

How to train your brain to flip to a new language - mise
http://www.bitesizeirishgaelic.com/blog/self-learning-non-widespread-languages/

======
hamletdrc2
I moved to a German speaking country about a year ago. I'm not brilliant at
languages, but I've made great progress and most people are surprised to find
out how little German I spoke a year ago. Here are some of my tips:

1) Use Mnemosyne every day. It is computerized flash cards based on the
SuperMemo algorithm. Do not skip days. At around 2000 words memorized (9
months) the 'switch flipped'. At 2000 words you can have conversations with
about anyone. Business is still hard, but smalltalk easy.

2) Read trashy literature - People, In Touch, Celebrity Rags... these are all
written so 10 years olds can read it. Newspapers use bigger words and don't
have pictures. Reading about celebrities is a hassle, but it helps and it an
appropriate level.

3) Got kids? Turn the Wii and Cartoons to the foreign language. This makes
your play time also a learning process.

4) _Do Not_ turn your computer to a foreign language. This will cripple your
productivity. I am forced to work in German on a Windows box now and it is
really awful and frustrating. Not recommended at all. Not one bit.

5) German Tuesday - Deutsche Dienstag - Every Tuesday was German Tuesday.
Anyone caught speaking English to me had to pay a Franc into a Jar. If I spoke
English then I paid. This make my German a fun game in the office. Plus we had
Bier Freitag at the end of the week. I stole this idea from an outsourcing
company I worked with where Tues and Thur were English only days.

UPDATE: For those learning German, the Mnemosyne flash cards on the website
are mine. If you have any issues I am glad to update or help.

~~~
mdemare
I like to read Harry Potter in various languages - works great for learning to
read well.

Also, I created a website where you can practice vocabulary and verb
conjugations: <http://inglua.com>

~~~
cdr
You're definitely not alone - "read your favorite (series of) book(s)" is an
old trick.

~~~
alexsb92
This also works if you pickup a series halfway through, having read the first
half in your native language, and then finishing it in the new language. I've
done this with Harry Potter. Before moving to Canada at 14, I read the first 4
in Romanian and the 5th and/or 6th in English. Since many of the terms were
found in previous books, or since i knew them from the movies (example
quidditch which the translators decided to translate. Still not sure how they
got with the Romanian term from quidditch)

------
maayank
The funny thing is that for me it IS a switch.

About a year ago I travelled to Ireland and England on vacation. While I did
mostly general touristic stuff, I added some geeky points of interest to my
itinerary such as Bletchley Park, Alexander Fleming's lab and planned to
attend a StackOverflow conference. Meeting fellow programmers is always fun.

Now, I'm an Hebrew speaker, but speak English fairly well.

After about 3 to 4 days I made the "switch" and generally thought in English
and spoke pretty fluently.

Towards the end of the trip (after about 20 days) I went to the StackOverflow
conference, where I saw two of my programming idols, Jeff and Joel. At some
point at the conference I approached the couple and we started to chat. Now, I
hate to admit this, but bear in mind I was as ecstatic as a little girl
meeting Justin Bieber in person. I was about 22 at the time and liked a lot of
what they wrote on their blogs.

I know that generally people feel pressured when being treated as "idols" and
these days I'm much better about these things, but at the time I couldn't help
myself. All of this lead to me "forgetting" some of the English and (what I
felt was) a much less fluent conversation, on my part. To make things more
ironic Joel tried some Hebrew with me and I insisted to speak in English
(which was a bit broken due to anxiety). After 20 days in English speaking
countries it just felt too awkward for me to speak in Hebrew. Maybe it was
awkward for me to speak in a language foreign to the rest of the group or just
the anxiety that kicked in and I'm making too much of it. I don't know.

Why ironic? Here I was, a native Hebrew speaker from Israel, unable to speak
in my native tongue while a former Israeli, practically his entire life living
in the states, tries to speak with me in Hebrew and unable to.

I'm not sure if it's a matter of plain capability. When thinking about
programming I can think simultaneously about how to express an idea in
different programming languages/paradigms. This is another point of interest,
how is thinking in other languages compares to thinking in different
programming languages.

tl;dr: It seems to me there is more to the switching metaphor than developed
in the article. When getting into the flow of a language it may be harder to
operate in a different one. Moreover, as programmers we are all too familiar
with thinking in different programming languages and it's interesting to see
how it all relates.

