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Comment by shmat | Hacker News Reader

I studied French from 7th-12th grade in an American High School. After that, I could not understand any French beyond "bonjour". I could not have a conversation in French. I could conjugate verbs and I could read some. Fast forward 45 years and I retired and decided to actually learn French. I followed a very, very similar method and after 9 months of self study took a 2 week intensive course in France where I was told I was at B2 level. Obviously I didn't start at A0 but when I first started with Duolingo, I remembered nothing. 45 years is a long gap. What he describes works. Even an old fart like me can get to B2 level with self study if they are motivated and use good resources. It's never been easier to learn a language with all the excellent resources available.

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I'm convinced that a classroom is the worst possible environment for actually learning a 2nd language. There are just so many reasons why.

Probably the most insurmountable one is that the pace at which the class can move is limited by the pace at which the least motivated student is going to learn.

But I also think that it's just a structurally bad environment for efficient language learning. Since everyone needs a chance to participate, you spend the vast majority of your time listening to other people who don't know the language any better than you do, so there's just not much to learn from them. Since you're working from a textbook, everyone has to read the same uncompelling least-common denominator materials, which, by virtue of being boring, are just as likely to sap as to sustain your motivation - and an unmotivated mind isn't going to absorb much.

I'm starting to feel that way about canned programs in general. I've been working on the kanji lately. At the start, a friend of mine told me he thought I was crazy to do all my own flashcards (though I am following the learning order from Remembering the Kanji) when I could just subscribe to WaniKani and have it all handed to me on a silver platter. A couple months later, he estimated I had learned more kanji over 2 months than he had in years. Just assembling your own materials admittedly involves a lot more up-front work and a steeper learning curve, but the process itself has a lot of mnemonic power.

While I had the same experience as you in high school (and primary school language learning was altogether a farce), I found the experience very different in classes at university. I think the primary factor was that there were a negligible number of unmotivated students.

Listening to other people at my level didn't seem a particular detriment because teachers have to speak at roughly my level anyway. They made more mistakes, but the instructors corrected them, and the corrections were valuable since they were often the sorts of mistake I'd make myself. Textbooks are trite, but since their main competition in the internet age is materials put together by dedicated but ultimately pedagogically-unskilled amateurs, I think they're better than most alternative prepackaged materials.

What I will acknowledge is that private study through a flashcard deck is probably the best way to acquire vocab, but that was never my biggest challenge. My vocab has consistently been on the large end of other people I've learned with, just because memorisation suits my personality (and I suspect that's true of a lot of people here). That never, though, translated to being the best in class - ability to fluidly construct a sentence beats out perfect word choice every time. It's also very easy to pair with a taught class, since there's no downside to learning extra vocab on the side.

Classes move a bit slowly, but I think the rationale is valid: You're here for three years anyway, you're probably trying to get to around B2, so we'll train you up to B2 in three years.

I'm not going to argue that it's as good as a private tutor, but it was closer to second-best than worst in my experience.

I moved to Norway as an adult and took classes meant for adult learners. And honestly, there were things I might not have grasped otherwise. Of course, I was in class 15-18 hours a week, was surrounded by Norwegian to a point (English is used a lot: Norwenglish is a thing). I had speaking practice in a nursing home two days a week for some months. Our teacher was a native speaker.

It is honestly helpful to have other learners to practice with: They, in general, have the same knowledge base as you do. Workbooks give repetition, and is helpful with things like grammar and word placement. (I only used a workbook with the first 2 books in the first year). The textbooks had common-sense dialogs and things: These focused on everyday situations (small talk, apartments, speaking about one's background, basic job stuff, and so on). A lot of reading introduced these things or made sure to include information about culture or civics.

And honestly, if one only went to school, participated, and did the homework when we had it, one would learn some language. You were simply better off if you worked on it yourself. I'd certainly not have as much understanding of dialects or grammar trying to learn Norwegian on my own.

This was completely different than the classes most folks had back in the US, generally in high school. I got more instruction as an adult in a day than we usually would get in a week back in high school. I had native speakers teaching. The class was taught in the target language from the first day.

Not all class is the same, and some are very beneficial.

> I'm convinced that a classroom is the worst possible environment for actually learning a 2nd language.

Surely classrooms are the worst environment for learning anything. Of course it's going to be easier to learn any subject if you have a dedicated teacher who makes sure that you understand the material before moving on and keeps you engages. However is it worse than anything? Classrooms usually end up giving you access to a teacher who you can ask questions to and receive a comprehensible response.

Just like in any subject if you actually don't take the effort to study from your own curriculum you're going to be relatively behind. If all someone does is attend their CS lectures and do the bare minimum on their homework assignments then they're effectively wasting their time as they'll be behind their peers who met with professors to collaborate on research projects or with peers to found a startup (in addition to side projects).

