I could write a book about my experience learning Spanish after I moved to Spain years ago. I'll summarize:
1. Immersion is overrated, even if you're trying your best to study vocabulary in your off hours. You won't just start "dreaming in a foreign language" because you've been around it all day. I wasted 6 months thinking it would someday just happen magically. It won't.
2. No one will put up with your shitty language skills for more than 5 minutes... Except your significant other. They'll have the patience because they love you. Everyone else will just cringe after a few minutes and change to English, or just smile and wave you off.
3. Hire a private tutor. I went to see a wonderful older woman named Nieves every day after work for 18 months. It was the only real way to chisel a language into my thick skull. She was part therapist, part cultural liaison and part drill master.
Y mas que diez años despues, no he olvidado mucho. Bueno, nunca podria escribir muy bien, pero puedo charlar con otros hispanohablantes sin mucho esfuerzo. Excepto los Argentinos. No tengo ni idea que estan diciendo por nada.
>2. No one will put up with your shitty language skills for more than 5 minutes... Except your significant other. They'll have the patience because they love you. Everyone else will just cringe after a few minutes and change to English, or just smile and wave you off.
This is actually not true. As a Dutch person I have huge respect and admiration for people that are learning dutch and willing to practice with me no matter how cringy it is. Exactly the cringe is how you learn! I have a friend with whom I can hold a full-blown conversation in Dutch and I'm honestly in awe, he's a PhD student and took on the liberty of learning Dutch whilst many PhD students that are here from foreign countries (i.e. will be here for 5 years) never even make the effort. The effort alone should be highly commended.
You're a rare exception, then. Every single person I know who has tried to learn Dutch has expressed frustration that the Dutch, more even than many (most?) other European countries, will immediately switch to English if they notice you're not fluent.
EDIT: That said, I do agree that if you get past a certain level of fluency it might be easier. And I suppose it depends on where you live. Cities are probably harder.
Pro tip froma friend who was learning Dutch: if you open every conversation with "I'm learning Dutch, so I'm going to try speak only Dutch" (in Dutch), people are more inclined to help.
There are a lot of variables, but one thing to keep in mind is that when people switch from $language to English, a subset of them may simply see the conversation as their chance to practice English (rather than as your chance to practice $language).
The problem with Dutch people is that their English is, all else being equal, unusually good compared to at least most of mainland Europe.
So whatever the variable (city/rural, expat/local, etc.), you're very likely to run into a Dutch person who is fluent in English, and usually fluent enough where it's not even a matter of 'a chance of practice' for them, just a matter of avoiding mutual frustration.
At least when you're talking to someone who wants to practice, there's a chance they'd still prefer or revert to their own language. With lots of Dutch people that's not an issue.
You may have the patience but I do suspect that the majority of people doesn’t.
I also don’t think it is necessarily about respect or admiration. In day to day interactions, people just prefer to use the most efficient means available to understand and be understood. Like using English instead of a clumsy beginners level of Spanish.
>I also don’t think it is necessarily about respect or admiration. In day to day interactions, people just prefer to use the most efficient means available to understand and be understood. Like using English instead of a clumsy beginners level of Spanish.
Of course, but I can guarantee you that, at least for Dutch people, we have huge admiration for people trying to learn our language. Dutch is hard and the effort is appreciated, it shows a certain kind of respect towards the country and its people.
I can guarantee you that if someone at the counter gives the receipt and a foreigner replies with "Ja, graag" in a thick heavy accent she will be greeted with a smile.
I think that we switch over to English and the easy more default setting way too easily, this makes it hard for people to learn the native language because no one wants to practice with them.
Irrelevant tangent: I was in Albert Heijn (common Dutch supermarket) today, the one in Amsterdam at Dam Square. They recently sell "Danish Chef Cheese Spread" (you might imagine Cheez Whiz in a tube), which I'm addicted to, to the detriment of my health. As I was stuffing tubes of this into my basket, a pretty young Chinese woman (tourist) stood right beside me and said something in Chinese. It took me a few seconds to realize she'd spoken Chinese and couldn't care less if I existed. It so happens that, at the risk of humble-bragging, I've taken some Chinese lessons. Ten more seconds later, I understood what she'd said: zhe shi shenme? "What is this?" She had no idea what this bin of cheese tubes was, and why would she? I then spent another half-minute trying to think of the word for "cheese" in Chinese. Of course, I was too late, and she re-joined several other attractive Chinese people. Google translate says Qǐ sī (chee suh), but is that possibly the actual translation? I may never know.
My experience in the Netherlands matches what you are saying. My Dutch is barely enough to hold a casual conversation with a colleague, and I do make a lot of mistakes. But people do keep up with me, and I had multiple job offers after doing the interviews entirely in Dutch.
After you reach a certain level people tend to be forgiving.
My oddest experience when learning Dutch was standing in line at the Post Office and hearing the woman berating the non-Dutch people in the queue in front of me for not learning Dutch. Then when I got to the front and asked for postzegels in OK Dutch, she replied immediately in English..., I told her she was a hypocrite...
> Immersion is overrated, even if you're trying your best to study vocabulary in your off hours. You won't just start "dreaming in a foreign language" because you've been around it all day.
It works for me. Even if immersion means a lonely weekend with a book in a foreign language. I begin to verbalise my thoughs in a foreign language, at least partially. The longer exposure to a language, the more foreign language in my thoughts. Sometimes I even need to make a conscious effort to switch to my native language, because I'm thinking slower and shallower in a foreign language.
> No one will put up with your shitty language skills for more than 5 minutes...
Possible it is the reason why immersion doesn't work for you. You need to stop using your native language for some time. Completely. Native language shouldn't be an option. When you mind sees an easy way to deal with language problem (switching to native) it uses easy way. It is the general principle of how human mind works: use the easiest possible way to get a desired result.
When I'm reading book, using native language is an option: I can translate sentencies into my native language and understand them from the translation. I did this before, but then my mind developed a shortcut way, not translating, just understanding. It is much easier. After that I got troubles with translating, it is hard, you know. I just do not know a good translation for words, I understand meaning of words, but it take a lot of effort to separate meaning from foreign word, and then to find a native word with this meaning.
> You need to stop using your native language for some time. Completely.
I second this.
