I'm posting this outside of the language learning thread because I worry those not currently learning languages are skipping it altogether :) In this post, I want to share general advice and takeaways about language learning, so this is for everybody, not just current learners!

Today, I've hit I think a big milestone: I am now comfortable calling myself "conversational" in Russian. This comes on the heels of a 30 minutes, all-Russian, naturally-flowing conversation with my coach who was very impressed, and a couple days after having participated in a total of 4+ hours of conversations that included a native speaker who doesn't actually speak English (training wheels are off, now!).

The goal I set myself mid-may to reach in 1 year, has been reached in 3 months. My Duolingo streak is on 87 days (or 89? I don't know if it counts the two streak freezes that were used), but I picked up DL a week after I started.

During this time, I journaled my progress here on Tildes (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 - really, I hope Tildes isn't getting sick of my spam!), and rekindled my love for learning languages. I think it's time for a recap: What worked, what helped the most, etc.

Summary

I didn't follow one specific technique or guide. Everything from the beginning has been improvised, based on experience from previous languages, and gut feel.

I talked about my methods in-depth in the journaling posts, but here's the bird's eye view of it:

1. Learn the script first, and how it's pronounced (I had already done that years ago, kinda)
2. Rigorously followed a single, complete-beginner crash course to get me started. In my case, a 9-hour, 30 episodes youtube series called Russian Made Easy, at an average of 45 min/day.
3. Started using Drops to start accumulating vocabulary; this replaced Flashcards for me.
4. After a little while, started the Duolingo course (but I don't use Duolingo the way most people do - See the old journals for details) and kept up with the streak since.
5. Started listening to spoken material on YouTube, as much as possible, even before I could understand what was being said.
6. Force myself to interact with the language by switching away from English in a variety of devices and apps
7. Watch loads of short videos on various bits and pieces about grammar, etymology, word lists and misc advice
8. Started writing in Russian on IM apps (at first using Google Translate, then without) with natives. Ask for feedback on it all.
9. Regularly try to speak, to whomever would have a conversation with me.
10. Regularly introspect: appreciate my progress, share it, and think about what I need to work on

Deep dive

Motivation

I wrote about how important motivation is. People start learning a language and then abandon it after a few weeks like a gym membership purchased on January 2nd. Having a motivator that goes beyond "this sounds cool" is really important, because all this is a lot of effort and your brain won't see the point of making all that effort if you don't have a proper need to go through it all.

I found that motivation is not a constant, either. It is something which has to be maintained. Sharing this experience with you all has been immensely useful in that process. And having native speakers in your life who can really appreciate your progress and encourage you is excellent.

Variety

The most useful part of my "method" is definitely the variety of the language diet. It seems to me that following only a set of single-source courses will just leave you with huge gaping holes as soon as you leave its bubble. It'd be like learning to read by only reading the same 100 words, over and over, until you become very quick at reading specifically those words. And then you're done and you come across the word "exhaustion" and you're like, what the fuck do I do with this?

So yes, a variety of activities that will cover all types of input (reading, listening) and outputs (speaking, writing and thinking). And with the varied diet, one should also be careful not to burn themselves out by doing too much. I ensured that a lot of what I was "doing" was passive: Switching my phone's language, leaving audio in the background, asking others to speak to me in the language and translating if I need, etc. My active learning was only being done when I felt like it. This circles us back to the motivation aspect: If that's rock solid, then you will want to keep studying/reading/learning, and you'll do more.

Regularity

So yes, quantity and regularity are also important, and keeping the language in your brain every single day is, I believe, critical to help it develop. The languages I do not think about on a regular basis don't develop. Despite speaking Greek my whole life, only interacting with that language once every couple weeks at most has kept it from evolving beyond a pretty basic level, and now I'm convinced my Russian is better than my Greek. Oof, this puts shame on my supposed bilingual heritage.

Finding comfort

I think it's easy to get frustrated at a language you're not yet good at, because you're so used to how you normally do things, that communicating is SO FRUSTRATING when you don't have your whole toolkit.

Speaking in the target language, with people who know your primary language(s), can also highlight that frustration because the barrier feels "artificial". For me, I have not particularly enjoyed speaking to non-natives, and that hasn't motivated me much. However, speaking to natives has been much easier because it's really nice to think "Hey, you've been making all these efforts to speak in a language I understand, let me do the effort this time".

And well, finding a way to be comfortable speaking is critical. Olly Richards mentions that, if you start speaking too early and in an unsafe space, you can scare yourself into a "bad experience" and regress because of that. I can definitely see that, and I personally was careful to challenge myself without trying to push too hard.

