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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

#141

Post by grepherder »

chastened wrote: post #127
ekianjo wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have seen a lot of foreigners learning French (being French myself, and exposed to international students/professionals in various situations) and I have to seriously doubt that claim as well. I have seen some Americans learning French very fast, in a matter of 6 months, enough to be able to communicate and work in French on a daily basis, but there is no way they could be qualified as producing "clear, well-struct…

>> There's just so much the brain can absorb in a short time. Daniel Tammet learned Icelandic in one week. I would be interested to see what backs your claim that the brain can only absorb so much in a short time. I think both you and the GP are projecting YOUR limitations onto everyone else. The brain can and does absorb a massive amount of information each and every day. Training the conscious mind to direct that n…

>> Daniel Tammet learned Icelandic in one week.

Your point? Daniel Tammet is an autistic savant. And some people have eidetic memory. There is little relevance unless we find a method to recreate these traits in "normal" people, there is by no means any evidence that every human has latent super powers.

As a normal person having nevertheless high language aptitude, I reached C1 or very close to C1 in about 6-7 months. I say close to C1 despite reaching C1 level in a test, because I don't think it's fair to claim you have every capability for C1 as described by CEFR just because you passed a 4-hour test, in certain ways you just cheat by learning for the test. Anyway, even that was with a very generous amount of immersion, about a minimum of 8 hours a day including long hours of grammar practice. Still, despite praises from native speakers, at that time I wouldn't assert that I was fluent in speech or writing. Now to claim you can be "fluent" in 5 months just by studying 30-60 minutes a day is a bit outrageous.

I can't tell you how much our brain can really "absorb" and "retain" in one day, but there are very real limits in language acquisition after a certain age. I won't say it's impossible, but to realize your claims, we definitely need a magic pill or surgical operation / cybernetics.

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

#142

Post by Spearchucker »

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…

I believe it.

The part that's a bit misleading is the 30 minutes a day he mentions. Those 30 minutes require a LOT of preparation. Also he's a musician, so has "the ear" for it.

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

#143

Post by grepherder »

shin_lao wrote: post #139
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…

I sincerely question this story. C1 requires around 20,000 words of vocabulary. That's more than 100 words per day to get there in 5 months. I submit that's impossible, even if you do that all day. On a more intuitive level, I'm C2 in English, and it took me 20 years to get there. I don't think C1 in 5 months is realistic.

100 words per day is definitely possible with very clever techniques and hard work, so is a vocabulary of about 20,000 words in 5 months, but to be fluent (C1) in using them is another story. It is certainly unrealistic unless we're talking 8+ hours a day immersion.

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

#144

Post by shin_lao »

grepherder wrote: post #143
shin_lao wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sincerely question this story. C1 requires around 20,000 words of vocabulary. That's more than 100 words per day to get there in 5 months. I submit that's impossible, even if you do that all day. On a more intuitive level, I'm C2 in English, and it took me 20 years to get there. I don't think C1 in 5 months is realistic.

100 words per day is definitely possible with very clever techniques and hard work, so is a vocabulary of about 20,000 words in 5 months, but to be fluent (C1) in using them is another story. It is certainly unrealistic unless we're talking 8+ hours a day immersion.

I think you may plateau quickly with 100 words per day and I think that plateau is well below 20,000 words.

Memorizing a foreign language word is not just translation, it's about understanding context and usage for that word.

When you tread outside the "trivial vocabulary kit" you lose bijection between languages and acquiring words becomes harder and harder.

Keep in mind I have nothing but my personal experience to back that up, which means formal studies on the topic are more than welcome to enrich the conversation.

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

#145

Post by JohnLBevan »

Sounds like an opening for an App.

Gabriel's put a lot of effort into creating his flashcards, but they'd be the same for everyone - so you could allow the community to generate the cards, and the part of the community for whom this is their native language could rate these cards, the best bubbling to preference.

The use of existing sites (Google Translate / Lang-8) to get/validate translations is good, but this could be baked into the same system as the flashcards, using that system's community, or having an API to connect that system with the external sites so that it's just one system from the user's perspective.

In terms of reading books / watching tv / etc, again a catalogue of links to e-books / youtube clips / etc., along with ratings of difficulty could be maintained by the community and presented through the app.

Build this on top of facebook / google plus / etc and tools such as hangouts are also available to help users from different countries / of different native languages talk to one another, taking it in turns of 30 min sessions in one another's languages.

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

#146

Post by why-el »

nandemo wrote: post #107
why-el wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am actually in Brazil right now and I just started learning Portuguese a week ago. I am basically just watching How I Met Your Mother with Portuguese subtitles. Such a beautiful language. My French helps a lot though.

I know you're already an accomplished language learner, but why bother listening to English audio if you're learning Portuguese in Brazil ? If you really need subtitles, at least it should be the other way round: Portuguese audio with English subtitles (readily available in DVDs, and maybe some cable channels too). Another way is watching dubbed movies on (non-cable) TV. If you've already seen the movie, then you don…

Good point. Part of the reason really is that I couldn't find any Brazilian TV shows that I liked (Movies are better). And second, this phase is really for vocab and not pronunciation, so when I hear a English sentence and read its translation in the subtitles, I tend to remember the structure and some of the words. It just works for me.

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

#147

Post by [deleted] »

grepherder wrote: post #141
chastened wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> There's just so much the brain can absorb in a short time. Daniel Tammet learned Icelandic in one week. I would be interested to see what backs your claim that the brain can only absorb so much in a short time. I think both you and the GP are projecting YOUR limitations onto everyone else. The brain can and does absorb a massive amount of information each and every day. Training the conscious mind to direct that n…

>> Daniel Tammet learned Icelandic in one week. Your point? Daniel Tammet is an autistic savant. And some people have eidetic memory. There is little relevance unless we find a method to recreate these traits in "normal" people, there is by no means any evidence that every human has latent super powers. As a normal person having nevertheless high language aptitude, I reached C1 or very close to C1 in about 6-7 months…

[deleted]

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

#149

Post by stephencanon »

freehunter wrote: post #21
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…

Yeah, I lived in Germany for just under a year. My great-grandparents spoke nothing but German, and my grandparents were about 50-50. Even being steeped in German my whole life and living there for a year, I only passed the B2 level test after I got back from Germany. Today, I could probably pass the A2, just because I don't know anyone anymore who I can speak German with at any deep level. C1 in 5 months without liv…

Agreed. I'm decent with languages (native English speaker, C1 German, B2 French, B1 Mandarin and Spanish, can fake my way through common travel situations in Moroccan Arabic and a couple other African languages). C1 in 5 months sounds wildly optimistic, even with immersion. I wouldn't consider myself to possess C1 French despite a couple years of classes in school and maybe a year of immersion broken into a few chunks. My German fluency came from ~10 years of classes, including several college classes in other subjects that were taught in German.

For that matter, I know non-native english speakers who don't have C1 fluency despite living in the US and UK for more than 20 years, and not for lack of trying. Learning languages is hard for almost everyone, and for a reasonable portion of the population, it's really hard.

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

#150

Post by chastened »

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.

The average vocabulary of the average person in their NATIVE TONGUE is just over 3500 words (it varies a lot from culture to culture).

The average vocabulary of a University Graduate in the Arts is 10-12000 words. In the sciences it varies greatly, chemistry, biology and medicine being the most demanding at >15,000.

Someone with a vocabulary of 20-25000 words would be highly educated or very well read, or an specialist in a field.

If you have a Japanese vocabulary of 8000 words, you already have a bigger vocabulary than 74.13% of the population (if you understand what that percentage represents, you already have a larger vocabulary than the majority of people).

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