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Comment by dkaleta | Hacker News Reader

I learned Spanish, too, in about 12 months to dogfood my new app for learning vocabulary (which I just recently launched) [0]

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.

[0] https://www.obstino.com

[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/DreamingSpanish

[2] www.newsinslowspanish.com

[3] https://elpais.com

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B1 in 5 months, as follows:

- 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.

> with french subtitles (!)

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.

The problem with french subtitles is that for many popular series/movies subtitles don't match the actual french speech. Looks like they are just translating English subtitles separately or something.

It's necessary to shorten and simplify dialogs. Not everything that is said would fit on the screen.

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)

Especially for French, since, like English, the actual pronunciation can be quite unexpected, compared to the text.

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.

> the actual pronunciation can be quite unexpected, compared to the text.

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.

The GHOTI example is rather contrived as it ignores so much context. For instance, you're claiming that "ti" can be pronounced "sh" on the basis of the pronunciation of the Latin-derived suffix "-tion," but in fact "ti" would never, ever be pronounced that way at the end of a word. Same with silent "gh" at the beginning of a word.

Well, for me anyway, compared to Latin, German, Japanese and Spanish it's very hard to listen to and write down what's being said, which is why I gave up on the class, because that's what the professor was asking us to do.

You cannot do that instinctively. It requires internalizing the rules which will take a while, a couple of months probably, longer in lower grades at school.

Thank you for sharing this list of resources. I have been studying French since September of 2020 (but only got serious about it in May of 2021). There are some resources here that I was not aware of.

I used the same method, in addition to going through all of the Rosetta Stone French lessons and the Defense Language Institute material (thanks to the Army.) I also went to a weekly French language Meetup where only French was spoken and any Alliance Française events in the area. It took me eight months, so you were faster than me.

> Defense Language Institute material (thanks to the Army.)

Is this publicly available, or were you in the service?

https://www.dliflc.edu/elearning/

Excellent!

Without https://leconjugueur.lefigaro.fr/ I could not survive. Mostly for writing, but if there e.g. is a weird passé simple or subjonctif also for reading sometimes.

I grew up bilingual (English first language, Italian from my mother) and the "read a book you liked in your first language but translated into your desired language" is an excellent way to get exposure.

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.

When I did an exchange in Germany, I picked up Der Kleine Hobbit for that reason. My first week it was mentally exhausting just reading a page or two, but things picked up quickly from there.

Never thought of this but makes a great deal of sense.

Same with movies. Watch your fav movies in French lang. for example. You’ll know what yippekayeh mother fudger is!

> [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.

Here you go for German: https://m.dw.com/en/slowly-spoken-news-reports-learning-germ...

Danke :)

You can slow down Youtube videos without it distorting the audio. I've found it more helpful to use subtitles in the target language, though.

Anyone know of this for Dutch?

It’s not quite like News In Slow French, but you might like https://www.nedbox.be/. They sometimes refer to the easier to grok content from the Belgian public broadcaster, https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/rubrieken/klaar/. Perhaps most similar is http://www.wablieft.be/nl/krant with text and audio at two levels of proficiency.

Let me add another resource to your list that helped me tremendously: https://coffeebreaklanguages.com/

They have free podcasts available on iTunes for a lot of languages, the Spanish content is absolutely amazing.

That's a pretty cool language learning app concept - you haven't overcooked it. A lot of apps want to make themselves the star of the show - if that makes sense - but really it's a vessel to learn vocabulary, and it looks like yours lets a user add arbitrary vocab, which means it will be relevant.

Any plans to add new languages?

The problem with Spanish is what country’s Spanish you learn. Words can mean different things in different countries, and also pronunciation changes.

If you are a native English speaker, the #1 trick is to learn the vowel sounds exactly correctly.

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’m a native Spanish speaker, that’s why I say words can change meaning amongst countries. Also, some sounds are pronounced different in different countries.

My mother tongue is English, and I originally learnt conversational Spanish in Sevilla using my own techniques (months not years).

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.

That's the least problem I'd say. Spanish is pretty conserved, especially the written language.

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.

> Listening comprehension is always the last of the skills to kick in

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.

Understanding spoken language means building a representation of the current sentence in your mind. For all but the shortest sentences, this can't be done word-by-word or even phoneme-by-phoneme. Humans have a working memory of 7+-2 items, and it gets quickly overloaded that way.

