I just don't believe his claim: "C1 fluency in French in about 5 months" if he started from 0 unless he didn't do anything but learning the language in the target country. C1 is a damn high fluency:
"Can understand a wide range of demanding, longer texts, and recognise implicit meaning. Can express him/herself fluently and spontaneously without much obvious searching for expressions. Can use language flexibly and effectively for social, academic and professional purposes. Can produce clear, well-structured, detailed text on complex subjects, showing controlled use of organisational patterns, connectors and cohesive devices."
I'm a long-time foreigner in a German-speaking country, learning German after already speaking two more languages apart from my mother tongue, not knowing German before I came here, so I know how many nuances a living language has. Had he say A2, or B1 if he's a language talent, I'd believe him, C1, I can't imagine. I can only guess he didn't actually try to pass some formal verification tests, or he didn't start from 0, there simply must be something he avoided to say. Or he simply lies to himself (and us) that it's actually C1 what he reached in five months.
Yeah, I lived in Germany for just under a year. My great-grandparents spoke nothing but German, and my grandparents were about 50-50. Even being steeped in German my whole life and living there for a year, I only passed the B2 level test after I got back from Germany. Today, I could probably pass the A2, just because I don't know anyone anymore who I can speak German with at any deep level.
C1 in 5 months without living in the country and speaking nothing but that language would put this person into "dangerously intelligent" territory. Super-human levels of language skills. With this "method", I have to wonder if he didn't just memorize phrases and words really, really well. Does he know the grammar and rules well enough to construct a compound thought on the fly and not sound overly foreign? Because you need to be able to do that for C1.
See my response, but I think it's possible. When I first saw this post, my first instinct as a professional (and nationally-certified) translator and polyglot (fluent in 4 languages at some point of my life) was to brush it off. But I see he places appropriate emphasis on vocabulary acquisition, which many language learners fail to do.
It's possible, at the very least. I did this in about 4-5 months at age 17 while living and studying in France (plus I was dreaming and thinking in the language by that point), and I only knew the basics before leaving. I consider myself smart, but not "dangerously intelligent". I have scored very high on foreign language aptitude tests, so I'm not totally representative. But it's certainly possible.
I think you're a good counter-example for what you claim. You knew the basics before -- how much was this "basics"? Couldn't it be at least four years of foreign language classes in school?
Second, you were 17. Third, you were fully immersed in the country of native speakers, probably spending all the time in language learning. Fourth, you say you were evaluated to be very talented for learning languages, do you know where you were at this curve (were you in the top 1% or so)?
What did I claim? I claimed that it was possible for someone to learn a language fluently in 4-5 months, because I did so. To be honest, your demanding tone is a little off-putting, particularly when you're asking personnel questions about my life and schooling. However, in the interest of science, I'll try to answer the questions:
1. The "basic". No, in the US, it's pretty rare to have four years of language training by age 17. I had two years of French before I left, but it was very basic French, on par with the way languages are taught in France. Not, for example, at the level at which languages are taught in Germany or Sweden. I knew the fundamentals of French grammar, but I could speak only very basic phrases when I first arrived in France. I could not carry on a basic conversation in French before my departure.
2. Yes, I was 17. I mentioned that.
3. Yes, I was immersed; I mentioned that as a mitigating factor.
4. Yes, I was in the top 1% of language learners according to aptitude tests. But my whole point in writing the post was to say that learning a language fluently in 4-5 months was possible (because I had done so), not that it had actually happened to the person in question. It may or may not have. But I tend to believe him.
5. What does a diploma have to do with this? In fact, I did not go to a French university, because I wanted to go to an American university.
Seeing the responses of some of you makes me understand a little better why some of the developers I've interviewed and worked with who have strong math/CS backgrounds are so surprised that I'm not able to immediately understand some complex algorithm. We all have different aptitudes, and just because something seems difficult for you, does not mean it is so for another person. I know some of you with strong math and CS training and aptitude are much quicker at understanding algorithms that I am (although I'm pretty quick at picking up PL syntax thanks to my natural language aptitude). I can totally accept that. Why is it so hard to believe that someone who has worked as a professional, ATA-certified translator would be quicker, even much quicker, at learning natural languages than others? If you think an average person could learn this material in a year, don't you think it's possible that a motivated individual with an aptitude for languages could do so in half that time? Isn't it possible that the blog author might be such a person?
Let me summarize: you've had two years of French as a foreign language before you came to France, you are a top 1% language learner, you've spent all your five months in France just learning language and you haven't taken any formal exam which would prove that you've actually reached a C1 level and not B1 or B2. In short, you didn't show that it's possible reaching C1 in five months from zero knowledge even for a top 1% person. Thank you.
(As a top 1% language learner you must have reached A2 only "by osmosis" in two years of French as a foreign language, before you came to France, then reaching B2 (again being top 1%) in five months there is fully realistic.)
When strangers ask you for specific information about claims that you make, they're not trying to insult your trustworthiness. They don't know you, so you start from a place where there's no reason to trust you at all. They're searching for a reason to believe you if you look at it in a positive way.
It doesn't cost me to believe that (if you are good and dedicate a lot of time to it) you can get to B1 or B2 in 4-5 months. C1 is a completely different story though.
I work for an international organization and people around here are naturally predisposed to learn new languages. It's amazing to see how much you can learn from native speakers, however C1 would require many more hours of interaction than 5 months can provide.
Why don't you ask some of the people you work with who are naturally good at languages if they've ever learned a language to a C1 level in 5 months? I imagine some of them will not only confirm that they learned a language to a level equivalent to C1 in that amount of time, but some may also tell you that they learned a language to C2-level fluency in around that amount of time.
We obviously have different ideas what C1 and C2 are. I'm sorry, I know only what exams look like here in this German speaking country for the purpose of obtaining B2 in order to get the right to study and I know how much harder C1 is (as much that a lot of native speakers not trained to write organized texts wouldn't pass it without targeted preparations), and it matches the specification I've linked, see the top post.
Can you please specify your reference for that what you consider a "C1" level? Also please note that once we relax the starting conditions, allowing two years of preparations and avoiding a formal C1 exam, we can't really call it "C1 in five months."
I believe you that you sounded awesome, I believe you you've received a lot of praise for your ability, we just don't agree if that was a C1 as defined.
If it really matters to you, you see my real name. Get in touch with me, and I'll put you in touch with university professors from Europe who will vouch for my progress in the language. But only if you promise to come back on here with your real name (like I'm using mine) and admit you were wrong.
Otherwise, I'm sorry we've both lost this amount of time arguing past each other, when you've clearly made up your mind that no one can learn a language fluently in 5 months, to and even beyond the C1 level as described in the standards posted (the CEFR had not yet been adopted when I was in school).
PS -- And to be clear, I'm not unique, or particularly unusual in my abilities. I've known many other language learners who have learned a language fluently in under 6 months. In fact, most of my translator and interpreter colleagues probably can learn a language in about that amount of time.
PPS -- I'm offline to play with my kids. Good luck.
You admitted you haven't learned French in five months but in at least two years and five months and you're a top 1%. I never doubted you progressed and the results were really good.
You never wrote clearly, have you passed any exam immediately after these five months in France? If so, how was it categorized then?
I agree with the parents that doubt the veracity of these claims. There is so much more to a language than just vocabulary and grammar that I can't imagine anybody picking up on their own in 4-5 months. For example, in Japanese, there are many levels of formality that affect the vocabulary you select as well as the way you say something. And it's not just a matter of using one level with a particular person, how formal you are is very dynamic, and can change back and forth in the same conversation. Also, it's pretty much impossible to reach a native level productiveness of giseigo and giongo (different types of mimetic words) without being born and raised there.
