There has been so much written on this topic. I don't think people actually agree on what's the best way to learn a foreign language, and that includes language teachers. Various methods I have encountered include:
* Focus on reading text and vocabulary. Grammar will follow naturally from the text.
* Focus on grammar. Vocabulary is a detail.
* Focus on speaking. Speaking is the key to fluency. Speak to as many natives as possible. (Note: this can be incredibly annoying to said native speakers)
* Focus on writing. This is the best way to retain both vocabulary and grammar. Speaking will follow when you have vocabulary and grammar memorized.
* Focus on listening/hearing. Understanding is the key to communication. Remembering grammar and vocabulary will follow naturaly, e.g. from TV shows, games, movies, songs, etc. in the target language.
I could go on and on and on. Seriously. My advice is two-fold:
* Stick with a language. Whatever your method is, don't give up.
* If your method doesn't work for you, change it. If your teacher doesn't work for you, change it (e.g. textbook, school, course, TV show, whatever the "teacher" is).
It's that simple. Truth to be told, learning a language is mostly hard work. There is no secret. There is no "aha, you've been doing it wrong, you could have learned Chinese in 3 months!" method.
For example, using Anki might be useful, and you might find it fun, but it will not magically make you remember anything. And, even if you remember something in the context of Anki, you might not recognize it in the wild (e.g. in a text, song, or a game). Alternatively, you might not be able to produce it (e.g. passive recollection is very different from active production of the language).
I think the best one can do when learning a language is to simply stick with it. In the grand scheme of things, whether it will take you 4 years, 5 years, or 6 years to feel fluent is fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. It will, most likely, be years though.
There are different valid approaches, but there are certainly techniques that are ineffective; I think the popular "just do something" advice is harmful as it suggests all approaches are equally valid. I think it's possible to develop an intuition about whether an activity is more or less beneficial for your learning.
'Language learning advice is conflicting,' 'Stick with a language, Whatever your method is, don't give up.'
'If your method doesn't work for you, change it.'
I agree with the author. I think a lot of language learning advice is of poor quality, or it's hard to establish complex behaviours simply from reading an article. It's hard to write stuff down that you could expect to improve the odds of the student. Learning a language on your own is a kind of a funny hack, it's like learning to program without access to a computer, it can be done but it needs specific techniques. I make software for learning languages, writing proper instructions for using it is something that I consider difficult and I don't attempt it. :)
There is definitely a difference in the quality of content you consume though, which is a bummer - new language learners don’t know what’s good. I just ran across a YouTube channel [1] which if I had known about it when I was starting Japanese, would have probably prevented me from getting confused about a great deal of things.
But there really is no substitute for persistence, regardless of technique.
Okay, but can't we objectively experimentally compare them? Take a class of 20 undergrads, have them use method X. Have the next class use Y. Repeat with as many methods as needed, with as many classes/semesters as needed, control for as many confounding factors as you can. Publish papers, reproduce. Is the noise floor too high, the effectiveness too close, or am I missing something? (Yes, probably that last one; if so, what?)
I think that the field is fraught with a number of caveats, just off the top of my head:
* "I learned a language" is a very poorly defined statement. It's really difficult to quantify. The EU tried with their language levels [1], but it's still a mess. So you get a person that says "I speak 15 languages! Just follow my method forehead!" while an academic says "this person speaks two languages barely, and makes noises in the rest."
"I know a language" means different things for different people, depending on one's motivation to learn a language. Do you want to book a hotel room? Do you want to read a newspaper? Do you want to read Crime and Punishment in the original? Note that, for example, reading a newspaper is significantly easier in Tagalog, which uses a mixture of English and Filipino, than in Chinese, which requires you to know around 3 thousand Chinese characters.
* Learning a language is highly influenced by your native language. If you take 20 undergrads, you might conclude that "to learn language X as a native speaker of Y, the best method seems to be Z." Then, other papers will likely dispute your definition of "learning" (see previous point).
* Learning a language is highly dependent on your motivation. If you take a class of 20 people, their motivation to learn a language X is going to be all over the place. Learning a language is always really difficult, even when a language is deemed easy (like Spanish). Most people will drop off unless they are really driven to learn the language.
Long story short, I don't think it's as easy to apply the scientific method. There's a reason why we don't have a matrix of "if you're a German speaker wanting to learn Russian, here's the optimal syllabus for you."
On the flip side, I do think we can say something about language learning. For example, apps like Duolingo are not that useful. I don't think that's a very controversial statement in the language learning community.
Similarly, just moving to a country won't do anything special for you (other than utterly isolate you). For example, you won't pick up any Japanese from your one-room 40-squared-feet apartment in downtown Tokyo alone.
> aha, you've been doing it wrong, you could have learned Chinese in 3 months!
Honestly there kind of is, you just have to put yourself in a "sink or swim" situation as the article says. You'll be surprised how far you can get in 3 months if you are in such a situation.
