Language Learning is Broken(thangudu.com)
thangudu.com
Language Learning is Broken
http://thangudu.com/2013/01/27/language-learning-is-broken/
57 comments
I had a friend move to Argentina and in order to improve his Spanish, he found a group that pairs fluent Spanish speakers learning English with fluent English speakers learning Spanish for one-on-one conversations. It was pretty informal in that the pair could meet wherever and whenever they wanted. Half the time they spoke in English, half the time they spoke in Spanish.
Perhaps software that scheduled live video chats of similar conversations between learners could help with the problem you bring up? Given that most language software aims at multiple languages anyway, seems like the only challenge is technical with the video chat (latency might be a problem although audio is pretty good too) and the scheduling interface. And I suppose enough users in each language willing to do such conversations.
Perhaps software that scheduled live video chats of similar conversations between learners could help with the problem you bring up? Given that most language software aims at multiple languages anyway, seems like the only challenge is technical with the video chat (latency might be a problem although audio is pretty good too) and the scheduling interface. And I suppose enough users in each language willing to do such conversations.
There are actually quite a few startups doing this already, e.g. Verbling: https://www.verbling.com/
While we can't give you conversational interaction with a human-level AI yet, I've been working for the past couple of years on a project for The Language Flagship (http://www.thelanguageflagship.org/) to try to solve the real-world context problem by creating a searchable database of re-usable multimedia resources for language learning, so that you can always give a learner new stuff. It's kinda like Duolingo, teaching you to translate the web, but with audio, images, and video along with the text. It's mostly vaporware still, but we do have some really nice tools for teachers for making playlists, video captions, transcripts, and annotations.
Additionally, there's a startup here in Utah that we've been working with called MovieMouth, which produces software and auxilliary content for teaching language comprehension via popular movies (they get around copyright problems by only providing playlist files and original content like test questions, and requiring that end-users have independent access to the video media to feed into their software). They've been running beta tests, teaching English with Pixar movies, down in Chile .
I couldn't agree more. My startup, Nulu ( http://www.nulu.com/ ) , is focused on two big things: bringing people new and interesting content every day (we use news content as the basis for learning) and super high quality support (native speaker translation done at the phrase level, as well as professional voice artist audio for the whole story).
Check it out, and let me know whether it's useful to you! We do English for Spanish speakers and Spanish for English speakers right now, with many more languages to come.
Check it out, and let me know whether it's useful to you! We do English for Spanish speakers and Spanish for English speakers right now, with many more languages to come.
This is a problem worth talking about. The good news is there's a lot of innovation in the field, and language learning in a few more years will be completely different than it was, say, 10 years ago.
I mostly agree with the author's four points - I've tried a number of the well-known systems over the years, and none of them really worked for me. I mean, sure, you can brute-force your way through them, but I can probably just pick up a dictionary and do it on my own with about the same level of success.
The first service I've used that has actually worked for me is http://www.memrise.com. I've been using it the last few months to bash my head against the wall that is Mandarin, with surprising (for me) success so far. The 1.0 "launch" removed some very useful features from the beta, but overall it's still pretty good. Incidentally, I guess it's a counter-example to "flashcard systems don't work" - they can, if done right.
Recently I found http://www.fluentu.com/, which I'm also very excited about. I don't think by itself it can get anyone very far in a language, but once I'm at an intermediate level it should be a great addition.
Did I mention both those sites are free? (bye bye #4, excessively boring costly systems).
My point is I'm gradually cobbling together a system from multiple parts that works for me. There's a lot of innovation in the field, and more and more new options will become available. I don't know if we'll ever find a "holy grail" that works for everyone at the same time, but there's no reason why it can't be achieved for anyone by combining several free or low-cost resources.
Edit: one of the biggest problems is how boring most of the systems are. Starting a new language from scratch is difficult enough on its own, but it doesn't NEED to be boring. Look at children's cartoons compared to any typical adult learning video...
I mostly agree with the author's four points - I've tried a number of the well-known systems over the years, and none of them really worked for me. I mean, sure, you can brute-force your way through them, but I can probably just pick up a dictionary and do it on my own with about the same level of success.
The first service I've used that has actually worked for me is http://www.memrise.com. I've been using it the last few months to bash my head against the wall that is Mandarin, with surprising (for me) success so far. The 1.0 "launch" removed some very useful features from the beta, but overall it's still pretty good. Incidentally, I guess it's a counter-example to "flashcard systems don't work" - they can, if done right.
Recently I found http://www.fluentu.com/, which I'm also very excited about. I don't think by itself it can get anyone very far in a language, but once I'm at an intermediate level it should be a great addition.
Did I mention both those sites are free? (bye bye #4, excessively boring costly systems).
My point is I'm gradually cobbling together a system from multiple parts that works for me. There's a lot of innovation in the field, and more and more new options will become available. I don't know if we'll ever find a "holy grail" that works for everyone at the same time, but there's no reason why it can't be achieved for anyone by combining several free or low-cost resources.
Edit: one of the biggest problems is how boring most of the systems are. Starting a new language from scratch is difficult enough on its own, but it doesn't NEED to be boring. Look at children's cartoons compared to any typical adult learning video...
I don't know if that means bye bye #4. Those 2 solutions are flash card systems. It might be worth testing fluentu by spending a considerable amount of time on the system and then talking to a native speaker.
Just because it's free, doesn't mean it's free, especially if it doesn't get you closer to the holy grail.
I think innovators should strive to get to the holy grail. The potential upside would be huge.
Just because it's free, doesn't mean it's free, especially if it doesn't get you closer to the holy grail.
I think innovators should strive to get to the holy grail. The potential upside would be huge.
Memrise works quite well for vocabulary building, but more interestingly they're working towards becoming a "course platform", where people can create and sell their own courses. It's not necessarily an innovative learning method (though the emphasis on "mems" and the practice schedule are quite effective), but it's an interesting business model - if it works and if the quality is reasonably high, the cost to produce and distribute the material will be much lower than the big players.
The amazing thing about FluentU is that you can dissect videos of native speakers and understand exactly what's going on, in context, at your own pace. Again, I haven't used it enough to say that it works, but it should be quite effective at learning to understand the spoken language. Again, their costs are relatively low - they use Youtube videos and all they have to do is translate and annotate them.
Then you have an entire army of sites that let you find native speakers to talk to over Skype, or to correct your daily written "journal", etc.
None of those by itself is the "holy grail", but there's a lot of experimentation and innovation. I would argue that combining several of those methods can be at least as effective as something like Pimsleur or Rosetta Stone, at a much lower cost. And I think figuring out how to combine them into a single coherent service will be the holy grail you want.
The amazing thing about FluentU is that you can dissect videos of native speakers and understand exactly what's going on, in context, at your own pace. Again, I haven't used it enough to say that it works, but it should be quite effective at learning to understand the spoken language. Again, their costs are relatively low - they use Youtube videos and all they have to do is translate and annotate them.
Then you have an entire army of sites that let you find native speakers to talk to over Skype, or to correct your daily written "journal", etc.
None of those by itself is the "holy grail", but there's a lot of experimentation and innovation. I would argue that combining several of those methods can be at least as effective as something like Pimsleur or Rosetta Stone, at a much lower cost. And I think figuring out how to combine them into a single coherent service will be the holy grail you want.
Students of language are always looking for the best way to learn, but there isn't any "best way" in my experience. Each person learns differently.
