If you're not a language enthusiast and aren't familiar with the little corner of the internet that spends its days oozing over languages, let me tell you, it's a chaotic world ruled by an equally chaotic bunch out there. I do not necessarily say this in a bad light, rather I'm pointing at how disorganized and complex it is. Most of the said complexity arises when the methods or processes of language learning are placed in question.
Of course, language acquisition is not a pure science, there aren't fixed rules on how to go about it. Many scholars tried different and innovative ways over the hundreds of years. Some of them are more popular than others. Even when there's a fixed curriculum, for example, institutionally—the teachers have distinct teaching styles that can vary a lot.
I remember one of my teachers at Alliance Française used to explain a grammatical rule with thousands of examples, and then mock us later on if we still made mistakes. Another one focused on whether the class could guess the gist of things. He was extremely flexible. But in their cases, all of them had to follow the same book, teaching manuals.
The chaos begins when you try to learn the language on your own and you go online and look for guidance. Now some gurus will tell you flashcards are paramount, some will tell you they aren't all that important. Some will only focus on the conversational method and ignore the grammar altogether, like the Pimsleur method, and some would suggest without grammar you'll never be good. Some will ask you to do intensive reading, some would suggest you do extensive reading no matter the content, it also doesn't matter whether you have total comprehension or none at all. There's also the idea of spaced repetition, where you keep teaching yourself some rules or vocabulary at a certain interval. Some would swear by keeping a language journal where you write down your progress. These suggestions are all good, some work for you, some don't.
I think the funniest and craziest suggestion is to get a girlfriend/boyfriend who is a native speaker of the target language. Tell me then genius, if I already have a partner, how am I gonna get a foreign partner? And let's presume I don't have a partner, and let's also presume I get myself a foreign partner—what happens if they know the real reason behind my interest in them? Isn't it transactional? You're kind of being unfaithful and unfair to them. Also what kind of a lover would I be if I just pick someone based on their language skill rather than following my heart? It's no different than being a gold digger.
I understand why they suggest it though, the idea is to maximize immersion. They also suggest traveling and living in a country where the target language is primarily spoken. This is an excellent method no doubt but not every language learner has the kind of time, scope, or means to do it realistically.
There are also different language apps, like Duolingo, babel, rosetta stone, busuu and they all have different teaching methods.
I've tried many things over the years and decided favorably upon the methods that work for me and discarded the ones that don't. Now I don't try everything, don't jump at the newest thing a new polyglot is suggesting on their YouTube channel.
First of all, I don’t find much value in investing time or money in apps. I’ve tried using them time and time again for a long time and I always stop using them after a while. I know other people can make them work, but they don’t work for me. A human teacher can overlook your spelling mistake and help you along the way, apps just show you errors even if you mess up an accent sign or grammatical format.
I don't like flashcards. Maintaining them is too much work IMO, as you have to input words and their definitions manually. I find the Pimsleur audio method a bit too situation-specific and the lack of grammatical focus kind of makes me feel like I'm lost in a jungle. I like a methodical approach to anything. Form! The Form! Yes, I'm a structuralist when it comes to art as well, you guessed that right!
Now intensive reading is something I do like a lot, but the problem is when you stop to look up every unknown word that pops up on your way, you tire yourself out. It can feel exhausting. I'm currently doing extensive reading and a renowned linguist Dr. Stephen Krashen argues that it helps build a personal lexicon and language acquisition. Sometimes I do look up words, and these automatically get added to my vocabulary builder on Kindle, which I can review later on. This method then solves the flashcard problem for me.
As for immersion, I'm using the radio, keeping it playing in the background all the time (https://radio.garden/ is the site and it’s wonderful). Films and TV shows as well as music are other sources, although because of their artistic nature, they can get pretty obscure with meaning sometimes. They help, at any rate. My practice buddies are other students at Alliance Française, we sometimes do speaking sessions.
So to sum up, I engage in French media (radio, tv, movies, music), do extensive reading with French books and of course, I do these practices while maintaining the language course AF offers. Compared to what's out there, I think this is pretty much simplified.
All photos are mine.
Immersion is great. When I was learning how to fly, one of the critical thing is to understand how to communicate and understand over radio to the towers. One widely accepted trick was just like learning new language is to listen to LiveATC, which is online, and free and public. Did you know you can listen to any Air Traffic Control of any airport anytime you like?
https://www.liveatc.net/
I still have that habit sometime. When my wife travels, which is quite frequent, I always like to hear her airplace asking for clearance to land at Houston Intercontinental......
Funny you reminded me on how I got this habit.
I actually had no idea about this (liveATC) and you got me super pumped! Especially since I was aware that there's a sort of universality in airways communication among the pilots.
Gotta say though dada, listening to her plane landing? You're quite the romantic!
Oh Well! I will tell her you said that :)
It's an old habit. Old habits die hard they say. I don't fly an airplane for years. But hopefully I will pick it up again, as I find time in hopefully not so distant future.
