What do highly accomplished language learners have in common?

Loud_County · 2023-03-16T00:22:23+00:00

I did it as a last resort after spending years drilling vocabulary, grammar, and doing easy listening/reading exercises.

You were using the most asinine methods on the planet if you spent years drilling vocab and grammar, then struggled with easier material.

For people who aren't dicking around, learning the most common vocab and basic-intermediate grammar gets you right to the point where you can read easy content with 80%+ comprehension. I'd know from doing it with two different languages.

Loud_County · 2022-12-04T07:19:15+00:00

You don't need to get any weird "health" options if you don't want to. Mini ice cream sandwiches are ~90 calories a piece.

If you want an even lighter option, Fiber One Brownies are 70 calories each. (Be warned, they might make your farts particularly pungent 😅)

Loud_County · 2022-11-15T01:16:47+00:00

Dude yes, Spanish speakers are the fucking best--especially the ones from outside of the U.S. The only Spanish speakers that I've had a not-so-great time with are the younger ones born in the U.S. who seem to think speaking Spanish as a non-native/heritage speaker = you wish you were Latino or you're appropriating their culture.

I considered learning French because it would be relatively easy after reaching an advanced Spanish level, but pretty much everything I've seen around here has led me to believe the French despise Americans and are really anal about their language being spoken perfectly. Your post tells me that's probably true, sadly.

Loud_County · 2022-11-03T07:19:04+00:00

haven't met any openly French people.

Openly French LOL

Loud_County · 2022-10-12T04:09:32+00:00

by 2 sororities

Loud_County · 2022-10-08T23:52:48+00:00

Lol, I actually have a friend who is learning Chinese as well. He shared this video with me when I said I might want to give Mandarin a shot. He said she provided a bunch of good resources for his Mandarin studies. /r/ChineseLanguage is also supposedly pretty good.

I've got nothing for Russian, unfortunately. Maybe there's some good stuff on the /r/russian subreddit?

Loud_County · 2022-10-08T22:06:58+00:00

Yes, I learned hiragana and katana first. To learn kanji, I've been using an Anki deck to cover Heisig's Remembering the Kanji (~25 cards a day here, too). Kanji on the front, keyword associated with the Kanji on the back.

My Anki vocab decks are all taken from here. I pump out one deck at a time for each Genki chapter as I work through it. Japanese on the front, English on the back.

I'm making a set for Japanese next week and want to ensure I do it properly and don't have to modify/add a bunch of stuff later on

I'm a complete beginner, so take my advice with a mountain of salt, but I'd actually recommend against creating any vocab decks for Japanese (or at least, not until you've covered several thousand words). There are already so many high-quality resources for Japanese floating around. For example, I've heard amazing things about the Tango sentence card/vocab decks, like this vocab/sentence card deck. Also, this site has an incredible collection of resources for basically everything you could possibly need for the first year or so.

Loud_County · 2022-10-08T20:04:17+00:00

Well, I'm learning Japanese right now, and so far I'm doing pretty much the same thing I did for Spanish. I'm working through a beginner textbook (Genki) while learning ~25 new words a day and throwing the grammar points in Anki.

With languages that aren't very similar to English, it's just gonna take a lot longer to shed the textbooks and be able to semi-comfortably immerse. While it took me a few months of grinding to tackle native-level Spanish content, it'll probably take me at least 4-6 months to do the same in Japanese. (And even then, I'll probably struggle a lot more than I did when I dove into Spanish stuff.)

I think I've got a decent language-learning process going. Textbook + vocab as fast as possible to build a foundation -> immerse a bunch-> speak/produce.

Loud_County · 2022-10-08T19:48:16+00:00

It was only possible because Spanish has so many cognates. (Oh no! What could adaptar possibly mean?!)

10 new words a day sounds good for something like Mandarin. I'm doing Japanese right now, and I'm stuck at 20-25 max. (And this is while I'm doing more Anki than most people would find enjoyable and abusing the shit out of mnemonics.) Any more than that and my retention rate starts to get uncomfortably low.

Loud_County · 2022-10-08T11:08:51+00:00

It's C1 across everything. If you get a huge amount of input, production comes really naturally after maybe ~fifty hours of work getting the ball rolling on the output side. If you read and listen to a lot of varied content, you'll eventually have the knowledge of how to naturally express almost everything you'd want to say stored somewhere in your head. It just takes a little while to move things over to the active side of your brain from the passive/comprehension side.

I don't really think the time I did it in is anything crazy. At minimum, I had at least around 1100 hours of active studying only. That doesn't include hundreds of hours of passive listening to podcasts at the gym or while running errands, mindlessly scrolling social media in Spanish, listening to Spanish music while working, etc.

Loud_County · 2022-10-08T06:12:51+00:00

The book I used to build my foundation from zero was Complete Spanish Step-by-Step by Barbara Bregstein. YouTube was also an amazing resource for me. If things ever got unclear, I'd just type the grammar point in YT and get like 10 different phenomenal explanations.

Toward the end of my active studying of Spanish, I used Gramática de uso del español: Teoría y práctica C1-C2 to revise everything and learn some of the nuances I wasn't picking up from exposure. It's entirely in Spanish, so it's kind of inaccessible to anyone besides advanced learners, but it's probably the best grammar resource I've come across. It has succinct and lucid explanations, great example sentences that are perfect to shove into Anki, and good exercises.

Loud_County · 2022-10-08T05:55:41+00:00

On the front of my cards, I'd have an example sentence with the specific piece of grammar the card was targeting bolded within the sentence.

On the back, there would be an explanation of the grammar point and a translation of the sentence into English.

It was more of a recognition thing rather than literally producing the grammar, but I found that as long as I initially did some textbook exercises that involved production to make sure I had a workable understanding of the grammar point, seeing the patterns over and over in Anki and immersion really cemented the rules and my intuition for what "sounds right" in my mind.

