Notes on Learning Languages | Hacker News Reader

Notes on Learning Languages

lukesmith.xyz

45 pointsjfax27 comments

The author of this article might have a language learning system that works for him but this article is not helpful for language learner. Learning a foreign language is a complicated process due to different needs of individual learner. The author makes a sweeping statement without detail description of the learning process is not helpful for people who might want to try his way of learning.

Let me give an example what different student background and learning environment will impact the learning process. I know very little English when I emigrated to US when I was 13. I started high school after 6 months in the US. The school had no Chinese speaking teaching staff( Mandarin is my native language). Since I do not know much English to begin with. I don't think anyone can teach me English using what Author proposed. I built up my vocabulary one word at the time until I know enough word to understand young adult novels. Reading many young adult novels helped to increase my vocabulary quickly and I was able to catch up within 3 years and managed to graduate from high school and enter University.

My English deteriorated after I have been back to Asia for 20 years but hopefully I get my point across.

No, vocabulary is the most important part of learning a language if you want to use to it to actually communicate, or consume media in that language. And learning vocabulary takes a lot of time. You can join exactly zero conversations about everyday topics without knowing at least a few hundred, better a few thousand words. You can't even read stories for toddlers without knowing a few hundred words. Grammar won't help you understand sentences if all the meaning you extract is Noun (singular, female) Verb (present tense) Object (plural, neutral).

Learning grammar on the other hand is relatively easy, because there are far fewer rules to remember and you naturally develop a "feeling" for correct sentence structure after you've used the language enough, even passively.

I agree, vocabulary is the most important part. I emigrated to US when I was 13 and I understand English very little at that time. I remember how difficult it was to read the textbook in high school. It took 3 years to catch up. It is just impossible to understand without know what the words mean.

If you wish to undertand and to be understood, I agree that vocabulary is very important.

I assume from the class of errors you made (understand instead of understood; know instead of knowing) that your native language doesn’t have verb tense like Chinese. But it doesn’t matter if these small grammatical errors are made, because native speakers can still understand sentences with flawed grammar. However, if you are missing vocabulary you will have a hard time understanding what other people are saying, and when you speak you end up spending a lot of time trying to describe words you don’t know in terms of words you do know.

I did not read the article and agree that vocabulary is crucial.

However just trying to memorize vocabulary is not the best approach. The reason is that it's hard to memorize vocabulary without associating certain emotions and experiences with them.

Actually using the language daily, even if you only know 100 words is the most important part. You will learn and memorize new words much quicker that way.

Another good practical approach is to change your computer's OS language to the target language as soon as possible - you'll have to remember new words fast and those words will stick forever!

I don't think thats a big revelation or secret though.

If you have someone with the iron patience needed to converse with you using a heavily restricted vocabulary: awesome. For the casual home learner I recommend learning words in context. For example using something like https://digitalwords.net/anki/tatoeba-audio/index.eng.html, or a hand-mined deck with sentences from things you read or heard. I've made good progress by reading the news and children's books and adding words I didn't understand. Many languages have easy news for children or foreigners (e.g. News in Slow German: https://www.dw.com/en/langsam-gesprochene-nachrichten-learni...)

Great resources.

I can also recommend language exchange platforms as a great tool to make new friends and have regular conversations and practice speaking in foreign languages.

Hard disagree. Give me a person with great pronunciation, ability to differentiate minimal pairs and decent grammar with only 400 words in their repertoire and they will be better language users in no time than any person with a +5000 vocabulary but crappy grammar and pronunciation. Vocabulary is the easiest part to get by daily usage, for the others you have to do a conscious and constant effort.

I think it depends on how you learn vocabulary. If somebody learns a bunch of vocabulary on context, then he will naturally acquire grammar and pronunciation compared to somebody who learns off context.

As others have already noted, vocabulary is the most important aspect with regards to learning a language to a good-enough extent; that is, with regards to making oneself capable of constructing sentences (as non-grammatical as they may be, or as unconventional as they may sound to a native or to a fluent individual, in spite of being deemed "technically correct") that can be understood by other people competent in a given language.

However, vocabulary acquisition shouldn't be constrained to the typical or more salient nouns and adjectives. It is absolutely crucial to acquaint oneself with discourse markers (adverbs, prepositional phrases, etcetera), conjunctions, auxiliary verbs, and other less markedly semantic and more functional elements. The main goal throughout the entire process should be becoming capable of producing intelligible sentences right off the bat about anything that crosses one's mind, without many hiccups. Of course, grammar, phonetics, and phonology must be taken into account as well, and a good grounding on their mechanisms is indispensable for anyone that aims to be proficient.

I'm writing a manual on language learning right now, and I've spent a very long time thinking and testing many different hypotheses and methods I've come up with through the years. It's quite an interesting topic, but I reckon many of the considerations that would make one proficient in learning languages can also be applied to any other learning process (learning to code, learning to play a musical instrument...), so it is probable that adopting a more general perspective would be beneficial.

> vocabulary acquisition shouldn't be constrained to the typical or more salient nouns and adjectives

My recent research finding (that needs to be confirmed with new data I collected) is that East-Asian L2 learners of English have a gap in knowledge of adjectives/adverbs in comparison of nouns. The nouns causing them problem are in the 3000 frequency vocabulary band while the adj/adv they don’t know are in the 2000 frequency band. That’s a very huge gap. So you are totally right that other part of speech that nouns should be given more attention.

