The Best Method to Master a Foreign Language, Guaranteed - <AUTHOR> http://askakorean.blogspot.com/2010/01/koreans-english-acquisition-and-best.html <comment><USER2> _Mind you, the Korean loves America. The Korean practically writes a love song to America every chance he has. But there are certain things about contemporary America drives the Korean crazy, and this is one of them: the idea that the process of learning is somehow supposed to be fun. Just drop it. Forget it. What is fun is the result of learning – the infinite amount of fun when you finally put the finished product to use. And truly, that applies to second language acquisition as well as anything else. Your horizon will expand beyond the limit of your imagination. You will gain perspectives that you couldn't have even dreamed of. Don't be a whiny bitch. Your sacrifice will be worthwhile._

This should be shouted, at top volume, to everyone entering university. Great advice.

<comment><USER3> I suppose you learned everything you know about Emacs by rote memorization and repetition of the manual, and absolutely no exploratory playfulness?

I suppose the gripe I have is not "wrong; humans can learn languages by immersion!" but "why the societal crosslink between deliberate learning, and not-fun?".

Is there no way to learn 30,000 words by any motivation other than fearing for your life from a disappointed father?

The line blurs more when he says "Immersion doesn't work" then describes his learning method which is ... (wait for it) ... completely submerging himself in the language he is learning for hours and hours, reading it, writing it, speaking it, paying attention to it - all in a country and in a school where everyone spoke it ... immersing himself in it.

I cite: <http://www.fluentin3months.com/studying-will-never-help/>

"""Studying will never help you speak a language, but (as long as you do it right) studying will help you speak a language better.

Most people don't see the difference here. That one crucial word changes absolutely everything you need to take into consideration.

If you already speak but your conjugations aren't great or you need to quickly increase your store of vocabulary about a specific topic, then by all means study. Need to pass a test in school? Sure, study for it. When the goal is to pass a test or improve your grasp on something specific, then study is the way to go.

But if you don't speak the language confidently right now, then it's time someone broke this news to you: studying is not the way to get this confidence!"""

(But they are aiming at slightly different targets - Benny aims to be conversationally fluent in 3 months, The Korean to gain college level mastery in two years).

<comment><USER4> I think that when he says "Immersion doesn't work" he really means that "Immersion alone doesn't work". Of course immersion is helpful, but it doesn't produce results by itself (at least not in Korean; maybe a language with more cognates with English would benefit more from immersion alone). Non-immersed learners sometimes use the prospect of immersion as an excuse, along the lines of "Once I'm immersed in the language, it will be much easier to really study effectively, so it'll be a more efficient use of my time to take the studying easier now."

I've made both of these mistakes myself (overestimating the value of immersion and slacking off study when not immersed). When I first went to Korea, it was a huge ego boost since it felt amazing to actually be using the language. Because of this ego boost, I felt that "book-study" was suddenly beneath me and stopped. After a few months of immersion, though, I realized I was learning more slowly than just going through flash cards, so I picked them up again. Even though immersion was useful for me, it was really only effective as a compliment to other study.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I blame the web for understanding (writing?) English as good as I do. I dabbled along in school, getting a lot of Cs, being not really all that bad but also not really all that great in my English classes. Then came the web.

The German speaking part of the web to me seemed utterly boring, nearly all of the interesting stuff was happening on English websites. The cool thing was that I could just read English, certainly with some difficulty at first, but something I learned in school actually proved to be useful in the real world. I read quite a lot on the web and suddenly something snapped. I never again had to learn anything for my English classes again, no vocabulary, no grammar and the As just kept rolling in. Writing essays, reading texts and discussing them was fun. (I even managed to get a Cambridge Certificate in Advanced English [1] – grade A – without any preparation on my part.)

It's the strangest thing – I started to 'feel' English like I 'feel' German. Constructing sentences with the right grammar turned from a painstaking conscious process into something automatic and unconscious. That's not entirely a good thing, though. I cannot feel something I don't care about and I really don't care about commas, which is why I suck at placing commas in English as well as in German.

Besides commas there are also other problems with this method of learning. Since I just stopped rote learning of vocabulary at some point and picked up words as I read more and more on the web my vocabulary is extremely detailed when it comes to some topics and lacking when it comes to other topics. It's basically badly deformed. Don't try to talk with me about food or cooking. I bet that only a few trips to supermarkets in English speaking countries could correct that but I have regrettably never been to any such supermarket.

Now, three years after I left school, I also really fear for my ability to speak English. In school we spoke English five days a week for at least thirty minutes every day. I feel like preserving this ability is really hard. Listening, conversely, is no problem. I watch tons of English stuff on the web and at this point understand pretty much everything you could throw at me.

Ah, and I should maybe mention that writing comments here is my humble attempt to preserve my writing abilities.

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_in_Advanced_English>

<comment><USER6> > I blame the web for understanding (writing?) English as good as I do.

s/good/well/

<http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/good.html> <http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/good-versus-well.aspx>

:)

<comment><USER7> s/good/good/

Good is good enough. I understand what he means.

Foreign learners shouldn't worry about proper English the way native speakers do.

<comment><USER8> Oddly enough I think some kinds of foreign learners end up _more_ worried about some aspects of written english than native speakers. Things like they're/there/their, affect/effect, it's/its etc are more likely to deceive someone who learned english orally than someone who did it by the web/as a second language.

At least, as a foreigner, it never ceases to amaze me that these things are even issues at all.

<comment><USER5> Its and it's is easy for me but seems to be a big problem for many native speakers.

