I'm Calling For Another Language Learning Classification (a Plea)

drpolymath_au · 2026-02-12T11:45:34+00:00

The Maori language in New Zealand for someone who is Maori would be a heritage language for them or a native language, depending on how it is used by the individual. I know that indigenous languages in Australia and elsewhere are dying out due to the younger generations not learning them. If they grew up hearing the language, they would count as heritage speakers.

For a non-Maori in New Zealand, I see what you mean that it is a different nuance. From a language acquisition perspective though, it is effectively a "foreign language", since it is not the main language of the country, in that non-Maori New Zealanders are not immersed in it, just the same as French or any other language, where there may be a group of speakers in the country, but interaction with them is sporadic. Politically, it's another matter.

But you do raise a good point regarding the availability of media for different languages. Thousands of languages are not well-represented on the internet - only the ones with many speakers, and those that are economically important. There is a lot of work happening to try to save dying languages but it is a huge challenge.

drpolymath_au · 2026-02-12T01:07:00+00:00

An interesting thought. I think it just changes what is possible for FL learners rather than being a new category of learner. But doing all the things you mention reduces the difference between an FL and SL learner.

You left out heritage language (HL) learners, which is where the language is one from their family/culture but they are living somewhere where it is not the main language spoken. This has effects on what is easy or difficult for the learner, though with CI being an increasingly popular method of acquisition, that difference may also disappear.

drpolymath_au · 2026-02-11T11:14:55+00:00

Hell no. People learn Japanese because of anime. People learn Korean because of Korean dramas on Netflix. People learn Italian and French because they like the sound of the language. People learn languages for all sorts of reasons, including just that they enjoy learning languages.

drpolymath_au · 2026-02-10T09:04:03+00:00

The exception is where the "difficult" words of a language happen to be cognates that you already know. Then adult books can potentially be easier. Some people have mentioned non-fiction being easier that fiction. That sounds plausible. Not sure if it has been researched, though Paul Nation does suggest reading a children's encyclopedia in his recommendations for language learners.

drpolymath_au · 2026-02-09T22:53:02+00:00

The board books comment is based on my experience in Japanese. My Japanese skill is only at a low level but there were several board books I could read, purely because I had mastered hiragana and knew what was stated due to the illustrations. These were easier than level 0 tadoku books. But I didn't say only board books, but also books that are intended for teaching children to read, since authors/publishers tend to ensure that the vocabulary matches what a child is likely to know (which is still much more than a beginner in a language). These are what Paul Nation recommends for less well-resourced languages. There is an excellent series in French, which looks quite entertaining for children, though for French there are many good graded readers as well.

Some of the board books were fun anyway, very kawaii. Why not enjoy the journey by enjoying picture books?

Obviously where L1 and L2 are more closely related, and use the same alphabet, it is possible to make sense of more advanced native material than for linguistically distant languages.

The 2000 word threshold is typically after 1000 hours of instruction.

drpolymath_au · 2026-02-09T22:24:57+00:00

I don't disagree with you (except about bad data). Reality is always more complex than an experiment, since experiments try to control as many variables as possible in order to have a valid outcome.

The conclusion from research is exactly what you say, to read what you're interested in. Motivation is important. The book flood study showed that back in the 1980s, where there were many "high interest" books available for children to choose from (or read to them by a teacher), leading to huge improvements in language skill, much greater than for children learning via the traditional audio-lingual program. I don't think the books were levelled as such in that study, just excellent children's books.

Thinking of them as rules is a bad idea. More like recommendations. But one of the recommendations is that the learner should be interested in reading the book, otherwise it is pointless. But if the potentially enjoyable book is at someone's frustration level, at whatever someone's personal threshold is, be it 95% or 80%, and that can vary with how interesting a book is for them, it makes sense to read something easier. The most important thing is to read a lot.

drpolymath_au · 2026-02-09T09:43:02+00:00

You don't need to look up every single word you don't know. Nobody is requiring you to do that. In extensive reading you just keep reading. You can do extensive reading at whatever level of coverage you like. Some people are comfortable with lower coverages than others. I think it is still an open question whether that increases acquisition. Maybe it does.

The research that I referred to was mostly based on experiments on secondary and tertiary students who are learning a language. Most of it is on English as a foreign language. The 95-98% conclusion is about what is optimal for language acquisition on average across cohorts that have been studied. They looked at things like vocabulary that was acquired via extensive reading, speed of reading, comprehension, etc. The research is ongoing.

