Comment by eigenspace | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eigenspace | Hacker News Reader

> It's confession time: after nearly eight years living in Germany, I still haven't learned the language. At this point it feels somewhat embarrassing and it's something I'd like to change.

I don't mean to shame the author, but I really do think this is quite sad, and the fact that this isn't even surprising is one of the things that I dislike about being a native English speaker. It's just too easy to get away with not learning the language somewhere. Not learning the language is not only isolating, but IMO rather weird / presumptuous if you're living there long term. Having lived in Germany for around a year and a half now, I am often a little embarrassed about speaking English in public (but that's also partially the Canadian in me not wanting people to think I'm an American), and I find learning the German language to be a quite enriching experience.

There's a lot of culture embedded in language, and it's really worth learning new languages, especially so that you can better understand and relate to the people around you in the country you live in. People often have different personalities in different languages too. You may find a new side of yourself when you learn German, and you may find a new aspect in some of your German friends.

There is no excuse for not getting to conversational level sure; but let’s say you’re working 8-10 hours in English with an hour commute. Kids. By the time you’re home, fed everyone, got the kids down it’s 2030. For me it was impossible to study grammar for my b2 in this scenario; nothing left in the tank for it.

So I can really sympathise with people in that situation; it’s not always choice.

In my case, I got my employer to allow me to attend classes during normal work hours; something which isn’t available to everyone I am sure.

It sounds like the OP isn't even at a conversational level though. I don't know about where the OP is at because they don't get into much detail, but I do know of some people who have lived here around that long and can barely order their lunch in German, let alone have a rough conversation.

And yeah, I'm much more understanding if someone just has functional, but poor German skills after a long time. Mastering a language is a legitimately difficult thing. But I find it rather difficult to not be judgemental towards people who have been here for a long time and don't seem to have made any effort at all.

What helped me was living in Hamburg and going to the physiotherapist: “Können Sie Englisch?” “NEIN!”

As the author of the post, I do agree. I do find it kind of sad as well. Sometimes life gets in the way, and you find it hard to motivate yourself. Change needs to begin somewhere.

However, I'm not a native English speaker, the other languages I speak is Japanese and Swedish.

I can totally empathize with finding it hard to find the motivation for something like this (despite being reflexively quite judgemental), and I wish you luck / success in your learning journey!

I suspect you'll find that between your knowledge of English and Swedish, you'll discover a lot of connections to those languages in German that may make it easier and maybe even fund to learn the vocabulary. The grammar will remain a pain in the butt, but at least once you get the vocabulary down, you can move onto more stimulating learning material than flash cards.

> However, I'm not a native English speaker, the other languages I speak is Japanese and Swedish.

Fair enough, Maybe I should just change my complaint to a complaint about the ubiquity of English. Or maybe it's just a silly complaint any way I slice it, but it just sometimes feels bad to me to see English everywhere (even though I am a native English speaker myself)

> but at least once you get the vocabulary down, you can move onto more stimulating learning material than flash cards.

I think that's the plan, and also get a feeling that you're making some kind of progress. A couple of weeks ago I had a meeting with a German person that spoke Swedish, and I really stumbled my way through the little German I know. Very painful.

I hope increasing the vocabulary with example sentences will broaden that and give me somewhat of a confidence boost. You've got to start somewhere..

I've been living in Austria for 13 years now, and I still haven't learned the language.

I couldn't find any German courses that would suit me. I found out I can trivially solve all exercises just by pattern matching. I'd get maximum points on everything we'd be doing, yet I was learning nothing. I've been to many courses. I aced them all, I learned nothing.

I even found reading or listening very easy, and not because I understood the material. Thes exercises always asks for some sort of information to extract from the text or dialogue. "How many people were talking?", "where did Max go?", "what was the relation between the people talking?", etc. These questions are trivial to answer even if you don't understand the material at all. I heard 3 people (no idea what they talked about), some dude mentioned Spain (no idea what he talked about), mother and daughter were talking (no idea what they talked about).

Writing was also easy for me, at least as homework. Just use a dictionary, and lookup the grammar rules! Yet I don't remember the words or the rules after I'm done with the exercise.

The educational materials and the course organization have been totally hopeless for me. How do people learn this stuff?

Looking for any sort of advice. Also keep in mind that, just as the parallel comment mentioned, I have work and other life commitments to attend to.

So why not move onto the next level? I assure you at B2 and C1, the questions cannot be solved with pattern matching.

Honestly, it's kinda hard to give advice when it sounds like the fundamental problem here is that you're either consciously or unconsciously trying your hardest possible to avoid learning the language, and resorting to rather elaborate tricks to circumvent classes meant to teach you.

Do you have any friends or family who speak German? Maybe a good start would be to try and get them to at least speak some basic German with you. Try to actually formulate German questions and try to think about what they respond with.

I know this isn't a great fit for everyone, but I find simply listening to German podcasts to be immensely helpful for me in internalizing the language and learning it in a way that's more organic than rote memorization / repetition. The Easy German podcast is really good and I strongly recommend it.

