Foreign Language Learning Hacks | Hacker News Reader

Foreign Language Learning Hacks

thangudu.com

137 pointskumarski69 comments

Number 2, number 4, and number 9 of the suggestions in the blog post kindly submitted here are all well worthwhile. As my user profile discloses, I am an American native speaker of General American English (originally part of a monolingual household in a basically monolingual neighborhood of native-born Americans) who acquired various second languages. I have reached a high enough proficiency in Modern Standard Chinese to make my living for several years as a Chinese-English, English-Chinese interpreter and as a Chinese-English translator. I know maintain a bilingual household. I still enjoy language learning as a hobby, and my children attempt learning various human languages.

One old webpage I like with language-learning advice

http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html

lists some helpful books with a lot of research-based advice on learning new languages.

Is your partner also 'an American native speaker of General American English'? I would be interested in learning more about households where both parents learned additional language(s) to raise their children bilingually.

Learning words != learning a language.

Most of the posts I see on HN mostly revolve around learning languages. In my opinion that's only part of the problem. It's more difficult to get the structure of sentences and tenses correct. I personally know words in 2 - 3 languages which share a root with my mother tongue, but it doesn't mean that I can speak those languages because I often don't get the way a single word transforms based on the tense, part of speech etc. For eg. merely knowing the word "smile" would only take you so far. Knowing the difference between "He is smiling", "He smiles", "He keeps smiling at me" is the tricky part.

Perhaps we are obsessed with learning words because it's the easier problem to solve. Learning sentence structure and grammar takes time and effort.

That's true.

Grammar learning and engagement might just be the holy grail of learning a language. I haven't come up with a good way of "hacking" grammar. So far it has just been a brute force study of grammar in front of a desk with a lamp.

Tips welcome.

This is true, but learning vocabulary is a long, hard slog that you have to get through to get anywhere with learning most of the other skills. It's something of a choke point in language acquisition, and your knowledge of vocabulary from related language is going to let you down again and again because you don't grasp all the senses of words you think you know or are fooled by false friends.

That said, phonology is neglected. Poor pronunciation makes verbal communication more error prone, something you don't need as a beginner, and if you rely entirely on body language for catching such non-lexical content as emphasis and modality, you will suffer when you talk on the phone. A bit of extra work here when you start learning a language will pay off.

Perhaps we are obsessed with learning words because it's the easier problem to solve.

I think that depends on the person and/or language.

My Polish grammar knowledge is now pretty impressive, but I'm having a terrible time trying to remember words, so spend the majority of my time attempting to force memorisation with flash cards.

In a way it's kinda fun - I can go through pages of grammar exercises, conjugating and declining correctly, but with no idea of what Marta did in the past with 101 of somebody's somethings.

I'm delving into learning Polish myself but have been taking mostly a whole language, immersion approach. For example, when I was in Krakow I bought myself a book on CD and the book itself, so I can 'read' along as I listen. I use translation tools to put selected passages into English. I also spend time listening to Polish radio. I know at some point I will have to develop some discipline about tackling grammar in a systematic fashion the way you are doing, but for the moment I guess I'm content to as much as possible to get a feel for the language. Japanese is my second language and its challenges are almost completely different... anyway, good luck!

Quite often you can figure out the essence of the sentences even if you don't know all the words. Of course, you do need to have a basic vocabulary. While speaking/writing it is possible for you to convey what you want to without using complicated words. If you can simplify your thought and strip out all that's non-essential, you will be able to convey the essence of your thought.

However, if you don't have a grasp of the basic grammar you're prone to confuse the person you're talking to. If you're reading, then you lose the context.

Exceptions abound, but I have found this to be true quite often while studying French.

In my experience, that's not the case. In the case of English, the main difficulty was (is) learning the pronunciation of every word, because the English spelling system isn't very helpful (to put it kindly). As you advance, the problem is then to get a good grasp on usage/pragmatics; that is, there are tons of syntactically correct ways of saying the same thing, but only a few of them sound "natural". Grammar was never a big problem for me.

