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Comment by msoad | Hacker News Reader

The cold truth about learning another language is that you will not learn much when you are not living in a community(country) that speaks that language.

I started learning English when I moved to the U.S. three years ago but I speak better than those who spent 10 years learning English in my home country.

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The cold truth about learning another language is that you will not learn much when you are not living in a community(country) that speaks that language.

This is verifiably true, by an experimental test of Chinese-language proficiency, of the foreigners who learned Chinese in my generation. Harvard and some other elite universities wanted to develop a test of Chinese as a second language to find out which Americans were learning Chinese the best. During the norming study for the test, someone thought to include foreigners at the Mandarin Training Center of the National Taiwan Normal University ( 國立台灣師範大學國語教學中心 ) in the norming sample. My fellow students and I who were there at the time "wrecked the curve" for all the graduates of Chinese language programs at United States elite universities who had not spent significant time overseas. Further development of the proposed test was scrapped after that was discovered.

That said, English is more learnable in-country than most languages because of its extensive use as an interlanguage. I lost count early of the number of different native language pairings I would see among foreign students in Taiwan--mostly in Taiwan to learn Chinese--who would converse with one another in English, because English was their strongest language in common. English-language movies, books, and other authentic examples of use by native speakers are also pervasively available around the world in a degree unmatched by materials in any other language.

This is commonly "known", but actually, I don't agree. It's all about exposure. I learned English in class, but most of my learning came from watching TV/movies and reading books in English, and posting on online forums. By the time I came to the US, some people confused me with being a native once in a while, even though I had never actually spoken English to a native, or spoken it much at all really. Of course my vocabulary is/was not as great as natives, but I made a concerted effort to try to sound American from the start. Most people in my country don't try to sound American, partly because it probably feels silly/fake to them, and partly because British English was what was taught in school.

My point is, if it's not true for English, then it's not necessarily true for other languages either. You just have to be interested in the culture, and expose yourself to media during and after taking classes.

When learning English, the easiness with which one learns also depends on your native language. For example, speakers of latin languages learn English much easier than speakers of slavic languages.

Also, many languages leave their mark on their native speakers in many cases being very hard to get rid of your native accent.

I was lucky to have Romanian as my native language, as it doesn't leave such a big scar on your pronunciation. I almost speak American English correctly, in spite of not living in an English-speaking country and I've got friends that speak perfect British English, French or Spanish (giving these as examples, as these have thick accents). True story - Microsoft has a support center in Bucharest, with one reason being our linguistic abilities.

I would much rather speak with a foreign accent rather than with something like a New England accent.

What you describe as a "scar" is the same effect the top comment refers to. Romanian, much like my native language (Portuguese) is a peripheral language. Those don't evolve as much and so have not simplified as much as languages from central countries (think central Europe for comparison). The end result is that they are more complex and, to our advantage, use many more phonemes, easing native speakers learning of foreign languages.

To this day, I'm still baffled that Spanish does not distinguish between 'v' and 'b'.

Really? I thought that Spanish does distinguish between 'b' and 'v', but the South American Spanish has the sounds the other way around than continental Spanish?

Interestingly, my native language is Czech, and it makes it rather easy to learn English and Spanish, because the only sound that's missing is English 'th' in three or think, which people here pronounce like 't' or 'f' and "I fink" sounds pretty horrible :)

I understand that Spanish has to be really hard for English speakers, because of things like words changing shape because of gender, and stuff, but the usual English/American pronunciation of Spanish 'j' (or 'x') is terrible. I had to laugh at Lady Gaga singing about some Alexandro, making up about three different ways to pronounce it, not a single one correct. It's not difficult sound!

Talking about difficult sounds, try this one: [1] it's fun :)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%98

You forgot people mixing up v/w, and being funny with r. ;-)

Have to second this. One of the artists I sometimes contract with for game development is Romanian, and while I sometimes notice idiomatic issues there's absolutely no issue understanding her. Her diction's as good as many native speakers I encounter on a regular basis.

Well, active interest helps as well. I started learning English in school at 10 (German native speaker, 29 years old), and starting at the age of 14, I became actively interested in watching US-American movies (well, the usual mainstream) in English (this coincided with the widespread availability of DVD players and DVDs with English-language audio tracks). My perception has been that it immensely helped me with both my listening comprehension and my vocabulary. That turned out to be an advantage when I worked in companies with English-speaking colleagues.

My only imperfections that I and my GF (who is from the UK) recognize are things like my US-centric pronounciation and vocabulary ("boot, not trunk!", "lift, not elevator!", etc.) and my tendency to mispronounce words that I've only ever read but not heard. And when I'm tired, my accent sometimes slips and I suddenly stereotypically sound like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Part of US Astronaut training is to live with a Russian family (I don't think it is a Cosmonauts' family) and participate in immersive Russian language training.

This is before they train on how to fly the Soyuz, and the Astronauts do serve as flight engineers on actual Soyuz missions to the ISS. There is a reason NASA does this.

The person who wrote this blog would disagree with you: www.alljapaneseallthetime.com . It's harder, no doubt, but most people can't give that excuse because they don't go 100% into immersing their lives into the language. Which means listening to audio, TV shows, anything in that language at least 12 hours a day even at work, and even sometimes when you sleep (a lot i know, but if it was that easy, everyone would speak 3+ languages).

Plus, if you live in NYC or any ethnically diverse community in the USA, you'd meet plenty of people who've lived here 20+ years, yet can't have a conversation with you in English - I know many Chinese immigrants like that.

That's why I said "community" not country. You can live in many modern cities and speak your mother tongue all the time.

First step for learning a language is wanting to learn I guess

I tend to disagree. Specially the Indo-European[1] family of languages and even more with the ones which are mostly phonetic. Most of the these languages have rules which you can mug-up and get used to in no time(ok a few months). I would assume learning a language which is pictorial in nature probably will be way more difficult and requires you to completely immerse yourself into it. The ruleset of all Indo-European languages is surprisingly common with varying degrees of sophistication but if you know one of these languages, then it is easier to learn others. But yeah, it probably wouldn't work if you speak none of these langauages.

I wish I had internet and wikipedia when I was in school.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages

That's not true. I lived in Rio de Janeiro for 3 years. I frequently encountered people who spoke perfect English with American accents... and had never left Brazil.

> The cold truth about learning another language is that you will not learn much when you are not living in a community(country) that speaks that language.

Patently false, as evidenced by the countless numbers of second language English speakers who have never been to an English-speaking country for more than some vacations (if even that).

As the person whom you are quoting said in an earlier reply in this thread,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6303229

he chose the word "community" precisely to indicate that you don't have to live in an English-speaking country to learn good English (or a Chinese-speaking COUNTRY to learn Chinese, etc.). But massive "real-world" exposure to a language outside required school lessons helps immensely, as many research studies on language acquisition around the world have shown.

English has the network advantage of being the "community" language of people who have no other common language, all over the world.

> But massive "real-world" exposure to a language outside required school lessons helps immensely, as many research studies on language acquisition around the world have shown.

Maybe the primary take-away from those findings should be that learning languages in school sucks. I can still remember being assigned 20 words to mindlessly repeat until I memorized them.

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