> Think about listening to a language unknown to you, one with different words, grammar and prosody. You will be at an utter loss to identify its words, let alone their meaning.
My experience learning French basically. I'd say understanding where one word ends and another starts was much easier for English and German. On paper I was able to grasp the rough meaning very quickly thanks to vocabulary shared with English and Latin, but listening took a year: I was facing a solid wall of sound, no cracks.
This may come off as a little inappropriate but one thing I think about when learning another language is the usual mistakes or quirks that native speakers of that language display when speaking English. It turns out that quite often those are reflective of the correct form in their language.
It's helped me sound more natural in Japanese and Hebrew.
I speak a bunch of languages, and this is especially helpful when learning languages that have a specific own idiomatic sentence structure. You get a pretty good insight into how people form sentences in their native language based on how they garble English. You can often derive where people are from based on those typical mistakes, even in a few sentences on an online forum.
My strategy is to keep listening to the same recording on repeat. 1000 times if needed. It is good if it is a high-quality recording. After a while, my brain starts picking out the word.s
I can speak German, English and Dutch (which are very close Germanic languages) and also understand a bit of French and Italian. I guess I could learn their basics relatively quickly if I tried hard enough.
However, I actually need to learn Croatian, a Slavic language. This is extremely difficult for me and I make hardly any progress. The vocabulary is so different from everything else I know, I just can't remember the words. The grammar is quite challenging as well.
I did give some thought whether your native language makes it easier or harder to learn others, but all I have is anecdotal cases from my life. I wonder if there are any scientific studies on the topic.
E.g. a curious thing I noticed is the frequent complaint about Latin being very hard to learn because of the seven grammatical cases, three genders and morphology -- words just don't stay the same. As native Russian speaker I find these things absolutely normal and easy to understand, but I can image this must be a nightmare after English.
Slavic languages you mention are very curious in how different yet how similar they all are. One of the most impressive thing I saw with respect to learning languages is the Interslavic language [1]. Apparently if you speak any of Slavic languages you can understand it quite well, even though you usually are completely lost with most of the other Slavic languages. You still need to learn to speak it, but the fact that you understand foreigners with zero training just blows my mind. Feels like you awakened the memory of your ancestors of something.
I'm Polish, I've never learnt any foreign Slavic languages, but I can mostly understand Ukrainian, Belarusian and Slovak from passive exposure on a few trips.
The experience is weird - when I first went to Ukraine I couldn't understand almost anything. After a few days it suddenly "clicked" and I realized how the most common sounds and word endings relate between Polish and Ukrainian - and since that moment I basically got all the words with the same roots for free (which is like half the language). It also gave me Belarusian as a side effect :)
Of course it's not actual language speaking, I'm just understanding every other word and connecting the dots.
With Slovak it was even quicker, but somehow it hasn't given me Czech - their pronuciation is just too weird, despite the fact it's almost the same in writing :).
I'm not sure Interslavic provides much value. For me it's basically Slovak, so if you come from East Slavic language you'd probably get the same benefit spending that time learning some Slovak, and you'd then know some actual language instead of an artificial one.
There’s a surprising amount of vocabulary difference across Czech and Slovak, in addition to the pronunciation differences you mention. Pre-split everyone on both sides grew up hearing bilingual broadcasts, so they picked up the differences ambiently. I’ve heard that it’s a lot less of a given whether the younger generations presumptively understand each other these days. But I’ve also seen evidence that many still choose to engage with people / content / opportunities on the other side enough to get to solid working familiarity anyway.
This comes from limited first-hand experience and more extensive second-hand cross-generational experience. Take it as you will.
Slovak children usually grow up with Czech narrated cartoons, so they are able to understand Czech more easily. I heard that Czech children does not receive this language training for Slovak, so they have a harder time understanding Slovak language. I never "learned" Czech in school but I watched a lot of cartoons as a child (born '93) and read books in Czech so I have no problem understanding Czech language as a Slovak. I have a hard time understanding Polish though, never clicked for me.
I can confirm this is true. Czech republic is cca 2x the population size of Slovakia and its historically more developed part, so during one state union a lot of media were in czech language and it became our second language without thinking about it. Also Czechs did get a decent exposure to slovakian language.
But if there is no exposure, its becomes visible how grammar is very similar, but most words are just a bit different (very few are completely different), and pronunciation varies so much across whole region (even within given country) that its not easy or even possible to understand each other out of blue, without prior exposure.
I got some exposure to Polish TV during 80s, since commies couldn't put together more than 2-3 channels on TV and those were anyway pretty bland. I can cca understand it, but can't say a single sentence well enough. If I read polish text, I have to read it loud in my head and then I grok it easily, otherwise too much 'cz', 'w', words are too long etc and I lose meaning very quickly.
