HN Books @HNBooksMonth

I took the trouble to classify all of these according to Huddleston & Pullum ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/0521431468 ). For most of these, they're just fixed (or nearly-fixed) expressions.

1. The Philippines / The United States / The Great Lakes / the poor

5.8.4(b), Fixed expressions containing the definite article.

"In such cases, it is largely arbitrary that the definite article is required rather than a bare noun."

(kaoD says 'I don't think most native speakers realize "poor" is an adjective here', but there's good reason for that -- it is not ordinarily possible to construct a the+adjective phrase.)

Examples: [17iii] I have (the) measles.; [17v] We caught the bus.

2. A means of production

This is not at all idiomatic (Marxist rhetoric invariably refers to the means of production), so this is a simple example of 5.6.2, The indefinite article a.

"The indefinite article a is the most basic indicator of indefiniteness for singular count nouns." (here, means)

Example: [9a] Bring me a ladder!

3. A number of hamsters.

5.3.3(a), Number-transparent quantificational nouns

"Both [number and couple] occur in singular form with an obligatory determiner (usually a, but others are possible []), and in addition number can occur in the plural, and take a limited range of adjectival modifiers"

"The definite article the does not occur with number in the sense we are concerned with here."

Examples: [58i] We found huge numbers of ants swarming all over the place.; [58v] An unusually large number of people have applied this year.

4. The number of hamsters.

5.6.1, The definite article the

"The definite article the is the most basic indicator of definiteness."

"Use of the definite article [] indicates that I expect you to be able to identify the referent -- the individual ladder, the set of ladders, the quantity of cement [or quantity of hamsters] that I am referring to."

In order for this phrase to be grammatical, you need to use number in its ordinary, non-quantificational sense, as in "That depends on the number of hamsters you've put in the cage".

Examples: [1] Bring me the ladder!; [6vii] They are interviewing the man who mows her lawn.

5. A shirt / a piece of furniture / a pair of pants

You appear to be talking about the difference between mass nouns (pants / bread / furniture) and count nouns (shirt). This is discussed in 5.2 ("Overview of noun classes and NP structure"), but has absolutely nothing to do with definiteness or choice of determiner. However, a cannot be used with mass nouns because a requires a count of one, and mass nouns cannot be counted.

6. A lion chased him. (a particular lion)

5.6.2, The indefinite article a

Exactly the same as in "a means of production".

7. A lion is a ferocious beast. (lions in general)

5.8.3(i), Generic interpretations

"The interpretation of singular indefinites in the same context, like a lion in [iia], is correspondingly "any lion that exists."

"The generic use of a singular definite like the lion is also possible in the context given in [iiia], but is an example of the restricted 'class' use of the definite article (see 5.8.4 below). If instead of lions we were talking about doctors, the definite singular would not generally be possible"

"In The lions are ferocious beasts, the plural definite the lions would also obligatorily be interpreted non-generically."

"With predicates that can only be applied to a set, a singular indefinite generic such as a lion is inadmissible"

Examples: [14i] Lions are ferocious beasts. ; [14ii] A lion is a ferocious beast.; [14iii] The lion is a ferocious beast.; [16c] This chapter describes the English noun phrase.

----

I have no real point; this was mostly for fun.

However, I'm a little confused as to why "a means of production" / "the number of hamsters" / "a shirt" / "a lion chased him" are in your list, since they're typical examples of the most common use of the / a as described above.

There is some overlap between the poor and the class use of the definite article, but it's not a perfect match, because it isn't possible to use poor in the same sense without accompanying it with the.

⬐ dragonwriter

> kaoD says 'I don't think most native speakers realize "poor" is an adjective here

That's because...it is not an adjective there. It is a mass noun.

⬐ thaumasiotes

I'm not agreeing with him. But "it is a mass noun" has its own problems. It isn't possible to use "poor" in that sense without using the full phrase the poor. I think it's best analyzed as a fixed phrase.

⬐ kaoD

> I think it's best analyzed as a fixed phrase.

And how did that phrase come to be? Noun ellipsis in "the poor people" (or "the poor ones" to be more general).

⬐ thaumasiotes

Definitely not. Try finding a citation for the phrase you conjecture, without the ellipsis.

It seems more likely to have originated as a direct calque of French les pauvres.

⬐ kaoD

18 million results in Google.

Another example: "the Chinese people" (we'd just say "the Chinese"), 10M results.

> It seems more likely to have originated as a direct calque of French les pauvres.

Definitely. Spanish "los pobres" too. Phrases with adjectives as nouns (again, I'd say originating from ellipsis) are very common in romance languages.

E.g. "los rojos" = "the red ones"

Notice how in English my proposed adjective ("poor") lacks the plural "s" (like adjectives do in English) unlike Spanish/French, which do agree adjectives plural forms with their nouns.

⬐ thaumasiotes

> 18 million results in Google.

That's not a response. Those results are overwhelmingly not synonymous with the phrase "the poor", which would be clear immediately if you looked at them.

If I search for "the poor people", I get told there are 22M results. The entire first page is taken up by references to a proper noun, The Poor People's Campaign; searching for '"the poor people" -campaign' cuts reported results to 12M, and the new results prominently feature The Poor People's Crusade. This is not a compelling argument that the phrase "the poor people" is permissible in the same contexts that allow "the poor" (which would be necessary if this were a case of ellipsis).

> Another example: "the Chinese people" (we'd just say "the Chinese"), 10M results.

That's a much better example; I'm willing to concede that "the Chinese people" and "the Chinese" mean the same thing and can be used in the same ways. But you haven't made the argument that the equivalence between "the Chinese people" and "the Chinese" transfers over to an equivalence between "the poor people" and "the poor".[1] I claim you cannot do this, because "the poor people" and "the poor" are not equivalent.

Note also that the parallel construction to "the Chinese" is "the Italians", not "the Italian". But we obviously can't claim that "the Italians" is ellipsed from "the Italian people". We also shouldn't claim that "the Chinese" is ellipsed from "the Chinese people".

[1] For one thing, people in "the Chinese people" is not even the same word as people in "the poor people"; "the poor people" uses Merriam-Webster's sense 2 ("plural form of person"), while "the Chinese people" uses sense 5 ("singular noun of which the plural is peoples; a body of persons that are united by a common culture, tradition, or sense of kinship"). https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/people

⬐ dragonwriter

> But "it is a mass noun" has its own problems. It isn't possible to use "poor" in that sense without using the full phrase the poor.

Sure, there's a very broad class of syntactically plural mass nouns without singular countable forms for which that is the case — interestingly, countable nouns with a similar relation to adjectives can become mass noun when their plural form is used with “the”.

⬐ thaumasiotes

> Sure, there's a very broad class of syntactically plural mass nouns without singular countable forms for which that is the case

Can you give an example of what you're talking about? If you mean something like "scissors", that's not true -- it's perfectly possible to say "I like scissors".

⬐ dragonwriter

> Can you give an example of what you're talking about?

Pretty much all (there's probably some exceptions, because English) nouns that are syntactically plural and written identically to an adjective are mass nouns used exclusively with the definite article and with the sense of “those (usually specifically people, but this can vary by context) to whom the adjective applies as a mass”. In addition to poor, you have strong, weak, educated, etc.

Nouns where there is a singular form written identically to the adjective tend to have a plural with two senses, both a countable sense that is a normal plural of the singular form and an uncountable sense identical to that of spelled-like-adjective plurals. Examples include Italian/Italians, etc.

⬐ thaumasiotes

Ah, ok.

As a technical note, I wouldn't call those words "syntactically plural". They are syntactically plural in that they can be the subject of verbs inflected for a plural subject, but that's not the best criterion. There are a few relevant questions:

1. Does it have the form of a plural noun?

2. Does it take plural verb agreement?

3. Does it take singular verb agreement?

Phrases such as "the poor" are hard to call "syntactically plural" because they fail criterion 1. They pass criteria 2 ("yes") and 3 ("no"), but nouns that are syntactically singular can also pass criterion 2.

Scissors (syntactically plural, semantically singular):

1. Yes. Scissors appears to be a plural noun in terms of raw morphology.

2. Yes. Scissors has obligatory plural verb agreement.

3. No. Despite the semantics, scissors has obligatory plural verb agreement.

Family (syntactically singular, semantically plural):

1. No.

2. Yes. My family are all painters.

3. Yes. My family is coming to visit me this summer.

With only the verb agreements supporting the classification of "the poor" as plural, you get into an unresolvable argument over whether singular verb agreement doesn't happen because it's impossible (syntactically plural) or because "the poor" are always being considered plurally (syntactically singular).

If you want to consider "the poor" as a mass noun, you also run into the problem that there are no syntactically plural mass nouns. Mass nouns are always syntactically singular. (Well, this depends on how you want to classify scissors and pants, I guess.)

⬐ dragonwriter

English has no “form of a plural noun”; it has a regular pattern of how, for countable nouns, singular and plural forms relate to each other (and even for such pairs, there are a number of irregular patterns with multiple examples, and a number of pairs with sui generis relations.

“Family” is a singular collective noun; singular collective nouns are a special case and can take plural or singular verbs. “Poor" is a plural mass (not collective) noun, it takes exclusively plural verbs

> If you want to consider "the poor" as a mass noun, you also run into the problem that there are no syntactically plural mass nouns

There's a whole broad class of them that are structurally just like "poor" as I mentioned and gave examples of in the grandparent post. Sure, if you ignore that broad and very frequently used class of mass nouns, there aren't any other plural mass nouns. But...

> Mass nouns are always syntactically singular. (Well, this depends on how you want to classify scissors and pants, I guess.)

Scissors and pants are normal countable (and so, not mass) plural nouns that just happen to not have a singular form because the quantum unit is conventionally taken to be a pair. This isn't really in question anywhere.

⬐ thaumasiotes

> Scissors and pants are normal countable (and so, not mass) plural nouns that just happen to not have a singular form because the quantum unit is conventionally taken to be a pair. This isn't really in question anywhere.

I don't have a strong position on this, but they aren't normal countable plural nouns. "Two pants" is ungrammatical; it must be "two pairs of pants".

(Expanding a bit: it's easy to say that "one pants" is impossible because pants is plural. But pants require counting in pairs regardless of how many you're talking about; it's not just a restriction on grammatical number. Whether you think "four pants" should correspond to "four pairs of pants" or "two pairs of pants", it isn't possible to say "four pants", and this is not normal behavior for a count noun.)

⬐ kaoD

It's a mass noun just because the adjective turned into a noun (sorry, don't know the technical terms in English) when the real noun was elided.

In "the poor people", "poor" is an adjective. If you elide "people" and turn the phrase into "the poor", it has to be a noun (otherwise we'd have a noun phrase without a noun).

Though IMHO it's better analyzed as an adjective with an elided noun, but I'm afraid I lost that war ages ago :shrug:

But I personally prefer to analyze what makes sense, not what's written (considering language is language). I'd rather have a regular case with an ellipsis than "oh, it's just a fixed phrase" and a zillion other corner cases.

沒錯。After reading the fine article kindly submitted here and all the previous comments, I think I should draw on my education and life experience to comment too. I have been studying the Chinese language since 1975, my undergraduate major subject in university was Chinese language, and have I lived after university graduation in the Chinese-speaking world for two three-year stints (mid-1980s and spanning the turn of the last century). I have worked for many years as a Chinese-English translator of written texts and as a Chinese-English interpreter for official visitors to the United States. Besides learning Mandarin well enough to work as an interpreter, I have also studied other Sinitic languages, such as Taiwanese, Cantonese, and Hakka. My university studies acquainted me not only with Modern Standard Chinese but also with Literary Chinese.

