The Mystery of People Who Speak Dozens of Languages

Re:The Mystery of People Who Speak Dozens of Languages by misiti3780 on Thursday August 30, 2018 @01:15PM (#17878547)

I didn't really get that from his book -- I thought he was saying you pick the top 1500 words (actually I think its 600 in his book) and learn how to pronounce / spell / and memorize them using Anki, and then start speaking with someone on iTalki etc and go from there. I have used this method to learn Italian and now I am doing it with French. I think the method works. Fluency is a loaded term in my opinion - from this article it seems to be defined as C1/C2, but in reality you can get by with a lot less, you need a handful for verbs and a large amount of nouns

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Re:The Mystery of People Who Speak Dozens of Languages by bunderbunder on Thursday August 30, 2018 @01:40PM (#17878820)

Just double-checked the book. Relevant bits (heavily elided), from the section on deciding how much vocabulary to learn (on page 144), is, "Begin with the top thousand words. . . Your next steps depend on your individual needs. If you just want to chat in restaurants, those top thousand words may be enough."

He then goes on to describe other benchmarks you might go for. But the minimum bar he's advocating is very low compared to what I think most people would expect.

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Re:The Mystery of People Who Speak Dozens of Languages by oh_sigh on Thursday August 30, 2018 @03:10PM (#17879776)

I have learned basic conversational german and spanish by doing just that - basically just drilling 2000 of the most common words in the language into my brain with complete disregard for any grammar, conjugations, etc. Then, I spend some time learning common conjugations, sentence structure, etc, and then I start talking with people where I can.

I've had much better luck with this system than with what I was forced to use in school to learn French, which was basically slowly build up all of the skills at once(learn a little grammar, a few words, at a time).

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Re:The Mystery of People Who Speak Dozens of Languages by misiti3780 on Thursday August 30, 2018 @03:53PM (#17880145)

I agree, the few things I think are really valuable in that book are the following

* learn pronunciation/spelling first

* learn the top words using images and space repetition

* study every single day

I think this method is by far superior to anything taught in high schools in the US, which is very sad given a large portion of our population speaks Spanish and I think they could change the curriculum a bit an a lot more students would leave school bi-lingual

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