
The Benefits of Failing at French - danso
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/16/opinion/16alexander.html
======
DonPellegrino
The author hits an important point. I'm a native French speaker and speak to
anglophones trying to improve their french everyday and the overwhelming
majority gets distracted if they don't get the noun genders right, pick the
right verb tenses and all sorts of things like that. They hesitate mid-
sentence trying to remember the rules and get it perfectly instead of just
saying "Tommy hitted me" like in the article. As soon as they start
hesitating, they freeze and switch back to English.

I can't emphasize how important it is to just keep going. The point of
language is to get the message across. The details like verbs and genders will
come with practice and to practice, you need to use the positive feedback loop
that getting the message across generates.

~~~
vdance
I learned French in my mid-20s -- in France. I spent a year learning French at
a school and literally couldn't even understand fluent, spoken French by the
time my ex-girlfriend moved back to the US. I stayed in France and began
dating a French girl who didn't speak English at all -- so we had these weird
intellectual/juvenile sounding conversations in the beginning - with me
basically speaking confusing, garbled French 100% of the time. Point is, after
about one month together with her, I understood spoken French very well, and
could articulate some fairly complex thoughts. It just felt like the language
came crashing into my head once I had to "articulate" what needed to be
articulated and "hear" what needed to be heard. It's one of the strangest
feelings of immersive learning that I can remember. Like DonPellegrino
mentioned, I never really cared about gender and proper grammar, because...
when your girlfriend doesn't know your language, you just have to force the
thoughts out somehow. This might sound obvious, but if you have a partner who
speaks another language fluently, just speak in your native tongue and ask
them to speak in their native tongue. From my experience, the most powerful
part of learning a language is just "slowing" it down in your head. You'd
think you could just watch television to do this -- but in my experience
(multiple languages now), you can't. It just seems like you need to be engaged
intimately with another human being to get these results.

~~~
mahyarm
How does that happen, entering a relationship with someone you can barely
speak to? I'm very curious!

~~~
vdance
For me - a dating website. Having lived in two foreign countries, I can see
that my story might be impossible otherwise. It's just that, from my
experience, when you meet someone on a dating website and you tell them you're
a foreigner and you're pretty bad at their language, it creates a sort of
"expectation" or "context" that can be nice for the first meeting (which was a
drink for us). It switches the date from an awkward, "try-to-impress-her"
meeting to "hey, this is kind of fun and weird" date, and can work with the
right person. I brought a translation dictionary to dates before I knew French
really well. With this particular girl, I remember it taking an
extraordinarily large amount of time for us to even go through details like
family, etc. But, she was patient and intrigued I suppose, because we only
communicated in my garbled French. On subsequent dates, I remember taking
walks around the city. I can't remember too many exact details because it was
7 years ago -- just that she was very patient and quirky and I truly felt like
a little kid absorbing up the French.

------
jmhain
I set out to learn Spanish almost exactly one year ago, deciding it was
ridiculous to be monolingual in a world of thousands of languages. My approach
was as intensive as the author's; I completed the Duolingo skill tree, read
books on grammar and slang, watched, listened to, and read Spanish media and
Spanish translations of English media, attended meetups, etc.

While I'm only 23, I experienced the same "mental fountain of youth" effect
the author describes. At first, it all sounded like gibberish even if reading
along with what I was listening to. My mind refused to accept words and
concepts that didn't map one-to-one with English. I repeatedly mixed up
similar looking words.

Despite constant failure, I kept at it, and eventually it just "clicked".
Spanish errors started to sound like "he hitted me". I went from barely
memorizing a few words a day, to successfully internalizing hundreds. And the
best part is, all these cognitive benefits have transferred to other realms. I
memorize stuff on Anki now just for the hell of it because it's so easy. I am
about halfway to being fluent in German after only a month of study. I really
can't recommend learning a foreign language enough.

~~~
theintern
I'm glad to hear a glowing report from using Duolingo. I find it easy to put
in daily practice with (must maintain my streak!) and it's good to hear that
it gave you a good foundation at the end of it all.

~~~
jmhain
Fortunately, I like languages and Duolingo enough to use it regardless of the
streak. I've experienced a lot of weirdness with it that ultimately caused me
to lose it despite daily practice.

------
time0
“Into the face of the young man who sat on the terrace of the Hotel Magnifique
at Cannes there had crept a look of furtive shame, the shifty hangdog look
which announces that an Englishman is about to speak French.”

― P.G. Wodehouse, The Luck of the Bodkins

------
VeejayRampay
I'm French and I do realize it's a pretty complicated language to learn.
Ridiculous amounts of exceptions to every single rule, dozens of tenses (which
no one ever uses), lack of general structure, arbitrary genders, it's got it
all.

My personal piece of advice to anyone: don't waste your time learning French,
it's a dying language. Go for Spanish if you need a latin language, it's at
least used in Spain, the United States, Central and South America. And once
you speak Spanish, French comes rather easy (with the benefit of Italian and
Portuguese becoming almost trivial).

