If you go to language-learning forums (e.g. the Japanese learning subreddit) you’ll find a lot of people who spend 95% of their time wanking with learning tools, and 5% (or less) actually studying. Everyone thinks the tools are the problem. Moreover, fixing tools is easier and less painful than doing the grueling work of learning a language. As a result, lots of people get caught in the trap of believing that fluency is One Good Tool Away. It isn’t.
The most important part of the parent’s comment is the one you overlooked: you need to listen and interact with people in the native language. The more hours you spend talking with people in your target language, the better you’ll become. Tools help on the margins, but there’s no magic bullet that will eliminate the time and exposure required.
Unless you're starting as a small child, you will never pick up words that do not occur frequently just from listening and interacting. Or it will take many more years than it ought to get to a given level.
Knowledge of a large number of these words is required to become competent, because, as a category, those words are coming at you all the time. Problem is, you don't know which one of the many thousands is coming your way next on any given day. The author of this article makes the same remark, basically:
> But there’s also an enormous amount of low-frequency words and syntax that even native speakers might encounter only once a year. Knowing any one of these “occasional” words or phrasings isn’t essential. But in every context — a book, an article or conversation — there will probably be several. They’re part of what gives native speech its richness.
If you don't know these words, you don't know a lot of what you're listening to. You might have this explained to you, and so then in that session you are okay with those words. However, without follow-up repetition, those words will soon evaporate.
I live in a highly multicultural country, Canada. Here you can encounter immigrants who have been here 25 years or more, whose English still sucks; and it's not always due to only associating with speakers of their native language. They use English everyday and interact with English speakers, all right. It's simply due to not mustering the academic wherewithal to study properly.
>you’ll find a lot of people who spend 95% of their time futzing with learning tools, and 5% (or less) actually studying
Exactly my point. It shouldn't be necessary to spend all that time futzing with tools, the tools should be there, ready to use.
>you need to listen and interact with people in the native language.
Such people are not available in all areas. Online availability does not scale. These are precisely the issues that digital tools should be good at addressing, but have failed to do so.
”Exactly my point. It shouldn't be necessary to spend all that time futzing with tools, the tools should be there, ready to use.”
It isn’t necessary. The tools are fine, and/or improving them won’t solve the fundamental problem. People are just procrastinating.
”Online availability does not scale. These are precisely the issues that digital tools should be good at addressing, but have failed to do so.”
Short of making an AGI that fluently speaks your target language, there are no obvious improvements to learning tools that will address the fundamental problem: you need to talk to actual humans.
> there are no obvious improvements to learning tools that will address the fundamental problem: you need to talk to actual humans
When learning to speak and listen, you need to already understand perhaps 80% of what actual humans are speaking in order to learn the other 20% you don't already understand. If you speak to someone and only understand say 30% of what they're speaking and they you, you won't pick up any of the 70% you don't understand, assuming the native speaker even wants to continue talking to you. Interactive software tools must deduce what vocab and grammar you can already understand and speak only that plus the 10% extra it wants you to practise and reinforce. And those tools don't exist. Good language teachers who can do the same are expensive.
Reading materials are far better in this regard, but even there, most of them use a specific learning sequence as defined by national language testing and don't cater for most learners who learnt haphazardly and thus whose current knowledge is scattered all over that continuum.
If that is true, then not only digital tools, but all books, classes, tests and every other technique aside from what you recommend for language learning are fraudulent wastes of time.
Language learning courses and tools are just ways to kickstart normal language acquisition, so you don't have to go through the years of gurgling like a baby has to. Learning to communicate in a new language isn't exactly like learning some other kind of skill--it's much, much huger.
When you're speaking your native language, you're decoding and processing complex social signals in real time at multiple levels of structure (phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic). Even the best AIs can only get a couple of these levels of structure, with significant error rates, and only in a handful of well-studied languages (there are hundreds or thousands of natural languages). How much time does it take for you to learn 1000 vocabulary words? A natural language will have tens of thousands. A comprehensive grammar of the English language would be dozens of heady volumes and have less information about English grammar than any competent native speaker.
Learning a language is just an astonishingly huge task. No course or system can cover it all. Mostly they're just trying to make things easier for you.
I have an uncle who speaks 6 different languages; he really likes picking up new ones. I once had a discussion about how he could pick them up so quickly and he basically said what the parent was saying: use it, practice it, read newspapers in it, speak to people that speak it too. Immerse yourself, accept that you'll be uncomfortable for a while, and before long, you'll be able to hold a simple conversation.
He also said you know you are fluent the day you can casually joke in real time with people and make them laugh (at the joke!)
The most important part of the parent’s comment is the one you overlooked: you need to listen and interact with people in the native language. The more hours you spend talking with people in your target language, the better you’ll become. Tools help on the margins, but there’s no magic bullet that will eliminate the time and exposure required.