> Writing was also easy for me, at least as homework. Just use a dictionary, and lookup the grammar rules! Yet I don't remember the words or the rules after I'm done with the exercise.

Common, no way this was easy. If you had to look up each word and look up grammar rules each time, it must have taken ages and ages. There is absolutely no way you could do this with longer texts which are part of pretty much all the courses I have seen later on.

> These questions are trivial to answer even if you don't understand the material at all. I heard 3 people (no idea what they talked about), some dude mentioned Spain (no idea what he talked about), mother and daughter were talking (no idea what they talked about).

That is beginner level questions. That is what you are expected to gather by the start, you do not need to understand everything. Later on, normal (not even good) courses add harder and harder questions, including tricky ones. I mean, even Duolingo was impossible to answer with pattern matching only, because the information you was quizzed on was indirect.

Talk, talk, talk.

I did a mix of talking together with some basic grammar.

Right now I am super fluent in German but still make mistakes. Just the damn articles are a pain.

When I hear someone speaking Spanish, my native language, and says a 10 word sentence, everything correct except of an article, I immediately think "oh shit, that's how I sound in German!", haha. Because even if almost everything was perfect, it sounds off.

I could have written these words in German but it would have been much harder. As I said, I am much more fluent in German than in English although my English is waaay better. I can read a book and write things down; in German? Hard :o

Motivation is really important. I work at Lieferando/Takeaway (courier with the bigass ugly backpack) and I am in charge of showing the workflow to the new hires.

It doesn't stop to amaze me how many Syrians who fled the war can speak soooo good. There's all kind of cases.

Half of the people hate the country, complain about it and hate the language. So many of them have been here for 5-10 years and their German sucks or just basically doesn't exist.

No easy answer but you really have to like the thing and try to talk. Retrieval, retrieval!

Interesting. It sounds like your analytical skills are really amazing which lets you get away with "solving for x".

But sounds like your retention and generative capabilities are underdeveloped because you're able to get away with so much through purely analytic hacks. Many gifted folks suffer from this -- they take so many shortcuts because its so frictionless for them to do so (and they are praised for it) but they end up not developing much deep comprehension (unless it's something that really interests them). This is why many gifted kids struggle with having the grit to do deep work beyond the quick solves. Some things just require work, no matter how smart one is.

Language production is what you might need to focus on, not "solving for" the language.

You might need to use the Feynman method to train your generative skills (which will also train your retention). The Feynman method is a forcing function to train comprehension.

> the fact that this isn't even surprising is one of the things that I dislike about being a native English speaker. It's just too easy to get away with not learning the language somewhere.

I have mixed feelings on this. On the one hand, it's certainly a valid observation. I lived in Japan for a while (and now have a reasonable level of sufficiency). Even though Japanese is about as different a language from English as you can find, these days, it's pretty easy to get by in Japan without learning the language at all. The locals will routinely "English" you, based only upon appearance [1], and pretty much everything of importance to daily life is subtitled in English as well. You can live a pretty comfortable life without any level of Japanese fluency, and you meet tons of expats who never bother, or who have atrocious language skills even after years of living there.

On the other hand, despite the incentive structure, learning the language isn't really harder because of any of this. If you want to learn, you will find a way to associate with Japanese people, read Japanese, listen to Japanese, and so on. You're living in Japan. It's trivial to immerse yourself, if you choose to do so.

Anyway, my point is that language learning is pretty much always about motivation, and maybe a bit of shamelessness. If you don't want to do the work, or you're too "shy", or uncomfortable, embarrassed, or whatever else, you won't learn, even if you live in the country and you're surrounded by people speaking it every day. Ultimately, the "I speak English, so it's harder for me" thing is just another excuse.

Yoda said it best: Do or do not. There is no try.

[1] White people speak English, according to the Japanese mindset. Sometimes, even if you are speaking to them in fluent Japanese.

I don't think we disagree. I didn't mean to imply that its 'harder' to learn new languages. I was just saying that it's too easy and tempting to not learn, and I find this to be a bad impulse.

I fully agree that one can still simply motivate oneself to learn and I have done so myself (though I'm still far from perfect, I think I'm quite good for only being here 1.5 years)

Yeah, I wasn't intending to imply disagreement. Comment just sorta wandered on me to a broad-based reaction to lots of comments I saw on the thread. You see so many people who get stuck while language learning for whatever reason, and I've become convinced it's basically just about motivation.

When I was younger I completely failed to learn to speak French because of embarrassment/shyness, so I do understand why people say that English is a crutch. I think part of the reason I was more successful with Japanese was that I was having more fun while I was doing it!

Ah I see. I thought you meant that you had mixed feelings on the truth of the claim I was making, sorry for misinterpreting.

Nono, it's definitely a real thing. Just mixed feelings on it as a cause, if that makes sense.

My fault for not being clear.

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