The blog post kindly submitted here is by a linguist, Geoffrey Pullum, who specializes in the English language and who co-edited the most definitive grammar of the English language.[1] Pullum is not a specialist in Chinese language but he cites the numerous writings of Victor Mair,[2] who does have deep professional knowledge of the Chinese language. Simply put, the author's comments are linguistically and sociologically correct. My nieces and nephews who grew up in the Chinese-speaking world were faced with a considerably more difficult task in learning to read and write than was strictly necessary, solely because of clinging to the tradition of writing Chinese in the traditional characters rather than the alphabetical writing systems that are used EVERYWHERE in the Chinese-speaking world for initial reading instruction.

The late Y.R. Chao, an eminent Chinese linguist, made the simple point about alphabetical writing of Chinese: if one claims that alphabetical writing cannot be understood, that is equivalent to claiming that Chinese people cannot speak to one another over the telephone. But in fact Chinese people can speak to one another over the telephone just fine--I have seen it done, and I have been party of many international voice-only conversations in Chinese. See a whole book The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy by the late John DeFrancis,[3] a linguist who specialized in the study of the Chinese writing system, for more details.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/The-Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language...

[2] http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?author=13

[3] http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Language-Fantasy-John-DeFranci...

It says a lot about the broken sensibilities of higher education that an Historian

The author of the blog post kindly submitted here is not a historian by occupation or training. He is a linguist who specializes in the study of the English language.[1] (He is a co-author of the definitive grammar of English, the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language.[2]) He writes "Let me state very clearly that I don’t intend any of this in triumphalist spirit" because that is the way that all scholars trained in linguistics write about language differences: languages are not better or worse, if they are natural human languages, but just arbitrarily different in interesting ways that seem to have an arbitrary relationship to their use in human society. That includes the issue of which languages become widespread around the world and which do not--that appears to have very little to do with specific features of each language, despite some of the discussion here.

[1] http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/

http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/wikipedia_is_wrong.html

[2] http://www.amazon.com/The-Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language...

One of the great benefits of the Hacker News community compared to most online communities is that Hacker News is truly international. We are blessed here with comments by participants from all over the world, many of whom did not grow up speaking English. But English is the common language (ἡ κοινὴ διάλεκτος, as the Greeks would say) here, so learning English is an interest of many Hacker News participants.

I had to learn Chinese up to a high level of proficiency as I studied Chinese as a major subject at university, lived for three years in Taiwan in the early 1980s, and then worked for several years as a Chinese-English interpreter all over the United States. I'll try to share here some information that helped me learn Chinese as a second language after starting out as a native speaker of English, in hopes that it will help readers here learn English better.

Any two languages, even closely related languages like Spanish and Italian or standard Thai and standard Lao (and, for that matter, different regional dialects of English or of Italian) differ in sound system, so that what is a phoneme in one language is not a phoneme in the other language.[1]

But anyone learning a second language past the age of early adolescence will usually simply not hear many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the language to be learned unless the learner is very carefully trained in phonetics. Disregarding sound distinctions that don't matter in one's own language is part of having a native language (or native languages). You can't imitate what you can't even perceive, so learning to perceive the sound distinctions in the language to be learned is the crucial first step in learning a second language.[2]

For most people it is brutally hard (especially after the age of puberty, and perhaps especially for males) to learn to notice sound distinctions that don't exist in the learner's native language. That is extraordinarily hard when the sound distinction marks a grammatical distinction that also doesn't exist in the learner's native language. To give an example, the distinction between "I speak" and "he speaks" in English involves a consonant cluster at the end of a syllable, and in Mandarin Chinese there are no such consonant clusters at the ends of syllables at all. Even worse for a Chinese person learning English, Chinese has no such grammatical distinction as "first person singular" and "third person singular" for inflecting verbs, so it is difficult for Chinese-speaking learners of English to learn to distinguish "speaks" from "speak" and to say "he speaks Chinese" rather than "he speak Chinese" (not a grammatical phrase in spoken English).

If software authors who write foreign-language-learning software simply included information about the sound system of the language to be learned, such as a full chart of the phonemes in that language, with descriptions of the sounds in the standard terminology of articulatory phonetics,[3] that would be a big help to language learners. Even better would be for all language-learning materials to teach the notations needed from the International Phonetic Alphabet[4] for each language to be learned.

Language-learning books, sound recordings, and software always need to include a lot of focused drills on sound distinctions (contrasting minimal pairs in the language) in the language to be learned. No software program for language learning should lack pronunciation drills and listening drills like that. It is still an art of software writing to try to automate listening to a learner's pronunciation for appropriate feedback on accuracy of pronunciation. That's a hard problem that needs more work.

Even before learners think about learning pronunciation, they think about learning vocabulary. But the vocabulary lessons in many language-learning materials are very poorly focused and ineffective.

The typical software approach to helping vocabulary acquisition is essentially to automate flipping flash cards. But flash cards have ALWAYS been overrated for vocabulary acquisition. The map is not the territory, and words don't match one-to-one between languages, not even between closely cognate languages. Every language on earth divides the world of lived experience into a different set of words, with different boundaries between words of similar meaning.

The best way to learn vocabulary in a second language is day-by-day steady exposure to actual texts (recorded conversations, stories, songs, personal letters, articles, and so on) written or spoken by native speakers of the language. The late John DeFrancis was a master teacher of Chinese, so I'll quote him on this point here. In the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of his book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, DeFrancis writes, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). In other words, vocabulary can only be well acquired in context and the context must be a genuine context produced by native speakers of the language.

I have been giving free advice on language learning since the 1990s on my personal website,

http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html

and the one advice I can give every language learner reading this thread is to take advantage of radio broadcasting in your target language. Spoken-word broadcasting (here I'm especially focusing on radio rather than on TV) gives you an opportunity to listen and to hear words used in context. In the 1970s, I used to have to use an expensive short-wave radio to pick up Chinese-language radio programs in North America. Now we who have Internet access can gain endless listening opportunities from Internet radio stations in dozens of unlikely languages. Listen early and listen often while learning a language. That will help with phonology (as above) and it will help crucially with vocabulary.

The third big task of a language learner is learning grammar and syntax, which is often woefully neglected in software language-learning materials. Every language has hundreds of tacit grammar rules, many of which are not known explicitly even to native speakers, but which reveal a language-learner as a foreigner when the rules are broken. The foreign language-learner needs to understand grammar not just to produce speech or writing that is less jarring and foreign to native speakers, but also to better understand what native speakers are speaking or writing. Any widely spoken modern language has thick books reporting the grammatical rules of the language.[5] It is well worth your time to make formal study of the grammar of your native language and of the language you are trying to learn, especially in materials for foreign learners.

[1] http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Wha...

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics

[4] http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html

[5] http://www.amazon.com/Soluzioni-Practical-Contemporary-Routl...

http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Italian-Grammar-Practical-Gramm...

http://www.amazon.com/Reference-Grammar-Modern-Italian-HRG/d...

http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-Language...

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/...

⬐ jacquesm

> But anyone learning a second language past the age of early adolescence will usually simply not hear many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the language to be learned unless the learner is very carefully trained in phonetics.

I had one very clear example of that at one time: The difference between the Polish words for switching something on and switching something off.

włączyć -> to switch on

and

wyłącz -> to switch off

When you see them written here they look very different but when you hear them in spoken Polish conversation they're all but impossible to tell apart (at least, to me!).

http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/aw/d/0521431468/

£188

Strunk and White is about £5

I've been developing a FAQ on language learning as this interest is mentioned on Hacker News from time to time. The article kindly submitted here mentions learning French in France by a (native?) speaker of English who had previously learned Spanish. All of those are Indo-European languages, more or less cognate with one another. I've taken on some tougher language-learning challenges over the years. As I learned Mandarin Chinese up to the level that I was able to support my family for several years as a Chinese-English translator and interpreter, I had to tackle several problems for which there is not yet a one-stop-shopping software solution.

I hope the FAQ information below helps hackers achieve their dreams. For ANY pair of languages, even closely cognate pairs of West Germanic languages like English and Dutch, or Wu Chinese dialects like those of Shanghai and Suzhou, the two languages differ in sound system, so that what is a phoneme in one language is not a phoneme in the other language.

http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Wha...

But a speaker of one language who is past the age of puberty will simply not perceive many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the target language (the language to be learned) without very careful training, as disregard of those distinctions below the level of conscious attention is part of having the sound system of the speaker's native language fully in mind. Attention to target language phonemes has to be developed through pains-taking practice.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032

It is brutally hard for most people (after the age of puberty, and perhaps especially for males) to learn to attend to sound distinctions that don't exist in the learner's native language. That is especially hard when the sound distinction signifies a grammatical distinction that also doesn't exist in the learner's native language. For example, the distinction between "I speak" and "he speaks" in English involves a consonant cluster at the end of a syllable, and no such consonant clusters exist in the Mandarin sound system at all. Worse than that, no such grammatical distinction as "first person singular" and "third person singular" for inflecting verbs exists in Mandarin, so it is remarkably difficult for Mandarin-speaking learners of English to learn to distinguish "speaks" from "speak" and to say "he speaks Chinese" rather than * "he speak Chinese" (not a grammatical phrase in spoken English).

Most software materials for learning foreign languages could be much improved simply by including a complete chart of the sound system of the target language (in the dialect form being taught in the software materials) with explicit description of sounds in the terminology of articulatory phonetics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics

with full use of notation from the International Phonetic Alphabet.

http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html

(By the way, the International Phonetic Alphabet was invented by language teachers in Europe to help native speakers of English learn French and native speakers of French learn English, so it could help the author of the article submitted to open this thread. The International Phonetic Alphabet was eventually extended to be useful for writing down any human language.) Good language-learning materials always include a lot of focused drills on sound distinctions (contrasting minimal pairs in the language) in the target language, and no software program for language learning should be without those. It is still an art of software writing to try to automate listening to a learner's pronunciation for appropriate feedback on accuracy of pronunciation. That is not an easy problem.

After phonology, another huge task for any language learner is acquiring vocabulary, and this is the task on which most language-learning materials are most focused. But often the focus on vocabulary is not very thoughtful.

The classic software approach to helping vocabulary acquisition is essentially to automate flipping flash cards. But flash cards have ALWAYS been overrated for vocabulary acquisition. Words don't match one-to-one between languages, not even between closely cognate languages. The map is not the territory, and every language on earth divides the world of lived experience into a different set of words, with different boundaries between words of similar meaning.

The royal road to learning vocabulary in a target language is massive exposure to actual texts (dialogs, stories, songs, personal letters, articles, etc.) written or spoken by native speakers of the language. I'll quote a master language teacher here, the late John DeFrancis. A few years ago, I reread the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). In other words, vocabulary can only be well acquired in context (an argument he develops in detail with regard to Chinese in the writing I have just cited) and the context must be a genuine context produced by native speakers of the language.

I have been giving free advice on language learning since the 1990s on my personal website,

http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html

and the one advice I can give every language learner reading this thread is to take advantage of radio broadcasting in your target language. Spoken-word broadcasting (here I'm especially focusing on radio rather than on TV) gives you an opportunity to listen and to hear words used in context. In the 1970s, I used to have to use an expensive short-wave radio to pick up Chinese-language radio programs in North America. Now we who have Internet access can gain endless listening opportunities from Internet radio stations in dozens of unlikely languages. Listen early and listen often while learning a language. That will help with phonology (as above) and it will help crucially with vocabulary.

The third big task of a language learner is learning grammar and syntax, which is often woefully neglected in software language-learning materials. Every language has hundreds of tacit grammar rules, many of which are not known explicitly even to native speakers, but which reveal a language-learner as a foreigner when the rules are broken. The foreign language-learner needs to understand grammar not just to produce speech or writing that is less jarring and foreign to native speakers, but also to better understand what native speakers are speaking or writing. Any widely spoken modern language has thick books reporting the grammatical rules of the language,

http://www.amazon.com/French-Grammar-Complete-Reference-Guid...

http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-French-Grammar-Glanville...

http://www.amazon.com/Mandarin-Chinese-Functional-Reference-...

http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar-Grammars...

http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-Language...

