It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by bitwize » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 6:28 PM UTC

salawat wrote: post #76

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.

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…

Telegraph and radio operators used to write down the messages, character by character, as soon as they heard each character in Morse, and only once the entire message had been received attempt to read or interpret it. There are artifacts of this even in modern voice radio usage; e.g., "do you copy?" meant originally, did you successfully copy down my message?

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

#252

Post by jperras » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 6:31 PM UTC

jacobolus wrote: post #178

jperras wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The more idiomatic translation of "de rien" would be "think nothing of it". Source: lifelong bilingual in French & English.

“Think nothing of it” is a rare and very stuffy sounding expression in (at least my California dialect of) English. “It’s nothing” is better but still not too common. As cced already said, common ways of expressing this in American English include “don’t worry about it”, “no worries”, “no big deal”, “no problem”, “you’re welcome”, “my pleasure”, etc.

Informal vs. formal and the gradient between them is always going to be an issue in any language, especially when comparing languages.

French also has more built-in structures for formal address/politeness, though many of them are being left by the wayside just as we left feudal lordships with a peasant class.

For what it's worth, I'd say that the more "stuffy" version of "de rien" in French would be "il n'y a pas de quoi".

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

#253

Post by kiba » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 6:34 PM UTC

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…

Flashcard tools like Anki and Tinycards are nice, but they lack enough readily available content to be really useful. Anyone with the expertise and perspective to use these tools in a practical time frame to assemble a deck of the many thousands of words necessary to achieve mastery doesn't need the tools.

For tools like anki, you don't want to use someone else's deck in the first place, because making cards is a learning process in itself, which will improve retention.

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

#254

Post by agumonkey » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 6:37 PM UTC

pcardoso wrote: post #56

agumonkey wrote: post #29

I despised French a bit (my own native tongue), as I grew up with a little fondness for English, and spent most of my time speaking English (probably Engrish at times). Then I got.. say bored of casual (tech/web) English, and started to feel happy again with French, even accounting for all its odd rules and twists and everything. I felt it was a lovely bag of varied multitudes and shades that were very good for paint…

I relate to that. As a Portuguese, I had both English and French in school. As a teen nerd learning Basic on the ZX Spectrum, English was much useful than weird french. I now regret not paying much attention to those classes.

Don't worry, to each his own path, as I said, even as a French I went away from it.. we all evolve.

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

#255

Post by blacksqr » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 6:42 PM UTC

yorwba wrote: post #250

blacksqr wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 impossible dream given the available tools and my current rate of progress. 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'l…

Building my own toolset and curriculum is exactly what I want to avoid.

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

#256

Post by coredog64 » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 6:45 PM UTC

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…

It goes the other way too. Most Parisians would rather speak English with a Québécois than listen to them “mangle” it.

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

#257

Post by yongjik » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 6:48 PM UTC

foldr wrote: post #191

davidy123 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pronounced in three syllables (de re-an) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/de_rien

That page lists it as a two syllable phrase (look at the categories at the bottom). English speakers would be tempted to think it as a three syllable phrase because ʁjɛ̃ isn't a possible syllable in English, but in French "de rien" should be two syllables. This is similar to, e.g., English speakers incorrectly pronouncing the Spanish word "luego" with three syllables.

Random fun fact: when an English speaker says "strike", a Korean speaker hears five syllables.

seu-teu-ra-i-keu

(Well, to be fair, it's more like "an awful lot of sounds that have no business being in the same syllable merged together", and less "five distinct syllables", but still that's how Koreans end up writing the sound in Korean.)

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

#258

Post by astrobe_ » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 6:50 PM UTC

baud147258 wrote: post #15

bambax wrote: post #11

> 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…

> And I revel in small triumphs, like discovering that a woolen ball on a sweater is a “boulouche” I'm French and I discovered that word today.

That's probably because you're not old enough. It was popularized by an ad in the mid 90':

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xmx1i4

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

#259

Post by vibrolax » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 6:54 PM UTC

I'm 60+. I've just finished 8 months of French integration for adult immigrants in Québec in Gatineau (across the river from Ottawa). Five days per week, 6 hours per day for 40 weeks. My wife (francophone) loves to hear me make appointments and carry on practical interactions in French.

I can follow the news and participate in conversations with people in our circle, but movies and street speech still elude me.

The thing I have enjoyed the most is forming friendships with other students who don't speak English at all.

This region of Québec is perhaps less impatient with the struggles of people learning French, with pockets of anglophones and francophones on the Quebec - Ontario border.

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

#260

Post by irq11 » Tue, Apr 30, 2019, 6:57 PM UTC

blacksqr wrote: post #244

irq11 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>you’ll find a lot of people who spend 95% of their time futzing with learning tools, and 5% (or less) actually studying 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 th…

”Exactly my point. It shouldn't be necessary to spend all that time futzing with tools, the tools should be there, ready to use.”

It isn’t necessary. The tools are fine, and/or improving them won’t solve the fundamental problem. People are just procrastinating.

”Online availability does not scale. These are precisely the issues that digital tools should be good at addressing, but have failed to do so.”

Short of making an AGI that fluently speaks your target language, there are no obvious improvements to learning tools that will address the fundamental problem: you need to talk to actual humans.