Vocabulary acquisition is not easy. Human remember things through story. Initial phase of the vocabulary acquisition is very difficult since you need to remember one word at the time and it is very easy to forget. Once you have enough vocabulary to read sentence and progress to understand story then you have better chance to retain vocabulary at faster pace and less likely to forget the word.

Listening is also a skill that people overlook. You need to train the ear to pick up how people pronounce a specific language otherwise it will just sound like noise. Let me give you an example: I have a 4 years old son. He likes cartoon. English speaking cartoon sounds like garbled noise to him. I know because he try to recreate the conversation and it came out like garbled noise. I prompt him with some word with Chinese translation before he watch video then gradually he can recognize the word in the video and gave me correct translation after I asked him.

I think the bit about imitating a foreign accent in order to sound more like a native in your target language is one of the better pieces of advice in this post; at least, doing so has worked pretty well for me in the languages I’ve tried to study so far.

It’s not always a benefit to quickly pick up the phonology, though. When native speakers hear a foreigner speaking with such a non-foreign accent, they tend to assume that I know the language a lot better than I really do, and I find myself asking people to slow down and repeat quite often...

> mass-memorizing words as if they're an Asian studying for a chemistry test.

Is this appropriate language to use?

He's offensive as hell in his vids on youtube too, so I think he's just a jerk

Stereotypical but not inappropriate. Using chemistry in this example is kinda bad, anyone that studied it knows that it's much less memorization and much more understanding that is involved.

Perpetuating racial stereotypes isn't inappropriate?

In this case it's a positive cultural stereotype not a racial one.

It is a racial stereotype, because it literally invokes race. It's also not positive if it helps reinforce beliefs that Asians are unreflective drones that are good at piano and math but lack personality and originality.

> It's also not positive if it helps reinforce beliefs that Asians are unreflective drones that are good at piano and math but lack personality and originality.

That's just like, your opinion, man

> Using chemistry in this example is kinda bad

That is the bad part? SOME white people (I mean crazies like Steve Sailer, not the average HN user) have a funny worldview. When white people perform better than black/latino people in tests, It is because of genetics. When East-Asian people perform better than white it is because they are mindless drones that only are good for rote memorization tests and creativity is a better marker for intelligence anyway.

The argument against needing to learn vocabulary seems to ignore the problem of understanding native speakers who are talking to you. I can certainly say a lot of things with some creative use of a small vocab, but I won't have a clue what people are saying to me.

More generally, I think language learning can be a bit like dieting, in that there are a lot of complicated individual factors, and the method that works for a given person is the one that motivates them and that they actually persist with.

Having watched my children learning foreign languages, I believe there's no single way of doing it, hence the article is somewhat quick to reach conclusions.

My son was not interested in learning a foreign language until 8, we bribed him with a long summer holiday in US that year if he consistently reach a daily goal in English on Duolingo (30 or 50 xp, I can't remember). He did that for six months and when he got comfortable with the language, we also bought a Kindle and bombarded him with books and videos. Two and a half years later at 10 yo, he scored 690/800 on SAT. He's a scientific thinking person, quite intelligent, loves working on math olympiad problems and consumes insane amount of content in English from YouTube. But he doesn't have a photographic memory and not interested in learning another language, maybe Gaelic as an unknown-to-us inside joke in his math olympian community.

My daughter is 8. She can speak English, German very well along with Turkish as the native language. She's working on Chinese now. For German she used Duolingo daily, every second-hand Lustiges Taschenbuch we can acquire in Turkey, Die Maus on iPad, channels from YouTube (from Peppa Pig in German to Checker Can|Tobi|Julian) etc [1]. When she first actually talked in German for an hour, it was after more than two years from starting learning it, and she managed almost perfectly according the lady she was talking with. She's not that much interested in science as my son, totally not into math, more of an athlete/jumper/dancer with way less attention span. Language learner is one of the identities she describes herself with.

For my two children with two different personalities, consistent daily introductory work on Duolingo or similar apps followed with lots of online content worked really well.

[1] In terms of quality (but not quantity) of the resources, we found German is much better than English for kids.

I get really annoyed when people needlessly go hard on duolingo. Is it perfect? No. Should you only use duolingo? Probably not. But it's still a great learning tool and I've personally gotten a lot out of it

Vocabulary is still kind of important. I think that learning the top 3000 words in any language will get you far. Start with 100, then 500, then 1000 etc.

My memory being quite spatial, I was intrigued that given the compactness of Chinese words, a good sized n-most-common-words working vocabulary, in a small font, would fit in 1080p.

I pictured an electron app, with words ordered by usage frequency, with mouseover for translation and speech, dynamic colorization for various relationships, and a window for browsing chinese websites, with their content tied back to the pane of words. I've never seen anything like that, but for me it had a feel of "but of course - how else would I best go about learning to read Chinese?"

> Vocabulary is the least important part of learning a language.

This is the first heading I read and it’s good the author write it upfront because I know his page is total bullshit.

Vocabulary is the most important thing in language learning since even without any grammar you can get basic communication done ("I hungry, please pizza"), while you can master all the grammar of a language you won’t go far without vocabulary.

Also while it’s good to give an opinion on the internet, it’s better to look at the half century of research in the field, starting by Nation book(s).

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