It seems to me that foreign language learning is an area where computer technology has clearly miserably fallen short of its potential.
Apps like Duolingo and Babel are nice, but they seem to me more oriented toward making the user feel good about making progress then about achieving mastery in any useful time frame.
Flashcard tools like Anki and Tinycards are nice, but they lack enough readily available content to be really useful. Anyone with the expertise and perspective to use these tools in a practical time frame to assemble a deck of the many thousands of words necessary to achieve mastery doesn't need the tools.
It should be possible, using relatively simple tools, for a person to immerse oneself virtually in language learning materials. It should be simple to choose a rate of exposure to material from trickle to firehose. It should be possible to see an estimate of time remaining to achieve functional fluency at the current rate of progress, no different from the progress bar you see when downloading files.
Instead, each individual is forced to cadge together learning materials, of varying quality, in dribs and drabs; and guess at ones progress.
There are plenty of full-time University foreign language teaching staff around the world, they should be able to collaborate in production of content for online learning tools.
Yet neither the sophistication nor the efficiency of foreign language learning seems to have improved much in my lifetime.
The problem is that the tools you need are "listening to and interacting with people in the target language". Human language is a problem of interpreting the creative social signals of other human beings, and there's no way to automate that. With the Web, YouTube and internet radio, the actual amount of target-language material that a person can expose themselves to is hugely, hugely more available than it was 20-30 years ago.
You have to keep in mind what a tool is trying to accomplish relative to the personal development it takes to grow into another human language. Different levels of learners require different kinds of instruction. Bilingual instruction is quickest if a person has zero knowledge of the language whatever. Absolute beginners need direct instruction in phonology. An Anki deck is to build basic vocabulary or literacy for a person who has some. Duolingo is there to get you comfortable with basic grammar or phrases, to get you interacting with native speakers in the first place once you stumble off the plane. A more advanced speaker might need accent reduction work.
Anki is fantastic at flashcards. Duolingo is fantastic at translation exercises, way better than what we had a few decades ago. Definitely the author in the OP should be using Anki rather than postcards on her bed.
"Mastery"-level linguistic tasks include things like writing creative poetry in the language that another person finds moving, describing the movements of a complex machine, or composing an essay in a specific literary style—things that native speakers may find difficult without formal training. There's just no way Duolingo can do that.
I took a survey recently that clarified a lot of this for me. The questions were all things like: What percentage of your time do you spend listening to music in the target language (and your native language)? What percentage of your time do you spend watching moveis in the target language (and your native language)? What percentage of your time do you spend reading books in the target language (and your native language)? What percentage of your time do you spend thinking and interacting with other people and thinking in the target language (and your native language)? If I spend 1% of my time or less in the target language and 99% in my native language, it's no wonder that I have plateaued in it.
The fact that digital tools can't be used to achieve total native-level fluency shouldn't be used as a reason not to try to improve what's available. It should be possible at least to use digital tools to learn to listen to and understand foreign language media at a useful level... I'd love to be able to watch a movie in the language I'm studying and understand 90% of what's going on. But that seems like an impossible dream given the available tools and my current rate of progress.
If I could reach just that goal, I'd be delighted to explore other more personally immersive avenues for taking my language skills to the next level.
If you go to language-learning forums (e.g. the Japanese learning subreddit) you’ll find a lot of people who spend 95% of their time wanking with learning tools, and 5% (or less) actually studying. Everyone thinks the tools are the problem. Moreover, fixing tools is easier and less painful than doing the grueling work of learning a language. As a result, lots of people get caught in the trap of believing that fluency is One Good Tool Away. It isn’t.
The most important part of the parent’s comment is the one you overlooked: you need to listen and interact with people in the native language. The more hours you spend talking with people in your target language, the better you’ll become. Tools help on the margins, but there’s no magic bullet that will eliminate the time and exposure required.
Unless you're starting as a small child, you will never pick up words that do not occur frequently just from listening and interacting. Or it will take many more years than it ought to get to a given level.
Knowledge of a large number of these words is required to become competent, because, as a category, those words are coming at you all the time. Problem is, you don't know which one of the many thousands is coming your way next on any given day. The author of this article makes the same remark, basically:
> But there’s also an enormous amount of low-frequency words and syntax that even native speakers might encounter only once a year. Knowing any one of these “occasional” words or phrasings isn’t essential. But in every context — a book, an article or conversation — there will probably be several. They’re part of what gives native speech its richness.
If you don't know these words, you don't know a lot of what you're listening to. You might have this explained to you, and so then in that session you are okay with those words. However, without follow-up repetition, those words will soon evaporate.
I live in a highly multicultural country, Canada. Here you can encounter immigrants who have been here 25 years or more, whose English still sucks; and it's not always due to only associating with speakers of their native language. They use English everyday and interact with English speakers, all right. It's simply due to not mustering the academic wherewithal to study properly.
>you’ll find a lot of people who spend 95% of their time futzing with learning tools, and 5% (or less) actually studying
Exactly my point. It shouldn't be necessary to spend all that time futzing with tools, the tools should be there, ready to use.
>you need to listen and interact with people in the native language.
Such people are not available in all areas. Online availability does not scale. These are precisely the issues that digital tools should be good at addressing, but have failed to do so.
”Exactly my point. It shouldn't be necessary to spend all that time futzing with tools, the tools should be there, ready to use.”
It isn’t necessary. The tools are fine, and/or improving them won’t solve the fundamental problem. People are just procrastinating.
”Online availability does not scale. These are precisely the issues that digital tools should be good at addressing, but have failed to do so.”
Short of making an AGI that fluently speaks your target language, there are no obvious improvements to learning tools that will address the fundamental problem: you need to talk to actual humans.
> there are no obvious improvements to learning tools that will address the fundamental problem: you need to talk to actual humans
When learning to speak and listen, you need to already understand perhaps 80% of what actual humans are speaking in order to learn the other 20% you don't already understand. If you speak to someone and only understand say 30% of what they're speaking and they you, you won't pick up any of the 70% you don't understand, assuming the native speaker even wants to continue talking to you. Interactive software tools must deduce what vocab and grammar you can already understand and speak only that plus the 10% extra it wants you to practise and reinforce. And those tools don't exist. Good language teachers who can do the same are expensive.
Reading materials are far better in this regard, but even there, most of them use a specific learning sequence as defined by national language testing and don't cater for most learners who learnt haphazardly and thus whose current knowledge is scattered all over that continuum.
If that is true, then not only digital tools, but all books, classes, tests and every other technique aside from what you recommend for language learning are fraudulent wastes of time.
Language learning courses and tools are just ways to kickstart normal language acquisition, so you don't have to go through the years of gurgling like a baby has to. Learning to communicate in a new language isn't exactly like learning some other kind of skill--it's much, much huger.
When you're speaking your native language, you're decoding and processing complex social signals in real time at multiple levels of structure (phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic). Even the best AIs can only get a couple of these levels of structure, with significant error rates, and only in a handful of well-studied languages (there are hundreds or thousands of natural languages). How much time does it take for you to learn 1000 vocabulary words? A natural language will have tens of thousands. A comprehensive grammar of the English language would be dozens of heady volumes and have less information about English grammar than any competent native speaker.
Learning a language is just an astonishingly huge task. No course or system can cover it all. Mostly they're just trying to make things easier for you.
I have an uncle who speaks 6 different languages; he really likes picking up new ones. I once had a discussion about how he could pick them up so quickly and he basically said what the parent was saying: use it, practice it, read newspapers in it, speak to people that speak it too. Immerse yourself, accept that you'll be uncomfortable for a while, and before long, you'll be able to hold a simple conversation.
He also said you know you are fluent the day you can casually joke in real time with people and make them laugh (at the joke!)
Oh, absolutely. But I think they're going to be more specialized tools to work on different skills.
For example, I used to use the perapera-kun plugin and I guess yomichan does a similar thing, but that sort of tool—but say, for closed captions—could help listeners get more comprehensible input from movies. Like, here's one I have to try. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/language-learning-...
Or just apps or social networks that help connect speakers in other languages. I know of a Discord server, that lets me practice a target language; the group just meets at an inconvenient time for me.
> I'd love to be able to watch a movie in the language I'm studying and understand 90% of what's going on. But that seems like an impossible dream given the available tools and my current rate of progress.
You could try making your own tools. Export a vocabulary list from the flashcard program you're using. Download subtitles for a bunch of movies. Cross-reference them with the vocabulary list to find the movie you'll be able to understand the best.
That's the basic idea behind a tool I'm building for myself, but for finding relevant example sentences on https://tatoeba.org instead of movies.
In my personal experience, the easiest way to learn a second language is to immerse yourself in a particular country/culture and interact with the locals, get a job, etc. Live there for at least a year. It worked for me, I learned English and it worked for my wife, she learned French.
Are you French and your wife English-speaking? That’s what the OP article mentioned as “école horizontale”. The author lived in France for years but her family spoke English at home and thus her French proficiency never got great.
In my experience living abroad, the fact that so many people speak pretty good English is both a blessing and a curse. We could have a conversation in French but it’d be pretty boring. So my friends and I always speak in English but I don’t get better at French.
To learn conversational language, you really do need to converse. It is a much faster route to basic fluency. Apps like Marco Polo or even Zoom or Skype along with a native speaking contact are going to work more quickly than any gamified experience where you're only taking to an app.
It is a wonderful privilege to have the money and people available to pursue those options, but it is a privilege many do not enjoy.
Meanwhile, for many of those many, learning a new language is more than a fun pastime or intellectual challenge, it is a matter of economic or even physical survival. Duolingo's mascot likes to breezily inform me that most people using Duolingo in Sweden are refugees trying to learn Swedish. Don't those people deserve more emphasis on practical mastery, and less on social engagement? Do they have the money and opportunity to pursue quality interactions with native speakers?
If digital tools could provide reasonable sub-levels of mastery short of full conversational fluency, like ability to read a newspaper, understand a news broadcast or sitcom, babysit a child, or hold a business conversation in an office, I wouldn't complain. But I'm not aware of any digital teaching tools that prepare a person adequately for any of that.
Fine, digital tools are inadequate for reaching full conversational fluency. But should we then let them off the hook for not delivering any level of practical skill in a reasonable amount of time?
Is it really impossible for them to do any better at delivering real-world value?
As an adult learner, you will never get far simply by listening and interacting. You need listening and interacting, plus intensive vocab memorization and a good modicum of grammar study.
In some ten years of being married to my Japanese wife, speaking as much as possible, and consuming Japanese entertainment (movies, music), I got pretty good at what you might call "household Japanese". That's it. I would forever be stuck at that stage if I didn't embark on intensive study.
Flashcard tools like Anki and Tinycards are nice, but they lack enough readily available content to be really useful. Anyone with the expertise and perspective to use these tools in a practical time frame to assemble a deck of the many thousands of words necessary to achieve mastery doesn't need the tools.
For tools like anki, you don't want to use someone else's deck in the first place, because making cards is a learning process in itself, which will improve retention.
Is it to be able to understand the spoken language? Of a kid, an adult, for work, in social situations?
Is it to be able to speak it? For what purpose, how often, how well?
None of the tools for "learning" a language really address this. They are all kind of linear and very vague about what skills you are training. Most of the popular ones feel like just memorizing words and phrases.
In my experience, the only way to "fully learn" a language, is to be fully immersed, i.e. for months, pretty much exclusively, read/listen/speak the language - watch movies, read news, talk to as many people as possible, all in that language. Unfortunately, pretty much the only way to do that is to move to a country that natively uses the language and ideally have a native significant other that you interact with a lot. Also, usually the biggest barrier is being ashamed of making mistakes, most people stay quite because they are afraid of sounding stupid in another language, so they miss out on most of the best potential learning experiences.
Anki+Yomichan integration is awesome for Japanese. Adding a new word with the surrounding context to your deck as you encounter it is as simple as clicking a button.
>It should be possible, using relatively simple tools, for a person to immerse oneself virtually in language learning materials.
This is the key.
I would love to digitally immerse myself in a given language. Nowadays what I do is tune the korean news in Youtube while getting prep for work, listen to some podcast in the commute, attempt to read some korean newspaper in the afternoon. But my whole job as a programmer is in front of a computer, I'm sure the immersion could be more gradual, more fine tuned to be there but not enough to block my productivity, etc.
I've been using lingq.com for about two months to learn Japanese, and I think it's lightyears beyond any of the other tools I've used, which include Duolingo, Anki, japaneselevelup, and probably a few others I've forgotten. I've made more progress in two months than in my previous 12-18 months of (somewhat sporadic) study. I think the fundamental reason is that rather than doing some second-order activity like studying flashcards, lingq has you spending most of your time listening and reading.
Lingq is based on the idea of input-based learning, which I would summarize as "Read, listen, and stop worrying." This approach has a lot of research to support it (search for Stephen Krashen if you want to learn more about the research), and it is also the approach used by some famous hyper-polyglots like Kato Lomb, as well as Steve Kaufmann, the founder of lingq.
There are two main tools in lingq: One, an assisted reader which displays foreign language text, with words color-coded to indicate they are known by you, previously seen by you, or brand new. Looking up a word and storing a definition takes only a few clicks, so you can rapidly get through texts that would otherwise take forever. Even looking up a word in an online dictionary is 10x slower than doing it in lingq. The other tool is the playlist, which you can use to easily listen to the accompanying audio for a text you are studying on your phone.
By going back and forth between studying the written text, and then listening to the corresponding audio over and over and over (which is easy to do during dead time like driving, doing dishes, etc), I've vastly improved my listening comprehension and vocabulary compared to any other approach I've tried. I'm still far from fluent, but I'm convinced this is how I'll get there.
lingq's language courses also included 50-60 "mini-stories" depending on the language, which expose you to a _lot_ of different grammar and vocabulary. Once you get beyond those, the idea is to start importing native content from podcasts, articles, etc into the app. There is also a big library of content that other users have imported.
lingq does have a built-in SRS system but its sort of an afterthought, and I haven't found it very useful.
