I used the internet to painlessly relearn a foreign language
medium.com
medium.com
I did all the things described in the article, more or less. This was my approach:
1. I had a 1h lesson with a private tutor over Skype (via italki.com) every single day. This was the part which cost me most money. But private tutors from italki is fairly cheap.
2. Listened to the news every day in easy french (RFI has a great short podcast).
3. I watched LOTR (the only one I had available where I could change language and subtitles to be the same) first with English audio and french subtitles, and then french audio and french subtitles and lastly only french audio no subtitles.
4. Listened to french kids books as audiobooks.
5. I read kids book in french.
6. I finished the 3 months with a week of immersive french course in France and then spent another week travelling France alone, committed to only speak french.
7. During this whole time I added 10 words per day into my Anki deck. I also added any other words that I learned along the way. This was quiet a lot of work.
8. During the three months I also went through the Duolingo French course.
After three months of hard work I passed the fluency test for french.
It took quiet a lot of time and quiet a lot of money. But it got the result I was after.
Ps. My tutor also wrote a nice review for me on LinkedIn which I’m very proud of and look at every now and again: “Xxx has learned French with my company. He became fluent in 3 months in has now reached a level close to B2 on the European Framework of Reference, starting from scratch. He has been an extremely hard-working and committed student, with classes every day at 6.30am.”
I think french is estimated to require about 600h of study, or something like that, for an English speaker, and that is probably a bit more than what I did. But it seems ball-park right.
Edit: Na, thinking about it, I think I did do about 600h, maybe even a bit more.
This comment is certainly a bit tongue-in-cheek but being able to relax the nerves a bit and just give it a good effort sometimes goes a long way. Sounds like landing with a wine consultant who doesn't speak your native tongue is about as good a scenario as possible!
For the audiobooks I tried to do books that I had already read myself previously. I found that to be better. So for example Bilbo (the french audio version is excellent) and Little Prince, for example.
You can reduce the price by going with "community tutors" instead. The price is lower, but they typically aren't professional teachers, so you're effectively paying for a conversation partner rather than actual lessons.
The region the teacher comes from is also a factor, due to cost of living differences. So the price can vary from language to language and dialect to dialect.
She was based in Hong Kong (which I believe she still is) and comes from central France. She was doing italki as a side gig teaching French in HK during days.
I would highly recommend RFI's podcast (Le Journal en Français Facile). At first, it's intimidating, and, despite the name, doesn't feel easy at all. They use simpler vocabulary, but still talk at full speed. You might need to listen to each episode a few times in a row, and read the transcript. And that's exactly what makes it such an effective tool. Struggling through it is part of training your brain to make sense of the sounds of the new language.
There are other options out there that try to be easy for learners by speaking very slowly. That's a trap. It's absolutely easier to understand, but you're learning to understand the wrong thing. The phonics of many languages undergo some subtle mutations when they are spoken slowly. This is especially true in French. So if you only listen to slow language that's over-pronounced to make it easier for learners to understand, you'll end up training your ear to understand the phonics of slow language that's over-pronounced for learners. Which isn't how actual people actually speak.
Make sure, once you have learned a language, to turn part of your life into a world operating in that language. Choose something - news, movies, books, internet - just pick something. Do that thing only in your new language once you can.
Once that becomes a habit, what you have learned you will not forget. And you will get better over time as well as your brain painlessly absorbs and deeply programs in the target language.
Second most important part - It takes a lot of work and consistency. Say that with me - consistency. Show up every day. If you don't, you will fail. That's one of those terrible truths about learning, and it is especially true about learning a language.
William Buckley was lost for more than 30 years among Australian aborigines. By the time he heard of whites in the vicinity, he was unable to speak to them, having forgotten how to produce English.
But, assuming you believe his memoirs, when they spoke to him, he regained his English within a day.
Something like that happens to me sometimes. I get stuck for a word in Norwegian and suddenly find that I can't summon the English word either (English is my mother tongue but I have been living and working in Norway since '86).
I am now capable of being tongue-tied in two languages simultaneously!
But of course it all comes back to me quickly once I switch back to speaking only English.
Side note: this is one of many points sufficient to disprove the popular idea that words are the medium of thought. Thought is not linguistic.
