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Comment by DonPellegrino | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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. :)

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!

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.

They both spoke the language of love. :x

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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?

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.

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