But in general Polish is a bit further away from either Slovak or Czech languages. We were and still are literal brothers (CZ and SK), extremely similar in so many regards, still see no good rational reason why we split up (of course I know real reasons, but those are nasty as are the people responsible for the split).
The US state department has some estimates of time to become proficient in target languages for English speakers. Germanic and Latin based languages take the least amount of effort:
It helps that staff are participating in these programs full-time, no other duties required.
A story I've heard first hand is that after the program, department staff can discuss diplomacy in the target language, but struggled to order a coffee!
As a dutch person i once spend 2 years in Ukraine. Hardly anyone spoke decent english there, so i was forced to learn (russian) the language. Within a year I was able to speak it moderately. Key is to focus on words only. Dont care about gramar. Its not important and will be fine later on. First learn 2000 to 3000 words and you will be able to say a lot of things.
This has been an approach I've seen used to great effect by people learning your language! My wife strings together Dutch words with English grammar (we're both American) and it's a common "mistake" that I experience when visiting a taalcafe.
Our brains are all extremely capable of moving a few words so we can understand things in context. When speaking Dutch, I'm spending a lot of time thinking about a verb, then attempting to string it together into something comprehensible.
What I also found to be almost universally true, is that if you are learning a less "popular" language (like Dutch or Ukrainian), just actually give a shit enough to learn more than "yes/no/please/thank you/my name is" will garner you a lot of good will from native speakers. Some countries get so many tourists that hearing the same 10 words butchered over and over and over and over and over again eventually starts to wear down on locals, making them jaded.
When you can walk into a room and somewhat confidently hold your ground, you become interesting and a novelty that people want to interact with. I went to a block party last weekend and spoke to most of the people there throughout the evening. Sure, everyone knew I was "foreign" and occasionally I had to ask someone to repeat something or re-word it, but that's a minor complaint for them considering the other option is to speak back to me in a language they don't have as good of control over. Despite popular belief, even in many "English friendly" countries, the normal citizens aren't actually that comfortable speaking unless they work in an environment that demands they speak English every day. This goes doubly so for older people. My next door neighbor is about 75 years old and speaks English pretty well (worked at Philips for 20+ years), but the _quality_ of our conversations went up 3x when I could understand enough Dutch for them to speak naturally to me.
All that to say, I agree with you! Vocabulary and basic grammar to get you started and then after that it's all about learning words and practice practice practice.
(As someone who has lived in different countries) Making an effort to learn "enough" of a language of the country you expect to be living in for a while is a gesture of decency. I feel that good will is justified, especially in cultures that see a lot of immigration and tourism. People try to live in a coherent society, which becomes hard if a large group of people is incapable of communicating naturally and reasonably fluently. Most Western European and Northern European people speak excellent English, but it's not nice to force a large group of people to switch to English and hamper natural communication style because somebody is slightly disrespectful and lazy.
You can get away with a lot in Dutch and especially Flemish Dutch though, because the local dialects are so strong (for being a relatively small area). Unless you look exotic, people don't always immediately pick you out as a non-native speaker.
> Key is to focus on words only. Dont care about gramar.
Absolutely! The way they teach foreign languages in school is insane. "OK, you know 20 words and can't say a thing, now it's time to learn past tense".
And before learning words, learning and practicing phonology. Then, add vocabulary while still practicing phonology. It's insane people and institutions assume one could be understood when speaking a language when its most basic building block is not acquired.
Can I ask what language you're thinking of here? When I was taking classes, the A0-A1 level class was all in the present tense for the full length of the course. We might have touched on past tense in the last lesson and most of the books I've seen for this language (Dutch), structure things as present/future tense first, and then past tense after.
These are my memories of learning English in school as a foreign language. French courses that my wife took recently also had past and future tenses in A1.
Even if it's not the tenses, still schools typically put a lot of focus on grammar and order of words but not even nearly enough into speaking. I have an suspicion that these corses are modelled after native-language programs which rightfully focus on grammar because everyone knows how to speak already. But starting from it is madness.
If you can say “subject verb noun” that’s good enough in many cases to at least get your point across.
Anecdotally, I know that I can understand people speaking English with what a school teacher would consider atrocious grammar, as long as the words are pronounced close enough to be recognizable.
As a foreigner a lot more useful to learn russian. Everybody speaks it in Ukraine. And other countries as well. Even at our university in Ukraine, russian was the main language amongst foreign students. Its sensible right now true.
As a foreigner a lot more useful to learn Russian.
