Comment by alexawarrior3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alexawarrior3 | Hacker News Reader

Duolingo doesn't actually do much if anything to help you become fluent. Nor does almost all the language learning apps such as Drops, Rosetta Stone, etc. What you need to move towards fluency is a lot of "comprehensible input" like with "Dreaming Spanish".

Learning about a language is different from acquiring a language, Krashen et. all has a lot of research on how people actually gain fluency. What most people are doing with language learning is like learning "about" chess, not learning to "play" chess. It's why you have people in China, Japan with seven years of English and they can't engage in simple conversation, or likewise people in the US, UK with seven years of Spanish and have trouble asking for anything beyond where is the library.

This is a great read (worth reading it all if you're really interested in acquiring a second language as an adult) about a guy who taught himself French as an adult to a high level of fluency via only watching TV and radio:

https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:9b49365

My taxi driver in Mexico spoke perfect English. I figured he was either American or had lived here. He said he learned the language watching YouTube videos and had never been.

My uncle learned Russian by just watching the news in the evenings when he was a student there during the USSR

haha I had a friend in high school, his dad worked at a local store as a clerk, but spoke multiple languages in what appeared to be "fluency", but I was young... anyways, he found this book at a yard sale "Russian by pictures", a year later he is throwing around full Russian sentences...

Some people are just magic at learning languages. 2 vs 10 isn’t that much more work. Always seemed wild to me as I struggled with Spanglish.

That's the main place he learned it but he was also interacting with people in Russian constantly which is what people upthread were saying makes the leap from being able to passably read to conversational and then on to fluency.

Agreed, no app, website, methodology or anything else is going to gain you fluency. The sole way of gaining fluency is speaking the language, and all that goes along with that (mostly it's integrating into the culture, because language is an extension of culture and if you don't get the culture, you won't get the language).

You need to know very little of the language to get started. Just find someone who's willing to talk to you in said language, and you'll fill in the gaps as you go.

I had 4 years of high school French and could read passably, write some, but was never really conversational. Probably if I had lived in France for a summer I'd have gotten a lot better.

I was actually talking with a (French and English-speaking) friend who now lives in Serbia and they were saying they pretty much just picked Serbian up and didn't sweat all the fancy verb conjugations and so forth.

I had four years of high school French and one year at university, and I was pretty conversational. How much did you use the language outside of class? A bunch of us high school French students would speak with each other outside of class, even just to make silly jokes in the language, which helped with retention.

>How much did you use the language outside of class?

Not at all. Which I think was my basic point. It was a class. I had no plans to move to France. Or any particular plan for French to be integral to subsequent education or career objectives.

Speaking frequently absolutely helps a lot, but I’ve found in my on-an-off language studies (as time allows) that vast amounts of input is also effective if finding speakers isn’t practical.

Reading content a bit above your level with a dual-language dictionary in hand as well as watching native content while actively trying to understand what’s being said paired with SRS of vocab you’ve picked up while reading will do vastly more for language acquisition than any app/subscription or textbook.

For more popular languages there’s community-made guides online that make doing this easier but it’s doable for any language.

That's the frustrating stage with learning a language; the part where you don't know enough to pick up the gist of a sentence, but learning more requires you to first pick up the gist of the sentence.

I'm not sure what the solution for this is, other than to tell you that I got over it with no formal study (or even much _in_formal study, now that I think of it) with time. Just hearing the language all around you helps.

Honestly, this just made me excited for AI in these apps. Imagine if you could just have a conversation with a personalized language coach constantly to help you learn a language and immerse yourself in it. Heck, this is HN. Who knows, maybe it's already in the works by someone around here. I think the first few iterations will be rough especially while "AI" generations remain close to current. Though I haven't messed with Gemini or Chat-GPT 4+ultra, maybe they've gotten disproportionately better.

That actually sounds great. If it were particularly smart, it could even take apart the bits of the language you were having problems with — and unbeknownst to you — concentrate on developing those with you.

I'd love to read this - but can't log into UQ. Can you repost or provide more detail please?

I don't know what the research is, but the best way I know to learn a language is to acquire a lot of data at the edge of your comprehension.

Basically, keep just listen to/read things in the target language, that you barely understand. Don't bother with grammar and rules, that's not how anyone thinks or speaks a language.

I'd love to see what's in OP's link, though.

I can't access the thesis either, but I believe it's "‘Picking Up’ a Second Language from Television: an autoethnographic L2 simulation of L1 French learning".

https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/189928232.pdf

Reposted with editable accessible link above.

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