Also, don't believe any crap when someone tells you "X language is hard". This is perhaps the biggest myth I have ever seen. It's only hard if you think it is, and if you try to learn everything by rules and flashcards, which native speakers don't generally do. You can also try to make anything look hard that actually isn't. I find people in the US especially love to talk about how hard Chinese (and also Japanese and a few others) is but it isn't particularly different in difficulty than English or any other major world language. 5-year-olds can handle it, they just weren't told it's hard, they just needed to speak it if they wanted to argue and get their stolen pencil back.
Any grammar is surmountable, but the languages that are truly hard are ones which have sounds or consonant clusters that your native language(s) don't. For example, learning Georgian as a native English/Italian speaker.. I could hardly even say basic words like "forest" (t'ke), "water" (tsqali), or "frog" (baqaqi) for the first few months. Look up the ყ letter, or listen and judge for yourself
ბაყაყი წყალში ყიყინებს (the frog cries in the water)
Hear natives speak it: https://forvo.com/word/%E1%83%91%E1%83%90%E1%83%A7%E1%83%90%...
The one by shaburgiorgi is the most faithfully enunciated, while the others are what you would more likely hear casually/in conversation.
I spent quite some time with the Swedish retroflex fricative, and always heard something else than my teacher described. I finally settled on learning it by IPA, i.e. learning where exactly the tongue needs to be.
Even harder are Russian consonants for me: I can try as much as I want, but I will probably never be able to distinguish Russian hard and soft consonants, even with a Russian speaker saying them slowly and in contrast (and with lots of "you're kidding me, right? Those sounds are nothing alike").
I can completely relate to everything you wrote haha. I never mastered ш (which I guess is retroflex fricative?) vs щ and I've completely given up on hard vs. soft sounds in Russian because this
>and with lots of "you're kidding me, right? Those sounds are nothing alike"
Is too true. With practice and listening, my pronunciation is naturally improving over time, but I really don't know how to improve it in a faster way. Do you think learning and practicing IPA would do the trick, like you did with Swedish?
Learning about phonetics absolutely helps. It provides an accurate way of precisely describing how sounds are pronounced.
Do keep in mind, though, that the IPA classifications that you find on Wikipedia are sometimes rough estimates. With particularly difficult sounds, it may be a good idea to look at multiple phonetic descriptions.
Begin with the sounds of your own native language, which you already know how to pronounce, and try to describe them phonetically. A tip for learning to feel where your tongue is, is to pronounce the sounds without tone, i.e. whisper them, or even without air, i.e. simply mouth them.
And a 5 year old would be cut a lot of slack for screwing it up.
One of the issues with learning anything as an adult is that other adults are viciously unaccommodating. Foreign language learning turns that up to 11.
Personally, I think this is the primary issue with adult learning. You have to be a very strong personality to have an intrinsic motivation that will cause you to put in long hours of work because you aren't going to get any external motivation for a very long time.
I know adults in the US are often sadly viciously unaccomodating of broken English, but I feel that isn't the case in most of the (especially non-English-speaking) world, where any attempts to speak the local language are usually very much welcomed.
There are some places where the locals tend to speak good enough English that if they realize you speak English better than their language they'll viciously insist on speaking English to get business done, but that is sometimes mitigated if you place yourself in a more rural area or less cosmopolitan city where English isn't common.
It depends how racist the country/situation is. Many countries will give English-speakers a break because many English speakers don't even try. So just being able to say something - anything - in the language counts as a plus. Anything after that is a bonus.
Even in English-speaking countries, you can screw up the grammar badly and still be comprehensible. US and British people may decide you're an idiot - and treat you accordingly - but they will mostly understand you.
So my personal ordering of importance is vocab, grammar, and finally accent/voice coaching. You will definitely need the latter for most languages, because even supposedly non-exotic ones like French require a novel set of mouth movements. Most lesson systems underemphasise this.
My working assumption as an adult is that it will take three months to learn basic conversation with full immersion and minimal distractions, and five years of constant practice to reach reasonable fluency in speaking, listening, and writing.
This is actually less time than it takes kids to learn a language, so the idea that kids are especially malleable or open is clearly wrong. Of course kids are learning language in general - and more - at the same time, so timings aren't absolutely comparable. But similarly adults are having to do a lot of distracting adult things at the same time, so it more or less evens out.
> Sounds came out of my mouth and people didn't understand what I was trying to say.
Right, and as a 5 year old who wants your pencil back, you find another way to say it. If you don't know how to say "backpack" you say "bag". If you don't know how to say "foyer" you say "that place near the door". If you don't know how to say "pencil" you say "pen" or "writing stick".
I realize it was an unforgiving interpretation. That was directed at the topic and not you personally. That's kind of my point. If you have a sink-or-swim attitude or situation you will learn it.
There's a variety of factors that make language easier or harder to learn. Broadly speaking, you can divide them into writing, grammar, vocabulary, and phonology.