Given that the state language is Ukrainian, and its overall dominance in media and culture -- there's no way this statement could possibly make sense.
Everybody speaks it in Ukraine.
This gets repeated a lot, but it's just not true. It's true that virtually everyone has some working comprehension of Russian because of earlier Soviet influences, and because the two languages are so similar (and in many parts of the country, the "Ukrainian" that is spoken is highly Surzhyk-influenced).
But realistically only about 70-80 percent of the population speak Russian fluently and comfortably. Given a choice, the vast majority would clearly prefer to speak Ukrainian (and many people have been switching voluntarily as a matter of preference since 2014; the government's mildly coercive efforts having nothing to do with this, really).
Even at our university in Ukraine, Russian was the main language amongst foreign students.
Probably because it's the only one among the two that they were able to study before coming there (and because they saw Russian as being more useful in other countries, as you say).
And even so, this applies only to certain universities in certain cities.
I spend many years till couple of months before the invasion in Ukraine. I have never met someone who doesnt speak russian. Only the elderly people have sometimes a mixed slang between russian and ukrainian. But other than that everyone speaks it. There are some hardcore nationalists connected to Bandera (pro nazi group) that refuse to speak russian, but remaining people dont care and speak both.
I have never met someone who doesn't speak Russian.
Then you haven't traveled broadly in Ukraine. And more importantly you're missing the point. The vast majority do speak and understand a reasonable amount of Russian (hence they will almost never object when you use it with them; they get that you're a foreigner and are doing the best you can) -- but they don't speak it fluently and comfortably, and it's not their preferred language in everyday use.
Only the elderly people have sometimes a mixed slang
It's more prevalent among the older set of course, but still this is just not true across the board. Surzhyk (or less pejoratively: Russian borrowings/breakings) are everywhere, though they are often subtle and it may take some training to detect them.
Part of the problem is that there are no well-defined boundaries (and there's only a barely defined notion of what constitutes "standard Ukrainian"). They're literally still in the process of cleaning up the nation's preeminent (and clearly Soviet-, if not exactly Surzhyk-influenced) dictionary.
There are some hardcore nationalists connected to Bandera (pro nazi group) that refuse to speak Russian
Now you're getting into pure BS territory.
This is obviously something you've read or something you've heard said a lot, but not something you know from direct observation.
Not a dog in the fight, at least this particular fight, but this might sound to many as "just learn the language of the oppressor". This gets thorny real quickly.
I had the same problem coming from the same Germanic/Romanic languages as you, trying to learn Finnish. It's not just the vocabulary, the whole construction and modality is often different, and it's hard to map things one on one. Then I learned Swedish, and it was just a funny dialect between Dutch and German.
Yes Finnish is way out there. We're raising our kid bilingual EN/FI, and I am really curious to know how he will align these two languages in his head, and what kinds of insights he will get. I suspect he will be a sponge for additional languages.
A big problem here is that slowed-down "teacher talk" does French learners an incredible disservice.
The classroom version of the language is at least a little bit different from natural, connected speech in every language I've studied. But classroom French is effectively a completely different dialect from the everyday spoken language.
Shameless plug: try Latudio - https://www.latudio.com/ - we have a listening-only approach, but you can pause sentence anytime and tap on words to see the translation. I'd say give it a try and let me know if that works for you, I'd be happy to hear.
I think French is notoriously difficult to understand from speaking language because they tie together so many words and sounds. Contrasted with a language such as Finnish, which is hard to learn, but relatively easy to understand and write because both pronunciation and spelling are just what you'd expect.
This may be a hot take, but I'd argue that there is no such thing as a language that's easier or harder to understand. Just languages that are more or less different from the one you grew up speaking. If they're more similar, then the learner can repurpose skills they already had from their native language. But that's not ease, per se, it's getting a head start.
To take French phonology as an example: objectively speaking, enchainement is an aid to comprehension, not an impediment. Now that I'm used to it, I find non-native speakers who don't do it to be harder to understand because they've effectively dropped an entire information channel from the language. Which isn't to say I didn't have a hard time getting used to it when I was learning. I absolutely did. But that's not because enchainement is inherently difficult; it's because I first had to un-learn some assumptions about the structure of language and how spoken word morphology works that I was bringing with me from my native language. And because I was being hindered by pedagogical methods that, in effect, try to hide the problem instead of solving it.
Native English-speaker here, moved to a German-speaking nation 20 years ago and have become a fluent German speaker as a result. Just want to add my 2c about that wall of sound ..
At the beginning I found it very difficult to parse German as I heard it on the street and in general life circumstances. It wasn't until I rigorously started looking up words I 'thought' I heard, with a dictionary, and gained about 100 of these, before I could accurately parse a spoken sentence.
