Unconventional Ideas for learning new Language? | Hacker News Reader

Unconventional Ideas for learning new Language?

8 pointstouseefliaqat9 comments

I am looking for some unconventional and innovative ideas for learning German language. I know there can't be better place then HN to ask this question.

Why unconventional because I think my language part of brain is not normal or so. So in school they tried to teach me English grammar for 10 years but still I do not remember any grammatical rule. By accident I learned(sort of) English while watching Hollywood action movies and commentary of cricket matches.

Now the problem is that I am not addictive to TV any more specially action pack movies which makes it impossible to watch daily some German movie to learn German.

Another problem is that I cannot do rot-learning for memorizing the vocabulary. May be because of ADHD or my laziness.

As an example what I have done in past. Once preparing for GRE, I had to memorize huge vocabulary of English, so I wrote a program to which given a ebook as input, adds meanings of difficult words in footnotes of each page. Difficult words were the words from GRE word list. That helped me a lot. But this cannot be used for German as I am in the beginning.

I am using a Polyglot chrome extension for German and doing customizations according to my needs. But still I need some other ways to quickly start communicating.

Now I am looking for other ideas. I am in Germany and started working part time in a software house. Can I involve my German colleagues somehow? Or what other methods you used for learning a foreign language?

1) There's a vibrant japanese learning community on the web that likes to talk about language learning in general; sites of note are http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/ and http://www.antimoon.com/ (about english learning).

2) Get a copy of Anki (http://ichi2.net/anki/) and load it up with the things you want to remember. If I were starting a new language, I'd do this with sentences from a textbook. As you get better, you can take sentences from things you're reading or from dictionaries, wikipedia, twitter (my favorite), or anything else.

There are lots of theories on language learning, and it's hard to pin down what works. Some people thing the above suggestions are crazy and will tell you so, loudly. But you since you're doing things yourself, you can just try stuff. If you don't like something or if you don't think it's working for you, then change it.

You might structure it something like Scrum: have a fixed study iteration that starts with a planning session and culminates with an assessment. The assessment could be a different depending on what you're studying; maybe a conversation with a native speaker on the subject of what you've been studying that week. Maybe a trial run of a standardized test you're studying for. Maybe watching the same TV show at 3 week intervals to see how much your comprehension improves. Depending on the result, then plan your text 2-3 weeks of study accordingly. For me at least, that seems like about as long as I can stick to any particular study plan without burning out anyhow.

... actually, I kind of like this idea, maybe I'll try it for my Japanese. :)

You've already done one of the most important parts: move somewhere where that language is spoken. Next: get everyone around you to speak German to you, and speak German to them (obviously, ask when you don't understand or need a term). Instruct them to always correct you, and when they do, repeat the correct sentence a few times out loud. Watch television. Read. Socialise with locals, not expats. Look up or ask about anything you don't understand. The idea is total immersion.

By the way, if you need techy reading material in German, Heise are great. I've been a subscriber to their c't magazine for years.

Thanks for these tips. Bad thing is that I am damn introvert and know only other few foreign people only. Any ideas on socializing with locals?

Scout for likeminded people nearby on Twitter. That's what I did when I moved to Vienna, not knowing hardly anyone here. Go to any sort of meetup where you might meet interesting people.

Practice some team sport.

You learn by conversation. As soon as you understand or are understood - whamm! You got it. I am German (although I'd spend a kidney to get out of here) and I know lots of English people who learned the language at an incredible turn of speed by just trying to get along. Use your belly instead of your brain. I must admit that most of them don't get the grammar right but it doesn't matter at all and it should get better reading an interesting book once in a while.

And don't get scared. I remember when I travelled to the Netherlands and as soon as I tried to speak a few words in Dutch I got the hot hints where to get a lovely, cheap place to stay. People just LOVE it if you try to learn their language. Remember that. Get out. Have a drink (not too much of course). And check out http://dict.leo.org :)

Look up the blog by Benny the Irish Polyglot and read his posts. I think you might do well with his style.

I checked out his site and it seemed like more hype than substance. He claims to be learning a language every three months for the past seven years but so far his list of languages is not terribly impressive, at least by European standards. There are eight languages in the list (aside from his native English). Out of the eight, one is still being learned (Hungarian) and four are from the same language group (French, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian). It's not a huge leap to become conversationally fluent in Portuguese after learning Spanish, especially if you can live in Portugal. I'd like to see how far he gets with Korean or even Mandarin in three months.

Something that always helped me was to look for similar words in my native language (or another language I know a little of) and make that the mental link rather than the one you typically see in translations. In German, window is "fenster" and in French it is "fenetre" (with some symbol over the second e indicating that there used to be an S before the T in old French). So that makes "fenetre" easier for me rather than remembering it directly as "window". In German, "flasche" is usually translated as "bottle". I remember it is "flask" first and foremost, which makes it easier for me.

I also transliterate rather than translate -- ie translate word for word instead of translating it actually into the grammar of my native language. When I took classical Greek, we had interlinear bibles that showed each word in English below the word in Greek. I had no trouble making sense of this, though it didn't make sense to other people. I was the only person in my Greek class who could read a passage in Greek and then tell you what it said in English. I was the most fluent person in that class. It also helps me familiarize myself with the grammatical differences between two languages.

Good luck with this.

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