The answer is no secret but it's hard to achieve. The fastest way to learn a new language fluently is to speak it, constantly.
Yes, it's easier for children to acquire a new language but they learn it because they are constantly forced to use it.
I've known a number of people that have lived in a foreign country yet they did not learn the language. Why? Because they could get away with using English most of the time. They were never forced to speak it. They could get away with only speaking it a little. And if they got in trouble they could always ask someone for help.
The stress caused by having to come up with the proper word combination helps immensely. We tend to remember what caused us stress. Also, repetition will always help in acquiring new words.
So, basically, start a learning program but make sure you practice every day by speaking with someone that's fluent in your new language ASAP and let them correct you as needed. Also, NEVER speak your native language with that person. Only use the language you want to learn with him or her.
Do not start book studying, grammar and such, until you have a good grasp of the language. Reading a new language will reinforce accents since we tend to read with our language in mind.
The more you have to think in the language you are trying to learn the faster you will reach fluency.
"If there were someone who knew how to learn new languages, we would all know it. They would be uniquely and unquestionably skilled at producing new language speakers. They would be very visible: everybody would be flocking to their doors and imitating them."
He seems to be confusing "learn" with "teach". All of the above would be true if he said "if there were someone who knew how to teach new languages...".
Lots of people know how to learn, but no one wants to hear about it, because the answer is: work really hard.
"Everyone wants to be a bodybuilder, but no one wants to lift no heavy ass weights."
> NEVER speak your native language with that person. Only use the language you want to learn with him or her.
You don't have to be quite that strict, it's enough to have dedicated time slots where you won't allow yourself to escape learning by switching languages. The most efficient way is to find someone who wants to learn your language and do tandem learning, so they're motivated to slog through correcting your mistakes over and over. Since I'm not that good at small talk, I had some trouble finding activities where there's actually enough to talk about, and eventually settled on museums.
Another thing that helps is to watch videos in your target language. It doesn't do much to improve your vocabulary unless you pause to write new words down, but it helps with listening and by proxy also improves pronunciation. I've found https://viki.com to have a nice collection of subtitled shows in the languages I'm interested in. (Though by now I've progressed enough to keep subtitles off.)
For quickly learning and actually remembering vocabulary, it's probably unavoidable to use a spaced repetition system like https://apps.ankiweb.net/
>>> Because they could get away with using English most of the time. They were never forced to speak it.
I live in a foreign country and this is my life, while english is not really the best here - I've had literally zero issues with either speaking english or having some help every now and then (like for 'official matters').
>>> The stress caused by having to come up with the proper word combination helps immensely. We tend to remember what caused us stress.
I also think this is very accurate, most of the words I know are really set in stone from these kinds of occasions. Some specific event happened related to the word, maybe I misspoke something and it was pointed out. And so on.
I pretty much did this with Japanese but there are a few caveats. Namely informal grammar study as fast as possible and learn to read quick as you can are also massive, massive boosters.
Of all the language learning methods I've seen I've only seen one thing consistent across all of them that in the end leads to results and that is you have to legitimately feel that it's deeply important to your life story to actually learn it to fluency. At some level you actually just have to care about the outcome. It's an emotional switch that once flipped, actually the method is irrelevant. I've seen every which way work. The constant was that it mattered to those people. And no one knows how to turn that switch on/off. Therefore I agree with the sentiment no one knows how to do it. I guess I'd be more specific and say that no one knows a fool proof method to engineer the outcome because it relies on emotional states and belief systems. As for the intellectual understanding of how to execute against learning a language. Plenty of seasoned language learners know full well what works and what doesn't.
I’d mostly agree with this, but I’m not sure the stress element is necessary. I learned a second language while living overseas. Most of the people in my office spoke good English, and I’d just speak their language as much as I could, filling in my gaps with English. I’d ask when I didn’t understand something, or when I wanted help forming a sentence. There was a fair bit of code-switching to begin with, but I had a good conversational grasp after a year.
Confirmed learning Japanese, and now learning German. Being in a situation where you need it for everyday life causes you to pick it up by osmosis. You get a feel for it after a couple of months, and then it just builds organically, exactly the same as how a child picks it up.
It also helps to get drunk from time to time, because your inhibitions drop and you practice better uninhibited (like a child does).
I found it immensely useful to speak English with my Thai tutor in the beginning when I was trying to get the pronunciation correct and train my ear to hear tones. When I listened to four different words that sounded the same to me but actually have different tones and meanings it would been totally baffling if my tutor did not point out the (to me) subtle tonal differences. I doubt I would have made much progress otherwise. After that, of course, force yourself to stay in the target language and not fall back to your native language.
