How I learned French in 12 months (2020)
runwes.com
runwes.com
I guess I’ll give a quick update on how things have been since this article was written. I haven’t used or studied French much since then, and have gotten quite rusty, though I’ve had a few conversations fully in French in the last few months and can still maintain a conversation. I have been thinking of picking up French again soon, as traveling to a French speaking country becomes more of an option.
I also did roughly the same thing with my Spanish in the following year, with similar results, though I’d say I probably reached a solid B1.5 or weak B2 after a year (due to COVID I was unable to take the proficiency test and lost some motivation to continue studying to a high level as a result.)
My recommendations are still largely the same, though I haven’t used these resources (e.g. Duolingo) since I stopped studying a while back. And as others have noted, for other languages, particularly those that are less closely related to English (e.g. Japanese), you’ll have to follow a different path to achieve the same proficiency. However, language learning resources are getting better constantly, so you can certainly still learn quite a lot without total, in-person immersion, as I did!
Since I left France the only way to maintain motivation is continue reading French books (OMG there is so much to chose from). But bittersweet having to make a choice as I now want to dive into Italian. And so with every hour I spend on Italian I see my previous skill and speed with which I could form a French sentence wane ...
The best thing about language is the vast ocean of superb material to chose from as you dive in. It's like a honeymoon phase with the country and its people.
Spending a whole year learning and then let yourself get rusty is almost like spending 12 months on crafting a magic key then throwing it away before entering the castle. Not that there is anything wrong with "learning for learning sake" but I know the feeling when you can literally see it slipping from your grasp and still can't stop it.
French Spanish English maybe not so much because it's everywhere so practicing it is easy. But many languages you have to actually be there if you want any chance at all of being good at it. I liked being able to brag about what rare, exotic languages (for a European) I was able to converse fluently in. After leaving these countries, breaking up with girlfriends, change of social circles, etc I felt like a fraud every time somebody introduced me with "and he is fluent in <xyz> can you believe it" ... the conversation had to quickly be corrected by "oh I'm totally rusty" which got the response of "oh don't be modest I am sure bla bla" which made me regret that the whole thing ever came up. Putting much effort into languages is quite a humbling experience.
I’d definitely still say the experience was worth it, given that I still have much of my previous ability and can probably relearn it rather quickly. It certainly is a bit sad to see your skills degrade over time, and this has certainly contributed to some fear of picking up the language again, but that probably goes for most skills and hobbies anyways.
And as you said, I have the same experience whenever someone asks me about my language learning experience —- I always mention how rusty I am these days, and there’s a nagging feeling I need to shake off the rust so I don’t have to say that anymore. But in the end, I guess we have to settle for doing whatever we think is best in the moment, and if it’s important enough, we can always pick it up again some day.
At this point, I suffer from the opposite problem: I've invested so much of my life into english (which is a second language for me) that I'm now losing vocabulary in my native tongue. I don't even regret it that much; language isn't really about the bragging rights, and how one feels about language shouldn't center around their ability to use it as a party trick IMHO. Instead, I think a healthier way to think about languages is to just see them as what they are: tools to communicate with the people around you. What you said about doing what's best in the moment is pretty spot on. Live in the moment, and let your language skills reflect from that.
Bravo et bonne continuation!
When I returned it the US, for the first few months I actually felt more comfortable in Spanish than English. I spoke Spanglish for a while.
I went to school and studied Latin American studies and Spanish.
Without daily practice I lost increasingly more vocabulary. I can listen to spoken Spanish and understand it pretty well but I have a hard time speaking or writing because of a lack of recall of vocabulary.
I have a feeling if I went back to being immersed in the language daily I could become comfortable again within a month.
A couple of months ago I booked a Lingoda sprint and my first German B1 class was embarrassing. Had to go back to A2. I had forgotten so many basic words, but it took only a few classes to go back to B1 and only a few more to go to B2 (I knew it was time to go up when I felt my classmates were speaking unbearable slow).
I feel like my grammar is still worse compared to 9 years ago but my understanding and speaking are almost back to where they were before. Definitely good to know it only takes a couple of months to get your level back. Oh and I think this time my English hasn't suffered that much, since I'm not a native English speaker.
It was nice to hear about your success with online tutors. Finding speakers was essentially impossible for me. South Carolina is not exactly a hot bed of French speakers.
You may have inspired me to pick up the torch again. Look out Chamonix, here I come!
There are beautiful landscapes on the seaside as well!
The courses are entirely audio (using a convenient app or downloadable MP3 files) and it all runs on donations.
Even though I made an app that helped me along the way to learn words, I don't believe in a single app/book/approach for learning a language. You need to expose yourself to A LOT of different language materials.
I was learning for about 2h a day, 6 times a week. I would read articles, books, websites in Spanish. I would watch YouTube videos [1]. I would read news, initially for beginners [2] and later regular [3]. And most importantly, I would have 4-5h a week itakly conversations.
After 6 months I understood quite a lot, but couldn't speak almost at all. Then magic happens and 6 months later, I was having a normal conversation (though still with some errors) about any range of topics: politics, global warming, travel, engineering etc.
I believe the key for me was to read a lot of books which were interesting to me. For example I read Bill Gate's book "How To Avoid A Climate Disaster" in Spanish, as well as about ~8 others in the first 12 months.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/DreamingSpanish
[2] www.newsinslowspanish.com
Oh wow I've been after something like this for a long time. It's awesome because it's relevant content (news) but at a pace that beginners can follow. I don't know Spanish but knowing French, I could follow along the super slow mode and not feel lost.
Going to look for this in German and Chinese, I wonder if there's something similar.
The age thing is mostly a myth imo. If you put in the time and effort you’ll get a lot back.
The biggest issue is the concept of fluency. A lot of people believe they have to be 100% perfect or they don’t “know” the language. In reality, from the moment you start you will continually become more and more comfortable in an asymptotic manner (no one knows 100% of a language, ie what percentage words in the dictionary do you know).