<comment><USER8> I think it might have something to do with translating. These "confusing" sets of words are translated as completely different things in portuguese. On the other hand, my high school teacher usually used "why" and "because" to explain the difference between "porque" and "por que" in portuguese (and she could, although she didn't, also use "the reason" as an analogy for "o porquê").

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The point of immersion is not that it's fun. The point of immersion is that pre-puberty, it's still more effective to 'acquire' languages than 'learn' them. The ability to intake languages organically from the environment degrades as you get older, but it's widely believed that there's a qualitative inflection point around age 13. Before that point, immersion is useful. Three years of Spanish instructions gave me the skill to conjugate verbs on a test. The following one year of light immersion[1] is what made me able to assemble sentences in real-time, and think directly in Spanish without having to mentally translate in and out of English.

If you're learning a language at age 16, like the author was, then yes, the most effective way is to smash your face against the brick wall until it crumbles. 10,000 hours, as they say.

What I'm curious about, for personal reasons, is whether learning additional languages early takes away any of the face-smashing in learning additional languages later on. I'm trying to acquire Bulgarian, so I'll get to find out on my own.

[1] During our one-hour-a-day class period, we were allowed to chat in class if we did so in Spanish.

<comment><USER10> English is not my native language, but my elementary school taught French since 1st grade and English since 6th. I immigrated to the US at age 12, and now speak both English and my native language fluently without an accent -- as do my friends with a similar background as mine (the ones that immigrated before 13).

I think it helps for kids to be exposed to many different languages early on. For example, I never learned to speak French fluently, but because I have some background in a latin-based language, I found it easier to learn Spanish.

It's much easier to relate existing words in your vocabulary with new foreign words, than it is to memorize them outright. For example, it's probably easier to learn Russian if you speak Czech already (and to speak it with less of an accent) than it is to learn Korean if you're a Spanish speaker.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> My experience is pretty much the opposite.

I've learnt Spanish during the last 3 years pretty much only by listening and watching TV (mostly listening to podcasts). I haven't really tried to memorize anything, and have above all tried to avoid being bored.

I also avoided reading and writing for quite a long time, trying to focus on spoken language.

I wouldn't say that I "master" Spanish yet, but by now I can enjoy all sorts of films, TV, radio and discussions in Spanish. I still miss the occasional idiom (especially the kind of slang that teenagers use), though, but it seldom bothers me.

Also it turned out that learning to read when you already know how to speak (and can read other languages, I suppose) is actually quite easy. By now I can read novels etc. in Spanish without too much effort.

Maybe I would have been able to learn Spanish even faster by using a more boring method. But then the cost would have been much, much higher for me - being bored for endless hours on end is a very high price to pay.

And I'm pretty sure that I would have given Spanish up a long time ago if I had followed that route.

<comment><USER12> >Also it turned out that learning to read when you already know how to speak (and can read other languages, I suppose) is actually quite easy. By now I can read novels etc. in Spanish without too much effort.

Spanish is likely an outlier here as it is spelled phonetically. French is more difficult, but not terribly so. However languages that are written with a different script, or in a completely different system like Chinese offer a much larger hurdle. Chinese literacy, in particular, is orders of magnitude harder.

<comment><USER13> I'll second that - in addition to my home university studies, I spent a year on exchange in Japan where pretty much all I did was study kanji and vocab - because we had at test on the 1942 kanji called necessary.

As it turns out I aced the test, and all that study is a big part of why I'm comfortable with reading a newspaper. Still have to look things up from time to time, but for the most part I know how to read the word even if I don't know the exact meaning. In that sense, I agree with the blogger that rote memorisation is key - and not just words, but often whole sentences as that gives context.

As for Spanish, it's cognate in some areas with English, so that's at least one part of why English natives are able to learn latin languages at a faster click than other languages. The blogger will find it easier to learn Japanese.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> For yet another data point, my brother has learned a number of languages. His best language is Mandarin, which he started learning when he was 19. He speaks, reads, and writes at a college level, with no discernible accent. He has varying levels of fluency in a number of other languages including French, Thai, Indonesian and Japanese.

His method of learning a new language is to just start out memorizing vocabulary. He is able to achieve a sustained acquisition of about 100 new words per day. Once he has sufficient vocabulary he adds in grammar practice, sample conversations, etc.

<comment><USER15> What does he consider "learning" a word? I'm genuinely curious, because it seems like there are so many ways to do this, especially when you are already comfortable with more than one language. Does he memorize the closest translation in his native language? Use a picture? (and if so, does he use the same set of pictures for each language?)

I doubt I could accomplish 100 words/day, but I may try his approach anyways.

<comment><USER14> I believe that when he starts he memorizes the words in another language. After that he starts memorizing definitions involving other words in his target language.

When he was learning Japanese I think he memorized the translations to Mandarin rather than English, because those two languages were more similar.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> I thought this part was interesting:

 _I also needed to be able to listen and speak. To develop speaking and listening, I watched at least 3 hours of television every day. God bless the closed caption, and the endless reruns of The Simpsons, Home Improvement and Full House – I had the caption on, and mouthed the word exactly as they sounded like. I said the difficult words over and over again until I got them right. (It took years to get "girl" and "rhythm" right.) I got into the habit of talking aloud to myself to make sure what my speech sounded right. (I still do this often, which initially creeped out my fiancée.)_

<comment><USER16> When I lived in Indonesia I met a housewife who told me she learned English entirely through diligent application of this method, no formal language education. She told me that I was one of only a few native English speakers she'd spoken to about it (she was really shy about her English, I think the only reason she spoke to me because I spoke fairly poor Indonesian in return!)

