How I Learned French in One Year
kuro5hin.org
kuro5hin.org
I'd rewind the film and switch to English subtitles when I didn't understand a phrase. It takes about 6 hours per film at first, but becomes faster and faster as you learn more vocabulary/grammar and get used to the process.
It's best to use real French films, because it's important that the actor's mouth movements match their voice, especially when they're speaking fast.
I live in Paris now, and speak French fairly well with no American accent.
I also read bilingual books and memorized songs on the bus (pasted the lyrics into iTunes so they'd show up on my iPod when listening to the song).
The rule was never sleep without giving your brain something to work on. I spent an hour in the morning and an hour at night practicing the precise pronounciation of syllables, words and phrases, using tapes as a reference. There was little improvement during sessions, but noticeable improvement between them. Thus the rule about sleep.
As my pronunciation improved, so did my comprehension. I can't imagine it working the other way. Comprehension is passive, and no guarantee of accurate or even coherent production.
Following such a method you can learn a language in 6-12 months.
EDIT: I just read up on Krashen, and well, no, his theories are wrong. I wasted years on that crap. I doubt fluency is even possible with such a method. Just do what sounddust said and you'll be set.
EDIT2: The average person acquires fluency despite the Krashen method, rather than because of it. In my case, due to very poor audio recall, the Krashen method was a complete failure, so I was forced to experiment with other ways.
It turns out perception of foreign sounds is very weak in adults. We recognize a subset of possible sounds and toss out the rest, or munge it into something heavily accented. The repetition & production method compensates for this by making such sounds "real". Once they are real, the actual language follows more quickly.
EDIT3 (sorry): More on Krashen, from http://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash.html:
The only instance in which the teaching of grammar can result in language acquisition (and proficiency) is when the students are interested in the subject and _the target language_ is used as a medium of instruction.
This is so fucking wrong. The study of grammar is analytical. Language is the vehicle of analytic thought--if your proficiency in a language is weak, your level of analytic thought in that language is also weak. So if you want to study French grammar and you've only just started learning the language, by all means, study it in English.
Wow. So this is why the English-speaking world can't seem to learn a foreign language. Thank you xccx, you opened my eyes.
For most people, analysis of how a language works is not meaningful. Just like for software users, most people don't care how a program works. They just want to use it.
For highly analytical mathematical minds, study of grammar can be effective. Krashen's research shows, however, that grammar study in classroom environments does not help the majority of students to achieve conversational fluency.
So I'm not saying you are wrong. But there's plenty of evidence to suggest that what works for you might not work for everyone.
Personally, I don't believe that human language is purely analytical framework for thinking. I do believe, strongly, that language is also physical, emotional and expressive. I mean, what is the first word out of a baby's mouth?
Just guessing, but I bet the experience that sounddust describes has less to do with grammar analysis, and more to do with personally relating to the stories in the films and songs. He gets input that A) he comprehends and B) he cares about.
Guessing again, I bet sounddust's success with early output results from practice within a safe environment, where he has no fear of sounding like an idiot. It's a much different experience that being surrounded by peers in a classroom and challenged by the teaching authority.
Further, since he's vocalizing expressions from authentic films and songs, he can mimic not only correct pronunciation, but also mimic expression with real gut feelings, like glad, sad or mad. Feelings are meaningful.
So I agree with you, pradocchia, that early output (expressive mimicry within a safe and playful environment) is useful: 1) it helps us to hear and understand the new language, and 2) it boosts our confidence so we can talk much sooner.
And to sounddust, please correct my wild guessing about what you experienced while learning French!
For example, Chinese sentence structure is Topic-Comment rather than Subject-Predicate. This little insight helped make sense of the sometimes odd phrasing that my mind had tried to cast as Subject-Predicate.
About the rest, though, I think you are trying to force good data into a broken framework. Krashen seems interested in the teaching of foreign languages. Thus the focus on student relaxation, comfort and interest--how do you ameliorate the school environment?
I'm interested in the study of foreign languages, which already assumes an interested student. Sounddust was determined to learn French. Play and safety seem beside the point.