The biggest piece of advice - get comfortable in dealing with ambiguity, and don’t try to force constructs from your primary language onto the one you are learning. Meaning: don’t say X word means Y word in my native language, therefore I can use it exactly the same (it’s a different word, VERY likely with different connotations).
A corollary to this is that this is the reason why memorizing flash cards/massive lists of words can be counter productive. A degree of that is helpful to start, but you really need to see words in proper context, repeatedly.
That’s super important. This also applies to translated texts. Something somebody in Iran says may sound crazy when translated straight but may just be a normal thing in their language.
As a German it took me a long time to understand that when an American says “we should have a beer someday “ that this means that you most likely will not have a beer with that person.
I haven't seen evidence that my ability to learn things has slowed down yet. I think a lot of "age-related" problems are more related to lifestyle until about 60.
When you're 20, you can eat sugar, fat and salt all day long while sitting on a couch and get along pretty well. When you're 40, you'll get fat and your body will atrophy.
There's a solution though: eat healthful foods, exercise, manage stress, pursue important goals, be active socially.
Hey i'll even throw in another language and still be able to fight the 5 year old. With one hand.
Here’s a study that found no link between age and a slow down of ability to learn things:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC4552811/#i...
And here’s Harvard’s thoughts on it:
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/how-memory-and-...
Scientists used to think that brain connections developed at a rapid pace in the first few years of life, until you reached your mental peak in your early 20s. Your cognitive abilities would level off at around middle age, and then start to gradually decline. We now know this is not true.
People can be weird with non-native adult speakers.
I tried to learn my wifes family language - mother in law seemed a bit embarrassed with how to deal with a non-native speaker, and mumbles short things very quickly. My father in law is better, he'll just talk and talk, reasonably clearly and slowly, and I've conversed way more with him (even if it's not at all fluent and involves a lot of dictionary pauses and trying to explain things).
What seems “obvious” to me is that the opposite is true - language learning accelerates for people who learn multiple languages; learning a second language takes less time than the first, if you measure the number of hours spent on it. A third one often goes even faster, especially for related languages. The main problem people have is they don’t put in the hours, and that may indeed get harder to find the motivation to do as we age.
Accent is not a metric for proficiency, understanding and communication is. 5 year old native speakers have good accents but have been immersed 100% and often don’t have the vocabulary for adult conversations. The article is someone reaching B2 level from scratch in 1 year, without full immersion. (B2 is the requirement for a foreigner to start a university degree, for example.) It doesn’t take 20 years of intense studying to learn a language, older adults learn them to proficiency in a year or two all the time.
Think of the hours again, a 5 year old has spent 8-16 hours a day (56-112 hours/week) immersed for 5 years, while the author here did like maybe 10-15 hours a week (which is indeed pretty intense and aggressive). Read his notes - ~100 hours of conversation to reach B2, where a 5 year old will have definitely had more than 1,000 hours of conversation and likely closer to ~5,000 hours of conversation. That’s more than 10x, plausibly much more, so it seems clear that in this case the author’s learning is far more efficient than childhood language learning.
Several comments seem to suggest babies are learning to speak full time, but it's very far from it, they have to learn to walk, eat, read physical expression, draw, etc etc, all kind of things we don't even realize. They are just awesome learning machines, which I find fascinating to watch.
* Older people can't remember the difficulty of learning their first language. They've been using it comfortably for years.
* Older people have bigger vocabularies so the gap between their first and second language is even larger.
* The discomfort of learning new things is less familiar for older peoples
The only difference is I’ve seen is I’m much more focused but they have much more free time. An hour of my focus learning is probably worth a week of their efforts.
Seriously - I don’t even have 2 hours a day
“Adults are quite strategic in their learning, compared with children. They are generally self-motivated, use time effectively, and can apply themselves to lengthy tasks.”
My personal opinion is that the #1 block to fluency as an adult is the concentration on written resources and trying to apply rules. Children learn by mimicry, but adults learn by resources, which creates errors. You can tell by listening to people that have learnt English as a second language, and understanding the source of the errors they make.
If you put in that much time you will learn no matter your age. Same for children. They are supposed to be better at language learning but in the end they spend a lot of time that adults often don’t have or don’t want to invest.
1. Older people get set in their ways, and learning a language requires rethinking how you think. This limitation is purely psychological and not biological and you can avoid it merely by giving it an honest attempt. Learning a foreign language can be a great way to to keep your mind fresh.
2. TIME. Learning a language requires thousands of hours of commitment. Young people have time to commit to it. Older people with work and careers do not, and so often don’t make as much progress. But if you chart progress vs. hours studied, age disappears as a factor. (There are studies of this, but I’m on mobile right now and can’t pull them up.)
3. Truly young people (under the age of 12) still have the ability to hear sounds not used in their mother tongue. This is why transplanted kids can speak fluently and pass as natives, but adults and even teens develop heavy accents. Older people still have enough neural flexibility to retrain their ear, but it takes much more time and conscious effort. This is the only truly biological age-related factor, and countering it just requires a bit more time and conscious attention.
If you are learning a languages as a busy adult, the key is to find ways to immerse yourself in the language, even if it is just passively listening to things on a loop while you do your day job, listening to audiobooks during your commute, and always having a study book or flash cards at hand everywhere you go. You need to study not 10 minutes a day, but 5-10 hours a day—but if you’re smart, that time will double dip for other things and you can get away with just 1 hour a day of real committed study, and the rest is various forms of background practice throughout the day.
- radio FranceInfo [almost] all the time (when no other structure learning happening)
- TV5 https://apprendre.tv5monde.com
- french movies streaming, with french subtitles (!)
- online magazines: Le Parisian, Libération, Le Figaro, etc.
- book : "Grammaire progressive du français - Niveau intermédiaire (A2/B1) - Livre + CD + Appli-web - 4ème édition"
- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.leconjugue...