For my part, I would have happily believed that she spent 2-3 years living and studying an English speaking country.

She might have been lying to me, but it didn't seem like it at the time. All the information is there if you take the time to really study and memorise it.

<comment><AUTHOR> I find it hard to believe that anybody could just accidentally pick up English from TV, but maybe that's where the "diligent application" comes in. On a related note, I think Indonesians might have an advantage over speakers of many other Asian languages when it comes to learning English. The Indonesian standard vocabulary has (IIRC) 10 or 12 thousand words borrowed from Dutch and the language uses a Latin alphabet.

<comment><USER16> Another advantage is that nearly everyone in Indonesia speaks at least two languages, Indonesian being a second language to whatever local language is spoken in your home region.

You're certainly correct about the alphabet though. In my experience, another big challenge for Indonesian speakers of English is correct grammar - Malay- style grammar is quite simple and usage conforms pretty well to its few rules. Although that applies to most people learning English as a second language.

Indonesian has also picked up many new or specific terms from English. I got in trouble with my history professor because I couldn't pronounce "historiography" correctly as "historografi".

(EDIT: Ok, this one might via Dutch. Recently terminology pretty much always come from English, though.)

<comment><AUTHOR> It seemed from my brief exposure to Indonesian that it uses a very similar set of phonemes to English, which might be another advantage. Not having actually studied the language I can't say for sure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I've learned a bunch of languages. Learning ANY language as second language helps with acquiring the next language. Here are tips I put on the Web for language learners:

<http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html>

(Hmm, it's about time to revise that webpage, but the advice is still good.)

</comment><comment><USER18> Excellent article! There's no "royal road" to learning a foreign language: (i) You have to be willing to put the time to memorize and (ii) you have to be in an immersive environment with some people who are willing to help you. To be able to do (i), there mist be some large incentive for the outcome.

I always thought that two near-monolinguals dating or getting married would be the quickest way to learn a new language, although I never had a chance to test this hypothesis

<comment><USER19> > I always thought that two near-monolinguals dating or getting married would > be the quickest way to learn a new language, although I never had a chance > to test this hypothesis

They have an expression for this in French:

"La meilleure façon d'apprendre une langue est sur l'oreiller"

"The best way to learn a language is on the pillow"

I saw lots of other exchange students improve their French immensely when they started dating a native. My experience was that having that sort of language partner is nice because they're sympathetic to your mistakes and there's lots of built-in incentive to have more interesting conversations.

<comment><USER20> I learned French almost entirely by helping raise my (now ex) girlfriend's 6 year old son. Best teacher I could have asked for, and he wasn't even trying to teach me :)

She was also very helpful as she was a native French speaker, but fluent in English.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Shameless plug:

I wrote an Android app a few months ago to help learn/maintain Spanish.

<http://www.appbrain.com/app/com.h4labs.free.spanish_vocab>

I've been studying Spanish for several years, including 10 weeks in Guatemala. It's easy to get rusty and I always need a refresher so I wrote this app. Gonna add more grammar and hopefully turn it into a "real" app, including versions for French(started), German, etc.

<comment><USER22> Any chance you'd make iPhone apps out of these?

<comment><USER21> I hope too. Just got my iPad yesterday, and I have an iPhone too. There's so much I can do with the screen real estate on an iPad. Want to get my Android to a Pro version first. Working on the verb conjugator now.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> Of all the languages for an adult to learn, English is the _least_ impressive I can think of. Here's why:

1) English language media can be found almost anywhere on earth. Many countries not only have English movies, but also local English language radio stations, newspapers and magazines specifically targeted at EFL learners. My current home, Taiwan, has all of these. A modest number of those resources exist for languages such as Mandarin, Spanish or French in various countries around the world. Materials in Taiwanese Hokkien, on the other hand, are very, very difficult to come by in most places.

2) No matter what kind of racial background you have, strangers in the US, UK and other English speaking places will probably assume you speak English. Not so for an American who moves to Korea, Sweden or Egypt.

3) Even when dealing with non-native speakers of English, it could very well be your best language for communication. When non-German speaking Chinese and non-Chinese speaking Germans do business, they'll likely use English.

4) English loan words are common in just about every major world language, except French. However, French learners of English still have a lot of cognates to help them out since English borrowed them from French.

5) In many parts of the world, English is a high-prestige language. This makes it even more likely that locals will want to use it with outsiders. It also makes it possible and even common for multi-decade expats to still be virtually monolingual English speakers.

6) Many people, including the author of this article have been instructed in English since childhood. However poor that instruction may be, it's still a head start.

If he learns a lower-prestige language for which materials are hard to find, I'll be impressed. Blackfoot and Navajo, for example, are both shrinking language communities. Most of their speakers also speak English (and many prefer to with outsiders). Here's an article about language learning from someone who's had success in those circumstances:

[http://www.sil.org/lingualinks/languagelearning/essaysonfiel...](http://www.sil.org/lingualinks/languagelearning/essaysonfieldlanguagelearning/LevMAlnCnTYSIMLrnngYrLngg/contents.htm)

<comment><AUTHOR> The point of the Korean's story is not that he learned English but rather how well he learned it and how fast. He estimated that he learned 30,000 words in 2 and a half years, and if you followed the link to the phone interview, the guy has no recognizable accent at all -- he sounds like he learned American English as a child, even though he didn't start really learning the language until he was 16. This is actually fairly remarkable.

<comment><USER23> First of all, that interview was after TWELVE years of living in the US, completing high school, completing college and working in the target language environment. Any highly motivated learner should have an excellent accent long before that.

