The Benefits of Failing at French | Hacker News Reader

The Benefits of Failing at French

nytimes.com

192 pointsdanso150 comments

The author hits an important point. I'm a native French speaker and speak to anglophones trying to improve their french everyday and the overwhelming majority gets distracted if they don't get the noun genders right, pick the right verb tenses and all sorts of things like that. They hesitate mid-sentence trying to remember the rules and get it perfectly instead of just saying "Tommy hitted me" like in the article. As soon as they start hesitating, they freeze and switch back to English.

I can't emphasize how important it is to just keep going. The point of language is to get the message across. The details like verbs and genders will come with practice and to practice, you need to use the positive feedback loop that getting the message across generates.

There's another advantage the toddler has, not mentioned in the article. People expect the toddler to speak poorly, and don't make fun of him or treat him badly for doing so. I found being laughed at was a huge barrier to learning French when I lived in Montreal.

For example, many English speakers (and Quebecers!) I know have stories like this to tell:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaFf2kWL45U (45s clip from The Monuments Men)

Now, as an English speaker, I feel like I need to do better for the ESL people I know. It's like having guests in my house. I want them to feel welcome. So when they don't know where the bathroom is, or they flip the wrong lightswitch, I don't make fun of them, I just pretend it didn't happen and offer to help if they ask.

It's also worth mentioning a similar advantage the toddler has: it's going to have more than a decade before it's expected to have adult fluency. Mind you, depending on the age of the toddler you want to emulate, you might just be able to get away with simply learning the word for 'no'...

You just have to suck it up and don't let it bother you as the majority of people are not really laughing at you. You may say something embarrassing like 'je suis chaud', which actually means you're horny and not feeling hot. That will get a chuckle out of people but the next time you will know to use avoir instead.

Another favourite of teachers is 'je suis fini'.

So, tu es chaud?

Funnily enough, living in an English speaking house for a few months in an environment where everyone made fun of my accent has hammered the accent away to such an extent that people can no longer tell where the hell my accent is from. They notice an accent, but can't place it.

Even fellow Slovenians can no longer place my accent despite technically having the same accent.

> I found being laughed at was a huge barrier to learning French when I lived in Montreal

Wow, can anyone explain the reasoning behind making fun of a language learner? I'm in Japan right now, and the reaction to me speaking my feeble attempt at Japanese here is more "OMG you can speak Japanese? That's amazing!"

I'm sure this isn't the case everywhere, but I got the same reactions in thailand; any time I tried to say anything in really awful thai, everyone was super appreciative and friendly about it.

It's a cultural thing. The French speaker stereotype is an asshole about that. There's a lot of racism in Vancouver (at least) against immigrant Chinese who are ESL, but an identical person speaking broken English with a Russian or Italian accent would be perceived as sexy.

I learned French in my mid-20s -- in France. I spent a year learning French at a school and literally couldn't even understand fluent, spoken French by the time my ex-girlfriend moved back to the US. I stayed in France and began dating a French girl who didn't speak English at all -- so we had these weird intellectual/juvenile sounding conversations in the beginning - with me basically speaking confusing, garbled French 100% of the time. Point is, after about one month together with her, I understood spoken French very well, and could articulate some fairly complex thoughts. It just felt like the language came crashing into my head once I had to "articulate" what needed to be articulated and "hear" what needed to be heard. It's one of the strangest feelings of immersive learning that I can remember. Like DonPellegrino mentioned, I never really cared about gender and proper grammar, because... when your girlfriend doesn't know your language, you just have to force the thoughts out somehow. This might sound obvious, but if you have a partner who speaks another language fluently, just speak in your native tongue and ask them to speak in their native tongue. From my experience, the most powerful part of learning a language is just "slowing" it down in your head. You'd think you could just watch television to do this -- but in my experience (multiple languages now), you can't. It just seems like you need to be engaged intimately with another human being to get these results.

I think the point is really to have a strong interest in the language. Not just an accademical curiousity, but something that is stromg enough to force the brain to go painful places, cram unordinary amount of new concepts and throw ourselves completely outside our comfort zones.

For most people it's a signifiant other, or just living in a foreign country where not understanding is more painful than doing the effort to learn. As an anecdote, a few people around me got to learn japanese by sheer passion for the culture, as they were breathing it day in day out anyway. We could say their games, anime, manga, novels and tv drama were kind of their S/O, if only by the amount of time it took in their daily lives.

How does that happen, entering a relationship with someone you can barely speak to? I'm very curious!

They both spoke the language of love. :x

For me - a dating website. Having lived in two foreign countries, I can see that my story might be impossible otherwise. It's just that, from my experience, when you meet someone on a dating website and you tell them you're a foreigner and you're pretty bad at their language, it creates a sort of "expectation" or "context" that can be nice for the first meeting (which was a drink for us). It switches the date from an awkward, "try-to-impress-her" meeting to "hey, this is kind of fun and weird" date, and can work with the right person. I brought a translation dictionary to dates before I knew French really well. With this particular girl, I remember it taking an extraordinarily large amount of time for us to even go through details like family, etc. But, she was patient and intrigued I suppose, because we only communicated in my garbled French. On subsequent dates, I remember taking walks around the city. I can't remember too many exact details because it was 7 years ago -- just that she was very patient and quirky and I truly felt like a little kid absorbing up the French.

My Brazilian friend called this "taking the dictionary to bed".

Or, as the french say: "La meilleure façon d'apprendre une langue étrangère est sur l'oreiller."

(The best way to learn a language is on a pillow.)

I wouldn't trust anything the French say about learning foreign languages.

(Note: Joke -- I'm a french polyglot. Seriously though nobody speaks English here)

Perhaps, but is there a more authoritative source on the art of pillow talk?

Touché. :)

The movie "The sleeping Dictionary" is based around that http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0242888/?ref_=nv_sr_1

I wish Chinese were the same way. Chinese grammar is very simple and there's little or no conjugation. A lot of Chinese words sound very similar and if you say a word in the wrong tone, you're likely to have said a different word.

Oftentimes, native Chinese speakers are bewildered when they hear learners attempting to speak Chinese. Not because they're being rude or condescending, but because if you're just slightly off they honestly have no idea what you're trying to say.

I've struggled a lot with Mandarin pronunciation. I think the difficulty is mostly due to Chinese speakers being sensitive to differences between some sounds that English speakers lump together.

For example, most English speakers would initially not be aware of any significant difference between the sounds of pinyin "x" and "sh". They're both basically English "sh".

And there are a few other similar cases in Mandarin. Imagine how confused you'd be if someone was speaking English, but randomly swapping the sounds of "p" and "j", and the sounds of "r" and "b", etc.

One thing that makes me love Chinese people even more is that they're so forgiving of my mistakes and accent. The provinces have their own mutually unintelligible dialects, so they're very used to hearing heavy accents. As long as I paint a good enough caricature for them to catch on, it's good enough, and they never make me feel bad about sounding strange. I'm very touched and grateful to them.

Here's something I wrote a while back on this subject: http://nopandas.posthaven.com/understanding-by-listening

> For example, most English speakers would initially not be aware of any significant difference between the sounds of pinyin "x" and "sh". They're both basically English "sh".

That's interesting. To me, as Southern Chinese, Pinyin "x" and "sh" are very different. What I get confused are Pinyin "sh" and "s", which both sound like English "s" to me.

Now try the Hunan dialect where they pronounce h as f and (stressed) n as l.

Yes, they pronounce their province "Fulan"

I feel this is especially true for french. There is so much grammar involved everywhere that trying to have everything perfect can be a huge burden. At the same time, the object of the sentence often comes last, forcing the listener to wait and "buffer" the words before starting to interpret the meaning.

When a speaker slows or halts a sentence because he/she is struggling on grammar, it makes it exponentially harder for the listener to keep listening and interpret what is said. On the contrary, grammar is so redundant that getting it wrong on half of the words would still leave enough information to understand even the nuances.

A lot of the grammar is extraneous indeed, and not actually used in spoken language. After taking a linguistics course, I started paying more attention to the difference between my spoken and written Québec French (my mother tongue) and realized that we almost never use the formal future tense in our speech; we use an auxiliary instead, English-style. So instead of saying "J'irai au dépanneur", I say "Je vais aller au dépanneur" (I will go to the convenience store). We often do the same with the past tense (passé composé), although that form is more kosher in written form.

That's why I loved learning Spanish so much through Central and South America for two years.

I learned on the road, and every person I met was extremely encouraging and helpful, even when I knew I was getting the genders and tenses wrong. No matter what kind of nasty sentence I would create, they would smile and welcome me wholeheartedly.

After two years, I was having political conversations in Argentina (their favorite topic...)

I've immensely looking forward to tackling French in the same manner.

It is much better just to embed yourself in the country of the language you want to learn. My Chinese was very bad when I first came to China back in 2002, but I really had no choice because English was not an option in most contexts.

In contrast, I lived in Switzerland for two years and didn't learn a word of French (well, maybe a couple): English was always an option, and I was busy enough working that I had not much time for self study.

I set out to learn Spanish almost exactly one year ago, deciding it was ridiculous to be monolingual in a world of thousands of languages. My approach was as intensive as the author's; I completed the Duolingo skill tree, read books on grammar and slang, watched, listened to, and read Spanish media and Spanish translations of English media, attended meetups, etc.

While I'm only 23, I experienced the same "mental fountain of youth" effect the author describes. At first, it all sounded like gibberish even if reading along with what I was listening to. My mind refused to accept words and concepts that didn't map one-to-one with English. I repeatedly mixed up similar looking words.

