
Unusual, evidence-based ways to get better at a new language - EndXA
https://digest.bps.org.uk/2019/07/03/five-unusual-evidence-based-ways-to-get-better-at-a-new-language/
======
dlkf
> Evening learning probably isn’t ideal for teenagers either. In a study
> published in 2012, Johannes Holz at the University of Freiberg, and
> colleagues, found that 16- and 17-year-old girls performed better on tests
> of factual memory if they’d learned the material at 3pm than at 9pm.

> However, another study, published in Psychological Science in 2016, suggests
> that evening learning can be beneficial – especially if you follow it with a
> decent night’s sleep, and a follow-up session the next morning.

In other words, we have directly conflicting results, because this is all a
bunch of p-hacked complete fucking bullshit.

~~~
hombre_fatal
Also why bother with microoptimizations? Just sound like easy ways to justify
excuses — “Welp my 3pm window passed, maybe tomorrow!” The best method is the
one you actually do.

~~~
zzzcpan
> The best method is the one you actually do.

Doesn't apply to languages. I studied French for years "actually doing it" but
using a typical traditional methodology with teachers, grammar, forced word
repetitions, etc. It's like it didn't even happen. But using a very different
methodology for English took me just about six months to go from understanding
nothing to understanding almost everything.

~~~
abdusco
Can you expand on your "very different methodology"?

~~~
zzzcpan
Sure. I was watching tv shows with english subtitles and was looking up every
word I didn't understand in a dictionary for an hour or more every day. Some
days much more, if the show was interesting to me, so it was kind of
motivating. At the beginning pausing video and switching between media player
and dictionary proved to be a bit too exhausting, so I also wrote a tiny
program that did that with a single hotkey before I really started doing all
this. A few months later I got to comfortable enough level to start reading a
book, it was a bit harder with a book, because not only there was much more
new words, you also need to listen to pronunciations to make sure you don't
learn the words incorrectly with your own pronunciations, luckily my
dictionary program had that built in. That's about it.

~~~
JoshTriplett
> At the beginning pausing video and switching between media player and
> dictionary proved to be a bit too exhausting, so I also wrote a tiny program
> that did that with a single hotkey before I really started doing all this.

That sounds like a great idea for a service to help learn languages: subtitled
videos with links from each word (or idiomatic phrase) in the subtitles to
dictionary definitions.

~~~
jbaudanza
My website, www.captionpop.com, does this with YouTube videos. It allows you
to watch videos with multiple subtitles at once, look up individual words, and
built interactive flash cards out of video snippets.

There are also Chrome extensions that do similar things for Netflix. For
example, Subadub.

Next to interacting with native speakers, I think consuming a ton of media is
the best way to learn a language.

~~~
senorsmile
Do you know the names of any of the extensions for Netflix?

~~~
jbaudanza
Yes, Subadub.
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/subadub/jamiekdimm...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/subadub/jamiekdimmhnnemaaimmdahnahfmfdfk?hl=en-
US)

------
melling
My feeling is that you need an incredible amount of repetition. I never really
learned Spanish well until I took immersion classes in Guatemala then
continued on backpacking through South America for several months. A decade
later I still struggle to retain what I learned.

I’ve built many language learning Android and iPhone apps over the years. I
still don’t have a great formula but I think my latest iPhone apps are simple
and focused enough to help get people started.

Hundred Words: [https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hundred-
words/id1469449237](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hundred-words/id1469449237)

Language Pairs: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/language-
pairs/id1438817614?...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/language-
pairs/id1438817614?mt=8)

Pictures and Words: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pictures-and-
words/id1459560...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/pictures-and-
words/id1459560476?mt=8)

Word Search: [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4labs-word-
search/id1311744...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/h4labs-word-
search/id1311744075?mt=8)

~~~
friedegg
There is a learning method called Spaced Repetition, which involves repeatedly
quizzing yourself, with a decreasing frequency as you learn them. So, if you
always know the word for dog, you'll get that one less frequently than the one
for cat that you have more trouble remembering.

