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I learned Spanish, too, in about 12 months to dogfood my new app for learning vocabulary (which I just recently launched) [0] Even though I made an app that he

I learned Spanish, too, in about 12 months to dogfood my new app for learning vocabulary (which I just recently launched) [0] Even though I made an app that helped me along the way to learn words, I don't believe in a single app/book/approach for learning a language. You need to expose yourself to A LOT of different language materials. I was learning for about 2h a day, 6 times a week. I would read articles, books, websites in Spanish. I would watch YouTube videos [1]. I would read news, initially for beginners [2] and later regular [3]. And most importantly, I would have 4-5h a week itakly conversations. After 6 months I understood quite a lot, but couldn't speak almost at all. Then magic happens and 6 months later, I was having a normal conversation (though still with some errors) about any range of topics: politics, global warming, travel, engineering etc. I believe the key for me was to read a lot of books which were interesting to me. For example I read Bill Gate's book "How To Avoid A Climate Disaster" in Spanish, as well as about ~8 others in the first 12 months. [0] https://www.obstino.com https://www.obstino.com [1] https://www.youtube.com/c/DreamingSpanish https://www.youtube.com/c/DreamingSpanish [2] www.newsinslowspanish.com [3] https://elpais.com https://elpais.com

amelius 5y ago
What is your age? (If you don't mind me asking)
fowkswe 5y ago
Do you mind sharing your age? Curious if youth played a part here - I'm in my 40s and wondering if I'll have as much success?
- dkaleta 5y ago
  I’m 34. I don’t think age matters that much. What matters the most is not even the method you use but the time spent with the language.
  - jgwil2 5y ago
    To put it into perspective, children learn their native language through ~10 years of complete immersion, so of course they speak it incredibly well. Very few adult learners will ever have the opportunity to be immersed in a foreign language that thoroughly over such a long time, but if they did we would expect them to speak that language excellently as well (albeit perhaps with a slight accent).
- wbsss4412 5y ago
  I’m in my early thirties and similarly learned French from 0 to a conversational level in a bit over a year. (Though I was already pretty strong in Spanish so that helped significantly) The age thing is mostly a myth imo. If you put in the time and effort you’ll get a lot back. The biggest issue is the concept of fluency. A lot of people believe they have to be 100% perfect or they don’t “know” the language. In reality, from the moment you start you will continually become more and more comfortable in an asymptotic manner (no one knows 100% of a language, ie what percentage words in the dictionary do you know). The biggest piece of advice - get comfortable in dealing with ambiguity, and don’t try to force constructs from your primary language onto the one you are learning. Meaning: don’t say X word means Y word in my native language, therefore I can use it exactly the same (it’s a different word, VERY likely with different connotations).
  - laurieg 5y ago
    You've hit the nail on the head! Being comfortable with ambiguity and not knowing something 100% is crucial. I've observed many language learners over the years and if someone has a habit of translating every word they see into their native language before they are satisfied then they usually make slow progress learning a second language.
    - wbsss4412 5y ago
      Exactly. A corollary to this is that this is the reason why memorizing flash cards/massive lists of words can be counter productive. A degree of that is helpful to start, but you really need to see words in proper context, repeatedly.
  - spaetzleesser 5y ago
    “ don’t try to force constructs from your primary language onto the one you are learning.” That’s super important. This also applies to translated texts. Something somebody in Iran says may sound crazy when translated straight but may just be a normal thing in their language. As a German it took me a long time to understand that when an American says “we should have a beer someday “ that this means that you most likely will not have a beer with that person.
- 300bps 5y ago
  I am almost out of my 40s. In the past year, I've gotten three AWS certifications and learned new hobbies from scratch (ex: electronics component-level repair). I haven't seen evidence that my ability to learn things has slowed down yet. I think a lot of "age-related" problems are more related to lifestyle until about 60. When you're 20, you can eat sugar, fat and salt all day long while sitting on a couch and get along pretty well. When you're 40, you'll get fat and your body will atrophy. There's a solution though: eat healthful foods, exercise, manage stress, pursue important goals, be active socially.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    I'm just dieting down for a second time, and I'll attest to this. Both times what got me to take diet seriously again was recognizing how sluggish I'd gotten, and cleaning my diet up again has a remarkably rapid effect.
  - forty 5y ago
    The ability to learn things slow down dramatically when you get older, it's probably even more true for languages. It's fairly obvious when you look at kids. They can learn in the 5 first years of their life, without even thinking about it, to speak a language as well (at least accent wise) as any adult would do in 20 years of pretty intense studying.
    - echelon 5y ago
      Because kids aren't working full time jobs and stressing out over free time.
      - na85 5y ago
        There's more to it than that. Neuroplasticity exists.
        youngNed 5y ago
