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Comment by mtalantikite | Hacker News Reader

I think the thing I dislike about Duolingo is it sort of catches the casual person into a trap by misleading them into thinking that by using this app they'll learn another language. It's not that it's a bad app, it's just that that's not going to happen. There's no one resource that will get you to even an intermediate level in a language. And the State Department's FSI estimates are unfortunately pretty accurate for hours to fluency [1].

For me to put a foundation for French down it was: Assimil for about 6 months (30 min/day), 30 minutes of daily comprehensible input, and Anki & Clozemaster for vocabulary (~15-20 min/day). Mixed in there was a couple months on Yabla doing listening comprehension, some grammar study from Bescherelle books, and some tutoring on iTalki. After about maybe 9-12 months I could listen to RFI's broadcast targeted to learners [2], but even then I still needed to go to the transcription a lot at the beginning.

To mislead people into thinking that doing some vocab study for 30 min a day in Duolingo is going to get them anything beyond the most basic grasp of a language is kinda not cool.

[1] https://www.state.gov/foreign-service-institute/foreign-lang...

[2] https://francaisfacile.rfi.fr/fr/

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> And the State Department's FSI estimates are unfortunately pretty accurate for hours to fluency [1].

It's worth noting that the FSI estimates are hours of direct classroom instruction, and that FSI cares a lot more about input than output. For someone who is looking to be fluent across all four competencies and is self studying, you can expect a lot more time to be invested.

Also the FSI estimates are for what it takes to get people who've tested into a FSI language program to that level. Individual differences are known to be a huge factor in language education, and FSI has the luxury of only needing to worry about teaching people who they know are well-suited to learning using their methods.

I doubt they're accurate at all as an absolute measure of how long a random person needs to study to reach S-3/R-3 on their aptitude scale. But based on my own experience and comparing notes with others who've studied languages from more than one of their categories, it does seem that they're at least a good indicator of relative effort. E.g, I wouldn't say that any English speaker can learn Mandarin in 2,200 hours just because that's what the FSI guideline says. But I do think it's true that the same person could learn French in about 1/4 the time it would take them to learn Mandarin.

FSI estimates are taken from diplomatics who study full time in preparation for their job. Not a good approximation for most people.

This is a far better one: https://www.cambridge.org/elt/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/1...

Yeah, for sure, thanks for pointing that out. For them it seems like fluency is defined as the ability to work comfortably in a professional setting in that target language. I self studied some of their French courses and found them helpful. I've never taken a course of theirs before, but a family member did do a year immersion in Arabic as part of their training for the foreign service, and of course it was a lot more intense than self-study.

There's also various levels of "fluency" - and what you're trying to achieve will inform how you're going to go about it.

There's a big difference between "I need to speak this well enough as I'm going there soon" and "I want to be able to read news from there" and "I need to pretend I'm a native."

So what's the hack? I'm guessing there isn't one?

Asking as it's "hacker news" after all, I remember reading how North Korean agents would watch shows like Friends for hours on end to become familiar with English, is that a hack?

I'm urgently trying to learn a language and I've done a lot of research on this. There's no one hack, but here are my top three: - Anki - Focus on producing speech over everything else, it's the hardest part 90% of the time. Practice production enough and everything else will follow. - Work on your accent much earlier than you think you should. If your accent is better than it should be, native speakers will naturally push you to the limits of your abilities when you talk to them.

There's not really strong evidence to support "comprehensible input," but it may work well for some people. However, it severely under-trains speech production. You must combine it with speech practice if you are going to make it work.

Highly recommend Language Jones on YouTube, great resource for language study best practices.

> Focus on producing speech over everything else

That’s a great way to gimp your language learning curve.

Receptive skills develop before productive skills. This is just a truism about language.

I could buy into dedicating time to speaking, as many folks don’t put enough time into that skill, but I’m not sure I would ever recommend prioritizing it over receptive skills.

> it's the hardest part 90% of the time.

While this is true, it doesn’t mean that production should be one’s “primary focus”.

> There's not really strong evidence to support "comprehensible input,"

I assume you are basing this on second hand information, or “really strong evidence” is doing a lot of work here, but volumes have been written about the efficacy of comprehensible input in foreign language learning.

To be charitable, I think many people do “comprehensible input” incorrectly (content too difficult, overly scaffolded with translations/subtitles, etc.), but the folks who reach higher levels of proficient (B2 or higher to be somewhat arbitrary) almost always have had massive amounts of (comprehensible) input at some point in their language learning journey.

> I assume you are basing this on second hand information, or “really strong evidence” is doing a lot of work here, but volumes have been written about the efficacy of comprehensible input in foreign language learning.

What I really mean to say is that there's no strong evidence that CI is more efficient than other language learning methods.

>the folks who reach higher levels of proficient (B2 or higher to be somewhat arbitrary)

Realistically, this is a small subset of language learners. Most people vastly overestimate the level of proficiency they are going for. People also underestimate just what a high level B2 is.

There are some new AI apps out there that I would put in the “hack” category for being a lot more effective than all the stuff I used in the past (which also included Duolingo, Anki, etc). The one I used the most over three months to refresh my Spanish is Langua (bad name with too much competition, but I put the link below).

