I'm overwhelmed by all the options out there. Duolingo, pimsluer, classes, books, etc. What did you do to become fluent in another language? How long did it take you?
I'm that red haired guy with a trucker hat who knows 9 languages. You may know from the Internet. The key to learning a lot of languages is total immersion and not being embarrassed for fear of sounding wrong.
The writing is super well done by a guy from Africa who moved to the US, and while in the US learned japanese.
He learned how to speak so well that when he took an interview for a software development job, they asked him for his address (assuming he was japanese) and didn't believe that he wasn't from there.
The site is not just for japanese. Most of the info is general (and uses either japanese or chinese as examples). I recommend it to everyone.
I'm fluent in German, English. I'm living in Japan and am almost fluent in Japanese and quarter fluent in Korean. I also recently started Hungarian and Spanish.
The most important part in my opinion is to live in a country that speaks the language you want to learn. You have to immerse yourself as much as possible with the culture and language.
Also very important that you aren't afraid to try to use what you learned. Even though it's very basic, you learn a lot by actively trying to understand and use the language. It might be tiresome and frustrating at first, but you will learn crazy fast. What I mean with that is: Change your OS to that language and accept that you don't understand anything at first.
Make internet friends and refuse to use English with them even though you have to translate every second sentence. Every time you see something you don't know, try to understand why it's written that way.
Lastly, if you have time and money: Do a 6 months ~ 1 year intensive every-day language course in the country that speaks the language you want. By doing that every day AND surrounding yourself with the culture + language, you will be able to speak after 6 month and become very good with it after 1 year.
On languages from a similar family (speak: English <-> German <-> French <-> Spanish || Japanese <-> Korean), you can get pretty far by buying books or doing internet courses.
For words, I prefer the spaced repetition method of tools like Anki. Important here is that you only create flashcards for words that you personally encountered to allow your brain to make connections to where you saw that word. Don't learn from wordlists.
Strongly agree that wordlists are useless (beyond the first few hundred that you are going to see constantly anyway) and making connections is key to retaining vocabulary.
Another tip is to pull vocabulary lists from reading material, and then to review them you just re-read that text until it becomes easy.
I learned to speak French starting from scratch in my 30s, while living in the US. I speak it well enough to enroll in an easy college-level course intended for native speakers[a] or to work professionally[b], although either experience would be painful at first.
For me, the process occurred in three phases:
1. Bootstrapping to the point where I could kinda-sorta read books and kinda-sorta carry on conversations. I personally used Assimil for this, which is excellent if you like learning by osmosis and you can spare 20 to 40 minutes a day for 5 months. Nine out of ten "language learning" apps just encourage you to screw around at this level with minimal progress, but if you just focus and get it done, it should only take a couple hundred hours (assuming you already know a vaguely related language—for an English speaker, French is easier than Japanese).
2. Using the language (as best I could). I read about 2.5 million words and watched about 15 seasons of television shows. This took my comprehension from vague and dodgy to automatic and nearly complete. I also spent many hours speaking, and I wrote a few dozen short texts which I had corrected.
3. Gradual improvement. I speak French every day of my life now, but my rate of improvement has slowed down because I don't currently need to be any better. I mostly talk to the same handful of people. To get better, I'd realistically need to work for a French-speaking company.
[a] I've taken an online statistics course for French speakers, and the language was rarely a problem.
[b] I've had multi-hour technical conversations with French-speaking programmers while debugging code.
I lived in the US for 20 years — came here when I was 10. I'm still not completely fluent in English. A lot of the learning came from interacting with others who mainly spoke in English, but in some occasions I still have to make an effort in order to get pronunciation and grammar correct.
In retrospect, what helped me the most in the early days were reading children's books and copying them down on separate piece of paper, and memorizing the most basic vocabularies that all native speakers naturally learned during their childhood years. These alone seemed to have improved reading comprehension and writing skills from level zero to the basic level. At first, try to write down the words in your native language next to the foreign words you are trying to memorize in order to make that initial connection, and later, try to memorize the definitions in the foreign language itself. I was using just pencil and paper throughout this process — I wasn't even aware that I could've used computers to do this at the time.
Fast forward to teenage years and up to early 20s, listening to podcasts and audio-based grammar courses helped with refining speech. I used to repeat after every sentence and even respond to questions that the hosts asked their guests in some radio shows as if the hosts were asking me the questions.
In regards to expanding my knowledge of vocabularies, I used to spend hours every week memorizing SAT vocabularies, but nowadays I try to use the new vocabularies that I come across as soon as possible in real conversations.
For now, I think you should focus on memorizing words for the things that you encounter most frequently every day, in addition to learning conversational speech rather than diving deep into the nuances of grammar and trying to cram all the vocabularies you can get your hands on into your brain. It's a long and arduous process — yet very rewarding, and IF you're a coder, you might know that there's a narrative by Peter Norvig — to set a long-term goal (up to 10 years) in learning a programming language — I think the same goes for spoken languages albeit it may take much longer to achieve an adequate level of fluency. Good luck.