        I'm sure it does, but you put me in a house, with 2 adults, house, feed and clothe me for 5 years that i don't have to worry about going to work and i guarantee you i will speak whatever language they speak a whole lot better than some 5 year old. Hey i'll even throw in another language and still be able to fight the 5 year old. With one hand.
- laurieg 5y ago
  Older second language learners have a harder time, but I don't think it's because of some kind of "weakening of the brain" with age. I think the real reasons are: * Older people can't remember the difficulty of learning their first language. They've been using it comfortably for years. * Older people have bigger vocabularies so the gap between their first and second language is even larger. * The discomfort of learning new things is less familiar for older peoples
  - exeldapp 5y ago
    I agree. Maybe there's some truth in the whole "brain plasticity" talking point but how long does it take a child to become fully comfortable with speaking and writing a language? 8 years? Longer? Compared to an adult who can accomplish that in about a year. And that is when the child has no choice but to use that language, since they know no other.
    - treeman79 5y ago
      Learned a few things like violin art and other stuff as a way to spend time with my kids. turns out I learn much faster than they do. The only difference is I’ve seen is I’m much more focused but they have much more free time. An hour of my focus learning is probably worth a week of their efforts.
  - avip 5y ago
    Strangely missing: older people (40s) usually take care of X pretty small kids + N pretty declining elders while having Y hours of work + Z hours commute daily. Seriously - I don’t even have 2 hours a day
  - robocat 5y ago
    “Studies comparing the rate of second-language acquisition in children versus adults have shown that although children may have an advantage in achieving native-like fluency in the long run, adults actually learn languages more quickly than children in the early stages (Krashen, Long and Scarcella, 1979.)” “Adults are quite strategic in their learning, compared with children. They are generally self-motivated, use time effectively, and can apply themselves to lengthy tasks.” My personal opinion is that the #1 block to fluency as an adult is the concentration on written resources and trying to apply rules. Children learn by mimicry, but adults learn by resources, which creates errors. You can tell by listening to people that have learnt English as a second language, and understanding the source of the errors they make.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  “I was learning for about 2h a day, 6 times a week. I would read articles, books, websites in Spanish” If you put in that much time you will learn no matter your age. Same for children. They are supposed to be better at language learning but in the end they spend a lot of time that adults often don’t have or don’t want to invest.
- adastra22 5y ago
  I’m in my late 30’s and learning Chinese and Japanese simultaneously. The age thing is almost entirely a myth. There are three factors in which age matters: 1. Older people get set in their ways, and learning a language requires rethinking how you think. This limitation is purely psychological and not biological and you can avoid it merely by giving it an honest attempt. Learning a foreign language can be a great way to to keep your mind fresh. 2. TIME. Learning a language requires thousands of hours of commitment. Young people have time to commit to it. Older people with work and careers do not, and so often don’t make as much progress. But if you chart progress vs. hours studied, age disappears as a factor. (There are studies of this, but I’m on mobile right now and can’t pull them up.) 3. Truly young people (under the age of 12) still have the ability to hear sounds not used in their mother tongue. This is why transplanted kids can speak fluently and pass as natives, but adults and even teens develop heavy accents. Older people still have enough neural flexibility to retrain their ear, but it takes much more time and conscious effort. This is the only truly biological age-related factor, and countering it just requires a bit more time and conscious attention. If you are learning a languages as a busy adult, the key is to find ways to immerse yourself in the language, even if it is just passively listening to things on a loop while you do your day job, listening to audiobooks during your commute, and always having a study book or flash cards at hand everywhere you go. You need to study not 10 minutes a day, but 5-10 hours a day—but if you’re smart, that time will double dip for other things and you can get away with just 1 hour a day of real committed study, and the rest is various forms of background practice throughout the day.
aeyes 5y ago
Let me add another resource to your list that helped me tremendously: https://coffeebreaklanguages.com/ https://coffeebreaklanguages.com/ They have free podcasts available on iTunes for a lot of languages, the Spanish content is absolutely amazing.
SneakyTornado29 5y ago
Does [0] support latex?
athenot 5y ago
> [2] www.newsinslowspanish.com Oh wow I've been after something like this for a long time. It's awesome because it's relevant content (news) but at a pace that beginners can follow. I don't know Spanish but knowing French, I could follow along the super slow mode and not feel lost. Going to look for this in German and Chinese, I wonder if there's something similar.
- halfdan 5y ago
  Here you go for German: https://m.dw.com/en/slowly-spoken-news-reports-learning-german/a-1833641 https://m.dw.com/en/slowly-spoken-news-reports-learning-germ...
  - cyberpunk 5y ago
    Danke :)
- patrickdavey 5y ago
  Anyone know of this for Dutch?
  - stdbrouw 5y ago
    It’s not quite like News In Slow French, but you might like https://www.nedbox.be/ https://www.nedbox.be/. They sometimes refer to the easier to grok content from the Belgian public broadcaster, https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/rubrieken/klaar/ https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/rubrieken/klaar/. Perhaps most similar is http://www.wablieft.be/nl/krant http://www.wablieft.be/nl/krant with text and audio at two levels of proficiency.
