I Learned French in 12 Months • Hacker News Board

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#51

Post by HuShifang » Sun, Feb 16, 2020, 6:37 PM UTC

OldFatCactus wrote: post #45

I've been using Babbel to learn Spanish. Anyone have suggestions for where to go after maxing resources like Babbel and Duolingo? I feel like I hit a wall somewhere and the next steps aren't so clear. Some of the steps the author used look helpful like changing phone language and heavy use of anki

Lingvist [0] has been useful to me for vocab building post-Duolingo. The mobile apps are thoughtfully designed -- you can use text or speech input fairly easily -- and they're rolling out (for Spanish and French so far; I'd expect German will come soon, but Russian seems to be a ways off) the ability to generate domain-inspired personalized courses using sample text you input. I'm mainly practicing my German right now, so I haven't tested it much, but this might be very powerful in combination with Project Gutenberg texts, etc. I also appreciate that they have Spanish courses for both Latin America and Spain.

[0]: https://lingvist.com/

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#52

Post by tacomplain » Sun, Feb 16, 2020, 6:40 PM UTC

I learned french in 3 months aprox. while living in France. Ive arrived there without much knowledge of the language. First weeks I was feeling like an alien. Then I started to understand but couldn't speak. Then I started to use translate and dictionary to build some phrases beforehand to be able to be polite and ask the questions I wanted. After 3 months something clicked during a talk I was watching, I not only began to understand without having to think but was able to ask questions to the French guy on my side about the talk (it was about a ML algorithm). I am a native speaker of a Latin language (Portuguese).

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#53

Post by andrewzah » Sun, Feb 16, 2020, 6:46 PM UTC

scottlocklin wrote: post #6

spenrose wrote: post #2

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/opinion/contributors/lear...

> Being a New York Times Columnist The article (not the NYT one, which is just typical whiney urban cat lady trash) has a lot of the components of a marketing submarine. Particularly obviously as .... well, who is this person? I do think apps are pretty helpful in stuffing vocab in the brain. Mixed bag though. Duolingo is shit for me; they don't have continental Portuguese (Memrise does). The rest of it rings true as…

That NYT article is an example of someone basically failing at learning a language, to put it quite bluntly. Learning a language as an adult entails hard work for years and years.

Living in France will not teach you French, besides "survival French" and probably "minimal conversational French". Even having a French partner won't help at all, unless you both commit to speaking French (and then your partner is put into a weird position where they're your partner but have to constantly correct you)...

Acquiring Superior/Distinguished [0] level vocabulary basically entails dense vocabulary study, daily. And then putting it into practice with usage and recognition (i.e. reading French books). Anything else is far too slow.

> When I try to tell a story in French, I sense that the listener wants to flee.

The hardest part of learning any language is just accepting that you're going to make mistakes. Maybe French people are more snobbish about French (I have no idea) but generally speaking... people understand that you're taking the time and effort to learn and speak their language.

s/French//g

I know people who have lived in Korea for 5, 8, 10 years and are frankly still terrible at it. Some of these people own businesses there! Having a bilingual Korean partner is probably the worst thing that I noticed, because you end up always speaking the language that's more convenient, i.e. English.

[0]: https://www.languagetesting.com/actfl-proficiency-scale

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#54

Post by rgovostes » Sun, Feb 16, 2020, 6:48 PM UTC

I've been reading similar anecdotes lately trying to gauge whether I could reach B1 in a Romance language in a few months of study.

What I've found is a lot of pessimism about how well Duolingo teaches you a language, with many arguing it's a waste of time altogether.

I'm surprised that could be the case though. They have data from millions of language learners processing through their lessons, and looking at their making-of blog (https://making.duolingo.com), the product seems data-driven. They do A/B testing to see the efficacy of new features they roll out. Aside from that, they combine reading, writing, speaking, and listening exercises, and have made some innovative features like chat bots. One language tree includes a few thousand words.

If anything, I would expect Duolingo to be vastly more effective than other methods.

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#55

Post by DmitryOlshansky » Sun, Feb 16, 2020, 6:48 PM UTC

I misread it as 12 minutes, and got really alert for a moment imagining some spooky mind-altering procedures.

Damned age of velocity.

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#56

Post by _jal » Sun, Feb 16, 2020, 6:48 PM UTC

Brakenshire wrote: post #19

burlesona wrote: post #13

I find the timeline believable but I’m impressed (and happy!) to see this worked with self-study. I lived abroad for a while and found I was able to pick up the local language pretty quickly because I was fully immersed in it, by 6 mo. I was comfortably conversational for day to day things. However, I would also caution for anyone wanting to learn a language at home, it’s a muscle and it does fade when you don’t use…

You could just watch French TV, films or podcasts, there's more access to that material now than there ever has been.

It isn't nearly as effective. I've done both - I was an exchange student to Germany, (Landed with 1 year of US highschool German, maybe 150 words.), and was thinking in German in about 10 months. (I was also 17/18 years old, which makes a huge difference.) For the last few months, I've been trying to get more functional than my "taqueria Spanish", and have shifted to listening/watching mostly Spanish-language media.

It helps, but is nowhere nearly as effective as not being able to escape it. In Germany, I remember going to bed exhausted with a headache quite a bit for a period of months, roughly the phase from when I was barely functional to when I was able to take part in class in non-stupid ways.

Watching TV for a couple hours is nothing like that.

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#57

Post by Cheyana » Sun, Feb 16, 2020, 6:49 PM UTC

dbancajas wrote: post #11

Cheyana wrote: post #7

Part of me is disappointed that there’s no link to the article in French. :(

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. :)

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#58

Post by gibolt » Sun, Feb 16, 2020, 6:50 PM UTC

rgovostes wrote: post #54

I've been reading similar anecdotes lately trying to gauge whether I could reach B1 in a Romance language in a few months of study. What I've found is a lot of pessimism about how well Duolingo teaches you a language, with many arguing it's a waste of time altogether. I'm surprised that could be the case though. They have data from millions of language learners processing through their lessons, and looking at their m…

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

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#59

Post by neplus » Sun, Feb 16, 2020, 6:50 PM UTC

throwaway41968 wrote: post #25

Couple remarks on the author's alleged "weaknesses": >Understand strongly accented speech. I understand essentially all the “standard” French without subtitles, but very little of the Quebecois. Most European French speakers have trouble understanding Québecois as well, especially if it delves into slang, so I wouldn't fret much. High level (and written) speech should be ok though. >Understand very slang-heavy speech…

Do you happen to be from Quebec? I'm Canadian by birth and have wanted recently to learn Quebecois French, but have struggled with finding practical resources (as everyone seems to agree most French resources and learning programs are going to give you a rather half-baked understanding of Quebecois French).

Re: I Learned French in 12 Months

#60

Post by bucket2015 » Sun, Feb 16, 2020, 6:55 PM UTC

> 11/18: Started going through the French Duolingo tree

> 3/19: Reached the end of the Duolingo tree (level 1 in all skills, but most were level 3+)

This is pretty impressive. I've started French Duolingo around the same time and have been doing 30 min per day every day; 14 months later I'm about 1/2-way down.

This must have taken ~3h/day of Duolingo.