This app, and I’m sure others, is a polished “overlay” of sorts on top of one LLM or another, but it’s very well done. By far the best way of learning a language is conversation with a native speaker. This puts 90% of that in your pocket on demand. You can chat (out loud) on various topics, or any topic, and this is augmented with various tools, way to save words to a vocabulary list with a flash card UI, etc. After each conversation you get an evaluation. I found it a lot more fun, and a lot more effective, than anything else I’ve tried.

https://apps.apple.com/ca/app/langua-ai-language-learning/id...

> There's not really strong evidence to support "comprehensible input," but it may work well for some people.

Except, there is? Comprehensible input is how you've learned your native language, and how any human learns their first language(s). After all, you can't output (produce) what you haven't first learned (gotten as input).

What I really mean to say is that there's no strong evidence that CI is more efficient than other language learning methods. It is certainly a way to learn a language. But is it a good way to learn a language?

You are smarter than a baby and you can learn a language faster (e.g. with fewer hours of study) then a baby.

Comprehensible input does seem to be the most effective way. i.e. get a lot of input that is only slightly beyond your current level (i+1).

I'm learning Ukrainian and there is a podcast "Ukrainian Lessons Podcast". Seasons 4-6 are not so much lessons but more just discussions about life, history, culture in 100% slow comprehensible Ukrainian. In one of the episodes Anna talks about how she spent most of her life getting English lessons at school and university, but still couldn't use the language freely. Finally, she watched Friends and by the time she'd finished every season, she felt she at last had a good command of English.

Sitcoms are good because they depict a lot of everyday situations, are rich in dialogue (i.e. real language people use daily), and there is a lot of slang and cultural references. Of course, you first need to develop enough of a base in the language to understand what's going on.

Sitcoms are a tried and true language promotion tactic. I remember when I was young there was a French teenage-sitcom, "Helene", which my mother would watch because her students watched it religiously (she was a language teacher). It was outrageously soapy, but even I noticed the relatively accessible language. My mother told me the show was a subsidized export of France's language evangelization program. Apparently teaching French was a lot easier when that show was popular.

Friends wasn't that, but close enough. I think I recall Simone Giertz saying that she learned English from it, and I can't be the only one who has noticed that there's something uncannily Lisa Kudrow-like about her stage persona.

You can find a lot (all?) of the Hélène et les Garçons episodes on YouTube, too.

Another good "sitcom-like" that you can find on YouTube is extr@. It's cheesy, but it's entertaining enough for what it is, and they have it for French, German, and Spanish (and English). Interestingly, it's the same main actor for French, German, and Spanish, a Dutch actor playing an American, while the rest of the cast changes around him.

There's something charming about old language learning shows, both overt and "covert" ones like Hélène et les Garçons. I remember Muzzy in Gondoland, BBC's English language teaching cartoon from the 80s.

I wonder why language learning apps aren't more into making entertainment in the language they're proselytizing these days.

Videos are expensive to make and expensive to host. Hard for an app to make money off them.

That makes sense. These old shows probably got government funding for their language promotion mission.

Why are you learning Ukranian?

For me it was because I dabbled in Russian before, but recent events have led me to avoid anything that could be seen as supporting Russia in any way, including culturally.

I also learned that a number of things I thought was Russian was in fact Ukrainian.

That's just sad to hear for me as a Russian. Russia and the Russian culture are a lot older than the current war and will still be around long after the war, but a lot of people just cannot draw a line between the two.

This is how it goes after any major war of aggression. Happened to Germany, Japan and USSR after the WW2. Germany and Japan are both generally seen in a favourable light now.

It seems that the reputation takes about two generations to recover once the hostilities are over and the country has started to reform. Russia never really attempted a real reform in the first place, so for it the outcome was different. Russia (and yes, the image of Russian culture) will obviously not come back from this disaster during our lifetimes.

You could argue that Russia successfully managed to sidestep reputational damage despite neo-imperialism/warmongering in the past, specifically with the Chechen wars.

I personally think this only worked out because it was easier to sell this as a civi-war-like internal conflict (and the situation was less obvious to other western nations than now). On the other hand, had the Ukraine invasion gone according to plan, I'm pretty confident that Russia could have managed at least a puppet government and lots of regional control at a manageable cost (in international reputation).

But it was very interesting to see how quickly the Ukraine war turned Russias image (at least in Europe) from "slightly crazy, badass" into overt contempt.

> But it was very interesting to see how quickly the Ukraine war turned Russias image (at least in Europe) from "slightly crazy, badass" into overt contempt.

I think this is because while much of the Europe was willing to 'turn the page' from 90s onwards, that changed during the 2008 war in Georgia. Since then there was enough attention in the media to the 'frozen conflicts' (Abkhazia, Transdnistria), then since 2014 we have the situation in Ukraine including MH17. Also how Russia dealt with its own political opposition. So in 2022 while the war itself was surprising, it did not require a total change of worldview to change the image of Russia.

This is a good point.

It seems to me that Russia could've easily kept pretending to be a slightly flawed democracy, and it would've been super effective in hoodwinking "the west", but they "blew it" with obvious assassinations even before the Ukraine war.

This raises the question: Why would you ever admit to be totalitarian or a dictator if you have to deal (economically/diplomatically) with softhearted democracies which really hate that?