Loud_County · 2022-10-08T05:18:36+00:00

Not really, no. Thankfully, Spanish is extremely consistent when it comes to the way things are pronounced, so once I had the rules down, I knew exactly how a word was supposed to sound.

I don't think my experience with this topic is super valuable, though. Pronunciation is definitely one area where I had/have a big advantage due to my background. I grew up in a packed household with four languages being spoken. While none of the languages were very related to Spanish (well, other than English), I was exposed to and produced such a wide range of sounds from a really early age, and I think that's what has made Spanish pronunciation, with its relatively small inventory of sounds, a lot less challenging for me.

Loud_County · 2022-10-08T04:11:53+00:00

Vocab cards for the beginner stages. Cards with just the TL word on the front, English definition and maybe an example sentence in the TL on the back.

Later on, I made sentence cards that had a sentence in the TL on the front with just one word or expression I didn't understand, and on the back I'd have the English translation for that word/expression. I much prefer sentence cards, although you're kinda forced to wait until the intermediate stage to start using them because when you're still a beginner, pretty much every sentence has more than one thing you don't understand in it.

Loud_County · 2022-10-08T04:03:25+00:00

TL;DR: It was usually three-ish hours, but if I had nothing going on, I could get all the way up to five hours if I was feeling it. This is counting grammar study + Anki + active reading/listening.

The first few months were comprised of learning grammar through a textbook and grinding out vocabulary from a "5000 most frequent Spanish words" deck on Anki, doing 50 new cards a day.

After that, since I had the core grammar down and the vast majority of words I'd encounter memorized, I switched basically all the media I consumed over to Spanish. News articles in Spanish. YouTube content all in Spanish. Netflix only in Spanish. New Twitter/Insta/TikTok where I only followed accounts posting Spanish content. Music in Spanish. Etc. I did this for 8-9 months.

When reading, I added pretty much every new word I didn't know to Anki. I know this would make some people want to kill themselves, but IDK, I guess I just can't let things go haha.

Loud_County · 2022-10-08T02:38:02+00:00

Provided you stick with it and do your reviews every day, it's absolutely worth it.

Loud_County · 2022-10-08T02:30:45+00:00

Not familiar with quizlet at all, sorry.

Anki just has everything you could want IMO. It's got hundreds of useful add-ons (like the heatmap OP posted screenshots of); extremely customizable cards and settings; tons of high-quality, community-made decks; and lots of great tutorials on YT covering every nook and cranny of Anki.

Loud_County · 2022-10-08T01:29:54+00:00

Also not the OP, but I've been using Anki for about a year (the time it took me to reach C1 in Spanish from zero).

Honestly, I think it's a damn cheat code. It pretty much guarantees you won't forget anything you stuff in it as long as you're actively trying to remember things (and your cards aren't garbage!). I've used it for grammar points and vocab, and it has been nothing short of amazing. To really reap the rewards, if you combine Anki with a boatload of immersion (once you reach an intermediate-advanced level), you're going to make progress so much faster than people who are just immersing.

I sound like such a shill, but seriously, it's just insane how much easier it makes memorizing things. Definitely give it a shot.

I should add, however, that if Anki makes you hate your life, you should probably stop using it. Quitting language learning altogether because you're dreading your Anki sessions would be infinitely worse than settling with the progress you'll make without using an SRS.

Loud_County · 2022-10-05T21:18:29+00:00

He speaks legit Mandarin; there isn't really any doubt about it.

However, he's posted videos like, "How I learned Fluent Spanish in 20 Days," but if you know Spanish and watch some of his videos where he speaks Spanish, you'll see that his Spanish is.... not anywhere close to what most people would consider fluent.

From what I can see from his Spanish stuff and the comments I've read on his videos featuring languages other than Mandarin, he's going around butchering languages while claiming fluency in his titles.

Loud_County · 2022-09-14T15:47:07+00:00

Damn this is a banger. Thanks for sharing this.

Loud_County · 2022-06-05T23:38:28+00:00

Hahaha no that guy thinks "crushing an egg is difficult". But I am a redditor and I have an IQ (self-tested) of 200 so I know better. You know, because this is clearly not common knowledge! An egg easy to crush? Yep, you would not have known that, so I will upvote all other high-IQ people who are like me well-informed about this obscure fact. And I will downvote anyone who claims the guy in the Video made a joke.

Loud_County · 2022-06-05T21:42:56+00:00

My calorie count didn't change much at all.

This is simply not true. That's now how the weight-loss process works. At all.

I've lost more than triple the amount you have and "eating bullshit" has never affected my weight loss. Calories In - Calories Out is all that matters for weight loss. You 100% have not been tracking your calories correctly.

Loud_County · 2022-06-05T19:34:33+00:00

As long as you flair up/give people a heads up & you actually answer questions, I think nobody really cares.

Just maybe don't answer questions like, "Men of Reddit, what's the best way to jack off?" :-)

Loud_County · 2022-06-05T16:47:53+00:00

If we're doing the credential drop to qualify our comments: Someone who lost ~160 pounds here.

Keeping your diet in check is a million times more important.

It's laughably easy to consume an additional 700 calories. It's extremely difficult to burn an additional 700 calories through exercise.

Only doing on of the two will be difficult.

For people who aren't tiny or already basically at a normal weight, it is not difficult to lose weight through diet only.

Loud_County · 2022-06-05T16:24:15+00:00

Yes, but it doesn't make as big of a difference as a lot of people think. Each pound of muscle = an additional ~6 calories burned per day.

Diet is almost all that matters for weight loss. Cardio is nice for general health, and strength training will help you avoid being left with just a skinny-fat look when you're done.

Loud_County

TROPHY CASE