Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

This seems to be based on the idea that learning a language is mostly about learning words. That has not been my experience as a language learner. (As disclosed in my HN user profile, I am a native speaker of English who learned Chinese to the proficiency that I was able to work as a translator and as a Chinese-English interpreter.)

Words in one language do not have a one-to-one mapping with words in any other language. As the saying goes, "The map is not the territory." Each language has its own peculiarities of dividing up the Universe of experience into words, and especially each language has a different approach to arranging words into sentences and longer utterances with grammar and syntax.

I know of a Web page that lists some language-learning resources, especially useful for the case of learning one Indo-European language (like the blog post author's native langauge) while already knowing another.

http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html

The best single bit of advice I can give for someone who wants to learn a language thoroughly is to do a lot of what the blog post author is doing: reading in the target language. The section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975 has great advice: "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original).

祝你好運。(Good luck!)

AFTER EDIT: The comment posted by _feda_ before this comment was posted that it is important to read target language text for meaning beyond one's current reading level, using context rather than a dictionary to figure things out, is correct. That has much to do with improving understanding of the second language, just grappling with the language directly a lot, not always relying on bilingual reference books.

> This seems to be based on the idea that learning a language is mostly about learning words. That has not been my experience as a language learner.

My experience, as a native English speaker who has learned German as an adult, is that different stages in language learning benefit from different kinds of study. There have been times where memorizing grammar rules have been enormously helpful to me, others where reading a lot is what I needed, and still others where holes in my vocabulary were holding me back. After a certain level of proficiency, the only new thing you encounter in the language is unknown words and phrases, so it makes sense to focus on learning them.

> Words in one language do not have a one-to-one mapping with words in any other language.

As you have mainly studied non-European languages, this might be more true in your experience than for those who are focusing on European languages. There are certainly many words that map one-to-one between German and English, especially in common usage.

What I like about the author's technique is that it seems like a smart way of priming the pump for real and detailed learning: when he encounters a new word in the text, he has a general idea of what it means from the definition, but he can sharpen that meaning with the particulars of the context where he finds it. Otherwise, he might get only the vaguest sense of what a word means from context, or have no clue at all.

I want to add that vocab would have helped me much more than the hours and hours of French verb drills I did in high school and university. I wish they would thrown so much vocab at you in school that retaining even 70-80% would be considered top notch.

Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ

I have little experience learning languages, but it seems that this sentence is pretty meaningless; we can replace the word "read" with any verb ("jump" is an amusing one) and retrieve the old adage "practice makes perfect". Is it your opinion that an hour spent reading Chinese is better than an hour spent practising with a speaker, or writing translations from English?

> This seems to be based on the idea that learning a language is mostly about learning words. That has not been my experience

Er, sure, there's tons of other important aspects to learning language, but words are really important. At some point (once you're somewhat competent with basic grammar and conversation flow, and have the core vocabulary down), lack of sufficient vocabulary can be a big hurdle for conversing with adults about non-trivial subjects. Educated conversation uses an amazing number of words... ><

Of course you're right that it's really good to learn words in context (e.g. by reading), not in isolation (on flash cards or whatever).

[Memory is also weird: for a huge number of words, I remember the exact context (e.g. book title/page/sentence or conversation topic) where I first learned it; I hate to think of the number of brain-cells all that info is using up, but it gives these words a nice ... familiar feel.]

I agree with you that bilingual reference books are often not terribly helpful when learning a foreign language. I also think that you're spot on when you write that reading extensively is an excellent way to improve your knowledge of a language. But in my experience, you can only do this once you have reached a certain stage in learning the language. Before that stage, it's critical to build up a sufficient vocabulary and (secondarily) to learn the grammar. I've learned several languages as an adult, and I made the most progress in the beginning by committing to learn at least 10 new words or phrases a day. Once you reach around 500 words (that's a wild guess, but it's in the ballpark), you should be able to start reading certain carefully-selected books and learning new words through context. In my personal experience, it's only at this stage of language learning that "immersion" is really effective.

So yes, learning a language is far more than learning words. In fact, to underline what you wrote above, most trained translators explicitly attempt to map ideas, not words (although there are in fact multiple "translation paradigms" on how exactly to go about this). So absolutely, many words and phrases are specific to a given language, and don't map one-to-one.

Nonetheless, as an adult learner, basic vocabulary -- combined with grammar -- provide you with a foundation upon which to build your language learning. Nouns like "man, woman, head, shoes, etc" and verbs like "go, speak, find, search". Without a basic vocabulary, it's pointless to try to build up oral fluency, or to read books. No serious language learner that I know willingly picks up a book in a foreign language and starts to study it without some preparation, or dives into in-depth spoken interactions with a speaker of the target language with no background in that language. Most try to establish the most common words of a language, memorize them, find a good grammar, study it, and only then do they start to interact with the spoken and/or written language.

(Background: native English speaker who learned one foreign language as an adolescent and several others as an adult / ATA-certified translator with a decade of experience doing technical/medical translations. Currently: transitioning back to professional web development!)

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