Personal motivation is without a doubt the largest factor in whether a person successfully learns a language. To that end, I think the goal of any classroom or learning system should be to maintain a high level of learner motivation. There is a strong correlation for students of foreign languages (i.e. a language that is not spoken in the country where it is being learned) who are strongly interested in the culture of the language they are learning and their success at learning that language. This is because their motivation to learn, driven by their desire to experience the culture more completely, remains high throughout the learning process. Students who take language courses as part of a compulsory education curriculum, or who are studying out of casual interest, lose motivation quickly regardless of the learning system.
As a language teacher, I try to expose my students to as many learning techniques as possible. Some students successfully increase their vocabulary using word lists and flashcards, others require the pressure of real communication to acquire new words.
There will never be one "best way" to learn, so my advice to any learner is to try as many learning systems as possible, expose yourself to as much media in that language as possible, and constantly change it up so that you don't lose motivation.
I wouldn't say that language learning is broken, but rather that students who begin learning a language have misguided expectations about how difficult and time consuming it actually is. If you, as an adult learner, can learn just one foreign language fluently in your lifetime, you are doing well.
Personal motivation is without a doubt the largest factor in whether a person successfully learns a language. To that end, I think the goal of any classroom or learning system should be to maintain a high level of learner motivation. There is a strong correlation for students of foreign languages (i.e. a language that is not spoken in the country where it is being learned) who are strongly interested in the culture of the language they are learning and their success at learning that language. This is because their motivation to learn, driven by their desire to experience the culture more completely, remains high throughout the learning process. Students who take language courses as part of a compulsory education curriculum, or who are studying out of casual interest, lose motivation quickly regardless of the learning system.
As a language teacher, I try to expose my students to as many learning techniques as possible. Some students successfully increase their vocabulary using word lists and flashcards, others require the pressure of real communication to acquire new words.
There will never be one "best way" to learn, so my advice to any learner is to try as many learning systems as possible, expose yourself to as much media in that language as possible, and constantly change it up so that you don't lose motivation.
I wouldn't say that language learning is broken, but rather that students who begin learning a language have misguided expectations about how difficult and time consuming it actually is. If you, as an adult learner, can learn just one foreign language fluently in your lifetime, you are doing well.
Learning a different language is very difficult, and IMO, a certain personal sense of necessity is necessary.
That necessity could be to be able to comunicate with others, living in a foreign land; or to be able to understand cultural products (like songs, books, movies, etc.), but I think if it's not present, or it's just a "I'd like/love to" level, is almost impossible to achieve a fluent level. Think of an English speaker that gets a lot of people just speaking to her in English, instead on their own different languages. It is too easy just to give up.
That necessity could be to be able to comunicate with others, living in a foreign land; or to be able to understand cultural products (like songs, books, movies, etc.), but I think if it's not present, or it's just a "I'd like/love to" level, is almost impossible to achieve a fluent level. Think of an English speaker that gets a lot of people just speaking to her in English, instead on their own different languages. It is too easy just to give up.
Very good answer in my opinion. However, it doesn't mean that technology can't help motivated students on the way. Many motivated students might be turned away because they don't know where to begin, or the learning curve is too difficult. By using the right tools you might make better use of your time. But ultimately you need intrinsic motivation.
Something I have always been interested in is developing videogames with the idea of teaching another language as a goal. Imagine a game such as Skyrim, a rather large and open world, but designed such that its goal was to teach you another language as you played the game.
Of course one can just change the language of the actual game Skyrim, and this is decent for learning new medieval themed vocabulary, but imagine if the game were designed with the concept of language learning in mind.
At the beginning of the game, the characters would speak clearly and with simple vocabulary. Perhaps with subtitles of written text in the same language. Maybe even with an English (or whatever your native language is) subtitle if you are really having trouble with a task.
The vocabulary used would go along the same pattern of reinforcing while slowly building more.
I think it might be a neat concept to explore, to learn a language passively while playing a fun game.
Of course one can just change the language of the actual game Skyrim, and this is decent for learning new medieval themed vocabulary, but imagine if the game were designed with the concept of language learning in mind.
At the beginning of the game, the characters would speak clearly and with simple vocabulary. Perhaps with subtitles of written text in the same language. Maybe even with an English (or whatever your native language is) subtitle if you are really having trouble with a task.
The vocabulary used would go along the same pattern of reinforcing while slowly building more.
I think it might be a neat concept to explore, to learn a language passively while playing a fun game.
Totally. I did this with the Diablo games et al. to aid in learning Polish, and it was very effective, even though language learning was probably as far from Blizzard's mind as you can get. The problem is that you need the really high production values of AAA games to keep people engaged. A studio prioritizing language learning to any degree will have a very hard time putting on the polish (not Polish...joke!) required to retain players.
I've thought a lot about this problem as well, and the best I can think of is to create mods, so you have the solid game engine and story already in place, and can then solve the language learning problem on top of that.
I've thought a lot about this problem as well, and the best I can think of is to create mods, so you have the solid game engine and story already in place, and can then solve the language learning problem on top of that.
Mods are indeed a good idea. I have played through Skyrim in both French and German and, even though I already spoke those languages with a decent amount of competency, it really helped with various grammar and vocabulary aspects.
I've been thinking about this for years. Recently, I tried to persuade Double Fine to introduce some English-learner-friendly features in their upcoming adventure game, but I got the feeling that it's a very low priority issue for them.
Here's a blog post I wrote about this topic: http://www.antimoon.com/blog/2012/06/making-adventure-games-...
Here's a blog post I wrote about this topic: http://www.antimoon.com/blog/2012/06/making-adventure-games-...
"Flashcard systems don't work"
No one tool is going to do everything. Flashcards are actually pretty good for acquiring masses of vocabulary. But it doesn't help you put those words together coherently or even enable you to comprehend what you hear.
Language acquisition is all about growing a set of extremely complex interconnections between brain cells. You need to grow a massive number of interconnections between many areas of the brain (including to sensory and emotional areas) and you need to strengthen those connections by repeated firing.
Software, books, audio and video can play a supportive role but there's a big chunk of the brain development that is only going to come from struggling to express your own mind and to interact with real people in real time.
No one tool is going to do everything. Flashcards are actually pretty good for acquiring masses of vocabulary. But it doesn't help you put those words together coherently or even enable you to comprehend what you hear.
Language acquisition is all about growing a set of extremely complex interconnections between brain cells. You need to grow a massive number of interconnections between many areas of the brain (including to sensory and emotional areas) and you need to strengthen those connections by repeated firing.
Software, books, audio and video can play a supportive role but there's a big chunk of the brain development that is only going to come from struggling to express your own mind and to interact with real people in real time.
Agreed; flashcards have worked quite well for me for learning lots of words. Also for me, vocabulary is normally the limiting factor, while Getting grammar an pronounciation up to a usable level is a lot easier. I guess that differs from individual to individual.
Trying to work with flashcards without a context (Learn the 1000 nost common words!), however, doesn't work at all. The words need to belong in a context with which I'm familiar, such as a book, film, or recurring conversation topic.
My attempt at vocabulary training (shameless plug, you call it): http://vocabulous.net. But that's pretty much only vocabulary, still on the drawing board on the rest of the components.
That said, the most important thing for the next big thing in language learning is that it's fun. Very few users will stick with it on willpower alone. Good thougts on this is at http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com. If I ever get the idea to learn japanese I'd check his stuff out.
