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Ask HN: How have you learned a speaking language?

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Re: Ask HN: How have you learned a speaking language?

#101

Post by ahoyhere »

brianobush wrote: post #60
sgt wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Find a boy/girlfriend who natively speaks the language. Its best if they cant speak yours." Now that one would be a tricky one.. Starting a relationship when you can hardly communicate with eachother? ;-)

True, but you can go at it backwards too. I met my wife in grad school and decided to learn the language afterwards; probably better route IMO. The hard part has been using English as a crutch - it has always been hard to go all out in Japanese.

My husband is a native (Austrian) German speaker and when we met, his English wasn't great. But he was just rusty… meanwhile, because we're DOING things together, we've given up on speaking German because it gets too frustrating and slow.

Now, even if I start a conversation in German, he responds in English. Bad habit. :)

I've absorbed as much as I can absorb from listening to people, language CDs & trying to read the free daily papers. I have pretty good but imprecise reading comprehension. I can have a basic conversation but I get tenses wrong sometimes and cases wrong often. (Farking cases.)

This winter I'm going to pay for a few weeks of one-on-one immersion at the local Berlitz school and hope that gets me over the hump!

Re: Ask HN: How have you learned a speaking language?

#102

Post by alinajaf »

mahmud wrote: post #93
ebiester wrote: post #42

TL;DR: Arabic is a bitch to pick up on your own. Take a class and then build on that. Okay, so you've picked one of the five most difficult languages in the world for English learners to pick up ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_difficult_language_to_lear... ) -- I have a lot of friends who speak Arabic to various levels, and every single one of them did it through a combination of university classes and immersion…

Arabic is hard, because it's hard to find native speakers to take the piss with. I say that because I am Arab and desperately trying to cling onto the language. I read and write it at a poetic level; but speaking with native speakers sucks, because few of them speak the beautiful language (and the ones who do carry shitloads of political baggage to make the companionship worthwhile.) Arabic would be trivial for conve…

>> If there are any worldly Arabs who enjoy al-Mutanabi with MJ and the occasional line of coke, and who love reading scripture to ladies of ill repute: hola at me, dog.

I'm not Arab, but dude we should so get a drink.

Re: Ask HN: How have you learned a speaking language?

#103

Post by alinajaf »

garply wrote: post #88

I'm a native English speaker who's basically fluent in Mandarin. I've studied for 8 years and I live in China. It's my 4th foreign language. From what I know, Arabic is about as far from English as Mandarin, so let me put in plainly: If you want to become fluent, expect to put in about a decade of work. This is not an easy language like French or Spanish which you'd be able to pick up by studying at home. You need to…

What you're describing is called Spaced Repitition. There is software out there that capitalizes on this phenomenon, i.e. Anki and (shameless plug) http://www.cardmonkeyhq.com/ that I develop.

Re: Ask HN: How have you learned a speaking language?

#104

Post by mahmud »

alinajaf wrote: post #102
mahmud wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Arabic is hard, because it's hard to find native speakers to take the piss with. I say that because I am Arab and desperately trying to cling onto the language. I read and write it at a poetic level; but speaking with native speakers sucks, because few of them speak the beautiful language (and the ones who do carry shitloads of political baggage to make the companionship worthwhile.) Arabic would be trivial for conve…

>> If there are any worldly Arabs who enjoy al-Mutanabi with MJ and the occasional line of coke, and who love reading scripture to ladies of ill repute: hola at me, dog. I'm not Arab, but dude we should so get a drink.

Shoot me an email; in my profile :-)

Re: Ask HN: How have you learned a speaking language?

#105

Post by mattm »

ximeng wrote: post #54

I have got to a reasonable level with mandarin Chinese through on-and-off study over a few years, mostly in my free time. Here is what worked for me. 1) Most important is how much time you put in. Don't worry about the on-and-off, though regular is better. Don't worry too much about efficiency unless you're putting in the hours. For Chinese I estimate I've spent at least 2000 hours studying to get to where I am today…

I have an account with http://www.chinesepod.com

I definitely notice that I can speak better when I do the lessons regularly. I try to listen to each lesson three times to really get it.

I have also studied at university and bought the Pimsleur course for Mandarin. Pimsleur is good but only if you are just starting out. I like how it focuses on repetition and gets you speaking which is the most important part.

Re: Ask HN: How have you learned a speaking language?

#106

Post by mootothemax »

gruseom wrote: post #97
mootothemax wrote: post #61

I live in Poland and have been trying to learn Polish for the past 10 months. And failing - a lot. There are two main reasons for this (in my mind at least): 1) I haven't been fully immersed in Polish; it's too easy to speak English instead. 2) I don't understand English grammar. If you have an analytical mind, I think point 2 is very important. The amount of textbooks I've read and failed to understand because it's…

Hey, I have a question for you: how do Poles react to your attempts to learn Polish? I ask because I spent a year or two studying Polish (not in Poland, though) and in my experience, Polish people were nonplussed by this. In fact, they were rather consistently cold and unhelpful. Their attitude seemed to be "Polish is for Poles, why are you intruding?" I'm curious to know if this is endemic or if I just fell afoul of…

Hi there!