Despite constant failure, I kept at it, and eventually it just "clicked". Spanish errors started to sound like "he hitted me". I went from barely memorizing a few words a day, to successfully internalizing hundreds. And the best part is, all these cognitive benefits have transferred to other realms. I memorize stuff on Anki now just for the hell of it because it's so easy. I am about halfway to being fluent in German after only a month of study. I really can't recommend learning a foreign language enough.

I'm glad to hear a glowing report from using Duolingo. I find it easy to put in daily practice with (must maintain my streak!) and it's good to hear that it gave you a good foundation at the end of it all.

Fortunately, I like languages and Duolingo enough to use it regardless of the streak. I've experienced a lot of weirdness with it that ultimately caused me to lose it despite daily practice.

“Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.”

― P.G. Wodehouse, The Luck of the Bodkins

I'm French and I do realize it's a pretty complicated language to learn. Ridiculous amounts of exceptions to every single rule, dozens of tenses (which no one ever uses), lack of general structure, arbitrary genders, it's got it all.

My personal piece of advice to anyone: don't waste your time learning French, it's a dying language. Go for Spanish if you need a latin language, it's at least used in Spain, the United States, Central and South America. And once you speak Spanish, French comes rather easy (with the benefit of Italian and Portuguese becoming almost trivial).

French is an official language in 29 countries and spoken by more than 200 million people. It's probably the most widely learned foreign language after English. It's also one of the top 10 languages on the internet. I'm genuinely curious why you would call it a dying language.

French is a really, really, really formal language! It's perfect to use in literature because it's kind of "pretentious". But on a daily basis, you'd find that the rules are simply not worth it.

That figure includes partial speakers , so people who learned a little French in school but probably have a much better knowledge of say English. With the exception of France most countries that legitimately speak French as the main language are either tiny or third world.

Being spoken in the least developed countries seems more like a plus for French than a minus. As those countries develop, French will become even more important (assuming they still speak French). A language like German on the other hand will never experience this kind of organic growth because pretty much everywhere that speaks German is already well developed (and has negative or near-zero population growth, which certainly isn't helping the language grow).

Examples of French speaking countries would be Rwanda, Congo, Niger and Madagascar. You could be waiting a very long time for these to become significant economies.

There are many more than that though. Basically you can draw a line from Congo to Algeria, and every country west of that line speaks French. There are 4 exceptions : Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia and Sierra Leone.

That still leaves a huge pool of speakers. Probably not enough to make it the 'most spoken language in the world by 2050'[0] because it is mostly spoken by educated and urban people, and far less in the countryside, but enough to make it a dynamic, growing language.

[0] : http://www.forbes.com/sites/pascalemmanuelgobry/2014/03/21/w...

Well, it's more that French is an official language of those countries, rather than those countries speak French. WP has a list where most of those countries have only around 10%[1] of the population that can speak French. Given that French isn't particularly popular in the world of business (English and Chinese rule there) and that English seems to have become the default in science and engineering, it seems an assumption that a growing African economy would retain its French as it's primary 'international' language.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_where_French_...

There are some regional shifts involved in some of those countries. Burundi and Rwanda are looking more east than west in recent years, and East Africa uses a mixture of Swahili and English rather than French as the common language.

Rwanda in particular is not in practice really part of French-speaking Africa anymore. The numbers you link show only 3% of Rwandans speak partial French, which is barely more than any other country where a handful of people choose French as a foreign language in school. That's related to the ethnic unrest in the country; much of the current elite are ex-refugees who grew up in Uganda, which is not Francophone, and there's also a political edge to it because they consider France to have been too close to the previous Hutu-dominated government.

Don't forget Montreal. It's the 8th largest city in North America. It has a rich history of bilingualism, but it's essentially French speaking.

My understanding is that 80% of people in Montreal use English as their primary language.

Your understanding is not consistent at all with the government census stats. French only at home: 56%. English only at home: ~10%. French mainly + other climbs higher.

http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2011/as-sa/98-...

It also doesn't seem true that Allophones (born not speaking English or French) necessarily are using English the most as their 2nd language. Allophones using French most often at home is increasing over time.

http://www12.statcan.ca/english/census01/Products/Analytic/c...

Going outside Montreal will yield 90%+ French speakers.

I would also offer my anecdote to the statistics that Tiktaalik provided based on a few trips to Montreal and French Canada over the last couple years--while it's true that many people speak English as well as French, English seems to be popular because of the large number of English speaking tourists that visit the city (in no small part because of its French culture). Even in the touristy areas you're greated with "Bonjour-hello" to see how you choose to respond. There were a few times I've been grateful to have some background in French, as the person I was talking to didn't know any English (this however, was mostly on the outskirts of Montreal and in smaller towns). Overall, I was surprised at how francophone the city/region as a whole were, as before traveling I had anticipated it being equally French and English.

Maybe that was true in 1965, but it's nowhere near the case today.

Historically the downtown business core of Montréal was Anglophone while the poorer, rural areas were completely Francophone. However, rural people could still vote: the result was the 1976 provincial victory for the Parti Québécois who immediately introduced far-reaching legislation requiring the use of French in public places, in the workplace, etc. The effect of this was to make Toronto Canada's primary business center.

There are still some English areas, I think mostly around McGill. Most of the city is completely French though.

As an English-speaker with only a rudimentary knowledge of French, I found Paris a lot easier than Montréal to get around in. In Paris, as long as you can remember to start with a nice "Bonjour"/"Bon soir" everyone I spoke with was happy to help in English as best they could. In Montréal, language is so politicized that doesn't work. To be fair, once people found out I wasn't from Canada they would be friendly and helpful -- their first assumption, though, would be that I was probably just someone from Ontario, must have had some French in school, and now am just refusing to try.

Thanks for the correction! I wasn't aware it had changed that much.

I am well aware of the treatment you get as an English speaker in Quebec. If they think you're non-Canadian, they are super friendly. If they think you're Anglophone Canadian, watch out!

It is the same for French (from France). As soon as they spot your french (from France) accent, and it just starts by saying "Bonjour" , they become less friendly. Exaggerating a little bit French are seen as pedantic, think he knows better than everyone else, and not trustworthy (but it is not exclusive to Québec ;-))

I am french and lived in Quebec for a few years. Be aware that the french spoken in Québec is somewhat different in every way (vocabulary, expressions and pronunciation) than the one spoken in France. For instance, up in the thread frandroid wrote "Je vais aller au dépanneur" and translated it to "I will go to the convenience store". For a French the translation would be "I am going to the auto repair shop" ;-) As a French I have hard time understanding french Québec people even after a few years spent there, mostly due to pronunciation (now I know the most common expressions and vocabulary).

Because we're dying as a world power. It's the cycle of history. We're slowing riding the wave of our past glory toward oblivion. Most of the countries in Africa who used to speak French are now switching to other languages like Swahili, Lingala or Wolof, the Belgian, the Swiss and the Québécois all speak French and English, it's only a matter of time.

You can bring up figures and number of speakers, it won't change the fact that we're not relevant as a linguistic group in the world and unlike the other European powers, we haven't yet made the vital switch to having a strong command of English. It's really depressing.

Arguably, it was only after France's inevitable and necessary[1] retreat from the global power sphere that it's "real" source of power -- it's way of living, and vernacular culture -- began to really flourish, and be genuinely appreciated on the global stage.

You "lost" Indochina and Algeria, pretty much all of your "possessions" everywhere else. But in return you got Houellebecq, Goddard, the Gainsbourgs, Hardy, Dutronc, Pussycat, etc (and the world finally discovered Brassens). And now we all eat brie and goat cheese. What's not to like?

[1] In the sense that the retreats of all colonial powers, including the current crop, are inevitable and necessary.

Would you say French is more or less complicated than English (from how much you can evaluate the two fairly, though it seems like your English is excellent)? I'm frequently catching myself on how hard English must be to learn...having it pushed on to me in school is only second in born-privilege to being a U.S. citizen by birth. My Vietnamese parents have been in the states nearly 40 years, speaking English in their jobs and to me everday, and it's still off.

I took French in high school just because most everyone else was taking Spanish...that was not a good attempt at rebelling :). I do love the language though, but liking it has no relation to having the discipline to be fluent in it...having situations where you need to speak it is the key factor, and that's not a frequent situation in the States.

Still, I'm almost certain that if I hadn't taken French (or Spanish), I would've never known what the nuance of something like the subjunctive mood, in French or in English, and I like thinking through sentence structure when writing and reading...not sure if that casual academic pleasure offers the same level of brain benefits the OP refers to.

I am neither native French not English speaker who learned both (although I forgot a lot of French ever since).

English is much easier in the beginning, but it is very hard to really master it. Prepositions are main culprit, it is basically random system. French is harder in the beginning (conjugations/ le vs la), but gets easier and more systematic afterwards.

I'd say English is simpler than French because it doesn't have as many arbitrary exceptions. To begin, English doesn't give genders to every idea. English has much fewer irregular verbs. Conjugation in French is a party of special cases. Participes passés?

I'm no authority on the subject, but here's what I gathered: during la Renaissance, some aristocrats made a game of overly complexifying the language such that the plebe couldn't understand what they were saying. Or just grabbing ideas that look good (participe passé) from other languages (Italian), then sticking to them (while Italian apparently got rid of this silly construction). Also, the basis for French evolution is how authors use the language. The Académie Française looks at what famous authors have written and then use that to define what's proper French, what's not. While this is not stuff I've researched (only what I've heard from French profs justifying our usage of insane constructs); those are what I believe make for French a worst language to learn than English.

