Best ways to learn a foreign language

Professional translators often do "shadowing", which is listening to source material from the language you're weaker at and attempting to just transcribe it in real time. You can start with source material which is easy, such as dialog on TV shows, and move to source material which is hard, such as news broadcasts. (Newscasters speak much much quicker than characters in fiction and employ large and often unpredictable vocabularies, whereas most popular culture is dominated by the ~200 words at the head of the zipf distribution for that language.)

It's totally free and, when you're at intermediate proficiency, both stupendously effective and the most maddening exercise you'll ever do. (What happens when you're thrown off the deep end into a newscast about nuclear power plant issues and you're deeply out of your depth with regards to the required vocabulary? You try your best, jot down the five words every 3 sentences you actually catch, and then break out a dictionary later to figure out why houshasen and shiyouzuminenryoupuuru seem to be so key to the topic.)

("Radiation" and "pool (for storage of) used (nuclear) fuel", respectively. And there, now you understand 5% more of that conversation.)

Learning a language isn't just a process of learning words out of context (with spaced repetition systems like Anki, or products that piggy back off of it like Duolingo). I don't mean this in an unkind way, but I get the impression the author hasn't ever learned a foreign language very well as an adult.

Until I became an engineer recently, my entire career revolved around learning and teaching foreign languages. I strongly recommend looking at what L2 acquisition linguists have learned before hitting bloggers for language learning advice. One great resource is Dr Krashen's website. The video on the front page does a great job of showing how context and comprehensibility matter more than brute memorization algorithms: http://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash.html

And if you must learn from a blog, pick a blog of someone who has learned a lot of languages well (e.g. Steve Kaufmann) over one who talks of his "learning hacks" but doesn't any videos of himself speaking a foreign language in an unscripted setting. That's my 2 cents.

There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of what works for some individuals.

However, pointing out the common problems, shared by everybody, is also informative. Here are some:

* The factors in learning a new language are age (adolescence is a threshold), innate skill, motivation (and guilt), effort and similarity of the languages.

* Sounds are not listener-independent: your Chinese friend does not hear the same sounds as you do, so don't expect that they know which sounds you are correcting in their English when you repeat the word for the tenth time. Same the other way around. I have seen this leading again, again and again to absurd "are you deaf?" situations between otherwise attentive friends and teachers.

* It might be helpful to discuss metalanguage: direct objects, word order, verb transitivity, nouns vs verbs, parsing, etc. This is something you learn in school in France, Spain, Germany, some Arab countries, etc, and if you studied Latin. But if you went through a standard English-speaking school system you might want to catch up with that.

I would disagree with much of this article. While Duolingo in particular is popular, its main focus is on teaching translation. It's hip, but it's not about teaching how to speak and understand a language. Similarly, the focus on vocabulary study in the other tools has similar limitations.

Self study needs to be augmented or driven by spoken conversation practice in the least. Your brain is a neural network to learn language as audio input. While challenging, it's the most effective way. Google doesn't support this due to the link popularity of a lot of software-driven methods.

Disclaimer: My business in the online language learning space.

+1 to watching TV with subtitles, and even better repeating out loud the sentences you find more interesting. That way y * It will be easier to remember and * You will improve your pronunciation

you need a repetitive stream of natural language. then brain automatically analyzes it.

usually, you pick one 30 minute to 60 minute video, and watch it every day, 6 days a week. make sure you take a break every week. you watch it to the point where you can mimic what they are saying as the video is playing. you don't have to know exact meaning of your utterance. but you already have some sense. then, you transcribe it on paper (you need to learn writing system by this time). maybe use dictionary to learn actual words. rehearse with the video. if have friends, rehearse with them. memorize it. move on to the next video.

start with sitcoms then maybe news broadcast, reality shows (court shows are great), movies...

video is just one example. if you're learning a language where you can't find suitable videos (there might be no production in the language), make friends who speak the language. record their conversations. play repetitively until you can follow along with a loud voice. transcribe.. etc.

Didn't see any references for us Classicists so I'll add my two cents:

I'm still struggling with classical Latin after 8 years. The problem being that it's a "dead" language and immersion/conversation is difficult to achieve on a modern era time schedule.

Over this time I've come to the conclusion that you need to start "speaking" in any language as soon as possible. The approach of learning grammar for a year and translating sentences on pen-and-paper is not effective enough.

My current toolbox for learning Latin is:

1. Supermemo (Anki is a free equivalent) for vocabulary and anything that needs to be committed to memory permanently. This takes away the burden of worrying about anything that needs to be remembered.

2. Follow Evan der Millner's "Comenius" Latin project, which attempts to teach you Latin the way school children were taught back when they were expected to speak, read and write it fluently. This is a reconstruction of the way Comenius would have taught children. [1] project overview, [2] reading of the texts. [3] Oral lessons, so you can start Skyping other Latin speakers and talking as soon as possible. (this is not "church" or Italian pronunciation, but the received Classical reconstructed pronunciation). Everything you need is available for free off the either Google books, Evan's YouTube videos and archive.org.

3. Know and use Diogenes (http://www.dur.ac.uk/p.j.heslin/Software/Diogenes/) for Windows or Linux.

4. Install the "Language Immersion for Chrome" extension and set it to Latin so you're forced to read the Internet in Latin as you browse ;)

[1] http://latinum.weebly.com/comenius-project.html [2] http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMH5SfME31ZKYChsIWSp_D... [3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0NIMm2eM8c&list=SPC6E7F1C5D4...

I'm attempting Attic Greek this way (Evans has started an Oral ancient Greek course on YouTube too) and can't wait to enjoy reading Plato, the Iliad and the Odyssey aloud in the reconstructed native tongue in my old age some day :)

> One of the best ways to improve your expressing skills is to talk with natives.

