It seems to me that foreign language learning is an area where computer technology has clearly miserably fallen short of its potential.
Apps like Duolingo and Babel are nice, but they seem to me more oriented toward making the user feel good about making progress then about achieving mastery in any useful time frame.
Flashcard tools like Anki and Tinycards are nice, but they lack enough readily available content to be really useful. Anyone with the expertise and perspective to use these tools in a practical time frame to assemble a deck of the many thousands of words necessary to achieve mastery doesn't need the tools.
It should be possible, using relatively simple tools, for a person to immerse oneself virtually in language learning materials. It should be simple to choose a rate of exposure to material from trickle to firehose. It should be possible to see an estimate of time remaining to achieve functional fluency at the current rate of progress, no different from the progress bar you see when downloading files.
Instead, each individual is forced to cadge together learning materials, of varying quality, in dribs and drabs; and guess at ones progress.
There are plenty of full-time University foreign language teaching staff around the world, they should be able to collaborate in production of content for online learning tools.
Yet neither the sophistication nor the efficiency of foreign language learning seems to have improved much in my lifetime.
This is anecdotal and I am a sample of one, so do with this as you will. I have learned to speak French at two particular times. When I was very young, my Grandma Yvette often spoke French to me and I spent three years in French immersion. Now, I am an adult who barely speaks the language, but I have a daughter who I badly want to bless with the French language. So, I’m learning again...
I have noticed two things. The first is that when I was a kid, I didn’t care who I spoke French to, how loud I was, or how many words I mangled. It was like a cool code for me. As an adult, I’m damned near petrified to speak the language. This is unlike me. I’ll gladly spend a week cold calling potential clients, but if I hear people speaking French, I often cannot bring myself to introduce myself or ask how they are. I’ll ask a stranger for money in English, but I’ll be damned if I ask a stranger to pass the cream in French.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that it’s a lot harder to learn how to pronounce things. Some sounds seem to be engrained from years of speaking when I was young. Other words, crap.
Consider the word “de rien”. It is so simple. Three syllables. Yet, I could walk into any French speaking country in the world and get a long term disability pension just by saying it. Last week, I even found a French couple to help me and I’ve been doing lots of drills, but when I record it and play it back, I sound quite soft in the head.
Who would have thought that a phrase that translates to ‘it’s nothing’ would be such a big problem for me?? :)
I grew up in NH where a fair number of people (half of my own family included) are fluent in Quebecois French and also took 4 years of French in high school.
One summer between junior and senior years, I took a road trip to Montreal and tried out my French. I was thoroughly embarrassed and lived the OPs nightmare. The residents I spoke with seemed actively offended by my French and would smile condescendingly and speak to me in English.
During senior year, I was able to spend a week in France. It was a totally different experience. I spoke nothing but French for the week and was able to feed and otherwise care for myself. The locals seemed to genuinely appreciate my efforts to speak the language. The capstone was later in the week when a 2am knock on my door woke me up. A younger member of our group was having serious homesickness and wanted to call home, but couldn't figure out how to make the call. I went to the lobby with her to ask the desk clerk how to make the call. I ended up having a great conversation with the desk clerk who was only a few years older than me and was in Paris for university. We chatted for about 30 minutes about life, things we liked, cool things to see in Paris, etc. It was awesome!
For OP, give it a shot. The only way to get better is to do it!
> As an adult, I’m damned near petrified to speak the language.
Have a drink or two. Really. I've noticed I'm much better in a foreign language when I'm mildly drunk (or at least I think I am, which helps get past the self-awareness block).
> get a long term disability pension just by saying it
> but when I record it and play it back, I sound quite soft in the head
> Who would have thought that a phrase ... would be such a big problem for me?? :)
If this is how you envision yourself with speaking French, then is it any wonder you might be stuck or have issues with certain phrases? Good lord.
Learning how to talk like a native in another language is exceedingly difficult. It requires thousands of hours of practice, and by practice I mean actually physically speaking. Babies do this over and over and over and over again. We just gloss over it because, well, they're babies.
The only way to learn a language properly (as an adult) is to get over your fear and nervousness. When I hear obvious ESL people speaking English, my first thoughts are not of criticism. It's the exact same with people with other languages.
I have been learning Korean for almost 2 years now and my pronunciation is still not good in a lot of areas because I haven't practiced them enough, or well enough yet. That's just a part of the learning process. I'm understood most of the time, and the rest I just note down as things to work on.
Of course it sucks to hear myself compared to a native or make a mispronunciation so bad I'm not understood. But this is part of the process. If I -didn't- make mistakes I wouldn't be a learner of Korean, no?