So there's languages that are hard to read and write. People love to talk about how poor English is when it comes to correspondence between written letters and sounds, but honestly, it's not close to the head of the pact. There are some Southeast Asian languages today where the gap between written word and speech is very much akin to writing Latin but speaking French. Japanese kanji is a moderately different level of burden, as every kanji has multiple different pronunciations, and it's at the point where--even for native speakers--it's not particularly expected that you can read someone's name and know how to pronounce it. Of course, for those of who use Latin scripts, any language that also uses Latin script is going to be easier to learn than one that doesn't.
Phonology can be a challenging aspect, because several languages don't have the same phonotactics as English does (or insert whatever native language here). There are multiple Slavic or Chinese sounds that my ears would process as "sh" and yet would be considered different consonants. Some phonemes are legitimately more difficult to pronounce--pronouncing click consonants literally scars your vocal tract. Some languages demand that you pay attention to tones, creakiness, breathiness, or aspiration, none of which is phonologically relevant to English or most Indo-European language.
Grammar and vocabulary are, as you imply, pretty mild concerns at the end of the day. They're not difficult enough to impede language acquisition, but there is actually some evidence to suggest that a language that becomes a major second language in the process goes through stronger grammatical simplification than their closest linguistic relatives--consider how much simpler English, Swahili, Malay, or Persian are compared to "normal" languages in their respective families.
I think my point is, even "polluting" your brain with analysis like this of a language will make it actually hard. For example
> Japanese kanji is a moderately different level of burden
If you didn't read this, you wouldn't actually go into it thinking of it as a burden, and it would turn out to not actually be a burden. The fact that "even" native speakers from time to time have to ask how to pronounce something is just a fact of life, and not a difficulty of the language, but observers have come to think of it as a burden for some reason. But now that you've read that it is a burden, it will be a burden to you.
I have pretty firm conviction that "hard" is very much influenced within some range by how hard you a priori think it is, and that logic is not the way to approach this. Rather, being blissfully unaware of any logical or linguistic experts' arguments around how hard others think something is will actually help you learn the language much faster and more efficiently.
> going to be easier to learn than one that doesn't.
> There are multiple Slavic or Chinese sounds
> Some phonemes are legitimately more difficult to pronounce
> literally scars your vocal tract
> demand that you pay attention to
Without any intent to personally attack you, because a LOT of people have logical arguments such as the above, it's quite literally even hearing such logical descriptions of languages which may make something extremely hard. We aren't fully logical creatures, the languages we invented aren't designed to be logically analyzed.
I live in Japan, and every single Japanese person that I know, and a few Chinese coworkers too, have told me how kanji/hanzi is so ridiculously difficult to learn. I mean, native Chinese and Japanese speakers require at least 12 years of education to learn how to read and write their languages at a basic level. They are the most difficult writing systems in the world by far, saying otherwise is totally disingenious.
> at least 12 years of education to learn how to read and write their languages at a basic level
The idea of a "basic level" is fundamentally flawed.
Can a 10-year-old child in Japan function to a similar level in their society as a 10-year-old child in England? If asked to water the plants can they do so? Can they catch the correct school bus? Can they read a children's book for their age level? Yes? If so language has served its purpose, and there isn't really a fundamental difference in difficulty level.
Yeah, native speakers will tell you their language is hard, but they too are influenced by the media that all says it's hard.
You might be right that it takes 12 years for the average kid to learn a particular set of Kanji but that's a very arbitrary standard applied to a language that does not demand you know all of those Kanji to be functional in society. There is context, there is the simple act of asking, there is so much more to it. Likewise, English speakers don't demand that they know the entire Oxford English Dictionary to be considered literate. I mean, yeah, if you asked the 10-year-old to "irrigate the agricultural enclosure" instead of "water the plants" you might stump them, sure. If we had those kind of expectations, English would be considered "hard" -- look at that thick book of the OED! It's thicker than the Kangxi dictionary and Xinhua dictionary combined, and therefore it must be harder! (My point is -- logic isn't the way to analyze this.)
You're not responding to the evidence presented in this thread that there is evidence that some aspects of language learning is objectively harder. Specifically:
* There's pretty strong evidence (comparison between literacy rates of children with different native languages) that some languages have writing systems that are harder to learn than others. (I feel obliged to point out that writing is the least important part of language acquisition--after all, writing dates to only ~6,000 years ago, whereas spoken language dates at least 100,000 years ago, possibly earlier. Of course, for most major modern languages, a language learner is equally expected to read/write in it as they are to listen/speak in it)
* There is some evidence, albeit more controversial, that there is a critical age range in which it is far easier to acquire pronunciation of phonemes than learning subsequently.
* Again, there is evidence that some phonemes are physically easier to pronounce than others, discovered in part by the order in which toddlers acquire various speech sounds. If you've got a toddler learning to speak, listen to the sounds he/she can pronounce and also the ones that aren't properly pronounced. I wouldn't attempt to chart out a full objective scale on which phoneme is harder than the other one, but I would be moderately confident in asserting that an Arabic ayin is objectively more difficult to pronounce than an `m' sound.