However, if you're a language maven, then I can see how you can obtain high fluency in a short amount of time (although even the mavens I came across had issue with giseigo/giongo production, figure that out). But don't assume the same technique a maven uses will apply to your everyday person. I've studied Japanese for going on 14 years now (8 of those years being intense study: masters program, study abroad) and the more that I learn the more that I realize that I don't know.
Japanese is notoriously hard to master. It's probably not very revealing to use your experiences with Japanese as a benchmark when the blog author is talking about his experiences with French, a language very close to English, particularly in vocabulary (for obvious historical reasons).
You would have a point if the post author didn't also claim to be having the same success with Russian (also rated notoriously hard to master for english speakers). The tone of the article also implies that the same technique can be applied to any language.
That said, I still doubt actual fluency is obtainable for non-mavens even in the romance languages. In my experience, all early learners have a naive view of their own ability, no matter what the target language is.
He mentions right at the start it took longer with Russian.
RTFA.
The US Foreign Service Institute makes estimates for language difficulties for native English speakers, and they seem to be spot on in terms of comparative difficulty—Russian seems to be taking twice as long as French did for me, and they estimate languages like Chinese to take twice as long as Russian.
Agree on the Japanese point. The way you build sentences is just TOO different. You can definitely learn Japanese and speak it as a "gaijin" (meaning using european-style sentences with Japanese words) but speaking Japanese like a Japanese takes tremendous efforts and a serious re-wiring of your own brain as to how you approach language.
I'd seriously doubt if anyone can claim they can learn Japanese to a high level of fluency in a matter of months or even a few years.
"Agree on the Japanese point. The way you build sentences is just TOO different. You can definitely learn Japanese and speak it as a "gaijin" (meaning using european-style sentences with Japanese words) but speaking Japanese like a Japanese takes tremendous efforts and a serious re-wiring of your own brain as to how you approach language."
I don't agree with this. The way you have to 're-wire' your brain isn't too different from what you do while learning a programming language.
The difficult part of Japanese would be all that vocabulary and all those funny symbols and combinations of symbols.
As a Korean learner, vocabulary is a mountain that I make great progress in scaling, yet my progress seems insignificant compared to the size of the mountain.
No, the difficult part of japanese is not about vocabulary or funny symbols. I have a JLPT level 2 certification in Japanese and at this stage, the wording and kanjis is just about memory and practice. What's harder is to learn expressions, idioms, how to use them and how to understand them in different contexts. What you are saying is just like : "as long as you know words and alphabet, then you know the language". There's no way it is that simple.
And human languages are way more complicated and contrived than programming languages. I don't think you can make a reasonable argument to support that it's the same thing.
> What's harder is to learn expressions, idioms, how to use them and how to understand them in different contexts.
Well, that's hard too. But knowing all the words involved makes it a whole lot easier.
I haven't had much success with SRS for Korean vocab. There are so many words that are just too similiar to each other.
> human languages are way more complicated and contrived than programming languages. I don't think you can make a reasonable argument to support that it's the same thing.
I don't claim it's the same thing; I'm just making a comparison. Something like switching from SVO to SOV order isn't particularly difficult for the average programmer. Idiomatic expressions with irregular grammar are going to be problematic, granted.
Why do you feel that the SRS's utility is determined by whether the words are in context or not? In fact, the people over at AJATT[0] have recommended using sentences and never using individual words. You want to practice in the types of situations you're actually going to encounter the language in. And in almost all cases, you'll encounter Korean (and any other spoken language) in the form of whole sentences, or at least phrases.
As an example in the US, we had a co-worker who was from Cyprus but lived in the US for 5 years to get a BS and MS degree. He knew English before coming to the US and spoke fluent English, but would be lost when we talked about US popular culture. Before then I hadn't really realized how often people made allusion to old TV shows, 15 year old politics, childhood books, etc.
Agreed. I'm decent with languages (native English speaker, C1 German, B2 French, B1 Mandarin and Spanish, can fake my way through common travel situations in Moroccan Arabic and a couple other African languages). C1 in 5 months sounds wildly optimistic, even with immersion. I wouldn't consider myself to possess C1 French despite a couple years of classes in school and maybe a year of immersion broken into a few chunks. My German fluency came from ~10 years of classes, including several college classes in other subjects that were taught in German.
For that matter, I know non-native english speakers who don't have C1 fluency despite living in the US and UK for more than 20 years, and not for lack of trying. Learning languages is hard for almost everyone, and for a reasonable portion of the population, it's really hard.
I have seen a lot of foreigners learning French (being French myself, and exposed to international students/professionals in various situations) and I have to seriously doubt that claim as well. I have seen some Americans learning French very fast, in a matter of 6 months, enough to be able to communicate and work in French on a daily basis, but there is no way they could be qualified as producing "clear, well-structured, detailed text on complex subjects".
I trust that some language learning methods work better than others (we can see the disaster of language teaching in schools to understand that HOW you learn makes a difference) , this being said, time spent learning the language is often a critical factor to look at. 30 mins a day, for 5 months is not going to cut it, even with the methods described.
There's just so much the brain can absorb in a short time.
>> There's just so much the brain can absorb in a short time.
Daniel Tammet learned Icelandic in one week. I would be interested to see what backs your claim that the brain can only absorb so much in a short time.
I think both you and the GP are projecting YOUR limitations onto everyone else.
The brain can and does absorb a massive amount of information each and every day. Training the conscious mind to direct that natural ability of the brain is something that is orthogonal to the brains capabilities. Being an Opera Singer (dedicated and focused) probably helps with that task.
Your point? Daniel Tammet is an autistic savant. And some people have eidetic memory. There is little relevance unless we find a method to recreate these traits in "normal" people, there is by no means any evidence that every human has latent super powers.
As a normal person having nevertheless high language aptitude, I reached C1 or very close to C1 in about 6-7 months. I say close to C1 despite reaching C1 level in a test, because I don't think it's fair to claim you have every capability for C1 as described by CEFR just because you passed a 4-hour test, in certain ways you just cheat by learning for the test. Anyway, even that was with a very generous amount of immersion, about a minimum of 8 hours a day including long hours of grammar practice. Still, despite praises from native speakers, at that time I wouldn't assert that I was fluent in speech or writing. Now to claim you can be "fluent" in 5 months just by studying 30-60 minutes a day is a bit outrageous.
I can't tell you how much our brain can really "absorb" and "retain" in one day, but there are very real limits in language acquisition after a certain age. I won't say it's impossible, but to realize your claims, we definitely need a magic pill or surgical operation / cybernetics.
I guess you have never read anything about the brain works. The brain is not an organ to memorize, but an organ to forget. It's a filter for information. You won't remember in 30 minutes a series of 10 numbers you are asked to remember by heart, unless you are exposed to it many, many times. Memory works by repetition. That should be a good observation enough to say the brain is not very good at remembering things, since you need to feed it again and again the same information for it to remember it for a while.
Daniel Tammet is not an ordinary person. You are projecting HIS extraordinary capabilities onto everyone else, and you can see that 99.999999 % of the population is NOT anything like Tammet. So your point does not stand.
Did Daniel Tammet really learn Icelandic in a week?
He studied for a particular interview about his experience learning Icelandic. I don't know how well he spoke in that interview, or if he could cope in situations which weren't interviews about what he thinks of Iceland/Icelandic and his studying method.
5 months without living/breathing the language amongst native speakers, fluency, methinks NOT ;-)
I took 8 years of French growing up (10-18) and I understood nothing, literally nothing when I visited Quebec for the first time (that's a joke, do you get it?)