> In theory, formal language instruction is precisely the right way to learn a new language.
Surely that's not true: otherwise, children wouldn't have learned their native tongue(s) the way they famously do.
Not sure what kind of theory the author's been immersing themselves with. When I was studying for a language tutor, along my linguistics program, the context was put forth as the most important part of learning anything, let alone a language.
> I studied French in elementary school — supposedly the “ideal” age to learn a new language, according to some people — and somehow continued to get As and Bs while retaining almost no ability to speak the language at all.
Perhaps they haven't because language acquisition, like most any mental skill¹, requires an interest to maintain, let alone improve. My suspicion is this is also why people dislike maths so much: because it's a tenuous process that requires considerate effort to develop. Without a passion for it – often gained either through a natural aptitude or an inspirational teacher – it might be difficult, in those two fields, or in any other of similar requirements, to obtain and retain the skills necessary.
¹ I have a sneaking suspicion – and might well be wrong – that, in physical skills, muscle memory or related mechanisms may affect retention. There've been studies suggesting that writing things down helps memorization, which is a rather "muscle" activity. Perhaps the latter is related to the former?
It's also not how most of us learn the much simpler computer languages, I can pick up a language much quicker by playing with it rather than learning it formally.
> Less than 1 percent of American adults today are proficient in a foreign language that they studied in a U.S. classroom.
Is this really as notable as the author suggests? Are there more people proficient in other subjects learned in the classroom? I don't think more than 1% of people from my classrooms are proficient in maths / chemistry / physics to a "fluent adult language" degree.
The first four paragraphs water down the title's claim to the more comfortably defensible: "Nobody knows how to learn a language... to native fluency without significant effort."
Figure out the most common 3000 words and memorize those. Practice the grammar. Read news papers in the language and try to summarize the articles in your own words. Watch YouTube videos in the language. Start speaking to native speakers. It’s not too crazy, school really dated your time. It’s funny, early on, in school you learn words like “apple” but these words don’t come up all that often.
Over the past several years, I've been fascinated with what linguists do in the large: not the narrow, tight study of particular language aspects, the broad understanding of human languages in general.
One thing I think I got from this: languages are spoken not written. Once you start writing a language it becomes something else. In some cases, you even end up with an official language. A standard.
Human language is the use of sounds to negotiate meaning. So yes, immersion really is the only way to learn because with immersion all you really care about is whether meaning can be transferred around, not whether it's "right" or not. All of that correctness stuff is a different thing entirely than language. Perhaps the author's goal might be "speak language X well enough that others don't realize it's their second language". It's a laudable goal. I'm just not convinced it qualifies as learning a language. (In the colloquial sense, sure.)
People are actually experts in creating and learning languages. They take what they know, extend it a little bit, and work it into some pattern of speech that conveys meaning. Any time you hear somebody who's new to your country speak in a way that half their old way, half the new way, you're hearing somebody create a language.
But if you want to start fooling people, to invisibly blend into a society and not give anything away with your speech, I think you're going to need stressors, either internal or external. Otherwise your brain is going to learn just enough to get by, just like it learns everything else.
In college we had a program where you studied in the country of the language you're trying to learn. What was interesting was the "pledge" where no matter how bad it got, you didn't revert to English. It sucked at the start, but eventually you just pick things up and it just works.
You don't quite get the grammar and native speakers will notice that, but so long as they correct you, eventually you'll just pick up the rules.
The hardest part about learning a new language is maintaining motivation.
Learning a new language isn’t a hobby you can just add to your life like knitting or cooking. It’s more like an ambitious diet and exercise program, except the payoff is even less motivating. If you look good, everyone sees. If you can speak Japanese, nobody cares but other people you talk to whose English is worse than your Japanese. Like exercise, if you invest anything less than four hours a week, you won’t make meaningful gains, and it’s often months before you get anywhere. It’s a slog.
The trick (if you can call it that) is to find something you really want to do, badly, that you NEED your L2 to do. For Japanese learners, maybe maybe wanting to watch anime is enough. For English learners, maybe it’s watching American TV and movies. For Americans learning an L2, immersion is the pretty much the only viable approach.
Immersion is just a hack to motivate yourself by making your life almost unbearably difficult, with learning to speak your L2 the only way out.