My German instructor mandated that all speaking in the class would occur in German (preferably thinking too)
So, you couldn't rely on English as crutch. It is astounding at how quickly the brain picks up key words when your main communication tool (English) is suddenly taken away. It is also very entertaining, to realize how the nature of our thoughts themselves becomes simple, when we think in a language while having a limited vocabulary
It led to funny situations too. When you don't even have the vocabulary to ask a question, how do you learn at all? When the instructor explains concepts to you in a language that you haven't learnt yet, how you gain insights at all !?
It appears to be a chicken and egg problem, but once the ball got rolling, it was arguably the fastest I learnt any new skill, bar none.
>Everyone else will just cringe after a few minutes and change to English
Due to this I decided to do immersion in Colombia and lived outside of the gringo neighborhood. No one in my neighborhood spoke English and I was forced to communicate in Spanish when buying groceries, the sim card I bought didn't work, taking tennis lessons, ordering food, etc.
Benny Lewis (Fluent in 3 Months[1]) says he doesn't speak English, if people try to switch. His approach is basically go to pubs and try to speak from day 1.
On the other end there's Khatzumoto (All Japanese All The Time[0]) who spoke as late as possible, getting as much exposure as possible first (had Japanese audio on 24 hours a day for 18 months).
After 18 months of "input-first" learning, he did a phone interview with a Japanese company and was treated as a native speaker (and hired and moved to Japan).
Benny's method is about getting a "workable" level as quickly as possible (at the risk of forming bad habits in accent early on, misusing grammar & vocabulary).
Khatzumoto's method (based on linguist Stephen Krashen's Input Hypothesis) is about getting a solid model for the language, which the brain builds naturally through constant exposure, before speaking or writing a great deal.
For more on these methods check out their respective sites. As an introvert I prefer the "listen first, speak only when necessary" approach, rather than "go out and make an ass of yourself from day 1" :)
Stephen Krashen's Input Hypothesis says that you need comprehensible input. Immersion as a complete beginner does not give you much comprehensible input. He advocates that you need what you listen to be 95% understandable, which means you have to start with very, very basic input. Personally, I find 50 - 60% is good enough for me to improve if only slowly. I went to France this year after 7 months of listening to French for 2 hours a day. During that 7 months I went from DELF A1 level material (complete beginner) to YouTube videos from native speakers talking about things that interest me (such as physics). I took a French immersion course in France and was tested at the beginning as B1 level. So, the input hypothesis method got me from complete beginner to intermediate in 7 months without immersion. I did not do any speaking until after 5 months of listening.
That's interesting. I learned of it second hand, and must have got the wrong idea. I thought the whole point was that it's the way everyone learns their first language, as babies? When you start, nothing is comprehensible. But with enough input, everything becomes comprehensible!
I lived in a bland, boring commuter suburb of Paris for 2 months to improve my French. Completely different to central Paris which I came to hate as much as the French. Even my poor French trumped people's willingness to switch to English, and many people in the suburbs speak very little English. So it's possible to get immersion even in a city like Paris.
I feel the need to comment on my original post to clarify (as it appears I may have been misunderstood)...
I strongly dislike Paris - the city - not Parisians or non-Parisian French living there.
I dislike it the same way I dislike London. To someone like me, more at home in the countryside, it's just a noisy, sprawling, unclean armpit of a place. My opinion (and one shared by many French people I spoke to) is that Paris is no longer French in the same way that London is no longer English. They effectively operate as city states.
I really dislike this cliche that Parisians are rude. It is absolutely untrue, and usually the product of tourists not understanding French culture and inadvertently causing offence. It is also a product of people only visiting the hellhole tourist areas. Like most French people I wouldn't dream of going to those areas unless you paid me!
As an unbias observer (neither a proper local, nor a proper tourist) I can definitely say that the rudeness of tourists far far outweighs the rudeness of the locals. In fact, I don't recall any direct rudeness from locals at all. On the other hand, seeing tourists behave in a disrespectful manner was a daily occurrence.
Parisians are a whole different breed of people. Actually, that's too nice. They're assholes. I watched my Quebecois travelling companion speak in perfect French to a counter person, who virtually sneered at him before ignoring him completely and speaking to me in English. They've got being rude down to an art form, truly. Outside the city though, we got treated like long lost cousins - all due to his French. Same experience in Italy with an Italian speaking travel partner. Paris is, um, special, no doubt.
My wife speaks pretty decent French, which leads to amusing scenarios in Paris where she speaks in French to a person who insists in replying in (sometimes poor) English. Often they both persevere in the opposite languages to their own, leading to a weird inversion of what you would imagine would be the most efficient communications strategy!
I would guess there might be a few motivations for people to do this though, not necessarily just rudeness. Misplaced helpfulness, wanting to save face by not switching languages back, practicing English, who knows?
(What's really funny is when they finally give up and revert to French and then address a question to me - only for me to shrug with embarrassment and tell them I don't speak French.)
I wouldn't advocate being an asshole usually, but for Parisians speaking in English at you to be snobs, just compliment them on their impeccable English skills and suggest that means they must have some Englishman blood in them.
It may have also been what your friend said — French people are quite formal compared to Canadians and Americans — I know some French and was corrected a couple of times based on how I started the conversation: “Good evening” first, then start... most Americans at least don’t talk that way
Another 'politeness' example that can often trip people up is 'tu' offending people in France in situations where it would be perfectly normal in Quebec.
Everybody says this about Parisians, but I haven't found it to be true. I've visited Paris 3 times for a total of almost 3 weeks and met very few rude people. I've met a lot more assholes in Manhattan than in Paris. Of course, I follow the French rules of politeness. I always start with "Bonjour/Bonsoir" and always finish any visit with "Merci, bon journée/soirée, Au revoir." On the other hand, I've seen plenty of rude behavior by American tourists who just start speaking English to French people without any greeting or any attempt at French.
Canadian French is very different from France's, be it the accent, the idioms, the vocabulary.
As a native French speaker travelling in Montreal, I often found it easier to talk English with French speaking people, to my great shame.
I recall a simple transaction with a cashier in a supermarket, and having her repeat the simplest things (like "hello") a couple time because I had no idea what she was saying or if she even was speaking French, this was awfully embarrassing.
Parisians are SO awful. I studied abroad there for a year and was shocked to find that many of them (especially women my age -- and I'm a woman) were nastier than New Yorkers. All the French friends I made were a) not native Parisians and b) mostly male. But I spent Spring Break in the South of France and most people there were supremely kind and tolerated my accented French.
