I Learned French in 12 Months - <AUTHOR> http://www.runwes.com/2020/02/11/howilearnedfrench.html <comment><USER3> I don't believe there is a shortcut for "hacking" languages. I'm a diplomat, and currently learning my fourth language to the C1+ level.

When we learn languages, it's a full time job. It was 9 months to learn Mandarin to a B1, 6 months to a C1+ in Spanish, and I'm currently at a B1 in Estonian after 5 months.

There are several things I think are crucial after years of full time study (note: this assumes you're going for professional fluency, not just touring around the country where interactions are largely scripted and predictable):

* There is no substitute for production - you must speak the language with a native speaker (not an app) and talk about topics that are relevant to the kind of scenarios you anticipate. We spend the first several months discussing current events in target language - at first scripted, then later free form. This builds vocabulary and helps fluency. This is quickly expanded to discussing current events in depth and participating in mock debates.

* Give mini presentations - target 3-5 minutes of talking about a relevant topic with little prep time. The difference between intermediate and advanced is the ability to move from discussing only facts to making a coherent argument. Native speakers will often not be able to follow your train of thought without learning to connect cause and effect using structures appropriate for your language.

* Interview native speakers - prepare 2-3 questions about a particular topic and check your comprehension by translating their answers to English. This obviously helps build your comprehension, but also helps to learn to "automate" comprehension while you are thinking about something else. If you can take notes in English while a native speaker is talking at normal speed (and achieving 90%+ accuracy), it will make it easier for you to participate in normal speed conversations.

* Read target language news - this is critical for expanding vocabulary and learning colocations - knowing what verbs are used in particular contexts (e.g., do they say "I talked _with_ X" or "I talked _to_ X". Do they say country X shot, launched, or threw a rocket?)

Bottom line - language learning is not just about the number of hours you put in. The quality and type of practice you do matters a lot. You aren't going to be fluent via Duolingo alone. You need to put in the time using structured practice with native speakers to really learn anything.

<comment><USER4> I've seen computational biologists , mechanical engineers , non-programmjng entrepreneurs but what does a diplomat do on HN?

<comment><USER5> Alan Mustard, former US ambassador to Turkmenistan and trained in agriculture, is a well-known OpenStreetMap geek and quite familiar with GIS issues. Diplomats can have hobbies, you know.

I myself am a linguist and translator, no professional background in the hard sciences or IT at all, but I have still been involved in Free Software for many years and so HN is a natural news channel to read.

<comment><USER6> And Allan Mustard is now Chairperson of the OpenStreetMap Foundation Board of Directors

[https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Board_Member_Bios](https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Board_Member_Bios)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I've been hacking language learning for about five years, and I've spent ridiculous amounts of time trying and reading about different strategies. I've been to Cuba, Mexico, Spain, and Puerto Rico to try immersion in different settings.

Getting to a solid level of competency in a language actually is not that hard. It just requires dedication and consistent practice.

That said, native speakers operate on a different level entirely. In my recent visit to Barcelona, I had no problems asking for directions, talking to the hotel staff and people in bars, chatting it up with friends in Spanish, etc. However, walking into a noisy / crowded restaurant where the language is going 100 miles an hour is a totally different scenario.

As much as I want to believe otherwise, I'm of the opinion that getting to a level of "automatic" response where you can fluidly handle any situation requires living in a country where the language is in your face all day every day--and even then it still takes real effort.

A friend of mine, who's a US ex-pat living in Madrid is of the same opinion. After three years living there, he still doesn't feel 100% confident; although, he admits that he has spent most of his social time around English speakers.

None of this is intended to discourage anyone at all. In fact, learning Spanish ranks as one of the best decisions I've ever made; however, I think it's important for folks to go in with realistic expectations, as there's big difference between functional competency--with a language and fluency with fluency being a "white whale".

<comment><USER8> > Getting to a solid level of competency in a language actually is not that > hard. It just requires dedication and consistent practice.

Though that's why it's hard. Just like eating healthy and exercise isn't hard, just requires dedication, yet notice how few people have a particularly good looking body.

The opportunity cost of learning a language is also immense. I've spent an incredible amount of time listening to and reading Spanish. It just isn't for everybody. It has to be something that makes you happy.

<comment><USER9> I am of the opinion that many people who want to learn a language don't have any real reason to learn a second language other than to say they know two languages.

Unless you have extended family or somehow became smitten with a foreign country, I am almost certain this is the case. So any attempts are really halfhearted and very little progress is made because the commitment is so large.

This is why, if I ever get around to learning a second language, it will be Esperanto. It takes an order of magnitude of less time to learn and gives you the accomplishment of knowing another language. (Plus uniformity in language is cool.)

<comment><USER10> > I am of the opinion that many people who want to learn a language don't have > any real reason to learn a second language other than to say they know two > languages.

Your opinion is a pretty localized one. For many people learning a second language is not an option, it is a must. I would have a very hard time functioning in my field without access to a second language.

<comment><USER11> Agreed. If you work in high level tech, for big companies, possibly with international companies, if you want a decent career, your English better be awesome.

You can make do with less, but it's probably going to have an impact on your career, at some point.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> They went from a non-speaker (A0) to a B2.

According to CEFR link in article, a B2 level:

Can understand the main ideas of complex text on both concrete and abstract topics, including technical discussions in their field of specialization.

Can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party.

Can produce clear, detailed text on a wide range of subjects and explain a viewpoint on a topical issue giving the advantages and disadvantages of various options.

CEFR Estimated time required to _academically_ learn B2 level French: 560-650 hours

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages#Common_reference_levels)

<comment><USER13> For a frame of reference, I also started doing DuoLingo daily about 12 months ago and am still at ~A1 proficiency, as far as speaking or writing. I might be at A2 listening, or even B1 reading comprehension. I definitely spend less than two hours a day on it and don't converse with native speakers, which doesn't help.

<comment><USER14> Duolingo is useful for memorizing vocab, but you'll never get anywhere near fluency with it. The possible space of interactions is just too limited.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I studied French from 7th-12th grade in an American High School. After that, I could not understand any French beyond "bonjour". I could not have a conversation in French. I could conjugate verbs and I could read some. Fast forward 45 years and I retired and decided to actually learn French. I followed a very, very similar method and after 9 months of self study took a 2 week intensive course in France where I was told I was at B2 level. Obviously I didn't start at A0 but when I first started with Duolingo, I remembered nothing. 45 years is a long gap. What he describes works. Even an old fart like me can get to B2 level with self study if they are motivated and use good resources. It's never been easier to learn a language with all the excellent resources available.

<comment><USER16> > I studied French from 7th-12th grade

As a French, I've lived a few years in Australia. A lot of people there can only say "Bonjour" and keep a bitter memory of their lessons. It feels like learning German for the French people, also a difficult (albeit more regular) language. It is merely necessary for political cohesion but not at an individual level; As such German lessons are... not designed for the students. If I had to believe the lessons, there are only two topics that Germans talk about: The Wiedervereinigung (reunification) and the war. All their movies are black and white with yellow subtitles. That's how I imagine the French language in the Australian culture ;) Something you gotta learn at school, like se hazing or something.

It really feels like we haven't mastered teaching, as a civilization. Our teaching works for pupils who have an interest; but for the others, it's like signing for a mortgage and hating the house from the day you move in.

In fact, a lot of Ozzies I've met told me they went to Paris and felt hated by parisians. This testimonial was so frequent (dozens of times) that I led my little survey. On Twitter and among friends, all French people love Australians, between surfing and Crocodile Dundee, we have good conversation starters ;) Some may dislike some British but I don't think there are many, let alone many who would act it out on the street. I just think parisians behave like stressed people behave in very stressful cities. So, no, we don't hate English-speaking people, and I'm sorry that my language is so hard and so required in your curriculum ;)

Good day everyone!

<comment><USER17> > If I had to believe the lessons, there are only two topics that Germans talk > about: The Wiedervereinigung (reunification) and the war.

According to my lessons, they also talk about Umweltschutz (environmental protection), especially Mülltrennung (garbage sorting).

<comment><USER18> As a Romanian who had to study German in school, I testify to that. I still remember the word "Umweltverschmutzung" but no idea if it's der, die, das, dem or des umweltverschmutzung :P

<comment><USER19> A small trick with the words ending in "-ung" is they're often feminine so "die" in nomanative.

<comment><USER18> I would have bet on "die", just coze it "sounds right".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> As a French native speaker, I'm a little bit surprised by the corrected text OP posted in her/his article ([http://www.runwes.com/images/learningfrench/image1.png](http://www.runwes.com/images/learningfrench/image1.png)).

Most of the corrections she/he received are not justified at all. Like using the work "crédits" is totally fine in this context. I can't get why they corrected some connectors like "à" or "pour", as the usage of these in the text seem at least as correct to me.

<comment><USER21> I'm also a native speaker (France's French if that makes a difference). "Crédits" was replaced by "bons", which means vouchers. In the context that would indeed be the likely correct option (and I never heard "crédits" used that way...)

It's grammatically incorrect to write "s'inscrire à une salle de sport" and should indeed be "dans une salle de sport" and so it was warranted to correct that.

The other corrections are similarly warranted.

I'm a bit worried if you guys all think the original text was fine... ;)

<comment><USER22> Interesting points! Thanks. I didn't know "inscrire" is a transitive verb, so indeed "s'inscrire à" is grammatically incorrect. As often with french it raises the question of "does this rule make sense regarding usage". A quick google search for "s'inscrire à une salle de sport" shows a lot of results, even from people specializing in sport. And many native speakers were fooled by this rule.

