How Learning a Second Language Changed My Life | Hacker News Reader

How Learning a Second Language Changed My Life

chadfowler.com

107 pointscyunker79 comments

I'd be hard pressed to name any 30 seconds in my life more consequential than these:

Counselor: "Wow, that's a lot of AP credits. Well, you've passed out of 3 of the 5 classes freshman CS majors are supposed to take. We don't have enough CS classes you're qualified for to fill the rest of the schedule. What are you going to take?"

Me: "I don't know, I'm thinking a language. Do you have a list of the ones the school teaches?"

Counselor: "Yep, page XXX."

Me: "scans list Oh, Japanese sounds fun. High tech country, lots of money, few English speakers. Sign me up."

Counselor: "I studied it in college, too. Its a "#%"%."

Me: "I'm up for a bit of a challenge."

I loved every minute of it, added another degree on, and here I am ten years later in Nagoya looking at a stack of bug reports filed against the university entrance exam administration system.

"and here I am ten years later in Nagoya looking at a stack of bug reports filed against the university entrance exam administration system."

So what would you recommend as a course of self study in Japanese? ( I assume such a thing is possible. I could be wrong)

Anything on the Internet is fine of course and I can buy any books available on Amazon, but I can't really go back to school or attend classes (no good Japanese teachers/schools where I live).

Candidly, I wouldn't.

If you put a gun to my head I'd say find yourself a copy of Japanese the Spoken Language with the CDs and drill them until your ears bleed. In particular, make sure you practice production (i.e. talk, talk, talk, if you don't sound like the CD keep talking until you do, then drill some more). The lack of somebody to tell you "You're saying everything... wrong" is one of the largest problems with self-study.

The largest is that almost everyone gives it up.

"Candidly, I wouldn't.

Thanks! What if I wanted (primarily) to read, write and understand (spoken) Japanese? (vs speak without mangling pronounciation) Would that be equally hard? Iow can self study get me to the point where I can watch a video clip or movie in Japanese and not have to look at the subtitles?

So can I level with you for a moment?

Nine times out of ten, when someone in my social circles asks me how to study Japanese, it is because they have some vague idea of enjoying anime/manga/video games in the original. (Especially when they start suggesting "Well, I don't need to actually be able to read anything, I just want to be fluent" or the converse.)

Without specific reference to you, approximately 98% of the people I know who went into Japanese with that objective gave up before they achieved any useful level of proficiency. (And one now works at SquareEnix, living the otaku dream.)

Hobbies are nice and relaxing. Committing to studying a foreign language means blocking off nights and weekends for the next several years of your life because you'll have BLOODY HARD WORK to do. And make no mistake, it is going to be work.

Two years from now, your fingers will bleed from writing practice, you'll know a few hundred characters, and this snippet from Wiki:

米国Googleは人類が使う全ての情報を集め整理すると言う壮大な目的をもって設立された。独自開発したプログラムが、世界中のウェブサイトを巡回して情報を集め、検索用の索引を作り続けている。約30万台のコンピュータが稼動中といわれる。検索結果の表示画面や提携したウェブサイト上に広告を載せることで、収益の大部分をあげている。

will still be mostly impenetrable to you. That is 6th grade Japanese.

I strongly suggest you find your driving motivation to learn the language which will get you through moments of despair like that one. Which you'll have plenty of, because learning languages is BLOODY HARD WORK.

(Obligatory disclaimer: I am fairly decent at Japanese. I can read 6th grade level Wikipedia articles. Yay. I can also give technical presentations to engineers and discuss outsourcing strategy with C-level executives. And you know what? I have a veritable mountain of HARD WORK ahead of me.)

can self study get me to the point where I can watch a video clip

Self study can get you to the point where you'd appreciate exactly how much you just asked to be able to do. (Here's a trivial example: I watched Monsters vs. Aliens yesterday. All of the military characters speak a cartoony parody of what Japanese translators think Japanese people would think sounds like what Americans think macho military types sound like. Were you planning on learning fake military Japanese? )

(Five second fake military Japanese lesson: 諸君 (Shokun) means "you", in the sense of a form of address used by a military officer to address his underlings as a body. An American writer might substitute "gentlemen", as in "Gentlemen, it has been an honor and a privilege serving with you. stirring music"

This word has no practical use in Japanese aside from signaling that you're trying to talk like you're military (or nationalist). Because this little factoid is 99.95% useless, you are unlikely to ever encounter it in a textbook.)