~~~
danso
Would you say French is more or less complicated than English (from how much
you can evaluate the two fairly, though it seems like your English is
excellent)? I'm frequently catching myself on how hard English must be to
learn...having it pushed on to me in school is only second in born-privilege
to being a U.S. citizen by birth. My Vietnamese parents have been in the
states nearly 40 years, speaking English in their jobs and to me everday, and
it's still off.

I took French in high school just because most everyone else was taking
Spanish...that was not a good attempt at rebelling :). I do love the language
though, but liking it has no relation to having the discipline to be fluent in
it...having situations where you need to speak it is the key factor, and
that's not a frequent situation in the States.

Still, I'm almost certain that if I hadn't taken French (or Spanish), I
would've never known what the nuance of something like the subjunctive mood,
in French or in English, and I like thinking through sentence structure when
writing and reading...not sure if that casual academic pleasure offers the
same level of brain benefits the OP refers to.

~~~
gnuvince
Native French speaker here, I think going from "I don't know the language" to
"I can hold me end in a conversation" is easier in English than in French.
French has a richer set of verb tenses, while with English you can go a long
way be knowing present, "<present> \+ ed" and "will + <present>". You also
don't need to understand why a chair feminine and an oven is masculine (hint:
there is no reason).

One thing I do think French has over English is ease of pronunciation;
although not completely regular, most letters have one pronunciation (unless
they have an accent, which gives them a different, but clear pronunciation).
If you know the phonemes, French gives you a much easier time. Try reading
this [1] out loud for kicks. I probably got 90-95% of that right, but even
after 15+ years of speaking English, I still got caught by a few words.

[1] [http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/stuff/english-
pronunciation...](http://pauillac.inria.fr/~xleroy/stuff/english-
pronunciation.html)

~~~
Ecio78
I was having the same expectation in French, hoping to survive with only
present, passé composé, future proche and "en train de" and avoid more complex
things :) And it will probably be enough, if I'd master them, but I still
don't remember tons of verbs, words and the pronunciation, oh my god.. As an
Italian it shouldn't be that difficult, many things are almost the same, and
in some situation it is (e.g. reading it) but the pronunciation is not easy
and false friends are everywhere, so most of the time I don't know if I'm
saying something that is sort-of French or I'm just mimicking French by
removing some vowels and consonants here and there from Italian words...

------
noname123
Great article. Tired of learning stupid front-end JS frameworks and would love
to hear your guys' story about failures at other hobbies and not just foreign
languages and what insights you gained from it.

Me personally, I took up basketball and thought that I could be like LeBron
dunking on everybody, then I realized that I was short and Asian and have no
leaping ability; then I shifted my goal a little bit to aim to be like Allen
Iverson to try to cross and drive, then I realized that I wasn't fast nor
agile and had no crafty finishing moves around the rim, so I settled on being
Jason Kidd before he could shoot, a point guard who passes the ball but I
enjoy throwing my teammates good passes at the right time for the bucket so
they can finish.

I took up guitar and thought I could be like Jimmi Hendrix, soloing and have
women throw panties at me up on stage. Then I realized that I had little
finger strength nor dexterity to play sixteenth-notes, bends, and vibratos. So
I settled on just trying to mime the part and playing with emotions like when
you're doing a bend or a vibrato, contorting your face with wistful wrinkles
and tilting your head rhythmically like Santana would behind his sunglasses.
But I enjoy playing music esp. when it's heavily distorted so that no one can
hear properly the poor tone and timing of my playing.

Finally I also took up daytrading and thought I could be like George Soros and
play a game of chicken with the British treasury and make a killin'! Then I
realized that I had little to no understanding of the dynamics of the option
pricing model and had no discipline except that I was overwhelmed with greed
and ego when the market is riding high and conversely with fear like a chicken
when the market goes against me. So I settled on keeping trading and accepting
to give my broker and hedge funds my money, but trying to preserve my capital
for as much as possible and taking small losses - so I can extend giving of my
money to Wall Street for as long as possible.

Would love to hear what you guys' failures and success stories at learning a
different craft and your insights gained.

~~~
pessimizer
You build up your finger strength with practice, and also using your little
finger instead of sliding your entire hand over because your pinkie hurts.
Pinkie pain is just a stage.

------
arafalov
A couple of points:

1) The guy lists his activities with heavy focus on Rosetta Stone. To me that
pretty much invalidates his claims on the spot. RS is not really well
respected in language learning circles (at least a couple of years ago, it was
not). Pimsleur is better due to its exponential backoff repetition model and
it's "how do you say" prompts.

2) I did not see any mention of activities that actually built vocabulary. Not
in a "listen to a show" way, but in a "read a book and translate every word
you don't understand". I learned English that way. As a Russian, I studied it
in school and in private courses to no effect. When I came to Australia, I
decided to re-read Tolkien's "The Hobbit" but this time in the original rather
than Russian translation. Of course, I did not realize that Tolkien was
philologist... So, I may have learnt a bit more of vocabulary and grammar than
I really needed for street English.

3) When you learn your first foreign language, you are learning two things at
once: language-learning practices and specifics of specific language
(vocabulary, grammar, sounds). That's why Esperanto as the first foreign
language is great.
([http://www.springboard2languages.org/](http://www.springboard2languages.org/))
You learn the practices (in a very supporting community
[http://lernu.net/](http://lernu.net/)) with a very regular language. Then,
you can attack a more complex language like French.

4) As an aside, last couple of years, language learning startups were quite
popular. Unfortunately, they all try to address global market and don't dive
deep enough into any single language. Therefore most of the interesting &
academic research that could have really impacted language learning process
goes unused. I have about 10 pages of (technical) notes on what _I_ would want
from a language-learning website and I have seen less than 10% of it out in
the wild.