In the case of Japanese too, the problem is not the grammar. Japanese morphology is simple (e.g. nouns are the same in singular and plural, verb conjugation doesn't vary with person) and very regular. The big problems are 1) acquiring the vocabulary in the first place, which is hard because the writing system is even less helpful than English's 2) and remembering all those words, which is hard because for the most part they don't resemble either my native language or English.

Oh yes, English is terrible at denoting the pronunciation with its script. Not so for French (or from what I hear, German). Most of the time you are able to predict the pronunciation based on a set of characters. Words in Indian languages which use the Devanagari script (or scripts derived from it) can be directly mapped to their pronunciations. There are no exceptions.

If you are trying to learn Italian, the good news is, there are a number of outstanding movies that are not famous outside Italy. I'm talking about masterpieces here. One for all:

"Indagini su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto"

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065889/

Thanks. Can you name more?

Sure:

"Amici miei" (1, 2, 3... there are many sequels)

"Un borghese piccolo piccolo" (Mario Monicelli)

"La dolce vita"

"Il Gattopardo" (Luchino Visconti)

"Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzuro mare d’agosto" Lina Wertmuller

"Le fate ignoranti" (Ferzan Ozpetek)

"Il Marchese del Grillo" (Mario Monicelli) // I love this

"Le conseguenze dell'amore"

And a lot more.

I love this list. I've seen most of these.

Ladri di biciclette http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0040522/

My favorite hack: talk to kids. They will do two things that adults won't:

1. Laugh at you, so you know when you're wrong. 2. Patiently "teach" you things over and over and over again.

Very true.

Why no mention of duolingo.com ?

Their iPhone app is driving an immense improvement in my German.

Living in Switzerland I also like to watch shows e.g. on MTV in English but with German subtitles on. Then I can pause the live TV and rewind to match English spoken expression to German translation. This helps too.

I can second this, their app is well thought out, works perfectly and helps me improve my spanish in little blocks of 5 minutes. Perfect when waiting / on the toilet / in bed / whatever.

Is there a service out there that includes the generation of vocab review sheets (many words, defined in one viewspace)? I find duolingo (and Anki, other web services) unsuitably slow for learning vocab.

> Grammar is always the toughest.

I think this depends somewhat on the language. For some, grammar is the first major bottleneck to get to a usable beginner level, but for others, it's pronunciation. For example, Danish grammar is relatively simple (which is one reason Google Translate is very good translating it), but it's quite difficult for non-native speakers to pronounce it intelligibly. I've also heard second-hand that pronunciation is a bigger problem than grammar for beginning Mandarin Chinese speakers.

It turns out that the obstacles are the same for both: tonal inflection. Most people are familiar with this fact as it pertains to Chinese and many of the languages of southeast Asia (Thai, Vietnamese, Cantonese et al) but remain completely unaware that it also a core feature of the languages of Scandinavia, Danish included. btw, Google translate does an excellent job translating Chinese (but a pretty terrible job with a superficially related language like Japanese). It turns out Chinese and English word order are the same.

The biggest one is missing. Why do you remember every line of every funny movie you've ever seen, but can't remember a single, excruciating, boring, mind numbing moment of Rossetta Stone ("el gato....snore....la mesa..snore...etc"). Because it's not engaging your brain in a lasting way.

I built this app (and download) w/ a business partner (and it's a side business as my main business is consulting), and people love it. We have Spanish and English and we're planning more languages (probably English for Mandarin and Cantonese speakers next)... http://www.buenoentonces.com/

Full disclosure - it's kind of randy so you need to be OK w/PG-13 humor. But that's why you learn it. If you do every class, and you already have a bit of Spanish, you WILL come out with a signifcantly greater grasp of conversational skill.

Email me (it's in my profile) and i'll send a coupon code for free classes to HN folks.

If you can, the very best way is simply immersion.

Move to the country and live there. Live with people, make friends with them. Ask them to speak to you only in their native language. Listen to their music and watch their TV and films. Read their books - above all children's books.

In my first four weeks in Germany I did a 4-week 'intensive' course that covered enough basic grammar and vocabulary to stumble through a one-on-one conversation with a lot of pointing.

After that I never looked at another vocab sheet. I could feel my brain soaking up the language day after day; I'd reach out for a word I'd never learned or a phrase I'd never used and find one waiting.

