

How to learn a new language in 90 days - oscardelben
http://www.freestylemind.com/how-to-learn-a-new-language-in-90-days

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quant18
The whole "once I land in a foreign country I'm going to stop speaking my
native language" advice is only applicable to people with very specific
personality types and life situations. To the rest of us, it's not
inspirational, it's demoralising to the extent that many people living abroad
simply never acquire any good command of their host society's language. You
can easily find American bankers in Shanghai who speak poor Chinese, or Korean
shopowners in Sydney who speak poor English, or whatever. And you can deride
them as lazy immigrants who refuse to assimilate, or arrogant expats who are
only there because they failed in New York, or whatever. Or you can try to
help them.

The best advice I ever heard for learning foreign languages is: treat your
brain the way it likes to be treated. This doesn't mean being lazy, but it
does mean not putting yourself in situations that go against your personality
type. And it means using learning methods that don't continually expose you to
a sense of failure you hate feeling. Because otherwise your brain will just
hate you later for putting it under stress, and take revenge by shutting down.

That means you give yourself the kind of intellectual, social, or physical
stimulation that you need to feel happy during the time that you _do_ devote
to your target language, and ignore the people who think you are "stupid" for
doing this. Read a book in your native language, talk with people in your
mother tongue, eat food from your homeland every day for breakfast, lunch, and
dinner. This is doubly important if you are learning your target language not
because you LOVE LANGUAGES (like 100% of people who write language learning
blogs) but because you need it for specific purposes.

And finally, if you are the kind of person who is very sensitive to
embarassment, then you do not have an "inhibition" to be "overcome", you have
an extremely good system for detecting when you are violating social norms ---
and knowing social norms is just as important as conjugations & vocabulary. No
one wants to communicate with a guy who is fluent in their language but rude
and uncouth by their cultural standards. Don't deliberately try to suppress
your embarassment just so you can get 10 minutes of horrid conversation
practise with the impatient cashier at your local supermarket while the line
builds up behind you.

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DrJokepu
One thing that is often gets unmentioned in "how-to-learn-x-in-y-days"
discussions (whether x is a programming language or a "human" language) is
that learning an (n+1)th language is a lot easier than learning your first (or
in the case of human languages second) language. Not just because you discover
patterns but also because you sharpen your methodologies - with human
languages you'll know which is the best way for you to get a vocabulary
(reading books? watching television? memorozing the dictionary?) etc., just
like with a computer language you'll know which approach works the best for
you (write a game? solve the problems on Euler Project? read the
specification? or a book? or a combination of these?).

Point is, if you know 10 programming languages well, you can definitely learn
your 11th programming language in 90 days. Just like if you speak English,
French, Spanish, Latin and German, you'll find learning Japanese a lot easier
even though it doesn't resemble these languages at all.

~~~
splat
This is very true, and I think it's one of the reasons that Esperanto works so
well as one's first second language. (I recall seeing one study where a group
of students who learned Esperanto for one year and then French for three years
ended up knowing French better than a group of students who studied French
exclusively for four years straight. Not conclusive by any means, but
suggestive.)

By eliminating the complicated grammatical idiosyncrasies of natural
languages, someone learning Esperanto can focus on learning how to learn a
foreign language. If you've never learned a second language before, it's easy
to memorize vocabulary and obscure grammatical rules, but it's extremely hard
to make the transition from reading prose word-by-word to reading it fluently.

~~~
hugh3
Does anyone in the world have Esperanto as their _first_ language?

~~~
tokenadult
There are a few children of dedicated Esperantists who have been brought up
with Esperanto as one of their native languages. They don't have a lot of
people to talk to, alas, whom they can't already speak to with whatever other
languages they know.

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Maro
AAAh I'm such a nerd.

I read the whole think before I realized it's about learning a new human
language, not programming language. I thought he's going to make some
ingenious connection to programming languages at some point.

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riffraff
"how to learn <programming language> in <short time> days", and "how to lose
<weight> in <short time>" are commonly considered dumb slogans.

Apparently, though, the intertubes are still very keen on "how to learn
<natural language> in <short time>". If someone has a good explanation or
theory I'd be really interested in learning it.

~~~
iheartmemcache
Peter Norvig on this topic: <http://norvig.com/21-days.html>

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GiraffeNecktie
In 90 days, you can certainly _memorize_ X number of useful words and phrases.
If you are actually living in an immersive environment (and you have a
reasonably outgoing personality) you'd probably become pretty fluent within
the small domain of that X number of words and phrases. But as for mastering a
language, there's no situation, tool or technique that will do more than get
you started on your journey within three months.

Having foreign words and phrases available in your memory is very different
than having those words on your tongue as part of your ingrained language.
It's a bit like the difference between off-line tape backup and RAM. Yes the
data is there somewhere and you can get to it eventually but you probably
can't pull it up fast enough to be useful.

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ecaradec
"How I Learned French in One Year" :
<http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/29/15258/287> is a very insighful
article on how to learn language without going to the country. Advices are not
specific to french. The best advice I retained is that commute time are your
friends when learning a language.

~~~
c00p3r
There are more self-praise than real stuff. To learn French to appropriate
level, that native speakers could understand you without a pain takes a whole
life, especially when started not so young.

It is just a cognitive stuff - it is very difficult to distinguish where the
one vowel ends and next one starts when you're listening to a native speaker
and almost impossible to articulate correctly such difficult and beautifully
sounded language if you started to learn after 25-30 years old.

~~~
ecaradec
I'm french, so I may miss in what way the language is difficult.

I agree, there is a lot to learn to speak a language correctly. I was very
average at english at school, but I improved by reading and recently listening
everyday. I'm not going to write novels, I'm interested at communicating with
others and as long as I can do that, I'm fine.

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majak
I didn't realise it wasn't about learning new computer language until the 4th
paragraph:-). But I think these points are also valid for learning new
computer language.

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c00p3r
It might be not so difficult to learn Spanish if you know French or English.

Try to learn some language from the different family (non Latin), like Hindi,
Nepali, Tibetan, or even Japanese at least in one year. =)

btw, to know a language doesn't mean that you've memorized some basic phrases
and most used words. I, for example, can read and translate on the fly to my
native language some scientific books on subjects with which I'm familiar, but
speaking and writing are extremely difficult to me. It is already an issue of
the age.

~~~
dragonquest
Not to nitpick, but I think you meant Hindi (the language) as opposed to Hindu
(the religion). :)

~~~
c00p3r
Thanks! =)