> but if I hear people speaking French, I often cannot bring myself to introduce myself or ask how they are.
If you can't overcome this, you will never learn French. As long as you're afraid of making mistakes, you will never learn French. If you don't actually speak the language, you will never learn French... You don't learn a language only in classroom environments or with very patient friends. You learn it by speaking as much as you can, whenever you can, and making as many mistakes as you possibly can.
Even if you don't know how to say one exact thing in particular, circumlocution is your friend. Or rewording it in another way.
> Yet, I could walk into any French speaking country in the world and get a long term disability pension just by saying it. Last week, I even found a French couple to help me and I’ve been doing lots of drills, but when I record it and play it back, I sound quite soft in the head.
Pro tip from an immigrant who spent decade and a half trying to get good at English pronunciation - You need to practice in front of he mirror with a recorder and youtube nearby. Find a clip of french person saying a word or a sentence you're having trouble with and mimic them in front of the mirror. Again and again, try to see what muscle engaging on their face and do the same, think of what your tongue is doing. Remember you are building muscle memory and your tongue has literally never been in some of those shapes so you need to work it.
Pro tip two - find a pronunciation workshop or do a couple of sessions with a professional. Sounding like a native speaker is an incredible undertaking, but you'd probably be satisfied with being 75% there frankly.
The problem with French is that the French are very sensitive to mistakes.
If I speak bad English (I am Russian), everybody is still happy, the worst thing can happen is I’ll get corrected, and in 99.9% of cases it’s not even that.
If I speak bad French with a French person... may God have mercy upon my soul. Especially if I forgot to say bonjour/bonsoir first (abomination! burn the heretic!)
It's just a matter on how much time you spend learning the language.
Even if you only consider the time you spent in school merely learning your own native language those school lessons will add up to thousands of hours.
How many adults, who have already "learned" a foreign language, dedicate 6 hours per week purely on further improving their skills in that language for 12 years?
If you are worried about not knowing certain rare words then using a spaced repetition system with a word deck that contains the first 20000 or even 40000 words should help a lot. You will quickly rush through the words you already know. I can do 50 reviews in less than two minutes if I have memorized the words but 50 unknown words will take me at least 20 minutes. At a rate of 30 new words per day you can do 10000 words per year + half a year at the end to make sure every card reaches maturity.
In college Mandarin courses we were required to learn 30 words a day. That was a nearly impossible task for 20 year old me and required three hours of study a day on top of the 1:20 or 1:50 long daily class. To think a person more than twice that age can learn 30 words a day is, to my aged brain, ludicrous. Maybe it’s just me, but my learning ability is now vastly below what it was in my teens or even college.
>It's just a matter on how much time you spend learning the language.
I'm not sure if you're making a personal observation that's unrelated to the specific findings in the research paper. That's fine but it may inadvertently make people think that's what the paper concludes.
The particular paper[0] says that when testing for grammar accuracy in a 2nd language, the years of experience is not as predictive as age of of first exposure. The same dropoff of learning grammar happens to immersion as well as non-immersion older learners.
The authors don't claim to know why that happens but nevertheless noticed the patterns.
What website/application would you recommend for spaced repetition of vocabulary?
I've found the changing Windows logon screens quite nice, since every other day or so there's a new beautiful picture along with a few bubbles of text in German, enabling me to learn a few new words (though I'll probably forget most of them).
I suppose it's hard to learn French when it's the first foreign language to learn. I managed to get a decent level of French (B2) by studying 3 hours per week for 2 years. I was 35+ back then. French was my second foreign language after English.
I actually like speaking French (which is now far not as good as it used to be) when possible. Learning French and the French culture has definitely changed my perception of the world. "Joie de vivre" is a beautiful concept that is sorely lacking in money- and work-obsessed North America (except Quebec).
Where do you find the words to add to your deck? I add words discovered in lessons - which are great for a proper context - but using words from internet sources (the news, etc.) is time consuming and means I keep seeing words from a few narrow niches (politics, economics, slang) without any understanding of how they'll be interpreted.
> When my kids brought home notices telling me to check their hair for “poux” (pronounced “poo”), I correctly deduced that it meant lice. But later, in a first-aid course, I was perplexed when the instructor told us to immediately check an unconscious person for “poux.” He was telling us to check for “pouls” — a pulse, pronounced identically.
There are homophones in many (most? all?) languages; but in this case "poux" are almost always plural (les poux / des poux) whereas a pulse is always singular (le pouls).