~~~
adrianN
I use Anki with Yomichan to study Japanese and find it very effective.

~~~
wahnfrieden
I built an iOS app for studying Japanese called Manabi Reader. It collects
interesting short-form reading materials, has one-tap dictionary lookups, and
lets you add words to flashcards.

I'm currently working on extending it with word tracking functionality, so
that you can see which words in an article are new to you, can track your
progress through kanji by reading, etc.

[https://reader.manabi.io](https://reader.manabi.io)

~~~
yorwba
How do you solve the problem that almost all interesting material is
copyrighted? I use texts from
[https://www.aozora.gr.jp/](https://www.aozora.gr.jp/) but most of those are
somewhat old-fashioned, except for a few modern Japanese translations of
foreign public-domain literature.

~~~
wahnfrieden
The app is a dressed-up RSS reader

------
notyourloops
I learned how to turn a stream of nonsense (from my perspective) into words by
listening to hundreds of hours of Spanish TV that I didn't understand. Spanish
audio + Spanish subtitles (to figure out how to parse sound, and to map sound
to writing), and then Spanish audio only (prevent reliance on reading).
Surprisingly effective. Incomprehensible input appears to be quite valuable.

At some point I'll try applying my methods to learning a different language to
see if I can generalize (for me and my ability to pick up a language, at
least).

~~~
f00zz
Just bear in mind that there's a huge difference between being able to get the
gist of something spoken in a foreign language and being able to convey your
thoughts effectively in that language. Even after man-years of study I still
sound like an idiot when trying to speak English in conference calls, even
though I can understand nearly 100% of written and spoken English.

~~~
sjcsjc
I obviously can't judge your spoken English, but your written English is fine.
If you hadn't stated otherwise, I would have assumed from your writing that
English was your native language.

~~~
asark
Idiomatic usage ("bear in mind") and register ("gist") even came off as
native, without running into common give-aways like incorrect or technically-
OK-but-not-quite-right prepositions. Nice.

------
chanandler_bong
"German volunteers learning Dutch who’d drunk enough vodka to achieve a blood
alcohol level of 0.04 per cent (approximately equivalent to just under a pint
of beer for a 70kg male) were rated by independent Dutch speakers as speaking
the language more proficiently during a short-test"

Based on my limited exposure to Dutch, this sounds about right; drunken
German.

Edit: "Als vliegen achter vliegen vliegen, vliegen vliegen vliegensvlug."

~~~
BigJ1211
We generally say if you shout Dutch it sounds German (especially if you do it
in a _certain_ way). So I guess the reverse also holds true somewhat. Though I
think in general people who've had a drink or two speak more 'fluently' in
foreign languages. Mostly because they don't think too much about what they're
trying to say.

Also translation: "If flies fly behind flies, flies fly flight speed" (in
general the translation for vliegensvlug is 'as fast as lightning' which isn't
really accurate and I suppose a better translation is "a bird's flight(speed)"
than lightning)

~~~
Doxin
As soon as a word has three (or more) meanings you can suddenly create silly
long sentences with one word in dutch:

Als in bergen bergen bergen bergen, dan bergen bergen bergen in bergen.

If mountains hide mountains in bergen (a place name) then mountains hide
mountains in bergen.

And similarly:

Als zeven zeven zeven zeven, dan zeven zeven zeven zeven

If seven sieves sieve sieves, then seven sieves sieve sieves. (this one works
surprisingly well in english too)

------
hwj
At least for Christians a good way to learn a foreign language is to read the
Bible in that language, because

(1) they are probably used to read a chapter or two on a daily basis (thus,
the routine is already there),

(2) and they probably remember some passages in their native tongue (thus,
already having a translation of the text).

This helped me. YMMV.

~~~
klmr
This is good advice, but

> they are probably used to read a chapter or two on a daily basis

This sounds mental. Reading the Bible on a daily basis? I’m pretty sure that
this is not the norm for the vast majority of (devout) Christians (at least in
Western/Central Europe).

~~~
jlg23
"mental"?

