When do people learn languages? (2002)
zompist.com
zompist.com
* Focus on reading text and vocabulary. Grammar will follow naturally from the text.
* Focus on grammar. Vocabulary is a detail.
* Focus on speaking. Speaking is the key to fluency. Speak to as many natives as possible. (Note: this can be incredibly annoying to said native speakers)
* Focus on writing. This is the best way to retain both vocabulary and grammar. Speaking will follow when you have vocabulary and grammar memorized.
* Focus on listening/hearing. Understanding is the key to communication. Remembering grammar and vocabulary will follow naturaly, e.g. from TV shows, games, movies, songs, etc. in the target language.
I could go on and on and on. Seriously. My advice is two-fold:
* Stick with a language. Whatever your method is, don't give up.
* If your method doesn't work for you, change it. If your teacher doesn't work for you, change it (e.g. textbook, school, course, TV show, whatever the "teacher" is).
It's that simple. Truth to be told, learning a language is mostly hard work. There is no secret. There is no "aha, you've been doing it wrong, you could have learned Chinese in 3 months!" method.
For example, using Anki might be useful, and you might find it fun, but it will not magically make you remember anything. And, even if you remember something in the context of Anki, you might not recognize it in the wild (e.g. in a text, song, or a game). Alternatively, you might not be able to produce it (e.g. passive recollection is very different from active production of the language).
I think the best one can do when learning a language is to simply stick with it. In the grand scheme of things, whether it will take you 4 years, 5 years, or 6 years to feel fluent is fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. It will, most likely, be years though.
Honestly there kind of is, you just have to put yourself in a "sink or swim" situation as the article says. You'll be surprised how far you can get in 3 months if you are in such a situation.
Also, don't believe any crap when someone tells you "X language is hard". This is perhaps the biggest myth I have ever seen. It's only hard if you think it is, and if you try to learn everything by rules and flashcards, which native speakers don't generally do. You can also try to make anything look hard that actually isn't. I find people in the US especially love to talk about how hard Chinese (and also Japanese and a few others) is but it isn't particularly different in difficulty than English or any other major world language. 5-year-olds can handle it, they just weren't told it's hard, they just needed to speak it if they wanted to argue and get their stolen pencil back.
The one by shaburgiorgi is the most faithfully enunciated, while the others are what you would more likely hear casually/in conversation.
If I may take the liberty to nitpick, that's a thing only an adult would say. A 5-year-old would just try.
Right, and as a 5 year old who wants your pencil back, you find another way to say it. If you don't know how to say "backpack" you say "bag". If you don't know how to say "foyer" you say "that place near the door". If you don't know how to say "pencil" you say "pen" or "writing stick".
I realize it was an unforgiving interpretation. That was directed at the topic and not you personally. That's kind of my point. If you have a sink-or-swim attitude or situation you will learn it.
And a 5 year old would be cut a lot of slack for screwing it up.
One of the issues with learning anything as an adult is that other adults are viciously unaccommodating. Foreign language learning turns that up to 11.
Personally, I think this is the primary issue with adult learning. You have to be a very strong personality to have an intrinsic motivation that will cause you to put in long hours of work because you aren't going to get any external motivation for a very long time.
I know adults in the US are often sadly viciously unaccomodating of broken English, but I feel that isn't the case in most of the (especially non-English-speaking) world, where any attempts to speak the local language are usually very much welcomed.
There are some places where the locals tend to speak good enough English that if they realize you speak English better than their language they'll viciously insist on speaking English to get business done, but that is sometimes mitigated if you place yourself in a more rural area or less cosmopolitan city where English isn't common.
Even in English-speaking countries, you can screw up the grammar badly and still be comprehensible. US and British people may decide you're an idiot - and treat you accordingly - but they will mostly understand you.
So my personal ordering of importance is vocab, grammar, and finally accent/voice coaching. You will definitely need the latter for most languages, because even supposedly non-exotic ones like French require a novel set of mouth movements. Most lesson systems underemphasise this.
My working assumption as an adult is that it will take three months to learn basic conversation with full immersion and minimal distractions, and five years of constant practice to reach reasonable fluency in speaking, listening, and writing.