Weird. My partner and I visit Paris annually for weeks at a time. I've had maybe one or two rude experiences that I can think of. Everyone else I've encountered has been pleasant.
I am a very fat American tourist who has spent a total of two months in Paris in my life. I never met any impatience with my terrible terrible French from any Parisians at all.
I've been visiting Paris for 40+ years and I've noticed a distinct difference in sentiment over the past 5-10. Perhaps it's the younger generation or the freedom of movement within the EU or some other factors.
Good to know - I visited Paris at the end of the eighties, with friends, and it was a terrible experience. After two days we fled the city. I was yelled at when trying to buy metro tickets, because my pronunciation and word selection was slightly off - I remember I literally backed away several steps from the counter. Restaurants.. all bad. We met a total of two nice people, one young guy with a button which said he would speak English, and an old woman who didn't speak a word of English but still came running when she saw us studying a map. They were both very helpful. Everybody else? Not very much. Not at all, really. Train stations, other public services - speak perfect French, or get ignored (at best).
And at that time I had been travelling to lots of countries for years, and I never had any trouble communicating with people. Big cities, villages at mountain tops, desolated island towns. People were nice everywhere. Except for Paris.
If that has changed for the better recently then that's truly good news.
I am in Norway and am from the US. Kids now learn English when starting school at 6: My spouse (in his early 40's) started learning later. Advertising is half english and half Norwegian. English language television has subtitles instead of dubbing and "Norwenglish" exists. To make matters worse, I'm in an urban area.
I only know one native english speaker here in Norway.
It took some time before I could use norwegian in everyday activities: Before I had a certain level, folks would just switch to English. Heck, I still get folks switching over and I'm firmly at an intermediate level (at least, I don't consider myself fluent). Honestly, the best resource I could have is to be around elderly folks - or sometimes folks about my mother's age - because this age group is less likely to know english, not understand it, and/or not speak it as well.
I'm sorry, but I feel compelled to say something, as I think your first point is potentially misleading to prospective foreign language students.
> Immersion is overrated
> Everyone else will just cringe after a few minutes and change to English
It's not really immersion if you aren't forced to speak the language, and form and maintain social relationships solely in the target language. It sounds like you weren't able to achieve that on your own in your day to day.
> Hire a private tutor
This is good advice. Your tutor was presumably speaking Spanish with you, which was the missing piece.
The takeaway should be if you're not part of a social group that speaks primarily (if not entirely) in the target language, then you will not learn it well.
Languages are a way of bonding between people. A single person raised alone in the wild has no language; a group of people in the wild always do.
I was definitely immersed - with my own apartment, and later a Spanish wife, baby, etc. - but I was also there on tech business, so there were plenty of people around with great English skills. I understand your point, and will agree that immersion is better than not, but my point is simply that there's no magical transformation just by living in another country.
My tutor definitely spoke Spanish to me, but the first several months was all in English. I hate the teaching method where a teacher just yammers away in the target language, as if (again) by magic and special miming gestures, the students will 'pick it up.' Bleh. Nieves gave me a review of concepts in English first, then we practiced speaking. I can't imagine learning any other way - but that's probably why she taught me that way. That's the benefit of a private tutor.
I can second what you are saying. Currently living in Switzerland and trying to learn the same way is nearly impossible. I learned better on my own for the years prior to coming here from the states. Every class I have taken, the teachers are just instantly speaking from German without zero explanation in your mother tongue. It truly is a waste, im here on tech business as well and basically all of my colleagues speak english as its the internal speaking language for businesses around Zurich. What has helped me slightly, is memorizing german songs, and translating them via google translate, to me the speaking it and hearing it doesnt help nearly as much as memorizing vocabulary, which is what I focus on now.
>My tutor definitely spoke Spanish to me, but the first several months was all in English. I hate the teaching method where a teacher just yammers away in the target language, as if (again) by magic and special miming gestures, the students will 'pick it up.' Bleh.
This is usually the difference between a trained teacher and someone who's teaching to earn a bit of money. When English speakers go and teach English abroad, it's normally to give already-fluent people conversation practice. They don't have the training to be able to teach beginners effectively.
It is remarkably difficult to drop your language to a beginner's level. You need to remember exactly which tenses the students know (which may just be the simple present) and their extremely limited vocabulary.
The best lessons I had were where the difficult concepts were explained in English, but the majority of the lesson was in Spanish. I think a lot of teachers view dropping to English as cheating or breaking immersion, so they don't do it.
I've known people who intentionally moved to a place where people only spoke the local language (and perhaps a few word of English) and they sent their children to a local school. It was incredible to see how effective immersion can be when there's no escape hatch. Of course usually it's difficult to pull off, considering how many locals speak English and how many non-locals tend to be around.
> 1. Immersion is overrated, even if you're trying your best to study vocabulary in your off hours. You won't just start "dreaming in a foreign language" because you've been around it all day. I wasted 6 months thinking it would someday just happen magically. It won't.
> 2. No one will put up with your shitty language skills for more than 5 minutes... Except your significant other. They'll have the patience because they love you. Everyone else will just cringe after a few minutes and change to English, or just smile and wave you off.
I suspect these two put together are actually the reason why it's easier to learn languages as a child.
I'm not familiar with the evidence (how could you test this?) but it seems to me that everyone I go as an adult people will switch to English as soon as they hear I don't speak the local language.
As a child, it's different. You're constantly corrected, and people will forgive your mistakes indefinitely. Also you're hanging out with kids, and they tend to only speak one language, so you end up learning it from them.
> I suspect these two put together are actually the reason why it's easier to learn languages as a child.
This is a difficult comparison to make. When we say easier, I think we mean without conscious effort (e.g bilingual kids). How old were you when you would consider yourself fluent in your native language?
Suppose you compared an adult with five years of Spanish lessons versus a five year old bilingual Spanish speaker. Almost certainly the child will have better conversational fluency and will be better at aural comprehension, but the adult is likely to be able to express more complex things. For example I'd expect someone with 5 years of regular Spanish lessons to be able to mostly comprehend a newspaper, ignoring specific vocab. I'm not sure I'd expect the same of a 5 year old.