"Check his pulse" would be said as "vérifiez son pouls" and "check if he's got lice", "vérifiez s'il a des poux": it seems hard or impossible for the author to mix them up.
"Check his pulse" would be said as "vérifiez son pouls"
and "check if he's got lice", "vérifiez s'il a des
poux": it seems hard or impossible for the author to
mix them up.
As someone who learned German as an adult (which also has lots of homophones + gendered nouns etc) I assure you it's not hard to make such mistakes.
It's not hard to them to make this mistake: "le", "la", "les" is all "the" for english natives, while verbs and adjective don't change according to plural or gender.
A lot of my mistakes in spanish comes from me trying to call masculine something that is not and vice versa.
French is a difficult language to learn:
- many letters are useless relics from the past, twisted, accentuated or silent.
- conjugations, plural, gender requires a lot of memory.
- rich and complex system to explain the chain of though or events. It's powerful to use, but it's surely hard to learn, and even harder to master.
- we like have a name for everything. Unless you know your latin, guessing meaning is not natural.
- verbose. If you a used to go to the point, well...
- similar sounds can be made by so many different combinations: au(x), eaux, ot(s), o(s), ô, oh... And we don't even agree on how to say it, rose is not said the same way in Paris, Toulouse or Nice.
- way less fun easy original french video content than in english (spanish is terrible in the same way). Not saying we have nothing, I like to advice "un gars, une fille" for french noobs, it's easy to get, and light. But learning english on Netflix is a treat.
You're being harsh for pouls/poux being singular/plural, provided it was the first time the author had encountered those words. That kind of knowledge comes with experience with the words, which the author didn't have.
A good way to get an idea of how your language sounds to a foreigner is to throw away every other word. Literally. Then randomly mix close sounds (depending on your accent it can be buck/bark or buck/book).
Was it "a symmetrical" or "asymmetrical"? Was it "inward" or an "n-word"? Was it "not able to" or "vagina"?
I started learning french at 50 to be an example to my teenage son, encouraging him to learn a second language rather than playing fortnite. It is harder when you are not in french speaking area/country. Everything around us is english. I listen ici.radio-canada during commute and after 6 month in, I can understand 60-70%. But if I would be in Quebec listening french all day, I think learning would be much faster even at middle age.
One thing that's really helped me learn languages is watching tv shows or movies with native subtitles. I had this revelation years ago in Spanish class. At the time, I had taken years of Spanish in school and yet I could barely speak or understand Spanish.
One day, our teacher made us watch Pan's Labyrinth with Spanish subtitles. It was such a struggle to watch, but because the movie is so good we paid attention anyway, and context clues help you along the way.
I vividly remember the next morning on the subway to school, where there were two men speaking Spanish and I suddenly realized I could understand everything they were saying. It totally blew my mind that I could finally understand Spanish!
I used this same technique years later when I lived in Italy for a summer. It was a lot of work, but I did the following:
1) Learned enough basic Italian grammar that I could translate a sentence by looking up words & conjugation rules
2) I watched Italian movies, both good and "blockbuster" ones, with English subtitles so I could understand the movie
3) Then, I re-watched the movies with Italian subtitles. If I saw/heard a sentence I couldn't immediately understand, I'd pause and hand translate it
Even though Spanish & Italian are quite similar, this was still surprisingly effective. I also enjoy watching movies, so it was also quite fun =)
There's probably some science as to why this technique works, but I don't know. It's probably because watching tv/movies is most similar to real-life conversations, as opposed to what you get in a classroom or a book. I never knew how to write an essay in Italian, but I also never cared.
I despised French a bit (my own native tongue), as I grew up with a little fondness for English, and spent most of my time speaking English (probably Engrish at times). Then I got.. say bored of casual (tech/web) English, and started to feel happy again with French, even accounting for all its odd rules and twists and everything. I felt it was a lovely bag of varied multitudes and shades that were very good for painting pictures with higher levels of colors and not being strictly informative or factual. I guess it's a question of desire and maturity .. at times you want easy and predictable, and maybe later you want to play a little more with words. And this might not be a French-only case, I'm just giving my 2 centimes ;)
I relate to that. As a Portuguese, I had both English and French in school. As a teen nerd learning Basic on the ZX Spectrum, English was much useful than weird french. I now regret not paying much attention to those classes.
Learning a language at any age is hard. It's just harder to fit in thousands of hours of deliberate practice in your thirties than in your teens. As the author correctly notes one needs to know tens of thousands of words to have a reasonable chance of getting through a text without encountering an unknown word. To get to that number a spaced repetition system is much more useful than sticky notes, but it doesn't help much with the time needed for practice.
