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I Learned French in 12 Months

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Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#251

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

alexis_fr wrote: post #115
shmat wrote: post #101

I studied French from 7th-12th grade in an American High School. After that, I could not understand any French beyond "bonjour". I could not have a conversation in French. I could conjugate verbs and I could read some. Fast forward 45 years and I retired and decided to actually learn French. I followed a very, very similar method and after 9 months of self study took a 2 week intensive course in France where I was to…

> I studied French from 7th-12th grade As a French, I’ve lived a few years in Australia. A lot of people there can only say “Bonjour” and keep a bitter memory of their lessons. It feels like learning German for the French people, also a difficult (albeit more regular) language. It is merely necessary for political cohesion but not at an individual level; As such German lessons are... not designed for the students. If…

For many years, I thought that most French people were arrogant douchebags that hated foreigners.

The reason was that I had only visited the center of Paris, and I really felt disdained there. I even developed the habit of opening conversation in Spanish (my native language) because then people would try English and we would communicate. When I opened conversation in English, they replied in French, I wouldn't understand and they didn't seem interested in communicating at all.

After going to other parts of the country like Nice, Avignon, Lille... and being involved professionally with French people, I had the chance to meet many excellent people and now have several awesome French friends.

Later on, I had the chance to revisit the center of Paris and it no longer felt that unwelcoming anymore (probably partly because I got the hang of the culture and at least some of the language, and partly because I had some more money to go to somewhat better hotels, etc., which can help). But for the first-time clueless foreign visitor, it can feel really hostile. I'm not at all surprised by the testimonials you mention.

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#252

Post by practice9 »

Does anybody here have experience of "learning" physics, electrical engineering or material science in 12 months?

By this I mean starting from the very basics to a level where you can comfortably talk about main concepts and start designing or experimenting using your knowledge

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#253

Post by yorwba »

wes1350 wrote: post #179
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?

The problem is because you're using GitHub Pages to host your website on a custom domain. When someone accesses your website via HTTPS, they get a certificate that is only valid for GitHub domains. Of course the HN submission is an HTTP link, so the person you're replying to probably has their browser configured to use HTTPS everywhere.

You can fix this by enabling HTTPS in GitHub pages, so that a valid certificate is served. See GitHub's troubleshooting information: https://help.github.com/en/github/working-with-github-pages/...

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#254

Post by k__ »

gramie wrote: post #208
k__ wrote: post #35

Pretty good! I tried to learn Spanish with DuoLingo only, and I couldn't motivate me to do the whole tree. I only did 1/3, but everything to level 5.

I found DuoLingo interesting, but it didn't really help me to learn Spanish. I had a lot more success (I just came back from a trip to Panama where I had to interact with people who spoke little no no English) using https://www.languagetransfer.org (it also has courses for Greek, French, German, Arabic, Turkish, Italian and Swahili). The courses are sets of MP3 tracks that are free to download, but if you find them u…

Thanks for the link. I'll look into that.

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#255

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

loeg wrote: post #150
brownbat wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Languages and gym stick out to me as the most astounding educational failures in high school. When I later actually wanted to learn about those on my own time, it became obvious that those initial classes were not only not helpful, but actively harmful. High school language courses might just be overinfluenced by academic linguists-- obscure grammar is probably the right focus if your main interest is comparative lin…

I disagree on the gym/fitness angle. It's quite possible you had a terrible gym teacher, and it wasn't a good fit for you. But I think it's extremely important to introduce the idea of normal, daily exercise and give students explicit time for that in their schedule, and I don't think the average gym teacher is so bad as to negate that benefit.

In my case, it made me hate exercise. I couldn't do the things they required (stuff like somersaults, jumping the pommel horse, etc.) so I just took an adversarial angle. It was not something to enjoy, but to try to beat if possible, or escape otherwise.

Many years later, I can kind of enjoy exercise like running or swimming but I still never go to gyms as they give me bad feelings.

Indeed, being a teacher myself today, I'd rate my gym teachers as terrible, as setting goals (like somersaults) with little relation to the actual exercise most people do, and more relation to innate talent than effort, while not providing much motivation or explanation of why that is useful (I still don't see why today), seems like a huge pedagogical failure. But I had various gym teachers and they all seemed cut from the same cloth, and other people with similar age and country give similar descriptions. Maybe it's better in other countries or it has improved by time, I don't know.