How do Poles react to your attempts to learn Polish

I think you were a victim of a small sample size :) All the Polish people I've met have been seriously impressed with my attempts to speak and learn Polish. For those that don't speak English, the effect's the same, usually with a smile on their face. There's one shop I love going to as the various staff there always try and have a conversation with me in Polish, very friendly and patiently.

The reason I need English grammar is because the description of grammar doesn't make any sense to me - I'm at the real basic stage of working out when to use adjective forms of a noun and so on. Shameful, but true sadly.

Re: Ask HN: How have you learned a speaking language?

#107

Post by CrackKid »

I've gotten thoroughly conversational in both German and Russian in the course of about a year by my own, somewhat unconventional method, which I see no reason couldn't also be applied to Arabic (though it'll probably take a decent bit longer):

1) Learn to read the alphabet, including as much pronunciation as possible (Trivial with German, slightly harder with Russian)

2) Learn just enough grammar to be able to recognize units of meaning and general semantic structure(ie be able to recognize generally when somethings a new word vs a new form of an old word, as well as word order). If you spend more than a week on this, you've spent far too much time.

3) Scour the web for children's stories and other material aimed at beginning readers. Pop the stories into google translate, and go word by word, making sure to distinguish each's meaning. Don't worry about consciously memorizing words, just cram in the volume. Aim for an hour a day. Subvocalise so you get the idea of the sounds of words

4) Once you're getting through stories with relative ease, search out video material where both the audio and the subtitles are in that language (This may be hard, depending on the language. Anime is a GREAT source of this type of thing for Russian). Speak along with the dialogue.

5) Once your comprehension's gotten good, seek out native speakers, and pester them to all ends of the earth (I admit unfair advantage in having a ready supply of conversational partners in both languages). Quantity, quantity, quantity.

I feel this approach trades off comprehensibility and fluency for absolute grammaticaloty, though I wonder if it might have gotten me past the toil threshhold (the line at which it is pleasurable, rather than a chore, to consume media/converes in a lanuage) a bit faster, with commesurate long term learning benefits.

Re: Ask HN: How have you learned a speaking language?

#108

Post by gruseom »

mootothemax wrote: post #106
gruseom wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I have a question for you: how do Poles react to your attempts to learn Polish? I ask because I spent a year or two studying Polish (not in Poland, though) and in my experience, Polish people were nonplussed by this. In fact, they were rather consistently cold and unhelpful. Their attitude seemed to be "Polish is for Poles, why are you intruding?" I'm curious to know if this is endemic or if I just fell afoul of…

Hi there! How do Poles react to your attempts to learn Polish I think you were a victim of a small sample size :) All the Polish people I've met have been seriously impressed with my attempts to speak and learn Polish. For those that don't speak English, the effect's the same, usually with a smile on their face. There's one shop I love going to as the various staff there always try and have a conversation with me in…

Oh, that's good to hear. I had a feeling my experience was atypical.

Re: Ask HN: How have you learned a speaking language?

#109

Post by ebiester »

mahmud wrote: post #93
ebiester wrote: post #42

TL;DR: Arabic is a bitch to pick up on your own. Take a class and then build on that. Okay, so you've picked one of the five most difficult languages in the world for English learners to pick up ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Most_difficult_language_to_lear... ) -- I have a lot of friends who speak Arabic to various levels, and every single one of them did it through a combination of university classes and immersion…

Arabic is hard, because it's hard to find native speakers to take the piss with. I say that because I am Arab and desperately trying to cling onto the language. I read and write it at a poetic level; but speaking with native speakers sucks, because few of them speak the beautiful language (and the ones who do carry shitloads of political baggage to make the companionship worthwhile.) Arabic would be trivial for conve…

To me, that's like complaining that the people who speak Shakespearian English tend to be SCA or thespians. :) Yes, most everyone is going to speak the Egyptian or Lebanese dialect. Heck, I didn't even know that the religious types actually spoke classical Arabic.

Re: Ask HN: How have you learned a speaking language?

#110

Post by phuff »

parktheredcar wrote: post #23
phuff wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having taken a Masters in Linguistics, and learned 3 languages besides my native one, I'd say that 1, 3 + 4 are basically the key to learning any language. It really is "Use it or lose it" when it comes to learning a new language.

Would you say you're a rare case, as far as learning three languages? Many that pursue linguistics seem offended when asked how many languages they speak.

Oh I misread the question! You're asking if it's rare for linguists to learn 3 languages? I dunno. But I think linguists who get offended if people ask them that are kinda of silly...
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