Let say in 6 months we are traveling to Europe. What is the best way to learn Italian, German, Russian etc. to be a tourist? I had always heard Rosetta Stone but lately I’ve been reading some bad reviews of it in regards to learning conversational language. Also, let’s assume I’m leaning a language with no speakers around to practice with.
I doubt there’s a GQ answer to the most efficient way for an adult to pick up travel-ready familiarity with multiple languages. I’ll give you my IMHO:
Travel language is basically about memorizing vocabulary, and in particular the spoken word (usually an emphasis on reading and writing is unnecessary unless you’re learning a language like Chinese). If you know the five hundred or so words you’re most likely to want to say and understand, you can get really far in most languages (and certainly the ones you name) even if you have no idea how to conjugate a verb or know where the verb is supposed to go in sentence structure. Since vocab is usually much easier than grammar, given your goal of picking up travel proficiency in multiple languages, I would skip grammar altogether.
Although the proper emphasis is spoken vocabulary, I wouldn’t obsess about native pronunciation. This probably varies by language, but in many languages the only people speaking the standard accent are newscasters, and people will understand you because the context will be obvious. An extra couple of hundred vocab words will go further than correctly pronouncing the word for bathroom, assuming you have a basic grasp of how each language sounds. Moreover, in my experience the people who don’t speak English are far more likely to speak some kind of heavily-accented version of the language (i.e., older people, people outside major cities). So I prefer to just use flashcards, or practice with a partner if you have one.
So it really comes down to how you memorize the words best, and using that method to plug as much vocab into your brain as possible.
Of the various languages you might encounter, I would also order them by easiest for native English speakers to pick up and pick two or three (learning four languages in the next six months sounds like a nightmare to me). There are charts for that all over the place, but it’s pretty obvious: Russian and related languages are gonna be the hardest (unless you’re going to Albania or something), and Spanish and French will be the easiest. Might as well focus your fire where it’ll be most efficient.
Build a frequency list for each language you want to attempt. For most languages, you can easily pull up a frequency list, and often one targeted to travelers. Assume you can learn 10 or so words a day (adjusting for how much time you have and how good your memory is, and keeping in mind that each day you’re going to be reviewing some of the previous days words, so the time will incrementally increase), and then just do the math to figure out how many of the most frequent words in each language you want to learn you can master by travel time. Then make flashcards or whatever for each list.
Heinrich Schliemann, most famous for his discovery of Troy, was a master language learner who was fluent or could “get-by” in English, French, Greek, Russian, Polish, Turkish, and several others. Here’s how he did it.
He learned English in six months by carrying around a dictionary and continually learning new words and sentences from it, attending English church services, and reading aloud from English books and lists of anything written in English. He learned French in the next six months by the same method. He got in the habit of keeping his diary in whatever language he was learning. Dutch, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese took him about six weeks each, with the advantage that he was living in Amsterdam and his native language was the closely-related German, and that the following three are all very similar to one another.
To learn Russian, Schliemann couldn’t find a tutor, so he taught himself the Russian translation of *Telemachus *and recited it by heart. His employers were impressed enough by this to send him to Russia, where he mastered the language. He learned modern Greek in six weeks, then set himself to the famous difficult ancient Greek, which took him three months.
I don’t think there is a proper answer to your question. I’ve taught & tutored various languages and find that everyone learns language in a different way. People will come in assuring me that they are no good at languages, they’re rubbish, they just can’t do it. But they learned their first language just fine. And they can learn another, they just need to find the way that works for them.
So maybe it’s through structure: rules, grammar. For some people that just clicks.
Maybe it’s memorising vocab, then learning the rest around that. Maybe reading texts and translating.
Maybe it’s listening and imitating sounds. Maybe it’s interacting with people: reading body language and getting the meaning from that. Maybe it’s watching sit coms with subtitles.
For most people a combination works best, that’s what schools try to do. But if you need to learn basics fast, you’d be best off knowing how you learn and also what’s important to you when you communicate. For example, Richard Parker’s suggestion would make sense to some people, but I would not be able to communicate like that. I speak 7 languages, but if I have no grammar I’d rather mime. I need to learn grammar to speak sentences.
Once you’ve learned several languages you know how you learn, and you don’t need to follow set programmes anymore. You can just buy a grammar, dictionary & dvd of local sit com and study your own way.