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).

> I've always found it easier to follow a conversation in a language I am learning than to speak it

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.

Like for instance, in the US there was once a large tex-mex restaurant chain called Chichi's (long since bankrupt). When I told my friend from Spain this, she was horrified.

Oh. Thank you for being up front about the time commitment. That helps. I, too, would like quick results but I don’t feel like I can give it the go that you did so I think I will not do this.

Do you mind sharing your age? Curious if youth played a part here - I'm in my 40s and wondering if I'll have as much success?

I’m in my early thirties and similarly learned French from 0 to a conversational level in a bit over a year. (Though I was already pretty strong in Spanish so that helped significantly)

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).

You've hit the nail on the head! Being comfortable with ambiguity and not knowing something 100% is crucial. I've observed many language learners over the years and if someone has a habit of translating every word they see into their native language before they are satisfied then they usually make slow progress learning a second language.

Exactly.

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.

“ don’t try to force constructs from your primary language onto the one you are learning.”

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.

Older second language learners have a harder time, but I don't think it's because of some kind of "weakening of the brain" with age. I think the real reasons are:

* 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

“Studies comparing the rate of second-language acquisition in children versus adults have shown that although children may have an advantage in achieving native-like fluency in the long run, adults actually learn languages more quickly than children in the early stages (Krashen, Long and Scarcella, 1979.)”

“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.

Strangely missing: older people (40s) usually take care of X pretty small kids + N pretty declining elders while having Y hours of work + Z hours commute daily.

Seriously - I don’t even have 2 hours a day

I agree. Maybe there's some truth in the whole "brain plasticity" talking point but how long does it take a child to become fully comfortable with speaking and writing a language? 8 years? Longer? Compared to an adult who can accomplish that in about a year. And that is when the child has no choice but to use that language, since they know no other.

Learned a few things like violin art and other stuff as a way to spend time with my kids. turns out I learn much faster than they do.

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.

I am almost out of my 40s. In the past year, I've gotten three AWS certifications and learned new hobbies from scratch (ex: electronics component-level repair).

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.

I'm just dieting down for a second time, and I'll attest to this. Both times what got me to take diet seriously again was recognizing how sluggish I'd gotten, and cleaning my diet up again has a remarkably rapid effect.

The ability to learn things slow down dramatically when you get older, it's probably even more true for languages. It's fairly obvious when you look at kids. They can learn in the 5 first years of their life, without even thinking about it, to speak a language as well (at least accent wise) as any adult would do in 20 years of pretty intense studying.

If people spoke to me using using baby level words, then took great delight when I learned and re-produced sound, and steadily upped the sophistication of what they said, I'm sure I'd learn super quickly as well.

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).

Do you have a citation on this? Or is it as you say just obvious?

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.

While this myth is repeated often, I don’t find it true or obvious at all, I’m not sure where it comes from and I don’t see any actual evidence for it. You need to compare the hours spent learning, not years, in order to compare effort.

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.

It is true that learning extra languages makes it easier and easier, but that just makes the learning capacity of babies even more impressive: they are not even learning a language, they are leaning what is a language, what does it mean to make sound with their mouth, etc etc.

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.

Because kids aren't working full time jobs and stressing out over free time.

There's more to it than that. Neuroplasticity exists.

I'm sure it does, but you put me in a house, with 2 adults, house, feed and clothe me for 5 years that i don't have to worry about going to work and i guarantee you i will speak whatever language they speak a whole lot better than some 5 year old.

Hey i'll even throw in another language and still be able to fight the 5 year old. With one hand.

I’m in my late 30’s and learning Chinese and Japanese simultaneously. The age thing is almost entirely a myth. There are three factors in which age matters:

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.

I’m 34. I don’t think age matters that much. What matters the most is not even the method you use but the time spent with the language.

To put it into perspective, children learn their native language through ~10 years of complete immersion, so of course they speak it incredibly well. Very few adult learners will ever have the opportunity to be immersed in a foreign language that thoroughly over such a long time, but if they did we would expect them to speak that language excellently as well (albeit perhaps with a slight accent).

“I was learning for about 2h a day, 6 times a week. I would read articles, books, websites in Spanish”

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.

What is your age? (If you don't mind me asking)

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