Anyway, the point is, fluency cannot be gained without living in the culture where the language is spoken. Book learning, reciting phrases, etc. will not give you the auditory queues that conversations with native speakers will. When you mispronounce a word or phrase, a raised eyebrow speaks volumes. Books do not raise eyebrows.
The best way to learn languages is to live abroad, in various places, watch loads of TV (really the more the better) and mingle with the locals.
Finally the absolute best way to learn a language is through your significant other; if he/she speaks the language you are trying to learn, and has no interest in speaking your native tongue, wow, spaceship language learning class of the highest order ;-)
> learn a language is through your significant other
That's a common misconception, and I have personal experiences: actually spoken communication with different native speakers improves your capabilities much more than the communication with only one, given the same amount of time.
I think a significant other helps to get you started, and later is handy for all the little cultural things which C1 fluency absolutely requires.
But you risk using the same terms all the time, getting used to each other's nonstandard pronunciation, and lastly, you may sound much more like a tomboy/sissy by only talking to the opposite gender. I really hope it's not too late for me to stop doing all of these :(
I think we should cut the guy some slack, here. He's laid out a structured plan for anyone to freely follow if they wish. Even if they don't follow it step-by-step, there are still some great tips to improve language-learning efficiency.
Personally, this looks much more effective than the textbook I'm currently using so I'll give it a try. We have no idea whether his timeframe claims are true or not (in which case, how can we criticize?) but any outcome of following his advice is going to be positive.
I speak three languages pretty well, two of them are of Latin origin (Spanish and Portuguese), and Spanish being my native language. I got really fluent in Portuguese in about 6 months, but those who know how close Spanish and Portuguese are, will know that that's not a hard task.
But to get fluent in English it took me some years, living in the U.S. I also know enough to understand Polish, but speaking it is pretty hard for me.
With that said, I can say with a lot of confidence that this guy is most likely to be lying.
Well, if he was immersed in the language, I could believe it. I got to that level in French at age 17 within about 4 months. Of course, I knew the basics before I went, and I was studying in a French school and living with a French family, which made a huge difference (although I attribute my greatest language learning to watching 21 Jump St. in French every day after school -- fortunately, since I had avoided the show like the plague back in the States).
I went on to learn two other languages to that level -- and became a professional translator and interpreter in the process -- but it took me longer because I was never again immersed in a language to the same extent (up to now, at least).
In five months - no way. I went as an exchange student to the US with virtually zero spoken English. I met noone speaking my language for first few months, so it was as immersive as it gets (save getting an English-speaking girlfriend), and yet it took me 3 months to just start conversing. No way in hell one can learn to C1 fluency in 5 month even if it's an 24/7 effort.
absolutely agree, I would LOVE to hear the C1 French speakers demonstrate their savoir faire with la belle langue NOW, with further years of practice post-C1 mastery.
I can guarantee that:
1) you will sound nothing like a native speaker
2) I will laugh
I find the doubters like yourself rediculous. Have you never emersed yourself in anything? Things that seem impossible aren't remotely when you take them seriously and let them consume your every thought. Focus 8 hours a day on memorizing the digit of pi, reading music, speed reading, multiplying four digit numbers in your head, "counting cards" in Blackjack, playing chess without sight of a board, learning JavaScript, playin Tetris, or whatever. You might find that what seems impossible now becomes second nature. You might find that taking something that is second nature to a higher level (speed-reading technical documents, reading symphonies, division in your head, beating level 41, or whatever) is doable in a few more months. Why wouldn't someone who has mastered the basics of a language, perhaps beyond the level of many native speakers in terms of grammar or vocabulary in say three or four months, not be able to reach a truly proficient level in just another month or two? The poster has devised a technique of getting to an accelerated level of learning as soon as possible. If you try, you might find you can do this, too. I won't laugh.
Not everyone has the ability or personality to be a hyperfocused genius working on a difficult task. Even if they could, it's simply doubtful that a learner would pick up everything necessary to be at C1 level in 5 months. On Chinese-Forums we have a few posters who have done intensive full-time study of Chinese using modern methods for months, and I don't believe any of them managed to achieve that level in several months. A2, B1, yes.
See this long debate about whether a guy can achieve C1 fluency in 3 months:
In the SW part of the country, the surf region, there are loads of foreigners, many of whom have been here year-round for more than a decade; still, the accent is poor, the phrasing limited, and the non-native speaker element is absolutely evident.
You may immerse yourself in everything French, but unless you start early on in life it will be exceedingly difficult to attain native speaker type fluency. Language is not just speaking phrases, being able to read literature, etc., it's also being, language is being the being of another culture.
I think you underestimate just how much there is to learn when learning a language that is very different to your own. Learning Javascript, which has a limited grammar and VERY limited vocabulary, really really doesn't compare.
I totally agree. 5 years living in France would be already very difficult, 5 months is just impossible. Unless OP has a special gift for languages, in which case the whole post about the method becomes irrelevant.
I come to France in the autumn and spring, have been doing so for 5 or 6 years; studied French as a kid, and lived off-and-on in Montreal for about 5 years.
I would not consider myself anywhere near fluent; that is, compared to how I am able to express myself in my native language, Scala. Hah, how clever, I actually am a rank amateur in Scala, but its hot, maybe you'd like to hire me?
Anyway, the point is, I've met anglophones who have lived here full-time for several years and, wow, sometimes the accent is just painful, all the words are there, but the ability to articulate themselves in French just isn't happening.
Really, language acquisition has to occur at a young age, the earlier the better. Furthermore, building up a vocabulary is helpful, but you can't think phrases in your native native language and then speak them in another language without creating confusion on the part of your listener(s)
I'd really love to hear the C1s, I think I might have a good laugh -- Skype anyone?
> Really, language acquisition has to occur at a young age, the earlier the better. Furthermore, building up a vocabulary is helpful, but you can't think phrases in your native native language and then speak them in another language without creating confusion on the part of your listener(s)
Ok, i consider myself competent 3 languages(English, Tamil, Hindi). And all three are as different as languages can get(grammatically,lexically).
I consider myself C1 competent in only English. I suspect i might be able to clear it in Tamil as it's after all the native tongue, though not sure, can do it without a month's studying(part-time).
My experience,
I learnt tamil and english during my school days. (english being the medium of instruction). I was fluent* in both in my teens(can't remember much before that, except what seems like episodic memory reformed by hearing). Somewhere around the age of 11/12 i started to learn hindi. but i achieved fluency quick. Infact one of the repetitive grouch/feedback i got from teachers' was "don't write on your own. just reproduce what you read. Newton's law is newton's.". Ofcourse I used to think if you want Newton's words go read the textbook and not my answer sheet.
-- I know i scored a 287/300 in TOEFL. Don't know of any equivalent in Tami l/Hindi, that i would compare to that format.
*-- I mean fluency in terms of forming sentences, by combining vocabulary learnt with/without context to form sentences that express and/or describe processes. Not spoken competency. That came long after that, only when i was forced to immerse myself(school rules around 16 for English and later at 25 when went to do a Master's for Hindi).
Exactly, in the language of the most of the readers here: just like knowing all C++ keywords and class names in the libraries doesn't make you fluent in C++ to the level of "can produce clear, well-structured, detailed text on complex subjects, showing controlled use of organisational patterns, connectors and cohesive devices" (that is a C1 definition).
5000? I have close to 8000 in japanese and I consider myself still a beginner.
Native is at least 20000-25000.
As long as you are continuing to learn then 5000 is a nice start, but you are not going to read novels and speak about broad topics with that vocabulary.