People forget how much time they spent learning something when they were younger. I feel like a lot of adults give up and use age as an excuse for not trying new things.
>Learning a language at any age is hard. It's just harder to fit in thousands of hours of deliberate practice in your thirties than in your teens.
Depends on the person and their budget. There are well off people (and quite poor people) with all the time in their hands to practice, because they hardly need to work. Doesn't need to be a billionaire, having a few houses to rent can be enough.
one of these days i am going to write tmux macro that updates the bottom pane with vocabulary. there will be a cli command that corresponds with it, once i write in the definition, it will cycle to the next word instantly.
I agree. Ms Druckerman needs to read a lot more books. She should make a point of reading the classics of French literature starting with something simple like "Le Petit Prince", then Maupassant and slowly work her way up to "Les Miserables" which will take years, but she has the rest of her life to do this. Even if she does not absorb everything, she should press on. She should do this reading plan on a e-reader. I've been glancing at the comments here and no one mentions the fact that e-readers are a great way to learn a language. Why? Because getting the definition of a word by touching it is way easier than old-fashion dictionaries. She should also highlight the word she does not know and when she is done with the book email herself the highlights which e-readers allow you to do. In this manner she will build up her own personal vocabulary list. This plan will require some discipline, but it's what you have to do if you want to be more fluent. Technology makes it easier than it used to be thanks to e-readers and online dictionaries.
It's not like it's actually possible to comfortably read french books when you learn the language, with their specific grammatical tenses only used in literature. I speak French fluently and at home but I'd be incapable to read a complicated book in that language (while I'm absolutely able to read English books and do that all the time, and speak English way less often).
I've found that, learning vocabulary was easier when I was younger, but I struggled with grammar. Now that I'm a lot older, it's harder for me to hold on to vocabulary but I pick up the grammar stuff much quicker.
This article would have been much more convincing if the author had done some testing of their actual level in French rather than just talking about how insecure they feel.
It's possible the author's language is poor, it's also possible it's very good but they see "great" as normal and so discount what they know due to imposter syndrome.
I've heard a lot of people apologise for their English after speaking flawlessly.
That's roughly what it argues further on in the article.
Dr. Hartshorne also points out that native speakers have exceptional precision. Even someone with 99 percent grammatical accuracy sounds foreign. He guesses that I have about 90 percent accuracy, which shouldn’t feel like failure. “Imagine if you decided you were going to pick up golf in your 30s, and you got to the point where you could keep up in a game with professional players. You’d think that’s actually really good. But for some reason, just being able to keep up in language feels not as impressive.”
If you ever watch little kids learning a language, you'll notice that they just try. They butcher it, they don't care. But at least they're trying and practicing the whole language generation pathways in the brain.
Meanwhile adults are often too anxious to even try no matter how proficient they might be. I myself went years without even trying to talk to anyone in Spanish despite living in Mexico. Watching children trying to learn a language was inspiring to me.
1) it's really, really hard to effectively drill vocab out of context because the gender of nouns affects everything around them, the indefinite form conceals gender (via contraction) in too many cases to be of much use, while the definite is awkward and still doesn't really drill modifying words around it anyway. To do it right you've really gotta come up with a few short model sentences or phrases involving adjectives, which is a giant pain in the ass.
2) It's bizarrely hard to get ahold of French media online, outside the EU. I just want to stream Le Juste Prix, damnit! Makes one envy Japanese learners. The language may, in some ways, be a lot harder, but there's so much media readily available and there are so many tools for it.
Courses, instructors, etc all fall short because ultimately mastery requires deep and prolonged immersion which the author and many people post-middle age never commit to. Her kids live in France yet she talks in English at home, doesn't watch TV/movies in French, and doesn't read much in French (inferred from one of her comments) - all her choices and all sufficiently big deal to 100% explain her lack of mastery.
I'm far from convinced based on anything in this article that learning languages is actually harder for middle aged people at all vs kids. Consider typical 2nd language education in the US: 1hr/day for 4 years during highschool - those 14-18yr olds speak terribly also and the reason has nothing to do with age.
Read the article to find out why, came out disappointed.
Yes, the French has many specific, unoften used words; but so does any other language. Some words sound similar or the same but that is not exceptional either.
I learned Vietnamese in my mid 40s. I think it’s just a matter of persistence and patience. As adults we’re less willing to be novices for an extended period of time.
Key answer: "And though I live in France, I’m not immersed enough. I use French for work, but I speak lots of English too, including with my kids and husband. I don’t have an “école horizontale” — a romantic partner with whom I speak only French."