"Hobbies are nice and relaxing. Committing to studying a foreign language means blocking off nights and weekends for the next several years of your life because you'll have BLOODY HARD WORK to do. And make no mistake, it is going to be work."

Great answer, thanks!

Just for some context, I speak read and write about 7 languages (4 Indian languages - 3 contemporary, one ancient - Sanskrit) and 3 European languages (English, French and German) fluently, (fluently == I can read and write classical works, can be airdropped into a country speaking the language and be fine, but no one really speaks Sanskrit anymore of course :-D ) and can speak (but not read and write) a couple more Indian languages.

From my experience of learning all the languages I do know, I know that they are "work" to learn and don't have any illusions of learning Japanese being "easy".

I took 3 plus years of classes in both French and German for example, but I can imagine someone who puts in serious self directed effort (and knows a language in the "family" already - Sanskrit grammatical structures are close to the the ones in German, for example with the verb coming at the end of a long sentence,and several word "running together" and so on) learning either of these from instructional material (books + cds), listening to radio/mp3/videoclips/ newspapers + dictionary +grammar book + Internet discussion and so on, to the point where they may have strong accents, but they can read, write and listen to radio broadcasts etc.

Now I've learned only languages within the Indo European (English, French and German) and "Indian" langauges (though the South Indian languages belong to a different family than Sanskrit and Hindi which are "North Indian").

I enjoy learning languages and was considering learning a non-European, non-Indian language "just for fun". So yes, the motivation was "for fun" but without the illusion of learning languages being easy, or with an anticipated "giving up" before a few years of effort.

So anyway I was considering Arabic or Hebrew or one of Chinese/Japanese.

Unfortunately I don't have teachers/classes nearby and I think Japanese/Chinese etc may have additional difficulties than say, French or German due to their scripts and tonality and general mind-bendingness(at least I think they are mind bending!).

I was just asking you whether you think the combination of all other possible resources (books, cd, dvd, internet discussion, video clips etc) could get one to a point of reasonable, non-perfect-pronounciation-but-can-read-and-write-and-understand fluency in Japanese, effort over a few years being a given, for someone gifted at languages.

I take it you are saying "no, not likely".

Fair Enough!

Thanks again! The great thing about HN is that it is so easy to tap into so many knowledgeable people.

Asian languages pose a difficulty to those of us only familiar with European languages, certainly. I cannot speak for Japanese directly, but at the highest level Chinese presents the (really quite large) challenges of a writing system where thousands of words are completely orthogonal and there is little (but not zero) connection between a word's written form and its pronunciation; a spoken language that depends on tonal motion to convey meaning at the word level similarly to how an English speaker modifies the connotation of a sentence using tone; and the concept of a language built around slightly different motivating philosophies such as outlining things chronologically instead of descriptively as English does. To my knowledge Japanese shares the first one, not the second, and has the added difficulty of an extremely pervasive system of honorifics which greatly modify the spoken language.

That all being said, if you keep an open mind Chinese isn't that difficult to learn. Characters will, after you learn several hundred, begin to form something which feels not unlike a vast alphabet (many people recognize the idea of radicals, but this extends to characters which are collections of other characters though not really radial/phonetic style). Speech is definitely going to be difficult for a long time and you will probably experience a lot of frustration if you think for any instant it'll be comparative to learning a language you've already got a foothold on. Finally, while you might have a slightly easier time than me with an Indian cultural background, I pretty firmly believe that language and culture are inescapably bound and if you don't have that and don't get a chance to experience it your learning prospects will be crippled.

So yeah. It's not easy. Then again, if I were in your position I'd pretty much jump into one immediately. If you learn Chinese (Mandarin/Putonghua) you could probably jump into some of the more common dialects (Cantonese/Guangdonghua) or Korean relatively quickly. I'm not sure if the same thing happens with Japanese.

I'm studying French as a hobby and I'm at the stage (after six months) where I can read a newspaper now. I'm not fluent in conversation and still have a long way to go, but (I keep telling myself) it's my journey and I'm doing it for myself. French is, undoubtedly, easier than Japanese so I appreciate that you're commenting about that language specifically, but I do react against this notion that learning something new (esp. a language) is all blood, sweat and tears. I'm really enjoying the study: each new word I can recognise feels like an achievement. It might take me years to become proficient but the alternative is to spend those years in ignorance; it's a no-brainer. I would recommend anyone with a hacker mindset (but, basically, anyone) to find a way to learn a language or two.