* I also mentioned evidence that some grammatical features may be more complicated: the developments of lingua francas, or additionally creoles, does suggest that languages used heavily as second language acquisition tend to drop several grammatical features.
(Now I should also addend that just because something is objectively more difficult doesn't necessarily mean that is specifically "hard." It is clearly objectively more difficult to lift a box 2 meters than to do so 1 meter... but that doesn't mean that it's hard to do so.)
I would even go so far as to say that I feel like comparing things like literacy rates (which have very arbitrary definitions) and phoneme acquisition are a very "western" way to analyze a language, and by doing so, Japanese and Chinese seem hard. If they are not analyzed with that kind of logical mindset and rather just "Do people function in society", "can the workings of a complex machine be articulated well" and "Are people able to communicate needs and emotions" I think a very different answer would be seen.
No, I never said that. I said that literacy has a very arbitrary definition.
Rather, the act of drawing a hard line between literate and non-literate is a very Western way of analyzing language learning and doesn't scale well past a certain set of languages. By drawing such a hard line you end up with ridiculous conclusions such as that a child needs 12 years to be literate in Japanese. Sure, if you go by your arbitrary definition.
You can say that the average kid in an English speaking country needs 18 years before they know what "erudite" and "ostentation" mean if you draw the line there.
That's simply a fact that doesn't need to be argued. Lots of English speakers can't read or write well, because English orthography is bad and hard, or because of dyslexia or blindness. They function in society. They can't do everything, but people who aren't plumbers, programmers, or are terrible at math can't do everything either. They work around it.
edit: I think the functional illiteracy number in the US is something like 1 out of 6. R. Kelly famously can't read.
Dude, why are you so stubborn? Have you ever tried to learn those languages? Do you really think that learning 20~30 simple characters is on the same level of difficulty as learning 2000~4000 characters, some of them very complex? But sure, Japanese and Chinese people think that kanji is hard because the media told them, not because they had to spend several hours a day of study for 12 years just to reach basic fluency.
> You might be right that it takes 12 years for the average kid to learn a particular set of Kanji but that's a very arbitrary standard applied to a language that does not demand you know all of those Kanji to be functional in society.
12 years is what it takes to learn the joyo kanji list (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_j%C5%8Dy%C5%8D_kanji) (I don't know the Chinese equivalent), a set of 2136 which is considered the *minimum* to function in modern society, what you will find in newspapers and government publication. Can you do with less than that? Maybe, but it won't be easy.
Yes? I grew up with both Chinese and English? What gave you the impression I was saying stuff out of nowhere?
> Do you really think that learning 20~30 simple characters is on the same level of difficulty as learning 2000~4000 characters, some of them very complex?
Yes. I'm happy to elaborate as to why I think so but if you're only going to stand on the opposite side and not interested in even trying to understanding my perspective it's a waste of time on my part.
> a set of 2136 which is considered the minimum to function in modern society
For an adult, fine, but (a) "number of characters remembered" not a good way to measure the ability to function, any more than "number of SAT/GRE words memorized" to an English speaker, and (b) to function at an 8-year-old level in society you most definitely don't need 2136 characters.
An 8-year-old in an English speaking country would trip up trying to read The Economist as well.
Ok, then maybe you are a genius, because everybody else has told me how painful it was to learn all the characters. I'm going through the process myself, and while sometimes I enjoy it, there is no point in denying that it is way more difficult than learning an alphabet-based language.
Experience is king. Language is used at a pace where it has to be intuitive. No amount of learning rules is going to give you that. As you use a language you build up intuition on it and you learn the patterns (combos) that go well together. It's actually quite similar to how you learn so many other things from mathematics to video games.
One thing that does set languages apart though is that they involve learning to listen and to speak. With other activities we don't usually have to learn to listen to a new audio pattern to start distinguishing it from noise. Even less frequently do we have to learn to make new sounds with our mouth. In fact, I bet most people couldn't even describe what they do in their mouth to produce the sounds of different characters in their languages that they can speak. (Think of the difference of French R and English R and how you produce them.) Learning those can be quite a new experience, especially if you're still learning up distinguish the sound from noise.
> Honestly there kind of is, you just have to put yourself in a "sink or swim" situation as the article says. You'll be surprised how far you can get in 3 months if you are in such a situation.
This is the problem in language learning. What you said could be true in certain contexts but is wildly misconstrued. As is, what you said is "bro science" without proper methods, context, and caveats. Finally, while immersion in a language is amazingly useful, you can't do much in 3 months.
Sounds like a recipe for burnout and total isolation in a foreign country.