I think this works if the language is your native language or if you have immersed yourself. I used to be ok with French but after a few years of not using it there is not much left.
For anyone else who wasn't familiar with this story.
The Wikipedia article links to John Morgan's interesting account of William Buckley's life, written in 1852: https://archive.org/details/lifeandadventur00morggoog/page/n...
Naturally after a couple of days I am back home.
It isn't worse, because thanks to Internet I am able to keep in touch with my native tongue still.
So yeah, I do believe his memoirs.
I later tried to learn Spanish - (similar to French/Italian) but couldn't get it to the same level - easy come, easy go. Long term interest in Aikido lead my to attempting Japanese - but again it's never stuck. At university took a course in Russian - made good progress for a year and then left it - all gone!
So for me it's a combination: - learning to a sufficient level, - with consistent effort at the time (some level of immersion) - it is easier when brain is younger!
Then I fell off studying, but kept using it recreationally. I didn't pick 1 medium and insist on it because I have a wife that doesn't speak Japanese at all and that just doesn't work.
But I do still use it occasionally for games, anime (with English subs), manga, and sometimes live TV. It's pretty seldom, but it happens.
After a few years of that, I rejoined a Japanese meetup group locally for reading a Manga with them that's above my level. I'm realizing that I'm basically where I was when I stopped studying. I haven't really lost anything.
My point is that I don't think you need to be extreme to maintain. Just casual usage across different media is enough.
Initially I tried the usual things like Duolingo, Babbel and some other apps. Out of those things the only one I found useful was Duolingo because it can get you started pretty quickly.
However, I got stuck after that. I couldn't see myself making any progress. Then I stumbled upon the Comprehensible Input theory and TPRS and since then I've been studying Russian using a method that loosely follows these. Here's what I do:
- I find short stories, news articles, social media posts etc online. - I read those texts and mark down the new words as I learn them. I add those words in a flashcard app and I practice them using SRS. I use an app called Ulangi. - I ask my girlfriend (a native speaker) to ask me short questions about the text and I have to answer in my target language. - Once I feel comfortable with that text I repeat the process with the next one.
And it works (at least for me). I grew my vocabulary immensely, I can acquire grammar rules naturally (like I did with my native language) and I get to actually speak the language from day 1. As an added bonus I get to learn a lot about the culture of my target language.
However, translating and saving words in my vocabulary became tedious so I decided to automate this whole process. So I started building a tool for me. I, then, realized that this might be useful for others so I made it public. You can use it for free at Talkabl.com
What do you have to do in order to support extra languages? Perhaps ensure font support if loading from web, and the dictionary comes from Wiktionary so you do need to know what language it is, but other than that should 'just work', anything else?
Regarding new extra languages - good question :) Thankfully because of the way the code was written, not a lot of work is needed to support a new language. I went from just 1 language (Russian) to the ones I support now in just 1-2 days worth of work. Having said that, some languages are trickier. For example, Japanese needed more work on how the tokens (words/characters) are parsed and split in the UI (to be honest I'm still not sure about how well it works). Also, not all languages are created equal according to Wiktionary. Some languages have way more Wiktionary entries than others (e.g. Korean has fewer entries than Russian). Also, I use some NLP libs for tokenization and lemmatization which vary in accuracy depending on the language.
The whole idea of the project is to experiment with how much can language learning be automated. Can we enable more people to learn a new language if they do not have access to native speakers or teachers? So automating some parts might need some sacrifices in the quality of the material but quite frankly from my own experience the benefit outweighs the occasional wrong word here and there :)
On mobile, I just tested the default French lesson. Right now, the 'dictionary' seems to be displayed dependent on where the last appearance of the word in the text. This means that if I select a word in the first paragraph but the word also appears in the last paragraph, I have to scroll to the bottom to see its definition (and add it to 'my list'). (ex: 'protestaires' in the default FR lesson) The column, in mobile view, gets bumped to the bottom.
I don't think you have to go as far as a modal window - something as simple as 'position:fixed' would let it pop on top of the text (though right now, the dictionary box doesn't have a defined independent class and is not contained). It's probably best for the large-screen view as well: you don't want your text body to be moving around while reading.
