241–250 of 339 posts
> And I revel in small triumphs, like discovering that a woolen ball on a sweater is a “boulouche” It's not. It's "bouloche" -- https://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/bouloche > When my kids brought home notices telling me to check their hair for “poux” (pronounced “poo”), I correctly deduced that it meant lice. But later, in a first-aid course, I was perplexed when the instructor told us to immediately check an unconscious…
It's not hard to them to make this mistake: "le", "la", "les" is all "the" for english natives, while verbs and adjective don't change according to plural or gender. A lot of my mistakes in spanish comes from me trying to call masculine something that is not and vice versa. French is a difficult language to learn: - many letters are useless relics from the past, twisted, accentuated or silent. - conjugations, plural,…
The same can be said about English "two", "write"?
I would say even more so: the amount of silent vowels, silent consonants in English is rather puzzling for someone coming from a Brazilian Portuguese background.
I still remember as a kid trying to get by the concept of not saying the S in "island" or just ignoring the K in "knight", "know" and "knowledge" or G in "align" and "design".
I studied English as a kid and then French, German and Spanish as a teenager and early 20s. In the "pronunciation from written form" department, Spanish is spectacular: an absurdly regular language in this department. German was unexpectedly regular and quite manageable to grasp in my experience. French coming in third place but yet shows some rather high degree of consistency — once you get the gist it coming with a close-enough pronunciation from the written form is doable for a new learner of the language.
I would not say the same applies to English, and the amount of loan words it takes from other languages doesn't make it any easier to someone learning it.
> And we don't even agree on how to say it, rose is not said the same way in Paris, Toulouse or Nice.
Again, dialects/accents variations are not a French exclusivity. I understand you are not comparing say inter-country variations (like Irish accent vs a Texan accent, Quebecois vs Parisian French ) but rather intra-country variations, but yet, Northern Germany German and its Souther variations are quite distinct.
> - rich and complex system to explain the chain of though or events. It's powerful to use, but it's surely hard to learn, and even harder to master. > - verbose. If you a used to go to the point, well...
Yeah. Romance languages are verbose :(
This is anecdotal and I am a sample of one, so do with this as you will. I have learned to speak French at two particular times. When I was very young, my Grandma Yvette often spoke French to me and I spent three years in French immersion. Now, I am an adult who barely speaks the language, but I have a daughter who I badly want to bless with the French language. So, I’m learning again... I have noticed two things. Th…
> As an adult, I’m damned near petrified to speak the language. Have a drink or two. Really. I've noticed I'm much better in a foreign language when I'm mildly drunk (or at least I think I am, which helps get past the self-awareness block).
Speaking wise it helps a lot. You stop worrying about the conjugation or sentence structure etc, and just communicate with the other person.
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The fact that digital tools can't be used to achieve total native-level fluency shouldn't be used as a reason not to try to improve what's available. It should be possible at least to use digital tools to learn to listen to and understand foreign language media at a useful level... I'd love to be able to watch a movie in the language I'm studying and understand 90% of what's going on. But that seems like an impossibl…
If you go to language-learning forums (e.g. the Japanese learning subreddit) you’ll find a lot of people who spend 95% of their time wanking with learning tools, and 5% (or less) actually studying. Everyone thinks the tools are the problem. Moreover, fixing tools is easier and less painful than doing the grueling work of learning a language. As a result, lots of people get caught in the trap of believing that fluency…
Exactly my point. It shouldn't be necessary to spend all that time futzing with tools, the tools should be there, ready to use.
>you need to listen and interact with people in the native language.
Such people are not available in all areas. Online availability does not scale. These are precisely the issues that digital tools should be good at addressing, but have failed to do so.
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No, you're misperceiving "rien" as having two syllables because you are (I'm guessing) a native English speaker. You can't just "hear" how many syllables something has as syllabification rules are language-specific. The nearest corresponding sequence of English phonemes would have to be split into two syllables - but English has different syllabification rules.
Native French speaker here. Maybe it's confusing to discuss this in terms of syllables unless you are a linguist. If you just want to learn how to say the word, what matters is how people actually say the word. Specifically, you pronounce "rien" in one quick shot. (So it's definitely closer to one syllable if we care about this. But if I am to say the word very slowly to teach somebody how it sounds, it might progres…
I'm sure that's true, but I don't think it gives rise to any real doubt as to the syllable count. For example, you could stretch out the English word "near" into two syllables in very slow and deliberate speech, but it's definitely a monosyllabic word in most (possibly all?) varieties of English.
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If you listen to the evening news on TV each night you will easily get up to 6 hours per week. Look up any new words in the dictionary.
10000 hours to proficiency divided by 6 is just 1666 weeks or 32 years. That's ignoring that just listening to the news is not the deliberate practice that is supposed to be accumulated for the proverbial 10000 hours.
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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.
That said, I believe it's also the user's fault if they're only using one tool to learn a language. That's quite a high bar that just simply hasn't been achieved yet, and at the moment I would consider it an unreasonable expectation.
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…
Lingq is based on the idea of input-based learning, which I would summarize as "Read, listen, and stop worrying." This approach has a lot of research to support it (search for Stephen Krashen if you want to learn more about the research), and it is also the approach used by some famous hyper-polyglots like Kato Lomb, as well as Steve Kaufmann, the founder of lingq.
There are two main tools in lingq: One, an assisted reader which displays foreign language text, with words color-coded to indicate they are known by you, previously seen by you, or brand new. Looking up a word and storing a definition takes only a few clicks, so you can rapidly get through texts that would otherwise take forever. Even looking up a word in an online dictionary is 10x slower than doing it in lingq. The other tool is the playlist, which you can use to easily listen to the accompanying audio for a text you are studying on your phone.
By going back and forth between studying the written text, and then listening to the corresponding audio over and over and over (which is easy to do during dead time like driving, doing dishes, etc), I've vastly improved my listening comprehension and vocabulary compared to any other approach I've tried. I'm still far from fluent, but I'm convinced this is how I'll get there.
lingq's language courses also included 50-60 "mini-stories" depending on the language, which expose you to a _lot_ of different grammar and vocabulary. Once you get beyond those, the idea is to start importing native content from podcasts, articles, etc into the app. There is also a big library of content that other users have imported.
lingq does have a built-in SRS system but its sort of an afterthought, and I haven't found it very useful.
There are a lot of rough edges in the content and the website and phone app, including UI issues, flaky speech-to-text, incorrect word segmentation in the reader, bad definitions, and even grammatical mistakes in some of their original content. Ultimately I haven't found any of these to be a big hinderance.
I have no affiliation at all with lingq although I realize that my glowing review probably sounds like I'm astroturfing. It is a paid service ($10/month) but I've found it to be worth it many times over.
I've found that one of the the reasons why learning a second language at middle age is less effective, is because we already have a language we can express ourselves in with great mastery. For children and teenagers, learning the intricacies and irregularities of a language is simply the only way they can learn to describe and apprehend the world --- and themselves in new ways and ideas, and not get shamed for saying…
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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…
The fact that digital tools can't be used to achieve total native-level fluency shouldn't be used as a reason not to try to improve what's available. It should be possible at least to use digital tools to learn to listen to and understand foreign language media at a useful level... I'd love to be able to watch a movie in the language I'm studying and understand 90% of what's going on. But that seems like an impossibl…
You could try making your own tools. Export a vocabulary list from the flashcard program you're using. Download subtitles for a bunch of movies. Cross-reference them with the vocabulary list to find the movie you'll be able to understand the best.
That's the basic idea behind a tool I'm building for myself, but for finding relevant example sentences on https://tatoeba.org instead of movies.