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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2805 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for August 18, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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What's the best way to learn another language these days, e.g. Spanish? Are there any good AI-aided offerings?

From my very imperfect experience, I think that Spanish is a language where early on you can get away with focusing heavily on drilling vocabulary and grammer as the pronunciation is fairly simple (it's hard to sound like a native of course but it's easy to be understood). They do talk very quickly though so you'll want to add some listening practice in also.

French on the other hand, you won't understand anything and you won't be understood if you haven't had a lot of exposure to how it sounds. I'm at a pretty good reading level for French but, unlike Spanish, improvements in reading and writing aren't helping my conversation get any more fluid, it only gets better with direct practice.

The best way is immerse yourself with native speakers.

It's worth noting that there's still a lot of effort and study required if you go down this path. Simply living in a country is no guarantee that you'll be forced to use the language, or that you won't settle at a comfortable level of fluency that lets you get by even if it's very imperfect.

I'm a big supporter of Stephen Krashen's input hypothesis. Essentially, he argues that the way infants acquire language is by understanding messages in that language, and that adults have the capacity to do this as well. Instead of practicing grammar or memorising vocabulary, the adult learner's focus should be on getting as much input as possible that is at or slightly above their level of understanding. This YouTube video gives a good overview of the principle.

In practical terms, this means watching lots of easy videos, listening to podcasts etc in your target language. Then gradually increasing the difficulty as you understand more. Crucially, in order to avoid your mother tongue's sounds and grammar 'getting in the way' and cementing bad habits, speaking should be left very late. You want to get a good model of the language in your head before you try producing it. Reading should also come quite late to avoid the learner subvocalising incorrect pronunciation.

Fortunately, for Spanish this is very easy. I've been subscribed to Dreaming Spanish for a few months now and it's amazing how quickly my comprehension is improving. I've been combining this with some easy podcasts (Cuentame, Chill Spanish Listening Practice, Un Dia en Espanol). I was considering writing a post about language acquisition so I may do this later on, but for now I'd recommend looking at Dreaming Spanish's method page to get an idea of what it entails. There's also an active subreddit for it.

Dreaming Spanish is amazing, it's like Muzzy for adults. Thank you for this.

Very much interested in a write up for Spanish, as there are several approaches and I'm not looking forward to subscribe to a glorified flash card service and be vendor-locked into language acquisition.

I take it you are not a fan of "Language Transfer" which is all about producing from the very start.

I actually did start with Language Transfer myself. The Spanish course is very good and the guy who runs it is impressive. I stopped halfway through when I discovered Dreaming Spanish but will probably finish the course one day.

I won't necessarily say that I'm opposed to it, but I think it works better if that kind of formal grammar explanation comes after you've had significant input. I've found that explanations like he offers 'stick' more if you can apply them to things you've already heard many times from input.

Fascinating. Are there similar resources for other languages that you're aware of?

There's no dedicated site like Dreaming Spanish for other languages yet (although they do plan to branch out in the future). There is the Comprehensible Input Wiki for lists of YouTube channels etc. You could also try searching Reddit as I'm sure the question has been asked a lot for your target language.

Very interesting point about accent. It seems in part to be effort and the 'fun' of it; it's always been true that the people who are best at accent impressions in English are the best at adopting native accents in foreign languages. But there's also status to avoiding accents, a lot of wealthy English seem to almost deliberately speak (often near-perfect) French in a strong English accent, just because they can, they don't want to be mistaken for natives.

By contrast, some accents are low status. If you move to Switzerland you are often better off speaking English than high-German, which is often low status in German Switzerland because they dislike a lot of the better jobs being taken by German immigrants. You could try learning Schwiizerdütsch, but that's a tough nut to crack because of the much faster speed than regular German and German-speakers who try it and aren't perfect are often made fun of.

I'm curious if listening to an audiobook while silently reading/following along with the physical book would lead to subvocalizing incorrect pronunciation.

So I guess that's equivalent to watching Spanish videos with subtitles, which is fine. That said, Dreaming Spanish advises against doing it too much as it can cause your listening to lag behind your reading.

This seems promising. Thank you! The theory makes sense to me. I'm not very good at remembering the spoken word though.

One of the counter intuitive things about this method is that it's subconscious. You don't need to actively try to remember anything, only to understand the meaning of what's being said. Your brain then builds a model of the language in the background.

Schools should probably take note of this... Acquisition of meanings instead of hearing + repeating back meaningless bits and pieces to a teacher.

I'm sure they'll stop hamstringing kids' potentials any day now. Let's just wait. o:)

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