I've lived abroad in multiple countries and have met a lot of people trying to learn the language. Without fail, you absolutely have to have either a full-time job in the language, or be romantically involved with someone in the language (without falling back to English) and spend a ton of time with them. That's simply the only way you'll get enough hours of exposure in.
Also you can learn English fluently without living in an English-speaking country, but only by spending basically all your free time watching English TV/films and listening to music. Not just every so often, but you make consuming English content your life.
If you're American living abroad but are married to another American and your job is mostly in English, it doesn't matter that you live in the country -- I've never seen anyone in that situation master the language. It just doesn't give you the necessary thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of exposure, and because it's low-level exposure, you also quickly reach the point where you're forgetting as many words as you're learning, so it's not even cumulative -- you just reach a plateau. There's even an academic name for it, just Google "intermediate language plateau".
I moved, in my 30's, to a non-English-speaking country. I tried Babble and DuoLingo. Babble was crap, and DuoLingo was alright at slowly expanding my vocab, but the sentences were idiotic. One example was "The horse is touching me" which I found particularly useless. I also tried private lessons, but the cost was high and required more effort than I had time for.
Rosetta Stone has, so far, been the best, precisely because it relies on immersion.
The downside is that I think the situations are traveler centric, and overly simplistic.
To my mind, the best way I've improved is by memorizing "scripts" of common interactions. For example, ordering coffee, or memorizing answers to the common questions people ask me about myself.
I've never said "The boy jumps over the water," in any language, but I have said, "I'd like a double espresso with hot water on the side, no milk or sugar" or "I'll be at home at 2 pm" many times. As I add scripts, my vocab improves.
Most fluent immigrants I've spoken to say that watching a ton of TV in the language was a massive help.
I've found that one of the the reasons why learning a second language at middle age is less effective, is because we already have a language we can express ourselves in with great mastery.
For children and teenagers, learning the intricacies and irregularities of a language is simply the only way they can learn to describe and apprehend the world --- and themselves in new ways and ideas, and not get shamed for saying something weird. Their quality of life is very highly correlated with how well they learn a language, whereas the same cannot be said for those who have already mastered one, or those who live in an environment that does not actively use a language they are learning (hence why learning French in school helps you so little, and why so few Japanese speakers are confident in their English).
Barring immersion, one way to force yourself to learn another language more effectively is to spend some time muting yourself in the languages you already know and allow yourself only to express your thoughts in the language you are learning.
[+] [-] blacksqr|7 years ago|reply
Apps like Duolingo and Babel are nice, but they seem to me more oriented toward making the user feel good about making progress then about achieving mastery in any useful time frame.
Flashcard tools like Anki and Tinycards are nice, but they lack enough readily available content to be really useful. Anyone with the expertise and perspective to use these tools in a practical time frame to assemble a deck of the many thousands of words necessary to achieve mastery doesn't need the tools.
It should be possible, using relatively simple tools, for a person to immerse oneself virtually in language learning materials. It should be simple to choose a rate of exposure to material from trickle to firehose. It should be possible to see an estimate of time remaining to achieve functional fluency at the current rate of progress, no different from the progress bar you see when downloading files.
Instead, each individual is forced to cadge together learning materials, of varying quality, in dribs and drabs; and guess at ones progress.
There are plenty of full-time University foreign language teaching staff around the world, they should be able to collaborate in production of content for online learning tools.
Yet neither the sophistication nor the efficiency of foreign language learning seems to have improved much in my lifetime.
[+] [-] hluska|7 years ago|reply
I have noticed two things. The first is that when I was a kid, I didn’t care who I spoke French to, how loud I was, or how many words I mangled. It was like a cool code for me. As an adult, I’m damned near petrified to speak the language. This is unlike me. I’ll gladly spend a week cold calling potential clients, but if I hear people speaking French, I often cannot bring myself to introduce myself or ask how they are. I’ll ask a stranger for money in English, but I’ll be damned if I ask a stranger to pass the cream in French.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that it’s a lot harder to learn how to pronounce things. Some sounds seem to be engrained from years of speaking when I was young. Other words, crap.
Consider the word “de rien”. It is so simple. Three syllables. Yet, I could walk into any French speaking country in the world and get a long term disability pension just by saying it. Last week, I even found a French couple to help me and I’ve been doing lots of drills, but when I record it and play it back, I sound quite soft in the head.