But now imagine an adult with 5 years of (buzzword) immersive language training. You move to the country, you speak every day (and ask people to correct you), you watch TV shows and listen to the radio, you read the newspapers. I think you could easily be comparably fluent to a 5 year old bilingual.
What you're saying is true - kids have the advantage of parents correcting them constantly, if they go to a school in their second language they'll have teachers and classmates correcting them. Though I'd argue that hanging around kids will only make you as good as those kids. That is, you will become very fluent using the language simply (which is probably the hardest to learn as an adult), but it will still take years to know concepts that adults already know and can transfer.
It’s not easier to learn a language as a child; that’s a now debunked myth. Children just don’t have any other distractions , internal or external, and literally nothing else to do.
I suggest that anyone who thinks a child has an easy time learning a language should try to explain a foreign concept (which all language is, initially) to a 4 year old.
Numerous peer-reviewed studies showing that if you add up all the hours kids spend learning their mother tongue, and then compare with adults that have made a similar investment in a second language, the adults achieve an equal or higher level of mastery.
Basically there's a relationship between time invested and skill that's nearly the same no matter how old you are (and perhaps even in the adult's favor). But what DOES differ significantly is that adults typically don't spend 8-16 hours every day immersed in their target language.
Reply to self since this is now too old, but these studies are anecdotally confirmed by online polyglots who are able to very efficiently learn languages to mastery by constructing 24/7 self-immersion environments. See www.ajatt.com, for example.
I really like drills. I posted a 'A Short Guide to Independent Language Learning' on Reddit last year, it also has some advice about how to work with a tutor:
Plug: Over last couple of months, me and a friend made an extension for studying languages with Netflix, we are quite pleased with how it's turning out:
Well... That depends, I'd say. I'm learning Japanese, and my learning rate always spikes when I'm actually there, hearing and speaking the language all day every day.
On the other hand, most people I encounter in Japan don't try to switch languages because my Japanese, clumsy as it is, is still better than their English.
I wish I could still edit the comment to clarify: Immersion is definitely better than not being immersed, but just being in another country - even for a length of time like myself - doesn't magically teach you the language. Seems obvious when it's written out, but I definitely remember being under the impression that it would help way more than it did. Thus my 'overrated' remark.
That's definitely true as evidenced by the huge numbers of people who can survive living in various countries without learning more than a handful of words in the host language.
The highest yield for me has been 1:1 video call tutoring (italki) by a long margin.
One of the most joyful conversations I had in Italy was for 15 mins with this old lady at the bus stop. She was patient and tender, in a way that old people are. If there was a younger person at the bus stop that day, I'm pretty sure we would have just spent the time skimming through our phones.
I forgot to put the context: My Italian was pretty broken then. I never had a meaningful chat in Italian till that point. She complimenting me several times on how well I could talk. It helped me approach other conversations with much more confidence.
.... or just speaking English. The reach of English is now at the point where, in my experience, most people in Europe will just switch to it even if you open the conversation with them in their own language! It's actually kind of deflating ("what was wrong with my grammar or pronounciation that immediately gave away that I'm English?") and it makes building foreign language competence through direct interaction that much harder. Of course from the other person's perspective they see an opportunity to practice their English, so they are identically motivated
Immersion works much better if you have the bases because you can't have a conversation if you don't have the minimum level and nobody want to talk and waste their time to someone really bad (ain't nobody got time for that), especially in France.
At the end of the immersion, worst case scenario you will have a better listening.
Personally when I went traveling in South America I improved a lot, people don't talk English so you have to make a huge effort and that's how you learn, but I had learned the bases at school and read the grammar few weeks before going.
I dunno, I'm somewhat disagreeing with this. I think the immersion can work, but it requires that one:
- has some working knowledge so that you can "follow" the conversations around you. I.e. you're able to understand that "mumble mumble" was a word that you do not know.
- you actively participate and try to speak and understand as much as possible.
2. Except when you have to deal with people who don't speak anything other than the local. I live in German and am learning German and there's no shortage of people who only speak German to me and therefore they have to deal with my shitty German. They seem OK with that, it's tiring for me but also somewhat rewarding and motivating.
Of course all this depends on one's knack for languages. I did "full immersion" type of Spanish in Argentina at a Language school, 5h / day. The teacher spoke only Spanish. I'd say it was extremely exhausting but also extremely effective. I'd say Spanish lends itself well to this kind of method since the basic grammar is quite easy and a lot of the words are familiar to a native French/English speaker (basis in Latin). However this method would never work with Chinese, that language is a few orders of magnitude harder.
> Immersion is overrated, even if you're trying your best to study vocabulary in your off hours.
That is not true AT ALL. Immersion is absolutely essential to learning a language. But you must remember that immersion means both passive listening to the language AND active speaking.
If you never speak the language because everyone switches to English, you are not immersed.
> No one will put up with your shitty language skills for more than 5 minutes.
Of course not. The point of language is communication. People will naturally become frustrated when they cannot understand another party or the communication is flawed.
The best way to learn a language is to go somewhere where no one actually speaks your language. In Europe, this might mean spending a lot of time around old people who don't speak English and talking to them.
Immersion can be very valuable once you learn the language to a serviceable extent.
I learnt German formally till the A2 level, and used to be able to speak in grammatically correct sentences, albeit with a limited vocabulary, no nuance and an obvious accent. (I'd say at 6 year old native speakers level)
Since then however, I haven't been around anyone familiar with the language, and now I am back to knowing nearly nothing (5 years since)
It becomes very easy to get learning new words, when 80% of the words in most sentences are familiar. You can piece the rest together.
Also, people are willing to tolerate having conversation with you in the language, if they speak it natively and the conversation is short + simple. Reception and billing counter interactions are perfect for this.
Immersion can also be very valuable when languages are closely related. I have learnt other Indian languages through immersion, because they closely resembled my native language. Again, because the grammatical structure and vocabulary had major overlaps.
I do however, fully agree with hiring a personal tutor, at least for the initial few months. Duolingo can help you with only so much.
> You won't just start "dreaming in a foreign language" because you've been around it all day. I wasted 6 months thinking it would someday just happen magically. It won't.
hmm, I went abroad for three months once and after two months my inner monologue and dreams were mostly english - even half a year after when I came back my girlfriend told me that I would sometimes be speaking in english during the night.
