Number 2, number 4, and number 9 of the suggestions in the blog post kindly submitted here are all well worthwhile. As my user profile discloses, I am an American native speaker of General American English (originally part of a monolingual household in a basically monolingual neighborhood of native-born Americans) who acquired various second languages. I have reached a high enough proficiency in Modern Standard Chinese to make my living for several years as a Chinese-English, English-Chinese interpreter and as a Chinese-English translator. I know maintain a bilingual household. I still enjoy language learning as a hobby, and my children attempt learning various human languages.
One old webpage I like with language-learning advice
Is your partner also 'an American native speaker of General American English'? I would be interested in learning more about households where both parents learned additional language(s) to raise their children bilingually.
Most of the posts I see on HN mostly revolve around learning languages. In my opinion that's only part of the problem. It's more difficult to get the structure of sentences and tenses correct. I personally know words in 2 - 3 languages which share a root with my mother tongue, but it doesn't mean that I can speak those languages because I often don't get the way a single word transforms based on the tense, part of speech etc. For eg. merely knowing the word "smile" would only take you so far. Knowing the difference between "He is smiling", "He smiles", "He keeps smiling at me" is the tricky part.
Perhaps we are obsessed with learning words because it's the easier problem to solve. Learning sentence structure and grammar takes time and effort.
Perhaps we are obsessed with learning words because it's the easier problem to solve.
I think that depends on the person and/or language.
My Polish grammar knowledge is now pretty impressive, but I'm having a terrible time trying to remember words, so spend the majority of my time attempting to force memorisation with flash cards.
In a way it's kinda fun - I can go through pages of grammar exercises, conjugating and declining correctly, but with no idea of what Marta did in the past with 101 of somebody's somethings.
I'm delving into learning Polish myself but have been taking mostly a whole language, immersion approach. For example, when I was in Krakow I bought myself a book on CD and the book itself, so I can 'read' along as I listen. I use translation tools to put selected passages into English. I also spend time listening to Polish radio. I know at some point I will have to develop some discipline about tackling grammar in a systematic fashion the way you are doing, but for the moment I guess I'm content to as much as possible to get a feel for the language. Japanese is my second language and its challenges are almost completely different... anyway, good luck!
Quite often you can figure out the essence of the sentences even if you don't know all the words. Of course, you do need to have a basic vocabulary. While speaking/writing it is possible for you to convey what you want to without using complicated words. If you can simplify your thought and strip out all that's non-essential, you will be able to convey the essence of your thought.
However, if you don't have a grasp of the basic grammar you're prone to confuse the person you're talking to. If you're reading, then you lose the context.
Exceptions abound, but I have found this to be true quite often while studying French.
This is true, but learning vocabulary is a long, hard slog that you have to get through to get anywhere with learning most of the other skills. It's something of a choke point in language acquisition, and your knowledge of vocabulary from related language is going to let you down again and again because you don't grasp all the senses of words you think you know or are fooled by false friends.
That said, phonology is neglected. Poor pronunciation makes verbal communication more error prone, something you don't need as a beginner, and if you rely entirely on body language for catching such non-lexical content as emphasis and modality, you will suffer when you talk on the phone. A bit of extra work here when you start learning a language will pay off.
In my experience, that's not the case. In the case of English, the main difficulty was (is) learning the pronunciation of every word, because the English spelling system isn't very helpful (to put it kindly). As you advance, the problem is then to get a good grasp on usage/pragmatics; that is, there are tons of syntactically correct ways of saying the same thing, but only a few of them sound "natural". Grammar was never a big problem for me.
In the case of Japanese too, the problem is not the grammar. Japanese morphology is simple (e.g. nouns are the same in singular and plural, verb conjugation doesn't vary with person) and very regular. The big problems are 1) acquiring the vocabulary in the first place, which is hard because the writing system is even less helpful than English's 2) and remembering all those words, which is hard because for the most part they don't resemble either my native language or English.
Oh yes, English is terrible at denoting the pronunciation with its script. Not so for French (or from what I hear, German). Most of the time you are able to predict the pronunciation based on a set of characters. Words in Indian languages which use the Devanagari script (or scripts derived from it) can be directly mapped to their pronunciations. There are no exceptions.
Grammar learning and engagement might just be the holy grail of learning a language. I haven't come up with a good way of "hacking" grammar. So far it has just been a brute force study of grammar in front of a desk with a lamp.
If you are trying to learn Italian, the good news is, there are a number of outstanding movies that are not famous outside Italy. I'm talking about masterpieces here. One for all:
"Indagini su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto"
Their iPhone app is driving an immense improvement in my German.
Living in Switzerland I also like to watch shows e.g. on MTV in English but with German subtitles on. Then I can pause the live TV and rewind to match English spoken expression to German translation. This helps too.
