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A comment on A Visa for founders, engineers and investors willing to join France. Parent comment

Re:A Visa for founders, engineers and investors willing to j... by potatoyogurt on Monday January 16, 2017 @01:39PM (#13411915)
Language lessons are good at giving you the grammatical foundation you need to become literate. I agree that they're pretty bad for fluency in spoken language. To be fair, though, language classes are usually 3-5 hours per week, and you won't become fluent if you move to France or somewhere and only spend 3-5 hours per week trying to speak the language.
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Re:A Visa for founders, engineers and investors willing to j... by PaulHoule on Monday January 16, 2017 @04:23PM (#13413157)
Motivations matter too.

I took three years of German in high school and a semester in college. I could never get the der/die/das stuff to stick. Later on I started reading German fiction for fun and then I got frustrated because I know the verb but not who did what to whom and then I got a lot better in the grammatical agreement area quickly.

I have gone through many years of on and off anime fandom without formal schooling. When I do pick up a book about the Japanese language, I often think "that is obvious" or alternately realized I'd heard the phrase many times without understanding it.

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