[HN Gopher] How I learned French in 12 months (2020)
___________________________________________________________________
How I learned French in 12 months (2020)
Author : elamje
Score : 444 points
Date : 2022-02-25 14:24 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (runwes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (runwes.com)
| onion2k wrote:
| Duolingo is _incredibly_ good if you 're receptive to spaced
| repetition learning.
| jgwil2 wrote:
| I think Duolingo is good for learning vocabulary but should be
| supplemented with other forms of study.
| wimagguc wrote:
| A huge Duolingo fan and I play every day, but I wonder whether
| it's actually helping me to learn anything. I've been using it
| to study mandarin characters for the 3rd year now, but when I
| actually see Chinese text there's barely anything I recognize.
|
| Admittedly, I spend maybe 5-15 minutes per day on average and
| most of that I do in a rush, but the expectation still sounds
| fair -- reading would be relatively passive knowledge too.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| You've certainly learned _something_ , but at the level of
| commitment it's going to be less than if you put more time
| into it (yes I'm captain obvious here).
|
| One thing that you will notice is that even if you can't
| utilize it fluidly now, if you were to jump into more
| immersive methods now, you'll realize that it's all there
| under the surface - you'll very likely make very rapid
| progress.
| ollysb wrote:
| I spent good year using Duolingo, I made steady progress, but
| only in Duolingo. It hasn't had any impact on my ability to
| hear/speak the language.
| [deleted]
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| It can be very hard to perceive the progress you've made if
| you aren't actually putting it into practice.
|
| Speaking from personal experience, if you've actually put
| in substantial time in the last year, you'll find that a
| lot of that practice will demonstrate itself over the
| course of a few conversation classes with a teacher.
| [deleted]
| tgb wrote:
| I'm studying too mostly on my own for about 2.5 years. I can
| read a most characters I see in the wild, though that still
| leaves enough that understanding the text is hard or
| impossible. OverallI find reading much easier to study than
| listening. I haven't used DuoLingo and would recommend
| HelloChinese instead. But that's only a few months to half a
| year of material; you have to move on. After that I used an
| Anki deck of HSK vocab.
|
| Are you reading anything? Find graded readers like from
| Mandarin Companion and read those (start with ones that seem
| too easy).
|
| Have you learned to write any of the characters? I don't
| think you need to learn to write all of them, but learning at
| least 50 or so got me to understand and recognize the
| characters better in my reading as well.
|
| The Pleco app is a nice reader letting you look up words just
| by tapping on them. Also turn off pinyin in any study apps
| you're using, just use characters (except for in answers to
| verify you're right).
| globular-toast wrote:
| Doing Duolingo every day makes you good at Duolingo.
|
| There aren't any tricks IMO. You have to practise the thing
| you actually want to be able to do. You wouldn't expect to
| get good at playing guitar by tapping an app every day, why
| would it help you learn a language?
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| I've successfully used duolingo to learn multiple
| languages.
|
| I've used it as the way to get started and build a base of
| vocabulary and grammar, allowing me to comfortably jump
| into immersion with audio/video/speaking etc.
|
| Duolingo is quite effective at what it advertises, it never
| claims it will bring you to full fluency.
| lupire wrote:
| what fraction / count of characters from a dictionary do you
| recognize?
|
| How many characters has Duolingo showed you (if you can get
| that metric)?
| ukraineally wrote:
| I was able to get to ~500 day streak in french on duolingo.
| there was certainly a few freebie days in there for free. I
| thought I was doing great.
|
| Then I bought a bunch of french books for my daughter and
| learnt I knew nothing.
| onion2k wrote:
| _Then I bought a bunch of french books for my daughter and
| learnt I knew nothing._
|
| Was it _really_ the case that you didn 't know _anything_ in
| the books? That would be very surprising. At the very least
| you 'd expect to recognize vocabulary you've encountered
| before, even if the sentences weren't familiar. I'd have
| thought after 500 * 15 minutes you'd be able to figure some
| things out.
|
| As it is though, even if the books were completely
| unfamiliar, I don't really know how you'd measure or test
| that Duolingo had had no impact on you. Obviously if a book
| has vocabulary in it that you've not encountered on Duolingo
| then you're not going to know what it means, but how could
| you know that you aren't picking up new things faster because
| you've worked through Duolingo first?
|
| My experience of it has been very different. I work through
| Duolingo courses for languages I build software in. I've not
| spent anywhere close to 500 days on any language yet, but
| I've found I am able to work with languages better having
| done a few months of Duolingo courses. When I've been working
| on German and Spanish websites I've actually understood much
| more of the text than I could with websites I haven't learnt
| any of. I mean, I couldn't drop in to Madrid and have a chat
| with someone, but it _definitely_ has made a difference.
| Tepix wrote:
| You need to do a certain amount of learning grammar, DuoLingo
| will teach you very little. Do read the tips for every
| exercise on the DuoLingo website (they are not in the app).
| Those are great!
| ukraineally wrote:
| >You need to do a certain amount of learning grammar,
| DuoLingo will teach you very little. Do read the tips for
| every exercise on the DuoLingo website (they are not in the
| app). Those are great!
|
| Honestly, probably not fluent in any language except
| python. I probably need to put significantly more effort
| into learning the language than I was doing.
|
| I hate the gendered nature of french. I love quebecois over
| the french academy crap.
|
| I guess I'm not an ideal student by any means.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| I like to say Duolingo is a slow way to learn a language, but
| it's infinitely faster than not learning it at all.
|
| The main benefit of Duolingo is the streak. Gotta keep the
| streak going, so I use it every single day.
|
| Is it working? I can read French news articles for the most
| part, filling in the blanks from context. I have trouble
| listening at normal talking speeds to French youtube videos.
| For speaking, I'm sure I could order a croissant and get a
| hotel room, but beyond that...
|
| Still, it's much better than looking for perfection and
| learning nothing.
| nicbou wrote:
| After a certain point, you need to talk with a human. I can't
| praise Chatterbug enough.
| onion2k wrote:
| Yeah, that's reasonable. It's incredibly good, but Duolingo
| alone isn't enough to become fluent. As a way to introduce
| yourself to a language it's brilliant though.
| shaicoleman wrote:
| I've had great success using the Pimsleur method.
|
| It involves 30 minute audio lessons using spaced repetition where
| you instinctively and intuitively build fluency over a restricted
| vocabulary.
|
| https://www.pimsleur.com/
|
| It worked for me, but it's expensive, and requires patience, as
| it advances somewhat slowly.
| sanjayio wrote:
| How much did it cost you, if you don't mind me asking?
| Jtsummers wrote:
| Pimsleur isn't cheap, but if you have an Audible subscription
| you can (could? haven't checked in a while) get them at a
| steep discount compared to list price (through Pimsleur or
| any other source). When I bought the Spanish lessons a few
| years ago, buying the whole set via Audible this way (even
| considering the subscription cost, and combined with their
| credits) basically cut the cost in half (I actually did price
| it out because I nerd out with spreadsheets sometimes, but I
| don't recall the exact figures anymore).
|
| Also, check your local library. They may have access for you
| for free.
| [deleted]
| wodenokoto wrote:
| What language did you learn and which did you already know?
|
| I've tried listening to some pimsleur tapes for Japanese and
| Chinese and it is hopeless even if you now a little bit already
| popularonion wrote:
| After a month or so on Pimsleur Mandarin as a total beginner,
| I was feeling pretty good about myself so I posted some voice
| recordings to get feedback. The feedback I got was along the
| lines of "uhh yeah we can't really understand you bud".
|
| That forced me to actually go learn Pinyin and learn about
| the j/q/x consonants. It took me about 2 months of obsessive
| practice to fix all the wrong pronunciations I taught myself
| from 1 month of Pimsleur.
|
| I think for any non Western European language, it's much
| better to learn the basics the old fashioned way,
| _especially_ the writing system and all the phonetic aspects
| of the language that don't exist in English.
| blip54321 wrote:
| This is a good place for an early intervention. I had u and
| the consonants explained to me around lesson 2-3, and I did
| fine. I practiced them every time, comparing myself to the
| speaker.
|
| I got railroaded on the difference between i and e. My chi
| and my che sound basically the same. This is little enough
| that people seem to understand well enough, but it's
| sometimes a bit awkward.
| popularonion wrote:
| Yeah. I would've saved a lot of time if I got feedback
| after the very first lesson instead of waiting a month. I
| might have been productive continuing to use Pimsleur in
| that case.
| laurieg wrote:
| The flip side is many people learn bad pronunciation habits
| _because of_ reading. Things like Chinese tones for native
| English speakers or L /R for native Japanese speakers are
| always going to be hard and no single textbook, tape or app
| will fix that.
| popularonion wrote:
| I should be clear that I was watching YouTube videos as
| much as reading over those two months. And I was aware
| from my experience taking Spanish classes that a letter
| in English probably sounds different from the same letter
| in $LANGUAGE2.
|
| To be honest it's hard for me to understand the "Pinyin
| teaches you wrong pronunciation" line of thinking. It so
| commonly repeated by so many people that there must be
| something to it, but not for me.
| blip54321 wrote:
| Pimsleur Chinese is excellent, but it takes patience to get
| into it, especially if you know a little bit already. There's
| a spaced repetition schedule, and you're not aligned when you
| start. Caveats:
|
| 1) You don't see spaced repetition working until a few weeks
| in, once you're on a schedule.
|
| 2) You can't have gaps, so you can't just start in the
| middle.
|
| 3) If you know stuff, you need to keep with it until it gets
| into new stuff.
|
| From there, it has to be done daily. If you miss 2-3 days,
| it's a chore to get back onto the schedule. I did it when I
| had a commute, so investing 30 minutes per day was easy. It
| added no time to my day, and by the end of 3 months, I knew
| /a lot/ of Chinese for not a lot of time invested. I was on-
| par with people who had roughly 2 years of college classes
| for speaking (but not reading or writing, which Pimsleur
| doesn't touch on). My accent was better too.
|
| Once I finished, there was nowhere to go. Nothing else was
| nearly as efficient. I kind of plateaued. There are better
| tools now; this was many years ago.
|
| I did the library/CDs route, so it was free.
|
| I highly recommend the same path.
|
| I haven't found anything good for writing Chinese. Does
| anyone have recommendations? Ideally, it'd leverage a pen
| tablet or iPad pencil or similar.
| queuebert wrote:
| Skritter is pretty good for writing.
| celie56 wrote:
| The best I've found for learning to write Chinese
| characters has been Skritter (https://skritter.com/) If you
| are following a textbook, you can probably find pre-made
| decks of characters for that textbook.