As for the "crédit", the dictionnary definition seem to state it is correct (even though "bon" would be a bit better). [https://larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/cr%c3%a9dit/20314...](https://larousse.fr/dictionnaires/francais/cr%c3%a9dit/20314?q=cr%c3%a9dit#20203) Crédit: Autorisation de dépenses accordée par les autorités qui établissent, votent ou règlent les budgets ; somme ainsi allouée : La bibliothèque dispose d'un crédit de dix mille euros.

<comment><USER23> Transitivity is not an issue: "obéir à ses instincts" and "suivre ces instincts".

So "s'incrire à" is not incorrect _per se_ , e.g. "s'inscrire à des cours de danse". Even, you must say "s'inscrire à la mairie" (e.g. for poll lists) and not "s'inscrire dans la mairie".

I think that what is technically correct is to use "à" when you talk about _where_ you sign in or register (usually a one-time action) and "dans" when you talk about signing in to perform a recurring activity.

That little _à_ word derives from the Latin words "ab" and "ad", which you can find in words ("adjacent", "adverb", "addition", "adventure"... hemmm I mean *aventure"; sometimes English is more Latin than French) which tell the idea of proximity or direction.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> This is an awesome post. The one thing I wish it included was context around their lifestyle during this time period. How many hours a day did they devote? Were they working full time? If so doing what? What other responsibilities / life things got in the way.

It's one thing to imagine yourself doing this given six months of dedicated time (not that they claimed to have had this) and another to get a real sense of how one might fit this into one's life. Anyway, great, detailed article and an impressive accomplishment.

<comment><USER25> Author here. I don't work full time but I'm a master's student. I had a decent enough chunk of free time to dedicate to this without too many serious obligations. It's hard for me to estimate time per day, as there were some week-long periods where I did very minimal study when particularly busy, and other periods where I'd spend 20+ hours a week of solid effort on it. I think achieving this is probably outside the scope of someone who isn't extremely abnormally self-motivated and efficient and who has a family, long working hours, etc. That being said, I think most people can find the time to reach a moderate conversational level in a year without too much trouble, assuming they work efficiently.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Couple remarks on the author's alleged "weaknesses":

>Understand strongly accented speech. I understand essentially all the "standard" French without subtitles, but very little of the Quebecois.

Most European French speakers have trouble understanding Québecois as well, especially if it delves into slang, so I wouldn't fret much. High level (and written) speech should be ok though.

>Understand very slang-heavy speech. I know a good chunk of argot but there are still plenty of informal vocab words and expressions I don't know. Especially that damn verlan.

Again, seeing how most people over 35 don't understand any of that stuff either I wouldn't worry too much. Especially because this stuff evolves like crazy and new slang/verlan words keep popping up all the time. I'm in my late 20s and can already feel the divide in the slang I and friends in their early 20s use.

>Write error free text. I can get the message across pretty well without relying on a dictionary, but I often phrase things a bit unnaturally and make minor grammatical errors.

Like I and another poster said, most of the mistakes aren't really mistakes. Only the most extraordinary pedant would object to these.

>Quickly use less common verb tenses. While I know how to construct the past conditional and future perfect, I still can't use them very fluidly. >Recognize all the weird literary tenses. Imperfect subjunctive? Yuck.

Yeah no one uses these. In fact if you _did_ attempt to use these in a normal conversation there's a good chance you wouldn't be understood. Even in writing, modern authors are more and more switching to present and past perfect. Even tenses like the future are getting increasingly uncommon, people instead use the present and rely on contextual clues or markers, like in German (" we'll meet tomorrow" -> "we meet tomorrow").

What I mean to say from all of this is that even native French speakers are not completely at ease with these pain points so it's no use worrying about them too much.

<comment><USER21> The future perfect is very much used both orally and (especially) in writing and so is the past conditional.

The passé simple is almost never used orally these days, and in writing mostly only in literary texts.

I've noticed that the subjunctive is used less in writing since some change to 'simplify' (i.e. dumb down) the language.

Exotic forms of subjunctive (imperfect subjunctive, anyone?) are hardly used anymore even in contemporary literary texts.

<comment><USER26> > The future perfect is very much used both orally

The past conditional, maybe. The future, really? Do you actually say things like _nous nous verrons demain_ or _il l 'aura fait avant_ in casual speech? Well I don't know if _you_ do, but the vast majority of French speakers would say something like _on se voit demain_ et _il l 'a probablement fait avant_. Instead of using specific verb forms to convery meaning people instead rely on context and adverbial cues, as do the speakers of the dozens of languages that do not use the byzantine tense and mood system of the Romance languages (see: Japanese, Chinese, etc.) and are certainly not the worse for it.

>I've noticed that the subjunctive is used less in writing since some change to 'simplify' (i.e. dumb down) the language.

You're aware that the argument you're making about the language getting "dumbed down" is literally millennia old, right?

<comment><USER27> > nous nous verrons demain or il l'aura fait avant

I am a french speaker from Québec and hear both of those often.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I find the timeline believable but I'm impressed (and happy!) to see this worked with self-study. I lived abroad for a while and found I was able to pick up the local language pretty quickly because I was fully immersed in it, by 6 mo. I was comfortably conversational for day to day things. However, I would also caution for anyone wanting to learn a language at home, it's a muscle and it does fade when you don't use it. After a decade back in the states I've lost the majority of the language I learned since there's no one around to use it with.

<comment><USER29> You could just watch French TV, films or podcasts, there's more access to that material now than there ever has been.

<comment><USER30> It's still much tougher to come by that one might think. For one thing, European networks don't care about distributing their content outside of Europe, even in exchange for actual money. For another, a huge proportion of the content is dubbed from English, which isn't ideal. Even pirating the stuff's pretty hard, since there's (apparently) little interest in it.

Japanese may be a pain in the ass to learn but it's hard not to be jealous of the resources and media available to Japanese learners, as someone learning most any other language (though, in the US at least, Spanish media's pretty easy to get ahold of)

<comment><USER31> Youtube will give you as many videos in any language as you want.

<comment><USER32> IF you can find them. Also you have no idea about quality. I've watched several videos in my TL where the plot was 1 here is what I'm going to do, then 10 minutes silently doing it, then 1 minute of reflection. There are a lot of videos of one guy doing something without talking. Note that the above is probably a reflection on my tastes.

I've also watched several videos and concluded after a while that it wasn't my TL but a related language.

<comment><USER31> Heh, YouTube is such a big place!

Best way to start is watching tv news. Hosts have very clear pronuntiation, it's their job after all.

I first research what tv channels are more popular in the country, then search YouTube with that info. YouTube doesn't seem to offer a lot of search options, but it's possible to do the search from Google or DuckDuckGo and later select "videos" tab.

DuckDuckGo has a dropdown menu that allows search localization, so the first results are the most relevant to the selected country. Once you find a handful of interesting channels, you're set up.

<comment><USER32> The only thing I disagree with is best. Best is subjective, I find most news boring an irrelevant (a lot of gossip about people I don't care about) so while it is great if you can stand it, I tend to get mad about the subjects they consider worth covering and turn it off.

This is a reflection on me of course - you should have your own opinions.

<comment><USER31> OK, let's say that it's a good way to learn the language, not so much as entertainment. Actually I agree with you about how little of what we see in the news is worth covering.

Anyway, if there's a channel with lots of contents, it's still possible to select only interesting topics. Maybe it's easier for me, because the language I'm most interested in is English :) Usually I don't even need YouTube, just setting Netflix language to English.

For other languages, I'm mostly interested in listening to specific words pronuntiation, usually names.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> > 11/18: Started going through the French Duolingo tree

> 3/19: Reached the end of the Duolingo tree (level 1 in all skills, but most > were level 3+)

This is pretty impressive. I've started French Duolingo around the same time and have been doing 30 min per day every day; 14 months later I'm about 1/2-way down.

This must have taken ~3h/day of Duolingo.

<comment><USER34> I went through the early parts of French Duolingo pretty intensively, but gave it up around the end of level 1, because it seems far too grindy -- not a good use of time. The part I did was good for bootstrapping to the point where you can start profiting from more real-life sources like the Harry Potter books.

<comment><USER35> How do you make the jump and apply the real life sources? A dictionary and a lot of free time? Two copies one in each language? Kindle French?

<comment><USER34> The best setup I know of is an e-reader with a good dictionary configured to pop up on tapping a word. You can also select a passage for auto-translation, which is usually better than nothing. I use the Kindle reader on the iPad the most.

(Although it's good enough, it could be much better: the French dictionary lookup consistently swaps accented with nonaccented e's, the translator goes to Bing instead of deepl.com, the French->English lookup (which pops up in parallel) forgets at least half the time that the source is French and displays a useless null English->English translation of an actually French word. Going beyond the minimum, why couldn't we align a human-translated edition if you've bought one, or found a public-domain one? And the same for an audiobook of the same text? There's so much room to do these things better, not just for Duolingo. I blame DRM and the intellectual-property status quo to a considerable degree. I'm a little ashamed to be plugging a DRM-promoting setup here.)

There are some webapps and iOS apps for parallel-text reading, but last I looked the execution wasn't very compelling to me, and for me the time when parallel texts made the most difference is past. (Also, you learn that translators often seem to want to exercise excess creativity, or misunderstand things. This counterbalances their still-better-than-Bing general skill.)

To make the jump early, assuming you can enjoy them, see if you can find a wide selection of children's books from the library. It was kind of a nostalgic experience -- I'd forgotten what it felt like to be running into puzzling words and expressions all the time. This way is not so quick for dictionary lookup, though.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Whenever I read posts like this I'm much more impressed with the person's desire, motivation, determination, and strength to go an entire year focusing on one a single goal, not necessarily their learning ability.

