Struggling to learn a new language? Blame it on your stable brain
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I'm going to shamelessly plug my project in case it might be useful for anyone here. A webapp to learn a language if you're in a relationship and learning it because you have a partner or spouse that speaks that language. It's still early, but I've been learning a third language as an adult for a while, and it helps to make use of a native speaker who is around you all the time. They can help train the ear as well. https://learncoupling.com
I learned conversational French, German, Russian and Spanish as an adult. The method that worked best for me is similar to what you mentioned. I watched as many shows as I could in the various languages. I listened to native language programming and attempted to read as much material in the languages as possible. While I was doing this, I was also working through Rosetta Stone, which worked well for me. I also went to language MeetUps and just absorbed the sounds and patterns of conversation.
When I did decide to join the conversation, I took on a philosophy of fearlessness and just went for it. Sure, many mistakes were made, but I had zero negative feedback from my attempts. When I later travelled, I adopted this same attitude. I knew I was going to make mistakes, but I generated a lot of goodwill for my attempts. Sometimes I got corrections, sometimes I had to repeat myself, sometimes I would get an answer back in English, whatever! No one ever shamed me and my skills continued to improve.
Whenever I'm traveling abroad I always make an attempt to learn a few hundred words, some phrases, and how to sting together simple sentences. With very few exceptions, the attempt is usually greeted with amusement and a polite response. People were down right thrilled in Hungary, and the Portuguese are in my experience quite happy to suffer through you attempt.
Love the Yale romanization for your included Cantonese flash cards! Definitely going to check this out.
As for listening before speaking: It has been incredibly hard for me to pick out specific vocabulary with colloquial Cantonese in movies and other videos. Native speakers talk too quickly for me right now. I did watch a lot of French movies when learning French and that seemed to help more with comprehension later. I likely just need to spend more time with Cantonese since it is more different to my native tongue than French.
There are podcast packs in the app to get you introduced to Cantonese. I'll keep in touch to see how it goes!
So relational training does work to a point, but if you want to be a man who speaks immersively and culturally like a man (and so forth) it's worth remembering that digesting telenovelas and practicing with your Colombian girlfriend will train you in a certain direction.
They tell me I still sound a bit like an extremely out-of-date teenager.
I picked up a hitchhiker in Denmark once that had been an exchange student in New York. He spoke English with the most delightful Brooklyn accent. Just enough Bugs Bunny to be hilarious coming from a Dane.
>I still sound a bit like an extremely out-of-date teenager.
I don't think it's surprising that the way you speak hasn't changed much when you stopped using the language. Your peers were mostly teens at the time and that's the manner of speech you picked up. Had you stayed in Germany and continued to speak with peers your age it surely would have developed along the way.
Do you hear that often?
It makes sense like the feminine speaking if a guy learns from their girlfriend.
If you can't tell the difference in how others use the language in stereotypical ways, you've basically not yet mastered the language.
I know from learning Japanese a bit myself. People often say using sources like anime and manga will make you sound like an anime character, which I think is ridiculous. Even in anime there are characters that talk quite normally (in fact a lot of them do, depending on what you watch, taking into account their age, gender, who they talk to, occupation and status, etc.) and it's easy enough to tell how actual usage in real life differs in real life by using some other sources, too. But even with only anime and manga as source, just use your brain and don't talk like friggin Naruto and you'd sound pretty normal. Given enough input variety at least.
Source: Learned a romance language for my SO and everyone I've met in the native country tells me I have a very natural accent and clean pronunciation.
https://fluent-forever.com/product/fluent-forever-pronunciat...
Personally, a two-week period or so just absorbing and practicing pronunciation by yourself sounds good before trying with other people.
Congrats on successfully learning your SO's language!
in Japan, men and women speak slightly differently, apparently, the women speaking in a higher register for example. There was a funny article I saw in a major publication about an American in Japan who learned Japanese primarily through his Japanese girlfriend, but she broke up with him because he ended up talking "like a girl"
Turns out it's the result of the partnership breakup between Matt and Yoga who used to run Mass Immersion Approach. I was reading the (incomplete guide) and realized it looked familiar.
"Casual" will never get you there.
If you're seeking functional fluency, expect to spend 2-3 hours a day for 1-3 years at least. Most of those hours should be spent consuming content in the target language.