But seriously, this is one of the simplest, smartest and most extensible language learning tools I've come across. Thank you for sharing it.
edit// It's a FF/Webkit quirk, but because the parent element (.bx--content) has 'transform' property applied to it, it will prevent the child div from actually responding to 'position:fixed'.
Yes, I know that the dictionary experience on mobile is suboptimal. When I started this project I thought most people would access it on desktop but I couldn't be more wrong :) Most people use it on mobile. I released this week a couple of audio fixes for mobile browsers but didn't get to the dictionary issues. I will fix it pretty soon!
Thanks for noticing and keep using it and sharing your thoughts.
So I retried. Now I have two of the same lessons. How can I delete?
Also, is the text-to-speech defined by the voices on the local machine? Because I'm getting the playback in native language only. (The target lang voice is installed...) (edit: had french/canada installed and I guess it doesn't count...)
Also, is there a more appropriate place for me to provide feedback/ask questions?
The text-to-speech uses Speech synthesis from the Web Speech API and I wish it worked seamlessly on all browsers but it doesn't. Are you using it on mobile? If yes and your device is a Samsung one please check that you are using Google's TTS engine and not Samsung's.
"You can pick which one by going to the Settings app, then Controls->Language and input->Text-to-speech options. Select the gear icon next to Google Text-to-speech Engine, then under Language you can update the exact locale you want to use. If you select "Install voice data" you can even select from a sample of different voices for some locales. You need to restart the device after changing this setting for it to take effect."
Yes, please shoot me an email at admin @ talkabl.com and let's pick it up from there :) Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.
I picked French and clicked the "Listen to the lesson" button. But what I got was my computer speaking French words as though they were English. Even my French accent, almost fifty years after failing my high school French exams, is better.
:-)
Can anyone tell me how to make it speak French French instead of Franglais? Apart from that it looks interesting.
Are you using it on mobile? If yes and your device is a Samsung one please check that you are using Google's TTS engine and not Samsung's.
"You can pick which one by going to the Settings app, then Controls->Language and input->Text-to-speech options. Select the gear icon next to Google Text-to-speech Engine, then under Language you can update the exact locale you want to use. If you select "Install voice data" you can even select from a sample of different voices for some locales. You need to restart the device after changing this setting for it to take effect."
Let me know if you got it working. You can also switch browser to check if it works on a different one. I really wish Web speech API was more consistent.
I'll have a look at this though. Thanks for sharing.
- Go mad because you don't understand a word of what's happening around you for the first time in your life.
- Decide to do something about it.
- Take a three week university summer introductory course. Erasmus courses area great idea.
- Always actively speak the language when in native company.
- Pick up at least the basics from news broadcasts.
- Read childrens' books and written press.
- Study five common new words a day from my actual use (speaking, listening, reading) using a spaced repetition algorithm. The article mentions ankiweb. It's stellar. Picking from your own use tailors to your needs and interests. It also makes finding example phrases easier.
That worked rather well for me getting to CEFR[0] C1 in Latvian.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...
Which does make sense for children, in English for example learning as a first language 'and on the dog's log, a cat was sitting gracefully' (mental block for a more basic adverb than 'gracefully' here) might be perfectly natural and simple, but for an adult ESL learner... it's not great. At the point where an adult's learning vocabulary like 'dog', 'log', (which er.. actually I don't know in Hindi) and 'cat', they don't want awkward grammar like past continuous 'was sitting', less common adverb position, subordinate clauses. Better would be 'a cat gracefully sat on the dog's log' grammar, but with more interesting vocabulary. Not because you won't ever say dog or cat, but because by the time you're reading to advance your second language you already know those words. It's easier to learn a different language for an idea you already know a way of communicating than it is for a child to comprehend meaning at the same time as learning the word.
And also more simply, they're targeted at children, and not interesting. It would be great if there were easy-reading second language books aimed at adults (in terms of subject matter / story line, and vocabulary as above) - but I suppose it's just too niche, especially for less popular second languages.
IIRC the early language acquisition literature supports the idea that exposing a child to the sounds of a language (even without any actual instruction or even requiring the child to pay particular attention to the person speaking) is enough to make it much easier for them to understand and produce that language later in life.