My wife studied both French and English as second language and found English to be much easier to learn than French. My personal opinion is biased since I'm a native French speaker, but still nowaday I find French to be much more cumbersome than English.

> English has much fewer irregular verbs.

English has, IIRC, far more irregular verbs than French but fewer conjugations to learn (for both regular and irregular verbs) and I think fewer regular patterns to learn.

> Conjugation in French is a party of special cases. Participes passés?

English has those, too. Its superficially simpler because for regular verbs (and some irregular ones that are irregular in other ways), the past participle is the same as the past tense, while in French for regular verbs the participe passé is different from any other conjugation.

But that superficial simplicity is, in a sense, one of the traps of English for non-native speakers.

I am a native English speaker (born and raised in the US). In school -- over a decade ago -- I took six semesters of French courses, and I've done some immersive trips to Quebec (which admittedly is a different dialect, but at least helps a bit).

Last week I was in Paris. Even with a refresh on grammar and vocabulary, I struggled a lot to communicate in French.

The most difficult thing, for me, is the sentence structure. I have enough vocabulary and grammar to choose the words I want, but I have a lot of trouble putting them in the correct order. And this is not a rare thing; it shows up in all sorts of simple sentences.

For example, in English I might ask "Where is (X)" or "Is this street (X)". In French, I need to flip those around to "(X), where is it" or "Here, this is (X)?" The sign to hang on the door of the hotel room would, in English, say "Please do not disturb" -- in French, it says "Thanks of not to disturb".

All of those words are, of course, easily recognizable, but the structure is completely alien to an English speaker (especially the way French uses infinitives in so many situations where English does not, giving rise to stereotypes of French speakers attempting English and always saying "Please to tell me..." and such).

I suspect that it would take me many months or perhaps even years of immersion and full-time speaking and thinking in French to get to the point of being able to construct most sentences in "natural French" structure on the first try.

> For example, in English I might ask "Where is (X)" or "Is this street (X)". In French, I need to flip those around to "(X), where is it" or "Here, this is (X), yes?"

I don't know where you got your French lessons but you've been mislead. Both "Where is (X)" and "Is this street (X)" translated directly are more correct than your alternatives:

    "Ou est (X)"
    "Est-ce que c'est la rue (X)"

> "Thanks of not to disturb"

Rather, "Thanks for not disturbing", which has the advantage of being understable in English:

    "Merci de ne pas déranger"

"(X), où est-ce"/"Ici, c'est la rue (X)"/etc. is the form I've consistently heard from native French speakers.

And the point was not to say that the French is un-understandable, but that the structure and the use of infinitive form is alien to an English speaker. It does not naturally occur to an English speaker to use infinitives the way they're often used in French.

> I suspect that it would take me many months or perhaps even years of immersion and full-time speaking and thinking in French to get to the point of being able to construct most sentences in "natural French" structure on the first try.

If you have difficulty learning French, I suggest learning another language with a similar "structure", such as Esperanto.

I'm a French native speaker, and I'm currently learning Esperanto. I find the two languages very similar in their way of constructing sentences, but the later one if a lot easier to learn: conjugation and agreement, in particular, are much simpler, and the absence of suppletion (a verb and its derivative always share the same root) helps greatly for memorizing the vocabulary.

Native French speaker here, I think going from "I don't know the language" to "I can hold me end in a conversation" is easier in English than in French. French has a richer set of verb tenses, while with English you can go a long way be knowing present, "<present> + ed" and "will + <present>". You also don't need to understand why a chair feminine and an oven is masculine (hint: there is no reason).

One thing I do think French has over English is ease of pronunciation; although not completely regular, most letters have one pronunciation (unless they have an accent, which gives them a different, but clear pronunciation). If you know the phonemes, French gives you a much easier time. Try reading this [1] out loud for kicks. I probably got 90-95% of that right, but even after 15+ years of speaking English, I still got caught by a few words.

[1] http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/stuff/english-pronunciation...

I was having the same expectation in French, hoping to survive with only present, passé composé, future proche and "en train de" and avoid more complex things :) And it will probably be enough, if I'd master them, but I still don't remember tons of verbs, words and the pronunciation, oh my god.. As an Italian it shouldn't be that difficult, many things are almost the same, and in some situation it is (e.g. reading it) but the pronunciation is not easy and false friends are everywhere, so most of the time I don't know if I'm saying something that is sort-of French or I'm just mimicking French by removing some vowels and consonants here and there from Italian words...

To be fair, the reason why only 90% of English speakers would get every word in that poem right is because there's a lot of very uncommon words in there. 'Sward' or 'phlegmatic' are not things I've ever heard used in casual conversation. I'm pretty well read, but I have never heard of Terpsichore before today. Similarly, Arkansas is an American peculiarism - I wouldn't expect a non-American to get that one right, same with Islington being a UK peculiarism. Probably should have left names out of the poem, because names have a ridiculously wide allowance for pronunciation.

It's also interesting that the poem writer has a particular accent: Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve, Friend and fiend, alive and live. Where I live, grieve and sieve rhyme, and neither rhyme with any verson of 'live' (though they do rhyme with 'leave'...). To me, sieve is 'seev', to the author, it's 'siv'.

The poem is very, very well put-together, but I think that the uncommon words and names should have been left out - the rest of the words (most of them) are pretty common, and most native English speakers that occasionally pick up a book should be able to get them.

The problem is that lack of diacritics - I was travelling through Vietnam and found it funny that they used so many diacritics where English needed none... then I realised English definitely needs them - for example, how do you pronounce 'wind'? It depends on context. If you're talking about air movement, it's pronounced differently to rolling something up on a spool...

Non-native French and English speaker (that is both are second languages to me). I find English much easier.

But, I also learned English first, and most of all, I learned it because all the computer stuff was in English and movies were in English. There were powerful external motivating factors to practice and understand English. French was imposed on me in school but I never saw a benefit in learning it aside from saying "I understand some French".

I'm French, so this will definitely color my judgement.

I find English to be rather simple. The grammar is as simple as can get, and due to it being the international language people are very open to weird accent (including ze frrrrench wane ;). This makes it easy to start, even with a pretty rough command of the language. Then the main challenge (IMHO) to a good mastery is the large vocabulary, and the very irregular pronunciation. But nobody expects that from a foreigner starting in English, which is a benefit of it being the international tongue I guess (spoken by all, mastered by... less).

On the other hand the French grammar is very complex. That's not specific to French, many languages are like this. Spanish and Italian are pretty close, and German is also complex (I tried the two first, but have no experience in the later). Still, it requires a significant upfront investment to get to a working level. There is also a cultural challenge: the expectation in French is that you have to speak properly. For a foreigner there is some tolerance of course, but still the culture has a strong bias on speaking correctly, and for some professional contexts it will matter. There's a lot of history there, but let's say that command of language has long been a class differentiator. Nothing unique to French, I would guess it's the same in British English for Great Britons. But in an "international English" context that's definitely not the case, and it helps get started. Another challenge is that words tend to be more overloaded in French (smaller vocabulary vs. English), which opens the door for a lot of double meaning. This exists in all language, but can be a challenge to a newcomer and is not as common in "international English".

So all in all, I'd guess international English is easier than French. In any case seriously learning another language and its culture is highly recommended, whatever your choice. It's really a mind opening experience, as any one will find that "obvious" things that everybody knows are actually just cultural conventions. So the more remote the culture, the bigger the gain on this account.

As for French dying, the number of speakers is actually increasing, mainly due Africa rising population and the large number of French speakers there.

This is perhaps one of the more insightful comments on learning a foreign language I've ever read. It really crystallizes the tolerance of the listener to foreign speakers as part of the barrier to learning a language.

One thing I'd add, at least as a native English speaker in a very international area, not all foreign accents and mistakes are equally well treated. And this may help contribute to and explain why some populations tend to learn English more poorly than others.

My wife is a non-native speaker (from Korea) and despite speaking and understanding English at relatively high levels, is clearly not a native speaker. But she frequently laments how people we know from different countries seemed to learn English faster or slower than others. It drives her a little crazy to think that all our Persian and Russian speaking friends effectively spoke fluent English inside of a few years (even if they have some lingering accentalisms like w-v confusion), while almost none of our Korean friends have managed the same level, even after decades.

But as an English listener, we definitely tolerate Persian and Russian accents better than Korean accents.

Persian and Russian are part of the same language family as English: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages

Interesting theory. I think there's also a sociological component as well. We're just far more familiar with them.

It could certainly be worse - there are no declensions.

Well it's dead to you, obviously.

My counter-advice to the above is that on an extremely deep, life experience level it doesn't matter how popular a language is, in numerical terms. Or what will come of that language 500 years from now.

What matters is what experiences open up to you, as individual, when you go visit (and live) in those countries, in this life, right. It's the people you meet -- and become friends with, perhaps fall in love and start a family with -- and the literature, the music, and poetry that keeps reading and listening into the dead of night and into your dreams -- that matter. Not the gender/case system, of the fact that can speak some generic version of it in 54 countries.

In that sense nearly every (major) language community is infinite, and unique. Maybe the one that's most meaningful for you will be a globally dominant language, like Spanish, Mandarin, or Arabic. Or maybe it will something far more "marginal", like Basque or Pashto.

But whichever it ends up being: whether that language is "alive" or "dead" to you will be a direct function of the energy and enthusiasm you invest in learning it, and (correspondingly) your love for the people who speak it, and their culture.