Depends on your native language there are harder and easier languages for sure. It is much easier for a Chinese to read and understand Japanese comparing to someone who don't know the symbols and need to learn it from scratch. It is easier to learn other languages from the same group, like learning a different latin language, germanic language or semitic language if you know one of them already. There are other factors also like similarities in grammatical structure, in variations of the language around situations which require more politeness or formality like in Japanese, written vs. spoken language like in Arabic and many other factors.
I have to disagree with this. If you focus on just learning words in a target language, you just become a foreign language dictionary. Knowing how to say "train station" in Spanish doesn't help when you can't use it properly in a sentence.
I think Michel Thomas has a fairly succinct take on the topic: “If you know how to handle verbs you know how to handle the language. Everything else is just vocabulary”. Although he is a somewhat controversial figure in regards to claimed past achievements, his system for language learning works well. Don't worry about amassing large amounts of vocabulary at the outset, just use words like "it" (Where is it / What is it / I can do it). You can swap out "it" for any other noun you learn later on.
Anyone who learns enough vocabulary to be something resembling fluent (say, can comfortably watch tv shows or read books in that language), will be good at grammar far before they learn the 10k+ words they need to know. You can't consume enough of the language to acquire that kind of vocabulary and not have a decent intuition for the grammar.
I don't advocate ignoring grammar, but you really just need awareness of the basics, not to spend time doing drills or filling in blanks.
What really jumped out at me in your comment is that its definition of fluency (watch tv shows, read books) focuses on comprehension and appears to completely ignore being able to produce anything in the target language.
When learning languages I used to focus on the grammar because it was most interesting to me (and words you can always look up in a dictionary). But for the most recent language I’ve attempted I’ve focused on just learning a ton of vocabulary and it’s made a huge and positive difference. Simply knowing a lot of words means you can read newspapers and twitter or whatever and allows you more chances to see the grammar in action.
For sure! When I learn a langauge, I find word frequency list "100 most common verbs", "100 most common nouns", etc. You really don't need more vocabulary than that. You can find a way to commumicate anything with a relatively small vocabulary. Once you have a base vocabulary, you can start practicing grammar and actual usage, and your vocabulary will naturally skyrocket without any additional vocabulary memorization.
> You really don't need more vocabulary than that.
What do you want to do with the language? Do you want to be able to book a hotel? Because if that's your goal, then you're probably correct. Then again, you can probably do that in English anywhere in the world.
However, if your goal is to communicate, you won't be able to get by with 200 words. Just try to watch an episode of Friends with a non-native speaker.
> "Just a pinch!"
A: "What is a pinch"?
B: "A little"
A: "Ah! They should say little!"
(Though the conversation above is highly contrived since you wouldn't be able to understand the vast majority of Friends with at the very least 2000 - 3000 words)
Exactly and that’s the big problem when people talk about learning a language. For some, to learn a language is to be able to get by on a trip. Sure you can do that on 3 months. But being able to have conversations on advanced topics, read books or watch movies? Good luck, unless you spend 6 hours everyday, immerse yourselves and use good ressources. And you’ll actually probably be at the level of a middle schooler. Really learn a language is quite hard (pitch accent, new sounds, specific grammar, concepts which can’t be translated). And even experts spent years to master one.
Fair, you're not gonna give a speech with 200 words, but if it's the right 200 words (the most used ones) you can find a way to communicate almost anything. My point is that with memorizing just 200 words, there are creative ways to express everything and you can use that as a good base to start using the language and your progress will grow exponentially from there with minimal memorization. With 200 words of English, you might not know what "a pinch" is, but you know enough to have the conversation and figure it out even if the person you're talking to only speaks English.
This is true for speaking but listening is impossible.
The vast majority of people do not speak using the simple terms that are in those 100 top lists.
As an example - I would guess that from my previous sentence, "vast", "majority", "simple", "terms", "lists" and possibly more would not be present, and that's in only one relatively simple sentence.
I can "speak in" probably ten languages, but I'd only say I can really _speak_ bidirectionally in one or possibly two.
> The vast majority of people do not speak using the simple terms that are in those 100 top lists.
It really depends who you're talking to. I've seen claims, and I believe them, that in many languages the average person has about a 500 word vocabulary that they're using on a daily basis.
Someone who is more educated than the average person is likely to use a larger vocabulary, but they're also more likely to be able to simplify their speech to accomodate you and make it possible for you to communicate with them.
Yes, but this is really distinct from understanding a language.
You might be able to have a very basic one on one conversation with someone who is speaking directly to you.
Now sit in the corner at a bar, party, in a conference, lecture hall, or even watch a movie without subtitles, and try to understand anything at all. In most if not all languages that's impossible with a 500 word vocab.
Verbs become a bit tricky when they are heavily inflected, with the most common having the most irregularities. Collisions become a problem too, it's almost as if a heavily inflected language, with a fairly consistent root vocabulary, quickly runs out of distinct syllable combinations. E.g. Portuguese, and presumably the other romance languages. Compare the past perfect of 'to go' and 'to be' in Portuguese - they are identical for all persons.
Getting the wrong inflection ruins any sense you're trying to make!