- started summer 2013
- kept up the anki thing for about half a year
- spent about 30% of my time there in 2014, 2015, 2016, and 15% of 2017
- regularly had Latvian friends visit since 2018
Wikipedia lists four surviving descendants of the Eastern Baltic branch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltic_languages#Eastern_Balti... : Latvian, Latgalian, Lithuanian and Samogitian. Though apparently Latgalian and Samogitian are frequently considered dialects of Latvian and Lithuanian respectively. So in a way it's tautological that related languages don't have high mutual intelligibility since otherwise they'd likely be considered dialects of the same language.
But for a counter-example, take the Scandinavian languages. They're always treated as different languages, even though they're highly mutually intelligible. Then there are the Czech and Slovak languages, extremely similar but not considered dialects.
It's incredible how many doors even basic language skills opened...
The volume of content in your target language available on youtube alone is enough to last you a lifetime. Not to mention all the channels specifically catered to teaching the language. Then the online tutoring marketplaces - you can be directly connected to a tutor from a country that speaks your language natively and remotely schedule 1:1 lessons at your convenience via video conferencing software. Plus the availability of language partner sites to practice if you're on a budget.
The biggest problem in my opinion is people struggling with self directed learning, more than anything. A college level course is likely going to be objectively worse than self directed study with targeted goals, but many people dont have a clear goal of what they're trying to achieve in their target language other than a vague sense of fluency, myself included. If your language goal is to become fluent in a language, that's a goal with no defined end in sight.
*if you are an English speaker.
Otherwise you have to do an extra hop.
native -> English -> target
but I agree it's still the best time in history to learn a language.
Not if your target language is danish. Danish YouTube somehow never evolved beyond clickbaity reaction videos and Minecraft letsplays. There are good danish YouTubers[1][2], but they present their material in english. Your best bet for danish content that won't cause acute brain rot, is probably music and film clips, or VPN'ing your way to the danish state broadcaster www.dr.dk. It's like BBC, but with more rødgrød.
Such as (no affiliation): [1]https://www.youtube.com/user/brainiac75 [2]https://www.youtube.com/user/SirNetrom1
> many people dont have a clear goal of what they're trying to achieve in their target language other than a vague sense of fluency
> If your language goal is to become fluent in a language, that's a goal with no defined end in sight
This is why I like tests that 'proof' the level (e.g. CEFR, HSK, NLPT, and so on) It does not make anyone better and does not really proof that one can converse in the language, but for me as a learner it is a nice goal to have. I can study by myself and know what I am learning for (the test for the next level)
Fluency just comes with it imo and needs immersion and practise anyway. Practise would mean application of the things learnt before
There are some positives. The community is very active and helpful. They've done a lot better with the lessons. Japanese, for example, is much improved. It used to be that you'd get exercises in hiragana with no context at all.
I agree with the other post, you'll get much more out of a two hour class once a week than doing ten minutes of duolinguo a day. The claim that x hours is equivalent to a university semester is nonsense.
Your question was about optimality. It doesn't take much classroom time to get good - maybe two or three courses? (say 60 hours to A2/B1) That gets you enough of a baseline that you can start watching TV, reading papers. For example in our B1 lessons for Spanish, we'd actually read El País as an exercise.
At the time I was also dating a native speaker and we would watch Spanish TV with English subs as well as English TV with Spanish subs. I still have a lot of friends who are native Spanish speakers which helps.
No idea about Fluenz, sorry. One of my friends used Lingoda for German and seemed to have a decent time with it. They also do language marathons where you get a significant discount if you do daily lessons, but it's easy to miss one and then you don't get a refund.
Professional (and experienced) teachers are careful to not use vocabulary that's beyond your level, but at the same time a good class will be taught solely in the target language. In that sense I would seriously look at Lingoda if you can't attend evening classes. You get structured lessons with real people with very flexible scheduling. I don't know what qualifications the teachers are required to have though, and it's important as a beginner that you have people who know how to teach (and aren't just regurgitating the material).
For Spanish, Instituto Cervantes (similarly for German you have the Goethe Institute) is the de facto international language school and you can mostly guarantee the teachers will be good.
There's no point doing higher levels on duolingo - if you actually want to learn a language to conversational level and beyond then proceed directly to memorising vocabulary with spaced repetition software such as Anki. It is much more effective.