I think the answer is that just lying about this (to improve your reputation abroad) by itself hurts your local power base. Every signal in that direction undermines that image of strength that dictators rely on to keep in control, and no dictator can stay in power "against" the population because all the instruments to exert that power (prison/murder/army) rely themselves on (parts) of that population.

Totally agree. Even the 2014 invasion of Crimea didn't cause widespread anger in Europe towards Russia. And the Chechen wars were definitely seen as an internal event.

This war is different. My generation and the one growing up now will hostile to Russia for our lifetimes. No Russian culture will be willingly ingested, no Russian products will be willingly purchased. I do hope that Ukraine manages to take that cultural spot though, including but not limited to changing all existing multilingual signs from Russian to Ukrainian.

> I personally think this only worked out because it was easier to sell this as a civi-war-like internal conflict (and the situation was less obvious to other western nations than now).

I mean... it was?

It absolutely wasn't.

Chechnya had a very popular president and was a stable country.

Then again Israel is annexing land and actively committing genocide and voicing any anger is seen a deeply antisemitic and completely taboo. You will see a reflexive assurance that you can not equate the people with the government and so on.

My point is not Whataboutism. I don't want to relativate any war crimes done by anyone. I don't criticize people that lost relatives in Ukraine for using dehumanizing language like calling Russian soldiers orks. For the growing racist rhetoric that says the Russian culture were inherently imperialistic.

You might reflexively try to figure out whose narrative I am trying to push. What is my angle? I am not sure if this works or is even possible but maybe try to reflect on why you do this. Isn't it because it clashes with your own narrative? Which is not something you are allowed to notice because the West has no narrative, you are the one who is objectively right, only other people have a narrative.

So why is Russia and Israel seen so differently? Because there is Western geopolitical interest that people do so.

> So why is Russia and Israel seen so differently?

When did Ukrainians terror bomb Russia for decades on end?

When did Ukrainian authorities pay people to kill Russian civilians?

When did Ukrainians cross the border to massacre Russians, rape and take hundreds of hostages and take bragging videos of it to share on WhatsApp and Telegram?

Gazans have done all this and those who do it have - until recently - been universally seen as heroes in Gaza although that is finally changing. Gazas official position is still that October 7th was a fantastic day but simultaneously just a small taste of what is to come.

Even those that acknowledge that 07th of October was a mistake seems to be more concerned about what it means for them than the fact that they killed over thousand innocent civilians, documented their own extreme sexual violence and bragged openly about it and took hundreds of hostages.

Ukrainians did terrorize the Donbass for years. They bombed the cities, tried to ban the Russian language, committed a horrible massacre on Odessa where they murdered many trade unionists and so on.

Ukrainian use cluster ammunition that has been internationally banned because it leads to extreme civilian causalities. They have formations of "idiologically-motivated" soldiers that are literally neo-nazis.

I am repeating the Russian narrative here? Yeah, this is how you framed the Palestinian struggle.

The genocide that Israel is committing did not start as a reaction to the terror. The terror was a reaction to the goal of Israel to eradicate the Palestinian people. Gaza has been an open air prison for decades.

And no I am not defending any war crimes from anyone. But it matters who the victim and and who the aggressor is. The aggressor is Israel. Palestinians have a right to exist.

Stop spreading Russian lies.

Donbas looked nicer after years of alleged Ukrainian bombing than any Ukrainian town looked after a week of Russian "liberation".

> So why is Russia and Israel seen so differently?

Israel had more accumulated goodwill left to burn though. Russia was on thin ice after Abkhazia, Crimea, etc. Israel was basically seen positively beforehand.

It's not infinite. A year ago it was basically only Muslim countries, some UN observers and the odd outlier like Ireland or Spain that were criticising Israel. But we've had in recent times the leaders of the UK and Germany criticising Israeli actions, and a decent number of mainstream US politicians even too. Israel is at serious risk of burning through as much goodwill in 2023-2026 as Russia did in 2008-2022.

The goodwill was because it was and is an geo-strategic partner of the West.

Israel has never garnered any goodwill from a humanitarian perspective. Gaza has long before been described as an open air prison. Israel itself as an apartheid nation. It has illegally annexed Syrian territory. Israel was never a beacon of humanity.

Israel is facing a ton of backlash for the latest conflict too (even from countries like Germany!).

But I would argue that in the Ukraine war it is much more obvious who "good guy/bad guy" is, because you have a totalitarian aggressor on one side and a somewhat democratic defender on the other.

In Israel, you have a democratically controlled army vs a terrorists group (Hamas), and it is much less clear where the justifiable limit for collateral damage is or whom to blame primarily for the current level of escalation.

> But I would argue that in the Ukraine war it is much more obvious who "good guy/bad guy"

I'd say they both suck. Have you seen how Ukraine abducts random people from the street and sends them to war?

I don't think mandatory conscription/press-gangs are anywhere close to murder/rape of civilians (which there are well-documented cases on the Palestinian and Russian side).

Pressing young men into military service is not even on the same scale by comparison.

And its not just the rape/murder/looting thats the problem- its about how the perpetrators deal with it.

The harsh reality of war is that tragedies like that are hard to completely prevent even for a disciplined force, but if you can not even be arsed to prosecute escalations like that (and respond with obvious lies, denial and finger-pointing instead), you lose any moral high-ground.