Check out a system like Refold for an idea of the effort required and how to plan your study https://refold.la/roadmap
I've only learned one foreign language so far, Spanish, and I started 10 years ago in highschool.
I made the greatest leaps in my ability when I spent 2-3 months at a time spending time like this:
- living in Spanish-speaking country
- reading and watching YouTube (10-20 hours/week)
- taking private lessons (1-3 hours/week)
- using spaced repetition systems (3-4 hours/week)
Living in a country where your target language is spoken makes learning opportunities more accessible, but without focused effort you won't just "pick up the language" unless it's already very close to a language you speak.
All that said, anyone can learn a language if they put the effort in. It's mostly "hard" only in the sense that it takes a lot of time. Most of your study time could be watching TV, reading books, talking to friends, or playing video games as long as they're in your target language and near your limit of comprehension. It should be as much as 80% fun stuff/20% studying to keep yourself motivated.
Then talk to native speakers, for hours a day, so that you internalize it all and can consume and produce sentences without thinking.
1. Learning a language is not an academic exercise, it's a social one. If you're an introvert, learning a second language is (IMHO) going to be extremely difficult because the activities most likely to make that happen aren't ones you're likely comfortable with. Worse, you'll be less inclined to do those activities because you'll feel hamstrung by your inability to communicate. It's difficult to get to a point where you have a sufficient vocabulary to understand what's said or say what you want; and
2. This is particularly difficult for English speakers for two reasons. First, so many speak English or are learning that it's hard to be in a situation where you can't revert to English. This makes progress more difficult. The second reason most other languages will have integral concepts that will be difficult for you to acquire because there's no English equivalent. Some examples:
- Gender of (non-person) nouns;
- Declension of words by gender, case, article and/or number;
- Agreement of adjectives;
The above is rather Indo-European centric of course. Asian languages tend to have different characteristics that make them difficult:
- The writing system;
- The importance of tone;
- Replacing grammar with context.
Nowadays most native English speakers do not know any grammar. Like at all. Ask the average high school graduate what a noun is and you're more likely than not to get a confused look.
To me this is a strength of English because you can obviously learn the language, including reading and writing, without "cruft". For example, word order in English is stricter than, say, German because in German you can denote case by declension and you can't do that in English. Likewise Spanish typically drops the subject because it's obvious from the conjugation of the verb.
Oh, I can muddle through pleasantries and transactions when traveling and I continue to enjoy learning new words and phrases. But when I finally let go of my aspirations to become fluent it was as if a major weight was lifted off my shoulders after decades of beating myself up about being such a poor language learner.
You can only have so many top priorities in your life so it's perfectly fine to choose to learn a language recreationally for fun rather than seriously for fluency.
If you need to communicate in a particular language, you learn it. If you just kind of think it would be nice to know another language, you probably won't really become fluent.
Of course, there will always be exceptions.
Having said that: Any tips for brushing up on my college French?
Find a local meetup and practice.
I started with Duolingo, Harry Potter, Coffee Break French, etc., and within a year, I felt comfortable enough to go to a meetup. Even when I was just quietly listening, I improved so much, to the point that after only one year of practicing in-person (plus the year solo), I could get by in rural France.
I'm guessing that no matter how rusty your college French is, you'll improve by leaps and bounds when you're with people.
Mother language aside, some of us have to work harder to acquire passing fluency in another tongue.
It's commonly known in the language learning community that your 1st new (adult) language is the hardest and every language from there gets easier. Because the first time you have to also build the "library" of metacognition appropriate for learning languages. The next time you do it, you already have that library in place and the process is much faster.
Remember, there's a lot more monoglots out there. You're testing this as a small self-assessed group.
It would be cheating, but I might add: maybe you have better than average metacognition brain function?
Probably just bad journalism but this quote just says “each brain strikes its own balance”. They don’t go so far as to say some people have more plasticity and whether there are other tradeoffs with that.
For example I’ve always felt I’m a fairly slow but deep learner- like my brain takes longer than average to be productive at complex new tasks as it is rewiring but I learn things at a fairly deep level, so I wish they had shed light on that.
1. Read or listen to something in your target language. 2. Work out the meaning of a word you don't know (using a dictionary, teacher, context clues etc).