In rural areas of central Europe you'll quite often find the Bible in hotel
rooms for your nightly bible lecture.

~~~
viraptor
Because they're supplied by specific organisations (mostly Gideons
International) in large quantities to hotels. You'll also find them in hotel
rooms in central Sydney. It's neither a rural nor European thing.

(Literally their main goal listed on the site:
[https://www.gideons.org/about](https://www.gideons.org/about))

------
kiliantics
I just recently started learning Swahili and found some amazing classes from
Language Transfer[0]. (I have no connection with them.) I've spent a lot of
time learning languages, including tricky ones like Mandarin, and this is by
far the best learning method I have ever come across.

The "class" takes the form of a dialogue between teacher and student where the
student is an actual learner unfamiliar with the language and you try to learn
with them. Each new word is introduced with a short but thorough explanation
of how it fits in with everything you have learned so far and sometimes a
mnemonic or story to help with recall. You are always prompted to try and
construct new sentences yourself with the new words, without being told how,
so that you are naturally exploring the grammar and idiomatic structure of the
language and building an intuition for it. You are also prompted
intermittently to recall previously learned words.

Within just an hour or so, I felt comfortable creating many sentences. I think
this style of teaching helps build confidence in the language quickly, which
is really important for making progress. They only ask for donations for their
content and all of it is on soundcloud and youtube. I really recommend trying
it out.

[0] [https://www.languagetransfer.org](https://www.languagetransfer.org)

------
yawboakye
Immersion still remains the best method. I've tried a plethora of approaches
to learn German (not the easiest or most fancy and I swear I'm not masochist)
and it's not working. The biggest progress I made came when I was forced to
speak it with my gym buddy because that was our common denominator. That said,
if you want to learn German, avoid Berlin. Everyone will meet you with
English.

~~~
zzzcpan
Did you try watching German movies or tv shows with German subtitles and
translating every word you don't yet understand? It's like immersion but on
steroids. It naturally prioritized and trains your brain on all the common
words and you get to seemingly impossible levels of understanding in the
shortest possible time.

~~~
yawboakye
I did this with some considerable success. But I found out that it trains
different abilities. Naturally, reading a new language and comprehending comes
faster than being able to speak it. As far as reading and recognizing words
go, it helped. Didn't help much with my speaking ability, which is the real
thing I wanted.

------
umvi
Someone should edit the title to say "... at a new _foreign_ language"

~~~
Sahhaese
I'm not sure why your comments are attracting downvotes; from the title I
assumed programming language.

~~~
lostlogin
I’m not one of the down voters, but it’s likely because adding that word
doesn’t really add anything - foreign can mean that something is strange or
unfamiliar.

------
demosito666
This is a usual bunch of crap thrown together to make another clickbait list
for your new tab recommendations feed. In reality, there are numerous ways and
tips to improve your language learning process, but there is no single magic
one. Some of them will work for you, some will not but you have to figure that
out yourself by trial and error. And this process by itself will likely bring
a huge benefit.

I strongly recommend watching the video "Ten things polyglots do differently"
[1] to get the elaboration of the above. Basically it boils down to this:
successful language learners use quite a few methods and techniques. But each
learner uses different ones. The main thing they all have in common is that
they are actively engaging in the process, not just following some guides and
doing tasks from a textbook. A language is not something you can be taught,
it's something you need to take yourself. Everything else is far less
significant.

[1] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROh_-
RG3OVg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROh_-RG3OVg)

------
mannykannot
"Don't pay too much attention to grammar."

Breaking that rule is one of the ways my high school failed to teach much
German to most of its students.

~~~
commandlinefan
Back in the ‘50s or ‘60s, the U.S. government Foreign Service Institute put
together a series of language learning courses that covered most of the
popular languages at the time. They’re public domain and if you look hard
enough, you can find them on the internet - they’re dated, but they’re still
accurate (there are some here [http://www.fsi-language-
courses.net/](http://www.fsi-language-courses.net/) but the hosting sucks).
I’ve learned Spanish and French well enough to carry on conversations in both
from them. One thing about their approach is that they focus on memorizing
spoken dialogues. It’s the standard goofy “what time will Mr. Gonzales arrive
at the restaurant” type of dialogue, but the idea is that you’re supposed to
remember what they say, even if you don’t understand the parts of speech, well
enough to recite it from memory. I’ve found that, more than anything else,
these memorized dialogues help the most with language recollection - if I want
to say something, I scan through my memorized dialogues for something close,
substitute a few words, and say it like they said it in the course.

~~~
mcguire
Interesting. The text to go along with the audio includes a phonetic version.

    
    
        Good morning.  bwenozdiás [Some marks removed.]  Buenos días.
    

[http://www.fsi-language-
courses.net/languages/Spanish/Basic/...](http://www.fsi-language-
courses.net/languages/Spanish/Basic/Volume%201/Fsi-SpanishBasicCourse-
Volume1-StudentText.pdf), Unit 1 - Useful phrases.

