[blacksqr]

>you’ll find a lot of people who spend 95% of their time futzing with learning tools, and 5% (or less) actually studying

Exactly my point. It shouldn't be necessary to spend all that time futzing with tools, the tools should be there, ready to use.

>you need to listen and interact with people in the native language.

Such people are not available in all areas. Online availability does not scale. These are precisely the issues that digital tools should be good at addressing, but have failed to do so.

[irq11]

”Exactly my point. It shouldn't be necessary to spend all that time futzing with tools, the tools should be there, ready to use.”

It isn’t necessary. The tools are fine, and/or improving them won’t solve the fundamental problem. People are just procrastinating.

”Online availability does not scale. These are precisely the issues that digital tools should be good at addressing, but have failed to do so.”

Short of making an AGI that fluently speaks your target language, there are no obvious improvements to learning tools that will address the fundamental problem: you need to talk to actual humans.

[vorg]

> there are no obvious improvements to learning tools that will address the fundamental problem: you need to talk to actual humans

When learning to speak and listen, you need to already understand perhaps 80% of what actual humans are speaking in order to learn the other 20% you don't already understand. If you speak to someone and only understand say 30% of what they're speaking and they you, you won't pick up any of the 70% you don't understand, assuming the native speaker even wants to continue talking to you. Interactive software tools must deduce what vocab and grammar you can already understand and speak only that plus the 10% extra it wants you to practise and reinforce. And those tools don't exist. Good language teachers who can do the same are expensive.

Reading materials are far better in this regard, but even there, most of them use a specific learning sequence as defined by national language testing and don't cater for most learners who learnt haphazardly and thus whose current knowledge is scattered all over that continuum.

[blacksqr]

If that is true, then not only digital tools, but all books, classes, tests and every other technique aside from what you recommend for language learning are fraudulent wastes of time.

[panglott]

Language learning courses and tools are just ways to kickstart normal language acquisition, so you don't have to go through the years of gurgling like a baby has to. Learning to communicate in a new language isn't exactly like learning some other kind of skill--it's much, much huger.

When you're speaking your native language, you're decoding and processing complex social signals in real time at multiple levels of structure (phonological, morphological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic). Even the best AIs can only get a couple of these levels of structure, with significant error rates, and only in a handful of well-studied languages (there are hundreds or thousands of natural languages). How much time does it take for you to learn 1000 vocabulary words? A natural language will have tens of thousands. A comprehensive grammar of the English language would be dozens of heady volumes and have less information about English grammar than any competent native speaker.

Learning a language is just an astonishingly huge task. No course or system can cover it all. Mostly they're just trying to make things easier for you.

[droussel]

I have an uncle who speaks 6 different languages; he really likes picking up new ones. I once had a discussion about how he could pick them up so quickly and he basically said what the parent was saying: use it, practice it, read newspapers in it, speak to people that speak it too. Immerse yourself, accept that you'll be uncomfortable for a while, and before long, you'll be able to hold a simple conversation.

He also said you know you are fluent the day you can casually joke in real time with people and make them laugh (at the joke!)

[irq11]

You’re just trolling now. Other tools are not useless, but improving them will not replace talking to humans.