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Comment by YawningAngel | Hacker News Reader

Depends which language learners. There are people who can learn 50 new words a day for months, but those people are rare and there feats are probably not replicable for most of us.

https://isaak.net/mandarin/ is an example

edit: Isaak is great, but it was 22 words per day not 50

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My pace is typically 35 words a day when learning languages and most people think that's insane. It's still only around 1000 a month, which is why I chose that number. That's on the order of 12k a year if you don't miss a single day, which you usually do.

The claim here is memorizing a full dictionary in 9 weeks. That has to be at least 40,000 words in 63 days. 634 words per day. And then or forgetting it.

It's beyond rare. Its alien.

Have you learnt many languages? I wish I had the energy to wanna do it.

In school 35 words a day would be really pushing it for me. It had a really hard time learning English words. I had to study like an hour for 20 words to pass the test. But I learned grammar really fast.

Japanese, Chinese and Korean. Fluent in Japanese, can watch kdrama and mostly follow along and have basic conversations in Korean, forgot virtually all the Chinese I did but I managed to pass HSK2 after 2 months of study and then HSK3 the following month. I was only in China for 3 months on a work trip, so I thought I'd have some fun.

What do you use to learn different languages? Firstly, where you get your vocabulary from but also pronunciation and grammar?

Anki, Netflix, Preply and social clubs.

I start by front loading all the grammar study up to upper-intermediate level as fast as possible. Usually a premade Anki deck of a few thousand sentences will be available for this.

Vocab I pick up from native media. I just read or watch whatever I'm interested in, lookup words as I go and put them into Anki. I do full immersion and it works well as access to entertainment in my target languages is a key goal.

Pronunciation I pick up through a crap tonne of exposure to native media.

Conversation is through a combination of private tutoring and finding people who speak my target languages to hang out with.

That's fairly different though, he doesn't need to learn the definitions, just memorize the strings. Which is still unbelievable.

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