The person who might benefit from higher levels on duolingo is the traveller who does not aim for conversational level but wants to pick up enough words to get by.
- Go mad because you don't understand a word of what's happening around you for the first time in your life.
- Decide to do something about it.
- Take a three week university summer introductory course. Erasmus courses area great idea.
- Always actively speak the language when in native company.
- Pick up at least the basics from news broadcasts.
- Read childrens' books and written press.
- Study five common new words a day from my actual use (speaking, listening, reading) using a spaced repetition algorithm. The article mentions ankiweb. It's stellar. Picking from your own use tailors to your needs and interests. It also makes finding example phrases easier.
That worked rather well for me getting to CEFR[0] C1 in Latvian.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...
So 100% live conversation, with a rising percentage of reading material after achieving some small degree of fluency.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7Xj3rGu1T0
I know it's not a great suggestion during the time of covid. I wonder if the online language exchange apps provide for different forms of interaction? The ability to show a picture or flip through a magazine or picture-book simultaneously with mouse pointer visibility on both sides would be nice.
Also a fun thing to to is read the Bible in multiple languages since it is translated into nearly everything and has free high quality audiobooksnfor everything but this can sometimes teach you arcane grammar and useless vocab but I find it useful anyway since you get side by sife comparison and can read along and have a massive corpus which probably infpunced the modern culture a lot. Try reading a language you just learned next to the next one you're learning, skipping your mother tongue.
I’m not sure how it is in the US, but in the UK we don’t even get taught the grammar of English. No one knows grammatical terms, like preposition, person, the name of tenses, the subjunctive, or even simple ones like verbs, adjective, adverbs and nouns.
When you don’t even know formally how your own language is structured, it is very difficult to learn another language.
For example, my mother (native French-speaker) gives private French lessons. She finds that instead of saying “ok today we’re going to learn about the subjunctive mood, the root is the third person plural of the indicative mood of the verb with the following endings”, she spends most of her time having to explain what those terms mean.
I realise that there may be other ways that are less formal to learn languages, but at the end of the day, grammars follow rules, and if you don’t even understand the rule book in your own language you’re already at a huge disadvantage in my opinion.
All these online articles claiming “don’t worry about grammar, that will come later” are missing out on what I think is the most important tool in language learning.
When you constantly switch between those languages in terms of grammar, you realize how different those languages are. I didn't realize that in the beginning and I still have a habit of translating sayings from German into English that just don't make any actual sense.
If you really want to learn a language, you need to learn the grammar, even if it isn't any fun.
While adults can learn second languages, very few can just pick up the grammar as they did with their native languages as children. For most adults, if we want to learn how to speak and write a second language with reasonable accuracy, we have to study the grammar explicitly. Practicing in immersive situations also helps a lot, of course.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period_hypothesis
Perhaps it depends on the language you start with and the one you learn but small children seem to pick things up very rapidly by immersion.
It took each of my children roughly six months to learn Norwegian from the age of three when they went to kindergarten. We kept them at home until then to make sure that they would be fluent in English, then sent them to kindergarten where they learned Norwegian without any formal lessons at all, and within a year they were indistinguishable from the natives.
Additionally, for really foreign languages (e.g. English vs Chinese) knowing in what order to place words and whether words are needed at all is of great help.
Both parts are needed.
The really significant upside that I think people tend to gloss over is that my pronunciation is pretty much perfect, because I’d learn to say things by just repeating what I’d heard. On the phone people can’t tell I’m not a native speaker.
It isn't like you think about grammar forever.
And by the way: I had formal language training, for adults. Immersive, even: I am in the target country, spent 15 hours a week in class with other immigrants, and was taught by a native speaker. Most of the learning was introducing new word groups and practicing speaking and listening. A little bit was grammar, though, for specifically the reason I listed.
This is interesting because in India schools do teach grammar and grammatical terms. I thought they copied it from the UK school system. May be UK used to teach grammar before 1947 (when India got independence) and then they stopped teaching it.