Are we talking about vocabulary usage or recognition? Estimates vary, but the rough consensus for English seems to be that the educated native speaker recognizes around 15,000-25,000 words, but only uses around 5,000-8,000 in their own speech/writing.
The average vocabulary of the average person in their NATIVE TONGUE is just over 3500 words (it varies a lot from culture to culture).
The average vocabulary of a University Graduate in the Arts is 10-12000 words. In the sciences it varies greatly, chemistry, biology and medicine being the most demanding at >15,000.
Someone with a vocabulary of 20-25000 words would be highly educated or very well read, or an specialist in a field.
If you have a Japanese vocabulary of 8000 words, you already have a bigger vocabulary than 74.13% of the population (if you understand what that percentage represents, you already have a larger vocabulary than the majority of people).
I don't know where you got that idea from, but I took an online test for English (which is my native language) vocabulary, and found that I knew about 30000 words. And I wouldn't consider myself to be that unusual.
100 words per day is definitely possible with very clever techniques and hard work, so is a vocabulary of about 20,000 words in 5 months, but to be fluent (C1) in using them is another story. It is certainly unrealistic unless we're talking 8+ hours a day immersion.
I think you may plateau quickly with 100 words per day and I think that plateau is well below 20,000 words.
Memorizing a foreign language word is not just translation, it's about understanding context and usage for that word.
When you tread outside the "trivial vocabulary kit" you lose bijection between languages and acquiring words becomes harder and harder.
Keep in mind I have nothing but my personal experience to back that up, which means formal studies on the topic are more than welcome to enrich the conversation.
>> Memorizing a foreign language word is not just translation, it's about understanding context and usage for that word.
Exactly. I didn't mean to suggest that you can actually "learn" those 100 words in a meaningful way. That treshold is also difficult to measure indeed, I also can't back that up besides anecdote without spending some time looking into research. Anyway, my point wasn't that at all. I was actually trying to state it's not realistic to assume a 100 word per day acquisition, because that would mean you would spend 4-5+ hours a day _just_ to know certain translations of those words, without any context or very little if any. I'm talking about something very mechanic that would gain you very little in real language acquisition terms for the effort you spend. Unrealistic scenario unless you're trying to win a bet.
Also, it's worth to note that this depends strongly on how you actually define new words, i.e. what kind of inflections etc. you consider to be distinct words. In languages where you can derive an average of 3-4 new words for every word you learn this can become almost trivial.
I've thought a little more on the whole subject. What we certainly shouldn't forget is that there are people who are better than 99% of other ones -- by definition, on average, one of hundred around you is better in learning languages than all the rest. I have a friend who's such a talent: after learning the foreign language in school for some years and not leaving her country, she spent only three months in that foreign country and sounds to the native speakers like somebody who was there much, much longer. Now if we'd ignore the years she spent learning language in her home country, it's easy to falsely claim that she did everything "in 3 months." Now the second question is -- what is that that she did.
If you would ask even professors to rate her based on what they hear, they'd give her the highest notes. How people sound is a very important point in the feeling other native speakers have, because those who are not top few percent have problem with that and for them, there is a good correlation between different aspects of their language capabilities. So if some professor is evaluating her for a C1 grade based only on whet he hears in a simple conversation with her, she'd pass it easily. However, if she'd have to write for a C1 exam and the same professor would have to give her a note only based on what she'd write, it would be another story.
Now consider also this: the author of the article we discuss is an opera singer. It's obvious that his "ear" is different than the one of an average person. He hears the nuances better. He is also preselected for his abilities to control his vocal tract enough to be probably one of at least one or even more thousands!
In short, I can easily imagine that he can sound even much better than an average guy who reached C1. Still, if C1 includes a written exam, it's not the same. Take a look at the message exchange between one talented person and me -- I believe him he's better than the most, but still it appears that he didn't understand the point and the arguments to which he replied even as they were in his native language. That's the really hard part, especially as I'm not a native English speaker and certainly not in possession of language superpowers, we can still see how hard is passing the gap between "good" and "the comparable to a good educated native."
That being said, if we compare, let's say, a million people, one of them will be by definition better than 999999 other ones. If the author of the article is one of those, it explains a lot, but then that's the major information missing in his article and the rest of it gives a false hope to 999999 of a million readers.
So I still believe that the article omits some important detail regarding that C1 feat of him. Most probably there is some mix of "small" details missing, just like in the conversation seen here -- some years of a foreign language in school, some years of learning and singing the whole opera pieces in French and a big predisposition for learning languages.
It does not have to be a lie, he could be a prodigious talent and not know it. Some people learn certian things much faster then the general population. He may have a naturally high amplitude for learning language, add a very efficient learning method, and it is not far fetch.
The part that's a bit misleading is the 30 minutes a day he mentions. Those 30 minutes require a LOT of preparation. Also he's a musician, so has "the ear" for it.
Another great resource is Pimsleur. I've used their courses to learn Italian and German.
It's a half hour of audio each day. The key is that you speak out loud. You can do it while cooking or driving, or any other activity that is routine and non-verbal.
They teach you to pronounce phrases very well, and you learn the basic structure of the language. Once you can say "I would like a glass of wine", you can easily learn to say "I would like X".
When I got to Italy, people thought I had been living there for a year.
There are only two things you MUST do:
1. Do a lesson every day.
2. Speak out loud, in a normal conversational tone. The program is teaching you to have conversations.
I love these courses so much that I'm compelled to gush about them whenever language learning is mentioned. They won't make you a native speaker, but you'll quickly reach a level where you can advance rapidly.
I used Pimsleur for Cantonese in 2010 during a trip to HK and have kind of mixed feelings about it. On one hand, it was good for pronunciation. Many people were shocked by how good my Cantonese sounded and had troubles believing me when I said I'd just gotten to Hong Kong. On the other hand, this caused some problems-- people consistently over-estimated my language abilities, and as a result said a ton of stuff I couldn't understand. Had my speech sounded worse they'd probably have modified theirs a bit and I'd have learned faster. The other wildcard is that I already spoke Mandarin fluently, and definitely had a bit of help from all the cognates.
Another downside to Pimsleur I discovered more recently while working on Swedish. They're all about the same! The dialogues and stories got kind of boring since I'd heard them already in Cantonese.
Ideally, I'd like a resource like Pimsleur plus some kind of podcast (e.g. popupcantonese.com) so that I could build more vocabulary at least at a passive level and understand more of the speech I elicit from native speakers.
people consistently over-estimated my language abilities, and as a result said a ton of stuff I couldn't understand
The same thing happened to me in South America. I studied Spanish in high school, but when I asked someone a question there, they started talking at 100mph and I had no idea what they were saying.
I find it's a lot easier to understand Spanish speakers who grew up stateside. They use a more limited vocabulary, and they're Spanglish accent is a lot easier to understand.
> On the other hand, this caused some problems-- people consistently over-estimated my language abilities, and as a result said a ton of stuff I couldn't understand.
Fundamentally, it's just a result of picking up certain attributes of the language more quickly than others. That could be a result of the particular teaching method that Pimsleur uses, or just the natural abilities of the student.
I've had a similar experience to the grandparent while learning Mandarin (not through Pimsleur), where my pronunciation has far outstripped my progress in listening, grammar, and vocabulary. Hoping to remedy this through different exercises, talking with (sympathetic) native speakers, and catching up on my Chinese soaps. ;)
Still, I don't see it as downside of the method at all. If Joe learns how to say "Excuse me, where is the Hilton Hotel?" in Chinese with really good pronunciation, and some Chinese people go on to assume he speaks really well, then that means to me: (i) Joe used a method that teaches good pronunciation from the start, (ii) those Chinese people are overestimating Joe's ability, they're simply wrong.