The thing that got me started was this article:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/29/15258/287

And this article pointed me to a set of open source products (Mnemosyne particularly) which have helped immensely with memorisation:

http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/16-05/ff_woznia...

Hehe, very nice writing. I'm just at the point where I can appreciate how much work it is - and it's a lot.

Reading/writing is especially criminal. The best resource I found so far is http://smart.fm, both for kanji and vocabulary. It works, but what I lack most is something to read at a 3rd grade - 5th grade japanese. Any ideas? It can be anything remotely interesting, from children's stories to learning materials.

Also, if you'd be willing to say more... I'm a lot more interested in how you managed to find qualified work in Japan, especially as a programmer. To be honest, this worries be about the same as the kanji, or more.

I absolutely agree with all of the points Chad makes here! I just recently returned from a 3 month stay in China after studying Chinese for two years and feel the same.

An interesting story was when I met another American traveler in a hostel in Shanghai. He was clearly loving his time exploring China, but every time we spoke I felt so bad for him. He was absolutely shackled to the parts of town where he could safely tread or easily find. I would spend a day wandering through streets, major and minor, dipping into shops or checking out maps to find new locations. I could fearlessly walk into a restaurant and have some idea of what I would be getting into. Best of all, I could ask anyone to help me out or just to tell me about their country -- and in a place like China, with thousands of years of rich history, people love to tell you wonderful stories about their country.

When you speak someone's language, they feel comfortable around you. They're willing to help you out or listen to you try to explain things you're not quite capable of. There's an immediate reciprocation of the effort you put into that immersion in their warmth and desire to help. Better, if you go somewhere where foreigners are less common (seated train rides in China are a particular example) everyone is excited to meet and share with you.

All of these things are pretty much inaccessible if you don't speak the language. So, as stereotypical as the desire to stop being monolingual is for your average American, absolutely do learn another language and then go use it.

You can't imagine how tiny a chunk of the world you live in until you do.

I'm always reminded of an anecdote my father told me.

Once, when he was working abroad in Australia, a faxed document arrived in French, which no one else on site could read. So he translated it to English.

This prompted a coworker to comment "How nice, you speak two languages!" So he reminded this person that he was, in fact, Dutch - he could speak that as well.

"Oh, that doesn't count, it's your native language!"

....

He should have asked the coworker how many languages he spoke.

The coworker only spoke English. My dad made some remark about his coworker not speaking any language at all, but I figured you'd get that from the context.

I mean really - that's pretty easy from here on out, right?

Very straight forward. The point was to see the coworker realize on his own that by his own standards he spoke no languages at all.

Well, in all honesty English is _not_ a foreign language. Except maybe for the Chinese and Japanese, who have a strong enough culture to survive without it.

That's exactly what I thought about. Nobody cares anymore if you speak english. Instead, it's just almost weird when you don't.

but could your father speak Australian?

To anyone considering a second language, I would recommend choosing one that is widely spoken somewhere where you can't get by with English - it will unlock a whole new part of the world for you.

You might also consider studying a non-Indo-European language. It will take more time, but the experience is the linguistic equivalent to discovering functional programming after a lifetime of seeing procedural code.

There's IE languages and IE languages. I think that, for example, a highly inflected free-word-order Slavic language may be more difficult to learn for an English speaker, and more revealing in the sense that you're referring to, than many non-IE languages.

(I know you know that, but many people here might not).

which Chad did by learning Kannada, a Dravidian (a non-Indo-european) language.

Wow, you read the article too?

Here in Wales schoolchildren are forced to learn a minority language in school. Welsh Language is given a very prominent position - it's only spoken in Wales (and bizarrely in a small area in Patagonia). I'd sooner have my kids learn a language they can use to communicate with other people that can't speak English - it's possible that there are perhaps a couple of kids now that haven't been taught English, Welsh all but died before being resurrected as a [false] part of nationalist pride.

I find it very strange, I'd sooner Hindi or Urdu or Mandarin or Japanese or Spanish. Something useful. They may as well be learning Ancient Sumerian (I'd still probably prefer that).

Not all second languages are equal.

> I find it very strange, I'd sooner Hindi or Urdu

Hindi and Urdu are practically the same languages (though, with different scripts - Hindi uses Devanagari; Urdu uses an Arabic-derived script). You can refer to both Urdu and Hindi as 'Hindustani'.