So many people, me especially, go through spurts of wanting to learn something new or complete a project, reach a goal, and yet I always seem to fizzle out because in the end, why bother?

I'll argue it's incredibly rare for people to set goals, work continuously towards them, and consider it a success more so than what they can now do.

<comment><USER37> He never touches on the why

<comment><USER38> I feel like the number one motivating reason is having a significant other who has a different native language. This also makes it a lot easier to make progress because you basically have your own tutor who is also motivated to patiently listen to your struggles.

<comment><USER8> There's a Spanish saying that goes something like: the best way to learn a language is in the bed or the crib.

Nothing is quite as motivating to learn a language than dating someone (or, more likely, trying to) who doesn't speak English very well or is willing to refuse to speak it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> I had the good luck of getting hired into a job in a 100% French environment here in Quebec just out of school almost 2 years ago. I started with just an intensive 6 credit French course in university and grade 11 English-Canada high school french as a background which conversationally accounted for very little.

I understand feeling as though your structured grammar classes in school failed you when you first went to X country and spaghetti came out your mouth. However, that grammatical framework served me incredibly well as time went on. I found it filled in holes of knowledge without need to go back and correct them later. IMO, it is not a bad place to start, a traditional grammar focused class.

If you're looking for tips, the biggest is to maximize exposure - speaking, reading, writing, hearing the language. It is simply a matter of time if you force yourself into it. In addition to everyday language practice with my colleagues to do my job (don't let them speak your native tongue with you, ever!), I hosted french movie nights, read in french, and installed Antidote for my emails (seriously - if you're learning French, buy Antidote).

Seriously, don't let them speak your native tongue with you, ever, for any reason. Force the language you want to learn without exception - <USER2> language patterns are very, very hard to undo once set.

Last point: Contrary to the author, "heavily accented French" to me is France French, I am far less fluent with it. Choose your teachers based on what accent you want to have, yourself.

</comment><comment><USER40> Very impressive progress. I think it speaks to the author's commitment and dedication, as adding 50 _new_ cards per day is a _lot_. Most people will burn out pretty quickly at that rate. I recommend something like 10-20 per day. I'm also one of those people that say you should make your own cards from material you're immersing in. When going through a predefined list of words like that I think you're bound to end up learning a bunch of words that you'll never encounter (at least not for a long time), and a bunch of words that you'll have no idea how to use correctly.

I wrote an article[0] about my own method for language learning, focusing mainly on the spaced repetition aspect.

[0] [https://mochi.cards/blog/using-spaced-repetition-to- learn-a-...](https://mochi.cards/blog/using-spaced-repetition-to-learn-a- language/)

<comment><USER25> Author here. It was a lot, but seeing the number go down rapidly was a nice motivator. Keep in mind that these are just pre-made 1-word cards, so they're much faster than the full-sentence cards people suggest, which are likely more effective though also more time-consuming. Furthermore, French has an unexpectedly (for me) large number of cognates with English, so many of those words were freebies for me. If I was learning Mandarin, for example, 50 cards a day would require an absolutely enormous amount of effort, most of which would likely be wasted.

You are correct in that a decent chunk of the words are relatively useless, and I forgot many of them already after stopping Anki for a few months. There were also some words that I had no idea how to use, as you said. However, I did some extra looking-up of difficult words, and the deck included example sentences for many of the words. Also, I definitely claim that your method is more effective, but clearly this one at least worked well enough to do what I did.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> As this article shows, it is perfectly possible to learn a language to a decent level (B2) in a year by studying at home. This is especially true if the language you're learning is closely related to your native language (e.g., English and French). You just have to consistently put in the time (probably an hour a day, at a minimum) and use a good mix of resources: a good textbook, flashcards (e.g., Anki), Italki (personal tutoring over video chat), radio, and some easy reading (childrens' books are great).

If you can go to a country where the language is spoken and are able to spend all of your time working on the language, you can learn to B2 level in much less than a year. I would say you should be able to achieve B2 level in a relatively easy (because close to English) language like French in less than 6 months.

</comment><comment><USER42> It reminds me a little of how I learnt English myself. Out of high school I was really bad and really wanted to change that. I switched all my video games to English, started watching 4 to 5 hours of TV shows/movies in English a day, reading books in English, etc etc. I definitely wasn't as intense as the author, but I think it worked pretty well considering that now I live in the US as a US citizen :)

</comment><comment><USER43> > no immersion

I see this somewhat frequently among some parts of the online language community. For some reason people seem to think that you're not immersing in a language unless you're in a country where that language is frequently used. They somehow equate being immersed in a language with physically being in a country where that language is frequently used.

Don't get me wrong, being in a country is a great way to immerse yourself in a language, but it is by no means a requirement.

In terms of exposure to content in the language you're learning, what's the difference between someone who is living in a country where they see that language on TV, in the newspapers, hear it on the radio, and speak it with native speakers, versus someone who watches content in that language on youtube, reads articles/newspapers online in that language, talks online with people who speak that language, but lives somewhere where they don't speak it? Not much.

Setting up a "local immersion environment" requires putting effort into finding native resources and trying to reduce your exposure towards your native language. It's certainly more effort than being in a country where you can't help but be surrounded by your target language, but it's definitely not impossible.

The idea that listening to music, listening to podcasts, watching youtube videos and reading articles in your target language is not immersion is silly, since this is what native speakers living in their country experience on a daily basis. Environment is everything, not location.

<comment><USER25> Author here. I see your point but I still prefer to say I wasn't "immersed" because I think actually living among native speakers and using the language carries an enormous advantage over what I did, a sort of "pseudo-immersion." This pseudo-immersion isn't 100% equivalent to typical immersion, but as you say, captures at least a significant part of it. Trying to imitate the immersion environment is the best I could do, and clearly is enough to get to a pretty decent level.

Regarding differences between this pseudo-immersion and "true immersion", I think there are a ton of things that I never picked up that I would receive had I lived in the country, which is a big reason why I still make this distinction. For example, I haven't shopped at a French grocery store and asked for help, and while I could do so, I'd probably use some uncommon wording. Or, for example, IIRC French people say "I'm having X" in restaurants instead of "I would like X", as all the online resources tell you to do, but I would have never picked up on this if I hadn't read it in a random article once. This sort of expression-mimicking you get from interacting daily with native speakers is, I imagine, hugely important in actually becoming natural in a native environment and is completely lacking with what I did.

I've never been to a French hospital, or complained about cigarette butts on the sidewalk, or explained how I stepped in dog poop on my way to work this morning, or told anyone how sweaty I became after rushing to catch the train. I could say all these things, but they'd all be new situations and there would be unnatural wording and a distinct lack of common expressions and idioms in my speech. Theoretically, I could watch enough movies or read enough books to catch a decent chunk of this, but in my immersion method I read 1 book and 0 movies or tv shows, (aside from a kid's cartoon for a bit.) This doesn't even include the massive amount of slang and idioms that are only said among very informal friends that I've never used with my Italki teachers. Perhaps including a lot more media in my method would be significantly more "immersive", but in any case I think the distinction is warranted. That being said, immersing yourself as much as possible, even at home, is definitely a very useful and effective way to learn a language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER44> If you just care about understanding most of the written language this can be done a bit faster in a very similar way: A few years ago I started watching Danish TV shows and went through a few months of "Danish obsession".

-I started Duolingo Danish, only 15-20 minutes every day, just unlocking stuff, not completing evey level. I never completed it all, but there's not much left.

-Then I followed a couple major Danish newspapers on Twitter. This is good because it is just incorporated in my couple daily sweeps through my timeline, provides a little "cultural immersion" and the translate button is sitting right there to help with those couple of words you didn't already know.

-The Twitter thing also works well to give a sense of progress: After a while you find you don't have much trouble with the tweets themselves and start clicking on some links to get a harder challenge with the articles themselves.

-When you can make out what most of the press articles say, you can start trying with some fiction: In my case I chose ebook Danish translations of the Millenium novel series, for no particular reason (just more Nordic noir). I had not read them previously.

I read them using my phone and set up the reader to provide Google translation by selecting words or sentences. I found out I could in fact enjoy the novel and had to use the "dictionary" less and less as I went on. I read the two first novels and the average speed was about half of English or my native Spanish.

\- Since my Danish reading was by now quite effortless, for an aditional challenge I tried the third novel in the original Swedish. This was viable and still fun, but certainly more belabored.

All this took about 3-4 months.

So now I can read Danish, Norwegian and Swedish newspapers but I can't really understand the spoken language. (In fact spoken Danish is notoriously difficult to understand). I can catch the drift of conversation, recognise words and phrases but not really understand or speak myself. I can surprise Danes by greeting them and exchanging some smalltalk, but not really keep up a conversation. But hey... it was all pretty much effortless, so RoI is great.

Nowadays I'm doing the same with Russian. It goes slower because I'm not as obsessed and stop from time to time, but I can understand tweets from Komsomolskaya Pravda pretty well by now.

<comment><USER25> Author here. I heavily concentrated on speaking, but you're absolutely right that without that you can get quite far surprisingly quickly if you only care about reading. I mean, look at the millions of language students that can read complex texts in their foreign languages but can't spend 30 seconds discussing their day.

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Reminds me of this [0].

Ikenna learned (conversational?) French in 6 months. It's quite an inspiring video. After watching a few of his videos now, it definitely plays a part in continuing to motivate me learning Japanese.