I think its very important to use a dictionary when learning another language. It wasn't until I got a massive English/German dictionary that I felt I stood a chance.
Another thing that really helped was using sub-titles and watching TV, even if it was a show I wasn't interested in - it taught me so many words that I had heard, but not recognized.
They seem to teach it pretty fast to any idiot in the French Foreign Legion from what little I know. I have a feeling people learn fast with the 'right' incentives.
They also actively teach it to them. They are immersed around the clock, using other languages is forbidden (recalcitrant recruits used to get hazed in the past), and they put in efforts to teach it in a practical and conversational way.
Unfortunately there’s no trick. You get better at listening by listening a lot.
Most people just severely underestimate the amount of work it is. You probably need 1,000 hours of listening to be decent, and 2,000 to be strong. If you practice 30 minutes a day, that will take 11 years.
So the only “trick” is that you need to find things that you genuinely enjoy doing in French. So that you can practice for multiple hours each day without burning out.
I’m a native English speaker who has a very high level in Spanish. It takes a long time for your brain to figure out how to decode the type of mumbling people use in casual speech.
Yes, practice vocabulary, practice grammar, read. But you’re probably already doing this. You just need to listen to a ton of stuff right at the edge of your abilities and you’ll notice improvements every few months.
My one final tip would be to not get in your head so much. Literally everyone who has learned a language will tell you that if you review vocab, do grammar exercises, and listen to the language for 1-3 hours every day, you’ll learn it.
But it happens so slowly that it doesn’t feel like it will work while you’re on the journey. It’s sort of like the gym: if you lift every day and eat healthy, you will have muscles in a year or two. But it’s really demotivating because you won’t notice a drastic difference even after 3 months.
I'm not the person you asked, but I'm in the process of learning French. I'm a native English speaker who had a much easier time with listening comprehension for Spanish and German, my other languages.
What I find helps me to make progress is two things:
1) prioritize vocabulary (you need to know a word to have any hope of recognizing it in speech)
I respectfully disagree wrt the prioritization of vocabulary. Yes, you do need the basics covered (a few thousand words). But what I realized is that if I am listening or reading a sentence with an unknown word in it, in most cases I just figure out from the context what that unknown word means (I check it against a dictionary and 9 times out of 10 I'm close enough).
Obviously this does not work if too many words in the sentence are unknown. And I'm not saying not to learn new words. But it is far more important in my opinion to read / listen so much that you get faster and faster. Especially if you are listening to speech, where you can't pause / rewind, and if you spend too much time on one thing you just get left behind entirely. Don't know a word - just skip it / ignore it and concentrate on the whole stream.
Listen a ton and then some more. For the first couple hundred hours or so preferably with subtitles, there will come a point where you realize you rely on the subtitles less and less. That’s the point where you can start to turn them of.
Audiobooks also work.
And work on your grammar and vocabulary. Listening gets easier if you intuitively know what you should hear (tenses, conjugations, plural or singular words etc).
Aside from my native language I speak three foreign languages, and I just started learning the fourth one. Besides that, I wasted a lot of time on another language that did not stick, so I kinda know what works and what doesn't.
1. Consistency. Make sure you practice a little every day. For example, I use an app that tells me every day what vocabulary I should practice that day. It takes ten minutes of my day, and does wonders.
2. Communication. Start talking to someone as soon as possible. If you're learning a Germanic or Romance language, after 6 months you should be able to find someone online to chat with. Of course it's going to take you 15 minutes with a dictionary to understand the other person's message and another 15 minutes to write the reply, but it truly does wonders because it allows your brain to see the language as a language.
3. Fun exercise: try vocalizing your internal monologue in foreign language. Don't focus on correctness at all, it's about familiarizing yourself with the language.
4. Find some interesting media in your target language. It's going to be difficult because most important stuff is available in English, but for example you might try movies or YouTube channels. Especially the latter is great because YouTube videos rarely ever have English translation, so you know that either you watch it in your target language or not at all. There are apps that allow you to listen to foreign radio stations. Why not doomscroll in your target language.
5. Don't give up until you reach level B2 and you can talk without consciously thinking about it.
6. Understanding native speakers talking naturally to each other is literally the hardest part, so don't treat it as a benchmark until you reach fluency.
7. A common mistake is to treat the whole thing as a "sequence to sequence" task and think about the target language in the context of your native one. Your actual goal of learning the word X is to have your brain understand the abstract concept behind it.
8. It's going to suck and you'll hate it. There's no way around it. Keep practicing and adjusting your techniques to your liking. One day something will "click" and you'll actually "feel" the language.