On (i): any method has to make some choices on what to teach first. I think good pronunciation and listening skills are much important than knowing spelling or explicit grammar rules at the beginning. While Pimsleur is not perfect, I believe it's a good method in that respect.
On (ii): it's possible that Joe got unlucky, or maybe people in that region are monolinguals and don't quite understand that language proficiency is far being binary. It's not a big deal anyway: just learn how to say "I don't understand", "sorry, I don't speak Chinese well" and "please speak slowly". At least the first 2 of those are stock Pimsleur phrases.
For what is worth, some of us foreigners in Japan experience a different phenomenon: Japanese people who can't quite believe that non-Japanese can speak their language.
I agree that it's not a downside. It's just an interesting effect and experience! As far as Pimsleur, from people's comments here I'd certainly consider using their materials.
Regarding your experience in Japan, I think that's a demonstration of why learning foreign languages (and traveling)is so significant: It creates new cultural ties and has the power to jolt people out of their preconceptions and prejudices (both for learners and native speakers). It opens minds on all sides.
On a similar note, I started learning Swedish mostly through months of self-study (reading/writing) in the US, and a private tutor every other week. She was the only Swedish tutor I could find in a 1 hour driving radius, and British. She is a professional translator and also teaches Spanish and German; I was her first Swedish pupil.
Which meant I, like you, had the strange ability when visiting Swedish, of speaking much better Swedish than I could understand.
agreed. This is a good thing. It puts you on the spot and you are forced to try to comprehend what is being said. Even if you only understand a word, you have consumed all and found the one word or phrase you do know.
I'll add my endorsement. Pimsleur was the most enjoyable audio learning experience I've had while commuting, because I actually learned something that has kept with me.
They use spaced repetition and native accents. I hear what I should say in my mind when I want to say it instead of trying to think of words on paper I've learned. Of course, it has its limits (you don't learn to read or write), and only gets you the basics of a language, but it really helps you nail them in a way that makes you feel like you're naturally learning a language like a child does.
I'm only a few lessons into Pimsleur but it is quite interesting. I understand the concept of speaking out loud, but I hope normal conversational tone is not required! I do these on the bus, which means I can mouth the words and speak in a quiet voice, but talking makes me look like a crazy person!
I don't know about pavel_lishin, but I care what other people think because I don't want to be an asshole. I don't want to be the guy talking loudly on his phone on a crowded bus, because that's guy's obnoxious.
The guy who's whispering to himself is fine. Weird, but at least not an asshole.
First, no one talks on the phone at a normal volume when they're on the phone. They always speak louder in order to speak "over" the noise of the bus.
Second, yes, it totally does. The guy loudly talking into his phone is audible to everyone on the bus, thanks to the fact that he's speaking loudly. It's really obnoxious. e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0uTi2qkgf0
With that said, you could probably practice this stuff on the bus without being obnoxious by simply speaking more quietly. You'll still be more annoying than the quiet guy reading a book, but probably not unreasonably so.
Just get a pocket dictionary of the language you're studying with the subject printed large on the cover. Headphones on, same mouth movements, but now you've gone from crazy to studious!
It's a great conversation starter, too, which might land you a conversation partner if you're in a multicultural city.
I thought Pimsleur was pretty good, but I hit a pretty big brick wall at one point. I was saying things properly accented, and I was doing really well in the prompted exercises. But I wasn't really getting any real understanding... I was just getting very good at memorizing whole-sentence responses. And at some point, they try to mix things up and I just had no idea how to go from what I "knew" to what they wanted me to say.
So I was very, very good at my canned sentences, but had no real language ability.
I tried using Pimsleur to learn Dutch, but I must say that I didn't like it too much.
The language they used was way too formal, and people here in the Netherlands don't really speak like that too much.
Michael Thomas courses, on the other hand, have been very helpful. Instead of just drilling how to ask for directions, you get taught how to form sentences.
Then again, it probably comes down to personal preferences.
I speak three languages fluently (Arabic, French, and English), and I have the same advice for anybody who wants to learn a new language:
- Watch their news media. For instance, if you are learning Arabic, then watch Arabic media. It might be tough at first, but just go at it. Be a baby. Babies bombard their minds with input and eventually patterns form.
- Pick a TV show you saw and watch the whole thing again using language-you-want-to-learn subtitles. This can be fun, and well things will be mentioned so often they will stick. This is extremely effective, and my English vocabulary improved dramatically this way. I prefer this to carrying cards and trying to memorize them. Its unnatural.
I'm with you on the bombardment method. In terms of fluency, my Portuguese is 95%, my Spanish is 85%, my Italian is 50% and my French is probably 20%. Of course, these percentages would be best if broken down into reading, writing, etc, in order to get a clearer picture.
I don't consider myself to be a quick language learner (ie, with a 'gift' for it) but I do believe that being passionate goes a long, long way and that bombardment and immersion are key. It's not about the time it takes, it's about your drive to reach the right level for you. Being a language lover, I never just want to "get by", I'm looking for near-fluency or fluency. It took me a good decade and a lot of commitment to reach the levels I've reached in the languages mentioned.
Btw, the OP is right about getting the accent down. To me this is just as important as any other aspect of the language.
Accent in foreign language is a very complex thing. Germanic languages shared same tone. So I would agree that an english speaker could _manage_ the german accent and vice-versa.
The #1 problem with accent is that in order to master a foreign accent you have to be 1. Young, 2. Gifted.
It's impossible for someone who's over 18 years old (arbitrary) to master a different accent (French from english speaking, Cantonese from French/English, etc.)
That's why 6-8 years old who learn a foreign language are so good at it, they have the brain set for learning accents.
You only kid yourself if you believe that you don't have an accent in xyz language and you started learning it past your 20s.
I am actually in Brazil right now and I just started learning Portuguese a week ago. I am basically just watching How I Met Your Mother with Portuguese subtitles. Such a beautiful language. My French helps a lot though.
I know you're already an accomplished language learner, but why bother listening to English audio if you're learning Portuguese in Brazil? If you really need subtitles, at least it should be the other way round: Portuguese audio with English subtitles (readily available in DVDs, and maybe some cable channels too).
Another way is watching dubbed movies on (non-cable) TV. If you've already seen the movie, then you don't care if you miss 80% of the dialogue.
Good point. Part of the reason really is that I couldn't find any Brazilian TV shows that I liked (Movies are better). And second, this phase is really for vocab and not pronunciation, so when I hear a English sentence and read its translation in the subtitles, I tend to remember the structure and some of the words. It just works for me.
After teaching myself Brazilian-Portuguese at home in California over a good 5 year period, I moved to Brazil to perfect the last stage, speaking. After half a year, I moved back to the States. A few years later, I moved again (to Brazil) for a few months and last year I moved here once more. Now I've been here for almost a year this time around.
So I've climbed this mountain and found myself wondering what is next. Seems I'm going to take another stab at Italian since it's been several years since I first got into it. That's what's great about language learning, if you consider yourself a lifelong learner, you can 'bookmark' your learning process for later.
I know right? I reserve a fixed time for each one of the languages I speak and find myself learning few more words every day. I dont know about you, but I see a lot of similarity between the human languages I speak and the computer languages I use. They both require life long commitment. Isn't that interesting?
As a fluent speaker of Russian, and to some extent English; having Ukrainian and Hebrew do well enough for business conversations – I can confidently second that.
