Hacker News Reader

Comment by sudahtigabulan | Hacker News Reader

I think the pre-internet ways are just fine - textbooks, phrasebooks, other kinds of books geared towards self-learners.

With them, one must be just a little bit more proactive, though.

You can also sign up to in-person classes.

View on HN

Pre-internet ways failed to teach language super often. Very frequent issue when learning from book was that you could not not understand anything people say, because you imagined the language to sound much differently then it does for months and months while learning. That was the most common result of language learning attempts - not much.

Language learning is one of the things that were genuinely made much more effective by the internet and streaming services. The input based learning methods were basically impossible pre-internet for most people. And these are very effective.

Many language learning books used to come with audio media. I'm old enough to own a few that came with cassette tapes.

Books are still worthwhile IMO, if only because they provide a bit of structure to one's learning. With free resources it's way too easy to become paralyzed by choice.

I am old enough to remember them. Comparably, you got maybe 4 hours of media - meaning sentences from the book being read and short boring dialogs. You cant compare it to what is currently available. It is like comparing a puddle of mud to Atlantic Ocean. And I mean it in a positive way - those audio tapes were almost nothing comparably.

Beyond projects like Dreaming Spanish, you have around infinite amount of French, Italian, Spanish or German Youtube about whatever topic you want to. There are even dedicated playlists for total beginners you can start to consume with zero knowledge. You have thousands of shows on Netflix in foreign language with various difficulty - some actually suitable for beginners. Some you have already seen in own language, so you can understand them more easily.

For major languages, there are dozens if not hundreds of podcasts with simplified news, "for beginner" discussions. Some of them are useable with literally miniscule amount of knowledge.

I think books are probably the worst way to learn a language

I learned French and my experience from best to worst ways to learn were:

1. 1-1 lessons with language teacher (by far the most effective way to learn)

2. audio lessons (Michel Thomas Method)

3. Visiting France a lot, interacting with French people (my wife is french) (and yes, for me this was less impactful than listening to audio lessons)

4. Duolingo (did a year of doing it daily, did almost nothing for me except a bit of vocab)

5. School (3 years of French in school was about equivalent to listening to 5 hours of Michel Thomas audio lessons)

Schools vary a lot. Some schools are really good, but a lot of them are bad. Schools are typically held back by those who don't care and so disrupt the class. (this isn't always bad, for kids learning how to deal with other kids is itself an important lesson - home school kids tend to do well on tests with much less time spent in study, but they always show a lack of meeting diverse people in my experience)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com