I'm the same with French. A few years later I recall nothing. I am proficient with Japanese which I learned using traditional methods and lots of reading over a few years. There's no magical easy way to learn a language!
It wasn't a process so much as an accidental by-product of what I was studying. By the time I left high school, I was taking German, Latin, and French. In undergrad, I expanded that to include some Old English, Mandarin Chinese, and Arabic. You can't get around memorization to learn languages.
The reason my memory ended up so nuts is that I was only interested in the nuts and bolts of the language, so I didn't continue on with French when it became about literature, I just picked up a new language instead. After a while, languages become more about things like context clues, but at the beginning and intermediate stages, you have to memorize a lot. Since I wanted to go for linguistic breadth (since I was interested in how languages were related/how features travel), I did the memorization stage of language learning a lot.
So I'd say it's down to consistency and longevity of practice. I used spaced-repetition as my main technique, but it's really down to spending 1+ hour a day for 8 years on memorizing.
You also have to keep up with it, or your memory degrades. It's been a good 10 years, and I don't have nearly the memory I used to.
Same as many, I learned English mostly by reading the web and watching TV show in English (with French subtitles, as I my mother tongue is French). So I firmly reject the notion that learning a language has to be done trough rote memorization.
Curiosity about words/idiomatic expressions you don't know is important tough. But stopping on each single word you don't understand is certainly not the way to go (well except if you have to, as in schoolwork).
I'm this way with foreign languages: Spanish and french. I know french very well, and learning/speaking Spanish is significantly harder because I'm always using french words by mistake. sure it'll get better with practice, but interlingual dyslexia is real.
Very interesting. Had you learned any language / had experience trying to learn a new language before this? How is your current knowledge of French, Spanish and Russian, and how long did it take to reach that level? As someone who has an incredibly hard time learning languages, this intrigues me greatly (not that I'm necessarily interested in trying this)
I learned by getting into conversations that forced me to speak the language. It's amazing how quickly you remember the basics if you don't want to look foolish or sound like an idiot.
Reading and listening use different types of memories so that's not enough to learn it. You have to actively recall to learn the language.
Also, keep in mind that there is no such thing as permanent fluency. You have to continue to practice it if you want to always be fluent. Even native speakers will lose their fluency in a language if they don't speak it. I've seen that a lot with kids that learned their parent's language at home but decide that the will only speak English once they start school. They eventually lose their fluency. They might understand their original language but will definitely have trouble speakng it.
I was having the same sort of difficulty with French. On vacation, I realized my ability to speak fluently had vanished over a decade of non-use of the language. I bought a few magazines, then a fiction book, and it's done wonders.
It's much more interesting to read about something that I'm interested in than it is to go through exercises. Since what you lose over time is mostly vocabulary, reading is an efficient way to re-grok a language. You just have to get over the initial bump, where you're reading really slow because you stop frequently on unknown words.
I suffer from the opposite problem: my mother speaks a language I don't. She is French, but despite giving me a French name never spoke to me in French while I was growing up. She'd speak to her family in French, but never to me or my brother.
I've studied to B2 level on my own and managed to osmose a fair ability to distinguish words and sounds, but I'll never be able to get the native-level fluency I could have. It's something we both regret.
Same here. I went to a fairly good state school and never received any English grammar but got some French grammar. The French language teaching was terrible - hours and hours of memorising irregular verbs. I passed all the exams but still can't speak the language.
I have taught myself Swedish listening to Sveriges Radio, reading and translating news articles and following a series of short Swedish lessons on youtube. I pick up grammar as I go along rather than learn it formally. I don't use flash cards, duolingo or rote memorisation. The key thing is to read, write, listen and pronounce - form sentences and use the language rather than work on memorising vocabulary (that comes naturally).
1. Read or listen to something in your target language.
2. Work out the meaning of a word you don't know (using a dictionary, teacher, context clues etc).
Do this 1000 to 10,000 times and you'll have a formidable knowledge of your target language.
Of course, the first thing people do is say: "Aha, I can optimise this! I'll make a list of all the words and just learn that!". Instantly you've removed all context, grammar and likely pronunciation (if the list is written only) from the language. Making an enormous word list is kind of taking the language out of the language.
In my personal experience, the easiest way to learn a second language is to immerse yourself in a particular country/culture and interact with the locals, get a job, etc. Live there for at least a year. It worked for me, I learned English and it worked for my wife, she learned French.
How do you practice or make yourself not forget the several languages you know? I find it really hard to be proficient in a language unless you live among native speakers?
I like to watch anime in Japanese because of the sound, but I don't know any Japanese so I look at subtitles, usually in English. I don't expect to learn any language in this way.