My Spanish is like that - my vocab is about a hundred words and I'm very comfortable using it but native speakers are not amused and there have been cases when I literally was asked to speak any other language
But the point is, if you were to find yourself in the countryside of a Spanish speaking country with only Spanish speakers around, you could find a way communicate what you need to survive. And 2-3 months in that environment, with no English, and you'd be fluent enough to keep up socially.
We waste a lot of time trying to teach teenagers languages in high school. I learnt French, very poorly. Have retained almost nothing to this day, what a waste of time.
I believe Latin is still offered in my high school system... A guaranteed waste of time.
I truly believe study of foreign language should almost be reserved for people who will be living in a country with that tongue. Using it everyday and getting good returns on all that grind.
More generally, we should be be more economical with our effort and time. "Why am I learning this? " Should be asked more often.
I feel the cultural pull for pointless learning on other subjects. I am sure we all do. "I should study some physics. Read Feynman's lectures." But to what end, I don't know. My life will not be appreciably better for learning more about electro-magnetism.
There's a yearning in us that pointless education must satisfy. A dream of a better life that you can pretend to be working towards.
You're not pretending to be working towards a better life, you're giving it a try. We're born clueless about what's the best investment in the limited amount of seconds we're blessed to have. Calling experimentation on what life has to offer a "waste of time" means you found no enjoyment in learning this specific subject, nor in the doors it unlocks for you (you could be having an apero on the French Riviera, enjoying great wine and compliments from locals for having invested energies into learning their language; or a well paid job in Geneva; or reading the Count of Montecristo in its original format). While I understand your concern about time economization, I think there's and implied slack in how you test what's best for you. As long as you're actively invested in spending your time, and not just let it vanish one second at a time, I believe any activity is worthy of experimentation.
Otherwise what's the point of not killing oneself - will you fight? Or will you perish like a dog?
> As long as you're actively invested in spending your time, and not just let it vanish one second at a time, I believe any activity is worthy of experimentation.
This is a great sentiment and one that lines up well with my philosophy in life, thank you for summarising it so concisely!
Beautiful sentiment that I agree with - I greatly enjoyed my Spanish class, got decent enough at it to have good experiences traveling in Spanish speaking countries, and ended up much more open to living abroad (which I’m doing now) and have language learning as one of my main hobbies. Was it useful for business or academically? Not particularly, but still very worth my while, and others have different experiences that resonated with them too.
That all said, instruction quality is a big differentiator; I agree that most classes taught at schools are pretty miserably bad, so from that perspective, point taken.
I am currently working through this book, transcribing as I go along, inspired from the Dowling Method (kinda similar feel to "Learn Python the Hard Way"). Highly, highly, highly recommend.
Homines autem si Latine nescient, daemonesne potestatibus suis uti poterunt ut linguas hodiernas rapide discant? Daemones ignavos vel impotentes putas?
Imagine a world where everyone speaks only the language of the country where they were born, and doesn't learn any foreign languagues.
On your other point - is browsing HN the most economic and effective way to spend your time? I think learning a language or studying physics would be more useful. Do you not waste time browsing internet, watching Netflix, playing games?
> We waste a lot of time trying to teach teenagers languages in high school. I learnt French, very poorly. Have retained almost nothing to this day, what a waste of time.
Does that mean the learning was in vain? I’ve probably forgotten 90% of what I learned in high school other than math. Does that mean most of my education was a waste of time?
>Does that mean the learning was in vain? I’ve probably forgotten 90% of what I learned in high school other than math. Does that mean most of my education was a waste of time?
Did the things you learn change you in some other fundamental way, that only learning those things could (ie you could come to a conclusion and forget the exact process that brought you to that conclusion, and thus the process was worth learning even though now forgotten)?
If not, then that learning must have been in vain, almost per the definition of vain, right?
Public school is much a place to dump kids so that both parents can work full time - this is how it’s utilised in reality. Otherwise there would be a cutthroat market for parents education spending - but almost everyone leaves the child in the closest school they don’t have to pay for.
Some would say separating state and school is equal or greater in importance, than separating state and church.
I went to public schools all the way through undergrad and they were all excellent. I don't really know what would have been improved by those schools being private.
To be fair, schools offer a lot of subjects to give you a taste of several academic disciplines. You are expected to choose one or two you like and discard the rest. If it is done well, you will enjoy the process. Having fun is not a waste of time.
Computational Linguist here (by training, though not frequent practice) so I had to work through Language Acquisition courses in the process.
Children learn language by necessity. They cannot translate needs and desires into meaningful results if they don't. Once they have the basics, they learn a lot more from peers (preschool) than parents: Adult speech patterns differ too much from the simpler language model of young children so it is their interactions with other young children where they learn pieces of each others' models. Pieces that they don't easily receive from their parents' speech patterns. Vocabulary explodes when they hit preschool even though parents and older siblings may speak to them just as much. This is first-language acquisition, and I hope it's obvious that this is an extremely simplified and incomplete explanation. As a side note, COVID is really screwing with this process for young children who are now far behind in this process. Research has shown that language delay can have lifelong impacts.