There are a lot of rough edges in the content and the website and phone app, including UI issues, flaky speech-to-text, incorrect word segmentation in the reader, bad definitions, and even grammatical mistakes in some of their original content. Ultimately I haven't found any of these to be a big hinderance.
I have no affiliation at all with lingq although I realize that my glowing review probably sounds like I'm astroturfing. It is a paid service ($10/month) but I've found it to be worth it many times over.
Asking out of curiosity and to learn from your experience. You had mentioned "I've made more progress in two months than in my previous 12-18 months of (somewhat sporadic) study".
How could you tell? Is it because you were able to comprehend more of the language (comprehension), or people who speak Japanese told you that you are better (understandability)?
The reason I ask is, I seem to pickup words and grammar but am absolutely incomprehensible when I converse with a native speaker.
Mainly my comprehension has improved. I haven't been doing much speaking practice because the method is so heavily focused on input. I'm not as worried about being understood, as I've never had much trouble being understood when saying the limited things I know how to say. My problem has always been that the response is incomprehensible to me.
I have found Duolingo great for revising basic vocabulary (Spanish) but, yeah, for grammar not at all.
I have also found that anything I have really learned (in a sense that I don't need to revise, I just know it) has not come from the comfort of an app but from the real struggle of trying to converse with someone in their native language.
I learned Italian from my mother and grandmother and other family so I can do okay in general conversation. However, conversing with young people is a different thing altogether. They speak faster and less articulated, and use a completely different vocabulary/slang. So it is not just about which technology tools you use but also who you talk with.
That said, I believe it's also the user's fault if they're only using one tool to learn a language. That's quite a high bar that just simply hasn't been achieved yet, and at the moment I would consider it an unreasonable expectation.
This is anecdotal and I am a sample of one, so do with this as you will. I have learned to speak French at two particular times. When I was very young, my Grandma Yvette often spoke French to me and I spent three years in French immersion. Now, I am an adult who barely speaks the language, but I have a daughter who I badly want to bless with the French language. So, I’m learning again...
I have noticed two things. The first is that when I was a kid, I didn’t care who I spoke French to, how loud I was, or how many words I mangled. It was like a cool code for me. As an adult, I’m damned near petrified to speak the language. This is unlike me. I’ll gladly spend a week cold calling potential clients, but if I hear people speaking French, I often cannot bring myself to introduce myself or ask how they are. I’ll ask a stranger for money in English, but I’ll be damned if I ask a stranger to pass the cream in French.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that it’s a lot harder to learn how to pronounce things. Some sounds seem to be engrained from years of speaking when I was young. Other words, crap.
Consider the word “de rien”. It is so simple. Three syllables. Yet, I could walk into any French speaking country in the world and get a long term disability pension just by saying it. Last week, I even found a French couple to help me and I’ve been doing lots of drills, but when I record it and play it back, I sound quite soft in the head.
Who would have thought that a phrase that translates to ‘it’s nothing’ would be such a big problem for me?? :)
I grew up in NH where a fair number of people (half of my own family included) are fluent in Quebecois French and also took 4 years of French in high school.
One summer between junior and senior years, I took a road trip to Montreal and tried out my French. I was thoroughly embarrassed and lived the OPs nightmare. The residents I spoke with seemed actively offended by my French and would smile condescendingly and speak to me in English.
During senior year, I was able to spend a week in France. It was a totally different experience. I spoke nothing but French for the week and was able to feed and otherwise care for myself. The locals seemed to genuinely appreciate my efforts to speak the language. The capstone was later in the week when a 2am knock on my door woke me up. A younger member of our group was having serious homesickness and wanted to call home, but couldn't figure out how to make the call. I went to the lobby with her to ask the desk clerk how to make the call. I ended up having a great conversation with the desk clerk who was only a few years older than me and was in Paris for university. We chatted for about 30 minutes about life, things we liked, cool things to see in Paris, etc. It was awesome!
For OP, give it a shot. The only way to get better is to do it!
The thing to remember is that in Montreal, roughly 1/2 the population are native English speakers, and most of the other half has serious ESL skills. When I lived there, it basically a faux pas to mangle your french, since the person you were speaking to inevitably spoke English vastly better than you/I spoke french. French classes (there) inevitably teach you phrases to use to try and stop people from "helpfully" switching back to English.
OTOH, if you wandered out to Shawinigan or Trois-Rivières, or even just Laval/Anjou you'd find a lot more uni-lingual Quebecois speakers, who would be positively delighted to hear your(/my) mangled grammar and grotesque pronunciations.
It also doesn't help that French and Quebecois French are different dialects to the point of almost being different languages. We "offended" our entire office in Montreal when we rolled their telephony system into our headquarter's PBX and added localization for IVRs, Voicemail and whatnot using prompts recorded by a Parisian. I could understand the French French, the Quebecois was..., well, honestly about as different as street Spanish in Mexico and the Columbian Spanish I learned early in life.
French spoken in Quebec is the same French as in France, they use their idioms and slang at time with an accent but we can 100% understand each others.
If you are not convinced you can find multiple interviews of Quebecois speakers done in France on youtube and see for yourself that it is without filters or subtitles. Here is an example for celine dion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x6ezHzWPDU
I am a French speaking Québécois and do work with many French people (downtown Montreal). You can't deny that the French French and Québécois French uses a lot of different words. They are still the same language for sure, but we often have so much fun exchanging funny expressions.
A funny anecdote was when I was working with a guy name Jean-Nicolas and all the Québécois people called him Jean-Nic. That was very funny to the French guys hehe
Not a native French speaker, no. Apologies if that one-sentence broad generalization was tiring to you - I meant neither to explain nor be exhaustive. ;)
Obviously they're not different languages - I was a bit exaggeratory in that regard. And I do understand both, in as much as I understand either. French is my third or fourth most proficient language after English, Spanish and maybe German, but I never get to use it (or German for that matter).
The two are however different enough in some pronunciation and idioms that we ultimately had to do a second localization to support both. And the differences reported to us ran the spectrum from simple things, such as how to correctly pronounce the (cardinal) number 1 (a cleaner "un" compared to what sounds to my ear like "arn"), to the longer phrases one might expect to hear in a voicemail prompt. Ultimately our translation department got things ironed out, but it was a (somewhat amusing/bemusing) learning experience for us.
Definitely. Some of the idioms are different and the language sounds come from the back of the throat vs. Parisian French. I had the same experience in terms of understanding and being understood.
I am Québécois and am in no way hostile to other languages. What we are protective of is that the official language is French, for historical reasons yes. Meaning, if I encounter an English speaking person, there is a big probability that I'll switch to English just because I'm not an asshole and want to be nice. But, I also don't want my whole culture to disappear and be assimilated to at the same time I do care that I can be served in French when I go out to the restaurant, etc.
If people made fun of OP's accent then they were dicks and I don't think the majority of people would do that. We do however switch to English quickly when we determine the other person is anglophone just because most people in Montreal are bilingual and hey, let's make it easier for everyone. If the other person asks me to continue in French, I'll gladly do so.
There were two accents in common use in 18th century France: the 'bel usage' and the 'grand usage'.
The short explanation is that after the French revolution, Parisians adopted the 'grand usage'—a pronunciation which till then had been reserved for public speeches and church sermons—for everyday speech.
The 'bel usage' was the usual French 'code' reserved for every day use. It more closely resembles the French spoken in Quebec.
But the 'bel usage' wasn't just a plebeian accent for the unwashed masses, the King's court spoke in 'bel usage'.
But after the revolution, people wanted to change things up: hence the new pencil head pronunciation they use there, which everyone says is the 'correct' one. lol
In Québec, we retained the original 'bel usage' and never adopted the new accent from Paris. We are the keepers of the proper pronunciation of French, unless you want to give a sermon or make a political speech that is...
I don't see a problem with either accent, as long as you enunciate, you will be understood across the entire Francophonie. (Well to be honest, I do prefer my 'accent' from Québec, because I don't have to lug around a dictionary to make sure I pronounce very si-ng-le sy-la-ble cleanly and correctly.)
> As an adult, I’m damned near petrified to speak the language.
Have a drink or two. Really. I've noticed I'm much better in a foreign language when I'm mildly drunk (or at least I think I am, which helps get past the self-awareness block).
Me too. Two of my close friends are native Spanish speakers and when I’m a little drunk I can converse with them fairly fluently. When I’m not I can still do it but I’m very slow and make more mistakes.
> get a long term disability pension just by saying it
> but when I record it and play it back, I sound quite soft in the head
> Who would have thought that a phrase ... would be such a big problem for me?? :)
If this is how you envision yourself with speaking French, then is it any wonder you might be stuck or have issues with certain phrases? Good lord.
Learning how to talk like a native in another language is exceedingly difficult. It requires thousands of hours of practice, and by practice I mean actually physically speaking. Babies do this over and over and over and over again. We just gloss over it because, well, they're babies.
The only way to learn a language properly (as an adult) is to get over your fear and nervousness. When I hear obvious ESL people speaking English, my first thoughts are not of criticism. It's the exact same with people with other languages.
I have been learning Korean for almost 2 years now and my pronunciation is still not good in a lot of areas because I haven't practiced them enough, or well enough yet. That's just a part of the learning process. I'm understood most of the time, and the rest I just note down as things to work on.
Of course it sucks to hear myself compared to a native or make a mispronunciation so bad I'm not understood. But this is part of the process. If I -didn't- make mistakes I wouldn't be a learner of Korean, no?
> but if I hear people speaking French, I often cannot bring myself to introduce myself or ask how they are.
If you can't overcome this, you will never learn French. As long as you're afraid of making mistakes, you will never learn French. If you don't actually speak the language, you will never learn French... You don't learn a language only in classroom environments or with very patient friends. You learn it by speaking as much as you can, whenever you can, and making as many mistakes as you possibly can.
Even if you don't know how to say one exact thing in particular, circumlocution is your friend. Or rewording it in another way.
If there's one thing I remember from my linguistics courses in college, it's that one of the biggest hurdles for adults is that they may have a fear of embarrassment that babies do not.
The willingness to practice a ton while making errors is a huge advantage to children (or any adult who just goes for it).
In many English-speaking countries, most people hear foreigners trying to speak English, so we're accustomed to that. French people do hear a lot of non-native speakers of their language as well. But when I lived in Turkey for a summer during college, I made a concerted effort to built up some vocab in a few verb tenses. While I didn't get very far, it was pretty fun since it's so different from the English and Spanish I knew. It was no surprise that the Turks were amused at my pronunciation, etc. But what really stuck out to me was how a group of my Turkish friends were not only tickled, they actually were kind of confused about what they were feeling about how I was sounding until one of them put their finger on it: they thought I sounded like a small child speaking Turkish!
Why did that stand out to me? Because it dawned on me that unlike me, who had heard countless non-native speakers of my own language, they had never ever heard a non-native speaker trying to communicate in Turkish! I was amazed in trying to wrap my head around what that experience was like for them.
Sometimes non-English speakers, when someone tries to learn their language past a basic degree, can be a bit rude even unintentionally.
I have had a good native Korean friend quite innocently (although randomly) point out that although I rarely make syntax errors I don't speak idiomatically at all and make weird constructs sometimes. Which makes sense, given my almost 2 years of study, but I would never think of saying something that to any ESL learner.
The same friend said something along the lines of "I talk to you a lot, so sometimes I speak like you [non idiomatically/weirdly] with my [native] Korean friends haha".
??!? was my initial reaction, but then I remembered that it's quite rare for a foreigner to actually learn Korean at all, let alone to intermediate+ levels. Internally I got reminded that I will practically always be a foreigner, though.
We're so used to people learning English and using broken English in all manners of dialects that it's not even a blip on our mental radars.
I have had a good native Korean friend quite innocently (although randomly) point out that although I rarely make syntax errors I don't speak idiomatically at all and make weird constructs sometimes.
Sure, I find myself doing the same thing with the Spanish language — especially in a country with very different slang than the US. Even in English. Even in America. Think about how many ways there are to say soda. They'll almost all be understood but some will stick out more than others depending on the context.
I would never think of saying something that to any ESL learner.
Telling someone who speaks a language at an intermediate level that they don't always speak idiomatically is pointless - they already know that.
Sure, but do they know when they're saying something awkward? Recently I struggled in both England and Barcelona to get carbonated water. In San Francisco I'd be saying "soda water". In New York, "seltzer water". In England, apparently, sparkling water is the trick. I'm a native English speaker so it was fairly easy for me to pick up on that.
Meanwhile my Spanish is not great, but enough to sound like I speak Spanish fluently and make casual conversation and order things at a bar. In Havana I learned "agua sin gas" and "agua gaseosa". I tried that a few times in Barcelona (a city you can navigate entirely in English) recently and eventually got a weird look. Next time I asked and was told "agua con gas". Were it not for the weird looks I'd've stuck with awkward phrasing.
I generally tiptoe pretty gently with non-native English speakers, but have one friend who is insistent upon having their mistakes and awkward phrasing corrected. They're also the one friend who seems most like a native English speaker with written communication (the accent is a whole other story).
If you don't know when you're doing something awkwardly you won't ever improve.
That's not what I was talking about. If I say something that's awkward like that, it gets pointed out and that's fine.
My friend, randomly, said that I speak non-idiomatically / kinda awkwardly in general.
Great. What am I supposed to do with this information? I already know that. It's just frustrating, especially since at the time I was in a rut about my progress.
I already know where my skill level is. I know that I make certain mistakes and definitely don't speak idiomatically.
Telling me this is not only useless but a stark reminder of where I'm at. If you're in a rut, or the accursed "intermediate plateau", it really sucks to hear things like this, even if they're 100% accurate.
> Yet, I could walk into any French speaking country in the world and get a long term disability pension just by saying it. Last week, I even found a French couple to help me and I’ve been doing lots of drills, but when I record it and play it back, I sound quite soft in the head.