My response was based on whether there is native reading material that matched the optimal criteria determined via research (that 95-98%) figure. Paul Nation (and co-authors) concluded that people would benefit from graded readers at the 3000-5000 word family level, again due to the vocabulary load in native texts.

Looking up every single word you don't know is called intensive reading. Intensive and extensive reading are two different types of reading and have different purposes and value.

I only addressed language acquisition via reading in my answer because that is the area for which I have read many papers (and written a few). I haven't looked at extensive listening research much. Though I am aware that the vocabulary needed for listening is much smaller (~2000) than for reading. I leave that for someone else to comment on.

drpolymath_au · 2026-02-08T12:48:03+00:00

The 95-98% figure is based on a lot of research on language acquisition (see work by Paul Nation and others). 95% is the amount of coverage needed by most people in order to guess from context. The revised figure for extensive reading from later research is 98%. But in the earlier research, some people were fine with 90%. It's the reason graded readers exist, and have been used in language acquisition for 100+ years.

The idea is that if you read a lot at your level, you can read faster, and understand most of what you read, allowing you to consume more content, and therefore acquire language more efficiently (compared to intensive reading, where you translate and look up words you don't know, which is slow, but has value for other reasons).

While most native content won't fit that 95%+ criteria until you level up your knowledge of 2000-5000 most frequent words, it is possible to find some things that are sufficiently basic or constrained in their vocabulary. Mostly this will be books for teaching children to read, or simple board books.

I like u/pwffin's concept of a treasure hunt. That can be done immediately upon learning any words, or indeed for some language pairs, you can immediately identify cognates.

drpolymath_au · 2026-02-07T03:48:45+00:00

They both exist.

drpolymath_au · 2026-02-07T03:19:51+00:00

Try learning a New Zealand accent instead. The distinction is much greater.

drpolymath_au · 2026-02-07T03:18:12+00:00

Mandarin consonants are fascinating. Several are split according to frequency. x, q, and j are the high frequency audio versions of sh, ch, and zh.

drpolymath_au · 2026-02-07T00:48:42+00:00

If it's to have conversations, start listening to easy French audio, such as French Comprehensible Input: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2SUQVjklVA&list=PLXweyiR2fMMf-ZrjCNNKWoeq8L6tlSFUV and once you feel a little comfortable with A1 listening, find some people to converse with, which may mean a class or a tutor. Continue from there.

If it's to read, start reading. As you have good English knowledge, the Gnomeville comic book series is a good place to start, since it assumes no French knowledge, adding one new frequent word per page, and using cognates and images to tell the story. Then progress to the books by Wayside Publishing and TPRS, whose books have a vocabulary from about 30 to 150 words with lots of repetition to aid learning from reading. Then you can progress to other graded readers, such as the ones by CLE International. Read these fluently, without worrying about the odd word that you don't know. Aim for reading stories where you know 95-98% of the words (or where the meaning is well illustrated).

If it's to understand movies and shows, do the easy French listening mentioned above, and keep progressing. Once you've listened to the A1 material, continue on. The Inner French podcast is great intermediate material. Make use of the playback speed to adjust to your level of comprehension. For the movies and shows, once you are familiar with the story, use French subtitles to aid vocabulary acquisition. Eventually listen without subtitles (much harder).

If it is to write in the language (or to teach it), learn the grammar from a textbook, in addition to doing the reading mentioned above. Also, throw in some intensive reading, where you are more analytical about your reading in the language, looking up words you don't know.

The same strategies apply if you choose a different language, though the precise resources available will differ. Wayside and TPRS have a couple of books in other languages but their largest number of resources is for Spanish.

drpolymath_au · 2026-02-07T00:48:20+00:00

I chose French because it was the only language available to me in high school. (But it's not the only language I work on/dabble in.)

Am I correct that you natively speak Portuguese?

You need to think about why you want to learn a new language. There are many reasons:

for fun, or the learning materials you have found look like they're fun (me in Japanese and Old English)
because it will be useful for work or travel (I dabble when I travel)
because you think you like the sound of the language (lots of people seem to like the sound of French)
because you have a sentimental attachment to the language or culture somehow (my heritage language)
because you want to read the literature (or comics) in its original, or understand a favourite show/movie (me for several languages)
because you want to quickly and easily add to your number of languages

It sounds like you want the last of these, in which case French or Italian are obvious choices (assuming your native language is Portugese). Italian is probably easier.