Over time, you can get very good at getting a sense of how difficult a certain activity or material is for you. You have three grades: Things you are comfortable with (level+0), things that are challenging and teach you (level+1), and things that are straight up too difficult for you (level+2).Input-based method proponents often advise staying at +1, without really defining what that means, but it's true you kinda know it when you see it. For example, watching Let's Plays in Russian is still my_level+2 for me, but I see them slowly edging towards +1, and that type of material is super effective because, any time you see the progress happening, your motivation is massively improved.

Mistakes

Developing on comfort: You have to be comfortable making mistakes. This is what really scares everybody, and it was definitely the case for me as well.. I was (and still am) ashamed of my bad grammar especially, and if I don't know how to say something properly, I hesitate to say it at all. But you gotta push through that. There's a balance to strike as always, and you still need to be ok with

How I use Google Translate

I've been doing something which has helped a lot, and in hindsight it's obvious to me why, so I want to share this and popularize this technique.

I started writing to native speakers on IM very, very early (people often use and recommend Tandem for this). Because I didn't have a good enough control over the language yet, what I would do was: Write in Google Translate what I want to say. But without writing long, complex sentences; instead, I would write things I felt I wanted to be able to say. So instead of "Hey, I'm super hungry right now, do you wanna meet me and grab a bite on the way?", I would write "Hey, I am a bit hungry. Can we go eat together?".

I would take the translation, understand it, and usually I would write it again on the keyboard rather than copy-paste (this helps with memorization). Sometimes I would use voice input, because cyrillic keyboard hard.

Then, over time, as I got better at output, I would think about what I want to say directly in Russian and write that into Google Translate to check it (and sometimes do a little back-and-forth dance to see if it suggests alternate forms).

So, yeah, this has been extremely helpful because it's given me a way of using the language as a tool from pretty early on. It's great because Google Translate really is going to adapt to your level, so if you want to be at "level+1", you just have to figure out what that looks like for you in your native language.

Conclusion

Wow, what a journey. Of course it's not over, but I've actually hit my goal... with nine months to spare! That's enough time to make, like, a whole baby.
I want to keep improving, not stagnate, so I'm now going to keep using the language and I think wait that full year before I really start learning a new one. (Ukrainian was next on my list, but I'm shocked at how much I now understand of it, it's much closer to Russian than I thought; so I'm still undecided).

I have loved sharing this experience with you, Tildes, and I really, really hope I motivated some of y'all in your own language learning journeys. If these threads have helped you in any way, please do share it with me here or by DM, I want to know!

Hi Tildes,

I'm looking to introduce my children (aged 10 or so) to simple electronics (blinking lights, simple sensors, ...). I've played with Arduino in the past, but I see that there are now many competing options: Arduino, cheap rip-offs, RPi zero, adafruit, ESP32, ... It's easy to get lost!

Which do you recommend? Ideally, I'd like something cross-platform and open-source, easy to set up (ideally a kit with everything included), and of course not insanely expensive.

Edit: thanks everyone for the good advice! There are so many good options...

The English word 'crane' means a large bird or a giant lever-thing for moving heavy stuff. The Hungarian word 'daru' means both of the same things.

English and Hungarian are about as unrelated as languages get ... and yet, I keep bumping into parallels like that.

Thoughts, anyone?

I recently bought a keyboard and am going to dedicate 30 minutes a day to practicing piano. My goal is to be able to play my favorite songs (jazz & indie mainly), improvise, and generally be competent.

I also want to learn how to sightread, so I've been using https://sightreading.training which has been really useful! I have a background in music (guitar, mostly) and know music theory as well.

Unfortunately due to COVID, Delta, etc, I am not really interested in in-person lessons at the moment, so I was wondering if any tilde users had advice about learning to play through resources online or books!

I'm also really interested in any tips that anyone may have!

When learning something new, often available resources are lacking in some departments - whether they're missing information, poorly written, or tedious and dry. But occasionally, some content just stands out as above and beyond the rest, serving to not only make the learning process enjoyable but also to kindle interest in further exploration. What is that for you?

This could encompass everything from computer programming to literary criticism, and could be in the form of a website, book, video tutorial, or the like.

I'm a sucker for languages and lately I've been wanting to learn a sign language (not specificallly ASL as I put in the title, I'm open to learning any local flavour).