Pro tip from an immigrant who spent decade and a half trying to get good at English pronunciation - You need to practice in front of he mirror with a recorder and youtube nearby. Find a clip of french person saying a word or a sentence you're having trouble with and mimic them in front of the mirror. Again and again, try to see what muscle engaging on their face and do the same, think of what your tongue is doing. Remember you are building muscle memory and your tongue has literally never been in some of those shapes so you need to work it.
Pro tip two - find a pronunciation workshop or do a couple of sessions with a professional. Sounding like a native speaker is an incredible undertaking, but you'd probably be satisfied with being 75% there frankly.
You can also look up the individual IPA phonemes on Wiki, you'll find surprisingly extensive descriptions of how to physically sound them, and sometimes comparisons to close phonemes in other languages. This removes the "guessing" factor entirely, so the video is only there to perfect your speech and as a sanity check.
Yeah, what the native language considers the break is not consistent between languages.
Japanese, for example, has "desu" (a form of "to be" so it's really common) which is nominally "two" syllables, but English speakers simply hear "dess" which they perceive as one syllable.
The issue is that Japanese relies more on time length to delineate syllables while English relies on vowel presence.
That page lists it as a two syllable phrase (look at the categories at the bottom).
English speakers would be tempted to think it as a three syllable phrase because ʁjɛ̃ isn't a possible syllable in English, but in French "de rien" should be two syllables.
This is similar to, e.g., English speakers incorrectly pronouncing the Spanish word "luego" with three syllables.
Random fun fact: when an English speaker says "strike", a Korean speaker hears five syllables.
seu-teu-ra-i-keu
(Well, to be fair, it's more like "an awful lot of sounds that have no business being in the same syllable merged together", and less "five distinct syllables", but still that's how Koreans end up writing the sound in Korean.)
I should have specifically called out the audible pronunciation, where it's clearly more than two syllables in pronunciation. As pointed out below, it has "two and a half" syllables, I guess the site has no category for that.
No, you're misperceiving "rien" as having two syllables because you are (I'm guessing) a native English speaker. You can't just "hear" how many syllables something has as syllabification rules are language-specific. The nearest corresponding sequence of English phonemes would have to be split into two syllables - but English has different syllabification rules.
Native French speaker here. Maybe it's confusing to discuss this in terms of syllables unless you are a linguist. If you just want to learn how to say the word, what matters is how people actually say the word. Specifically, you pronounce "rien" in one quick shot. (So it's definitely closer to one syllable if we care about this. But if I am to say the word very slowly to teach somebody how it sounds, it might progressively become closer to two syllables. Languages are complicated.)
>But if I am to say the word very slowly to teach somebody how it sounds, it might progressively become closer to two syllables. Languages are complicated.
I'm sure that's true, but I don't think it gives rise to any real doubt as to the syllable count. For example, you could stretch out the English word "near" into two syllables in very slow and deliberate speech, but it's definitely a monosyllabic word in most (possibly all?) varieties of English.
For "rien" in particular, I'd say speakers can do that diaeresis as a sort of emphasis. For instance "Tu n'as rien fait! Rien! ("you did nothing! Nothing!"). The first "rien" can be said as a single-syllable world, while the second one can be pronounced as a two-syllables.
It also may be pronounced slightly differently in various places in France (regional accents).
Could you expand on that? Semivowels don't usually give rise to any uncertainty regarding syllable boundaries. E.g. Spanish 'tieso' clearly has two syllables (though many English speakers would misperceive it as having three), and it also has a semivowel following the initial consonant:
Hey, don't worry to much about your accent. I am Québécois and French is my first language. I can speak English very well apart from that terrible accent... I used to work at a place where we had daily calls with the office in California and most of the engineers there where Indian people speaking English. It probably took me 2-3 months before I could understand a single sentence on the conf. call. Their accents were just that bad (to me).
All that to say, don't be shy of your accent. Personally, I am simply happy when people make an effort to learn my language. I'll listen patiently if they stumble on words, I'll help where I can, etc. As long as they are also patient with my own horrible accent :)
I was in French immersion for 11 years, took classes in high school and university, and then took a long break from it -- about 10 years -- before I went back to it about 5 years ago. At first it was really hard! But things really got better over time. I practice 1-3 times a month with a French language meetup, and I also set my alarm to a French radio station. (If you can do one or both, I highly recommend!)
Yet even last year when I visited France for the first time, I was still somewhat petrified to speak to the locals. After 3 days I got over it, and it started to flow again.
Your angst is natural and common. Accept what you're feeling. You can push through it!
Really focus on the movement of your lips when you speak French. French has entirely different physical demands on you than English does. Exaggerate the lip and cheek movement. It really helps with pronunciation.
I do cold call on occasion and I have even grown to enjoy the game of it. I’m never quite that open and up front, but cold calling is always about drumming up business and getting paid. Frankly, it doesn’t work for me unless I hunt rejection in search of pay.
Not to be nitpicky, but to be precise, “de rien” translates to “from nothing”. Similar expressions in english are “no worries”, “no problem”, or “you’re welcome” .
As for speaking a foreign language, you need to take the jump. Know that, you are likely to be judged. However, there are people who find joy in seeing others speak their language and do so in a nurturing environment. You just need to find those people and practice with them, without fear of judgement.
Your translation is word-for-word correct, but I've never heard somebody say "from nothing" in English in a situation where you might say "no worries", "no problem", or "you're welcome". I have heard "It's nothing" though, so I think his translation is fine. Perhaps people don't use it that way in the dialects of English you know?
“Think nothing of it” is a rare and very stuffy sounding expression in (at least my California dialect of) English. “It’s nothing” is better but still not too common.
As cced already said, common ways of expressing this in American English include “don’t worry about it”, “no worries”, “no big deal”, “no problem”, “you’re welcome”, “my pleasure”, etc.
Informal vs. formal and the gradient between them is always going to be an issue in any language, especially when comparing languages.
French also has more built-in structures for formal address/politeness, though many of them are being left by the wayside just as we left feudal lordships with a peasant class.
For what it's worth, I'd say that the more "stuffy" version of "de rien" in French would be "il n'y a pas de quoi".
Your translation is word-for-word correct, but I've never heard somebody say "from nothing" in English in a situation where you might say "no worries", "no problem", or "you're welcome".
From nothing is an overly literal translation. You'll hear it in Spanish for sure as de nada (of/from nothing) or por nada (literally for nothing) depending on context though.
I _love_ overly literal translations. They express, in the purest translatable form, the idiomatic differences between languages and the cultures they belong to. You'll find many fascinating insights about culture and history by learning how different cultures express the same complex concept, situation or emotion.
De rien I learned was something to say in response to merci (thank you) where the English response is you're welcome and bienvenue is welcome to a place.
The problem with French is that the French are very sensitive to mistakes.
If I speak bad English (I am Russian), everybody is still happy, the worst thing can happen is I’ll get corrected, and in 99.9% of cases it’s not even that.
If I speak bad French with a French person... may God have mercy upon my soul. Especially if I forgot to say bonjour/bonsoir first (abomination! burn the heretic!)
An anecdote from a trip to Paris, I walked into a store to look for a gift for someone back home. After making the greeting in French, I started to explain what I was looking for. The woman stopped me. With a dramatic eye roll she said, "Speak English, pleeeease."
An anecdote from a trip to Quebec city. My wife and I walked up to a hostess to inquire about getting a table for dinner. We greeted her in French. As soon as we started to ask about a table, she stopped us and said, "No no no no. This will be in English."
It's only two anecdotes. I may have simply run into rude people. But, they made me not care to ever speak French.
My daughter is taking Spanish in school right now. I'm learning a little as well. We have a large population of people around us from different Spanish speaking countries. They seem to be very tolerant of mistakes. I'm very much looking forward to learning more of their language.
Why did you think those people were rude, instead of, say, trying to be helpful?
French is difficult to understand when spoken badly, even for natives (maybe esp. for natives). We don't understand what people are trying to say -- really. We don't try to be condescending: we truly do. not. understand. I get that foreigners / tourists may not believe it, but it is true.
The reason why Parisians are so rude in this context, as I've heard from several French natives, is that time is money. Most interactions with tourists in Paris are transactional. If a shopkeeper or restaurant server can spend two minutes with one customer in not-perfect French, or 30 seconds in not-perfect English, and there is no recreational value for the Parisian to the slower choice, then the Parisian will renegotiate the discussion's language to the faster choice.
You could call that helpful if you're optimizing for fastest transaction. For tourists who might have spent years in school learning the French language, and many recent weeks on Duolingo refreshing before the trip, and who are optimizing for a richer local experience, it's thoughtless and rude. Both viewpoints are rational.
It's not what they said that was rude. It's the way they said it.
Also I doubt that French is objectively harder to understand when spoken poorly than most languages. Especially when you consider tonal languages like Vietnamese and Mandarin.
Difficulty in understanding non native speakers is largely subjective. It depends heavily on the perception of the listener.
Basically if the listener believes that it is difficult, it will be. Additionally, the harder the listener tries to engage with and understand the non-native speaker, the easier it becomes.
French could be unique among languages, but my strong suspicion is that if what you describe is true for most French speakers, it's mostly due to a widespread cultural perception that non-native French speakers are hard to understand rather than objective difficulty.
There is a professor at Georgia State University who's primary research focus is on this topic if you're interested in reading more.
> There is a professor at Georgia State University who's primary research focus is on this topic if you're interested in reading more. http://www2.gsu.edu/~eslsal/cv.htm
Untrue: the last time I was in Portugal, I had a couple of marvelous conversations in my lousy French with older Portuguese shopkeeps (whose French was probably similarly lousy -it is more common among older people to speak French than English, as many of their generation emigrated to France for work). I'm pretty sure the French dislike how accented, goofy foreigners sound when mispronouncing their language. I always found it a relief when they switched to much better English, as French is pretty hard.
I now have some lousy Portuguese, so we'll see if the Portuguese people are more gregarious with their language or if they ask me to fall back to French.
As a French living in France, here is my take on it.
Your two anecdotes do seem rude, however I would personally have asked the same thing, but in a different way, like "We could continue in English if you want" with probably a slight incentive in my tone to actually switch to English (sorry if I also appear a bit rude). Or Maybe I will just reply to your every question in English.
A native English speaker is blessed, English has become the de facto lingua franca of the World which means learning a foreign language generally is a luxury. For everybody else, it's more of a necessity, and you tend to be exposed to English in your everyday life, at least to some degree (films, tv shows, technical documentation, meetings if you work within an international team), so chances are the person you are talking to is actually more fluent in English that you are in French (and it's also valid for any other language).
It also means it's somewhat harder to actually learn a foreign language as a native English. As a personal experience, one of my colleagues is American, but wants to settle in France, so he is trying to learn French, and sometimes, we actually start speaking in French, but after one or two minutes, we switch to English. I just see my colleague struggling and I know the conversation would be easier in English. I feel a little guilty about it.
Lastly, but a bit out of topic, there might be some small cultural differences. Just to illustrate, In an American restaurant, the waiter will ask you if everything is ok at least once or twice during the course of the meal, in a French restaurant, he will take your order and leave you alone until you finish eating your dish (and then ask you if you want a desert, a coffee or the bill).
I would have appreciated your approach. When I studied French we focused on reading and writing, not speaking. So, I was admittedly not a strong French speaker. I can understand their frustration. Had I been given the choice I might have chosen English.
You've been to American restaurants and only been interrupted once or twice by waiters? You were quite blessed then. Ordinarily, we expect conversations to be interrupted 5-6 times per meal. (I'm only slightly exaggerating.) Here's a true story illustrating how ridiculous it gets. I proposed to my wife in our favorite restaurant. I chose purposefully an early dinner time so we would have the restaurant to ourselves. As I began to kneel and pull the engagement ring out of my pocket, a busboy stepped between my wife and I to refill our water glasses. It was a bit awkward for about 20 seconds or so.
> An anecdote from a trip to Quebec city. My wife and I walked up to a hostess to inquire about getting a table for dinner. We greeted her in French. As soon as we started to ask about a table, she stopped us and said, "No no no no. This will be in English."
Native Québecois here. That's most definitely very odd.
The typical scenario is someone not fluent in French attempts to speak it, and the other person switches to English as a courtesy, not as a slight against you; many people forget or don't know that most Québecois in major cities are bilingual.
Simply mentioning that you would like to continue in French so that you can practice will elicit gratitude and wide smiles - we really, really, really like it when people speak French, no matter the quality, and most will happily help you learn a few extra words or expressions.
I had a similar experience in Paris. "No, no, no, monsieur; we make this easy for everyone and do it in English." Depending on your mood and charitable inclinations, that's either supremely helpful or amazingly condescending.
It's gonna be interesting for me. I'm about to move to Montreal (flight is in 2 days). I want to learn French very well to idle-mine immigration points. I'm gonna make mistakes. That's just how it is. The surest path to success is failure.
It's sometimes difficult in Montreal due to how easy it is to get around in English; people will by default switch to English to help you out, and almost everyone is bilingual to some degree.
Just stick to your guns of speaking in French and let people know you want to practice, and you'll do great!
And congratulations on the move! It's a wonderful city. So wonderful that I'm moving back there in a month after being in the Toronto region for almost 10 years.
We enjoyed Quebec and Montreal. The singular rude experience didn't diminish it. We're eager to introduce our daughter to both cities now that she's old enough to appreciate them.
Sure, I am passionate about Russian grammar too, and I used to correct mistakes of native Russians writing in Russian (I stopped doing that when I learned that dyslexia is quite real and common, and I now feel sorry for that).
However, any foreigner trying to speak Russian, no matter how broken or incorrect, will meet nothing but praise and encouragement from other Russians.
Except the lady who sells subway tickets in Moscow. That lady is quite grumpy.
(Everyone else was kind.)
I took immersive classes, speaking 6 hours / day, 90 minutes spent on pronunciation drills. The only downside is my accent got better faster than my vocab, confusing lots of people with whom I interacted.
That's too bad, but I have a hopeful story for you.