Looking back on six years living in China and learning Chinese while working (borderline fluent in some topics but woefully inadequate in others), if I could do it over again I would:
1. Spend a few months getting the fundamentals down: learn pronunciation, drill it with a patient native speaker, go hard at 10+ hours a week book studying. (I did this)
2. Move somewhere to either work or study only in your L2, and where there’s barely any English speakers. Live there for a year or more. (I didn’t do this; I lived in a large city and had mostly English speaking friends and my work was in English)
There’s no way to fluency without spending hundreds of hours talking with people in your L2: ~500 hours for Spanish, ~1500 for Chinese or Arabic.
I'm going to skip my usual really, really, long explanation. Long story short: TFA is wrong. Many people know how to learn a language. Many people learn several languages because after learning how to learn one, they realised it's not that hard.
Main problem people have: they have unrealistic expectations. Children don't have a magic ability to learn languages. They take 10-20 years to learn up to adult level proficiency. They take 3-5 years to learn fluency up to a basic level. If you learn as fast as a child, it will take you 5 years to be able to speak like a 5 year old.
Technique is important, but it is late and I don't want to write a massive post about it (again). Here is the short version. Study every day. Don't miss a day. If you study 3 times a week, you will plateau at a very low level. If you do less than that, you won't get past baby level. You will eventually have to "study" at least 1 hour a day, but you can start with any small amount you want (even 5 minutes is enough) -- but don't skip days. If you miss a day (or several), you can't make up for it. Don't miss days.
Only study language you understand. If you can not understand a sentence at least 95%, you will have troubles (the 95% number did not come out of my ass... it is important). Always aim for 100% comprehension. Whether you study grammar explicitly or not is up to you -- do it if you enjoy it, don't if you don't. However, do not practice constructing sentences from "first principles" using grammar. This will mean that you acquire non-idiomatic language. Only use grammar to check that your grammar is correct, not to produce sentences.
In order to learn sentences, it is enough to expose yourself to them (as long as you understand them). I found it faster to memorise exemplars. YMMV. If using flash cards (with or without SRS), always practice from your native language to your target language. Never the other way around. It is important.
You must also practice forming sounds. You can "mirror" recorded audio, but sometimes it is too fast. To combat this, get recordings of songs and learn them. Try to perfect them. Record yourself and check to see how close you are.
Always try to practice with native language sources. It can be a live person, TV, radio, or written language. Reading written language is usually best for the bulk of your learning. This is because you can easily get a lot of it and you can easily go through it again and again. When reading, make sure you understand 95% (there's that number again). If you don't, find something simpler, or find out what the content means and read it again. If the latter, repeat the section every few days until it seems like your native language.
Take every opportunity to speak the language. However, beware. Most people go through a "closed period". This is a period where you can understand a lot more than you can say. Often you can't say anything. This is normal. It means you are around a 2-3 year old native level of speaking. Congratulations! Don't let it bother. Keep going and you will definitely break through it. Most failures happen because people quit (duh). Most people quit at this stage.
There is a lot more, but that's probably enough to get anyone started. Many languages share a lot of grammar and vocabulary. If your native an target language are related, you can often "learn" a language (to a child level of ability) pretty quickly (say a year or two). If you are choosing a very different language, it will take you longer (3-5 years). No matter which you choose, you won't get adult level of fluency and proficiency in less that 5-10 years. Anybody telling you differently is selling you something that doesn't exist. Languages are huge -- you have to be in to for the long haul.
Although I agree with plenty of things you say, and we probably have similar experiences learning language, the strength of your assertions to always use i+1 (95%) and to always go from native to target when doing flashcards are unwarranted.
That's A method. Or A way to do it. There are many paths up the mountain. Granted I appreciate it when people explicitly lay out "here's the path I walked up" as that's good information. But there exist other paths equally as fast and maybe some even faster, many slower of course but there really is a surprising multitude of techniques that wind up at similar results.
I remember sitting and engaging with content that I had fuck all idea what was being said but I was so damn delighted every time a word came up that I knew that it just lit the fire and kept it burning. I did plenty of i+1 flashcards which were sentences (both reading and listening) purely from target to native. I quickly established a foundation on which I could parse any sentence, I just needed the vocab. Then I did nothing but engaging with content I was interested in regardless of difficulty and hung out with friends getting in 10+ hours conversation (one on one plus group situations) per week. End of my second year of doing that I could hold my own in a lengthy one on one for hours on end and end of year 3 I could hold my own indefinitely in groups.