- DonaldFisk 5y ago
  You can slow down Youtube videos without it distorting the audio. I've found it more helpful to use subtitles in the target language, though.
netfortius 5y ago
B1 in 5 months, as follows: - radio FranceInfo [almost] all the time (when no other structure learning happening) - TV5 https://apprendre.tv5monde.com https://apprendre.tv5monde.com - french movies streaming, with french subtitles (!) - online magazines: Le Parisian, Libération, Le Figaro, etc. - book : "Grammaire progressive du français - Niveau intermédiaire (A2/B1) - Livre + CD + Appli-web - 4ème édition" - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.leconjugueur.droid https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.leconjugue... - https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais-monolingue https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais-monolingue - https://www.reverso.net/orthographe/correcteur-francais/ https://www.reverso.net/orthographe/correcteur-francais/ Last two in browser with strong ad blocking, to avoid distraction.
- diskzero 5y ago
  I used the same method, in addition to going through all of the Rosetta Stone French lessons and the Defense Language Institute material (thanks to the Army.) I also went to a weekly French language Meetup where only French was spoken and any Alliance Française events in the area. It took me eight months, so you were faster than me.
  - boppo1 5y ago
    > Defense Language Institute material (thanks to the Army.) Is this publicly available, or were you in the service?
    - barry-cotter 5y ago
      https://www.dliflc.edu/elearning/ https://www.dliflc.edu/elearning/
      - boppo1 5y ago
        Excellent!
- usr1106 5y ago
Izikiel43 5y ago
The problem with Spanish is what country’s Spanish you learn. Words can mean different things in different countries, and also pronunciation changes.
- barbecue_sauce 5y ago
  Like for instance, in the US there was once a large tex-mex restaurant chain called Chichi's (long since bankrupt). When I told my friend from Spain this, she was horrified.
- bayesian_horse 5y ago
  That's the least problem I'd say. Spanish is pretty conserved, especially the written language. Listening comprehension is always the last of the skills to kick in, because it is all-or-nothing. You only understand every word in the sentence or your brain gets overloaded. While reading foreign texts you can easily skip a word you can't understand and still figure out what the rest means. Or at least, more often so, because you don't have to keep everything in short term memory.
  - _puk 5y ago
    > Listening comprehension is always the last of the skills to kick in Is that actually the case? I've always found it easier to follow a conversation in a language I am learning than to speak it. You get an awful lot of context when listening, only need to put a few words in the right place and suddenly what you're hearing makes sense. You can get away without literally translating everything. Speaking on the other hand, you can't converse properly without being able to find the right word at the right time and in the right place.
    - usr1106 5y ago
      > I've always found it easier to follow a conversation in a language I am learning than to speak it Absolutely not. I have lived abroad half of my life (sometimes with a language reasonably close to my mother tongue and sometimes very far) Speaking is always easier. I can make my own speed and I never use an unkown word. Sometimes I have to be a bit creative how to explain things if I am lacking a word. Following discussions is hard. People use words I don't know all the time. Slang, dialects, accents on top of that. And many of them just speak too fast. This can take many many years and might never disappear when certain speakers are involved. News speakers or documentary movies might be a different story.
renewiltord 5y ago
Oh. Thank you for being up front about the time commitment. That helps. I, too, would like quick results but I don’t feel like I can give it the go that you did so I think I will not do this.
alexpotato 5y ago
I grew up bilingual (English first language, Italian from my mother) and the "read a book you liked in your first language but translated into your desired language" is an excellent way to get exposure. For several reasons: - You liked the book originally so you won't mind reading it again - You know the story so if you get to a part where you don't understand the language, you can infer the meaning based on the your knowledge of the story - Because it was translated, it's good to see how a phrase you know well in your primary language was converted into the new language. This is particularly helpful for your own "on the fly" translation when you are speaking. In my particular case, I knew "family" level Italian very well (e.g. how you would speak to your parents, siblings at home etc). What I didn't know was more formal and inter-adult language grammar. Reading books by one of my favorite English authors translated into Italian was a real game changer.
- aidenn0 5y ago
  When I did an exchange in Germany, I picked up Der Kleine Hobbit for that reason. My first week it was mentally exhausting just reading a page or two, but things picked up quickly from there.
- jamiek88 5y ago
  Never thought of this but makes a great deal of sense. Same with movies. Watch your fav movies in French lang. for example. You’ll know what yippekayeh mother fudger is!
LAC-Tech 5y ago
That's a pretty cool language learning app concept - you haven't overcooked it. A lot of apps want to make themselves the star of the show - if that makes sense - but really it's a vessel to learn vocabulary, and it looks like yours lets a user add arbitrary vocab, which means it will be relevant. Any plans to add new languages?

