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It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

nytimes.com

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Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#261

Post by Mikulas0 »

intertextuality wrote: post #222
adventured wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had not previously heard of Anki. In briefly looking at the site it sounds very interesting. Can you describe what your daily routine is like in using it?

Let me first describe my initial routine, and how it spiraled into me quitting anki entirely. Then my current routine which actually works. When I started learning Korean, I grabbed anki + Evita's 5k words deck. It's a pretty good deck, but lacks sentence samples. I use the mac osx app at home and the ios app on the go. The ios app is $20 but you can use ankiweb.net to do reviews. The android app is free. For about s…

What benchmark do you use for marking a kanji card as known in Anki? Do you just memorize the meaning of each kanji, or memorize the readings too? I'm looking to get back into studying japanese myself.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#262

Post by astrobe_ »

foldr wrote: post #245
ebruchez wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Native French speaker here. Maybe it's confusing to discuss this in terms of syllables unless you are a linguist. If you just want to learn how to say the word, what matters is how people actually say the word. Specifically, you pronounce "rien" in one quick shot. (So it's definitely closer to one syllable if we care about this. But if I am to say the word very slowly to teach somebody how it sounds, it might progres…

>But if I am to say the word very slowly to teach somebody how it sounds, it might progressively become closer to two syllables. Languages are complicated. I'm sure that's true, but I don't think it gives rise to any real doubt as to the syllable count. For example, you could stretch out the English word "near" into two syllables in very slow and deliberate speech, but it's definitely a monosyllabic word in most (pos…

You are talking about a diaeresis [1]

For "rien" in particular, I'd say speakers can do that diaeresis as a sort of emphasis. For instance "Tu n'as rien fait! Rien! ("you did nothing! Nothing!"). The first "rien" can be said as a single-syllable world, while the second one can be pronounced as a two-syllables.

It also may be pronounced slightly differently in various places in France (regional accents).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaeresis_%28prosody%29

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#263

Post by wrycoder »

bitwize wrote: post #251
salawat wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, it isn't actually. I did a short foray into learning Morse Code, and I ran into what I found to be the biggest barrier to learning new languages. The bloody lookup table phenomena. What happens is your mental representation maps the Morse sequence->your primary language character->whatever the message then actually means. This is a very high overhead mental process, and one specifically advised against by fluent…

Telegraph and radio operators used to write down the messages, character by character, as soon as they heard each character in Morse, and only once the entire message had been received attempt to read or interpret it. There are artifacts of this even in modern voice radio usage; e.g., "do you copy?" meant originally, did you successfully copy down my message?

You can’t do that above 25 wpm (unless you are a fast typist). You have to transition to hearing entire words.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#264

Post by eagsalazar2 »

Courses, instructors, etc all fall short because ultimately mastery requires deep and prolonged immersion which the author and many people post-middle age never commit to. Her kids live in France yet she talks in English at home, doesn't watch TV/movies in French, and doesn't read much in French (inferred from one of her comments) - all her choices and all sufficiently big deal to 100% explain her lack of mastery.

I'm far from convinced based on anything in this article that learning languages is actually harder for middle aged people at all vs kids. Consider typical 2nd language education in the US: 1hr/day for 4 years during highschool - those 14-18yr olds speak terribly also and the reason has nothing to do with age.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#265

Post by dazc »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #214
dsjoerg wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What are Duolingo/Babel not doing that they should?

They're shit for teaching grammar, verb conjugations and the vocabulary is quite limited, in some cases not even close to what native speakers use.

I have found Duolingo great for revising basic vocabulary (Spanish) but, yeah, for grammar not at all.

I have also found that anything I have really learned (in a sense that I don't need to revise, I just know it) has not come from the comfort of an app but from the real struggle of trying to converse with someone in their native language.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#266

Post by blacksqr »

irq11 wrote: post #260
blacksqr wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>you’ll find a lot of people who spend 95% of their time futzing with learning tools, and 5% (or less) actually studying Exactly my point. It shouldn't be necessary to spend all that time futzing with tools, the tools should be there, ready to use. >you need to listen and interact with people in the native language. Such people are not available in all areas. Online availability does not scale. These are precisely th…

”Exactly my point. It shouldn't be necessary to spend all that time futzing with tools, the tools should be there, ready to use.” It isn’t necessary. The tools are fine, and/or improving them won’t solve the fundamental problem. People are just procrastinating. ”Online availability does not scale. These are precisely the issues that digital tools should be good at addressing, but have failed to do so.” Short of makin…

If that is true, then not only digital tools, but all books, classes, tests and every other technique aside from what you recommend for language learning are fraudulent wastes of time.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#267

Post by salawat »

mi100hael wrote: post #147
salawat wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, it isn't actually. I did a short foray into learning Morse Code, and I ran into what I found to be the biggest barrier to learning new languages. The bloody lookup table phenomena. What happens is your mental representation maps the Morse sequence->your primary language character->whatever the message then actually means. This is a very high overhead mental process, and one specifically advised against by fluent…

The Koch method of learning morse code addresses that by never introducing an intermediate visual representation of the dits and dahs. Instead, you listen to audio sequences and transcribe them directly to the characters of your language. So instead of learning the language visually, you learn to understand the sounds which is far more natural. There's a great free site that teaches morse code in this fashion if you…

Thanks. I'll have to check it out!

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#268

Post by intertextuality »

Mikulas0 wrote: post #261
intertextuality wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me first describe my initial routine, and how it spiraled into me quitting anki entirely. Then my current routine which actually works. When I started learning Korean, I grabbed anki + Evita's 5k words deck. It's a pretty good deck, but lacks sentence samples. I use the mac osx app at home and the ios app on the go. The ios app is $20 but you can use ankiweb.net to do reviews. The android app is free. For about s…

What benchmark do you use for marking a kanji card as known in Anki? Do you just memorize the meaning of each kanji, or memorize the readings too? I'm looking to get back into studying japanese myself.

I'm following this method: https://nihongoshark.com/learn-kanji/

I'm not learning the readings yet since a lot of them have multiple readings, some less common than others. My thought process was to learn the kanji, then the readings as I learn daily vocabulary through Genki 1 / TaeKim's grammar guide.

I don't know if this is actually the best way to start learning Japanese but I thought it would be fun just as a personal goal to learn the 2,200 kanji before anything. Studying Korean takes up the lion's share of my time so I haven't started studying Japanese grammar much yet.

---

I just follow the default progression of anki. 1 day -> 2 days -> etc. If it takes me zero effort to remember, I grade it as Easy. If it takes me more than 3-4 seconds to remember it, I grade it as Hard. If it takes more than 10-15 seconds I reset the card and start learning it again.

So far the only resets have been on similar looking characters and some newly-learned ones from the day before if I was a bit distracted.

You can see my progress from April 2nd until now:

https://i.imgur.com/yyHvgf9.png

Some are much easier than others, I marked kanji like 林 (grove) as Easy pretty quickly, as well as commonly used ones like 見.

Re: It’s Hard to Learn French in Middle Age

#269

Post by magic_beans »

hluska wrote: post #95

This is anecdotal and I am a sample of one, so do with this as you will. I have learned to speak French at two particular times. When I was very young, my Grandma Yvette often spoke French to me and I spent three years in French immersion. Now, I am an adult who barely speaks the language, but I have a daughter who I badly want to bless with the French language. So, I’m learning again... I have noticed two things. Th…

Really focus on the movement of your lips when you speak French. French has entirely different physical demands on you than English does. Exaggerate the lip and cheek movement. It really helps with pronunciation.
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