I agree mostly with this but I think you understate the importance of grammar. To express yourself in another language, you need two tools, vocab and grammar. Vocab without grammar in most languages is just a stream of words with no connection, and grammar without vocab leads to the problem you suggest, that of unnatural sentences. But grammar is still important, sure I think there's some leeway in how much you do, but it's absolutely key to do a fair bit, otherwise your sentences will always be fairly basic and you can't understand the nuances in someone's speech.
I think the problem, at least in schools, is the dedicated grammar classes, which have no apparent meaning or use. It's best to tackle grammar using practical examples, with an understanding that grammar is not just an end in itself, but something useful to be exploited during speech.
If someone wants to learn a language just to enjoy its language & literature, and not necessarily be conversant in it, then would it be okay to never speak it? Or is conversation an essential practice?
> If there were someone who knew how to learn new languages, we would all know it. They would be uniquely and unquestionably skilled at producing new language speakers.
The thing is... There are people like that. They may not know how to teach that to others, but if you look at simultaneous translators, they don't just know another language. They know 4 or more fluently. And maybe pick up another one over summer holiday just for fun. (At least the ones I know did that)
I got curious about the CIA notes. When I was at uni, a GCHQ person tried to recruit people from the class. One of the things he mentioned was that they want people to pick up new languages and it's common to learn them during your career. I wonder if it's the same as in CIA (we can now claim we have an X-speaking analysts), or if the situation there is better for some reason. Does anyone know more details?
My problem is I can pickup the grammar and theory while learning, but poor at speaking the spot. I don't really have anyone to practice with. Any ideas?
I grew up with four languages around me and am currently learning another, having also added a couple of others before. Here's my take on it:
- For a child, every lesson in everything is a language lesson. Everyone you come across will correct you. Everyone will add to your vocabulary. Say you're cooking, or going to the zoo. You'll learn what pots and pans are, all the animals in the zoo, some verbs that are relevant.
- English is very relaxed about its pronunciation. If you're British, "scarf" and "giraffe" rhyme. In American English, they don't. Yet nobody meeting someone from the other side of the pond considers either to be wrong. When English speakers go and learn another language, there's a lot of these close sounds that are wrong. In fact just yesterday in a Mandarin class a guy asked the teacher what the difference between "车" (car/vehicle) and "吃"(to eat) is. He couldn't hear it until we tried a few times.
- English is everyone else's second language because pronunciation is not a big deal. You can often tell if someone is a foreign speaker from their accent, but it's still understandable and nobody complains. By contrast most people in Europe will just swap to English if they hear you say something slightly wrong.
- Institutions are bad at teaching languages because they're not geared towards teaching, they're actually just indices. When you learn something like Linear Algebra or Data Structures, you don't learn stuff in class as much as you learn that they exist. So you go to a DS class and you find out there's a thing called a hash map. You go home, fire up your toolchain, and play with it for a few hours until you get it. Everything you need is out there on the internet somewhere, in English. Same with just about everything else, you learn on your own what's been mentioned in class. If you sit in a language class, you can't do that. Nobody can hear if you are pronouncing things correctly. Also, there's a minimum amount of structure and vocab you need to be able to say anything useful, and you're constantly running into missing ideas, eg "how to I say 'used to' in this language?".
- I suspect the real reason people find it hard is economics. Contrary to this article, I don't think it's actually particularly valuable. This is why immersion doesn't happen. Kids have low opportunity cost, this is why they are able to spend their youth learning a bunch of things. If you move to a new country as an adult, chances are your livelihood depends on some specialist skill that is supported by English, and the rest of the time you're taking care of your family. So you're not getting immersion. You also don't get cultural immersion from the language class. I'm not talking about the fact they eat baguettes in France; your knowledge of France as a culture requires you to access umpteen levels more information than people normally do. How many people are going to know what the French think of secularism, or the Dreyfus affair, from just studying French? I don't think I'll be coming across essays about the cultural revolution in my Mandarin class, either. And then add to that cultural items that every local knows, but isn't considered historically/politically important. The most popular Danish song of all time?
As a non native english speaker, I don't agree that english has relaxed pronunciation rules. People have trouble understanding english coming from, say, spanish, because english has around 20 vowel sounds whereas spanish has 5. So for any spanish speaker starting to learn english, the differences between, say, cut & caught in spoken english are not evident at all. And this is going to happen to any speaker jumping to languages with more vowel sounds.
Furthermore, cantonese is a bad comparison to english because it's a tonal language; i.e. the inflection of the word changes the meaning. So on top of having to learn more or less vowel sounds, students have to struggle with a fundamentally different way to conceptualize language.