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8gno6Uzuo8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8gno6Uzuo8)

<comment><USER25> Author here. Indeed, I linked to this video in one of the sections. Starting off every few weeks or so I'd watch the video again to remind myself that this is possible and "keep my eyes on the prize." His level in the video isn't incredible or anything but definitely something to be proud of after 6 months of study. I can confirm such is possible because I was around his level after 6 months too, from what I can tell.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> I've done short stints in Spanish and Japanese classes, and have traveled abroad for short periods (Spain, Russia, China). I understand short phrases and can do very basic stuff: ask for directions, say please/thank you, get mugged, etc.

I have some family that have done intense language study, and lived abroad for years (mostly Russia, but other places too), one thing I've always been curious about is wordplay.

Do non-English languages and cultures have the same amount (or potential for) wordplay like English does? My family who've lived abroad have said 'not as much as English', but... they only lived in non-English places for a few years, so their experience - while valuable - may not be conclusive.

<comment><USER47> I don't speak Swedish but someone told me they have their own pun Olympics simply because of how easy the language is to mold into puns

<comment><USER48> Looks like it is a comedy group that is setting some competition event yearly.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> I have achieved the same results in Chinese (HSK 5), but it took me 5 years. The resource I see that is missing is HelloTalk, with lots of opportunities to converse for free, and post your writing practice to receive corrections. Can also post your voice.

</comment><comment><USER50> I learned french in 3 months aprox. while living in France. Ive arrived there without much knowledge of the language. First weeks I was feeling like an alien. Then I started to understand but couldn't speak. Then I started to use translate and dictionary to build some phrases beforehand to be able to be polite and ask the questions I wanted. After 3 months something clicked during a talk I was watching, I not only began to understand without having to think but was able to ask questions to the French guy on my side about the talk (it was about a ML algorithm). I am a native speaker of a Latin language (Portuguese).

</comment><comment><USER51> Congratulations to the author! They achieved a level where having a conversation with them is not painful, for either side of the conversation.

For anyone who is bored of learning yet another programming language, learning a human language will challenge you and humble you and reward you if you keep going at it.

Just please give up on self-imposed deadlines, and as this article states, there is no magic bullet, no magic method to learning a language, despite what SEO-driven blogs and videos will tell you.

</comment><comment> globular-toast I learnt French in about six months. I was able to read the news, Wikipedia, technical journals and and some novels (although this was by far the most difficult). My main motivation was to be able to read French papers for my PhD. I accomplished that goal.

However, I was not able to speak French _at all_. I actually went to the South of France thinking I'd be able to converse but was immediately disheartened when I couldn't understand the first thing they said and they couldn't even understand me saying the word "tarte" in a _patisserie_.

My approach to learning to read/write French was simple. First learn the grammar of your mother tongue. If you don't speak a second language, you probably don't know this. Secondly, learn the grammar of the new language by using study materials written in your mother tongue. There is an excellent series of books that covers both of these called _English Grammar for Students of X_ (where X is, French, for example). Thirdly, learn loads and loads of vocabulary (including genders etc if necessary). For this I used Memrise which was excellent at the time (but I think it has regressed since). Then just read a lot.

Things I found not useful at all were Duolingo and Rosetta Stone. They don't teach grammar to adults. They are aimed at babies which is fine if you have ten years to learn this, I guess. There are no shortcuts if you want it to be quicker.

I still know a surprisingly large amount of French after several years, but it's fading. I'd still love to be able to speak it fluently one day. Any advice for getting there?

</comment><comment><USER52> I've been reading similar anecdotes lately trying to gauge whether I could reach B1 in a Romance language in a few months of study.

What I've found is a lot of pessimism about how well Duolingo teaches you a language, with many arguing it's a waste of time altogether.

I'm surprised that could be the case though. They have data from millions of language learners processing through their lessons, and looking at their making-of blog ([https://making.duolingo.com](https://making.duolingo.com)), the product seems data-driven. They do A/B testing to see the efficacy of new features they roll out. Aside from that, they combine reading, writing, speaking, and listening exercises, and have made some innovative features like chat bots. One language tree includes a few thousand words.

If anything, I would expect Duolingo to be vastly more effective than other methods.

<comment><USER53> Their A/B testing probably isn't testing education efficacy, but retention and actions that lead to payment/miscellaneous business goals.

<comment><USER34> Ironically, as a user I'd use it more if it were more effective and less grind-grind-grind. But I suppose you're probably right. An efficient, effective learning process feels more challenging and frustrating, which must drive a lot of people away. It must be a solvable problem, though.

<comment><USER25> Author here. I agree that Duolingo is almost certainly not optimizing for language learning effectiveness, which ends up being somewhat of a side-effect of their business model. However, by using the desktop version and turning off the word bank, you can better optimize for effectiveness for yourself.

Duolingo is certainly a grind, but I don't think that's 100% a bad thing. It's far from perfectly executed, but I think you need a certain amount of grind to really drill some of the vocab and grammatical concepts into you.

As an example, in a classroom you do some homework exercises, and maybe get feedback the next day on however many exercises you do. You don't necessarily get to redo the exercises you miss enough to let the concept sink in, and you might do way too many exercises that do nothing for you as you've already internalized the concept. With Duolingo grinding, you have to repeat your weakest points after you get them wrong and get to drill in all the exercises until they stick.

I estimate that each lesson of roughly 20 questions, with redoing exercises I got wrong, takes me something like 3-5 minutes, so in an hour of focused effort you might get 300 exercises in. That's far more exercises than I imagine you do in school for example, and you also get to decide if a unit is too easy and you can afford to skip it, or if it's hard enough where you have to repeat it. Plus, each sentence has a discussion page, many of which (especially the tricky ones) have detailed explanations about the concepts within the sentence.

Duolingo is far from perfect, but despite all the criticism it receives (rightly so for what it claims you can do with 5 minutes a day on the mobile app), you can actually make it a surprisingly effective tool.

<comment><USER34> Oh, I agree it's useful! I'm pretty sure it's a great improvement over my high-school Spanish classes or my rudiments of grade-school French in Canada.

It's just that I moved on nearly as soon as I could to learning by osmosis from reading real books; which, not being deliberate practice, is quite suboptimal in learning rate too, but is a much more tolerable use of time. If they were as effective as I think they could be, I wouldn't ditch them so soon.

I have the unusual issue of being severely hard of hearing and I'm not sure what'll be the effective way to learn spoken conversation if I do move to a French-speaking country. Even hearing English is, uh, problematic in most settings. So this is also an example of tailoring your own approach in view of goals and context. I like reading books, and this most directly got me the thing I like.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER54> Does anybody here have experience of "learning" physics, electrical engineering or material science in 12 months?

By this I mean starting from the very basics to a level where you can comfortably talk about main concepts and start designing or experimenting using your knowledge

</comment><comment><USER55> [https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/opinion/contributors/lear...](https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/opinion/contributors/learning- french-in-middle-age.html)

<comment><USER56> > Being a New York Times Columnist

The article (not the NYT one, which is just typical whiney urban cat lady trash) has a lot of the components of a marketing submarine. Particularly obviously as .... well, who is this person?

I do think apps are pretty helpful in stuffing vocab in the brain. Mixed bag though. Duolingo is shit for me; they don't have continental Portuguese (Memrise does). The rest of it rings true as well (I listen to Portuguese radio at home to work on my understanding when I'm not being a slug).

<comment><USER57> That NYT article is an example of someone basically failing at learning a language, to put it quite bluntly. Learning a language as an adult entails hard work for years and years.

Living in France will not teach you French, besides "survival French" and probably "minimal conversational French". Even having a French partner won't help at all, unless you both commit to speaking French (and then your partner is put into a weird position where they're your partner but have to constantly correct you)...

Acquiring Superior/Distinguished [0] level vocabulary basically entails dense vocabulary study, daily. And then putting it into practice with usage and recognition (i.e. reading French books). Anything else is far too slow.

> _When I try to tell a story in French, I sense that the listener wants to > flee._

The hardest part of learning any language is just accepting that you're going to make mistakes. Maybe French people are more snobbish about French (I have no idea) but generally speaking... people understand that you're taking the time and effort to learn and speak their language.

s/French/<Your Desired Language>/g

I know people who have lived in Korea for 5, 8, 10 years and are frankly still terrible at it. Some of these people _own businesses_ there! Having a bilingual Korean partner is probably the worst thing that I noticed, because you end up always speaking the language that's more convenient, i.e. English.

[0]: [https://www.languagetesting.com/actfl-proficiency- scale](https://www.languagetesting.com/actfl-proficiency-scale)

<comment><USER56> Funny, one my best friends lives in Korea and is terrible at it. I don't think he ever put any effort into it though. I thought about joining him and put a little effort into learning with a Korean friend: the alphabet made a lot of sense anyway!

I have a low opinion of NYT columnists. As you say, you really have to work at it. Reading the peregrinations of someone who admitted they didn't actually work at it, larded with excuses from psychologists (who are measuring people who also didn't work at it) isn't real edifying or useful; we already know how people manage not to do it. Enough people succeed in learning new languages as adults, I'd rather hear from them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER58> There's a lot of meta discussion about learning languages but I'd like to thank the author for two great tips in particular:

* using the desktop version of Duolingo

* the shared Ankiweb decks for <x> most common words in <x> language

I've been slowly learning Spanish via a few short classes and intermittently using Duolingo on my phone.

I'm not even sure I knew a non-mobile version of Duolingo existed until now and it's so much better. Even though I knew that turning off the work bank was better for learning I didn't do it because typing on my phone sucks.

And I had never used Anki before but earlier today I downloaded it and a top 5000 Spanish word deck and already went through my first lesson.

Even these two small things will help me a lot so thank you.

