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Comment by Ronsenshi | Hacker News Reader

Reading literature, watching films, listening to the music.

Basically, delving into culture which contains common phrases, idioms and sayings scattered around. You hear/read them, understand meaning from context, and commit to memory so you can use it later on.

This is not really that different from how kids learn idioms too, isn't it?

By the way, a lot of idioms/saying are pretty similar in different countries. Their wording might be slightly off, but just by translating it in your mind you understand what it means.

Example: "Dark Horse" - One who was previously unknown and is now prominent. In Russian it is pretty much the same thing "Черная Лошадка" or if to translate it to English "Dark Horsey" ("horse" is used with affectionate diminutive suffix).

Source: Russian.

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France here - starting as a student and stepping into the university library, it took me 30 seconds to realize that everything interesting was written in English and not being able to proficiently ingurgitate vast amount of it was going to be a problem. I just shunt French as written input for the next 5 years. When the valley called for a job, I was ready. Pasteur said "Chance favors the prepared mind" - he was relating it to the field of observation but it obviously applies almost anywhere.

Nowadays, if you have access to the Internet, there's no excuse not to be proficient with English. I've noticed during my travel that youngsters with a bit of education (high school or better) in countries where movies/series aren't translated (because the market is just too small) have very good English level. France has an official language which means that content is vastly translated and this-is-bad(TM) - the we are slower at getting better at English.

With the change to digital TV in France the original soundtrack is often available too so people can get exposure to English.

Indeed - it makes a few broadcasts palatable. I don't think that option is widely used though and I'd say mostly by people who don't speak French.

Casting aside writing in French for 5 years, did your ability to write in French degrade over that time?

I cast aside written French input. I still had to produce output. And I did learn, under supervision, how to write well during these years; using French as a target language but that knowledge has proven to be highly re-usable. I'm lost writing correct French without a spell checker.

> Nowadays, if you have access to the Internet, there's no excuse not to be proficient with English.

That is so true. A lot of my compatriots seem to not realize that they are missing an incredible amount of information by disregarding English. And I often find myself angry at them when they try to argue that English is not that important and they don't need to know/learn it. So frustrating.

> France has an official language which means that content is vastly translated and this-is-bad(TM) - the we are slower at getting better at English.

Again, completely agree. I'm a huge proponent of subtitled media content and believe that that's what should be used when showing movies/tv shows on national networks (cable or sat can do whatever they want).

I wonder about the mind/minds

I should say Chance favors those with a prepared mind or Chance favors only favor people with prepared minds, perhaps minds is plural in Spanish an singular in English and this is reasoning? Can anyone confirm this reasoning or I am completely confuse?

Edited: Gooling I found people with heads are smarter, so here they use the plural. So why mind and not minds.

http://gnosticwarrior.com/head-size-matters.html

"Chance favors those with a prepared mind" is grammatically correct and sounds just fine, it's just not as pithy as the original. You could also say "Chance favors prepared minds".

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