Ask HN: What's the best way to learn a new human language? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What's the best way to learn a new human language?

6 pointsflippyhead12 comments

My company has fantastic support for remote working so I'm going to spend two months coding from Buenos Aires, Argentina starting in February. Given the five or so months I've got, what's the best way for met get as fluent as possible in Spanish?

Things I'm considering:

* babel.com * the memory palace approach * taking a language school class * video conference-based tutoring lessons * the approach advocated by Timothy Ferris

Note: I'm an English speaking American. I studied Japanese for 10 years, lived there for one, and speak/read Japanese at a decent level.

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> What's the best way to learn a new human language?

The best way is to be four years old, live in an environment that requires the target language, and have a lot of spare time.

The second best way is to live with a native speaker and have a need to communicate.

The third best way is to take a class with a native speaker.

The fourth and lesser choices are too painful and inefficient to consider.

Hi Flippy :) I am from Buenos Aires, Argentina.

In BA, we have some meetings where people who want to learn English meet with people who want to learn Spanish. They are at bars and you speak X hours in Spanish and then X hours in English. You learn and teach at the same time :) A few of my friends went and said they are really useful, and you meet a lot of people. I am not sure who organize them but I could find out for you if you want to.

I think that's the best possible way to learn it. Interacting with other people. If you to a class, you will understand Spanish, written and possibly spoken, but I am not sure if that will make you fluent.

Edit: I misread, I thought you wanted to learn Spanish in here. Online, I would say to try Duolingo and reddit.com/r/argentina :)

That sounds fantastic! My hope is that I can establish a solid base before I come to Argentina, so once there I can make count as much as possible the time I do spend with locals. I very much hope I can develop a credible plan to reach fluency between now and when I leave Argentina after being there two months. Thanks! I'd love to connect, please find me on github: https://github.com/flippyhead

Ouch, Argentina...

An argentinian here, currently living in Spain and polyglot of 5 languages. Well, first, it will be complicated because argentinians speaks with a lot of slang, but in front of you they will not.

The best way is by try/error. I started to speak italian in 15 days doing this, knowing that my mother language is a romance one, like Spanish, learning a new one was piece of cake, but coming from an american, things can be a little different, specially when pronouncing the vocals and some other letters but with the time and able to hear, I beat you can even speak some of the slang.

I've meet many americans in Buenos Aires and so far I've remember, most of them learnt a good spanish base with slang. Funny, but they loved.

If you go to Spain, you will find the spanish language isn't so singed as the argentinian, also the spaniards doesn't have so much slang so the language is plain boring.

See my lengthy (and evidently well liked) recent comment from another tread with detailed recommendations.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302816

I speak many languages. It's easy for me because my native spanish helped me to reach the romance languages (derivated from latin). English was quite easy to reach a good level (nothing expert like).

Once you learn 1 romance language, jumping to the next one will be really easy. I always start with the same stuff as usual on books. The key is to find people to talk and talk like a crazy is the way to train your brain to think on a new language. No book will teach you how to say good morning properly. It differs so much from reality.

A tool I love to learn new languages (as a guy living out of his hoe country), is Anki. https://ankiweb.net/ Flash cards are really helping to get new words stick in your brains. What I usually do then is to read a book I already read in my native language; and force myself to catch up the grammar .

The brain does a wonderful job searching for patterns and similitude. Ha, and watch tv and listen to radio. Period.

You might want to check out Tim Ferris's How to learn any language in 3 months: http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/01/20/learning-lan.... It's been on my plate for sometime but I haven't personally tried it yet and so don't endorse his method.

Tim Ferris can be entertaining, but this is just total blog spam. It lures you in with "you can do it in three months!".

It apeases people like yourself, who adds it to their list, another hack, more tricks in my bag. When you start learning you'll realise it's just three bullets.

I have been using the Pimsleur Method which is all audio during my drive from/to work, combined with watching spanish movies with subtitles on Netflix. My Spanish is now where I can keep up a basic conversation with my native South American friends. I have been doing this for about a year now.

Like the mermaid from Splash! I always assumed learning by watching tv/movies was useless but maybe I'll give it a shot.

FYI if you route your IP address through mexico, you can get Mexican netflix through your regular netflix account.

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