- https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais-monolingue
- https://www.reverso.net/orthographe/correcteur-francais/
Last two in browser with strong ad blocking, to avoid distraction.
This is crucial. Watching movies in a foreign language can be difficult because of how fast the dialog is, but if you use subtitles in your language, you will always be thinking in your language first, then translating to the target language. Put subtitles on in the target language so that you can catch words that you wouldn't catch from the audio only, but you are still immersing yourself completely in that language.
I came out of high school with four years of Latin and three years of German.
Being a language expert, I thought I'd try the beginning French course. The first day in class, the professor began rattling off in French, and the other students seemed to have no problem with that, having apparently had several years of high school French. I couldn't make heads or tails of what what going on and quickly dropped the course.
Not at all. French is over 95% many to one: From a given spelling it's clear how to pronounce it. Of course you need to know the rules and enough practice. Just writing dictations is really hard, because the same pronunciation can be spelled various ways. And it's not even enough to know how to spell the word. You need to understand the meaning of the sentence, because there are endings that are not pronounced, but depend on the grammar.
English is much more many to many. The same letter combinations can have different pronunciations and the other way round. GHOTI is either pronounced fish or completely silent... GH as in enough or in right. And so on for all remaining letter (groups). You can't do that in French.
Often I can understand how they shortened it, sometimes I understand only one variant. And of course sometimes everything is just too fast.
Still, the French subtitles are essential for me to understand French movies.
(studied French in school decades ago and semi-actively trying to stop forgetting)
Is this publicly available, or were you in the service?
Listening comprehension is always the last of the skills to kick in, because it is all-or-nothing. You only understand every word in the sentence or your brain gets overloaded. While reading foreign texts you can easily skip a word you can't understand and still figure out what the rest means. Or at least, more often so, because you don't have to keep everything in short term memory.
Is that actually the case?
I've always found it easier to follow a conversation in a language I am learning than to speak it.
You get an awful lot of context when listening, only need to put a few words in the right place and suddenly what you're hearing makes sense. You can get away without literally translating everything.
Speaking on the other hand, you can't converse properly without being able to find the right word at the right time and in the right place.
Absolutely not. I have lived abroad half of my life (sometimes with a language reasonably close to my mother tongue and sometimes very far)
Speaking is always easier. I can make my own speed and I never use an unkown word. Sometimes I have to be a bit creative how to explain things if I am lacking a word.
Following discussions is hard. People use words I don't know all the time. Slang, dialects, accents on top of that. And many of them just speak too fast. This can take many many years and might never disappear when certain speakers are involved.
News speakers or documentary movies might be a different story.
When we know a language well enough, we actually compress the sentence to a mental model that takes a lot less space in that working memory. But this only works when we know every word of the sentence and understand the grammar involved. Even one unresolved word often means the sentence expands from one chunk to at least three chunks.
Of course, your speaking skill also improves all the time. But at least in my case I feel like I can usually speak better than listen, in a new language (and I've had a few).
Vowel sounds in words extremely variable in English, but are very rigid in Spanish, even in different countries. In Spanish consonants may change their sound in some countries, but the differences are fixed, and it is easily learnable. Get your pronunciation corrected as soon as you begin learning, otherwise you teach yourself bad habits that are hard to break.
English speakers tend to really screw up the vowel sounds in Spanish, which makes words unintelligible to Spanish speakers. The one-to-one correspondence between written vowels and spoken vowel sounds actually makes Spanish quite easy to pick up.
One other trick is to speak English words using Spanish vowel sounds, because Spanish speakers with a little English will often hear the word if you do that. It also helps if you can hear English words spoken with Spanish vowel sounds by Spanish speakers.
If you are in a hick area then the Spanish language can change in other ways which can be difficult to understand (for example eating S’s, ma o meno).
The rumour is that the grammar is hard to learn, but if you only need conversational Spanish then there is one future and one past tense that is easy for English speakers to learn to speak: Voy a = I am going to, He = I have.
I have subsequently had little trouble communicating with people speaking 100% Spanish when I have travelled (mostly Cuba, Mexico, Majorca) or at home (Chilean, Argentinian etc).
I agree that some words change, and I agree that there are pronunciation changes, but my experience is that the changes are not too difficult to pick up.
Perhaps I am exceptional or not widely enough travelled, but I can only share what I have experienced.
In my opinion, another thing to beware of for anyone learning Spanish is to avoid learning the "correct" pronunciation (sounding like a madrileño). A "proper" accent sounds like you are stuck-up to many people from other countries, which hinders friendly communication. For example: I use an s sound (not th) for 'hace', and dja (not lya) for 'ella'. Aside: Spanish people responded fabulously to me when I had unintentionally picked up a Cuban accent! I have responded really well to people who have picked up a random English accent when they learnt English (except US accents which mostly sound bad to me). Also if you are learning Spanish and native Spanish speakers think you have a strong English accent, you have been teaching yourself using the wrong methods: instead use more mimicking and less reading.
They have free podcasts available on iTunes for a lot of languages, the Spanish content is absolutely amazing.
For several reasons:
- You liked the book originally so you won't mind reading it again
- You know the story so if you get to a part where you don't understand the language, you can infer the meaning based on the your knowledge of the story
- Because it was translated, it's good to see how a phrase you know well in your primary language was converted into the new language. This is particularly helpful for your own "on the fly" translation when you are speaking.
In my particular case, I knew "family" level Italian very well (e.g. how you would speak to your parents, siblings at home etc). What I didn't know was more formal and inter-adult language grammar. Reading books by one of my favorite English authors translated into Italian was a real game changer.
Same with movies. Watch your fav movies in French lang. for example. You’ll know what yippekayeh mother fudger is!
Any plans to add new languages?
When I first started learning French I took a "school" approach to it, get a dedicated notebook, buy books, buy cards to make my own flash cards, schedule 1 hour a day... needless to day that I failed, not just that but I hated it all!
