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It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

nytimes.com

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Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#211

Post by adrianN »

Kaiyou wrote: post #140
SomeHacker44 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In college Mandarin courses we were required to learn 30 words a day. That was a nearly impossible task for 20 year old me and required three hours of study a day on top of the 1:20 or 1:50 long daily class. To think a person more than twice that age can learn 30 words a day is, to my aged brain, ludicrous. Maybe it’s just me, but my learning ability is now vastly below what it was in my teens or even college.

If you learn a language through memorization of words you're being very, very inefficient. Very. Learning a language requires next to no effort (compared to 30 words per day) and can be done at any age within six months. The strange thing is that nearly everyone does language learning wrong. I think it's because schools set everyone up for failure by teaching how to learn a language in a way, that's just so very inef…

You can redefine fluency to be something that is achievable with dedicated study in six months, but most people probably wouldn't call themselves fluent with the very limited vocabulary you can acquire in that time. Elementary school children know in excess of 20k words. I really don't believe that you can remember over a hundred new words every day without forgetting a single one.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#212

Post by dsjoerg »

blacksqr wrote: post #192

It seems to me that foreign language learning is an area where computer technology has clearly miserably fallen short of its potential. Apps like Duolingo and Babel are nice, but they seem to me more oriented toward making the user feel good about making progress then about achieving mastery in any useful time frame. Flashcard tools like Anki and Tinycards are nice, but they lack enough readily available content to b…

What are Duolingo/Babel not doing that they should?

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#213

Post by wolco »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #180
intertextuality wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes non-English speakers, when someone tries to learn their language past a basic degree, can be a bit rude even unintentionally. I have had a good native Korean friend quite innocently (although randomly) point out that although I rarely make syntax errors I don't speak idiomatically at all and make weird constructs sometimes. Which makes sense, given my almost 2 years of study, but I would never think of sayi…

I have had a good native Korean friend quite innocently (although randomly) point out that although I rarely make syntax errors I don't speak idiomatically at all and make weird constructs sometimes. Sure, I find myself doing the same thing with the Spanish language — especially in a country with very different slang than the US. Even in English. Even in America. Think about how many ways there are to say soda. They'…

You mean pop

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#214

Post by Mikeb85 »

dsjoerg wrote: post #212
blacksqr wrote: post #192

It seems to me that foreign language learning is an area where computer technology has clearly miserably fallen short of its potential. Apps like Duolingo and Babel are nice, but they seem to me more oriented toward making the user feel good about making progress then about achieving mastery in any useful time frame. Flashcard tools like Anki and Tinycards are nice, but they lack enough readily available content to b…

What are Duolingo/Babel not doing that they should?

They're shit for teaching grammar, verb conjugations and the vocabulary is quite limited, in some cases not even close to what native speakers use.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#215

Post by marvin »

inferiorhuman wrote: post #186
amanaplanacanal wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your translation is word-for-word correct, but I've never heard somebody say "from nothing" in English in a situation where you might say "no worries", "no problem", or "you're welcome". I have heard "It's nothing" though, so I think his translation is fine. Perhaps people don't use it that way in the dialects of English you know?

Your translation is word-for-word correct, but I've never heard somebody say "from nothing" in English in a situation where you might say "no worries", "no problem", or "you're welcome". From nothing is an overly literal translation. You'll hear it in Spanish for sure as de nada (of/from nothing) or por nada (literally for nothing) depending on context though.

I _love_ overly literal translations. They express, in the purest translatable form, the idiomatic differences between languages and the cultures they belong to. You'll find many fascinating insights about culture and history by learning how different cultures express the same complex concept, situation or emotion.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#216

Post by ta1234567890 »

blacksqr wrote: post #192

It seems to me that foreign language learning is an area where computer technology has clearly miserably fallen short of its potential. Apps like Duolingo and Babel are nice, but they seem to me more oriented toward making the user feel good about making progress then about achieving mastery in any useful time frame. Flashcard tools like Anki and Tinycards are nice, but they lack enough readily available content to b…

Also, what does it mean to "learn" a language?

Is it to be able to read it? At what level?

Is it to be able to understand the spoken language? Of a kid, an adult, for work, in social situations?

Is it to be able to speak it? For what purpose, how often, how well?

None of the tools for "learning" a language really address this. They are all kind of linear and very vague about what skills you are training. Most of the popular ones feel like just memorizing words and phrases.