And well, with COVID and everything, I figure this may be a good opportunity to do this with someone else and have someone to talk to. So, is there anyone on Tildes who would be willing to have regular informal video chats, where we talk and you try to teach me as we go? (And of course I can accommodate by text if needed)

No hard commitment, this can just be something we try once and if it's boring for either of us we don't have to continue :) But I'm hoping it'll be fun enough to be a regular thing!

PS. I can teach you French in return if you are interested!

Stop me if you've heard this one before:

• You get an idea for something you'd like to learn more about. (Maybe you have a question, maybe you want to explore a new hobby, or maybe you want to make a more informed decision.)
• You type something into a search engine.
• You click a result, only to realize that what you're reading is poorly written. It seems rushed, surface-level, and ill-informed. "This doesn't answer my question at all!" you think to yourself.
• You go back, and try another one, and another one, only to give up and put the idea back in your head.

I don't think these webpages are written to be useful in the first place. They seem to be written to attract attention to the website for other reasons (ad revenue, affiliate links, to draw attention to a product or service). Regardless of why it's happening, though, I want to find a better way to search.

The sort of content I'm looking for is written by someone who really cares about the topic. I want to learn from dorks and nerds and passionate people. Once I stumbled across this blog about extra virgin olive oil. The website isn't pretty, and it goes way more in depth than I'll ever need, but I trust the author, and there are some really interesting nuggets of insight on these pages. (e.g. "Another myth debunked: Heating EVOO makes it ‘toxic’")

Do you have any tips or tricks to more reliably find these sorts of sources (whether online or in-person)?

Toki Pona is a minimalist conlang famous for having a vocabulary of under 130 words. There are communities of speakers on all major social media platforms. This is an introduction thread for speakers, learners or the toki-curious to introduce themselves. I'll advise on learning resources, or just answer general questions if anyone is interested.

I'm a toki pona speaker and creator of the YouTube channel 'seme li sin?' which translated news stories into toki pona.

mi wile e ni: kulupu wawa pi toki pona lon lipu Tetesu. jan ale pi toki pona li jan pona mi. sina ken la o kepeken e toki pona lon lipu ni!

I know those are easy to find on children's education materials, but the keyword here is simple. Anything kiddie, requiring too many clicks or that takes 3 seconds is off the table.

I kinda need to brush up on my super basic reasoning. In part, because a grown man should know the time table by heart, and in part, because I wanna convince myself that I did not get brain damage after being hit by a car (there's really nothing indicating that, I'm just paranoid).

I'm looking for something simple that presents me with the multiplication table and or simple calculations to answer under a time frame. The requirement for iOS is that my computer is broken.

And it really can be super simple, even something I open from a mobile web browser or transfer to my Kindle.

Additionally: there is no need for if to be an app. A huge list of exercises (with answers) would be greatly helpful.

Thanks!

I read the AskReddit thread on "What costs less than $100 that changed your life?" (link unavailable since I'm at work) but someone responded "SQL" - jobs just open up that make a ton of money.

I did a cursory search on Indeed and holy moly they were right -- SQL jobs get easily 2x what I make now. I'm pretty good at Excel and that sort of thinking, so I was thinking I'd try taking a class.

Do yall have any recommendations as to a good course to take in SQL, preferably online, preferably free or cheap? I'm willing to pay a bit if it'll mean I can make a lot more, but I'm currently not making a ton, haha.

Any responses welcome, including ideas as to how to break into like, tech-oriented fields as well.

Not leaving the house much these days (due to social distancing and also insane heat in NYC right now) means I've got some time to kill that I'd like to spend productively.

I took MIT 6.00.2x: Introduction to Computational Thinking and Data Science a few years back when I was refreshing my Python skills. I think it's been updated a bit since then. It was a high quality course and I enjoyed it, though there are so many Python-related courses these days, I can't guarantee it's the best.

I'm currently taking:

1. Model Thinking on Coursera from the University of Michigan. I don't know where I saw this recommended (maybe on Tildes or Hacker News?) but it's quite good so far. Scott Page teaches about how to use various models (mental models, computational ones, etc.) for breaking down and analyzing various problems and systems. I've only just started but I quite like it.

2. Testing and Monitoring Machine Learning Model Deployments on Udemy. Taking this along with a few coworkers since it's relevant to what I do. Only just starting but appears to be quite good and works through a well-documented example project on Github.

I've also come across a few that seem like they might be good courses for the future:

• Bayesian Methods for Hackers
• Probalistic graphical models on Coursera (3-part sequence, not free)
• Computational probability and inference

Now your turn: what have you taken? What did you like or not like, and why? What do you want to take?