Trying to work with flashcards without a context (Learn the 1000 nost common words!), however, doesn't work at all. The words need to belong in a context with which I'm familiar, such as a book, film, or recurring conversation topic.
My attempt at vocabulary training (shameless plug, you call it): http://vocabulous.net. But that's pretty much only vocabulary, still on the drawing board on the rest of the components.
That said, the most important thing for the next big thing in language learning is that it's fun. Very few users will stick with it on willpower alone. Good thougts on this is at http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com. If I ever get the idea to learn japanese I'd check his stuff out.
"Flashcards are actually pretty good for acquiring masses of vocabulary. But it doesn't help you put those words together coherently or even enable you to comprehend what you hear."
In my experience with Japanese, using flashcards for kanji doesn't really help with long-term memory acquisition.
I agree with your latter point about context; it's better to find an unknown word in a sentence and look up its meaning, then you tend to remember the word longer b/c you understand how it's used.
In my experience with Japanese, using flashcards for kanji doesn't really help with long-term memory acquisition.
I agree with your latter point about context; it's better to find an unknown word in a sentence and look up its meaning, then you tend to remember the word longer b/c you understand how it's used.
Have you tried using Heisig's "Remembering the Kanji"? I have never tried to learn Japanese, but I have heard very good things about using this book to learn the Kanji.
I've heard of Heisig, but only recently.
My method for learning kanji was to count the strokes (it's relatively simple to figure the stroke count for any character: http://infohost.nmt.edu/~armiller/japanese/strokeorder.htm) then use that number to look them up in a dictionary.
But everything I looked up was in the context of a sentence, while trying to read a report at work, e.g.
My method for learning kanji was to count the strokes (it's relatively simple to figure the stroke count for any character: http://infohost.nmt.edu/~armiller/japanese/strokeorder.htm) then use that number to look them up in a dictionary.
But everything I looked up was in the context of a sentence, while trying to read a report at work, e.g.
For anyone using "RTK" I recommend using http://kanji.koohii.com/ . I also recommend that you actually write the kanji out (on paper, or even just tracing it out with your finger in the air) when reviewing, and only consider a kanji remembered when you can render it properly, with the correct stroke order.
how did you use flashcards? I.e. did you use some "refined" form of spaced repetition or just moved a card at the end of the pile?
IMHO the difference in the quality of learning varies greatly across the paper flashcard/supermemo-ish software continuum.
IMHO the difference in the quality of learning varies greatly across the paper flashcard/supermemo-ish software continuum.
I don't remember which set I tried, but their characters seemed disjointed/random and, worst of all, unrelated to anything I was doing at work.
I just found it better to try to read the reports and memos being passed around at the office, and once I looked up kanji I didn't know, I would tend to remember them, since I'd read them in the context of a sentence.
I just found it better to try to read the reports and memos being passed around at the office, and once I looked up kanji I didn't know, I would tend to remember them, since I'd read them in the context of a sentence.
You can use flashcards to learn kanji. The problem is trying to learn them without context and by learning their readings rather than by learning the reading via learning vocabulary which use the kanji you want to learn.
"No one tool is going to do everything."
Why not? Isn't it something they should strive for?
Why not? Isn't it something they should strive for?
I think in a lot of cases, effort can be better spent by accepting a combination of tools (e.g. for dealing with screws in my glasses and screws in my kitchen table, having multiple screwdriver heads is probably a lot simpler than designing one that can handle both).
From the submitted blog post:
"I believe the holy grail of language learning is the ability to learn a language outside the country that speaks it, to a level of fluency that puts the user within 30 to 45 days of advanced reading, speaking, and vocal comprehension fluency once they are in the country." That sounds like an ambitious, but reasonable, goal.
The author notes, while writing in English, "I’ve independently studied the following languages and achieved varying levels of fluency. By competency:
1. Spanish
2. French
3. German
4. Swahili
5. Russian
6. Hindi
7. Farsi
8. Arabic
9. Afrikaans
10. Polish"
That list is heavy on Indo-European languages (with Swahili in the highest place for a non-Indo-European language) and rather heavy on closely cognate languages within the Indo-European language family that share many mutual literary influences. Learning Japanese or learning Tamil for someone who already knows those languages would be a good test of a new method.
AFTER EDIT AS EDIT WINDOW IS ABOUT TO EXPIRE: Yes, Arabic too is a non-Indo-European language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages
and as a Semitic language in the Afroasiatic language family different language family is quite a differennt language from Swahili (a language from the Niger-Congo language family).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swahili_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger%E2%80%93Congo_languages
My (partial but suggestive) list of languages studied before appears in my Hacker News user profile.
"I believe the holy grail of language learning is the ability to learn a language outside the country that speaks it, to a level of fluency that puts the user within 30 to 45 days of advanced reading, speaking, and vocal comprehension fluency once they are in the country." That sounds like an ambitious, but reasonable, goal.
The author notes, while writing in English, "I’ve independently studied the following languages and achieved varying levels of fluency. By competency:
1. Spanish
2. French
3. German
4. Swahili
5. Russian
6. Hindi
7. Farsi
8. Arabic
9. Afrikaans
10. Polish"
That list is heavy on Indo-European languages (with Swahili in the highest place for a non-Indo-European language) and rather heavy on closely cognate languages within the Indo-European language family that share many mutual literary influences. Learning Japanese or learning Tamil for someone who already knows those languages would be a good test of a new method.
AFTER EDIT AS EDIT WINDOW IS ABOUT TO EXPIRE: Yes, Arabic too is a non-Indo-European language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semitic_languages
and as a Semitic language in the Afroasiatic language family different language family is quite a differennt language from Swahili (a language from the Niger-Congo language family).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swahili_language
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger%E2%80%93Congo_languages
My (partial but suggestive) list of languages studied before appears in my Hacker News user profile.
An argument can be made, too, that both Afrikaans and Swahili approach the simplicity of a creole; they're certainly closer to being truly rule-based grammars than most of their relatives (which tend to have accreted a lot more arbitrary classifications, exceptions and etic peculiarities). Standard Arabic is also relatively simple, being more of a regional lingua franca than a typical everyday language (much like Europeans slipping into Latin for political or scientific discourse).
I'm tackling Japanese, but from a reading and writing perspective: http://macaronics.com/
It's not for beginners, though, and there's no emphasis on pronunciation (yet).
It's not for beginners, though, and there's no emphasis on pronunciation (yet).
I just want to emphasize, for anyone hoping to learn writing this way, that you can't effectively learn to write Japanese by typing. It truly isn't for beginners. Some Kanji are so similar that the only real difference is the stroke type and stroke order. Anyone wanting to learn how to write Japanese should, after mastering Hiragana and Katakana (both of which don't take long), pick up an engineer notepad, a brush pen and a modern Kanji learning book like "Let's Learn Kanji", and proceed to practice. Within a few months of daily practice you'll have mastered 250 Kanji, all of the Kanji components and learned a lot of new vocabulary as well.
Just don't attempt to learn Kanji in the order Japanese school-children do. They learn it in the order of conceptual difficulty, not difficulty of writing or frequency of use. Adults should learn Kanji by commonality and difficulty of writing, since our brains have already learned to grasp difficult concepts in our native tongue.
Just don't attempt to learn Kanji in the order Japanese school-children do. They learn it in the order of conceptual difficulty, not difficulty of writing or frequency of use. Adults should learn Kanji by commonality and difficulty of writing, since our brains have already learned to grasp difficult concepts in our native tongue.