<comment><USER25> Author here. Don't quote me on this, but I think something like 90% of Duolingo users are mobile. Mobile is more "fun" and good for casual users who want to do 5 minutes everyday to feel like they're making progress. I imagine Duolingo's business model leads to it heavily promoting the mobile platform, but thankfully the desktop version is quite good too.

I didn't like the Anki UI at first but I got used to it quickly. My Anki pace of 50 new cards a day was very aggressive, but this was largely possible due to the massive number of cognates between English and French. I imagine the same will hold for you in Spanish, though perhaps to a slightly lesser extent. I think Anki is wonderful for acquiring vocab though, so keep at it and you should do quite well! Also consider making your own Anki deck or using sentences instead of words. While this 5000 word deck was good enough to get to B2 for me, those methods are very likely more effective for long-term retention of more obscure words, although of course they are far more time- consuming.

<comment><USER58> I don't doubt the 90%. You can tell they don't care really care about desktop so it doesn't have the heart system.

Yeah I'll eventually build my own Anki deck. I'm spending a month in Mexico right now so that's definitely helping too :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> Honestly learning french was incredibly easy when I did it in school. I just was too lazy to actually put in the effort. To learn vocabulary all I did was write down the french word and based on that say the translated word and then do the opposite. That's it. It just stuck in my head. Then when I decided to use Anki I added 350 words it didn't even take me a week to learn them. It was so incredibly easy that I just did 150 words per day. I can't say the same about Asian languages. Those refuse to stick even at a moderate pace of 30 words per day.

</comment><comment><USER60> Part of me is disappointed that there's no link to the article in French. :(

<comment><USER61> Isn't the intended audience of the article non-french speakers? So he writes it in a "universal" language so you could apply it on "how to learn <X> in 12 months" where X is your non-native tongue.

<comment><USER60> Yeah, and it is a very informative article. I just wanted to see him slingin' that French. :)

<comment><USER25> Je suis l'auteur. Je pensais à écrire une version française, mais il y a 9000 mots dans l'article ! Ce serait un tache énorme et probablement pas la meilleure façon de passer mon temps, car j'écris bien moins vite en français qu'en anglais. De plus, j'imagine que la grande majorité de gens qui vont lire cet article sont anglophones.

(For those who don't (or do) speak French, I tried to write this: "I'm the author. I thought about writing a French version, but there are 9000 words in the article. This would be an enormous task and probably not the best way to spend my time, since I write significantly slower in French than in English. Furthermore, I imagine that most people who are going to read this article are English speakers.")

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> I learnt French (stopped just shy of B2) in 1.5 years. My learning pace was intensive (4-6 hours/week), but not as much as the author's. So I find the author's statement credible.

My advise to those who want to learn French - after getting the grammar basics, start practicing spoken French as soon as possible. I found two French teachers online and skyped with them 2-3 hours a week. Initially with a bit of English, then entirely in French. Also, a huge help was having a French TV channel always on. I listened to TV5Monde.

<comment><USER63> Yeah, speaking french is hard. You speek with the front of your mouth whereas english is more about the back of your mouth. Totally different muscles.

<comment><USER64> > Yeah, speaking french is hard. You speek with the front of your mouth > whereas english is more about the back of your mouth.

Can you provide some examples of French words that are formed in the front of the mouth that you find difficult to pronounce? English is my native language and I don't speak French, but some of my coworkers do and they occasionally teach me words and phrases. I find it to be the opposite of what you've described in that the most difficult words for me are formed at the back of the tongue/mouth, particularly words containing "r" like "quarante-trois" (the number 43). I remember that word because I was out to lunch with one of my French speaking coworkers and I asked him how to pronounce my order number in French. We both had a good laugh as I struggled to say it without sounding like I was choking.

However, I studied Spanish from middle school through college, and I've noticed that English speakers tend to have difficulty with rolling their r's, which is done in the front of the mouth. Are there French words that have this type of pronunciation too? If so, I understand what you mean about the front of the mouth.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER65> Polyglot here. I'm struggling with written Chinese (traditional Chinese, as I live in Taiwan). Written (traditional Chinese) and spoken (Mandarin) forms are very different, especially in novels but even in news articles. I've got a pretty decent level in spoken Mandarin (most of my colleagues are Taiwanese, meetings are in Mandarin), I can use traditional Chinese to type when chatting with friends online, but I'm completely lost as soon as I open any news articles shared by my Taiwanese friends.

Any recommendations?

<comment><USER66> Have you tried the Guoyu Ribao, or Mandarin Daily News? Seems like you need extensive reading practice, and that might be a good way to start.

I've also heard excellent things about Outlier Linguistics' resources for Chinese characters, assuming you're still spending a lot of effort learning characters.

<comment><USER65> Thanks!

I'll try 國語日報, I'm not sure where to buy it though (it used to be available easily in every 7-Eleven out there but it's been a while since I've seen a copy in a convenience store...).

I already know between 800 and 1000 traditional characters. Looking at Outlier Linguistics products, it seems more targeted towards the entry level. Their Pleco dictionary is nice, though. Reminds me of the explanations one could find in Wenlai (a desktop Chinese-English dictionary with a lot of historical explanations for each characters).

<comment><USER67> 800-1000 characters is not enough. Should be about 2500-3000 characters to be comfortable with reading news and random articles online. I am at this level now, but can't handle novels yet. Need to learn much more vocab for that.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> > Started consistently covering 50 new words a day on Anki

That's a lot! I could never do that... I'm learning Japanese, and I could never imagine myself doing more than 10 words a day.

<comment><USER69> The author definitely benefits from French and English being related languages. Remembering that "interesting" is "intéressant" takes a lot less effort than remembering it is "おもしろい".

I studied Japanese full time for a year and would probably average something like 20 word a day but even that was pushing it. I advise people to aim for 3-5 words a day and be consistent. Adding huge amounts of words very quickly and then giving up on reviewing them is all too common.

<comment><USER25> Author here. You're absolutely correct. Make that deck 5000 non-cognate words and 50 words a day quickly becomes unsustainable. Not to mention the alphabet(s) required for a language like Japanese. French is a language I think any decently well-read person (so as to recognize many of the cognates) can learn vocabulary in surprisingly quickly, considering how much of English vocabulary is derived from French.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> "The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) has created a list to show the approximate time you need to learn a specific language as an English speaker." [0] French ranks in Category I: you wonder if the same method would apply for a Category V language.

[0] [https://effectivelanguagelearning.com/language- guide/languag...](https://effectivelanguagelearning.com/language- guide/language-difficulty/)

</comment><comment><USER71> I've always been interested in languages and over the years I've tried many.

Apps certainly help but I find nothing sticks. I can easily read words of the language in front of me. But I can't think of example sentences on my own.

For French I was amazed at how much of it is condensed. Like English some people jokingly may say "jeet" for "did you eat". In French there are a surprisingly large amount of examples like that.

</comment><comment><USER72> French here. If you travel to a French-speaking country, don't hesitate to speak french, even if it's not perfect. Priority is to be understood. For an english-native, the temptation is probably to speak english because « everyone speak english in the world » (wrong), but generally people prefer listen a foreigner speaking their language with errors than perfect english.

</comment><comment><USER73> I've been using Babbel to learn Spanish. Anyone have suggestions for where to go after maxing resources like Babbel and Duolingo? I feel like I hit a wall somewhere and the next steps aren't so clear. Some of the steps the author used look helpful like changing phone language and heavy use of anki

<comment><USER74> Lingvist [0] has been useful to me for vocab building post-Duolingo. The mobile apps are thoughtfully designed -- you can use text or speech input fairly easily -- and they're rolling out (for Spanish and French so far; I'd expect German will come soon, but Russian seems to be a ways off) the ability to generate domain-inspired personalized courses using sample text you input. I'm mainly practicing my German right now, so I haven't tested it much, but this might be very powerful in combination with Project Gutenberg texts, etc. I also appreciate that they have Spanish courses for both Latin America and Spain.

[0]: [https://lingvist.com/](https://lingvist.com/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER75> The OP did a lot of work learning French, it's always interesting to get a peek into someone's process for something impressive and out of the ordinary. So thanks for the long and detailed write up.

I wanted to point out that the limitations that were encountered are normal. The OP learned 95% of what can be learned without living in the culture itself. Sure, you could learn all these extra details by chatting online, but it's not until you need the vocabulary to get something from the French bureaucracy or to do your job that it all sinks in.

1\. Don't worry about Québécois, most French cannot understand it either. I once saw an interview on French public television that subtitled the French (Québécois) in French. To the French from France, it's a very heavy and rustic accent, such as an Irish or Scottish brogue to an American English speaker. And it has its own local variations, such as between urban and countryside, with all its own idioms as well. The subtitled conversation was an old person in the country, young urban dwellers know to speak slower and clearer on purpose, unless they get familiar with slang and cussing.

2\. Verlan is also just slang, interjections, and cussing, what the young and hip youth speak to be unintelligible on purpose. It also has overtones of poor, working-class, and immigrant identity, thus many layers and uses. Many words have made it into mainstream speech, though never into formal or newscaster speech. And when verlan words became mainstream, the original speakers just flipped the words again and kept on going (not sure if there have been 3 reversals yet). Like in any language, familiar speech can be a minefield: what's used and appropriate depends on whether you are speaking to friends, homies, co-workers, managers, shop-keepers, bureaucrats, family, children, etc,

3\. Phrasing just takes time and exposure to native speakers. All languages have these subtleties, such as gynmase <-> salle de sport and how they are used, so you can only learn them through exposure, not vocabulary decks. Plus the concepts are cultural as well, sometimes we don't have the equivalent concept in American culture, and vice-versa, the concept you want to convey isn't apparent in French culture (for example, membership gyms with weight rooms and such are relatively new in France). The salle de sport might be closest to a rec center or the Y, but both have slightly different cultural connotations in American English as well. This sample also shows how you are/were translating phrases and ideas from English. They sound vaguely off to a French speaker because they would approach the whole topic with different concepts and constructs. That level of expression cannot come until you live in the culture for years and interiorize it's thought patterns.