The fastest way to learn languages is to be experienced learning languages.
Can you clarify what you’re trying to do: Learn one of those languages or all of them?
If just one, I’d stick with Rosetta stone and spend as much time as you can with it. If you’re trying to learn 3 or more… good luck! Stick to the common phrases: Where is… how much… learn the numbers, directions, key food items. common verbs (want, come, go, give, tell, know, etc), learn some colors, articles of clothing,
Glad you found the reviews before wasting your money on the hugely overpriced and overhyped Rosetta Stone. It’s an amusing little game for an hour or two, and is okay for learning single words, but is useless for developing any actual fluency. I used it for about 10 hours total, and in that time I never even got close to knowing how to say something simple like “hello, how are you” or “What time is it?”.
Rosetta Stone, IMHO, is one of those products that is absurdly expensive not because it is worth anywhere near the money they charge, but due to clever, aggressive marketing. After all, some folks might think, a program that costs over $600 has to be pretty awesome, right? It’s not. Having used it, then finally lost interest and switched to better software, my estimation of its value is about $75. $600 is ludicrous.
When my wife and I were preparing for a trip to Germany a few years ago, we got Berlitz CDs from the library, and listened to them in the car. The first lessons focussed in the phatic phrases - “hello”, “good morning” “thank you”, and others - and featured lots of repetition. Later lessons moved to very basic sentences like “I am an American”, and “I would like a beer, please” and again, lots of repetition. In fact, we heard Wo ist der Goethestrasse? (“Where is Goethe Street?”) so often that it became a joke, and we looked for one in every city we visited. We were delighted when we finally found a Goethestrasse in Leipzig.
When we got to Germany, we were able to get around with just these bare bones of the language. I mean, we weren’t going to read Thomas Mann in the original, but we were able to get around a city and order food at a restaurant.
As has been pointed out above, your learning style may be different. But don’t stress over attaining proficiency; if you’re just traveling, you don’t need more than a very basic understanding of the language.
I would suggest that you do get the social words and phrases down pretty well. It’s just polite to start off in the native language, even if just to say, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak X, do you speak English?” Shows that you realize you’re not in Kansas anymore.
Date a multilingual European woman… Watch movies in foreign languages. Listen to music in foreign languages. Watch the news in foreign languages. Get a dictionary. Don’t waste money on Rosetta stone… Any cheap book and/or language CD will work good enough. The most important ingredient in learning a language is motivation…
Get a Ham Radio license and an HF RIG if you want to practice speaking other languages with people around the world.
There’s been a new development in the field of teaching Thai.
Second this. In the short term it’s much better to know a decent number of nouns and verbs than perfect grammar, or even, within reason, correct pronunciation IME.
In terms of phrases, it’s fine to memorize some of the basic ones, but if you want to say more complex sentences then at that point it’s time to learn the rules for constructing sentences rather than trying to use memorization.
Finally, it’s very useful just being able to read out words written in a foreign language.
And, since many European languages are more phonetic than English, you can get a decent grasp of how to read some languages in as little as an hour.
For those languages that you are not going to have time to study this is well worth doing.
I am English and have holidayed in many of the countries you mention (Russia excepted). I have a little French from school so that is a help and I do try to learn some very basic words in the local language wherever we go.
In my experience English in various forms is widely spoken in tourist areas all over Europe. If you can say please, thank you and hello in local, order a beer, and say some numbers (1 to 10 and 100) then you are streets ahead of most of your fellow tourists. The locals do appreciate the effort.
Buy a pocket phrase book with a menu translator in it for each language - in my experience this is the main problem area. Many restaurants have English translations available but you can’t rely on it and a menu can be daunting.
At least in mainland EU you only have one currency, the Euro currently costing around $1.35.
Just came in to say Rosetta Stone is a colossal waste of money. It truly should be taught as an example in marketing.
I’m a grammar guy (I speak/read a number of languages fairly well); I’m also a sound guy, but it’s a waste of time at the beginning of learning, except for one thing: when you hear speech, it is basically an undifferentiated wave of sound, without the helpful white spaces that tell you when a word begins or ends. There, calling upon your knowledge of the sound profile of a word gives you a chance to eke them out in the sound wave. That’s probably the greatest stumbling block when you are in the wilds with live speech.
Actually, this post reads more dispiriting than it really is. Have fun!