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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

#331

Post by geebee »

gooseserbus wrote: post #330
taejo wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly why I thought it was illegal for people requesting service in French to be told, "no, this will be in English"

If they insisted to be served in French then they would have to be served in French, but what little of the situation has been detailed this does not seem to be the case.

I think it's ambiguous. At what point is there a refusal, and what degree of insistence is required? Someone initiates a request for service in French, the response is "no, no, no this will be in English". Has that person refused to conduct the transaction in French?

I suppose the person requesting service could be more forceful about insisting on being served in French, but does someone have to go through a second round of insisting/refusing before service has been denied? And what words count as insisting (id that is required), what words count as refusal? "No, no, no, this will be in English" seems very close to a refusal to me.

I wouldn't be surprised if this has been formally litigated in Canada, it'd be interesting to know.

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

#332

Post by emtel »

somberi wrote: post #313
emtel wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using lingq.com for about two months to learn Japanese, and I think it's lightyears beyond any of the other tools I've used, which include Duolingo, Anki, japaneselevelup, and probably a few others I've forgotten. I've made more progress in two months than in my previous 12-18 months of (somewhat sporadic) study. I think the fundamental reason is that rather than doing some second-order activity like studyi…

Asking out of curiosity and to learn from your experience. You had mentioned "I've made more progress in two months than in my previous 12-18 months of (somewhat sporadic) study". How could you tell? Is it because you were able to comprehend more of the language (comprehension), or people who speak Japanese told you that you are better (understandability)? The reason I ask is, I seem to pickup words and grammar but a…

Mainly my comprehension has improved. I haven't been doing much speaking practice because the method is so heavily focused on input. I'm not as worried about being understood, as I've never had much trouble being understood when saying the limited things I know how to say. My problem has always been that the response is incomprehensible to me.

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

#333

Post by kazinator »

The 49-year-old author is using stickers on her monitor for vocab and shocked to find duplicates due to lapses.

Meanwhile, 48-year-old me has some 8300 Japanese entries in Anki, most of them "mature".

A few months ago, someone Japanese asked me, do you know how to read this thing I received in a text message? Showed me the screen, where "逞しい" appeared. At first I declined; no idea. Seconds later, though, I asked, can I see that again? I stared at it for another moment or two and it kicked in: hey, wait, that spells "takumashii": strong, sturdy, burly, and such. God damn!

Repetition works.

I later checked into Anki: I had reviewed 逞しい 42 times. That would have included a lot of lapses; words I don't lapse on don't get reviewed 42 times.

(For that word, I still didn't have the confidence to immediately recognize it. This is probably because I have never studied that kanji, and have no other word in my vocab which uses it. It's not in the jouyou list.)

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

#334

Post by kazinator »

panglott wrote: post #220
blacksqr wrote: post #192

It seems to me that foreign language learning is an area where computer technology has clearly miserably fallen short of its potential. Apps like Duolingo and Babel are nice, but they seem to me more oriented toward making the user feel good about making progress then about achieving mastery in any useful time frame. Flashcard tools like Anki and Tinycards are nice, but they lack enough readily available content to b…

The problem is that the tools you need are "listening to and interacting with people in the target language". Human language is a problem of interpreting the creative social signals of other human beings, and there's no way to automate that. With the Web, YouTube and internet radio, the actual amount of target-language material that a person can expose themselves to is hugely, hugely more available than it was 20-30…

As an adult learner, you will never get far simply by listening and interacting. You need listening and interacting, plus intensive vocab memorization and a good modicum of grammar study.

In some ten years of being married to my Japanese wife, speaking as much as possible, and consuming Japanese entertainment (movies, music), I got pretty good at what you might call "household Japanese". That's it. I would forever be stuck at that stage if I didn't embark on intensive study.