Furthermore, learning Hindustani really is very advantageous. Every other grad student I see nowadays speaks Hindi (Indians, Bengalis, Pakistanis, etc.). Its speakers are usually very warm-hearted, and even more welcoming when they see someone making an effort to learn their language (and culture).

Oh, and it's also the second most-spoken language by number of native-speakers. [Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_... ]

A language that your kids can identify with as their own and practise everyday will do more for their further language learning ability than an 'useful' language that they'll gloss over in the classroom and seldom get to practice with natives.

Also, if that 'false' nationalism perchance catches on, your English-Sumerian speaking children might end up feeling like half foreigners in their own country. I've seen that kind of thing and it's sad.

It's catching on, the gov spend millions on it. There's a lot of anti-English [people] sentiment which feeds into not speaking English (just because of the name of the language rolls-eyes). Gov jobs require it, despite not needing it. Middle classes use it to get kids into Welsh school and away from the poor performers and chav-y types.

There are more daily Urdu and Mandarin speakers in the city I live in than Welsh speakers. Indeed, I work in a store and the only welsh language I hear is from educators speaking to their kids.

It's probably the thing that would/will push me to move or seek alternative education (eg home-ed). I don't see Welsh language as being important enough to be a part of every school lesson.

What you call "not speaking English" I'd just call "speaking Welsh". Your framing such self affirmation gestures negatively, as an aggression to the other, only shows your bias. The world will hopefully keep one more language around thanks to the people that make that perfectly legitimate choice. In any event, I bet any adversary feelings towards the English language are not due to the name but to the fact that it's been dislodging Welsh out of existance, as your reasoning illustrates.

A Gov employee should be expected to know all official languages in the country where she'll be serving. Especially if she is going to have to face public.

Considering to move or home school your children only to keep their minds uncontaminated by Welsh sounds more like political or social prejudice than actual educational concern. Trust me, knowing Welsh will only make it easier, not harder, for them to learn Urdu and Mandarin. In Spain, students from nations with one or more languages of their own average a higher proficiency in foreign languages (including Castillian, AKA Spanish) than those of monolingual provinces.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Linguistic_maps_o...

I've been to that tiny part of Patagonia. Sadly Welsh is no longer spoken - the older generation understands it, but for the kids it's strictly Spanish.

Curious as to your answer: why is it sad? Surely if the kids speak fluent Spanish instead of Welsh then they can now (in their first language) communicate with far more people in the world. That's got to be better for cultural exchange, social mobility, access to services, business, etc., no? I can see an argument about losing some of the rich tradition, but the world moves on.

There is a saying in czech (and in some culturally close languages as well) that goes like "Kolik řečí umíš, tolikrát jsi člověkem".

I was totally stuck with the translation but google says it could be something along the lines of "You live a new life for every new language you speak. If you know only one language, you live only once" or shorter "How many languages you speak, so many times you are a human being".

The way I heard that quote was "You receive a new soul every time you learn a new language"

What a delightful, and in my limited experience, true idea. Having spent stretches of my life thinking mostly in english, then mostly in french, and now mostly in japanese and english, there is a noticeable influence on the basic kind and character of thoughts I have in each of the three. It isn't huge, but each has its own thought coloration and has concepts that are more easily expressed than the others.

Most fun for me now is talking with someone else that speaks all three, and watching the conversation just naturally blend them. Sometimes the blending is black/white (several sentences in one, then a statement in another state-changes the conversation into another language) and other times it ends up a mish-mash of two.

I speak Indonesian and Javanese as my native language, "forced to learn" Japanese, English, Malay, and a bit of Chinese here in Japan. Contrary to common opinion, I regret that I learn and speak a lot of languages because I don't feel adequate enough in any of them, even my native language. Being able to use a lot of language really broaden your view, but at the same time, you will incline to develop multiple personalities/conscious in your effort to speak like the native. I find it difficult to express myself in a "constant" way regardless languages, hence the feeling of inadequate.

I was raised in Galician but taught to read and write in Castillian (Spanish), and grew up in an environment where almost all media, signs, labelling, ..., were in Castillian. Programming related learning and work has taken most of my studying since my teen years, and I did that exclusively in English. Because of this, I estimate English is already the language in which I've done most of my reading and a fair share of my writing.

I can relate to what you say, because for quite a time when trying to express myself formally I used to end up resorting to a lot of transliterated Castillian constructs and phraseology. Other times, ideas would come in English and I'd try and find a Galician equivalent. I only got past that after a conscious decision to immerse myself in Galician and Portuguese literature. Sometimes I still feel like learning my native language as a second language.