| shaicoleman wrote:
| I learned Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Polish, I
| knew English and Hebrew.
|
| Every day I would usually repeat the previous day's lesson,
| and do a new lesson.
|
| For languages such as Japanese and Chinese, you'd probably
| need to repeat it more than that. It's recommended that you
| know about 80% of the answers before moving on to the next
| lesson.
| anon_123g987 wrote:
| It worked for me when I studied Japanese, German and Russian,
| even though the language of instruction is English, which is
| not my native language. The trick is that you have to follow
| the instructions, not just "listen to some tapes". The
| Japanese course consists of 3*30 units, the recommendation is
| one 30 minute unit every day. Do that, no more, no less. It's
| not magic, even if you master all 90 units, that's just a
| very basic spoken proficiency. But it gives you that result
| reliably.
| golemiprague wrote:
| triceratops wrote:
| > it's expensive
|
| I got Pimsleur for free through my public library. It's even
| available through various public library apps.
| myfavoritedog wrote:
| Chris2048 wrote:
| > No heart system
|
| What! This is revolutionary!
|
| The bullshit heart system is absent?!
| huachimingo wrote:
| If you feel confident about your Latin/Romance general vocabulary
| (you already know how they work), I would recommend you to read
| old teaching/natural method books.
|
| Like these ones, the first has every page written in french and
| english (1647,but its like Assimil series), and the second is
| from basic school:
| https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=yWf4czen8jIC
|
| https://archive.org/details/enseignementprim01brunuoft
|
| Old books are free :)
| toto444 wrote:
| What is it you call natural method ?
|
| Have you heard of 'Le Francais par le methode Nature' ?
| https://archive.org/details/jensen-arthur-le-francais-par-la...
|
| It is a book that teaches French in French from the ground up.
| huachimingo wrote:
| Books that teach a language using only that language, yes.
| Best example that comes to mind is "Lingua Latina per se
| Ilustrata" in Latin.
| Kelamir wrote:
| It took me 200 hours of reading and doing some Anki to be fine
| with reading just about any German text last year, there are
| words I didn't know yes, but I by the time it felt I have climbed
| the steeply hill of getting a hang of the language. What's 200
| hours? Not much. You can do it. I started with a few mins daily.
| Increased. Point is, see for yourself.
| christofosho wrote:
| The poster completely missed an incredible resource: Discord! The
| Reddit r/French has a fantastic Discord community where you can
| engage in written and spoken communication.
|
| https://discord.gg/french/
| Lamad123 wrote:
| I've been learning French since I was 9 and when I moved where
| French is dominant, I can barely communicate French to the locals
| and would usually quickly switch to English.
| lambda_dn wrote:
| It took me 10 mins to learn French.
|
| "Je me rends"
| werber wrote:
| Thank you op I needed this today
| eatplayrove wrote:
| I did the same, measuring my progress by taking the exams from A1
| to B2 every three months, and most of the text I can agree with.
| But I must say this must be one of the easiest language pairs in
| the world (speaker of English learning French), so do not take
| this as an example in general and do not be discouraged for other
| language pairs if you're taking longer.
| dkaleta wrote:
| I learned Spanish, too, in about 12 months to dogfood my new app
| for learning vocabulary (which I just recently launched) [0]
|
| Even though I made an app that helped me along the way to learn
| words, I don't believe in a single app/book/approach for learning
| a language. You need to expose yourself to A LOT of different
| language materials.
|
| I was learning for about 2h a day, 6 times a week. I would read
| articles, books, websites in Spanish. I would watch YouTube
| videos [1]. I would read news, initially for beginners [2] and
| later regular [3]. And most importantly, I would have 4-5h a week
| itakly conversations.
|
| After 6 months I understood quite a lot, but couldn't speak
| almost at all. Then magic happens and 6 months later, I was
| having a normal conversation (though still with some errors)
| about any range of topics: politics, global warming, travel,
| engineering etc.
|
| I believe the key for me was to read a lot of books which were
| interesting to me. For example I read Bill Gate's book "How To
| Avoid A Climate Disaster" in Spanish, as well as about ~8 others
| in the first 12 months.
|
| [0] https://www.obstino.com
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/DreamingSpanish
|
| [2] www.newsinslowspanish.com
|
| [3] https://elpais.com
| netfortius wrote:
| B1 in 5 months, as follows:
|
| - radio FranceInfo [almost] all the time (when no other
| structure learning happening)
|
| - TV5 https://apprendre.tv5monde.com
|
| - french movies streaming, with french subtitles (!)
|
| - online magazines: Le Parisian, Liberation, Le Figaro, etc.
|
| - book : "Grammaire progressive du francais - Niveau
| intermediaire (A2/B1) - Livre + CD + Appli-web - 4eme edition"
|
| -
| https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.leconjugue...
|
| - https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais-monolingue
|
| - https://www.reverso.net/orthographe/correcteur-francais/
|
| Last two in browser with strong ad blocking, to avoid
| distraction.
| diskzero wrote:
| I used the same method, in addition to going through all of
| the Rosetta Stone French lessons and the Defense Language
| Institute material (thanks to the Army.) I also went to a
| weekly French language Meetup where only French was spoken
| and any Alliance Francaise events in the area. It took me
| eight months, so you were faster than me.
| boppo1 wrote:
| > Defense Language Institute material (thanks to the Army.)
|
| Is this publicly available, or were you in the service?
| barry-cotter wrote:
| https://www.dliflc.edu/elearning/
| dsiegel2275 wrote:
| Thank you for sharing this list of resources. I have been
| studying French since September of 2020 (but only got serious
| about it in May of 2021). There are some resources here that
| I was not aware of.
| jgwil2 wrote:
| > with french subtitles (!)
|
| This is crucial. Watching movies in a foreign language can be
| difficult because of how fast the dialog is, but if you use
| subtitles in your language, you will always be thinking in
| your language first, then translating to the target language.
| Put subtitles on in the target language so that you can catch
| words that you wouldn't catch from the audio only, but you
| are still immersing yourself completely in that language.
| aquadrop wrote:
| The problem with french subtitles is that for many popular
| series/movies subtitles don't match the actual french
| speech. Looks like they are just translating English
| subtitles separately or something.
| wrycoder wrote:
| Especially for French, since, like English, the actual
| pronunciation can be quite unexpected, compared to the
| text.
|
| I came out of high school with four years of Latin and
| three years of German.
|
| Being a language expert, I thought I'd try the beginning
| French course. The first day in class, the professor began
| rattling off in French, and the other students seemed to
| have no problem with that, having apparently had several
| years of high school French. I couldn't make heads or tails
| of what what going on and quickly dropped the course.
| athenot wrote:
| > [2] www.newsinslowspanish.com
|
| Oh wow I've been after something like this for a long time.
| It's awesome because it's relevant content (news) but at a pace
| that beginners can follow. I don't know Spanish but knowing
| French, I could follow along the super slow mode and not feel
| lost.
|
| Going to look for this in German and Chinese, I wonder if
| there's something similar.
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| You can slow down Youtube videos without it distorting the
| audio. I've found it more helpful to use subtitles in the
| target language, though.
| patrickdavey wrote:
| Anyone know of this for Dutch?
| stdbrouw wrote:
| It's not quite like News In Slow French, but you might like
| https://www.nedbox.be/. They sometimes refer to the easier
| to grok content from the Belgian public broadcaster,
| https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/rubrieken/klaar/. Perhaps most
| similar is http://www.wablieft.be/nl/krant with text and
| audio at two levels of proficiency.
| halfdan wrote:
| Here you go for German: https://m.dw.com/en/slowly-spoken-
| news-reports-learning-germ...
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Danke :)
| alexpotato wrote:
| I grew up bilingual (English first language, Italian from my
| mother) and the "read a book you liked in your first language
| but translated into your desired language" is an excellent way
| to get exposure.
|
| For several reasons:
|
| - You liked the book originally so you won't mind reading it
| again
|
| - You know the story so if you get to a part where you don't
| understand the language, you can infer the meaning based on the
| your knowledge of the story
|
| - Because it was translated, it's good to see how a phrase you
| know well in your primary language was converted into the new
| language. This is particularly helpful for your own "on the
| fly" translation when you are speaking.
|
| In my particular case, I knew "family" level Italian very well
| (e.g. how you would speak to your parents, siblings at home
| etc). What I didn't know was more formal and inter-adult
| language grammar. Reading books by one of my favorite English
| authors translated into Italian was a real game changer.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Never thought of this but makes a great deal of sense.
|
| Same with movies. Watch your fav movies in French lang. for
| example. You'll know what yippekayeh mother fudger is!
| aidenn0 wrote:
| When I did an exchange in Germany, I picked up _Der Kleine
| Hobbit_ for that reason. My first week it was mentally
| exhausting just reading a page or two, but things picked up
| quickly from there.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Oh. Thank you for being up front about the time commitment.
| That helps. I, too, would like quick results but I don't feel
| like I can give it the go that you did so I think I will not do
| this.
| amelius wrote:
| What is your age? (If you don't mind me asking)
| fowkswe wrote:
| Do you mind sharing your age? Curious if youth played a part
| here - I'm in my 40s and wondering if I'll have as much
| success?