This mirrors my experience learning German, in Germany, pretty much exactly. I falsely assumed I would just somehow pickup German by being exposed to it every day but the brain is amazing at filtering things out. I'm attending German lessons 3 evenings a week now but it's still a rough road.
The point of immersion is not to absorb the language by osmosis with zero effort, but rather keep you in a daily linguistic/cultural context. Your learning efforts will simply stick a lot better than just doing Anki cards in your home country.
I feel this way about some Caribbean Spanish accents. I was recently in Havana and sometimes I felt like they weren't even speaking Spanish. I find Argentine Spanish pleasant to listen to.
Pro Tip: Go to Latin America (ok, maybe not Argentina in your case), there people have much more time and will talk to you on the street. Try to avoid capitals or quasi-capitals though.
Brazil was a great place to practice Spanish. Almost nobody spoke English when I visited, so I ended up speaking Spanish with everyone. Some people spoke Spanish themselves, and for the rest, the mutual intelligibility with Portuguese was good enough to get by.
I can speak Spanish, and I find that Portuguese is really hard to understand. In written form I can usually figure out what the meaning is (as I can do with other, more distant languages such as French or Italian), but hearing it spoken, I can’t make sense of what is going on at all. It sounds like Spanish, but all wrong, and I find that I just can’t focus on trying to parse what the words mean.
You probably mean Continental Portuguese. Brazilian Portuguese is really much better for learning. They don't eat syllables and they take their time to pronounce and emphasize words. You still need to know a few rules but they are sufficiently regular to eventually start guessing words (e.g., "ue" within a word -> "o", ending "dad" -> "dade", ending "ion" -> "ão").
Source: I've had at least half a decade of frequent contact with both dialects and I still have way more difficulties with the continental version.
It's been shown that after puberty the chance to master a second language is statistically highly improbable. But native speakers appreciate the effort to get to an acceptable level.
This mirrors my experiences with Duolingo. I tried it out, and realized that it went against my ideas about learning languages: translation, no person involved, no real communication. Maybe they'll remedy some of these, as the article notes, but I feel very strongly that translation like this is nearly useless busy-work, and further, harmful.
When I learn a language, I use translation to look words up, but strive to expose myself to rich language. By this I mean large amounts of language, some of it near my level (textbook dialogues), some of it way above (an audiobook of favorite book), as interest dictates.
In addition I write people in the language and make friends on sites like italki, or in apps like HelloTalk and Tandem.
I don't worry about learning words, nearly ever. I just expose myself to them and look them up when I 'notice' them (my brain: oh, this word is interesting, we've heard it before... What does it mean?).
I hate translation when learning with a passion, and listen a lot to get away from it.
Results (N=1, YMMV) have been fantastic with Russian. It's strong enough now that it messes with my English and I can make the same mistakes a Russian/Ukrainian would in English if I've been using Russian a lot.
Learning languages is cool, and it opens so many doors and connects you with all sorts of people. If Duolingo works for someone, great. From working as a tutor and getting to know lots of students, you'd be better off doing what I talk about above, but something is better than nothing, and perfect is the enemy of good here.
Strongly second "expose yourself to a lot of the language" from my own experience with Spanish. Lot easier to get that exposure now than a decade or two ago, too.
Watch out for aging. My mom spoke French and Spanish aside from English. As she aged, she reads both and doesn’t understand why we can’t read too. My wife has a patient that speaks five languages. Her husband speaks 3 of them. As the patient’s illness progresses, she starts talking in a random language. Sometimes she gets lucky and it’s one of 3 her husband speaks.
In Sweden there is very large minority of finns - many of the older ones forget Swedish and can only speak Finnish. (Or in some areas, actually never learned Swedish to begin with.) Hence the prevalence of nursing homes with the requirement to know Finnish to work there.
I think language learning is a growth area for intelligent machine interactions: a machine can understand pretty well if you are saying the right thing, like Duo Lingo tries to do. If it could add in some actual conversation flow, it would start to emulate a teacher or a conversation class. I'd certainly try it out - Eliza in Spanish?
Jokes apart, this is what I think. If you want to learn conversational Italian to be able to spend some time in Italy, the best way to learn what you need is actually to go to Italy and practice there. Most Italians would love to practice some English with you, and to teach you Italian. You will have a great time. You will have fun. You will remember your holiday when you're older.
Not only do I agree with you (I'm also Italian LOL) but I wanted to add that, in my experience, what you said also applies to pretty much every other language. I've learned a few languages that way, mostly speaking with people on the street while travelling, and only occasionally reading language books or taking lessons.
PS (however I'm not saying that books or lessons are useless, their importance depends on the kind of language skills you want to acquire)
Jen's fake italian is ok, the "real italian" is cringeworthy: it's like someone who does not know italian reading a google translation, accent is off, grammar is off, word choice is mostly right but also a bit off.
But the scene is still fun, like most of the IT Crowd :)
This is par for the course btw, it's how italian is done in 99% of english content, for obvious reasons.
I'll take you up on it. Do some Italian exclamations have soft versions (that are similar in spelling to each other)? To give English examples, one could say "darn" instead of "damn", or "shoot" instead of "shit".
Almost 2 years of using Duolingo, German, here. At this point, I can understand the very basics and even less when it comes to speaking.
Here's what I learned about duo
- Good to get you started on the language
- It's very good at keeping you engaged initially
- Hard to remember everything so at some point you find it hard to understand the new lessons. There's a language deficit that eventually catches up with you.
- It's not bad to get you started but long term it's not the best way to learn.
If I had to do it again:
-I'd say use it for a few months while it keeps you engaged(6months?) along with a system where you are forced to speak it. Like the Pimsleur system.
- Find someone to speak it with on a regular basis as soon as possible.
- Continue with Pimsleur and dump Duo.
- Immerse your self with the media in the Language you are trying to learn.
The absolute fact is that you can never be fluent in a language unless you speak it on a regular basis so move towards it ASAP.
There's no substitute for determination. Eventually, you just have to fight the feeling of wanting to quit once it gets difficult. By the way, wanting to quit is a sign that you are about to take a major step forward if you can fight through it and move forward.
In the end, I did pretty well in Rome, engaging in simple, fractured semi-conversation in most of my encounters. Was that how the app was supposed to work?
Yeah, I'd say that if you were going to solely use Duolingo this is what a reasonable person would hope to achieve. Italian isn't foreign to you like it was when you started, but it's not going magically be familiar because you practiced on Duolingo every day. Honestly that sounds like a really good outcome for the investment so far, and what a big motivator to explore other avenues of gaining proficiency.
