
Best ways to learn a foreign language - domedefelice
http://domenicodefelice.blogspot.it/2013/06/best-ways-to-learn-foreign-language.html
======
patio11
Professional translators often do "shadowing", which is listening to source
material from the language you're weaker at and attempting to just transcribe
it in real time. You can start with source material which is easy, such as
dialog on TV shows, and move to source material which is hard, such as news
broadcasts. (Newscasters speak much much quicker than characters in fiction
and employ large and often unpredictable vocabularies, whereas most popular
culture is dominated by the ~200 words at the head of the zipf distribution
for that language.)

It's totally free and, when you're at intermediate proficiency, both
stupendously effective and the most maddening exercise you'll ever do. (What
happens when you're thrown off the deep end into a newscast about nuclear
power plant issues and you're deeply out of your depth with regards to the
required vocabulary? You try your best, jot down the five words every 3
sentences you actually catch, and then break out a dictionary later to figure
out why _houshasen_ and _shiyouzuminenryoupuuru_ seem to be so key to the
topic.)

("Radiation" and "pool (for storage of) used (nuclear) fuel", respectively.
And there, now you understand 5% more of that conversation.)

~~~
jacques_chester
A small thing I've noticed about seeing news from France and Switzerland.

Swiss newsreaders seem to speak more slowly. I don't know if it's a peculiar
Swiss behaviour, but I wondered at the time if it was connected to the fact
that Switzerland has four official languages, some of them having overlapping
linguistic footprints.

To make a Swiss French broadcast accessible to Swiss Germans who have
rudimentary French, it would make sense for the presenters to speak more
slowly.

Meanwhile, over on France 2, the appallingly videogenic presenters of _Le 20
Heures_ drive a swishy gallic stereotype through the paper thin limits of my
understanding.

~~~
carlob
The French have this stereotype of the Swiss being slow-spoken (some go as far
as to claim they are slow-witted). So it's not just newscasters, but the
general public as well.

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xiaoma
Learning a language isn't just a process of learning words out of context
(with spaced repetition systems like Anki, or products that piggy back off of
it like Duolingo). I don't mean this in an unkind way, but I get the
impression the author hasn't ever learned a foreign language very well as an
adult.

Until I became an engineer recently, my entire career revolved around learning
and teaching foreign languages. I strongly recommend looking at what L2
acquisition linguists have learned before hitting bloggers for language
learning advice. One great resource is Dr Krashen's website. The video on the
front page does a great job of showing how context and comprehensibility
matter more than brute memorization algorithms: [http://www.sk.com.br/sk-
krash.html](http://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash.html)

And if you _must_ learn from a blog, pick a blog of someone who has learned a
lot of languages well (e.g. Steve Kaufmann) over one who talks of his
"learning hacks" but doesn't any videos of himself speaking a foreign language
in an unscripted setting. That's my 2 cents.

~~~
steveridout
I completely agree with this.

I've created the site Readlang ([http://readlang.com](http://readlang.com)) to
allow learning vocabulary _in context_ by reading uploaded content,
translating, and using SRS flashcards which include the original context.

It's in public beta and would love to get feedback if anyone tries it out.

~~~
nandemo
I checked out your site about the time it was announced on Reddit. I really
like the idea although I noticed some problems using it for my target
languages (Spanish and Hebrew). For inflected languages like these, you really
need a good stemmer/lemmatiser (either one, I'm not an expert, but you get the
idea). I haven't tried Readlang recently though, when I do I'll be happy to
give you more feedback.

~~~
steveridout
Thanks, yes I'm relying on Google Tranlsate at the moment, but eventually I'd
like it to recognize word families and verb conjugations. I use it for Spanish
and regularly edit the generated verb flashcards to indicate the correct
conjugation.

------
opminion
There is plenty of anecdotal evidence of what works for some individuals.

However, pointing out the common problems, shared by everybody, is also
informative. Here are some:

* The factors in learning a new language are age (adolescence is a threshold), innate skill, motivation (and guilt), effort and similarity of the languages.

* Sounds are not listener-independent: your Chinese friend does not hear the same sounds as you do, so don't expect that they know which sounds you are correcting in their English when you repeat the word for the tenth time. Same the other way around. I have seen this leading again, again and again to absurd "are you deaf?" situations between otherwise attentive friends and teachers.

* It might be helpful to discuss metalanguage: direct objects, word order, verb transitivity, nouns vs verbs, parsing, etc. This is something you learn in school in France, Spain, Germany, some Arab countries, etc, and if you studied Latin. But if you went through a standard English-speaking school system you might want to catch up with that.