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| "I was learning for about 2h a day, 6 times a week. I would
| read articles, books, websites in Spanish"
|
| If you put in that much time you will learn no matter your
| age. Same for children. They are supposed to be better at
| language learning but in the end they spend a lot of time
| that adults often don't have or don't want to invest.
| laurieg wrote:
| Older second language learners have a harder time, but I
| don't think it's because of some kind of "weakening of the
| brain" with age. I think the real reasons are:
|
| * Older people can't remember the difficulty of learning
| their first language. They've been using it comfortably for
| years.
|
| * Older people have bigger vocabularies so the gap between
| their first and second language is even larger.
|
| * The discomfort of learning new things is less familiar for
| older peoples
| exeldapp wrote:
| I agree. Maybe there's some truth in the whole "brain
| plasticity" talking point but how long does it take a child
| to become fully comfortable with speaking and writing a
| language? 8 years? Longer? Compared to an adult who can
| accomplish that in about a year. And that is when the child
| has no choice but to use that language, since they know no
| other.
| treeman79 wrote:
| Learned a few things like violin art and other stuff as a
| way to spend time with my kids. turns out I learn much
| faster than they do.
|
| The only difference is I've seen is I'm much more focused
| but they have much more free time. An hour of my focus
| learning is probably worth a week of their efforts.
| robocat wrote:
| "Studies comparing the rate of second-language acquisition
| in children versus adults have shown that although children
| may have an advantage in achieving native-like fluency in
| the long run, adults actually learn languages more quickly
| than children in the early stages (Krashen, Long and
| Scarcella, 1979.)"
|
| "Adults are quite strategic in their learning, compared
| with children. They are generally self-motivated, use time
| effectively, and can apply themselves to lengthy tasks."
|
| My personal opinion is that the #1 block to fluency as an
| adult is the concentration on written resources and trying
| to apply rules. Children learn by mimicry, but adults learn
| by resources, which creates errors. You can tell by
| listening to people that have learnt English as a second
| language, and understanding the source of the errors they
| make.
| avip wrote:
| Strangely missing: older people (40s) usually take care of
| X pretty small kids + N pretty declining elders while
| having Y hours of work + Z hours commute daily.
|
| Seriously - I don't even have 2 hours a day
| [deleted]
| dkaleta wrote:
| I'm 34. I don't think age matters that much. What matters the
| most is not even the method you use but the time spent with
| the language.
| jgwil2 wrote:
| To put it into perspective, children learn their native
| language through ~10 years of complete immersion, so of
| course they speak it incredibly well. Very few adult
| learners will ever have the opportunity to be immersed in a
| foreign language that thoroughly over such a long time, but
| if they did we would expect them to speak that language
| excellently as well (albeit perhaps with a slight accent).
| 300bps wrote:
| I am almost out of my 40s. In the past year, I've gotten
| three AWS certifications and learned new hobbies from scratch
| (ex: electronics component-level repair).
|
| I haven't seen evidence that my ability to learn things has
| slowed down yet. I think a lot of "age-related" problems are
| more related to lifestyle until about 60.
|
| When you're 20, you can eat sugar, fat and salt all day long
| while sitting on a couch and get along pretty well. When
| you're 40, you'll get fat and your body will atrophy.
|
| There's a solution though: eat healthful foods, exercise,
| manage stress, pursue important goals, be active socially.
| vidarh wrote:
| I'm just dieting down for a second time, and I'll attest to
| this. Both times what got me to take diet seriously again
| was recognizing how sluggish I'd gotten, and cleaning my
| diet up again has a remarkably rapid effect.
| forty wrote:
| The ability to learn things slow down dramatically when you
| get older, it's probably even more true for languages. It's
| fairly obvious when you look at kids. They can learn in the
| 5 first years of their life, without even thinking about
| it, to speak a language as well (at least accent wise) as
| any adult would do in 20 years of pretty intense studying.
| 300bps wrote:
| Do you have a citation on this? Or is it as you say just
| obvious?
|
| Here's a study that found no link between age and a slow
| down of ability to learn things:
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC4552811
| /#i...
|
| And here's Harvard's thoughts on it:
|
| https://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/how-memory-
| and-...
|
| _Scientists used to think that brain connections
| developed at a rapid pace in the first few years of life,
| until you reached your mental peak in your early 20s.
| Your cognitive abilities would level off at around middle
| age, and then start to gradually decline. We now know
| this is not true._
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| If people spoke to me using using baby level words, then
| took great delight when I learned and re-produced sound,
| and steadily upped the sophistication of what they said,
| I'm sure I'd learn super quickly as well.
|
| People can be weird with non-native adult speakers.
|
| I tried to learn my wifes family language - mother in law
| seemed a bit embarrassed with how to deal with a non-
| native speaker, and mumbles short things very quickly. My
| father in law is better, he'll just talk and talk,
| reasonably clearly and slowly, and I've conversed way
| more with him (even if it's not at all fluent and
| involves a lot of dictionary pauses and trying to explain
| things).
| echelon wrote:
| Because kids aren't working full time jobs and stressing
| out over free time.
| na85 wrote:
| There's more to it than that. Neuroplasticity exists.
| youngNed wrote:
| I'm sure it does, but you put me in a house, with 2
| adults, house, feed and clothe me for 5 years that i
| don't have to worry about going to work and i guarantee
| you i will speak whatever language they speak a whole lot
| better than some 5 year old.
|
| Hey i'll even throw in another language and still be able
| to fight the 5 year old. With one hand.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| I'm in my early thirties and similarly learned French from 0
| to a conversational level in a bit over a year. (Though I was
| already pretty strong in Spanish so that helped
| significantly)
|
| The age thing is mostly a myth imo. If you put in the time
| and effort you'll get a lot back.
|
| The biggest issue is the concept of fluency. A lot of people
| believe they have to be 100% perfect or they don't "know" the
| language. In reality, from the moment you start you will
| continually become more and more comfortable in an asymptotic
| manner (no one knows 100% of a language, ie what percentage
| words in the dictionary do you know).
|
| The biggest piece of advice - get comfortable in dealing with
| ambiguity, and don't try to force constructs from your
| primary language onto the one you are learning. Meaning:
| don't say X word means Y word in my native language,
| therefore I can use it exactly the same (it's a different
| word, VERY likely with different connotations).
| spaetzleesser wrote:
| " don't try to force constructs from your primary language
| onto the one you are learning."
|
| That's super important. This also applies to translated
| texts. Something somebody in Iran says may sound crazy when
| translated straight but may just be a normal thing in their
| language.
|
| As a German it took me a long time to understand that when
| an American says "we should have a beer someday " that this
| means that you most likely will not have a beer with that
| person.
| laurieg wrote:
| You've hit the nail on the head! Being comfortable with
| ambiguity and not knowing something 100% is crucial. I've
| observed many language learners over the years and if
| someone has a habit of translating every word they see into
| their native language before they are satisfied then they
| usually make slow progress learning a second language.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| Exactly.
|
| A corollary to this is that this is the reason why
| memorizing flash cards/massive lists of words can be
| counter productive. A degree of that is helpful to start,
| but you really need to see words in proper context,
| repeatedly.
| adastra22 wrote:
| I'm in my late 30's and learning Chinese and Japanese
| simultaneously. The age thing is almost entirely a myth.
| There are three factors in which age matters:
|
| 1. Older people get set in their ways, and learning a
| language requires rethinking how you think. This limitation
| is purely psychological and not biological and you can avoid
| it merely by giving it an honest attempt. Learning a foreign
| language can be a great way to to keep your mind fresh.
|
| 2. TIME. Learning a language requires thousands of hours of
| commitment. Young people have time to commit to it. Older
| people with work and careers do not, and so often don't make
| as much progress. But if you chart progress vs. hours
| studied, age disappears as a factor. (There are studies of
| this, but I'm on mobile right now and can't pull them up.)
|
| 3. Truly young people (under the age of 12) still have the
| ability to hear sounds not used in their mother tongue. This
| is why transplanted kids can speak fluently and pass as
| natives, but adults and even teens develop heavy accents.
| Older people still have enough neural flexibility to retrain
| their ear, but it takes much more time and conscious effort.
| This is the only truly biological age-related factor, and
| countering it just requires a bit more time and conscious
| attention.
|
| If you are learning a languages as a busy adult, the key is
| to find ways to immerse yourself in the language, even if it
| is just passively listening to things on a loop while you do
| your day job, listening to audiobooks during your commute,
| and always having a study book or flash cards at hand
| everywhere you go. You need to study not 10 minutes a day,
| but 5-10 hours a day--but if you're smart, that time will
| double dip for other things and you can get away with just 1
| hour a day of real committed study, and the rest is various
| forms of background practice throughout the day.
| aeyes wrote:
| Let me add another resource to your list that helped me
| tremendously: https://coffeebreaklanguages.com/
|
| They have free podcasts available on iTunes for a lot of
| languages, the Spanish content is absolutely amazing.
| Izikiel43 wrote:
| The problem with Spanish is what country's Spanish you learn.
| Words can mean different things in different countries, and
| also pronunciation changes.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| That's the least problem I'd say. Spanish is pretty
| conserved, especially the written language.
|
| Listening comprehension is always the last of the skills to
| kick in, because it is all-or-nothing. You only understand
| every word in the sentence or your brain gets overloaded.
| While reading foreign texts you can easily skip a word you
| can't understand and still figure out what the rest means. Or
| at least, more often so, because you don't have to keep
| everything in short term memory.
| _puk wrote:
| > Listening comprehension is always the last of the skills
| to kick in
|
| Is that actually the case?
|
| I've always found it easier to follow a conversation in a
| language I am learning than to speak it.
|
| You get an awful lot of context when listening, only need
| to put a few words in the right place and suddenly what
| you're hearing makes sense. You can get away without
| literally translating everything.
|
| Speaking on the other hand, you can't converse properly
| without being able to find the right word at the right time
| and in the right place.
| robocat wrote:
| If you are a native English speaker, the #1 trick is to learn
| the vowel sounds exactly correctly.
|
| Vowel sounds in words extremely variable in English, but are
| very rigid in Spanish, even in different countries. In
| Spanish consonants may change their sound in some countries,
| but the differences are fixed, and it is easily learnable.
| Get your pronunciation corrected as soon as you begin
| learning, otherwise you teach yourself bad habits that are
| hard to break.
|
| English speakers tend to really screw up the vowel sounds in
| Spanish, which makes words unintelligible to Spanish
| speakers. The one-to-one correspondence between written
| vowels and spoken vowel sounds actually makes Spanish quite
| easy to pick up.
|
| One other trick is to speak English words using Spanish vowel
| sounds, because Spanish speakers with a little English will
| often hear the word if you do that. It also helps if you can
| hear English words spoken with Spanish vowel sounds by
| Spanish speakers.
|
| If you are in a hick area then the Spanish language can
| change in other ways which can be difficult to understand
| (for example eating S's, ma o meno).
|
| The rumour is that the grammar is hard to learn, but if you
| only need conversational Spanish then there is one future and
| one past tense that is easy for English speakers to learn to
| speak: Voy a = I am going to, He = I have.
| barbecue_sauce wrote:
| Like for instance, in the US there was once a large tex-mex
| restaurant chain called Chichi's (long since bankrupt). When
| I told my friend from Spain this, she was horrified.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| That's a pretty cool language learning app concept - you
| haven't overcooked it. A lot of apps want to make themselves
| the star of the show - if that makes sense - but really it's a
| vessel to learn vocabulary, and it looks like yours lets a user
| add arbitrary vocab, which means it will be relevant.
|
| Any plans to add new languages?
| blodkorv wrote:
| And i have been studying for 3 years by my self and no where near
| to be able to say i "know" french. Some people just are better at
| learning stuff than others.
