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I Learned to Speak Four Languages in a Few Years: Here’s How

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Re: I Learned to Speak Four Languages in a Few Years: Here’s How

#111

Post by dpark »

mdaniel wrote: post #47
rms25 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pimsleur is all about pronunciation, you should try it.

I thought that Pimsleur was basically a language podcast: i.e. unidirectional content. _Hearing_ someone speak a native language is not the same as having ones pronunciation evaluated, which is also separate from learning proper pronunciation. But yes, after hearing all of the raving reviews in this thread, maybe I should give it a closer look.

The first lesson is free in most (all?) languages, so you can give it a try if you want. You just have to give them an email address. After the reviews in this thread, I decided to give it a try, and it seems like a nice product. I'm planning to buy the first level (Italian), and I'm now just trying to decide between the audio-only and the "Unlimited" that they've introduced recently, which throws in flash cards and some reading material.

It is "one way", but if you're able to dedicate time to it, the "they pronounce", "you pronounce" will probably work well. If you're halfway listening in the car, then it probably won't work.

Re: I Learned to Speak Four Languages in a Few Years: Here’s How

#112

Post by soc »

wisty wrote: post #29
acqq wrote: post #16

I just don't believe his claim: "C1 fluency in French in about 5 months" if he started from 0 unless he didn't do anything but learning the language in the target country. C1 is a damn high fluency: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Re... "Can understand a wide range of demanding, longer texts, and recognise implicit meaning. Can express him/herself fluently and spontaneously without much obvi…

5000 vocabulary cards. It won't be enough. You need (say) 5000 words, but you'd need a lot more idioms to be near native.

5000? I have close to 8000 in japanese and I consider myself still a beginner.

Native is at least 20000-25000.

As long as you are continuing to learn then 5000 is a nice start, but you are not going to read novels and speak about broad topics with that vocabulary.

Re: I Learned to Speak Four Languages in a Few Years: Here’s How

#113

Post by sakopov »

My native language is Russian and I have never met a foreigner who mastered it even after years and years of practice. It is almost unheard of to find a foreigner who can speak and pronounce correctly. Usually it's one or the other. The majority of native Russians spend 12 years learning Russian grammar and still cannot spell right. I find it hard to believe that a non-native speaker could. On the other hand it took me 3 months to become fluent in English at 14 while attending a high school in the US. Another 6 months to lose my accent and by the end of the year i was thinking in English. Being immersed in the culture of native speakers is probably the best way to learn any language. However, overcoming the complexity of a language is sometimes very difficult/impossible.

Re: I Learned to Speak Four Languages in a Few Years: Here’s How

#114

Post by oohaba »

w1ntermute wrote: post #96
Jun8 wrote: post #44

I looked at the estimates for learning difficulty for English speakers ( http://voxy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/110329-VOXY-... ) and saw that they mix together the language difficulty with the difficulty of the writing system. For example, Japanese (labeled hard) and Turkish (labeled medium) are similar (relatively speaking, looking from a English speaker's vantage, also add Korean to this group). In the ex…

> As for the "thousands of characters" scare for Chinese, I've read estimates that for daily communication you can make do with less than a thousand characters. It's not that hard. After years of frustration at being essentially illiterate in Japanese while having a decent level of spoken fluency, I've finally buckled down and started learning the kanji using Remembering the Kanji in combination with Anki. It really…

I used RTK as well, except with the website kanji.koohii.com instead of Anki, to learn 50 kanji a day. Did that for 2 months before moving to Japan, started using Anki for vocab / grammar, and passed the JLPT 1 examination in less than a year and a half.

Re: I Learned to Speak Four Languages in a Few Years: Here’s How

#117

Post by gurkendoktor »

w1ntermute wrote: post #96
Jun8 wrote: post #44

I looked at the estimates for learning difficulty for English speakers ( http://voxy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/110329-VOXY-... ) and saw that they mix together the language difficulty with the difficulty of the writing system. For example, Japanese (labeled hard) and Turkish (labeled medium) are similar (relatively speaking, looking from a English speaker's vantage, also add Korean to this group). In the ex…

> As for the "thousands of characters" scare for Chinese, I've read estimates that for daily communication you can make do with less than a thousand characters. It's not that hard. After years of frustration at being essentially illiterate in Japanese while having a decent level of spoken fluency, I've finally buckled down and started learning the kanji using Remembering the Kanji in combination with Anki. It really…

I am not sure if Chinese and Japanese can be equated like that. I find Chinese much easier to learn than Japanese because Chinese characters have plenty of built-in pronunciation mnemonics that don't help as much with the Japanese pronunciation. When I studied Japanese, I wasted lots of time coming up with stories to remember complex characters. Maybe it also depends on whether you have good pictorial memory or need some kind of analytical system, I definitely belong to the latter camp.

Re: I Learned to Speak Four Languages in a Few Years: Here’s How

#118

Post by _delirium »

soc wrote: post #112
wisty wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5000 vocabulary cards. It won't be enough. You need (say) 5000 words, but you'd need a lot more idioms to be near native.

5000? I have close to 8000 in japanese and I consider myself still a beginner. Native is at least 20000-25000. As long as you are continuing to learn then 5000 is a nice start, but you are not going to read novels and speak about broad topics with that vocabulary.

Are we talking about vocabulary usage or recognition? Estimates vary, but the rough consensus for English seems to be that the educated native speaker recognizes around 15,000-25,000 words, but only uses around 5,000-8,000 in their own speech/writing.

Re: I Learned to Speak Four Languages in a Few Years: Here’s How

#119

Post by gurkendoktor »

virtualeyes wrote: post #80
acqq wrote: post #16

I just don't believe his claim: "C1 fluency in French in about 5 months" if he started from 0 unless he didn't do anything but learning the language in the target country. C1 is a damn high fluency: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Re... "Can understand a wide range of demanding, longer texts, and recognise implicit meaning. Can express him/herself fluently and spontaneously without much obvi…

5 months without living/breathing the language amongst native speakers, fluency, methinks NOT ;-) I took 8 years of French growing up (10-18) and I understood nothing, literally nothing when I visited Quebec for the first time (that's a joke, do you get it?) Anyway, the point is, fluency cannot be gained without living in the culture where the language is spoken. Book learning, reciting phrases, etc. will not give yo…

I think a significant other helps to get you started, and later is handy for all the little cultural things which C1 fluency absolutely requires.

But you risk using the same terms all the time, getting used to each other's nonstandard pronunciation, and lastly, you may sound much more like a tomboy/sissy by only talking to the opposite gender. I really hope it's not too late for me to stop doing all of these :(

Re: I Learned to Speak Four Languages in a Few Years: Here’s How

#120

Post by reneherse »

acqq wrote: post #73
eric_bullington wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did I claim? I claimed that it was possible for someone to learn a language fluently in 4-5 months, because I did so. To be honest, your demanding tone is a little off-putting, particularly when you're asking personnel questions about my life and schooling. However, in the interest of science, I'll try to answer the questions: 1. The "basic". No, in the US, it's pretty rare to have four years of language trainin…

Let me summarize: you've had two years of French as a foreign language before you came to France, you are a top 1% language learner, you've spent all your five months in France just learning language and you haven't taken any formal exam which would prove that you've actually reached a C1 level and not B1 or B2. In short, you didn't show that it's possible reaching C1 in five months from zero knowledge even for a top…

Pardon me, but are you by chance familiar with the French word for "shower"?
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