~~~
jodrellblank
To pull a bit out of the Esperanto / Springboard2Languages idea, particularly
watch this linked TEDx talk about teaching Esperanto to young school children:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gSAkUOElsg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gSAkUOElsg)

How it serves as a good simplified language because it's so regular, there's
very little learning before you can start saying your own sentences instead of
reciting pre-made ones.

------
jsbgir
I can't recommend the Pimsleur language courses enough. They teach languages
in a way that's similar to how a toddler learns to speak - by going from
sounds to words, and by gradually expanding your lexicon while jogging your
memory on previously learned words and phrases. In my experience, 45-50 daily
30-minute lessons were enough to comfortably navigate a new country. Most
courses include ninety 30-minute lessons.

------
kstenerud
There's a reason why toddlers learn so "easily": They must communicate in
order to get what they want.

If you were placed in a similar situation, where you cannot get what you want
unless you speak the language, it would not take you very long to learn. I
went through this twice in my life: Once between ages 5 and 16 (French), and
once between ages 31 and 35 (Japanese). In both cases, it took about 6 months
to get the basics, after which the rate of learning slowed a bit due to the
decline in novel situations requiring new usage or vocabulary.

------
gwern
> After a year of struggling with the language, I retook the cognitive
> assessment, and the results shocked me. My scores had skyrocketed, placing
> me above average in seven of 10 categories, and average in the other three.
> My verbal memory score leapt from the bottom half to the 88th — the 88th! —
> percentile and my visual memory test shot from the bottom 5th percentile to
> the 50th. Studying a language had been like drinking from a mental fountain
> of youth. > > What might explain such an improvement?

What? 'regression to the mean' comes to mind. People shocked by their
extremely low scores are often shocked to find that their scores improve over
time...

~~~
disgruntledphd2
While that is completely true, its somewhat unlikely to go from the mid point
of the distribution to the tails. Its not impossible, of course, but its less
likely. The 5th to the 50th certainly suffers from that problem, however.

------
Steko
Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic has talked in depth over the past few years
about his attempts to learn French as an adult and I believe he's
incommunicado at the moment due to an immersion program.

Nice video here showing his level at the time, great moment near the end
when's he's asked by his conversation partner to explain his recent article
for the magazine (the widely discussed 'case for reparations' article).

[http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/a-l...](http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/a-last-
tango-with-paris/373168/)

------
fallinghawks
The best thing about speaking bad French is that it makes French people speak
English to you. Possibly because they don't want to hear their beloved
language mangled, but I don't really know. All I know is that they kindly
switched once they heard me speaking. :)

------
virtualwhys
I challenge any Anglophone without mastery of the French language to say the
word, "flourure" (making sure to elongate the Rs) before a group of
Francophones _without feeling absolutely ridiculous_

There are other examples but I find this word (meaning flouride) especially
comical as it stumbles out of my mouth at the pharmacy -- as does anyone
within hearing distance ;-)

I believe the "th" sound is generally difficult for latins. As a test, if you
are Francophone please stand before a mirror and quickly say, "hello, my name
is thof thimblefith", making sure to enunciate each "th" clearly. If you can
do so you will have mastered a lisp.

------
KhalilK
Speaking of personal experience, when begun at an early age, learning a
language will be really easier and almost innate. I started learning French at
the age of 8 within school classes, then English at the age of 11 and finally
Spanish when 17. I am thus not as fluent in Spanish as I am in French or
English BUT since French is a dying language and way complicated I find
English to be the perfect language to use, even on a personal level and
despite the fact Arabic is my native tongue.

Bottom line is, if you are a parent and wish for your kids to learn a
particular language, start as they are young.

------
gedrap
I tried to learn Mandarin a year ago because I started a relationship with a
Chinese girl. The words made no sense (felt just a completely random sounds),
got angry and gave up after a couple of days.

A year later, after hearing a lot of Mandarin (she speaks quite a lot of
Mandarin over the phone and I spent a month in China), I gave another shot. It
feels much easier, more familiar and less random.

Of course, it's a totally anecdotal 'evidence'... But getting familiar with
the sound of the language before actually studying might help.

------
windust
Spanish native speaker here. I'm still waiting for my ah-ha moment (I'm
learning Japanese for the past 4 months at a rate of 4 hours per week), I do
hope it arrives. It took me probably 5 years to be fluent in English, and
probably 4 more to actually be good enough as to read/write government
proposals, abstracts/CFP, and finally co-authoring a published book "Java 7
Recipes"; my accent still lingers (javapubhouse.com if you want to hear it),
the Ys, Js all come out with the same sound for me. I did learn French for 5
years, but lost most of it due to not practicing it. Learning French coming
from Spanish felt a little weird because there are gender swaps (for the
inanimate objects) that do trip you up. Did try to learn German for 5 months
just after finishing French, so I ended up sounding like a French speaking
German, which my teacher hated (and whom scared me away from the language!)

I noticed that I'm not really going anywhere fast with my Japanese and I think
I might be doing it wrong (listen to one hour podcast while running / biking).
Some stuff sticks but in general it does seem that my progress is nowhere near
what I had when learning the other languages in a more structured format.