My wife is Russian and we have close Ukrainian friends and Ukrainian neighbors. We often shop at a Ukrainian grocery store. Her dentist is Ukrainian. It’s never been an issue. She spent many vacations as a child in Ukraine and obviously doesn’t support the war. She still loves her country. We watch Russian classics and I learned how to cook Russian dishes for her. It’s wild to me that people who are neither Ukrainian nor Russian take such extreme positions of canceling an entire nation when not even Ukrainians themselves do.

Some also don't really want to draw a line, because the current war is not an exception, it's fully in character with the past 200 or so years of Russian behavior. In the 90s and later some thought it's going to be better, but I think most people can see now nothing has changed for the better and Russian culture does not reflect any sort of guilt and shame like the Germans did.

That's a narrative. Over my life, I've seen 4 regimes and heard about a dozen historical narratives about the particular place I was born in, each radically different from the others and exaggerated to ridiculous proportions. Enough to understand that they're all mostly nonsense. One massive red flag is dealing in absolutes, another is "it's always been like that".

Sure, it's easy to dismiss anything as 'narrative, therefore nonsense'. I will give you another narrative to dismiss: oil-rich countries are waging wars more often than oil-poor countries, and they are starting them when the oil price is high. Russia is an oil-rich country. And there are several other reasons why things are the way they are.

> oil-rich countries are waging wars more often than oil-poor countries, and they are starting them when the oil price is high

I'd really like to see some statistics backing that up

this seems like a good starting point: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/event/petro-aggression-when-oil...

And yet we're both discussing it on an American site in English, so you clearly have no problem with either imperialism or wars ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ah yes the old 'and you are lynching negroes' defence deployed again because you can't face your failures. My country was occupied by the Soviet Army, many people killed and whole society destroyed, and all of that for nothing. Did we hear an apology, admission of guilt, anything, not only from the Russian heads of state but from artists etc? Of course not.

And let me expand on the 'and all of that for nothing'. The Americans brought us prosperity. To some other countries, they brought misery. I'm not a fan of that. But at least it's very clear they are doing it for the money, that when someone is exploited, someone else is going to be rich. Eventually the exploited people or even whole countries can get rich too if they are smart, like South Korea.

Now contrast that with the Russian imperialism. Not only are they not bringing prosperity anywhere, they also can't manage to create prosperity back home. They plundered Eastern Europe for decades, they have vast natural resources, whole country could live very comfortable life. Instead there is a very small group of people living luxurious life until the next upheaval when they are going to flee into exile or be killed, and a bigger group of people living a mostly comfortable life mostly in big cities. The rest are essentially serfs that are also sent to the war to be killed. Maybe this war will end soon and another will start in a few years. Maybe the oil price will go down and there will be no money for a new war, which means there will be even less monery for the serfs. And all of this for nothing, it does not advance the society, it doesn't do anything good, it's just evil people playing their games. That's why what we really want is to be as far away from Russia as possible.

I'm sorry if I didn't make myself clear. You don't have any problems with imperialism or wars, when you're not targeted by them personally or even can get some benefit out of them, which is normal human behavior. This is why I don't see why the war in Ukraine is any different. If the war in Iraq did not change what people in, say, South America felt about the American culture, then why is the war in Ukraine supposed to have more impact on the same people and their attitude towards the Russian culture? And I'm sad if it does.

> You don't have any problems with imperialism or wars, when you're not targeted by them personally

I do. And I don't agree it's normal human behavior - normal human behavior is also to feel some empathy for people you have never met. Or even for animals.

> If the war in Iraq did not change what people in, say, South America felt about the American culture

It did. Can't speak for South America (who probably have a more balanced view already) but it definitely changed the perception of American culture in Europe.

> why is the war in Ukraine supposed to have more impact on the same people and their attitude towards the Russian culture?

Every day the news are full of Russian indiscriminately killing Ukrainian civilians, children in their sleep, the Russian society is quiet about that or even cheering, and you are asking why that should have any impact on our attitude towards the Russian culture?

It is what it is.

I used to really want to learn Russian language. I thought of it as an investment in my career as I expected to work a lot more with Russians and Russian companies because I assumed Russia like the Baltics and Poland would become part of Europe.

I have also had some really nice and smart colleagues from Russia over the years.

Then came 2014 and 2022 and now sadly I think Russians will go through what Germans experienced from 1946 and the next few decades.

Hopefully you'll not go through what Germans suffered in 1945.

If you are working against the regime we are still friends.

And I look forward to visit Russia again in a decade or two.

But remember (and everyone should remember this): a people is responsible for the government they choose. Those who cheer when their militaries are successfully attacking peaceful neighbors and taking civilians including kids as hostages and talk about erasing their neighbors can't expect much sympathy when the war returns home.

Well German and Germany took a significant hit after WW2, you will face the same disgust for a generation or two depending on you future behavior.

Why is it important?

People are allowed to be curious.

Sure! Thats why I ask :)

I became interested in the language after a brief relationship with a Ukrainian.

In an immersion context I can get to conversational fluency in about 3 months and to complete mastery in a year. I've done it twice, once for Spanish and once for English. A few things in my approach helped me move quite a lot faster than my peers:

1. I would carry a mini-dictionary with me EVERYWHERE. Anytime there's a new word, I would ask a local to teach me how to pronounce it and then make sentences with it while I was walking around. CONSTANTLY.