> English is everyone else's second language because pronunciation is not a big deal
That is not true. English has become the lingua franca of the day because England & America have dominated the cultural and commercial global market for centuries. The adoption of lingua francas has nothing to do with how easy it is to learn a language (after all, this is incredibly relative) and more with how international trade and history have shaped a region. For example, in the late bronze age the lingua franca was Akkadian, a semitic language that would've been pretty tough to learn for, say, indoeuropean speakers like the greeks.
Having moved to an english-speaking country because my husband is a native english speaker, I find that even with the language immersion is difficult. Unless you have a very particular hobby that allows you to connect to other people, it's difficult making friends because of the cultural differences. And even though at this point I'm so fluent in english I've written and published fiction stories in it, it's still a difference that can be felt - imagine being barely fluent or speaking barely a few words.
> I suspect the real reason people find it hard is economics. Contrary to this article, I don't think it's actually particularly valuable.
Yes, most times you don't really need to know a language. In the old times in europe, many village people never left their home village. As long as you can understand everyone in your village, everything is fine. Traders, priests etc had to learn multiple languages and often used latin as lingua franca.
Nowadays, in the western world, knowing english is often enough to communicate with most people you have to do in various areas of your life.
The exception confirms the rule: sometimes, languages are useful for jobs. In the CIA for example, they actually do encourage employees to learn languages. Because knowing the language of the country your work is about is actually helpful.
> If you're British, "scarf" and "giraffe" rhyme.
> In American English, they don't.
They don't rhyme in British English either. Maybe in one of the regional dialects - I think that you could probably force it in a scouse (Liverpool) accent.
WheelsAtLarge|7 years ago
Yes, it's easier for children to acquire a new language but they learn it because they are constantly forced to use it.
I've known a number of people that have lived in a foreign country yet they did not learn the language. Why? Because they could get away with using English most of the time. They were never forced to speak it. They could get away with only speaking it a little. And if they got in trouble they could always ask someone for help.
The stress caused by having to come up with the proper word combination helps immensely. We tend to remember what caused us stress. Also, repetition will always help in acquiring new words.
So, basically, start a learning program but make sure you practice every day by speaking with someone that's fluent in your new language ASAP and let them correct you as needed. Also, NEVER speak your native language with that person. Only use the language you want to learn with him or her.
Do not start book studying, grammar and such, until you have a good grasp of the language. Reading a new language will reinforce accents since we tend to read with our language in mind.
The more you have to think in the language you are trying to learn the faster you will reach fluency.
injb|7 years ago
The author of the article says:
"If there were someone who knew how to learn new languages, we would all know it. They would be uniquely and unquestionably skilled at producing new language speakers. They would be very visible: everybody would be flocking to their doors and imitating them."
He seems to be confusing "learn" with "teach". All of the above would be true if he said "if there were someone who knew how to teach new languages...".
Lots of people know how to learn, but no one wants to hear about it, because the answer is: work really hard.
"Everyone wants to be a bodybuilder, but no one wants to lift no heavy ass weights."
yorwba|7 years ago
You don't have to be quite that strict, it's enough to have dedicated time slots where you won't allow yourself to escape learning by switching languages. The most efficient way is to find someone who wants to learn your language and do tandem learning, so they're motivated to slog through correcting your mistakes over and over. Since I'm not that good at small talk, I had some trouble finding activities where there's actually enough to talk about, and eventually settled on museums.
Another thing that helps is to watch videos in your target language. It doesn't do much to improve your vocabulary unless you pause to write new words down, but it helps with listening and by proxy also improves pronunciation. I've found https://viki.com to have a nice collection of subtitled shows in the languages I'm interested in. (Though by now I've progressed enough to keep subtitles off.)
For quickly learning and actually remembering vocabulary, it's probably unavoidable to use a spaced repetition system like https://apps.ankiweb.net/
wingerlang|7 years ago
I live in a foreign country and this is my life, while english is not really the best here - I've had literally zero issues with either speaking english or having some help every now and then (like for 'official matters').
>>> The stress caused by having to come up with the proper word combination helps immensely. We tend to remember what caused us stress.
I also think this is very accurate, most of the words I know are really set in stone from these kinds of occasions. Some specific event happened related to the word, maybe I misspoke something and it was pointed out. And so on.
james_s_tayler|7 years ago
Of all the language learning methods I've seen I've only seen one thing consistent across all of them that in the end leads to results and that is you have to legitimately feel that it's deeply important to your life story to actually learn it to fluency. At some level you actually just have to care about the outcome. It's an emotional switch that once flipped, actually the method is irrelevant. I've seen every which way work. The constant was that it mattered to those people. And no one knows how to turn that switch on/off. Therefore I agree with the sentiment no one knows how to do it. I guess I'd be more specific and say that no one knows a fool proof method to engineer the outcome because it relies on emotional states and belief systems. As for the intellectual understanding of how to execute against learning a language. Plenty of seasoned language learners know full well what works and what doesn't.
radicalbyte|7 years ago
Listening to the radio, reading one newspaper article a day whilst following an intensive language course helped the most.
