, then reach for a dictionary.

I tried something similar recently. I am learning Japanese and so I dumped audio track from anime to my mp3 player. It seems to help with understanding the language. And it was fun to guess what is going if I haven't seen the series for long time.

4) Do Not turn your computer to a foreign language.

I don't agree entirely. I recommend changing one of your computers to the foreign language.

It depends on the language, but I haven't found that useful with Greek, unless you specifically want to learn the formal Greek words for computer-related things. In casual conversation, nobody uses that vocabulary, and it'd be seen as very stilted/old-fashioned (English loanwords are more common, and even where Greek's used, it's often not the same words).

But if you're in Greece and can speak and read Greek, but are then put in front of a Greek computer and can't use it, that looks pretty bad...

Eh, I haven't found it to be a major problem. I speak fluent oral Greek (learned it when I was a kid to talk to my grandparents/cousins), and can read some Greek, but nobody really expects me to be able to read formal Greek. It's slightly diglossic in that formal Greek is substantially different than the spoken language, partly a relic of the days when it was an actually different language: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharevousa

“4) Do Not turn your computer to a foreign language. This will cripple your productivity. I am forced to work in German on a Windows box now and it is really awful and frustrating. Not recommended at all. Not one bit.”

That’s interesting. I never thought about it but it makes a lot of sense. The problem with software is that you often need to know the exact translation, especially when you are looking for something in a menu. You might know a correct translation but it won’t help you if that’s not the particular translation the translator picked. The weird vocabulary software often uses only amplifies the problem.

That’s why switching from English Photoshop to German Photoshop (my native language is German) was so hard for me.

I have my computer in English, but all my Google settings to Spanish. I know the layout well enough that it doesn't hinder productivity and getting a new error message always leads to learning a new word.

I've started using computers a very long time ago. Almost all the computers were in English. Now when I have to use a software in my native language everything fails, specially the keyboards shortcuts. In Office, Ctrl-S make things become underlined! I've even did a macro to make Ctrl-S to save.

regarding "Read trashy literature", the tabloids are harder to read than normal newspapers. They seemed to just be colloquial ways of saying, "crazy, wild", and never had a point. I found lay science magazines to be great practice; interesting, clearly written and short enough to work through.

> a German speaking country

> a Franc

I take it you're in Switzerland ;)

Are there a lot of other foreigners where you are? That can make language learning difficult.

Also, there is a whole website called All Japanese All The Time[0] (AJATT) for learning Japanese via an SRS, although they use Anki rather than Mnemosyne.

0: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/

If you seek out English speaking peer groups, then yes learning German will be harder. Luckily(?) for me I am one of only two English speakers in my company, so none of my friends are English speakers. My wife, on the other hand, has an almost entirely Anglo peer group, making picking up German casually near impossible.

For me thinking in a foreign language came through immersion and doing a lot of talking to myself.

The following helped a lot also

1)Watch films dubbed into your target language. Turn on English subs if you find it difficult. choose films you actually want to see.

2)Watch infomericials. Seriously. they repeat the same phrases over and over again in a clear accent. The downside is you will randomly find yourself talking about the plus points of the world greatest mop.

3)Read comics before books: the pictures and context will help you figure you meanings

4) Forget fast and relearn by using srs like anki/mnemosyne

5)study mnemonics - roman room is very useful

talk to everyone

Skritter for chinese literacy; pimsleur for beginners

someone please develop some language learning software that isn't glorified flashcards, matching games. The stuff I've come across out there is lazy and unimaginative.

my dream is language software developed by Nintendo. Fun and intuitive.

> my dream is language software developed by Nintendo. Fun and intuitive.

Like "My Japanese Coach"?

I haven't played My Japanese coach but I have played my Chinese Coach.

It's is exactly the kind of boring, unimaginative software I was referring to.

The games are incredibly joyless. Matching cards gets old soon.

These games were not developed by Nintendo

I was thinking more along the lines of a cross between a Nintendo RPG and warioware

And for subtitles, have a look at http://universalsubtitles.org - anyone wanting English subs created should drop me a line. I've done a small number of these now, eg http://universalsubtitles.org/en/videos/xPy3pbVWResd/info/Ze...