~~~
rtpg
>don't expect that they know which sounds you are correcting in their English
when you repeat the word for the tenth time.

This phenomenon is probably the most interesting thing I've found out in my
life. The fact that some people simply cannot hear certain sounds goes against
everything we would like to think.

When people talk about varying tone inside words (such as in Chinese or Thai),
while I obviously hear that something is happening, I cannot for the life of
me reproduce what I hear or even retain the tonal information. For me , tone
is a separate aspect to vocabulary and I can't assimilate the two.

Inversely, seeing the plight of poor Japanese people, who get taught English
from an early age through the limited japanese syllable system (not sure the
exact name), unable to repeat words properly, and sometimes going completely
off the mark.

This just accents the need for everyone to be exposed to as many languages as
possible as a child.

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snoonan
I would disagree with much of this article. While Duolingo in particular is
popular, its main focus is on teaching translation. It's hip, but it's not
about teaching how to speak and understand a language. Similarly, the focus on
vocabulary study in the other tools has similar limitations.

Self study needs to be augmented or driven by spoken conversation practice in
the least. Your brain is a neural network to learn language as audio input.
While challenging, it's the most effective way. Google doesn't support this
due to the link popularity of a lot of software-driven methods.

Disclaimer: My business in the online language learning space.

------
3oheme
+1 to watching TV with subtitles, and even better repeating out loud the
sentences you find more interesting. That way y * It will be easier to
remember and * You will improve your pronunciation

~~~
dpapathanasiou
I have a language learning site[1] which started out as text translation, but
I'm also experimenting with videos, the idea being it's helpful to see
captions in both languages simultaneously as the video plays.

Examples here[2], here[3], and here[4].

[1] [http://www.macaronics.com/](http://www.macaronics.com/)

[2]
[http://www.macaronics.com/article/6e9812608f0b4dcdba8cfab3e6...](http://www.macaronics.com/article/6e9812608f0b4dcdba8cfab3e6fe6730/?lang=en)

[3]
[http://www.macaronics.com/article/9540f24d080241dd9b27f7939c...](http://www.macaronics.com/article/9540f24d080241dd9b27f7939c7a0772/?lang=en)

[4]
[http://www.macaronics.com/article/a6ab2c3d8c364ad38401d6dba3...](http://www.macaronics.com/article/a6ab2c3d8c364ad38401d6dba3190804/?lang=ja)

------
the1
you need a repetitive stream of natural language. then brain automatically
analyzes it.

usually, you pick one 30 minute to 60 minute video, and watch it every day, 6
days a week. make sure you take a break every week. you watch it to the point
where you can mimic what they are saying as the video is playing. you don't
have to know exact meaning of your utterance. but you already have some sense.
then, you transcribe it on paper (you need to learn writing system by this
time). maybe use dictionary to learn actual words. rehearse with the video. if
have friends, rehearse with them. memorize it. move on to the next video.

start with sitcoms then maybe news broadcast, reality shows (court shows are
great), movies...

video is just one example. if you're learning a language where you can't find
suitable videos (there might be no production in the language), make friends
who speak the language. record their conversations. play repetitively until
you can follow along with a loud voice. transcribe.. etc.

------
laichzeit0
Didn't see any references for us Classicists so I'll add my two cents:

I'm still struggling with classical Latin after 8 years. The problem being
that it's a "dead" language and immersion/conversation is difficult to achieve
on a modern era time schedule.

Over this time I've come to the conclusion that you need to start "speaking"
in any language as soon as possible. The approach of learning grammar for a
year and translating sentences on pen-and-paper is not effective enough.

My current toolbox for learning Latin is:

1\. Supermemo (Anki is a free equivalent) for vocabulary and anything that
needs to be committed to memory permanently. This takes away the burden of
worrying about anything that needs to be remembered.

2\. Follow Evan der Millner's "Comenius" Latin project, which attempts to
teach you Latin the way school children were taught back when they were
expected to speak, read and write it fluently. This is a reconstruction of the
way Comenius would have taught children. [1] project overview, [2] reading of
the texts. [3] Oral lessons, so you can start Skyping other Latin speakers and
talking as soon as possible. (this is not "church" or Italian pronunciation,
but the received Classical reconstructed pronunciation). Everything you need
is available for free off the either Google books, Evan's YouTube videos and
archive.org.

3\. Know and use Diogenes
([http://www.dur.ac.uk/p.j.heslin/Software/Diogenes/](http://www.dur.ac.uk/p.j.heslin/Software/Diogenes/))
for Windows or Linux.

4\. Install the "Language Immersion for Chrome" extension and set it to Latin
so you're forced to read the Internet in Latin as you browse ;)

[1] [http://latinum.weebly.com/comenius-
project.html](http://latinum.weebly.com/comenius-project.html) [2]
[http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMH5SfME31ZKYChsIWSp_D...](http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLMH5SfME31ZKYChsIWSp_DkEb2k6jPBka)
[3]
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0NIMm2eM8c&list=SPC6E7F1C5D4...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0NIMm2eM8c&list=SPC6E7F1C5D4F96ACC)

I'm attempting Attic Greek this way (Evans has started an Oral ancient Greek
course on YouTube too) and can't wait to enjoy reading Plato, the Iliad and
the Odyssey aloud in the reconstructed native tongue in my old age some day :)