This is the process of making a foreign language "real". It starts off like a chore and then becomes a meditation. I could have spent 3 hours per session once I got into the groove. I would have to stop myself after 60 minutes, because extra practice w/out sleep would do me no good.
I don't know how I would apply these methods to the classroom. I did TA a Chinese class once, and no I didn't try to apply the methods. Clock in, clock out. I would tell students about them, but who knows if anyone listened. It all sounded like black magic, and I sounded like a raving fool.
I was also scared of sounding like a fool, and need privacy to practice.
Were you able to learn Chinese in 6-12 months? What's your mother language? I know a lot of Westerners who've learned Mandarin and no one achieved fluency in anything near a year. For someone whose mother tongue is near the Romance languages, I can see picking up another Romance language very quickly (I know Latin, Greek, and French and I can essentially understand Spanish even though I've never studied it). But I don't think an English speaker is going to pick up Arabic, Russian, or Chinese in under a year. I'm on year 7 of studying / speaking Mandarin, and I still have problems sometimes.
High school was a wash, and living in China helped but I never made real progress till I hit upon this produce and repeat method. College and grad school were mostly classical Chinese and other dialects, so I'm not sure if that counts.
Were I to start Russian today, 6-12 months would be enough for a) no discernible accent and b) every day proficiency. But "pick up" is the wrong phase here. You aren't going to pick up a foreign language in 6-12 months with the immersion method. Look at what the grand OP did: 6-12 months of produce and repeat, followed by immersion. By the time he immersed himself, he had developed the faculties to process the stream of stimulus. That's a huge difference.
"In June 2004, at the ripe old age of 21, all post-pubescent and supposedly past my mental/linguistic prime, I started learning Japanese. By September 2005, I had learned enough to read technical material, conduct business correspondence and job interviews in Japanese. By the next month, I landed a job as a software engineer at a large Japanese company in Tokyo"
Basically, his method involved constantly immersing himself in Japanese media.
I lived in Tokyo for 2 years, studying Japanese full-time, and completed several courses in Finland before that. Speaking came pretty easy and I am quite fluent in normal conversation, but learning kanji has proven to be a real time-sink and a source of frustration, although at the same time I love them for their beauty. Also reading Japanese feels different than reading languages in the Latin alphabet, as the characters have an extra layer of meaning (not a huge difference, but helps to distinguish homonyms + create new kinds of puns / emphasis).
There are roughly 2000 kanji that you should know to be a high-school level reader. The latest test I took (http://www.speedanki.com) shows I know about 800. Reading a newspaper is not possible currently, as I would have to constantly look up kanji, and often the important words are the rarer ones.
But I will learn them. At this point it's an obsession, I'm not even sure why I need to know them, except to prove to myself that I can.
But what I really meant were dead-tree books and newspapers that I could read while not at the computer.
Yes, I have seriously tried it. Maybe it works for some people. It's of course quite hard to recall why you really remember something, but in the 800 kanji I know according to the test, the vast majority I seemed to remember from seeing/using them in context while reading/writing Japanese. Mnemonics are an attractive thought, and I hope they do really work for some people. Personally I am a bit skeptical. My feeling now is that learning doesn't have to be brought up to conscious thought, but is something that happens naturally as you re-encounter things. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition
If you'd like, you can combine these two things too. http://kanji.koohii.com/learnmore.php
However, in order to become fluent in a language, you need to think in that language, which means you need to build up concept associations in that language. By teaching yourself e.g. English mnemonics when learning Japanese, you are irreversibly tying your Japanese knowledge to your English, and giving yourself a handicap in acquiring fluency.
If you instead remember a word by memorizing a specific use / context of that word in the target language (and add some visual imagery to that for good measure), then this gives you memory associations that will actually remain useful as you become a better speaker. This is why immersion works so well: your entire learning is grounded in the necessity of speaking with and understanding the culture you are living in. If you need to eat, you will develop a food vocabulary very rapidly.
Mind you, I speak about four languages, am fluent in three and grew up naturally speaking two, so maybe my brain is also wired differently than most.
The problem is that Japanese has the most complicated written language in the world. It has two alphabets and a set of many thousands of symbols (kanji) borrowed from Chinese. Learning spoken Japanese is an entirely different undertaking than learning written Japanese.