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/...

http://www.amazon.com/English-Grammar-Students-French-Learni...

and it is well worth your while to study books like that both about your native language(s) and about any language you are studying.

A special bonus for learners of French (which I have used) is that many classic French literature books (novels, collections of short stories, collections of essays, etc.) are now in the public domain, and are available as free-of-charge ebooks. You can practice a lot of reading French with resources like that, and relearn classic tales you knew in youth. Similarly, today there is boundless free audio, for example in the form of online movies and streaming news broadcasts, in all of the major world languages. Take advantage of that as you learn.

Bonne chance. 祝

好运。

⬐ sho_hn

Personally I prioritize learning grammar over vocab. I feel it's a lot easier to acquire vocab once you have a decent grammar framework to slot words into, because it means you can practice and retain words much more effectively. For example, you can then start reading prose much earlier, because all you need to do is look up words in a dictionary - since the grammar training has equipped you to glean tense, relations, and so on the two combine to give you the meaning, so once you have grammar down you can read almost anything with the aid of a dictionary. And when you learn new words you will know immediately how to use them (e.g. conjugate them) correctly, and the immediate application will make them stick better.

(I'm currently learning Korean, where e.g. properly conjugated verbs are immensely powerful information encoders, and also serve as adjectives. Grammar is indispensable there.)

There should be a lot more information here. Because the blog post kindly shared here is just a teaser for some wordy blog posts without a lot of actionable information, I'll share my own draft FAQ about language learning in this comment. I've been developing the FAQ because an interest in learning human languages is mentioned on Hacker News from time to time. I hope the FAQ information below helps hackers achieve their dreams. As I learned Mandarin Chinese as a second language up to the level that I was able to support my family for several years as a Chinese-English translator and interpreter, I had to tackle several problems for which there is not yet a one-stop-shopping software solution.

PHONOLOGY LEARNING

For ANY pair of languages, even closely cognate pairs of West Germanic languages like English and Dutch, or Wu Chinese dialects like those of Shanghai and Suzhou, the two languages differ in sound system, so that what is a phoneme in one language is not a phoneme in the other language.[1]

But a speaker of one language who is past the age of puberty will simply not perceive many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the target language (the language to be learned) without very careful training, as disregard of those distinctions below the level of conscious attention is part of having the sound system of the speaker's native language fully in mind. Attention to target language phonemes has to be developed through pains-taking practice.[2]

It is brutally hard for most people (after the age of puberty, and perhaps especially for males) to learn to attend to sound distinctions that don't exist in the learner's native language. That is especially hard when the sound distinction signifies a grammatical distinction that also doesn't exist in the learner's native language. For example, the distinction between "I speak" and "he speaks" in English involves a consonant cluster at the end of a syllable, and no such consonant clusters exist in the Mandarin sound system at all. Worse than that, no such grammatical distinction as "first person singular" and "third person singular" for inflecting verbs exists in Mandarin, so it is remarkably difficult for Mandarin-speaking learners of English to learn to distinguish "speaks" from "speak" and to say "he speaks Chinese" rather than * "he speak Chinese" (not a grammatical phrase in spoken English).

Most software materials for learning foreign languages could be much improved simply by including a complete chart of the sound system of the target language (in the dialect form being taught in the software materials) with explicit description of sounds in the terminology of articulatory phonetics[3] with full use of notation from the International Phonetic Alphabet.[4]

Good language-learning materials always include a lot of focused drills on sound distinctions (contrasting minimal pairs in the language) in the target language, and no software program for language learning should be without those. It is still an art of software writing to try to automate listening to a learner's pronunciation for appropriate feedback on accuracy of pronunciation. That is not an easy problem.

VOCABULARY LEARNING

After phonology, another huge task for any language learner is acquiring vocabulary, and this is the task on which most language-learning materials are most focused. But often the focus on vocabulary is not very thoughtful.

The classic software approach to helping vocabulary acquisition is essentially to automate flipping flash cards. But flash cards have ALWAYS been overrated for vocabulary acquisition. Words don't match one-to-one between languages, not even between closely cognate languages. The map is not the territory, and every language on earth divides the world of lived experience into a different set of words, with different boundaries between words of similar meaning.

The royal road to learning vocabulary in a target language is massive exposure to actual texts (dialogs, stories, songs, personal letters, articles, etc.) written or spoken by native speakers of the language. I'll quote a master language teacher here, the late John DeFrancis. A few years ago, I reread the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). In other words, vocabulary can only be well acquired in context (an argument he develops in detail with regard to Chinese in the writing I have just cited) and the context must be a genuine context produced by native speakers of the language.

I have been giving free advice on language learning since the 1990s on my personal website,[5] and the one advice I can give every language learner reading this thread is to take advantage of radio broadcasting in your target language. Spoken-word broadcasting (here I'm especially focusing on radio rather than on TV) gives you an opportunity to listen and to hear words used in context. In the 1970s, I used to have to use an expensive short-wave radio to pick up Chinese-language radio programs in North America. Now we who have Internet access can gain endless listening opportunities from Internet radio stations in dozens of unlikely languages. Listen early and listen often while learning a language. That will help with phonology (as above) and it will help crucially with vocabulary.

GRAMMAR AND SYNTAX LEARNING

The third big task of a language learner is learning grammar and syntax, which is often woefully neglected in software language-learning materials. Every language has hundreds of tacit grammar rules, many of which are not known explicitly even to native speakers, but which reveal a language-learner as a foreigner when the rules are broken. The foreign language-learner needs to understand grammar not just to produce speech or writing that is less jarring and foreign to native speakers, but also to better understand what native speakers are speaking or writing. Any widely spoken modern language has thick books reporting the grammatical rules of the language, for example Modern Standard Chinese,[6] Portuguese,[7] and of course English,[8] and it is well worth your while to study books like that both about your native language(s) and about any language you are studying.

[1] http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Wha...

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics

[4] http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html

[5] http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html

[6] http://www.amazon.com/Mandarin-Chinese-Functional-Reference-...

http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar-Grammars...

[7] http://www.amazon.com/Modern-Brazilian-Portuguese-Grammar-Pr...

http://www.amazon.com/Falar-Ler-Escrever-Portugues-Exercicio...

[8] http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-Language...

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/...

⬐ wodenokoto

I find myself zoning out completely when listening to radio in my target language.

What are your views on that?

⬐ gtani

Excellent writeup. One little thing i will add is that i learned a few languages to varying degrees by reading magazines and websites on a specialized but not terribly complicated subject that i knew well, bike racing. That way I had a 40% comprehension before starting, encountered a lot of familiar words in italics and my brain was better able to interpolate meaning.

also that some things are harder or easier than you think. After learning French, Latin, Spanish and some Italian, in that order, i had a lot of difficulty with Brazilian Portuguese, but i once bought a "Learn Dutch in your Car" CD set and starting listening, the usual banal dialog about going shopping for groceries, when i realized i could understand a language that i had never studied or heard before, as native English speaker who understood German well

In reply, I say bravo for trying to become a better writer. And if English is not your native language, don't become discouraged too soon if your progress seems slow at first. I've been very impressed by the English writing here of some people who plainly grew up speaking some other language in a non-English-speaking country. Keep practicing, and you will become better.

For specific writing advice, I recommend the new book The Sense of Style[1] by Steven Pinker, which is about not just fussy rules of English but also about THINKING in a way that helps improve writing. I will have to practice with the ideas in that book for a long time.

For specific advice on improving English, I have some tips I've shared before here on Hacker News that other readers have liked. As I learned Mandarin Chinese up to the level that I was able to support my family for several years as a Chinese-English translator and interpreter, I had to tackle several problems for which there is not yet a one-stop-shopping software solution. For ANY pair of languages, even closely cognate pairs of West Germanic languages like English and Dutch, or Wu Chinese dialects like those of Shanghai and Suzhou, the two languages differ in sound system, so that what is a phoneme in one language is not a phoneme in the other language.

http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Wha...

But a speaker of one language who is past the age of puberty will simply not perceive many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the target language (the language to be learned) without very careful training, as disregard of those distinctions below the level of conscious attention is part of having the sound system of the speaker's native language fully in mind. Attention to target language phonemes has to be developed through pains-taking practice.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032

It is brutally hard for most people (after the age of puberty, and perhaps especially for males) to learn to attend to sound distinctions that don't exist in the learner's native language. That is especially hard when the sound distinction signifies a grammatical distinction that also doesn't exist in the learner's native language. For example, the distinction between "I speak" and "he speaks" in English involves a consonant cluster at the end of a syllable, and no such consonant clusters exist in the Mandarin sound system at all. Worse than that, no such grammatical distinction as "first person singular" and "third person singular" for inflecting verbs exists in Mandarin, so it is remarkably difficult for Mandarin-speaking learners of English to learn to distinguish "speaks" from "speak" and to say "he speaks Chinese" rather than * "he speak Chinese" (not a grammatical phrase in spoken English).

Most software materials for learning foreign languages could be much improved simply by including a complete chart of the sound system of the target language (in the dialect form being taught in the software materials) with explicit description of sounds in the terminology of articulatory phonetics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics

with full use of notation from the International Phonetic Alphabet.

http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html

Good language-learning materials always include a lot of focused drills on sound distinctions (contrasting minimal pairs in the language) in the target language, and no software program for language learning should be without those. It is still an art of software writing to try to automate listening to a learner's pronunciation for appropriate feedback on accuracy of pronunciation. That is not an easy problem.

After phonology, another huge task for any language learner is acquiring vocabulary, and this is the task on which most language-learning materials are most focused. But often the focus on vocabulary is not very thoughtful.

The classic software approach to helping vocabulary acquisition is essentially to automate flipping flash cards. But flash cards have ALWAYS been overrated for vocabulary acquisition. Words don't match one-to-one between languages, not even between closely cognate languages. The map is not the territory, and every language on earth divides the world of lived experience into a different set of words, with different boundaries between words of similar meaning.

The royal road to learning vocabulary in a target language is massive exposure to actual texts (dialogs, stories, songs, personal letters, articles, etc.) written or spoken by native speakers of the language. I'll quote a master language teacher here, the late John DeFrancis. A few years ago, I reread the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). In other words, vocabulary can only be well acquired in context (an argument he develops in detail with regard to Chinese in the writing I have just cited) and the context must be a genuine context produced by native speakers of the language.

I have been giving free advice on language learning since the 1990s on my personal website,

http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html

and the one advice I can give every language learner reading this thread is to take advantage of radio broadcasting in your target language. Spoken-word broadcasting (here I'm especially focusing on radio rather than on TV) gives you an opportunity to listen and to hear words used in context. In the 1970s, I used to have to use an expensive short-wave radio to pick up Chinese-language radio programs in North America. Now we who have Internet access can gain endless listening opportunities from Internet radio stations in dozens of unlikely languages. Listen early and listen often while learning a language. That will help with phonology (as above) and it will help crucially with vocabulary.

The third big task of a language learner is learning grammar and syntax, which is often woefully neglected in software language-learning materials. Every language has hundreds of tacit grammar rules, many of which are not known explicitly even to native speakers, but which reveal a language-learner as a foreigner when the rules are broken. The foreign language-learner needs to understand grammar not just to produce speech or writing that is less jarring and foreign to native speakers, but also to better understand what native speakers are speaking or writing. Any widely spoken modern language has thick books reporting the grammatical rules of the language,

http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar-Grammars...

http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-Language...

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/...

and it is well worth your while to study books like that both about your native language(s) and about any language you are studying. Good luck.

[1] http://stevenpinker.com/publications/sense-style-thinking-pe...