Classrooms for any subject are a bad environment because like you stated everyone else has a chance of participating. In addition the material is suited for the majority and isn't personalized. When I was learning about geometric functions in middle school no teacher ever related it to cosine similarity that can be used in NLP.

However 1-on-1 lessons are expensive, so aren't classroms a good enough compromise?

It's the gulf of the difference.

Most other subjects, I'd say classes are a bit sub-optimal, but still a great choice if you aren't working with unlimited resources. There's value in hands-on group projects, labs, instructor feedback, etc. And, in most subjects, there are plenty of successful people who did a lot of their learning in a classroom environment.

Language learning, though, I'd say that a classroom is worse than nothing at all, if you're motivated. And not just a little worse, like, a lot worse. In language learning, it seems remarkably consistent that the vast majority of people who achieve much success eschew classrooms entirely.

That's one thing I disagree with in the original post. Like you, I created my own Anki deck and I'm convinced it's a better way to learn.

> I studied French from 7th-12th grade

As a French, I’ve lived a few years in Australia. A lot of people there can only say “Bonjour” and keep a bitter memory of their lessons. It feels like learning German for the French people, also a difficult (albeit more regular) language. It is merely necessary for political cohesion but not at an individual level; As such German lessons are... not designed for the students. If I had to believe the lessons, there are only two topics that Germans talk about: The Wiedervereinigung (reunification) and the war. All their movies are black and white with yellow subtitles. That’s how I imagine the French language in the Australian culture ;) Something you gotta learn at school, like se hazing or something.

It really feels like we haven’t mastered teaching, as a civilization. Our teaching works for pupils who have an interest; but for the others, it’s like signing for a mortgage and hating the house from the day you move in.

In fact, a lot of Ozzies I’ve met told me they went to Paris and felt hated by parisians. This testimonial was so frequent (dozens of times) that I led my little survey. On Twitter and among friends, all French people love Australians, between surfing and Crocodile Dundee, we have good conversation starters ;) Some may dislike some British but I don’t think there are many, let alone many who would act it out on the street. I just think parisians behave like stressed people behave in very stressful cities. So, no, we don’t hate English-speaking people, and I’m sorry that my language is so hard and so required in your curriculum ;)

Good day everyone!

For many years, I thought that most French people were arrogant douchebags that hated foreigners.

The reason was that I had only visited the center of Paris, and I really felt disdained there. I even developed the habit of opening conversation in Spanish (my native language) because then people would try English and we would communicate. When I opened conversation in English, they replied in French, I wouldn't understand and they didn't seem interested in communicating at all.

After going to other parts of the country like Nice, Avignon, Lille... and being involved professionally with French people, I had the chance to meet many excellent people and now have several awesome French friends.

Later on, I had the chance to revisit the center of Paris and it no longer felt that unwelcoming anymore (probably partly because I got the hang of the culture and at least some of the language, and partly because I had some more money to go to somewhat better hotels, etc., which can help). But for the first-time clueless foreign visitor, it can feel really hostile. I'm not at all surprised by the testimonials you mention.

We certainly haven't mastered language teaching, at least at public schools. What I remember most is being tested on verb conjugations of irregular verbs. Worst possible way to learn a language.

Languages and gym stick out to me as the most astounding educational failures in high school.

When I later actually wanted to learn about those on my own time, it became obvious that those initial classes were not only not helpful, but actively harmful.

High school language courses might just be overinfluenced by academic linguists-- obscure grammar is probably the right focus if your main interest is comparative linguistics and you've already studied six other languages. That just doesn't apply to many high schoolers.

High school fitness education is like a bad daycare with spontaneous expectations for you to run a couple miles, despite having never been trained in how to build up capacity slowly over time. It's as if the goal is to teach people that fitness is unlearnable and out of reach. It's exactly the opposite, it's one of the domains where it's easiest to measure how much consistent practice improves performance.

I feel like we could redesign both from scratch, based around how people grow up and actually learn these things, and we'd be way ahead.

I disagree on the gym/fitness angle. It's quite possible you had a terrible gym teacher, and it wasn't a good fit for you. But I think it's extremely important to introduce the idea of normal, daily exercise and give students explicit time for that in their schedule, and I don't think the average gym teacher is so bad as to negate that benefit.

> It's quite possible you had a terrible gym

Yeah, it's just anecdotal, and I don't want to take away anything from anyone's great gym memories, but I think there's something systemic, or at least common and broader than my own experience, for a few reasons.

I went to multiple schools with different teachers that all used the concept of modules to expose kids to a bunch of activities in rapid bursts without practicing or developing any skills.

