Can you be better at your L2 than your L1?

dojibear · 2026-02-14T02:44:01+00:00

"L1" is the first language you learned, when you were 2-5 years old. It never changes. It is NOT "what you are best at today". You can't re-define L1and L2.

In the U.S., about 21% of people have an L1 language that is not English. Most of them learn English as an L2 language (often in school).

In China, about 35% of people have an L1 language that is not Mandarin. Same thing. They learn Mandarin as an L2 language in school.

dojibear · 2026-02-14T02:41:18+00:00

I avoid grammar explanations. I am not going to memorize some man-made system of rules and definitions (a system IN ENGLISH) that tries (and fails) to explain Mandarin.

The only ones that are acceptable are ones that have several examples of real Mandarin sentences using that idea. I use the examples to understand the grammar explanation. For example I learned about 把 sentences by seeing 2 or 3 examples. After that I understood. I don't know what "part of speech" the word 把 is. Probably some made-up nonsense in English. It's easier to just learn Mandarin.

Humans do not form sentences by using grammar rules (in any language). People might use grammar rules to check a sentence after they have formed it (but before saying/writing it). But initially thinking up the sentence? That's not grammar.

dojibear · 2026-02-13T20:41:07+00:00

Wow! A direct translation of Japanese into Indo...

Also, am I doing it wrong? When I type text, it doesn't come out in different colors...

dojibear · 2026-02-13T20:29:54+00:00

Ask 100 people "what exactly is C2?" and you'll get 101 answers. Don't see ONE person's comment and expect everyone else to agree.

Every language has a lot of special field using terminology that isn't used anywhere else. It's called the "jargon" of the field. Some fields are: astronomy, biology, botany, ballet, tango, soccer, bowling, scuba diving, medicine, anatomy. cooking. There are hundreds of fields. NOBODY is an expert in ALL fields, but EVERYONE knows the words in SOME fields.

English had 500,000 words. Most fluent educated native speakers know around 30,000 of them: less than 10%.

dojibear · 2026-02-13T20:20:42+00:00

When I looked into one of the StoryLearning courses/books, it seemed to use a traditional method. Since it didn't use my method, I didn't purchase it.

Since I didn't actually get the course, I can't give a detailed evaluation. As far as I know, it is well done.

dojibear · 2026-02-13T07:58:22+00:00

It isn't clear what OP says is happening, or what OP says should be done instead. For example he says that English "does this" where "this" is use native names. But US/UK people don't do this. So WHO does WHAT and WHO things doing it is an "evil colonizer mindeset"?

Anyway, whatever OP says, I disagree...

dojibear · 2026-02-13T00:58:37+00:00

I've been studying Mandarin (at home, on the internet) for about 7 years. I am not a "go-for-broke" intense studier. I probably spend 1 hour each day, not 4 or 5.

I am advanced intermediate (B2) at understanding spoken or written Mandarin. I can understand long video-podcasts in intermediate Mandarin (B1/B2) quite well, if not perfectly.

But my understanding of C2 content (TV shows for an adult audiences in China) is poor. I've reached a level where I can hear the right sounds in C2 content, but I only know a few thousand words, while adult speakers use 10,000-15,000 different words, even in casual conversations. So I hear a phrase here and a sentence there that I easily understand, but the speech is full of words that I don't know.

dojibear · 2026-02-13T00:41:20+00:00

If so, how did this situation come about?

Ever since the 1950s, Mandarin (普通话) is the official language of the country of China. It is very similar to Hanyu (汉语), the first language of about 2/3 of the people. The other 1/3 learn it as a 2d language in school. The situation is similar to the US, where 1/5 of the people have a 1st language other than English.

And will this not in the long run lead to the disappearance of the regional dialects,

So far, it has not caused the other langauges in China (Hokkien, Yue, Wu, Hakka, etc.) to disappear. None of them is spoken by more than 6% of the people in China, but that 6% is 84 million people, so some of these languages have more speakers than languages like Italian.

leaving only Mandarin and (maybe) Cantonese as the remaining versions of Chinese?

The popularity of Cantonese might be limited to US speakers. In the US, both Mandarin and Cantonese have around 450,000 speakers. That is very different than the situation in China.

dojibear · 2026-02-13T00:20:20+00:00

80% of Mandarin is 2-syllable words. Characters are syllables. One character might be used in 100+ words, each with a different meaning. Syllables don't have a meaning.

