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Comment by guitarbill | Hacker News Reader

> The most important part in my opinion is to live in a country that speaks the language you want to learn. You have to immerse yourself as much as possible with the culture and language. Also very important that you aren't afraid to try to use what you learned.

I cannot agree with this more. Coincidentally, I'm also fluent in German and English, and am learning Japanese.

At school, I took French, but I hated it. It only clicked when I went on an exchange, although I never kept it up. With English it was easier to pick up because of TV, films and games. But I only got good at it when I moved to the UK. The same with Japanese. Made almost no (real) progress until I went to Japan, and started using what I'd learned. Sure, learning the alphabet first helps, but language relies on being spoken IMO.

If you can, take a chance and just move to a country that speaks the language you want to learn.

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I had the same experience with French. I learned it for 10 years, I even won a national essay competition - guess what, when I was in France, I couldn't open my mouth. English on the other hand - I had only 2 years of study under my belt, and lots and lots of practice - movies, programming books, Shogun by James Clavell, song lyrics, chats on IRC, and so on. I'm fairly confident in my English skills. I know Russian a fair bit, and it's just a consequence of living in Moldova, where we have a lot of Russian influence and a lot of speakers of the language (16%) - but since I don't use it every day, I tend to forget it.

I am learning french as well, via Duolingo. Spoken french fries my brain, I just cant keep up. So many words seem to be pronounced the same way. And they speak so fast!

For example, did they say:

jeune

Jaune

john

je une

Je un

Joan

Je ont

Jean

Je ne

....

Perhaps it's just an unconscious bias on my part. Just for reference, I am fluent in at least two more languages apart from my mother tongue.

Context is king. Language is pretty verbose, most of the time you can understand the gist without understanding 100%. So at least you can make a start - that's the first step! It doesn't have to be perfect. Granted, the French can be gruff about it, but most cultures appreciate you trying to learn and will accommodate you a bit.

It could be the training material. I'm an auditory learner and the Michel Thomas courses work amazingly for me. I also ignore spelling until later, because I find conversations much more important and also pleasurable (so I'm more likely to stick with it). My English spelling was atrocious, I still rely on Chrome's spellchecker (actually, so do many of my English friends!).

Keep at it, everybody's different!

Well half of those you can eliminate because they're grammatically incorrect or make no sense. (Je une = nonsense, unless you mean J'ai une whatever, but still, very different)

The others all have different pronunciations.

When you live in a foreign country, how do you make sure that you have plenty of opportunities to talk to people?

Well, a job or education are obviously the best way to do this. University is amazing for this. Sports work well, e.g. finding an amateur football (soccer) league. Most people hang around before and after.

I've had great success in hackspaces. They're a great place to meet geeky, like-minded people. They can be a bit dead in smaller cities though.

Chat to somebody at a language school and see if they meet up and they'd be interested in speaking to a native speaker. This seems counter-intuitive, but it's about growing your friend circle, and ultimately will probably relapse into the country's tongue. Plus, they're way more sympathetic to your situation.

When you live in a foreign country many things will be different/new, and so you have the perfect excuse to talk to strangers.

"Does this tram go to the (railway) station?", "Do you sell edam?", "How much is this?", "How do I buy a bus-pass?", etc.

I've recently moved from Scotland to Finland, and finding reasons to speak to strangers has not been difficult. Too often they reply in English, but every now and again I pass and have a conversation, albeit brief, entirely in Finnish - it's a little victory.

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