You're right in that my site is for people who've already mastered kana and some basic kanji, and there are already so many resources where you can learn those, but there are relatively few for intermediate and advanced students, and that's what I'm addressing.
As for learning kanji by writing by hand, that's actually my own m.o. when dealing with an assignment (i.e., I write all the words out longhand before looking up those I don't know).
But digital input methods have become so much of a crutch, that many native Japanese (especially the younger generations) cannot write by hand any more b/c they forget how.
It's called "character amnesia": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia
As for learning kanji by writing by hand, that's actually my own m.o. when dealing with an assignment (i.e., I write all the words out longhand before looking up those I don't know).
But digital input methods have become so much of a crutch, that many native Japanese (especially the younger generations) cannot write by hand any more b/c they forget how.
It's called "character amnesia": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia
It's an exaggeration (a huge one) to say that many native Japanese cannot write by hand anymore due to technology. Rather, they have forgotten the stroke order on certain characters, or often confuse two similar characters. It's very debatable as to whether this has been caused by more widespread use of computers, or if such "character amnesia" has always been present. The same can be said for spelling: Do you think English speakers never made spelling mistakes before spellcheck?
> Do you think English speakers never made spelling mistakes before spellcheck?
English speakers make more spelling mistakes when typing into a spell-checked document because they know they no longer need to spell correctly.
English speakers make more spelling mistakes when typing into a spell-checked document because they know they no longer need to spell correctly.
> It's an exaggeration (a huge one) to say that many native Japanese cannot write by hand anymore due to technology
Sure, such an absolute statement is an exaggeration, and yeah, it's "debatable," but Japanese themselves seem pretty firmly convinced it's the case.
Practice is necessary to maintain a complex detail-oriented skill, and when many people are doing most of their major writing using keyboards of various sorts, and only writing by hand in very casual and formulaic contexts, there's going to be some fallout.
I think this is rather different from spelling mistakes because spelling mistakes occur regardless of the input method used (computer text entry of western languages is much more "literal" than computer text entry in Japanese). If you write in English at all, regardless of input method, you're going to exercise your spelling ability (even if using a computer lets you spell check, there's still a feedback loop). Japanese text entry using a computer, on the other hand, is completely different than writing by hand; they exercise very different abilities.
Sure, such an absolute statement is an exaggeration, and yeah, it's "debatable," but Japanese themselves seem pretty firmly convinced it's the case.
Practice is necessary to maintain a complex detail-oriented skill, and when many people are doing most of their major writing using keyboards of various sorts, and only writing by hand in very casual and formulaic contexts, there's going to be some fallout.
I think this is rather different from spelling mistakes because spelling mistakes occur regardless of the input method used (computer text entry of western languages is much more "literal" than computer text entry in Japanese). If you write in English at all, regardless of input method, you're going to exercise your spelling ability (even if using a computer lets you spell check, there's still a feedback loop). Japanese text entry using a computer, on the other hand, is completely different than writing by hand; they exercise very different abilities.
No, Japanese people do not seem pretty firmly convinced "that many native Japanese (especially the younger generations) cannot write by hand any more b/c they forget how".
This problem is often reported on the news in Japan, and the problem is that people are forgetting things such as: 1) the correct stroke order for difficult kanji 2) the exact radicals in rarely used complex kanji. For example, 薄 and 簿 look similar, but the top radical is different. Confusing these rarely results in someone being unable to understand the desired meaning, but will elicit eye-rolling and chuckles.
It's absolutely not the case that Japanese people can't write by hand anymore.
A better analogy would be cursive writing. Most young Americans can no longer write in cursive. Their handwriting has become simple, inelegant, and they probably don't follow the "correct" way of writing their letters. But they can still write. Just as Japanese can still write.
This problem is often reported on the news in Japan, and the problem is that people are forgetting things such as: 1) the correct stroke order for difficult kanji 2) the exact radicals in rarely used complex kanji. For example, 薄 and 簿 look similar, but the top radical is different. Confusing these rarely results in someone being unable to understand the desired meaning, but will elicit eye-rolling and chuckles.
It's absolutely not the case that Japanese people can't write by hand anymore.
A better analogy would be cursive writing. Most young Americans can no longer write in cursive. Their handwriting has become simple, inelegant, and they probably don't follow the "correct" way of writing their letters. But they can still write. Just as Japanese can still write.
Perhaps I could have been more clear. I'm not defending your absolute statement. As I said it's clearly an exaggeration, but it's so absolute that it's at best a strawman—I don't think you'll find many people trying to defend it, so arguing against it is kind of pointless...
However, many Japanese people are indeed firmly convinced that Japanese—and particularly young Japanese—have non-trivial problems writing by hand, and that it's because of computer usage. I know this because I hear them say it constantly...
However, many Japanese people are indeed firmly convinced that Japanese—and particularly young Japanese—have non-trivial problems writing by hand, and that it's because of computer usage. I know this because I hear them say it constantly...
A fantastic book for learning Kanji is "Remembering the Kanji", by James Heisig.[1] It teaches you the meaning and writing of each character independent of its Japanese readings, which drastically reduces the cognitive load of memorization. It also arranges the characters in a logical order to speed up the process. A few months of study with this book are enough to memorize the reading and meaning of the 2136 jouyou kanji. These are the basic characters you need for proficiency; Japanese students learn them during elementary and middle school.
(A personal anecdote: I used this book one summer to learn and remember about 1500, substantially more than I could use after 6 years of studying Japanese and drilling kanji the usual way.)
If this sounds too good to be true, it's partially because it is. You won't learn much actual Japanese by studying the characters; you'll just learn to associate them with English words. This might be frustrating initially, but if you're committed to becoming proficient in Japanese this will speed up the path substantially. If you've ever seen how quickly native Chinese speakers pick up Japanese, you'll understand why: the Chinese and Japanese languages have about as much relation as Japanese and English. The advantage of the Chinese speakers is that they already know all the Kanji in their native tongue.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-Japanese-Ch...
(A personal anecdote: I used this book one summer to learn and remember about 1500, substantially more than I could use after 6 years of studying Japanese and drilling kanji the usual way.)
If this sounds too good to be true, it's partially because it is. You won't learn much actual Japanese by studying the characters; you'll just learn to associate them with English words. This might be frustrating initially, but if you're committed to becoming proficient in Japanese this will speed up the path substantially. If you've ever seen how quickly native Chinese speakers pick up Japanese, you'll understand why: the Chinese and Japanese languages have about as much relation as Japanese and English. The advantage of the Chinese speakers is that they already know all the Kanji in their native tongue.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Remembering-Kanji-Complete-Japanese-Ch...
I believe that a serious study of kanji (such as Heisig) is best left for a more advanced level of Japanese. Beginners often overload themselves trying to learn thousands of kanji when they don't even know the meanings of the compounds that the kanji are used in. I believe that Heisig even mentions in his introduction something to the effect that using his book won't really improve your Japanese, it will just improve your ability to learn Japanese. Rather than spend hours per day studying Heisig for months, I would recommend a more traditional approach to beginners of learning the most common kanji as they learn the vocabulary.
For the advanced student looking to master kanji, then a method like Heisig's seems best. However, for those interested in the Heisig method, I recommend this book: Kanji ABC [1]. It is similar to Heisig's but organizes the kanji so that you learn similar kanji together. Also, while Heisig spends much time trying to get you to memorize convoluted association sentences, Kanji ABC simply gives you the radicals (similar to Heisig's 'primitives') and you build your own association sentences.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Kanji-ABC-Systematic-Approach-Characte...