AmericanChopper|7 years ago
kstenerud|7 years ago
It also helps to get drunk from time to time, because your inhibitions drop and you practice better uninhibited (like a child does).
geomark|7 years ago
MarsAscendant|7 years ago
Surely that's not true: otherwise, children wouldn't have learned their native tongue(s) the way they famously do.
Not sure what kind of theory the author's been immersing themselves with. When I was studying for a language tutor, along my linguistics program, the context was put forth as the most important part of learning anything, let alone a language.
> I studied French in elementary school — supposedly the “ideal” age to learn a new language, according to some people — and somehow continued to get As and Bs while retaining almost no ability to speak the language at all.
Perhaps they haven't because language acquisition, like most any mental skill¹, requires an interest to maintain, let alone improve. My suspicion is this is also why people dislike maths so much: because it's a tenuous process that requires considerate effort to develop. Without a passion for it – often gained either through a natural aptitude or an inspirational teacher – it might be difficult, in those two fields, or in any other of similar requirements, to obtain and retain the skills necessary.
¹ I have a sneaking suspicion – and might well be wrong – that, in physical skills, muscle memory or related mechanisms may affect retention. There've been studies suggesting that writing things down helps memorization, which is a rather "muscle" activity. Perhaps the latter is related to the former?
mattmanser|7 years ago
viraptor|7 years ago
Is this really as notable as the author suggests? Are there more people proficient in other subjects learned in the classroom? I don't think more than 1% of people from my classrooms are proficient in maths / chemistry / physics to a "fluent adult language" degree.
_abattoir|7 years ago
jcl|7 years ago
adamnemecek|7 years ago
thecleaner|7 years ago
DanielBMarkham|7 years ago
One thing I think I got from this: languages are spoken not written. Once you start writing a language it becomes something else. In some cases, you even end up with an official language. A standard.
Human language is the use of sounds to negotiate meaning. So yes, immersion really is the only way to learn because with immersion all you really care about is whether meaning can be transferred around, not whether it's "right" or not. All of that correctness stuff is a different thing entirely than language. Perhaps the author's goal might be "speak language X well enough that others don't realize it's their second language". It's a laudable goal. I'm just not convinced it qualifies as learning a language. (In the colloquial sense, sure.)
People are actually experts in creating and learning languages. They take what they know, extend it a little bit, and work it into some pattern of speech that conveys meaning. Any time you hear somebody who's new to your country speak in a way that half their old way, half the new way, you're hearing somebody create a language.
But if you want to start fooling people, to invisibly blend into a society and not give anything away with your speech, I think you're going to need stressors, either internal or external. Otherwise your brain is going to learn just enough to get by, just like it learns everything else.
potatofarmer45|7 years ago
You don't quite get the grammar and native speakers will notice that, but so long as they correct you, eventually you'll just pick up the rules.
physicles|7 years ago
Learning a new language isn’t a hobby you can just add to your life like knitting or cooking. It’s more like an ambitious diet and exercise program, except the payoff is even less motivating. If you look good, everyone sees. If you can speak Japanese, nobody cares but other people you talk to whose English is worse than your Japanese. Like exercise, if you invest anything less than four hours a week, you won’t make meaningful gains, and it’s often months before you get anywhere. It’s a slog.
The trick (if you can call it that) is to find something you really want to do, badly, that you NEED your L2 to do. For Japanese learners, maybe maybe wanting to watch anime is enough. For English learners, maybe it’s watching American TV and movies. For Americans learning an L2, immersion is the pretty much the only viable approach.
Immersion is just a hack to motivate yourself by making your life almost unbearably difficult, with learning to speak your L2 the only way out.
Looking back on six years living in China and learning Chinese while working (borderline fluent in some topics but woefully inadequate in others), if I could do it over again I would:
1. Spend a few months getting the fundamentals down: learn pronunciation, drill it with a patient native speaker, go hard at 10+ hours a week book studying. (I did this)
2. Move somewhere to either work or study only in your L2, and where there’s barely any English speakers. Live there for a year or more. (I didn’t do this; I lived in a large city and had mostly English speaking friends and my work was in English)
There’s no way to fluency without spending hundreds of hours talking with people in your L2: ~500 hours for Spanish, ~1500 for Chinese or Arabic.
huffmsa|7 years ago
I don't think of English as a formal structure except for when I'm editing a written document.
