Comment by xiaoma | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xiaoma | Hacker News Reader

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.

Anki (or any other SRS) doesn't have to be about learning words out of context. I've learned a lot with Anki plus sentences off of Tatoeba, which has a large amount of sentences translated into many languages. And I did that while being familiar with the basics of Krashen's ideas. I think there's no contradiction. Learning words and not forgetting them helps me to focus on getting a lot of input on my target language, without the drudge of (re-)looking up the dictionary for every other word.

http://tatoeba.org/eng/

By the way, (for the benefit of other people reading this) the website you link to has many other interesting articles about language learning vs. acquisition.

I completely agree with this.

I've created the site Readlang (http://readlang.com) to allow learning vocabulary in context by reading uploaded content, translating, and using SRS flashcards which include the original context.

It's in public beta and would love to get feedback if anyone tries it out.

I checked out your site about the time it was announced on Reddit. I really like the idea although I noticed some problems using it for my target languages (Spanish and Hebrew). For inflected languages like these, you really need a good stemmer/lemmatiser (either one, I'm not an expert, but you get the idea). I haven't tried Readlang recently though, when I do I'll be happy to give you more feedback.

Thanks, yes I'm relying on Google Tranlsate at the moment, but eventually I'd like it to recognize word families and verb conjugations. I use it for Spanish and regularly edit the generated verb flashcards to indicate the correct conjugation.

I've used Memrise and Duolingo to learn a bit of a couple different languages, and I wouldn't really say they're out of context. Even though memrise is a flash card app at heart, it gives you words and full sentences using those words at the same time. Duolingo does the same, and goes as far as showing you how to conjugate those words.

Hi Xiaoma, thanks for your feedback. I think that Duolingo and Anki are great trampolines to learn the basics of a language. Duolingo worked great for various people I know and it helped me learning the basics of German in a funny way.

I've made good use of Anki myself. In fact, I was an early contributor to it!

I still feel SRS is best used as a supplement instead of primary source, though. In Taiwan I knew a guy who had spent 3 hours a day for a year and a half memorizing Chinese characters and phrases on an SRS. He could write 3000 characters. He wasn't that great in terms of actually communicating with people or reading comprehension, though.

This came up in HN thread on a language teaching app about 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4992561

Let's assume he took weekends off, so he had 3 x (365 + 183 - 150) = 1194 hours of study. In that time he learned to read and write 3000 characters in context.

How is this a bad example of language aqcuisition? It sounds to me like the guy learned what he was studying, and learned it very efficiently.

If I remember correctly, most school curricular will have you learn 3000 characters in 3 years, and most students won't be proficient in them when finishing.

Ofcourse, if his goal was to chit-chat about the weather, then obviously he wouldn't learn that since he didn't practice it, but it sounds like he could read a newspaper after only 1.5 years of study, which I for one find rather impressive.

>In that time he learned to read and write 3000 characters in context.

Well actually he didn't learn them in context! That's the thing. He absolutely could not read a newspaper if by read you mean understand the content of the articles. He could mostly sound out sentences, with poor pronunciation and often using the wrong reading for various characters (e.g. pronouncing 行 as háng when it should be xíng or vice versa).

He could write many, many characters based on English keywords and pinyin associated with them in his deck. But as I've been trying to explain, words don't map one to one across languages and learning a language isn't simply a matter of memorizing words. The case of using a deck for isolated Chinese characters is even worse since a character is a syllable as opposed to a word. In modern Chinese, the vast vast majority of words are poly syllabic (i.e. multi-character compounds).

FYI, he had been studying some Chinese for a couple of years before going on the SRS craze. And he didn't take weekends off. He put even more time into study, fortunately including some things other than decontextualized SRS-based study. During the time I knew him, he largely backed off the SRS in favor of getting loads of comprehensible input in the form of media, talking to parents of his English students and his girlfriend's friends. Over time the input did lead to a better ear for the language, better pronunciation and the ability to read and actually understand. It's possible the first couple of years with the SRS gave him a good foundation that helped for the next three years of working with the language in context. I still think it would have been a better bet to focus on listening and reading from year one.

Based on your experience, what level of proficiency would you expect from 1.5 years of 3hrs/day study?

3000 actually tracks about right from what I know. Here's some information with little backing: I've read somewhere that children pick up around 10 new words a day, and at the peak of my full time language studies, that was what I was achieving as well. Considering that it takes a few months to ramp up to that speed (I've read that it takes about 10 separate exposures to a word for it to become memorable), his 3000 characters for 1.5 years is pretty good.

"Acquisition requires meaningful interaction in the target language - natural communication - in which speakers are concerned not with the form of their utterances but with the messages they are conveying and understanding." Stephen Krashen word. i made several failed attempts at learning a second language before up and moving abroad. after a year, i'm still pretty bad at it, but i don't know if i'd /ever/ have made it this far if i didn't have to speak on a daily basis... although part of that assessment is based on me being lazy and bad with natural languages.

anki and similar are really useful, though, if you're studying a non-phonetic writing system.

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