⬐ jseliger

For specific writing advice, I recommend the new book The Sense of Style[1] by Steven Pinker, which is about not just fussy rules of English but also about THINKING in a way that helps improve writing. I will have to practice with the ideas in that book for a long time.

I'd add Write Right! by Jan Venolia and Writing With Style by John Trimble.

The Sense of Style is wonderful but I worry especially that it might be too advanced for relative beginners, and the chapter about sentence diagramming / sentence grouping may be confusing.

⬐ graycat

What progress I made in learning a foreign language, for both vocabulary and appropriate usage of the words, was from learning phrases and not individual words one at a time. Or, to learn several words, it's much easier to learn a phrase that uses those words than just the words themselves. And learning the phrases lets you start to think in the new language and not keep going back via 1-1 word to word from your own language to the foreign one.

One way to learn a lot of those phrases is to have a little story with maybe 20 such sentences and then read the story out loud maybe 20 times a day for a few days. Then practice making the sounds correct via use of language lab where hear a recording of a native speaker reading the story and, then, correcting your reading of the story.

Can learn a lot of a foreign language that way, quickly.

So, this approach is radical: Start with reading and speaking and leave writing and grammar until later, say, after have already learned a lot of phrases. Or, in English, how does one learn I am, you are, he is, we are, you are, they are? Sure, not by memorizing such a table but by lots of phrases that are examples of the content of such a table. Then, when have lots of good examples, learn the rules later.

⬐ jkaunisv1

Another good way to be exposed to a new language: if you already watch TV shows/movies on your computer, try to find an audio dub in the target language with subs in your native language. Try to ignore the subtitles but use them as a reference when you hear an unfamiliar word or sentence structure.

I really like this because you get to hear usually several different accents & voices that you can start to correlate with stereotypes - how does a young woman talk, how does a shy person talk, how does a businessman talk, how does a thug talk, etc.

⬐ everslick

I want to add: I love to watch English movies (and TBBT) with English caption also (Austrian-German is my native Tongue). This allows me to fall back to the English written word should I have missed the spoken one. The meaning of single words is usually easily deducible from context. It also helps to correct my pronunciation of words I use to pronounce incorrectly.

⬐ Envec83

If I may suggest another resource: http://www.dailywritingtips.com

Articles are published daily, as the name implies, and the they are not that long, so you can learn about standard English usage without spending too much time at it.

⬐ grownseed

Thank you for this thoughtful comment, I think your writing precisely embodies what nevergetenglish was referring to.

> "It is brutally hard for most people (after the age of puberty, and perhaps especially for males) to learn to attend to sound distinctions that don't exist in the learner's native language."

I'm a native French speaker who learnt English in Scotland when I moved there (been living in mostly English-speaking countries ever since). As far as most people I meet are concerned, I have a very weird accent; the perception ranges from "he's Scottish" to "what the hell?" depending on where I go and who I talk to. In any case, while phonology is clearly very important, I would argue that it is not completely necessary for expressing yourself properly, at least in writing.

> "[...] another huge task for any language learner is acquiring vocabulary, and this is the task on which most language-learning materials are most focused. But often the focus on vocabulary is not very thoughtful."

This is sadly very true, though I honestly don't think there's a silver bullet when it comes to learning vocabulary. One additional source I would add to your "royal road to learning vocabulary" would be exposure to colloquial language, or slang at the extreme, i.e. listening to day-to-day conversations between "commoners". This is how I realized that there is often a "correct" way of saying something (as in purely grammatically correct), and the "natural" way (i.e. as expected by native speakers).

> "Every language has hundreds of tacit grammar rules [...] which reveal a language-learner as a foreigner when the rules are broken"

Continuing from my previous point, I think the opposite sometimes applies too. For instance, back in Scotland, I had to force myself to say "If I was" instead of "If I were", because the mistake has become so systematic that it has almost become a rule.

I think grammar is at least as important as vocabulary, particularly in a language like English where the language is so modular that words can fairly easily be made up, to the extent that they are understandable within a logical context, even if incorrect.

Finally, I would add culture as a possible fourth big task to add to your list. This may just be me, but there seems to be a dimension of language closely tied to the culture associated with it. There are idioms that make complete sense to me, yet I cannot explain why to my (French) family. This is ostensibly related to linguistic relativity[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

⬐ jrm2k6

Do you also have an accent when speaking in French now? My family and friends told me that even when I speak French I have a weird accent. I have been living in the US, Canada and Hungary and have been speaking English daily for the last 3 years, and it is weird to me that I have now an accent in my native language

⬐ touristtam

I am French as well and I have been living in Scotland for the last 10 years or so, and although I do agree on the perception that Scots have a somewhat, perceived, regional dialect, it is true Scottish-English is actually seen as a language; Words that are spoken only on this side of the border are not seen as merely a form of dialect.

I agree as well to the advise given to listen to locals having conversation. It is probably the best way to learn colloquial conversation skills and therefore blend within the local population.

On the accent, it is really hard to leave completely behind your native accent and requires huge amount of effort to replace it. I am not saying it is impossible, but as mentioned by grownseed, some folks will be completely oblivious to the fact that you are not a local and some other will just recognize a twang in the way you speak that isn't quite what they expect from another local.

That being said: "practice makes perfect" ;)

⬐ None

None

⬐ toomuchtodo

This is a phenomenal reply tokenadult. Would you be willing to reply to the same question if I post it in http://writers.stackexchange.com/?

⬐ gphilip

ELL [+] is perhaps a better fit for this question?

[+] http://ell.stackexchange.com/

"English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English."

⬐ clebio

Well, the original question was specific to writing. The author in fact does not say whether English is a second language.

⬐ wodenokoto

Out of pure curiosity: Why are you interested in having it cross posted on Stackexchange?

⬐ tokenadult

I'd have to register an account over there, but I could get ready for that while you post the question. Thanks for the suggestion.

AFTER EDIT: I'm registered on Stack Exchange now. I refer in my user profile there to my Hacker News user I.D.

⬐ toomuchtodo

Thank you! I'd love you buy you a beer or coffee in return!

⬐ TeMPOraL

Post the link to the question when you submit it :).

After reading all the comments posted here till now, I see that they are almost all about foreign language learning, with few mentioning other applications of spaced repetition systems. I had better apply my own background in foreign language learning (I learned Chinese as a second language beginning at age seventeen well enough to spend most of my twenties working as a language teacher, translator, and interpreter) to letting my friends here on HN know what else is useful to do for learning a human language well.

I hope the FAQ information below helps hackers achieve their dreams. As I learned Mandarin Chinese up to the level that I was able to support my family for several years as a Chinese-English translator and interpreter, I had to tackle several problems for which there is not yet a one-stop-shopping software solution. For ANY pair of languages, even closely cognate pairs of West Germanic languages like English and Dutch, or Wu Chinese dialects like those of Shanghai and Suzhou, the two languages differ in sound system, so that what is a phoneme in one language is not a phoneme in the other language.

http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Wha...

But a speaker of one language who is past the age of puberty will simply not perceive many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the target language (the language to be learned) without very careful training, as disregard of those distinctions below the level of conscious attention is part of having the sound system of the speaker's native language fully in mind. Attention to target language phonemes has to be developed through pains-taking practice.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032

It is brutally hard for most people (after the age of puberty, and perhaps especially for males) to learn to attend to sound distinctions that don't exist in the learner's native language. That is especially hard when the sound distinction signifies a grammatical distinction that also doesn't exist in the learner's native language. For example, the distinction between "I speak" and "he speaks" in English involves a consonant cluster at the end of a syllable, and no such consonant clusters exist in the Mandarin sound system at all. Worse than that, no such grammatical distinction as "first person singular" and "third person singular" for inflecting verbs exists in Mandarin, so it is remarkably difficult for Mandarin-speaking learners of English to learn to distinguish "speaks" from "speak" and to say "he speaks Chinese" rather than * "he speak Chinese" (not a grammatical phrase in spoken English).

Most software materials for learning foreign languages could be much improved simply by including a complete chart of the sound system of the target language (in the dialect form being taught in the software materials) with explicit description of sounds in the terminology of articulatory phonetics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics

with full use of notation from the International Phonetic Alphabet.

http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html

Good language-learning materials always include a lot of focused drills on sound distinctions (contrasting minimal pairs in the language) in the target language, and no software program for language learning should be without those. It is still an art of software writing to try to automate listening to a learner's pronunciation for appropriate feedback on accuracy of pronunciation. That is not an easy problem.

After phonology, another huge task for any language learner is acquiring vocabulary, and this is the task on which most language-learning materials are most focused. But often the focus on vocabulary is not very thoughtful.

The classic software approach to helping vocabulary acquisition is essentially to automate flipping flash cards. But flash cards have ALWAYS been overrated for vocabulary acquisition. Words don't match one-to-one between languages, not even between closely cognate languages. The map is not the territory, and every language on earth divides the world of lived experience into a different set of words, with different boundaries between words of similar meaning.

The royal road to learning vocabulary in a target language is massive exposure to actual texts (dialogs, stories, songs, personal letters, articles, etc.) written or spoken by native speakers of the language. I'll quote a master language teacher here, the late John DeFrancis. A few years ago, I reread the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). In other words, vocabulary can only be well acquired in context (an argument he develops in detail with regard to Chinese in the writing I have just cited) and the context must be a genuine context produced by native speakers of the language.

I have been giving free advice on language learning since the 1990s on my personal website,

http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html

and the one advice I can give every language learner reading this thread is to take advantage of radio broadcasting in your target language. Spoken-word broadcasting (here I'm especially focusing on radio rather than on TV) gives you an opportunity to listen and to hear words used in context. In the 1970s, I used to have to use an expensive short-wave radio to pick up Chinese-language radio programs in North America. Now we who have Internet access can gain endless listening opportunities from Internet radio stations in dozens of unlikely languages. Listen early and listen often while learning a language. That will help with phonology (as above) and it will help crucially with vocabulary.

The third big task of a language learner is learning grammar and syntax, which is often woefully neglected in software language-learning materials. Every language has hundreds of tacit grammar rules, many of which are not known explicitly even to native speakers, but which reveal a language-learner as a foreigner when the rules are broken. The foreign language-learner needs to understand grammar not just to produce speech or writing that is less jarring and foreign to native speakers, but also to better understand what native speakers are speaking or writing. Any widely spoken modern language has thick books reporting the grammatical rules of the language,

http://www.amazon.com/Mandarin-Chinese-Functional-Reference-...

http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar-Grammars...

http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-Language...

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/...

and it is well worth your while to study books like that both about your native language(s) and about any language you are studying.

⬐ None

None

⬐ captaindiego

Thank you for the excellent links. A lot of your comments really ring true. A number of times I've really wished that the international phonetic alphabet was far more widespread and included in more language learning materials.

In addition as someone who has spent countless hours studying vocab flashcards with very little gains I can corroborate the fact that using it as a primary study method is quite ineffective. When I want to flashcard style studying now I focus on sentences, or groups of sentences with translations. The added context helps significantly but is still no substitute for full passages of text.

⬐ stupandaus

A bit off topic from your post, but I'm curious how far your Mandarin studies took you. Did you ever make any headway into Business Chinese and/or do you know of any good resources for that?

I'm a native bilingual Mandarin/English speaker, and worked abroad in Shanghai for a year or so, but am still lacking a lot of professional business vocabulary.

⬐ neves

Learning in context is really an underrated aspect of language learning. Some more tips:

1) Podcasts: you can handpick a theme you like, so you can transfer your knowledge between languages to get all subtleties.

2) Graphic Novels (aka: comics): you see the dialogs with a corresponding image. You mix narrative aspects of a book, where you read whats in the mind of the characters and see with a corresponding image.

3) Movies: you should watch them with subtitles in the spoken language.

4) Kindle Touch/Paperwhite: you will easily click in a word to see its definition.