SLA (second language acquisition) has many interesting aspects beyond what I can explain here, but I will say that the ease of learning-- all else being equal (a very important caveat)-- source language and target language play a large part. Languages that share similar phonemes tend to be a little easier, ditto for syntactic structure. It makes the exercise a bit more about mapping lexical entries in one language to another, along with learning declinations. Going from a non-tonal language to a tonal language is harder, though interestingly musicians may have an easier time. Conversely, tonal to non-tonal may be easier. Also interesting-- speakers of tonal languages tend to have higher rates of perfect pitch.
True bilingualism-- learning two languages from birth-- is its own separate category of language acquisition. It's not uncommon for the learner to never quite learn either language as well as a single language learner. However the process, and learned facility for code switching, carries it's own cognitive advantages.
Once again though, all of this is a highly simplified and incomplete explanation. There are plenty of very important factors that I'm leaving out here-- my comments here are probably biased towards those aspects of language acquisition that I find most interesting.
> True bilingualism-- learning two languages from birth-- is its own separate category of language acquisition. It's not uncommon for the learner to never quite learn either language as well as a single language learner. However the process, and learned facility for code switching, carries it's own cognitive advantages.
This is an interesting point indeed as it pertains to my experience. I believe I learned both English and Arabic from birth, however, my Arabic skills have atrophied and my English is definitely stronger but it could use some improvement. However, Levantine Arabic phonemes not found in English at all come naturally to me and when immersed in my home country I would be able to pick up vocabulary quickly and to some degree reading skills although I have very little education in that aspect.
Yep, that fits. And it's been a while since this coursework so I may be wrong, but IIRC one advantage of being multi-lingual and specifically bilingual is the ability to more easily shift to different systems of abstractions. I think the wider range of idiomatic metaphors etc. also presented a more multi-perspective mode of viewing the world. Somewhat on that topic, I can highly recommend the book "Metaphors We Live By", by George Lakoff. Truly a fantastic book & revelatory in showing just how extensively we don't* use literal language and instead rely quite heavily on metaphor.
One brief example is to say "up" when the literal is "increase". "Up" is a physical directions, yet we might say "My bank account balance keeps going up". Really, the $ number is increasing though. Metaphor is everywhere.
One method that works wonders is Michel Thomas’ method. I have no affiliation with them, just personal experience. The method feels weird initially (old man’s audiotapes), but if you had slightest interest in neuroscience, you’d see it’s absolutely brilliant way of tailoring the learning to how the brain works.
I can read newspaper or have a brief conversation in a restaurant or shop in ~6 languages. You can acquire that skill easily in ~20 hours of audio (per language). But the course stops at certain level, and getting to active speaking is still very difficult next step.
As an English person living in Portugal, this article makes a lot of sense.
The Portuguese (well those under about 45 years old anyway) speak excellent English, and seem as comfortable in it as a native speaker. They will quickly default to English when they want to communicate with me - understandable, but it does make practicing harder. The half and half conversations (like the Russians and Americans on the ISS) are common (and trippy).
Verb inflections are a nightmare, you can't simply cram a bunch of stem words together quite like you can in English. Peruse a verb conjugation reference to get a sense of the combinatorial explosion going on there. The most common verbs are the most irregular, and there are collisions everywhere.
Listening comprehension is the hardest part. I do wonder that as a native English speaker I'm used to ESL speakers, so naturally slow down and speak more clearly. Perhaps native Portuguese speakers are not so used to their language being used as a second language, so don't instinctively do that in quite the same way.
Hilariously even the most proficient Portuguese English speaker cannot understand a word I say when I turn and converse with a fellow Brit, or an American. I don't notice any difference, but I guess my perfectly enunciated Queen's English turns into incomprehensible gibberish.
Hilariously even the most proficient Portuguese English speaker cannot
understand a word I say when I turn and converse with a fellow Brit, or an
American. I don't notice any difference, but I guess my perfectly enunciated
Queen's English turns into incomprehensible gibberish.
As a native English speaker, it's easy to underestimate how nuanced and even culture specific our language is, even compared to other English speaking countries such as NZ or AUS.
For example, I have learned that when I'm communicating with folks in India, who speak wonderful English, that I can't use common American colloquialisms such as "shooting yourself in the foot" or other similarly colorful language. It has no context for them, and the point is lost.
I notice that when I speak to Japanese people (I live in Tokyo) that I subconsciously simplify and slow down my English, and even occasionally imitate their English errors; but when I speak with other native English speakers I naturally pull out loads of slang and speed up significantly. I also notice that my friends don’t always do that naturally, and so my Japanese friends confide that they didn’t understand much of what my friends were saying. I wonder if I’m more attuned to that since my own parents weren’t native, 100% fluent English speakers (I definitely dumbed things down for them, too).