~~~
commandlinefan
Yes, you find that through the whole Spanish course. I never found it to be
very useful, but it's there if somebody wants it.

------
sak5sk
As a kid I would watch english-spoken news without having any understanding of
English. Then all of a sudden one day I started understanding the news
anchors. It was a weird experience. Shortly after I started on a lessons book
and that got me to basic english - enough to understand a tiny bit to get into
an American school, but not enough to actually communicate.

------
musicale
>German volunteers learning Dutch who’d drunk enough vodka...were rated by
independent Dutch speakers as speaking the language more proficiently during a
short-test

I have no horse in this race, but this is brilliant.

(Though they seem to have missed out on an opportunity to determine which
alcoholic beverage works best for each language.)

------
gwbas1c
Ok, so the first picture is a lady holding a GIANT glass of wine. Does this
mean that the best way to learn a language is to get drunk while doing it?

For those who don't drink wine, that glass probably has about two "servings"
and will give anyone who drinks it a small buzz. Large wine glasses like this
aren't meant to be filled up, they're meant to help the drinker really swirl
the wine. It brings oxygen into the wine which helps release the flavor.

Edit: The amount of alcohol that the lady in the picture is drinking is more
than what the article recommends.

------
HerrMonnezza
This talk by Chris Lonsdale gives some practical advice on learning new
languages fast. Most of it is along the lines of what the article says, but
seems to say that the key part is to get a "language parent", whom you can
have conversations with and will try to understand and reply to you, no matter
what (like parents do with small children):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0yGdNEWdn0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0yGdNEWdn0)

------
dhconnelly
Re: alcohol - in my experience, it depends. For the first year or two of
learning German, a beer or glass of wine helped me relax and speak more
effortlessly, as suggested. But now, as a fluent speaker -- I've passed a C2
exam, i.e. "mastery" on the CEFR scale, with a good score -- I definitely
notice that any amount of alcohol hurts more than it helps. In the same way
that any amount of alcohol makes my English worse: I have trouble with recall
of even basic words.

------
ricardobarbosa
That's how I managed to learn spanish: immersion. To watch movies, series,
music, jokes, websites, everything in spanish, with my Google Translator buddy
by my side.

------
seandhi
I speak Spanish fluently as a second language.

> Listen to the language, even if you don’t have a clue what’s being said –
> and you’re not even paying close attention

I totally agree that this is helpful. Playing Spanish music while I work was
one of the things I credited helping me learn so quickly.

> Don’t try too hard with the grammar

This, too. When I first started learning, I tried to remember all of the rules
that I was taught in high school, but it was easier to just remember how the
words are used in different contexts. Asking native speakers the whys behind
the languages usually just results in frustration.

> Have a drink…

My verbal fluidity increases significantly when drinking. This probably has to
do with letting go of the worry about sounding "dumb" while conversing in a
different language. Most people are very forgiving towards people speaking in
their non-native tongue, but it's still hard not being self-conscious. Alcohol
helps.

I don't know about the other points, as I learned in an immersive environment
by the seat of my pants.

------
kebman
There was a German teacher in Norway who really hated how the Norwegian way of
teaching German. In Norway the curriculi focusses a lot on grammar. This
teacher decided to ditch all that in favour of speaking the language a lot
more, however, and only teach grammar after the pupils had mastered the
language reasonably well. This turned out great, and it even made it easier
for the pupils to understand the grammar, because instead of using grammar to
decipher how the language was supposed to be spoken, the pupils now used
grammar as a way to describe what they already could speak. In other words,
they didn't use "logic" to try to form sentences, as much as pure intuition.

------
iacutone
I created [http://masterspanish.today](http://masterspanish.today) to help
with my Spanish.

I receive a daily email, at noon Eastern time, with a Spanish article from El
Pais and an English translation.

