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Comment by zzzeek | Hacker News Reader

> What lengths people go just to avoid reading a book and talking to people.

odd take, do you have the same negative sentiment for the entire field of language instruction? introductory German class at a local college? 7th grade French ? things like that?

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I don't think it is an odd take. I live in Switzerland, which has 4 national languages (Swiss German is spoken in dialect form that varies between towns, while Romansh has well-defined idioms with distinct spelling, although the 5 or so idioms are mutually intelligible). I speak French, passable German and one of the Romanshes, and I'm a native of none of them. Between French and Romansh I can more or less read Italian, although I can't understand it when spoken.

The same thing that has worked for me as a method for learning languages has always been the same. Get books, particularly short stories or children's stories aimed at A2/B1 level, and read them. Practice grammar. Get a pen and paper and learn vocab by repeatedly writing it down. Boring but effective. And of course practice listening and talking, which means either having native friends, doing a course, using audio materials from somewhere, etc. Courses with actual humans make learning go faster (in the case of Romansh, it would have been impossible without the course).

I don't find duolingo to be effective at all, as others mention beyond the A1/A2 level. I'd be a bit more skeptical and say even A2 you need to expand your horizons.

So I think people who grew up in Europe surrounded by many languages have a huge language learning advantage over mono-lingual Americans. Also exercises like "get a pen and paper and learn vocab by repeatedly writing it down" this is exactly what language applications have you do, just minus the pen and paper. (I'm not a young person so I have deep familiarity with pens and paper)

In my own personal experience, the pen and paper is actually a very important tool of memory to which tapping on a phone doesn't compare.

Opposite for me, I struggled with courses that required thorough notes until college where they didn't care if I brought in a laptop. Once I could take digital notes I excelled thanks to the speed and organization of it. I don't think the physical instrument for note-taking matters so much as the act of note-taking.

I don't think that Europeans have language advantages over Americans. America is way more multinational than Europe, by design. There are few European countries with multiple official languages; most only have one, like the US.

It's just that most Europeans' native language is not English or some other language spoken by hundreds of millions or billions of people. So they have to learn at least one foreign language to function in the modern world. And many European countries require children to learn two of them. Some require passing language exams as part of the high school graduation.

I studied English and French in school. My native tongue is spoken by about 15 million people in the world, the official language of my native country (which I also speak fluently) is spoken by about 20. One gets a lot of motivation from knowing that, by learning English, one will be able to speak to billions.

I agree with this to some extent. I am from the UK, which is pretty monolingual and with the same advantage as the US: we're native English speakers. So I think we do have a slight advantage, or put another way the incentive to learn another language isn't always there.

I think, based on my own experience, it is harder to to from English to another language for a variety of factors. Many native speakers will jump on the opportunity to practice with you, understandably. Everyone has different motivations and some will ask why are you even bothering if you speak English. Since there's almost always an English source for what you want, you have to avoid laziness as much as you can. Lastly a great majority of entertainment is in English - things like french rap are basically a crime against humanity.

That doesn't mean that every European you meet is automatically multilingual or automatically has English in one of their languages. Go to rural France and you will find plenty of monolingual french people. Italy is also somewhere English is not as widely spoken as you might think given the tourism (in fact outside major tourist areas, good luck). Go to the mountains in Switzerland and you might find people who speak a couple of national languages but no English.

You can however go "the other way" and for major languages there is an abundance of materials. I agree 100% with the sibling comment that there is something about the act of writing things out that helps with memorisation. I've done this with a few languages and I don't think flashcard apps are enough. Can they help? I guess a little. Are they going to make you fluent? Not a chance. Absolutely nothing beats taking a course and being dedicated to it, in my experience.

More generally I think what I am saying is that there is no magic shortcut, except being born to parents speaking multiple languages at you.

Surely those things entail reading books and talking to people.

What introductory German class does not use books and does not talk to people?

oh, so you only mean like the gamified nature of duolingo? Lots of language apps have lessons that are interactive versions of language books and they also include conversational practice with language models. Conversational practice with humans is not necessarily easily available nor is it that appropriate if you are just learning a language and can't have simple conversations yet. Babbel for example is pretty comparable to a traditional language class in how it's structured. It's pretty convenient that I can use it any time of day and as often as I want, from my car or whatever.

I suggest that they meant that the process does not involve "reading a book" or "talking to people."

In most of them, you talk to people with an equally horrible accent as you have.

All your counter-examples directly depend on the part you quoted and are presumably arguing against.

You definitely meet other people in local colleges

And few of them are native speakers of the language you're learning.

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