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Comment by kevinstubbs | Hacker News Reader

Any grammar is surmountable, but the languages that are truly hard are ones which have sounds or consonant clusters that your native language(s) don't. For example, learning Georgian as a native English/Italian speaker.. I could hardly even say basic words like "forest" (t'ke), "water" (tsqali), or "frog" (baqaqi) for the first few months. Look up the ყ letter, or listen and judge for yourself ბაყაყი წყალში ყიყინებს (the frog cries in the water) Hear natives speak it: https://forvo.com/word/%E1%83%91%E1%83%90%E1%83%A7%E1%83%90%...

The one by shaburgiorgi is the most faithfully enunciated, while the others are what you would more likely hear casually/in conversation.

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Even listening is hard.

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").

I can completely relate to everything you wrote haha. I never mastered ш (which I guess is retroflex fricative?) vs щ and I've completely given up on hard vs. soft sounds in Russian because this

>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?

Learning about phonetics absolutely helps. It provides an accurate way of precisely describing how sounds are pronounced.

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.

> I could hardly even say

If I may take the liberty to nitpick, that's a thing only an adult would say. A 5-year-old would just try.

That's a pretty unforgiving interpretation of what I wrote. Sounds came out of my mouth and people didn't understand what I was trying to say.

> Sounds came out of my mouth and people didn't understand what I was trying to say.

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.

> A 5-year-old would just try.

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.

Interesting take. Are they?

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.

It depends how racist the country/situation is. Many countries will give English-speakers a break because many English speakers don't even try. So just being able to say something - anything - in the language counts as a plus. Anything after that is a bonus.

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.

This doesn't match my experience at all, you just have to have a good sense of humour.

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.

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