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?
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?
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.
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).
You are smarter than a baby and you can learn a language faster (e.g. with fewer hours of study) then a baby.
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...
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.
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.
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.
I also learned that a number of things I thought was Russian was in fact Ukrainian.
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 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?
I'd really like to see some statistics backing that up
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I mean... it was?
Chechnya had a very popular president and was a stable country.
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.
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.
I'd say they both suck. Have you seen how Ukraine abducts random people from the street and sends them to war?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Donbas looked nicer after years of alleged Ukrainian bombing than any Ukrainian town looked after a week of Russian "liberation".
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.
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.
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.
I wonder why language learning apps aren't more into making entertainment in the language they're proselytizing these days.
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.
Language Transfer is a good completely free resource: https://www.languagetransfer.org
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.
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".
If you could de-age yourself, becoming a child would also help immensely, as child brains are much better at learning languages.
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.
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?
Based on my experience I don't believe it's true.
Perhaps coincidentally, he is now fluent in more languages than anyone else I personally know, and leveraged that into a consulting career.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
(Friends was on Veronica, Net5 and Comedy Central, not BBC :)
That's it.
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.
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.
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
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.
(motivation, I guess, plays a role too)