2. accent and good basics help more than a vast vocabulary: when I went to spain for the first time I would hear in the metro the famous male and female voices saying "proxima parada... something something" and I would repeat that sentence trying to imitate the pronunciation and rythm to get used to "sounding spanish". That helped a lot.

3. date a local: in spain I was dating this girl that was a journalist and from a pretty conservative family. She was very afraid that I would put off her family by being a foreigner and not being able to pronounce things correctly or making grammatical mistakes so she would correct me on the spot EVERY TIME I said something wrong. I dind't mind it and it worked like a charm. Years later I met my American wife that wasn't nearly as concerned about my pronunciation in English so my accent is not nearly as good as in Spanish, but I definitely learned the language, went from being barely understandable to business meeting in about 4 months.

3. Watch tons of movies with the original subtitles (for example spanish movie with spanish subtitles) to understand how people pronounce certain words. DO NOT limit yourself to learner materials, you won't learn a thing. Find something you enjoy and just dive in, you'll learn a lot quicker that way.

Dedication and systematic work is all you need to move pretty quickly, the human brain is wired for language, if you feed it what it needs it will do the work for you.

What is your native language? Distance to existing languages you're fluent in makes things ten times easier or harder.

I think tools that help develop conversational language skills can be effective in ways that they may not (and don't have to be) for reading and writing.

Immersion and transferring patterns you already know from other languages.

Language Transfer is a good completely free resource: https://www.languagetransfer.org

Language Transfer is great. On the topic of immersion, I made https://nuenki.app in my gap year. It estimates the difficulty of sentences in webpages and translates the ones at your knowledge level into the language you're learning.

The danger here is that you're not learning German - you're learning machine German. Even if the app makers have structured the machine translation so that it's smart about taking context into account, it will be at best subtly different from actual German, and at worst you'll pick up nonsense and think it's good German.

The safe way to use this would be in reverse. You shouldn't be browsing English pages and get 1 in 10 translated into German. You should be browsing German pages and get 9/10 translated into English. You'll still get machine translation artifacts, but they're much less likely to interfere with your learning, and you'll be much better equipped to spot them.

Transferring patterns only really works when the language you’re learning is similar to ones you already know. I’m learning Chinese, and to my Western mind it feels like an alien language.

For sure, some common ground is needed. Madrigal's is a famous example of LT that almost exclusively focuses on transfer itself, because English and Spanish are reasonably similar.

LT's method goes a bit further though, hence why there are courses on Arabic, Swahili and (upcoming) Japanese. Chinese might be even further removed, but the LT courses are about learning to _think_ about how the language works, and the format of the course (teacher + median student + you) goes a long way to encourage this. Beyond Madrigal's "look how similar these words are".

This looks quite good! Thanks for the recommendation.

Its in the article itself.... Nothing wrong with coming straight for the comments but this is what the author recommends as an alternative lol

As others have said, immersion is the only way that you have control of.

If you could de-age yourself, becoming a child would also help immensely, as child brains are much better at learning languages.

I keep hearing this but sometimes I am not 100% sure if they are _much_ better so asking honestly: Is there any reputable quantitative analysis of this in the context of language learning?

For example: I have spent the last two years in japan (I am in my 30s) and just got back to my home country. Went to a language school in the mornings there, immersed myself in the language a little but did not go all out on studying at home except for some Anki and the homework we got. I would spend 1 or 2 evenings per week talking to japanese people in my apartment building for practice. I just took the N2 exam before I left and just failed by 1 point, without any extra studying specifically for it. I could have conversations with people in my apartment complex, make phone calls to get stuff done and get the gist of most news I heard if they were not hyper-specific and I can read easy novels. If I open the NHK news website I am still lost on a bunch of stuff and have to look up a lot. But again, that was 2 years and I was neither particularly good nor bad compared to the other fellow students and I did not go all out full immersion - lots of my interactions were still with foreigners in the afternoon. Anyway, I for sure know more kanji than a 2nd grade elementary school student. I also can say more than a two year old kid. I know of course children learn to navigate a language without explicit study in their first years of life but the point still stands. If time spent studying was equal, how much of a difference remains?

My strong suspicion is that children just have no responsibilities and are socially allowed to not be able to talk while everyone will speak at their level with a great deal of patience.

speaking to a child at their level is the best way to keep them from speaking well. I never did it with my son and it didn't hold him back one bit. Everyone remarks his incredible vocabulary and language skills for his age. IMHO holding back with kids is an anti-pattern.

My aunt used baby talk with my cousin so much she accidentally invented a new language with him, and he ended up needing a bit of speech therapy to get back to a "standard" level of English for his age.

Perhaps coincidentally, he is now fluent in more languages than anyone else I personally know, and leveraged that into a consulting career.

Yes. Also, they don't need much vocabulary, no grammar concerns, no reading/writing.

We much overestimate how well kids learn, and how "easy" is for them. Many kids have language difficulties, and they usually know, and they don't feel too great about it.

I think you're right on this one. Children have an immense amount of practice time, support and social pressure to learn a language.

The only thing that seems to be different between adult and child learners is acquiring specific sounds/tones. I know many good speakers of English who cannot distinguish L/R sounds. I basically cannot hear pitch accent differences in Japanese despite having spoken it for over a decade.