The US teaches most terms. It's pretty important to know what prepositions are, and how adjectives and adverbs differ. Lots of more complex topics do come up, but kids don't listen. It's not immediately applicable to their life so it goes in one ear and out the other. Plenty of people say also schools need to teach how to balance a checkbook and teach some basic finance. They do--but kids aren't paying attention, because no 5th grader should be out there balancing checkbooks for quite a few years, and no kid really cares what a "preposition" is either until they're learning another language or trying to improve their writing and suddenly need to dig back into those memory banks.
But people who say to not study grammar usually don't make progress. What's worse is some people say "don't worry. Our language has no grammar." Every language has some basic rules to learn. The problem is some textbooks heavily front load some formal grammar because a lot of adult learning materials are focused on business usage, and they come with the implication that somehow a person is going to go from zero to handling diplomatic meetings in a month.
Japanese textbooks are notoriously bad for emphasizing very formal speech (sometimes even excessively formal speech) before delving into more casual stuff that people will use 90% of the time. Then you meet a person and the grammar you've studied doesn't align with most of what's immediately practical, and it's easy to conclude it "doesn't matter".
Oh, everyone in school will have been taught concepts like past tense and pluralisation.
But often you can apply concepts just fine without having memorised the precise technical term for that concept. You can write just fine without understanding sentence diagrams, as surely as you can lift a box without understanding free body force diagrams.
It may well differ between schools, though.
Though having learned French from two very different teachers, I'll say I'm not at all convinced that focusing on the grammar is helpful until people have reached a relatively advanced level.
My first teacher was very formal and went through the grammar in detail from the start. My second, in an intensive course at university, focused on immersion instead - she started speaking French to us almost exclusively from the very first lesson (which included people who had never had French before), and the focus was on speaking, with an insistence that everyone in class participated every lesson. The second course brought those who had never spoken French previously to a conversational level much faster.
My French teacher fully explained the grammar most of which passed me by since, certainly in my case, one doesn't really rationalise their own language in terms of technicalities.
My German teacher just pitched up on day one and spoke nothing but German. Two years later I was absolutely none the wiser. I could quite honestly have been listening to white noise.
That anybody "picks up" a language is something I am amazed by.
The structure meant both that we were forced to try and that the teacher knew at any point how we were doing.
She is an exceptional teacher. If only every teacher were that good, that dedicated.
"They" attempted to teach me both French and German and in both cases I quite literally had no idea what was going on. A* pupil in English and English Literature.
I am sure it is different today but certainly in the '80s and into the '90s you could arrive in senior school with perfect English and no idea why.
The shocker for me was that I'd spent my whole short life up until that point just correctly intuiting all of the weird grammar modifications and then suddenly I couldn't. Any attempt to explain went right over my head as the framework to explain them was just missing.
I think the step from "slowly doing grammar while I try to understand" to "I'm so good at grammar that I just understand" doesn't work that way.
I was taught English from 6 to 18 in a very traditional, strict, grammar-driven way and learned nothing. All spaniards go through the same type of lessons and very few can understand anything at all after years.
At 18 I stopped any classes or studying but I got satellite TV, English computing magazines and shortly afterwards the Internet and then just learned all the English I needed to get by without much conscious effort.
A few years ago I got interested in Danish and in about 4 months I could read regular novels at a decent pace just from Duolingo, newspapers and subtitled TV series. I probably could do the same with any language just with enough motivation.
I think most people would be best served learning a language by not learning about any grammar 'rules' at all (maybe some simplified rules of thumb here and there for illustration and anchoring of skills - I'm not saying everyone should have to build their own grammar mental models from scratch through osmosis, but they should be introduced after a basic level of competence with the construct, not up front). As is remarked above - I'm sure this is a convenient way of teaching, because you can just tick off boxes of discrete 'components' ('does my student know the rules to conjugate in this and this past tense? check!), but there is a weak correlation to actually being able to use the language.
I learned most of my language skills in both English and French by listening to rap music, transcribing it, translating into Dutch (my native language), repeating it and mimicking pronunciation etc. If anything, having to learn the grammar rules made the actual language acquisition harder. My best French teacher was one who, after asking in desperation 'how can I get you boys to be interested in learning French?' and me (mockingly) suggesting we analyse some MC Solaar CD's, then actually went out and got some of those, and contacted her Parisien neice to give us some of the backstory on the slang used in them, too.