4\. Verb tenses have rules and everything, but they later just boil down to an extensive vocabulary: you just memorize the words for each case, in the sense that your brain just knows the words for each subject-verb combination. We do the same in English for a few remaining times we use complex tenses: would you have known, what could you have done, etc.

5\. All languages blend and trim words, dontcha know? The French do have a tendency to speak quickly, and compress some of the extra wordiness of the language—so it happens even more than in English.

6\. For complex or technical topics, again it's just about learning extensive vocabulary and word combinations. French isn't that difficult a language to learn (compared to others) but both English and French have some of the largest vocabularies meaning there is a huge mapping from one to the other. French also has centuries of cultural expression and academic publication, and has thus developed both a special style and vocabulary for many domains.

<comment><USER76> >We do the same in English for a few remaining times we use complex tenses

Which we mostly try not to overuse because of the cognitive load it places on the listener. It's also the case that, as a native English speaker, I have no idea what any of the less common cases are even called and would have trouble explaining why they're structured the way they are. I just know the words to use for a given purpose.

</comment></comment><comment><USER77> Nice article, but just a headsup: The website certificate of runwes.com is only valid for the following names: www.github.com, * .github.io, * .githubusercontent.com, * .github.com, github.com, github.io, githubusercontent.com.

Everyhing is alerts and warnings when clicking the link.

<comment><USER25> Author here. I have never configured a website like this so I wasn't aware of these problems. Any tips for fixing this?

<comment><USER78> The problem is because you're using GitHub Pages to host your website on a custom domain. When someone accesses your website via HTTPS, they get a certificate that is only valid for GitHub domains. Of course the HN submission is an HTTP link, so the person you're replying to probably has their browser configured to use HTTPS everywhere.

You can fix this by enabling HTTPS in GitHub pages, so that a valid certificate is served. See GitHub's troubleshooting information: [https://help.github.com/en/github/working-with-github- pages/...](https://help.github.com/en/github/working-with-github- pages/troubleshooting-custom-domains-and-github-pages#https-errors)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER79> In my opinion he'd have done even better throwing away anki and watching way more kid shows. Languages aren't supposed to be memorized. If you're communicating with it, it just sticks in your brain.

When learning to ride a bike You don't memorize when to move your legs.

<comment><USER26> The way you learn as an adult is very different from the way you learn as a child. There's nothing compelling about kid shows. I don't know what drives your efforts to learn a language but, mine are about having access to _interesting_ media, literature, conversations, etc. Speaking like a 4 year old only gets you so far.

And if you want to do it, and do it _quickly_ , you've got to do your Anki reps. Acquire lots and _lots_ of vocabulary so you get through the boring part and start enjoying the use of the language.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> Excellent collection of resources! I'd like to add one: [https://forvo.com/](https://forvo.com/) Forvo is a free site where you can look up words and hear them spoken by native speakers.

</comment><comment><USER81> Interesting! Just today I thought about learning french or spanish with Duolingo. I started with spanish because it seems to be easier to learn. The article was really inspiring tbh, now I really want to stick to it for a year or so.

</comment><comment><USER82> This person has a lot of will power, and I think that is the secret here. I'm pretty weak on will power, which is why I'm not yet B2 level in Finnish after nearly 20 years living in Finland.

</comment><comment><USER57> > Started consistently covering 50 new words a day on Anki

For anyone here who has used anki, that's a huge number. This person is really dedicating their time at this point, because 50 new cards/day very quickly snowballs and you're doing 300+ reviews daily.

I did 20 reviews/day for ~6 months straight for Korean, and that took me 30-60 minutes, every day. Thinking about 50/day sounds utterly exhausting.

It's a good thing a french 5k deck exists also, as they saved a lot of time on not having to make cards manually. On average a word entry takes ~1-2 minutes (I have to query 3 dictionaries), so that comes down to only ~45 words per hour...

\---

> _I firmly believe that learning languages in school, especially in the > United States, is generally extremely inefficient._

This, so much this. Classes provide rigidity but having a tutor + finding people to talk with helps you out significantly more. I went to a language exchange that wasn't bad* where I was able to speak for 1 hour with 1 korean person, a teacher, who would point out my mistakes and write down words when I had to dip into English. My conversational ability improved dramatically after doing that for ~1 month.

* Most language exchanges are shit. Because they're unstructured. People randomly filter in/out and a lot of people are shy or aren't sure what to do. It often devolves into a) "Any korean questions??" or just general conversation. Great for making friends, terrible for seriously practicing Korean.

\---

> _As much as Duolingo likes to tell you this, 5 minutes a day of fumbling > around with the mobile app isn't going to make you fluent._

I get why duolingo does this. At the same time, I hate them for advertising themselves as "the world's best way to learn <Language>". Not only is this not true, their Japanese and Korean courses were (still are?) notoriously terrible compared to their Spanish and French courses. Not that a language can be learned from 1 resource, anyways.

\---

> _On the other hand, since I spent so many hours just casually talking with > people, I got pretty good at having generic conversations._

This is where I got after ~12-15 months as well. I can quite easily converse about basic things like me, my hobbies, work, etc for hours but as soon as the conversation delves into a niche like politics or just more advanced discussion, I falter pretty hard. Also describing things beyond a basic level is rough: "I like this, that" vs "The mood of the film was twisted but exhilarating".

\---

What I find interesting here is how far one can progress in only 12 months with a language like Spanish or French (with a mother tongue of English). For Korean, I wasn't even remotely close to understanding things like news articles at 12 months of study. I'm still not, because that vocabulary is quite advanced and not really used in regular conversations that much.

The simple truth for learning a language is as the author here mentioned: consistent and diligent studying, with humility. There is no shortcut, no one app that does it all. You just have to study, and be able to honestly evaluate yourself and your mistakes. (Recording yourself speaking the language greatly helps here).

<comment><USER83> How's your Korean now? Any other tips for Korean? I spent 4 months in Korea and really want to learn the language, but it seems impossibly difficult. 감사합니다 :(

<comment><USER57> Well, the good news is that its not impossibly difficult! Just very difficult. ;-) As the Koreans say, 화이팅! (Fighting!)

Korean isn't that different from other languages, really. It's difficult for English speakers because there aren't really any commonalities besides random loanwords. And it uses the SOV (subject object verb) pattern instead of SVO. Hangeul was designed to be easy to learn, so unlike Japanese, you'll always be able to read/pronounce any Korean text... even if you don't know what it means.

In some ways Korean is actually easier than, say, German (der/die/das tables, anyone?). The only thing I would say is make sure you focus on good pronunciation. Korean is very particular about mouth shapes and tongue positions. Many Americans especially come off with an accent because they neglect to put their tongue in the right spot. TalkToMeInKorean has a video course for ~$10, highly worth it.

Also, do not romanize! Only use 한글. For example, ㄱ is NOT g/k, it's simply ㄱ. Those are only meant as reference points for brand new learners. Romanizations will only impede your progress for pronunciation.

\---

I would say I'm intermediate in speaking, high intermediate in writing/reading, low intermediate in listening. That is to say, I can converse in Korean somewhat easily for a few hours as long as the topics are relatively basic. Like my occupation, hobbies, what I like, and so on. Listening is still very difficult for "real" conversations, because of dialects, abbreviations/contractions, slang, etc. I can listen to textbook conversations and drama dialogues much more easily. I pretty much only text my friends in Korean.

\---

There are 3 major players for korean learning resources right now, and a few smaller ones:

1) Go!Billy Korean. This guy is really good at korean and IMO is the best at explaining things in a clear manner. He has a youtube channel [0] as well as a website [1] with free PDFs of his lessons. He does a livestream every sunday, but he takes those ~2h videos and condenses them into shorter videos as well. He also has a textbook series which many people like.

2) HowToStudyKorean.com. This is mainly what I used when I started. This guy (over)explains sometimes but there is an incredible amount of material here. The only issue is the lesson order is kinda wack sometimes. I followed it linearly, but I read ahead if I wanted to learn that specific grammar point. I.e. how to say "because", etc.

3) TalkToMeInKorean.com. They have a youtube channel [2] and publish books. I have spent like $130+ on their books so feel free to ask a question about a particular one. The Beginner/Intermediate Korean Conversations books are really good.

Aside from these main resources, I recommend the Korean Grammar In Use textbooks. The beginner one has a good selection of grammar points. However, the main resources I mentioned pretty much cover the same beginner grammar points for free, so this book isn't strictly necessary. IMO the advanced one is worth it.

Other youtube channels I like: Dingo Story [11] has drama clips, around 10-15 minutes. WBKT Yujin [12] does lessons and listening practice, around intermediate+ level.

Apps: ignore duolingo/lingodeer, they have issues with spacing and teaching formality levels. Sejong Beginner Grammar (세종 문법 초급) is good, it has audio as well [3]. It supports android & ios.

\---

Dictionaries: endic.naver.com and krdict.korean.go.kr are the main dictionaries. krdict is better but a bit slower.

There's also a hanja dictinoary at hanja.dict.naver.com, but as a beginner do not start studying that stuff. It'll only complicate things. Once you're at least intermediate or so, howtostudykorean also has a hanja course [17].