⬐ ktf

> 3) Movies: you should watch them with subtitles in the spoken language.

I can't believe I never thought to do this. Great idea, thanks!

Learning foreign languages to high levels of communication proficiency was the first adult learning challenge I took on. I majored in Chinese at university and worked for quite a few years as a Chinese-English interpreter and translator. I'll back up what pg said with a data point from academic research. The online article "How to Become a Good Theoretical Physicist,"

http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/theorist.html

by a Nobel laureate in physics who is a native speaker of Dutch, makes clear what the key learning task is to be a good physicist: "English is a prerequisite. If you haven't mastered it yet, learn it. You must be able to read, write, speak and understand English." On his list of things to learn for physics, that even comes before mathematics.

I like to share advice on language learning, because this topic comes up on Hacker News frequently. I hope the FAQ information below helps hackers achieve their dreams. As I learned Mandarin Chinese up to the level that I was able to support my family for several years as a Chinese-English translator and interpreter, I had to tackle several problems for which there is not yet a one-stop-shopping software solution. For ANY pair of languages, even closely cognate pairs of West Germanic languages like English and Dutch, or Wu Chinese dialects like those of Shanghai and Suzhou, the two languages differ in sound system, so that what is a phoneme in one language is not a phoneme in the other language.

http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Wha...

But a speaker of one language who is past the age of puberty will simply not perceive many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the target language (the language to be learned) without very careful training, as disregard of those distinctions below the level of conscious attention is part of having the sound system of the speaker's native language fully in mind. Attention to target language phonemes has to be developed through pains-taking practice.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032

It is brutally hard for most people (after the age of puberty, and perhaps especially for males) to learn to attend to sound distinctions that don't exist in the learner's native language. That is especially hard when the sound distinction signifies a grammatical distinction that also doesn't exist in the learner's native language. For example, the distinction between "I speak" and "he speaks" in English involves a consonant cluster at the end of a syllable, and no such consonant clusters exist in the Mandarin sound system at all. Worse than that, no such grammatical distinction as "first person singular" and "third person singular" for inflecting verbs exists in Mandarin, so it is remarkably difficult for Mandarin-speaking learners of English to learn to distinguish "speaks" from "speak" and to say "he speaks Chinese" rather than * "he speak Chinese" (not a grammatical phrase in spoken English).

Most software materials for learning foreign languages could be much improved simply by including a complete chart of the sound system of the target language (in the dialect form being taught in the software materials) with explicit description of sounds in the terminology of articulatory phonetics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics

with full use of notation from the International Phonetic Alphabet.

http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html

Good language-learning materials always include a lot of focused drills on sound distinctions (contrasting minimal pairs in the language) in the target language, and no software program for language learning should be without those. It is still an art of software writing to try to automate listening to a learner's pronunciation for appropriate feedback on accuracy of pronunciation. That is not an easy problem.

After phonology, another huge task for any language learner is acquiring vocabulary, and this is the task on which most language-learning materials are most focused. But often the focus on vocabulary is not very thoughtful.

The classic software approach to helping vocabulary acquisition is essentially to automate flipping flash cards. But flash cards have ALWAYS been overrated for vocabulary acquisition. Words don't match one-to-one between languages, not even between closely cognate languages. The map is not the territory, and every language on earth divides the world of lived experience into a different set of words, with different boundaries between words of similar meaning.

The royal road to learning vocabulary in a target language is massive exposure to actual texts (dialogs, stories, songs, personal letters, articles, etc.) written or spoken by native speakers of the language. I'll quote a master language teacher here, the late John DeFrancis. A few years ago, I reread the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). In other words, vocabulary can only be well acquired in context (an argument he develops in detail with regard to Chinese in the writing I have just cited) and the context must be a genuine context produced by native speakers of the language.

I have been giving free advice on language learning since the 1990s on my personal website,

http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html

and the one advice I can give every language learner reading this thread is to take advantage of radio broadcasting in your target language. Spoken-word broadcasting (here I'm especially focusing on radio rather than on TV) gives you an opportunity to listen and to hear words used in context. In the 1970s, I used to have to use an expensive short-wave radio to pick up Chinese-language radio programs in North America. Now we who have Internet access can gain endless listening opportunities from Internet radio stations in dozens of unlikely languages. Listen early and listen often while learning a language. That will help with phonology (as above) and it will help crucially with vocabulary.

The third big task of a language learner is learning grammar and syntax, which is often woefully neglected in software language-learning materials. Every language has hundreds of tacit grammar rules, many of which are not known explicitly even to native speakers, but which reveal a language-learner as a foreigner when the rules are broken. The foreign language-learner needs to understand grammar not just to produce speech or writing that is less jarring and foreign to native speakers, but also to better understand what native speakers are speaking or writing. Any widely spoken modern language has thick books reporting the grammatical rules of the language,

http://www.amazon.com/Mandarin-Chinese-Functional-Reference-...

http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar-Grammars...

http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-Language...

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/...

and it is well worth your while to study books like that both about your native language(s) and about any language you are studying.

⬐ tel

I wanted to add that while in my PhD program I was studying this effect for a little while. In studies on ferrets scientists have discovered that the second auditory cortex, A2, tends to collect sonic motifs—things like a quickly rising pitch beginning near middle C, or any kind of warbling, or clear, constant tones at various pitches. Computationally, these motifs can be adapted to a particular corpus in order to improve detection and prediction rates while using a smaller bank of motifs. There's also lots of investigation into how these motif banks can improve robustness to distortions and noise.

As far as I know, it remains speculation that this effect occurs in humans, but it seems by your experiences (and my own learning Mandarin as a second language) plausible that the human brain itself "prunes" less useful sonic motifs in early life improving your ability to rapidly understand your primary language(s) even under shifts in accent or other distortions. This would likely come at the cost of literal inability to be attentive to motifs that haven't been stored. you would perceive them in A1, but they would have less resolution and perhaps semantic meaning (this is as far as I know quite wild speculation, mind).

I remember that it took almost an entire 6 mos of study before I really had a clue what tonality in Mandarin meant—I could hear it, but never perceive it as a linguistic phenomenon. After 6 months it appeared to almost overnight become something sensible to me at which point I had to relearn almost my entire vocabulary including the tonal information that I'd been unknowingly ignoring.

⬐ diydsp

warning: anecdote of 1 here. but one time my native Japanese roommate and I were playing with a real-time audio spectrum analyzer and I was demonstrating the difference b/t "l" and "r" and she simply could not hear the difference.

As tokenadult mentions, it is brutally hard to learn these distinctions. perhaps that is why successful founders push their way past accent problems; they are successful as pushing through brutally hard problems.

⬐ BenSS

That's a really interesting observation. I've got hearing damage in the high frequencies, so I'm incapable of hearing the difference between an 'f' and an 's'. Fir and Sir sound identical to me, and I can only infer from context! However, I can -speak- them due to the difference in mouth and tongue placement + av therapy.

⬐ foobarbazqux

'l' is made with the tongue starting at the top of the mouth and striking the bottom, 'r' the tongue stays at the bottom, and the Japanese 'l/r' has the tongue at the top but touching the back of the teeth and it pulls away but it doesn't hit the bottom of the mouth. If you put your finger in your mouth and hold your tongue down you can still make an 'r' sound, but 'l' is impossible, as is 'l/r'.

⬐ bad_user

I'm Romanian and our language is a latin one. When pronouncing both "l" and "r" my tongue first goes to the upper alveolar ridge and for "r" it stays there with the tongue trembling for a bit.

Also, our "r" is much thicker than in English. For that reason, our English accent resembles a bit that of Russians :-)

⬐ tokenadult

You'll enjoy learning some articulatory phonetics and finding out about the great variety worldwide in /l/ and /r/ sounds. I particularly like the final sound in the word "Tamil" as spoken by speakers of that language.

⬐ joyeuse6701

Good explanation, I've used it before. Polish is similar in the lack of a 'th' sound which is usually replaced with a 'f' sound: Think becomes Fink. Was always funny growing up to me.

⬐ bad_user

Hah - Romanian also doesn't have "th" and so beginners tend to replace it with "z".

⬐ jholman

I can't speak to the articulation of ら &c, but I don't agree with aspects of your description of English articulation.

When pronouncing an 'l' (alveolar lateral), my tongue stays on alveolar ridge of my mouth (the roof, right behind the teeth) for the entire time. When the 'l' sound ends, my tongue leaves the roof of my mouth, but it never "strikes the bottom" of my mouth. If there's a vowel next, it moves to a neutral position for a vowel. If the 'l' was the end of the speech, it just kind of sits in place for a second after the noise stops. If it's followed by another consonant, it moves for that articulation (e.g. when saying "all the sounds", it moves directly from the alveolar ridge to the teeth for the dental fricative).

When pronouncing an 'r' (alveolar approximant), I, and I think most English speakers, roll the tongue backwards to some degree (although not enough that the point of articulation is the bottom of the tongue). I.e. the tongue does not "stay at the bottom". Yes, it is certainly possible to pronounce an English 'r' with the tip of your tongue held down (unlike 'l'), but I think most English speakers would find this "impossible" at first, and then with a minute of practice would realize that it was possible but difficult. In English, these two articulations are perceived as the same phoneme; I assume that some language somewhere differentiates between them. I notice that often when I speak (English) to natives of India (whose first languages I have not identified), I get the sense that they have a richer complex of 'r' noises than I do.

In summary, "l" does not involve "striking the bottom [of the mouth]", and "r" typically does not involve the tongue staying at the bottom of the mouth, although it can.

⬐ foobarbazqux

There are five Japanese l/r sounds: ra (raa), ri (ree), ru (roo), re (ray), ro (roe) - sorry, not a linguist. For each of those, if I pronounce them in English, my tongue doesn't touch the top of my mouth. If I pronounce la (laa), li (lee), lu (loo), le (lay), lo (low) in English instead, my tongue moves from top to bottom. Specifically, the tip of my tongue starts by touching the gums behind my front teeth and at some point touches my gums behind my bottom teeth. Whereas in Japanese it touches the front teeth and doesn't touch behind my gums at the bottom.

Is that more clear? I agree that there are other r and l sounds in English, but there aren't in Japanese, there is a fixed set of phonemes. I'm trying to explain how each Japanese l/r sound is clearly split into a different l and r sound in English. Of course, there are many English l and r sounds that are badly approximated by the five l/r sounds in Japanese.

⬐ eropple

I can't speak Japanese, but I've studied it enough to be able to read a little bit. My first Japanese book referred to it as the "tapped R" for exactly this reason.

⬐ jholman

My Japanese training is very limited (I know the hiragana alphabet, but I'm sure my pronunciation is terrible), so I won't pretend any confidence there. Of course, we both agree that English "l", English "r", and the five Japanese "ra/la" sounds (ら, り, る, れ, ろ), are all different sounds. We all know it's a bad approximation to say that "ら" is "la" or "ra", but it's the best approximation available. (I'm told that whether it's more like "la" or like "ra" depends on where you are in Japan, to some degree). Indeed, this one-to-two mapping problem is so well-known, that there are demeaning "jokes" about saying "lice" when one means "rice", and so on.

Anyway, my point was this: your description of English articulation had some minor errors in it, which I tried to improve upon.

> If I pronounce la (laa) ... in English, my tongue ... at some point touches my gums behind my bottom teeth

That may be true for you, but this is not typical. Or at least, it's not the the "L" that's doing that. If you say "raaaaaaaaa" in English, you'll find that the "aaaaa" noise puts your tongue on the bottom of your mouth just as much as it does for "laaaaaaa".

And if you put your finger on your lower gums, you can learn to say "la lee loo lay low" without your tongue ever touching your finger, much less your gums. Just like how many English speakers curl their tongue to say English "ra ree roo ray roe" but they can learn to leave the tip of their tongue down (with practice).