A serious language learner can get to a very high level of proficiency in a couple years' full-time effort. Some of them have fun, too!

<comment><AUTHOR> My sister-in-law's mom, who is originally from India, has lived in the U.S. longer than I've been alive, and yet she still has a strong accent. I'm not an expert, but in my experience it's extremely unusual for someone who learns a second language later than about 10 or 12 to ever completely get rid of a noticeable accent. Of course the first and second languages matter -- native Japanese and French speakers who learn English later in life rarely seem to loose their strong accents. Speakers of germanic languages seem to have it easier.

It would certainly be interesting to hear a sample of the Korean's speech from when he was 18 or 19. However, I think the reason he speaks English like he grew up in the U.S. is because he put a lot of specific effort into getting his pronunciation absolutely right.

 _A serious language learner can get to a very high level of proficiency in a couple years' full-time effort. Some of them have fun, too!_

In general I agree with that. What the Korean did was clearly overkill for what just about anybody would ever need to do. However, I think you could employ the Korean's techniques to a lesser degree and still have fun learning a second language.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Although I don't disagree with anything specific in this article, there's an uncontrolled variable here that seems pretty crucial:

\- The Korean was living in America (albeit a fairly Korean-influenced part of America) when studying English, so there was an immersion factor (however negligible) present.

\- Similarly, in the discussion of other languages The Korean learned in a non-immersion environment, The Korean has only compared their results to other non-immersion students.

Not saying that The Korean is wrong about anything, just that it seems like they can be right, and concurrently immersion can also still be a valuable tool when learning a foreign language.

</comment><comment><USER24> I moved to Canada when I was 23 and left when I was 25. After those two years, native English speakers frequently wouldn't believe that I was from Germany and that I didn't grow up speaking English.

My take on becoming good at speaking a foreign language: You must make an effort, it will not come to you passively. You must be willing to "forget" what you already know. Listen to yourself. Ask other people to help and/or correct you. Try to learn like a child. Play with the language. Be curious.

(On another note, I also realized that not having an accent got me into fewer conversations since people would not bother asking me where I was from.)

</comment><comment><USER25> Suppose you wanted to learn, say, French. I've occasionally wondered if you could do it this way:

1\. Pretend that French is a dead language from an ancient culture. Obtain a bunch of French books and study them, to try to notice patterns and infer rules about the language.

2\. Do the same with some other language, such as Spanish.

3\. Use the manuals from your TV, microwave, vacuum cleaner, and so on that have the instructions printed in English, French, and Spanish to relate the two "dead" languages to a language you understand (English). The idea is that these manuals are your Rosetta Stone.

<comment><USER26> "Use the manuals from your TV, microwave, vacuum cleaner, and so on that have the instructions printed in English, French, and Spanish to relate the two "dead" languages to a language you understand (English). The idea is that these manuals are your Rosetta Stone."

WARNING: I have repeatedly found the translations of houseware manuals to be thoroughly broken. I often read the English part even though my native language is French because English is, if not the original language, at least well-supported. The French version has pathetic grammar and lacks many accents and has some in wrong places, with bad grammar.

</comment></comment><comment><USER27> 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).

</comment><comment><USER28> I have been thinking that math is similar. Little substitutes for simply rote memorizing your basic multiplication tables to be able to multiply. You can remember the relationships between various concepts, and it helps to validate and update your memory, but in the end, it is pattern matching. Rote memorization helps you jump straight from A to B without needing the translation step of C in between.

<comment><USER29> I can't find the reference. But some time ago there was a post in HN about how different subjects require different strategies. It was written by a big shot AI or Math professor. Probably someone from MIT. I can't quite remember.

<comment><USER30> I want to read that. Do tell if it comes back to you.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> brown9-2 Somewhat tangential but: this blog and the author's writing is fascinating. Where did you find it?

</comment><comment><USER31> I believe the area of that graph with a "North" accent is significantly too large. I can tell you that Cleveland, Ohio in no way has the typical "North" accent.

</comment><comment><USER32> Somebody told me the best way to learn a foreign language is to date a native speaker for three months or more.

No kidding.

</comment><comment><USER33> i just got called a soft sack of shit.

</comment><comment><USER34> Apparently his technique does not give one a particularly subtle grasp of nuance when writing blog post titles.

</comment><comment><USER35> Yep, learning another language is hard work, but if you want an advantage, find a sleeping dictionary.

</comment><comment><USER36> tl;dr: flashcards, tv and books

</comment><comment><USER37> On a related note I think the world should all switch to English as the default standard language. So much less wasted effort, ink, paper, miscommunication, cultural opacity, etc. We might lose some things, but I bet it would be a net win.

<comment><USER38> I'm not sure if you are joking, but language is highly political. You could say that language is the root of cultural, and thus national and ethnic, identity.

Language domination tends to follow political, trade, and economic domination. The "lingua franca" of Europe used to be, as the phrase implies, French. Before that was bastard Latin, after that it was German. More people speak Spanish than English in the New World, and Brazillian is a close third.

The problem with suggesting a default language is that you are also implying worldwide domination. It's not usually a welcome idea. :)

There is a joke about that: air traffic control frequencies are shared, for obvious reasons. Once a Lufthansa flight was coming into Berlin. The pilot asked for clearance in German. The tower responded that he must use English, as that is the rule. The pilot responded: "Why? I am a German, flying a German plane to a German airport. Why must I speak English?" Another pilot cut in-- "because you lost the bloody war!"