\---

Vocab: use Anki [4]. Anki is a spaced repetition flashcards app. The pc/mac/android apps are free, the ios app is $20, which supports the developer. I cannot recommend anki enough for brute-forcing vocab acquisition. I have written about anki here [5] [6], but the manual [7] is also good.

Evita's Korean Deck [8] has almost 6k words, sorted by usage. I highly recommend using this deck, at least for the first ~5-6 months of study. The main issue with this deck is it starts to put multiple definitions on one card, which is a no-no for spaced repetition. There is also a grammar deck with sentences+audio [9], which may be of use once you study a bit more.

At some point you'll want to start maintaining your own deck, inputting vocabulary that you discover from Korean tv shows, books, webtoons, etc.

\---

Native Media: there are plenty of korean dramas. These are recommended because the actors usually focus on clear pronunciation and standard language. There are a lot of comedy/variety shows like Running Man (런닝맨), Knowing Bros. (아는 형님), New Journey to the West (신서유기). Even if you can't follow along much, you can still watch them and write down words you see. I bet you probably know this but Korean tv shows put text on the screen about once per second, so its a good way to pick up random vocab words.

Webtoons [10] are also great, once you are around high intermediate / advanced. Webtoon authors frequently use nonstandard language, dialects, or make mistakes so I don't recommend it for beginners.

\---

Practice: Hello Talk [13] is pretty good for finding people to talk to. However the real selling point is facebook-like posts: You can post longer stuff and Koreans can correct it! My Korean friends literally never correct my Korean (it gets awkward) so I have to use this to practice longer writing.

Just be mindful that some people do try to date on there. As a guy I don't really face that but some of my friends have to block people.

Tandem [14] also exists but I haven't tried it.

\---

Tutoring: Many people recommend tutors from italki [15]. I'm going to try it soon. My friend has a tutor that types up transcripts of their conversations and points out errors, etc. I feel that at some point, you need a personal tutor to help you fix personal issues that you may not notice.

\---

Language exchanges: They're not that good for actually practicing Korean, as most of them are not structured. So people just show up and just end up having conversations in English.

They are good for making korean friends, though. Just be mindful to communicate that you want to practice Korean specifically, and that might mean you guys swap from English (30 mins) to Korean (30 mins), etc.

I just text all my korean friends in Korean unless they specifically ask to split. ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

For Seoul specifically, there is a GREAT exchange near 이대역 called MingleCup [16]. This one is highly structured, and you can get 1-on-1 with a korean teacher for 1 hour! The tradeoff is after that hour, you speak English with different rotating groups of people. (The koreans are coming there to learn English, after all). Its a super fun way to meet people and make friends.

\---

This is all I can think of off the top of my head. Feel free to email me with further questions. I'm also part of the Let's Learn Korean! discord: [https://discord.gg/e3H9Pde](https://discord.gg/e3H9Pde)

There are a lot of knowledgeable students and native speakers there, and its where I got most of these resources from.

I'm also working on a website that compiles all these resources + a grammar search tool into a one stop shop.

\---

[0]: [https://www.youtube.com/user/GoBillyKorean](https://www.youtube.com/user/GoBillyKorean)

[1]: [https://gobillykorean.com/](https://gobillykorean.com/)

[2]: [https://www.youtube.com/user/talktomeinkorean](https://www.youtube.com/user/talktomeinkorean)

[3]: [https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.org.kingse...](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=air.org.kingsejong.grammarbasic&hl=ko)

[4]: [https://apps.ankiweb.net/](https://apps.ankiweb.net/) (Be careful, there is a copycat at [https://www.ankiapp.com/](https://www.ankiapp.com/) which is NOT the same).

[5]: [https://andrewzah.com/posts/things-to-avoid-with- anki/](https://andrewzah.com/posts/things-to-avoid-with-anki/)

[6]: [https://andrewzah.com/posts/better-anki-usage- guide-2019/](https://andrewzah.com/posts/better-anki-usage-guide-2019/)

[7]: [https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html](https://apps.ankiweb.net/docs/manual.html)

[8]: [https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/4066961604](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/4066961604)

[9]: [https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/3614346923](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/3614346923)

[10]: [https://comic.naver.com/index.nhn](https://comic.naver.com/index.nhn)

[11]: [https://www.youtube.com/user/moncastwebdong](https://www.youtube.com/user/moncastwebdong)

[12]: [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC- SYbQJvveakVdU36w2kIcg](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC- SYbQJvveakVdU36w2kIcg)

[13]: [https://www.hellotalk.com/](https://www.hellotalk.com/)

[14]: [https://www.tandem.net/](https://www.tandem.net/)

[15]: [https://www.italki.com/](https://www.italki.com/)

[16]: [http://minglecup.com](http://minglecup.com)

[17]: [https://www.howtostudykorean.com/hanja- unit-1-lessons-1-20/](https://www.howtostudykorean.com/hanja- unit-1-lessons-1-20/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> If you enjoyed this post, you will also like this one:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22344602](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22344602)

</comment><comment><USER85> Just in case the author stops by HN: I want to echo the sentiment that this post was awesome, informative, and motivating. Thank you for posting, and please continue with your blog!

</comment><comment><USER86> Pretty good!

I tried to learn Spanish with DuoLingo only, and I couldn't motivate me to do the whole tree. I only did 1/3, but everything to level 5.

<comment><USER87> I found DuoLingo interesting, but it didn't really help me to learn Spanish. I had a lot more success (I just came back from a trip to Panama where I had to interact with people who spoke little no no English) using [https://www.languagetransfer.org](https://www.languagetransfer.org) (it also has courses for Greek, French, German, Arabic, Turkish, Italian and Swahili).

The courses are sets of MP3 tracks that are free to download, but if you find them useful, please donate!

<comment><USER86> Thanks for the link. I'll look into that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> I learned Toki Pona in a few hours. Highly recommend if you need a language 'win'.

</comment><comment> grayed-down Why learn another language when you can just talk louder?

</comment><comment><USER89> I'm from the future, you should learn Chinese.

</comment><comment><USER90> Uh huh. And I taught myself C++ in 21 days.

</comment><comment><USER91> Native French speaker here... (this is a throwaway account)

I am not judging the overall ability of OP to actually speak French or its methodology but I got triggered by the embedded French text and "correction" [1].

Neither the original text nor the correction make any sort of sense.

Here is the original text :

Je vous propose une deuxième solution : des credits pour s'inscrire à un gymnase proche. Il est évident que faire du sport nous aide beaucoup à bien gérer le stress et améliorer la santé. Cependant, il est parfois difficile de trouver le temps pour s'inscrire à un bon gymnase et se dédier à l'assister, particulièrement quand on est tout seul. Si on donne aux employés des credits pour faire du sport, il sera probable qu'ils se motiveront et ils iront le gymnase ensemble. Cela pourrait beaucoup réduire le stress parmi nos employés et faire en sorte que notre entreprise trouve toujours le succès.

In a conversation, French-speaking people would probably get the general idea if they were to try hard enough but it is at the frontier between gibberish and (young) child level of French.

Let me break it down :

> Je vous propose une deuxième solution : Perfectly fine.

> des credits pour s'inscrire à un gymnase proche "crédits" is an unrelated > term ; "gymnase" is the old-fashioned name for a place where all kinds of > indoor sports take place. If the the idea here is "vouchers for gym > subscription", the closest in French would be "des abonnements à des clubs > de fitness/salles de sport".

> Il est évident que faire du sport nous aide beaucoup à bien gérer le stress > et améliorer la santé. You can improve _your_ health, not _the_ health. > Given that he used "nous", that would be "… améliorer notre santé".

> Cependant, il est parfois difficile de trouver le temps pour s'inscrire à un > bon gymnase Same comment as above regarding "gymnase".

> et se dédier à l'assister Literally translated "dedicate yourself to assist > the gym [the building]". A correct wording would be "et y être régulier".

> particulièrement quand on est tout seul. Perfectly fine.

> Si on donne aux employés des credits pour faire du sport, Same comment as > above regarding "crédit".

> il sera probable qu'ils se motiveront et ils iront le gymnase ensemble. > Here, the conjugation (the tenses) are plain wrong – it's really obvious yet > whoever did the correction didn't have a clue. And it lacks a preposition > and a grammatical article. Literally translated "it is going to be likely > that they will be motivate themselves and they would go to the place where > all sorts of sports take place together". Properly translated "il est > probable que cela les motive et qu'ils participent à cette activité > ensemble".

> Cela pourrait beaucoup réduire le stress parmi nos employés Ok.

> et faire en sorte que That's perfectly fine and the "correction" isn't any > better. They are synonyms.

> notre entreprise trouve toujours le succès. That's fine from a grammatical > point of view but that is not a wording that would be used in that context. > Once again, the "correction" isn't better. The general idea of the text is > that, in the context of a fictional company, providing employees with > vouchers for gym subscriptions could help reduce their overall stress, have > a positive effect on their health and, at the end of the day, contribute to > the success of the company. The last sentence would be used by a sect and > would roughly translate to "our company will always manage to find success".

[1] [http://www.runwes.com/images/learningfrench/image1.png](http://www.runwes.com/images/learningfrench/image1.png)

</comment><comment><USER92> Studying French with audio is a must if you want to learn French to communicate: understand spoken French and speak French yourself. Absolutely. One year is quite enough time to learn a language reasonably well if you put in necessary amounts of daily hours and disciplined study.

</comment><comment><USER93> If you live in Canada or Quebec, it makes sense to learn French. Note that conversational French only uses half of the 14 or so verb tenses, and people expect you to use the correct grammar and gender.