I had great luck with the "opposite" of #1. I happened to watch some English language movies subtitled in French and it was a great way to slam a lot of written vocabulary into my head very quickly in an engaging way. That and some other techniques (living with three French girls helps ;>) had me thinking and dreaming in French at the end of a month.

I had a horrible accent, but I could get through basic conversations. A year later I was fluent, with a much better Parisian accent.

After gaining fluency in an additional language, I "disengaged" English as my translation layer and have been able to think in a foreign language much more quickly. At this point when speaking, whatever language I'm using sort of scrolls past the back of my eyes, including English.

Thanks for making me aware of Mnemosyne!

One thing that helped me to learn English was to watch movies (especially stuff with cool oneliners) with both subtitles and close captions on when possible, so I get a transcript of the dialogue and a translation at the same time. Later on I only needed the English subtitles to verify that what I heard was correct.

Movie quotes are great because they lend themselves to repetition (much to the annoyance of everyone else in the room).

How do you get the words you put in mnemosyne?

> Read trashy literature - People, In Touch, Celebrity Rags... these are all written so 10 years olds can read it.

Had to laugh in agreement when I read this. I never thought of this before but I guess it's directly related to my little "trick": I never watch TV except when it's in whatever language I am trying to learn. Same principle there. Indeed, TV is for 10-year-old equivalent brains, otherwise it wouldn't work.

The funny thing is that for me it IS a switch.

About a year ago I travelled to Ireland and England on vacation. While I did mostly general touristic stuff, I added some geeky points of interest to my itinerary such as Bletchley Park, Alexander Fleming's lab and planned to attend a StackOverflow conference. Meeting fellow programmers is always fun.

Now, I'm an Hebrew speaker, but speak English fairly well.

After about 3 to 4 days I made the "switch" and generally thought in English and spoke pretty fluently.

Towards the end of the trip (after about 20 days) I went to the StackOverflow conference, where I saw two of my programming idols, Jeff and Joel. At some point at the conference I approached the couple and we started to chat. Now, I hate to admit this, but bear in mind I was as ecstatic as a little girl meeting Justin Bieber in person. I was about 22 at the time and liked a lot of what they wrote on their blogs.

I know that generally people feel pressured when being treated as "idols" and these days I'm much better about these things, but at the time I couldn't help myself. All of this lead to me "forgetting" some of the English and (what I felt was) a much less fluent conversation, on my part. To make things more ironic Joel tried some Hebrew with me and I insisted to speak in English (which was a bit broken due to anxiety). After 20 days in English speaking countries it just felt too awkward for me to speak in Hebrew. Maybe it was awkward for me to speak in a language foreign to the rest of the group or just the anxiety that kicked in and I'm making too much of it. I don't know.

Why ironic? Here I was, a native Hebrew speaker from Israel, unable to speak in my native tongue while a former Israeli, practically his entire life living in the states, tries to speak with me in Hebrew and unable to.

I'm not sure if it's a matter of plain capability. When thinking about programming I can think simultaneously about how to express an idea in different programming languages/paradigms. This is another point of interest, how is thinking in other languages compares to thinking in different programming languages.

tl;dr: It seems to me there is more to the switching metaphor than developed in the article. When getting into the flow of a language it may be harder to operate in a different one. Moreover, as programmers we are all too familiar with thinking in different programming languages and it's interesting to see how it all relates.

For me it doesn't really feel like a switch (unless we talk about a very fast one). I tend to mix thinking (and sometimes speaking) in English and Polish to the level they blend together - sometimes I express separate phrases or even words in another language just because it "feels better" this way. Similarly for programming languages - I tend to mix thinking in them with thinking in natural language.

I do agree that those two issues - thinking in programming and natural languages - might be connected. It somehow feels similar.

tldr (actually, it's quite short and worth reading) - practice sub-verbally as much as you can. If you see a cat, you think "there's a cat" in your head.

2 advantages I think this has:

1) It's good practice.

2) You will find holes in your vocabulary, and that that will encourage you to fill them.

This. Subverbal thinking IS the switch. When you start to think in a language, or even dream in a language, that's when you know the switch has flipped.