~~~
aneisf
Going off-topic a bit, I highly recommend you peruse the forum over at the
Reviewing the Kanji site (koohii.com). Even if you have no interest in the
book the site is based around (Heisig's Remembering the Kanji) there are
troves of great advice and methods for Japanese self-study to be found there.

~~~
windust
Neat, will check it out. Yeah, Kanji might be a tall order right now (still
working with Hiragana/Katakana first), but found the forums. Kinda nice to
find a community of Japanese learners

------
bane
This is timely. I'm about 4 weeks into a "let's learn Korean" self-study
program. The last time I seriously tried to learn a foreign language was
Spanish in high school and it was quite a debacle. But after many years
married to a Korean woman, I finally decided I was embarrassed enough not
knowing more than a few utility words in Korean to take the plunge.

I remember looking into learning Korean about 6 or 7 years ago and there
really weren't many on-line self-study resources and very few classes I could
take. This time I found an virtual explosion of resources, free text books,
skype practice sessions, listening guides, vocabulary resources, etc. For more
popular languages, like French, the number of resources is almost
mindboggling.

I've decided to focus the beginning of my studies on raw vocabulary
acquisition and I've settled on using Anki to do this. My friends know that I
have a pretty bad memory, so I've been shocked and surprised at how well Anki
has worked. In 4 weeks I've managed to memorize (to different degrees of
recall) about 300 words (out of a list of the 1000 most common).

Last week I sat down to start my grammar lessons with a free university
textbook and was even more shocked and surprised at how much of the text I was
able to decode. I wouldn't call it comprehension exactly, but maybe 20-40% of
the beginner-level sentences I could read well enough to get the gist without
knowing any grammar. I checked ahead into later chapters and was amazed that I
was still able to work out some non-negligible percent of most of the lessons.

For practice I watched a couple Korean tv shows (they love to put subtitles
under everything which is helpful) and was also surprised that I could work
out some bits of the nightly news. Not enough to really know what was going
on, but within a month going from knowing basic foods and the word "bathroom"
to starting some minimal comprehension felt pretty remarkable.

More recently I've been practicing language production and took the attitude
the article advocates -- just focus on getting the point across, don't worry
about all the grammar bits. So, when something my wife and I are doing
involves some vocabulary I remember, I try to formulate a basic sentence
around it. I know I'm missing some things, but I told my wife to just grade me
on "is it understandable or not?" not on "is it correct or not?". It's eased
up the pressure quite a bit.

More importantly, even if my little experiment fails in the end. Outside of
language study, I feel much more..."engaged" all the time. Like my brain is
turned up a little. I'm finding my memory is definitely improving and some
mental tasks that were starting to become harder as I've aged have started to
become easier.

It's actually kind of cool.

~~~
silencio
Out of curiosity, what are the texts/resources you're getting vocab from?
Where do you get shows to watch? Did you pick up on the basics like the
alphabet and pronunciation first and study that together?

My husband's just like you and beyond knowing words for his favorite foods and
some of the lyrics to Gangnam Style, he doesn't know much more. I would like
to change that. Plus it'd be nice to practice my rusting Korean with him -
there's few Koreans in SF and most assume I'm Chinese despite my Standard
Korean dialect. I really want him to learn for raising our future kids fluent
in multiple languages but no real stress there - between me (fluent in 2,
conversational in 1, formerly conversational in 2-3 I could pick up again), my
bilingual mother, and my polyglot father (former military interpreter, near
fluent to fluent in 4 and currently learning 3-4 others or however many he
maxed out on with his best friends Duolingo and iTunes U...) I think they will
be covered.