This is actually less time than it takes kids to learn a language, so the idea that kids are especially malleable or open is clearly wrong. Of course kids are learning language in general - and more - at the same time, so timings aren't absolutely comparable. But similarly adults are having to do a lot of distracting adult things at the same time, so it more or less evens out.
One of the first things I learn in a language is how to say some variant of "I'm a little puppy", spring chicken, I speak like a 2 year old, etc.
You're never going to sound like the Queen, no-one reasonable expects that.
I spent quite some time with the Swedish retroflex fricative, and always heard something else than my teacher described. I finally settled on learning it by IPA, i.e. learning where exactly the tongue needs to be.
Even harder are Russian consonants for me: I can try as much as I want, but I will probably never be able to distinguish Russian hard and soft consonants, even with a Russian speaker saying them slowly and in contrast (and with lots of "you're kidding me, right? Those sounds are nothing alike").
>and with lots of "you're kidding me, right? Those sounds are nothing alike"
Is too true. With practice and listening, my pronunciation is naturally improving over time, but I really don't know how to improve it in a faster way. Do you think learning and practicing IPA would do the trick, like you did with Swedish?
Do keep in mind, though, that the IPA classifications that you find on Wikipedia are sometimes rough estimates. With particularly difficult sounds, it may be a good idea to look at multiple phonetic descriptions.
Begin with the sounds of your own native language, which you already know how to pronounce, and try to describe them phonetically. A tip for learning to feel where your tongue is, is to pronounce the sounds without tone, i.e. whisper them, or even without air, i.e. simply mouth them.
So there's languages that are hard to read and write. People love to talk about how poor English is when it comes to correspondence between written letters and sounds, but honestly, it's not close to the head of the pact. There are some Southeast Asian languages today where the gap between written word and speech is very much akin to writing Latin but speaking French. Japanese kanji is a moderately different level of burden, as every kanji has multiple different pronunciations, and it's at the point where--even for native speakers--it's not particularly expected that you can read someone's name and know how to pronounce it. Of course, for those of who use Latin scripts, any language that also uses Latin script is going to be easier to learn than one that doesn't.
Phonology can be a challenging aspect, because several languages don't have the same phonotactics as English does (or insert whatever native language here). There are multiple Slavic or Chinese sounds that my ears would process as "sh" and yet would be considered different consonants. Some phonemes are legitimately more difficult to pronounce--pronouncing click consonants literally scars your vocal tract. Some languages demand that you pay attention to tones, creakiness, breathiness, or aspiration, none of which is phonologically relevant to English or most Indo-European language.
Grammar and vocabulary are, as you imply, pretty mild concerns at the end of the day. They're not difficult enough to impede language acquisition, but there is actually some evidence to suggest that a language that becomes a major second language in the process goes through stronger grammatical simplification than their closest linguistic relatives--consider how much simpler English, Swahili, Malay, or Persian are compared to "normal" languages in their respective families.
I think my point is, even "polluting" your brain with analysis like this of a language will make it actually hard. For example
> Japanese kanji is a moderately different level of burden
If you didn't read this, you wouldn't actually go into it thinking of it as a burden, and it would turn out to not actually be a burden. The fact that "even" native speakers from time to time have to ask how to pronounce something is just a fact of life, and not a difficulty of the language, but observers have come to think of it as a burden for some reason. But now that you've read that it is a burden, it will be a burden to you.
I have pretty firm conviction that "hard" is very much influenced within some range by how hard you a priori think it is, and that logic is not the way to approach this. Rather, being blissfully unaware of any logical or linguistic experts' arguments around how hard others think something is will actually help you learn the language much faster and more efficiently.
> going to be easier to learn than one that doesn't.
> There are multiple Slavic or Chinese sounds
> Some phonemes are legitimately more difficult to pronounce
> literally scars your vocal tract
> demand that you pay attention to
Without any intent to personally attack you, because a LOT of people have logical arguments such as the above, it's quite literally even hearing such logical descriptions of languages which may make something extremely hard. We aren't fully logical creatures, the languages we invented aren't designed to be logically analyzed.
> at least 12 years of education to learn how to read and write their languages at a basic level
The idea of a "basic level" is fundamentally flawed.