This is actually true; if you don't trust the pilots of a former enemy, a good way to keep tabs on them is to make them use your language on the radio. QED.

<comment><USER39> I very much doubt he's joking. It's actually subtly insulting that you think he is. Marilyn vos Savant, for one, agrees with that idea. Not that she has any credentials other than being smart, but there's really no better credential than that for weighing in on this topic, as it's not a matter of expertise but one's assumptions about what's important. Like her, I favor the gradual unforced adoption of a single global language, and English seems the best bet at this point. I think what we lose in diversity we more than gain in standardization.

Perhaps more controversially, I happen to think English is objectively the best[1] natural language currently available for this role. It's got by far the biggest vocabulary and is by implication the most expressive. Ayn Rand's native language was Russian, she was fluent in several other languages, and she wrote that English gave her the most freedom and power of expression.

[1] Assuming we can agree that a concept such as "best" can exist and we don't degenerate into nihilistic pseudo-philosophical examinations of first principles.

<comment><USER38> Well, that wasn't what I intended. I am truly unsure the original intent.

English is pretty good, I agree, though phrasal verbs are the work of the devil. It has a head start in aviation, mathematics, engineering, some television, finance, and computer science. The British did a good job of seeding it everywhere and WWII gave it a large boost. Then again, the dissolution of the empires in the 60s made English and French _less_ fashionable in many areas of the world as nationalism took hold.

Favoring "gradual unforced adoption" is a fine thing. I suppose I favor it too, as a "lingua franca" but not as a single global language. Knowledge of history does, I'm sorry to disagree with you here, qualify one to have a credentialed opinion. Language hegemony has _never_ happened without a lot of people getting killed. I do not favor that, and I trust you don't either. Maybe this time will be different, who knows? America has always had wonderful, astonishing optimism.

But keep in mind that what you are proposing is no less than closing the book on many venerable, vibrant, and (ahem) more populous cultures. They will push back as much as you would push back on being told that English was obsolete.

<comment><USER37> I never said _how_ or _when_ it should happen. Just that it should. (Would be great if it happens peacefully and gradually and with some effort to not hurt other folks feelings.) I also never said I think English is the "best". I only think it's the path of least resistance. Of all the languages that are serious candidates, most reasonable people would agree it's already the closest thing we have to a global standard language, especially in science, business and programming. Also, you can have and preserve culture even when a people's default language changes. I also would argue that there is nothing inherently special in "culture" which is distinct from it's component elements -- much of it is random and arbitrary and due to different choices and evolutionary paths caused by geographic, racial and tribal/breeding differences. I'd argue that much of what we now consider to be national culture will blur together and fade away over a long enough period of time. And the pace has likely accelerated due to modern travel and communication technology (eg. jet airliners and the Internet). I also think it would be a net-win eventually if all nations merged together into a single nation -- among other things, it would eliminate or at least drastically reduce the need or justification for large standing armies and the military-industrial complex. US wouldn't need to make another country a boogeyman (USSR/China/Iraq/Iran/etc.) and vice versa. What would have become a military/espionage situation in a multi-nation world become perhaps at most a legislative or law enforcement action.

Just thinking outside the box. Long term.

<comment><USER38> Fair enough. I hope that everyone learns English too. But I also hope that if it does happen, it does not happen at gunpoint or to the exclusion of other languages, cultures, literary and oral legacies. That is what happened when Old English was merged at swordpoint with Norman French to produce the language we're using now.

I happen to disagree that "culture" is a null word or that it can be translated fully. Virtually all multilingual people I know think the same way. It's ok to disagree with, but not dismiss, that opinion.

Where one stands depends largely on where one sits. Would you be willing to give up English --completely, not even teaching it to your children-- for Spanish or Chinese?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> "The practice makes a man perfect".

<comment><USER41> "The PERFECT practice makes a man perfect".</comment></comment>


End of Year Librem 5 Update - <AUTHOR> https://puri.sm/posts/end-of-year-librem-5-update/ <comment><USER2> 2019, the year of an open source phone. I almost can't believe it. I'm super happy they're not reinventing the entire wheel and are using an ecosystem that already exists (GNOME). Much of the non librem specific work is being done upstream which is great.

<comment><USER3> An Open Source phone would only be actually beneficial if there will be an automated transparent and trusted global support infrastructure for it that would require zero user interaction.

I use an iPhone because it's the most secure hardware and software combination you can get and you are guaranteed to receive support for 5> years.

I don't want to have to compile my own kernels, set up my own chain of trust or deploy my own patches. It's too cumbersome which would lead to procrastination that is if you don't screw up something in the process to being with.

Also as far as the hardware goes I have currently more faith in Apple being able to get and secure its supply chain than a small company which completely relies on Chinese OEMs for its design.

The baseband will not be open source, it will have to use blobs as such other than running a more vanilla flavor of Linux I don't see it being any different than any phone that can run AOSP.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Strong disagree; progress is progress, and not yet being perfect does not make it pointless.

<comment><USER4> Being imperfect relative to the flagship commercial phones _is_ a problem, because ultimately end-users have to use these things for them to remain going concerns, and it's hard to see which users are better served by a less secure phone stack.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h That would be imperfection in terms of features, not security. And yes, users do need to be able to actually do what they want, but the bar isn't that high and it certainly isn't uniform; some of us are happy with web browser, SMS, and a shell. Further features will widen the appeal, but for starting out they seem to be doing fine.

I believe that it is at least an _equally_ secure phone stack vs most Android (granted, with the root of trust in the user rather than manufacturer, which I think is a good thing), and only might lose against Apple and Google flagships thanks to hardware features.