Fluency is the ability to carry on an uninterrupted conversation with another fluent speaker.
Immersion (true immersion, where you don't try to cheat) is the best way to become fluent.
You've gotta be Daniel Day Lewis.
mikekchar|7 years ago
Main problem people have: they have unrealistic expectations. Children don't have a magic ability to learn languages. They take 10-20 years to learn up to adult level proficiency. They take 3-5 years to learn fluency up to a basic level. If you learn as fast as a child, it will take you 5 years to be able to speak like a 5 year old.
Technique is important, but it is late and I don't want to write a massive post about it (again). Here is the short version. Study every day. Don't miss a day. If you study 3 times a week, you will plateau at a very low level. If you do less than that, you won't get past baby level. You will eventually have to "study" at least 1 hour a day, but you can start with any small amount you want (even 5 minutes is enough) -- but don't skip days. If you miss a day (or several), you can't make up for it. Don't miss days.
Only study language you understand. If you can not understand a sentence at least 95%, you will have troubles (the 95% number did not come out of my ass... it is important). Always aim for 100% comprehension. Whether you study grammar explicitly or not is up to you -- do it if you enjoy it, don't if you don't. However, do not practice constructing sentences from "first principles" using grammar. This will mean that you acquire non-idiomatic language. Only use grammar to check that your grammar is correct, not to produce sentences.
In order to learn sentences, it is enough to expose yourself to them (as long as you understand them). I found it faster to memorise exemplars. YMMV. If using flash cards (with or without SRS), always practice from your native language to your target language. Never the other way around. It is important.
You must also practice forming sounds. You can "mirror" recorded audio, but sometimes it is too fast. To combat this, get recordings of songs and learn them. Try to perfect them. Record yourself and check to see how close you are.
Always try to practice with native language sources. It can be a live person, TV, radio, or written language. Reading written language is usually best for the bulk of your learning. This is because you can easily get a lot of it and you can easily go through it again and again. When reading, make sure you understand 95% (there's that number again). If you don't, find something simpler, or find out what the content means and read it again. If the latter, repeat the section every few days until it seems like your native language.
Take every opportunity to speak the language. However, beware. Most people go through a "closed period". This is a period where you can understand a lot more than you can say. Often you can't say anything. This is normal. It means you are around a 2-3 year old native level of speaking. Congratulations! Don't let it bother. Keep going and you will definitely break through it. Most failures happen because people quit (duh). Most people quit at this stage.
There is a lot more, but that's probably enough to get anyone started. Many languages share a lot of grammar and vocabulary. If your native an target language are related, you can often "learn" a language (to a child level of ability) pretty quickly (say a year or two). If you are choosing a very different language, it will take you longer (3-5 years). No matter which you choose, you won't get adult level of fluency and proficiency in less that 5-10 years. Anybody telling you differently is selling you something that doesn't exist. Languages are huge -- you have to be in to for the long haul.
james_s_tayler|7 years ago
That's A method. Or A way to do it. There are many paths up the mountain. Granted I appreciate it when people explicitly lay out "here's the path I walked up" as that's good information. But there exist other paths equally as fast and maybe some even faster, many slower of course but there really is a surprising multitude of techniques that wind up at similar results.
I remember sitting and engaging with content that I had fuck all idea what was being said but I was so damn delighted every time a word came up that I knew that it just lit the fire and kept it burning. I did plenty of i+1 flashcards which were sentences (both reading and listening) purely from target to native. I quickly established a foundation on which I could parse any sentence, I just needed the vocab. Then I did nothing but engaging with content I was interested in regardless of difficulty and hung out with friends getting in 10+ hours conversation (one on one plus group situations) per week. End of my second year of doing that I could hold my own in a lengthy one on one for hours on end and end of year 3 I could hold my own indefinitely in groups.