I have a few years of high school and college French fortified by a couple months spent living in Lyon with a French family. Other than an hour between CDG and the TGV station, I'd never been to Paris until 2016, which was long after my French studies.
That 2016 trip was disappointing. I'd mentally rehearse the restaurant order while looking at the menu, or check Google Translate for the exact words describing the thing I needed from the store, and I had the same experience as you: a strong feeling I was exceedingly boring to the other person, and please let's switch to the easy path to get this drudgery over with. Speaking French was a big attraction to why I was looking forward to going to France. It was a letdown.
But three years later, in 2019, I found myself back in Paris, and this time I had several successful non-phatic discussions with natives that I'd characterize as enjoyable in any language. What changed?
Strangely enough, the change was learning Mandarin, which I started doing last year. Aside from my being an adult, Mandarin is hard for anyone to learn as a second language, so I never expected to reach conversational fluency in it. And my resulting attitude every time I'm talking to a native Mandarin speaker is "well, fuck it, I'm never going to be good at this, but I have to start somewhere, so let's just try to assemble what I'm thinking out of the 500 words I know, and see what happens." It's a totally different attitude from my well-studied, well-schooled, well-read, but not well-practiced French brain. And while I still concede I'll never be fluent in Mandarin, I'm saying an awful lot more to Mandarin speakers than I would have a single year into my French studies.
This lack of inhibition led into a better experience in France. I didn't bother trying to construct full, stammering sentences in restaurants. I just said the numbers and nouns and gave one-word answers to whatever the server asked -- insisting on switching to English would have actually prolonged our time together. But in circumstances where conversation would have helped pass the time -- cab ride where the driver looks like he's wondering something about us, or standing in line where all of us were clearly confused by the same situation, etc. -- I just went for it, with the same fuck-it attitude, and it worked out. We had our short, meaningful, optional conversations that scratched the "I spoke real French in real France" itch.
In short, yes, unfortunately, the problem really is you (and me). But it's fixable. Stop thinking "I'm about to speak French." Just let it happen.
> It's only two anecdotes. I may have simply run into rude people. But, they made me not care to ever speak French.
Oddly, my experience has been the opposite. Most of the places I have gone to in Paris spoke very little to no English but were trying to be very helpful anyway and I HAD to use my broken French.
However, I could tell that we didn't really hit the "standard" tourist shops (stayed just off École Militaire).
I will say that most English speakers tend to be VERY tolerant of mistakes. I think it's a combination of:
1) There is no single "native" English.
Think about how different people from different socioeconomic classes in the US, Canada, UK, India, etc. sound. And they are all native English speakers!
2) English is really agglomerative and absorbs neologisms readily.
Think about how quickly typhoon and tycoon entered the language, for example. Can you picture that kind of evolution for any other language?
In this way Belgium is much better in my experience. Especially in Brussels people are really tolerant of poor French (presumably due to the two language situation).
> An anecdote from a trip to Quebec city. My wife and I walked up to a hostess to inquire about getting a table for dinner. We greeted her in French. As soon as we started to ask about a table, she stopped us and said, "No no no no. This will be in English."
I was under the impression (having never been to Quebec) that she was in fact breaking the law by doing this.
As someone who lives in Quebec, I assure you that the government does not legislate what languages people can speak. They're picky about signs and menus and whatever, but you can't tell people what language to speak. There was a motion in the legislature to urge people not use "Bonjour-Hi" as a greeting, but that's not binding, and cannot be.
It's a little shocking that you're under this impression. The Charter of the French Language in Quebec ensures the right of consumers to be informed and served in French. It does not prevent people from serving you in English or any other language for that matter.
If they insisted to be served in French then they would have to be served in French, but what little of the situation has been detailed this does not seem to be the case.
I think it's ambiguous. At what point is there a refusal, and what degree of insistence is required? Someone initiates a request for service in French, the response is "no, no, no this will be in English". Has that person refused to conduct the transaction in French?
I suppose the person requesting service could be more forceful about insisting on being served in French, but does someone have to go through a second round of insisting/refusing before service has been denied? And what words count as insisting (id that is required), what words count as refusal? "No, no, no, this will be in English" seems very close to a refusal to me.
I wouldn't be surprised if this has been formally litigated in Canada, it'd be interesting to know.
> If I speak bad French with a French person... may God have mercy upon my soul. Especially if I forgot to say bonjout/bonsoir first (abomination! burn the heretic!)
These are two very different things. In my years of experience, the most likely outcome of speaking imperfect French is just that the French person switches to speaking perfect English.
Not saying hello+good morning is a social sanitation faux pas viewed akin to not washing your hands after using the toilet.
I'm not going to defend the latter, because it's all very formulaic, but I lived in France for years without proficiency and never had a poor encounter because of my unskilled French.
I've only met French speakers who could switch to perfect English in Quebec province.
French speakers from France make mistakes all the time and their pronunciation is very far from perfect. (As long as I can understand them, I don't care.) That being said, someone from France's English is more than likely many times better than my French.
> In my years of experience, the most likely outcome of speaking imperfect French is just that the French person switches to speaking perfect English
If they're from Canada, maybe [1]. If they're from France, a decent chunk of Wallonie (French-speaking Belgium) or Romandie (French-speaking Switzerland), I doubt it. France has one of the lowest rates of English proficiency among the other developed countries in Western Europe and I know that first hand.
[1] And the average French person wouldn't consider what the Quebecois speak as French :p
> The problem with French is that the French are very sensitive to mistakes.
Define sensitive?
When my wife (who is Czech) or my colleague (who is Venezuelan) make French errors, I correct them the same way I correct my children: not because it is annoying me (I don't speak Czech and my Spanish is terrible!) but because I want to help them.
And yes, if someone speaks bad French, I'll switch to English but that's not out of disrespect, it's because it's more efficient/easy, if you prefer that the discussion stays in French to practice your French, just say so..
No, your attitude is fine. I am OK when somebody corrects me. When they switch to English because they think English will be comfortable for both sides, this is also fine.
It is rolling one's eyes and immediate passive aggressive remarks that I hate, and they are quite common...
It might be the passive aggressive attitude itself rather than a reaction to the language. A frequent example is Parisian waiters in bistros. It is an old tradition for the waiter to be slightly cavalier with the clients, and for the clients to respond in kind. But it’s a kind of a parisian joke. Though I get how it would put off foreigners. But many other trades have their ritual (like a souk in Marrocco).
As a French, let me tell you that I find the behaviour of many Parisian waiters rude and unprofessional, perhaps that's because I'm not Parisian though..
> And yes, if someone speaks bad French, I'll switch to English but that's not out of disrespect, it's because it's more efficient/easy, if you prefer that the discussion stays in French to practice your French, just say so..
It might be efficient, but it will definitely hurt the self-esteem of the other person. Been there. I speak 5 languages fluently and tried to learn Italian. Went to Florence and every time I tried to speak Italian, people would answer in English. I know they're doing it because they're used to tourism and it's more efficient - yet at the same time it made me doubt so much about my language learning skills that I probably won't try it again for a while.
I think in part it's due to very few native English speakers being multi-lingual. Rudely correcting someone on their second-language is a faux-pas for most people in the UK. From my experience, people will try to be helpful and constructive with their criticism - because lets be honest, how many native English speakers could say much more than Hello, Please and Thank You in anything but English?
Conversely, I can see why some Europeans might be more passionate about correct grammar and pronunciation. As youth begin to speak in a hybrid of English and their native language, it begins to erodes their cultural identity. It makes sense if they're passionate about their countries heritage, which many French people are, to try and resist the Anglicising of a part of that.
Americans butchered the English language anyway so you couldn't do much worse ;)
You make a fair point. I can understand fear about a loss of cultural identity. But, speaking from a strategic standpoint, if you want to preserve the language, you need to get more people speaking it. Corrections can come later. It's like a child learning a musical instrument. Rare is the child who can tolerate being stopped every few seconds with corrections. But, teach a child to play a song in a rudimentary way on the instrument and you capture their interest. Once interest is captured, you can start teaching proper technique.
And yes, we of the US butchered English. I have no qualm with that statement. We also can't get metric right. At least we drive on the proper side of the road though. ;-)
It also depends on social circles. If you hang around with a bunch of eton/oxbridge old boys, even as a non native english speaker closing in on my 15th year in London, I struggle to understand many of the expressions. But I don’t when watching the BBC. Also as the article mentions there are many terms that are very infrequent, and even as a native French speaker, I had to look up a few cathedral terms in the dictionary.
But I kind of disagree with your “God have mercy on my soul” statement. French people are extremely proud (and being a French native, rightly so!). There is nothing they appreciate more than the world looking at them. When the international press makes their cover on France, it usually gets reported with screenshots in French media, something I have not seen in any other large country. For the same reason, most French people tend to feel flattered when someone makes an effort to speak their language. Though there are enough ancient and illogical grammatical rules to ensure a non native always gets spotted after only a few sentences.
This is very correct. English's status as an international language does wonders - you can speak in any terrible accent, get all the vowels wrong, invert word orders, ignore plurals and be wrong about every preposition and people will make an effort to understand you.
Now for German, you can speak any of the awful dialects natively and it's fine. But never, never dare Hochdeutsch with with a _foreign_ accent as people will make a point of not understanding you! Because dropping a umlaut suddenly makes an entire sentence impossible to parse!
> Now for German, you can speak any of the awful dialects natively and it's fine. But never, never dare Hochdeutsch with with a _foreign_ accent as people will make a point of not understanding you! Because dropping a umlaut suddenly makes an entire sentence impossible to parse!
Well, for Germany it's not about the language, it's about the fact that making any mistake that gives away that German is not your native language suddenly makes you a stupid immigrant of lower education in the eyes of the most of the natives.
I visited Germany (West Germany at the time) in the Summer of 1988. At the time, I had taken one course in German (Hochdeutsch) at my university. People seemed very friendly and willing to speak German or English. Mistakes were tolerated and they provided assistance when I couldn't remember a word. It was a short trip. I visited four cities. But, people were consistent throughout.
I’m a sample of one, but my experience with French people has been much different. As long as I’ve been open about being a beginner (from Western Canada) who badly wants to practice, I’ve actually been quite pleasantly surprised by how hard French speakers work to make me feel comfortable.
For example, just last week, I asked a French speaking couple I know to help me pronounce “de rien”. When I say it, I sound like I dun just gots off the potato patch. They quite literally tag teamed me, one started working on drills to help me roll the ‘r’. Another started making a list of other similar words (so that I could sound stupid across a wider range of vocabulary).
It was quite amazing. But, with the exact same people, if I just speak French without prefacing it with a request for help, they switch to English instantly.
Do you mean "de rien"? (As in "no problem", literally "it was nothing")
I agree r's are definitely the hardest thing to pronounce in french (as an english speaker at least). I think "rire" is the hardest word in the french language
Singing along to French songs in the car finally fixed my R problem, in a matter of days. Found I could do the rolled Spanish R and even the lazy, liquid Latin R with very little practice after getting that one down, too, and I couldn't at all before.
Once I received the feedback “you are killing the French language”, so we switched to English. But at no point did I tell this speaker that he was “killing the English language”.
If you do this while making it clear via subtext that you've messed up the difference between liver pâté and foie gras, you might as well get a cab right to the airport before you're deported.
My experience in France is people in many places are very happy for you to attempt to converse in French. Outside of the main tourist areas, many people only speak French so you have to at least try. Of course in Paris, this is often not true.
Because English is such a widely spoken language by people coming from very diverse first languages, I think English speakers are accustomed to not just bad English, but diversity of English.
I think this is not true, it's just an often told cliché. French is spoken in so many countries around the world and yet still French have this thing with foreigners trying to speak it. I think it's just more cultural and educational, nothing else.
They are sensitive because even what may seem to you like a tiny mistake, or a slight mispronunciation can completely change the meaning of a sentence or make it impossible to understand.
Broken English is everywhere, people got used to it. This is not the case for other, less pervasive languages.
True enough, but I remember being accused of deliberate misunderstanding by friends when they emphasised wrong syllable in English. Some minutes later with me racking my brain I might come up with the answer. But the mispronunciation had sent me off on the wrong track totally.
The fact that I speak other languages helps in that I am better prepared for likely sorts of mistakes, but even so.
If you try to speak Russian, no matter how broken, you will be encouraged and praised by every Russian person out there, no exceptions. The same is with Spanish. With French, it doesn't work this way, for some reason.
It's just a matter on how much time you spend learning the language.
Even if you only consider the time you spent in school merely learning your own native language those school lessons will add up to thousands of hours.
How many adults, who have already "learned" a foreign language, dedicate 6 hours per week purely on further improving their skills in that language for 12 years?
If you are worried about not knowing certain rare words then using a spaced repetition system with a word deck that contains the first 20000 or even 40000 words should help a lot. You will quickly rush through the words you already know. I can do 50 reviews in less than two minutes if I have memorized the words but 50 unknown words will take me at least 20 minutes. At a rate of 30 new words per day you can do 10000 words per year + half a year at the end to make sure every card reaches maturity.
In college Mandarin courses we were required to learn 30 words a day. That was a nearly impossible task for 20 year old me and required three hours of study a day on top of the 1:20 or 1:50 long daily class. To think a person more than twice that age can learn 30 words a day is, to my aged brain, ludicrous. Maybe it’s just me, but my learning ability is now vastly below what it was in my teens or even college.
I did a short foray into learning Morse Code, and I ran into what I found to be the biggest barrier to learning new languages. The bloody lookup table phenomena.
What happens is your mental representation maps the Morse sequence->your primary language character->whatever the message then actually means.
This is a very high overhead mental process, and one specifically advised against by fluent Morse keyers. What you want is to map the Morse pattern->it's representative concept.
Example:
First mental impl would look like
... -> S
--- -> O
... -> S
Then you mentally reparse that string to get semantic meaning.
Trying to do this for more complex messages blows. Case and point.
Imagine that coming over a line at about 13 to 25 wpm.