I spent about a year studying Italian on Duolingo and had a positive experience. But I also augmented Duolingo with Anki: I made flashcards for every single word I learned in Duolingo, and went over them every day. That really helped me memorize the vocabulary. I also got a workbook on verb conjugations to practice those (I didn't end up finishing that workbook and my verb conjugations are weak).
The real benefit of Duolingo is that I can do it while I'm waiting for my coffee order, or on the train. My only free time is spontaneous, and in short increments; e.g., 5 minutes here and there, unexpectedly. It's hard to learn anything in that context! I'm surprised I learned Italian as well as I did! Taking a class in Italian with a human teacher would no doubt be superior, but I unfortunately don't have time for that!
IMHO the best way to learn a language is a Michel Thomas audio course. Also, whatever way you choose, adding another one or more (whatever) as soon as you become fluent in the way you have picked up initially is a great idea.
The most annoying problem with Duolingo is it quickly becomes boring by asking you stupid questions repeatedly, you start daydreaming and clicking-through the questions-answers too fast, making mistakes purely out of lack of attention (so you click a wrong one although the right answer is obvious to you) and it reacts with asking you more stupid questions, the same or on the same topic. It really should let you progress faster then just ask you to repeat what you have learnt occasionally (but not too soon and not too much).
Nevertheless I wish more subjects would be available to learn the Duolingo way. I.e I'd love to study math, history, literature, biology, geography etc like that. I hope Duolingo authors will eventually come up with such a universal non-language-centric kind of platform and let users publish courses on different kinds of subjects.
Same. Spent a lot of time on Duolingo trying to learn French, couldn't understand anything a French waitress asked me. Surprisingly, I can now understand a lot of written French, but maybe that's normal for English+Spanish speakers?
I recently found Anki (https://apps.ankiweb.net/), a free cross-platform app for index card-style learning. Their shared decks seem useful, and I like that you can customize exactly how you practice, though of course its effectiveness in "conversational" practice is obviously limited.
One difficulty with French is that their system of stress makes it very hard for a beginner to know when one word ends and another begins. I lived in France for a few years, and I was initially surprised that after a few months of working hard at it, I could still sometimes understand Spanish and Italian a little more easily than French (even though I don't speak them at all), just because they have per-word stress like English, but French is unusual (for Europe at least) in having per-phrase stress (not sure of the technical term for that, but I'm sure it's a thing). That was extremely frustrating. But it passed... I'd say it took about 3-4 months of immersion to learn enough stock phrases (waiters say "Vous désirez ?" and other stock protocol phrases you just get used to) and common slang, and train my ear to understand the way words melt into each other (liaisons in real life, omitted words, strange sound transformations that no one ever tells you about... I like the aspiration that appears at the end of some words in the Paris accent, I do it myself, but I can't tell you the rule for it). You just can't learn that stuff from a book or whatever. I think I was relatively good at it (at least, much better than the other English speakers in our circle, but not as good as a couple of others whose foreignness I couldn't hear at all, so they knew tricks I didn't), and I put that down to vast amounts of immersive discussion in real life and also on IRC, where I could see people transcribing what they actually say.
It also doesn't help that pronunciation rules for French border on the bizarre (only English is worse) due to language evolution and the spelling being conservative to it's Latin roots, and there are some sounds that are flat out strange to English speakers (like the growling r). I joke that probably English speakers would have an easier time understanding African french due to the very careful pronunciation of consonants and the regularized rhythm
I found the same when I was learning French through Duolingo.
I could read French fairly well, I could write a bit too, although it was very formulaic. Sometimes I'd be able to speak a bit of French to someone and they might understand me through my thick New Zealand accent (which is apparently incredibly cute to French people), but I could barely understand a word of French spoken to me.
The big problem with Duolingo in my opinion is the computer generated French audio sounds nothing like actual French.
My approach: be in country, do the Pimsleur audio course, obsessively bang out vocab flash cards in the native script, study grammar every morning for 2-3 hours, and (the secret sauce) live with a s.o. who speaks the target language exclusively. Six months is enough to be comfortably conversational. I did it three times, and the last was so successful that the next would require a divorce!
What's good about Pimsleur? I'm about to start learning a new language so I'm looking for the most efficient resources to supplement classes with a teacher.
I listened to about 20 hours of lessons, which is very easy to do as part of the method is "don't write anything down, don't try to remember anything", and my French improved massively.
It only got me so far, and I switched to private lessons afterwards, but it was incredibly efficient while it lasted.
Michael Thomas really helped me with my french but he doesn't do the language I am learning right now. A pity as I love the sound of his voice, so calm yet authoritative.
Pimsleur is nice because it asks you to actively and quickly respond to the recordings. It's a little over-priced, though. There's so much free content out there for most languages.
I've been learning Chinese for about four years. I use apps, but only to drill and help me improve my reading + vocabulary outside of the in-person classes.
There's nothing like an in-person tutor. (OK, so mine is online, but it's almost the same.) My teacher knows my strong and weak points, and when I get stuck with a certain word or grammar pattern, she makes sure to test it before we move on.
That said, I only have one hour of class per day, and that's not enough to really progress. So I use the apps to jog my memory, learn new words (since everyone will stress different ones), and internalize the grammar.
Besides, a language is a very dynamic and living thing: When you speak it with natives, you'll sometimes be able to rely on sentences you've learned in class. But the real test is whether you can take their new-to-you question, and respond with a new-to-you answer. And that only comes with time and repetition with real instructors -- and with repeated practice with native speakers. And there's no better teacher than a puzzled look on a native's face, telling you that your pronunciation is totally off.
I often say, half jokingly, that my trips to China (where I go 3-5 times a year to teach Python + data science courses) are my end-of-semester exam, when we see if my Chinese has really improved. Without fail, interactions with natives help me to improve.
None of this would happen with just the apps. Yeah, they're great -- but they are far from sufficient.
Seems crazy to me (and a bit depressing) that doing anything for 1 hour per day would not lead to good progress! We only have so few truly free hours in a day to spend on things like this.
Oh, it has led to great progress -- when I go to China, everything I do before and after class is in Chinese. I chat with locals, order at restaurants, read street signs, and the like. That said, there's still a long way to go before fluency.
