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I Learned French in 12 Months

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Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#171

Post by wes1350 »

knubie wrote: post #15

Very impressive progress. I think it speaks to the author's commitment and dedication, as adding 50 new cards per day is a lot . Most people will burn out pretty quickly at that rate. I recommend something like 10-20 per day. I'm also one of those people that say you should make your own cards from material you're immersing in. When going through a predefined list of words like that I think you're bound to end up lea…

Author here. It was a lot, but seeing the number go down rapidly was a nice motivator. Keep in mind that these are just pre-made 1-word cards, so they're much faster than the full-sentence cards people suggest, which are likely more effective though also more time-consuming. Furthermore, French has an unexpectedly (for me) large number of cognates with English, so many of those words were freebies for me. If I was learning Mandarin, for example, 50 cards a day would require an absolutely enormous amount of effort, most of which would likely be wasted.

You are correct in that a decent chunk of the words are relatively useless, and I forgot many of them already after stopping Anki for a few months. There were also some words that I had no idea how to use, as you said. However, I did some extra looking-up of difficult words, and the deck included example sentences for many of the words. Also, I definitely claim that your method is more effective, but clearly this one at least worked well enough to do what I did.

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#172

Post by wes1350 »

abecedarius wrote: post #99
gibolt wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their A/B testing probably isn't testing education efficacy, but retention and actions that lead to payment/miscellaneous business goals.

Ironically, as a user I'd use it more if it were more effective and less grind-grind-grind. But I suppose you're probably right. An efficient, effective learning process feels more challenging and frustrating, which must drive a lot of people away. It must be a solvable problem, though.

Author here. I agree that Duolingo is almost certainly not optimizing for language learning effectiveness, which ends up being somewhat of a side-effect of their business model. However, by using the desktop version and turning off the word bank, you can better optimize for effectiveness for yourself.

Duolingo is certainly a grind, but I don't think that's 100% a bad thing. It's far from perfectly executed, but I think you need a certain amount of grind to really drill some of the vocab and grammatical concepts into you.

As an example, in a classroom you do some homework exercises, and maybe get feedback the next day on however many exercises you do. You don't necessarily get to redo the exercises you miss enough to let the concept sink in, and you might do way too many exercises that do nothing for you as you've already internalized the concept. With Duolingo grinding, you have to repeat your weakest points after you get them wrong and get to drill in all the exercises until they stick.

I estimate that each lesson of roughly 20 questions, with redoing exercises I got wrong, takes me something like 3-5 minutes, so in an hour of focused effort you might get 300 exercises in. That's far more exercises than I imagine you do in school for example, and you also get to decide if a unit is too easy and you can afford to skip it, or if it's hard enough where you have to repeat it. Plus, each sentence has a discussion page, many of which (especially the tricky ones) have detailed explanations about the concepts within the sentence.

Duolingo is far from perfect, but despite all the criticism it receives (rightly so for what it claims you can do with 5 minutes a day on the mobile app), you can actually make it a surprisingly effective tool.

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#173

Post by nmfisher »

tmountain wrote: post #108

I've been hacking language learning for about five years, and I've spent ridiculous amounts of time trying and reading about different strategies. I've been to Cuba, Mexico, Spain, and Puerto Rico to try immersion in different settings. Getting to a solid level of competency in a language actually is not that hard. It just requires dedication and consistent practice. That said, native speakers operate on a different…

Totally agree.

I believe there's a difference between "competence" (I know how to say X) and "fluidity" (I can say X as easily as breathing).

You can learn the first on your own. Takes a lot of effort, sure, but it's doable.

I don't think you can learn fluidity outside of actually living in a country. You need to be bombarded daily with questions that you're forced to respond to. Even then, some people just don't make the effort, which is why you get people who have lived in a foreign country for decades and their language skills haven't improved.

My first three months in China were worth more than the preceding three years of self-study.

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#174

Post by wes1350 »

fcatalan wrote: post #117

If you just care about understanding most of the written language this can be done a bit faster in a very similar way: A few years ago I started watching Danish TV shows and went through a few months of "Danish obsession". -I started Duolingo Danish, only 15-20 minutes every day, just unlocking stuff, not completing evey level. I never completed it all, but there's not much left. -Then I followed a couple major Danis…

Author here. I heavily concentrated on speaking, but you're absolutely right that without that you can get quite far surprisingly quickly if you only care about reading. I mean, look at the millions of language students that can read complex texts in their foreign languages but can't spend 30 seconds discussing their day.