I most noticed this when it didn't. I met a Swedish girl traveling in the US, and it turned out we were going the same way so I gave her a ride. She seemed perfectly fluent so I didn't think of simplifying my speech and used an unusual word which confused her.
The english learnt/spoken by most non-native speakers is also often referred to as "globish" for this very reason: get rid of any local or cultural idioms so that it is globally understandable.
I've learned two languages other than my native language (English), and use both actively. I'm probably categorized as a "language nerd" because I wasn't required to learn either. But I do agree with almost everything in this article, especially that kids aren't any better at learning languages than adults. I will say that one of the biggest keys for me in learning a new language is to start using it as soon as possible, and to do as much as I can in the target language. I think most languages could be learned in this way with very few formal classes. In essence, you trick your brain into thinking that the language is necessary, even though the reality might be that you could get by without it, and your brain will just start picking things up seemimgly through osmosis.
Wow, great to see this site on there. When I was a teenager the Language Construction Toolkit is what got me into Linguistics and completing a degree in it: https://www.zompist.com/lckbook.html
When I say I have a degree in linguistics inevitably I'm asked "How many languages do you speak?" which is a question that I think most people with linguistic degrees roll their eyes at. Linguistics is very, very different than learning a language and even applied linguistics is just a subcategory of it.
What I typically say is that I'm awful at learning languages. I believe very strongly from both the research that I've seen and anecdotally that someone's aptitude for learning a language has a hell of a lot more to do with someone being an extrovert who likes new experiences and doesn't have anxiety. I am bad at learning languages because I am awkward and asocial. My favorite language to learn was Sanskrit because it felt like "decoding" something versus the social/anxiety producing "production" aspect of languages.
With the skills I do have though, depending on how much work I put into it, I can probably get better at comprehension in reading more quickly than most people because I like the "decoding" aspect.
I think languages are great to learn, as long as it's an elective.
I legitimately had to go to a less prestigious college since I couldn't pass French at Community College. In hindsight I really should of took Spanish and practiced with people in my neighborhood.
Unless you had a childhood which provided you opportunities to study languages it's very hard to pass a language class.
That said, I take private Chinese lessons and it's been very fun. I even went out with a girl because of it( she's not Chinese, but she found it very interesting!).
I’m an expat in Japan - I wonder if there are effective ways to get your kids to have separate friend groups in different languages so that they end up learning to a high level of proficiency from peers in either group, like classmates speak English at some international school or something + all Japanese in some Kendo club or some kind of hybrid multilingual school. Maybe religious groups have been a good source of local/foreign language peer groups in this sense?
Only if there is no other common language, otherwise they will all speak English when they realize they know it anyway. (Or perhaps Japanese in your example )
Yeah that’s what I’m thinking - I wonder if there’s a natural way to have one’s children end up with peer groups that really are dependent on separate languages.
The article is a bit too pessimistic about bilingual homes. Most people in the world are bilingual. That would not be the case if people quickly forgot one of their native languages. Language death is not that fast. It is however true that utterly useless languages, especially those taught in schools, are abandoned as soon as the teaching stops. Success rates would be higher if we limited ourselves to one local and one global language, English being the obvious global language.
The US military has a school that teaches people languages very quickly: https://www.dliflc.edu/ . It's very interesting how they teach, in that there are multiple methods, categories, and amounts of training depending on both the language itself and what it's going to be used for. They have an impressive track record and work very fast.
* Focus on reading text and vocabulary. Grammar will follow naturally from the text.
* Focus on grammar. Vocabulary is a detail.
* Focus on speaking. Speaking is the key to fluency. Speak to as many natives as possible. (Note: this can be incredibly annoying to said native speakers)
* Focus on writing. This is the best way to retain both vocabulary and grammar. Speaking will follow when you have vocabulary and grammar memorized.
* Focus on listening/hearing. Understanding is the key to communication. Remembering grammar and vocabulary will follow naturaly, e.g. from TV shows, games, movies, songs, etc. in the target language.
I could go on and on and on. Seriously. My advice is two-fold:
* Stick with a language. Whatever your method is, don't give up.
* If your method doesn't work for you, change it. If your teacher doesn't work for you, change it (e.g. textbook, school, course, TV show, whatever the "teacher" is).
It's that simple. Truth to be told, learning a language is mostly hard work. There is no secret. There is no "aha, you've been doing it wrong, you could have learned Chinese in 3 months!" method.
For example, using Anki might be useful, and you might find it fun, but it will not magically make you remember anything. And, even if you remember something in the context of Anki, you might not recognize it in the wild (e.g. in a text, song, or a game). Alternatively, you might not be able to produce it (e.g. passive recollection is very different from active production of the language).
I think the best one can do when learning a language is to simply stick with it. In the grand scheme of things, whether it will take you 4 years, 5 years, or 6 years to feel fluent is fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. It will, most likely, be years though.