Obviously not everyone has the opportunity to immerse themselves in a foreign culture for twelve months, but if you do then just take it - time spent learning the language before you go is probably inefficiently spent if not outright wasted.

Oh, so going to the country is the best way to learn a foreign language? I guess that's what I've been doing wrong all these years.........

Unfortunately that's a bit difficult for us in the tech field, where English is often the lingua franca of daily work.

Ok, so my brain is soaking it up, but rather more slowly than I'd like. My ability to read and understand Hebrew has grown far more quickly than my ability to actually speak and write it. Too much of what I need to say and write all day consists of technical material for which even the local native speakers will switch into English.

It's not impossible to learn a language in your home country, but it's damn difficult. Most English learners reach a pretty good level even in their home country, but English is unprecedented in it's universality, usefulness, availability of TV, movies, books, everything.

For example, living in Sweden I was fairly fluent by the time I was 18 without ever having had a single conversation with an English speaker. I did what most people do, watch a lot of TV, then TV without subtitles, play games, write posts on online forums etc. The first time I had to actually speak it, I was 21 and taking care of an exchange student from the US. That year was what made me truly comfortable speaking English for days, without having to struggle for words and expressions.

It's that experience, and also spending 2 years at a US university and then working here, that made me a 98% native speaker. It's to a point where people can't tell that I'm not native now unless they spend a day with me. Some people sense that there's something a little off perhaps, still. I think the last 10-15% is extremely difficult to get for most people, without living in the country. A lot of that last 10% is cultural as well, there are still many cultural references that fly past me.

Kindles support good foreign-language dictionaries, allowing you to look up unfamiliar words as you read. This has massively improved my reading speed in German, and made reading less frustrating by making it faster.

I've been working on a variation of this with a connection to a flashcard app [http://www.vocabulous.net]. Basically whenever you look up an unfamiliar word you can tap "add" and it ends up among your flashcards.

Now I just need amazons book catalog, and it'll be awesome...

FYI:

>das ist nicht gut

is also perfect, normal, modern German

I was about to point out the same thing, also "tak tak" means "yes, yes". Also, learning from "meme posters" is a bad idea. They often intentionally misuse the language in a non-obvious way, especially if you've just started learning it.

I don't think breadth first works well with learning many languages at once. What's the point of being able to recall a few phrases in each language. Learn one until it's at a usable level.

One important thing I wanted to add that helps me a lot is: use Anki! It's the most time efficient way to memorise information.

Also, advice like this is specific to a family of languages.

Yeah. Very true. I guess memes should be taken in context with the help or under the tutelage of a native speaker.

And only perfect, normal, modern German. "This is not good" in yiddish is more like (depending on dialect)

Dos iz ni[sh]t gut.

My favourite technology for memorizing vocabulary is definitely memrise[1]. It actually combines a lot of these things together so it becomes more than just a flashcard site, it has a wiki-like community format so people can add 'meme'-based mnemonics, usage examples, etc. Really smart stuff.

[1] http://www.memrise.com

<useless_rant>

Why are all those sites english->whatever-language and not whatever-language->whatever-other-language?

I know it can be long to translate everything, but once you have a English->French course and an English->Italian course, why can't we have a French->Italian one (and vice versa)?

</useless_rant>

Because going between any two languages is a separate task. Unless you have a universal language that contains every linguistic feature everywhere and can achieve lossless transition, using X->Y and X->Z to make Y->Z will introduce an unacceptable level of error. English is not a universal language.

In the 80's the Wang corporation (of Wang wordprocessing fame) was working on using Aymara as such a bridge language. I don't know what happened to the project.

My Natural Language Systems professor just went through that topic yesterday -- that in the case of all machine translation applications, the ultimate goal is to get as high up in a 'natural language pyramid' where the tip is a single universal language. So we get the most use out of elements of any two given languages that have as much in common with each other as possible; these common elements could then be applied to other similar languages.

Interestingly, he also proposed that the closest thing we have right now to that 'tip' language is sanskrit.

Actually it does have a lot of x language->y language courses, when browsing courses you can select the base language on the left where it says 'For [English] speakers'. (Though it appears there isn't a french->italian course...)