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#175

Post by wes1350 »

laurieg wrote: post #130
jason0597 wrote: post #66

> Started consistently covering 50 new words a day on Anki That's a lot! I could never do that... I'm learning Japanese, and I could never imagine myself doing more than 10 words a day.

The author definitely benefits from French and English being related languages. Remembering that "interesting" is "intéressant" takes a lot less effort than remembering it is "おもしろい". I studied Japanese full time for a year and would probably average something like 20 word a day but even that was pushing it. I advise people to aim for 3-5 words a day and be consistent. Adding huge amounts of words very quickly and th…

Author here. You're absolutely correct. Make that deck 5000 non-cognate words and 50 words a day quickly becomes unsustainable. Not to mention the alphabet(s) required for a language like Japanese. French is a language I think any decently well-read person (so as to recognize many of the cognates) can learn vocabulary in surprisingly quickly, considering how much of English vocabulary is derived from French.

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#176

Post by wes1350 »

Cheyana wrote: post #57
dbancajas wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the intended audience of the article non-french speakers? So he writes it in a "universal" language so you could apply it on "how to learn in 12 months" where X is your non-native tongue.

Yeah, and it is a very informative article. I just wanted to see him slingin’ that French. :)

Je suis l'auteur. Je pensais à écrire une version française, mais il y a 9000 mots dans l'article ! Ce serait un tache énorme et probablement pas la meilleure façon de passer mon temps, car j'écris bien moins vite en français qu'en anglais. De plus, j'imagine que la grande majorité de gens qui vont lire cet article sont anglophones.

(For those who don't (or do) speak French, I tried to write this: "I'm the author. I thought about writing a French version, but there are 9000 words in the article. This would be an enormous task and probably not the best way to spend my time, since I write significantly slower in French than in English. Furthermore, I imagine that most people who are going to read this article are English speakers.")

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#177

Post by wes1350 »

205guy wrote: post #98

The OP did a lot of work learning French, it’s always interesting to get a peek into someone’s process for something impressive and out of the ordinary. So thanks for the long and detailed write up. I wanted to point out that the limitations that were encountered are normal. The OP learned 95% of what can be learned without living in the culture itself. Sure, you could learn all these extra details by chatting online…

Author here. Thanks for assuring me that these drawbacks aren't so bad! I did want to include these sort of limitations though so that people don't think I can do everything a native speaker can do. In particular, I wanted to avoid giving off the "I GOT FLUENT IN 12 MONTHS USING THIS SECRET TRICK!" vibe.

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#178

Post by cgarrigue »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #109
MaupitiBlue wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For French, it’s really easy. Use a vpn to get a French ip, and you can watch TV1 - TV5 for gratuit! Avec subtitles en francais.

There's also this news channel (works in Europe, don't know outside): https://www.bfmtv.com/mediaplayer/live-video/ It's a typical 24/7 news channel but that's real, everyday French and, well, the latest news.

It seems to work worldwide: I watch it from Japan. Interestingly most of the commercials are not displayed from here, instead we get the rolling presentation of the channel.

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#179

Post by wes1350 »

38911BBF wrote: post #14

Nice article, but just a headsup: The website certificate of runwes.com is only valid for the following names: www.github.com, * .github.io, * .githubusercontent.com, * .github.com, github.com, github.io, githubusercontent.com. Everyhing is alerts and warnings when clicking the link.

Author here. I have never configured a website like this so I wasn't aware of these problems. Any tips for fixing this?

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#180

Post by wes1350 »

andrewzah wrote: post #50

> Started consistently covering 50 new words a day on Anki For anyone here who has used anki, that's a huge number. This person is really dedicating their time at this point, because 50 new cards/day very quickly snowballs and you're doing 300+ reviews daily. I did 20 reviews/day for ~6 months straight for Korean, and that took me 30-60 minutes, every day. Thinking about 50/day sounds utterly exhausting. It's a good…

Author here. You are right, that was a lot of cards, but doing it in French is several times easier and faster than doing it in English due to the massive number of cognates and near-identical alphabet. The 5k deck was also, as you say, a massive time saver, if not less effective than making your own deck.
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