<comment><USER4> "Versus most Android" is, of course, a dodge, because the Android ecosystem ranges from comically insecure phones to expensive devices that asymptotically approach the security of iPhones. Achieving parity with commodity Android devices doesn't help end-users; every user who uses a Librem device to obtain that weak level of security has probably been harmed by the project.

This isn't to say that it's impossible to build a device that is _more_ secure than an iPhone! It isn't. Librem simply isn't doing it; they have other priorities, including feature parity with modern smartphones. They're not willing to make the serious tradeoffs needed to get security given their circumstances.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h By "most Android", I mean "everything without a Titan chip". I'm not convinced that it's meaningfully less secure for anything but targeted attacks by abnormal skilled attackers. Should be better, if its kernel is better maintained.

<comment><USER3> Considering the plethora of ARM trustzone and bootloader attacks against Android devices I don't think an abnormal skilled attacker means what you think it means the average repair shop can extract data from the majority of android phones today.

You also have successful key recovery/bypass attacks against most non-hardware backed crypto Android devices as well.

Like Thomas said it's not impossible to build a secure device, it's not even impossible to build a secure open mobile device but it doesn't seem that they are doing it.

Their focus is on having feature parity, using commodity hardware and just having an FSF approved stack. Having an FSF approved stack doesn't make you more secure by default.

And usability has a great impact on security, I remember the early android days where getting a file off the device was PITA so myself and many others were running an FTP server on the phone, and since most of our phones were rooted im pretty sure it was running as root.

The other side is things like permissions while mobile operating systems aren't that great still they've began taking application permissions really seriously going through the Librem documentation I don't see anything that is even remotely close to the level of granularity that Android and iOS offer today.

Sure they might add that in the future but the point being is still that there is little chance that the first phone they launch would be more secure than an android phone yet alone a modern iPhone in fact I would bet at least one paycheck that they would be considerably less secure at least initially, and then it's the question of how they would be able to maintain and support their platform given their size to begin with.

I don't doubt the intentions of the developers I just highly doubt that anything they set is even remotely achievable.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> The work puri.sm are doing and the way they are doing it is just fantastic. I really hope they manage to get the phone out sometime this year. If they can make a project as big as this work, then it could really show the industry that you don't need to make restrictive, secret, proprietary software to make a success.

</comment><comment><USER6> so some of the "hurt" GNOME used to introduce on major versions will pay off in user friendliness in a hybrid user story on handheld devices? the long con ! - I wish them luck, the presentations are impressive. So too the kde-neon folks had a convincing technological argument last I checked them out end of 2018.

Smartphones always were a downer to me. Having flashed some devices and using f-droid exclusively I sure saw good apps by good folk, but "desktop computing" always felt friendlier. The slick Apple and Google ecosystems never attracted me - and with the breaking-news stories on whatnot App SDK had some data sending somewhere I think the browser is a better sandbox for some companys and use-cases than deeper OS integration. Not that it is benign, but still.

I'm incredibly thankful to the people driving the GNU/Linux effort and foss ecosystem, offering their ingenuity for inspection by a wide audience. Computing got actually simpler as I got older and discovered tools sometimes made before my time. I never had that feeling with handhels - but this might change soon.

</comment><comment><USER7> One thing that I think is a strategic mistake, they should've used UBports for the OS, instead of also developing their custom OS for the device.

This market is too small and fragmented to have the wasted effort. Its difficult enough to build the open hardware device, no need to split energy / IQ by also worrying about the OS.

<comment><USER2> They're not building their own OS, they're building a few apps and dealing with hardware specific driver issues - but otherwise a lot of stuff is projects that already existed and needed improvements (which they have done upstream) or working directly with those upstream projects.

<comment><USER8> And updating libraries so they can re-use existing apps in a phone context, like GNOME Contacts and Web.

<comment><USER9> I LOVE this approach. Responsive gnome. It seems essential to me anyway, allows for tablets and any form factor you like.

That, and they take advantage of decades of work put into GNOME.

Collaboration!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Happy to see lots of progress in this update. Each month I'm saving towards purchasing the Librem 5 after I hear confirmation that it works on T-Mobile networks in the US.

<comment><USER11> I'm sitting in the same boat, but for Verizon. This blog post actually comes with some hope, with the specific statement that the SIM7100E is supported. Verizon has already approved another SimCom chip, the 7500V: [https://opendevelopment.verizonwireless.com/design-and- build...](https://opendevelopment.verizonwireless.com/design-and- build/approved-modules/module/6073)

One could hope that the code used to support the former could be adapted to support the latter. And as long as the Librem 5 is able to support an already- approved Verizon module, it shouldn't be a problem to activate the phone on Verizon.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Anybody knows if this phone is "fair" as well?

(Eco-friendly/fair worker conditions.)

<comment><USER13> It's very unlikely to be. The Fairphone is one of the only phones making an effort, and it's a lot of work [1] and even then they're still long ways of from being actually fair. I can't imagine Purism to have the time to invest in this, nor to do that without even so much as mentioning it.

