Ask HN: Most effective way to learn a new language (not the programming kind)?
3 comments
As stevekemp mentions immersion is a surefire method.
When learning Indonesian my sole company for most of the day was my korean flatmate, who had no english. We evolved through some hilarious pidgins to fluency pretty fast.
Necessity is the mother of invention
When learning Indonesian my sole company for most of the day was my korean flatmate, who had no english. We evolved through some hilarious pidgins to fluency pretty fast.
Necessity is the mother of invention
I'm also curious about this. To my knowledge I managed to learn a good amount of Japanese by literally studying every day for 1-2 hours, listen to a good amount of Japanese music. Rented Japanese books to see if I could recognize any symbols and try to figure out what the book was about. I hope this helps.
How many hours did it take for the approach to work?
I committed to this for 6 months. Also I studied around the same time every day.
What also helped me was that on the course of the day I would force myself to count in Japanese and to try to think in Japanese. Sometimes I would be so distracted that I would catch myself actually thinking in Japanese for a good amount of time.
How far would you say you got at the end of 6 months? I took a Japanese 101 class a couple years ago and still remember some basic phrases/verbs/etc and how to read katakana and hiragana as well as probably 50 or so kanji. Been thinking about getting back into it so that I can at least use it at some semi-basic conversational level for my trip.
I would say that I got to the point that I was able to understand the majority of the words on Japanese songs and movies. The reading part on the other hand was another story. Talking I was at a elementary level. I was able to defend myself somewhat.
Previously I persuaded my wife to only speak to me in her native language every Thursday afternoon/evening. That helped a little, but only when I moved and was surrounded by the new language did I really get better.
It took me months to learn to hear AND pronounce the difference between "o" and "ö", and still I get it wrong at times.