So I decided to make it fun (the way I learn programming or other things that I enjoy) and the Michel Thomas was super fun for me :-) It my motivation to mow the lawn since mowing the lawn is my french listening time.
The other day I got a random marketing email with some french in it trying to be fancy, and I was so happy when I could understand everything it said before having to read the english translation!
I'm not affiliated with them in any way, I just really enjoy his approach to teaching languages
How's your conversational French after having listened to the program?
I won’t say that I could speak fluently from the start, but It gave me a very strong foundation to build on.
But after getting a few rules in my mind like "oi" sounds like "wah" in english and the ending of the french words are mostly not pronounced, it was easier for me going from the sound and meaning (concept) of the word to the reading part.
But the most important thing is that it is fun, and it's a lot easier to stick to fun things!
As a big believer in immersion I don't think there is any other way of learning languages other than immersing yourself in it..
(As opposed to traveling to a country and living in it.)
Also note that they switched their phone over to French.
2/19: Started lessons on Italki, roughly once a week
1/19: Started occasionally watching Peppa Pig in French (yes, really)
2/19: Changed my phone language to French
For those that don't know, iTalki is a platform where you can talk to native language speakers. You can join either as a teacher or learner. You can get actual lessons from people or just join to have discussions to improve/maintain your language
Immersion outside of a classroom context, as an adult, is a terrible way to learn a language on its own. Your exposure to comprehensible context is lower than in traditional language learning methods.
In a classroom setting it can be highly effective, but is still best paired with traditional approaches. Grammar is difficult to teach through immersion, and there's no obvious benefit in doing so. You can spend hours going through various combinations of "y" and "en" pronouns hoping to make it stick. Or you could take a quick pause and explain that, roughly, "y" replaces "à + noun", "en" replaces "de + noun", and move back to immersion for practice.
People often seem to have done reasoning along the lines of "children learn languages through immersion, children learn languages faster than adults, therefore learning is faster with immersion." But that's obviously flawed logic. It's just that people rarely make their argument explicit.
The idea is that you're learning like a kid, but in a more focused and efficient way. E.g., someone tells you a story, and while doing so, they'll motion or point to the things they're talking about, but they do so entirely in the foreign language. However, since they're doing so in a comprehensible way, you can easily figure out what they're saying.
It's meant to trigger the connection in your mind between the objects/actions and the corresponding words in the foreign language, and it's meant to bypass the translation phase which language learners often start with.
This is the YouTube channel that really opened my eyes to the model: https://youtu.be/t4CAdmquJsY
Do you have any resources for something similar in Dutch?
However, a good option, which is similar in principle, is Lingq (https://www.lingq.com/en/). The designer of it has recently become interested in comprehensible input and I've noticed he's adding more and more similar concepts into the app. He also knows 20+ languages, and much of the app was designed based on the approaches he's applied over the years.
Anyway, the app has stories written and spoken in Dutch (as well as other languages), and you can stop and click individual words if you're not able to figure out their meaning.
Also, a YouTube series that I find useful for Spanish (EasySpanish) has recently added a Dutch channel: https://youtube.com/c/EasyDutch.
Lastly, a free chrome extension that I find quite useful for all languages is Language Reactor, which adds easy playback handling and quick translations when needed. It works for YouTube and Netflix: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/language-reactor/h...
I wish there were more options for Dutch, but once you pick up on the comprehensible input methodology, you'll see how you can adapt apps like Lingq and Language Reactor into a similar method.
For anyone hoping to learn a language I think this step is the key. Probably worth the same as doing everything else on the list put together. 2 hours a week will probably get you from A1 to B1 in 3-6 months
(Italki are 1 on 1 language classes)
There are many linguists who think it's more important to get comprehensible input, then produce comprehensible output [0]
Surely yes you need to adjust to the sound of a foreign language, but with no feedback loop of trying to speak and having another person feedback, how do you adjust?
Listening to hours of completely foreign language won't make you understand what the words are or what they mean, so "comprehensible" input includes weasel words that require you to already know the language before you can learn it. It's all over a bit weird.
Don't people say some of the most effective ways to learn are the immersion courses where you go to a retreat and speak only that language for weeks at a time, studying and learning 8 hrs+/day and then there are people who spend years reading or listening but aren't confident to speak anything. But are there people who spend years speaking with fluent speakers who still report they don't know the language?
[1] inb4 "hurr think you know better than professional linguists"
I've been learning German 2 hours a week + homework for 2 years and I'm not yet B1 in German. We are 4 students with one teacher and, from what I understand, we are not particularly slow.
Maybe German is really harder to learn than other languages, but probably not 2x or 4x as French (I'm French).
English shares a significant amounts of structure and words with French, so French ends up being relatively straightforward to learn for a motivated English speaker - the only real difference is the amount of tenses, which OP unsurprisingly still struggles with. I bet you, as a French speaker, would grasp Italian very quickly - much faster than most Chinese likely ever will.
German ended up sharing much less with Romance languages, so it stands to reason that it would take 2x-3x the effort of going from English to French.
2 hours a week to B1 in German as an English speak seems totally impossible. I was probably B1 in 6 months at the level of study I described. I studied 5 years of Latin prior to starting so the case system wasn't an additional learning curve. Your pace honestly seems standard.
French has plenty of difficulty in orthography and some in grammar. Maybe the grammar is slightly less complex than German, but only slightly. But I'd say for someone from another language that is easily overshadowed by prior experience in English or Spanish or similar.
I do wish the class was twice a week for more forced cadence of practice but that's an adult problem.
I used mostly the Tandem app (finding good ambitious people to learn with is the key), a grammar book and the DuoLingo app (free tier). When using DuoLingo, you will find very useful tips for every exercise on their website (but not in the app!). Without these tips, learning things other than vocabulary only on DuoLingo can be quite inefficient.
I've very recently discovered that I downloaded the MosaLingua French app when it was free a while ago and am now using that as well (spaced repetition) but i find DuoLingo provides better motivation.