I was interested in Italian>Whatever (sorry, I inverted them in my first post). There only seems to be Italian>Mandarin. Though luck...

Anyway thanks for the suggestion.

I think most people who are serious about learning a foreign language either want to learn English or already speak it. It's relatively rare for, say, a person who speaks only Spanish to start studying Mandarin without even basic fluency in English.

The content on memrise is by large contributed by users. I've created a Portuguese->Spanish course there, and so have other people.

Noone is stopping you from creating a French->Italian course. Add 10 words a day and soon you'll have a basic course.

How does learning pangrams help? I don't get how the author has benefited from learning all the letters of German when they mostly correspond to the English alphabet. It does sound like a cool thing to learn, but I can't think of any use beyond that. What am I missing?

Good point. I should have been clearer.

The german pangram I cited happens to be my favorite, but in some sense provides less utility than a Russian or Arabic pangram. In the early days of learning a new language, sometimes people forget the letters or pronunciation, but a pangram can help.

Shameless plug: two years ago I created http://nabbber.com to help me learn English. Basically, it's like Twitter, but instead of tweets you post words that you've recently learned. You can follow other people and see their new words on your home page (just like tweets).

I'm in Bali now and I'm using Nabbber to learn Indonesian. Whenever I see an unknown word (in a shop, at a gas station, etc) I save it and then revise from time to time.

Here's how my profile page looks like: http://nabbber.com/AlexanderZaytsev/words/id:en

I find this method (just got out in the wild and write down unknown words) the most efficient one.

Not a bad list, but I've never understood the reasoning behind frequency word lists. The 5,000 most common words in a new language are the ones that I need to worry about least, simply because I'm going to be encountering them so frequently.

For the record, I've found that very little can match forcing yourself to speak your target language with native speakers. Back this up with studying vocabularly and grammar on your own. Hard work, but incredibly effective.

I think learning the top 3000 words makes it easier to get more passive help from books, newspapers and television. For me, there is a threshold when I improve without really trying, just by reading and listening. It's not the most efficient method, but I don't have to sit down and study.

Yeah, establishing that baseline of 2-3k works is what makes most of what you read comprehensible, and allows you to pick up more vocabulary and understanding through context, which I think is pretty much the key. I actually do think it might be the most effective method once you're at that level.

"Learn the top 1000 spoken or written words of a language"

Is there a resource that provides a list of the most frequent words for a given language?

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists

watch shows in your favorite genre, in (target) foreign language + eng (or your native language) subtitles.

I found this didn't help me much beyond picking up the odd word I'd learned in context. Switching to target language subtitles and using VLC to slow down the playback slightly has done wonders for me.

I've been learning Spanish for about 3 weeks now. I use a combination of Duolingo (highly recommended!), memrise.com (nice way to retain words) and Coffee Break Spanish podcast on iTunes. Can someone suggest Spanish movies/shows I can watch?:)

That's a good list. I think the most important first step is to find what really interests you (whether that be comic books, TV shows, movies, music) and use that as a starting point. For example, a lot of people I know learned Japanese because they were interested in anime. If you are studying something that truly interests you, it is much easier to stay motivated.

In my opinion, there is still a lot of room for innovation in the online language learning space. It is a very tough problem to solve and it is one that I am currently working on with my startup - BiFluent[1]. Our thesis is that one thing that is really missing for people learning a foreign language is metrics. If you are running a startup, I'm sure you could immediately tell me how many new users signed up today, what your current conversion rate is, etc. But can you do the same thing if you are learning a foreign language? Can you tell me what your level was 1 year ago, 6 months ago, 1 month ago? Can you tell me (precisely) what your strengths are, and what your weaknesses are (speaking, pronunciation, vocabulary, idioms, grammar, etc.)? Can you tell me which words you should be studying next, based on frequency analysis and tailored to fit your study goals? I believe that if you truly know your level, and if you are able to measure your improvement over short term periods (every month), it becomes much easier to stay motivated and stay on track.