You don't have time to decode and reparse. You need realtime streaming and recognition of word units->meaning. No decode phase, just "oh, that's 'blah'"
Same thing applies with other languages. Language is used to nominatively stand in for forms of life. N'est ce pas? In any other language is still indicative of the same form of life/confluence of characteristics, 'is it not?'
It's seems easier when you're younger because you aren't fighting the lookup table phenomena because you're still learning your primary language.
It's why when learning a new programming language, an escalating series of higher complexity Hello World's you've implemented in other languages can be a godsend in getting up to speed.
The Koch method of learning morse code addresses that by never introducing an intermediate visual representation of the dits and dahs.
Instead, you listen to audio sequences and transcribe them directly to the characters of your language. So instead of learning the language visually, you learn to understand the sounds which is far more natural.
There's a great free site that teaches morse code in this fashion if you ever decide to give it another go: https://lcwo.net/
Learning morse code directly from audio is absolutely essential. Once you have learned all the characters by sound, I found it helpful to listen to code at a faster level than you can handle. You will miss characters, but I found it speeds up your ability to copy well. For example, back when I was taking morse code tests for licenses, I would listen to code at 20 wpm to prepare for the 13 wpm test and 30 wpm to prepare for the 20 wpm test. The tests seemed easy. BTW, I cannot read morse code without making the sounds in my head from the visual representation.
That's true, yet you have to go through a lot of Morse -> letter before it becomes automatic enough to advance to the stage where you can go from Morse -> meaning. There's no alternative really, you can't just wish yourself into automatically divining the meanings, you have to put in the hours of incremental training before it all becomes second nature.
I studied German in college, and I have been studying Korean for almost 2 years and I would say you're spot on.
The hardest thing about learning a new language is learning to think in that language, not 1. think in native language 2. transcode to target language. Not only is this quite slow, it leads to very unnatural language. English and Korean have different idioms and ways of structuring sentences.
Since I've been studying Korean for a while now I have certain thoughts I can innately express in Korean and actually have difficulty directly mapping to English.
---
However, one has to start somewhere. I can't really learn a concept in Korean without it being explained in English.. until I'm advanced enough to understand Korean grammar and word explanations in Korean.* One just has to remember that things don't map neatly although textbooks pretend like they do. Over time and exposure, you get a sense for how and when things are really used.
So the real answer is you need to just use the target language as much as you can. The only way to innately grasp a concept is by seeing it and using it.
* It's a bit like bootstrapping a compiler, isn't it?
I vividly remember the moment I first thought in French. It was about a year ago, I was 31 years old and walking along the beach after hanging out with a French couple for a few hours. I don't have a clue what I thought, but I remember idly musing about some subject in my head for a few seconds, suddenly realizing that the musing was in French.
Telegraph and radio operators used to write down the messages, character by character, as soon as they heard each character in Morse, and only once the entire message had been received attempt to read or interpret it. There are artifacts of this even in modern voice radio usage; e.g., "do you copy?" meant originally, did you successfully copy down my message?
Anki may very well be one of the best applications ever made.
I have been using it for about a year and a half for Korean, and now I'm memorizing kanji characters with it. My goal is to memorize 2,136 kanji within 4-5 months and I fully believe it's possible with Anki if I don't miss a day of reviews.
However, anki is the most useless app ever if you miss reviews. 1-2 days is fine, but you're hurting yourself otherwise.
My suggestion is to change the default deck setting to order review cards first. The default is to mix new cards + review cards, but sometimes I don't have the energy to learn new the cards, leading me to skip doing the reviews.
Also the decks are very customizable, since you can add custom properties, change what shows on each front/back, and style them with css.
I plan on doing a full writeup of anki at some point.
Let me first describe my initial routine, and how it spiraled into me quitting anki entirely. Then my current routine which actually works.
When I started learning Korean, I grabbed anki + Evita's 5k words deck. It's a pretty good deck, but lacks sentence samples. I use the mac osx app at home and the ios app on the go. The ios app is $20 but you can use ankiweb.net to do reviews. The android app is free.
For about six months I did anki just about every day, @ 20 new words/day. This took me anywhere from 30-50 minutes depending on my focus. It always took longer if I missed the previous day, because then I would have to re-do the newly-learned words (1-3 days interval). I had to commute on the bus every day so I was able to easily knock out anki as I just forced myself not to use reddit/HN before doing anki.
However after a certain point I had missed a few days, which made the next anki cycle take longer. It was frustrating, and caused me to miss more days.. Eventually I had so many reviews piled up that I didn't even want to open anki at all.
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How did I fix this? For starters, I used a custom session to knock out all the 400+ backed up review cards at once. It took me a good 3 or 4 hours. Next, I reduced the new daily card limit to 10. I think 20 is unsustainable unless you are consistently studying at least 3-4 hours daily. Since I work and also study Korean grammar/resources it was just too much.
Next, I changed the default system from "mixed review" (new cards + review cards) to "review cards first". This way even if I don't have the time or energy, I can still knock out the daily reviews. If done right it can be as short as 5-10 minutes depending on how many reviews you have for that day. It's not ideal but still far better than you backsliding on your learned words.
For beginners you can use premade decks, just make sure they have good reviews, and are ordered so you learn words like "mom" before you learn "diplomacy". If you google anki + $language deck, there are recommended ones on reddit usually. That's how I found the core2k japanese deck, which may be the best I've used so far.
However after that point you really ought to be making your own decks. Through your study you should be finding new words; write these down and add them to anki but be prudent about it. I made the mistake of learning advanced and niche words before learning "circle" and "foggy", which are way more useful to know. Also, add sample sentences. It's not really helpful to know a word but not the context when it is used.
In anki you can add custom fields for card types, so I added ones for grammar type, notes, sample sentences, and hanja. I also made a color card with custom html and css styling to let me practice memorizing color words. You can look into cloze deletion cards, I have heard they're good but have not used them myself.
Tip: You can bulk import anki cards from csv files. I maintain a spreadsheet and add them every so often.
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Nowadays I use 2 decks: my personal korean one @ 5 words/day and nihongoshark kanji @ 20 kanji/day. The reason being I am focusing more on memorizing 2k kanji right now. I do the korean one while taking the bus home from work and then I do the kanji one right away at home or at a cafe.
Hopefully this clarified things, otherwise let me know if you have any questions. Anki's manual documentation is actually very good so I recommend reading that.
Also a Korean learner who uses Evita's 5k word deck. She has a sentence deck with 2k sentences (most with recordings). I started it after doing 2k words in the vocab deck.
I honestly think that's the missing piece for people learning, learn vocab, but then start reading sentences. I love children's books for this.
What benchmark do you use for marking a kanji card as known in Anki? Do you just memorize the meaning of each kanji, or memorize the readings too? I'm looking to get back into studying japanese myself.
I'm not learning the readings yet since a lot of them have multiple readings, some less common than others. My thought process was to learn the kanji, then the readings as I learn daily vocabulary through Genki 1 / TaeKim's grammar guide.
I don't know if this is actually the best way to start learning Japanese but I thought it would be fun just as a personal goal to learn the 2,200 kanji before anything. Studying Korean takes up the lion's share of my time so I haven't started studying Japanese grammar much yet.
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I just follow the default progression of anki. 1 day -> 2 days -> etc. If it takes me zero effort to remember, I grade it as Easy. If it takes me more than 3-4 seconds to remember it, I grade it as Hard. If it takes more than 10-15 seconds I reset the card and start learning it again.
So far the only resets have been on similar looking characters and some newly-learned ones from the day before if I was a bit distracted.
Surely the words per day one can learn correlates with the difficulty of the language, and mandarin is amongst the hardest for English speakers to learn. So it is probably meaningless to argue about the absolute number of words per day a person can reasonably expect to learn without specifying the foreign language and the learner's native language.
It's hard for native Mandarin speakers too. Lots of educated Chinese can't write some of the characters anymore, especially as handwriting becomes less important.
If you learn a language through memorization of words you're being very, very inefficient. Very.
Learning a language requires next to no effort (compared to 30 words per day) and can be done at any age within six months. The strange thing is that nearly everyone does language learning wrong. I think it's because schools set everyone up for failure by teaching how to learn a language in a way, that's just so very inefficient.
You can redefine fluency to be something that is achievable with dedicated study in six months, but most people probably wouldn't call themselves fluent with the very limited vocabulary you can acquire in that time. Elementary school children know in excess of 20k words. I really don't believe that you can remember over a hundred new words every day without forgetting a single one.
No dedicated study. Basically zero effort on your part is required, you just need to spend some time on it everyday. Your vocabulary will build itself over time if you keep engaging with the language. It takes ten years to mastery, just like with everything else. Six months until you can communicate in the new language. English is my second language and I speak from experience.
>It's just a matter on how much time you spend learning the language.
I'm not sure if you're making a personal observation that's unrelated to the specific findings in the research paper. That's fine but it may inadvertently make people think that's what the paper concludes.
The particular paper[0] says that when testing for grammar accuracy in a 2nd language, the years of experience is not as predictive as age of of first exposure. The same dropoff of learning grammar happens to immersion as well as non-immersion older learners.
The authors don't claim to know why that happens but nevertheless noticed the patterns.
What website/application would you recommend for spaced repetition of vocabulary?
I've found the changing Windows logon screens quite nice, since every other day or so there's a new beautiful picture along with a few bubbles of text in German, enabling me to learn a few new words (though I'll probably forget most of them).
You don't want ready-made decks except at the very beginning. Once you get past words like "mom" that have very obvious usage, these decks aren't great because they lack examples and structure.
Instead, one should use Anki to make their own decks with words that they find whilst learning the language.
You can, and I have, make your own Memrise courses as well. I'm better at remembering to visit a website than I am at remembering to open a program. It's a silly difference, but I almost always have a browser open and every new tab I open serves as a reminder. I always fail to remember to open/use software. The times I've tried converting to Anki rather than relying that Memrise will continue to be available, my study time per week dropped by about 95%~.
You actually can use anki online, it's ankiweb.net. You can't modify decks on the website but it works for studying daily cards. Otherwise I use the mac osx or ios apps.
If you want a Spaced Repetition vocabulary quizzing for German, you might try: https://eardoor.com I created it just for listening practice and spaced repetition vocabulary practice: 1 hr/ 1 day/ 1 week. No sign in/sign up required.
Anki. See my other comments in this thread, but I can vouch for it after using it for almost 2 years for Korean and now Japanese kanji.
The manual documents it well, and I recommend you only use a ready-made deck for about 3 months at the most. After that you should be making your own word decks.
I like readlang a lot. They have a very nice browser integration allowing you to read text and get dictionary lookups in-line. It does cost $5/month but it's very well made.
I suppose it's hard to learn French when it's the first foreign language to learn. I managed to get a decent level of French (B2) by studying 3 hours per week for 2 years. I was 35+ back then. French was my second foreign language after English.
I actually like speaking French (which is now far not as good as it used to be) when possible. Learning French and the French culture has definitely changed my perception of the world. "Joie de vivre" is a beautiful concept that is sorely lacking in money- and work-obsessed North America (except Quebec).
10000 hours to proficiency divided by 6 is just 1666 weeks or 32 years. That's ignoring that just listening to the news is not the deliberate practice that is supposed to be accumulated for the proverbial 10000 hours.
I wasn't claiming that 6 hours a week was enough by itself to master a language, the parent comment suggested that people would find it hard to fit this much practice into their life.
I can use myself as an example of doing this kind of thing, when I'm in France I don't watch any english language media, and seeing a big improvement in my French.
Where do you find the words to add to your deck? I add words discovered in lessons - which are great for a proper context - but using words from internet sources (the news, etc.) is time consuming and means I keep seeing words from a few narrow niches (politics, economics, slang) without any understanding of how they'll be interpreted.
Get used to it. Learning a language is time consuming. Nobody ever learned a language by studying it 30 mins per day.
At a beginner level, one can find words through the grammar textbooks and the like.
At intermediate+, you find words through material that you find. For example, news, tv shows, songs, and the like. It's up to you from here on out.
> I keep seeing words from a few narrow niches
The trick is to vary your resources. Read the news, but also read a short fiction book, watch a comedy tv show and then a drama, etc. You should also find resources at your level. If you are a beginner, don't bother reading the news. Even if you look up all the words, they're usually niche and will not help you that much.
One way to combat this is to find a list of the 2k, 3k, 5k most commonly used words and add them to your anki deck.
What I do is I add unknown words from my daily conversations with native speakers.
> without any understanding of how they'll be interpreted
If you see a word in a sentence from a native source, that's a pretty good way to see how it's used. You can also cross-reference with a dictionary or by asking the native speakers you practice with.
When you add a word to your anki flashcard deck, you need to also add sample sentences. It's borderline useless to learn a niche word without examples of how it's used.
> When my kids brought home notices telling me to check their hair for “poux” (pronounced “poo”), I correctly deduced that it meant lice. But later, in a first-aid course, I was perplexed when the instructor told us to immediately check an unconscious person for “poux.” He was telling us to check for “pouls” — a pulse, pronounced identically.
There are homophones in many (most? all?) languages; but in this case "poux" are almost always plural (les poux / des poux) whereas a pulse is always singular (le pouls).
"Check his pulse" would be said as "vérifiez son pouls" and "check if he's got lice", "vérifiez s'il a des poux": it seems hard or impossible for the author to mix them up.
"Check his pulse" would be said as "vérifiez son pouls"
and "check if he's got lice", "vérifiez s'il a des
poux": it seems hard or impossible for the author to
mix them up.
As someone who learned German as an adult (which also has lots of homophones + gendered nouns etc) I assure you it's not hard to make such mistakes.
I can't edit my parent comment anymore; I didn't mean that it would be hard for anyone to fail to make the distinction, esp. for people beginning to learn French.
But the author has been in France for 15 years and by her own admission, speaks the language pretty well; so I doubt that she actually had a hard time discriminating between "les poux" and "le pouls" -- she probably thought this play on words was funny, but didn't experience the confusion herself.
It's not hard to them to make this mistake: "le", "la", "les" is all "the" for english natives, while verbs and adjective don't change according to plural or gender.