| ghaff wrote:
| Yeah. I had four years of high school French and was in maybe
| the top 25% of the class (barely). But I've never spent any
| appreciable time in France and, even when I was at my best, was
| maybe "OK" for written French and thoroughly mediocre for
| spoken French. So the idea that it just takes a bit of
| dedicated effort to get very good is not true broadly.
|
| I realized on my last trip to Paris with a friend that I know a
| _lot_ more than someone who has never studied the language at
| all but it 's still pretty bad.
| Felger wrote:
| "Prouve le moi" ;)
| bitdivision wrote:
| A lot of discussion on this last time it came up:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22341983
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| > 2/19: Started lessons on Italki, roughly once a week
|
| For anyone hoping to learn a language I think this step is the
| key. Probably worth the same as doing everything else on the list
| put together. 2 hours a week will probably get you from A1 to B1
| in 3-6 months
|
| (Italki are 1 on 1 language classes)
| [deleted]
| qnsi wrote:
| why would you say so?
|
| There are many linguists who think it's more important to get
| comprehensible input, then produce comprehensible output [0]
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwjkqUBztiM
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| Paying someone to speak to you is going to provide
| comprehensible input and output.
| jodrellblank wrote:
| That approach feels intuitively wrong to me[1]; people who
| watch sports don't automatically become good athletes. People
| who look at pictures don't automatically become good at
| drawing. People who read don't automatically become good
| authors. People who watch cooking shows on TV don't
| automatically become good at cooking. Students who watch
| programming videos notoriously don't automatically become
| able to code anything the compiler accepts. Reviewing study
| notes by re-reading them is one of the less effective study
| strategies, compared to flashcards which prompt you to recall
| and generate answers from your memories.
|
| Surely yes you need to adjust to the sound of a foreign
| language, but with no feedback loop of trying to speak and
| having another person feedback, how do you adjust?
|
| Listening to hours of completely foreign language won't make
| you understand what the words are or what they mean, so
| "comprehensible" input includes weasel words that require you
| to already know the language before you can learn it. It's
| all over a bit weird.
|
| Don't people say some of the most effective ways to learn are
| the immersion courses where you go to a retreat and speak
| only that language for weeks at a time, studying and learning
| 8 hrs+/day and then there are people who spend years reading
| or listening but aren't confident to speak anything. But are
| there people who spend years speaking with fluent speakers
| who still report they don't know the language?
|
| [1] inb4 "hurr think you know better than professional
| linguists"
| pigeonhole123 wrote:
| Check out the studies and lectures by Stephen Krashen if
| you want to hear from an academic that's been studying this
| for 40 years.
| tjader wrote:
| Isn't individually targeted comprehensible input a large part
| of a 1-on-1 class? I would expect a good teacher to speak a
| lot during those 2 hours, and to properly adjust his speech
| so that's always pushing the boundaries of what the student
| can understand.
| notyourwork wrote:
| I'm on week 8 of a weekly 90 minute Italian course. My wife and
| I both are in it, 8 other students and the class is held over
| Zoom. I've actually been pleasantly surprised with my progress.
| We study a bit outside of class and there is some casual
| homework but I'm excited to see after taking a few more levels
| with the teacher.
|
| I do wish the class was twice a week for more forced cadence of
| practice but that's an adult problem.
| martius wrote:
| It seems unreasonable to me to expect to be B1 in 6 months with
| 2 hours of class per week.
|
| I've been learning German 2 hours a week + homework for 2 years
| and I'm not yet B1 in German. We are 4 students with one
| teacher and, from what I understand, we are not particularly
| slow.
|
| Maybe German is _really_ harder to learn than other languages,
| but probably not 2x or 4x as French (I 'm French).
| itronitron wrote:
| https://youtu.be/mE5XaYXUtPY
| mistahenry wrote:
| I'm probably C2 comprehension, C1 speaking in German. I self-
| taught to high B2 (based off placement into that level in a
| Goethe Institut Intesivkurs) in 15 months of 2 hours a day. I
| studied 1-2 hours per day on average and did not miss a
| single day.
|
| 2 hours a week to B1 in German as an English speak seems
| totally impossible. I was probably B1 in 6 months at the
| level of study I described. I studied 5 years of Latin prior
| to starting so the case system wasn't an additional learning
| curve. Your pace honestly seems standard.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| I think language classes are in itself slow. Duolingo is a
| lot faster. After Duolingo you should read texts in the
| language (B1-B2 maybe) and then you will start being able to
| listen to arbitrary native speakers (which I don't think is
| practicable before C1).
|
| French has plenty of difficulty in orthography and some in
| grammar. Maybe the grammar is slightly less complex than
| German, but only slightly. But I'd say for someone from
| another language that is easily overshadowed by prior
| experience in English or Spanish or similar.
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| In my experience duolingo on its own doesn't get you
| anywhere past A1 or maaaaybe A2 in German.
| Tepix wrote:
| Try to immerse yourself as much as you can! I think one key
| factor is to get your brain to think in/about the new
| language, all the time.
| toyg wrote:
| People talk of "difficult" languages in absolute terms, but
| there is always the question of where one is coming from.
|
| English shares a significant amounts of structure and words
| with French, so French ends up being relatively
| straightforward to learn for a motivated English speaker -
| the only real difference is the amount of tenses, which OP
| unsurprisingly still struggles with. I bet you, as a French
| speaker, would grasp Italian very quickly - much faster than
| most Chinese likely ever will.
|
| German ended up sharing much less with Romance languages, so
| it stands to reason that it would take 2x-3x the effort of
| going from English to French.
| shughes wrote:
| The approach that has seemed most effective for me (for Dutch and
| Spanish), and I can also rationalize it from my logical side, is
| "comprehensible input" method.
|
| The idea is that you're learning like a kid, but in a more
| focused and efficient way. E.g., someone tells you a story, and
| while doing so, they'll motion or point to the things they're
| talking about, but they do so entirely in the foreign language.
| However, since they're doing so in a comprehensible way, you can
| easily figure out what they're saying.
|
| It's meant to trigger the connection in your mind between the
| objects/actions and the corresponding words in the foreign
| language, and it's meant to bypass the translation phase which
| language learners often start with.
|
| This is the YouTube channel that really opened my eyes to the
| model: https://youtu.be/t4CAdmquJsY
| blakesley wrote:
| Whoa, this channel looks great! Thanks so much for the rec!
| anhner wrote:
| That spanish channel is so awesome!
|
| Do you have any resources for something similar in Dutch?
| kjerzyk wrote:
| Dreaming Spanish is awesome! Totally recommend his YouTube but
| also his website - few PS/$ a month to support him and have
| access to thousands of videos!
| toto444 wrote:
| I am a huge fan of comprehensible input as well. I am working
| on a website that can (in theory) teach Japanese by relying
| entirely on comprehensible input. I start by defining simple
| words using Emojis and I build the vocabulary from there
| through enjoyable stories. The grammar is introduced very
| slowly in context. You can check it out here if you're
| interested : https://drdru.github.io/stories/intro.html
| [deleted]
| amatecha wrote:
| Nice, I've been learning French on Duolingo for the past couple
| months and feel I have learned quite a lot. Nice to see some
| recommendations on this article for stuff I can help bolster my
| learning/progress.
| jchook wrote:
| For learning German I have enjoyed these audiobooks @ 30 min per
| day:
|
| - Paul Noble parts 1 & 2 - Pimsleur course starting at Lesson 11
| rozenmd wrote:
| I managed to get from A1.2 (started there from having a few
| holidays in France, having listened to a Michel Thomas audiobook
| once) to B2.4 in two years before moving to France.
|
| The InnerFrench podcast helped a _lot_ - I had french courses
| twice a week, 2 hours each, and the podcast kept french in my
| mind on weekends /days off.
|
| That being said, after moving here it still took 3-4 months to
| get comfortable with just how bloody fast they speak French in
| real life.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| It's important to note that it's not just speed, they also
| drop/concatenate words in spoken French in ways that are rarely
| explicitly taught.
| maxFlow wrote:
| Not entirely true, liaisons---and the rules around them---
| make part of any half-decent French curriculum. But liaisons
| are only one part of the "dropping/concatenating" in spoken
| French, the other part being accents. Accents can obfuscate
| speech terribly, but detecting accents can only come by with
| practice and exposure [in the wild] to regional varieties of
| FR.
|
| The thing that made liaisons much more clear for me was
| bucketing them by: optional, forbidden, and required.
| wbsss4412 wrote:
| This is true. But as you say it is only a part of it.
|
| Whole words get dropped as well "ne ___ pas" simply becomes
| "pas" as an obvious example.
|
| This phenomenon happens in spoken English as well. "I am
| going to go to the store" => "imagotada store"
| mabub24 wrote:
| That's the big thing with me as well. I would comfortably say
| I'm at a B2 level, but the french from native speakers in
| casual conversation is _so_ fast sometimes. It gave me a new
| appreciation for how fast I probably speak english.
| plainnoodles wrote:
| I took 5 years of french in high school and really loved it,
| so I leaned into it heavily and read novels in French, etc. I
| felt pretty confident in my vocab and grammar, and I even had
| a decent time reading some of the Old French stuff from
| classic novels (I disliked my English teacher and loved
| French, and since English class at that point is less about
| the language and more about literary analysis, I asked if I
| could read the books (where the original was in French) in
| their native language, and she could hardly refuse such a
| reasonable and intellectually curious request! So anyway I
| read Madame Bovary and L'Etranger and a few other older books
| whose titles escape me).
|
| And on the more modern side, I could read French newspapers
| quite well too.
|
| But at no point could I ever reliably make out more than the
| gist of what an actual French speaker, speaking normally,
| said. We have two Belgian exchange students and I struggled
| to understand them, and just watching French video content,
| similar struggles there.
|
| I don't know if it's like this for every language where
| native speakers just talk really fast and there's a large
| gulf in comprehension speed for learners to close, or if it's
| something specific to French, but I know your pain here.
| mabub24 wrote:
| Reading and conversing are really almost like two different
| skills.
|
| A lot of learning how to speak a language is ear-training.
| With French, I started much more with speaking so now I can
| make out a lot of what people say. But, the big challenge
| with French is that, like in English, native speakers
| "break" the rules or use subtle turns of phrasing that are
| very culturally specific, usually they're collocations that
| don't exactly translate (but luckily for English they
| actually commonly do thanks to the Norman mixing in
| English).
|
| It gets even more complicated when French has different
| formal and casual registers that are much more distinct
| than in English. So when you're reading Le Monde, or
| Flaubert, you're getting the literary, fancy, French. Most
| people speak in a much more argot mixed way.