> The only thing that seems to be different between adult and child learners is acquiring specific sounds/tones.

It isn't actually different. It appears to be different, because people conceptualize the problem backwards, as learning to distinguish two sounds that, in the beginning, sound the same.

But what actually happens is that babies are born distinguishing all linguistically relevant sounds, and learn not to distinguish the sounds that their language considers equivalent. This ability is retained by adults.

I appreciate the clarification, but does it provide any actionable insight on how to learn to discriminate those sounds as an adult?

That can be very difficult. Fundamentally, you need to keep trying to tell samples of the two sounds apart until, eventually, you figure it out. You will need a trustworthy source for the sounds.

It will probably help if you practice producing the sounds too, but that's not enough.

A friend of mine put in a lot of effort to learn English by listening to the radio. And her English is very good.

But like most Mandarin speakers, she can't tell the difference between "th" (as in "thick") and "s" ("sick"). I was able to teach her how to produce "th"; that was easy.

Since she learned by listening instead of reading (which is the correct way to do it if you want to interact with people rather than books), she has no mental model of which "s" sounds in English are real "s" sounds and which ones are secretly "th". So if you talk to her now, it will be essentially random whether any of those sounds is produced correctly or as its evil mirror version. You'll hear a lot of stuff like "thingle".

It's not obvious to me that this is an improvement over her original practice of using "s" in all cases.

I looked into this once and couldn't find anything -- after all, vanishingly few people practice total, 100% immersion in their new language, where you must either speak or not get what you want.

Based on my experience I don't believe it's true.

The idea that child brains are better at learning languages is a myth. Adults struggle with languages because traditional language education is not fit for purpose. If you took a child and isolated them in such a way that they never got comprehensible input, and instead only gave them traditional language lessons (think textbooks, grammar drills) - they too would struggle. The good news is that if you take an adult and give them comprehensible input like you would a child, they will learn at least as effectively as a child.

What about pronunciation? Many of the assertions I've heard about adults in a foreign language is about our ability to recognize, differentiate, and reproduce the different phonemes, many which do not exist in our language.

These phonemes are even more difficult to recognize when we're not conversing face-to-face and in-person! So if you're listening to "comprehensible input" if it's on audio, or video voice-over, it is much inferior to seeing/feeling/hearing a native speaker make sound-shapes with their mouth!

I made many efforts to imitate my Spanish teachers in my youth, in terms of pronounciation, mouth shapes, accent and emphasis, etc. I credit the in-person instruction with achieving a nearly fluent comprehension and ability to make myself understood.

So the argument goes: if an adult is set in their ways and knows a particular set of phonemes, (or even tones, etc.) is it more difficult than a blank-slate child who has no prejudice about hearing and learning new sounds?

> if an adult is set in their ways and knows a particular set of phonemes, (or even tones, etc.) is it more difficult than a blank-slate child who has no prejudice about hearing and learning new sounds?

The answer is sort of "yes". If an adult is set in their ways and knows a particular set of phonemes, they will have a more difficult time with the phonemes of a new language than an infant would.

However, "learning new sounds" is not a correct way to think about it. You're born knowing all the sounds. You unlearn the differences between certain ones. If you, as an adult, have unlearned a difference that matters in your target language (because it didn't matter in your native language), you will have trouble with that difference. An infant can't have this problem.

Note that the cutoff point where an immersed child will fail to learn the pronunciation of a new language "automatically" is somewhere in the late teens, though.

I hear this a lot (that children learn languages faster, or the corollary from various app ads that the best way to learn a language is to do so like a baby does), but is it actually true?

It takes children a very very long time to learn a language and they're quite bad at it for many years. I've even met some teens/young adults who are only borderline literate in their native language after years of schooling and immersion.

Children spend pretty much every waking hour - every day - learning language. If you were to put in that amount of constant effort, you might also learn language just as effectively as a child. Okay, probably not just as effectively, but I think people underestimate the amount of effort children put into learning language. That's practically their job for the first 5+ years of life.

The main reason why people fail to learn languages is that they do not put in enough time. There is no magic shortcut, despite countless language-learning programs claiming they have one. You have to spend a significant amount of time every day working at it.

Having good resources (e.g., access to native speakers, competent instruction, a flashcard app like Anki) is important, but again, people fail mostly because they don't dedicate enough time towards the language.

I have Dutch friends who swear they learned all their English simply by watching Friends on BBC in the Netherlands.

Then they're lying...

(Friends was on Veronica, Net5 and Comedy Central, not BBC :)

You don't need to watch BBC for that. Not a lot of tv shows, even child programs are dubbed on Dutch tv. So you get accustomed to it early on. Combined with the fact the languages are closely related means the Dutch usually have a reasonable grasp of English before it's being taught in school.

Yeah, IIRC they mentioned most movie releases in the cinema are also in English too.

I learned english at school in France, and we're notoriously bad at teaching foreign languages. The approach is way to academic and mainly based on reading. That's why our accents are often atrocious. I was good at written tests, but what allowed me to actually get fluent (as in being able to think in english and convert my thoughts to speech in real time) was watching tv series in english with subtitles in english (no translation involved.)

For me in Croatia it was The Simpsons.