A lot of my mistakes in spanish comes from me trying to call masculine something that is not and vice versa.
French is a difficult language to learn:
- many letters are useless relics from the past, twisted, accentuated or silent.
- conjugations, plural, gender requires a lot of memory.
- rich and complex system to explain the chain of though or events. It's powerful to use, but it's surely hard to learn, and even harder to master.
- we like have a name for everything. Unless you know your latin, guessing meaning is not natural.
- verbose. If you a used to go to the point, well...
- similar sounds can be made by so many different combinations: au(x), eaux, ot(s), o(s), ô, oh... And we don't even agree on how to say it, rose is not said the same way in Paris, Toulouse or Nice.
- way less fun easy original french video content than in english (spanish is terrible in the same way). Not saying we have nothing, I like to advice "un gars, une fille" for french noobs, it's easy to get, and light. But learning english on Netflix is a treat.
> - many letters are useless relics from the past, twisted, accentuated or silent.
> - similar sounds can be made by so many different combinations: au(x), eaux, ot(s), o(s), ô, oh...
The same can be said about English "two", "write"?
I would say even more so: the amount of silent vowels, silent consonants in English is rather puzzling for someone coming from a Brazilian Portuguese background.
I still remember as a kid trying to get by the concept of not saying the S in "island" or just ignoring the K in "knight", "know" and "knowledge" or G in "align" and "design".
I studied English as a kid and then French, German and Spanish as a teenager and early 20s. In the "pronunciation from written form" department, Spanish is spectacular: an absurdly regular language in this department. German was unexpectedly regular and quite manageable to grasp in my experience. French coming in third place but yet shows some rather high degree of consistency — once you get the gist it coming with a close-enough pronunciation from the written form is doable for a new learner of the language.
I would not say the same applies to English, and the amount of loan words it takes from other languages doesn't make it any easier to someone learning it.
> And we don't even agree on how to say it, rose is not said the same way in Paris, Toulouse or Nice.
Again, dialects/accents variations are not a French exclusivity. I understand you are not comparing say inter-country variations (like Irish accent vs a Texan accent, Quebecois vs Parisian French ) but rather intra-country variations, but yet, Northern Germany German and its Souther variations are quite distinct.
> - rich and complex system to explain the chain of though or events. It's powerful to use, but it's surely hard to learn, and even harder to master.
> - verbose. If you a used to go to the point, well...
Both resources list the languages according to "time to Professional Working Proficiency" level. Not native level.
Learning any language to a native degree is going to be exceedingly difficult. French has more difficult pronunciation and spelling rules, significantly moreso than Spanish or German. Even for native English speakers.
The fact that overall, learning French is easier than say Korean, does not change the fact that French has difficult pronunciation.
> - similar sounds can be made by so many different combinations: au(x), eaux, ot(s), o(s), ô, oh... And we don't even agree on how to say it, rose is not said the same way in Paris, Toulouse or Nice.
That's true, but probably irrelevant for English speakers. English is possibly the only language that is worse than French in that respect. And there are English accents too.
Me too. As there are only around 602 000 results on Google I suspected it was only used in specific areas and according to the dictionary ("Petit Robert") it originates from Lille.
You're being harsh for pouls/poux being singular/plural, provided it was the first time the author had encountered those words. That kind of knowledge comes with experience with the words, which the author didn't have.
I still think it is weird to be that bad after 15 years in the country.
Counter point — I think it was French ambassador or someone from diplomatic corpus who impressed me in their interview on the radio. I think they have been in the country for half a year only and spoke amazingly well. And I mean it. It was not amazing in the way bear dancing is amazing (e.g. it dance terribly, but the fact itself is amazing). She spoke genuinely very well. And Lithuanian is a very very difficult language.
I don't know what foreign learners of french learn, but native speakers very early learn the complete list of words ending with ou whose plural is with an x instead of an s, which poux is one of (there are only 7 of them)
Keep in mind that her encounter with "pouls" was spoken, not written. The "poux" warning probably came with a written note.
Regardless, @bambax said she should have known that, in a spoken context [lə pu] is the pulse and [lɛ pu] is lice. I argue that it isn't surpising that the author didn't have that knowledge. Lice exceedingly rare in adult life (if common for school kids). Pulse is specialized vocabulary.
A good way to get an idea of how your language sounds to a foreigner is to throw away every other word. Literally. Then randomly mix close sounds (depending on your accent it can be buck/bark or buck/book).
Was it "a symmetrical" or "asymmetrical"? Was it "inward" or an "n-word"? Was it "not able to" or "vagina"?
Although your three examples are definitely not homophones in New Zealand English, but the vowel sound distinctions could be difficult for some non-native speakers.
I disagree. I find most of what the NYT publishes nowadays of a very low level, biased along with a lack of research. I think it used to be a much better newspaper, but that was a long, long time ago now.
Note that this is not unique to the NYT, the (former) printed press has fallen enormously since the advent of online news (once you can measure what attracts viewers, your articles will tend to be more and more clickbaity and sensationalist by nature).
I started learning french at 50 to be an example to my teenage son, encouraging him to learn a second language rather than playing fortnite. It is harder when you are not in french speaking area/country. Everything around us is english. I listen ici.radio-canada during commute and after 6 month in, I can understand 60-70%. But if I would be in Quebec listening french all day, I think learning would be much faster even at middle age.
> But if I would be in Quebec listening french all day, I think learning would be much faster even at middle age.
Full immersion is obviously a huge booster to fluency by a mix of opportunity (you're basically learning and practicing all the time) and necessity (you want to navigate the country without being stuck to a dictionary or translation application).
As long as you have a working basis and don't hang out too much with expats from your own country / first language (it's obviously comfortable and easy to slip into an insular community) even 3~6 months will do absolute wonders.
One thing that's really helped me learn languages is watching tv shows or movies with native subtitles. I had this revelation years ago in Spanish class. At the time, I had taken years of Spanish in school and yet I could barely speak or understand Spanish.
One day, our teacher made us watch Pan's Labyrinth with Spanish subtitles. It was such a struggle to watch, but because the movie is so good we paid attention anyway, and context clues help you along the way.
I vividly remember the next morning on the subway to school, where there were two men speaking Spanish and I suddenly realized I could understand everything they were saying. It totally blew my mind that I could finally understand Spanish!
I used this same technique years later when I lived in Italy for a summer. It was a lot of work, but I did the following:
1) Learned enough basic Italian grammar that I could translate a sentence by looking up words & conjugation rules
2) I watched Italian movies, both good and "blockbuster" ones, with English subtitles so I could understand the movie
3) Then, I re-watched the movies with Italian subtitles. If I saw/heard a sentence I couldn't immediately understand, I'd pause and hand translate it
Even though Spanish & Italian are quite similar, this was still surprisingly effective. I also enjoy watching movies, so it was also quite fun =)
There's probably some science as to why this technique works, but I don't know. It's probably because watching tv/movies is most similar to real-life conversations, as opposed to what you get in a classroom or a book. I never knew how to write an essay in Italian, but I also never cared.
I despised French a bit (my own native tongue), as I grew up with a little fondness for English, and spent most of my time speaking English (probably Engrish at times). Then I got.. say bored of casual (tech/web) English, and started to feel happy again with French, even accounting for all its odd rules and twists and everything. I felt it was a lovely bag of varied multitudes and shades that were very good for painting pictures with higher levels of colors and not being strictly informative or factual. I guess it's a question of desire and maturity .. at times you want easy and predictable, and maybe later you want to play a little more with words. And this might not be a French-only case, I'm just giving my 2 centimes ;)
I relate to that. As a Portuguese, I had both English and French in school. As a teen nerd learning Basic on the ZX Spectrum, English was much useful than weird french. I now regret not paying much attention to those classes.
Learning a language at any age is hard. It's just harder to fit in thousands of hours of deliberate practice in your thirties than in your teens. As the author correctly notes one needs to know tens of thousands of words to have a reasonable chance of getting through a text without encountering an unknown word. To get to that number a spaced repetition system is much more useful than sticky notes, but it doesn't help much with the time needed for practice.
People forget how much time they spent learning something when they were younger. I feel like a lot of adults give up and use age as an excuse for not trying new things.
I think this is one of the biggest points. Kids spend all day in school being forced to learn, they come home and do homework, and everything they're doing day to day is exposing them to something new. Every little thing they know feels like a huge accomplishment.
Adults are generally getting paid to do things they can already do and when we get home, we tend to piss away our time with things we know we'll like and aren't too unfamiliar. We can spend a week learning something, but in terms of our gross knowledge, it's comparatively nothing at all.
I'm not quite middle aged yet, but I'm working on learning my third language and started just a few months ago. I'm setting aside a solid hour a day + small 2-5 minute intervals throughout the day, and I'm learning faster than my second language due to the effort I'm putting in. I won't deny that it does get harder to learn completely new concepts as we age, but one benefit we have over kids is we know how to learn effectively and we have exposure with wide arrays of topics. Try to find ways to apply your other accumulated knowledge and discipline to new topics and you can learn faster.
And I mean, shit, you ever see kids try to learn Spanish or French in middle school or high school? Most can barely put together a basic greeting at the end of 1 or 2 years. A 30 or 40 something who reads a phrase book during lunch break and watches some 5 minute grammar practice videos at night 4 days a week will learn faster than 9/10 teenagers.
> I think this is one of the biggest points. Kids spend all day in school being forced to learn, they come home and do homework, and everything they're doing day to day is exposing them to something new. Every little thing they know feels like a huge accomplishment.
You’re far too kind to school. You can teach an illiterate 9 year old to read English in 40 hours, about the same time as it takes to cover the entire primary school math curriculum with a 12 year old. Homework in primary school has nugatory impacts on learning; it’s a theft of time from children and their families for ~0 benefit. You can take a native speaker of Mandarin from completely illiterate to grade level in reading and writing in three years and that’s either the most difficult or the second most difficult language after Japanese to write. If children actually retained what they were taught in school maybe it would be worth it but the average US adult doesn’t know each state has two senators. People do not retain knowledge they don’t use or find interesting.
School before 12 years old is an exercise in teaching children things slowly and haltingly that they are capable of picking up quickly and easily in a fraction of the time two years later, and things that genuinely help children like play time, especially unstructured play are forced out to increase test scores in earlier age groups when the increase washes out to nothing compared to those of two decades ago by the end of high school.
You are all absolutely correct, that it comes down to effort and practice, for the typical adult. If you treat language learning like a serious hobby, and practice it several hours a week, consistently, of course you can learn to speak a language. Practice with an ear to eliminating your accent, and you can minimize that, too.
Most people don't, or they look at how "easy" it is for kids (it's easier, but kids are also more fearless for just saying stuff and making noise), and they give up and say it's hard.
Allowing for some broad exceptions for people whose brains aren't wired to pick up a language, like people who struggle to learn math or music or painting...
I'd add another factor. Young children love communicating. They (no offense) have nothing better to do than trying to find ways, sounds and words to exchange. My theory is that this level of mind/brain engagement toward language is unmatched after 4 yo. You have other center of interests later on that would make a kid go mad if they tried to learn them.
>Learning a language at any age is hard. It's just harder to fit in thousands of hours of deliberate practice in your thirties than in your teens.
Depends on the person and their budget. There are well off people (and quite poor people) with all the time in their hands to practice, because they hardly need to work. Doesn't need to be a billionaire, having a few houses to rent can be enough.
one of these days i am going to write tmux macro that updates the bottom pane with vocabulary. there will be a cli command that corresponds with it, once i write in the definition, it will cycle to the next word instantly.
I agree. Ms Druckerman needs to read a lot more books. She should make a point of reading the classics of French literature starting with something simple like "Le Petit Prince", then Maupassant and slowly work her way up to "Les Miserables" which will take years, but she has the rest of her life to do this. Even if she does not absorb everything, she should press on. She should do this reading plan on a e-reader. I've been glancing at the comments here and no one mentions the fact that e-readers are a great way to learn a language. Why? Because getting the definition of a word by touching it is way easier than old-fashion dictionaries. She should also highlight the word she does not know and when she is done with the book email herself the highlights which e-readers allow you to do. In this manner she will build up her own personal vocabulary list. This plan will require some discipline, but it's what you have to do if you want to be more fluent. Technology makes it easier than it used to be thanks to e-readers and online dictionaries.
It's not like it's actually possible to comfortably read french books when you learn the language, with their specific grammatical tenses only used in literature. I speak French fluently and at home but I'd be incapable to read a complicated book in that language (while I'm absolutely able to read English books and do that all the time, and speak English way less often).
English books use different registers, vocabulary, and grammatical tenses than found in everyday speech also. Basically every language has differences in formally printed books and daily speech.
And it's not like you have to read dense texts only. There are plenty of short books, or books with lighter material, that learners can definitely read. It's a very good way to discover new vocabulary and see how words are used in what contexts.
Written English matches spoken English almost 1:1. Written French could as well be a different language (hyperbole, but not that much). "Just read books" is just not good advice in this case. Reading comics would work, maybe.
English is not my native language. I've been reading English books mostly for pleasure for years: when books main language is English that's what I get (thanks Amazon). At first it was hard, it is still hard when trying a book in a domain I've not encountered a lot. And I'm still reading faster in my language but there are not a lot of modern English books I'd consider impossible to read.
That's kind of my point. Your advice to read books to learn more words is right, in languages like English and German. It does not work well for French because the written French is too complicated and different.
Absolutely true -- but read BD's instead. That will give you spoken language, context and fun in one package. Forget about Maupassant, La Peste, Tartarin de Tarascon, Seigneur de Brantome, Victor Hugo, Balzac or any of the other ancient French classics. Ancient language, weird sentences and -- not much good as a read either.
I've found that, learning vocabulary was easier when I was younger, but I struggled with grammar. Now that I'm a lot older, it's harder for me to hold on to vocabulary but I pick up the grammar stuff much quicker.
This article would have been much more convincing if the author had done some testing of their actual level in French rather than just talking about how insecure they feel.