|
| Now add onto that different regional dialects like
| Quebecois (really really fast, distinct, french from them),
| Belgian, Swiss, different parts of France, etc...and it's
| even more difficult. (Personally I find Parisian French, ou
| _francais standard_ to be the easiest to understand).
|
| The best solution is just immersion. And constant use.
| Language is _used_ , and use is the best method for
| improvement. You can't really think of it like a logical
| code. It's more like behavior for communicating. You have
| to learn the right rules in the language game for things to
| "make sense".
| jodrellblank wrote:
| Learning Morse Code it's tempting to start slow. The
| problem is you get skilled at "slow Morse" and it's hard to
| speed up, since the sounds and feel change. An alternative
| is to learn with fast Morse characters or words from the
| beginning but with long gaps between them for thinking
| time. Then as you need less thinking time you can shrink
| the gaps and be fast.
|
| I haven't seen online discussions of this idea for language
| learning, but I wonder if the same technique could be used?
| Hear snippets of fast French, words or short phrases, with
| long gaps for you to think what they said. Then as you
| understand quicker, need less thinking time, shrink the
| gaps. ?
|
| Maybe even as simple as a "press space for next sentence
| when ready, or R to repeat".
|
| [It's also an interesting thing about language
| comprehension / artificial intelligence. After hearing a
| thing in English I have awareness of whether or not I
| understand it, and can correct small misunderstandings
| without further input, only time and imagination, e.g. "it
| makes no sense in context, maybe they said _this_ instead "
| or "I just realised that _someword_ said in their accent
| would sound like that. It might be _someword_ they said "].
| yonaguska wrote:
| R to repeat would be an amazing vlc plugin. If an audio
| file was annotated, having a repeat button that jumps
| back to the last tag, and double tapping goes back to the
| previous previous tag.
| usrusr wrote:
| Interesting line of thought! For French I'd say
| definitely go for gaps between full sentences, because
| sentences because single words have almost as little to
| do with spoken French as single letters.
|
| Which is my pet peeve with French: when I feel
| particularly bad at talking English (I'm German), it
| feels natural to fall back to a sequence of separate
| words that isn't a sentence but gets some message to the
| receiver (while making me sound like the imbecile that I
| might be, but it does the job and sometimes that's worth
| this cost). For French, I feel like there's no
| alternative to trying to form a sentence. And on my
| level, that works worse than the English "words no
| sentence" fallback would (and if it does not work it will
| certainly also fail to make me seem anywhere close to
| competent in the language)
| sersi wrote:
| In my experience with other languages (can't say for French
| since that's my native language), it's normal. I'd say that
| for someone at your level who has extensive vocabulary and
| good reading comprehension, just staying a month or two in
| France would be enough for you to get to the point where
| you wouldn't have issues understanding French speakers
| speaking normally.
|
| Also, once you do understand French speakers, you might not
| understand other accents. For example, even as a native
| French speaker, I struggle with Quebecois.
| jgwil2 wrote:
| As an English speaker who learned French, Spanish, and
| German I'd say that of the three, French has the biggest
| gap between written, formal language and spoken language,
| especially in informal contexts (e.g. conversation among
| friends and family). I would also say that for all
| languages, reading comprehension and and listening
| comprehension are two different but complementary skills.
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Takes time to get used to any accent.
|
| Americans struggle in Ireland for instance. Or people
| from the northeast once they get to Louisiana.
| johnisom2001 wrote:
| The innerFrench podcast is fantastic for comprehension if
| you're not yet at a high level.
| katspaugh wrote:
| I've been studying German on Lingoda and Chatterbug a lot during
| the pandemic. Like the author, I took advantage of their marathon
| plans.
|
| On Chatterbug, it was 400EUR for unlimited (!) 1-on-1 lessons
| with native teachers.
|
| Can't praise them enough. It was a singular thing that just
| propelled my speaking to the next level (from B1 to B2-C1).
|
| Lingoda is less fun and more traditional classroom-like.
| Chatterbug is fun and startuppy.
|
| Both offer structured lessons with natives.
|
| Edit: Chatterbug is no longer unlimited for 400EUR, it's only 30
| lessons a month. Still cheap. Here's a referral link for a
| further 25% discount: https://app.chatterbug.com/r/DerIvan-66
| RajT88 wrote:
| The Peppa Pig thing is legit.
|
| When I studied Japanese, watching kid shows was really helpful
| for ear training with a more simplistic vocabulary.
|
| My preferred weird kid's show for that was Anpanman.
| Hahihuhehooooo~!
| huachimingo wrote:
| Same with old pokemon games.
| eschulz wrote:
| I know someone who augmented his English study by spending more
| time on the bus than necessary and sitting near old ladies who
| were chatting amongst each other. They tend to speak slower and
| with more clarity. Tactics like these really helped him master
| his English accent. This was back in the 1980s.
| usrusr wrote:
| When you happen to be around parents interacting with their
| toddler age children, you almost can't not learn the language.
| Only on toddler level, but that can't be the worst start.
| cruano wrote:
| I don't know what that is but according to wikipedia[1]
| Anpanman has a higher total revenue than MCU, Harry Potter,
| Transformers, Spiderman, Barbie, etc
|
| It's insane that the only one I don't recognize is so high up
| on the list
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest-
| grossing_media...
| gramie wrote:
| My Japanese improved significantly by reading the Crayon Shin-
| chan comics. The advantage of comics aimed at young people is
| that they have phonetic characters (hiragana) written above the
| Chinese characters (kanji), so you don't have to deal with the
| hell of written Japanese (early Christian missionaries
| described Japanese as being a language "from the devil", and I
| am sure they were referring to the written version).
| claydiffrient wrote:
| I picked up French to a fairly fluent level back when I was a
| Mormon missionary in about 6 months time. Being completely
| immersed (living in France, speaking/reading it daily) in the
| language was definitely a boon to learning it. Nothing I did in
| high school or college even approached that level.
| deutschewelle wrote:
| On ne peut pas lire un livre pour jouer du piano.
| claydiffrient wrote:
| Oui, c'est vrai!
| deutschewelle wrote:
| Fornetify chrome extension remains the fastest way to learn
| French with minimal effort to.
| jamisteven wrote:
| such a french thing to bring about it too.
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| I use Duolingo a lot, about 6 languages in parallel. I think the
| mobile app is great, I'm a lot faster doing that.
|
| People underestimate the effectiveness of multiple-choice type
| exercises, and I would count the word-bank among those. It is
| harder to type in the answers from scratch, but especially in the
| beginning the speed of the MC formats more than compensates for
| the "laziness" compromise. Double that for translations to
| English. Just reading and hearing the foreign sentences is enough
| to have some repetition benefit.
|
| For latin scripts I use the corresponding phone keyboard to put
| in the words. It's still quite fast. Overall I'm faster with the
| phone than with the website.
| _benj wrote:
| I came across the Michel Thomas Method[0] on some comments here
| some time ago, and I've been thoroughly enjoying it!
|
| When I first started learning French I took a "school" approach
| to it, get a dedicated notebook, buy books, buy cards to make my
| own flash cards, schedule 1 hour a day... needless to day that I
| failed, not just that but I hated it all!
|
| So I decided to make it fun (the way I learn programming or other
| things that I enjoy) and the Michel Thomas was super fun for me
| :-) It my motivation to mow the lawn since mowing the lawn is my
| french listening time.
|
| The other day I got a random marketing email with some french in
| it trying to be fancy, and I was so happy when I could understand
| everything it said before having to read the english translation!
|
| I'm not affiliated with them in any way, I just really enjoy his
| approach to teaching languages
|
| [0] https://www.michelthomas.com/
| jgmmo wrote:
| I second this. Michel Thomas french CD's are awesome. I don't
| like the other languages they offer as much, but the french
| lessons by Michel himself are the BEST language program I've
| ever heard.
| honkdaddy wrote:
| I'm intrigued! This seems super promising.
|
| How's your conversational French after having listened to the
| program?
| _benj wrote:
| The slight challenge for me was seeing the words, because
| french words don't sound like one would think!
|
| But after getting a few rules in my mind like "oi" sounds
| like "wah" in english and the ending of the french words are
| mostly not pronounced, it was easier for me going from the
| sound and meaning (concept) of the word to the reading part.
|
| But the most important thing is that it is fun, and it's a
| lot easier to stick to fun things!
| mierz00 wrote:
| I went through Michel's French courses before moving to
| France and I think they helped me greatly.
|
| I won't say that I could speak fluently from the start, but
| It gave me a very strong foundation to build on.
| quacked wrote:
| Advice for people trying to learn a language:
|
| 1. Focus on learning the accent and intonation before you focus
| on learning vocabulary 2. Speaking to a native speaker daily will
| bring far more proficiency than studying will
| j1elo wrote:
| That reminds me of the saying:
|
| _Languages are (best) learned in the cradle or in bed_
|
| (no idea where I heard it first)
| issa wrote:
| There is some portion of learning new languages that involves
| natural ability, which is no different than how people learn math
| at different speeds. But the overwhelmingly critical factor is
| motivation.
| WhitneyLand wrote:
| Maybe the best first words for a dev to learn in French? Someone
| walked into my office and said Ca marche!
|
| After humbly reminding I was the FNAG (freaking new Anglo guy) he
| said, it means the new build is working great!
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| If you pay close attention, about 60% of words in English are
| either the same in French or share a latin root.