I dug up some of my old books, AppleTV has KORTV and Crunchyroll and
Netflix/Amazon have an okay movie selection (can't figure out how to get it to
show/hide subtitles in multiple languages and sometimes english is just burned
into the video itself -_- )...I also talked to some Duolingo people at I/O
about contributing to "Korean for English speakers", but eh. I grew up with
the language and my limited formal study was with a super nerdy polyglot
linguistics researcher at Yonsei (Korean Ivy-level-esque university) so I have
no idea where to start for new mostly monolingual learners for a less popular
language.

~~~
bane
I learned Hangul years ago from some website. It's impressively easy to learn
and makes figuring out pronunciation _way_ easier than writing Korean in a
Latin alphabet.

There's actually a great list of resources here.

[http://www.reddit.com/r/korean](http://www.reddit.com/r/korean)

and more specifically here:
[http://www.reddit.com/r/Korean/comments/rq3th/the_ultimate_b...](http://www.reddit.com/r/Korean/comments/rq3th/the_ultimate_beginners_resource_thread/)

Right now I'm using Ankidroid and Anki for Windows and OS X (all free and they
sync with Ankiweb, Anki for iOS is some small fee) for vocabulary. There's
tons of "decks" (all free) available through Anki. I'm currently grinding
through the "Korean 1000 most common words" deck since it also has a vocal
pronunciation for each word for me to practice against.

You have to be a little disciplined with it: for each card, listen, practice
the pronunciation and then when you flip the card the for the meaning score
your result honestly for the SRS system to work right. You only ever get 20
new words a day, but it adds up really fast.

Right now I do a morning session (or I break it up into two 15 minute
sessions), and then in the afternoons I use Ankidroid to generate a list of
words I keep forgetting to practice against. I do this every day.

I'm using this textbook at the moment.
[http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/korean/my-
korean-1/](http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/korean/my-korean-1/)

It's free, and I just upload it to my google play books account and read it on
my tablet. I'm also entering every sentence and vocabulary word from this book
into a new Anki deck so I can practice more as well as get some time learning
how to type in Korean.

I don't have a Korean keyboard, so I took a screen shot of this one
([http://www.branah.com/korean](http://www.branah.com/korean)) and printed it
out and just stick it on top of my cheapo $5 Logitech keyboard to help me.
It's slow, but I'm getting steadily faster.

About once a week, I'll do an extended study session and sit down for a few
hours and try to _write_ all of the vocabulary I'm learning and what it means.
This is giving me practice actually writing Hangul, which will help me later
in reading people's messy handwriting. I'll probably start doing this as well
to improve my handwriting since figuring out how to fit different syllables in
a square is still a challenge for me.
[http://koreanvitamin.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/how-to-
practic...](http://koreanvitamin.wordpress.com/2012/11/28/how-to-practice-
writing-hangul/)

I've tried and struggled a _lot_ with memorizing vocabulary in the past which
is why I've put it off for so many years, so I can't say enough good things
about Anki. If I have a criticism, it's that I'm much better now at
remembering Korean->English than I am going from English->Korean. There's some
decks that cover that as well though, and I'm planning on making a "1000 most
common words in English to Korean" deck at some point when my Korean and
typing gets better.

There's also a deck of every TOPIK vocabulary word I'm planning on moving to
next. It's almost 8,000 words.

For videos, I'm not as much into those yet. But I'm planning on moving to
start that in a few months to build listening comprehension. My goal is not
academic/formal Korean, but more conversational/colloquial. So I'm thinking of
shows like Running Man on www.dramafever.com might be good to watch, at least
if you get tired studying you can be entertained.

There's also quite a few youtube channels at various levels of complexity. The
people who make the videos usually put quite a bit of effort into them to make
them at least entertaining.

In my queue for future studying:

[https://www.youtube.com/user/talktomeinkorean](https://www.youtube.com/user/talktomeinkorean)

[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCg-p3lQIqmhh7gHpyaOmOiQ](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCg-p3lQIqmhh7gHpyaOmOiQ)
(he puts subtitles everywhere in Korean and English so it's super helpful to
pause on each sentence and work them out)

[https://www.youtube.com/user/sweetandtasty/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/sweetandtasty/videos)
\- mostly English, but she provides lots of entertaining background stuff and
nouns for things

\- Based on my readings from other people and what to expect, I'm expecting to
get up to _very_ basic conversational level in 6-9 months and be able to
handle most typical daily conversational needs somewhere between 1-2 years of
study. Korean is a _very_ hard language for English speakers to learn (as I'm
finding out).

~~~
bcmd87
Sorry to push my own side project but it might be useful to you guys.

[http://www.toktogi.com](http://www.toktogi.com)

It's a popup dictionary extension for Chrome and Firefox that is based on an
open source K-E dictionary
([https://github.com/garfieldnate/kengdic](https://github.com/garfieldnate/kengdic)).
It still needs a lot of work, but I plan to open source it soon and hopefully
allow people to contribute back to and improve the original dictionary as
well.

~~~
bane
OMG, this is amazing. I've already added it. Really appreciate it, this will
definitely come in all sorts of handy.

------
dredmorbius
Much of the discussion here is focused on the linguistic acquisition aspects
of this article. I see the largely ignored wider aspect to be that of skills
learning, particularly in light of _unlearning_ and lost plasticity.

The key paragraphs are these:

"[A] 2-year-old’s brain has a substantial neurological advantage, with 50
percent more synapses — the connections between neurons — than an adult brain,
way more than it needs. This excess, which is an insurance policy against
early trauma, is also crucial to childhood language acquisition, as is the
plasticity, or adaptability, of the young brain.

[NB: I challenge the assumption that the excess neural capacity is simply for
trauma recovery -- it seems specifically applicable to the very mental
plasticity that youthful skill acquisition entails, and which _needs_ to be
discarded as concrete skills are laid down.]

"Another advantage a toddler holds is his very lack of experience. After
speaking our native language for decades, we adults can’t help but hear the
second language through the filter of the first. And this filter doesn’t take
decades to develop. Researchers have found that newborn Japanese babies can
distinguish between the English “L” and “R” sounds, but if not exposed to
Western languages, they begin to lose that ability — not by the age of 6 or
even 3 — but by eight months.

"Adult language learners are, to borrow a phrase used by some psycholinguists,
too smart for our own good. We process too much data at once, try to get
everything right from the get-go and are self-conscious about our efforts. But
toddlers instinctively grasp what’s important and are quite content to say,
“Tommy hitted me,” as long as Tommy gets what’s coming to him."

That is, if you're trying to learn something, _anything_ , as an adult, you're
up against two principle blocks:

• Your brain has physiologically adapted. It's no longer sufficiently plastic
to accept novel concepts.

• You've got a litany of previously acquired skills (or biases) which get in
the way of the new knowledge. It's a form of Mark Twain's famous "It's not the
things you don't know, but what you know for sure that just ain't so".

Or, in this case, just ain't what the new skill you're trying to pick up is.

Which may also help explain youthful hiring bias in software and tech.

------
Kaivo
Without realizing it, we think in the language we know[1]. When starting to
learn another language, we still think in our native language and translate it
to the foreign one.

However, when reaching a higher experience with a second/third language, the
thought process gradually changes. My native language is French, but very
often I have thoughts "in English", because the idea seems easier to
express/understand with the way English works. Sometimes, the words don't
exist in French to express the idea I'm thinking, while it exists in English.

I've read somewhere (citation needed) that at some point, one would stop
thinking in language and start thinking in concept.

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_and_thought](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_and_thought)