For the advanced student looking to master kanji, then a method like Heisig's seems best. However, for those interested in the Heisig method, I recommend this book: Kanji ABC [1]. It is similar to Heisig's but organizes the kanji so that you learn similar kanji together. Also, while Heisig spends much time trying to get you to memorize convoluted association sentences, Kanji ABC simply gives you the radicals (similar to Heisig's 'primitives') and you build your own association sentences.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Kanji-ABC-Systematic-Approach-Characte...
I think you need to be a bit clearer about what you actually learn via Heisig - it's not accurate to say you're learning the meaning of kanji (which have several meanings depending on how they're compounded or not with other kanji), which you're not actually. And my understanding was that you don't learn the readings either. I could be wrong on that but learning all the readings for a kanji is a terrible approach. Much better to learn them by way of learning vocabulary.
Heisig seems to be best as a way just to get all the kanji into your mind as opaque artifacts, just a visual familiarity primarily. Which can be a huge help when you actually start learning Japanese.
Heisig seems to be best as a way just to get all the kanji into your mind as opaque artifacts, just a visual familiarity primarily. Which can be a huge help when you actually start learning Japanese.
I've been trying to learn Spanish for a year now, I'm struggling and I even live in Spain! Here's the list of things I've tried:
Rosetta Stone - probably spent about 2 months working my way through this.
Language school - 6 weeks, spent most of it feeling utterly confused and wondering why they were trying to teach me Spanish, using fluent Spanish...
Pimsleur - this did really improve my accent and some of the words I'd been using along the way started to become second nature. Still a long way from conversational though, did this for about 4 weeks.
Michelle Thomas - by far the best of the bunch for learning grammar, by the end of the basic and advanced courses I pretty much knew the various past/future tenses. Great base, but conversation still isn't happening...
Memrise - yeah actually, this really did help my vocabulary, spent about a month using it before christmas, learnt a lot and I can see me using this in the future to expand my vocab.
Duolingo - a good base for getting started, not sure how much if sticks though, it has the "lack of context" problem.
Private tutor - this is hands down the winner. I've only had a few lessons but I find this really works for me. The big difference is you can have conversations with complete understanding of every word that is said by either of you i.e. if you don't understand a word they say, they can write it down for you, explain what it means (falling back to english if necessary but generally avoided) and then move on. Likewise, if you make an error in something you've said it's corrected on the spot, often going off on tangent to explain some grammar before continuing the conversation. If you want to learn at a consistent pace I think a private tutor is really the only way to go. You're trying learn to converse in a foreign language, until computers can do the conversation bit the other approaches are all going to fall short of the mark. That's not to say they don't have value, and they're obviously far cheaper than a private tutor but without the conversation part they're never going to be enough to get you speaking fluently.
Rosetta Stone - probably spent about 2 months working my way through this.
Language school - 6 weeks, spent most of it feeling utterly confused and wondering why they were trying to teach me Spanish, using fluent Spanish...
Pimsleur - this did really improve my accent and some of the words I'd been using along the way started to become second nature. Still a long way from conversational though, did this for about 4 weeks.
Michelle Thomas - by far the best of the bunch for learning grammar, by the end of the basic and advanced courses I pretty much knew the various past/future tenses. Great base, but conversation still isn't happening...
Memrise - yeah actually, this really did help my vocabulary, spent about a month using it before christmas, learnt a lot and I can see me using this in the future to expand my vocab.
Duolingo - a good base for getting started, not sure how much if sticks though, it has the "lack of context" problem.
Private tutor - this is hands down the winner. I've only had a few lessons but I find this really works for me. The big difference is you can have conversations with complete understanding of every word that is said by either of you i.e. if you don't understand a word they say, they can write it down for you, explain what it means (falling back to english if necessary but generally avoided) and then move on. Likewise, if you make an error in something you've said it's corrected on the spot, often going off on tangent to explain some grammar before continuing the conversation. If you want to learn at a consistent pace I think a private tutor is really the only way to go. You're trying learn to converse in a foreign language, until computers can do the conversation bit the other approaches are all going to fall short of the mark. That's not to say they don't have value, and they're obviously far cheaper than a private tutor but without the conversation part they're never going to be enough to get you speaking fluently.
Language-learning is broken and remains to be a VERY complex problem. There are so many factors involved - language complexity, understanding of culture, student's age & ability to learn...
I'm convinced that learning a language without complete immersion in culture is doable for easy languages such as English, French, Spanish, but almost impossible for Mandarin, Russian, Polish and others. I'm a native Russian speaker and i can confidently tell you that 70% of native Russian speakers cannot speak proper Russian, mangle vocabulary and sentence structure. I'd say something like 90% cannot use proper grammar. This is after 11 consecutive years of taking Russian in elementary, middle and high schools. This got really bad after the collapse of Soviet Union, which took Russia's impressive Soviet-era education system with it.
Obviously, the older you are the worse it gets. I took English lessons for 4 years in Russia. In the end, i could barely put a sentence together. After immigrating to the US, I picked up English at 14 in less than a year and got to the point of losing any kind of identifiable accent. If i tried to learn it today i would likely never reach the level of fluency i'm enjoying now.
Having said that, I've only ran into one American who actually spoke Russian possibly better than I did (my Russian is significantly worse now than at 14). It was an intelligence agent who interviewed my father when we came to the US 14 years ago. So our government likely has a few tricks up their sleeves.
I'm convinced that learning a language without complete immersion in culture is doable for easy languages such as English, French, Spanish, but almost impossible for Mandarin, Russian, Polish and others. I'm a native Russian speaker and i can confidently tell you that 70% of native Russian speakers cannot speak proper Russian, mangle vocabulary and sentence structure. I'd say something like 90% cannot use proper grammar. This is after 11 consecutive years of taking Russian in elementary, middle and high schools. This got really bad after the collapse of Soviet Union, which took Russia's impressive Soviet-era education system with it.
Obviously, the older you are the worse it gets. I took English lessons for 4 years in Russia. In the end, i could barely put a sentence together. After immigrating to the US, I picked up English at 14 in less than a year and got to the point of losing any kind of identifiable accent. If i tried to learn it today i would likely never reach the level of fluency i'm enjoying now.
Having said that, I've only ran into one American who actually spoke Russian possibly better than I did (my Russian is significantly worse now than at 14). It was an intelligence agent who interviewed my father when we came to the US 14 years ago. So our government likely has a few tricks up their sleeves.
Here's a new comment, based on the other comments that have come up in this thread now that discussion is active. As I learned Mandarin Chinese up to the level that I was able to support my family for several years as a Chinese-English translator and interpreter, I had to tackle several problems for which there is not yet a one-stop-shopping software solution. For ANY pair of languages, even closely cognate pairs of West Germanic languages like English and Dutch, or Wu Chinese dialects like those of Shanghai and Suzhou, the two languages differ in sound system, so that what is a phoneme in one language is not a phoneme in the other language.
http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Wha...