Do people dream in a specific language? I can think in more than one language, but my dreams are abstract, rather than verbal.

I have a bilingual friend who claims after spending few weeks in Australia or Japan his dreams switch to the local vocabulary.

When I was living in Spain I definitely started dreaming in Spanish (it's weird to describe... ) and I know foreign friends of mine have shared similar experiences where they started dreaming in English in the US.

Haven't flipped the switch on my Portuguese yet, but I'm trying..

I would strongly disagree with "It’s like feeling that unexpectedly, you have a button in your brain. When you push it you can get thoughts straight to your target language." being the level of "at least being able to interact with locals".

In my personal experience, that's a point well beyond that. I was speaking fluid english for considerable time before being able to think in english on a whim. I can (usually) get my point across in german and russian, but thinking in those languages? No. I'm still translating to and fro in my brain, still formulating what I want to say in a language I feel more confident with.

From my experience, it takes total immersion in the language to become fluent. I spent two years in Brazil and it took 6-8 months before I reached the point where I began to think in Portuguese. It's a pretty amazing thing though, once you reach that point. You're thinking and even dreaming in another language. I still have dreams in Portuguese even though it's been 15 years since I returned to the US.

He suggests little flash cards as a way to casually practice language on a daily basis, I have a bit of a more geek-oriented suggestion: change the language of your browser.

You'll start seeing sites you use every day in the foreign language (like Google products), and become very familiar with the words and phrases used in the UI. You won't be practicing the same sort of phrases you'd use in every day spoken conversation, but you'll definitely learn something. (And it shouldn't be too annoying for you to use the translated interface if you're already used to the product).

I did this as a Spanish refresher before taking a month-long trip to the Dominican Republic. Worked very well! This especially helped in learning "tech" words, which are rarely taught in formal courses. Came in handy when helping troubleshoot wireless connectivity issues at the hostels where we stayed.

Some soccer players in Europe who transfer clubs to another country will get sticky notes and paste them to everything in their apartment to get used to nouns. Of course, there's always players like Eric Cantona who used to deliberately talk in French to the English media to throw them off.

when I lived in Ireland I had such stickers in irish in my kitchen (they were already there). I still remember a few words, so I believe it works. Too bad you seldom use "fork" or "drawer" in normal conversations :)

I've been doing this (with my whole OS X system) for a while, and I do recommend it. As a multiple-language-learner, though, what I really want is some app or something to let me assign certain languages to certain apps, and also perhaps randomize the current 'active' language for the next app launched (from my list of known languages, of course). Bit niche I guess, but I'd buy it.

I just did it, thanks for the idea. It's going to take time before I get used to it, though.

"by sheer persistence and a constant playful spirit"

Pretty good advice for any challenging task.

Also, how cool is it that irish gaelic of all languages would get such a pretty website? I can easily imagine these becoming a series of sites, like the X pod 101 series. I would absolutely pay $15 a month for bitesizeicelandic.

Heh heh, perhaps Rubén can help me build that.

It would be awesome if I made to that level!!

Haha I would pay for that, too. I'm fighting my way through Icelandic (post it notes, reading, tweeting occasionally) and any help is always welcome. If you want to do some "mail exchange in Icelandic" to practice with someone else, please drop me an email!

Alas, I'm not really studying Icelandic at the moment--too busy learning Mandarin :)

I went there on vacation last spring and fell completely in love with the language (and the landscape!!), so I would definitely start playing with it again if I could find some fun, easy resources...

I also felt in love with the country, but so far no "fun and easy resources". Also, it is a heck hard language, so far it is the hardest grammar I've found (although looks like gaelic grammar is hard, too), the declension rules are nightmarish.

In my opinion, the most important word in this post is 'phrase'.

I'm learning Chinese and the only way to translate English to Chinese is complete phrases / sentences. You can probably cheat much easier if your languages are more similar, but don't get lazy, think in phrases or you will never reach fluency.

The number one language tool for me these days is parallel texts. I grab ebooks in my target language, along with their english translations, and I use some open-source software called "hunalign" to create a sentence-aligned text.

Hunalign is an amazing little piece of software that will figure out which sentences correspond to which other ones in the second text, independent of language. It uses some neat algorithms to find the correspondences using sentence length, and then builds a partial dictionary and rematches.