~~~
maw
I have downloaded and tried to play with Diogenes several times. I can never
seem to get it to do anything. As best as I can tell, you need to provide it
with data sets as well. Do you know where you can get these?

~~~
laichzeit0
You don't need the data sets unless you're interested in exploring the Greek
or Latin texts. On it's own it's useful for entering dictionary words in their
declined/conjugated forms and it finding the correct entry(ies) in the
dictionary.

For the data sets: In all honesty, just torrent it. What you're looking for is
TLG /PHI/ Cd-rom_E, which is the Thesaurus Linguae Gracae and the Latin texts.

~~~
maw
Wow, you're right. It does come with some data out of the box after all. Its
UI isn't all that it could be, though.

------
ExpiredLink
> _One of the best ways to improve your expressing skills is to talk with
> natives._

Go to the foreign country and don't speak one sentence in your native
language. Jump in at the deep end (BTW, I had to look up that phrase because I
never lived in an English-speaking county).

------
leke
Having a general interest in languages, I've tried many things to improve my
language learning. The thing I was probably most impressed with though is the
Michael Thomas method.

------
tokenadult
The submitted article had some interesting tips, and several of the previous
comments are quite good too. I've been developing a FAQ on language learning
as this interest is mentioned on Hacker News from time to time. As I learned
Mandarin Chinese up to the level that I was able to support my family for
several years as a Chinese-English translator and interpreter, I had to tackle
several problems for which there is not yet a one-stop-shopping software
solution. For ANY pair of languages, even closely cognate pairs of West
Germanic languages like English and Dutch, or Wu Chinese dialects like those
of Shanghai and Suzhou, the two languages differ in sound system, so that what
is a phoneme in one language is not a phoneme in the other language.

[http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Wha...](http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhoneme.htm)

But a speaker of one language who is past the age of puberty will simply not
perceive many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the target language
(the language to be learned) without very careful training, as disregard of
those distinctions below the level of conscious attention is part of having
the sound system of the speaker's native language fully in mind. Attention to
target language phonemes has to be developed through pains-taking practice.

[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032)

It is brutally hard for most people (after the age of puberty, and perhaps
especially for males) to learn to attend to sound distinctions that don't
exist in the learner's native language. That is especially hard when the sound
distinction signifies a grammatical distinction that also doesn't exist in the
learner's native language. For example, the distinction between "I speak" and
"he speaks" in English involves a consonant cluster at the end of a syllable,
and no such consonant clusters exist in the Mandarin sound system at all.
Worse than that, no such grammatical distinction as "first person singular"
and "third person singular" for inflecting verbs exists in Mandarin, so it is
remarkably difficult for Mandarin-speaking learners of English to learn to
distinguish "speaks" from "speak" and to say "he speaks Chinese" rather than *
"he speak Chinese" (not a grammatical phrase in spoken English).

Most software materials for learning foreign languages could be much improved
simply by including a complete chart of the sound system of the target
language (in the dialect form being taught in the software materials) with
explicit description of sounds in the terminology of articulatory phonetics

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics)

with full use of notation from the International Phonetic Alphabet.

