Thread: How I Learn a Foreign Language

After almost 50 years of studying several foreign languages with varying degrees of success, I have come to two conclusions. First, that classroom instruction is the worst way to learn. Second, that the most important thing is to stop consciously trying to learn. As an example, many years ago one of my guys, after completing 9 months German language classroom instruction, where he was at best an average student, went to work in a small town in Germany. After 6 months there, he was speaking well enough to pass as a native. He did it by spending his spare time down at the local gasthaus chasing women. I, on the other hand, after a year learning the Vietnamese language and two years in country using the language daily but not in a position to use it socially, could never pass myself off as a native. I guess I could never get the pronunciations right.




Being convinced of the correctness of my two conclusions above, I searched the internet to find out why those conclusions may be right. I found that there is some very recent research into how the brain functions that may explain it. Researchers, by scanning the brain, have found that there is a huge difference between how the conscious brain and the subconscious brain functions. I will use an analogy that experts would probably call overly simplistic or silly, to illustrate my understanding:


IBM recently developed a computer system called 'Watson' designed to understand natural, complex English language and respond to questions in real time (within 3 seconds). The system is made up of a large room full of 90 servers capable of parallel processing (carrying on many tasks simultaneously) and accessing many terabytes of data. Think of this system as the 'subconscious brain'. Then consider hooking your laptop computer up to the Watson system. Think of your laptop as the 'conscious brain'. Obviously, if you needed to input large amounts of data into your brain, you would want to directly access the main system, the 'subconscious brain'. Inputting the huge amounts of data making up human language through your laptop, the 'conscious brain', would take forever. There are estimates that the 'conscious brain' only has about 2% of the capacity of the 'subconscious brain'.


Another example of the difference between conscious and subconscious (or non-conscious) activity would be the simple act of picking up a beer. The conscious brain makes the decision to pick the beer up. The subconscious brain directs the movement of the muscles to actually pick it up.


Young children learn much of what they do (as quickly as they do) because they apparently have direct access to the subconscious brain. Thus, young children can rapidly learn any language. As we get older, consciousness gets in the way of the subconscious brain, making learning (especially languages) much slower and harder. Experts believe that distracting consciousness increases subconscious brain activity and that the brain is capable of flipping quickly and frequently between conscious and subconscious.


So, my way of learning is not so much to memorize vocabulary or conjugations, but rather to place myself in situations (preferably social) where I simply must speak the language. Distract the conscious brain so that the subconscious brain can do its job. I found that a beer helps.

German and English are somewhat close though.
Vietnamese and English are not.

Originally Posted by Koojo

German and English are somewhat close though.
Vietnamese and English are not.

I make no excuses for my incompetence.....other than being an American.

Originally Posted by Borey the Bald

So, my way of learning is not so much to memorize vocabulary or conjugations, but rather to place myself in situations (preferably social) where I simply must speak the language. Distract the conscious brain so that the subconscious brain can do its job. I found that a beer helps.

Immersion, swim or sink. That worked for me too.
A beer probably helps to the degree that one doesnt worry too much about making a few linquistic fuckups along the way.
I have found that quite a few adults are somewhat reluctant to use their newly acquired language out of fear of ridicule.
Kids dont think like that, they just speak, listen, learn and adjust their vocab.

Both my sons spoke great english years before they were introduced to it at school.
Due to constant exposure to the language from an early age of.

But some times there is no way around "brute force" learning as when one wants to learn, say the thai script.

multilingualism works on many levels ie: learning a language. its not so much about the 'learning' part as the environment that plays a major role of sorts. i type this as my kids are shouting in three different tones including english.

Originally Posted by Koojo

German and English are somewhat close though.

nowhere near, unless you know neither. you know french, you know spanish, italian as they are latin based. immerse in the culture and the environment and thou shall overcome.

mandarin writing kicks my head, i'm fluent by my strokes are out of order, can't type it fast enough or write it fast enough. my kids its like 'mum, what are you doing?' getting older doesn't help. you are what you are and where you are.

german is a bitch to learn, i am fluent in french ( from murten) but the german has me garbled. like cantonese and mandarin, completely different vibes.

English is considered a Germanic language just as Icelandic and Dutch are. The transition from English to German, apart from vocabulary, is made difficult by the need to decline nouns.
The average American understands conjugation to a point but in American English there is, for the most part, no visible declension of nouns.
The other problem Americans seem to have is dealing with another language's sentence structure. Subject-Verb-Object is basically what we learn. What happens when you suddenly have the verb ending the sentence with the subject and object appearing first?
Vietnamese is fairly simple grammatically. Vocabulary wise, you don't have to worry about monster syllabic words, but the tones will get you. Six possible meanings for every word makes it interesting. Mandarin only has three tones. Woe to anyone who is tone deaf. Of course, military conversations ease it because you can get the meaning by context.
Total immersion has always been the best means of learning a language. The classroom is good for providing basics but in the end you learn best from real face to face interaction with native speakers.

