Also it depends on what language you want to learn. If you want to learn Spanish you can speak with native speakers who don't speak say English in the US.
Ask HN: To those who became fluent in a second language, what did you do?
121–130 of 207 posts
Re: Ask HN: To those who became fluent in a second language, what did you do?
#122I moved to another country. Actually, along the way, I traveled to a lot of countries and spent a fair amount of time in some of them, and I credit immersion and a desire to communicate in the everyday language of the locale with my ability to learn over 6 languages after my 30th birthday being previously mono-lingual with English...
Re: Ask HN: To those who became fluent in a second language, what did you do?
#123I moved to another country. Actually, along the way, I traveled to a lot of countries and spent a fair amount of time in some of them, and I credit immersion and a desire to communicate in the everyday language of the locale with my ability to learn over 6 languages after my 30th birthday being previously mono-lingual with English...
technique-wise: most Indo European languages will have some patterns to verbal conjugation. Learn how to conjugate 10-20 verbs for various actors (I, you(formal, informal) he, she, they, etc) in the present tense. Learn a couple easy "cheater" ways to do past and future tense. Learn 10-20 adjectives, which are possibly forms of similar words you already know from other languages. Start conversing, even poorly, but make a point to avoid fellow speakers of the language you are trying to avoid being stuck in. (in my case, it was about avoiding people who speak and like to speak english, and trying to speak the local language wherever possible instead.) I would go and plop myself in the middle of social situations where it was necessary to converse and where it flowed easily (often aided by coffee or alcohol lol...)
Re: Ask HN: To those who became fluent in a second language, what did you do?
#124Java for Dummies ;)
Re: Ask HN: To those who became fluent in a second language, what did you do?
#125There is no substitute for living in the country and avoiding your native speakers like the plague. Immerse yourself completely (take a few language courses, move in with locals, make an effort to avoid English speakers at all costs). Give yourself little challenges: Groceries, info about the train, museum, read a leaflet, book an activity, ask questions at a restaurant (even if you don't quite get the answer)...
People will want to practice their English with you. Be stubborn. Reply in the foreign language and let them talk in English.
For the first 2 months you will feel incredibly tired at the end of each day. Your brain will fight to stay afloat but that stress will make it learn so much faster. Around the 3rd month something clicks and you start to talk more and more. After that, the progress becomes almost automatic. Try to study something, or work or be part of some local group.
One key element is to avoid perfection. Understand that you will never speak perfect grammar for years (just like kids make silly mistakes, you will too). Embrace it, have fun, make mistakes ... enjoy the trial and error discovery and the challenge of communicating ideas with rudimentary tools. Be patient. You will get frustrated because your brain has complex and nuanced ideas but your language is as basic as "me not good" or "me good". You will learn that body language and tone already communicate more than you can tell with your basic language.
After a year you'll be pretty fluent (You'll be able to hold a conversation with anybody, on any topic, but still peppered with clarifications and questions). Mastering a new language would still take many years (with lots of reading, writing, talking, etc).
(source: I speak French and Spanish as native languages, English as third language and German as 4th which I learnt as an adult living in Germany for a year)
Re: Ask HN: To those who became fluent in a second language, what did you do?
#126I moved to Puerto Rico at 32. I didn't really speak any Spanish, though I had a few years of it in high school. So I had some familiarity with the grammar. Nearly a decade later, I consider myself fluent, though I know at times I sound funny to native speakers.
PR turned out to be an exceptionally difficult place to learn Spanish (for why, see: http://www.speakinglatino.com/study-spanish-in-puerto-rico/ particularly #2). It took me longer than it would have taken had I gone somewhere that English was not an option, and my biggest jumps forward were on business trips to those places.
When I arrived, I started taking lessons twice a week, and continued that for about 18 months. I spoke Spanish almost exclusively for work, usually over the phone, which is much harder and likely helped. A few years in, I moved to Miami, where I actually speak more Spanish at times (here, social situations are in Spanish, in PR all social interactions were in English) Later, I married an Argentine, and found out that I had to learn a whole other language!
Other things I did that helped:
1- I decided I was going to say dumb things, and that I had to be okay with that. When someone would point something out, I'd laugh. An example, I remember mixing up the words for 'butterfly' and slang roughly equivilent to 'faggot' in American English. I didn't know that's what it meant. I had heard the word somewhere and associated it with butterfly because they sound somewhat similar. Be ready to laugh at yourself, that makes it much easier to just throw it out there and try. And let's be honest, pointing at a butterfly and saying, "Hey look at the faggot" with no other context or offensive intent is pretty funny. 2- Find people to speak with regularly. Daily if you can. The really valuable people are those who will correct you without switching to your language unless absolutely necessary. 3- Focus on communicating, not grammar. You need enough grammar to be understood, and you should keep correcting it when you make mistakes, but if you work on communicating effectively with people, the grammar falls into place. 4- Have fun with it! Its interesting. Enjoy. 5- Learn the bad words too. I used an offensive word above. But its important to learn those words, because that's how people actually converse. You'll learn whole other levels of both language and culture by doing so. Sometimes, its important to realize when someone is being offensive, or even that you're being offensive and don't know it.
But mostly, have fun with it.
Re: Ask HN: To those who became fluent in a second language, what did you do?
#127duolingo, weekly classes, then spent 3 months in the destination countries [spanish]
Re: Ask HN: To those who became fluent in a second language, what did you do?
#128I'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…
> 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. I cannot agree with this more. Coincidentally, I'm also fluent in German and English, and am learning Japanese. At school, I took French, but I hated it. It…
I am learning french as well, via Duolingo. Spoken french fries my brain, I just cant keep up. So many words seem to be pronounced the same way. And they speak so fast!
For example, did they say:
jeune
Jaune
john
je une
Je un
Joan
Je ont
Jean
Je ne
....
Perhaps it's just an unconscious bias on my part. Just for reference, I am fluent in at least two more languages apart from my mother tongue.
Re: Ask HN: To those who became fluent in a second language, what did you do?
#129Get films in the language and watch them with subtitles (in that language). Read novels as soon as you can. This is hard to start off with, stopping every couple of lines to look up a word, once you get down to 2-3 words a page that you don't know then start reading without a dictionary, skipping words you don't know (humans are great at interpolating meaning). Just those 2 get you half-way to fluency. For the rest,…
Good advice, just a small addition: if novels are too hard, give comics a try.
Re: Ask HN: To those who became fluent in a second language, what did you do?
#130Netflix is a great tool for getting started - choose an interesting series in the language you're trying to learn, e.g French, and turn on subtitles in that language (in this case French) - it helps you decipher accents more clearly and gives you an ear for the language.