But a speaker of one language who is past the age of puberty will simply not perceive many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the target language (the language to be learned) without very careful training, as disregard of those distinctions below the level of conscious attention is part of having the sound system of the speaker's native language fully in mind. Attention to target language phonemes has to be developed through pains-taking practice.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032
It is brutally hard for most people (after the age of puberty, and perhaps especially for males) to learn to attend to sound distinctions that don't exist in the learner's native language. That is especially hard when the sound distinction signifies a grammatical distinction that also doesn't exist in the learner's native language. For example, the distinction between "I speak" and "he speaks" in English involves a consonant cluster at the end of a syllable, and no such consonant clusters exist in the Mandarin sound system at all. Worse than that, no such grammatical distinction as "first person singular" and "third person singular" for inflecting verbs exists in Mandarin, so it is remarkably difficult for Mandarin-speaking learners of English to learn to distinguish "speaks" from "speak" and to say "he speaks Chinese" rather than * "he speak Chinese" (not a grammatical phrase in spoken English).
Most software materials for learning foreign languages could be much improved simply by including a complete chart of the sound system of the target language (in the dialect form being taught in the software materials) with explicit description of sounds in the terminology of articulatory phonetics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics
with full use of notation from the International Phonetic Alphabet.
http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html
Good language-learning materials always include a lot of focused drills on sound distinctions (contrasting minimal pairs in the language) in the target language, and no software program for language learning should be without those. It is still an art of software writing to try to automate listening to a learner's pronunciation for appropriate feedback on accuracy of pronunciation. That is not an easy problem.
After phonology, another huge task for any language learner is acquiring vocabulary, and this is the task that most language-learning materials are most focused. But often the focus on vocabulary is not very thoughtful.
The classic software approach to helping vocabulary acquisition is essentially to automate flipping flash cards. But flash cards have ALWAYS been overrated for vocabulary acquisition. Words don't match one-to-one between languages, not even between closely cognate languages. The map is not the territory, and every language on earth divides the world of lived experience into a different set of words, with different boundaries between words of similar meaning.
The royal road to learning vocabulary in a target language is massive exposure to actual texts (dialogs, stories, songs, personal letters, articles, etc.) written or spoken by native speakers of the language. I'll quote a master language teacher here, the late John DeFrancis. A couple years ago, I reread the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). In other words, vocabulary can only be well acquired in context (an argument he develops in detail with regard to Chinese in the writing I have just cited) and the context must be a genuine context produced by native speakers of the language.
I have been giving free advice on language learning since the 1990s on my personal website,
http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html
and the one advice I can give every language learner reading this thread is to take advantage of radio broadcasting in your target language. Spoken-word broadcasting (here I'm especially focusing on radio rather than on TV) gives you an opportunity to listen and to hear words used in context. In the 1970s, I used to have to use an expensive short-wave radio to pick up Chinese-language radio programs in North America. Now we who have Internet access can gain endless listening opportunities from Internet radio stations in dozens of unlikely languages. Listen early and listen often while learning a language. That will help with phonology (as above) and it will help crucially with vocabulary.
The third big task of a language learner is learning grammar and syntax, which is often woefully neglected in software language-learning materials. Every language has hundreds of tacit grammar rules, many of which are not known explicitly even to native speakers, but which reveal a language-learner as a foreigner when the rules are broken. The foreign language-learner needs to understand grammar not just to produce speech or writing that is less jarring and foreign to native speakers, but also to better understand what native speakers are speaking or writing. Any widely spoken modern language has thick books reporting the grammatical rules of the language,
http://www.amazon.com/Mandarin-Chinese-Functional-Reference-...
http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar-Grammars...
http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-Language...
http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/...
and it is well worth your while to study books like that both about your native language(s) and about any language you are studying.
P.S. I'm puzzled about the pattern of upvotes and downvotes on my first comment in this thread (which was the first comment posted, when it wasn't clear whether this story would move from the new page to the main page here on HN.) I'm not aware of any factual mistakes in the first comment I posted here, which was a response to the submitted article, nor anything about it that violates the Hacker News guidelines.
http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Wha...
But a speaker of one language who is past the age of puberty will simply not perceive many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the target language (the language to be learned) without very careful training, as disregard of those distinctions below the level of conscious attention is part of having the sound system of the speaker's native language fully in mind. Attention to target language phonemes has to be developed through pains-taking practice.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032
It is brutally hard for most people (after the age of puberty, and perhaps especially for males) to learn to attend to sound distinctions that don't exist in the learner's native language. That is especially hard when the sound distinction signifies a grammatical distinction that also doesn't exist in the learner's native language. For example, the distinction between "I speak" and "he speaks" in English involves a consonant cluster at the end of a syllable, and no such consonant clusters exist in the Mandarin sound system at all. Worse than that, no such grammatical distinction as "first person singular" and "third person singular" for inflecting verbs exists in Mandarin, so it is remarkably difficult for Mandarin-speaking learners of English to learn to distinguish "speaks" from "speak" and to say "he speaks Chinese" rather than * "he speak Chinese" (not a grammatical phrase in spoken English).
Most software materials for learning foreign languages could be much improved simply by including a complete chart of the sound system of the target language (in the dialect form being taught in the software materials) with explicit description of sounds in the terminology of articulatory phonetics
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics
with full use of notation from the International Phonetic Alphabet.
http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html
Good language-learning materials always include a lot of focused drills on sound distinctions (contrasting minimal pairs in the language) in the target language, and no software program for language learning should be without those. It is still an art of software writing to try to automate listening to a learner's pronunciation for appropriate feedback on accuracy of pronunciation. That is not an easy problem.
After phonology, another huge task for any language learner is acquiring vocabulary, and this is the task that most language-learning materials are most focused. But often the focus on vocabulary is not very thoughtful.
The classic software approach to helping vocabulary acquisition is essentially to automate flipping flash cards. But flash cards have ALWAYS been overrated for vocabulary acquisition. Words don't match one-to-one between languages, not even between closely cognate languages. The map is not the territory, and every language on earth divides the world of lived experience into a different set of words, with different boundaries between words of similar meaning.
The royal road to learning vocabulary in a target language is massive exposure to actual texts (dialogs, stories, songs, personal letters, articles, etc.) written or spoken by native speakers of the language. I'll quote a master language teacher here, the late John DeFrancis. A couple years ago, I reread the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). In other words, vocabulary can only be well acquired in context (an argument he develops in detail with regard to Chinese in the writing I have just cited) and the context must be a genuine context produced by native speakers of the language.
I have been giving free advice on language learning since the 1990s on my personal website,
http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html
and the one advice I can give every language learner reading this thread is to take advantage of radio broadcasting in your target language. Spoken-word broadcasting (here I'm especially focusing on radio rather than on TV) gives you an opportunity to listen and to hear words used in context. In the 1970s, I used to have to use an expensive short-wave radio to pick up Chinese-language radio programs in North America. Now we who have Internet access can gain endless listening opportunities from Internet radio stations in dozens of unlikely languages. Listen early and listen often while learning a language. That will help with phonology (as above) and it will help crucially with vocabulary.
The third big task of a language learner is learning grammar and syntax, which is often woefully neglected in software language-learning materials. Every language has hundreds of tacit grammar rules, many of which are not known explicitly even to native speakers, but which reveal a language-learner as a foreigner when the rules are broken. The foreign language-learner needs to understand grammar not just to produce speech or writing that is less jarring and foreign to native speakers, but also to better understand what native speakers are speaking or writing. Any widely spoken modern language has thick books reporting the grammatical rules of the language,
http://www.amazon.com/Mandarin-Chinese-Functional-Reference-...
http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar-Grammars...
http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-Language...
http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/...
and it is well worth your while to study books like that both about your native language(s) and about any language you are studying.
