Comment by narwally | Hacker News Reader

Comment by narwally | Hacker News Reader

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Anki is fantastic for its flexibility, but for language learning I've found I reach a point of diminishing returns after a certain point. From personal experience, I've been pretty much sold on Stephen Krashen's theory of second language acquisition[1][2], which in practice focuses on comprehensible input.

lingq.com is a pretty good way to learn a second language this way. I use it by uploading an ebook in my target language. The app keeps track of the words I've learned, and highlights the words and phrases I'm still learning or haven't encountered. I can click on the word/phrase as I'm reading to see a definition or translation in the sidebar, and then mark the level at which I've learned it just like in Anki.

It's pretty slow going at the start, and the texts you have to use are very basic, but pretty quickly I was reading entire YA novels with only a handful of unknown words on each page.

[1]https://www.sk.com.br/sk-krash-english.html [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fnUc_W3xE1w

Yes, I can mirror this experience for Anki! I still find it very useful though.

About the comprehensible input theory I have been using this method consistently for almost a year now to teach myself Russian.

It really really works. Initially I focused on learning grammar etc through online course etc but it didn't work for me. When I started focusing on consuming increasingly harder input in Russian (news articles, tweets, short stories etc) I saw a huuuge difference! Your grow your vocab tremendously fast and grammar rules are acquired naturally. I'm not saying it's easy I just say that that method really worked for me.

I tried LingQ to help me and even though is a very good resource the UX is incredibly bad and the free version is even more limiting. To the point that I decided to create my own tool talkabl.com. I decided to open it for free for any language learner.

It's an ongoing experiment on how much of the language learning can be automated :)

> talkabl.com

This is fantastic. The LingQ UX is truly horrible and it has way too many unnecessary features, but as far as I knew it was the only thing available with what it offers. I end up paying a monthly subscription, even though I use a very small subsets of its features, just so I can upload ebooks to it.

I've had the same experience with comprehensible input while learning Dutch. The grammar acquisition is what I've found most interesting. I still know next to nothing about formal Dutch grammar rules, but I was able to pass a few B2 practice exams with good scores regardless. I could pick out the correct answer on the grammar questions through process of elimination because all of the other answers just don't feel right. It's also been great for those words and phrases that don't translate well to English. Just by seeing them over and over in different contexts the meaning just slowly accumulates over time without ever seeing it translated or defined.

What really sold me on the method was that learning only through input actually produced equal levels of improvement in my ability to produce output. My speaking and writing skills seem to consistently lag just a bit behind my reading and listening skills. I think it just takes a bit longer to learn new words and phrases at a deep enough level that just come naturally when producing output.

Yeah this is more or less how I feel about the method too. Another big plus is unlike other methods studying with texts allows you to have unlimited lessons :) Your lessons are as limited as the corpus available for your target language online.

Keep it up my friend :)

Yous should check out languagetools.io. Like LingQ, but with a much better UI, way cheaper and chill with non-premium users, and they fund a school in Africa as well.

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