And not a function of whether you can go to a Barnes and Noble right now and find a shelf with 50 (mostly) mediocre books and interactive learning tools for it.

I was giving you the benefit of the doubt until you put Arabic in the same category as Mandarin or Spanish. Vernacular Arabic is as much a single language as vernacular Germanic. Not at all. Mutually unintelligible languages that qualify as Germanic; Nynorsk, Bokmal, Swedish, Danish, Hochdeutsch, Allemanic, at least 4 varieties of Swiss German, Dutch, Frisian, Scots, English, Jamaican Patois, Tok Pisin.

[Incredibly vulgar abuse]

Learn a language if you feel like it, or it will be useful. Don't learn it for the money or the career. Trust me that aside from English all useless unless you can work in them well enough to translate to English.

Learn a language if you feel like it, or it will be useful. Don't learn it for the money or the career.

I agree, this is good advice.

Trust me that aside from English all useless unless you can work in them well enough to translate to English.

Useless in career - not necessarily. Useless in life - definitely untrue.

In and of themselves, these languages may not be that "useful."

That said, breaking out of the English-only mindset, and practicing the discipline required to become truly fluent in another language (which can carry over to other endeavors in your life) can be incredibly useful -- and perhaps one of the best long-term strategic decisions regarding your intellectual development that you can make.

Could you provide some metrics, please? I'll be happy to confess my ignorance, but I was under the impression that among countries where some form of Arabic is counted among the official languages spoken, these variants were much closer to Modern Standard Arabic than, say, Swedish is to German.

Mutually unintelligible languages that qualify as Germanic; Nynorsk, Bokmal, Swedish, Danish, Hochdeutsch, Allemanic, at least 4 varieties of Swiss German, Dutch, Frisian, Scots, English, Jamaican Patois, Tok Pisin.

BTW, you forgot Kiezdeutsch.

I don't have any metrics on Arabic but here's what Wikipedia has to say on intelligibility

> From a linguistic standpoint, it is often said that the various spoken varieties of Arabic differ among each other collectively about as much as the Romance languages.[34] This is an apt comparison in a number of ways. The period of divergence from a single spoken form is similar—perhaps 1500 years for Arabic, 2000 years for the Romance languages. Also, while it is comprehensible to people from the Maghreb, a linguistically innovative variety such as Moroccan Arabic is essentially incomprehensible to Arabs from the Mashriq, much as French is incomprehensible to Spanish or Italian speakers. This suggests that the spoken varieties may linguistically be considered separate languages.

I also fogot Afrikaans. Arabic ia really, really diglossic so all educated Arabs will be able to speak and understand fusha but people don't talk like that outside of extremely formal situations. Speaking fusha at home would be as weird as a Romance speaker raising their kids in Latin.

Poetic!

I'm an Australian whose wife is Chinese, we just had our first child, who is German, in Thailand and are thinking to move - after 8+ years in China - to France. Neither of us speak French, but we sometimes translate classical Chinese together. You only get out of languages what you put in to them. Speaking of which, there's a great Arabic calligraphy torrent around at the moment...

PS. Pashto's pretty close to Farsi, isn't it? It's not that marginal. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Modernir...

I meant "marginal" in an facetious sense. None of these languages are "marginal" to those who grow up speaking them (or who end up meeting a soul mate, of one kind or another, from which they learn them). That's the main point I was trying to make.

Sorry but could you clarify? How is the child of an Australian and Chinese couple German?

I have three nationalities. Under German law, children of Germans are considered German no matter where they are born.

EDIT: "in this life, right." => "right now."

Compared to, say, Russian or Ukrainian French is really not that complicated. It also has way less "exceptions to every single rule" than English. You should choose a language based on your goals, not "how many countries use it" (and even by that metric French would still be really high up). For example, if you ever want to work in Canada knowing French would help you a lot more than knowing Spanish.

>>if you ever want to work in Canada knowing French would help you a lot more than knowing Spanish.

Only if you want to work for the federal government or in the decidedly non dynamic province of Quebec.

New Brunswick is officially a bilingual province. There are lots of opportunities for bilingual (French/English) speakers in Ontario as well.

Non dynamic?

Non dynamic:

>From 2000 to 2009, no province had lower so-called “firm entry” than Quebec. In fact, in the manufacturing, retail, transportation and finance sectors, more companies went away than were created. No other province had that level of “destruction” without the customarily accompanying “creative.”

http://www.macleans.ca/economy/business/why-quebec-business-...

Pretending Quebec is a small province, it also helps a lot to work in Ontario near Ottawa.

> I'm French and I do realize it's a pretty complicated language to learn.

According to this classification, French is actually in the easiest category of foreign languages to learn, for an English speaker:

http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/lang...

Interesting change going on in language education. I'm a coordinator for my daughter's elementary school's after school program. I wanted to bring in foreign languages so I started with Spanish because of the large Spanish speaking population (plenty of people to practice with) around our area. I partnered with the foreign language department at a nearby college to get some Spanish education students to teach: they received credit while we received free instruction. The head of the department developed the learning modules with her students. The modules were all cultural - music, food and dining, art, literature, etc. - and emphasized vocabulary and phrases associated with the particular cultural lesson. The department head told me that modern language instruction is no longer about learning rules and exceptions, which is how I was taught French, rather it's about getting kids to use language practically as soon as possible.

An interesting side note is that the department head and her students consciously stayed away from the culture of Spain itself and focused on the countries of people in our area - Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Guatemala, and Columbia.

Learning, in general, seems to have changed away from rote learning of rules to "let's get the students doing something practical right away so they get excited about learning". My daughter's music teacher is a fairly recent graduate of Berklee Music College's music education program. When my daughter showed up for her first lesson, she had to pick a song she liked. He had her playing it - albeit crudely - by the end of the hour. She was excited and wanted to play more. When I learned drums I don't think I could play to an actual song for my first year. I had to go through hours of practicing rudiments - basic patterns to develop coordination - before applying them to anything.

I think we're learning more about how people learn. I'm hopeful that "older dogs will be learning new tricks" thanks to teaching methods better aligned with how we learn.

I'm french and I agree,the language is bloated and too complicated.

English might be difficult for a french native that didnt learn it at young age like me but it's much more simple than french.

I wonder though why french is that complicated,in some other countries you have the official language and dialects,but often the core of the official language is tiny,so if one sticks to that core one will write correct sentences.It feels like modern french is the result of trying to shove every french dialects into the core,resulting in the bloat it is today.

Canadian french seems less bloated.They often use old french expressions,which is good because,many expressions in modern french from France just dont make sense,or words have their meaning abused. And Canadian french seems more able to extend itself from its core,instead of using english words like french from France do.French from France definetly doesnt "scale".

It's just my opinion.

> I wonder though why french is that complicated,

Mostly simple really: 1) French has a long history so a long time to accumulate warts 2) (nearly) each time, someone tries to remove some of these warts, purists scream loudly.

Why politicians listen to purists instead of thinking that reducing French's complexity could help foreign people learning French is the thing I wonder though..

Well, having the Académie française doesn't help the language evolve much!

Language should change over time, take on loanwords, simplify grammatical structures, etc. When they don't, they tend to get passed by by more dynamic languages.

One thing we're definitely learning is that adding lots of loanwords to a language does not mean that the language is becoming the same as the source of the loanwords. It's just becoming a newer version of itself. And eliminating baggage doesn't mean the language is no longer "pure", it's just making room in the language for new ideas.

Bof, French does change, all of the time, and the Académie française only codifies and regularises these changes 30 years later -- it is irrelevant to the development of the language. What is different is that 'loanwords' are frenchified almost immediately, my favourite example being the regular -er verb 'liker', to like on Facebook, je like, tu likes, il like, nous likons, ...

Seven years of "learning" French in school. I was more conversant in Japanese after a week. French has two non-exceptions to verb conjugation "rules". Japanese has two exceptions. That was a lot of wasted time and I wish there had been more alternatives offered.

This is such a sad thing to think about. Truthfully almost all languages outside of English, Mandarin, and Spanish will eventually die out. But for me learning a second language has never been about practicality, if it was I already needn't bother knowing anything but English. I've been studying Japanese for 12 years now just for the way I can think about things completely differently, and for the way it sounds. I started with French in school and after I feel more solid in my Japanese I plan to go back to it (this could never happen, Japanese is fantastically difficult). As a language lover it is very disheartening to see the inevitability of the decline in human expression through language.

On the flip side, it's important to consider that different languages are arguably the largest barrier to anyone looking to experience another culture. While different languages have the novelty factor it also prevents you from fully being able to engage individuals in conversation and really get to know them.

This isn't an issue if you're only encountering two or maybe even 3 languages, but when you truly take a global perspective you're looking at French, English, Mandarin, Swahili, Japanese, Hindi, Arabic, German, Portugese, Spanish, and Russian. And that's only the big ones I know off the top of my head!

Learning new languages is great and I have no desire to see them completely forgotten, but I think when push comes to shove having one global language is absolutely preferable to the current mess we have.

That's a pretty poor advice. (I'm French myself.)

French is pretty widely used (as a native language, and as a learned language as well) and very relevant in today's economy.

But moreover, learn French if you want to! If you find it fun, just do it. If you already speak English, you can already communicate with a huge chunk of the world's population. Any language you learn besides that is bonus!

(I am currently learning Norwegian on my own, just for the fun of it. There is little interest for me in doing that besides curiosity and the sheer pleasure of expanding my language skills.)