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| For building up vocabulary, I've found parallel text very
| helpful. For French, I've used:
|
| Penguin Parallel Text French Short Stories 1 and 2. New Penguin
| Parallel Text Short Stories in French. Dover Dual Language Great
| French Short Stories of the 20th Century. Candide, ou
| L'optimisme.
|
| These give you enough vocabulary to transition to French-only
| text or speech without constantly having to refer to a
| dictionary.
|
| The Penguin series also covers other European languages: Spanish,
| Italian, German, and Russian. (It also covers Chinese and
| Japanese, but for them you'd still need to refer to a dictionary
| for the pronunciation of Hanzi/Kanji, except where furigana are
| used.)
|
| For spoken French, I've found the Inner French, Hugo Lisoir, and
| Mamytwink Youtube channels not too difficult to follow.
| criddell wrote:
| The author criticizes the way we teach languages in schools but
| I'm not sure you can do much better when most of the class is
| only there because they have to be there. Frankly, I think it's
| remarkable how well schools do.
| plainnoodles wrote:
| This is my experience as well. If you're just there to fulfill
| your credit hour obligations, you can squeak through managing
| to shield yourself from truly learning much of the language at
| all.
|
| I think much of the value, though, is in the opportunity it
| affords people who find a passion in it. I really loved French
| in high school, and the combination of the support/resources it
| offered (a book, a teacher) and the regimen (I think French was
| either 3 or 5 times per week? I can't recall) was just right to
| let me learn as much as I wanted to, and also enough regimen to
| keep me coming back to it even if I wouldn't have otherwise
| necessarily felt like it if left to my own devices.
| hnjst wrote:
| > I Learned French in 12 Months
|
| That's not so difficult I guess, here even babies do so.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Maybe I missed it but this doesn't state how to find French
| speakers to converse with. If I, say, live in England, how do I
| find people who will happily help me practise my French? In my
| experience speakers that you meet would rather just speak English
| than help you understand them.
|
| Many years ago I studied French intensively and got to the stage
| I could read and write quite well and understood some fairly
| advanced grammar. But I couldn't even make the most spoken basic
| requests, let alone have a conversation, because I had no
| exposure to the spoken language. I had done a lot of what the
| author suggests here in terms of listening (some French films are
| _excellent_ , by the way), but it's not enough.
|
| One thing I'm quite certain about is techniques that treat you
| like a baby are really inefficient. That includes Rosetta Stone,
| Duolingo etc. It's just way more convenient to learn much of the
| grammar using your existing language skills. Practice with people
| who can speak your current language and your target language, as
| the author suggests, is ideal as you can get them to explain what
| they meant in your language. There are certain fixed phrases and
| figures of speech which would take a long time to learn like a
| baby, plus the _faux amis_ will trip you up if you 're not
| careful.
| christofosho wrote:
| Check out https://discord.gg/french/
|
| It is directly related to the subreddit, with a fantastic and
| kind community!
| toyg wrote:
| _> Maybe I missed it but this doesn 't state how to find French
| speakers to converse with_
|
| It's in there, Italki: https://www.italki.com/
| [deleted]
| Tepix wrote:
| Try Tandem (the app)
| stakkur wrote:
| Highly recommend Duolingo app, especially for first exposure to a
| language. I used the app as a refresher this past year (for
| Latin) and it was excellent for that, too.
| mahdi7d1 wrote:
| In the first paragraph he says "without any formal programs or
| immersion" and a couple of lines below says "by spending lots of
| time talking with fluent French speakers". Isn't this the best
| type of immersion someone can use?
|
| As a big believer in immersion I don't think there is any other
| way of learning languages other than immersing yourself in it..
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I suspect they spoke on Zoom. I've come across quite a few
| entrepreneurs basically running sites that pair international
| people together to converse in different languages.
|
| (As opposed to traveling to a country and living in it.)
|
| Also note that they switched their phone over to French.
| moeris wrote:
| > As a big believer in immersion I don't think there is any way
| of learning languages other than immersing yourself in it
|
| Immersion outside of a classroom context, as an adult, is a
| terrible way to learn a language on its own. Your exposure to
| comprehensible context is _lower_ than in traditional language
| learning methods.
|
| In a classroom setting it can be highly effective, but is still
| best paired with traditional approaches. Grammar is difficult
| to teach through immersion, and there's no obvious benefit in
| doing so. You can spend hours going through various
| combinations of "y" and "en" pronouns hoping to make it stick.
| Or you could take a quick pause and explain that, roughly, "y"
| replaces "a + noun", "en" replaces "de + noun", and move back
| to immersion for practice.
|
| People often seem to have done reasoning along the lines of
| "children learn languages through immersion, children learn
| languages faster than adults, therefore learning is faster with
| immersion." But that's obviously flawed logic. It's just that
| people rarely make their argument explicit.
| flanbiscuit wrote:
| I wonder if he was talking about this: 2/19:
| Started lessons on Italki, roughly once a week
|
| along with doing this: 1/19: Started
| occasionally watching Peppa Pig in French (yes, really)
| 2/19: Changed my phone language to French
|
| is what he could be considering "immersion"
|
| For those that don't know, iTalki is a platform where you can
| talk to native language speakers. You can join either as a
| teacher or learner. You can get actual lessons from people or
| just join to have discussions to improve/maintain your language
| rel2thr wrote:
| i tried for 3 years of self study plus some weekly in person
| lessons. Heavily grinded anki , did pimsleur, michel thomas ,
| duolingo.
|
| Overall i would say it was a failure, got to where I could read
| almost anything , but completely failed at being able to have
| real-time conversations.
|
| I think for me I would need immersion to really get to the next
| level. Like I would need a french person to live with me for a
| few months.
| gramie wrote:
| I grew up in Ontario, with French at school from grade 4-13.
| What really made the difference was going to two six-week
| French immersion courses (https://englishfrench.ca/explore/) in
| Quebec at the end of grades 12 and 13.
|
| It's a shame that more people don't know about these courses,
| which are still operating more than 40 years later. The only
| expense is getting to the location in Quebec; all tuition,
| housing, meals, books, etc. are paid for by the government. The
| only requirement is that you have been a Canadian student in
| the past year.
| Tepix wrote:
| The Tandem app is very good for finding people to talk to.
| devmunchies wrote:
| Nothing beats living in a native speaking country and not having
| English speakers. I learned Spanish in 6 months in the Caribbean.
| Almost fluent at 12 month. It the difference between reading a C#
| book and building an app in C#. It's best to do both.
| hk__2 wrote:
| Of course, but it's also the hardest solution.
| acheilies wrote:
| DarkContinent wrote:
| Does anyone have advice for learning a rare language, like
| Icelandic? A lot of the advice in this and other articles assumes
| you're learning one of the popular languages that everyone wants
| to learn. While that's certainly a good thing, I think there's a
| lot of value in picking up these less common languages that give
| you more of a niche--but obviously that's something that's very
| hard to get started on.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| If icelandic wasn't just an arbitrary example, if you speak
| English you can already communicate with 98% of Icelanders.
| popularonion wrote:
| I think the only way to have a "niche" these days is to
| triangulate between two uncommon languages, but it will be
| one hell of a small niche. Like maybe knowing Icelandic and
| Farsi or something.
|
| And as you said, Iceland is not the best example, since for
| all intents and purposes it's an English speaking country.
| mabub24 wrote:
| I think with something like Icelandic, your best bet is to find
| a teacher, be it online or in person.
|
| Because Icelandic has a small population of speakers, and less
| of a global reach compared to languages like French, Mandarin,
| or English, there will be less easily available resources. It
| will also be very distinct. I don't believe Icelandic is a part
| of common language families, like a romance language, or a
| germanic language.
| aktensoufi42 wrote:
| I'd like to point out to OP that most of his/her listed
| limitations are also limitations most french native speaker have.
| Cultural differences from one area to another influence the way
| french people speak a lot (I guess it's true in a lot of
| countries though). I sometimes don't understand half what my in-
| laws say, and we were born like 100km away from each other. This
| goes beyond colloquial speak like argot (which is mostly parisian
| anyway) or verlan. It's basically words from local dialects (like
| provencal, basque or breton) that became part of some kind of
| accepted local french variant which is for everyone involved just
| french and nothing more. The local variant aspect is not really
| blatant until someone from outside points out he/she doesn't
| understand a word that until then sounded very...basic to
| everyone else. The word for "mop" for example has like its own
| variant in every region.
|
| My point is: your limitations are a proof that you understand
| french almost as well as a native speaker that never really left
| his/her hometown. Which is impressive.
| lupire wrote:
| Is that like fountain vs bubbler, soda vs pop, in USA?
| aktensoufi42 wrote:
| I guess yes, for some examples, but sometimes the new words
| meaning are not even "guessable". Maybe you can see it as
| what you could experience as an american visiting the UK.
| slibhb wrote:
| > You absolutely NEED to spend a lot of time talking with people,
| particularly advanced or native speakers of your language, in
| order to make significant progress understanding native speakers
| and speaking yourself.
|
| Right on the money. Almost everyone I know who speaks lots of
| languages is very sociable. They have no problem talking to
| anyone about anything.
| CSSer wrote:
| I took four semesters of French in undergrad (U.S.) from zero
| knowledge. I went to a small, rural high school that only had the
| budget for a Spanish teacher. I decided I would've preferred
| French had I been given the choice so I switched when I made it
| to college.
|
| I met and in some ways exceeded the level of proficiency the
| author noted. In a lot of ways, this was out of necessity because
| I would've otherwise been quickly left behind. Based on what the
| author shared about his own proficiency, I suspect the primary
| difference for me is grammatical. Ironically, this whole endeavor
| improved my English grammar too. I had teachers that consistently
| emphasized "correct French", graded everything I wrote, and then
| gave me thorough feedback. It seems like this made a big
| difference. I also peppered my instructors with questions about
| native slang and speech patterns I noticed in my personal
| practice/exploration. In response, they did a combination of
| humoring me with answers and guiding me towards what I needed to
| know first for those concepts to make sense later. I think this
| helped a lot because the native 'shortcuts' I learned later made
| much more sense in context than when I had first heard them.
|
| All that being said, if I wrote up my own list of resources or
| recapped what I did to practice in my free time it would _eerily_
| match this. We consumed most of the same media, used the same
| practice tools, and even used the same references right down to
| the method of lookup (setting up the search engines), so there 's
| no question in my mind it's possible to find and utilize
| resources that get you very far in your own time. I wonder if he
| has considered that someone learning a language in school should
| take advantage of all of these tools too.
|
| > I firmly believe that learning languages in school, especially
| in the United States, is generally extremely inefficient. If you
| struggled learning a language in school, don't let that affect
| your confidence with learning a new language now. If you practice
| intelligently, you can learn much more effectively on your own.
| You get to avoid doing redundant work that isn't helping you, and
| you can spend much more time getting 1-on-1 speaking time with
| teachers who put all their focus lessons on you.
|
| It's obvious to me he succeeded due to dedication (and his own
| account supports this), yet he moves so quickly to condemn the
| system with only anecdotal evidence. There's no doubt it's not
| perfect, but couldn't it possibly be that some students simply
| take French in school to meet a separate requirement and don't
| really care about learning a language? This was certainly my
| experience in Undergrad. It was no loss to me as it just freed up
| more of the teacher's time for my benefit. It also seems like I
| managed to avoid some of his frustrations in the process based on
| the experiences I noted above e.g. with finding adequate
| instructors. Overall, I applaud him for his achievements. I'm
| just not sure I'm ready to so quickly support this kind of
| conclusion. Institutions and learning are certainly changing, but
| it remains to be seen what shape that will take.
| sinuhe69 wrote:
| When my son was learning English, I observed that reading on the
| appropriate level was tremendously important for his learning.