And I'd be at a loss if I had to talk about programming related concepts in anything but English. I'd have to reinvent the vocabulary as I go. My own scribbled notes for personal use are written in a patois that is mostly Galician generously sprinkled with English.

I run into quite a few people that were raised either first half in japanese and second half in english, or vice versa, and many of them seem to have this difficulty, not being quite up to the highest level of fluency in any language. They can get by perfectly well in both, but neither language is perfect.

Nice to know I'm not the only one who thinks that.

I learned English when I was about 12, in part thanks to my passion for computers and in part because I had great teachers (in public school!). It's been one of the greatest gifts I've been given.

I know very few people who understand it. I do tell many how life changing it is, and how it greatly opens up your world and your mind... but mostly they look at me bewildered:

"why would I learn that? I'm doing fine!" or, "Nah, too difficult, and I don't have time"...

It's a shame, to not be able to share so many things I've learned with the people I care about, and to know how much they're missing. Ignorance is indeed bliss I guess.

I wouldn't even be here on HN if it wasn't for this.

Most 14 year olds in Europe study 2 sometimes 3 foreign languages.

It's very hard to stay mono-lingual in this environment. And then there are all the children that have parents from more than one country. It's not rare to see them growing up fluently tri-lingual.

http://smart.fm is a very useful service for learning a second language (especially Japanese), highly recommended.

I always got non-first language words confused. What interested me was when I was relearning French and learning German (to read patent docs) after having learnt sign-language (as my 4th studied language) I could think of words in sign when I was trying to find the right French word. It's kinda weird to think of a word and have an action come to mind.

I have a similar anecdote — getting muddled between French and German when learning them back-to-back at school — but bringing sign into the mix blows mine away!

Makes a lot of sense actually. Just today I was forgetting the name of someone I had just written down in the morning, and visualising the japanese characters of their name as I had written them brought the name into clarity.

As a child, I wanted to be fluent in six languages. I speak a little German and read and write a little French. I know a few words of Russian and a smattering of Spanish. I have gotten some use of those, mostly German because I have German relatives and lived there for a time. But I never became as fluent as I wanted and it never opened up social opportunities like I had fantasized it would -- opportunities like the author of this article experienced. For me, learning a little HTML, XHTML and CSS have done far more for my ability to reach out to other people and therefore has done far more towards widening my horizons. I'm not particularly fluent in those either, but they get a good deal more use than the human languages I dabble in. It has had the unexpected side effect that I no longer bitterly regret not becoming fluent in six human languages.

This article showcases that a critical component of attaining fluency in a language is immersion. Many linguists insist that language cannot be separated from culture. Another important ingredient in language learning is practicing output; i.e. not restricting yourself solely to input (reading, listening).

My university forced me to take a second language for a CS degree. The department was located in Arts/Sciences, not engineering where it belonged.

It was a perilously stupid waste of time. It required 14 credit hours. 14 credit hours of learning a language I will never speak to anyone ever again and never had any interest in learning. The only thing the language requirement does now is make the CS degree at my alma-matar less competitive since I would have taken more CS/Math/EE electives.

21 or 18 hours of humanities is enough. I'll get down-modded for being this way but I don't care. This was the reality of the situation. It genuinely hurt me. The only way it changed my life was make me miss out on interesting elective classes, like AI or computer music and I also didn't have enough time (in semesters) to do undergraduate research.

Give it time, man. Your priorities will change. Ten years ago you were complaining that you'd never use any of that silly Math they were forcing you to learn.

It took me 5 years before I appreciated the German I learned in high school. I was in Bangkok airport and met a German woman that didn't speak a word of English. She asked me something, and I understood it. I opened my mouth and a complete sentence came out in a language that I'd never truly believed that people actually spoke in real life. That was the moment I got it.

So yeah, wait and see. Ten years from no I won't be surprised to find you backpacking across Guatemala, burned out on writing code, and thanking that stupid university for forcing you to learn a foreign language.

> Ten years ago you were complaining that you'd never use any of that silly Math they were forcing you to learn.

No, I wasn't. I minored in math.

> Ten years from no I won't be surprised to find you backpacking across Guatemala

And no, I won't. One of the ways to make the pain go by faster was to go to a language school in Mexico. Worse two weeks of my life in recent memory.

