This is a more focused follow up to a question I had the other day about moving to other countries. I’m wondering what the best options are for learning a new language at the moment. I’m vaguely aware of companies like Duo-lingo losing their reputation lately and it’s hard to trust the top google results nowadays with all the SEO junk. So does anyone have suggestions for trustworthy/useful sites for learning a new language? If it matters, in particular I’m interested in trying (In roughly this order) Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, or Spanish.
I’m tri-lingual, and can make myself understood for basic stuff and can generally get the gist in 3 more. I learned English by immersion in my teens, probably the ideal age. When I arrived in America, beginning of summer, I joined all youth summer activities available in town; baseball, archery, joined a Scout group, etc. I made friends and was interacting in English constantly. By School start, I was placed in regular classes. My sister didn’t do these things and was placed in many English for learners classes, with foreign students. I speak much better than her.
Also, I watched Sesame Street, Mr Roger’s, and other children’s shows
My kids have not lived in an English speaking country, but game in English, watch all media in English, with subtitles in English, and attended bi-lingual schools. I spoke in English with them a lot while they were growing up. They speak very good English, with my daughter having EU C2 level, the highest official level in a foreign language.
Watching foreign media, with subtitles in that language, including children’s shows, reading foreign news and stuff, etc. helps a lot.
Also, in many areas there are foreign language oriented Meetups.
I’ve seen some variant of this advice in a few places, but I don’t really understand how it’s meant to work at the start. If I don’t understand anything being said, how do I begin to start translating and learning? I’ve been watching anime for years and while I know a handful of really common words or phrases that tend to get said in isolation, I don’t know anything about the grammar or most vocabulary that isn’t neatly isolated from the rest of a sentence. If you asked me to try to say even a basic sentence or listen and understand one, I’d be lost. Thinking about it now, I don’t think I even know some of the basic touristy phrases like how to order food or ask for directions. Most of the things I do know seem quite useless in real life. (SUGOI!)
I suppose technically this is how we all learn our first language as a child but… that kind of just happened at a time I can’t really remember. I have no idea how to replicate that as an adult.
So do you have any insight on how to do this?
You’re right, staring blankly at media when you know nothing at all, even children’s programming, is a waste of time for languages as foreign as Japanese. That’s why it’s usually recommended to first go through a basic grammar guide like Yokubi or Tae Kim, and grind some basic vocab through Anki with a deck like Kaishi.
If you don’t know the basic alphabets (kana) yet, you can learn to read them as early as right now, it’s the first thing any learner should do IMO, and the good news is that it can be done in less than a week’s time or even just a few hours. I highly recommend Tofugu’s guides for that purpose.
Set up Yomitan, it’s a chrome extension to look up words in your browser instantly and can connect with anki to create flashcards, together they’re the backbone of my studies.
All ressources linked are free
Btw, Sugoi is a totally useful word in real everyday life too ;)
Ooh so much information! I’m saving this to give it proper attention later, thank you very much
(Now, little dummy myself, don’t forget to come back here and do exactly what you said you would, please)
Sugoi! This is the kind of thing I was looking for. Thank you.
Try sesame Street. It’s very visual, and surprisingly cute for adults
As far as I know, the current best practice for language learning is called Krashen’s Hypothesis or Comprehensible Input. Basically, we can learn a language best by hearing words that are slightly more complicated than what we already know. I am learning Korean and there is a nice YouTube channel where a guy makes videos of himself playing games and he talks about what’s on the screen at different levels of complexity. You could look for something like that in the language you want to learn.
CI is the correct answer. The ppl at dreamingspanish have a great breakdown of why it works. Chinese is a bit tougher because its much harder to find CI content, especially for beginner, but I’ve made faster progress in both spanish and chinese than I have with any other method.
I tried all the other methods people suggested below for years (flash cards, audio courses, reading); none of them worked. You might memorize words, but you won’t actually be able to understand someone speaking to you. I have a friend who has a duolingo 3+ years streak (meaning she uses it every day), and still can’t understand a native speaker talking at a beginner level. If she’d have spent even 1% of that time doing comprehensible input she’d be much further along.
dreamingspanish
Thanks for the recc. I was half expecting it to force a pay gate to simply watch the videos (the internet can make me cynical like that!) and better yet, they have a superbeginner video on an exact topic I was interested in learning about after some South American immigrant friends had brought it up. Immersion almost seems ‘too good to be true’ because one can learn interesting content more enthusiastically than studying it formally, I’ve found the same with history and political theory.
Chinese is a bit tougher because its much harder to find
do you have any you can recommend for chinese?
Lazychinese is really the only good channel / site that I’ve found. But it needs a lot more content, especially at the beginner levels. I’m having trouble making the jump from beginner to intermediate, because there isn’t enough content there yet.