If you plan to write French for a living, that will be tough for a non-native writer.

But if you live in the USA, Spanish is more useful and you'll have the opportunity to practise it.

<comment><USER94> Am I missing something? The author doesn't state where he/she lives.

</comment></comment><comment><USER95> I misread it as 12 minutes, and got really alert for a moment imagining some spooky mind-altering procedures.

Damned age of velocity.

</comment><comment><USER96> French isn't that hard. Lots of words are the same as English, grammar is a bit different but once you 'get' it, it's way more consistent than English which makes it easier for the most part.

<comment><USER94> How long did it take before you were comfortable speaking french?

<comment><USER96> I learned it at school as a kid. Not long. But I've taught others, seen adults pick it up. Like most other skills, it just requires work and practice. Immerse yourself in it, want to learn and you will. Most people simply take an intro course, don't talk to anyone then complain it's hard.

<comment><USER91> I am a native French speaker.

French is hard even for people who speak it on a daily basis.

I am neither a linguist nor an historian (so google it and find reliable sources for more information) but AFAIK, it was designed and reformed to be an "elitist" language (for political reasons), there are gazillions of special cases that do not make any sense (both in the written and spoken language) and there are heated debates about what should be kept or removed (in the perspective of teaching it for instance).</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Disney CEO asks employees to chip in to pay copyright lobbyists - <AUTHOR> http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2016/02/disney-ceo-asks-employees-to-chip-in-to-pay-copyright-lobbyists/ <comment><USER2> > "For your convenience, DisneyPAC has implemented a payroll deduction system, > through which your contributions to the PAC will be deducted from your > weekly paycheck"

The idea of suggesting employees donate to your PAC is tacky, but payroll deductions are just over the top.

While they're at it, they should ask their employees to donate to a fund to help the company purchase office supplies.

<comment><USER3> When I worked at AT&T, we (annually) had presentations by a PAC and if you wanted to have a payroll deduction done, you would stay behind after. They took attendance for these presentations (and for other things like United Way).

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> This is very common. I have been solicited to contribute to PACs at multiple employers. At each employer everyone has understood the career consequences of not contributing. No threat was needed. The law should really require some sort of firewall where corporate management can not know who has or hasn't contributed.

<comment><USER5> I have worked at some very politically charged places, where I was solicited for PAC donations, and declined. It had no effect on my career.

And it makes no sense that employers would even want to retaliate. All PACs want from employees is money, and individual donors are limited to $5,000/year. Anyone who can afford to donate $5,000, would probably cost more than $5,000 to replace, in recruiting, training, and lost productivity.

<comment><USER6> I'm genuinely pleased /you/ haven't been burned by it.

You know sometimes people think those who disagree with them must be stupid? You know how not everyone being paid the same wage is actually worth the same to the business? You know how managers want to lose the "dead wood." You know how we see firing as a part of corporate culture and it comes up here often. "If you aren't willing to fight to keep them you should fire them." Optimal staff turnover ratios that managers are judged on etc.

That.

"I just don't think you're really committed to the goals and ideals of Disney corporation and would be better suited working elsewhere."

<comment><USER5> Disney has 185,000 employees. Their PAC received contributions over $200 from 144 people in the 2014. If they're going to use PAC contributions to pick employees to keep, they're going to have a hard time.

[https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/pacgave2.php?cycle=2014&cmt...](https://www.opensecrets.org/pacs/pacgave2.php?cycle=2014&cmte=C00197749)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> So working in finance I got a letter like this. It included helpful donation levels like:

* Normal salary employee: $100 a year

* Mid level pointy hair boss: $1000 a year

* Double level pointy hair boss: $10,000 a year

I can't remember exact numbers but was that ballpark.. what they asked for the normal guy making 100k was small, what they wanted form the double pointy boss making 300k was a lot more.

Either way, SuperPACs are out of control and we need some mad finance reform. When have lobbyists ever helped the consumer?

<comment><USER8> I am not sure you can blame the SuperPACs exactly. It is the morons who allow their workforce to be politicised and exploited that need be be reformed.

<comment><USER7> > It is the morons who allow their workforce to be politicised and exploited > that need be be reformed.

Can you explain more?

From a business standpoint, the leadership wants the stock price to go up. Their stock is worth more, and they make more money.

Historically, money going to lobbying has a very good return. Say $1 spent lobbying can give your business a $100 return or more if the right laws pass or don't pass. So I hardly thing the executives are "idiots" for telling their workforce to contribute. Do I have moral issues with it? Yes. But I think they are smart and working within the law. The only solution is to fix the law.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> martin-adams Wow, the concept of a PAC is something I never even knew existed. I don't think I get it. Isn't an employer supposed to be a source of money for the employee, not the the other way around. Hypothetically, if Disney have 180K employees, and each did contribute $1000 a year, that comes to $180 million a year.

Now, if the company made around $5bn profit a year, $180m is a mere 3.6% of their profits - why is such a move funded out of the pockets of employees, and not the company profits (i.e. the shareholders). I know why, but if it's really that important, shouldn't it be a company investment and not an employee investment?

Of course my figures are extremely exaggerated, as the actual money raised is in the low millions.

<comment><USER9> It looks bad if a politician accepts a $1000 donation from Disney, but less bad if the politician accepts 1000 $1 donations from 1000 of Disney's employees. I believe this is the premise under which PACs operate.

What I find odd is that PACs only seem to accept contributions from a company's employees. Like, why can't just anyone contribute to the Apple PAC, or the Google PAC, the way that they can contribute to the Wikimedia Foundation or to the EFF to make political change?

<comment><USER5> There are different types of PACs. I forget the exact names, but some are directly attached to organizations, and can only solicit from org people like employees, directors, board members, etc., and some PACs are not affiliated with an org and can solicit from anybody. Emily's List is a famous pro-choice PAC that is not affiliated with any other organization.

As for why PACs exist--they exist for the reason any other organization exists. People can have a greater social impact if they pool their resources, than if they act individually. This is the fundamental basis for nonprofits, corporations, partnerhips, newspapers, churchs, clubs, etc... basically any collection of people brought together by a mission.

The specific thing that ONLY a PAC can do is give money directly to candidates. No other type of organization can give money to political candidates.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> What makes this even more outrageous is Disney's history of outsourcing IT jobs.

Previous discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10969721](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10969721)

</comment><comment><USER11> I would think that if they wanted to redact the amount, they should be careful of the entire letter being "personalized", to be used as a canary trap, as Elon Musk apparently did: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap#Known_canary_trap_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canary_trap#Known_canary_trap_cases)

</comment><comment> gat-bitty I work at a bank and we are asked to voluntarily sign a payroll deduction for our industry pac as well. They don't outright say it but it's generally understood that they keep track of who pays and who does not.

</comment><comment><USER12> Impressively shameless.</comment>


Software Tester (M/with X) Automotive / Infotainment Systeme - <AUTHOR> https://www.meelogic.com/jobs/2019/software-tester-m-w-x-automotive-infotainment-systeme-dresden-2/ <comment><USER2> Again, HN is not a job board. See the FAQ on job postings</comment>


Why Amazon's Data Centers Are Hidden in Spy Country - <AUTHOR> https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/01/amazon-web-services-data-center/423147/?single_page=true <comment><USER2> > When this happens, it usually means that Amazon Web Services is having a > technical problem, most likely in their US-East region.

When I got to this I had to look up at the publish date to see if it was written today. Nope -- it is a year old, but extremely prescient.</comment>


NASA uses GIT as the SCM for their Open Projects - <AUTHOR> http://vmo.nasa.gov/scm/git/

<comment><USER2> I work for NASA Ames (here: <http://ti.arc.nasa.gov/groups/intelligent- robotics/>). A bunch of us use git where we can, and git-svn for the rest of it.

We're going to be meeting with the lawyers in a few weeks to hopefully get official blessing for pushing any NOSA-licensed project (agency-wide) to github. A couple of my group's projects have open-source releases, but don't really practice open-source development (non-committers can't see the repo). I'm trying to fix that :)

I can keep HN posted if people care, or want to use us as a convincing tool- "hey, the federal government is adopting something faster than you are... something's wrong". Obviously, no promises that it will happen exactly as I say, because... lawyers. We just have to get past their trained skeptical conservatism.

It's worth noting, though, that NASA is not even close to a homogeneous entity. My group is one group in one division at one NASA center (and a smaller center, at that). Many groups are run autonomously by their group leads, and culture is mostly maintained at the group level. Open-source is already here, it's just not distributed equally :)

<comment><USER3> I am curious about your Git usage, is there an email address you can be reached at? (your hackernews profile is empty)

<comment><USER2> mike[at]fluffypenguin.org (I've added it to my profile now, too). For some reason, it's taken me a long time to realize that the email I put into my profile isn't visible to others unless I also put it in the about box :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> I could imagine that this might be helpful to convince a boss or a colleague that git is not some obscure hacker tool ("Look, even NASA uses it").

<comment><USER5> really? i'm not surprised at all that nasa uses git to manage open source projects. i'd be more surprised if they didn't.

hearing/confirming that nasa uses git internally for all of their mission- critical code would be something different.

<comment><USER6> Still, just saying "some piece of the federal government uses it" is a very strong case for it being enterprise-ready.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> NASA also uses Django. Here's the first link I found by google: <http://nebula.nasa.gov/services/framework/> but there is also someone whose blog is frequently featured on the Django community aggregator that works for NASA.

... (Searching w/ Reader) ...

Daniel Greenfield! <http://pydanny.blogspot.com/>

<comment><USER8> It's worth noting that Danny Greenfield's team and the Nebula team each choose to use Django independently.</comment></comment>