Can a 10-year-old child in Japan function to a similar level in their society as a 10-year-old child in England? If asked to water the plants can they do so? Can they catch the correct school bus? Can they read a children's book for their age level? Yes? If so language has served its purpose, and there isn't really a fundamental difference in difficulty level.
Yeah, native speakers will tell you their language is hard, but they too are influenced by the media that all says it's hard.
You might be right that it takes 12 years for the average kid to learn a particular set of Kanji but that's a very arbitrary standard applied to a language that does not demand you know all of those Kanji to be functional in society. There is context, there is the simple act of asking, there is so much more to it. Likewise, English speakers don't demand that they know the entire Oxford English Dictionary to be considered literate. I mean, yeah, if you asked the 10-year-old to "irrigate the agricultural enclosure" instead of "water the plants" you might stump them, sure. If we had those kind of expectations, English would be considered "hard" -- look at that thick book of the OED! It's thicker than the Kangxi dictionary and Xinhua dictionary combined, and therefore it must be harder! (My point is -- logic isn't the way to analyze this.)
You're not responding to the evidence presented in this thread that there is evidence that some aspects of language learning is objectively harder. Specifically:
* There's pretty strong evidence (comparison between literacy rates of children with different native languages) that some languages have writing systems that are harder to learn than others. (I feel obliged to point out that writing is the least important part of language acquisition--after all, writing dates to only ~6,000 years ago, whereas spoken language dates at least 100,000 years ago, possibly earlier. Of course, for most major modern languages, a language learner is equally expected to read/write in it as they are to listen/speak in it)
* There is some evidence, albeit more controversial, that there is a critical age range in which it is far easier to acquire pronunciation of phonemes than learning subsequently.
* Again, there is evidence that some phonemes are physically easier to pronounce than others, discovered in part by the order in which toddlers acquire various speech sounds. If you've got a toddler learning to speak, listen to the sounds he/she can pronounce and also the ones that aren't properly pronounced. I wouldn't attempt to chart out a full objective scale on which phoneme is harder than the other one, but I would be moderately confident in asserting that an Arabic ayin is objectively more difficult to pronounce than an `m' sound.
* I also mentioned evidence that some grammatical features may be more complicated: the developments of lingua francas, or additionally creoles, does suggest that languages used heavily as second language acquisition tend to drop several grammatical features.
(Now I should also addend that just because something is objectively more difficult doesn't necessarily mean that is specifically "hard." It is clearly objectively more difficult to lift a box 2 meters than to do so 1 meter... but that doesn't mean that it's hard to do so.)
I would even go so far as to say that I feel like comparing things like literacy rates (which have very arbitrary definitions) and phoneme acquisition are a very "western" way to analyze a language, and by doing so, Japanese and Chinese seem hard. If they are not analyzed with that kind of logical mindset and rather just "Do people function in society", "can the workings of a complex machine be articulated well" and "Are people able to communicate needs and emotions" I think a very different answer would be seen.
edit: I think the functional illiteracy number in the US is something like 1 out of 6. R. Kelly famously can't read.
Rather, the act of drawing a hard line between literate and non-literate is a very Western way of analyzing language learning and doesn't scale well past a certain set of languages. By drawing such a hard line you end up with ridiculous conclusions such as that a child needs 12 years to be literate in Japanese. Sure, if you go by your arbitrary definition.
You can say that the average kid in an English speaking country needs 18 years before they know what "erudite" and "ostentation" mean if you draw the line there.
> You might be right that it takes 12 years for the average kid to learn a particular set of Kanji but that's a very arbitrary standard applied to a language that does not demand you know all of those Kanji to be functional in society.
12 years is what it takes to learn the joyo kanji list (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_j%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji) (I don't know the Chinese equivalent), a set of 2136 which is considered the *minimum* to function in modern society, what you will find in newspapers and government publication. Can you do with less than that? Maybe, but it won't be easy.
Personal attacks not appreciated here
> Have you ever tried to learn those languages?
Yes? I grew up with both Chinese and English? What gave you the impression I was saying stuff out of nowhere?
> Do you really think that learning 20~30 simple characters is on the same level of difficulty as learning 2000~4000 characters, some of them very complex?