I found when in the Philippines if I had to think of a filipino word I was bloody hopeless but on our regular saturday night after work get together with my filipino business partner, with a tanduay rum in hand I conversed well enough to be understood.

Originally Posted by Borey the Bald

Originally Posted by Koojo

German and English are somewhat close though.
Vietnamese and English are not.

I make no excuses for my incompetence.....other than being an American.

My point was it's a LOT more difficult to pick up a language so dissimilar to ones first as it is one based in a similar tradition.
Some of the sounds in the Vietnamese language you would be hard pressed to write in the roman alphabet.

Long-haired dictionary and a few drinks in you are the way to go, especially if the girl speaks little English.

This is an interesting topic as my nippers are currently learning two languages as I dare say many other's offspring are/have. The way we're going about it (I've no idea if it's the right way or not but we're doing it anyway) is for mum to speak soley in Thai to them and for me to speak in English..they're obviously a tad confused by it all and combining English and Thai in the same sentence but from the off I need them to have a good grasp of English because I get bored having inane conversations with granny and co about how the price of betel nut is on the rise, and surprisingly enough, even with living in Thailand and listening to it all day, English seems to be pravelent.

Originally Posted by somtamslap

This is an interesting topic as my nippers are currently learning two languages as I dare say many other's offspring are/have. The way we're going about it (I've no idea if it's the right way or not but we're doing it anyway) is for mum to speak soley in Thai to them and for me to speak in English..they're obviously a tad confused by it all and combining English and Thai in the same sentence but from the off I need them to have a good grasp of English because I get bored having inane conversations with granny and co about how the price of betel nut is on the rise, and surprisingly enough, even with living in Thailand and listening to it all day, English seems to be pravelent.

My boy now 5 1/2 did the same, he now speaks fluent English and mandarin. Like yours he was getting them mixed up in the begining. I made sure there was lots of sesame street videos, then Thomas the tank Engine then Kids cartoon movies and he was well exposed to them, also reading to him every evening and talking to him. Listening is just as important and don't correct them EVERY time they make a mistake or they'll get discouraged.
it does take work on your part.

Originally Posted by Koojo

he now speaks fluent English and mandarin

Very useful indeed. If we're still here when mine start primary school, I'll learn mandarin with them.

I can only suply with learning languages, tried a bit in practice with my own kids and it works out fine...
Learning by doing in real life, classrooms can come later...

I am Danish, the wife Thai, we live in Germany, and our 3 kids attend an International school in an English section...
Basicly when the kids grew up, I spoke Danish with them, the wife spoke Thai with them, we let them attend German kindergarten at age 3, so they had to speak German with their playmates, and then we let them start in school at age 6, with English as the main language , so there they had to speak English with their playmates.. In order to prepare them for English we only let them watch cartoons/kids movies in English....so by the age 6-7 they had 4 languages, no problem at all, now they are in their teens and had added some Latin, Spanish and French on their own...The main thing is, I have never forced them to do anything, let it all come naturally by the surroundings, playmates....sure in the beginning they mix the languages a bit, but after a while the learn by themself to seperate...
The moment that you force classes or books on kids, you have lost..let it come naturally

excellent. ^

Originally Posted by Koojo

Originally Posted by Borey the Bald

Originally Posted by Koojo

German and English are somewhat close though.
Vietnamese and English are not.

I make no excuses for my incompetence.....other than being an American.

My point was it's a LOT more difficult to pick up a language so dissimilar to ones first as it is one based in a similar tradition.
Some of the sounds in the Vietnamese language you would be hard pressed to write in the roman alphabet.

Vietnamese is written in a modified Roman alphabet. If you are talking about using the English version of the Roman alphabet, then there is difficulty with the diacritical signs unless you use a standardized transliteration system such as that used in international telegraphy.

Accordig to an article I read, Thai is the third most difficult (common) language for English-speaking people to learn to speak and read and write. Chinese and Japanese are in the top two, with one being the hardest to speak and the other the hardest to learn to read/write (I can't remember which was which).

The difficulty in many Asian languages is due to the fact that they are tonal languages. As I'm sure many of you know Thai has 5 tones, and words can mean very different things depending upon the tone.

I was talking to a native-English speaking guy the other day, who speaks fluent Chinese. He has an advanced degree in Languages and had lived in Taiwan for several years. Since I had lived in Taiwan once upon a time I asked him about Taiwanese (a different language than Mandarin - the official language of Taiwan). He told me he had tried to learn Taiwanese, but it was extremely difficult due to the fact that it had 7, shifting tones! In other words the tones changed depending upon how the word was used.

So people who can learn non-tonal languages very easily may still struggle when it comes to the tonal languages.

I, for one, will never be able to speak Thai very well. Even if I know the proper tone, I will not always pronounce it correctly, or hear it correctly when a Thai is speaking.

I've been learning to read and and write Thai, and I am much better at that then I will ever be when it comes to speaking the language.

I envy people who can pickup the language, just by talking with Thais.

Good for you!

"Talking Dictionary" by Poonbai Publishing is the software I mentioned in the above post.

Regards,

RickThai