It's possible the author's language is poor, it's also possible it's very good but they see "great" as normal and so discount what they know due to imposter syndrome.
I've heard a lot of people apologise for their English after speaking flawlessly.
That's roughly what it argues further on in the article.
Dr. Hartshorne also points out that native speakers have exceptional precision. Even someone with 99 percent grammatical accuracy sounds foreign. He guesses that I have about 90 percent accuracy, which shouldn’t feel like failure. “Imagine if you decided you were going to pick up golf in your 30s, and you got to the point where you could keep up in a game with professional players. You’d think that’s actually really good. But for some reason, just being able to keep up in language feels not as impressive.”
If you ever watch little kids learning a language, you'll notice that they just try. They butcher it, they don't care. But at least they're trying and practicing the whole language generation pathways in the brain.
Meanwhile adults are often too anxious to even try no matter how proficient they might be. I myself went years without even trying to talk to anyone in Spanish despite living in Mexico. Watching children trying to learn a language was inspiring to me.
1) it's really, really hard to effectively drill vocab out of context because the gender of nouns affects everything around them, the indefinite form conceals gender (via contraction) in too many cases to be of much use, while the definite is awkward and still doesn't really drill modifying words around it anyway. To do it right you've really gotta come up with a few short model sentences or phrases involving adjectives, which is a giant pain in the ass.
2) It's bizarrely hard to get ahold of French media online, outside the EU. I just want to stream Le Juste Prix, damnit! Makes one envy Japanese learners. The language may, in some ways, be a lot harder, but there's so much media readily available and there are so many tools for it.
Courses, instructors, etc all fall short because ultimately mastery requires deep and prolonged immersion which the author and many people post-middle age never commit to. Her kids live in France yet she talks in English at home, doesn't watch TV/movies in French, and doesn't read much in French (inferred from one of her comments) - all her choices and all sufficiently big deal to 100% explain her lack of mastery.
I'm far from convinced based on anything in this article that learning languages is actually harder for middle aged people at all vs kids. Consider typical 2nd language education in the US: 1hr/day for 4 years during highschool - those 14-18yr olds speak terribly also and the reason has nothing to do with age.
Read the article to find out why, came out disappointed.
Yes, the French has many specific, unoften used words; but so does any other language. Some words sound similar or the same but that is not exceptional either.
I learned Vietnamese in my mid 40s. I think it’s just a matter of persistence and patience. As adults we’re less willing to be novices for an extended period of time.
Imho the way languages are taught is too often counter intuitive to the way we communicate.
The issue is not accepting to be a novice but the harmful doxa dictating that in order to learn a language you first need to start thinking dumb before expressing a complex line of thoughts.
It is mind numbing to be deprived of coordination when expressing yourself and the resulting brain atrophy caused by years of saying My name is.. I live in... I have... This stuff is such and such etc... is the biggest deterrent to learn a new language and become fluent in it.
NOTE: this comment does not add anything to the discussion
"As adults we’re less willing to be novices for an extended period of time." - I read this comment and thought to myself "Interesting" and moved on to other web pages. And then it hit me again and again that this was absolutely true in a lot of cases where me or my friends found it frustrating to learn something new. Thank you for putting it this way.
Key answer: "And though I live in France, I’m not immersed enough. I use French for work, but I speak lots of English too, including with my kids and husband. I don’t have an “école horizontale” — a romantic partner with whom I speak only French."
I've lived abroad in multiple countries and have met a lot of people trying to learn the language. Without fail, you absolutely have to have either a full-time job in the language, or be romantically involved with someone in the language (without falling back to English) and spend a ton of time with them. That's simply the only way you'll get enough hours of exposure in.
Also you can learn English fluently without living in an English-speaking country, but only by spending basically all your free time watching English TV/films and listening to music. Not just every so often, but you make consuming English content your life.
If you're American living abroad but are married to another American and your job is mostly in English, it doesn't matter that you live in the country -- I've never seen anyone in that situation master the language. It just doesn't give you the necessary thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of exposure, and because it's low-level exposure, you also quickly reach the point where you're forgetting as many words as you're learning, so it's not even cumulative -- you just reach a plateau. There's even an academic name for it, just Google "intermediate language plateau".
>I've lived abroad in multiple countries and have met a lot of people trying to learn the language. Without fail, you absolutely have to have either a full-time job in the language, or be romantically involved with someone in the language (without falling back to English) and spend a ton of time with them. That's simply the only way you'll get enough hours of exposure in.
I've met many people who have learnt to speak a language (most examples would be for English and German, latter without consuming that much German media) without having this, and am currently learning a language without anything resembling this. Your statement simply seems wrong to me no matter how I read it.
Agreed. There's a a few guys on /r/languagelearning who learned Italian to a C1 level without ever stepping foot in the country, or being married to a native. It can be done, it's just more difficult.
Let me clarify: get beyond intermediate proficiency, which is what the article was about. I thought that was understood from the context, sorry.
So it really depends on what you mean by "leaning to speak a language". You can learn to speak at an intermediate level just by taking courses for a couple of years, dedicated study with books/tapes, etc. But I don't mean that.
I mean getting to the point where it being a foreign language becomes a non-issue. Where you can travel to the country and interact fully in any social conversation, normally understanding every single word (i.e. at the same level of your native language) and speaking with appropriate vocab and grammar so everybody understand every word of yours. Without having to constantly ask for clarification, or just "not get" half of it, or constantly re-explain what you meant using other words because people were confused the first time you said something.
They're worlds apart. And that real fluency just absolutely requires thousands and thousands and thousands of hours of constant real-life interaction (and real-time correction, whether from friends or coworkers or romantic partners) in the language. There aren't any shortcuts to that.
I moved, in my 30's, to a non-English-speaking country. I tried Babble and DuoLingo. Babble was crap, and DuoLingo was alright at slowly expanding my vocab, but the sentences were idiotic. One example was "The horse is touching me" which I found particularly useless. I also tried private lessons, but the cost was high and required more effort than I had time for.
Rosetta Stone has, so far, been the best, precisely because it relies on immersion.
The downside is that I think the situations are traveler centric, and overly simplistic.
To my mind, the best way I've improved is by memorizing "scripts" of common interactions. For example, ordering coffee, or memorizing answers to the common questions people ask me about myself.
I've never said "The boy jumps over the water," in any language, but I have said, "I'd like a double espresso with hot water on the side, no milk or sugar" or "I'll be at home at 2 pm" many times. As I add scripts, my vocab improves.
Most fluent immigrants I've spoken to say that watching a ton of TV in the language was a massive help.
I've been consumed with this idea since going back to France for a few days after living there for five months almost 10 years earlier. I had the experience of trying to learn Danish mostly by immersion and a little by terrible classes (no one seems to have an idea how to make Danish phonetics decently teachable, and that's the number 1 challenge in Danish). I theorized that foreign language learning has evolved to develop a pyramidal approach towards literary translation. That's definitely an important skill, but my guess is 99% of people interested in in a foreign language don't care about that level of language mastery, even in their native tongue, and would much prefer to learn enough grammar to start to acquire more and more conversational fluidity. People shouldn't read poetry in foreign language learning, but magazines. People should watch TV, partly because there's so much TV/video available in every language now via the web, and it's a great venue to hear diversified fluent speakers speak, rather than just actors or newscasters who are trained in speaking as clearly as possible.
My plan for Danish was to try and establish a transcript feed for viewing DR programs online, so you could watch the most audibly diverse shows on your device and quickly refer to the complete transcript (not the CC for hearing impaired because it scrubs the verbal grammar a bit and omits the vocal punctuation that are extremely important for holding your own in a foreign language), and change the playback, jump back and forth a few seconds, etc., the way one reads and rereads a passage in a text that catches their attention or evades comprehension at first.
That sounds really cool, actually. I rely on YouTube/Daily Motion for shows in foreign languages but I struggle without a transcript due to dialect and speed.
When there are subtitles, it helps immensely, so I imagine your idea would be a benefit on top of this already helpful technique.
I've found that one of the the reasons why learning a second language at middle age is less effective, is because we already have a language we can express ourselves in with great mastery.
For children and teenagers, learning the intricacies and irregularities of a language is simply the only way they can learn to describe and apprehend the world --- and themselves in new ways and ideas, and not get shamed for saying something weird. Their quality of life is very highly correlated with how well they learn a language, whereas the same cannot be said for those who have already mastered one, or those who live in an environment that does not actively use a language they are learning (hence why learning French in school helps you so little, and why so few Japanese speakers are confident in their English).
Barring immersion, one way to force yourself to learn another language more effectively is to spend some time muting yourself in the languages you already know and allow yourself only to express your thoughts in the language you are learning.
>And I revel in small triumphs, like [...] that French Jews and Christians use the familiar “tu” when addressing God.
English speakers do as well, but the form of address is so deprecated in modern usage that it sounds more formal instead of less. The English familiar-you is thou, and is/was only used with intimate relationships.
I actually think that for her not letting go of English is the biggest obstacle. You won't be properly immersed if any significant part of your live still happens in your native tongue.
In my student exchange year this was very noticeable: all of us Europeans decided to not speak our native languages among ourselves while the large group of Brazilians kept speaking Portuguese with each other. At the end of the year the their English showed little improvement and they also did not seem be well integrated with American friends and so on.
On the other hand, we came home barely able to speak our native languages. That is a really weird feeling when you try to speak to your parents in German and your brain just gives you English words and idioms.
So yeah, before you give up because of age try to not leave your brain an out to be lazy. Brain, there is only one language now and you'd better learn it quickly.
> I actually think that for her not letting go of English is the biggest obstacle. You won't be properly immersed if any significant part of your live still happens in your native tongue.
I agree. Despite Swedish and English being very similar, my experience is that native English speakers are among the slowest to pick up the language, and most reluctant to use it.
I have been learning French from the very beginning of my life, because my parents and everyone else considered that success in our country can only be achieved if you are fluent in it. Now I can hold a descent French conversion and I even did my engineering education in that language, but I never managed to be fully fluent in it. French is an interesting language, and I really enjoyed the countless Fantasy and sci-fi books I read, But I think I should have invested my time in learning English instead.
Languages require continuous practice. Immersing yourself in it is the only way, or else just forget it, it won't happen. Every language in particular is hard on the tongue depending on your linguistic background and upbringing. An arabic speaking person would have challenges with french that are similar to an english speaking or spanish one but still not the same. How? Well for starters for example, such as in "de rien", the "e" vowel would threw off the Arabic speaker but not the "R". With Spanish the "R" is a nightmare and also the "e". For the English speaker the combining both brings pain and suffering. This simple comparison is about not just the non existing tones and sounds that one must master before uttering the correct word, but like I said before, it rhymes with immersing oneself in the language. Learning the meaning of "de rien" and using it correctly in a sentence is far from speaking it. Observing its context, ways of pronouncing ( think state of mind, a word can be spoken following many colors, something a non native lacks. as his or her speech comes flat). I wish I could use other words to deliver what I must say, but I hope you get the idea that Spoken language runs deeper than pronunciation and mastering grammar. Another side note I wanna add is that occasional practice is not gonna cut it. You wanna learn a language? Make it a daily activity. Music, TV,trivial conversations etc..You'll realize you're stepping out of your comfort zone, and that is a huge sign enough that you're building actually something solid.
> Languages require continuous practice. Immersing yourself in it is the only way, or else just forget it, it won't happen.
I wonder if this applies to programming. I have tried many times to pick up Swift and Python. I am interested in it but I tend to get distracted by something else and then completely forget the languages.
I know any skill requires constant practice. But I still feel like programming falls more towards learning a different language.
I recently realized I had learned late nineteenth-century French at high school... I had French from 1982 to 1989. My teacher was in his sixties, and being a friar, had never been to France, or even Brussels. He had been taught by another friar, also in his sixties, back then. My teacher was taught in 1946, 1947, his teacher in 1900 or so. Even the audio materials were ancient, dating back to the sixties... When I started reading BD's, I was in for a rude surprise!
As someone that's studied Spanish intensively for the last four years, I've come to the conclusion that fluency is somewhat arbitrary and also that learning a language should be a goal directed activity. Are you learning the language to travel? Are you learning the language to read the classics? To integrate with a family, etc? I have mental mile markers, which are mostly comprised of situations where I've embarrassed myself in the past. In looking back on these mile markers, it becomes obvious how far I've come, which should feel great; however, I think most of us are attuned to focusing on our deficits rather than our successes ("I should have been able to understand that conversation I overheard, etc"). At the end of the day, I think of language learning as a lifetime journey rather than a destination, and this has allowed me to make peace with my deficits. I also think there's no substitute in the world for slogging through hundreds of improvised conversations, with our barbarisms in full view, and learning a little bit each time. People idealize fluency as some kind of holy grail, but at the end of the day, we're really just trying to communicate with each other, are we not?
There is actually a new app, just out of beta testing, called Fluent Forever that uses strategically spaced repetition like anki, but flashcard creation is way faster, plus there's audio built in. The problem with Duolingo, Babel, etc. is that they are forcing you to use English in your study of the foreign language. It's much closer to immersion to link pictures to the written and audio vocab you are trying to learn. This obviously gets trickier the less concrete your words are as you advance, but for way more info on this topic https://blog.fluent-forever.com/what-makes-fluent-forever-di... or, better yet, read the book Fluent Forever. The fluent forever method is to learn the sound needed (phonemes), then basic vocab (600-1000 words), then start building sentences to get at the trickier material.
The 49-year-old author is using stickers on her monitor for vocab and shocked to find duplicates due to lapses.
Meanwhile, 48-year-old me has some 8300 Japanese entries in Anki, most of them "mature".
A few months ago, someone Japanese asked me, do you know how to read this thing I received in a text message? Showed me the screen, where "逞しい" appeared. At first I declined; no idea. Seconds later, though, I asked, can I see that again? I stared at it for another moment or two and it kicked in: hey, wait, that spells "takumashii": strong, sturdy, burly, and such. God damn!
