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Comment by devrandoom | Hacker News Reader

What are the modern methods and what's to back up they're better?

> What are the modern methods

It depends on the community, but the current meta among serious (non-casual) language learners is 1) comprehensible input, 2) extensive reading, 3) sentence mining, 4) spaced repetition + active recall

> what's to back up they're better?

Unfortunately... just the anecdotal experiences reported by these learners. I've talked with hundreds of successful language learners who reached actual fluency using these methods and I'm also one of them. Unfortunately, as many people online like to point out, these anecdotes are not technically scientific so there is a bit of "faith" you have to put into these methods. (Also, there is some debate in the field of SLA (second language acquisition) as to whether we will ever have a truly scientific model of SLA. If you're interested in this question, I'd recommend checking out the book "Key questions in second language acquistion")

In general, my advice to any serious language learner is you're gonna have to experiment a lot to reach fluency. Language learning takes on the order to thousands of hours and requires a vocabulary of over 10,000 base words for functional fluency (don't believe the youtubers who say you only need to know a couple hundred words. I've run the math on this way too many times)

I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I agree: focusing on input, especially through comprehensible reading, seems like a solid approach.

One resource I like for finding comprehensible input is: https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Main_Page

One document I found particularly helpful is Paul Nation's "What Do You Need to Know to Learn a Foreign Language?": https://wgtn.ac.nz/lals/resources/paul-nations-resources/pau...

It has a lot of practical advice. In particular, he recommends reading graded readers books.

Inspired by that, I’ve also been building a free (open-source code + CC-licensed texts), community-driven website for interactive graded readers. Think Choose Your Own Adventure in your target language: you read simple stories, make choices, listen to audio, and check translations only when needed.

It’s still early (just a couple of stories so far) and definitely not a full language learning solution, but the goal is to create enjoyable input for learners. Would love your feedback if try it out: https://lingostories.org

Military translator bootcamps and Mormon mission preparations are the most consistently successful methods in broad use for getting people good at a new language.

is "total immersion" still the name of that method? where you learn target language basics during the first and only bilingual week, and then you force yourself to only use the target language with the help of a printed booklet?

I don't know what the name is, but that is essentially it. Though bilingual week doesn't seem quite right - the very first day the military puts you in a history class taught in the language with no local language allowed for an hour. And you still get to use your first language in the latter weeks when you need to - though they push you to not most of the time.

Remember that first week is 20-30 hours of classroom time plus homework. That by the time you are done with that first week you already have most of a semester of regular classroom behind you.

I have lived in a foreign country for 25 years and have started picking up the local language. There might be faster methods.

My wife lived in a foreign country for 3 months (as an exchange student) before the family told her that was enough and refused to use English.

Your experience is common. However it is mostly a reflection on you and your situation. You could have picked the language up much faster if you tried.

Note that I'm not intending to judge you. It is likely you have a life and other things to do with your time. Only you can figure out what is the right time balance for you (though once in a while something happens that would make you regret your decision)

No worries - I was exaggerating for comic effect. I don't speak the local language like a local, but I do do it all day at work.

I often wish the locals here would refuse to use English, but I enjoy speaking other foreign languages when I get the chance, so I understand when they want to do the same.

I'll answer the opposite question: the worst way to learn a language is to spend all you effort learning all the different ways to learn trying to find what is best.

unfortunately the above is not a joke. It is what many people are really doing. The question itself is fine but don't let it consume you. Or if it does at least do as I do: confine your research to the language you are trying to learn.

Anki cards comes to my mind, diploma from local university, preparing for TOEFL/IELTS equivalent. Also some languages have better alternatives than jack of all trade, Duolingo.

That is absurd suggestion when OPs complaint was about translation. A person new to language doing Anki always end up only translating words in always the same sentences.

That is actually much less of a problem in Duolingo where those sentences warry and that has you do variety of exercises.

You can do Anki without translation. My preferred approach is to have "type answer" cards where the question side just plays a recording and then you type in what you heard. I do add a translation on the answer side to let me check whether I understood the sentence correctly, but the focus is on listening and writing in the target language, not translation.

Of course the number of cards is finite, but so are Duolingo's example sentences, so whether you get more or less variety ultimately depends on the size of your deck.

You can, but this is not what someone who just came to it all for the first time and looks for "app I can download and use" will do.

They will download a dect with single words translations rsther then spend a lot of times doing own deck with special features. That is done by people who primarily learn in another way and use anki as memory refresher.

Anki is great memory refreser, but that is not what was asked here.

To your last paragraph, you do set number of cards per day. Even if you have many different sentences on many different cards, they will graduate independently from each other. So, you will still see the exact same sentence a lot rather then getting different sentence each time you see the card.

More important is that practically Duolingo did not caused me to have any particular sentence or translation super strongly burned into my head. Maybe it is variety, maybe something else, but practical result was just not that.

I wrote https://thehardway.guide just about that, in case it helps.

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