You can be completely fluent in Japanese and still not be able to read a newspaper (this may actually be more common than not).
Rhythm is an important mnemonic aid. The Homeric epics are poems because poetry has meter and rhyme, and people needed that to remember the whole thing. Same thing with Kanji.
It may be painful, but it should be possible; yes, you'll have to look up the kanji, over and over -- writing them down as you look them up -- and it'll take you half an hour to read half of one article. But if you keep at it, and keep looking them up, every day, you will improve -- you will learn them! You just have to tolerate a lot of tedium on your way.
I picked up enough Portuguese to fumble along in Brazil by taking 40 hours of lessons from Berlitz, 2 hours per day twice a week, just me and the teacher. That was kind of the minimum to make continuous progress. Group classes are way less effective, and courses at the local JC are totally worthless. The only thing that counts is how much time you actually spend speaking.
It's expensive as hell, but I strongly recommend 100 hours of individual instruction before going off on your own in learning. It gives you a good feel for the pronunciation of the language. If you learn by reading but with the wrong pronunciation, it may take a long time to recover. The proof to me was when I was in rural northeastern Brazil. The person that I was haltingly talking to said that he could tell that I was from Rio by my accent. I wasnt, but my teacher was.
The two takeaways here are: learn pronunciation first, and learn the script of the new language immediately (or you'll just mentally transcribe the sounds using your first language)
Correct, and correct. All native speakers of any language are habituated to produce the sounds and perceive the phonemes of their own language, and NOT to produce the sounds or perceive the phonemes of any other language. Acquiring an understandable accent generally takes good training at the beginning.
How about starting with a CD and book of nursery rhymes and then listening whilst following the text.
Then eventually ditching the CD and reading/singing the rhymes from the book out loud.
Then (having read the translations) doing the same whilst visualising the content.
For an adult learner, CONSCIOUS awareness of the different phoneme system of the target language is almost surely necessary. For some language combinations, dictionaries with International Phonetic Alphabet pronunciation keys can help a good deal. Better quality language textbooks have a beginning section detailing differences in the sound system from the learner's native language to the target language.
What does "script" mean in this context? What is the "script" of a language?
P.S. I wrote a little Adobe Air application for someone who likes to learn a language while listening to songs or watching youtube. You can search lyrics/save/translate and bookmark your videos. It's a just organizes the whole process. Have fun ! http://www.singandstudy.com
The emphasis would have to be on fun in that formula for making a fortune.
I think various websites publish the skill set(s) the country and/or provinces are looking for. It's trivial for a US-ian to get work here, and it's a 3-6 month process for Europeans to do so (at least in software-related businesses). It also helps if you're young, single, ...
It seems that most Swiss speak at least two languages well, but these two are usually Swiss German and either French or Italian. Those working touristy jobs usually know enough English to take orders and direct tourists to bathrooms, but that's about it.
Edit: The irony of this article is, of course, that this guy probably now has a better understanding of French than most Canadians outside of Quebec.
But more power to anyone who takes the time and effort to learn another language well.
The United States government agencies that track this matter don't generally seem to think so. But if you have other evidence on this point, I'd be glad to hear it.
I agree in general that a grammatical feature such as minimal marking of nouns for case and verbs for person, number, or gender, making word order the main basis for grammar distinctions, makes Chinese eerily familiar for native speakers of English. But even though Chinese grammar is "easy" for native speakers of English, to the degree that some Americans say "Chinese has no grammar" (definitely a false statement), nonetheless lack of a lot of cognate vocabulary or similar phonological system usually means that the native speaker of English will thrive as a learner of any Indo-European language over almost any non-Indo-European language.
The comparisons I've seen most often assume native speakers of English learning various languages to an equal tested level of functional proficiency after government-sponsored training. Length of training to reach the required level is generally longer for the non-Indo-European languages than for the Indo-European languages. The "easy" languages for English speakers are the typically studied languages like French, German, and Spanish, perhaps because of prior exposure as well as close similarity. It would be interesting to see what studies of language learning starting from various native languages to acquire various target languages are showing these days.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspon...
If that's not possible, sounddust's method seems the most likely for a hacker with limited access to Japanese people.