[1] [https://www.fairphone.com/en/blog/](https://www.fairphone.com/en/blog/)

<comment><USER14> Indeed. Hopefully one day two projects in these spaces can converge once they've learned all they need to for each niche.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm very compelled to pre-order one but has anybody heard any news about the touchscreen or the CPU issue? I worry that there is no word on either in the recent update (like what is being done, what is missing...?)</comment>


Ask HN: Choosing the perfect baby name with data? - <AUTHOR> Did you pick a great baby name using a lot of data and some software? If so, please tell me how!<p>It seems like there are a lot of considerations, and although billions of people have done the process on paper, I wonder whether I could create a shortlist by setting some constraints (with software) about:<p>- Popularity in specific countries (not too popular, but not unique)<p>- Length<p>- How it sounds with the baby's surname<p>- Whether there are any famous serial killers or whatever with the same forename+surname combo<p>- ... <comment><USER2> Recently I read a quote somewhere along the lines of: picking a baby name makes you realise just how many people you dislike.

That, and: my neighbour/coworker/friend already picked that name.

So, I'm highly skeptical about the usefulness of software and data.

</comment><comment><USER3> Not everything is solved by an algorithm or an app.</comment>


Google Docs rolls out mobile editor for Android, iOS - <AUTHOR> http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/google-docs-rolls-out-mobile-editor-for-android-ios/41784

<comment><USER2> I've been happy with being able to just read my docs on my Droid. Light editing would be nice - it's not as if that keyboard is suitable for writing anything of significant length.</comment>


Housing in San Francisco Is So Expensive Some People Live on Boats - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/housing-in-san-francisco-is-so-expensive-some-people-live-on-boats-11557999002 <comment><AUTHOR> Sorry about the paywall

<comment><USER2> A few non-paywalled articles on the same topic:

[https://www.businessinsider.com/couple-buys-boat-to-avoid- sa...](https://www.businessinsider.com/couple-buys-boat-to-avoid-san- francisco-rent-2017-7#but-the-payoff-can-be-worth-it-its-our-vacation-its-our- home-its-a-passion-misa-said-21)

[https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/As-more- anchor-o...](https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/As-more-anchor-outs- live-on-SF-Bay-tension-11126968.php)

[https://thebolditalic.com/what-its-like-living-on-a- sailboat...](https://thebolditalic.com/what-its-like-living-on-a-sailboat-in- the-san-francisco-bay-ba4226af2f50)</comment></comment>


Britain launches data.gov.uk for software developers - <AUTHOR> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/7037682/Britain-frees-its-data.html

<comment><USER2> Compare with <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1066972> where there are already some comments.</comment>


The 3 Books That Teach New Startup Founders What They Need to Know NOW - <AUTHOR> http://blog.spanishcurls.com/what-to-read-when-starting-out

<comment><USER2> I'm a fan of _The Innovator 's Dilemma_ but I don't really see it as an essential book for startup founders. Maybe for intrapreneurs...

If I were putting together a list of essential books for startup founders, I'd go with:

1\. The Four Steps To The Epiphany

2\. The Startup Owner's Manual

3\. Business Model Generation

4\. The Art Of The Start

5\. Blue Ocean Strategy

6\. Crossing The Chasm

And yes, I do realize that (1) and (2) are largely the same book. But there is enough difference that I'd actually recommend people read both, especially if they're doing enterprise software startups. For consumer facing webapps or something of that nature, I might drop TFSTTE in favor of just TSOM.

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks for the recommendations. Haven't read the Blue Ocean Strategy, will check it out!</comment></comment>


FDA Approves First Gene Therapy for Leukemia - <AUTHOR> http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2017/08/30/547293551/fda-approves-first-gene-therapy-treatment-for-cancer <comment><USER2> Kite's $12b acquisition by Gilead [1] on Monday may be a harbinger of anticipated success of these kinds of biotherapeutics.

Given the modularity of these CAR systems, I'd expect to see a cascade of more approvals as the therapeutic scaffold is perfected. It's not just giant pharma working on these systems either. Younger companies like Cell Design Labs, Chimera bio, Nkarta are taking very novel approaches to further refining the specificity and precision of these kinds of treatments.

The cool thing about the CAR system is that it's amenable to rational engineering from modular, biological components. The CAR approved here was the product of low-throughput painstaking labor, but many companies are trying to boost the rate of R&D.

We're building digital infrastructure to facilitate the rational design of these kinds of biotherapeutics in hopes of speeding up the R&D cycle through an intelligent high-throughput development.

You can dig into the structure of the approved CAR therapy here: [https://serotiny.bio/notes/proteins/car19/](https://serotiny.bio/notes/proteins/car19/)

[1] [https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-kite-pharma-m-a-gilead- sci...](https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-kite-pharma-m-a-gilead-sciences- idUKKCN1B810Y)

<comment><AUTHOR> I just hope these kinds of innovations become accessible to people while not replicating the big pharma greed of high prices that dominated the better part of this century leaving people I'm a developed nation like ours rely on animal antibiotics.

<comment><USER2> These kinds of genetically designed therapies will require some major retooling of infrastructure, capital, regulation, etc., but are fundamentally cheap and curative - for mis/dis-regulation of the body's own systems. Ultimately, the material to be delivered is extraordinarily cheap to produce. There is a LOT of capital that must be recouped to get these innovations up and running, but in time they should dramatically drop in price and accessibility.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: PleasantFish 2.0 – Skills Feedback and Articles for Tech Professionals - <AUTHOR> https://www.pleasantfish.com <comment><AUTHOR> We are super excited to launch version 2.0 of PleasantFish today.

What is PleasantFish? For tech professionals, a platform that enables them to get feedback on their skill-set and helps them get better by providing them with related top quality content.

Vision? Helping tech professionals grow and learn through continuous feedback.

Problem? Continuous honest feedback from colleagues in companies is too hard to get. Moreover, even if feedback is obtained and there are some weaknesses identified, improving them is difficult. Pleasant Fish attempts to take care of the two things by enabling user to get private feedback and improve their skill-set by top quality articles personalised to their skill-set

How it works?