Is there a service out there that includes the generation of vocab review sheets (many words, defined in one viewspace)? I find duolingo (and Anki, other web services) unsuitably slow for learning vocab.
I can second this, their app is well thought out, works perfectly and helps me improve my spanish in little blocks of 5 minutes. Perfect when waiting / on the toilet / in bed / whatever.
I think this depends somewhat on the language. For some, grammar is the first major bottleneck to get to a usable beginner level, but for others, it's pronunciation. For example, Danish grammar is relatively simple (which is one reason Google Translate is very good translating it), but it's quite difficult for non-native speakers to pronounce it intelligibly. I've also heard second-hand that pronunciation is a bigger problem than grammar for beginning Mandarin Chinese speakers.
It turns out that the obstacles are the same for both: tonal inflection. Most people are familiar with this fact as it pertains to Chinese and many of the languages of southeast Asia (Thai, Vietnamese, Cantonese et al) but remain completely unaware that it also a core feature of the languages of Scandinavia, Danish included. btw, Google translate does an excellent job translating Chinese (but a pretty terrible job with a superficially related language like Japanese). It turns out Chinese and English word order are the same.
The biggest one is missing. Why do you remember every line of every funny movie you've ever seen, but can't remember a single, excruciating, boring, mind numbing moment of Rossetta Stone ("el gato....snore....la mesa..snore...etc"). Because it's not engaging your brain in a lasting way.
I built this app (and download) w/ a business partner (and it's a side business as my main business is consulting), and people love it. We have Spanish and English and we're planning more languages (probably English for Mandarin and Cantonese speakers next)... http://www.buenoentonces.com/
Full disclosure - it's kind of randy so you need to be OK w/PG-13 humor. But that's why you learn it. If you do every class, and you already have a bit of Spanish, you WILL come out with a signifcantly greater grasp of conversational skill.
Email me (it's in my profile) and i'll send a coupon code for free classes to HN folks.
If you can, the very best way is simply immersion.
Move to the country and live there. Live with people, make friends with them. Ask them to speak to you only in their native language. Listen to their music and watch their TV and films. Read their books - above all children's books.
In my first four weeks in Germany I did a 4-week 'intensive' course that covered enough basic grammar and vocabulary to stumble through a one-on-one conversation with a lot of pointing.
After that I never looked at another vocab sheet. I could feel my brain soaking up the language day after day; I'd reach out for a word I'd never learned or a phrase I'd never used and find one waiting.
Obviously not everyone has the opportunity to immerse themselves in a foreign culture for twelve months, but if you do then just take it - time spent learning the language before you go is probably inefficiently spent if not outright wasted.
It's not impossible to learn a language in your home country, but it's damn difficult. Most English learners reach a pretty good level even in their home country, but English is unprecedented in it's universality, usefulness, availability of TV, movies, books, everything.
For example, living in Sweden I was fairly fluent by the time I was 18 without ever having had a single conversation with an English speaker. I did what most people do, watch a lot of TV, then TV without subtitles, play games, write posts on online forums etc. The first time I had to actually speak it, I was 21 and taking care of an exchange student from the US. That year was what made me truly comfortable speaking English for days, without having to struggle for words and expressions.
It's that experience, and also spending 2 years at a US university and then working here, that made me a 98% native speaker. It's to a point where people can't tell that I'm not native now unless they spend a day with me. Some people sense that there's something a little off perhaps, still. I think the last 10-15% is extremely difficult to get for most people, without living in the country. A lot of that last 10% is cultural as well, there are still many cultural references that fly past me.
Unfortunately that's a bit difficult for us in the tech field, where English is often the lingua franca of daily work.
Ok, so my brain is soaking it up, but rather more slowly than I'd like. My ability to read and understand Hebrew has grown far more quickly than my ability to actually speak and write it. Too much of what I need to say and write all day consists of technical material for which even the local native speakers will switch into English.
Readit News
One old webpage I like with language-learning advice
http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html
lists some helpful books with a lot of research-based advice on learning new languages.
Most of the posts I see on HN mostly revolve around learning languages. In my opinion that's only part of the problem. It's more difficult to get the structure of sentences and tenses correct. I personally know words in 2 - 3 languages which share a root with my mother tongue, but it doesn't mean that I can speak those languages because I often don't get the way a single word transforms based on the tense, part of speech etc. For eg. merely knowing the word "smile" would only take you so far. Knowing the difference between "He is smiling", "He smiles", "He keeps smiling at me" is the tricky part.
Perhaps we are obsessed with learning words because it's the easier problem to solve. Learning sentence structure and grammar takes time and effort.
I think that depends on the person and/or language.