Yes. I'm happy to elaborate as to why I think so but if you're only going to stand on the opposite side and not interested in even trying to understanding my perspective it's a waste of time on my part.
> a set of 2136 which is considered the minimum to function in modern society
For an adult, fine, but (a) "number of characters remembered" not a good way to measure the ability to function, any more than "number of SAT/GRE words memorized" to an English speaker, and (b) to function at an 8-year-old level in society you most definitely don't need 2136 characters.
An 8-year-old in an English speaking country would trip up trying to read The Economist as well.
One thing that does set languages apart though is that they involve learning to listen and to speak. With other activities we don't usually have to learn to listen to a new audio pattern to start distinguishing it from noise. Even less frequently do we have to learn to make new sounds with our mouth. In fact, I bet most people couldn't even describe what they do in their mouth to produce the sounds of different characters in their languages that they can speak. (Think of the difference of French R and English R and how you produce them.) Learning those can be quite a new experience, especially if you're still learning up distinguish the sound from noise.
This is the problem in language learning. What you said could be true in certain contexts but is wildly misconstrued. As is, what you said is "bro science" without proper methods, context, and caveats. Finally, while immersion in a language is amazingly useful, you can't do much in 3 months.
Sounds like a recipe for burnout and total isolation in a foreign country.
Here's the best advice I could write down: https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/66myn1/a_...
I agree with the author. I think a lot of language learning advice is of poor quality, or it's hard to establish complex behaviours simply from reading an article. It's hard to write stuff down that you could expect to improve the odds of the student. Learning a language on your own is a kind of a funny hack, it's like learning to program without access to a computer, it can be done but it needs specific techniques. I make software for learning languages, writing proper instructions for using it is something that I consider difficult and I don't attempt it. :)
* "I learned a language" is a very poorly defined statement. It's really difficult to quantify. The EU tried with their language levels [1], but it's still a mess. So you get a person that says "I speak 15 languages! Just follow my method forehead!" while an academic says "this person speaks two languages barely, and makes noises in the rest."
"I know a language" means different things for different people, depending on one's motivation to learn a language. Do you want to book a hotel room? Do you want to read a newspaper? Do you want to read Crime and Punishment in the original? Note that, for example, reading a newspaper is significantly easier in Tagalog, which uses a mixture of English and Filipino, than in Chinese, which requires you to know around 3 thousand Chinese characters.
* Learning a language is highly influenced by your native language. If you take 20 undergrads, you might conclude that "to learn language X as a native speaker of Y, the best method seems to be Z." Then, other papers will likely dispute your definition of "learning" (see previous point).
* Learning a language is highly dependent on your motivation. If you take a class of 20 people, their motivation to learn a language X is going to be all over the place. Learning a language is always really difficult, even when a language is deemed easy (like Spanish). Most people will drop off unless they are really driven to learn the language.
Long story short, I don't think it's as easy to apply the scientific method. There's a reason why we don't have a matrix of "if you're a German speaker wanting to learn Russian, here's the optimal syllabus for you."
On the flip side, I do think we can say something about language learning. For example, apps like Duolingo are not that useful. I don't think that's a very controversial statement in the language learning community.
Similarly, just moving to a country won't do anything special for you (other than utterly isolate you). For example, you won't pick up any Japanese from your one-room 40-squared-feet apartment in downtown Tokyo alone.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...
But there really is no substitute for persistence, regardless of technique.
[1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLg9uYxuZf8x_A-vcqqyOFZu06... (though her pronunciation is very unnatural, her explanations are spot on)
I have to disagree with this. If you focus on just learning words in a target language, you just become a foreign language dictionary. Knowing how to say "train station" in Spanish doesn't help when you can't use it properly in a sentence.
I think Michel Thomas has a fairly succinct take on the topic: “If you know how to handle verbs you know how to handle the language. Everything else is just vocabulary”. Although he is a somewhat controversial figure in regards to claimed past achievements, his system for language learning works well. Don't worry about amassing large amounts of vocabulary at the outset, just use words like "it" (Where is it / What is it / I can do it). You can swap out "it" for any other noun you learn later on.
Getting the wrong inflection ruins any sense you're trying to make!
What do you want to do with the language? Do you want to be able to book a hotel? Because if that's your goal, then you're probably correct. Then again, you can probably do that in English anywhere in the world.