Buying the french grammar book has been the only money I've spent so far and it's been a very enjoyable experience! Being able to understand texts and videos in a new language is a huge motivator. Being able to have a conversation is awesome, too.
Some other resources that have been useful:
- ThoughtCo language learning resources has some very good texts https://www.thoughtco.com/languages-4133094
- https://deepl.com - the best for translating entire sentences
- https://defr.dict.cc/ - for looking up words and idioms at the PC
- Reverso Konjugator - verb conjugation
You have to find what works for you, and what type of content you like, you don't want to be fighting the language, the content, and the platform.
Saludos.
Anything else might be a waste of time, including conjugation apps. The exception may be actual grammar references which can sometimes be helpful.
I also didn't even realize until relatively recently that you could move on from one lesson after completing the first level, so I have apparently been inefficiently learning each lesson to level five this whole time. My recall of stuff from the beginning of the program is already faded...
Maybe it's better if you pay for it just to be able to do more lessons, or alternatively maybe the desktop application described in the article is still active and doesn't require payment?
I actually prefer the free version, because it naturally creates spaced repetition by forcing me to review old lessons in-between new content.
I don't use it any more, but when they added the heart feature, I finally bought a subscription. Without it, Duolingo ends the lesson just as you're about to learn from your mistakes which is unfortunate.
Also with the mobile apps there are these special XP challenges which you can use to repeat what you have learned before. I use these a lot, and it's more fun. I also notice when I'm too far in front of my skis, in that those exercises seem to difficult for the time allotted. That is a sign that I progressed too quickly through the lessons.
It involves 30 minute audio lessons using spaced repetition where you instinctively and intuitively build fluency over a restricted vocabulary.
It worked for me, but it's expensive, and requires patience, as it advances somewhat slowly.
Also, check your local library. They may have access for you for free.
I’ve tried listening to some pimsleur tapes for Japanese and Chinese and it is hopeless even if you now a little bit already
Every day I would usually repeat the previous day's lesson, and do a new lesson.
For languages such as Japanese and Chinese, you'd probably need to repeat it more than that. It's recommended that you know about 80% of the answers before moving on to the next lesson.
That forced me to actually go learn Pinyin and learn about the j/q/x consonants. It took me about 2 months of obsessive practice to fix all the wrong pronunciations I taught myself from 1 month of Pimsleur.
I think for any non Western European language, it’s much better to learn the basics the old fashioned way, especially the writing system and all the phonetic aspects of the language that don’t exist in English.
To be honest it’s hard for me to understand the “Pinyin teaches you wrong pronunciation” line of thinking. It so commonly repeated by so many people that there must be something to it, but not for me.
I got railroaded on the difference between i and e. My chi and my che sound basically the same. This is little enough that people seem to understand well enough, but it's sometimes a bit awkward.
1) You don't see spaced repetition working until a few weeks in, once you're on a schedule.
2) You can't have gaps, so you can't just start in the middle.
3) If you know stuff, you need to keep with it until it gets into new stuff.
From there, it has to be done daily. If you miss 2-3 days, it's a chore to get back onto the schedule. I did it when I had a commute, so investing 30 minutes per day was easy. It added no time to my day, and by the end of 3 months, I knew /a lot/ of Chinese for not a lot of time invested. I was on-par with people who had roughly 2 years of college classes for speaking (but not reading or writing, which Pimsleur doesn't touch on). My accent was better too.
Once I finished, there was nowhere to go. Nothing else was nearly as efficient. I kind of plateaued. There are better tools now; this was many years ago.
I did the library/CDs route, so it was free.
I highly recommend the same path.
I haven't found anything good for writing Chinese. Does anyone have recommendations? Ideally, it'd leverage a pen tablet or iPad pencil or similar.
I got Pimsleur for free through my public library. It's even available through various public library apps.
Spanish learning material is heavily biased towards the language as spoken in Spain. Don't worry about it. Use what you can and the delighted local will help you with the rest.
Sometimes it's awkward. Smile, laugh, and accept the blessing of the experience and carry on. Don't try to change or fix it. Mexico is this place where your mood is reflected right back at you. This matters when you don't want to deal w/ the language barrier in the moment.
If you're working a day job in English you've got to spend the rest of the day immersed in Spanish. That means don't date expats. Stick to Spanish music and culture as much as you can. Subtitles and what not. Books with English and Spanish are really helpful. Schedule your day based on your priorities.
Get a qualified teacher, a high school English teacher is a good bet or ask around. I was doing 3 days/week with an instructor + plus daily homework, and that was a lot, but now 2 days/week feels slow.
Learning Spanish can be done while learning Salsa, making Spanish friends that scuba dive or sail, hiking groups, or golfing. Facebook groups is a good place.
Digital nomads have their own agendas. Often they're not really there to have their belief system tested or to learn Spanish, and view world as if they're at a cultural theme park or at a petting zoo. This is not always true of course but I standby it.
People that actively go out and see the world for themselves are a very high grade of human and worth getting to know.
Like Hemingway said about Italy: don't look at the women; share your cigarettes.
Like walking into the wind, you must lean into and accept the resistance of learning in order to move forward. Reframe the process as a blessing and an opportunity.
You'll be shocked how foreign your homeland will become to you.
It's the greatest thing I've ever done.
Like these ones, the first has every page written in french and english (1647,but its like Assimil series), and the second is from basic school: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=yWf4czen8jIC
https://archive.org/details/enseignementprim01brunuoft
Old books are free :)
Have you heard of 'Le Francais par le methode Nature' ? https://archive.org/details/jensen-arthur-le-francais-par-la...
It is a book that teaches French in French from the ground up.
When I studied Japanese, watching kid shows was really helpful for ear training with a more simplistic vocabulary.
My preferred weird kid's show for that was Anpanman. Hahihuhehooooo~!
