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Comment by jdw64 | Hacker News Reader

The biggest obstacle to learning a foreign language is that it's so much slower and more frustrating than using your native language, right? Compared to your native-language typing speed, even English typing speed is only half...

So it's really frustrating. how do you all relieve that frustration?

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The frustration goes away with time. It's always going to be slightly more friction and that's worse when tired, etc, but the cost becomes less.

As someone who's done a second language to fluency past 30 years old, the largest hurdle IMO is the inverse frequency curve for words (not sure what the real term is).

But basically, the most common (and therefore most easy to pick up and learn) words carry the least amount of meaning. A, The, Where, Why, etc..

The most meaning-dense words are the least common, and therefore you learn them much slower when consuming native media.

It gets to the point where, if you learn a quarter of all the words in a language, you can read every word of most sentences except for one or two, and those 1-2 words carry all the meaning.

It's incredibly frustrating and the only way through is grinding vocabulary lists, as far as I know.

English native -> Norwegian C1 in ~ 5 years. The back half of any language learning is brutal, IMO. I had a huge dip where I stopped being able to absorb vocabulary via osmosis and consuming media, and just had to grind. But maybe that's just me.

Thanks for the advice.

For me, reading is fine, but writing and speaking are hard. Especially speaking. What should I do about this?

Should I change my environment first, after all?

My speaking only got better after speaking a lot with native speakers, just, a lot. And focusing hard on vowel sounds. In Norwegian specifically those kill a lot of understanding. If you can't immerse by living there, I really liked 1:1 online interactions. I paid for an italki instructor my first year here.

My writing is still my weakest point. I'm fine with spell check and predictive text on my phone, but my spelling is atrocious without it. That could be improved with spelling practice like we did as kids in our native language, but I just haven't put in the time, due to how common spell check is.

Basically just time and effort! Sorry, I know it's not a nice answer. It's just a really hard thing to do, and you have to keep doing it, and a lot of people minimize the effort. Maybe it's easier for some but not most of us.

No that’s correct, I fully agree.

It’s exceedingly frustrating, and you either get an awful lot of exposure ( say you stop reading in English , only read in Norwegian and read 10k pages a year ) or you grind and learn word lists.

The good news is that word lists are now much easier to learn thanks to SRS systems.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law may be what you're looking for

I think ultimately the highest barrier is looking stupid. I try not to care, like how kids do not and simply try. People underestimate you all the time when you do not speak a language, or do it badly.

Immersion, unfortunately.

You put yourself in a situation where nobody understands you in your native language, nothing helpful for your daily life is written in your native language, and you must constantly try to comprehend and produce the target language if you want to accomplish even basic tasks.

If you can't up and move, then studying a language with a lot of cultural export helps a bit, if you can get into the habit of switching all of your media consumption to the target language. It's not the same, though.

I guess that's the only way. Thanks for the advice.

Instead of English, howbout L Exists ForAll N?

Anyways I have slept maybe almost quite enough, and identified that feeling of depth from your

"Problems(/strategies) humans found but overlooked"

As coming from AI and (unaugmented) humans making different tradeoffs (related to rational inattention..?)

On your side, did you lose all respect for Graeber and his recommenders, or did you gain newfound respect for your own ADHD. Lol

Go somewhere you are forced to learn and speak it.

Defaulting to your native language will get zero comprehension, which is much more frustrating than some.

I watch and read different things. I like different things in foreign language - stuff that is simple or kind of cringy in my own. So I rarely ends up comparing it.

Second, I rewatch things I liked a lot. Watching them dubbed with more need to rewind makes me notice different stuff about series - how they are composed. So it is a bonus.

Dealing with frustration is such a fundamental skill that we should all have learned it as kids.

Yes. And with the effort in learning. Schools kind of do try to teach that by making people face confusion and failed recall and repeated effort. What they often fail to do is demonstrate how confusion is exactly the mechanism that leads to learning and how to make that not be frustrating or overly exhausting or depressing.

The work involved in learning so often doesn't feel rewarding. Only success and familiarity feel like progress when they, funnily enough, generally indicate non-engagement and no learning.

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