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#256

Post by namelosw »

BTBurke wrote: post #182

I don't believe there is a shortcut for "hacking" languages. I'm a diplomat, and currently learning my fourth language to the C1+ level. When we learn languages, it's a full time job. It was 9 months to learn Mandarin to a B1, 6 months to a C1+ in Spanish, and I'm currently at a B1 in Estonian after 5 months. There are several things I think are crucial after years of full time study (note: this assumes you're going…

Totally agree on there is no shortcut for "hacking" languages. But at the same time "The quality and type of practice you do matters a lot" as you've said.

And also, for learning languages, one way could be significantly less painful than others.

I grew up in China, where almost every student struggles so much on English learning, every day. I found myself very easy to pass every exam and beating the average, without listening to the lectures or doing any homework - simply by playing video games (especially RPG). I was/am by no means excellent at English, but it was almost a totally free perk for me.

Basically video games are:

1. Designed to be both engaging and challenging, whereas schools suck at those so much.

2. Have specific and meaningful targets, if you failed to understand what's going on or what's the mechanism you're not likely to play along.

3. Including scenarios and plots. A lot of reading and listening activities. You don't have to appoint a teacher or native speaker to talk with you. You can start anytime you want (except I have intolerant parents so I have to play it sneakily).

4. Cheap.

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#257

Post by dsego »

brendyn wrote: post #215
thedirt0115 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What of the folks who have watched countless hours of anime, but still can't speak Japanese? Input alone is not enough, at least not for adults wanting to become fluent from what I've seen.

When they do that, they are focusing on the English subtitles and effectively filtering out the Japanese. If they tried to hide the subtitles and only glimpse at them occasionally they would start to see gradual improvement. Many people won't because they'll find they suddenly can't understand most things and it becomes exhausting. by that that's what it's like when you are really learning. That being said it's still…

Ask pretty much any Croatian who was a kid in the 90ies and they will probably say that watching Cartoon Network as a kid on their satellite dish helped them learn English. Only 3-4 national channels were available on the terrestrial TV at the time, which made the huge variety of satellite channels novel and exciting for a kid. These foreign stations didn't have subtitles, so you had to try and pick up the language to follow the shows.

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#258

Post by bayesian_horse »

rajlego wrote: post #202
BTBurke wrote: post #182

I don't believe there is a shortcut for "hacking" languages. I'm a diplomat, and currently learning my fourth language to the C1+ level. When we learn languages, it's a full time job. It was 9 months to learn Mandarin to a B1, 6 months to a C1+ in Spanish, and I'm currently at a B1 in Estonian after 5 months. There are several things I think are crucial after years of full time study (note: this assumes you're going…

Have you heard of Stephen Krashen's Input Hypothesis? [1] There are a couple of parts to it but it essentially says that linguistic competence (a fancy way to say your innate knowledge of a language) only increases when you take in input. If you talk all day that doesn't really make you any better (since you don't learn anything new) unless you use a process like deliberate feedback to be corrected. Personally I thin…

"Output" only reviews information. Useful, but not sufficient.

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#259

Post by himinlomax »

shmat wrote: post #129
lottin wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a highly effective method in my experience. Also don't forget the production side, you need to practice talking and writing too. You can talk to yourself if you have no one to talk to, it works just as well.

Production is absolutely important, but harder to do. I talk to 3 French people every week, 30 minutes in French in exchange for 30 minutes in English. I also have conversations with myself in French (like a schizophrenic). Where I have been lazy is writing. I need to write more and get it corrected.

Well I learned English by posting to message boards like this one (and before that Usenet) over the past 25 years, so you could try that.

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#260

Post by jowdones »

jamil7 wrote: post #240
jowdones wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Romanian who had to study German in school, I testify to that. I still remember the word "Umweltverschmutzung" but no idea if it's der, die, das, dem or des umweltverschmutzung :P

A small trick with the words ending in "-ung" is they're often feminine so "die" in nomanative.

I would have bet on "die", just coze it "sounds right".
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