There’s a YT channel called comprehensible mandarin that has a lot of content, but unfortunately none of it is organized by difficulty, which makes it impossible to use. You should really be understanding like 90% of the content, and if you can’t, you should bump down to a lower difficulty.
If anyone has any other good recs, I’d also like to know.
I’ve never seen any persuasive evidence to support Krashen’s hypotheses.
Krashens hypothesis is just that people acquire languages by understanding messages. Not by studying grammar, memorizing vocab, and “traditional” learning (IE based on skinner’s method, of error=punish, correct=reinforce).
Not only is CI backed up by evidence, and by the many polyglots who have successfully learned many languages through CI / immersion, you’d also need to show evidence of babies not learning their first language this way to refute it (IE show evidence of babies learning their first language by studying grammar and doing flashcard study).
you’d also need to show evidence of babies not learning their first language this way to refute it
By that logic, it’s refuted. Children produce language during the learning phase.
Children babbling then being able to talk after a long time period of input doesn’t disprove anything. CI just says that talking isn’t learning, which is true, because you’re not receiving any information. That’d be like trying to learn geography without looking at a map, or how to play a musical instrument without hearing anyone play it before.
Are you saying musical instruments are learned entirely by observation, not by production?
There’s no way I can stretch to believing that.
Both of course, but as a life-long musician, listening / reading / getting input is the first and most important step.
If someone has never heard a guitar before, and you hand them one, they’ll have no basis for how or what to play. Instead how people learn, is they listen, then imitate, just like language. Mastery comes not through try / fail / correction, but through listening then playing a lot of different music, so that it becomes completely internalized and occurs without active thought. They call this the suzuki method, and its much preferred nowadays over the traditional method of memorizing scales, the circle of fifths, , which I unfortunately wasted years of my early music learning through.
After playing jazz for a few years now, I couldn’t even imagine how skinner’s method would work for that. Jazz is too complicated to think about or logic your way through, just like language.
Adults are different from babies.
Sus.
“This just in…”
I’ve really enjoyed Busuu (created by Chegg, a US company) for learning eng—> spanish and eng —>german. Their free version has annoying ads but it does give you a chance to test the interface. The yearly subscription fee isn’t bad for the premium version that gets rid of ads. I’ve taken traditional classes and also used various apps like duolingo. Busuu strikes a happy medium between immersion and clear, digestible grammar explanation. I also like their review area (for vocab and grammar topics).
The platform doesn’t support Vietnamese yet but has chinese, japanese, and spanish of the ones you mentioned.
My advice for future: just try to use language for things that interest you. It doesn’t matter what it is. Youtube videos, films, books, games, anything!
Great way to learn a language indeed. And even while browsing:
Toucan is a browser extension which changes some words or sentences on all websites you browse to the language you selected. Clicking on the word/sentence will show you the word in your language together with a “listen” button to hear how it sounds.
I used it for a while and installed it on a browser profile I only use to browse generic content like news, nothing private.
I wouldn’t attempt that. Try to get some in-person practice with native speakers, either wherever you are now, or (better) by travelling to the countries of interest. If neither of those works for you, take a class with a human instructor. We are all wired for that, and not for learning languages from computer screens.
I found a personal tutor and I spend an hour with them every week (online). Outside of that I watch YouTube videos (with English subtitles) and practice with friends who I have who know the language too. I have tried Memrise, Duolingo and others in the past and I have made considerably more progress this way.
Basically: find someone who can actually make sure you’re getting something from it and find a good way to practice too
I like Anki for when I want to increase my vocab on words I actually need and am otherwise plateauing. I can take photos of the book, get an LLM to define the word in context, and record audio of my friends saying it if it’s particularly tricky to pronounce. Then train on these flashcards to improve over time.
A good grammar book (series), flashcard decks with example sentences (not only vocabulary) and audio by native speakers e.g. from , native media of your choice with subtitles, for some you might be able to use dual subtitles in both your and the original language (some local media players support that, or e.g. ).
Don’t try to optimise language-learning just keep putting one foot in front of the other and don’t let your zeal flag.
Right, but I do need some teaching material to start, and I don’t know what are good sources vs scammy subscription services.
search the Pirate Bay
you can use everything, I think. Just search what you need. You can learn basics by videos, or maybe you like more books? Then just type: good books to learn …
Very insightful…
yep
Language Transfer is pretty neat, though it doesn’t have many languages.
Duolingo is easy and it does teach a lot of vocabulary, but never explains a single rule of grammar or conjugation or sentence construction.
Language Transfer is pretty neat, though it doesn’t have many languages.
Yep, it’s pretty good for the two I’ve tried of the eight available.