Was a blast. So long ago now.
amaccuish|7 years ago
I think the problem, at least in schools, is the dedicated grammar classes, which have no apparent meaning or use. It's best to tackle grammar using practical examples, with an understanding that grammar is not just an end in itself, but something useful to be exploited during speech.
jasim|7 years ago
v4ult|7 years ago
viraptor|7 years ago
The thing is... There are people like that. They may not know how to teach that to others, but if you look at simultaneous translators, they don't just know another language. They know 4 or more fluently. And maybe pick up another one over summer holiday just for fun. (At least the ones I know did that)
viraptor|7 years ago
person_of_color|7 years ago
uncle_d|7 years ago
lordnacho|7 years ago
- For a child, every lesson in everything is a language lesson. Everyone you come across will correct you. Everyone will add to your vocabulary. Say you're cooking, or going to the zoo. You'll learn what pots and pans are, all the animals in the zoo, some verbs that are relevant.
- English is very relaxed about its pronunciation. If you're British, "scarf" and "giraffe" rhyme. In American English, they don't. Yet nobody meeting someone from the other side of the pond considers either to be wrong. When English speakers go and learn another language, there's a lot of these close sounds that are wrong. In fact just yesterday in a Mandarin class a guy asked the teacher what the difference between "车" (car/vehicle) and "吃"(to eat) is. He couldn't hear it until we tried a few times.
- English is everyone else's second language because pronunciation is not a big deal. You can often tell if someone is a foreign speaker from their accent, but it's still understandable and nobody complains. By contrast most people in Europe will just swap to English if they hear you say something slightly wrong.
- Institutions are bad at teaching languages because they're not geared towards teaching, they're actually just indices. When you learn something like Linear Algebra or Data Structures, you don't learn stuff in class as much as you learn that they exist. So you go to a DS class and you find out there's a thing called a hash map. You go home, fire up your toolchain, and play with it for a few hours until you get it. Everything you need is out there on the internet somewhere, in English. Same with just about everything else, you learn on your own what's been mentioned in class. If you sit in a language class, you can't do that. Nobody can hear if you are pronouncing things correctly. Also, there's a minimum amount of structure and vocab you need to be able to say anything useful, and you're constantly running into missing ideas, eg "how to I say 'used to' in this language?".
- I suspect the real reason people find it hard is economics. Contrary to this article, I don't think it's actually particularly valuable. This is why immersion doesn't happen. Kids have low opportunity cost, this is why they are able to spend their youth learning a bunch of things. If you move to a new country as an adult, chances are your livelihood depends on some specialist skill that is supported by English, and the rest of the time you're taking care of your family. So you're not getting immersion. You also don't get cultural immersion from the language class. I'm not talking about the fact they eat baguettes in France; your knowledge of France as a culture requires you to access umpteen levels more information than people normally do. How many people are going to know what the French think of secularism, or the Dreyfus affair, from just studying French? I don't think I'll be coming across essays about the cultural revolution in my Mandarin class, either. And then add to that cultural items that every local knows, but isn't considered historically/politically important. The most popular Danish song of all time?
wickerman|7 years ago
Furthermore, cantonese is a bad comparison to english because it's a tonal language; i.e. the inflection of the word changes the meaning. So on top of having to learn more or less vowel sounds, students have to struggle with a fundamentally different way to conceptualize language.
> English is everyone else's second language because pronunciation is not a big deal
That is not true. English has become the lingua franca of the day because England & America have dominated the cultural and commercial global market for centuries. The adoption of lingua francas has nothing to do with how easy it is to learn a language (after all, this is incredibly relative) and more with how international trade and history have shaped a region. For example, in the late bronze age the lingua franca was Akkadian, a semitic language that would've been pretty tough to learn for, say, indoeuropean speakers like the greeks.
Having moved to an english-speaking country because my husband is a native english speaker, I find that even with the language immersion is difficult. Unless you have a very particular hobby that allows you to connect to other people, it's difficult making friends because of the cultural differences. And even though at this point I'm so fluent in english I've written and published fiction stories in it, it's still a difference that can be felt - imagine being barely fluent or speaking barely a few words.
est31|7 years ago
Yes, most times you don't really need to know a language. In the old times in europe, many village people never left their home village. As long as you can understand everyone in your village, everything is fine. Traders, priests etc had to learn multiple languages and often used latin as lingua franca.
Nowadays, in the western world, knowing english is often enough to communicate with most people you have to do in various areas of your life.
The exception confirms the rule: sometimes, languages are useful for jobs. In the CIA for example, they actually do encourage employees to learn languages. Because knowing the language of the country your work is about is actually helpful.
radicalbyte|7 years ago
They don't rhyme in British English either. Maybe in one of the regional dialects - I think that you could probably force it in a scouse (Liverpool) accent.
fleshfly|7 years ago
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kurtisc|7 years ago
Digit-Al|7 years ago
> Case in point: did you catch the split infinitive in the previous sentence?
tdeck|7 years ago