Another thing that is hard in French (at least for me) is listening comprehension.

For example, I know many more French words than German ones. Not quite enough to read very much (someday, I hope!) but if I were handed a text in French and German, I'd definitely get more out of the French half.

When it comes to hearing the languages it's reversed. In German, I can spot the words I do know in a spoken sentence and hope to work out the rest of the meaning from them. In French, between the liaisons and the low degree of syllable emphasis I probably couldn't even tell you how many words there were, much less what any of them were! (The exception is in language instruction videos where they carefully enunciate each word one-by-one, but nobody speaks French like that in real life)

I know that with practice picking apart French sentences would become second-nature, but it's a bit of a barrier.

Great article. Tired of learning stupid front-end JS frameworks and would love to hear your guys' story about failures at other hobbies and not just foreign languages and what insights you gained from it.

Me personally, I took up basketball and thought that I could be like LeBron dunking on everybody, then I realized that I was short and Asian and have no leaping ability; then I shifted my goal a little bit to aim to be like Allen Iverson to try to cross and drive, then I realized that I wasn't fast nor agile and had no crafty finishing moves around the rim, so I settled on being Jason Kidd before he could shoot, a point guard who passes the ball but I enjoy throwing my teammates good passes at the right time for the bucket so they can finish.

I took up guitar and thought I could be like Jimmi Hendrix, soloing and have women throw panties at me up on stage. Then I realized that I had little finger strength nor dexterity to play sixteenth-notes, bends, and vibratos. So I settled on just trying to mime the part and playing with emotions like when you're doing a bend or a vibrato, contorting your face with wistful wrinkles and tilting your head rhythmically like Santana would behind his sunglasses. But I enjoy playing music esp. when it's heavily distorted so that no one can hear properly the poor tone and timing of my playing.

Finally I also took up daytrading and thought I could be like George Soros and play a game of chicken with the British treasury and make a killin'! Then I realized that I had little to no understanding of the dynamics of the option pricing model and had no discipline except that I was overwhelmed with greed and ego when the market is riding high and conversely with fear like a chicken when the market goes against me. So I settled on keeping trading and accepting to give my broker and hedge funds my money, but trying to preserve my capital for as much as possible and taking small losses - so I can extend giving of my money to Wall Street for as long as possible.

Would love to hear what you guys' failures and success stories at learning a different craft and your insights gained.

You build up your finger strength with practice, and also using your little finger instead of sliding your entire hand over because your pinkie hurts. Pinkie pain is just a stage.

A couple of points:

1) The guy lists his activities with heavy focus on Rosetta Stone. To me that pretty much invalidates his claims on the spot. RS is not really well respected in language learning circles (at least a couple of years ago, it was not). Pimsleur is better due to its exponential backoff repetition model and it's "how do you say" prompts.

2) I did not see any mention of activities that actually built vocabulary. Not in a "listen to a show" way, but in a "read a book and translate every word you don't understand". I learned English that way. As a Russian, I studied it in school and in private courses to no effect. When I came to Australia, I decided to re-read Tolkien's "The Hobbit" but this time in the original rather than Russian translation. Of course, I did not realize that Tolkien was philologist... So, I may have learnt a bit more of vocabulary and grammar than I really needed for street English.

3) When you learn your first foreign language, you are learning two things at once: language-learning practices and specifics of specific language (vocabulary, grammar, sounds). That's why Esperanto as the first foreign language is great. (http://www.springboard2languages.org/) You learn the practices (in a very supporting community http://lernu.net/) with a very regular language. Then, you can attack a more complex language like French.

4) As an aside, last couple of years, language learning startups were quite popular. Unfortunately, they all try to address global market and don't dive deep enough into any single language. Therefore most of the interesting & academic research that could have really impacted language learning process goes unused. I have about 10 pages of (technical) notes on what _I_ would want from a language-learning website and I have seen less than 10% of it out in the wild.

To pull a bit out of the Esperanto / Springboard2Languages idea, particularly watch this linked TEDx talk about teaching Esperanto to young school children: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gSAkUOElsg

How it serves as a good simplified language because it's so regular, there's very little learning before you can start saying your own sentences instead of reciting pre-made ones.

Great (and true) points. I like to think of the process as one might think of exercising a part of the body, in that one shouldn't let the muscles get used to just one method. When people ask me what's the best method to learning a foreign language, I say 'do them all'. I also advocate for the 'translate word by word' technique and to realize what you can do alone (reading, writing, listening) should be better than what you can do with someone else present (speaking). In other words, work on what you can, when you can. Small steps, consistency and not giving up are also key factors.

the fact that he was doing it wrong may invalidate his claim that it's nigh impossible for adults to learn a new language (from what I remember, people are also more sceptical about some "language window" closing off one you hit 5 or so), but his other point about the attempt improving his general mental abilities is surely still valid.

I can't recommend the Pimsleur language courses enough. They teach languages in a way that's similar to how a toddler learns to speak - by going from sounds to words, and by gradually expanding your lexicon while jogging your memory on previously learned words and phrases. In my experience, 45-50 daily 30-minute lessons were enough to comfortably navigate a new country. Most courses include ninety 30-minute lessons.

There's a reason why toddlers learn so "easily": They must communicate in order to get what they want.

If you were placed in a similar situation, where you cannot get what you want unless you speak the language, it would not take you very long to learn. I went through this twice in my life: Once between ages 5 and 16 (French), and once between ages 31 and 35 (Japanese). In both cases, it took about 6 months to get the basics, after which the rate of learning slowed a bit due to the decline in novel situations requiring new usage or vocabulary.

> After a year of struggling with the language, I retook the cognitive assessment, and the results shocked me. My scores had skyrocketed, placing me above average in seven of 10 categories, and average in the other three. My verbal memory score leapt from the bottom half to the 88th — the 88th! — percentile and my visual memory test shot from the bottom 5th percentile to the 50th. Studying a language had been like drinking from a mental fountain of youth. > > What might explain such an improvement?

What? 'regression to the mean' comes to mind. People shocked by their extremely low scores are often shocked to find that their scores improve over time...

While that is completely true, its somewhat unlikely to go from the mid point of the distribution to the tails. Its not impossible, of course, but its less likely. The 5th to the 50th certainly suffers from that problem, however.

Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic has talked in depth over the past few years about his attempts to learn French as an adult and I believe he's incommunicado at the moment due to an immersion program.

Nice video here showing his level at the time, great moment near the end when's he's asked by his conversation partner to explain his recent article for the magazine (the widely discussed 'case for reparations' article).

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/a-l...

The best thing about speaking bad French is that it makes French people speak English to you. Possibly because they don't want to hear their beloved language mangled, but I don't really know. All I know is that they kindly switched once they heard me speaking. :)

I challenge any Anglophone without mastery of the French language to say the word, "flourure" (making sure to elongate the Rs) before a group of Francophones without feeling absolutely ridiculous

There are other examples but I find this word (meaning flouride) especially comical as it stumbles out of my mouth at the pharmacy -- as does anyone within hearing distance ;-)

I believe the "th" sound is generally difficult for latins. As a test, if you are Francophone please stand before a mirror and quickly say, "hello, my name is thof thimblefith", making sure to enunciate each "th" clearly. If you can do so you will have mastered a lisp.

Speaking of personal experience, when begun at an early age, learning a language will be really easier and almost innate. I started learning French at the age of 8 within school classes, then English at the age of 11 and finally Spanish when 17. I am thus not as fluent in Spanish as I am in French or English BUT since French is a dying language and way complicated I find English to be the perfect language to use, even on a personal level and despite the fact Arabic is my native tongue.

Bottom line is, if you are a parent and wish for your kids to learn a particular language, start as they are young.

I tried to learn Mandarin a year ago because I started a relationship with a Chinese girl. The words made no sense (felt just a completely random sounds), got angry and gave up after a couple of days.

A year later, after hearing a lot of Mandarin (she speaks quite a lot of Mandarin over the phone and I spent a month in China), I gave another shot. It feels much easier, more familiar and less random.

Of course, it's a totally anecdotal 'evidence'... But getting familiar with the sound of the language before actually studying might help.

Spanish native speaker here. I'm still waiting for my ah-ha moment (I'm learning Japanese for the past 4 months at a rate of 4 hours per week), I do hope it arrives. It took me probably 5 years to be fluent in English, and probably 4 more to actually be good enough as to read/write government proposals, abstracts/CFP, and finally co-authoring a published book "Java 7 Recipes"; my accent still lingers (javapubhouse.com if you want to hear it), the Ys, Js all come out with the same sound for me. I did learn French for 5 years, but lost most of it due to not practicing it. Learning French coming from Spanish felt a little weird because there are gender swaps (for the inanimate objects) that do trip you up. Did try to learn German for 5 months just after finishing French, so I ended up sounding like a French speaking German, which my teacher hated (and whom scared me away from the language!)

I noticed that I'm not really going anywhere fast with my Japanese and I think I might be doing it wrong (listen to one hour podcast while running / biking). Some stuff sticks but in general it does seem that my progress is nowhere near what I had when learning the other languages in a more structured format.

Going off-topic a bit, I highly recommend you peruse the forum over at the Reviewing the Kanji site (koohii.com). Even if you have no interest in the book the site is based around (Heisig's Remembering the Kanji) there are troves of great advice and methods for Japanese self-study to be found there.