Repetition works.
I later checked into Anki: I had reviewed 逞しい 42 times. That would have included a lot of lapses; words I don't lapse on don't get reviewed 42 times.
(For that word, I still didn't have the confidence to immediately recognize it. This is probably because I have never studied that kanji, and have no other word in my vocab which uses it. It's not in the jouyou list.)
I think it's one of those articles that gets upvoted because people like the topic. I'm getting old - what do. Same as random stuff regarding privacy, depression and google killing its projects.
So here we have generic discussion number #72, where we talk how neurogenesis stops at a certain age but not really and how stuff can improve your cognition but only if you're a mouse.
Also a good place to recommend The Brain That Changes Itself[1].
Nothing. Learning a new language at middle age is hard and demands a lot of effort.
Some languages are harder than others though. I leaned English in my twenties (20-25) it was easier than learning German (at 25+). Maybe that's because there is a lot of material in English compared to German (TV shows, Movies, Music).
I also tried Japanese, it's fairly easy to pick up daily phrases but reading/writing was almost impossible for me.
Well, anecdotally, liaisons. Prior to a trip to the French part of Switzerland last year, I practiced my French pronunciations instead of learning word banks. I was able to hear much more than during my four semesters of college level French a decade ago. But, those sentences where you leave the consonant sound off the end of a word? Got me every time. I imagined that the word was different, not the pronunciation. My friend I was visiting, on the other hand, took the train to another city to participate in a French language course with other foreigners learning French as a prerequisite to employment. Immersion: Given that, his family speaking French fluently, living in a country where French is spoken slowly, and seeing Italians and Germans make mistakes in French, he could suss out the words much faster. I didn't feel outclassed, just outpracticed.
Strictly anecdatally (nb: intentional), I moved to France at 26, spent a total of five years living in France before heading back to the US, have kept French involved in my life, and now fifteen years later will have French people ask me where in France I am from. Which is to say, that this article reads as personal experience more than anything else. However, French is probably a very unique case for study.
French poses a large number of difficulties for the native English speaker. While the letters are the same, the sounds are subtly different (more precise, less rounded than English), and there are at least three sounds that simply don't exist in English (the two "u" sounds "ou" and "u", the nasal "n", the guttural "r"). You most likely won't even be able to hear the difference between the two "u" sounds until after you've trained your ears.
Also, many sounds are simply elided from the words they are attached to. Almost any word with an "s" loses that sound ("filles" and "fille" for daughter(s) are both pronounced "fee"). A word like "comment" (how), where if you were to pronounce the "ent" would be a very light nasal "n" sound, is pronounced "co-mo".
Additionally, while the number of contractions in English is small, French has a construct called the liaison (which means link), which causes a combinatorial explosions in audible contractions. For example, the word comment (pronounced "co-mo") and the word allez (pronounced "ah-lay") links to become "co-mo-ta-lay". (added "T" sound).
This link is because normally, in French, two vowel sounds can not be consecutive, and so the otherwise silent sound is re-injected to make the two sounds flow together better. In cases where no sound has been elided, a new letter is injected to keep the flow. "Has" is "a", and "he" is "il", but "has he eaten?" gets an injected "t": "a-t-il mangé?". However, if adding the sound for flow causes confusion, then the French will leave it out for no strict reason. The example given to me was "trop aidé", which translates literally as "too helped", because the link would make it sound like "too gay", which would cause confusion.
So when you combine these (along with a number of complexities I haven't mentioned yet (like there's a whole verb tense that only exists in writing, but not spoken form), then French in specific conflicts with a lot of what you learn for English, making it very difficult to learn as your second language.
What you describe applies to any foreign language. The details differ, but they’ll all have different spelling and pronunciation rules, different sounds, different grammar, and all that.
I also learned French as an adult, first in school and then by immersion. I also learned Mandarin, although not as well. I’m somewhat functional in it but not at all fluent. French is really easy by comparison, coming from English. You get a shitload of vocabulary for free. It uses the same alphabet with minor differences in sounds. Grammar is different but with many familiar concepts.
English is basically French mixed with Germanic languages and then baked for a thousand years. English gives you a great foundation for French.
I think the subtle thing missed here is the effort required to speak a second language well is not worth the effort. Just scraping by is good enough especially if you still have access to your first language. Why speak French well when for a fraction of the effort speaking poorly gets you 90% of the return.
> Why speak French well when for a fraction of the effort speaking poorly gets you 90% of the return.
Because that last 10% (which is actually more like the last 99%) is the part where you actually create friends, relationships, and connect with other people beyond "how are you?" And people actually start inviting you to social gatherings again because you can keep up in conversation even though your new-foreign-guy appeal wears off. And when you meet a cute girl, you can actually hold her attention and interest and feel fulfilled after the honeymoon stage wears off, and you don't just conjure up questions like "so how long is she gonna last with this foreign play-thing?" when you visit her friends and family. And you stop feeling like a fucking outsider all the time.
Your post is the same bullshit I told myself when I moved abroad and didn't actually want to put much effort into learning the language. It won't get you as far as you think.
The issue for the OA author is she has her family in France so she can speak English.
I am not trying to suggest it is not a good idea to learn to speak the language well in the country you live, just that the effort can be out of proportion to the benefit if you are surrounded by people who speak your native language.
People who rely on wit and charm as their social lubricant need it.
I remember one place I worked had an exchange program between labs, we had a French girl in ours who seemed very shy and withdrawn, but the colleague who'd been to the French lab the year before (and was fluent in French) said she was an absolute riot and the soul of any party in France.
Very few french folks who live in France like to speak any other language, regardless of their objective level. Those who went abroad are better in this. The excuse is always the same - "my level is not so good" - which is mostly not true, they are perfectly understandable and speak fine. Maybe they don't like their accent, but this is not any blocker for a good conversation.
Very personal experience for past 8 years - living 2km from French border, surrounded by them day and night.
I was watching a basic italian video last weekend as I'm visiting Tuscany soon and the teacher made an excellent point that vocab matters so much more than grammar to begin with.
We'd all understand 'I the toilet need', and most languages have about 1000 everyday words, so just learn them and you'll be able to make yourself understood, don't worry about the grammar too much to begin with, or not at all if you're just travelling there.
Perhaps not so true of some languages, but certainly most Romantic and Germanic ones.
But we make up for it with our good looks and sporting ability! /s
While "charm" may not fit the stereotype of an HNer, I'd guess we're more likely than average to rely on communication to make a good impression. I, as an immigrant, certainly feel that I'm handicapped because humour and interesting conversation are all I have to offer on a first date!
If you live somewhere long-term not speaking the local language well will pose more subtle barriers even though you could still buy bread in the bakery. It really makes you feel like you don't belong (in a way you don't) and are not "home".
Looking back at my years of failure at French in school I get the impression that French does not lend itself particularly well to scraping by. Any form of rudimentary word-uuuhm-by-hrmmm-word rendering of French is so far removed from actual French (and noticeably so even to the uninitiated, which might be the key difference), that it's hard to find your "scrapping by voice". Objectively harder than in many other languages I think.
Yes one of the thing us native english speakers forget is how easy it is to speak English badly and get by - with many other languages unless you have a good grasp of the language nobody has any idea what you are trying to say.
Maybe there is more to the dominance of the English language than just British and American pop music, movies and empires. Relatively high functionality at low skill levels should be the main quality metric for a common secondary language. English ranks terribly in consistency between spelling and pronunciation, but maybe selecting the wrong mapping rule for a word isn't quite as damaging to communication as over might expect. But I'm biased myself, as a native speaker of German I am clearly on the winning side of English dominance: just add the French half of the vocabulary, the rest is almost a dialect.
As an expat trying to learn the language of my new country I have found I have the most difficulty forming the vowel sounds I didn't grow up with.
I made something of a breakthrough when I finally found someone who could listen to me and tell me what I'm doing wrong with my mouth and tongue position.
I'm 60+. I've just finished 8 months of French integration for adult immigrants in Québec in Gatineau (across the river from Ottawa). Five days per week, 6 hours per day for 40 weeks. My wife (francophone) loves to hear me make appointments and carry on practical interactions in French.
I can follow the news and participate in conversations with people in our circle, but movies and street speech still elude me.
The thing I have enjoyed the most is forming friendships with other students who don't speak English at all.
This region of Québec is perhaps less impatient with the struggles of people learning French, with pockets of anglophones and francophones on the Quebec - Ontario border.
She mostly follows english speakers on Twitter. Twitter is a useful way to improve language skill because there is a "Translate" button right there, and it's already part of your routine if it's in your feed. It's kind of funny she mentions circling a word Le Monde and then looking it up, as if there weren't much better ways of doing that online.
Because Twitter is such a good way to learn a language I've started an account for learning a little Greek every day (you need the equivalent of a year of Greek already).
The biggest difficulty, apart from the aging difficulties (which I think are smaller than people think) is that you don't have time to immerse yourself in the learning experience.
There is no reason if someone not making an effort won't learn a language when they depend on it. Sure, they won't get all the grammar details, and will have an accent, but they will learn to be conversational on it.
It's easier if you approach French after you've learned Spanish, Italian or Romanian. I'm fluent in Spanish, and despite not having learned French in a dedicated way, I can read and understand almost everything. Spanish -> Catalan -> French could even be a smoother route, move to Barcelona!
I'm an English-native speaker living in a French-speaking part of a country with a number of national languages. I speak fluent French, and I suspect Americans/British would call my German fluent too, but it isn't in my view. I have small bits of other languages.
To qualify fluent French is hard without sounding like a "humblebrag", but, I insist on doing French for everything locally and am often more comfortable in French than my local friends are in English.
I feel like the author is both simultaneously making excuses and being overly hard on herself. If the expectation is to learn French to the level of les immortels de l'académie française... yes, I know she did not say that, but this is a standard to which any non-native will always fall short. The complaints she makes that there is ever-more-specific vocabulary, new gaps and having words that simply don't stick in your mind are simply all part of my daily life. It takes an enormous, persistent effort and continual use to really get good at a language.
A possible difference between myself and the author (although I'm unsure, given her past ability in Portuguese) is that I started learning French when I was 9, had the good fortune to have one good French teacher for a year who taught me everything I've ever needed for languages (learn grammar by heart, as much vocab as you can and seek to immerse yourself as much as you can), I worked on my languages outside of school and I moved to my current country in my mid-20s. I don't have the fear of being wrong other people have mentioned.
The author writes the article as if French specifically is difficult, but the only real point she makes that diverges from other languages is the existence of l'académie française. I actually agree that French specifically is difficult for English speakers (and my German speaking friends believe it is difficult for them as well). Where I am there are large numbers of Italian, Portuguese and Spanish immigrants and they integrate far more successfully and learn better French, statistically, than other nationalities. Their languages are all from the romance family and have closer structure and form than to English or German. Concepts that are fairly rare in English, such as the subjunctive (English: if I were bilingual) are very important in French. The structure of a French sentence is typically different to how English sentences are structured, such that a direct translation will almost always sound a bit foreign. There are a large number of false friends. Gendered nouns are a foreign concept to English speakers and the only way to get this right is to learn them with the noun. Similarly, verbs can take à or de for their indirect objects and again you can only learn this, it is almost impossible to guess. These are still challenges for romance language natives, but less so.
However, on the side of the author being overly hard on herself, the reverse of the above is also true. France is a comparatively monolingual country and I have acquaintances there to whom I can only speak in French, as they never pursued a foreign language. Not all French speakers who speak English have a full mastery of it: I'm helping some of my local friends study for their exams and some of them have extreme difficulty switching out of the French way of thinking. Those that do still trip up on the little details, like "I am in the train" because "I am on the train" translated into French means literally on top of the roof, and "I am thinking to write on hackernews" instead of "I am thinking of writing on hackernews" because the gerund does not exist in French; the infinitive form takes its place. I am not surprised to hear the French often think they are bad at French - in my native country, many people are very bad at English.
Outside the author's specific problems and the particular difficulty of French for English speakers, the difficulty of learning languages for English native speakers is due to the hegemony of English language and culture. There is a far greater incentive for others to learn English. My local friends hate films dubbed in French (actually so do I, it's usually very poor quality) so they grew up with English films with subtitles in French (VO instead of VF). They listen to English music and tag their photos with English words they like on instagram. The efforts of l'académie française to introduce quotas for French music (https://www.franceinter.fr/societe/quel-quota-pour-la-chanso...) and promote the French language are in conflict with the fact that, at least where I am, masters level courses and above are taught in English and many good jobs either require it or list it as an advantage. For a young European today, learning English opens up a lot of opportunities and there is an enormous amount of easy, enjoyable material from which to learn.
I've no idea how good the author's French truly is, but if she's understanding a first aid course I am going to guess pretty good. In my view she is being overly defeatist and unfair on herself. I have no doubt it is easier to start young, but I also believe that setting too much store the studies she mentions ("studies say I'm losing my ability to learn languages, my French is not perfect, well, I should give up") is unhelpful. If in 20 years she still lives in France, I think she would regret it if she stopped trying to improve now.
Apps like Duolingo and Babel are nice, but they seem to me more oriented toward making the user feel good about making progress then about achieving mastery in any useful time frame.
Flashcard tools like Anki and Tinycards are nice, but they lack enough readily available content to be really useful. Anyone with the expertise and perspective to use these tools in a practical time frame to assemble a deck of the many thousands of words necessary to achieve mastery doesn't need the tools.
It should be possible, using relatively simple tools, for a person to immerse oneself virtually in language learning materials. It should be simple to choose a rate of exposure to material from trickle to firehose. It should be possible to see an estimate of time remaining to achieve functional fluency at the current rate of progress, no different from the progress bar you see when downloading files.
Instead, each individual is forced to cadge together learning materials, of varying quality, in dribs and drabs; and guess at ones progress.
There are plenty of full-time University foreign language teaching staff around the world, they should be able to collaborate in production of content for online learning tools.
Yet neither the sophistication nor the efficiency of foreign language learning seems to have improved much in my lifetime.