| But in his school French, they mostly do conversation and a bit
| of writing but not much reading. I tried to find some good
| reading sources in French like the Reading A-Z in English (not
| only has leveled reading but also audio) but so far not much. Can
| anyone recommend some good sources (he is 15)? Thanks!
| Tepix wrote:
| My advice is go to your local library. Here they have a ton of
| books written for language learners (at different levels,
| A1-C1). Some old classics like Jules Verne are perfect.
| nobleach wrote:
| This is actually a really cool article. I'm fascinated that we
| can learn languages this way. Immersion is definitely the avenue
| I'd seek but, often, that is not possible. The time table the
| author kept was amazing.
|
| One thing caught my eye as it brought back some fun memories:
| Verlan is equivalent to our Pig Latin. The biggest difference is,
| many places in France actually use it! Here in the States, we
| tend to use Pig Latin around small children when we don't want
| them to understand what we're saying.
| blakesley wrote:
| If you're using Duolingo, make sure to do all the stories! They
| are much more conversational than the lessons.
| Tepix wrote:
| I also started learning French last February (as a hobby), and
| i'm now near B1 level.
|
| I used mostly the Tandem app (finding good ambitious people to
| learn with is the key), a grammar book and the DuoLingo app (free
| tier). When using DuoLingo, you will find very useful tips for
| every exercise on their website (but _not_ in the app!). Without
| these tips, learning things other than vocabulary only on
| DuoLingo can be quite inefficient.
|
| I've very recently discovered that I downloaded the MosaLingua
| French app when it was free a while ago and am now using that as
| well (spaced repetition) but i find DuoLingo provides better
| motivation.
|
| Buying the french grammar book has been the only money I've spent
| so far and it's been a very enjoyable experience! Being able to
| understand texts and videos in a new language is a huge
| motivator. Being able to have a conversation is awesome, too.
|
| Some other resources that have been useful:
|
| - ThoughtCo language learning resources has some very good texts
| https://www.thoughtco.com/languages-4133094
|
| - https://deepl.com - the best for translating entire sentences
|
| - https://defr.dict.cc/ - for looking up words and idioms at the
| PC
|
| - Reverso Konjugator - verb conjugation
| maxFlow wrote:
| I tried Tandem for a couple of months without success. It's
| basically a dating site. I find it much more efficient to learn
| by myself. My go-to resources for language learning are:
| LingQ[0], Youtube, and Wikipedia (in the target language,
| evidently).
|
| You have to find what works for you, and what type of content
| you like, you don't want to be fighting the language, the
| content, and the platform.
|
| Saludos.
|
| [0] https://www.lingq.com/en/
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| It seems Duolingo goes quite far in terms of French. Not sure
| if there needs to be anything else to be honest.
|
| Anything else might be a waste of time, including conjugation
| apps. The exception may be actual grammar references which can
| sometimes be helpful.
| bscphil wrote:
| The difficulty with Duolingo (free tier) is that it's so
| limited in how much you can learn per day. I have a streak of
| about 600 days and I'm only about a third of the way through
| the total program. I average about one lesson a day (5-10
| min); in the beginning I was able to do a lot more, but now I
| will not-infrequently fail my first lesson of the day due to
| difficulty, and have to do a "practice" lesson (which are
| too-easy review lessons that don't require "hearts") just to
| keep the streak alive.
|
| I also didn't even realize until relatively recently that you
| could move on from one lesson after completing the first
| level, so I have apparently been inefficiently learning each
| lesson to level five this whole time. My recall of stuff from
| the beginning of the program is already faded...
|
| Maybe it's better if you pay for it just to be able to do
| more lessons, or alternatively maybe the desktop application
| described in the article is still active and doesn't require
| payment?
| muffinman26 wrote:
| The practice lessons give you back hearts, 1 per practice
| plus another 1 if you watch a short ad afterwards. Starting
| a new lesson will sometimes also give you an opportunity to
| watch another ad for a new heart, so after doing 2-5
| practice lessons you can go back to progressing the new
| material you were working on before.
|
| I actually prefer the free version, because it naturally
| creates spaced repetition by forcing me to review old
| lessons in-between new content.
| speakspokespok wrote:
| A few hopefully helpful comments from a single white male 38 year
| old American that's been living in Mexico for the last 8 months.
| These aren't meant to be all encompassing and are from the
| perspective of a guy in a supermarket holding up the line while 8
| or 10 people behind him want to get on with their day.
|
| Spanish learning material is heavily biased towards the language
| as spoken in Spain. Don't worry about it. Use what you can and
| the delighted local will help you with the rest.
|
| Sometimes it's awkward. Smile, laugh, and accept the blessing of
| the experience and carry on. Don't try to change or fix it.
| Mexico is this place where your mood is reflected right back at
| you. This matters when you don't want to deal w/ the language
| barrier in the moment.
|
| If you're working a day job in English you've got to spend the
| rest of the day immersed in Spanish. _That means don 't date
| expats_. Stick to Spanish music and culture as much as you can.
| Subtitles and what not. Books with English and Spanish are really
| helpful. Schedule your day based on your priorities.
|
| Get a qualified teacher, a high school English teacher is a good
| bet or ask around. I was doing 3 days/week with an instructor +
| plus daily homework, and that was a lot, but now 2 days/week
| feels slow.
|
| Learning Spanish can be done while learning Salsa, making Spanish
| friends that scuba dive or sail, hiking groups, or golfing.
| Facebook groups is a good place.
|
| Digital nomads have their own agendas. Often they're not really
| there to have their belief system tested or to learn Spanish, and
| view world as if they're at a cultural theme park or at a petting
| zoo. This is not always true of course but I standby it.
|
| People that actively go out and see the world for themselves are
| a very high grade of human and worth getting to know.
|
| Like Hemingway said about Italy: don't look at the women; share
| your cigarettes.
|
| Like walking into the wind, you must lean into and accept the
| resistance of learning in order to move forward. Reframe the
| process as a blessing and an opportunity.
|
| You'll be shocked how foreign your homeland will become to you.
|
| It's the greatest thing I've ever done.
| LightG wrote:
| I have a bad memory, I think!
|
| If I spend a year learning French, I fear I'll forget it within 6
| months. Any other forgetful people out there with solutions? lol!
| Graffur wrote:
| No solution but I am similar. I don't retain anything when
| trying to learn languages.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Learning french coming from another romance language is easier
| than learning it coming from a completely different language,
| like chinese or swahili.
| Koshkin wrote:
| As with any learning, dedication is the key. You won't believe
| how much progress one can make in just a couple of weeks of a
| persistent study.
| dorianmariefr wrote:
| I would say C1 is what I consider the level to tell that you have
| learned a language.
| dEnigma wrote:
| I don't know how the tests are structured and therefore what
| those levels mean in practice, but simply from the description
| on Wikipedia[1] I'd consider B2 quite enough of an achievement
| when it comes to learning a language: Can
| understand the main ideas of complex text on both concrete and
| abstract topics, including technical discussions in their field
| of specialisation. Can interact with a degree of fluency
| and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native
| speakers quite possible without strain for either party.
| Can produce clear, detailed text on a wide range of subjects
| and explain a viewpoint on a topical issue giving the
| advantages and disadvantages of various options.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R
| ... (also linked in the article)
| rozenmd wrote:
| The French government considers B1/B2 sufficient to become a
| citizen.
| csunbird wrote:
| So does Germany
| dsiegel2275 wrote:
| It really depends on what your goals are with the language. If
| your goal is to "be able to communicate basic needs while
| visiting Paris for five days" then A2 is likely sufficient. If
| your goal is to "converse on a range of subjects with locals
| while living in France for a month" you're probably needing
| closer to a B2.
| contravariant wrote:
| That's closer to mastery of a language than merely having
| 'learned' it. To me something like B1 is a much more important
| threshold, since it's the point where you start to be able to
| _use_ a language in an uncontrolled environment. Obviously
| becoming more practised and fluent is important but to me that
| 's a less important difference than being able to _use_ the
| language for more than some predefined scenarios. If only
| because it allows you to learn unsupervised.
| cgag wrote:
| I agree, and people should probably ignore advice from people
| who haven't reached it, unless they'd be content with being b2,
| which is a lower level than I think people realize.
| tomcam wrote:
| I know this sounds flip, but it is a piece of anecdata worth
| considering. In my thirties I had a very good-looking girlfriend
| from Poland who spoke no English. I literally ended up speaking
| Polish conversationally within six weeks using ad hoc methods
| (mostly carrying around a Polish/English dictionary and a
| phrasebook at all times). Certain, ah, motivations can impel us
| more than others...
| mabub24 wrote:
| It is well known that having an SO that speaks your learning
| language is a huge help. Every older french lady has always
| told me to "get a french gf if I really want to learn." The
| same is true for programming. Very common to hear of people
| learning programming later in life with the help of an SO. The
| quicker and more personalized the feedback you can get when
| learning anything is always the better.
| gramie wrote:
| Soon after I arrived in Japan, I dated a Japanese co-worker who
| spoke very little English. You can bet that we carried our
| dictionaries around with us! We later got married (another,
| less cheerful story).
|
| One drawback was that I mainly learned household Japanese and
| not business/politics Japanese. Also I apparently spoke like a
| woman because almost all the people around me were women!
| (Japanese has very distinct versions for men and women.)
| benbristow wrote:
| Tres bon!
| gwbas1c wrote:
| I got a kick out of the comments about Quebecois, and the Quebec
| dialect. There's some American movie (name escapes me) filmed
| where they go across the boarder into Quebec. I found the dialect
| extremely recognizable, even though I can only understand a few
| words of spoken French.
|
| Maybe it's because my extended family (who grew up speaking
| Quebec) sounded very different than my high school French teacher
| when they switched to French?
| mabub24 wrote:
| You might be thinking of _Bon Cop Bad Cop_ which is all about
| the differences between Franco-Ontarian and Quebecois French,
| or Standard French versus Quebecois. Where I live I hear a ton
| of Quebecois but even with knowing B2 level French I find the
| accent very hard to parse out.
|
| Here's a funny scene from the movie on Quebecois swearing:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUGW0jszPzo
| reactspa wrote:
| > 11/18: Complete beginner (A0) excluding basics like "hello, do
| you speak English?"
|
| OP: please clarify what the above means. When you say you did
| "A0", I'm presuming it's a level in the French proficiency
| measurement system. Is it just the exam that you completed, or
| was there accompanying course material as well? If the latter,
| please point me to the actual course material you used.