\- User lists down their current skill-set and ask their colleagues to give them private/anonymous feedback. \- We provide skills-related content to them curated everyday that keeps them up-to-date \- We also provide with relevant jobs based on their skill-set.

Looking forward to your questions and feedback!</comment>


Newest Androids will join iPhones in offering default encryption - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/09/18/newest-androids-will-join-iphones-in-offering-default-encryption-blocking-police/?hpid=z1

<comment><USER2> Only the data physically on the smartphone gets encrypted. All information (emails, documents, photos, ...) in the cloud is up for grabs.</comment>


Snapchat CEO's Warning About a Tech Crash and a Brutal Fall for Facebook - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/Leaked-2013-Email-Shows-Snapchat-CEOs-Warning-About-A-Tech-Crash-And-A-Brutal-Fall-For-Facebook/articleshow/45554862.cms

<comment><USER2> [http://www.businessinsider.com/snapchat-ceo-on-tech- bubble-a...](http://www.businessinsider.com/snapchat-ceo-on-tech-bubble-and- facebook-overvaluation-2014-12)

</comment><comment><USER3> is it sore grapes for him? Although, in some cases the valuation might have been higher but largely the businesses where longterm revenue opportunities and promising sustainability are financed.

</comment><comment><USER4> Broken Link.</comment>


Technology Radar Vol. 21 is out - <AUTHOR> https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar <comment><USER4> New Edition!

New in ADOPT:

      Techniques:
        - Container security scanning
        - Data integrity at the origin
        - Micro frontends
        - Pipelines for infrastructure as code
        - Run cost as architecture fitness function
        - Testing using real device

      Tools:
        - <USER2>
        - <USER3>
        - React Styleguidist

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Enzyme is on HOLD.

Oh boy, major deprecation/refactoring is coming my way.

airbnb is not as influential in JS world as it used to be</comment>


Core Graphics, Part 1: In the Beginning - <AUTHOR> https://www.bignerdranch.com/blog/core-graphics-part-1-in-the-beginning/ <comment><USER2> > It's commonly said that Quartz is "based on" PDF, and in a sense that's > true. PDF (Adobe's Portable Document Format) is the PostScript drawing model > without the arbitrary programmability. Quartz was designed that the typical > use of the API would map very closely to what PDF supports, making the > creation of PDFs nearly trivial on the platform.

Would making a PDF reader with the Core Graphics API also be nearly trivial then?

<comment><USER3> Yes. [https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Gr...](https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/GraphicsImaging/Conceptual/drawingwithquartz2d/dq_pdf/dq_pdf.html).

I don't think it is easier because of that mapping, though. The basic drawing operators are just a tiny part of creating a PDF reader; you also have to support various PDF features such as password protection, forms support, embedded JavaScript, etc, and you need a good library for building the GUI.</comment></comment>


Nicole Mitchell, an Innovative Flutist with an Afrofuturist Vision - <AUTHOR> https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/10/arts/music/nicole-mitchell-black-earth-ensemble-mandorla-awakening.html?_r=0 <comment><AUTHOR> NY Times article this morning about Nicole Mitchell, an amazing composer and flutist. A couple of great YouTube links ...

Solo concert in 2014: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5CXlPeeVn4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5CXlPeeVn4)

With the Malian musicians mentioned in the Times article: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4XBbfxVmS4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4XBbfxVmS4)</comment>


Ask HN: Computer Science GRE Subject Test - <AUTHOR>

I'm a Biology student considering going on to grad school in Bioinformatics, which is in the Department of Computer Science so it's going to stress the computational side. I have a lot of programming experience but have only taken two "real" CS courses - Intro to and Advanced Bioinformatics Algorithms, which are Masters level courses here. If I can take and pass the CS GRE Subject Test at the 50th percentile or higher, I'll get preference for financial awards and get out of taking CS placement tests and makeup courses.
I'm wondering if this is realistic for a non CS student, and I don't have any real way to gauge that. For anyone who's taken the CS Subject Test, can I get your thoughts? How difficult was it for you, what types of questions seem to show up a lot, and in lieu of CS coursework what type of preparation would you recommend as most effective?
I have all the basic algorithms/data structures knowledge (or at least, I don't know what I don't know), as well as experience in different types of programming languages (from C++ to C#/VB.NET and Python and now Haskell.) I also have calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, and discrete math under my belt. My current research has involved fuzzy logic and issues of data access and database structure in ecology, and I've used algorithms such as dynamic programming and genetic algorithms for class projects.
Thanks for your help! <comment><USER2> First off, make 3 hours of time, and take the free practice GRE test on the ets website. That will give you a good sense of how well you're going to do.

You say two very different things in your post - that you've only taken two "real" CS classes, and that you know basic algorithms / data structures. A lot of what comes out of an algorithms or data structures class is the vocabulary surrounding those topics, and my experience was that the vocabulary is a significant part of the GRE.

The worst thing that happens is that you're out a hundred dollars for the registration fee, so you might as well find a CS GRE prep book and start studying. It is definitely more doable to cram for the CS GRE than for the Math or Physics tests.

<comment><AUTHOR> A lot of basic algorithms and data structures knowledge was assumed for the Bioinformatics courses I took, so I learned the vocabulary as I went along. Also, I've been through the online lecture notes for the basic algorithms/data structures course at my university, and am confident that I have a good grasp on the subject matter.

Thanks for the advice - I wasn't aware there was a free practice test. I'll definitely check that out.</comment></comment>