Children's books are very helpful, and give you a kind of fluency with the low-level stuff that you will never get from SAT lists, etc. I think exposure to children's rhymes, poems, and nursery stories is useful if you really want to be fluent and probably necessary to get to a native-like level.
Everyone I know who has advanced skills in a foreign language spent one or more years in their target country where they had to speak the language daily, combined with a structured language course or class.
Otherwise it is extremely difficult to get the necessary amount of daily exposure to new and novel situations where the language you want to study is used. You can try by watching a lot of foreign TV series and movies, reading books, but those are not necessarily representative of the vocabulary useful in real life.
If you are a US citizen I think the only language you could get fluent in without leaving the country would be Spanish.
Live in another country, and in an environment where English wasn't an option 80%+ of the time.
But when there (here) structured learning in the form of a few books to round-off vocabulary/grammar and a few lessons mainly to track progress and give feedback helped hugely in going from basic to intermediary. Pleco dictionary and flashcards for 1-2 hours per day also very useful.
Did not take any holidays. You need to work on it every day, 365 days per year. Lots of little tricks. Like reading books written for 10 year-olds, by native authors of the language and set in a country where this is the native language. No translations of famous English writers.
Keep track of words you don't kn ow during the day, and look them up in the dictionary every evening. Go out of your way to meet native speakers. When I worked in Silicon Valley, I listened to Spanish language radio stations only, watched only SPanish language TV networks, only read Spanish language newspapers which happened to be free, and only spoke Spanish in stores and restaurants. It helped that 50% of population in SV is hispanic, and I was a foreigner in the USA just like them.
Another trick, after you check the news in English, read it again on the net in your target language. And watch TV series with subtitles in the same language. For instance, I watched Russian TV series with subtitles in Russian. That helped me when my ear could not make out the words. Also, not movies, but TV series because the same characters appear again and again so you get used to their quirks of speech and can learn faster.
Buy a kids encyclopedia in the target language. Don't be afraid to download and read university papers and dissertations in linguistics about your target language.
And finally, get married to someone who speaks the language and raise bilingual kids.
At different points of my life I spoke Thai, Malay, Italian, French and a teeny bit of Mandarin. I would say the ones I became extremely fluent with were the result of total immersion (living in that country - being fully immersed in it for years).
I've known expats who go to Thailand, live in western communities, associate with other westerners mostly speaking English and deal with locals mostly on a limited level don't get very far. I've also met foreigners who come to live among locals in local neighborhoods and interact with the locals on a daily basis get very good at the language.
Rinse lather repeat.
It took about 2 years before I was confident enough in my German skills to consider myself conversationally fluent at a beginner level. I spent four years of devoted study (yes high school) to get the concepts down, and now I've basically tried to maintain it in the 8 years since. For me it was important to focus on syntax and semantics more than vocabulary. It's super easy to find a translation for concrete concepts like "dog", "cartographer", and so forth, but it's rather difficult to find an elegant translation of advanced concepts like expressing conditional circumstances, and all those fun different tenses and voices. Repetition of vocabulary and all that helps to build up conversational awareness, but I find that it's important to focus on how the pieces are supposed together more than the individual pieces themselves. But hey, ymmv
I'm just overly fond of the procedural and qualitative approach of grammar and syntax first, but I know that runs contrary to how other individuals tend to acquire language. You do have to find some individual pieces beforehand so you can have pieces to put together, so obviously vocabulary itself functions as an important part, but I find that you are more likely to become fluent in a language when you've trained yourself to think with the logical approach that the language you're learning utilizes.
I'd say variety is your friend. I don't know any learner who has mastered a language by sticking to a single technique. You would do everything, maybe with varying levels of comittment - read textbooks, take classes, do flashcards, do speech shadowing, talk to native speakers, watch movies and TV programs, etc.
After becoming able to say what I want (more or less), participating online discussions in the topics I care has been useful for me. It taught me how to structure longer chunks of text to express more complex ideas - you would be surprised to see how often sentence-to-sentence translation fails (between Japanese and English, at least).
If you are starting as an adult, native-level pronunciation would be difficult to achieve, even if you invest decades into it. I have almost given up on that front, and instead am focussing on how I can make my pronunciation less misunderstood. Part of that is to pay attention to vowels and consonants I'm not good at (or to use easier-to-pronounce synonyms where possible).
The other comments about speaking the language daily (i.e. living in a country that speaks the language) are dead on. If that is not practical for you, then you can help retain and increase your _vocabulary_ with Anki [1], but it is no substitute for actually speaking.
For Android phones, you can sync Anki with Ankidroid [2].
I know English, Spanish and Japanese. I started studying Japanese in college and I live and work in Japan now. Structured lessons were fundamental in becoming fluent but when I was here I sang a ton of Karaoke whenever I could. It really helped my pronunciation and vocabulary. Definitely recommend signing to learn language.
I speak, read and write english (my second language) fluently although not perfectly correct.