Wow, talk about missing the point. The point of university (or used to be before they turned into high priced vocational schools) is to teach you how to learn. If you didn't learn AI or computer music in school then what's stopping you from learning on your own. In fact, you could enroll at any university right now and take those electives as audits.

And the 14 credits you took to learn another language barely cover what is required to speak that language. So congratulations you have the same vocabulary as a 7 year old native speaker. The school did their part. They got you in the game. How you go about the rest is entirely up to you.

>Wow, talk about missing the point.

No, I didn't. I understand the point of university is to learn. I did a lot of learning on my own. I get that. I'm not some idiot that you make me out to be.

The point is that it took way too much time. The one thing I didn't have enough of and it impacted my future career. The reason I had to take 14 hours is because some decades ago, some inflexible bureaucrat decided that we need to "understand" each other and created this idiotic requirement. Now, in the 21st century, that ideal is becoming irrelevant and of course the language department won't let this change. This, as you can probably tell, has created a lot of resentment.

Let me be clear: We had to take 14 hours because of departmental politics, not some hypocritical ideal about how the university is for learning.

I can't take them at the university because I don't have time now that I'm working. Also, there are somethings that I just need guidance on. So maybe I am a moron. Whatever.

The easiest way to learn a second or third language, would be in school. Many Indian schools are English medium, but kids learn at least one more language, as their 'second' language. Sometimes Hindi, sometimes Sanskrit or even a foreign language like French. In addition to it, we learn our mother tongue (assuming Hindi is not the mother tongue), so its easy to be trilingual.

There is one disadvantage though. Kids don't get to choose the language, its pretty much decided for them by their parents. When we learn as adults, we can pick and choose - depending on our goals.

The three language system exists in all South-Indian states. I studied Kannada, English and Hindi from grade 5-8; Sanskrit, English and Kannada from 8-10; Sanskrit and English from 11-12. So that's 4 languages in 8 years :)

Kannada has a rep of being one of the hardest languages in India.

I love the secret language bit. I always speak Japanese in public and it is great fun. Once, though, I met a couple at an event and I recognized them from a time I was at a starbucks speaking about very personal affairs in Japanese. It turns out they were from Japan. Embarrassing.

Kannada is no harder to learn to learn than any other Dravidian or Indo-european languages.

If kannada is difficult to learn, the same can be said of Telugu, whose script is close to kannada. And Hindi which also follows the same script rules (forming composites from consonants and vowels using Devanagari script). This is so much true that Sanskrit is often printed in Kannada script in my state without any loss in phonetics and "spelling"

Tamil might be harder to learn as it is not phonetic. there is no unambiguous way to write 'ha' and 'ga' for instance. Mohan (a proper noun) is written mokan and called mogan.

So says a native kannada speaker who can speak 3 other languages, read 4 and comprehend a couple more.

My experience from learning English, Spanish, Portuguese, some Japanese and French, and a little bit of Chinese is that mostly-phonetic writing systems are not actually difficult at all. I suspect I could learn the Kannada script well enough to read aloud fluently in a day or two, but learning Kannada well enough to speak it in conversation would take me at least three months, probably more like three years.

My talent for scripts is very unusual, but I think that any person could probably learn a phonetic script in maybe a few weeks at most.

"My talent for scripts is very unusual"

Your humility is very refreshing Mr Kragen.

Your sarcasm is noted, but misplaced. I came in first in the school spelling bee every year throughout my childhood (until 8th grade, where I came in second), without drilling for it, competing with kids who did drill for it, so my disclaimer is just being realistic.

It's not a particularly important talent, since as I said, orthography is far from the most important part of learning a language; if it were, I might feel embarrassed about bringing it up.

But in context, it's important to point out that my experience with learning scripts probably doesn't generalize that well, and normal people's experience will be an order of magnitude worse. If you have a way I could have explained that without either sounding conceited (to you) or simply not mentioning my experience at all, I'd like to hear it.

"Kannada has a rep of being one of the hardest languages in India."

This isn't really true. Kannada has a (relatively) regular structure.

Starting from scratch the most "difficult" of the four South Indian languages is probably Malayalam - the language of the state of Kerala. (note to hackers - the language name is a palindrome!)

It combines influences of Sanskrit and Tamil with a very unique pronounciation (to untrained ears Malayalam is more "flowing" and "liquid" vs the other South Indian languages which are more "staccato"). It is almost impossible to pick up the correct pronunciation and lilt of Malayalam without some deep immersion.