However, if your goal is to communicate, you won't be able to get by with 200 words. Just try to watch an episode of Friends with a non-native speaker.
> "Just a pinch!"
A: "What is a pinch"?
B: "A little"
A: "Ah! They should say little!"
(Though the conversation above is highly contrived since you wouldn't be able to understand the vast majority of Friends with at the very least 2000 - 3000 words)
The vast majority of people do not speak using the simple terms that are in those 100 top lists.
As an example - I would guess that from my previous sentence, "vast", "majority", "simple", "terms", "lists" and possibly more would not be present, and that's in only one relatively simple sentence.
I can "speak in" probably ten languages, but I'd only say I can really _speak_ bidirectionally in one or possibly two.
It really depends who you're talking to. I've seen claims, and I believe them, that in many languages the average person has about a 500 word vocabulary that they're using on a daily basis.
Someone who is more educated than the average person is likely to use a larger vocabulary, but they're also more likely to be able to simplify their speech to accomodate you and make it possible for you to communicate with them.
You might be able to have a very basic one on one conversation with someone who is speaking directly to you.
Now sit in the corner at a bar, party, in a conference, lecture hall, or even watch a movie without subtitles, and try to understand anything at all. In most if not all languages that's impossible with a 500 word vocab.
I don't advocate ignoring grammar, but you really just need awareness of the basics, not to spend time doing drills or filling in blanks.
I believe Latin is still offered in my high school system... A guaranteed waste of time.
I truly believe study of foreign language should almost be reserved for people who will be living in a country with that tongue. Using it everyday and getting good returns on all that grind.
More generally, we should be be more economical with our effort and time. "Why am I learning this? " Should be asked more often.
I feel the cultural pull for pointless learning on other subjects. I am sure we all do. "I should study some physics. Read Feynman's lectures." But to what end, I don't know. My life will not be appreciably better for learning more about electro-magnetism.
There's a yearning in us that pointless education must satisfy. A dream of a better life that you can pretend to be working towards.
Does that mean the learning was in vain? I’ve probably forgotten 90% of what I learned in high school other than math. Does that mean most of my education was a waste of time?
Did the things you learn change you in some other fundamental way, that only learning those things could (ie you could come to a conclusion and forget the exact process that brought you to that conclusion, and thus the process was worth learning even though now forgotten)?
If not, then that learning must have been in vain, almost per the definition of vain, right?
Yes.
Some would say separating state and school is equal or greater in importance, than separating state and church.
And you can do that with language instruction in most cases.
Hell, maybe make language instruction more hardcore and immersive for those who need or actively seek it.
For everyone else, it's not worth pursuing 98% of the time.
Quomodo loqueris tu cum daemoniis sine latinam te scire??
Felicem natalem Christi
Otherwise what's the point of not killing oneself - will you fight? Or will you perish like a dog?
This is a great sentiment and one that lines up well with my philosophy in life, thank you for summarising it so concisely!
That all said, instruction quality is a big differentiator; I agree that most classes taught at schools are pretty miserably bad, so from that perspective, point taken.
On your other point - is browsing HN the most economic and effective way to spend your time? I think learning a language or studying physics would be more useful. Do you not waste time browsing internet, watching Netflix, playing games?
Most people don't have fun learning a language, especially those forced through school. 98% don't learn it to fluency.
But if you enjoy it, more power to you.
Children learn language by necessity. They cannot translate needs and desires into meaningful results if they don't. Once they have the basics, they learn a lot more from peers (preschool) than parents: Adult speech patterns differ too much from the simpler language model of young children so it is their interactions with other young children where they learn pieces of each others' models. Pieces that they don't easily receive from their parents' speech patterns. Vocabulary explodes when they hit preschool even though parents and older siblings may speak to them just as much. This is first-language acquisition, and I hope it's obvious that this is an extremely simplified and incomplete explanation. As a side note, COVID is really screwing with this process for young children who are now far behind in this process. Research has shown that language delay can have lifelong impacts.