It's insane that the only one I don't recognize is so high up on the list
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-grossing_media...
The InnerFrench podcast helped a lot - I had french courses twice a week, 2 hours each, and the podcast kept french in my mind on weekends/days off.
That being said, after moving here it still took 3-4 months to get comfortable with just how bloody fast they speak French in real life.
And on the more modern side, I could read French newspapers quite well too.
But at no point could I ever reliably make out more than the gist of what an actual French speaker, speaking normally, said. We have two Belgian exchange students and I struggled to understand them, and just watching French video content, similar struggles there.
I don't know if it's like this for every language where native speakers just talk really fast and there's a large gulf in comprehension speed for learners to close, or if it's something specific to French, but I know your pain here.
Also, once you do understand French speakers, you might not understand other accents. For example, even as a native French speaker, I struggle with Québécois.
Americans struggle in Ireland for instance. Or people from the northeast once they get to Louisiana.
A lot of learning how to speak a language is ear-training. With French, I started much more with speaking so now I can make out a lot of what people say. But, the big challenge with French is that, like in English, native speakers "break" the rules or use subtle turns of phrasing that are very culturally specific, usually they're collocations that don't exactly translate (but luckily for English they actually commonly do thanks to the Norman mixing in English).
It gets even more complicated when French has different formal and casual registers that are much more distinct than in English. So when you're reading Le Monde, or Flaubert, you're getting the literary, fancy, French. Most people speak in a much more argot mixed way.
Now add onto that different regional dialects like Quebecois (really really fast, distinct, french from them), Belgian, Swiss, different parts of France, etc...and it's even more difficult. (Personally I find Parisian French, ou francais standard to be the easiest to understand).
The best solution is just immersion. And constant use. Language is used, and use is the best method for improvement. You can't really think of it like a logical code. It's more like behavior for communicating. You have to learn the right rules in the language game for things to "make sense".
I haven't seen online discussions of this idea for language learning, but I wonder if the same technique could be used? Hear snippets of fast French, words or short phrases, with long gaps for you to think what they said. Then as you understand quicker, need less thinking time, shrink the gaps. ?
Maybe even as simple as a "press space for next sentence when ready, or R to repeat".
[It's also an interesting thing about language comprehension / artificial intelligence. After hearing a thing in English I have awareness of whether or not I understand it, and can correct small misunderstandings without further input, only time and imagination, e.g. "it makes no sense in context, maybe they said this instead" or "I just realised that someword said in their accent would sound like that. It might be someword they said"].
Which is my pet peeve with French: when I feel particularly bad at talking English (I'm German), it feels natural to fall back to a sequence of separate words that isn't a sentence but gets some message to the receiver (while making me sound like the imbecile that I might be, but it does the job and sometimes that's worth this cost). For French, I feel like there's no alternative to trying to form a sentence. And on my level, that works worse than the English "words no sentence" fallback would (and if it does not work it will certainly also fail to make me seem anywhere close to competent in the language)
The thing that made liaisons much more clear for me was bucketing them by: optional, forbidden, and required.
Whole words get dropped as well “ne ___ pas” simply becomes “pas” as an obvious example.
This phenomenon happens in spoken English as well. “I am going to go to the store” => “imagotada store”
And as you said, Iceland is not the best example, since for all intents and purposes it’s an English speaking country.
Because Icelandic has a small population of speakers, and less of a global reach compared to languages like French, Mandarin, or English, there will be less easily available resources. It will also be very distinct. I don't believe Icelandic is a part of common language families, like a romance language, or a germanic language.
Passing a B2 (=basic) level exam is definitely not equal to "I learned French". It is a realistic goal to get to the B2 level in a year, if you devote sufficient time to it. But a B2 exam is just that - an exam, with certain types of questions that you can prep and pass, without that actually meaning much in terms of your language skill.
How do I know? I am currently attending a C1 course in German. Yes, we do learn new words, phrases and expressions, but actually, the major parts of a C1 exam are: * understanding and summarizing texts (either written or spoken) * doing a 5 minute presentation on a given topic, with very strict rules (the outline structure is given, the expected speech parts are given etc). * knowing grammar rules, which even the native speakers don't really know or care about.
As a matter of fact, C1 is more like a university preparation course, and not so much like a language course. Also, it is so much more dense than the previous levels, that it might take one person the same time to go from A1 to B2 as another person to go from B2 to C1.
In the meantime, the following are not really checked or prepped: * understanding real native speakers (not on radio or giving a speech, but the real everyday speech) * making sure the basics are there, eg. how do you organise your life? How do you make a phone call, talk to the postman, your colleagues during lunch, how do you ask your mechanic what is that creaky noise while you are driving your car...? * speaking and writing without (many) errors. Yes, you can speak, but judging the face of the person who is listening to you.... not very well. Actually, in my case I almost always immediately recognize when I say something stupid, but I still say it...
One can pass the C1 exam, and be almost completely unable to fit in everyday life. This is even more so if the area you live in doesn't speak the "mainstream" of the language, but some weirdo variation of it. For example, if you think you speak German B2, I challenge you to try to speak to a random person on the backstreets of Munich or Vienna... if you are lucky, they speak some English :)
To end on a more positive note, achieving B2 is ABSOLUTELY a worthy goal in any language, and your life will be better for it. Just set your expectations accordingly.
One thing caught my eye as it brought back some fun memories: Verlan is equivalent to our Pig Latin. The biggest difference is, many places in France actually use it! Here in the States, we tend to use Pig Latin around small children when we don't want them to understand what we're saying.
After the first 50 pages of this (I did a page a day) I stopped needing deepl so much and just now use a dictionary for words. My spoken German was always better than my English, and now the problems I have are pronunciation instead of missing words or poor sentence structure.
YMMV, but this worked for me :}
On Chatterbug, it was 400€ for unlimited (!) 1-on-1 lessons with native teachers.
Can’t praise them enough. It was a singular thing that just propelled my speaking to the next level (from B1 to B2-C1).