My Polish grammar knowledge is now pretty impressive, but I'm having a terrible time trying to remember words, so spend the majority of my time attempting to force memorisation with flash cards.
In a way it's kinda fun - I can go through pages of grammar exercises, conjugating and declining correctly, but with no idea of what Marta did in the past with 101 of somebody's somethings.
However, if you don't have a grasp of the basic grammar you're prone to confuse the person you're talking to. If you're reading, then you lose the context.
Exceptions abound, but I have found this to be true quite often while studying French.
That said, phonology is neglected. Poor pronunciation makes verbal communication more error prone, something you don't need as a beginner, and if you rely entirely on body language for catching such non-lexical content as emphasis and modality, you will suffer when you talk on the phone. A bit of extra work here when you start learning a language will pay off.
In the case of Japanese too, the problem is not the grammar. Japanese morphology is simple (e.g. nouns are the same in singular and plural, verb conjugation doesn't vary with person) and very regular. The big problems are 1) acquiring the vocabulary in the first place, which is hard because the writing system is even less helpful than English's 2) and remembering all those words, which is hard because for the most part they don't resemble either my native language or English.
Grammar learning and engagement might just be the holy grail of learning a language. I haven't come up with a good way of "hacking" grammar. So far it has just been a brute force study of grammar in front of a desk with a lamp.
Tips welcome.
"Indagini su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto"
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065889/
"Amici miei" (1, 2, 3... there are many sequels)
"Un borghese piccolo piccolo" (Mario Monicelli)
"La dolce vita"
"Il Gattopardo" (Luchino Visconti)
"Travolti da un insolito destino nell’azzuro mare d’agosto" Lina Wertmuller
"Le fate ignoranti" (Ferzan Ozpetek)
"Il Marchese del Grillo" (Mario Monicelli) // I love this
"Le conseguenze dell'amore"
And a lot more.
1. Laugh at you, so you know when you're wrong. 2. Patiently "teach" you things over and over and over again.
Their iPhone app is driving an immense improvement in my German.
Living in Switzerland I also like to watch shows e.g. on MTV in English but with German subtitles on. Then I can pause the live TV and rewind to match English spoken expression to German translation. This helps too.
I think this depends somewhat on the language. For some, grammar is the first major bottleneck to get to a usable beginner level, but for others, it's pronunciation. For example, Danish grammar is relatively simple (which is one reason Google Translate is very good translating it), but it's quite difficult for non-native speakers to pronounce it intelligibly. I've also heard second-hand that pronunciation is a bigger problem than grammar for beginning Mandarin Chinese speakers.
I built this app (and download) w/ a business partner (and it's a side business as my main business is consulting), and people love it. We have Spanish and English and we're planning more languages (probably English for Mandarin and Cantonese speakers next)... http://www.buenoentonces.com/
Full disclosure - it's kind of randy so you need to be OK w/PG-13 humor. But that's why you learn it. If you do every class, and you already have a bit of Spanish, you WILL come out with a signifcantly greater grasp of conversational skill.
Email me (it's in my profile) and i'll send a coupon code for free classes to HN folks.
Move to the country and live there. Live with people, make friends with them. Ask them to speak to you only in their native language. Listen to their music and watch their TV and films. Read their books - above all children's books.
In my first four weeks in Germany I did a 4-week 'intensive' course that covered enough basic grammar and vocabulary to stumble through a one-on-one conversation with a lot of pointing.
After that I never looked at another vocab sheet. I could feel my brain soaking up the language day after day; I'd reach out for a word I'd never learned or a phrase I'd never used and find one waiting.
Obviously not everyone has the opportunity to immerse themselves in a foreign culture for twelve months, but if you do then just take it - time spent learning the language before you go is probably inefficiently spent if not outright wasted.
For example, living in Sweden I was fairly fluent by the time I was 18 without ever having had a single conversation with an English speaker. I did what most people do, watch a lot of TV, then TV without subtitles, play games, write posts on online forums etc. The first time I had to actually speak it, I was 21 and taking care of an exchange student from the US. That year was what made me truly comfortable speaking English for days, without having to struggle for words and expressions.
It's that experience, and also spending 2 years at a US university and then working here, that made me a 98% native speaker. It's to a point where people can't tell that I'm not native now unless they spend a day with me. Some people sense that there's something a little off perhaps, still. I think the last 10-15% is extremely difficult to get for most people, without living in the country. A lot of that last 10% is cultural as well, there are still many cultural references that fly past me.
Ok, so my brain is soaking it up, but rather more slowly than I'd like. My ability to read and understand Hebrew has grown far more quickly than my ability to actually speak and write it. Too much of what I need to say and write all day consists of technical material for which even the local native speakers will switch into English.