Let's play badminton for a week, then football, then dodgeball, then baseball. Now let's administer the presidential fitness test without any warning or prep. No attempt to work on those measurers after the test, making it unclear how important they are.

I might have drawn all the bad teachers and was just unlucky, but my experience seems to track with most people I meet and also with portrayals of gym in popular media.

In my case, it made me hate exercise. I couldn't do the things they required (stuff like somersaults, jumping the pommel horse, etc.) so I just took an adversarial angle. It was not something to enjoy, but to try to beat if possible, or escape otherwise.

Many years later, I can kind of enjoy exercise like running or swimming but I still never go to gyms as they give me bad feelings.

Indeed, being a teacher myself today, I'd rate my gym teachers as terrible, as setting goals (like somersaults) with little relation to the actual exercise most people do, and more relation to innate talent than effort, while not providing much motivation or explanation of why that is useful (I still don't see why today), seems like a huge pedagogical failure. But I had various gym teachers and they all seemed cut from the same cloth, and other people with similar age and country give similar descriptions. Maybe it's better in other countries or it has improved by time, I don't know.

If gym is a child's introduction to the idea of normal, daily exercise all hope has already been lost.

A school or education system that was serious about exercise or fitness would look nothing like the American one. There would not be elementary schools without recess, exercise would be a part of every student's schedule every day and not taking part would not be an option.

As is gym class has to deal with absurdly huge variations in interest and ability. Some children exercise every day, or play multiple sports because they're either enthusiastic or genuinely athletic. Having them in the same class as bookworms and couch potatoes serves no one well.

Gym is awful and cannot be made not awful without a thoroughgoing reform, not of gym class, but of the entire education system. It would be better off burned to the ground. That way it would at least not teach many people that they hate exercise, it would just leave them indifferent.

> a lot of Ozzies I’ve met told me they went to Paris and felt hated by parisians

It's the somewhat true in Québec too, but Québec isn't busy like Paris, so there must be something more to it.

The govt tries to force feed French to new Quebeckers who wants to settle in Québec. I am an expat in Québec. The attitude of Francophones and the Language Policing in Québec makes me not wanting to learn French at all even though it's the best opportunity to learn French. While I understand the reasons behind protecting French in Québec, I feel it can be done differently than by being rude and coercive. Ex: The pastagate in Québec.

Quebec is often feeling disregarded culturally by the rest of Canada, or just seen as "that one area where people don't speak English" even though it is the most bilingual province of Canada by a decent margin [0]. There's also additional bad blood between provinces historically in Canada and a lot of debates that are quite specific to the country, which I don't have the ability to explain properly here.

They're also older than the rest of the country by a good amount of time (I seem to recall Montreal celebrating its 375th birthday during Canada's 150th[1]). And there's definitely a culturally French element to it: being defensive of the French culture and language is not exclusive to Quebec, see the Toubon Law [2] introduced in 1994 forcing 40% of songs on the radio in France to be in French. There's been a lot of pushback to lower the percentage these last few years, while at the same time arguably french-language rap and hip-hop is at an all-time high most likely in big part thanks to that very same law [3] [4, in french] So in a way you can see why being defensive of the language is mostly a reaction to the shift in dominant language throughout the world, in this case coupled with the good old nonchalant attitude that is part of the French heritage.

And Parisians don't hate you or Australians or anyone in particular, they just hate everyone. Source: Parisian

[0] https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/as-sa/98...

[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/canada-day-150-montr...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toubon_Law

[3] https://djbooth.net/features/2019-06-26-the-french-hip-hop-r...

[4] in French: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5kIjAikHbs

Nobody should base their opinion of a country on the way service workers in that country's capital city treated them.

See Le Louvre, La Tour, Musee D'Orsay, Sainte Chapple, perhaps pop in to l'Orangerie, then get on a train and visit the real France and find real French people.

Actually Père Lachaise is pretty cool too: Fourier and Jim Morrison are buried there.

> If I had to believe the lessons, there are only two topics that Germans talk about: The Wiedervereinigung (reunification) and the war.

According to my lessons, they also talk about Umweltschutz (environmental protection), especially Mülltrennung (garbage sorting).

As a Romanian who had to study German in school, I testify to that. I still remember the word "Umweltverschmutzung" but no idea if it's der, die, das, dem or des umweltverschmutzung :P

A small trick with the words ending in "-ung" is they're often feminine so "die" in nomanative.

I would have bet on "die", just coze it "sounds right".

If you are a guest, sentences like: "Wo ist der Verpackungsmüll?" And "Trennt ihr Biomüll?" Can definitely land you plus points

Everyone below 50 speaks B1 or better English anyhow.

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