Who would have thought that a phrase that translates to ‘it’s nothing’ would be such a big problem for me?? :)
[+] [-] fatnoah|7 years ago|reply
One summer between junior and senior years, I took a road trip to Montreal and tried out my French. I was thoroughly embarrassed and lived the OPs nightmare. The residents I spoke with seemed actively offended by my French and would smile condescendingly and speak to me in English.
During senior year, I was able to spend a week in France. It was a totally different experience. I spoke nothing but French for the week and was able to feed and otherwise care for myself. The locals seemed to genuinely appreciate my efforts to speak the language. The capstone was later in the week when a 2am knock on my door woke me up. A younger member of our group was having serious homesickness and wanted to call home, but couldn't figure out how to make the call. I went to the lobby with her to ask the desk clerk how to make the call. I ended up having a great conversation with the desk clerk who was only a few years older than me and was in Paris for university. We chatted for about 30 minutes about life, things we liked, cool things to see in Paris, etc. It was awesome!
For OP, give it a shot. The only way to get better is to do it!
[+] [-] bambax|7 years ago|reply
Have a drink or two. Really. I've noticed I'm much better in a foreign language when I'm mildly drunk (or at least I think I am, which helps get past the self-awareness block).
[+] [-] intertextuality|7 years ago|reply
> but when I record it and play it back, I sound quite soft in the head
> Who would have thought that a phrase ... would be such a big problem for me?? :)
If this is how you envision yourself with speaking French, then is it any wonder you might be stuck or have issues with certain phrases? Good lord.
Learning how to talk like a native in another language is exceedingly difficult. It requires thousands of hours of practice, and by practice I mean actually physically speaking. Babies do this over and over and over and over again. We just gloss over it because, well, they're babies.
The only way to learn a language properly (as an adult) is to get over your fear and nervousness. When I hear obvious ESL people speaking English, my first thoughts are not of criticism. It's the exact same with people with other languages.
I have been learning Korean for almost 2 years now and my pronunciation is still not good in a lot of areas because I haven't practiced them enough, or well enough yet. That's just a part of the learning process. I'm understood most of the time, and the rest I just note down as things to work on.
Of course it sucks to hear myself compared to a native or make a mispronunciation so bad I'm not understood. But this is part of the process. If I -didn't- make mistakes I wouldn't be a learner of Korean, no?
> but if I hear people speaking French, I often cannot bring myself to introduce myself or ask how they are.
If you can't overcome this, you will never learn French. As long as you're afraid of making mistakes, you will never learn French. If you don't actually speak the language, you will never learn French... You don't learn a language only in classroom environments or with very patient friends. You learn it by speaking as much as you can, whenever you can, and making as many mistakes as you possibly can.
Even if you don't know how to say one exact thing in particular, circumlocution is your friend. Or rewording it in another way.
[+] [-] theflyinghorse|7 years ago|reply
Pro tip from an immigrant who spent decade and a half trying to get good at English pronunciation - You need to practice in front of he mirror with a recorder and youtube nearby. Find a clip of french person saying a word or a sentence you're having trouble with and mimic them in front of the mirror. Again and again, try to see what muscle engaging on their face and do the same, think of what your tongue is doing. Remember you are building muscle memory and your tongue has literally never been in some of those shapes so you need to work it.
Pro tip two - find a pronunciation workshop or do a couple of sessions with a professional. Sounding like a native speaker is an incredible undertaking, but you'd probably be satisfied with being 75% there frankly.
[+] [-] eequah9L|7 years ago|reply
I had this with English. Then with Russian. Now I have it with German. It goes away with practice.
Languages are hard. Keep it up, it will get better.
[+] [-] 19690401|7 years ago|reply
Not that it changes your point, but "de rien" is two syllables!
[+] [-] atemerev|7 years ago|reply
If I speak bad English (I am Russian), everybody is still happy, the worst thing can happen is I’ll get corrected, and in 99.9% of cases it’s not even that.
If I speak bad French with a French person... may God have mercy upon my soul. Especially if I forgot to say bonjour/bonsoir first (abomination! burn the heretic!)
[+] [-] imtringued|7 years ago|reply
Even if you only consider the time you spent in school merely learning your own native language those school lessons will add up to thousands of hours.
How many adults, who have already "learned" a foreign language, dedicate 6 hours per week purely on further improving their skills in that language for 12 years?
If you are worried about not knowing certain rare words then using a spaced repetition system with a word deck that contains the first 20000 or even 40000 words should help a lot. You will quickly rush through the words you already know. I can do 50 reviews in less than two minutes if I have memorized the words but 50 unknown words will take me at least 20 minutes. At a rate of 30 new words per day you can do 10000 words per year + half a year at the end to make sure every card reaches maturity.