Yes! This for sure plays a huge role as well. How many times have we as programmers picked up a new language, done the 'Hello World', and then set it down and went back to one we already know? Spoken languages are much the same. They all include various concepts that are shared (verbs, nouns, adjectives, grammar concepts, loops, variables, functions, etc) but the actual process of putting them together in the idiomatic order is the hard part.
But without the carrot at the end of the stick, it's unlikely you'll be disciplined enough to stick to it. A new job is a natural place for many people to pick up a new programming language because everything else is also new. For languages it is no different. Can you learn a language outside of the country where it's commonly spoken? Sure, but it's going to be 100x more difficult and you have to generate all of the discipline yourself. If you can crack that problem and build the discipline, then you've basically won the war if you can hold in there "long enough for your enemy to starve." :D
This is next level! Thinking back to my language textbooks, this would be brutal for me on a mental level.
Do you think it could work as well with a short story or novella? Perhaps one of the books by Olly Richards? I find the dialogues in textbooks absolutely mind numbing most of the time and while easy books for learners aren't that interesting anyway, at least it's a full story and not people ordering lunch or a trip to the doctor for the 99th time!
I'd really like to give this method a go. I'm trying to learn French and struggling with the listening component. Do you have any sources for dialogues that you used?
I've never had a French class or any language courses in English so I just don't know; do foreign language classes in general not start with phonetics? Vowels, consonants, syllables, then words. From there is a long road ahead but that should lets you(at least seemed to let my small brain) break down pure stream of audio in TVs and media content into spaced syllables that occasionally forms into words.
I find it's sometimes quite difficult to tell where the word boundaries are when a person with a strong French accent is speaking English. I think the difficulty is because French encourages the emphasis to be in completely different places to English.
It clicked after a year of practice, the change was quick and noticeable. I started learning after moving to France and it helps a great deal even though at work it's English. Not sure how long it would take if I was learning it elsewhere.
It definitely takes longer if you don't live in an environment where it's spoken. Before I moved to NL from the US, I did duolingo every day for 3 months (from the time I accepted the offer to moving) and by the time I got on the plane, I had moved from the beginner module to the intermediate one. After landing and getting settled, I ventured out to really test my skills at the local supermarket and I was completely and utterly useless. Perhaps the only thing I could recognize was the total at the end that I needed to pay.
We take for granted regional dialects when speaking our own language and in some languages, dialects can be a huge component of the language. Being able to just go outside and sit on a bench and listen to people speak in the language you want to learn is a huge advantage. Every day, you will passively pick up some words from the context of passers-by. You'll also start to subconsciously figure out what words are "common" in a different way that the lists of "1000 most common words in X langauge" can convey. You also learn how to put them together in context and how some words travel together within a certain context.
If I was tasked with learning a language abroad, I would spend 2-4 hours a day consuming native content and make it a priority to speak with a coach online 1-2 times a week, trying to work my way up to holding a conversation for an hour straight.
After living here for almost 2 years now, I can just barely get to 1 hour when speaking to my boss (super grateful btw!) but I'm really drained mentally by the end of it. With each meeting it gets easier though and now I can somewhat even make out the local dialect. Learning a language is a numbers game and the reason we often attribute superior language learning skills to kids is simply due to the fact that they have so much free time to listen, absorb, speak, and make mistakes without people judging them because they're kids. I'm fully convinced that adults can learn just as fast or faster, but our own egos often get in the way to putting in the work to learn.
The good news is that now that you’ve cracked French, you’ll find Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese easy. They’re all basically the same language with divergent dialects, but practically identical grammars and structure.
Spanish, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, Italian, are all in a cluster together and a bit apart from French. I can read French, but I think it's equidistant from the Iberian/Italic language cluster and English.
So the first language in that cluster after French won't exactly be "easy". Easier than without French yeah but the subsequent ones will be much easier and on the same level of difficulty from one to another as then you mostly just change the ending of the words and the most used connectives.
I’m a native English speaker, and French (and some very rusty Latin) was my bridge into that cluster - they’re absolutely heaving with common cognates and structures from my experience.
What I will say is that my French has become much harder to access since - I will find myself lapsing into a creole for the first few days when I switch from one to the other.
“est-ce qu'il y a”…. Three syllables, representing six words.
We taught both kids French by dropping them unprepared into the local village school at age 6. Whatever part of their brain taught them English as infants kicked back in and did the same thing for a second time.
My experience learning French basically. I'd say understanding where one word ends and another starts was much easier for English and German. On paper I was able to grasp the rough meaning very quickly thanks to vocabulary shared with English and Latin, but listening took a year: I was facing a solid wall of sound, no cracks.