[Alexey_Nigin]

I (sort of) agree that having many languages encourages diversity and coexistence of different cultures. However, I think that apparent drawbacks outweigh any potential benefits.

As a native Russian speaker, I know just how excruciating learning English can get. I have been learning it for 12 years, and most of the time it was no fun. For example, I once literally memorised 1500 words over a few months. Still, I cannot say that I speak as well as native speakers do. Most Russians never make it past learning to say "I don't speak English" with a funny accent. By the way, if you are an English speaker, you probably don't realise what it means not to know English. Let me assure you: it's horrible.

[sverige]

I'm a native English speaker who learned Russian. It has to be harder to learn English, though Russian was no picnic.

Though I was once maybe 75% fluent speaking (and could understand 90% of what Gorbachev said - he speaks pretty fast), I haven't used it for 25 years and so have forgotten most of it. I do remember that it was easy to spell, especially compared to English. I also remember that Russian verbs of motion were hard to get right, and declining numbers and certain adjectives correctly was tough.

English has become the new lingua franca (still cracks me up to pause and consider that literally), for better or worse. For all its faults, English is very flexible and can be precise, despite the fact that it's not often used for that feature. Most native speakers I know would be surprised to learn how many verb tenses English there are, and even more surprised at their proper use. The MLA and AP styles haven't helped that cause any.

[HillRat]

>English has become the new lingua franca (still cracks me up to pause and consider that literally), for better or worse.

On a completely pedantic note, lingua franca doesn't actually refer to what I think most people associate it with (the use of French as the diplomatic language of the 18th and 19th centuries in particular). It actually means the language of the franj, the "Franks," or Western Europeans. The original lingua franca was a pidgin Italian with a lot of Arabic and Turkish loanwords, the result of the Venetian dominance of the Levantine sea trade. Of course, in a purely literal sense, using it in phrases like, "Gulf media Arabic is the lingua franca of the Middle East" is itself wrong.

Tiresome pedantry complete, please carry on.

[haddr]

I think 'lingua franca' is never used in a purely literal sense, so probably nobody even thought about what you mention (which is definitely true)

[taneq]

This particular tiresome pedantry was quite interesting. Thanks!

[mitchtbaum]

> lingua franca doesn't actually refer to what I think most people associate it with

Wikipedia users also make that mistake: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Common_language&r...

[sverige]

TIL

[gaius]

English has become the new lingua franca

It's funnier if you say "de facto lingua franca" :-)

But the strength of English is that you can freely mix in words from other languages and there is enough redundancy that your meaning will probably be understood anyway, and eventually the word will simply be absorbed - and that's where alot of the irregularity came from. There's no Academie Francaise equivalent to police it and no-one even wants one.

[shitgoose]

"it was easy to spell"

Yep. Russian speaker is always puzzled by North American obsession with "spelling". Spelling competitions etc. In Russian if you want to "spell" a word, just say it slowly. No big deal really.

[Alexey_Nigin]

Actually, declining numbers is something most native Russian speakers can't do. Even people on TV, whose job is to speak correctly, often struggle with it. Moreover, in the Russian translation of the Empire Strikes Back, C3PO's line "Sir, the possibility of successfully navigating an asteroid field is approximately three thousand seven hundred and twenty to one" has the number declined a wrong way.

[sverige]

That makes me feel better then!

[bsder]

> For example, I once literally memorised 1500 words over a few months.

If you want to do things like pass the SAT, even native English speakers have to sit down and memorize about 6000 words over the course of a year or two.

Learning a language sucks. Period.

[fapjacks]

I've been using Duolingo to learn Russian every day for a few months. I'm just finally getting somewhat confident about all of the Russian characters, and the "weird" sounds made through the various character combinations that change the pronunciation of the individual characters. I'm no dumbass, being able to speak two other languages besides my native English (which weren't learned through Duolingo, though I really like it). There just must be something tough about learning the other, between Russian and English.

[gkya]

Memorising is such an ineffective way to study language, it's like cutting down a big tree with a pair of scissors. Lots of research has been done on the topic, and many methods invented. The key is skipping complex grammar and working on comprehension and production from as early as day one, every day and trying to think in the target language. It seems silly, but does work.

[wolfgke]

> The key is skipping complex grammar

I personally tend to think about languages a lot in terms of grammar. The reason might be that in German (my native language) grammar plays a much larger role (four cases and lots of rules for declination and conjugation) than in English (also in Russian grammar plays a very central role, as far as I know).

As I have often written on Hacker News when learning German I would strongly recommend to get the grammar by heart (yes, it is complex and ugly), until you don't have to think about it anymore (if necessary by rote memorization) since

> trying to think in the target language

for German means thinking in the German grammar. Any approach that tries to skip grammar at the beginning will soon confuse learners, because for example verbs are typically associated with some class of object (either based on a case or a preposition) and if you use it wrong often the meaning can change. For example :

auf etwas warten (to wait for something) has to be used with an accusative, so

"Ich warte auf den Zug" (I'm waiting for the train) is correct

If you use a dative instead, this is also yields a correct sentence, but with a completely different meaning

"Ich warte auf dem Zug" means you are on the top of the train and waiting, since "auf" followed by dative is a local adverbial.

So learn the grammar correctly from the beginning.

[gkya]

Grammar is a science, and it's not necessary to speak a language. My mother tongue is Turkish, an agglutinative vocal-harmonising beast with hundreds of suffixes, yet I don't need any grammar while speaking nor while reading or writing.