|
| I've been learning French for a few years now (Michel Thomas
| method). I'd conjecture that this was the most helpful
| (considering you weren't in an immersion situation to help you):
| iTalki
| bigDinosaur wrote:
| A0 isn't official but it's a reference to
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...
| realusername wrote:
| > OP: please clarify what the above means. When you say you did
| "A0", I'm presuming it's a level in the French proficiency
| measurement system.
|
| https://www.coe.int/en/web/common-european-framework-referen...
| diffeomorphism wrote:
| > I'm presuming it's a level in the French proficiency
| measurement system.
|
| Not quite, no. The system is linked in the first paragraph:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...
|
| it begins at A1. So "A0" is just word play for "I know
| nothing", no exam necessary ;-).
| reactspa wrote:
| Thanks!
| cyberpunk wrote:
| What helped me was picking a book in some random subject you're
| interested in, and translating it into your mother tongue. I'm
| translating some books by a Zen priest who only writes in German
| into English. I start by just copying (I mean, manually typing
| out into Logseq or vim) a sentence in German, then I make a stab
| at a translation. Then I fire it into deepl, and then I combine
| my first attempt with the machine translated one.
|
| After the first 50 pages of this (I did a page a day) I stopped
| needing deepl so much and just now use a dictionary for words. My
| spoken German was always better than my English, and now the
| problems I have are pronunciation instead of missing words or
| poor sentence structure.
|
| YMMV, but this worked for me :}
| thesaint wrote:
| goldcd wrote:
| I'm 2 months into French on Duolingo. I did a small bit of French
| at school (maybe 30 years ago) and have never used it, aside from
| translating the odd menu. Now I'd always meant to pick it back up
| again, but until Duolingo I'm pretty sure I'd have left it to
| rot. The near-zero commitment you have to make to onboard
| yourself is great - and so is the hellishly perfect gamification
| that nudges you to do more. No way I'd have signed up for an
| evening class, but I reckon if I can keep up Dulingo for another
| few months, I'll have easily exceeded what I learnt at school.
| Maybe that's a little unfair, fair amount of vocab was still
| lodged somewhere my mind, but I'd lost the ability to stitch it
| together into something meaningful.
|
| I don't for one moment thing interacting with my phone will give
| me another language, but doing wonders for my confidence. Can
| just throw yourself into it at great velocity, and if you fuck
| up, it doesn't judge and just throws up those same hurdles until
| you clear them.
|
| Time has also cleared another hurdle - I've now got loads of
| access to French in a format I want. I can watch netflix in
| english with french subs, and then switch to french with english
| subs. Previous time I tried this, was watching La Haine on VHS
| from my local library. A great film - but didn't overlap too much
| with the french I was taught at school (Somewhere out there, I
| like to imagine there's the friendlier "Le n'aime pas" version)
|
| What I would be interested in, is the best place for the next
| step - being forced to talk to a real French speaker.
|
| Maybe my favourite bit of Duolingo, is the mini-forum attached to
| each question. It's a little bit hidden (as maybe doesn't align
| to their smooth-app-experience), but found it invaluable when I'd
| screwed up to be told why. So many times I've clicked full of
| rage at being told I was wrong, and not only learnt why I was
| wrong, but got a proper explanation that's stuck with me.
|
| Maybe that's my main Duolingo quibble, the never-ending-pop-quiz
| is great, but it maybe over-simplifies. I'd like a tables showing
| all declensions, or a paragraph covering why nobody uses Vous any
| more.
| wes1350 wrote:
| Author here, didn't expect to see this here again after two
| years!
|
| I guess I'll give a quick update on how things have been since
| this article was written. I haven't used or studied French much
| since then, and have gotten quite rusty, though I've had a few
| conversations fully in French in the last few months and can
| still maintain a conversation. I have been thinking of picking up
| French again soon, as traveling to a French speaking country
| becomes more of an option.
|
| I also did roughly the same thing with my Spanish in the
| following year, with similar results, though I'd say I probably
| reached a solid B1.5 or weak B2 after a year (due to COVID I was
| unable to take the proficiency test and lost some motivation to
| continue studying to a high level as a result.)
|
| My recommendations are still largely the same, though I haven't
| used these resources (e.g. Duolingo) since I stopped studying a
| while back. And as others have noted, for other languages,
| particularly those that are less closely related to English (e.g.
| Japanese), you'll have to follow a different path to achieve the
| same proficiency. However, language learning resources are
| getting better constantly, so you can certainly still learn quite
| a lot without total, in-person immersion, as I did!
| werber wrote:
| Thanks for writing this. I hadn't seen it Before and I needed
| to today. I hope you're thriving
| leveraction wrote:
| I'm so jealous. I tried to learn French a few years ago. I went
| after it pretty hard with Pimsleur for at least a year and then
| eventually hired an in person French tutor but we did not
| click. Things basically collapsed after that.
|
| It was nice to hear about your success with online tutors.
| Finding speakers was essentially impossible for me. South
| Carolina is not exactly a hot bed of French speakers.
|
| You may have inspired me to pick up the torch again. Look out
| Chamonix, here I come!
| JPLeRouzic wrote:
| > Look out Chamonix, here I come!
|
| There are beautiful landscapes on the seaside as well!
| gramie wrote:
| One resource you may not be aware of is
| https://languagetransfer.org. It is easily the best language
| acquisition system I've ever used (I did the Spanish course).
| I've previously learned French, German, Sesotho and Japanese
| using a variety of techniques, and I wish Language Transfer had
| been around then!
|
| The courses are entirely audio (using a convenient app or
| downloadable MP3 files) and it all runs on donations.
| TheHypnotist wrote:
| And you can speak each of those fluently?
| hugs wrote:
| How much time did you spend on Duolingo per day at the
| beginning?
| wes1350 wrote:
| At the very beginning, just enough to maintain a streak. Once
| I started getting into it, I spent quite a bit of time on it,
| up to a couple of hours a day on average at the peak. It's
| worth noting this is on the desktop version, so that meant a
| lot of typing actual sentences. I'm not sure how Duolingo
| works these days and if anything's changed, so I'm not sure
| if I would do things differently if I were to be learning
| today.
| gpspake wrote:
| Thanks for the update. I think it's healthy and encouraging to
| hear stories about people who deep-learn something for a while,
| get most of what they need out of it and move on to the next
| thing. All learning is good and nobody should feel guilty about
| putting things down - you can always pick them up later if you
| need to :)
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| I like to think learning it is "easy", not getting rusty is the
| hard part :)
|
| Since I left France the only way to maintain motivation is
| continue reading French books (OMG there is so much to chose
| from). But bittersweet having to make a choice as I now want to
| dive into Italian. And so with every hour I spend on Italian I
| see my previous skill and speed with which I could form a
| French sentence wane ...
|
| The best thing about language is the vast ocean of superb
| material to chose from as you dive in. It's like a honeymoon
| phase with the country and its people.
|
| Spending a whole year learning and then let yourself get rusty
| is almost like spending 12 months on crafting a magic key then
| throwing it away before entering the castle. Not that there is
| anything wrong with "learning for learning sake" but I know the
| feeling when you can literally see it slipping from your grasp
| and still can't stop it.
|
| French Spanish English maybe not so much because it's
| everywhere so practicing it is easy. But many languages you
| have to actually be there if you want any chance at all of
| being good at it. I liked being able to brag about what rare,
| exotic languages (for a European) I was able to converse
| fluently in. After leaving these countries, breaking up with
| girlfriends, change of social circles, etc I felt like a fraud
| every time somebody introduced me with "and he is fluent in
| <xyz> can you believe it" ... the conversation had to quickly
| be corrected by "oh I'm totally rusty" which got the response
| of "oh don't be modest I am sure bla bla" which made me regret
| that the whole thing ever came up. Putting much effort into
| languages is quite a humbling experience.
| Osiris wrote:
| Around 2000 I spent 2 years in Mexico as a missionary. I
| became fluent enough that when people called on the phone
| they thought I was Mexican.
|
| When I returned it the US, for the first few months I
| actually felt more comfortable in Spanish than English. I
| spoke Spanglish for a while.
|
| I went to school and studied Latin American studies and
| Spanish.
|
| Without daily practice I lost increasingly more vocabulary. I
| can listen to spoken Spanish and understand it pretty well
| but I have a hard time speaking or writing because of a lack
| of recall of vocabulary.
|
| I have a feeling if I went back to being immersed in the
| language daily I could become comfortable again within a
| month.
| [deleted]
| Volrath89 wrote:
| The good thing is... it's not that hard to get your level
| back. I went from A0 to B2 in German in about a year, 9 years
| ago. After that I lived for 1 year in Germany then left the
| country and didn't use nor practiced any German again for 8
| years.
|
| A couple of months ago I booked a Lingoda sprint and my first
| German B1 class was embarrassing. Had to go back to A2. I had
| forgotten so many basic words, but it took only a few classes
| to go back to B1 and only a few more to go to B2 (I knew it
| was time to go up when I felt my classmates were speaking
| unbearable slow).
|
| I feel like my grammar is still worse compared to 9 years ago
| but my understanding and speaking are almost back to where
| they were before. Definitely good to know it only takes a
| couple of months to get your level back. Oh and I think this
| time my English hasn't suffered that much, since I'm not a
| native English speaker.
| wes1350 wrote:
| What you say is very relatable. I did a bit of reading in
| French after this article, though I haven't kept up with it.
| A huge motivation for me while learning was that I wanted to
| experiment with living in France for at least a year or two
| after finishing school, to be able to experience living
| abroad, while speaking a foreign language, before "life
| happens" and I get too rooted here in the US. That didn't end
| up happening (which in hindsight was very fortunate, as my
| time in France would've been severely compromised due to
| COVID), but is still something I would consider in the
| future. Of course, visits will certainly be an option in the
| future.
|
| I'd definitely still say the experience was worth it, given
| that I still have much of my previous ability and can
| probably relearn it rather quickly. It certainly is a bit sad
| to see your skills degrade over time, and this has certainly
| contributed to some fear of picking up the language again,
| but that probably goes for most skills and hobbies anyways.
|
| And as you said, I have the same experience whenever someone
| asks me about my language learning experience --- I always
| mention how rusty I am these days, and there's a nagging
| feeling I need to shake off the rust so I don't have to say
| that anymore. But in the end, I guess we have to settle for
| doing whatever we think is best in the moment, and if it's
| important enough, we can always pick it up again some day.
| tomcam wrote:
| I have decided to look at the situation this way: learning it
| once means that if I really need to, I can learn it again.
| That's pretty cool. Also, one thing I have learned is that a
| lot of people who say they know more than one language
| frequently don't know the secondary languages very well at
| all.
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