⬐ foobarbazqux

Well, I'm certain of two things: 1) there is a clear difference between l, l/r, and r and it's easy to say all three if you know what you're doing; 2) I'm doing a bad job of explaining the difference.

I'm pretty sure I know what my tongue is doing in English, but alright it may be due to the vowel instead of the consonant. The problem in Japanese is there's no distinction between vowel and consonant.

Yes, it could be that touching the bottom of the mouth during the vowel part is not as important as the position of the tongue initially. l: relaxed, some sliding, top of mouth; l/r: tighter, as for a rolled r, more forward, top of mouth; r: does not touch top of mouth. loo and roo are both incorrect pronunciations of ru.

⬐ wildgift

The Mexican Spanish "r" is close to the Japanese r/l. You don't say "bulito" or "burr-ito" like a burr of metal. You say "burrito", and know that people who can speak it add a tiny bit of a roll to the "r". The Japanese R is not rolled, but it's like just starting the roll.

⬐ foobarbazqux

This is a nice and concise way to articulate it.

⬐ Jongseong

The simple description you'll find in most linguistic descriptions of Japanese is that the Japanese r is what is called an alveolar tap and written as [ɾ] in the International Phonetic Alphabet, which is also the Spanish r in pero (not the trilled r in perro). The reality is more complicated because Japanese only has one liquid phoneme. The fact that there is no separate l sound in Japanese means that there is a bigger phonetic space that the r sound can occupy. What ends up happening is that the Japanese r can be lateralized, that is, part of the airstream is through the sides of the tongue rather than through the middle of the mouth. A lateralized tap which results in this case is written as [ɺ]. This ends up sounding like l, which is technically known as a lateral approximant because the airstream is only through the sides of the tongue.

The more complete description of the Japanese r is that it is a tapped alveolar consonant that can range between a completely central [ɾ] and the lateralized [ɺ], with different degrees of lateralization. All will be interpreted as the Japanese r, and speakers tend to use [ɾ] after vowels, with lateralization likely to creep in if the r comes at the beginning of an utterance or after an n.

I'm a native speaker of Korean by the way, and while at the abstract phonemic level we also have a single l/r sound represented as ㄹ in the Korean alphabet, we do distinguish [ɾ] and [l] between vowels. 아리 ari uses the tap [ɾ] and 알리 alli uses [l] because that's how double ㄹ is pronounced. It's a similar distribution to the tapped and trilled r's in Spanish, where trilled r's between vowels can be analyzed as double r's.

⬐ foobarbazqux

Thanks for the thorough explanation. IPA seems useful, like the kind of thing schools should teach, but it also scares me with its complexity.

⬐ dchichkov

A small correction here - A2 is a secondary auditory cortex (as in 'secondary stage of processing').

[it's just that the phrase 'second auditory cortex', especially in the context of discussing a process of acquiring a second language sounds suggestive of a development of another separate part. and A2 is definitely not that.]

⬐ tel

Oh! Yeah, definitely did not mean to imply that. I was interpreting it to myself to mean "second stage in an audio processing pipeline" as that was what I had been modeling.

⬐ jamesli

I want to add an interesting personal experience. My native language is a Northeastern dialect in China. The dialect doesn't distinguish well the sounds between /z/ and /zh/, between /c/ and /ch/, and between /s/ and /sh/.

I went to Beijing for college, started speaking Mandarin, and picked it up quickly. But until now, I still regularly make the mistake between /z/ and /zh/, and the other two pair. I am able to easily tell the differences between the sounds themselves. If the sounds are included in a sentence, however, I simply can't tell which is which.

Here is the interesting part. I have no difficulty in distinguishing these sounds in English. I can clearly hear the differences between words like 'sip' or 'ship', no matter if they are spoken as single words or are part of a sentence. My ears will immediately catch the difference. But if it is Mandarin, i will get lost between words like 'ziji' and 'zhiji'.

⬐ tel

Yeah, I personally feel that there's a great deal of "modality" in the sonic motifs we are attuned to. It can be remarkable how palpably different "listening in English" is from "listening in Mandarin".

⬐ arbuge

Extremely interesting. Some other commenters mentioned this is off-topic; I think it's pertinent to understanding what's behind the empirical evidence pg presented.

This paragraph in particular:

It is brutally hard for most people (after the age of puberty, and perhaps especially for males) to learn to attend to sound distinctions that don't exist in the learner's native language. That is especially hard when the sound distinction signifies a grammatical distinction that also doesn't exist in the learner's native language. For example, the distinction between "I speak" and "he speaks" in English involves a consonant cluster at the end of a syllable, and no such consonant clusters exist in the Mandarin sound system at all. Worse than that, no such grammatical distinction as "first person singular" and "third person singular" for inflecting verbs exists in Mandarin, so it is remarkably difficult for Mandarin-speaking learners of English to learn to distinguish "speaks" from "speak" and to say "he speaks Chinese" rather than "he speak Chinese" (not a grammatical phrase in spoken English).

One thing I've noticed is that there seem to be relatively few super-successful Chinese immigrant founders in the USA. Fewer than Indians for example, even though both are large immigrant communities. My wife is Chinese and her theory is that Chinese aren't really good at teamwork. I think it has more to do with their difficulties in catching the subtleties of the language as described above.

It is not quite a problem of them not communicating their message well, I think. Most of the time they do, although it may not aesthetically be very pleasing. It is more an issue of them missing alot when you speak to them, unless you conciously try to adapt to your audience.

⬐ 001sky

Interesting, but a couple of points worth considering.

It is more an issue of them missing alot when you speak to them

Language grasp =/= communications skills.

(1) Plenty of studies on body language and other forms of cognitive bias back this up. Attractive people are deemed more trustworthy etc.

(2) There are huge swathes of social interactions and nuances that cultural signals. 'Westenized' children educated for example in the us or uk grasp intuitively things completely alien to their parents or to similar kids brought up in the east. Such examples of ""comprehension has noting to do with wether or no the kids have accents or their "language skills".

(3) A regional welsh, working class, or a northern uk dialect is almost indecipherable to many americans. But such would not likely be a signal that this person won't be able to pick up westernized social cues.

⬐ wildgift

What about NewEgg? You also have to look and see if there's a brain drain going to Taiwan and China, because Taiwan decided, years ago, to focus on making PCs.

⬐ jerrytsai

My parents are from Taiwan, I was born in the U.S. I have reflected on this topic, and my thought was that South Asians, due to British colonization, appear to adapt more easily to American culture. Comparing immigrant parents from South and East Asia, (anecdotally) I have noted that South Asian parents speak English with greater facility than East Asian parents, which I have attributed to the effects of the British Raj.

I also have noted that South Asians have a strong culture that resists rote Westernization, which I attribute to native Indians (etc.) learning over time about what to sustain and what to adopt from the culture of their British overlords. So I conclude that when South Asians emigrate to America, they have a "leg up" in adopting to American culture, while East Asians experience culture shock to a much greater degree. Not only is the language more unfamiliar, but East Asians don't have the historical/cultural experience of keeping their culture separate from a Western culture as South Asians do. As an example, look at the relative interest of children of immigrants in the USA's National Spelling Bee.

I therefore think that because of these reasons, and because I think East Asian immigrants are as bright as South Asian immigrants, that we will observe a bolus of super-successful East Asian immigrants one generation later than when we observe a bolus of super-successful South Asian immigrants.

Now obviously these observation are generalizations, but I suspect that the "strong accent" observation of PG is not just a proxy for facility with English but a measure of cultural adaptation than may be helpful in becoming successful in the USA.

⬐ msoad

The cold truth about learning another language is that you will not learn much when you are not living in a community(country) that speaks that language.

I started learning English when I moved to the U.S. three years ago but I speak better than those who spent 10 years learning English in my home country.

⬐ purplelobster

This is commonly "known", but actually, I don't agree. It's all about exposure. I learned English in class, but most of my learning came from watching TV/movies and reading books in English, and posting on online forums. By the time I came to the US, some people confused me with being a native once in a while, even though I had never actually spoken English to a native, or spoken it much at all really. Of course my vocabulary is/was not as great as natives, but I made a concerted effort to try to sound American from the start. Most people in my country don't try to sound American, partly because it probably feels silly/fake to them, and partly because British English was what was taught in school.

My point is, if it's not true for English, then it's not necessarily true for other languages either. You just have to be interested in the culture, and expose yourself to media during and after taking classes.

⬐ bad_user

When learning English, the easiness with which one learns also depends on your native language. For example, speakers of latin languages learn English much easier than speakers of slavic languages.

Also, many languages leave their mark on their native speakers in many cases being very hard to get rid of your native accent.

I was lucky to have Romanian as my native language, as it doesn't leave such a big scar on your pronunciation. I almost speak American English correctly, in spite of not living in an English-speaking country and I've got friends that speak perfect British English, French or Spanish (giving these as examples, as these have thick accents). True story - Microsoft has a support center in Bucharest, with one reason being our linguistic abilities.

⬐ eropple

Have to second this. One of the artists I sometimes contract with for game development is Romanian, and while I sometimes notice idiomatic issues there's absolutely no issue understanding her. Her diction's as good as many native speakers I encounter on a regular basis.

⬐ Dewie

I would much rather speak with a foreign accent rather than with something like a New England accent.

⬐ sergiosgc

What you describe as a "scar" is the same effect the top comment refers to. Romanian, much like my native language (Portuguese) is a peripheral language. Those don't evolve as much and so have not simplified as much as languages from central countries (think central Europe for comparison). The end result is that they are more complex and, to our advantage, use many more phonemes, easing native speakers learning of foreign languages.

To this day, I'm still baffled that Spanish does not distinguish between 'v' and 'b'.

⬐ glogla

Really? I thought that Spanish does distinguish between 'b' and 'v', but the South American Spanish has the sounds the other way around than continental Spanish?

Interestingly, my native language is Czech, and it makes it rather easy to learn English and Spanish, because the only sound that's missing is English 'th' in three or think, which people here pronounce like 't' or 'f' and "I fink" sounds pretty horrible :)

I understand that Spanish has to be really hard for English speakers, because of things like words changing shape because of gender, and stuff, but the usual English/American pronunciation of Spanish 'j' (or 'x') is terrible. I had to laugh at Lady Gaga singing about some Alexandro, making up about three different ways to pronounce it, not a single one correct. It's not difficult sound!

Talking about difficult sounds, try this one: [1] it's fun :)

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%98

⬐ gngeal

Interestingly, my native language is Czech, and it makes it rather easy to learn English and Spanish, because the only sound that's missing is English 'th' in three or think, which people here pronounce like 't' or 'f' and "I fink" sounds pretty horrible :)

You forgot people mixing up v/w, and being funny with r. ;-)

⬐ _ak

Well, active interest helps as well. I started learning English in school at 10 (German native speaker, 29 years old), and starting at the age of 14, I became actively interested in watching US-American movies (well, the usual mainstream) in English (this coincided with the widespread availability of DVD players and DVDs with English-language audio tracks). My perception has been that it immensely helped me with both my listening comprehension and my vocabulary. That turned out to be an advantage when I worked in companies with English-speaking colleagues.

My only imperfections that I and my GF (who is from the UK) recognize are things like my US-centric pronounciation and vocabulary ("boot, not trunk!", "lift, not elevator!", etc.) and my tendency to mispronounce words that I've only ever read but not heard. And when I'm tired, my accent sometimes slips and I suddenly stereotypically sound like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

⬐ neurotech1

Part of US Astronaut training is to live with a Russian family (I don't think it is a Cosmonauts' family) and participate in immersive Russian language training.

This is before they train on how to fly the Soyuz, and the Astronauts do serve as flight engineers on actual Soyuz missions to the ISS. There is a reason NASA does this.

