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Comment by foldr | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of wishful thinking around language learning. The idea that some part of it will "just happen" naturally is very appealing. The unfortunate reality is that you meed lots of practice at everything: speaking, listening, reading and writing. You won't improve significantly at any one of those skills without many hundreds of hours of practice.

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>There's a lot of wishful thinking around language learning. The idea that some part of it will "just happen" naturally is very appealing. The unfortunate reality is that you meed lots of practice at everything

Not really. In actual life tons of people have learned to speak a second language naturally without any deliberate practice, books, etc, just by immigrating to another place and picking it up making acquantainces, working (e.g. menial jobs), and so on.

I interpreted the GGP to mean something like: think about how you learn your first language -- you spend a ton of time listening before trying to speak. Don't focus on speaking so soon. I don't think that is so much "wishful thinking" as an interesting strategy to consider.

I'd do it for spanish, but I can't find star trek with (latam) spanish audio.

I don't think so. Babies are constantly making sounds and trying to speak even when they have a very poor grasp on the language.

I personally learn much more from fumbling around with a language, and letting fluent speakers correct me, than I do from listening to it - though both are helpful. I recently had the opportunity to watch a lot of Spanish TV with a couple native Spanish speakers and I learned a ton from it. Through the commercial breaks I'd be repeating phrases from the show and asking them about it - or telling them my theories about what was going on in the show to see if I was understanding it.

There is little in common between language acquisition in kids and adults. And I have been reading the literature, and you have one research group that says it is the same, another saying it is different. Find me one kid (maybe there is one, but you get the idea) who is growing up in a household in which the local language is spoken and does not sound native when they speak.

Massive amounts of listening and reading is practice :)

Yes. It will make you better at listening and reading, but not at speaking.

Yes, like speaking will not make you better at comprehension, although comprehension is required to have any meaningful conversation. Speaking needs to be practiced, but input and understanding comes first.

I'm pretty sure the originally poster did not mean to never speak at all. But just not to worry about it for a while.

I don’t see any reason to delay practicing simple phrases like “Hello”, “How are you?”, etc., or practicing the pronunciation of the vocab that you’re learning. It takes years to be able to reliably comprehend naturalistic conversation. You can’t realistically delay speaking until that point.

You definitely can, but whether it's necessary to delay simple things like that, I'm not sure.

It's pretty simple to speak things that you've acquired (of course it'll be slow and awkward at first, but that's natural), I just don't think there's much point in trying to speak things you haven't already acquired.

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