Singapore education system: bilingual mindset. How long? Since birth, 20 over years.
Ask HN: To those who became fluent in a second language, what did you do?
11–20 of 207 posts
Re: Ask HN: To those who became fluent in a second language, what did you do?
#12I'm fluent in German, English. I'm living in Japan and am almost fluent in Japanese and quarter fluent in Korean. I also recently started Hungarian and Spanish.
The most important part in my opinion is to live in a country that speaks the language you want to learn. You have to immerse yourself as much as possible with the culture and language.
Also very important that you aren't afraid to try to use what you learned. Even though it's very basic, you learn a lot by actively trying to understand and use the language. It might be tiresome and frustrating at first, but you will learn crazy fast. What I mean with that is: Change your OS to that language and accept that you don't understand anything at first. Make internet friends and refuse to use English with them even though you have to translate every second sentence. Every time you see something you don't know, try to understand why it's written that way.
Lastly, if you have time and money: Do a 6 months ~ 1 year intensive every-day language course in the country that speaks the language you want. By doing that every day AND surrounding yourself with the culture + language, you will be able to speak after 6 month and become very good with it after 1 year.
On languages from a similar family (speak: English German French Spanish || Japanese Korean), you can get pretty far by buying books or doing internet courses.
For words, I prefer the spaced repetition method of tools like Anki. Important here is that you only create flashcards for words that you personally encountered to allow your brain to make connections to where you saw that word. Don't learn from wordlists.
Re: Ask HN: To those who became fluent in a second language, what did you do?
#13For me it was mostly playing games on-line. Having a clan / team where you talk with your peers every day is pretty cool.
I also took English classes for several years when I was young.
Re: Ask HN: To those who became fluent in a second language, what did you do?
#14I speak, read and write english (my second language) fluently although not perfectly correct.
I started thinking (when studying) and even dreaming (when I dreamt about programming, that is :-) in English before graduating because most of my books etc where in English.
In addition to reading lots and lots, one of the small things that helped me a lot was 10 years back or so I used to have an FF extension that let me doubleclick on any word on a webpage to get TFD definition of the word highlighted.
This took the effort out of expanding my vocabulary as I could look things up without breaking flow.
I still sometimes look up words that I haven't seen before although not as frequently as before.
(My problem is for a lot of words, esp. those I don't use at work I can read and write them but I might never have heard them.)
Re: Ask HN: To those who became fluent in a second language, what did you do?
#15A long-time English learner here.
I'd say variety is your friend. I don't know any learner who has mastered a language by sticking to a single technique. You would do everything, maybe with varying levels of comittment - read textbooks, take classes, do flashcards, do speech shadowing, talk to native speakers, watch movies and TV programs, etc.
After becoming able to say what I want (more or less), participating online discussions in the topics I care has been useful for me. It taught me how to structure longer chunks of text to express more complex ideas - you would be surprised to see how often sentence-to-sentence translation fails (between Japanese and English, at least).
If you are starting as an adult, native-level pronunciation would be difficult to achieve, even if you invest decades into it. I have almost given up on that front, and instead am focussing on how I can make my pronunciation less misunderstood. Part of that is to pay attention to vowels and consonants I'm not good at (or to use easier-to-pronounce synonyms where possible).
Re: Ask HN: To those who became fluent in a second language, what did you do?
#16A lot of software to attempt to make the boring repitition-based stuff more fun, for things like grammatical patterns and vocab. Anki (free) is my all-time favourite. Usually use a popular pre-made deck to learn what's recommended, and then have my own one going which I add a new flash-card to whenever I encounter a new word in my daily life. Review them in the evening. Something new I found out recently is that Anki has plugins [0]. AnkiStrategy [1] is currently making sure I get my daily review in.
Duolingo [2] (free) also helps with getting a grasp on basic grammar and vocab, but doesn't support many Asian languages (Vietnamese just got released and Indonesian is in progress).
Memrise [3] (free) is similar to Anki but has more of a modern, community-based app feel. A lot of great user-generated content.
Skritter [4] (subscription, phone app) helped me a lot when I was learning to write and recognise Chinese characters. They also have Japanese Kanji version.
Software-wise, I am currently learning Vietnamese, and for that using my own Anki deck (30-40 cards a day) and 5 duolingo lessons (adding new vocab to Anki). Feel like I'm making fast enough progress, but I think integrating anymore software to my daily revision routine would be too much.
Then you need a lot of interaction with people, using what you have leant in that language to attempt to communicate. I think this is the most important part and where you'll learn the most. You'll be forced to practise your listening, speaking, drawing on vocab and grammar that you know and have to put mould them into an understandable sentence. You'll make mistakes and look like a fool, but that's just part of the learning process. Try to treat it like a bit of fun, and hopefully the people you're talking to will also.
[0] https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-most-useful-Anki-plugins
Re: Ask HN: To those who became fluent in a second language, what did you do?
#17I started working (illegally) as a dishwasher in a ski resort in Spain. You'll learn fast if you need to get a job. Necessity. ;)
Re: Ask HN: To those who became fluent in a second language, what did you do?
#18I worked (illegally) as a restaurant dishwasher at a ski resort in Spain. You'll learn fast if you are totally immersed and need to communicate to work. ;)
Re: Ask HN: To those who became fluent in a second language, what did you do?
#19I learned to speak French starting from scratch in my 30s, while living in the US. I speak it well enough to enroll in an easy college-level course intended for native speakers[a] or to work professionally[b], although either experience would be painful at first.
For me, the process occurred in three phases:
1. Bootstrapping to the point where I could kinda-sorta read books and kinda-sorta carry on conversations. I personally used Assimil for this, which is excellent if you like learning by osmosis and you can spare 20 to 40 minutes a day for 5 months. Nine out of ten "language learning" apps just encourage you to screw around at this level with minimal progress, but if you just focus and get it done, it should only take a couple hundred hours (assuming you already know a vaguely related language—for an English speaker, French is easier than Japanese).
2. Using the language (as best I could). I read about 2.5 million words and watched about 15 seasons of television shows. This took my comprehension from vague and dodgy to automatic and nearly complete. I also spent many hours speaking, and I wrote a few dozen short texts which I had corrected.
3. Gradual improvement. I speak French every day of my life now, but my rate of improvement has slowed down because I don't currently need to be any better. I mostly talk to the same handful of people. To get better, I'd realistically need to work for a French-speaking company.
[a] I've taken an online statistics course for French speakers, and the language was rarely a problem.
[b] I've had multi-hour technical conversations with French-speaking programmers while debugging code.
Re: Ask HN: To those who became fluent in a second language, what did you do?
#20Rinse lather repeat.
It took about 2 years before I was confident enough in my German skills to consider myself conversationally fluent at a beginner level. I spent four years of devoted study (yes high school) to get the concepts down, and now I've basically tried to maintain it in the 8 years since. For me it was important to focus on syntax and semantics more than vocabulary. It's super easy to find a translation for concrete concepts like "dog", "cartographer", and so forth, but it's rather difficult to find an elegant translation of advanced concepts like expressing conditional circumstances, and all those fun different tenses and voices. Repetition of vocabulary and all that helps to build up conversational awareness, but I find that it's important to focus on how the pieces are supposed together more than the individual pieces themselves. But hey, ymmv