Then again, I'm bitter about many of the traditional teaching methods and I have no proof my anecdote scales to the general population, so my opinion is worth about as much as... well, something that's pretty worthless I guess...
I have taught myself Swedish listening to Sveriges Radio, reading and translating news articles and following a series of short Swedish lessons on youtube. I pick up grammar as I go along rather than learn it formally. I don't use flash cards, duolingo or rote memorisation. The key thing is to read, write, listen and pronounce - form sentences and use the language rather than work on memorising vocabulary (that comes naturally).
What works for Swedish might not work for many other languages.
This just isn't true. It might have been true for you, but it isn't true 'in the UK', and most likely you've just forgotten because it wasn't and hasn't been important to you; it's on the national curriculum.
> When you don’t even know formally how your own language is structured, it is very difficult to learn another language.
Absolutely agree with that, and it's worth learning more and revising what you were taught when at school in the UK if you choose to learn another language.
It's also (one reason) why 'Latin is useless' is bollocks. Latin has a more 'complete' grammar than (modern) English, by which I mean that it has more cases, conjugations, etc. that are productive, and which take differing forms. It can be difficult to get your head around two different constructions in a language being learnt if both take the same form in English; they probably don't in Latin.
I've never learnt Latin formally, but I've tried to pick a tiny bit up, and I tend to look to Latin grammar and resources rather than English in my pursuit of Hindi.
But the rest? I don't remember them being taught them at all. I went to school in Northern Ireland starting in 1999, I thought the "national curriculum" covered all of the UK but it turns out NI has its own so that may have something to do with it.
I'm an avid amateur linguist so perhaps I'm letting my own perceptions of what is important colour what I think should be important to other people.
In England, most of these basic concepts are introduced in primary school. These terms are introduced in Year 2 (age 6-7): noun, noun phrase, statement, question, exclamation, command, compound, suffix, adjective, adverb, verb, tense (past, present), apostrophe, comma[1, p66].
How much grammar is taught has changed -- it's more now than it was in the 1990s or 2000s -- but certainly "simple ones like verbs, adjective, adverbs and nouns" have always been taught.
Children who paid no attention in English lessons should get a second opportunity to learn in modern language lessons (e.g. French).
A Danish language school I attended filtered people into "professional" and "non-professional" groups. The "professional" group saved time by assuming students understood "the subjunctive mood…" etc.
[1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
As you've communicated, a major difference between native speakers and non-native speakers is that native speakers usually don't know or care about the grammar of the language they speak. They learn it through a series of dopamine hits they get from successfully understanding or being understood. If people who regularly and naturally use the subjunctive don't know the word "subjunctive" and can barely understand or repeat an explanation given of it, how important could it be to fluency?
In her case, the target language is Spanish, so she does courses from Domestika: https://www.domestika.org/
If you've enjoyed a non-fiction book in English, for example, pick up the equivalent translation in your target language. It lets you compare and contrast; and the experience can also be richer.
This definitely requires good discipline, but it is rewarding :-)
[+] using the reference "B2" or "C1" from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...
Be wary though, not all translations are created equal, there might be errors or divergences.
I remember the Russian version translated "I will go so far as to send you on this adventure" incorrectly as "I went all this way because of you" or some such. (And a number of other blunders of this sort.)
Also one of the Stephenson's Baroque Cycle books had "men-of-war" translated to Czech as literally "warriors".
It's a good approach overall though.
1. 1h lesson every Sunday with a professional Cantonese teacher from italki.com (native speaker from Hong Kong) 2. Focus on pattern recognition of character radicals, write with pen and paper 30 new vocab words per week. Starting on Monday, I would prepare the words of the week, focusing on utility. Then, I would write each word every morning 10-15 times. Thankfully, my memory would never forget a character after doing this approach. 3. Focus on listening and reading advanced content with an OCR translator handy, even if it was very uncomfortable, difficult, I would not stop until I 100% understood a paragraph down to its nuances 4. Keep a handy grammar book or resource cheat sheet, covering particular grammar edge cases 5. Conversation practice every day with my girlfriend, with the goal of pushing myself into uncomfortable territory by trying to express complex ideas and not just talk about the weather 6. Native speaking intonation practice every Saturday, focusing on all the different phonemes and listening to various native speakers pronounce sounds I had a hard time enunciating, such as the `ng` sound or `j` vs. `ch` in Cantonese. Cantonese has 6 tones in HK and 9 tones in the regional variants in Guangdong, so it's important to master them and understand all the nuances of their pitch differences. 7. Write, write, write. Attempt to gather thoughts first in my native tongue, then try my best to translate a paragraph using my Cantonese vocab so far and learn new words in the process.
