Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How I Learned French in One Year

kuro5hin.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 50 posts

Re: How I Learned French in One Year

#21

Post by sounddust »

I learned French in one year by hooking up a mic/mixer to my laptop (so that I could easily hear myself speak) and watching French DVDs with French subtitles, pausing after every sentence and repeating what was said.

I'd rewind the film and switch to English subtitles when I didn't understand a phrase. It takes about 6 hours per film at first, but becomes faster and faster as you learn more vocabulary/grammar and get used to the process.

It's best to use real French films, because it's important that the actor's mouth movements match their voice, especially when they're speaking fast.

I live in Paris now, and speak French fairly well with no American accent.

I also read bilingual books and memorized songs on the bus (pasted the lyrics into iTunes so they'd show up on my iPod when listening to the song).

Re: How I Learned French in One Year

#22

Post by thras »

unconed wrote: post #19
bemmu wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those that don't know, the Heisig method is a very famous mnemonic method for remembering the kanji. According to some people with brains apparently wired differently than mine, you can learn all kanji in a few months with this method. The method starts with giving each compound part that appears in more complex characters an English language name. These names are then used to create stories that tie the more com…

Mnemonic methods where you remember elaborate stories using your own language are actually kind of a bad idea, though the intent is good. The idea is that you remember a concept better when there are plenty of connections with other things in your head. This is true, and this is why mnemonic methods work very well for beginners, especially people who are getting nowhere on their own. However, in order to become fluen…

The mnemonic method being referred to is aimed as specifically learning written Japanese. It is not about learning words. It's about learning kanji.

The problem is that Japanese has the most complicated written language in the world. It has two alphabets and a set of many thousands of symbols (kanji) borrowed from Chinese. Learning spoken Japanese is an entirely different undertaking than learning written Japanese.

You can be completely fluent in Japanese and still not be able to read a newspaper (this may actually be more common than not).

Re: How I Learned French in One Year

#23

Post by sp332 »

fb wrote: post #13

If you want to learn to speak French and use it actively, not just to prepare for some exam, I can recommend French In Action from my experience. It is a base for a 2-year course at Yale University. The whole course revolves around a story about an American student on vacation in France, a French girl, and their families. A complete multimedia course consisting of 52 30-minute video episodes with commentaries, 2 text…

Watch French in Action for free (legally!) here: http://www.learner.org/resources/series83.html

Re: How I Learned French in One Year

#24

Post by tungstenfurnace »

tokenadult wrote: post #17
akamaka wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't agree more about learning the correct pronunciation first. I spent some time tutoring students learning English, and many of them had spent years learning to read without any training on pronunciation. They end up speaking English using the sounds from their own language, and will never recover from it without massive relearning effort. The two takeaways here are: learn pronunciation first, and learn the scri…

learn pronunciation first, and learn the script of the new language immediately Correct, and correct. All native speakers of any language are habituated to produce the sounds and perceive the phonemes of their own language, and NOT to produce the sounds or perceive the phonemes of any other language. Acquiring an understandable accent generally takes good training at the beginning.

OK, so what's the optimum strategy?

How about starting with a CD and book of nursery rhymes and then listening whilst following the text.

Then eventually ditching the CD and reading/singing the rhymes from the book out loud.

Then (having read the translations) doing the same whilst visualising the content.

Re: How I Learned French in One Year

#26

Post by tempest67 »

bemmu wrote: post #3
jibiki wrote: post #2

From http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/about "In June 2004, at the ripe old age of 21, all post-pubescent and supposedly past my mental/linguistic prime, I started learning Japanese. By September 2005, I had learned enough to read technical material, conduct business correspondence and job interviews in Japanese. By the next month, I landed a job as a software engineer at a large Japanese company in Tokyo" Ba…

Oh man, I wish I could advance at such a pace. Sometimes I doubt these fast-learner stories, but I guess different people just have different abilities. I lived in Tokyo for 2 years, studying Japanese full-time, and completed several courses in Finland before that. Speaking came pretty easy and I am quite fluent in normal conversation, but learning kanji has proven to be a real time-sink and a source of frustration,…

"Reading a newspaper is not possible currently..."