Just turn on any busy airport, like NYC JFK or BKK Thailand, and you will see what I mean. You won't understand anything in the beginning :) Then slowly you get used to it. Some of it is just listening through the crackle of the static though. Its fun :)
I tried a few stations to see how things are and this whole thing has a certain charm to it, like eavesdropping of a sort, or spying on a police radio network haha! At first, I was confused as the station was quiet, as no data was on the air.
I wish they had French airport listed there though!
I vaguely remember you sharing photos taken from a Cessna like aircraft, not sure if that's from back then. Flying a plane must be a very liberating experience. Ah well, so many things bar my way here...
Well ATC communications is all English! Well if you can call that English. It’s like math, or codes.
I never tried to look up Europe. Looks like Paris de gulle is not available. Some other European airport are there though
https://www.liveatc.net/feedindex.php?type=international-eu
Yes mostly it is lot of silence unless it is a major airport like LAX or JFK or IAH. The first two never stops
Yep, I've noticed, but I'm not familiar with the air controller jargon, I suppose I need to educate myself on it first. Is this similar to military command codes?
Even though there are no French airports, I see one from Quebec. Then again if its all in English, different airports wont matter much.
It’s all English. It’s actually hilarious to listen to Russians talking in ATC :)
Yes it’s a lot of jargon and acronyms, but all English.
As you can imagine there are lot of online resources and courses :)
You can search, but here are some basics
https://www.aopa.org/training-and-safety/students/presolo/special/new-pilots-guide-to-atc-communication
These are the most popular ATCs
https://www.liveatc.net/topfeeds.php
I just heard Air India 307 asking for permission to land Tokyo control :) :)
🤣😂
I LOVE languages, and I gave up learning several languages, but I gave up for all the reasons you've mentioned here. I studied Spanish in high school and I was good at it, but could never really interact with a Spanish speaker. I also did conversational German and could interact with tourists at my resort, which I was good at. I tried to learn Dutch when I lived in the Netherlands. I could write and read some, but not speak it. I studied French, and could write specific things and speak about specific topics, but I didn't see much progress. I started Cebuano (Visayan and a little Tagalog) while living in the Philippines. The thing is, I have not retained any of them, simply because I do not practice. Interestingly, when I was learning French, all the German knowledge that I thought I forgot resurfaced, and the same when I started learning the Filipino languages my French resurfaced and a little Spanish.
I don't know what to do anymore.
Maybe finding the right minimalist learning style would save me... I really want to be a dual-language speaker in this lifetime 😅
Wow, that's a lot of languages! And lots of places too! 😲
And it's not surprising practicing French revived German knowledge, they have the same root after all! I wanted to learn German too as my 4th language, alongside French, but later decided against it, not to mix it up all! Although I had no idea Philipino was connected to French. That is curious indeed!
Being bilingual is quite fun I'd say. You notice things a bit differently depending on the language and sometimes think differently in two languages. Some emotions are better expressed in a particular language. It's like having your arsenal of expressions grown into a bulkier one. If you can manage the time, make a plan, go for it! 😇
Haha! No, there was no connection between the two languages. I think my mind was just playing games with me. What I find, is that whichever new language I start learning, the knowledge of the last one just resurfaces.
I like that expression, it's so true. ✅
I've also tried lots of methods. In the end, here is what is working best for me now:
language reactor coupled with a netflix subscription. I also use pleco as a language dictiory and occasionally watch a youtube video or a read a web page to clarify grammar points that I'm not able to understand just by example.
I'm studying mandarin, so I have language reactor configured to show the dialog in 3 forms: the pinyin, the chinese characters (simplified chinese), and the english translation.
I use it in a couple of modes:
For a while I go line-by-line where it pauses after each person speaks and I use the mouse cursor to hover over any new words I want to learn to get the definition and the sound. In this mode, I'm actively trying to increase my vocabulary. This is similar to the benefits you mentioned from reading, but language reactor makes it trivial looking up new vocabulary words.
Then, when I get tired, I switch to the mode where it doesn't pause on each line, and I try to hear as many of the words from the subtitles as they flash by. When there are some pauses in the dialog, I can also read ahead from the sidebar, so I'll know what the actors will say ahead of time and can mentally prepare more.
When I'm trying to practice reading the characters, I turn off the pinyin for characters I "should" know.
I prefer watching tv shows to movies, because a long-running tv show will use more of the same vocabulary, so there's more repetition.
One of the most substantial advantages of this method of study is I can do it for a long time. When I started, I mostly studied vocabulary via traditional methods (digital flash cards, etc) and I found my brain got tired after about an hour (I'd even get sleepy). Since this method is more pleasurable, I can easily study for 3-4 hours at a time even... And since I'm just replacing time I would watch normal tv, I don't lose a lot of time for other things.
I've used extensions like Toucan before, which basically changes a few words of any article you're browsing on a website, but never came across Language Reactor, and this seems like a fun tool! I primarily watch films on MUBI, but got myself a Netflix subscription just because of French tv shows. Might just give this extension a try. I'm surprised it works, Netflix being so guarded against piracy, I can't even take screenshots.