Babies have a unique way to acquire languages that we don't have as adults. However i find that reading newspapers and understanding the basics is quite easy (mostly because you already know most of the facts mentioned). But the stuff written in newspapers is not the language you would use in a normal conversation. The TV subtitles thing really works, especially when watching reruns of shows you like.
Movies, too. When I was learning Russian in college, we'd be assigned a 5-10 ten minute segment of a movie and have to transcribe it for homework. It took forever at first, but it really helped my listening comprehension improve quickly.
Oh I don't know. I am actually a native Arabic speaker so never needed TV shows for that purpose.
And there is one issue you will face if you want to learn Arabic watching Arabic TV Shows: Any show you pick will be in some colloquial form of Arabic and not Classic Arabic. The most popular ones across the Middle East now are in Turkish dubbed in Lebanese Arabic (Yeah :p), and seconds are Egyptian TV shows, so you will have to choose. Pretty much any country makes TV Shows in its own version of Arabic, except in Syria where they used to make historical TV Shows in Classical Arabic.
What I suggest is to watch news outlets like Aljazeera, which you can watch online for free [1]. Don't pay attention to the existing perception of Al Jazeera; they are very professional. And, relevant to our discussion, their Arabic is the best around. If in doubt, get a feeling of their editorial policies watching Al Jazeera English, then proceed to learn Arabic.
For Arabic I also recommend learning songs. I learned to read and write (but not understand anything) but the phrases I remember best are Wael Kfoury songs.
I was forced to leave my home country at the age of 3 because of war and then after 6 years in Germany we were given no choice but to leave the country since the refugees were costing the German government too much money and various other reasons.
There's plenty of time to make a new life in 6 years only to be forced to throw it all away. We were given a choice between Australia, the US and Canada. We ended up in Quebec city where I've been for almost 14 years now (since September 98').
Even though the journey was hard for the 4 of us, harder for my parents than for me and my sister, I regret nothing. I'm fluent in 4 languages and functional in 2 others with a brain wired for learning to speak.
Upon arrival at 9 years old I was the best in French after only 1 year, in a school filled mostly with people raised on the language. Plus I was picking up English at an amazing rate thanks to the Simpsons playing 6x more often than in Germany. Add subtitles and the fact that I knew all the episodes anyways and you get an abnormal learning rate.
What I'm trying to say is, bullshit as to C1 fluency, I was under ideal conditions to get there (and C2) in a little less than a year with a brain that acts like a sponge at that age. His method may get him towards his objectives faster but I think he may overestimate his abilities.
As an American who speaks multiple languages, the thing for me was learning the first. When you learn another language you get a true understand of your own language that other people don't understand who are not bilingual.
After you learn a second language, others get much much easier and the learning curve is much shorter.
I learned a fair bit of Spanish in high school, already knowing English and Russian. A lot of the language constructs were similar to Russian, so they just clicked easily in my mind.
Lost most of it by now, of course. I can call a guy an asshole, and I can buy him a beer, but the bit in the middle where I apologize - that, I can't do :P
Learning a second language allows you to appreciate the commitment that it requires. People who has never gone thru the process, don't appreciate it and they think it is a matter of studying six months one hour a day. I had a supervisor who said that he was going to learn Spanish (at 55) so we can tell him stuff that we didn't know how to say in English. I have been learning English for 23 years since I was 21. I felt this was insulting. Somehow he thought he could do it; may be he felt he was smarter than us because his English was fluent. Of course he was never able to say anything in Spanish.
Great tips! Another fascinating (Creative Commons-licensed!) framework I have heard about recently is Language Hunters. http://www.languagehunters.org. Their methods involve playing games with native speakers, in person or via Skype. They claim someone can reach fluency in a few months.
I looked at the estimates for learning difficulty for English speakers (http://voxy.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/110329-VOXY-...) and saw that they mix together the language difficulty with the difficulty of the writing system. For example, Japanese (labeled hard) and Turkish (labeled medium) are similar (relatively speaking, looking from a English speaker's vantage, also add Korean to this group). In the explanation for why Japanese is so difficulty they mention the three different writing systems, etc., which is true (some consider the convoluted Japanese writing system to be the most complex in the world, on par with Maya hieroglyphs). But what if you want to learn just spoken Japanase? Similarly, what if you wanted to learn Turkish in the 1910s when it was still using the (modified) Arabic alphabet?
As for the "thousands of characters" scare for Chinese, I've read estimates that for daily communication you can make do with less than a thousand characters.
Good luck learning "spoken" anything without any decent texts to read. You could listen to the radio / watch movies, but you'll find the dialogue is way too fast and not very coherent (dialogue isn't structured very nicely, it's more free form, so you can't follow it as easily).
You won't catch many words.
If you have a tutor, they might be able to gradually build you up, but you won't have the hours with them. Reading at your own pace is a better way to build your vocabulary and grammar.
You're right about the "thousands of characters" thing - a lot of Chinese writing is pretty simple (in terms of character use - simple characters are usually combined to form longer words, the first thousand goes a looong way), as long as you stay clear of classical Chinese literature (at which point, even some Chinese give up).
> As for the "thousands of characters" scare for Chinese, I've read estimates that for daily communication you can make do with less than a thousand characters.
It's not that hard. After years of frustration at being essentially illiterate in Japanese while having a decent level of spoken fluency, I've finally buckled down and started learning the kanji using Remembering the Kanji in combination with Anki. It really is possible to learn 20 kanji a day if you dedicate about 45 minutes of time.
There's a similar book called Remembering the Hanzi (both Traditional and Simplified versions are available) that you can use to much the same effect. At 20 per day, you can learn the 5000 hanzi that are said to cover just about everything you might come across in day-to-day life in less than a year.
I am not sure if Chinese and Japanese can be equated like that. I find Chinese much easier to learn than Japanese because Chinese characters have plenty of built-in pronunciation mnemonics that don't help as much with the Japanese pronunciation. When I studied Japanese, I wasted lots of time coming up with stories to remember complex characters.
Maybe it also depends on whether you have good pictorial memory or need some kind of analytical system, I definitely belong to the latter camp.
You're right, I think the consensus is that the Japanese system is much harder than the Chinese (i.e. Mandarin). The reasons are:
1. it consists os three different systems side by side with complex and sometimes arbitrary rules of switching between:
2. Japanese and Chinese are totally unrelated languages, so the Chinese characters were bolted on due to cultural reasons (similar to how Turkish was written with the Arabic alphabet previously). Chinese characters evolved naturally and are suited with Chinese, since many words were single syllable. They are ill-suited for writing languages unrelated to Chinese.
3. Finally, Japanese has a complicated honorifics system which is hard for foreigners to grasp.
The super complicated Japanese writing system is to be contrasted with the Korean system, which although it uses many Chinese characters (again die to cultural reasons) has a system that is ideally suited to its phonology. I think the difficulty of learning spoken Japanese and Korean would be on par; the writing system makes learning Japanese really hard.
I used RTK as well, except with the website kanji.koohii.com instead of Anki, to learn 50 kanji a day. Did that for 2 months before moving to Japan, started using Anki for vocab / grammar, and passed the JLPT 1 examination in less than a year and a half.
My senseis and American coworkers were, but knowing the meaning of individual kanji is still two steps away from learning the actual reading and usage in compound words （熟語）, so I still had no right to show off.
The reason why Turkish is in the same group as Japanese is probably because of the subject-object-verb [1] order they have in common (vs SVO in English). This is why even spoken Japanese is difficult to master for English speaking people.