Neat, will check it out. Yeah, Kanji might be a tall order right now (still working with Hiragana/Katakana first), but found the forums. Kinda nice to find a community of Japanese learners

This is timely. I'm about 4 weeks into a "let's learn Korean" self-study program. The last time I seriously tried to learn a foreign language was Spanish in high school and it was quite a debacle. But after many years married to a Korean woman, I finally decided I was embarrassed enough not knowing more than a few utility words in Korean to take the plunge.

I remember looking into learning Korean about 6 or 7 years ago and there really weren't many on-line self-study resources and very few classes I could take. This time I found an virtual explosion of resources, free text books, skype practice sessions, listening guides, vocabulary resources, etc. For more popular languages, like French, the number of resources is almost mindboggling.

I've decided to focus the beginning of my studies on raw vocabulary acquisition and I've settled on using Anki to do this. My friends know that I have a pretty bad memory, so I've been shocked and surprised at how well Anki has worked. In 4 weeks I've managed to memorize (to different degrees of recall) about 300 words (out of a list of the 1000 most common).

Last week I sat down to start my grammar lessons with a free university textbook and was even more shocked and surprised at how much of the text I was able to decode. I wouldn't call it comprehension exactly, but maybe 20-40% of the beginner-level sentences I could read well enough to get the gist without knowing any grammar. I checked ahead into later chapters and was amazed that I was still able to work out some non-negligible percent of most of the lessons.

For practice I watched a couple Korean tv shows (they love to put subtitles under everything which is helpful) and was also surprised that I could work out some bits of the nightly news. Not enough to really know what was going on, but within a month going from knowing basic foods and the word "bathroom" to starting some minimal comprehension felt pretty remarkable.

More recently I've been practicing language production and took the attitude the article advocates -- just focus on getting the point across, don't worry about all the grammar bits. So, when something my wife and I are doing involves some vocabulary I remember, I try to formulate a basic sentence around it. I know I'm missing some things, but I told my wife to just grade me on "is it understandable or not?" not on "is it correct or not?". It's eased up the pressure quite a bit.

More importantly, even if my little experiment fails in the end. Outside of language study, I feel much more..."engaged" all the time. Like my brain is turned up a little. I'm finding my memory is definitely improving and some mental tasks that were starting to become harder as I've aged have started to become easier.

It's actually kind of cool.

Out of curiosity, what are the texts/resources you're getting vocab from? Where do you get shows to watch? Did you pick up on the basics like the alphabet and pronunciation first and study that together?

My husband's just like you and beyond knowing words for his favorite foods and some of the lyrics to Gangnam Style, he doesn't know much more. I would like to change that. Plus it'd be nice to practice my rusting Korean with him - there's few Koreans in SF and most assume I'm Chinese despite my Standard Korean dialect. I really want him to learn for raising our future kids fluent in multiple languages but no real stress there - between me (fluent in 2, conversational in 1, formerly conversational in 2-3 I could pick up again), my bilingual mother, and my polyglot father (former military interpreter, near fluent to fluent in 4 and currently learning 3-4 others or however many he maxed out on with his best friends Duolingo and iTunes U...) I think they will be covered.

I dug up some of my old books, AppleTV has KORTV and Crunchyroll and Netflix/Amazon have an okay movie selection (can't figure out how to get it to show/hide subtitles in multiple languages and sometimes english is just burned into the video itself -_- )...I also talked to some Duolingo people at I/O about contributing to "Korean for English speakers", but eh. I grew up with the language and my limited formal study was with a super nerdy polyglot linguistics researcher at Yonsei (Korean Ivy-level-esque university) so I have no idea where to start for new mostly monolingual learners for a less popular language.

I learned Hangul years ago from some website. It's impressively easy to learn and makes figuring out pronunciation way easier than writing Korean in a Latin alphabet.

There's actually a great list of resources here.

http://www.reddit.com/r/korean

and more specifically here: http://www.reddit.com/r/Korean/comments/rq3th/the_ultimate_b...

Right now I'm using Ankidroid and Anki for Windows and OS X (all free and they sync with Ankiweb, Anki for iOS is some small fee) for vocabulary. There's tons of "decks" (all free) available through Anki. I'm currently grinding through the "Korean 1000 most common words" deck since it also has a vocal pronunciation for each word for me to practice against.

You have to be a little disciplined with it: for each card, listen, practice the pronunciation and then when you flip the card the for the meaning score your result honestly for the SRS system to work right. You only ever get 20 new words a day, but it adds up really fast.

Right now I do a morning session (or I break it up into two 15 minute sessions), and then in the afternoons I use Ankidroid to generate a list of words I keep forgetting to practice against. I do this every day.

I'm using this textbook at the moment. http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/korean/my-korean-1/

It's free, and I just upload it to my google play books account and read it on my tablet. I'm also entering every sentence and vocabulary word from this book into a new Anki deck so I can practice more as well as get some time learning how to type in Korean.

I don't have a Korean keyboard, so I took a screen shot of this one (http://www.branah.com/korean) and printed it out and just stick it on top of my cheapo $5 Logitech keyboard to help me. It's slow, but I'm getting steadily faster.

About once a week, I'll do an extended study session and sit down for a few hours and try to write all of the vocabulary I'm learning and what it means. This is giving me practice actually writing Hangul, which will help me later in reading people's messy handwriting. I'll probably start doing this as well to improve my handwriting since figuring out how to fit different syllables in a square is still a challenge for me. http://koreanvitamin.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/how-to-practic...

I've tried and struggled a lot with memorizing vocabulary in the past which is why I've put it off for so many years, so I can't say enough good things about Anki. If I have a criticism, it's that I'm much better now at remembering Korean->English than I am going from English->Korean. There's some decks that cover that as well though, and I'm planning on making a "1000 most common words in English to Korean" deck at some point when my Korean and typing gets better.

There's also a deck of every TOPIK vocabulary word I'm planning on moving to next. It's almost 8,000 words.

For videos, I'm not as much into those yet. But I'm planning on moving to start that in a few months to build listening comprehension. My goal is not academic/formal Korean, but more conversational/colloquial. So I'm thinking of shows like Running Man on www.dramafever.com might be good to watch, at least if you get tired studying you can be entertained.

There's also quite a few youtube channels at various levels of complexity. The people who make the videos usually put quite a bit of effort into them to make them at least entertaining.

In my queue for future studying:

https://www.youtube.com/user/talktomeinkorean

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCg-p3lQIqmhh7gHpyaOmOiQ (he puts subtitles everywhere in Korean and English so it's super helpful to pause on each sentence and work them out)

https://www.youtube.com/user/sweetandtasty/videos - mostly English, but she provides lots of entertaining background stuff and nouns for things

- Based on my readings from other people and what to expect, I'm expecting to get up to very basic conversational level in 6-9 months and be able to handle most typical daily conversational needs somewhere between 1-2 years of study. Korean is a very hard language for English speakers to learn (as I'm finding out).

Sorry to push my own side project but it might be useful to you guys.

http://www.toktogi.com

It's a popup dictionary extension for Chrome and Firefox that is based on an open source K-E dictionary (https://github.com/garfieldnate/kengdic). It still needs a lot of work, but I plan to open source it soon and hopefully allow people to contribute back to and improve the original dictionary as well.

OMG, this is amazing. I've already added it. Really appreciate it, this will definitely come in all sorts of handy.

Thank you so much for your response!

I don't know how I didn't come across r/Korean while I've been lurking in r/Korea for the last couple weeks (trying to find out more about dual citizenship)... I'll definitely have to check that out. I've been in the middle of creating an Anki deck while studying for the MCAT and I've used it in the past for learning Mandarin and I absolutely love it, just wondered if there were any existing Korean decks you particularly recommend.

Good idea on the youtube videos too. I was thinking straight up kdrama and rewatching some of my favorite Korean movies but it might be too complicated right now for beginning.

I'm surprised to hear Korean is supposed to be hard for English speakers to learn...I don't think fundamentals are that hard. It's really vocab that sucks balls and I feel like I can say that about lots of languages, but I'll never know in person how hard it is so :/

Sure thing! Glad you've been using Anki also. /r/korean is definitely growing and becoming more active. It used to be pretty dead about a year ago but it's really coming to life as an awesome resource recently.

The main deck I've been working with is the 1000 most common. I figure that will get me up to speed enough to start digging into basic grammar without getting too hung up on common vocabulary. It's a pretty good deck, a few of the definitions I've been changing a bit because they're either not clear or not quite right (after running them past my wife). It's a little lacking in nouns, it's much more focused on common verbs, connecting terms (like 그런데) and support words like 뿐. So I'm already planning on following up with some more dedicated noun study.

At the moment, kdramas and movies are pretty impenetrable for me. It'll take me about an hour to get through a 5-10 minute youtube video with lots of subtitles, and I only get about 5-30% depending. 영국남자 is pretty good. For example I got about 40-50% of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aFRUoygkaeI&list=UUg-p3lQIqm... which is not bad after a month of study.

Korean is one of the hardest languages for English speakers to learn. The Foreign Service Institute ranks languages based on the average number of study hours it takes an English speaker to achieve proficiency in Speaking and Reading. To achieve what they call "general proficiency" which is basic fluency (or a 3/3 in reading and speaking), it takes about 600 hours to learn a Category I language like French, Spanish or Norwegian. A category V language takes about 2200 hours of study and the languages in that group are Arabic (for various linguistic reasons), Chinese (speaking is considered relatively easy, like a Cat I but reading is incredibly hard), Japanese (speaking is hard, plus all the downsides of written Chinese) and Korean (speaking is hard and particularly listening is difficult, especially with the double consonants and very specific vowel distinction we don't make in spoken English).