P.S. I'm puzzled about the pattern of upvotes and downvotes on my first comment in this thread (which was the first comment posted, when it wasn't clear whether this story would move from the new page to the main page here on HN.) I'm not aware of any factual mistakes in the first comment I posted here, which was a response to the submitted article, nor anything about it that violates the Hacker News guidelines.
I can't agree more with your thoughts about radio. For me, I found that TV lets you slip in a passive mode where learning isn't optimized. When you're listening to a radio broadcasts, you're forced to concentrate on how the words sound and what they mean in order to follow along, for listening comprehension and building up vocab, listening to the radio is the method that has worked by far the best for me. It usually takes a couple of minutes before anyone recognizes that I'm not a native speaker, even in the languages I learned after my early 20s, and I think learning by radio as opposed to texts or the usual classroom-ish stuff had a huge part in giving me "native speaker" pronuncation (which incidently is almost always quite different than "correct" pronuncation).
>It is brutally hard for most people (after the age of puberty, and perhaps especially for males) to learn to attend to sound distinctions that don't exist in the learner's native language.
Do you think people who grow up bilingual have an advantage in this area? Not necessarily just because they have a larger set of phonemes to fall back on, but because they may find it easier to notice differences and recognize new ones? ("this is language specific" understanding vs. "this is how it always is")
Also, your comment about reading touches on a project I've been working on (and have shelved for about a year). If you don't mind I'd love to hear what you think, I'll dust it off and send you an email once I get the prototype up and running again.
Do you think people who grow up bilingual have an advantage in this area? Not necessarily just because they have a larger set of phonemes to fall back on, but because they may find it easier to notice differences and recognize new ones? ("this is language specific" understanding vs. "this is how it always is")
Also, your comment about reading touches on a project I've been working on (and have shelved for about a year). If you don't mind I'd love to hear what you think, I'll dust it off and send you an email once I get the prototype up and running again.
I have read a tiny bit of the literature on language acquisition, and what I have read says that mere exposure to the phonemes of a language (even absent any attempts to actually teach that language) during early years (definitely before puberty but with greater effect between the ages of 1 and 6) makes it easier to form those phonemes later in life.
That said, I think every second-language learner (even those who will never learn a third language) could benefit from being taught the entire international phonetic alphabet, to aid them in mentally placing (inside the mouth) the sounds they're supposed to be making.
Knowing the difference between 'a' (unrounded open front) and 'ɐ' (unrounded near-open central) vowels helped me when learning the Cantonese phonetic system. Just knowing all the sounds that are "available" and knowing which of those sounds the target language uses is very useful.
That said, I think every second-language learner (even those who will never learn a third language) could benefit from being taught the entire international phonetic alphabet, to aid them in mentally placing (inside the mouth) the sounds they're supposed to be making.
Knowing the difference between 'a' (unrounded open front) and 'ɐ' (unrounded near-open central) vowels helped me when learning the Cantonese phonetic system. Just knowing all the sounds that are "available" and knowing which of those sounds the target language uses is very useful.
Alex, yes, please feel free to follow up about our shared interests. Perhaps some of my writing on those interests, updated after I read the sources you suggest, will show up either here on HN as FAQ posts or as new pages on my personal website, or both.
To answer your direct question, my anecdotal observation is that people who are native bilinguals enjoy a life-long advantage in further language learning, which makes sense on theoretical grounds. I'm not sure to what degree this hypothesis has been put to the test in the research literature on language acquisition, some of which I have read.
To answer your direct question, my anecdotal observation is that people who are native bilinguals enjoy a life-long advantage in further language learning, which makes sense on theoretical grounds. I'm not sure to what degree this hypothesis has been put to the test in the research literature on language acquisition, some of which I have read.
About the upvotes/downvotes: I frequently find your comments to be a little tiring. You frequently repost long comments with lots of links which are merely reposts of comments on a related topic (for instance, your standard "hiring practices" comment). When I see one of your long-winded comments, I always wince a little bit, because sometimes it is a long-winded repost that is not quite relevant to the discussion at hand, and so while it may have some good information, it feels a bit like a hijacking of the thread. I would not be surprised if there were people who started automatically downvoting your comments for that reason.
That said, this comment in particular is pretty much spot on, and is perfectly relevant to the discussion at hand.
One of the frustrations I've always had as an adult male trying to learn languages is that many of the teachers don't actually have the linguistic training to describe some of the phonetic and grammatical distinctions they are trying to teach. For instance, when learning French, I was trying to figure out the liaison and enchainment system; and for the most part, it actually adheres to some fairly universal phonetic principles (though there's a bit of confusion do to the fact that there are some prestige dialect rules which get over-applied to sound more formal, which actually cause you to break those more regular and universal rules; this is not dissimilar to English in which prescriptivists try to over-apply certain grammatical rules to cases in which they just don't make sense). But I could never actually discuss this with my French teachers, because none of them had any kind of education in phonology and so didn't know anything about the terminology or rules.
It surprises me that many of those who teach language don't have any kind of formal training in how language actually works, how languages differ, and the like. Mostly, they are someone who is just a fluent speaker who happens to have studied a good deal of literature in the language.
Edit to add: ah, I just realized that you were talking about your earlier comment, about the list of languages and their similarity. I'm not sure why people would have downvoted that. My experience is that asking or complaining about downvotes on sites like Hacker News (or others where people vote anonymously, like Reddit or Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange) is generally fruitless; if the person wanted you to know why they had downvoted, they would have left a comment about it. If you have to ask, whoever downvoted probably isn't paying enough attention to respond. And asking and/or complaining about it can lead to the thread being somewhat derailed, like this one is starting to be (which is partly my fault for responding). So I've since stopped asking about downvotes; if I know what to fix, I fix it, if not, I just move on with my life.
That said, this comment in particular is pretty much spot on, and is perfectly relevant to the discussion at hand.
One of the frustrations I've always had as an adult male trying to learn languages is that many of the teachers don't actually have the linguistic training to describe some of the phonetic and grammatical distinctions they are trying to teach. For instance, when learning French, I was trying to figure out the liaison and enchainment system; and for the most part, it actually adheres to some fairly universal phonetic principles (though there's a bit of confusion do to the fact that there are some prestige dialect rules which get over-applied to sound more formal, which actually cause you to break those more regular and universal rules; this is not dissimilar to English in which prescriptivists try to over-apply certain grammatical rules to cases in which they just don't make sense). But I could never actually discuss this with my French teachers, because none of them had any kind of education in phonology and so didn't know anything about the terminology or rules.
It surprises me that many of those who teach language don't have any kind of formal training in how language actually works, how languages differ, and the like. Mostly, they are someone who is just a fluent speaker who happens to have studied a good deal of literature in the language.
Edit to add: ah, I just realized that you were talking about your earlier comment, about the list of languages and their similarity. I'm not sure why people would have downvoted that. My experience is that asking or complaining about downvotes on sites like Hacker News (or others where people vote anonymously, like Reddit or Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange) is generally fruitless; if the person wanted you to know why they had downvoted, they would have left a comment about it. If you have to ask, whoever downvoted probably isn't paying enough attention to respond. And asking and/or complaining about it can lead to the thread being somewhat derailed, like this one is starting to be (which is partly my fault for responding). So I've since stopped asking about downvotes; if I know what to fix, I fix it, if not, I just move on with my life.
After I read this article, I decided Chinese was far beyond me. Not for the faint of heart, to say the least!
http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html
In a few years of high school I learned enough Spanish to comfortably read a newspaper or simple novel, looking up occasional words. After some considerably more ad hoc attempts to learn Chinese and probably thousands of hours of exposure to it, I'm able to get the gist of a simple conversation (without most of the details), read idiot-proof signs, and able to say about a dozen simple greetings etc. without getting a blank look back. It's very humbling.