Those two languages are very close, if he had to learn Japanese or Arabic he won't be able to do it.

The hack is immersion. Move to a country where the language is spoken, and have a girlfriend/boyfriend native in the language whom you move in with.

That's it.

It is so often dismissed how important the second part is. Many think that just moving to a country is enough, and you will pick up the language. Maybe the basics, but not if you don't speak and think it 24/7, however uncomfortable that is at the start.

You see this clearly with the people who move with their family vs the single person. The family person will speak English or whatever their native language is at home every day, will never really speak fluently, whilst the single guy/girl will often become fluent very fast.

Though this also depends on who their new friends are, so if they only hang out with people from their home country or just groups of international friends who all speak English with each other, then that learning journey will take a lot longer.

This is hard, though. But when I moved to the UK I decided not to try to find the student groups from my home country, and mostly had English only friends and I got an local English accent super quickly. On the other side years later when my GF and me moved back to Norway for a few years she struggled to get non-international friends and didn't loose the accent.

A native-language workplace helps too, but that's step 2. Step 1 is getting to a level that allows you to switch from english to local language at the workplace.

The hack is there isn't really one thing, it's using multiple tools like I mentioned in my original comment.

If I were to start again with a new language I'd do 1) A full Assimil course 2) comprehensible input and 3) an iTalki tutor 3x per week. Anki is helpful too, so if you had time to add that in every day I'd do that as well.

That's part of immersion or comprehensible input, yeah.

Watching lots of hours of something in a language works so long as you know at least enough vocab and grammar to mostly understand it. To get there stuff like spaced repetition seems good

but the "hack" comes down to putting in hours doing all that and doing the groundwork too, essentially. you can only speed it up so much

Immersion as others have said.

But you can speed up the process by simply getting better at memorizing words to give you a much wider vocabulary.

There are various hacks to memorize things such as decks of cards or long sequences of numbers and similar techniques can aid you here too.

Had a friend in college learn Ukrainian by switching his phone language settings and watching only Ukrainian reality tv… and then he also spent a summer in Ukraine

This is how I learned English myself. Good enough to pass a phone interview with the mumbling Dutch softie, and then it was easier.

(motivation, I guess, plays a role too)

Probably traveling to the local and living there.. ie full immersion. If I were to wager and riff off ya ;)

You would still need to study or this would be super slow. When I went to China even after I did DuoLingo for two years I understood only super basic sentences and sometimes I even missed those because of accents. I couldn't learn "new" words or concepts or grammar through immersion, it only gave me the question to ask my wife so I could learn it through study.

For me, the best way to learn a foreign language was (besides also studying the grammar separately) to read some books in whose content I was interested and to watch carefully some untranslated movies spoken in that language, until I became able to understand perfectly the books and the movies.

Now, with the free resources available on the Internet, both reading books and watching movies in foreign languages has become much easier.

So I have not used learning books, just grammars and dictionaries, together with exposure to large amounts of written and spoken language expressing a content in which I was interested.

Once you have learned one or two foreign languages, learning more becomes much easier, especially when they belong to the same language family as one of the languages that you already know.

I accept that some people are doubtless much more talented in acquiring languages than I am. But I did take 4 years of high school French and was considered "good." And, traveling with a friend in Paris, I clearly knew a lot more of the language than they did. But I'm a very very far way from being fluent.

Maybe the people who claim to spend a few weeks with Duolingo and get the language are uniquely talented. Or maybe they're BSing.

A few weeks is definitely BS, but I took 3 years of German in high school and after roughly 3 months of 30min-1hr daily Duolingo I was already past the high school material.

I mean in our high school (Poland) it was like maybe 1 lesson (45mins) per week shared with a group. And of course excluding all the holidays and what not. That's not a high bar.

To be fair, you already had the high school material and you spent at least as much time on Duolingo as in the classroom.

Styles are different oo. I would say my high school was a lot more focused on writing, translation, and grammar than anything truly conversational though they did work on on pronunciation to some extent.

> I think the thing I dislike about Duolingo is it sort of catches the casual person into a trap by misleading them into thinking that by using this app they'll learn another language

But does it? I have learned other languages using it casually (one lesson a day on average.) Enough to read text in those languages and understand basic conversations. It is not getting you to B1, but it is getting you well in to the A's. If you do any type of additional study on the side, you can easily get to B1.

The main issue with Duo is the quality of the courses. It varies a lot. Some of the user maintained ones are fairly poor. Especially for the more niche languages.

By learn another language I mean getting to C1 or equivalent. Being able to comfortably spend time in a country that speaks your target language. Having regular, improvised conversations of various depths. Reading literature in that language. Things like that. I really don't think Duolingo can get you there on it's own, but hey, I'm open to being wrong.

I've just have seen many friends keep their Spanish streak for a year or two and I would say they'd still test around the A2 level. I've said it in this thread that that is of course not nothing, but there are much more efficient ways to get to A2 or B1.

I'm not sure how you can be so confident about that. A year of Duolingo got me far enough along to comfortably follow "NOS Journaal in Makkelijke Taal", seemingly the Dutch equivalent of the RFI broadcast you linked. No transcript needed, though I do pause on occasion to look up an unfamiliar word.

Maybe you call that "the most basic grasp of a language", but it doesn't seem to have been less effective than the approach you took with French.