The Defense Language Institute (DLI) ranks it a Category IV (the highest) as well - at 64 weeks of intense, 8 hour a day instruction. I think this number has shrunk as well as I know a few DLI trained Korean speakers who swear they spend almost 2 years there. While French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish are over in 26 weeks. DLI's language education goal is actually lower than FSI's and the goal is only 2/2.

To compare, a language like Finnish, Russian or Vietnamese, one category down, is expected to be done after only 1,100 class hours, or half the time.

Oh, I'm using Anki to learn Chinese, and it's actually not very hard at all to modify a deck to include English->Chinese as well.

Anki has a set of `fields` which you can embed in html templates to make each card's front and back.

Start studying from a deck, press "e" (or click the edit button), then click "cards" from the top. From that menu, you can adjust the card to make reverse direction cards, or even sound only cards. It's quite flexible.

I had to pull out all the English->Chinese cards and put them in a new deck to try and study them at the same time, but that it maybe fixable if there's a sort order.

https://translate.google.com/ is a great source for virtual keyboards if you want to practice typing. Select the source language and click the keyboard in the lower left.

I began some Korean self-studying and found that koreanclass101 and Talk to Me in Korean (ttmik) have pretty good audio lessons. The rest of the process was trying to get my hands on as much material as possible - practice with native speakers, children's books, dramas, readers, flash cards, etc. Anki is incredible for memorizing a huge number of facts (e.g. words), but can only power one part of the whole experience. Finding material can be hit or miss, so don't be afraid of spending small amounts of money here and there on books, etc. I will say that prepackaged courses like Rosetta Stone and Pimsleur will not get one very far.

Just tell him that Korean's not too bad to learn once you already know English, Chinese, and Japanese - that'll really encourage him!

Much of the discussion here is focused on the linguistic acquisition aspects of this article. I see the largely ignored wider aspect to be that of skills learning, particularly in light of unlearning and lost plasticity.

The key paragraphs are these:

"[A] 2-year-old’s brain has a substantial neurological advantage, with 50 percent more synapses — the connections between neurons — than an adult brain, way more than it needs. This excess, which is an insurance policy against early trauma, is also crucial to childhood language acquisition, as is the plasticity, or adaptability, of the young brain.

[NB: I challenge the assumption that the excess neural capacity is simply for trauma recovery -- it seems specifically applicable to the very mental plasticity that youthful skill acquisition entails, and which needs to be discarded as concrete skills are laid down.]

"Another advantage a toddler holds is his very lack of experience. After speaking our native language for decades, we adults can’t help but hear the second language through the filter of the first. And this filter doesn’t take decades to develop. Researchers have found that newborn Japanese babies can distinguish between the English “L” and “R” sounds, but if not exposed to Western languages, they begin to lose that ability — not by the age of 6 or even 3 — but by eight months.

"Adult language learners are, to borrow a phrase used by some psycholinguists, too smart for our own good. We process too much data at once, try to get everything right from the get-go and are self-conscious about our efforts. But toddlers instinctively grasp what’s important and are quite content to say, “Tommy hitted me,” as long as Tommy gets what’s coming to him."

That is, if you're trying to learn something, anything, as an adult, you're up against two principle blocks:

• Your brain has physiologically adapted. It's no longer sufficiently plastic to accept novel concepts.

• You've got a litany of previously acquired skills (or biases) which get in the way of the new knowledge. It's a form of Mark Twain's famous "It's not the things you don't know, but what you know for sure that just ain't so".

Or, in this case, just ain't what the new skill you're trying to pick up is.

Which may also help explain youthful hiring bias in software and tech.

Without realizing it, we think in the language we know[1]. When starting to learn another language, we still think in our native language and translate it to the foreign one.

However, when reaching a higher experience with a second/third language, the thought process gradually changes. My native language is French, but very often I have thoughts "in English", because the idea seems easier to express/understand with the way English works. Sometimes, the words don't exist in French to express the idea I'm thinking, while it exists in English.

I've read somewhere (citation needed) that at some point, one would stop thinking in language and start thinking in concept.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_and_thought

My first language is Russian. But I spent so long outside of Russian language and culture that my language of thought and speech is English. Not a citation, but a confirmative data point.

Still, I feel that my English speech and thought lacks the nuances I get when my mind and my mouth switches back into Russian.

I started to learn French a year ago and I made a lot of progress. There are just a few bugs left to fix in my own vocabulary management tool, and then I'm ready to learn some words, systematically well tracked and documented. ;)

one problem i have with foreign languages is how its taught. a child spends years to just get to 'i hitted the dog' and still mispronounces most of the words and its like 'yay great job. despite the kid having the synapse advantages over an adult.

an adult spends a few months learning an entire language and its like 'what? you have to learn how to spell it correctly, say all the right tenses, pronounce it correctly, etc etc or else you're not learning!'.

i feel like we're forced to focus on so much detail and our minds just quits on us.

Children seem to always figure out the details eventually, whereas many second language learners seem to miss out on some details unless explicitly corrected, and even then find it hard to change established speaking habits. I’m not sure anyone really knows why this is, but it’s one reason why some people recommend trying very hard to avoid speaking (and listening to others speak) incorrect sentences when learning a language.

few days late, but thought I'd share my anecdote. several years ago now, I was on a road trip through the largest island of Japan, Honshu, and was staying at a cheap roadside motel in the middle of nowhere. My girlfriend was having a shower, and I walked out of the room without the keycard as you needed it to operate the lights etc in the room. off I went to grab a few cold drinks from the vending machine, and then suddenly realised I had no idea what room number or even what floor our room was on. Despite what she says, my girlfriend is fluent in Japanese and I'd always relied on her to do all the hard work, and spent maybe 3 months picking up a bit of the language a few years previously.

Well, I had no choice but to go to the front desk and explain the situation using the full range of my vocabulary. As a few people have already mentioned, native Japanese speakers tend to treat you with a mix of awe and pity when you clearly can't speak the language but nonetheless attempt it. But exactly as the article described, I concentrated on saying what I could, not what was necessarily correct. I actually surprised myself, and my girlfriend when I eventually returned to the room and explained why the cold drinks were now tepid.

I imagine that most earnest attempts at problem solving will yield the same cognitive benefits. So I just won't stop programming. Good thing I love it.

Dr. Carlos do Amaral Freire has supposedly learnt 115 languages. I find that difficult to comprehend.

http://thelinguistblogger.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/the-wisdo...

Any such claim implies a much lower level of proficiency for "learnt a language" than most of us are referring to when we say that someone has learned a language fluently.

When I'm learning a human language, especially immersed, I find that I can play the Set game twice as well. Proof enough for me.

http://www.setgame.com/set

First I'll address the point about cognitive testing found in the article. "So to reassure myself that nothing was amiss, just before tackling French I took a cognitive assessment called CNS Vital Signs, recommended by a psychologist friend. The results were anything but reassuring: I scored below average for my age group in nearly all of the categories, notably landing in the bottom 10th percentile on the composite memory test and in the lowest 5 percent on the visual memory test." And later the author writes, "After a year of struggling with the language, I retook the cognitive assessment, and the results shocked me. My scores had skyrocketed, placing me above average in seven of 10 categories, and average in the other three. My verbal memory score leapt from the bottom half to the 88th — the 88th! — percentile and my visual memory test shot from the bottom 5th percentile to the 50th. Studying a language had been like drinking from a mental fountain of youth." An alternative explanation is that the author enjoyed a practice effect from taking the test more than once, and didn't necessarily gain much from his effort to learn French. To tease out which explanation makes more sense, we would have to know more about score stability ("reliability" in the psychometric sense) of the CNS Vital Signs test, and what validation studies have show about practice effects from repeated test-taking on that test.

I grew up as a monolingual native speaker of General American English in the heartland of that dialect in the upper Midwest of the United States. My first foreign language instruction in school occurred in the fourth grade of elementary school. My school district was very unusual among American school districts of that era in having mandatory German classes each week in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade, promoted and developed by a school district employee who was a refugee from Germany. So everyone I went to elementary school with had early exposure to foreign language learning--at least early compared to most other American school pupils.

I studied more German in junior high, moving to another school district in ninth grade that didn't offer German at all in junior high, even though that state (Wisconsin) has a higher percentage of German-descended persons than any other state in the United States. In tenth grade I moved back to my home town in Minnesota, and took one more year of high school German, which I bombed at after the time off occasioned by my move out of state. The following year in eleventh grade I started taking Russian, which went more smoothly for me, in part because German grammar got me ready for Russian grammar, and in part because the teacher was more kindly and more engaging and I had classmates in Russian class who were highly motivated to learn languages and shared their love of languages with me.

I went into university as an intending Russian major, hoping to take Chinese on the side as an elective course. But as soon as I started taking Chinese classes, I fell in love with that language--no declensions of nouns, no conjugation of verbs, and mostly indication of grammar by word order, as in English--and eventually switched my major course to Chinese when I had to formally declare a major and dropped taking Russian classes after a while. Chinese is of course especially challenging when it comes to achieving full literacy. (Chinese is plenty challenging for native speakers of the spoken language to achieve full literacy in the Chinese Han character writing system.) But I persisted, and enjoyed along the way learning about methods of language study from the writings of John DeFrancis, the dean of teachers of Chinese language to a whole generation of American students.