Agreed with TV series having words with repetitive qualities, also I feel like Tv shows use more colloquial and applicable language compared to cinema. More trendy and street-friendly words. Great for slang words too.
When you watch Netflix, which language it's set by default for you? English or Mandarin? Do you hover over unknown Mandarin words and find out the English translation?
I have it show both the pinyin, the chinese characters, and the english (3 separate lines). Yes, I hover over unknown words to learn them.
There's a few features missing that I wish it had: 1) sometimes it groups characters wrong and I can't ungroup them, so then I have to manually use pleco to look them up and 2) it doesn't allow you to look up individual characters in words to find the "sub meanings" (again pleco fills this gap). The first problem is really a "mandarin-only" issue and people's names cause most of the problems (sometimes it thinks part of a person's name is instead of part of an adjacent word).
Yeah I think it is a Mandarin only issue, is it because of how the language merges words/characters into one? I can do all of the things you mentioned with French, look up individual words, and check their sub-meanings, as well as the root of the verb.
Yes, its not a problem for languages with word breaks. It's not a big problem even for mandarin, but it occasionally makes mistakes. I just wish it had a way for us to override when it does.
I tried Toucan briefly, but I don't recall it being very useful for me. But I'm a super fan of language reactor now. I feel it has really dramatically speeded up my learning rate, especially when it comes to how people really use the words, something that I found lacking in many other tools.
Gotta admit I'm halfway there! I've seen a few episodes since last night and the flexibility it offers! Like during the play, you can hover over the word, video playback immediately stops lets you see the meaning and when you move the cursor away it resumes! It's so good it makes you want to reward the developers lol!
A monthly subscription is like $5 or less, if I recall correctly. And it is well worth it, in my opinion, since it lets you track the words you know/don't know well. I forget the exact benefits, but I know I find it useful for the price.
Huh, this extension is letting me screenshot Netflix now! Dang!
Many thanks, man!
Good to know, but I've never tried to screenshot with it, so didn't know that was an issue.
On a related note, I get a side button beside the subtitle that allows me to copy/paste them, but I don't see that button on your screenshot. I use this to copy off dialog that I want to research more later.
Oh, I had to delve into setting and customize things a bit, I now have that one click subtitle copy button too as well as two layers of translations, one by humans and the oher by machine. And the change can often be huge! This is very helpful indeed.
Yeah, one of the things I find most interesting is the translators, at least for chinese, often translate the native chinese idioms to ones that are more familiar to the reader than the native saying. It's very annoying to me because you lose a lot of "flavor" of the show when they do that. In the beginning, having the machine translation helped a lot for that.
It was also useful to get a better match to actual word order when a line of dialog was split across several subtitles. Nowadays I've improved to the point that I don't use the machine translation much anymore though. But there's a bunch of useful settings in that dialog, expecially related to when you're studying characters vs pinyin in mandarin.
I also sometimes use it to slow down the speed at which people talk on shows when I'm listening to them. For example, slowing down speed to .875 or even .75 is tolerable.
Also, if you purchase the for-pay subscription (it's cheap, highly recommended), you can mark words you know and/or learning. I find this very helpful when scanning the dialog along the side to see words I need to lookup or refresh my memory on what they mean.
I've tried getting into flashcards too, with no success at all! I agree, immersion is best. Movies, and music for me are the best. I like translating songs in the language I'm learning (I used to do it with Russian, and now with Spanish). It helps a lot! Lovely post!
Hey, cheers!
I mostly listen to French music these days because they can be quite melodious and poignant, Spotify yearly report says French pop is my top genre of the year lol. I do believe they passively boost your understanding.
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STOPI have become addicted to watching Chinese dramas and have learned a bit.
The thing that gets me is the letter combination for sounds. I now get annoyed when I hear an American try to pronounce a Chinese word. The zh letter combination, for example has the same sound as the American j and the chinese x sounds like the sh sound in America.
Linguistics is something that interests me but when it comes to the actual sound of some languages it can throw me, especially when the characters are different like in Russia and Asia. 😁
Chinese is quite interesting, when I first learnt Qi is pronounced as Chi, imagine my shock! I do watch Korean Drama and their pronunciations always bug me, haha!
Asian languages have a distinct language root than English, which comes from latin. French is really close to English, as English borrowed a lot of words from French and it is also of the same root.
I love different languages. I just wish I could speak more then one fluently.
Ever since I saw the series Firefly I have been in love with the idea of speaking Chinese. I have to say the actors did not speak in proper tones but the words themselves were something foreign and beautiful to me. 😁
Yeah I totally know what you mean about actors having not the proper accent. When you don't understand the language at all, it seems impressive of course but when you do, lol, its another story.
Same happened to me with a song I love sung by Annwn (Douce Dame Jolie), which is an old french song and she singer is German. I was only able to detect heavy german accent and improper pronunciation when I myself was a bit good at French!
The song itself is amazing, try that here -