That's great! Maybe Duolingo has changed things up since the last time I tried them years ago. Being able to listen to even simplified native content and understand it would of course be beyond a basic grasp of the language. What were your study habits with it?

My opinion is of course just an opinion, and it's made up from all the many people I personally know that have done Duolingo for a year (or years) and would maybe be at an A2 level. It's certainly not nothing, and honestly might be better than your regular grammar first course, but I think there's more effective ways. For me it was Assimil as the primary base, which got me to reading "L'Étranger" in about 6 months. Listening to native content took longer.

I started out doing 5-10 minutes a day, building up to 30 as motivation grew. I'm still at it, 633 days later, though I'm no longer pushing Dutch quite as hard now that I'm also learning Spanish. (I figure that exposure to Dutch through youtube, reddit, etc helps me continue to learn now, anyway.)

My goals are: maintain the daily streak; stay in the diamond league; do all the "legendary" bonus levels; get all three daily quest points. That's enough work that I'm usually pushing myself a bit, but not to the point of tedium.

I'm sure that if I actually needed to learn a language, for some practical reason, Duolingo would not be the quickest or most thorough way to do it. As something I'm doing for fun, though, using downtime I'd otherwise waste on puzzle games or pointless web scrolling, it feels like a pretty good deal.

Feeling the world of Dutch-language media starting to open up was kind of magical. I'm not there yet with Spanish, but I look forward to it. How much bigger can my world get, I wonder?

That's a super helpful list from the State Department!

Good to know ahead of time what you're getting yourself into.

Lord have mercy. All the languages I'm learning are:

> Category IV Languages – “Super-hard languages” – Languages which are exceptionally difficult for native English speakers.

Given that four of the five are Asian languages, there's a lot of transferability. Not a crazy amount but enough to give you a boost. Knowing Chinese made learning Japanese feel a notch easier, and learning Korean afterwards felt yet another step easier.

The 2200 hours represents learning from scratch.

Duolingo doesn't work because that's the point.

Same problem as dating apps: if you could actually learn a language with Duolingo, then you would stop using Duolingo. No good for business.

The hard part is how to trick people into believing that it works or even "it's better than nothing". Hence gamification.

https://www.languagereactor.com is something similar to Yabla I think... But you can use it indefinitely and subscribe if you need the premium features.

I tried it for a few months, but never was really able to get it to work for me, although I did find the dictionary hover overlay in YouTube videos to be helpful at the beginning. Yabla is different in that they will break up a video into pieces, have you listen to it without subtitles, and then ask you to type out what you heard. This was really helpful, particularly on the advanced levels, as picking up various accents can be difficult until your ears adjust.

Conversationally might be different than reading/writing alone.

I hate this take. Duolingo users understand fully, once they clear their language's Section 3 or higher, that they have a long road ahead.

The point of Duolingo is to be a hook into language learning, not a complete replacement. It should be coupled with Pimsleur and other traditional study methods if one is truly serious about learning a language.

Would you rather have teens shitposting on TikTok or learning Duolingo? Posts like yours are doomer cringe.

This is an app that constantly nags you to use it, to the point that its mascot is so widely known as annoying that they play it for laughs in their ads.

All that to say: you and Duolingo’s owners may disagree about what “the point of Duolingo is”. I don’t think they care if users are achieving fluency, they want users to keep coming back to the app so they can be served ads.

And yeah, that doesn’t mean users can’t take initiative and build a better habit-based approach that incorporates Duolingo, but that’s not what the app is pushing you to do.

Most apps are nagware, that is not a Duolingo issue.

The ads are for converting users to paid subscribers, not just "ads."

I don't see your point at all.

I'll vouch for the nagware. When I was studying with duolingo, it was the nag features that got me to practice every day.

A lot of apps are nagware, but I’ve never seen any as blatant and forceful as Duolingo.

They diligently A/B test their notifications, constantly looking for the variations that’ll show a higher click rate. They’ll hit you with “[Your friend’s name] will hate you forever if you don’t do Duolingo right now!” if you start slipping.

I’ve dropped it after a year or so when I realized that I wasn’t really learning any Turkish, but I was caught in some sort of corporate-designed psychological trap.

When I see my friend getting their smartphones out at 23:58 to complete a lesson and not lose their streak because they paid for the app I can confidently say that the point of duolingo is to make money by appealing to your monkey brain through gamification

I agree with you, it could have a place in a toolkit of things to acquire a language with. But I don't think that's what they're marketing themselves as. Their tag line is "The world's best way to learn a language", which, personally, I wouldn't blame a person for reading and thinking "cool, I guess I'll just do this and finally learn a second language!". They didn't say "build your foundation in a foreign language" or "first steps in your language learning journey". They said "best way to learn a language", which, I'd say, is false and misleading.

I've never used TikTok, but I actually wonder if this hypothetical teenager would learn more following a ton of users in their target language or playing games on Duolingo. I'd be interested in that study.

You're instinctively ranking TikTok as worse, but I think that parent is trying to say that Duolingo is effectively a waste of time. If you have two ways to waste your time on a phone, what makes one of them worse?

If the difference is that TikTok is a thing that "the youth" does and that we don't understand, then I guess some introspection is warranted on your closing ad hominem...

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