~~~
TeMPOraL
For me it doesn't really feel like a switch (unless we talk about a very fast
one). I tend to mix thinking (and sometimes speaking) in English and Polish to
the level they blend together - sometimes I express separate phrases or even
words in another language just because it "feels better" this way. Similarly
for programming languages - I tend to mix thinking in them with thinking in
natural language.

I do agree that those two issues - thinking in programming and natural
languages - might be connected. It somehow feels similar.

------
wisty
tldr (actually, it's quite short and worth reading) - practice sub-verbally as
much as you can. If you see a cat, you think "there's a cat" in your head.

2 advantages I think this has:

1) It's good practice.

2) You will find holes in your vocabulary, and that that will encourage you to
fill them.

~~~
hammock
This. Subverbal thinking IS the switch. When you start to think in a language,
or even dream in a language, that's when you know the switch has flipped.

~~~
deno
Do people dream in a specific language? I can think in more than one language,
but my dreams are abstract, rather than verbal.

~~~
hackerblues
I have a bilingual friend who claims after spending few weeks in Australia or
Japan his dreams switch to the local vocabulary.

------
silversmith
I would strongly disagree with "It’s like feeling that unexpectedly, you have
a button in your brain. When you push it you can get thoughts straight to your
target language." being the level of "at least being able to interact with
locals".

In my personal experience, that's a point well beyond that. I was speaking
fluid english for considerable time before being able to think in english on a
whim. I can (usually) get my point across in german and russian, but thinking
in those languages? No. I'm still translating to and fro in my brain, still
formulating what I want to say in a language I feel more confident with.

~~~
golfga
From my experience, it takes total immersion in the language to become fluent.
I spent two years in Brazil and it took 6-8 months before I reached the point
where I began to think in Portuguese. It's a pretty amazing thing though, once
you reach that point. You're thinking and even dreaming in another language. I
still have dreams in Portuguese even though it's been 15 years since I
returned to the US.

------
pamelafox
He suggests little flash cards as a way to casually practice language on a
daily basis, I have a bit of a more geek-oriented suggestion: change the
language of your browser.

You'll start seeing sites you use every day in the foreign language (like
Google products), and become very familiar with the words and phrases used in
the UI. You won't be practicing the same sort of phrases you'd use in every
day spoken conversation, but you'll definitely learn something. (And it
shouldn't be too annoying for you to use the translated interface if you're
already used to the product).

~~~
patrickk
Some soccer players in Europe who transfer clubs to another country will get
sticky notes and paste them to everything in their apartment to get used to
nouns. Of course, there's always players like Eric Cantona who used to
deliberately talk in French to the English media to throw them off.

~~~
riffraff
when I lived in Ireland I had such stickers in irish in my kitchen (they were
already there). I still remember a few words, so I believe it works. Too bad
you seldom use "fork" or "drawer" in normal conversations :)

------
happy4crazy
"by sheer persistence and a constant playful spirit"

Pretty good advice for any challenging task.

Also, how cool is it that irish gaelic of all languages would get such a
pretty website? I can easily imagine these becoming a series of sites, like
the X pod 101 series. I would absolutely pay $15 a month for
bitesizeicelandic.

~~~
RBerenguel
Haha I would pay for that, too. I'm fighting my way through Icelandic (post it
notes, reading, tweeting occasionally) and any help is always welcome. If you
want to do some "mail exchange in Icelandic" to practice with someone else,
please drop me an email!

~~~
happy4crazy
Alas, I'm not really studying Icelandic at the moment--too busy learning
Mandarin :)

