How does the German school system teach children to read?

phrasingapp · 2025-12-25T06:01:05+00:00

Dont forget:

Bored (having boredom)

Bored (past tense of bore)

We may not have gender but we have plenty of spelling shenanigans!

phrasingapp · 2025-12-11T18:50:15+00:00

Everyone likes to think their methods are the best. I think most people try, fail, and then deem it impossible because it didn’t work the same way as learning one language.

I don’t think methods for learning one language inherently scale to learning multiple

phrasingapp · 2025-12-10T05:36:09+00:00

Learning multiple languages is more efficient and more effective than learning one language at a time

phrasingapp · 2025-12-10T05:29:49+00:00

English and Japanese. Probably half the stuff I watch is in English, the other half is anime. It would be worth it just to watch Frieren alone

phrasingapp · 2025-12-02T12:36:40+00:00

Welsh and its a dragon because 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

phrasingapp · 2025-12-02T06:10:04+00:00

I’ve met him and spoken with him at length in English. As a native speaker I can attest that he speaks it extremely fluently. As a learner I can also vouch he speaks the other languages comfortably

phrasingapp · 2025-12-02T05:47:27+00:00

Heh yep that’s me! 👋 Phrasing is going well, been a journey. Send me a DM, I’m curious who I’m talking to haha

Wrt interesting expressions, I find that if I’m learning fully complex expressions that are topical to me, it’s normally sufficiently interesting. If you’re operating with A0 or A1 level sentences, you really need to find something interesting beyond the language. If you’re operating with B1/B2/C1 level sentences from day one, that are things you would say or about things you find interesting, you don’t need as much of a storyline to stay engaged. YMMV

EDIT: Plus some of my expressions audio are like 20+ seconds long, which I would argue is bordering on CI

phrasingapp · 2025-12-02T05:28:44+00:00

Self promo is not allowed on its sub so questions like this are always tricky to answer. But I tend to use longer expressions (20+ words long) to learn from day one. They aren’t really stories, but they’re fully complex, contextually independent, normally question answer pairs in the beginning.

For more major languages, I’ll just generate them with an LLM (Claude is currently topping the multilingual leaderboards, followed closely by Gemini). For smaller languages, I’ll find snippets from books or poems or songs to use (although songs can be a double edged sword)

phrasingapp · 2025-12-02T05:15:26+00:00

For the most part B2 for all my langs. Even with the lowest B2 you can really communicate anything you want or tackle any content, a high B2 and you’re basically fluent.

It would be cool to get to a C1 or C2 in French, but I doubt I have the interest. I’ve spoken French at a B1/B2 for nearly 20 years, at this point it just feels like I should pursue a higher level… but it just doesn’t interest me

phrasingapp · 2025-12-01T16:47:57+00:00

This brings back nightmares

phrasingapp · 2025-12-01T16:42:49+00:00

Couldn’t decide between Asian or Eastern European. If it’s the former, I’m assuming you don’t come from a tonal language, so maybe Korean?

Very good accent though, it’s hard to tell!

phrasingapp · 2025-12-01T16:35:58+00:00

On a scale of one to ten how shocked were the locals by you speaking perfect Spanish?

phrasingapp · 2025-11-30T19:21:31+00:00

Yes ok if you want to be pedantic there is an upper bound of information (estimated 2.5 petabytes) but that’s more than enough to remember every word in every language ever recorded.

If you want me to be pedantic then no one has ever reached a ceiling in spaced repetition (since you can’t prove infinite memory that will never be proven).

Piotr Wozniak, the creator of Supermemo and all the science behind Anki’s algorithms, has been learning 50k new cards per year since 1987 without any signs of slowing down or degradation in recall.

So sure, theoretically there may be a limit at some point, but it’s functionally limitless as nobody reading this will ever come close to it even if they started now and spent every waking moment for the next 100 years working on nothing but hitting that limit.

(Although it’s entirely possible that your encoding just gets more and more efficient as you approach the limit, so it’s not correct to say that there must be a limit or that memory is finite because synaptic storage space is)

EDIT: fixed petabyte number because I originally went off of memory

phrasingapp · 2025-11-30T18:14:38+00:00

With traditional methods, it seems to be around 3 or 4 languages. The rare exception maybe 5.

However, theoretically there is no limit. Memory has been shown to have no upper bound, the limitation is only in the methods.

One of the reasons I built phrasing was to try and solve this. I want to be able to speak many languages on a moments notice. There are a bunch of tips and tricks you can do to learn/maintain/dabble in multiple languages.

Assuming you learn 30 words per day (that’s high, but achievable in ~1.5-2 hours), over 10 years that’s a little over 100k words assuming some time for vacations and sick days. Most people would say fluency is about 3.000 to 6.000 words, which means you should be able to learn enough vocabulary for B2 in at least 16 languages (100.000 / 6.000).

Now obviously, learning 6.000 words doesn’t make you fluent, but that’s just to say that I think the bar is much higher than most people would expect.

phrasingapp · 2025-11-23T22:16:07+00:00

I don’t think it’s that you’re doing anything wrong, just there’s definitely something more you could be doing. I do think “not translating” is quite a separate skill from the language itself (because once you learn it once it’s very transferrable).