It's also known that Chinese takes a long time for non-native speakers to learn. For someone like me (48 years old, self-employed, married with three kids), I'm delighted with my progress and feel a great sense of a accomplishment. Moreover, I often meet up with foreigners who have living in China for years, and it turns out that my Chinese is better than theirs. So it's not depressing at all!
I have been learning Spanish for 3 years and have played around with a number of different techniques.
I think Duolingo is awful at helping you retain the vocabulary you have learnt. It doesn't give you a good grounding on context or grammar so you'll end up in a situation where you may know a lot of words but not how to string a sentence together. Exactly as detailed in the article. I will normally put Duolingo in the same category as Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone and not recommend them at all.
There are three apps that I do recommend:
1. Italki - You can book lessons with tutors or teachers in your chosen language and have structured lessons online.
2. HelloTalk - A language exchange app that works better than on Skype. It has a large userbase where you speak to individuals in your chosen language and practice what you have learnt.
3. Lingvist - A vocabulary app that gives you words within the context of a full sentence. This has helped me remember words a lot easier plus my level of reading comprehension went through the roof after using it.
Aside from the apps, it is always a good idea to visit the country of your target language and just try speaking. You will find out what works and what doesn't much faster than any other method.
Finally it is important to remember not to be afraid to make mistakes. It's only words and not the full amount of how we communicate. Keep trying.
Outside of Duolingo, there are two major methods of language learning. One is to aim for deliberate practice and excellence in everything. For reading, it means reading a passage over and over until you have basically memorized it and then going on to the next thing to master. For listening, it means listening to the sane video or audio over and over until your brain can process all of it flawlessly.
The other school is to just dive in. Start listening to business radio in the new language, sing along with songs, make mistakes with native speakers constantly. Learn by context.
The reality is there is no one method, no magic bullet. It may be a combination of things that work for you. Just like dieting, it is not one size fits all. However, as you venture out from Duolingo, you will find what works for you. What your strengths and weaknesses are with regards to learning another language as an adult.
The hardest thing for me was dealing with the slow progress. You may even get frustrated. However, if you don’t give up, what was hard will become easier and what was easy will become like breathing.
It is a personal journey, we can give you prescriptive advice but the doing is what matters.
If it takes 3 years instead of 6 months, no one cares. And you should not.
What this highlights strongly is that multiple choice (which I understand is still the mainstay of the US examination system) is a terrible way to assess competence in a subject. Its siren call is very strong however because of the convenience of automatic marking. Maybe with improvements in technology we will see moves away from it; eg my kids do all their Maths homework via a website that requires answers to be typed in, which although not ideal (it can't see the working-out process) is obviously better than multiple choice, and it seems to have some sensible leniency in its interpretation of input.
Where do people get the idea one resource is supposed to teach you a language? As someone who has learned and uses multiple foreign languages Rosetta stone, pimsleur, duo linguo are all fantastic tools for their indended use cases but language requires reading, writing, listening(to natives), speaking and many other smaller skills. With just whats available on the internet and mail you could learn a language in a matter of years but so many people complain because 1 app didn’t teach them in 3 months what it took their entire life to learn in their native language.
I was going to write a long comment detailing what I did on the way to Spanish fluency, but I realized that the main thing I wanted to say was this:
There's a podcast called Language Transfer which focuses on understanding other languages from scratch using English and its Latin/Germanic roots. I really can't speak highly enough of this guy. His passion for language is contagious, it's clear how much thought he has put into the lesson structure, and his method of teaching left me wishing I could have him teach me something else, like music theory.
It took me some time to understand how to properly use Duolingo, but I feel like I have found a solution that genuinely fits into my learning strategy. My first attempt was with German. I studied for months and months during breaks at work, but I was no match for conversing at the local German meetup or in Berlin. I could read books and read signs, but in know way could I hold a conversation. I was very disappointed, but I have absolutely retained my knowledge of reading German.
The language I'm currently learning is Vietnamese. I'm learning because my girlfriend's family is Vietnamese and it's a lot of fun to share another language with her and her relatives. I've disabled all of the score-related addons and purchased the offline version. I can hold myself to two lessons on my train home from work without any dopamine rushes. I find it substantially easier than bringing along a thick workbook (which I do have) or trying to force my way through an ebook. The sentence structure helps me more than flashcards. When I go home, I can practice actual conversations with my girlfriend and we can share the vocabulary we know (her grasp of the language isn't perfect). It works extraordinarily well for me. We don't have the time or energy to attend night classes like we thought we would so trading phrases every now and then works pretty well.
I've been using Duolingo and Memrise to learn Portuguese (still far from perfectly fluent but I can read and understand the language fairly well now) and I've been working on my Russian as well. I currently have a 430day streak in Duolingo and I've finished the entire Portuguese tree (all skills to max level).
I really do thing that Duolingo on its own won't get you really far. I always see people recommend it, it seems to be the most popular language learning "app" as far as I can tell, but it's really quite mediocre. The synthetic voices they use are often very awkward and sometimes plain wrong. The intonation is all over the place and very unnatural. The translation-based approach is very simplistic and often limits what you can do. The main problem being that when you want to speak a language fluently you shouldn't translate but construct the language directly. I'm a native French speaker but as I'm writing these words I'm not translating from French, I directly "think in English" for better or worse. This is even worse for language like Russian where the syntax is completely different from English and you have to make a conscious effort to "forget" the English syntax when constructing the Russian translation, otherwise you'll end up with something awkward.
The only feature of Duolingo that keeps me going is effectively the streak counter itself. It forces me to do at least a little bit of Portuguese/Russian every day instead of slowly drifting away from my studies. You keep the contact with the language, even if it's in a very limited fashion. However when I have some free time I do some actual language learning, reading grammar lessons, reading articles online, practicing my writing skills on lang-8 or similar websites, listening to podcasts etc... Then I actually make good progress.
On the other hand I strongly recommend Memrise. It's just a flashcard application so it's really only good at teaching you vocabulary but it does it very effectively and it's got a bunch of high quality decks available (some made by Memrise themselves, with an actual human speaker pronouncing the words and expressions instead of a bad synthetic voice). Again, on its own it's not enough but for drilling vocab it's really great IMO. There's also the open source Anki but I prefer Memrise overall.