That said, I knew an Englishman,Graham Hall (now deceased unfortunately) a journalist/author who spoke fluent, accentless, perfect Malayalam. An incident where he chastised a local plumber trying to rip him off (no doubt assuming the blond foreigner was clueless about the local cost of repairs and prices of parts and such) in fluent Malayalam, with perfect slang, indicating what he thought of the plumbers' parentage and ancestry, made the local papers. (The thoroughly nonplussed and chastened plumber refused to take payment for his work and fled as soon as he could!)

That's pretty awesome. The fascinating thing is how his life changed just because of his interest in a second language. What if he had learned just french or spanish?. I think taking a different path than others sometimes pays off well. Also reminds me that luck favors the one who is well prepared.

My whole life was entirely changed by the decision to try learning Chinese after elementary school lessons in German (also a heritage language in my family) and secondary school lessons in German. The East and West can meet--just learn the language of the other side. I strongly recommend to everyone to give an earnest try to learning a language you don't speak as a native language, especially if your language-learning efforts can be paired with lengthy foreign residence. There is a lot to learn from speaking to everyday people who grew up in another country and who don't share your cultural assumptions.

I love that these types of articles make it to the front page of HN. It's not about being shackled to technology but using technology where you need to to free you and enrich your life. /swoon

"we’ve discovered...when you even try to say “Hello” or “Thank you” in their language."

I'll attest to that, even though I live in the states. While this article I was proud of both the author and my own Indian heritage. Learning languages is a great thing to do, it's just a shame not all of us have the time to do it. Makes me sad that my high school was forced to cut Latin from the curriculum — it's a very interesting language to learn.

I've read that "joke" many times before. MOST people around the world are monolingual, there are just fewer multi-lingual people in the US.

According to the book The Tongue-Tied American: Confronting the Foreign-Language Crisis by United States Senator Paul Simon,

http://www.amazon.com/Tongue-Tied-American-Confronting-Forei...

the United States is EXTREMELY unusual in its degree of monolingualism among native-born people. The book said that the United States is the only country in the world, for example, in which it is possible to earn a Ph.D. academic degree without gaining a working knowledge of a second language.

The book is wrong. People here in Taiwan can get PHDs without working knowledge of a second language, depending on the school and department.

Recently, some English-only programs have been popping up and foreigners here are getting advanced degrees from Taiwanese universities without learning any Chinese. Amazingly, quite a few of those foreigners are getting degrees in Taiwan Studies, without the ability to understand much of anything Taiwanese people speak or write.

Monolingual PHD programs aren't limited to Taiwan, either. In mainland Chinese schools, 100% mandarin programs are even more common. I've also had the acquaintance of a Japanese physics post-doc with what couldn't possibly be construed as a "working" knowledge of English.

People here in Taiwan can get PHDs without working knowledge of a second language, depending on the school and department.

Thank you for mentioning the example of Taiwan, the country where I have lived longest outside the United States. Let me first agree with you that I should have reported the book's statement as "earn a Ph.D. academic degree without being expected to gain a working knowledge of a second language," which more accurately represents what the book said, and takes into account cases in which the Ph.D. candidate does the bare minimum of what is required before giving up on language study.

Let me ask some questions about current conditions in Taiwan. Isn't 大一英文 (first-year university English) still a routine course for university students in Taiwan? And isn't English still one element of the college entrance examination in Taiwan? And isn't English still a compulsory subject in secondary schooling in Taiwan? (And, after all, isn't that the language we are writing to each other just now, although it appears we could both write in Chinese?)

But the situation of bilingualism in Taiwan is more nuanced than that. Most people in Taiwan in my generation learned a second language in primary school. They learned Mandarin (Modern Standard Chinese) even though their home language was either Taiwanese (in most cases) or Hakka or some other non-Mandarin Sinitic language, or one of the non-Sinitic aboriginal languages of Taiwan. Most people in Taiwan my age (Baby Boom generation) or younger are proficient in Mandarin, but two generations ago very few people on Taiwan spoke Mandarin at home. That's a major example of a huge amount of second-language learning in a Third World poor country.

Accepting your correction that some people get Ph.D.s without MEETING the expectation that they should learn a second language (which is how I should have said what the book said in the first place), I still find it baffling that in the United States there are large numbers of young people who pursue higher education who never even consider enrolling in any second language course, and who have not taken any such course in high school. Study of Spanish is quite widespread in the United States, with French, German, and now Chinese following behind, but there do seem here genuinely to be more people farther along in higher education who have never, ever studied a foreign language than there possibly could be in most other countries, where taking a test in an acquired language is usually a routine part of college entrance testing. I have had the appalling experience of meeting United States professors of Chinese history who can't speak Modern Standard Chinese well enough to talk their way out of a paper bag (I've met others who speak well), so I think the Ph.D.-ready standard even in related disciplines here is not high by world standards.

