Zompist Bboard Again

From my own experience, I realise there's a difference between being interested in how languages work and being good at learning them. Inspired by Zompist's essay on the topic I was therefore wondering if people here have had any interesting experiences learning a second (or third) language in practice. What worked for you, and what didn't? And was there anything you wish you had known from the start?

In my own case, learning English lies too far back for me to remember how exactly I did it, other than by going to class - and by watching a lot of movies, I guess. Much later, I learned German while living in a German-speaking country, and that did give me some thoughts on the topic:

- Learning intensively with other learners is great in the beginning, because one can make as many mistakes as necessary without feeling any dumber than everyone else.

- Speaking of the "embarrassment factor", I made friends with quite a few people with whom I spoke English from the outset, and in retrospect, I wish I had just tried getting to know them in German. Once you are comfortable talking to someone in a language you're confident in, it will be really hard to switch to a language where you feel like an idiot.

- Maybe this is obvious, but learning by immersion is so much easier and more effective than classes/excercises/etc. The only languages I know, I have learned by being surrounded by them for a time. On the other hand, I feel that formal "correct" grammar takes longer to really stick when learning through trial and error.

I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on the topic!

I'm afraid the only additional language I ever managed to learn reasonably well is English, and as with you, Flau, I started doing that so long ago that I don't really remember it that well. Later attempts to learn Latin (in school) and Verdurian (on my own) eventually just fizzled out.

I agree that exposure is very important. If you keep hearing and reading more and more texts in a language produced by native speakers, and if you also have a bit of a knack for learning languages, then sooner or later, you should, without even intentionally trying to, develop a kind of instinct for how that language works, what kinds of things speakers of that language usually would or wouldn't say or write, and how they would or wouldn't express themselves.

But there's absolutely no guarantee that this will work. On the internet, I've seen English-language posts written by native German speakers who had apparently been learning and using English for a long time and still did things like using "make" in place of "do".

Speaking of which, part of what motivated me to seek out original English materials instead of translations - and I'm sure that that improved my English at least somewhat - was a frustration with German translations of English texts which had apparently been written by translators who, in order to get their jobs, first had to prove that they had never heard of the idea of False Friends. Or gotten the idea that ways of expressing something that sound perfectly normal and natural in one language might sound awkward, stilted, and artificial in another languages. Really, it did sometimes happen that I heard or read a German text which had been translated from English, I did not have any kind of access to the original English text, but I still thought I had a reasonably good idea of what the English version had said, and how, in my not so humble opinion, it might have been translated better.

Thanks for your input!

Raphael wrote: ↑Mon Apr 06, 2026 1:23 pm I agree that exposure is very important. If you keep hearing and reading more and more texts in a language produced by native speakers, and if you also have a bit of a knack for learning languages, then sooner or later, you should, without even intentionally trying to, develop a kind of instinct for how that language works, what kinds of things speakers of that language usually would or wouldn't say or write, and how they would or wouldn't express themselves.

But there's absolutely no guarantee that this will work. On the internet, I've seen English-language posts written by native German speakers who had apparently been learning and using English for a long time and still did things like using "make" in place of "do".

Good point - I guess one can accidentally teach oneself some bad habits that then take effort to unlearn. It reminds me of when I did an exchange semester and picked up some weird grammar (e.g., I started saying "I didn't went" instead of "didn't go") from hanging out with a lot of other non-native English speakers.

Also, I am surprised to hear that good German translations are hard to come by, with German and English being so widely spoken. Maybe the good translators are just expensive?

Flau wrote: ↑Tue Apr 07, 2026 1:35 pm
Also, I am surprised to hear that good German translations are hard to come by, with German and English being so widely spoken. Maybe the good translators are just expensive?

I'm mainly talking about my memories from the 1990s and 2000s. I don't consume enough translations these days to judge whether my impressions from back then are still valid.

- Maybe this is obvious, but learning by immersion is so much easier and more effective than classes/excercises/etc. The only languages I know, I have learned by being surrounded by them for a time. On the other hand, I feel that formal "correct" grammar takes longer to really stick when learning through trial and error.

I've never taken a French class but I'm confident enough now to read news articles and listen to short-form instagram content in it. The way I've done it is through following lots of French media. It's helped that French social media accounts are more likely to subtitle their videos than English-language ones, which has helped the phono-orthographic matching aspect of language learning

Arzena wrote: ↑Wed May 13, 2026 10:00 am

- Maybe this is obvious, but learning by immersion is so much easier and more effective than classes/excercises/etc. The only languages I know, I have learned by being surrounded by them for a time. On the other hand, I feel that formal "correct" grammar takes longer to really stick when learning through trial and error.

I've never taken a French class but I'm confident enough now to read news articles and listen to short-form instagram content in it. The way I've done it is through following lots of French media. It's helped that French social media accounts are more likely to subtitle their videos than English-language ones, which has helped the phono-orthographic matching aspect of language learning

This sounds much like my progress with learning French. I’m still frustrated at my difficulties in understanding French without subtitles, though. (Like, you know, any real-world conversation.)

I find spoken and especially sung German easy to parse, whereas both spoken and sung French sound like strings of syllables to me. This is probably due to German having similar stress patterns to English, while French conversely does not have stress outside the final syllables of utterances.

Flau wrote: ↑Mon Apr 06, 2026 8:58 am From my own experience, I realise there's a difference between being interested in how languages work and being good at learning them. Inspired by Zompist's essay on the topic I was therefore wondering if people here have had any interesting experiences learning a second (or third) language in practice. What worked for you, and what didn't? And was there anything you wish you had known from the start?

Most of my advice is in that article, but today I'd add that it is now so much easier to find spoken-language material— podcasts, music, Youtube videos, Twitch.

- Maybe this is obvious, but learning by immersion is so much easier and more effective than classes/excercises/etc. The only languages I know, I have learned by being surrounded by them for a time. On the other hand, I feel that formal "correct" grammar takes longer to really stick when learning through trial and error.

I agree with both points. Nothing is so motivating as being in person with people who don't speak your language.

Gotta be careful when they do, however. Last time I was in Brazil, I spent most of my time with Brazilian family who spoke either English or Spanish or both. So my Portuguese didn't improve much!

I feel like a warning is in order about machine translation. Not that it's bad, though it sometimes is, but because it's so easy, for a language you're trying to learn. The brain needs to engage with a fact in some vivid manner for it to be remembered.

Thanks everyone! I agree, the internet is a big deal in this respect. Compared to earlier language nerds we're definitely privileged to have foreign-language media so easily available.

This point actually did bring back one memory of how I learned English: by listening to a scratchy cassette recording of the textbook in class...