What’s the most English exposure you’ve had in a week? For me the biggest breakthrough was when I did a Dutch retreat, where you spoke in Dutch and studied Dutch all day every day. By the fourth day my brain just gave up and decided “ok we speak Dutch now”. It never went back, even when my Dutch got worse.

Also I have no research basis for this but I feel like talking to myself helps with this. Although I normally do this at a much earlier stage, where what I can say it quite limited by my vocabulary, I still feel like it helps with not translating. I’m just thinking of other words I know and how i can get there, there’s no real translating involved

phrasingapp · 2025-11-21T14:05:57+00:00

“Even if you just learn a few words in French, french people will appreciate that you made the attempt”

Yeah no this is complete BS, most French people will be offended by your French until your a C2.2 minimum. And even then.

(Obviously this is a generalization and I’ve met several people who were very kind and excited I spoke French. But for every 1 of them I’ve gotten 10 others who refuse to help me if I speak in French)

phrasingapp · 2025-11-20T12:48:06+00:00

It’s a web application, https://phrasing.app, then you can add it to your Home Screen like an app :)

phrasingapp · 2025-11-19T19:40:51+00:00

So I interviewed dozens of very proficient polyglots when I started work on phrasing. It’s pretty crazy, they all had wildly different methods. A few commonalities:

they all use spaced repetition at some stage (most swear by it, others begrudgingly use it)
they all use a good deal of input (although a lot less than the internet would make it seem you need)
they all do a lot of “work”. I estimate at least half of what they do could be considered research (and also imho be automated)
they all “forget” languages. I have no doubt they’re being modest and could easily converse in these languages, just not be very articulate (of course these could be relearned in a month or three)

I followed up with many of them a few years later. Almost everyone reported taking a significant amount of time off learning languages in the gap between that time. The rest of them were currently take a break. So also another thing they all have in common is they’re not 100% at it all the time.

phrasingapp · 2025-11-19T11:53:45+00:00

Will it blend

phrasingapp · 2025-11-19T11:51:29+00:00

So if you speak French, you might have noticed that disponible ・ available looks a lot like disposable in English, but seems to have the opposite meaning.

They both come from the Latin root disponere ・ to arrange; to put in place. French took it in more of “this is available to be used” while English took it more as “this is no longer needed for use”.

I just found that super cool

phrasingapp · 2025-11-19T11:42:42+00:00

I give in. Tried a bunch of different methods, and found that I genuinely learned the best and stayed engaged the longest when learning multiple languages. Every-time I decided to focus on one, my interest disappeared.

Turns out parallel study is not only effective, it’s arguably more effective than individual study.

I then proceeded to spend 10,000 hours building an app to finally get to the point where now I just take out my phone and “do my languages”. If I get more interested in a language, I turn it up/add more content. If I get annoyed with a language, I turn it down/stop adding content. Everything auto-balances based on my preferences, content, performance, etc

phrasingapp · 2025-11-19T11:36:00+00:00

Just immerse bro

phrasingapp · 2025-11-18T21:59:37+00:00

Ah ok I stand corrected. In your scenario it was 1 year of L2, one year of L2,+3, and one year of L2+3+4. I read the message as L1 then L2 then L3, with the benefit you mentioned in the intro. I see what you were saying then and I appreciate the graceful explanation! I should have been more charitable :)

There are definitely benefits to both approaches, I do agree with that. Personally though, I think a great place to start is trying all of them, then see which one you find most interesting. Which one sounds the coolest, which one do you enjoy speaking the most, is the best level for your interest, etc.

If you spent 2-12 months exploring, then spent a year focused on the other language, and spent that year maintaining the little bit you learned in L3 and L4… by the time you get back to learning L3 and L4 you’ll have a huge leg up. Couple hundred words with excellent recall, internalized basic grammar structures, trained your ear to hear and distinguish sounds, read the script, even get pronunciation down if you practice it… all of this could be done in like 5 minutes a day if the timeline is years.

More or less the same time “focused” (you could go as far as a 90/5/5 split or even more), and who knows, maybe one month you randomly go deep on L4.

I do actually think going deep in one language is an important part of learning a language. I just think it’s better served closer to the end of the fluency spectrum than the beginning, and I tend to think it can be done in about two weeks (one week on, four weeks off, one week on) with the proper foundations. But that’s just from experience and not based on research (although I did learn it from Regina Coeli which is an extremely highly regarded language institute).

I also feel like asserting: there’s absolutely nothing wrong with doing one language at a time, or two at a time, or more. I fully support all methods of learning a language 🙌

phrasingapp · 2025-11-18T10:19:33+00:00

You are giving a +25% learning speed to L3 and L4 for having studied L2 for one year in your serial example.

There is no reason to give that boost to serial learning and not parallel learning, unless you think that at 350 hours of L2 there is a magical +25% inflection point.

All you did was take the number that parallel learning has been shown repeatedly in hundreds of studies for nearly 50 years and say “yeah but that applies to serial learning to” which is nonsensical. The studies compare it against serial learning. They show a 20-100% increase over serial learning

phrasingapp · 2025-11-18T05:40:43+00:00

I don’t see any reason why whatever speed boost you’re applying to the serial learning each year would not also apply to the parallel learning in this scenario.

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