It's worth noting this takes up the majority of my free time, essentially being my major "hobby" as I have a goal of fluency within the next few years.
It's a tough world out there for anyone learning a Chinese language that isn't Mandarin. Overall, I learned there _are_ indeed resources and people are more than willing to help. If anyone is learning Cantonese, please DM me and I'd be happy to share more information.
Finally, it really is a dying language and I myself struggled with squaring the effort I was putting in with the perceived benefit I would get from it -- it was largely an attempt at filial piety, so that I could speak with my wife's grandparents and also demonstrate respect, but then they passed away. Nowadays I hear that Cantonese isn't even taught in schools in Hong Kong. The writing is on the wall for the language.
I was amazed that the local community college in my hometown had Cantonese for a long time (before finally giving up and shuttering it about 7 years ago).
http://www.cantonese.sheik.co.uk/ is a great resource for anybody learning Cantonese.
I grew up in San Diego and took like four Spanish classes and even some in college. But never really learned verbal skills and did not use it since school.
I moved to Playas de Tijuana a few years ago to save money. For more than a year I made really minimal efforts to practice my Spanish though. It was not usually necessary since a lot of the people here speak okay English. I usually just take an Uber and it wasn't very important. And since my Spanish was horrible, often it felt counterproductive to try.
But the last several months I have been making a deliberate modest effort to practice. And I feel like I am slowly getting less hopeless.
But I would say if you are going for the immersion route and are lazy (practical?) like me, you might actually have to go somewhere kind of far (definitely not right next to the border) to find a place where you really need to use it a lot due to lack of English in the population. Here it is a little too easy to find people who are fluent in English.
Part of the challenge for me is that I didn't want to sound like an idiot. I decided to just accept that and now I pretend that verb tenses don't exist (I was pretty good at them in high school but that was like 25 years ago) and it makes it much easier. Lol.
Fosh wowk gutegow natim. Im gut kowltim.
Bonus clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFNuGjqjyQo
From my pov, that just means that you'd rather exercise your patience than the target language, because you you have control over your patience and kindness, and you don't have control over the target language (it's a scarier position to be in.)
All the things he lists are consuming the language though (reading/listening), not speaking it. Which is a great start, don't get me wrong, but having to find the correct words and form a sentence is something else than understanding one.
Reason I ask is I have become very interested in the origin of languages over the last year or so (partially because of Covid). I've been learning German and French for a while now and I find the most difficult parts of learning these languages to be the grammar. I'd like to find a hierarchy of grammar for related languages, and see if there are some patterns that filter down through the child languages. I have a Latin textbook (probably need to dust that off), and am very interested in how these languages (Romance and Germanic) are all stitched together.
Plus, the short format makes it relatively painless, even when your reading comprehension is a little slow. Novels and news were always a slog to me, but a few lines of text feels more manageable. (And less daunting if you have to grab the dictionary.)
AFAIR it depends not on physical country you're in, but on Accept-Language sent by your browser. You can edit your browser's preferred langs and you'll get a different suggestions of languages. I saw it explained (maybe even here on HN) by someone from Netflix as "it's a feature™ to prevent having too long list of languages in UI".
I also recommend Flowlingo for reading practice. It lets you visit websites or read e-books with tap-to-translate. The killer feature is that every word you tap gets entered into a spaced-repetition deck for later review. It's a great way to build and maintain your higher-register vocabulary with words you wouldn't ordinarily use in everyday speech.
This alone will considerably improve your target language comprehension, especially when it comes with common expressions, slang and small talk
Learned English from reading Comics and watching e.g. Fawlty Towers in the end.
If you learn something else you might never use it as much as you have used English above. If your personal experience puts you in an experience where a different language is needed, knowing that language will have a large ROI. Knowing a language tends lead you to experiences where knowledge of that language is useful, even if the language is useless to the rest of us.