My guess is some company has developed a language course app or program and set up an agressive marketing campaign. I see that ad with those two bearded guys all the time.
The beauty of the ad is that they make it a competetive thing. “HE speaks four languages, how many do YOU speak?” They are vague about the profits of it all. And they should, because there is very, very little profit in speaking a language like they teach it.
Commercial at home courses like that usually get abandoned around lesson four. And even if completed, you learn enough to stumble out a few polite expressions with a heavy accent.
In Dutch schools, lessons in German, French and English are compulsory two- three times a week for at least two years. An additional three years if you decide to keep them ( one foreign language is compulsory, most people take English). Still, if we only had the language classes from school, we would all be lousy speakers. That is how I learnt French and I know it only at the basic level where you talk to waiters and loosely understand a really dumb tabloid.
No, immersion is a far, far better way to learn a language. Dutch people are immersed in (subtitled) foreign languages for hours a day through TV programs, internet, etc. Form a young age. THAT is how people learn. That is how I learnt English.
For my seven-year-old son, having a foreign kid in his class is normal. Expats, refugees… One of his classmates was a Finnish girl and she learnt to speak Dutch fluently in the two years her mom worked at our University. Same with a little Greek boy, and a Portuguese kid. They came in speaking with their hands and left bantering slang expressions.
So, in short, I thinks those online languages courses are a bogus product. And I also think it silly that all of a sudden learning a language seems the IT thing to do.
Well I mostly agree, but let me get out the one way I disagree first:
I think many people have this idea of language being binary; and you’re either fluent or you is ain’t.
In reality of course, there are lots of points along the way and just learning a relatively small vocabulary can still be very useful.
My Spanish and German are pretty poor, for example, but since their written language is very phonetic, I can read either out pretty accurately, which has proven very useful. And that did not take long to learn.
Languages that aren’t so phonetic have “quick wins” in other places (for example chinese numbers, days and months are very logical and you could probably learn them all in an afternoon).
Heck, just being able to say “cheers” in various languages has been indispensable
But I agree that there’s an unrealistic idea many people have of how much effort and immersion is required to become proficient in a language.
I think it’s because old-fashioned ways of teaching language were boring and frustrating, so when many of us try apps like Pimsleur, Anki or Memrise, it’s exhilarating, and feels like learning a language can be a snap. And it makes commercial sense for businesses to pander to that feeling.
But of course really learning a language takes a huge amount of practice. And some degree of risk / embarrassment really helps vocabulary stick in there…private study often doesn’t give you that.
Also, without sounding too much like I’m making excuses, I don’t think we’re so far away from good real time translation apps. If you don’t know whether you’ll need to learn language X in the next couple of years, I would factor that into my decision to make the huge investment in time that learning a language takes.
That’s on thing that always irks me about movies and tv shows, if people speak a second language they can always switch to it fluently. Even if they haven’t spoken it for ages.
I can converse to some extent in a handful of languages and my fluency is different for all of them. With the exception of my native language, nobody will confuse me for a native speaker of any of the other languages. Even when I use English on a daily basis.
In any case, if I haven’t spoken a language for a while it takes a few days to get back to “my level”. If someone would address me in that language out of the blue, the chances are I’ll be stumbling and stuttering when trying to come up with an answer.
As an aside to Maastricht, I took 6 years of French in high school (also the Netherlands) and very little of it stuck. Although I guess I understand more then I think when I need to.
True, but not everyone has that opportunity. I wish I had learned another language as a child while my brain was still elastic, but I didn’t. The fact that I didn’t then is a pretty foolish reason to refuse to learn one now.
I’m sure some of them are. I’m pretty impressed with Duolingo so far.
I hadn’t noticed that it was the IT thing to do, but as far as IT things go, I rank it way above selfies and planking.
Well, yeah, but as you say you are Dutch and you were fortunate (?) to be born in a country with a language few foreigners speak. Many of us non-Dutch are in a completely different position. I never had the opportunity to study a language other than English until I was in the 8th grade.
BTW, I’ve been to The Netherlands several times, and I was always amazed at how people flipped back and forth between English, Dutch, French and German as if it were nothing. You guys rock, as far as foreign languages go!!
Only, very often the opinion of those members of the watching public who actually speak it is “like fuck they can”. It’s amazing how many grammar and pronunciation mistakes can be packed into “good morning, I would like a room for one night”.
Because investors suddenly realized that people can be persuaded/shamed to spend money to learn a foreign language. The answer to any question beginning with "Why . . . " can always be answered with “Follow the money.”
Interesting that, of all the shareware on the internet, you can’t find a free language-learning program.
I wasn’t aware it had suddenly become trendy. Studying a second language has been fashionable my whole half century of life, and was fashionable for thousands of years before that.
If you’re seeing lots of ads for “learn a language” it’s because business thinks it can make a buck off it.
Someone mentioned Duolingo. Check that out. I signed up for it when it first came out. I never followed up on it but it sounded like the real deal, and free.
Studying a second language is good for your brain, even if you never use it. (heh)
The translation tools like the Google translate do a terrible job for even text unless they are cleaned for even the straight text, sounding strange and making numerous errors.
in a near future it may be you will have a tool that allows you to speak like an American who learned the French in the high school and avoid the massacre enough to be barely understood, but it is not going to be any thing like any fluency.
I agree. I haven’t noticed a big change in ads for language study. The one I hear most often is Rosetta Stone, but I’ve been hearing those ads for years.
I disagree.
It’s funny to point out the errors, but I think the tools are actually improving very fast. And it’s a perfect problem for the deep learning systems which are being aggressively worked on right now (and already rolled out for related problems like OCR).
I’d be willing to bet a sizeable amount of money that within 10 years we’ll have real time audio translate that will be almost entirely correct. That it will make fewer errors than most human translators (given that RT translate is very challenging).
10 years is just because I’d be betting money, my suspicion is that within 5 years is likely.
Yeah but that was a purposeful joke. Usually it’s a matter of the writer and the team being too lazy to check. Because after all, nobody who actually speaks whatever-exotic-language-that-is will ever watch the movie or read that book untranslated, right? Mijin, the tools which are improving are those which use databases of translated fragments (such as Google translate). Those trying to apply rules haven’t improved at all in the last 20 years. It doesn’t really seem like “AI improvements” are very helpful there, or at least not as much as “disk drive size” is.
Google Translate still has some work to do. It works well with languages where it has acquired lots of texts, but others, not so much. Romanian is a language with 20+ million speakers, not an obscure tribal dialect. But when I looked up the Romanian wikipedia entry for sorcerers from folklore, it gave me:
“Also of ascetics, solomonarii live far from the world, on the other realm, but down through villages to beg although not need anything, and where they are not getting better, stray dragon hail. Their knowledge is transmitted from master to apprentice, he took an old solomonar mark the birth of children (CAIT carriers, a membrane that covers the head and body) and increased their caves of the earth. The name “solomonar” and it just gets in the Middle Ages under the influence of Judeo-Christian culture due to the phonetic similarities with the local term “salman”. Most people relate to stories tall, ruddy, with white robes, with waist magic tools or begging in villages or hail dragons riding alone or with poltergeist. To shun anger shaman, people could call a master mason, a solomonar back among men, but he knows magic.”
“Stray Dragon Hail” will be the first single by my new metal band, Änger Shämän.
It is known.
