Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

My Journey to a Better Language Learning System

chatterbug.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 134 posts

Re: My Journey to a Better Language Learning System

#111

Post by bababooey »

gramie wrote: post #19

I have been using http://www.languagetransfer.org to learn Spanish, and it is the best language system, aside from total immersion, I have ever used (I speak five language with varying degrees of fluency). It is a series of audio files, typically about 10 minutes each, and all you do is listen to them, answering questions when the instructor asks. German, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Swahili, Spanish, and others. It's a…

I've been supporting Language Transfer for years. I believe that the program suffers a bit when it branches out into languages with grammatical case more complex than English.

But the courses are all free of charge. Please recommend them to friends or family to spread the word! I can especially endorse the Spanish course.

Re: My Journey to a Better Language Learning System

#112

Post by bababooey »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #27
gramie wrote: post #19

I have been using http://www.languagetransfer.org to learn Spanish, and it is the best language system, aside from total immersion, I have ever used (I speak five language with varying degrees of fluency). It is a series of audio files, typically about 10 minutes each, and all you do is listen to them, answering questions when the instructor asks. German, Italian, Greek, Turkish, Swahili, Spanish, and others. It's a…

I just went to the site. From the description, it sounds like a similar method to that used in the Michel Thomas CD courses. I'll definitely try it!

I think it's actually better than Michel Thomas, but you're right that it's the same system.

Fun fact, this system was first pioneered not by Michel Thomas, but rather by Margarita Madrigal. She has a book called the Magic Key to Spanish. You can also find her Magic Key to French and German online since those are out of print.

Re: My Journey to a Better Language Learning System

#113

Post by barry-cotter »

bsaul wrote: post #76

That video convinced me and was ready to give you all my money since I have some time right now. But unfortunately the two languages i’d like to learn ( mandarin and hebrew) aren’t there. Anyone could recommend me a system for Chinese or Hebrew ?

This is not how I got past basic Mandarin but I’m fairly confident it would work.

Get the paid version of Pleco, the best Chinese dictionary app. Turn on spaced repetition in flash cards and download the HSK 1-6 flash cards. Learn the HSK 1 cards _with sound_ so you get started on pinyin. Buy the Chinese Breeze graded reader books, leve 1. Listen to the audio version on the cds a few times then try and read the books. Repeat by HSK level until you run out of Chinese Breeze graded readers, move on to other graded readers, move on to using italki.com for conversation and native texts loaded into pleco’s reader functionality for reading.

Duolingo has Hebrew for what that’s worth.

Good luck.

Re: My Journey to a Better Language Learning System

#114

Post by thewhitetulip »

dicemoose wrote: post #105
schacon wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will absolutely tackle these languages. We're releasing German for English speakers currently in order to learn better how more customers respond to the methods we're using, and German is more complex grammatically for English speakers than romance languages. Also, I didn't speak any German and I think it's important to use your product yourself. Personally I want very much to return to Japanese myself some day. A…

Is it important to learn the kana and kanji at the same time as learning how to converse in Japanese? I'm a native speaker, but it was a lot easier to learn kana and kanji because I already was able to speak some Japanese. Also, I hope you try some immersion Japanese again. :D

Yes, learning Kana and Kanji is very important. You'll learn Kana in less than a week but it takes time to learn Kanji. there are 2136 characters which are high school level.

I followed this thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/6q4h6a/a_...

What I have done so far:

1. one chapter of Genki Elementary I 2. 60 Kanji via memrise and "remember the kanji" 3. Given up on Duolingo till I read Genki 4. Use an app called LingoDeer, it is awesome. 5. Started watching Japanese anime. Haven't understood anything but "thank you" and "good morning" yet.

Re: My Journey to a Better Language Learning System

#116

Post by andai »

casey_lang wrote: post #58

I've always wanted to be fluent in a second language and have tried in the past, but I always end up with the same problem. While I recognize that the only way to gain conversational skills is to actually have conversations, they terrify me. Engaging in small talk with strangers in my native language is hard enough. Trying to do it in a second language seems impossible. Even watching the demo video from the link, all…

You may be interested in AJATT [0]. It recommends a method based on the Input Hypothesis by linguist Stephen Krashen, which basically says it's better to read and listen before writing and speaking, and that producing input too early can actually be harmful in the long run (picking up bad phonetic / structural habits).

In other words, find media you enjoy in your target language (books movies series music YouTube etc) and spend as much time as possible consuming that media.

The guy who wrote AJATT (All Japanese All The Time) had earphones playing Japanese audio 24 hours a day for almost 2 years. Along with learning the writing system, after 18 months of this method he aced a phone interview (got mistaken for a native speaker) and got a job at Sony. And he's pretty introverted / shy.

Might be worth checking out!

[0] http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/

Re: My Journey to a Better Language Learning System

#117

Post by andai »

ThinkingGuy wrote: post #72
primitivesuave wrote: post #18

I highly recommend trying the app. The user interface is beautiful and the approach seems effective. I could actually see this being used in a German language school to supplement the curriculum, unlike pretty much every language app I've seen so far. I find Pimsleur to be a highly effective spoken language acquisition tool, but the writing/reading aspect is abysmal and quite demotivating. Chatterbug seems to be doin…

Another vote for Pimsleur, at least for quickly acquiring a basic set of phrases and words for travel purposes. I've used 5 different Pimsleur courses (Turkish, Italian, Greek, Russian, and Dutch) in preparation for various international trips. I've found going through just the first 8 or 10 lessons is enough to get the necessary survival phrases firmly embedded in my memory. Pimseur also offers lessons intermediate…

Repetition is the key to mastery!

Repetition is the key to mastery!

Repetition is the key to mastery!

Re: My Journey to a Better Language Learning System

#118

Post by cloverich »

andy_wrote wrote: post #26

I've done the Duolingo Spanish tree, and my feeling was the same as the author's regarding "% fluency," which I thought was kind of a joke. Especially for speaking and listening, there's really no substitute for immersion and real-life regular interactions. But I do feel that Duolingo was honestly pretty good about helping me to read and write. In NYC there's a little ambient Spanish everywhere and I went into it not…

I think Duolingo's main issue w/ Fluency is its just too easy to pass lessons. You can repeatedly miss a phrase, click on every word in the phrase (to get the translation), get it correct once, and now you've passed. You can get the entire tree Gold without actually _knowing_ the words. So if you want to get the most out of Duolingo, imho, you have to really force yourself to do your own review, and only consider it learned if you can repeatedly get through without missing any in a row or looking up any words. Its still got an upper limit, but I feel like (in Japanese) I"m learning it much faster than I was before.

Re: My Journey to a Better Language Learning System

#119

Post by andy_wrote »

mercer wrote: post #107
andy_wrote wrote: post #26

I've done the Duolingo Spanish tree, and my feeling was the same as the author's regarding "% fluency," which I thought was kind of a joke. Especially for speaking and listening, there's really no substitute for immersion and real-life regular interactions. But I do feel that Duolingo was honestly pretty good about helping me to read and write. In NYC there's a little ambient Spanish everywhere and I went into it not…

I've been doing about 30 XP of Spanish on Duolingo for more than year now. 30 XP is about 10 minutes of practice, so very little. One day I was watching a show or movie that had many scenes in Spanish, and to my surprise I could actually follow much of what was said! I didn't realize how (relatively) effective even those 10 minutes a day can be.

Awesome! I did notice when doing the Spanish tree that I recognized a lot of words just from seeing them around the city, especially from ads and public service announcements on the subway.
Post reply on HN