⬐ AznHisoka

The person who wrote this blog would disagree with you: www.alljapaneseallthetime.com . It's harder, no doubt, but most people can't give that excuse because they don't go 100% into immersing their lives into the language. Which means listening to audio, TV shows, anything in that language at least 12 hours a day even at work, and even sometimes when you sleep (a lot i know, but if it was that easy, everyone would speak 3+ languages).

Plus, if you live in NYC or any ethnically diverse community in the USA, you'd meet plenty of people who've lived here 20+ years, yet can't have a conversation with you in English - I know many Chinese immigrants like that.

⬐ msoad

That's why I said "community" not country. You can live in many modern cities and speak your mother tongue all the time.

First step for learning a language is wanting to learn I guess

⬐ kops

I tend to disagree. Specially the Indo-European[1] family of languages and even more with the ones which are mostly phonetic. Most of the these languages have rules which you can mug-up and get used to in no time(ok a few months). I would assume learning a language which is pictorial in nature probably will be way more difficult and requires you to completely immerse yourself into it. The ruleset of all Indo-European languages is surprisingly common with varying degrees of sophistication but if you know one of these languages, then it is easier to learn others. But yeah, it probably wouldn't work if you speak none of these langauages.

I wish I had internet and wikipedia when I was in school.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-European_languages

⬐ seeingfurther

That's not true. I lived in Rio de Janeiro for 3 years. I frequently encountered people who spoke perfect English with American accents... and had never left Brazil.

⬐ Dewie

> The cold truth about learning another language is that you will not learn much when you are not living in a community(country) that speaks that language.

Patently false, as evidenced by the countless numbers of second language English speakers who have never been to an English-speaking country for more than some vacations (if even that).

⬐ tokenadult

As the person whom you are quoting said in an earlier reply in this thread,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6303229

he chose the word "community" precisely to indicate that you don't have to live in an English-speaking country to learn good English (or a Chinese-speaking COUNTRY to learn Chinese, etc.). But massive "real-world" exposure to a language outside required school lessons helps immensely, as many research studies on language acquisition around the world have shown.

English has the network advantage of being the "community" language of people who have no other common language, all over the world.

⬐ Dewie

> But massive "real-world" exposure to a language outside required school lessons helps immensely, as many research studies on language acquisition around the world have shown.

Maybe the primary take-away from those findings should be that learning languages in school sucks. I can still remember being assigned 20 words to mindlessly repeat until I memorized them.

⬐ tokenadult

The cold truth about learning another language is that you will not learn much when you are not living in a community(country) that speaks that language.

This is verifiably true, by an experimental test of Chinese-language proficiency, of the foreigners who learned Chinese in my generation. Harvard and some other elite universities wanted to develop a test of Chinese as a second language to find out which Americans were learning Chinese the best. During the norming study for the test, someone thought to include foreigners at the Mandarin Training Center of the National Taiwan Normal University ( 國立台灣師範大學國語教學中心 ) in the norming sample. My fellow students and I who were there at the time "wrecked the curve" for all the graduates of Chinese language programs at United States elite universities who had not spent significant time overseas. Further development of the proposed test was scrapped after that was discovered.

That said, English is more learnable in-country than most languages because of its extensive use as an interlanguage. I lost count early of the number of different native language pairings I would see among foreign students in Taiwan--mostly in Taiwan to learn Chinese--who would converse with one another in English, because English was their strongest language in common. English-language movies, books, and other authentic examples of use by native speakers are also pervasively available around the world in a degree unmatched by materials in any other language.

⬐ Jongseong

But a speaker of one language who is past the age of puberty will simply not perceive many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the target language (the language to be learned) without very careful training, as disregard of those distinctions below the level of conscious attention is part of having the sound system of the speaker's native language fully in mind. Attention to target language phonemes has to be developed through pains-taking practice.

There is a simple and effective technique to help adult learners to perceive difficult phonemic distinctions, called HVPT (High Variability Phonetic Training). It consists of listening to several native speakers produce the phonemes in question and being quizzed on which phoneme is used in each case. You receive immediate feedback whether you were correct or not. This turns out to be much more effective than simply listening to a single speaker pronounce the phoneme pair and being asked to hear the difference (multiple speakers are crucial in helping you generalize what the salient differences are for a range of pronunciations).

Unfortunately, I don't know of any actual implementation of HVPT, and it doesn't seem to be used much if at all in language learning. Surely there is an opportunity there for someone to design a web-based HVPT system.

⬐ langgeek123

I had similar thoughts a few years ago, and prototyped such an app. It ended up reinforcing what research on the topic already says: HVPT helps, but not enough. It's semi-effective - better than nothing.

I'm now working on creating something better. In the meanwhile, getting a book with good phonetic descriptions of your target language (including lip/tongue diagrams) and recordings, and doing phonetic transcriptions is a better bet than HVPT. Being able to correctly produce the sounds goes a long way towards being able to distinguish them, though it seems to be a two-way feedback loop.

⬐ Jongseong

HVPT is of course only part of the solution; I hope I didn't make it sound like a cure-all. Being able to distinguish the phonemes that you hear is just the first step, and it should logically be followed by learning to produce the sound distinctions in question yourself. And it is definitely a two-way feedback loop in that the better you hear the differences, the better you produce them, and vice versa, just as it is for infants learning their native language. So a more complete training method would combine HVPT with ways to have your own pronunciations scored to see how well you are producing the sounds of the target language.

This is I feel a relatively neglected part of non-native language education, and it is very common for people to have spoken a non-native language for years without learning to distinguish native sound pairs. So good luck with your efforts to help people learn better, and I hope you share the results with us.

⬐ ollysb

My current side project is a web app to teach you to imitate sounds in a particular language. There's some fantastic resources here that will be very useful so thank you.

⬐ cgag

I'm working on some tools trying to make this extensive reading process easier, would you mind if I emailed in sometime to ask for feedback?

⬐ simonebrunozzi

Best. Commenter. Ever. You rock.

⬐ gbog

"English is a prerequisite. If you haven't mastered it yet, learn it. You must be able to read, write, speak and understand English." On his list of things to learn for physics, that even comes before mathematics.

You could also say that learning to use a computer is key to become a programmer. That's obvious and not very telling about what is specifically required to be a programmer.

⬐ natural219

This is completely tangential and I'm not sure if this is off-topic enough to be considered breaking the rules, but you are by far my favorite commenter on HN, and perhaps even the internet. Every post you write is a joy to read, and I know that when I see a comment by "tokenadult" I am in for an informative and thorough break-down of the subject matter. Thank you, and please keep posting.

⬐ m_myers

Conversely, I skimmed down the page, saw the list of references at the bottom, and knew it had to be a tokenadult comment.

⬐ marcamillion

Wow....just looking at his 'about' section in his profile - that's another essay with references.

Interesting!

⬐ NIL8

I agree. Thank you tokenadult!

⬐ jt2190

I guess this is one of those cases where I wish that the commenter would submit a link to their blog, instead of posting an interesting-yet-not-really-on-topic-way-too-long comment. [1]

[1] To refresh everyone's memory, pg's essay is about what happens when founders have trouble making themselves understood, while tokenadult's comment is about how to learn a foreign language.

⬐ dasil003

I think it's fine to post a comment like this to HN, absolutely we are better for it. However it should also be posted to a blog so it's not lost to the sands of time.

⬐ chris_wot

That post was on topic. He explained why it is so hard to be made understood when English is your second language, which was what pg was talking about!

⬐ chc

His comment was specifically about learning how to speak a foreign language with a reasonably "native"-sounding quality — i.e. what the stumbling blocks are that lead to hard-to-understand accents (and/or difficulty understanding native accents) and how to get past them. It seems pretty relevant to me.

The submitted article had some interesting tips, and several of the previous comments are quite good too. I've been developing a FAQ on language learning as this interest is mentioned on Hacker News from time to time. As I learned Mandarin Chinese up to the level that I was able to support my family for several years as a Chinese-English translator and interpreter, I had to tackle several problems for which there is not yet a one-stop-shopping software solution. For ANY pair of languages, even closely cognate pairs of West Germanic languages like English and Dutch, or Wu Chinese dialects like those of Shanghai and Suzhou, the two languages differ in sound system, so that what is a phoneme in one language is not a phoneme in the other language.

http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Wha...

But a speaker of one language who is past the age of puberty will simply not perceive many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the target language (the language to be learned) without very careful training, as disregard of those distinctions below the level of conscious attention is part of having the sound system of the speaker's native language fully in mind. Attention to target language phonemes has to be developed through pains-taking practice.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032

It is brutally hard for most people (after the age of puberty, and perhaps especially for males) to learn to attend to sound distinctions that don't exist in the learner's native language. That is especially hard when the sound distinction signifies a grammatical distinction that also doesn't exist in the learner's native language. For example, the distinction between "I speak" and "he speaks" in English involves a consonant cluster at the end of a syllable, and no such consonant clusters exist in the Mandarin sound system at all. Worse than that, no such grammatical distinction as "first person singular" and "third person singular" for inflecting verbs exists in Mandarin, so it is remarkably difficult for Mandarin-speaking learners of English to learn to distinguish "speaks" from "speak" and to say "he speaks Chinese" rather than * "he speak Chinese" (not a grammatical phrase in spoken English).

Most software materials for learning foreign languages could be much improved simply by including a complete chart of the sound system of the target language (in the dialect form being taught in the software materials) with explicit description of sounds in the terminology of articulatory phonetics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics

with full use of notation from the International Phonetic Alphabet.

http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html

Good language-learning materials always include a lot of focused drills on sound distinctions (contrasting minimal pairs in the language) in the target language, and no software program for language learning should be without those. It is still an art of software writing to try to automate listening to a learner's pronunciation for appropriate feedback on accuracy of pronunciation. That is not an easy problem.

After phonology, another huge task for any language learner is acquiring vocabulary, and this is the task that most language-learning materials are most focused. But often the focus on vocabulary is not very thoughtful.

The classic software approach to helping vocabulary acquisition is essentially to automate flipping flash cards. But flash cards have ALWAYS been overrated for vocabulary acquisition. Words don't match one-to-one between languages, not even between closely cognate languages. The map is not the territory, and every language on earth divides the world of lived experience into a different set of words, with different boundaries between words of similar meaning.

The royal road to learning vocabulary in a target language is massive exposure to actual texts (dialogs, stories, songs, personal letters, articles, etc.) written or spoken by native speakers of the language. I'll quote a master language teacher here, the late John DeFrancis. A few years ago, I reread the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). In other words, vocabulary can only be well acquired in context (an argument he develops in detail with regard to Chinese in the writing I have just cited) and the context must be a genuine context produced by native speakers of the language.

I have been giving free advice on language learning since the 1990s on my personal website,

http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html

and the one advice I can give every language learner reading this thread is to take advantage of radio broadcasting in your target language. Spoken-word broadcasting (here I'm especially focusing on radio rather than on TV) gives you an opportunity to listen and to hear words used in context. In the 1970s, I used to have to use an expensive short-wave radio to pick up Chinese-language radio programs in North America. Now we who have Internet access can gain endless listening opportunities from Internet radio stations in dozens of unlikely languages. Listen early and listen often while learning a language. That will help with phonology (as above) and it will help crucially with vocabulary.

The third big task of a language learner is learning grammar and syntax, which is often woefully neglected in software language-learning materials. Every language has hundreds of tacit grammar rules, many of which are not known explicitly even to native speakers, but which reveal a language-learner as a foreigner when the rules are broken. The foreign language-learner needs to understand grammar not just to produce speech or writing that is less jarring and foreign to native speakers, but also to better understand what native speakers are speaking or writing. Any widely spoken modern language has thick books reporting the grammatical rules of the language,

http://www.amazon.com/Mandarin-Chinese-Functional-Reference-...

http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar-Grammars...

http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-Language...

