Those of you who speak foreign languages: how did you learn?

I worked with a guy who needed two years of foreign language credits to complete his chemistry degree and get the resultant huge pay increase. He spent an entire summer watching nothing but spanish TV, watching Spanish movies with subtitles, hanging out in Mexican restaurants and bars. He said it helped most to watch American movies he'd already seen overdubbed in Spanish. He read all the local Spanish newspapers. He tested out of two years of college Spanish after three months of near complete immersion.
 
It was easy for me. I grew up in a foreign country... San Diego.

Español es no difacil para mi.
 
I'll second Assimil as being great. That's where I got the biggest foundation ever of French speaking, more than 2 or 3 years of studying French in school. Lots of self practice combined with Quizlet.com, constantly typing out exact sentences until I knew them from memory and got every accent right. That went along with cue cards and visuals and vocab learning. Also teamed up with French in Action which I know you know about.

Rosetta Stone I find to be kinda shit unless it's changed.

This forum is a great resource by the way:

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/

Lots of fluent self taught polyglots there.
 
Theodore said:
I've been thinking of posting a want ad on craigslist for a language learning partner or something like that, i.e. let's hang out, you can teach me your language and I can help you not sound like an idiot even though your knowledge of my language is vastly superior to mine of yours. My patience for puter stuff is really low but I want to learn conversationally.
Click to expand...
Dude, I can do that.
 
I learned a little about Spanish living in Los Angeles, enough to know how it is supposed to be pronounced and the general formation of the sentences.

But what really did it is when I traveled to Peru, and was in the Andes, where people spoke Spanish as a second language (Quechua was usually their first language). This was actually a bonus, as they spoke a little more slowly and simply, and I caught on quickly, and from there, I just kept adding on to it whenever I traveled to South America or Spain. While I am not close to fluent, I get around quite well. Usually.
 
I used to be functionally fluent in French but it's almost all gone. Like for music I have a tiny part of my brain available for languages in spite of trying to learn Japanese, Cantonese and recently (with Duolingo) Spanish. I could probably get french back faster but I have no where to use it. I could speak Cantonese every day but it was really fucking hard and caused my brain to hurt badly :P
 
BS555 said:
Rosetta Stone I find to be kinda shit unless it's changed.
Click to expand...

It's still trash unless you're learning a language with lots of English cognates and loan words. I tried Rosetta Stone Arabic and about halfway through level one it just stopped making sense. But it has a lot of value as a supplement for reviewing what you learn in good programs.
 
I just did some Duolingo and the computer voice is terrible, especially with Portuguese where a ton of the words are run together.
 
Agreed on Rosetta Stone not being that great. It's Pros are that it's easy and in bite sized pieces. It's a good way to make a goal of x number of lessons per day, or x number of minutes. But I finished, I think, 3 levels of Dutch, whatever they have available, and tried reading some news articles and other stuff online. Couldn't do it. You'll get a small foundation and a small vocabulary, but a pretty weak sense of sentence structure and congugation, etc. I wouldn't knock it as a starting point, or something to do concurrently with another method. But if you pay the shelf price for it, it's not worth it. Better stuff out there for much less.

I also agree that Assimil is great.
 
nuke_diver said:
I used to be functionally fluent in French but it's almost all gone. Like for music I have a tiny part of my brain available for languages in spite of trying to learn Japanese, Cantonese and recently (with Duolingo) Spanish. I could probably get french back faster but I have no where to use it. I could speak Cantonese every day but it was really fucking hard and caused my brain to hurt badly :tongue:
Click to expand...
Your French will come back as you get better with Spanish. At least mine did. I was in the Dominican Republic (which borders Haiti) ..maybe my second trip, and I was trying to talk with a baseball player training on the beach. He was from Haiti. English? No. Spanish? No. French? Oui.
I was able to pull enough French back to actually talk for a while. It was pretty cool.
 
Last edited:
Is anybody currently doing Duolingo?. Enjoying it more. (Brazilian Portuguese). Still don't think it's any way to learn to speak a language but I've picked up a bunch of vocabulary and grammar in a very short period of time, and I still have a long way to go. I know it's harder to learn than Spanish, which I also want to learn, so I figure if I build off my current jones for Portuguese and learn that to a good degree, learning Spanish will be relatively easy. Sure I'm speaking too soon but whatevs.
 
BS555 said:
I'll second Assimil as being great. That's where I got the biggest foundation ever of French speaking, more than 2 or 3 years of studying French in school. Lots of self practice combined with Quizlet.com, constantly typing out exact sentences until I knew them from memory and got every accent right. That went along with cue cards and visuals and vocab learning. Also teamed up with French in Action which I know you know about.

Rosetta Stone I find to be kinda shit unless it's changed.

This forum is a great resource by the way:

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/

Lots of fluent self taught polyglots there.
Click to expand...

Assimil can't be bothered with an English website. Onh honh.
 
eloydrummerboy said:
Agreed on Rosetta Stone not being that great. It's Pros are that it's easy and in bite sized pieces. It's a good way to make a goal of x number of lessons per day, or x number of minutes. But I finished, I think, 3 levels of Dutch, whatever they have available, and tried reading some news articles and other stuff online. Couldn't do it. You'll get a small foundation and a small vocabulary, but a pretty weak sense of sentence structure and congugation, etc. I wouldn't knock it as a starting point, or something to do concurrently with another method. But if you pay the shelf price for it, it's not worth it. Better stuff out there for much less.

I also agree that Assimil is great.
Click to expand...

Dutch is all about structure, so I guess it won't be that helpful to plough through Rosetta Stone more. Also, verb conjugation in dutch is a mess. Sentence structure is a lot like english though. But I guess for some languages you just need courses and practice, I don't think learning dutch online is going to be a great success.
 
When two Dutch people are together, talking, it always reminds me of the way the Sims speak in the game of the same name.

I hope thats not racist or Dutchist, I love the place!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top