Hacker News Reader

Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, learning a foreign language is strictly a data game. Get as much input data as possible (hopefully with some sort of translation or aid), and keep at it. Textbooks don't help because you don't learn a language as a list of rules, being afraid of making mistakes doesn't help because it gets in the way of getting more data, and any sort of "quality over quantity" is the wrong approach.

Consume as much of the language as possible, as fast as possible, while still roughly understanding what you're reading. Don't do it so quickly that you have no idea what you're reading, but don't spend time trying to memorize each and every word and concept.

View on HN

What level of proficiency have you achieved? As a B2 in English, I cannot fully agree with you.

The method you pick depends on your goals of learning the language. If you want to simply read and listen - sure, your method might do.

If you want to actually communicate in a language with native speakers, especially in a business environment where every mistake can cost you good impression, then you'll need some information which can be really hard to take from something else than textbooks. For example, conjugation tables, which can be quite lengthy for languages such as Russian or Arabic. Textbook creators have put some effort to make these tables, and I don't see any benefit to discard this effort.

I'm a non native speaker who has reached native-level fluency in English, and I have never looked at a conjugation table in my life. The only experience I have is thousands of hours of reading/listening, and maybe a couple hundred hours of speaking.

Right, but you started as a child, spent a lot of time in an English-speaking environment and (presumably) had teachers who would identify language mistakes in your homework.

BTW I think most native speakers would write 'non-native' instead of 'non native'.

Also English has the easiest verb conjugation of nearly all languages but Esperanto.

English does not have many different conjugations or verb inflections. Russian has lots.

Yet Russian people learn the language just as OP did. Those tables serve at best as references to be consulted rarely, not as an organic learning material, that would be insanity.

They do, they start as toddlers, they practice the language 24/7, and they have a decade to master it. Adult people simply don't have this luxury. Kids are not really a model for learning as an adult.

Learning is an effort that needs to be put. Preferably, in a time frame narrow enough you don't forget why you even started learning. And when optimizing the language learning process, grammar tables are useful.

Kids actually learn really slowly when you think about it.

I have learned Russian at around 10 years and Engish at 22 and in both cases grammar tables and rules were waste of time. After accumulating some initial vocabulary, the best route was to read books and watch tv.

A lot of time in school is spent learning grammar. And one (small) part of it is conjugation - you actually learn the rules. For situations where feel guides you wrong. Or for arguing - if there is disagreement you solve it y rules.

> What level of proficiency have you achieved?

In English, well, you've read my post, I'm conversational in Spanish and I've forgotten most of my German.

Sure, conjugation tables feel useful, but I've never actually noticed myself using the information. Instead, I use the information I've learned from speaking with native speakers and reading texts, and never from a rote recital of the rules.

I always thought that foreign languages are like programming languages- you don’t really know what you don’t know until you do formal study.

People that aren’t classically trained in either are usually easy to identify by those that are.

I think textbooks do help, immenesly, atleast for me, with the caveat that they are not there for you to help understand a language, learning to speak comes from understanding. Sure, you can learn without a formal grammar, but being an adult gives you an advantage over babies, who have to learn everything de novo.

I do think going through a basic textbook is important but imo they shouldn't be a part of your plan once you get through one or two. I learned all the rules of spanish grammar more or less in a few semesters in college, but it's just a stepping stone to help with getting tons of input. Like now that I've listened to hundreds of hours of spanish, i just get the subjunctive. Occasionally youtube will recommend me a youtube video explaining it and hearing the rules people throw around seem pretty useless. You hear them and think about them and go, huh, i guess that is true, but for learning I don't think it helps beyond having in the back of your mind as you consume the language, I wouldn't spend any time doing grammar drills or anything with them.

Something else people should keep in mind (i don't mean for this to apply to you, i just don't want to make a separate post) is that people will give you language learning advice and claim to speak a language when they can't watch tv, listen to podcasts, or read books in it. If you aspire to this kind of level (no judgement if you don't) do not listen to anyone who hasn't reached it.

How did textbooks help you? They help with giving you texts to read at your level, giving and translating examples, and with exercises, but I've found the "formal grammar" sort of rules entirely useless.

For me they shortened the time needed to actually learn the language. Admittedly I couldn't speak Italian now if my life depended on it, but a quick run through a textbook (personal emphasis was on conjugation rules and tenses) before spending more time on vocabulary made my trip to Italy much better because on hearing or reading a new verb I could identify the stem and work towards the meaning much faster than if I just heard a random conjugation of the verb without any idea of how to derive that stem. Even if I didn't have to look it up (could derive meaning from context), I could identify that it was a verb, what it's probable conjugations were and start using it much more rapidly than if I'd had to infer these rules from exposure. Especially on a short 2-week trip like I had.

There are textbooks that sit somewhere between "Baby's First Italian Reader" and "A First Course in Italian Grammar". A high school or college freshman text can be worked through pretty quickly by a motivated individual and are often more practical than the sort of textbook a pedantic grammarian might seek out, but faster than (only) trying to infer the rules from a participatory experience that isn't always easy to get.

How do you expect to pick apart a sentence without understanding the grammar? It would look like word soup.

When you read this sentence, do you parse it by logically analyzing which word is the subject, which the object and which the verb?

No, because English is my first language. German on the other hand is what I've learned as an adult and that's exactly what I'd do.

It must take you hours to read a paragraph, then.

It went much quicker after I learned the grammar!

It's not like I'm thinking up all the terms that a sentence could possibly consist of, and then finding them in the text. Reading left-to-right you know what kind of word to expect next. It also helps you fill in unknown words based on their context.

That is the approach that I advocate as well. I believe that if you manage to carefully craft a path of comprehensible and enjoyable input of slowly increasing complexity you can speed up the learning process. I have been working for the past two years on creating such a thing for the Japanese language. You can check it out here if you are intested : https://drdru.github.io/ ).

However I don't agree with what you say about textbooks. Being able to read the rules of the language stated explicitly is definitely useful (once you have some familiarity with the language).

Likewise. I have five observations:

The more words I know, the more likely I can recognize them as they flow by....

By flow I mean listening to the whole sentence, paragraph, and not trying to hang on every phoneme: Between context and the human tendency to repeat, chances are you'll get the gist, especially if there are key words you can pick out.

I find the most important things to learn are "how do say", "what is the word for", "can you please repeat, but more slowly, please", and "sorry for mangling your language".

Learn the lilt of the language, how speakers hold their mouths, and how people use their bodies: The more you sound like you know the language, a) the less likely they are to switch to English, and b) the more pleased they will be with the effort you are making.

People are remarkably forgiving of poor grammar when its seems you are making a genuine and respectful effort.

(Native English, near-native and fluent French, joual, and a few other regionalisms, conversational Spanish that would likely come back pretty quickly, porto-conversational Turkish that might come back, market Arabic that might come back, really bad Greek, enough Polish and German once upon a time to at least order beer and food and get from A to B.)

It's true, but only half the story. You'll only become functional in the language through trying to actually speak it. It's extremely important to have efforts focused on collecting data points, and efforts focused on conversing with real people.

That might be difficult with languages that are practically dead, like latin: if you are self studying there is no opportunity to speak it or hear it used in conversation, there are no movies, no radio, no tv in it, etc..

though a few modern books are translated into latin, including Harry Potter! But I bet scholars are doing that just for fun

Reply on news.ycombinator.com