At the end, I get a two-column version of the book, with one language on each side, with sentences matching in each row. As I read in my target language, I can just glance over to the equivalent English on the other side in order to get the meaning.

Reading is the fastest way I've found to really get an intuitive sense for the language's grammar and to learn tons of words. And the whole process goes much faster with parallel texts. I learned fluent German through reading, and now I'm working my way through Dutch. I started Dutch in January, and used parallel texts to read through the Harry Potter series while listening to the Dutch audiobook versions of them...now I feel quite ready to jump into non-parallel Dutch novels.

More info available on my parallel text process coming soon on my blog: http://languagefixation.wordpress.com/

I'll repeat my site comment here: A more efficient way is to use Spaced Repetition Software http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition.

You will spend more time in the items you don’t remenber. Anki and Mnemosyne are good open source softwares for language acquisition.

Anki: http://ankisrs.net/ Mnemosyne: http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/

There's a kind of art in creating your flashcards. It's important to follow the "20 rules in formulating knowledge": http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm

Loved the comment about it being a "switch." This is exactly what I found when I went to Turkey after 2 years of studying Turkish. I was in a program where we had a 4 hour class in the morning taught about 80% in Turkish. The first week or two was terrible. Then the "switch" flipped. I wasn't a fluent speaker and still missed words and phrases while listening, but all of a sudden I could follow the class, do the lessons correctly, and ask semi-intelligent questions. It's a great moment when you're learning a language.

Which program? I did a month of the absolute beginner level at Tomer in Istanbul. I remember being so absolutely lost the entire class, but somehow I kept learning. I'm still not at the point where I can make the "switch," like I used to in Spanish, but that's more my current priorities. (watching two languages slip away... sigh)

I did the AATT/ARIT summer program at Bogazici in Istanbul. I thought it was a very good program, but very intense. I have heard some good things and some bad things about Tomer.

Tomer has some good teachers, but the admin side is one of the worst bureaucracy experiences I've seen. I've heard good things about Bogazici, including that they didn't let you speak anything but Turkish on campus.

On a related note: it took 8 weeks of struggle coding daily to convert to C++. I would go home each day sweating and exhausted. At the end, a switch turned and the code would come out with much less effort.

Yeah, yeah, your favorite language is much easier than C++, I'm sure. But maybe it took something similar to get 'fluent'?

When learning functional programming (F#), there was a distinct point where I suddenly "got" functions and so many things suddenly made sense. I can actually remember the day and place where it snapped. (Perhaps if I had studied FP in school instead of just learning FP on the side after being conditioned by Basic and C, it would have been more natural.)

A bit off topic: I consume a lot of English, and produce some (like there ;) ), but I don't have many opportunities to practice my speaking skills. As a result my spoken English is not as good as it could be. I assume some different part of the brain gets involved while speaking and mine did not have enough training :) I wonder is there some community where I could find native speakers willing to chat with me online—Skype, most likely–and help me improve? Paid services, if reasonably priced are OK too.

http://www.lingq.com has the option to either pay (it's pretty cheap), or swap (You give lessons in your native language to earn points, and spend those points on lessons). I haven't used it yet (I'm still too much of a beginner) but I hear people are quite good there. After your 15min conversation they'll send you a report of suggestions/corrections you can make.

Some free options, none of which I've used, are: http://chatonic.com/ http://www.italki.com/ http://www.babelyou.com/ http://www.mylanguageexchange.com/, http://www.sharedtalk.com/ http://www.lenguajero.com/ (Spanish) http://vraiment.info/parlezfrancais/index.html (French)

http://www.lenguajero.com/

This is an excellent site to get started with a language: http://www.livemocha.com

Am I the only one who thought this post was about learning new programming languages ? ;)

Raymond Chen has some neat posts on language:

"If somebody speaks a language I'm not expecting, sometimes I don't understand it, even though I should" Jul 6, 2009 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/07/06/98183... (the last paragraph is particularly interesting)

"More musings on the peculiar linguistic status of languages acquired in childhood" Jul 7, 2009 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/07/07/98209...

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