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Comment by pkulak | Hacker News Reader

I'm about 18 months in as well and feel like I don't know crap. I just can't memorize thousands of new words. I honestly have no idea how anyone is bilingual.

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No one source of language learning material will bring you to fluency. There's a great community of language learners over at the Language Learners Forum [1] (note: it's been down the past few days but seems to be back up, although slow).

One resource that seems to be universally loved over there is Assimil [2]. I've been working through one of their courses and it's been great. I augment it with youtubers that make comprehensible input videos at my ability level, as well as with iTalki lessons.

I tried Duolingo once many years ago, but there's no way that memorizing words is going to get you all the way there. You need reading, writing, listening, and speaking practice in real world situations.

[1] https://forum.language-learners.org/ [2] https://www.assimil.com

> I tried Duolingo once many years ago, but there's no way that memorizing words is going to get you all the way there. You need reading, writing, listening, and speaking practice in real world situations

I’m not disagreeing that multiple sources is necessary, but describing Duolingo as just a “memorising words” app is wrong.

It has reading, writing, listening, speaking, and conversation exercises.

That’s totally fair, I haven’t tried to use it in more than 5 years and it’s probably a lot more than I remember. It didn’t work for me though and I just wish I had found Assimil a long time ago.

If people find it a useful tool and it has helped them gain fluency though that’s great!

Assimil is great.

My personal favorite ressource is Lingolia [1]

[1] https://lingolia.com

Go live, date, and work in a country that speaks the language you are studying. You will find that you don't need to start from ground zero and you will gain speaking and listening skills quickly.

My family, wife, and employer might object to each part of that plan.

Damn, I can't even date in English. Got no hope overseas.

But unfortunately, I mostly want to focus on reading in a foreign language and that's just a huge slog as of now.

And that's pretty much the thing. Pretty much everyone I know says immersion is the thing. You can probably learn to read academically. And I'll probably do some more language courses before a more immersive situation. But for the vast majority of people "I've spent a month with this online course" fluency isn't realistic.

Just subscribe to ChatGPT and tell it to teach you whatever language you want to master including meaning of each sentence in your own language. There are plugins for voice input/output as well so you can learn while doing a workout etc.

They use other methods, like Rosetta. Duolingo is trash.

Why is roesetta better?

It's not, it's just a different style, "full immersion" where you have no clue what is going on and they think at some point you'll understand. I don't think it works well but whatever. Best is to pay for a trip to some remote area speaking only the target language and force yourself to understand it quickly, swim or sink.

Do you think an environment like this in say, VR, has merit?

No idea, if you can survive with VR goggles for hours, and you have reasonable VR partners not trying to teach you all kinds of slang and swearwords, then maybe.

Immersion is the best way. Go to the place where the language is spoken and throw yourself to the wolves.

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