I started thinking (when studying) and even dreaming (when I dreamt about programming, that is :-) in English before graduating because most of my books etc where in English.
In addition to reading lots and lots, one of the small things that helped me a lot was 10 years back or so I used to have an FF extension that let me doubleclick on any word on a webpage to get TFD definition of the word highlighted.
This took the effort out of expanding my vocabulary as I could look things up without breaking flow.
I still sometimes look up words that I haven't seen before although not as frequently as before.
(My problem is for a lot of words, esp. those I don't use at work I can read and write them but I might never have heard them.)
Let's say (for sake of example) that you only speak English, and you are learning some other language.
Several things. The more the better; in combination is best: Physically move to the place. Befriend locals who don't use English. Shun people who do use English. Take classes. Get a job where your coworkers do not use English in the workplace. Use Quizlet or flashcards or some similar tool.
A lot of software to attempt to make the boring repitition-based stuff more fun, for things like grammatical patterns and vocab. Anki (free) is my all-time favourite. Usually use a popular pre-made deck to learn what's recommended, and then have my own one going which I add a new flash-card to whenever I encounter a new word in my daily life. Review them in the evening. Something new I found out recently is that Anki has plugins [0]. AnkiStrategy [1] is currently making sure I get my daily review in.
Duolingo [2] (free) also helps with getting a grasp on basic grammar and vocab, but doesn't support many Asian languages (Vietnamese just got released and Indonesian is in progress).
Memrise [3] (free) is similar to Anki but has more of a modern, community-based app feel. A lot of great user-generated content.
Skritter [4] (subscription, phone app) helped me a lot when I was learning to write and recognise Chinese characters. They also have Japanese Kanji version.
Software-wise, I am currently learning Vietnamese, and for that using my own Anki deck (30-40 cards a day) and 5 duolingo lessons (adding new vocab to Anki). Feel like I'm making fast enough progress, but I think integrating anymore software to my daily revision routine would be too much.
Then you need a lot of interaction with people, using what you have leant in that language to attempt to communicate. I think this is the most important part and where you'll learn the most. You'll be forced to practise your listening, speaking, drawing on vocab and grammar that you know and have to put mould them into an understandable sentence. You'll make mistakes and look like a fool, but that's just part of the learning process. Try to treat it like a bit of fun, and hopefully the people you're talking to will also.
An old-fashioned method, but it works: start dating someone who speaks the language you'd like to learn.
Outside of that, watch children's television shows in the language you want to learn, with english subtitles. The language is simple and will help get it in your ears.
I worked (illegally) as a restaurant dishwasher at a ski resort in Spain. You'll learn fast if you are totally immersed and need to communicate to work. ;)
IME I needed both. I moved to an English-speaking country in my early teens, knowing virtually no English at all. Naturally I needed remedial classes, but IIRC I wasn't progressing very quickly, for I wasn't sufficiently motivated, and would have likely needed to take them throughout secondary school. That is until I got interested in computers. I devoured all magazines, books, etc. on computing I could get my hands on, and within that school year I "graduated" from the remedial classes. So I needed both to become fluent in English.
I've got another example where I had motivation but not necessity. A few years later I became interested in manga / anime, back when translations of either were scarce. So I signed up for Japanese classes, and eventually even went to Japan as an exchange student for a summer. I continued to take lessons in college, until I'd essentially run out of classes to take. Having done all that, I would say my Japanese proficiency was merely functional. I probably could have passed JLPT N1 had I tried, but I didn't bother since I wasn't planning on working or studying in Japan. In this case, IMO I was reasonably motivated, but since the necessity component was missing, I never made it over the hump and became fluent.
Finally, the kpop craze got me somewhat interested in learning Korean, but I barely know how to say hello / goodbye. I'll blame that on my brain plasticity though. :-P
I'm still learning but my recommendation is a lot of repetition. I learn primarily by trying to read a book in the foreign language with a translation available.
Only I repeat and repeat each sentence, each paragraph, and then each page, until I can read it out loud quickly with good pronunciation (I have a reader with TTS in the foreign language), where I can construct the meaning in my head on the fly. Until I get to that point, I don't consider the sentence, paragraph, whatever, learned.
My theory of language learning is that you need a strong root of a few sentences before you can branch off into new words and grammar constructs.
Too many language courses try to pack in the material as fast as possible. To me, that's a mistake. Like etching a lot of faint scratches into stone, you have a lot of information there, but it's difficult to read any specific thing and they wear away quickly. So, basically go for a few deep marks over a bunch of small light ones.
I mostly use English. Never been to the U.S. and not in a country where it's spoken. I've never "studied" English except in school. I just wanted to learn about Neuro-Linguistic Programing and all the good stuff was in English. I have a few replies on Reddit about how I acquired languages. I'm on mobile right now and I'm not accustomed to it (xorg isn't talking to me). hjugurtha on reddit.
Check out Stephen Krashen, he basically describes how I and a lot of people have acquired languages.
reply