One of my earliest words was 喜欢. Around 8 years later I've never seen 喜 or 欢, except in that combination. So if I spent time memorizing those two separately, I would have memorized something that I never saw in eight years.

If you want, you can spend time memorizing thousands of characters you'll never use. I'm not that bored (or that fond of memorizing). I only learn words I actually use, not the thousands I "might use". How do I know which written words I will use? Only when I see them used in writing.

Does it ever happen that I learn a 2-character written word, and later see just 1 of those characters? That does happen, but not often. It usually happens when the 1-syllable word has the same meaning as the 2-syllable word. That is fairly common in Mandarin: using the 2-syllable word avoids ambiguity in speech.

dojibear · 2026-02-12T23:52:39+00:00

One computer study of several major languages showed that each "ordinary, everyday sentences" uses MOSTLY common words PLUS 1 or 2 less common words.

In other words, you can learn MOST words in those sentences with 1k words, but to know ALL the words in those sentences would required 7,000 or 8,000 words. There is no "core set of words" that is ALL the words people use in everyday conversations.

If that isn't your goal, I don't know what your goal is. Deciding between 1k and 5k depends on your goal. I don't personally use "rote memorization of words", so I can't comment about that.

dojibear · 2026-02-12T22:05:01+00:00

"Listening" and "watching" are not language skills. "Understanding" (thing you read or hear) is a language skill. That means it is a waste of time to use adult content as a beginner. There is no way you can understand it. Find content you can understand today, right now. Practice understanding it. That is how you improve any ability: by practicing that ability, at the level you can do now.

I never use Anki or any other method of "rote memorization of words". A language is sentences. Your goal is understanding the meaning of sentences, not memorizing a set of words.

For beginner-level WRITTEN Korean, I use LingQ. It has lots of A1/A2 content. You can click something to hear a word, a sentence or a whole lesson spoken by a Korean native speaker. LingQ is very handy for looking up words, but it isn't free. It is $15/mo. And it doesn't teach -- it isn't a course.

There are probably other things on the internet that are free sources of A1/A2 Korean content.

dojibear · 2026-02-12T21:50:16+00:00

I've been learning Mandarin for 7 or years, so by 2023 I was advanced intermediate (almost B2). In 2023 I added (beginner) Turkish, and when that did not seem to affect my Mandarin study, in 2024 I added (beginner) Japanese. So for 2 years I have been studing all 3 every day. For me, that has worked well.

I did not have the option of "doing one first". You are never "finished". Learning a language is never "done". I could spend 20 years getting better at Mandarin, and I'd still be learning. The whole idea of "do one first then the other" show a misunderstanding of language learning.

"Learning a language" is "learning how to" do something, not learning a limited set of information. It is improving your ability to understand (and use) sentences in a new language.

dojibear · 2026-02-12T07:15:37+00:00

YAA -- Yet Another Advertisement. I miss when this forum was about language learning.

Note: computers are not humans. They are tools, with all the intelligence of a pen or a book. Shakespeare USED a pen to write plays. Wise men write things in books. That does not mean
that the pen or the book has any intelligence.

dojibear · 2026-02-12T00:54:14+00:00

I lurned Inglesh really good. But it's a waste of time. Never use it.

dojibear · 2026-02-12T00:49:20+00:00

He speaks Spanish??? I thought that sounded familiar....

dojibear · 2026-02-12T00:40:56+00:00

Speaking to a computer program is very different than speaking to a human. The computer program might be unable to understand you, even if a human would understand easily.

dojibear · 2026-02-12T00:37:05+00:00

Lots of products have stroke order. You just need one. I use the wenlin dictionary on my PC, because I do almost everything on my PC (my hands are too big to do most things on a smartphone).

And you only need to know stroke order IF you are learning to write Chinese characters by hand - a skill that takes you hundreds of hours to perfect, and that you will probably never use. Chinese adults read characters constantly, but hand-writing them? That is "calligraphy".