Knowing grammar helps. I'm Italian and Spanish and French have such similar grammars that learning to read them was mostly a matter of building a vocabulary. Listening to French is more complicate as its hard to find spaces between words. Talking is both simple (similar sounds except a few ones) and complex (subtle differences in how to build sentences.) Writing is the most difficult skill. Everything has to be almost perfect.
English wasn't only a matter of vocabulary. The differences in grammar are large enough that building and understanding a sentence requires to think in a really different way. I got a shot at German a couple of times. The differences are an order of magnitude larger and I never had the time to go beyond the basics.
I had the same experience with French. I learned it for 10 years, I even won a national essay competition - guess what, when I was in France, I couldn't open my mouth. English on the other hand - I had only 2 years of study under my belt, and lots and lots of practice - movies, programming books, Shogun by James Clavell, song lyrics, chats on IRC, and so on. I'm fairly confident in my English skills. I know Russian a fair bit, and it's just a consequence of living in Moldova, where we have a lot of Russian influence and a lot of speakers of the language (16%) - but since I don't use it every day, I tend to forget it.
I learned French in my mid-20s -- in France. I spent a year learning French at a school and literally couldn't even understand fluent, spoken French by the time my ex-girlfriend moved back to the US. I stayed in France and began dating a French girl who didn't speak English at all -- so we had these weird intellectual/juvenile sounding conversations in the beginning - with me basically speaking confusing, garbled French 100% of the time. Point is, after about one month together with her, I understood spoken French very well, and could articulate some fairly complex thoughts. It just felt like the language came crashing into my head once I had to "articulate" what needed to be articulated and "hear" what needed to be heard. It's one of the strangest feelings of immersive learning that I can remember. Like DonPellegrino mentioned, I never really cared about gender and proper grammar, because... when your girlfriend doesn't know your language, you just have to force the thoughts out somehow. This might sound obvious, but if you have a partner who speaks another language fluently, just speak in your native tongue and ask them to speak in their native tongue. From my experience, the most powerful part of learning a language is just "slowing" it down in your head. You'd think you could just watch television to do this -- but in my experience (multiple languages now), you can't. It just seems like you need to be engaged intimately with another human being to get these results.
Find shows, movies, music that interest you. Watch them (with subtitles). Listen to it.
A lot of language learning exists below the "level" of words and sentences. The sound of a language.
And even when you progress to words and sentences, phrases, idioms, and the like differ. Gender exists, or differs. Native speakers don't memorize these. They learn by absorption. You are fortunate in that, with today's connected world, so can you.
P.S. The rest of it, e.g. working through texts, tutoring videos, and all that, I leave to you. Just remember: EXPOSURE. And that you can't and shouldn't try to consciously process and monitor it all. Steep yourself in it, and let your whole mind (including sub-conscious, or whatever we're calling it) process it.
P.P.S. Approach it this way, and you will find that some of the "much harder than when a child" belief doesn't actually really of fully apply. I became conversational in French, starting from zero, in about seven weeks when I was 22. In the middle of Vermont.
My high school language was Japanese. Attempting European languages in adulthood, I'm always thrown off by the object-verb order. My brain subconsciously skips over the action, hears the object and then is left waiting to hear what we're supposed to do with it.
There has been so much written on this topic. I don't think people actually agree on what's the best way to learn a foreign language, and that includes language teachers. Various methods I have encountered include:
* Focus on reading text and vocabulary. Grammar will follow naturally from the text.
* Focus on grammar. Vocabulary is a detail.
* Focus on speaking. Speaking is the key to fluency. Speak to as many natives as possible. (Note: this can be incredibly annoying to said native speakers)
* Focus on writing. This is the best way to retain both vocabulary and grammar. Speaking will follow when you have vocabulary and grammar memorized.
* Focus on listening/hearing. Understanding is the key to communication. Remembering grammar and vocabulary will follow naturaly, e.g. from TV shows, games, movies, songs, etc. in the target language.
I could go on and on and on. Seriously. My advice is two-fold:
* Stick with a language. Whatever your method is, don't give up.
* If your method doesn't work for you, change it. If your teacher doesn't work for you, change it (e.g. textbook, school, course, TV show, whatever the "teacher" is).
It's that simple. Truth to be told, learning a language is mostly hard work. There is no secret. There is no "aha, you've been doing it wrong, you could have learned Chinese in 3 months!" method.
For example, using Anki might be useful, and you might find it fun, but it will not magically make you remember anything. And, even if you remember something in the context of Anki, you might not recognize it in the wild (e.g. in a text, song, or a game). Alternatively, you might not be able to produce it (e.g. passive recollection is very different from active production of the language).
I think the best one can do when learning a language is to simply stick with it. In the grand scheme of things, whether it will take you 4 years, 5 years, or 6 years to feel fluent is fairly insignificant in the grand scheme of things. It will, most likely, be years though.
reply