amelius 5y ago

What is your age? (If you don't mind me asking)

fowkswe 5y ago

Do you mind sharing your age? Curious if youth played a part here - I'm in my 40s and wondering if I'll have as much success?

dkaleta 5y ago
I’m 34. I don’t think age matters that much. What matters the most is not even the method you use but the time spent with the language.
- jgwil2 5y ago
  To put it into perspective, children learn their native language through ~10 years of complete immersion, so of course they speak it incredibly well. Very few adult learners will ever have the opportunity to be immersed in a foreign language that thoroughly over such a long time, but if they did we would expect them to speak that language excellently as well (albeit perhaps with a slight accent).
wbsss4412 5y ago
I’m in my early thirties and similarly learned French from 0 to a conversational level in a bit over a year. (Though I was already pretty strong in Spanish so that helped significantly) The age thing is mostly a myth imo. If you put in the time and effort you’ll get a lot back. The biggest issue is the concept of fluency. A lot of people believe they have to be 100% perfect or they don’t “know” the language. In reality, from the moment you start you will continually become more and more comfortable in an asymptotic manner (no one knows 100% of a language, ie what percentage words in the dictionary do you know). The biggest piece of advice - get comfortable in dealing with ambiguity, and don’t try to force constructs from your primary language onto the one you are learning. Meaning: don’t say X word means Y word in my native language, therefore I can use it exactly the same (it’s a different word, VERY likely with different connotations).
- laurieg 5y ago
  You've hit the nail on the head! Being comfortable with ambiguity and not knowing something 100% is crucial. I've observed many language learners over the years and if someone has a habit of translating every word they see into their native language before they are satisfied then they usually make slow progress learning a second language.
  - wbsss4412 5y ago
    Exactly. A corollary to this is that this is the reason why memorizing flash cards/massive lists of words can be counter productive. A degree of that is helpful to start, but you really need to see words in proper context, repeatedly.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  “ don’t try to force constructs from your primary language onto the one you are learning.” That’s super important. This also applies to translated texts. Something somebody in Iran says may sound crazy when translated straight but may just be a normal thing in their language. As a German it took me a long time to understand that when an American says “we should have a beer someday “ that this means that you most likely will not have a beer with that person.
300bps 5y ago
I am almost out of my 40s. In the past year, I've gotten three AWS certifications and learned new hobbies from scratch (ex: electronics component-level repair). I haven't seen evidence that my ability to learn things has slowed down yet. I think a lot of "age-related" problems are more related to lifestyle until about 60. When you're 20, you can eat sugar, fat and salt all day long while sitting on a couch and get along pretty well. When you're 40, you'll get fat and your body will atrophy. There's a solution though: eat healthful foods, exercise, manage stress, pursue important goals, be active socially.
- vidarh 5y ago
  I'm just dieting down for a second time, and I'll attest to this. Both times what got me to take diet seriously again was recognizing how sluggish I'd gotten, and cleaning my diet up again has a remarkably rapid effect.
- forty 5y ago
  The ability to learn things slow down dramatically when you get older, it's probably even more true for languages. It's fairly obvious when you look at kids. They can learn in the 5 first years of their life, without even thinking about it, to speak a language as well (at least accent wise) as any adult would do in 20 years of pretty intense studying.
  - echelon 5y ago
    Because kids aren't working full time jobs and stressing out over free time.
    - na85 5y ago
      There's more to it than that. Neuroplasticity exists.
      - youngNed 5y ago
        I'm sure it does, but you put me in a house, with 2 adults, house, feed and clothe me for 5 years that i don't have to worry about going to work and i guarantee you i will speak whatever language they speak a whole lot better than some 5 year old. Hey i'll even throw in another language and still be able to fight the 5 year old. With one hand.