~~~
arafalov
My first language is Russian. But I spent so long outside of Russian language
and culture that my language of thought and speech is English. Not a citation,
but a confirmative data point.

Still, I feel that my English speech and thought lacks the nuances I get when
my mind and my mouth switches back into Russian.

------
tawan
I started to learn French a year ago and I made a lot of progress. There are
just a few bugs left to fix in my own vocabulary management tool, and then I'm
ready to learn some words, systematically well tracked and documented. ;)

------
autokad
one problem i have with foreign languages is how its taught. a child spends
years to just get to 'i hitted the dog' and still mispronounces most of the
words and its like 'yay great job. despite the kid having the synapse
advantages over an adult.

an adult spends a few months learning an entire language and its like 'what?
you have to learn how to spell it correctly, say all the right tenses,
pronounce it correctly, etc etc or else you're not learning!'.

i feel like we're forced to focus on so much detail and our minds just quits
on us.

~~~
rlanday
Children seem to always figure out the details eventually, whereas many second
language learners seem to miss out on some details unless explicitly
corrected, and even then find it hard to change established speaking habits.
I’m not sure anyone really knows why this is, but it’s one reason why some
people recommend trying very hard to avoid speaking (and listening to others
speak) incorrect sentences when learning a language.

------
irv
few days late, but thought I'd share my anecdote. several years ago now, I was
on a road trip through the largest island of Japan, Honshu, and was staying at
a cheap roadside motel in the middle of nowhere. My girlfriend was having a
shower, and I walked out of the room without the keycard as you needed it to
operate the lights etc in the room. off I went to grab a few cold drinks from
the vending machine, and then suddenly realised I had no idea what room number
or even what floor our room was on. Despite what she says, my girlfriend is
fluent in Japanese and I'd always relied on her to do all the hard work, and
spent maybe 3 months picking up a bit of the language a few years previously.

Well, I had no choice but to go to the front desk and explain the situation
using the full range of my vocabulary. As a few people have already mentioned,
native Japanese speakers tend to treat you with a mix of awe and pity when you
clearly can't speak the language but nonetheless attempt it. But exactly as
the article described, I concentrated on saying what I could, not what was
necessarily correct. I actually surprised myself, and my girlfriend when I
eventually returned to the room and explained why the cold drinks were now
tepid.

------
scott_s
I imagine that most earnest attempts at problem solving will yield the same
cognitive benefits. So I just won't stop programming. Good thing I love it.

------
guard-of-terra
The L-R confusion with asian languages' speakers is very strange to me btw.

For example, English has t and th and f, most other languages don't have th
and some don't even have f. However it's very rare to see non-native English
speakers to swap or merge those sounds. Virtually unseen in writing.

Asian languages' speakers do swap r and l and vice versa in writing too.

~~~
colanderman
Asian languages have neither the English R (tongue curled backward in mouth,
sides curled upward relative to mouth; "retroflex approximant") nor L (tongue
straight, sides curled downward; "lateral alveolar approximant"). Rather, they
have an R which is a combination of these (tongue straight, sides curled
upward; "alveolar approximant"). Without a native sound to map these two
distinct sounds to, it's easy to confuse them.

I've definitely seen foreigners confuse TH and T in writing. TH is very often
pronounced (and therefore sometimes likely misremembered) as T. TH and T a
more distinct than R and L however; TH is fricative (has duration), T is
plosive (instantaneous).

What's more common is for foreigners to confuse our sundry vowels. I count at
least 14 distinct sounds. Many foreign languages have only 5. But since we
have only 5 written vowels, we notice less when a foreigner uses the wrong
vowel (and brush it off more as an accent).