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/...

and it is well worth your while to study books like that both about your native language(s) and about any language you are studying.

One point to bear in mind in discussing this issue is that not all natural human languages reach the same result in ordering adjectives. For example, speakers of Chinese (Cantonese, specifically) have to be taught English adjective order

http://www2.elc.polyu.edu.hk/cill/exercises/adjectiveorder.h...

and it is generally familiar to persons who have had a strong first-year linguistics course at a university or who have studied a modern foreign language in depth that adjective order varies from language to language. So the one thing we can be sure about here is that the grammatical sense of native speakers of English (or native speakers of Chinese, etc.) does NOT reflect some kind of underlying universal rule of human thought.

The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/...

is an expensive reference book well informed by worldwide investigation of English as it is actually written and spoken. It is a useful tool for informed discussion about the interesting issues brought up by the Stack Exchange question kindly submitted here.

Since you asked, insofar as the participle "burned" is functioning as an adjective here, it is in positive degree. The comparative degree would be "more burned," and the superlative degree would be "most burned."

This classification of adjectives by degree comes, of course, from Latin,

http://www.dl.ket.org/latin2/grammar/ch34-degofadj.htm

and English doesn't operate completely in the straitjacket of Latin grammar, but has its own very intricate grammatical rules.

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/...

Here's a new comment, based on the other comments that have come up in this thread now that discussion is active. As I learned Mandarin Chinese up to the level that I was able to support my family for several years as a Chinese-English translator and interpreter, I had to tackle several problems for which there is not yet a one-stop-shopping software solution. For ANY pair of languages, even closely cognate pairs of West Germanic languages like English and Dutch, or Wu Chinese dialects like those of Shanghai and Suzhou, the two languages differ in sound system, so that what is a phoneme in one language is not a phoneme in the other language.

http://www.sil.org/linguistics/GlossaryOfLinguisticTerms/Wha...

But a speaker of one language who is past the age of puberty will simply not perceive many of the phonemic distinctions in sounds in the target language (the language to be learned) without very careful training, as disregard of those distinctions below the level of conscious attention is part of having the sound system of the speaker's native language fully in mind. Attention to target language phonemes has to be developed through pains-taking practice.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10442032

It is brutally hard for most people (after the age of puberty, and perhaps especially for males) to learn to attend to sound distinctions that don't exist in the learner's native language. That is especially hard when the sound distinction signifies a grammatical distinction that also doesn't exist in the learner's native language. For example, the distinction between "I speak" and "he speaks" in English involves a consonant cluster at the end of a syllable, and no such consonant clusters exist in the Mandarin sound system at all. Worse than that, no such grammatical distinction as "first person singular" and "third person singular" for inflecting verbs exists in Mandarin, so it is remarkably difficult for Mandarin-speaking learners of English to learn to distinguish "speaks" from "speak" and to say "he speaks Chinese" rather than * "he speak Chinese" (not a grammatical phrase in spoken English).

Most software materials for learning foreign languages could be much improved simply by including a complete chart of the sound system of the target language (in the dialect form being taught in the software materials) with explicit description of sounds in the terminology of articulatory phonetics

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Articulatory_phonetics

with full use of notation from the International Phonetic Alphabet.

http://www.langsci.ucl.ac.uk/ipa/ipachart.html

Good language-learning materials always include a lot of focused drills on sound distinctions (contrasting minimal pairs in the language) in the target language, and no software program for language learning should be without those. It is still an art of software writing to try to automate listening to a learner's pronunciation for appropriate feedback on accuracy of pronunciation. That is not an easy problem.

After phonology, another huge task for any language learner is acquiring vocabulary, and this is the task that most language-learning materials are most focused. But often the focus on vocabulary is not very thoughtful.

The classic software approach to helping vocabulary acquisition is essentially to automate flipping flash cards. But flash cards have ALWAYS been overrated for vocabulary acquisition. Words don't match one-to-one between languages, not even between closely cognate languages. The map is not the territory, and every language on earth divides the world of lived experience into a different set of words, with different boundaries between words of similar meaning.

The royal road to learning vocabulary in a target language is massive exposure to actual texts (dialogs, stories, songs, personal letters, articles, etc.) written or spoken by native speakers of the language. I'll quote a master language teacher here, the late John DeFrancis. A couple years ago, I reread the section "Suggestions for Study" in the front matter of John DeFrancis's book Beginning Chinese Reader, Part I, which I first used to learn Chinese back in 1975. In that section of that book, I found this passage, "Fluency in reading can only be achieved by extensive practice on all the interrelated aspects of the reading process. To accomplish this we must READ, READ, READ" (capitalization as in original). In other words, vocabulary can only be well acquired in context (an argument he develops in detail with regard to Chinese in the writing I have just cited) and the context must be a genuine context produced by native speakers of the language.

I have been giving free advice on language learning since the 1990s on my personal website,

http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html

and the one advice I can give every language learner reading this thread is to take advantage of radio broadcasting in your target language. Spoken-word broadcasting (here I'm especially focusing on radio rather than on TV) gives you an opportunity to listen and to hear words used in context. In the 1970s, I used to have to use an expensive short-wave radio to pick up Chinese-language radio programs in North America. Now we who have Internet access can gain endless listening opportunities from Internet radio stations in dozens of unlikely languages. Listen early and listen often while learning a language. That will help with phonology (as above) and it will help crucially with vocabulary.

The third big task of a language learner is learning grammar and syntax, which is often woefully neglected in software language-learning materials. Every language has hundreds of tacit grammar rules, many of which are not known explicitly even to native speakers, but which reveal a language-learner as a foreigner when the rules are broken. The foreign language-learner needs to understand grammar not just to produce speech or writing that is less jarring and foreign to native speakers, but also to better understand what native speakers are speaking or writing. Any widely spoken modern language has thick books reporting the grammatical rules of the language,

http://www.amazon.com/Mandarin-Chinese-Functional-Reference-...

http://www.amazon.com/Chinese-Comprehensive-Grammar-Grammars...

http://www.amazon.com/Comprehensive-Grammar-English-Language...

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/...

and it is well worth your while to study books like that both about your native language(s) and about any language you are studying.

P.S. I'm puzzled about the pattern of upvotes and downvotes on my first comment in this thread (which was the first comment posted, when it wasn't clear whether this story would move from the new page to the main page here on HN.) I'm not aware of any factual mistakes in the first comment I posted here, which was a response to the submitted article, nor anything about it that violates the Hacker News guidelines.

⬐ alex_c

>It is brutally hard for most people (after the age of puberty, and perhaps especially for males) to learn to attend to sound distinctions that don't exist in the learner's native language.

Do you think people who grow up bilingual have an advantage in this area? Not necessarily just because they have a larger set of phonemes to fall back on, but because they may find it easier to notice differences and recognize new ones? ("this is language specific" understanding vs. "this is how it always is")

Also, your comment about reading touches on a project I've been working on (and have shelved for about a year). If you don't mind I'd love to hear what you think, I'll dust it off and send you an email once I get the prototype up and running again.

⬐ tokenadult

Alex, yes, please feel free to follow up about our shared interests. Perhaps some of my writing on those interests, updated after I read the sources you suggest, will show up either here on HN as FAQ posts or as new pages on my personal website, or both.

To answer your direct question, my anecdotal observation is that people who are native bilinguals enjoy a life-long advantage in further language learning, which makes sense on theoretical grounds. I'm not sure to what degree this hypothesis has been put to the test in the research literature on language acquisition, some of which I have read.

⬐ philsnow

I have read a tiny bit of the literature on language acquisition, and what I have read says that mere exposure to the phonemes of a language (even absent any attempts to actually teach that language) during early years (definitely before puberty but with greater effect between the ages of 1 and 6) makes it easier to form those phonemes later in life.

That said, I think every second-language learner (even those who will never learn a third language) could benefit from being taught the entire international phonetic alphabet, to aid them in mentally placing (inside the mouth) the sounds they're supposed to be making.

Knowing the difference between 'a' (unrounded open front) and 'ɐ' (unrounded near-open central) vowels helped me when learning the Cantonese phonetic system. Just knowing all the sounds that are "available" and knowing which of those sounds the target language uses is very useful.

⬐ lambda

About the upvotes/downvotes: I frequently find your comments to be a little tiring. You frequently repost long comments with lots of links which are merely reposts of comments on a related topic (for instance, your standard "hiring practices" comment). When I see one of your long-winded comments, I always wince a little bit, because sometimes it is a long-winded repost that is not quite relevant to the discussion at hand, and so while it may have some good information, it feels a bit like a hijacking of the thread. I would not be surprised if there were people who started automatically downvoting your comments for that reason.

That said, this comment in particular is pretty much spot on, and is perfectly relevant to the discussion at hand.

One of the frustrations I've always had as an adult male trying to learn languages is that many of the teachers don't actually have the linguistic training to describe some of the phonetic and grammatical distinctions they are trying to teach. For instance, when learning French, I was trying to figure out the liaison and enchainment system; and for the most part, it actually adheres to some fairly universal phonetic principles (though there's a bit of confusion do to the fact that there are some prestige dialect rules which get over-applied to sound more formal, which actually cause you to break those more regular and universal rules; this is not dissimilar to English in which prescriptivists try to over-apply certain grammatical rules to cases in which they just don't make sense). But I could never actually discuss this with my French teachers, because none of them had any kind of education in phonology and so didn't know anything about the terminology or rules.

It surprises me that many of those who teach language don't have any kind of formal training in how language actually works, how languages differ, and the like. Mostly, they are someone who is just a fluent speaker who happens to have studied a good deal of literature in the language.

Edit to add: ah, I just realized that you were talking about your earlier comment, about the list of languages and their similarity. I'm not sure why people would have downvoted that. My experience is that asking or complaining about downvotes on sites like Hacker News (or others where people vote anonymously, like Reddit or Stack Overflow/Stack Exchange) is generally fruitless; if the person wanted you to know why they had downvoted, they would have left a comment about it. If you have to ask, whoever downvoted probably isn't paying enough attention to respond. And asking and/or complaining about it can lead to the thread being somewhat derailed, like this one is starting to be (which is partly my fault for responding). So I've since stopped asking about downvotes; if I know what to fix, I fix it, if not, I just move on with my life.

⬐ nacker

After I read this article, I decided Chinese was far beyond me. Not for the faint of heart, to say the least!

http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

⬐ svachalek

In a few years of high school I learned enough Spanish to comfortably read a newspaper or simple novel, looking up occasional words. After some considerably more ad hoc attempts to learn Chinese and probably thousands of hours of exposure to it, I'm able to get the gist of a simple conversation (without most of the details), read idiot-proof signs, and able to say about a dozen simple greetings etc. without getting a blank look back. It's very humbling.

⬐ jfaucett

I can't agree more with your thoughts about radio. For me, I found that TV lets you slip in a passive mode where learning isn't optimized. When you're listening to a radio broadcasts, you're forced to concentrate on how the words sound and what they mean in order to follow along, for listening comprehension and building up vocab, listening to the radio is the method that has worked by far the best for me. It usually takes a couple of minutes before anyone recognizes that I'm not a native speaker, even in the languages I learned after my early 20s, and I think learning by radio as opposed to texts or the usual classroom-ish stuff had a huge part in giving me "native speaker" pronuncation (which incidently is almost always quite different than "correct" pronuncation).

Well, he wrote a book on this topic http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Grammar-English-Language/dp/...

Edit: and they're kind of shy:

"Our aim is to describe and not prescribe: we outline and illustrate the principles that govern the construction of words and sentences in the present-day language without recommending or condemning particular usage choices. Although this book may be (and we certainly hope it will be) of use in helping the user decide how to phrase things, it is not designed as a style guide or a usage manual."

⬐ MrRage

And at $161 it's not going to sell as well as The Elements of Style.