I'll start my archaeology double major in short, and German seems to be quite an important language in the field, so I'll have to learn that. I'll use my way and see if you and the others who agree you are right that German requires heavy grammar. Though I can reasonably guess that I'll start reading research by the six months mark.

[ivm]

It's not silly, that's how people learn to speak in the childhood and how foreign languages were learned before books even existed. There's also a te

I'm now learning Spanish and I just can't stand books with grammar exercises or using Memrise for more than 10 days.

The problem is that compared to English there's not enough Spanish content I like (Reddit, HN, non-fiction books). So I'm going with news, doubled cartoons, and flashcards for tough words.

[gkya]

I did Italian just like that, as a student of Italian philology. Made lots of research before starting the school (about 2 years ago) and devised a self immersion method, and followed it religiously. In about a couple months I was reading news in italian okay, in six months I started reading actual literature, now I'm quite close to a C1.

I also learned English a bit in primary school but the bulk of it while actively self teaching programming via tutorials and conference videos, and consuming other media in English too. And my English is near-native, which was the experience that encouraged me to do what I did with Italian.

[wallflower]

Paraphrasing the X-Files, the content is out there. It might not be exactly what you are seeking, but it is out there. It's not going to be 'Running Kubernetes in Production on a Roller Coaster' (note: this is obviously made up) - e.g. hip and timely - but maybe some articles that were translated/paraphrased/borrowed from the original English news. The key, as you may already know, is consistency of action day after day. Don't just do it once a week for 2 hours, every day for 10-15 minutes will work much, much better.

> I just can't stand books with grammar exercises or using Memrise for more than 10 days... and flashcards for tough words.

I too dislike grammar books and I have stopped using Memrise. It was too much work to 'water the plants' and just answering a question required excessive game playing (multiple choice etc.). With flashcards, if it has not already been imparted to you, please write down the entire sentence. Context is so important.

> The problem is that compared to English there's not enough Spanish content I like (Reddit, HN, non-fiction books).

Yes, it is true that the overwhelming majority of medium and long-form content is posted in English. Because that is what the majority of the target audience can understand.

Here are some Spanish speaking websites for you to read:

Reddit/Digg like:

Meneame - Sort of like Digg, in that it has short article summaries across many topic areas (including technology and general interest news).

https://www.meneame.net/

Barrapunto - The Slashdot equivalent. Biased towards sysadmin-type articles and knowledge.

http://barrapunto.com/

Subreddits in Spanish

https://www.reddit.com/r/espanol (like Reddit in English (cat pictures LOL etc.) but Spanish sourced

Country/region-specific subreddits For example, Chile https://www.reddit.com/r/chile/

Comics Mafalda - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafalda Very famous Argentinian comic book.

Non-fiction books Gutenberg Press (Spanish). Most are out-of-copyright old. https://www.gutenberg.org/browse/languages/es

Ted talks in Spanish

http://tedxtalks.ted.com/browse/talks-by-language/spanish

Short-form content (Twitter, Facebook)

Register another Twitter account and just follow people/news who tweet in Spanish. It is quite easy to find these accounts - search for keywords like 'noticias' (news), 'ciencia', (science), 'creo que' (I believe), 'la crisis' (the 2006/2007 financial crisis), (your own keywords)

Warning, understanding the Spanish used in short tweets can be quite challenging as it is very terse and concise.

For the biggest challenge, microcuentos (also on FB, hashtags, instagram, etc.)

https://twitter.com/microcuentos

[ivm]

Thank you a lot, I'm going to check it out! I'm already reading many of my Spanish-speaking friends on FB, subreddits in Spanish, and https://twitter.com/pictoline on Twitter.

My macOS is also in Spanish. I'm doing as much as possible to get out from the English "vendor lock-in" but it's quite hard even in Spanish-speaking country since I work from home and my friends know English.

[wallflower]

> since I work from home and my friends know English.

I'm going to give it to you straight. You're going to need to actively leave your comfort zone of your friends and your working from home. You're going to have to mess up again and again and eventually you will become correct and smoother. You don't need to speak grammatically correct Spanish right away. You can get to that along the way. For now, just 'abra su boca'. They will make fun of you and eventually you will be good enough that they won't make fun of you.

Even if you have friends who speak English (and prefer to), you can go out with them and speak Spanish to the people around you. You won't feel alone and they (your English-speaking preference friends) will eventually feel 'left out' and speak to you more in Spanish.

Even if you work from home, you can go out and have lunch or coffee in a public area. Just like you would in English, try to strike up a conversation by making an observation (try to avoid questions - in all languages, no one wants to be interrogated).

You: 'Me gusta este cafe porque hay demasiado tomas de corriente disponsibles. Them: 'Si. Ayer fui un cafe y no tenía las mesas disponsibles.' You: 'Algun veces, me levantaba y trabajaba con mi ordenador encima de la cabeza de alguien.' Them: '¿En serio?' You: <una pausa> No (laugh) Hopefully they laugh

Make jokes, be self-deprecating. Never make fun of someone else. Especially with the translation difficulties.

[haddr]

I learned that you can grasp English without learnig grammar (this is what they do in UK). But while it works for some people, it might not work for others. And it definitely wouldn't work for some more grammatically complex languages...

[kahrkunne]

Yeah that's why they do that in schools all over the world- oh wait...

The best way to learn a language is still to memorize grammar and 2000-3000 words, then read.

[gkya]

They do so because it's impractical to do one on one lessons with a classroom-ful of people. You can believe what you want but there is a lot of research on the subject that supports me instead of you. See e.g. Krashen.