[http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html](http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html)

Good language-learning materials always include a lot of focused drills on
sound distinctions (contrasting minimal pairs in the language) in the target
language, and no software program for language learning should be without
those. It is still an art of software writing to try to automate listening to
a learner's pronunciation for appropriate feedback on accuracy of
pronunciation. That is not an easy problem.

After phonology, another huge task for any language learner is acquiring
vocabulary, and this is the task that most language-learning materials are
most focused. But often the focus on vocabulary is not very thoughtful.

The classic software approach to helping vocabulary acquisition is essentially
to automate flipping flash cards. But flash cards have ALWAYS been overrated
for vocabulary acquisition. Words don't match one-to-one between languages,
not even between closely cognate languages. The map is not the territory, and
every language on earth divides the world of lived experience into a different
set of words, with different boundaries between words of similar meaning.

The royal road to learning vocabulary in a target language is massive exposure
to actual texts (dialogs, stories, songs, personal letters, articles, etc.)
written or spoken by native speakers of the language. I'll quote a master
language teacher here, the late John DeFrancis. A few years ago, I reread the
section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book
Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in
1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading
can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of
the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ"
(capitalization as in original). In other words, vocabulary can only be well
acquired in context (an argument he develops in detail with regard to Chinese
in the writing I have just cited) and the context must be a genuine context
produced by native speakers of the language.

I have been giving free advice on language learning since the 1990s on my
personal website,

[http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html](http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html)

and the one advice I can give every language learner reading this thread is to
take advantage of radio broadcasting in your target language. Spoken-word
broadcasting (here I'm especially focusing on radio rather than on TV) gives
you an opportunity to listen and to hear words used in context. In the 1970s,
I used to have to use an expensive short-wave radio to pick up Chinese-
language radio programs in North America. Now we who have Internet access can
gain endless listening opportunities from Internet radio stations in dozens of
unlikely languages. Listen early and listen often while learning a language.
That will help with phonology (as above) and it will help crucially with
vocabulary.

The third big task of a language learner is learning grammar and syntax, which
is often woefully neglected in software language-learning materials. Every
language has hundreds of tacit grammar rules, many of which are not known
explicitly even to native speakers, but which reveal a language-learner as a
foreigner when the rules are broken. The foreign language-learner needs to
understand grammar not just to produce speech or writing that is less jarring
and foreign to native speakers, but also to better understand what native
speakers are speaking or writing. Any widely spoken modern language has thick
books reporting the grammatical rules of the language,

[http://www.amazon.com/Mandarin-Chinese-Functional-
Reference-...](http://www.amazon.com/Mandarin-Chinese-Functional-Reference-
Grammar/dp/0520066103/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar-
Grammars...](http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar-
Grammars/dp/0415150329/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-
Language...](http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-
Language/dp/0582517346/)

[http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-
Language/dp/...](http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-
Language/dp/0521431468/)

and it is well worth your while to study books like that both about your
native language(s) and about any language you are studying.

------
gordonguthrie
Getting an ear for a foreign language is quite difficult - getting to the
point where you can separate the words out (without necessarily knowing what
they are) so that you can learn them. I have quite good reading French (I can
read proper full-length books) pretty poor written French and bloody awful
spoken/hearing French. Listening to a lot of French pop music on Spotify
really helped me get an ear.

------
danielharan
Hack 0 should be to find a good motivator to learn the language. Only then do
tools matter.

I got bored learning Kanji. Had I known that 300 of those were enough to read
a food menu -- and what they were, I would have prioritized them and learned
them in a month. Instead, I stopped after thinking it would take too much time
to ever get to 2,000.

------
bigd
I'm quite happy with rosetta stone. do you have any particular reason not to
like it? (beside paying?)

~~~
domedefelice
Hi bigd. I've only tried the free demo of rosetta stone and it was too short
to make me form a useful opinion about it. Anyway I would prefer free
material.

------
Dewie
I find that using mnemonics is an efficient way of learning words. The only
problem is to find good mnemonics, which can be easy if the word sounds like
something you already know, and hard if it reminds you of nothing and the word
represents a very abstract concept.

Memorizing something like the top 1000 words used in everyday conversation,
with little grammar exercises sprinkled in, seems to be a good strategy. I've
only got to memorizing something like 500 words (give or take 150 words...) so
I haven't put this method quite to the test yet.