We're at least as bad in Australia and quite possibly worse given the number of Americans who speak Spanish. You certainly don't need a second language to get a Ph.D. here.

But that is relatively new. Many US universities had a foreign language requirement for graduate degrees, but since English has become the standard language in most academic fields it has been seen as unnecessary.

For example, if you go to many European universities and visit any science/engineering/math department with significant foreign faculty, the language spoken is usually English. And of course that's the language in which most papers, theses, etc. are published.

Learning a second language as an adult, while difficult, is definitely worthwhile.

As an American in Norway, I'm struggling to learn Norwegian for many reasons, not the least of which being that pretty much everyone here speaks English very well and doesn't mind switching to English. Still, I'm continuing to work on it and hopefully will be fairly fluent within a couple of years.

The same applies to programming. (And I don't mean learning C# if you already know Java.)

Yeah, we might as well cut straight to the Sapir-Whorf chase

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

Executive summary of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: The languages we speak and think in have certain inherent cultural understandings that affect our perception of things. Reading the whole thing is recommended though.

Agreeing with the author of the submitted article that learning a new language is a wonderful thing, and agreeing with you in your capsule summary of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (linguistic relativity hypothesis), I have to respectfully register disagreement with the strong version of that hypothesis. Most people are stuck in their thinking because of evolutionarily developed cognitive illusions that are not language-specific.

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/stanovich1

Many people can be very creative and think thoughts that have never been thought before by their fellow language-speakers even if they are resolutely monolingual. And many of the features of language that might seem to be the most influential on human thought (e.g., whether or not a language has strong concord for grammatical gender) in practice don't seem to lead to any differences in thinking.

That said, even though the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is wrong, it's still a good idea to learn a new language. That does, at the very least, expose a reader or listener to authors or speakers from a different cultural tradition, and that does tend to result in new ideas and new approaches to identifying and solving problems.

I am Australian, living in Austria. My two year old son speaks German and English now. It is an awesome thing to see him understand English speakers, and reply in German, and vice verse. I also speak German, but he is really teaching me things about the language already that I never knew I'd comprehend, after 10 years of speaking German myself already.

Once he gets older, I want to move us to somewhere in Asia, perhaps India, and give him another language to speak, which we will learn together. I can't think of a greater gift to give your child than another language, personally. It really truly opens the world to him.

Of course, I'm a programmer. Language is my bread and butter. To be truthful, I'm a bit ashamed that I haven't learned as many human languages as computer languages, but there is still time for that.. ;)

Downmodded?

A fantastic book about learning languages:

How to Learn Any Language: Quickly, Easily, Inexpensively, Enjoyably and on Your Own

by Barry Farber

- http://www.amazon.com/How-Learn-Any-Language-Inexpensively/d...

which is available as a PDF here:

- http://fld.hit.edu.cn/english/webedit/uploadfile/20085121524...

Some articles on the TPR method for language learning:

- http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/rw/tprmax.htm

- http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/other/krashentpr.htm

- http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/other/ashertpr.htm

- http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/rw/firstday.htm

More great articles on language learning here:

- http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/articles.htm

Anything with "quick" and "easy" in the title automatically discredits itself. Language learning can be a lot of fun, but it's on a par with learning to play a musical instrument, or build furniture. You're going to spend a long time on it, and you're going to spend a long time sucking at it.

I'd second the recommendation for Farber's book. It doesn't try to hide that you will need to work, but the work can be enjoyable and productive - that's the sense of the word "easy" in this context, rather than "work-free". It also recommends some techniques for memorisation and has some great anecdotes from Farber's own language-learning experiences.

Farber's book is actually one of the worst in that moderately large genre, but thanks for reminding me to post a link to a bibliography with some better books.

http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html

And thanks for the other links, several of which are new to me.

What didn't you like about Farber's book?

Thanks for asking. Because I file names phonologically in my brain, I may have been confusing Farber with Fuller, mentioned in the link I posted above. I do NOT recall anything I specifically disliked about Farber's book, upon review of that link, so consider that comment withdrawn and applied to Fuller's book.

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