[+] [-] SomeHacker44|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jasode|7 years ago|reply
I'm not sure if you're making a personal observation that's unrelated to the specific findings in the research paper. That's fine but it may inadvertently make people think that's what the paper concludes.
The particular paper[0] says that when testing for grammar accuracy in a 2nd language, the years of experience is not as predictive as age of of first exposure. The same dropoff of learning grammar happens to immersion as well as non-immersion older learners.
The authors don't claim to know why that happens but nevertheless noticed the patterns.
[0] found a full pdf in amazon s3: https://s3.amazonaws.com/l3atbc-public/pub_pdfs/JK_Hartshorn...
[+] [-] tambre|7 years ago|reply
I've found the changing Windows logon screens quite nice, since every other day or so there's a new beautiful picture along with a few bubbles of text in German, enabling me to learn a few new words (though I'll probably forget most of them).
[+] [-] dgudkov|7 years ago|reply
I actually like speaking French (which is now far not as good as it used to be) when possible. Learning French and the French culture has definitely changed my perception of the world. "Joie de vivre" is a beautiful concept that is sorely lacking in money- and work-obsessed North America (except Quebec).
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] rjsw|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kurtisc|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bambax|7 years ago|reply
It's not. It's "bouloche" -- https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/bouloche
> When my kids brought home notices telling me to check their hair for “poux” (pronounced “poo”), I correctly deduced that it meant lice. But later, in a first-aid course, I was perplexed when the instructor told us to immediately check an unconscious person for “poux.” He was telling us to check for “pouls” — a pulse, pronounced identically.
There are homophones in many (most? all?) languages; but in this case "poux" are almost always plural (les poux / des poux) whereas a pulse is always singular (le pouls).
"Check his pulse" would be said as "vérifiez son pouls" and "check if he's got lice", "vérifiez s'il a des poux": it seems hard or impossible for the author to mix them up.
[+] [-] ido|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sametmax|7 years ago|reply
A lot of my mistakes in spanish comes from me trying to call masculine something that is not and vice versa.
French is a difficult language to learn:
- many letters are useless relics from the past, twisted, accentuated or silent.
- conjugations, plural, gender requires a lot of memory.
- rich and complex system to explain the chain of though or events. It's powerful to use, but it's surely hard to learn, and even harder to master.
- we like have a name for everything. Unless you know your latin, guessing meaning is not natural.
- verbose. If you a used to go to the point, well...
- similar sounds can be made by so many different combinations: au(x), eaux, ot(s), o(s), ô, oh... And we don't even agree on how to say it, rose is not said the same way in Paris, Toulouse or Nice.
- way less fun easy original french video content than in english (spanish is terrible in the same way). Not saying we have nothing, I like to advice "un gars, une fille" for french noobs, it's easy to get, and light. But learning english on Netflix is a treat.
[+] [-] baud147258|7 years ago|reply
I'm French and I discovered that word today.
[+] [-] pygy_|7 years ago|reply
Bouloche has been corrected.
[+] [-] AlexTWithBeard|7 years ago|reply
Was it "a symmetrical" or "asymmetrical"? Was it "inward" or an "n-word"? Was it "not able to" or "vagina"?
Lots of fun!
[+] [-] cm2187|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NotPaidToPost|7 years ago|reply
This is as contrived as the example of the article's author.
[+] [-] ekianjo|7 years ago|reply
That says a lot about the quality of peer review at the NYT.
[+] [-] oogway8020|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shay_ker|7 years ago|reply
One day, our teacher made us watch Pan's Labyrinth with Spanish subtitles. It was such a struggle to watch, but because the movie is so good we paid attention anyway, and context clues help you along the way.
I vividly remember the next morning on the subway to school, where there were two men speaking Spanish and I suddenly realized I could understand everything they were saying. It totally blew my mind that I could finally understand Spanish!
I used this same technique years later when I lived in Italy for a summer. It was a lot of work, but I did the following:
1) Learned enough basic Italian grammar that I could translate a sentence by looking up words & conjugation rules 2) I watched Italian movies, both good and "blockbuster" ones, with English subtitles so I could understand the movie 3) Then, I re-watched the movies with Italian subtitles. If I saw/heard a sentence I couldn't immediately understand, I'd pause and hand translate it
Even though Spanish & Italian are quite similar, this was still surprisingly effective. I also enjoy watching movies, so it was also quite fun =)
There's probably some science as to why this technique works, but I don't know. It's probably because watching tv/movies is most similar to real-life conversations, as opposed to what you get in a classroom or a book. I never knew how to write an essay in Italian, but I also never cared.