laurieg 5y ago
Older second language learners have a harder time, but I don't think it's because of some kind of "weakening of the brain" with age. I think the real reasons are: * Older people can't remember the difficulty of learning their first language. They've been using it comfortably for years. * Older people have bigger vocabularies so the gap between their first and second language is even larger. * The discomfort of learning new things is less familiar for older peoples
- exeldapp 5y ago
  I agree. Maybe there's some truth in the whole "brain plasticity" talking point but how long does it take a child to become fully comfortable with speaking and writing a language? 8 years? Longer? Compared to an adult who can accomplish that in about a year. And that is when the child has no choice but to use that language, since they know no other.
  - treeman79 5y ago
    Learned a few things like violin art and other stuff as a way to spend time with my kids. turns out I learn much faster than they do. The only difference is I’ve seen is I’m much more focused but they have much more free time. An hour of my focus learning is probably worth a week of their efforts.
- avip 5y ago
  Strangely missing: older people (40s) usually take care of X pretty small kids + N pretty declining elders while having Y hours of work + Z hours commute daily. Seriously - I don’t even have 2 hours a day
- robocat 5y ago
  “Studies comparing the rate of second-language acquisition in children versus adults have shown that although children may have an advantage in achieving native-like fluency in the long run, adults actually learn languages more quickly than children in the early stages (Krashen, Long and Scarcella, 1979.)” “Adults are quite strategic in their learning, compared with children. They are generally self-motivated, use time effectively, and can apply themselves to lengthy tasks.” My personal opinion is that the #1 block to fluency as an adult is the concentration on written resources and trying to apply rules. Children learn by mimicry, but adults learn by resources, which creates errors. You can tell by listening to people that have learnt English as a second language, and understanding the source of the errors they make.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
spaetzleesser 5y ago
“I was learning for about 2h a day, 6 times a week. I would read articles, books, websites in Spanish” If you put in that much time you will learn no matter your age. Same for children. They are supposed to be better at language learning but in the end they spend a lot of time that adults often don’t have or don’t want to invest.
adastra22 5y ago
I’m in my late 30’s and learning Chinese and Japanese simultaneously. The age thing is almost entirely a myth. There are three factors in which age matters: 1. Older people get set in their ways, and learning a language requires rethinking how you think. This limitation is purely psychological and not biological and you can avoid it merely by giving it an honest attempt. Learning a foreign language can be a great way to to keep your mind fresh. 2. TIME. Learning a language requires thousands of hours of commitment. Young people have time to commit to it. Older people with work and careers do not, and so often don’t make as much progress. But if you chart progress vs. hours studied, age disappears as a factor. (There are studies of this, but I’m on mobile right now and can’t pull them up.) 3. Truly young people (under the age of 12) still have the ability to hear sounds not used in their mother tongue. This is why transplanted kids can speak fluently and pass as natives, but adults and even teens develop heavy accents. Older people still have enough neural flexibility to retrain their ear, but it takes much more time and conscious effort. This is the only truly biological age-related factor, and countering it just requires a bit more time and conscious attention. If you are learning a languages as a busy adult, the key is to find ways to immerse yourself in the language, even if it is just passively listening to things on a loop while you do your day job, listening to audiobooks during your commute, and always having a study book or flash cards at hand everywhere you go. You need to study not 10 minutes a day, but 5-10 hours a day—but if you’re smart, that time will double dip for other things and you can get away with just 1 hour a day of real committed study, and the rest is various forms of background practice throughout the day.