English speakers confuse u and ü in German; ㄱ (k), ㅋ (kh), and ㄲ (kk) in
Korean (heck I know phonetics and I can't get these right); e and é, and
gender in French (quick, where do the accents go in "resume"?). Chinese
speakers confuse second-person pronouns in English. Japanese confuse green and
blue. There are a ton more examples of such confusion; they're all due to our
minds mapping information based on our native tongues.

------
thret
Dr. Carlos do Amaral Freire has supposedly learnt 115 languages. I find that
difficult to comprehend.

[http://thelinguistblogger.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/the-
wisdo...](http://thelinguistblogger.wordpress.com/2008/09/30/the-wisdom-of-a-
man-who-knows-115-languages/)

~~~
tokenadult
Any such claim implies a much lower level of proficiency for "learnt a
language" than most of us are referring to when we say that someone has
learned a language fluently.

------
thadk
When I'm learning a human language, especially immersed, I find that I can
play the Set game twice as well. Proof enough for me.

[http://www.setgame.com/set](http://www.setgame.com/set)

------
tokenadult
First I'll address the point about cognitive testing found in the article. "So
to reassure myself that nothing was amiss, just before tackling French I took
a cognitive assessment called CNS Vital Signs, recommended by a psychologist
friend. The results were anything but reassuring: I scored below average for
my age group in nearly all of the categories, notably landing in the bottom
10th percentile on the composite memory test and in the lowest 5 percent on
the visual memory test." And later the author writes, "After a year of
struggling with the language, I retook the cognitive assessment, and the
results shocked me. My scores had skyrocketed, placing me above average in
seven of 10 categories, and average in the other three. My verbal memory score
leapt from the bottom half to the 88th — the 88th! — percentile and my visual
memory test shot from the bottom 5th percentile to the 50th. Studying a
language had been like drinking from a mental fountain of youth." An
alternative explanation is that the author enjoyed a practice effect from
taking the test more than once, and didn't necessarily gain much from his
effort to learn French. To tease out which explanation makes more sense, we
would have to know more about score stability ("reliability" in the
psychometric sense) of the CNS Vital Signs test, and what validation studies
have show about practice effects from repeated test-taking on that test.

I grew up as a monolingual native speaker of General American English in the
heartland of that dialect in the upper Midwest of the United States. My first
foreign language instruction in school occurred in the fourth grade of
elementary school. My school district was very unusual among American school
districts of that era in having mandatory German classes each week in fourth,
fifth, and sixth grade, promoted and developed by a school district employee
who was a refugee from Germany. So everyone I went to elementary school with
had early exposure to foreign language learning--at least early compared to
most other American school pupils.

I studied more German in junior high, moving to another school district in
ninth grade that didn't offer German at all in junior high, even though that
state (Wisconsin) has a higher percentage of German-descended persons than any
other state in the United States. In tenth grade I moved back to my home town
in Minnesota, and took one more year of high school German, which I bombed at
after the time off occasioned by my move out of state. The following year in
eleventh grade I started taking Russian, which went more smoothly for me, in
part because German grammar got me ready for Russian grammar, and in part
because the teacher was more kindly and more engaging and I had classmates in
Russian class who were highly motivated to learn languages and shared their
love of languages with me.

I went into university as an intending Russian major, hoping to take Chinese
on the side as an elective course. But as soon as I started taking Chinese
classes, I fell in love with that language--no declensions of nouns, no
conjugation of verbs, and mostly indication of grammar by word order, as in
English--and eventually switched my major course to Chinese when I had to
formally declare a major and dropped taking Russian classes after a while.
Chinese is of course especially challenging when it comes to achieving full
literacy. (Chinese is plenty challenging for native speakers of the spoken
language to achieve full literacy in the Chinese Han character writing
system.) But I persisted, and enjoyed along the way learning about methods of
language study from the writings of John DeFrancis, the dean of teachers of
Chinese language to a whole generation of American students.

As I left the United States for a first stay overseas, with a university
degree in Chinese language, I could read a book in Modern Standard Chinese
reasonably comfortably and could also read some of the classic texts in
Literary Chinese, but I could barely keep up with a live Chinese conversation.
Landing in Taiwan in 1982, I had a headache soon after I arrived, and it was
immensely gratifying to be able to go to the corner drugstore and say, "I
would like to buy aspirin" and be understood well enough to get what I wanted.
That relieved my headache even more than taking the medicine. Before I had
left, I had spoken to two different Americans who had each spent a year living
in Taiwan after two years of studying Chinese in the United States. They gave
me what seemed like very contradictory descriptions of how they were able to
get along linguistically in Taiwan with that much background in Chinese. One
said, "It was great. As soon as I got of the plane I found out I could use my
Chinese to talk to people." The other said, "It was terrible. For the first
six months I was there I could hardly understand a thing that people were
saying around me." I found out that they were BOTH correct, as I could
communicate my needs, when I had them, especially around local people who were
used to meeting American students, but I had the worst time for the longest
time really understanding radio broadcasting or live conversation. I was very
gratified when I could first listen through the full weather forecast on the
radio and understand every word and phrase--months after arrival.

I have studied other languages, both "dead" classical languages and living
languages from various language families. Every language on earth has purely
arbitrary features that make it differ from other languages, and what makes a
language "easy" or hard is mostly resemblance to a language a learner already
knows. (German felt very easy indeed to me after I had studied Russian and
classical Greek, for example, even though it had seemed hard earlier.) Young
people in Taiwan used to tell me that Japanese is "easy" in about the same way
that many Americans say Spanish is easy. There are many opportunities to learn
each language in each of those places, but to learn them well is not
particularly easy, really.

My experiences as a language learner have turned into advice I share on the
World Wide Web[1] and here on Hacker News.[2] Fortunately, there are a lot of
tips (one could say hacks) that help learners learn foreign languages better.
I admire the many participants on Hacker News who participate while using
English as a second language. That is not easy. Few Americans could
participate in online discussion in any language other than English. I'm not
sure I think that studying Chinese and other languages I've studied really
strengthened my cognition, but I am glad for the experiences I had overseas
and think that even Americans who will never leave the United States should
make the effort to learn at least one foreign human language.

[1]
[http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html](http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html)

[2]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302276#up_6302816](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6302276#up_6302816)

------
spindritf
_Short of cauterizing your own genitals, nothing seems like it would change
who you are like speaking in an-other 's language. Blech, I'd rather wear
someone else's underwear, no thanks, I'll take the 12 credits but no way am I
retaining anything. "Well, science says you lose the ability to learn
languages as you get older." Oh, did NPR just interview TED? Dummies in other
countries and dummies in the CIA learn as adults, are they all using different
science? An American describes another American who is fluent in French as "oh
my God, he's so smart, he speaks French and everything" but this statement is
easily unmasked as a defense by getting him to describe a Frenchman who speaks
English: "well, they all speak English over there." The bilingualism is robbed
of the "intelligence" signification because it's seen as customary.... who
they are. America is a branded-identity nation, which means hearing yourself
speak in not-your accent, with not-your vocabulary sounds very not-you, which
is why when an American tries to speak French he feels self-conscious, but the
Frenchman hearing it feels you aren't even trying. He'd be wrong, you are
trying: trying not to become French._

 _" Ugh, I hate psychobabble, why can't you be more like Malcolm Gladwell and
give me practical neuroscience based tips like 'get up before dawn' or 'play
basketball annoyingly'?" Fine, here's your concrete advice that you won't take
for shaving 6 months off your second language acquisition: master the accent
first. Before even one word of vocabulary. The accent will teach you the
rhythm of the words and the grammar-- it will make it okay for you to learn
the vocabulary. And you will think differently. American exceptiono-
isolationism isn't arrogance, it's a cognitive bias impressed on us from
kindergarten when we learn that there are only two languages in the world,
English and Everything Else. Which teaches us that a German is more similar to
an Italian than a Texan to a New Yorker, and I can predict with 100% accuracy
that if that made you pause you only speak English. Can't wait to hear your
foreign policy ideas over drinks. You should work for NPR._

 _Once you have the accent down, pick a foreign language actor or actress you
admire, and learn the language as if you were them. Talk like them. This trick
works because you are thinking like someone else, acting like someone else,
yet simultaneously distancing yourself from this change-- I 'm doing this, but
it's not me, I'm just pretending. The self-consciousness is removed because
it's not "you" who is doing it. Yet it is; and after a time, you'll become
it-- and the positive benefit for society is you'll hate the guy you used to
be. C'est la vie._

[http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/05/thank_god_the_heart_a...](http://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/05/thank_god_the_heart_attack_gri.html)

