

Studying a foreign language is a physical process as much as it is intellectual - japanesesandman
http://oddline.blogspot.com/2014/11/why-you-cannot-be-taught-foreign.html

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tokenadult
There should be a lot more information here. Because the blog post kindly
shared here is just a teaser for some wordy blog posts without a lot of
actionable information, I'll share my own draft FAQ about language learning in
this comment. I've been developing the FAQ because an interest in learning
human languages is mentioned on Hacker News from time to time. I hope the FAQ
information below helps hackers achieve their dreams. As I learned Mandarin
Chinese as a second language 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.

PHONOLOGY LEARNING

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.[1]

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.[2]

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[3]
with full use of notation from the International Phonetic Alphabet.[4]

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.

VOCABULARY LEARNING

After phonology, another huge task for any language learner is acquiring
vocabulary, and this is the task on which 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,[5] 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.

GRAMMAR AND SYNTAX LEARNING

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, for example Modern
Standard Chinese,[6] Portuguese,[7] and of course English,[8] 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.

[1]
[http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Wha...](http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/WhatIsAPhoneme.htm)

[2]
[http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032](http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032)

[3]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics)

[4]
[http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html](http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html)

[5]
[http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html](http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html)

[6] [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/)

[7] [http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Brazilian-Portuguese-Grammar-
Pr...](http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Brazilian-Portuguese-Grammar-
Practical/dp/0415566444)

[http://www.amazon.com/Falar-Ler-Escrever-Portugues-
Exercicio...](http://www.amazon.com/Falar-Ler-Escrever-Portugues-
Exercicios/dp/8512543221/)

[8] [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/)

~~~
gtani
Excellent writeup. One little thing i will add is that i learned a few
languages to varying degrees by reading magazines and websites on a
specialized but not terribly complicated subject that i knew well, bike
racing. That way I had a 40% comprehension before starting, encountered a lot
of familiar words in italics and my brain was better able to interpolate
meaning.

also that some things are harder or easier than you think. After learning
French, Latin, Spanish and some Italian, in that order, i had a lot of
difficulty with Brazilian Portuguese, but i once bought a "Learn Dutch in your
Car" CD set and starting listening, the usual banal dialog about going
shopping for groceries, when i realized i could understand a language that i
had never studied or heard before, as native English speaker who understood
German well