aeyes 5y ago

Let me add another resource to your list that helped me tremendously: https://coffeebreaklanguages.com/ https://coffeebreaklanguages.com/ They have free podcasts available on iTunes for a lot of languages, the Spanish content is absolutely amazing.

SneakyTornado29 5y ago

Does [0] support latex?

athenot 5y ago

> [2] www.newsinslowspanish.com Oh wow I've been after something like this for a long time. It's awesome because it's relevant content (news) but at a pace that beginners can follow. I don't know Spanish but knowing French, I could follow along the super slow mode and not feel lost. Going to look for this in German and Chinese, I wonder if there's something similar.

halfdan 5y ago
Here you go for German: https://m.dw.com/en/slowly-spoken-news-reports-learning-german/a-1833641 https://m.dw.com/en/slowly-spoken-news-reports-learning-germ...
- cyberpunk 5y ago
  Danke :)
patrickdavey 5y ago
Anyone know of this for Dutch?
- stdbrouw 5y ago
  It’s not quite like News In Slow French, but you might like https://www.nedbox.be/ https://www.nedbox.be/. They sometimes refer to the easier to grok content from the Belgian public broadcaster, https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/rubrieken/klaar/ https://www.vrt.be/vrtnws/nl/rubrieken/klaar/. Perhaps most similar is http://www.wablieft.be/nl/krant http://www.wablieft.be/nl/krant with text and audio at two levels of proficiency.
DonaldFisk 5y ago
You can slow down Youtube videos without it distorting the audio. I've found it more helpful to use subtitles in the target language, though.

netfortius 5y ago

B1 in 5 months, as follows: - radio FranceInfo [almost] all the time (when no other structure learning happening) - TV5 https://apprendre.tv5monde.com https://apprendre.tv5monde.com - french movies streaming, with french subtitles (!) - online magazines: Le Parisian, Libération, Le Figaro, etc. - book : "Grammaire progressive du français - Niveau intermédiaire (A2/B1) - Livre + CD + Appli-web - 4ème édition" - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.leconjugueur.droid https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.leconjugue... - https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais-monolingue https://www.larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais-monolingue - https://www.reverso.net/orthographe/correcteur-francais/ https://www.reverso.net/orthographe/correcteur-francais/ Last two in browser with strong ad blocking, to avoid distraction.