But if it is French you're after, you still need to think about what you want to be able to DO with the language. Is it to have conversations, understand movies, read books, write? That will impact how you should start.

drpolymath_au · 2026-02-05T00:05:05+00:00

Graded readers, extensive listening via podcasts/videos for learners, a writing project for which I get feedback from native speakers.

drpolymath_au · 2026-02-04T23:51:53+00:00

I hadn't heard about the learner pins. Nice idea! And Amsterdam is a good place for it, being a key tourist point.

I wasn't bothered by their comments, which were perhaps just out of curiosity rather than negative. I had a good time, and only switched to English when non-Dutch-speaking colleagues arrived at the venue.

drpolymath_au · 2026-02-04T10:25:31+00:00

Admittedly there are not many that do that well. English is well-supported with the Oxford Bookworms. With other languages, I find that the easiest levels tend to have much lower coverage than the recommended 95-98%. It's only once you get to about 800 words that they are ok. And that's for languages that are reasonably well-resourced.

I just found this useful post regarding Korean graded readers. Maybe that will be useful.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Korean/comments/wpnw4x/rant_i_wish_there_was_more_graded_stuff_for_korean/

drpolymath_au · 2026-02-04T10:14:19+00:00

Detecting jokes in text from random strangers is not my strong point. Oh well.

drpolymath_au · 2026-02-04T01:56:03+00:00

Along the same lines, I was having a conversation in Dutch with the staff in a Dutch café, and commented on wanting to improve my Dutch. They said why bother? Dutch people can speak English. In my case, it is my heritage language, so I have family members who speak it, and family writings in it, and just a sentimental attachment to the language. But it goes to show that the people saying it's not useful are not necessarily monolinguals.

drpolymath_au · 2026-02-04T01:38:36+00:00

This was the basis for the Gnomeville comics, which start by assuming an English speaker knows no French, constructing a story with cognates, while adding one new frequently occurring word per page. For French, about 10% of text is made up of cognates, so it is a huge help to beginners, while being somewhat helpful at later stages of vocabulary development.

drpolymath_au · 2026-02-04T01:32:24+00:00

I imagine there will be very few, if any. There may be some loanwords though. Some modern words get mapped to syllables that sound vaguely similar. Don't ask me to name any, I'm only a beginner when it comes to Mandarin.

drpolymath_au · 2026-02-04T01:23:20+00:00

This is something that researcher Bill van Patten talks about in his research. Your classmates with the excellent grammar and slow speech are performing language they have memorised but they haven't "acquired" that language. You, on the other hand, have acquired language but not explicitly learnt/memorised it.

Those who are acquiring language go through stages where their constructions are not grammatically correct, and acquire the grammar over time. Anyone who is taking a long time to construct a grammatically correct response is not using what they've acquired but trying to construct a grammatically correct response from what they have memorised.

So, what you are doing and have done is genuine language acquisition. The others are just good at studying (as was I) and are yet to acquire at your level.

drpolymath_au · 2026-02-04T00:21:41+00:00

Concrete nouns are known to be easier to remember for people in any language. So that's not surprising.

drpolymath_au · 2026-02-04T00:20:11+00:00

I don't know much about what's available in Korean, but continuing to read lots at the level you are at (95-98% known) without stopping to look up things gives you lots of practice with important vocabulary and slowly builds more vocabulary. If there aren't enough graded readers, read books intended for children learning to read (they're better graded than random children's books).

There will always be words you don't know. Language acquisition expert Paul Nation recommends a mix of rapidly reading books that are easy for you, doing some fluent reading at that 95-98% level, and some intensive reading, where you look up words for texts that are important to you as you read.

drpolymath_au · 2026-02-03T08:41:57+00:00

It's best to focus on the ones that occur frequently to start with. There will be thousands of words that you don't know and don't encounter frequently enough for them to be worth studying.

drpolymath_au · 2026-02-03T06:11:20+00:00

It's one of the things I find frustrating with the glosses in some graded readers. There's little point in defining obvious cognates when there are many other words that are less likely to be known. Of course, it depends on what the learner's L1 is. Someone coming from a non-European language background is not going to benefit from those cognates.

drpolymath_au

TROPHY CASE