Lingoda is less fun and more traditional classroom-like. Chatterbug is fun and startuppy.
Both offer structured lessons with natives.
Edit: Chatterbug is no longer unlimited for 400€, it’s only 30 lessons a month. Still cheap. Here’s a referral link for a further 25% discount: https://app.chatterbug.com/r/DerIvan-66
I don't for one moment thing interacting with my phone will give me another language, but doing wonders for my confidence. Can just throw yourself into it at great velocity, and if you fuck up, it doesn't judge and just throws up those same hurdles until you clear them.
Time has also cleared another hurdle - I've now got loads of access to French in a format I want. I can watch netflix in english with french subs, and then switch to french with english subs. Previous time I tried this, was watching La Haine on VHS from my local library. A great film - but didn't overlap too much with the french I was taught at school (Somewhere out there, I like to imagine there's the friendlier "Le n'aime pas" version)
What I would be interested in, is the best place for the next step - being forced to talk to a real French speaker.
Maybe my favourite bit of Duolingo, is the mini-forum attached to each question. It's a little bit hidden (as maybe doesn't align to their smooth-app-experience), but found it invaluable when I'd screwed up to be told why. So many times I've clicked full of rage at being told I was wrong, and not only learnt why I was wrong, but got a proper explanation that's stuck with me.
Maybe that's my main Duolingo quibble, the never-ending-pop-quiz is great, but it maybe over-simplifies. I'd like a tables showing all declensions, or a paragraph covering why nobody uses Vous any more.
I think much of the value, though, is in the opportunity it affords people who find a passion in it. I really loved French in high school, and the combination of the support/resources it offered (a book, a teacher) and the regimen (I think French was either 3 or 5 times per week? I can't recall) was just right to let me learn as much as I wanted to, and also enough regimen to keep me coming back to it even if I wouldn't have otherwise necessarily felt like it if left to my own devices.
1. Focus on learning the accent and intonation before you focus on learning vocabulary 2. Speaking to a native speaker daily will bring far more proficiency than studying will
Languages are (best) learned in the cradle or in bed
(no idea where I heard it first)
Many years ago I studied French intensively and got to the stage I could read and write quite well and understood some fairly advanced grammar. But I couldn't even make the most spoken basic requests, let alone have a conversation, because I had no exposure to the spoken language. I had done a lot of what the author suggests here in terms of listening (some French films are excellent, by the way), but it's not enough.
One thing I'm quite certain about is techniques that treat you like a baby are really inefficient. That includes Rosetta Stone, Duolingo etc. It's just way more convenient to learn much of the grammar using your existing language skills. Practice with people who can speak your current language and your target language, as the author suggests, is ideal as you can get them to explain what they meant in your language. There are certain fixed phrases and figures of speech which would take a long time to learn like a baby, plus the faux amis will trip you up if you're not careful.
It is directly related to the subreddit, with a fantastic and kind community!
It's in there, Italki: https://www.italki.com/
I realized on my last trip to Paris with a friend that I know a lot more than someone who has never studied the language at all but it's still pretty bad.
My point is: your limitations are a proof that you understand french almost as well as a native speaker that never really left his/her hometown. Which is impressive.
Can understand the main ideas of complex text on both concrete and abstract topics, including technical discussions in their field of specialisation.
Can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party.
Can produce clear, detailed text on a wide range of subjects and explain a viewpoint on a topical issue giving the advantages and disadvantages of various options.
Penguin Parallel Text French Short Stories 1 and 2. New Penguin Parallel Text Short Stories in French. Dover Dual Language Great French Short Stories of the 20th Century. Candide, ou L'optimisme.
These give you enough vocabulary to transition to French-only text or speech without constantly having to refer to a dictionary.
The Penguin series also covers other European languages: Spanish, Italian, German, and Russian. (It also covers Chinese and Japanese, but for them you'd still need to refer to a dictionary for the pronunciation of Hanzi/Kanji, except where furigana are used.)
For spoken French, I've found the Inner French, Hugo Lisoir, and Mamytwink Youtube channels not too difficult to follow.
People underestimate the effectiveness of multiple-choice type exercises, and I would count the word-bank among those. It is harder to type in the answers from scratch, but especially in the beginning the speed of the MC formats more than compensates for the "laziness" compromise. Double that for translations to English. Just reading and hearing the foreign sentences is enough to have some repetition benefit.
For latin scripts I use the corresponding phone keyboard to put in the words. It's still quite fast. Overall I'm faster with the phone than with the website.
OP: please clarify what the above means. When you say you did "A0", I'm presuming it's a level in the French proficiency measurement system. Is it just the exam that you completed, or was there accompanying course material as well? If the latter, please point me to the actual course material you used.
I've been learning French for a few years now (Michel Thomas method). I'd conjecture that this was the most helpful (considering you weren't in an immersion situation to help you): iTalki
https://www.coe.int/en/web/common-european-framework-referen...
Not quite, no. The system is linked in the first paragraph:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...
it begins at A1. So "A0" is just word play for "I know nothing", no exam necessary ;-).
J'avoue que je ne les ai pas _tous_ lus, mais....
Maybe it's because my extended family (who grew up speaking Quebec) sounded very different than my high school French teacher when they switched to French?
Here's a funny scene from the movie on Quebecois swearing:
One drawback was that I mainly learned household Japanese and not business/politics Japanese. Also I apparently spoke like a woman because almost all the people around me were women! (Japanese has very distinct versions for men and women.)
If I spend a year learning French, I fear I'll forget it within 6 months. Any other forgetful people out there with solutions? lol!
1. English has about a million words
2. College educated people have about a 30,000 word vocabulary
3. High school graduates about 10,000 words
4. TV uses about 2,000 words
Learning 2,000 words doesn't seem so daunting. I was surprised that the article also brought up the 2,000 word vocabulary.