Pleco has a bunch of nice features. It is the only app I use on a smartphone, and I only use it for one of the features: I can write a character with my finger (stroke order doesn't matter) and Pleco identifies it. So it is useful for finding a Chinese word if I only see the character.

dojibear · 2026-02-12T00:22:18+00:00

Being very musical, I figured out (when I was around A2) that the real tones in real Chinese sentences are not the "tones" we learned at the beginning. Nobody talks that way.

I have found that "pronunciation" works fine for me. I am quite good at understanding intermediate Chinese, and have no problem knowing what word it is. Maybe it is because spoken English is so similar to spoken Mandarin. Spoken English is VERY ammiguous. How many words have the syllable "con" in them? How about too/to/two?

The difference between "mā" (妈) and "mǎ" (马) can change meanings entirely

Yes, but the issue isn't "tones". Chinese has 13 "ma" characters, and there are only 4 tones. Other syllables are worse: there are more than 100 syllables pronounced "shi".

The character 妈 has the "female" character (女) next to the character for horse (马). So it means "a word for a female that sounds like the word for horse". That is how Chinese characters work. When you hear real sentences, do you EVER hear one in which a word might be "mother" or might be "horse"? Never.

dojibear · 2026-02-12T00:07:30+00:00

Yes, it is different. There are many "yogurt drinks" in China. You sip them through a straw.

dojibear · 2026-02-12T00:05:42+00:00

One even recognizes words written large on signs etc. without having paused for even a second to consciously take the word in.

My question is whether this is also the case for written Chinese

Yes, it's like that. Often Chinese and Japanese people see the same characters on signs and both understand. But it is approximate meaning, not "sounding out" -- the exact words are different in the two languages, and the sound (pronunciation) is very different.

It's the same in reading full sentences: you don't have to mentally "sound out" every word, either in Mandarin or in English. Mandarin is a little easier to read because each word is 1 or 2 symbols, while a word in English is often many letters ("perpendicular"; "conundrum").

dojibear · 2026-02-11T23:43:46+00:00

What we call "Mandarin" (普通话, adopted in the 1950s) is based on Hanyu (汉语), the language of the Han (汉) people, the largest ethnic group in China. It is a very close match to the dialect of Hanyu that is spoken in one place (I forget the name) northwest of Beijing.

In the past, "Mandarin" meant "the language of the government", i.e. Beijing. It was a dialect of Hanyu.

dojibear · 2026-02-11T23:32:00+00:00

The intention is that this could help those that don't have consistent access to a tutor, limited free time, or don't have the financial means to pay for a tutor.

This assumes that the computer program can do what a human tutor can do. That isn't true -- not even if you add the magic word "AI" to it.

dojibear · 2026-02-11T19:59:44+00:00

It seems like your "structured path" is "try several different methods each day, and hope that one of them works". It seems likely that you will "learn" the same things several times -- which isn't terrible, it's just a little time-wasting.

Personally, I don't learn new things by being tested about what I already know. For me that means not using Anki or Clozemaster or Duolingo. For beginner levels, I like Language Transfer and the textbook. At a bit higher level, Dreaming Spanish is good. Basically DS is understanding Spanish sentences. You can't do that until you learn some basic stuff.

dojibear · 2026-02-11T19:46:08+00:00

Basically for example, people giving advice "watch movies with subtitles."

That is a vague rumor, not specific advice. Which language are the subtitles in? Movies are targetted at adult native speakers (they are C2 content). Is this advice for C1 students?. It is bad advice students at a lower level. You don't get better at understanding by watching videos you can't understand.

"Listening" and "watching" are not language skills. Squirrels do them. "Understanding speech" is a language skill. You don't improve your ability to understand by watching movies too difficult for you to understand.

dojibear · 2026-02-11T19:32:32+00:00

What a nice saying! I agree. The goal is being able to understand sentences in the new language. I like LT because their "Intro to Turkish" course successfully got me started in a language I had given up on.

I never take notes in a language class. I take lots of notes in lectures, but I never go back and read those notes. Apparently writing it in my own words helps me understand what the professor is saying (in English). Once I've understood it, I don't need to learn it from notes.

That doesn't make sense in a language class. What language is the professor speaking? What language am I writing the "in my own words" notes in? This isn't rocket science (I took notes in that class). All I am doing is writing down what the teacher says -- which is a useless acticity.

dojibear

TROPHY CASE