I studied Spanish for 10 years taking courses at Berlitz (not recommended), The Spanish Institute (http://spanishinstitute.org/ - pretty good), a private tutor (a lot more enjoyable) and finally immersion at a language school in Antigua, Guatemala (http://www.spanishschoolplfm.com/).
I found immersion to be orders of magnitude better. After a few months in Antigua I probably learned as much as the prior several years. You get so much more out of spending your day just talking in another language. I remember when I stopped trying to translate from English to Spanish and just spoke in Spanish. It's quite a trip to speak so much Spanish that you find yourself hunting for words in English when you switch back. Spanish sometimes came first.
Unfortunately, you'll lose it quickly. My weekend project is to take what I learned and put it on the iPhone and iPad for both myself and others. Shameless plug:
https://itunes.apple.com/app/id388918463
I've got more content that I used to create a rather ugly website, which I'm about to turn off that I will eventually put in the app. I'll spare everyone that link. :-)
I found immersion to be orders of magnitude better. After a few months in Antigua I probably learned as much as the prior several years. You get so much more out of spending your day just talking in another language. I remember when I stopped trying to translate from English to Spanish and just spoke in Spanish. It's quite a trip to speak so much Spanish that you find yourself hunting for words in English when you switch back. Spanish sometimes came first.
Unfortunately, you'll lose it quickly. My weekend project is to take what I learned and put it on the iPhone and iPad for both myself and others. Shameless plug:
https://itunes.apple.com/app/id388918463
I've got more content that I used to create a rather ugly website, which I'm about to turn off that I will eventually put in the app. I'll spare everyone that link. :-)
Sorry, bit late to this discussion. Took me a while to read through all of it. I think there is no one system that can teach languages fluently. As a language learner, I currently use a variety of ways - from speaking to native speakers, watching movies, using flashcards, playing games and listening to podcasts.
I'm also the founder of language startup called http://www.nativetongue.com If you are interested check us out. We combine language learning with gaming, to make it fun and addictive. We have the following apps available:
- Learn Chinese with Mandarin Madness http://itunes.apple.com/app/mandarin-madness/id494800742
- Learn Spanish with Spanish Smash https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/learn-spanish-spanish-smash/...
I think the ultimate would be learning like Neo in Matrix. Just plug a cord into the back of your head and upload the mandarin lesson module, and absorb it in seconds!
I'm also the founder of language startup called http://www.nativetongue.com If you are interested check us out. We combine language learning with gaming, to make it fun and addictive. We have the following apps available:
- Learn Chinese with Mandarin Madness http://itunes.apple.com/app/mandarin-madness/id494800742
- Learn Spanish with Spanish Smash https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/learn-spanish-spanish-smash/...
I think the ultimate would be learning like Neo in Matrix. Just plug a cord into the back of your head and upload the mandarin lesson module, and absorb it in seconds!
I just want to add that I recently took the plunge and bought levels 1-5 Rosetta Stone for both Spanish and German. I know there are a lot of criticisms about this system, mostly in terms of cost but I have found it to be a huge improvement over any other self study course. Unless you are able to take off time and go live in the other country I think Rosetta Stone is the best option. I would go so far as to say that it is better than taking a night course at a local community college.
I do think the system has it flaws but it is definitely a big improvement over everything that has come before. I think the future of language learning will resemble Rosetta Stone but that it will use machine learning to be more dynamic and adapt itself to things that you are having trouble with, perhaps it will seem more 'croudsourced'. Before Rosetta Stone I was making zero progress with German, after one year using a CD/Book approach I was continually forgetting vocabulary, unable to pronounce things, etc, etc. There is something about Rosetta Stone that is almost like falling into hours of mindless gaming. It never seems too hard to get stuck but it just keeps on pushing what I know little by little. I think that they should use photoshop to make their pictures more cheaply. Also, the milestone segments seem pretty worthless. Sometimes it would be nice to see the grammar of a practice sentence diagrammed so that I could go and read an analytic description of the grammar point.
For German more than for Spanish I'm finding it helpful to treat the Rosetta Stone as a supplement to other approaches especially as the grammar confuses me a great deal.
So while the program is expensive (I paid $500 for Spanish on disks and $329 for one year of online only access to the German) it is the only thing I have found worth spending money on short of immersion. If you have a 9-5 job then most likely Rosetta Stone will be a good time vs cost trade off. That has been my experience so far.
I do think the system has it flaws but it is definitely a big improvement over everything that has come before. I think the future of language learning will resemble Rosetta Stone but that it will use machine learning to be more dynamic and adapt itself to things that you are having trouble with, perhaps it will seem more 'croudsourced'. Before Rosetta Stone I was making zero progress with German, after one year using a CD/Book approach I was continually forgetting vocabulary, unable to pronounce things, etc, etc. There is something about Rosetta Stone that is almost like falling into hours of mindless gaming. It never seems too hard to get stuck but it just keeps on pushing what I know little by little. I think that they should use photoshop to make their pictures more cheaply. Also, the milestone segments seem pretty worthless. Sometimes it would be nice to see the grammar of a practice sentence diagrammed so that I could go and read an analytic description of the grammar point.
For German more than for Spanish I'm finding it helpful to treat the Rosetta Stone as a supplement to other approaches especially as the grammar confuses me a great deal.
So while the program is expensive (I paid $500 for Spanish on disks and $329 for one year of online only access to the German) it is the only thing I have found worth spending money on short of immersion. If you have a 9-5 job then most likely Rosetta Stone will be a good time vs cost trade off. That has been my experience so far.
I think flashcards are popular because they're a good way to prepare the night before the exam.
Language learning schools are popular because they're in fun places with lots of other interesting young people.
Watching a YouTube video kind of sucks the fun out of language learning worse than flashcards do. Not that language learning in and of itself is fun to begin with.
Language learning schools are popular because they're in fun places with lots of other interesting young people.
Watching a YouTube video kind of sucks the fun out of language learning worse than flashcards do. Not that language learning in and of itself is fun to begin with.
Most of this is beyond me; but I have a domain name originally for a translation site that could be useful to someone looking to solve these problems (depending on approach) -- scatterlang.com.
Let me know if anyone's interested.
Let me know if anyone's interested.
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As someone who has learned several languages to near native fluency and majored in linguistics at the University, I think the OP is right on in his estimate of the goal. But the biggest problem software in this area is facing is that language learning is not a one way street. You can't memorize thousands of words in all the contexts in which they occur and expect to be able to have any competency, at least for speaking & vocal comprehensione. Even when the software provides dialoges and attempts to simulate conversations (ie. "Pimsleur" and others), it fails because its the same over and over, mostly outside of real world contexts, where background noise, dialects, and other tasks are involved. A new language learner has to be able to respond rapidly and fluidly in spoken conversation over a variety of subjects if he/she wants to be able to function at the level the OP is talking about, and current software simply doesn't provide the degree of realism in these types of situations.
IMHO, in order for any software to be able to achieve the above stated goal, I think it would need to first have a very good humanlike AI. why? So you can have a "human partner" in conversations over a variety of subjects, where the learner is forced to quickly respond and interact with the partner/software. Otherwise, you're left with all the current options which are at best subpar in comparison to actually living and interacting with native speakers in the said country.