Do this 1000 to 10,000 times and you'll have a formidable knowledge of your target language.
Of course, the first thing people do is say: "Aha, I can optimise this! I'll make a list of all the words and just learn that!". Instantly you've removed all context, grammar and likely pronunciation (if the list is written only) from the language. Making an enormous word list is kind of taking the language out of the language.
As I get older I want to teach, and perhaps this is natural, to want to teach more and more as we get older, but sometimes that actually gets in the way of learning. It's as if I spent decades putting knowledge into my brain and now I want to pour that knowledge out of my brain. If you've ever read my blog, you know I like to write about things I've learned during my tech and consulting career.
But occasionally I need to still put knowledge into the brain, and fast, and chemicals like Paxil are very helpful there. SSRI drugs are known to increase the flexibility with which new neuronal connections are made. And I suspect that is very helpful when trying to learn a new skill fast.
I also personally recommend memantine, but that's because it helps me clear out the brain fog and anxiety that normally keeps me from doing basically anything successfully, and it has the same benefit of small dose, MASSIVE half life (60+ hours), and a proven track record of facilitating improved cognitive functioning
- this is an study into a mechanism that might be related learning to discriminate sounds;
- it's 10 subjects, and two, yes two, syllables;
- during a very short period of time.
This is not about learning a new language. And the title "blame it on your stable brain" falls in the wave of neuro-feel-good writing: you don't have to blame yourself, it's your bloody brain! Well, who are you, if not your brain?
And "stable brain" is interpreted in the article as non-plastic, which is thinly veiled language for "bad at learning". So, if you're struggling to learn a new language, it's because you're a bad learner.
It was also a refreshingily daunting experience to throw myself at something I quickly realized I had no talent in and to really writhe and struggle, but to stick through it, motivated not by any external party or marketable skill, but by earnest interest in the topic.
It also helps if you look foreign enough to where natives don't expect you to know their language, and are shocked when you can say even just "hello my name is..."
This immediately jumped out at me, the rest of the article notwithstanding. My hot take is that there are at least two strong reasons why it's so difficult:
1. You're not serious about it.
There's a man in my weekly French meetup who when I joined was a little bit better than me (which wasn't saying much -- I was horrible). Since then, his French has improved almost none. He can't conjugate, he can't pronounce, he can't even stay in the language: stumbling halfway through a simple sentence, he just gives up and switches to English. He's not serious about trying to improve. For him, I think, he just likes the social aspect of the group.
2. You worried about failing.
Far too many people I've seen want to be fluent to the detriment of becoming fluent. When in conversation, they think very carefully about what they say, practice pronunciation in their head, etc. Saying something embarrassing or even just slightly off is seen as a hindrance to their goals, but it's just the opposite: you have to make mistakes in order to get better.
Not to say that it's not hard to learn a language, but I've talked with so many people who just say, "Learn Spanish? At my age?! Impossible." But I can get by pretty well by myself in France with patient native speakers, and I'm self-taught. It's not as hard as people think.
There has been and continues to be a lot of research behind that cope. The effortless mastery over e..g. phonology that children emerge with is very difficult to replicate in adulthood, even after decades of speaking.
Adults don't have those luxuries; however, we can be taught and easily comprehend rules that kids don't get. Since I'm familiar with French, one such rule might be that you use a pronoun before the verb but a noun goes after. « J'aime ma femme » compared with « Je t'aime ». The contractions here, too, are things that you are likely to very easily understand (je + aime = j'aime; te + aime = t'aime, and 'je' isn't contracted).
I've seen ESL make serious progress in a few months after moving to the US and starting a new job. Immersion really works.
a) constantly needing to interact with native speakers in their language to accomplish goals (obtain food, get them to stop screaming at you), and
b) those native speakers attempting to figure out what you want and telling how to say that.
I suspect that the supposed greater ease with which children learn languages is mostly explained away once you control for those factors.
I was confronted in Japan with the choice of putting my crappy Japanese into practice and being thought a jerk, or attempting to speak English to the locals and removing all doubt. I gained considerable facility with the Japanese language in those two weeks. Still not within spitting distance of fluent, but a whole lot better than I was when I boarded the plane.