------
ivankolev
Good read. I like to think it's just life getting in the way, and if you are
in the right circumstances and environment you could achieve respectable level
of proficiency in almost anything, even later in life.

------
evrydayhustling
It's interesting that the first two - listen even without comprehension, and
deprioritize grammar - correspond significantly to advances in NLP on the last
few years. Unsupervised language models (that learn to predict text without
any labeled task) turn out to be valuable through transfer learning in
specific comprehension tasks. And old school NLP methods that focused on
grammar tree construction have fallen behind attention and transformer based
methods that learn softer, more abstract representations of structure.

------
cmsj
It's great to finally have scientific validation of my hypothesis that the
Dutch language is pretty much just drunk German :D

------
vladojsem
I can speak 5 languages but having a drink didn't help me to learn any of them
:-) Quite the contrary.

------
pmiller2
Oddly enough, these things all seem to apply for me when learning to play an
instrument (especially the “just listen” one). I do much better in practice
when I listen to what I’m practicing than when I don’t.

------
moron4hire
I work for a language learning company, where I am building VR apps for
immersive (in both the VR and language learning sense of the word) language
learning.

~~~
danielscrubs
Japanese company made for learning English?

------
sneakernets
I had a friend tell me that you're only truly near-native in a foreign
language if you can troll online using it.

It's crass, but I like it.

------
no1youknowz
I'm currently learning Japanese and I've only been at it for a month. My tools
are :-

1) Pimsleur Japanese [0]

2) Michel Thomas Japanese [1]

3) Creating my own Anki decks [2]

4) Genki Textbooks [3]

5) Remembering the Kanji [4]

Firstly, I know it's going to take at least 2 years to be good at Japanese and
I'm intent on just enjoying the journey. I have absolutely no need to rush.

Right now I'm only concentrating on my speaking and listening skills. I'm not
at all fussed about pitch accents and will improve that when I get a tutor
(think year 2).

My methodology is going to consist of:

\- Doing each CD of Pimsleur (there are 5 in total, with 30 lessons each).

\- Actively listening and speaking for 30 minutes in the morning, just after
lunch and just after dinner. Thus doing 1 hour and a half a day.

\- Write down all the newer words for each lesson into a notebook for review
later.

\- Writing down all the sentences in an excel spreadsheet for the anki deck.
So far I have around 900 words and sentences.

My progress is that I have completed the first CD and I have memorised into my
long term memory up to lesson 20. Unfortunately my memory starts to fade when
reviewing the anki deck past lesson 20 and I get the sentence order incorrect
even though I know the words. Of course, I want to get to 100% before moving
onto the next CD.

To switch things up a bit. I've now started to do Michele Thomas CDs and
listen passively in the background. Michele Thomas isn't as demanding for your
attention as Pimsleur.

When I have finished both groups of CDs. I'll go through the Genki textbook
and after that start to focus on my writing skills with Remember the Kanji.

After that, that's when I'll go on italki [5] and get a tutor.

Oh and when watching Anime (with Japanese Subs). I understand around 10% so
far, in just a month. I do start to laugh though when the subs are not
correct.

I can only imagine what I understand, when I have finished all CDs. I hope to
get to at least 75% and then start to watch Anime with the subs removed.

Finally, if anyone wants to go the immersion route. Highly recommend Matt vs
Japan [6]. I'll be doing this once I finish the CDs and books.

[0]: [https://www.pimsleur.com/learn-japanese/pimsleur-japanese-
le...](https://www.pimsleur.com/learn-japanese/pimsleur-japanese-
levels-1-5-cd/9781501185663)

[1]: [https://www.michelthomas.com/learn-
japanese/](https://www.michelthomas.com/learn-japanese/)

[2]: [https://apps.ankiweb.net/](https://apps.ankiweb.net/)

[3]: [https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-
Japanese-...](https://www.amazon.com/GENKI-Integrated-Elementary-Japanese-
English/dp/4789014401)

[4]: [https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-
Japanese-C...](https://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-Japanese-
Characters/dp/0824835921)

[5]: [https://www.italki.com/](https://www.italki.com/)

[6]:
[https://www.youtube.com/user/MATTvsJapan](https://www.youtube.com/user/MATTvsJapan)