It may be painful, but it should be possible; yes, you'll have to look up the kanji, over and over -- writing them down as you look them up -- and it'll take you half an hour to read half of one article. But if you keep at it, and keep looking them up, every day, you will improve -- you will learn them! You just have to tolerate a lot of tedium on your way.

Re: How I Learned French in One Year

#27

Post by xccx »

sounddust wrote: post #21

I learned French in one year by hooking up a mic/mixer to my laptop (so that I could easily hear myself speak) and watching French DVDs with French subtitles, pausing after every sentence and repeating what was said. I'd rewind the film and switch to English subtitles when I didn't understand a phrase. It takes about 6 hours per film at first, but becomes faster and faster as you learn more vocabulary/grammar and get…

Thanks. Very useful information here. Current theory (Krashen) says output or production happens naturally only after hundreds of hours of "comprehensible input". It's great to see contrary evidence. I'd love to know more.

Re: How I Learned French in One Year

#28

Post by granular »

akamaka wrote: post #11
russell wrote: post #6

The Peace Corps of my youth taught the volunteers to speak the new language by 3 months of total immersion, then threw them into the wild. My friends who had gone through the process said that they could get by, but it took a year to become totally fluent. I picked up enough Portuguese to fumble along in Brazil by taking 40 hours of lessons from Berlitz, 2 hours per day twice a week, just me and the teacher. That was…

I can't agree more about learning the correct pronunciation first. I spent some time tutoring students learning English, and many of them had spent years learning to read without any training on pronunciation. They end up speaking English using the sounds from their own language, and will never recover from it without massive relearning effort. The two takeaways here are: learn pronunciation first, and learn the scri…

> learn pronunciation first, and learn the script of the new language immediately

What does "script" mean in this context? What is the "script" of a language?

Re: How I Learned French in One Year

#30

Post by pradocchia »

xccx wrote: post #27
sounddust wrote: post #21

I learned French in one year by hooking up a mic/mixer to my laptop (so that I could easily hear myself speak) and watching French DVDs with French subtitles, pausing after every sentence and repeating what was said. I'd rewind the film and switch to English subtitles when I didn't understand a phrase. It takes about 6 hours per film at first, but becomes faster and faster as you learn more vocabulary/grammar and get…

Thanks. Very useful information here. Current theory (Krashen) says output or production happens naturally only after hundreds of hours of "comprehensible input". It's great to see contrary evidence. I'd love to know more.

I had a similar experience learning Chinese. Output did not follow comprehension.

The rule was never sleep without giving your brain something to work on. I spent an hour in the morning and an hour at night practicing the precise pronounciation of syllables, words and phrases, using tapes as a reference. There was little improvement during sessions, but noticeable improvement between them. Thus the rule about sleep.

As my pronunciation improved, so did my comprehension. I can't imagine it working the other way. Comprehension is passive, and no guarantee of accurate or even coherent production.

Following such a method you can learn a language in 6-12 months.

EDIT: I just read up on Krashen, and well, no, his theories are wrong. I wasted years on that crap. I doubt fluency is even possible with such a method. Just do what sounddust said and you'll be set.

EDIT2: The average person acquires fluency despite the Krashen method, rather than because of it. In my case, due to very poor audio recall, the Krashen method was a complete failure, so I was forced to experiment with other ways.

It turns out perception of foreign sounds is very weak in adults. We recognize a subset of possible sounds and toss out the rest, or munge it into something heavily accented. The repetition & production method compensates for this by making such sounds "real". Once they are real, the actual language follows more quickly.

EDIT3 (sorry): More on Krashen, from http://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash.html:

The only instance in which the teaching of grammar can result in language acquisition (and proficiency) is when the students are interested in the subject and _the target language_ is used as a medium of instruction.

This is so fucking wrong. The study of grammar is analytical. Language is the vehicle of analytic thought--if your proficiency in a language is weak, your level of analytic thought in that language is also weak. So if you want to study French grammar and you've only just started learning the language, by all means, study it in English.

Wow. So this is why the English-speaking world can't seem to learn a foreign language. Thank you xccx, you opened my eyes.

Post reply on HN