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

#335

Post by kazinator »

irq11 wrote: post #239
blacksqr wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that digital tools can't be used to achieve total native-level fluency shouldn't be used as a reason not to try to improve what's available. It should be possible at least to use digital tools to learn to listen to and understand foreign language media at a useful level... I'd love to be able to watch a movie in the language I'm studying and understand 90% of what's going on. But that seems like an impossibl…

If you go to language-learning forums (e.g. the Japanese learning subreddit) you’ll find a lot of people who spend 95% of their time wanking with learning tools, and 5% (or less) actually studying. Everyone thinks the tools are the problem. Moreover, fixing tools is easier and less painful than doing the grueling work of learning a language. As a result, lots of people get caught in the trap of believing that fluency…

Unless you're starting as a small child, you will never pick up words that do not occur frequently just from listening and interacting. Or it will take many more years than it ought to get to a given level.

Knowledge of a large number of these words is required to become competent, because, as a category, those words are coming at you all the time. Problem is, you don't know which one of the many thousands is coming your way next on any given day. The author of this article makes the same remark, basically:

> But there’s also an enormous amount of low-frequency words and syntax that even native speakers might encounter only once a year. Knowing any one of these “occasional” words or phrasings isn’t essential. But in every context — a book, an article or conversation — there will probably be several. They’re part of what gives native speech its richness.

If you don't know these words, you don't know a lot of what you're listening to. You might have this explained to you, and so then in that session you are okay with those words. However, without follow-up repetition, those words will soon evaporate.

I live in a highly multicultural country, Canada. Here you can encounter immigrants who have been here 25 years or more, whose English still sucks; and it's not always due to only associating with speakers of their native language. They use English everyday and interact with English speakers, all right. It's simply due to not mustering the academic wherewithal to study properly.

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

#336

Post by catcromar »

There is actually a new app, just out of beta testing, called Fluent Forever that uses strategically spaced repetition like anki, but flashcard creation is way faster, plus there's audio built in. The problem with Duolingo, Babel, etc. is that they are forcing you to use English in your study of the foreign language. It's much closer to immersion to link pictures to the written and audio vocab you are trying to learn. This obviously gets trickier the less concrete your words are as you advance, but for way more info on this topic https://blog.fluent-forever.com/what-makes-fluent-forever-di... or, better yet, read the book Fluent Forever. The fluent forever method is to learn the sound needed (phonemes), then basic vocab (600-1000 words), then start building sentences to get at the trickier material.

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

#337

Post by baud147258 »

astrobe_ wrote: post #258
baud147258 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I revel in small triumphs, like discovering that a woolen ball on a sweater is a “boulouche” I'm French and I discovered that word today.

That's probably because you're not old enough. It was popularized by an ad in the mid 90': https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xmx1i4

It's true that if I heard it at that time, I wouldn't have remembered it.

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

#338

Post by Kaiyou »

adrianN wrote: post #211
Kaiyou wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you learn a language through memorization of words you're being very, very inefficient. Very. Learning a language requires next to no effort (compared to 30 words per day) and can be done at any age within six months. The strange thing is that nearly everyone does language learning wrong. I think it's because schools set everyone up for failure by teaching how to learn a language in a way, that's just so very inef…

You can redefine fluency to be something that is achievable with dedicated study in six months, but most people probably wouldn't call themselves fluent with the very limited vocabulary you can acquire in that time. Elementary school children know in excess of 20k words. I really don't believe that you can remember over a hundred new words every day without forgetting a single one.

No dedicated study. Basically zero effort on your part is required, you just need to spend some time on it everyday. Your vocabulary will build itself over time if you keep engaging with the language. It takes ten years to mastery, just like with everything else. Six months until you can communicate in the new language. English is my second language and I speak from experience.

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

#339

Post by intrasight »

gerbilly wrote: post #277
hnnmzh wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, can you please elaborate more?

More like 18th century French. There were two accents in common use in 18th century France: the 'bel usage' and the 'grand usage'. The short explanation is that after the French revolution, Parisians adopted the 'grand usage'—a pronunciation which till then had been reserved for public speeches and church sermons—for everyday speech. The 'bel usage' was the usual French 'code' reserved for every day use. It more clos…

Thanks for that
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