Turkish (not just the language spoken in Turkey but spoken on a large swatch of Asia, including Kazak, Ozbek, etc.) was perviously grouped with Korean, Japanese and some other local languages as the Altaic group. They are quite similar. This grouping is no longer widely accepted. I've read that Japanese academics want their language to be treated as an isolate and certainly not grouped with, e.g. Korean, because of nationalistic reasons.
http://www.memrise.com is another spaced repetition alternative to Anki. You'd need another tool to practice your grammar, but for vocab alone it works great.
alljapaneseallthetime.com basically recommends same techniques: listening first, then verbal. He even goes to the extreme of listening to the foreign language 24/7, even in your sleep. Have kanji (or hanzi, or arabic) posters displayed in your bathroom. Turn the radio on when you're in the shower. Listen to podcasts when you're at work and subway. Keep those podcasts on while you're sleeping so you hear it first thing when you wake up.
Immerse yourself completely, and it'll almost be the same as listening in that foreign country.
I'm learning Ukrainian and Russian for 3,5 months. I understand Ukrainian just like that and understand Russian quite well; written and spoken. I speak ukrainian quite good and start to speak russian (because I started with ukrainian and didn't write russian first). It was 3,5months of nearly no effort maybe couple hours a week.
OK, I'm polish so slavic languages are nothing new to me, but many people learnt russian here with nearly no result. I think it's way of learning. I just started write and read ukrainian and russian bit later.
If I learnt familar language so fast with no effort why not to learn european language in 5 months of some effort? It's possible since european languages are not completely different and I know english and understand german now. Well, maybe it won't be C1, but I can believe there are people with better language skills than me.
Its great to see this kind of discussion on Hacker News and how people are hacking their way to learning a language. I think its kinda difficult to obtain that level of fluency without living in the country, being immersed, and communicating with other people. There are certainly tools and ways that can aid you to learn - I've done similar things to learn a language such as learning from movies/tv shows/CD's/books/mobile apps/sitting near people on the train and listening to their conversation.
I've actually made it my mission to make languages fun and easy to learn, and started a company called Native Tongue. If you are interested in learning a language check out our vocabulary mobile apps for Spanish and Mandarin. They're called Spanish Smash and Mandarin Madness.
My native language is Russian and I have never met a foreigner who mastered it even after years and years of practice. It is almost unheard of to find a foreigner who can speak and pronounce correctly. Usually it's one or the other. The majority of native Russians spend 12 years learning Russian grammar and still cannot spell right. I find it hard to believe that a non-native speaker could. On the other hand it took me 3 months to become fluent in English at 14 while attending a high school in the US. Another 6 months to lose my accent and by the end of the year i was thinking in English. Being immersed in the culture of native speakers is probably the best way to learn any language. However, overcoming the complexity of a language is sometimes very difficult/impossible.
Gabriel's put a lot of effort into creating his flashcards, but they'd be the same for everyone - so you could allow the community to generate the cards, and the part of the community for whom this is their native language could rate these cards, the best bubbling to preference.
The use of existing sites (Google Translate / Lang-8) to get/validate translations is good, but this could be baked into the same system as the flashcards, using that system's community, or having an API to connect that system with the external sites so that it's just one system from the user's perspective.
In terms of reading books / watching tv / etc, again a catalogue of links to e-books / youtube clips / etc., along with ratings of difficulty could be maintained by the community and presented through the app.
Build this on top of facebook / google plus / etc and tools such as hangouts are also available to help users from different countries / of different native languages talk to one another, taking it in turns of 30 min sessions in one another's languages.
I'm always irritated when people talk about how good they are in [xyz] language. Here in Québec City, I hear all the time how this person is fluent in english and everything.
I spent 1 year in New Zealand when I was 17, I learned the language the hard way, when I got back, I was fluent, not bilingual but fluent.
Now, 10 years later, I'm no where as good as I used to be, still I find people who tell me they are fluent in english and how they can express themselves nearly perfectly in english. If I have the luck to hear them speak once, I usually figure out right away how their english is (poor). On the other hand I have a friend that is perfectly bilingual from birth. He never claimed he was so and I knew about it after I knew him for a year...
This is a personal story, I agree, but it does show a trend. People who claims that "speak", "are fluent", etc. are usually to be taken with a grain of salt. There's no magic in this world, and language is hard.
It's the same for me when I'm in England, the locals just don't understand me.
"you know what I mean, right?", I say, and they respond with, "oh, royt, e means royt!" WTF is royt, can't these people articulate themselves properly? k-rist they invented the language and we had to improve it, god bless America, rush limpbag and everything that makes the homeland free of the brave.
Can anybody share his/her self-made Anki DBs or recommend some good-quality ones? This looks to be of tremendous utility to other language learners, myself included (I'm mostly interested in English, French and German).
Lots of people, but spoken in only two countries (China and Singapore) and essentially nowhere else.
2. Spanish
With only half the number of speakers of Mandarin, Spanish is the second most widely spoken language in the world. The people of over twenty countries on three continents prefer it.
3. English
Only third in speakers, but the most widely spoken language, number one in both art and commerce.
4. Hindi
Spoken in only two countries.
5. Arabic
The world's third most widely used language, but usually spoken in places where you just can't use it to pick up girls. (Unless you are a girl yourself)
If you're going to use Arabic to pick up women in conservative Middle Eastern countries, you need to: 1.) buy a phone with bluetooth [1], 2.) learn the Arabic chat alphabet [2].
You forgot Taiwan/ROC under Mandarin. Also there are a lot of cities in the US (or at least in California) where you can get by just speaking Mandarin/Cantonese.
Also, how is that list misleading? The title is, "List of languages by number of native speakers" and not, "List of languages by some specific importance"
1. There is only one China. The pretenders in Beijing will be overthrown soon enough.
2. The list is misleading if used, as suggested, to prioritize languages to learn. It seems accurate enough as far as sheer numbers go.
3. California should just be marked as an exception to every list of facts. (The only country where you can comfortably live you life speaking only Vietnamese, except California; the first twenty digits of pi, except in California; &c)
If he claims that he's now fluent in French then he needs to back this up with a posting of his voice (or a youtube clip) of him speaking in it. Let that be the judge of how fluent he is.
Couldn't that be easily faked? Anyone could memorize a speech in another language and make sure to get the accent/intonation down before recording. If he's an Opera singer he's already experienced in this.
This guy's method is a very solid approach to learning languages especially for Romance and Germanic languages, even if his claimed results (C1 in 5 months) are hard to believe for ordinary people.
Two other resources which are inline with his approach are the Assimil series, which is highly regarded by non-academic linguists (and some practical academics), and the LingQ words-in-context language learning website.
Awesome story. I had to laugh at the part where you linked the language difficulties. I had a somewhat abortive attempt to learn Chinese last year (we have an office over there). I don't think I've ever come up against something quite so hard as trying to get the tones right in Chinese.
Almost everything ever asked about language learning can be found in the forums of 'How to learn any language' [1]. But careful, you can get hooked pretty fast.
English/Spanish here. My wife is Cuban and did not speak much English when I meet her so it was a Huge motivating factor. ;) Italian and Portuguese will be next for me as once you know Spanish you automatically know big chunks of other Latin based languages.
I bought all 5 levels of Rosetta French version 3, and I lambast it at every opportunity.
There is one positive item, one huge negative and one poor implementation point.
The positive is that I think the mechanism, or put another way the Rosetta Stone platform, is mostly good. The combination of visual and aural, with a relatively simple screen-is-one-concept approach, is good.
The negative for me was the actual content itself. I learned about ladders, and horses and crazy things that not once have I encountered here in Paris. It would have been helpful to learn food items, grocery store items, things folks (even tourists) would likely find useful.