Go to the foreign country and don't speak one sentence in your native language. Jump in at the deep end (BTW, I had to look up that phrase because I never lived in an English-speaking county).

Having a general interest in languages, I've tried many things to improve my language learning. The thing I was probably most impressed with though is the Michael Thomas method.

The submitted article had some interesting tips, and several of the previous comments are quite good too. I've been developing a FAQ on language learning as this interest is mentioned on Hacker News from time to time. As I learned Mandarin Chinese up to the level that I was able to support my family for several years as a Chinese-English translator and interpreter, I had to tackle several problems for which there is not yet a one-stop-shopping software solution. For ANY pair of languages, even closely cognate pairs of West Germanic languages like English and Dutch, or Wu Chinese dialects like those of Shanghai and Suzhou, the two languages differ in sound system, so that what is a phoneme in one language is not a phoneme in the other language.

http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Wha...

But a speaker of one language who is past the age of puberty will simply not perceive many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the target language (the language to be learned) without very careful training, as disregard of those distinctions below the level of conscious attention is part of having the sound system of the speaker's native language fully in mind. Attention to target language phonemes has to be developed through pains-taking practice.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032

It is brutally hard for most people (after the age of puberty, and perhaps especially for males) to learn to attend to sound distinctions that don't exist in the learner's native language. That is especially hard when the sound distinction signifies a grammatical distinction that also doesn't exist in the learner's native language. For example, the distinction between "I speak" and "he speaks" in English involves a consonant cluster at the end of a syllable, and no such consonant clusters exist in the Mandarin sound system at all. Worse than that, no such grammatical distinction as "first person singular" and "third person singular" for inflecting verbs exists in Mandarin, so it is remarkably difficult for Mandarin-speaking learners of English to learn to distinguish "speaks" from "speak" and to say "he speaks Chinese" rather than * "he speak Chinese" (not a grammatical phrase in spoken English).

Most software materials for learning foreign languages could be much improved simply by including a complete chart of the sound system of the target language (in the dialect form being taught in the software materials) with explicit description of sounds in the terminology of articulatory phonetics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics

with full use of notation from the International Phonetic Alphabet.

http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html

Good language-learning materials always include a lot of focused drills on sound distinctions (contrasting minimal pairs in the language) in the target language, and no software program for language learning should be without those. It is still an art of software writing to try to automate listening to a learner's pronunciation for appropriate feedback on accuracy of pronunciation. That is not an easy problem.

After phonology, another huge task for any language learner is acquiring vocabulary, and this is the task that most language-learning materials are most focused. But often the focus on vocabulary is not very thoughtful.

The classic software approach to helping vocabulary acquisition is essentially to automate flipping flash cards. But flash cards have ALWAYS been overrated for vocabulary acquisition. Words don't match one-to-one between languages, not even between closely cognate languages. The map is not the territory, and every language on earth divides the world of lived experience into a different set of words, with different boundaries between words of similar meaning.

The royal road to learning vocabulary in a target language is massive exposure to actual texts (dialogs, stories, songs, personal letters, articles, etc.) written or spoken by native speakers of the language. I'll quote a master language teacher here, the late John DeFrancis. A few years ago, I reread the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). In other words, vocabulary can only be well acquired in context (an argument he develops in detail with regard to Chinese in the writing I have just cited) and the context must be a genuine context produced by native speakers of the language.

I have been giving free advice on language learning since the 1990s on my personal website,

http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html

and the one advice I can give every language learner reading this thread is to take advantage of radio broadcasting in your target language. Spoken-word broadcasting (here I'm especially focusing on radio rather than on TV) gives you an opportunity to listen and to hear words used in context. In the 1970s, I used to have to use an expensive short-wave radio to pick up Chinese-language radio programs in North America. Now we who have Internet access can gain endless listening opportunities from Internet radio stations in dozens of unlikely languages. Listen early and listen often while learning a language. That will help with phonology (as above) and it will help crucially with vocabulary.

The third big task of a language learner is learning grammar and syntax, which is often woefully neglected in software language-learning materials. Every language has hundreds of tacit grammar rules, many of which are not known explicitly even to native speakers, but which reveal a language-learner as a foreigner when the rules are broken. The foreign language-learner needs to understand grammar not just to produce speech or writing that is less jarring and foreign to native speakers, but also to better understand what native speakers are speaking or writing. Any widely spoken modern language has thick books reporting the grammatical rules of the language,

http://www.amazon.com/Mandarin-Chinese-Functional-Reference-...

http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar-Grammars...

http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-Language...

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/...

and it is well worth your while to study books like that both about your native language(s) and about any language you are studying.

Getting an ear for a foreign language is quite difficult - getting to the point where you can separate the words out (without necessarily knowing what they are) so that you can learn them. I have quite good reading French (I can read proper full-length books) pretty poor written French and bloody awful spoken/hearing French. Listening to a lot of French pop music on Spotify really helped me get an ear.

Hack 0 should be to find a good motivator to learn the language. Only then do tools matter.

I got bored learning Kanji. Had I known that 300 of those were enough to read a food menu -- and what they were, I would have prioritized them and learned them in a month. Instead, I stopped after thinking it would take too much time to ever get to 2,000.

I'm quite happy with rosetta stone. do you have any particular reason not to like it? (beside paying?)

I find that using mnemonics is an efficient way of learning words. The only problem is to find good mnemonics, which can be easy if the word sounds like something you already know, and hard if it reminds you of nothing and the word represents a very abstract concept.

Memorizing something like the top 1000 words used in everyday conversation, with little grammar exercises sprinkled in, seems to be a good strategy. I've only got to memorizing something like 500 words (give or take 150 words...) so I haven't put this method quite to the test yet.