~~~
zwieback
I love TLP but losing your accent is easier said than done. I started learning
English when I was a few years old and I've lived in the US for 22 years
speaking English 99% of the time. My German accent is still clearly there. I'm
not sure what it would take at this point but it's not something that happens
easily. I listen to the way other people pronounce words but hearing your own
accent is hard.

Interestingly, my kids claim they can't really hear my accent, they know I
speak a little differently but they don't think I sound like Arnold or Angela.

~~~
fenomas
I think TLP's accent advice falls squarely into the "fake it until you make
it" category - like becoming a confident presenter by impersonating somebody
confident when you get on stage. It's not that if you try hard your accent
will go away, it's more that you (consciously) do an impression of the accent
you're learning. So if you're studying German you go full Ahhhnold.

I didn't read that TLP column until I was mostly fluent in my second language,
but in retrospect I think it's spot on (and one of his best - he can be a
little hit or miss).

~~~
_delirium
This is a big stumbling block for Swedes trying to speak Danish (which is a
very similar language grammatically, but pronounced quite differently). Going
"all in" reminds many people too much of Swedish comedians making fun of how
Danish sounds, so they worry they'll sound mocking if they speak like _that_.
So, many will try for a less "exaggerated" Danish accent instead, which ends
up not sounding very Danish at all. Doing the Swedish-comedian-impersonating-
Danish accent is actually a decent place to start, but it just sounds wrong
and borderline offensive to Swedish ears to try it.

~~~
fenomas
I don't think it actually matters whether you're any good at the impersonation
- the point is to convince your brain that you're creating a new persona,
rather than trying to change your existing one. (An overarching theme of TLP's
writings is how extraordinarily good the brain is at insulating itself from
change.)