Right on the money. Almost everyone I know who speaks lots of languages is very sociable. They have no problem talking to anyone about anything.
I pushed through Cien Años and game of thrones in this manner.
Admittedly, I spend maybe 5-15 minutes per day on average and most of that I do in a rush, but the expectation still sounds fair -- reading would be relatively passive knowledge too.
Speaking from personal experience, if you’ve actually put in substantial time in the last year, you’ll find that a lot of that practice will demonstrate itself over the course of a few conversation classes with a teacher.
One thing that you will notice is that even if you can’t utilize it fluidly now, if you were to jump into more immersive methods now, you’ll realize that it’s all there under the surface - you’ll very likely make very rapid progress.
Are you reading anything? Find graded readers like from Mandarin Companion and read those (start with ones that seem too easy).
Have you learned to write any of the characters? I don’t think you need to learn to write all of them, but learning at least 50 or so got me to understand and recognize the characters better in my reading as well.
The Pleco app is a nice reader letting you look up words just by tapping on them. Also turn off pinyin in any study apps you’re using, just use characters (except for in answers to verify you’re right).
There aren't any tricks IMO. You have to practise the thing you actually want to be able to do. You wouldn't expect to get good at playing guitar by tapping an app every day, why would it help you learn a language?
I’ve used it as the way to get started and build a base of vocabulary and grammar, allowing me to comfortably jump into immersion with audio/video/speaking etc.
Duolingo is quite effective at what it advertises, it never claims it will bring you to full fluency.
How many characters has Duolingo showed you (if you can get that metric)?
The main benefit of Duolingo is the streak. Gotta keep the streak going, so I use it every single day.
Is it working? I can read French news articles for the most part, filling in the blanks from context. I have trouble listening at normal talking speeds to French youtube videos. For speaking, I'm sure I could order a croissant and get a hotel room, but beyond that...
Still, it's much better than looking for perfection and learning nothing.
Then I bought a bunch of french books for my daughter and learnt I knew nothing.
Was it really the case that you didn't know anything in the books? That would be very surprising. At the very least you'd expect to recognize vocabulary you've encountered before, even if the sentences weren't familiar. I'd have thought after 500 * 15 minutes you'd be able to figure some things out.
As it is though, even if the books were completely unfamiliar, I don't really know how you'd measure or test that Duolingo had had no impact on you. Obviously if a book has vocabulary in it that you've not encountered on Duolingo then you're not going to know what it means, but how could you know that you aren't picking up new things faster because you've worked through Duolingo first?
My experience of it has been very different. I work through Duolingo courses for languages I build software in. I've not spent anywhere close to 500 days on any language yet, but I've found I am able to work with languages better having done a few months of Duolingo courses. When I've been working on German and Spanish websites I've actually understood much more of the text than I could with websites I haven't learnt any of. I mean, I couldn't drop in to Madrid and have a chat with someone, but it definitely has made a difference.
Honestly, probably not fluent in any language except python. I probably need to put significantly more effort into learning the language than I was doing.
I hate the gendered nature of french. I love quebecois over the french academy crap.
I guess I'm not an ideal student by any means.
After humbly reminding I was the FNAG (freaking new Anglo guy) he said, it means the new build is working great!
I learned English by studying Beatles songs. Excellent material for studying
Overall i would say it was a failure, got to where I could read almost anything , but completely failed at being able to have real-time conversations.
I think for me I would need immersion to really get to the next level. Like I would need a french person to live with me for a few months.
It's a shame that more people don't know about these courses, which are still operating more than 40 years later. The only expense is getting to the location in Quebec; all tuition, housing, meals, books, etc. are paid for by the government. The only requirement is that you have been a Canadian student in the past year.
- Paul Noble parts 1 & 2 - Pimsleur course starting at Lesson 11
I met and in some ways exceeded the level of proficiency the author noted. In a lot of ways, this was out of necessity because I would've otherwise been quickly left behind. Based on what the author shared about his own proficiency, I suspect the primary difference for me is grammatical. Ironically, this whole endeavor improved my English grammar too. I had teachers that consistently emphasized "correct French", graded everything I wrote, and then gave me thorough feedback. It seems like this made a big difference. I also peppered my instructors with questions about native slang and speech patterns I noticed in my personal practice/exploration. In response, they did a combination of humoring me with answers and guiding me towards what I needed to know first for those concepts to make sense later. I think this helped a lot because the native 'shortcuts' I learned later made much more sense in context than when I had first heard them.
All that being said, if I wrote up my own list of resources or recapped what I did to practice in my free time it would eerily match this. We consumed most of the same media, used the same practice tools, and even used the same references right down to the method of lookup (setting up the search engines), so there's no question in my mind it's possible to find and utilize resources that get you very far in your own time. I wonder if he has considered that someone learning a language in school should take advantage of all of these tools too.
> I firmly believe that learning languages in school, especially in the United States, is generally extremely inefficient. If you struggled learning a language in school, don’t let that affect your confidence with learning a new language now. If you practice intelligently, you can learn much more effectively on your own. You get to avoid doing redundant work that isn’t helping you, and you can spend much more time getting 1-on-1 speaking time with teachers who put all their focus lessons on you.
It's obvious to me he succeeded due to dedication (and his own account supports this), yet he moves so quickly to condemn the system with only anecdotal evidence. There's no doubt it's not perfect, but couldn't it possibly be that some students simply take French in school to meet a separate requirement and don't really care about learning a language? This was certainly my experience in Undergrad. It was no loss to me as it just freed up more of the teacher's time for my benefit. It also seems like I managed to avoid some of his frustrations in the process based on the experiences I noted above e.g. with finding adequate instructors. Overall, I applaud him for his achievements. I'm just not sure I'm ready to so quickly support this kind of conclusion. Institutions and learning are certainly changing, but it remains to be seen what shape that will take.
What! This is revolutionary!
The bullshit heart system is absent?!
That's not so difficult I guess, here even babies do so.