One tool we are hoping to ship in the next week or so is a vocabulary assessment tool. Historically, the only way people have measured vocabulary is by the number of words you know. For example, "I know 5,000 words". In my opinion, this is a vanity metric. It doesn't really tell us any useful, actionable information. Our new tool reports what we call your Vocabulary Coverage Ratio. This is the percentage of the total vocabulary of a language that you will know or understand (analyzed on a frequency basis). So, for example, if your Vocabulary Coverage Ratio is 85%, this means that you will understand 85% of the vocabulary in any given situation. After we ascertain your level with our tool, we can also break out your coverage ratio across different mediums (TV, newspapers, magazines, fiction) using the data in our corpus. Also, once we know your vocabulary coverage ratio, we can use the frequency analysis in our database to give you tailored study lists. These study lists will show you the next 50 most frequent words you should be studying based on your current level and interest (we have different lists for medical, business, SAT, GRE, TOEIC, etc.). If you choose the right words to target, you can quickly improve your coverage ratio.

So in conclusion, I think the best "hack" is a mix of two things. 1) You need to find what interests you and use that as a jumping point 2) you need to use science and tools to accelerate your progress (just like we use analysis tools in every other aspect of our lives).

[1] https://www.bifluent.com

I also agree that the most important first step is to find content that's interesting to you. Coming from France (a country well-known for its crappy language learning methods), I learnt english as a teenager because I wanted to understand comic books I had found on the Internet. Later on I subscribed to english speaking magazines such as the economist.

> [1] https://www.bifluent.com

Man, remove/change that bear and penguin image, it makes it so '90s-internet-marketing-website.

A common problem for tech-minded people when approaching human languages is to equate learning words with learning a language but it doesn't work that way.

The two big reasons are differing division of word boundaries and collocations. The second half of this 2 minute video explains both: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cjnP6mogEU

Very true. One way around that is to put more than one word on your flashcard; a phrase of five-ish words enough to study in that way, but long enough to show some grammar and context ("the elephant has a long trunk").

I'd add two of mine to that list: try thinking in foreign language and calculating in it.

Great tips, but if I remember correctly the Italian movie is called La Vita e bella.

It's called "La Vita è bella"

I would love to see something like this but for learning programming languages.

And everybody searching for Aleksandra Kozuszek

I find mixing tasks helps me out. I use duolinguo at home and I have a bunch of Pimsleur tapes (old method but still great for basics) on my phone for various languages that I listen to when I walk home from the gym and I'm still excited from working out.

Of course I seem like a madman walking down the street still flushed from the gym muttering to myself in french or german but hey, that's how it goes sometimes.

I really do think immersion is the best way to master a language but you still need a basic proficiency in it. Then just walk around speaking like an idiot and asking for corrections until you don't sound like an idiot anymore.

You made my evening with that comment. All three paragraphs. I would upvote you twice if I could but alas.

The 2nd para definitely made me chuckle. I could clearly visualise a flushed individual muttering "ich haben eins, und ich brauchen kein" and "Mist! Tut mir leid", etc..... to himself :-) Made my evening.

The last part is a little easier if you're in a context where other people either don't speak English or are unconfident in it. Many Spanish people will be okay interacting with your broken Spanish, for example, but many (most?) Scandinavians will immediately switch to English. I've also had better luck with languages which have more speakers, since they're more used to hearing non-native accents: French or Spaniards or Italians can accept a pretty wide range of pronunciations, but mispronounced Danish ends up completely unintelligible to many people.

mm, the only place I've put this into practice was when I was learning French and living in Quebec, I'd simply say that I was trying to practice and most people would go along with it. I can see it being a problem if your bad accent makes the language unintelligible though.

Learn the verbs at simple present like in the target language: I am, you are, she is, he is.... I have, you have, she has...

Every time you want to say something and you cannot find out how to say and write down in your paper.

And keep them in a a4 page in some place and take it with you everywhere you go. When you speak and you don't remember a word, quickly check your page.

I recommend using https://github.com/antijingoist/AlphaSymbolic as a means of distilling the cultural/economic/historical/etc unnecessary typographic biases/information latent in current font libraries. At least for Latin-based systems; these biases may distract the reader from developing extensible representation models of the text itself; thus, they distract the reader from more immediately perceiving the "stress" or density of text, since the characters are each so "unique" in terms of glyphs, etc.

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