As I left the United States for a first stay overseas, with a university degree in Chinese language, I could read a book in Modern Standard Chinese reasonably comfortably and could also read some of the classic texts in Literary Chinese, but I could barely keep up with a live Chinese conversation. Landing in Taiwan in 1982, I had a headache soon after I arrived, and it was immensely gratifying to be able to go to the corner drugstore and say, "I would like to buy aspirin" and be understood well enough to get what I wanted. That relieved my headache even more than taking the medicine. Before I had left, I had spoken to two different Americans who had each spent a year living in Taiwan after two years of studying Chinese in the United States. They gave me what seemed like very contradictory descriptions of how they were able to get along linguistically in Taiwan with that much background in Chinese. One said, "It was great. As soon as I got of the plane I found out I could use my Chinese to talk to people." The other said, "It was terrible. For the first six months I was there I could hardly understand a thing that people were saying around me." I found out that they were BOTH correct, as I could communicate my needs, when I had them, especially around local people who were used to meeting American students, but I had the worst time for the longest time really understanding radio broadcasting or live conversation. I was very gratified when I could first listen through the full weather forecast on the radio and understand every word and phrase--months after arrival.

I have studied other languages, both "dead" classical languages and living languages from various language families. Every language on earth has purely arbitrary features that make it differ from other languages, and what makes a language "easy" or hard is mostly resemblance to a language a learner already knows. (German felt very easy indeed to me after I had studied Russian and classical Greek, for example, even though it had seemed hard earlier.) Young people in Taiwan used to tell me that Japanese is "easy" in about the same way that many Americans say Spanish is easy. There are many opportunities to learn each language in each of those places, but to learn them well is not particularly easy, really.

My experiences as a language learner have turned into advice I share on the World Wide Web[1] and here on Hacker News.[2] Fortunately, there are a lot of tips (one could say hacks) that help learners learn foreign languages better. I admire the many participants on Hacker News who participate while using English as a second language. That is not easy. Few Americans could participate in online discussion in any language other than English. I'm not sure I think that studying Chinese and other languages I've studied really strengthened my cognition, but I am glad for the experiences I had overseas and think that even Americans who will never leave the United States should make the effort to learn at least one foreign human language.

[1] http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302276#up_6302816

The L-R confusion with asian languages' speakers is very strange to me btw.

For example, English has t and th and f, most other languages don't have th and some don't even have f. However it's very rare to see non-native English speakers to swap or merge those sounds. Virtually unseen in writing.

Asian languages' speakers do swap r and l and vice versa in writing too.

Many dialects of English (in both UK and USA) merge these sounds.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th-fronting

Asian languages have neither the English R (tongue curled backward in mouth, sides curled upward relative to mouth; "retroflex approximant") nor L (tongue straight, sides curled downward; "lateral alveolar approximant"). Rather, they have an R which is a combination of these (tongue straight, sides curled upward; "alveolar approximant"). Without a native sound to map these two distinct sounds to, it's easy to confuse them.

I've definitely seen foreigners confuse TH and T in writing. TH is very often pronounced (and therefore sometimes likely misremembered) as T. TH and T a more distinct than R and L however; TH is fricative (has duration), T is plosive (instantaneous).

What's more common is for foreigners to confuse our sundry vowels. I count at least 14 distinct sounds. Many foreign languages have only 5. But since we have only 5 written vowels, we notice less when a foreigner uses the wrong vowel (and brush it off more as an accent).

English speakers confuse u and ü in German; ㄱ (k), ㅋ (kh), and ㄲ (kk) in Korean (heck I know phonetics and I can't get these right); e and é, and gender in French (quick, where do the accents go in "resume"?). Chinese speakers confuse second-person pronouns in English. Japanese confuse green and blue. There are a ton more examples of such confusion; they're all due to our minds mapping information based on our native tongues.

Short of cauterizing your own genitals, nothing seems like it would change who you are like speaking in an-other's language. Blech, I'd rather wear someone else's underwear, no thanks, I'll take the 12 credits but no way am I retaining anything. "Well, science says you lose the ability to learn languages as you get older." Oh, did NPR just interview TED? Dummies in other countries and dummies in the CIA learn as adults, are they all using different science? An American describes another American who is fluent in French as "oh my God, he's so smart, he speaks French and everything" but this statement is easily unmasked as a defense by getting him to describe a Frenchman who speaks English: "well, they all speak English over there." The bilingualism is robbed of the "intelligence" signification because it's seen as customary.... who they are. America is a branded-identity nation, which means hearing yourself speak in not-your accent, with not-your vocabulary sounds very not-you, which is why when an American tries to speak French he feels self-conscious, but the Frenchman hearing it feels you aren't even trying. He'd be wrong, you are trying: trying not to become French.

"Ugh, I hate psychobabble, why can't you be more like Malcolm Gladwell and give me practical neuroscience based tips like 'get up before dawn' or 'play basketball annoyingly'?" Fine, here's your concrete advice that you won't take for shaving 6 months off your second language acquisition: master the accent first. Before even one word of vocabulary. The accent will teach you the rhythm of the words and the grammar-- it will make it okay for you to learn the vocabulary. And you will think differently. American exceptiono-isolationism isn't arrogance, it's a cognitive bias impressed on us from kindergarten when we learn that there are only two languages in the world, English and Everything Else. Which teaches us that a German is more similar to an Italian than a Texan to a New Yorker, and I can predict with 100% accuracy that if that made you pause you only speak English. Can't wait to hear your foreign policy ideas over drinks. You should work for NPR.

Once you have the accent down, pick a foreign language actor or actress you admire, and learn the language as if you were them. Talk like them. This trick works because you are thinking like someone else, acting like someone else, yet simultaneously distancing yourself from this change-- I'm doing this, but it's not me, I'm just pretending. The self-consciousness is removed because it's not "you" who is doing it. Yet it is; and after a time, you'll become it-- and the positive benefit for society is you'll hate the guy you used to be. C'est la vie.

http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/05/thank_god_the_heart_a...

I love TLP but losing your accent is easier said than done. I started learning English when I was a few years old and I've lived in the US for 22 years speaking English 99% of the time. My German accent is still clearly there. I'm not sure what it would take at this point but it's not something that happens easily. I listen to the way other people pronounce words but hearing your own accent is hard.

Interestingly, my kids claim they can't really hear my accent, they know I speak a little differently but they don't think I sound like Arnold or Angela.

I think TLP's accent advice falls squarely into the "fake it until you make it" category - like becoming a confident presenter by impersonating somebody confident when you get on stage. It's not that if you try hard your accent will go away, it's more that you (consciously) do an impression of the accent you're learning. So if you're studying German you go full Ahhhnold.

I didn't read that TLP column until I was mostly fluent in my second language, but in retrospect I think it's spot on (and one of his best - he can be a little hit or miss).

This is a big stumbling block for Swedes trying to speak Danish (which is a very similar language grammatically, but pronounced quite differently). Going "all in" reminds many people too much of Swedish comedians making fun of how Danish sounds, so they worry they'll sound mocking if they speak like that. So, many will try for a less "exaggerated" Danish accent instead, which ends up not sounding very Danish at all. Doing the Swedish-comedian-impersonating-Danish accent is actually a decent place to start, but it just sounds wrong and borderline offensive to Swedish ears to try it.

I don't think it actually matters whether you're any good at the impersonation - the point is to convince your brain that you're creating a new persona, rather than trying to change your existing one. (An overarching theme of TLP's writings is how extraordinarily good the brain is at insulating itself from change.)

At least for some people it's easy to pick up accents (even for languages she doesn't actually speak, she just speaks gibberish): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybcvlxivscw

There are actors that grew up in many different countries you have seen in movies that pass just fine as americans. But it's impractical for most folks to work with a dialect coach for years, but it clearly is possible. And outside of LA the demand for dialect coaches is almost zero.

My father grew up in a very rural part of the U.S. and had a very rural accent as a result (all his brothers still do). When he moved to Chicago as a young adult, he realized the social stigmas attached to his accent were hurting him and he set about to get rid of it. I'm not quite sure how he did it, he says he just read the dictionary and practiced the pronunciation guides for each word. But it was pretty total, he can't affect his native accent anymore even when he tries.

Here on the East Coast, there's actually quite a few dialect coaches who make their living teaching Asian immigrants how to pronounce all those terrible English 'L' and 'R' sounds (among others) they struggle with. The immigrant community here is pretty large, and the desire to succeed is very high (and their accents are often seen as barriers to success, often rightly so), so there's actually a fairly robust accent/dialect industry here.

"American exceptiono-isolationism isn't arrogance, it's a cognitive bias impressed on us from kindergarten when we learn that there are only two languages in the world, English and Everything Else."

Actually the French suffer from this as well, thinking that every language has the rhythm of French, and only stressing the last syllables.

Learning the accent first is an insteresting trick.

But what it seems to me is that the biggest disadvantage of learning as an adult is the exposure to the new language.

Adults, by necessity (and lazyness) shy themselves of exposure to new languages, they also don't have the environment around them to support it (watching cartoons on TV, school kids talk a lot more amongst themselves and/or are paying attention to classes, etc)

Actually the French suffer from this as well, thinking that every language has the rhythm of French, and only stressing the last syllables.

Having taught Latin to French speakers, I can confirm.

> . The accent will teach you the rhythm of the words and the grammar-

I think that in part is how kids learn too. I am watching my 2 year old learn two languages and I can see that easily. They have the accent down very well. Sometimes they would repeat syllables that sound meaningless, but it seems they are just like practice rounds.

Then I noticed they also get excited about a new word that has an "interesting" combination of syllables and sounds. They laugh at that and want me to repeat it. They have this detector "Oh, here is a new challenge, I might want to know more about it".

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