I got excited and almost learned Spanish, Japanese, German, then I realized I was simply addicted [1]. The good part is that at least it gave me the confidence to speak to people in different languages thinking I made sense, even though I didn't. The confidence to make mistake is how you end up learning anyway.
One of the apps which really stuck with me was "Human Japanese" - Years later the stuff that I learnt is still as embedded in my memory as when I first saw it.
I took five years of Spanish -- high school and university (I thought I'd since forgotten it, this was 30 years ago). A few years ago I found myself in Barcelona for a week. First day, I was completely lost. By the end of my stay I found it had come back to me, at least for rudimentary conversation. I even picked up a little Catalan. This reminds me of a conversation I had with a former boss. He asked if I spoke Italian. I said no. "But you speak some Spanish, right?" To wit I sheepishly said, "yeah but it's been a long time". Then he rattles off something in Italian and asks "What did I just ask?" .. "Something about wanting 4 glasses of Tignanello wine for the table" And he says: "See? You have enough to be in the conversation, or at least listen. Talking is overrated, anyway..."
I've found that the Pimsleur method is very good (at least at the beginning/intermediate levels), but is mostly auditory. I think this leveraged the creator's research on timed reinforcement learning. I imagine something like this paired with Duolingo to provide visuals would be pretty effective.
I remember trying to brush up on my French skills. The training sentences are absurdly stupid, repetitive and redundant. Duolingo fails by design. Good news is there are other much better web services available for learning languages (f.x. babbel.com).
I studied Spanish for years but never really learned it until I was immersed for a few months. Now that I don’t use it often I find it to be a struggle to retain.
I’ve been toying with language apps myself. I still think there’s a place for apps. For example, I have an iOS Word Search game for several languages:
When I can to Germany, I jumped the gun and bought yearly subscription of Duolingo only to realize they will bore you to death with endless Brot(bread) and Wasser(water) multiple choice questions. Even when you move up and questions should be focused on that level, they still add a lot of Brot and Wasser just to keep the scoreboard alive and kicking.
I suspect they want to keep you on the basic level for as long as possible because they have a subscription model and you feeling confident enough to leave them is bad for business.
I studied Japanese in college for 1 year. After living in Tokyo, I realized I knew basically nothing before moving here.
I've found that I can read and write easier than I can speak, mostly because I have more time to build context in the former. With speaking, synthesizing a thought in a different language (for me) requires use of the language to be a reaction rather than something I think about.
Isn't the title of the article totally misleading?
I learnt Italian, to learn it quickly find out what makes you excited about Italy, is it music, movies? And then just try to understand what they say. In my case it was opera.
I agree with the article and comments as well. Does anyone else get so fed up with this light and fluffy style of "gamefication"? I see so many apps that have this same design where there are lots of bright colors and birds but less actual substance. To me it seems to be something related to this hustler culture of web entrepreneurs.
See I want a language learning app that is as fast as an action video game and moves too quickly for me. I want it to feel like I'm playing speed chess. You can keep the cute owls and whatever kind of points system you have devised.
It seems it improved, but almost all Duolingo German students would eventually ask a question that Duolingo wouldn't answer. (They wouldn't understand genders and cases)
But the article touches the main core of the issue with Duolingo:
"You’re at the airport outside Rome, she said, and you want to get downtown; how would you ask? I gaped like a fish. ... “Do you have a table for four?” “I’d like two glasses of red wine.” I knew I had seen all the pieces in Duolingo’s sentences. But I was utterly unable to recall them and pull them together."
I think Duolingo is great for forming habits. Ultimately, if you want to learn something new you need to work on that skill over a decent period of time, and this becomes hard to do without a regular habit.
Duolingo is also great at exposing yourself to the language gradually, but unless your goal is to simply be able to hold a conversation or say a few phrases, I don't think it will get you anywhere in the long run.
As I'm getting more into language learning (specifically Japanese), Krashen's input hypothesis seems to be an important part of the process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NiTsduRreug
Essentially he makes the distinction between "learning" that word A in language X has some meaning Y, and acquiring an unconscious understanding that word A means Y.
His main point being that this unconscious acquisition (that is, being able to hear a words/phrase and not having to put conscious effort into to translating it in your head) only comes from comprehensible input, that is, listening to the language and understanding messages (I'm not so convinced that it has to be entirely 100% comprehensible, rather from experience think language can be acquired even from something like 20% comprehensible material).
Communities have been rising up around Krashen's theory, one being AJATT (All japanese all the time).
alljapaneseallthetime.com
The creator of the site advocated listening to native Japanese material 24/7 (or at least as much as you possibly can during the day) as well as making i+1 sentence (linking back to Krashen) flash cards using Anki (or equivalent SRS system).
More recent innovations on AJATT have been arising thanks to MattVsJapan (https://www.youtube.com/MATTvsJapan).
He is currently developing a method he's calling MIA (Mass Immersion Approach) that refines AJATT into a more general approach that is applicable to any language (for now it's more focused on Japanese since that's what Matt is most experience in).
One common criticism of these methods is that they advocate NOT speaking until you are have achieved some form of basic fluency. The reasoning being that training your unconscious model on listening will prevent you from making mistakes early on, until you are ready to train your model from your own speech.
Honestly I'm not doing these methods enough justice, there is a lot of background and theory behind them, and MIA itself is still evolving (Matt is actively trying to change the way people learn languages, or if not that, at least the way people think about how language learning works). If anyone is serious about learning a language to a highly proficient level, ditch duo lingo, textbooks and tutors and read up on these methods instead, you won't regret it.
1. Immersion is overrated, even if you're trying your best to study vocabulary in your off hours. You won't just start "dreaming in a foreign language" because you've been around it all day. I wasted 6 months thinking it would someday just happen magically. It won't.
2. No one will put up with your shitty language skills for more than 5 minutes... Except your significant other. They'll have the patience because they love you. Everyone else will just cringe after a few minutes and change to English, or just smile and wave you off.
3. Hire a private tutor. I went to see a wonderful older woman named Nieves every day after work for 18 months. It was the only real way to chisel a language into my thick skull. She was part therapist, part cultural liaison and part drill master.
Y mas que diez años despues, no he olvidado mucho. Bueno, nunca podria escribir muy bien, pero puedo charlar con otros hispanohablantes sin mucho esfuerzo. Excepto los Argentinos. No tengo ni idea que estan diciendo por nada.