diskzero 5y ago
I used the same method, in addition to going through all of the Rosetta Stone French lessons and the Defense Language Institute material (thanks to the Army.) I also went to a weekly French language Meetup where only French was spoken and any Alliance Française events in the area. It took me eight months, so you were faster than me.
- boppo1 5y ago
  > Defense Language Institute material (thanks to the Army.) Is this publicly available, or were you in the service?
  - barry-cotter 5y ago
    https://www.dliflc.edu/elearning/ https://www.dliflc.edu/elearning/
    - boppo1 5y ago
      Excellent!
usr1106 5y ago

Izikiel43 5y ago

The problem with Spanish is what country’s Spanish you learn. Words can mean different things in different countries, and also pronunciation changes.

barbecue_sauce 5y ago
Like for instance, in the US there was once a large tex-mex restaurant chain called Chichi's (long since bankrupt). When I told my friend from Spain this, she was horrified.
bayesian_horse 5y ago
That's the least problem I'd say. Spanish is pretty conserved, especially the written language. Listening comprehension is always the last of the skills to kick in, because it is all-or-nothing. You only understand every word in the sentence or your brain gets overloaded. While reading foreign texts you can easily skip a word you can't understand and still figure out what the rest means. Or at least, more often so, because you don't have to keep everything in short term memory.
- _puk 5y ago
  > Listening comprehension is always the last of the skills to kick in Is that actually the case? I've always found it easier to follow a conversation in a language I am learning than to speak it. You get an awful lot of context when listening, only need to put a few words in the right place and suddenly what you're hearing makes sense. You can get away without literally translating everything. Speaking on the other hand, you can't converse properly without being able to find the right word at the right time and in the right place.
  - usr1106 5y ago
    > I've always found it easier to follow a conversation in a language I am learning than to speak it Absolutely not. I have lived abroad half of my life (sometimes with a language reasonably close to my mother tongue and sometimes very far) Speaking is always easier. I can make my own speed and I never use an unkown word. Sometimes I have to be a bit creative how to explain things if I am lacking a word. Following discussions is hard. People use words I don't know all the time. Slang, dialects, accents on top of that. And many of them just speak too fast. This can take many many years and might never disappear when certain speakers are involved. News speakers or documentary movies might be a different story.

renewiltord 5y ago

Oh. Thank you for being up front about the time commitment. That helps. I, too, would like quick results but I don’t feel like I can give it the go that you did so I think I will not do this.

alexpotato 5y ago

I grew up bilingual (English first language, Italian from my mother) and the "read a book you liked in your first language but translated into your desired language" is an excellent way to get exposure. For several reasons: - You liked the book originally so you won't mind reading it again - You know the story so if you get to a part where you don't understand the language, you can infer the meaning based on the your knowledge of the story - Because it was translated, it's good to see how a phrase you know well in your primary language was converted into the new language. This is particularly helpful for your own "on the fly" translation when you are speaking. In my particular case, I knew "family" level Italian very well (e.g. how you would speak to your parents, siblings at home etc). What I didn't know was more formal and inter-adult language grammar. Reading books by one of my favorite English authors translated into Italian was a real game changer.

aidenn0 5y ago
When I did an exchange in Germany, I picked up Der Kleine Hobbit for that reason. My first week it was mentally exhausting just reading a page or two, but things picked up quickly from there.
jamiek88 5y ago
Never thought of this but makes a great deal of sense. Same with movies. Watch your fav movies in French lang. for example. You’ll know what yippekayeh mother fudger is!

LAC-Tech 5y ago

That's a pretty cool language learning app concept - you haven't overcooked it. A lot of apps want to make themselves the star of the show - if that makes sense - but really it's a vessel to learn vocabulary, and it looks like yours lets a user add arbitrary vocab, which means it will be relevant. Any plans to add new languages?