Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghusto | Hacker News Reader

Agreed, no app, website, methodology or anything else is going to gain you fluency. The sole way of gaining fluency is speaking the language, and all that goes along with that (mostly it's integrating into the culture, because language is an extension of culture and if you don't get the culture, you won't get the language).

You need to know very little of the language to get started. Just find someone who's willing to talk to you in said language, and you'll fill in the gaps as you go.

View on HN

Speaking frequently absolutely helps a lot, but I’ve found in my on-an-off language studies (as time allows) that vast amounts of input is also effective if finding speakers isn’t practical.

Reading content a bit above your level with a dual-language dictionary in hand as well as watching native content while actively trying to understand what’s being said paired with SRS of vocab you’ve picked up while reading will do vastly more for language acquisition than any app/subscription or textbook.

For more popular languages there’s community-made guides online that make doing this easier but it’s doable for any language.

That's the frustrating stage with learning a language; the part where you don't know enough to pick up the gist of a sentence, but learning more requires you to first pick up the gist of the sentence.

I'm not sure what the solution for this is, other than to tell you that I got over it with no formal study (or even much _in_formal study, now that I think of it) with time. Just hearing the language all around you helps.

I had 4 years of high school French and could read passably, write some, but was never really conversational. Probably if I had lived in France for a summer I'd have gotten a lot better.

I was actually talking with a (French and English-speaking) friend who now lives in Serbia and they were saying they pretty much just picked Serbian up and didn't sweat all the fancy verb conjugations and so forth.

I had four years of high school French and one year at university, and I was pretty conversational. How much did you use the language outside of class? A bunch of us high school French students would speak with each other outside of class, even just to make silly jokes in the language, which helped with retention.

>How much did you use the language outside of class?

Not at all. Which I think was my basic point. It was a class. I had no plans to move to France. Or any particular plan for French to be integral to subsequent education or career objectives.

Honestly, this just made me excited for AI in these apps. Imagine if you could just have a conversation with a personalized language coach constantly to help you learn a language and immerse yourself in it. Heck, this is HN. Who knows, maybe it's already in the works by someone around here. I think the first few iterations will be rough especially while "AI" generations remain close to current. Though I haven't messed with Gemini or Chat-GPT 4+ultra, maybe they've gotten disproportionately better.

That actually sounds great. If it were particularly smart, it could even take apart the bits of the language you were having problems with — and unbeknownst to you — concentrate on developing those with you.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com