In my experience, the only way to "fully learn" a language, is to be fully immersed, i.e. for months, pretty much exclusively, read/listen/speak the language - watch movies, read news, talk to as many people as possible, all in that language. Unfortunately, pretty much the only way to do that is to move to a country that natively uses the language and ideally have a native significant other that you interact with a lot. Also, usually the biggest barrier is being ashamed of making mistakes, most people stay quite because they are afraid of sounding stupid in another language, so they miss out on most of the best potential learning experiences.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#217

Post by marvin »

intertextuality wrote: post #113
salawat wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, it isn't actually. I did a short foray into learning Morse Code, and I ran into what I found to be the biggest barrier to learning new languages. The bloody lookup table phenomena. What happens is your mental representation maps the Morse sequence->your primary language character->whatever the message then actually means. This is a very high overhead mental process, and one specifically advised against by fluent…

I studied German in college, and I have been studying Korean for almost 2 years and I would say you're spot on. The hardest thing about learning a new language is learning to think in that language, not 1. think in native language 2. transcode to target language. Not only is this quite slow, it leads to very unnatural language. English and Korean have different idioms and ways of structuring sentences. Since I've bee…

I vividly remember the moment I first thought in French. It was about a year ago, I was 31 years old and walking along the beach after hanging out with a French couple for a few hours. I don't have a clue what I thought, but I remember idly musing about some subject in my head for a few seconds, suddenly realizing that the musing was in French.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#218

Post by malpighien »

cydonian_monk wrote: post #187
_yawn wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People in Quebec are actively hostile to other languages in general, mostly for historical reasons. Probably not the best place to get started haha

It also doesn't help that French and Quebecois French are different dialects to the point of almost being different languages. We "offended" our entire office in Montreal when we rolled their telephony system into our headquarter's PBX and added localization for IVRs, Voicemail and whatnot using prompts recorded by a Parisian. I could understand the French French, the Quebecois was..., well, honestly about as differe…

French spoken in Quebec is the same French as in France, they use their idioms and slang at time with an accent but we can 100% understand each others. If you are not convinced you can find multiple interviews of Quebecois speakers done in France on youtube and see for yourself that it is without filters or subtitles. Here is an example for celine dion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x6ezHzWPDU

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#219

Post by bambax »

learc83 wrote: post #176
bambax wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I may have simply run into rude people. Why did you think those people were rude, instead of, say, trying to be helpful? French is difficult to understand when spoken badly, even for natives (maybe esp. for natives). We don't understand what people are trying to say -- really. We don't try to be condescending: we truly do. not. understand. I get that foreigners / tourists may not believe it, but it is true.

It's not what they said that was rude. It's the way they said it. Also I doubt that French is objectively harder to understand when spoken poorly than most languages. Especially when you consider tonal languages like Vietnamese and Mandarin.

Harder, I don't know. Hard, yes.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#220

Post by panglott »

blacksqr wrote: post #192

It seems to me that foreign language learning is an area where computer technology has clearly miserably fallen short of its potential. Apps like Duolingo and Babel are nice, but they seem to me more oriented toward making the user feel good about making progress then about achieving mastery in any useful time frame. Flashcard tools like Anki and Tinycards are nice, but they lack enough readily available content to b…

The problem is that the tools you need are "listening to and interacting with people in the target language". Human language is a problem of interpreting the creative social signals of other human beings, and there's no way to automate that. With the Web, YouTube and internet radio, the actual amount of target-language material that a person can expose themselves to is hugely, hugely more available than it was 20-30 years ago.

You have to keep in mind what a tool is trying to accomplish relative to the personal development it takes to grow into another human language. Different levels of learners require different kinds of instruction. Bilingual instruction is quickest if a person has zero knowledge of the language whatever. Absolute beginners need direct instruction in phonology. An Anki deck is to build basic vocabulary or literacy for a person who has some. Duolingo is there to get you comfortable with basic grammar or phrases, to get you interacting with native speakers in the first place once you stumble off the plane. A more advanced speaker might need accent reduction work.

Anki is fantastic at flashcards. Duolingo is fantastic at translation exercises, way better than what we had a few decades ago. Definitely the author in the OP should be using Anki rather than postcards on her bed.

"Mastery"-level linguistic tasks include things like writing creative poetry in the language that another person finds moving, describing the movements of a complex machine, or composing an essay in a specific literary style—things that native speakers may find difficult without formal training. There's just no way Duolingo can do that.

I took a survey recently that clarified a lot of this for me. The questions were all things like: What percentage of your time do you spend listening to music in the target language (and your native language)? What percentage of your time do you spend watching moveis in the target language (and your native language)? What percentage of your time do you spend reading books in the target language (and your native language)? What percentage of your time do you spend thinking and interacting with other people and thinking in the target language (and your native language)? If I spend 1% of my time or less in the target language and 99% in my native language, it's no wonder that I have plateaued in it.

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