SLA (second language acquisition) has many interesting aspects beyond what I can explain here, but I will say that the ease of learning-- all else being equal (a very important caveat)-- source language and target language play a large part. Languages that share similar phonemes tend to be a little easier, ditto for syntactic structure. It makes the exercise a bit more about mapping lexical entries in one language to another, along with learning declinations. Going from a non-tonal language to a tonal language is harder, though interestingly musicians may have an easier time. Conversely, tonal to non-tonal may be easier. Also interesting-- speakers of tonal languages tend to have higher rates of perfect pitch.
True bilingualism-- learning two languages from birth-- is its own separate category of language acquisition. It's not uncommon for the learner to never quite learn either language as well as a single language learner. However the process, and learned facility for code switching, carries it's own cognitive advantages.
Once again though, all of this is a highly simplified and incomplete explanation. There are plenty of very important factors that I'm leaving out here-- my comments here are probably biased towards those aspects of language acquisition that I find most interesting.
This is an interesting point indeed as it pertains to my experience. I believe I learned both English and Arabic from birth, however, my Arabic skills have atrophied and my English is definitely stronger but it could use some improvement. However, Levantine Arabic phonemes not found in English at all come naturally to me and when immersed in my home country I would be able to pick up vocabulary quickly and to some degree reading skills although I have very little education in that aspect.
One brief example is to say "up" when the literal is "increase". "Up" is a physical directions, yet we might say "My bank account balance keeps going up". Really, the $ number is increasing though. Metaphor is everywhere.
I can read newspaper or have a brief conversation in a restaurant or shop in ~6 languages. You can acquire that skill easily in ~20 hours of audio (per language). But the course stops at certain level, and getting to active speaking is still very difficult next step.
The Portuguese (well those under about 45 years old anyway) speak excellent English, and seem as comfortable in it as a native speaker. They will quickly default to English when they want to communicate with me - understandable, but it does make practicing harder. The half and half conversations (like the Russians and Americans on the ISS) are common (and trippy).
Verb inflections are a nightmare, you can't simply cram a bunch of stem words together quite like you can in English. Peruse a verb conjugation reference to get a sense of the combinatorial explosion going on there. The most common verbs are the most irregular, and there are collisions everywhere.
Listening comprehension is the hardest part. I do wonder that as a native English speaker I'm used to ESL speakers, so naturally slow down and speak more clearly. Perhaps native Portuguese speakers are not so used to their language being used as a second language, so don't instinctively do that in quite the same way.
Hilariously even the most proficient Portuguese English speaker cannot understand a word I say when I turn and converse with a fellow Brit, or an American. I don't notice any difference, but I guess my perfectly enunciated Queen's English turns into incomprehensible gibberish.
Hilariously even the most proficient Portuguese English speaker cannot
understand a word I say when I turn and converse with a fellow Brit, or an
American. I don't notice any difference, but I guess my perfectly enunciated
Queen's English turns into incomprehensible gibberish.
For example, I have learned that when I'm communicating with folks in India, who speak wonderful English, that I can't use common American colloquialisms such as "shooting yourself in the foot" or other similarly colorful language. It has no context for them, and the point is lost.
I learned to speak clearly in my native English when working on some EU scientific programmes.
When I say I have a degree in linguistics inevitably I'm asked "How many languages do you speak?" which is a question that I think most people with linguistic degrees roll their eyes at. Linguistics is very, very different than learning a language and even applied linguistics is just a subcategory of it.
What I typically say is that I'm awful at learning languages. I believe very strongly from both the research that I've seen and anecdotally that someone's aptitude for learning a language has a hell of a lot more to do with someone being an extrovert who likes new experiences and doesn't have anxiety. I am bad at learning languages because I am awkward and asocial. My favorite language to learn was Sanskrit because it felt like "decoding" something versus the social/anxiety producing "production" aspect of languages.
With the skills I do have though, depending on how much work I put into it, I can probably get better at comprehension in reading more quickly than most people because I like the "decoding" aspect.
I legitimately had to go to a less prestigious college since I couldn't pass French at Community College. In hindsight I really should of took Spanish and practiced with people in my neighborhood.
Unless you had a childhood which provided you opportunities to study languages it's very hard to pass a language class.
That said, I take private Chinese lessons and it's been very fun. I even went out with a girl because of it( she's not Chinese, but she found it very interesting!).