[+] [-] agumonkey|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pcardoso|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adrianN|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fabricexpert|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|7 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] coldtea|7 years ago|reply
Depends on the person and their budget. There are well off people (and quite poor people) with all the time in their hands to practice, because they hardly need to work. Doesn't need to be a billionaire, having a few houses to rent can be enough.
[+] [-] digitalsushi|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arkh|7 years ago|reply
Not reading books will limit your vocabulary. If you read when required, you don't read.
[+] [-] julienchastang|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] onli|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mseidl|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drchewbacca|7 years ago|reply
It's possible the author's language is poor, it's also possible it's very good but they see "great" as normal and so discount what they know due to imposter syndrome.
I've heard a lot of people apologise for their English after speaking flawlessly.
[+] [-] mattmanser|7 years ago|reply
Dr. Hartshorne also points out that native speakers have exceptional precision. Even someone with 99 percent grammatical accuracy sounds foreign. He guesses that I have about 90 percent accuracy, which shouldn’t feel like failure. “Imagine if you decided you were going to pick up golf in your 30s, and you got to the point where you could keep up in a game with professional players. You’d think that’s actually really good. But for some reason, just being able to keep up in language feels not as impressive.”
[+] [-] hombre_fatal|7 years ago|reply
Meanwhile adults are often too anxious to even try no matter how proficient they might be. I myself went years without even trying to talk to anyone in Spanish despite living in Mexico. Watching children trying to learn a language was inspiring to me.
[+] [-] asark|7 years ago|reply
2) It's bizarrely hard to get ahold of French media online, outside the EU. I just want to stream Le Juste Prix, damnit! Makes one envy Japanese learners. The language may, in some ways, be a lot harder, but there's so much media readily available and there are so many tools for it.
[+] [-] eagsalazar2|7 years ago|reply
I'm far from convinced based on anything in this article that learning languages is actually harder for middle aged people at all vs kids. Consider typical 2nd language education in the US: 1hr/day for 4 years during highschool - those 14-18yr olds speak terribly also and the reason has nothing to do with age.
[+] [-] yoz-y|7 years ago|reply
Yes, the French has many specific, unoften used words; but so does any other language. Some words sound similar or the same but that is not exceptional either.
[+] [-] cageface|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crazygringo|7 years ago|reply
I've lived abroad in multiple countries and have met a lot of people trying to learn the language. Without fail, you absolutely have to have either a full-time job in the language, or be romantically involved with someone in the language (without falling back to English) and spend a ton of time with them. That's simply the only way you'll get enough hours of exposure in.
Also you can learn English fluently without living in an English-speaking country, but only by spending basically all your free time watching English TV/films and listening to music. Not just every so often, but you make consuming English content your life.
If you're American living abroad but are married to another American and your job is mostly in English, it doesn't matter that you live in the country -- I've never seen anyone in that situation master the language. It just doesn't give you the necessary thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of exposure, and because it's low-level exposure, you also quickly reach the point where you're forgetting as many words as you're learning, so it's not even cumulative -- you just reach a plateau. There's even an academic name for it, just Google "intermediate language plateau".
[+] [-] tutfbhuf|7 years ago|reply
would also be an interesting article
[+] [-] deanalevitt|7 years ago|reply
Rosetta Stone has, so far, been the best, precisely because it relies on immersion.
The downside is that I think the situations are traveler centric, and overly simplistic.
To my mind, the best way I've improved is by memorizing "scripts" of common interactions. For example, ordering coffee, or memorizing answers to the common questions people ask me about myself.
I've never said "The boy jumps over the water," in any language, but I have said, "I'd like a double espresso with hot water on the side, no milk or sugar" or "I'll be at home at 2 pm" many times. As I add scripts, my vocab improves.
Most fluent immigrants I've spoken to say that watching a ton of TV in the language was a massive help.
[+] [-] jhanschoo|7 years ago|reply
For children and teenagers, learning the intricacies and irregularities of a language is simply the only way they can learn to describe and apprehend the world --- and themselves in new ways and ideas, and not get shamed for saying something weird. Their quality of life is very highly correlated with how well they learn a language, whereas the same cannot be said for those who have already mastered one, or those who live in an environment that does not actively use a language they are learning (hence why learning French in school helps you so little, and why so few Japanese speakers are confident in their English).
Barring immersion, one way to force yourself to learn another language more effectively is to spend some time muting yourself in the languages you already know and allow yourself only to express your thoughts in the language you are learning.