I hesitate to mention this because it might not have been a Rosetta Stone objective, nor might it fit into their framework/platform. But, there were no verb tense lessons. Even just rote learning of "je voudrais ..." [I would like ...] would get you out of 80% of the conversational jams when trying to get a sandwich, or similar.
The poor implementation point is that I did not experience any good luck using their voice recognition engine. Perhaps it is because I really have horrible French pronunciation. However, isn't that the very situation Rosetta is trying to correct? I found no way to discover why it was upset with my pronunciation. It was just a very frustration experience.
I somewhat agree with the content criticism, it is indeed fairly random sometimes - I doubt I'm ever going to use the French word for 'postage stamp' or the French word for 'ladder'. I think it might have got better in this regard --- you learn a lot of words for food in Level 1 Unit 4, and I've also learned stuff a tourist would ask. Also, to be fair, I think the word for 'ladder' is only taught because it helps you learn the word for 'hardware store' later :)
There definitely are verb tense lessons if you get far enough! It doesn't teach you by rote, but that's the whole idea, I had lessons in French at school where we did rote learning and Rosetta Stone seems to be working a lot better (I feel more confident in my ability to actually speak and read) than my lessons in school ever did.
I thought that Pimsleur was basically a language podcast: i.e. unidirectional content. _Hearing_ someone speak a native language is not the same as having ones pronunciation evaluated, which is also separate from learning proper pronunciation.
But yes, after hearing all of the raving reviews in this thread, maybe I should give it a closer look.
The first lesson is free in most (all?) languages, so you can give it a try if you want. You just have to give them an email address. After the reviews in this thread, I decided to give it a try, and it seems like a nice product. I'm planning to buy the first level (Italian), and I'm now just trying to decide between the audio-only and the "Unlimited" that they've introduced recently, which throws in flash cards and some reading material.
It is "one way", but if you're able to dedicate time to it, the "they pronounce", "you pronounce" will probably work well. If you're halfway listening in the car, then it probably won't work.
Rosetta has improved quite a bit over the last few versions.
I tried a copy a few years back and wasn't too impressed, then saw it again last year and they actually had working voice recognition that judged your pronunciation! They also have an iPad version out now which seems like a great fit.
The one big thing I've noticed is that they're a bit random on what they teach you. I remember the Arabic 1 program taking quite a few lessons before teaching 'bathroom', for example.
Rosetta Stone isn't supported by most linguists who study foreign language acquisition. It is also ridiculously overpriced and never explicitly teaches even basic grammar, something which FSI points out helps almost 100% of learners.
Rosetta Stone worked great for me. I learned Russian in about 6 months, my wife says my pronunciation is perfect. Well, she wasn't my wife when I met her, and she didn't speak any english, so it was motivation enough for me to learn to speak Russian. It helps that I have someone to practice with. I'd say if you are going to be doing Rosetta Stone, it helps if you do it every day without fail for a minimum of 30 minutes a day. When I was studying, I did 30 minutes twice a day. Any periods longer than 30 minutes, and I found that my brain didn't retain as much. But, if I took that hour and split it into two sessions about 3 hours apart, that did the trick. It also helps to study right before you go to bed. Now it's not very difficult for me to speak Russian. I don't think of the english first and then translate it - I just think of the russian words and how to say what I want. Sometimes I don't know the word, and I have to describe what I want to say.
Anyway, I am at a point now that I am learning new words every day just by speaking.
downvote me please, but why is this on HN?
I am currently learning Swedish just because we moved here for work, but English is the language we ALL speak at work, no matter where we come from. most HNers would need to learn a language if they get a job overseas for daily survival outside of work, @ work I bet 100% will be speaking English.
My guess is because it falls under the topic of "brain hacking".
Plus, I hear your point about pragmatics, but I am also appreciative of the exercise of learning the language as part of expanding ones horizons. "Walk a mile in his shoes" kind of deal, which only gets lip service unless one has actually needed to switch mental, cultural and linguistic contexts.
I also honestly think that more Americans are not bilingual (or perhaps even interested in such a thing) because of the lack of opportunity to use that skill.
This probably rings true in many European companies, but in Asia it's absolutely the opposite. I'm working for a Japanese company at their development center in Shenzhen right now - the westerners (the UI/UX team) use English to communicate with each other, but the dev team speaks only Chinese and/or Japanese.
Anything that falls within topic as long as the author frames to match the guidelines ("anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity"). Don't believe me? Try looking back at some of the /best lists in archive.org for politics, crime, or sports. They are there and it's the high rep Hners posting them. This is all about framing it right as long as you are seen in a favorable condition for framing the item.
So yeah, that's how it is. I am sure to expect a counter stating why this is on-topic, or how this one topic is rare etc etc. Framing. Frame shit well, anything looks like gold.
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The backstory? HN tells you to read http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html and http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html but not even the regulars do it. No one follows the rules, because the rules are the regulars and hive mind make the rules. They make this their land to stomp on all and armchair speak. And that's the truth. I can pull references all day.
If ever tried swearing here? Or giving a point against the masses? Downvoted right? Blame the hive mind and their inability to think on their own.
Now check a regular high rep HNer. He swears, he goes against the masses tells them "What are you all thinking? I am ashamed of these comments here"
A bazillion votes right? Same content, different framing.
Before this post ends up as a dead link from users with too much emotion overflowed from the workplace, remember if you want to do well in this community, here are some steps to follow. I assure you these work. I've experimented with them and have studied high rep members for months
* Circle jerk with reference, your point must inflate the previous point if not disagree with reference.
* Frame your shit. Follow the masters and their styling, they can make cooking a pasta HN worthy. It's amazing actually they really do have that bullshit making skill
* Bring in completely tangential points and references to counter anything written. The aim of the game is to disagree with just the right level of snark
* Never ask why HN is the way it is, this will only upset the hivemind, they don't like their emotions swayed.
* Attack YC companies, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, the community gets a kick out of this, they love seeing them fail and pointing how crappy they but never when those companies are busting their chops making something successful
* If you are really really really angry about something someone wrote, use a throwaway account this is key. HN regulars do this, all the time.
* Never interact with an HNer out of HN, not on twitter not on forums not on anywhere. The pseudonymity high they get off of being here makes them who they are. Don't take that away from them.
* Never comment on the original article (Cannot let the author know all the snark and non constructive criticism you leave them can you?)
* If you find a cool product on the internet that is not free, find a way to clone it in a weekend and put in on Github on rails and say "Tell HN: This is my piss poor clone done over the weekend give me karma now"
pg once/twice/three times?/I lost count/ tried to fix this community but it's not fixable when the top community members fail to see they are full of themselves and imparting that notion to newcomers that this is how the conversation and behaviour must be.
You may ask, why am I still here? Well you see, after you get past the circle jerk inflated ego mindset, there is actually treasure in here. And that sucks. Love/hate relationship I tell you.
Did I once say frame your shit?
If you haven't already, would you mind reading about HN's approach to comments?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Re...
"Can understand a wide range of demanding, longer texts, and recognise implicit meaning. Can express him/herself fluently and spontaneously without much obvious searching for expressions. Can use language flexibly and effectively for social, academic and professional purposes. Can produce clear, well-structured, detailed text on complex subjects, showing controlled use of organisational patterns, connectors and cohesive devices."
I'm a long-time foreigner in a German-speaking country, learning German after already speaking two more languages apart from my mother tongue, not knowing German before I came here, so I know how many nuances a living language has. Had he say A2, or B1 if he's a language talent, I'd believe him, C1, I can't imagine. I can only guess he didn't actually try to pass some formal verification tests, or he didn't start from 0, there simply must be something he avoided to say. Or he simply lies to himself (and us) that it's actually C1 what he reached in five months.