I went there on vacation last spring and fell completely in love with the
language (and the landscape!!), so I would definitely start playing with it
again if I could find some fun, easy resources...

~~~
RBerenguel
I also felt in love with the country, but so far no "fun and easy resources".
Also, it is a heck hard language, so far it is the hardest grammar I've found
(although looks like gaelic grammar is hard, too), the declension rules are
nightmarish.

------
nwomack
In my opinion, the most important word in this post is 'phrase'.

I'm learning Chinese and the only way to translate English to Chinese is
complete phrases / sentences. You can probably cheat much easier if your
languages are more similar, but don't get lazy, think in phrases or you will
never reach fluency.

------
doviende
The number one language tool for me these days is parallel texts. I grab
ebooks in my target language, along with their english translations, and I use
some open-source software called "hunalign" to create a sentence-aligned text.

Hunalign is an amazing little piece of software that will figure out which
sentences correspond to which other ones in the second text, independent of
language. It uses some neat algorithms to find the correspondences using
sentence length, and then builds a partial dictionary and rematches.

At the end, I get a two-column version of the book, with one language on each
side, with sentences matching in each row. As I read in my target language, I
can just glance over to the equivalent English on the other side in order to
get the meaning.

Reading is the fastest way I've found to really get an intuitive sense for the
language's grammar and to learn tons of words. And the whole process goes much
faster with parallel texts. I learned fluent German through reading, and now
I'm working my way through Dutch. I started Dutch in January, and used
parallel texts to read through the Harry Potter series while listening to the
Dutch audiobook versions of them...now I feel quite ready to jump into non-
parallel Dutch novels.

More info available on my parallel text process coming soon on my blog:
<http://languagefixation.wordpress.com/>

------
neves
I'll repeat my site comment here: A more efficient way is to use Spaced
Repetition Software <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaced_repetition>.

You will spend more time in the items you don’t remenber. Anki and Mnemosyne
are good open source softwares for language acquisition.

Anki: <http://ankisrs.net/> Mnemosyne: <http://www.mnemosyne-proj.org/>

There's a kind of art in creating your flashcards. It's important to follow
the "20 rules in formulating knowledge":
<http://www.supermemo.com/articles/20rules.htm>

------
abrenzel
Loved the comment about it being a "switch." This is exactly what I found when
I went to Turkey after 2 years of studying Turkish. I was in a program where
we had a 4 hour class in the morning taught about 80% in Turkish. The first
week or two was terrible. Then the "switch" flipped. I wasn't a fluent speaker
and still missed words and phrases while listening, but all of a sudden I
could follow the class, do the lessons correctly, and ask semi-intelligent
questions. It's a great moment when you're learning a language.

~~~
ebiester
Which program? I did a month of the absolute beginner level at Tomer in
Istanbul. I remember being so absolutely lost the entire class, but somehow I
kept learning. I'm still not at the point where I can make the "switch," like
I used to in Spanish, but that's more my current priorities. (watching two
languages slip away... sigh)

~~~
abrenzel
I did the AATT/ARIT summer program at Bogazici in Istanbul. I thought it was a
very good program, but very intense. I have heard some good things and some
bad things about Tomer.

~~~
ebiester
Tomer has some good teachers, but the admin side is one of the worst
bureaucracy experiences I've seen. I've heard good things about Bogazici,
including that they didn't let you speak anything but Turkish on campus.

------
JoeAltmaier
On a related note: it took 8 weeks of struggle coding daily to convert to C++.
I would go home each day sweating and exhausted. At the end, a switch turned
and the code would come out with much less effort.

Yeah, yeah, your favorite language is much easier than C++, I'm sure. But
maybe it took something similar to get 'fluent'?

~~~
MichaelGG
When learning functional programming (F#), there was a distinct point where I
suddenly "got" functions and so many things suddenly made sense. I can
actually remember the day and place where it snapped. (Perhaps if I had
studied FP in school instead of just learning FP on the side after being
conditioned by Basic and C, it would have been more natural.)

------
rimantas
A bit off topic: I consume a lot of English, and produce some (like there ;)
), but I don't have many opportunities to practice my speaking skills. As a
result my spoken English is not as good as it could be. I assume some
different part of the brain gets involved while speaking and mine did not have
enough training :) I wonder is there some community where I could find native
speakers willing to chat with me online—Skype, most likely–and help me
improve? Paid services, if reasonably priced are OK too.

~~~
jomohke
<http://www.lingq.com> has the option to either pay (it's pretty cheap), or
swap (You give lessons in your native language to earn points, and spend those
points on lessons). I haven't used it yet (I'm still too much of a beginner)
but I hear people are quite good there. After your 15min conversation they'll
send you a report of suggestions/corrections you can make.

Some free options, none of which I've used, are: <http://chatonic.com/>
<http://www.italki.com/> <http://www.babelyou.com/>
<http://www.mylanguageexchange.com/>, <http://www.sharedtalk.com/>
<http://www.lenguajero.com/> (Spanish)
<http://vraiment.info/parlezfrancais/index.html> (French)

------
jules
This is an excellent site to get started with a language:
<http://www.livemocha.com>

------
phatbyte
Am I the only one who thought this post was about learning new programming
languages ? ;)

------
georgieporgie
Raymond Chen has some neat posts on language:

"If somebody speaks a language I'm not expecting, sometimes I don't understand
it, even though I should" Jul 6, 2009
[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/07/06/98183...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/07/06/9818300.aspx)
(the last paragraph is particularly interesting)

"More musings on the peculiar linguistic status of languages acquired in
childhood" Jul 7, 2009
[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/07/07/98209...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2009/07/07/9820997.aspx)

