Any tips for learning a new language at my age? (50s) via Babbel?
I learned French to schoolboy level as a, well, schoolboy. I've remembered quite the remarkable amount I think. Learned The Klingon Language must be 20 years ago, to a point where I could converse with other speakers to some extent, but never the best.
More recently I've become quite interested in historical linguistics, from watching Simon Roper with Old English, and Jackson Crawford. Old English fascinates me as we were never considered clever enough at school to study English properly - that was only for the clever kids.
Because I couldn't find a good Frisian online learning resource, I decided to try my hand at modern German.
Been following Babbel for about 2 months now so super early. I "completed" the first set of lessons and have been doing the vocabulary tests to try and make sure these sink in before progressing, but I find that I regularly only get 2/10, 3/10 on the flashcards.
I've started doing whole first lesson set again, and I find them really easy. I'm basically intuiting a lot of the questions from knowledge of English, French and "common sense" I suppose. Is it odd that I can 100% the lessons easily and quickly, but the vocabulary tests just aren't there for me? My listening and speaking seems quite good according to the app.
Is it too early to tell (I think it might be), should I supplement Babbel with something else, like live learning (perhaps eventually, not right now - I think it'd be pointless at such a low level).
Anything else? Interested in anyone's thoughts.
The most important thing for language learning is starting to digest input and start to do output.
For input, that means that you should go out and get graded readers for your level. For listening, these days its easy to find youtube videos of varying difficulties of every language. Start with a level where you can read/listen to 90% of the content.
For output, that's harder. For text, genuinely it can be quite good to do pretend conversations with LLMs. If ChatGPT can convince people to marry them in their native language, it's a good enough "Hi, I would like to buy 5 apples" conversation partner.
For speech, there are services where you can pay for people's time as either a tutor or conversational partner, but realistically that's quite an investment, so that can wait.
Gemini live allows you to have the same conversations in voice. It's pretty wild.
What do you want to use the language for?
In general, comprehensible input (and optionally flash cards with Anki) is the best way to truly learn a language. At a beginner level, that means complete beginner learner content or young children's TV shows (Bluey and Peppa Pig). At an intermediate level, you can start transitioning to simple podcasts and easier videos or shows then native content.
Reading a lot is the best way to improve your grammar, and there are usually graded readers available for every level. If the beginner ones are boring, it's easy to start reading after getting to an intermediate level with listening because your brain will have a mental model for the language.
One of the things with the early German flash cards is my brain is just throwing French words at my head , flash card shows 'Yellow' and I'm thinking, yea, that's Jaune.
Same thing happened actually when I followed Michelle Thomas Spanish course 20 years ago. Bits of French polluting my Spanish learning.
This happens to me, too, to varying degrees depending on my strength of the language. Like my brain has an 'anything but English bin' it tries to grab from if I dont know/forget how to say something. It's boring, but for me it really only seems to lessen the more vocab I learn, and the more I focus on one language.
This is actually a documented phenomenon. It happens to me all the time as well. I'm English/Dutch fluent, with a smattering of French and Spanish. I'm trying to learn more Spanish since a majority (80% or so) of my school's student body speaks it, but French keeps throwing a monkey wrench into everything.
"What do you mean 'On y va'?"
Seconding "what do you want it for?"
If you want to be fluent so you can converse with natives (or live there) then I feel your requirements are different than just for fun to read/write/listen to German content.
As a early 30s person with zero language skills, learning Norwegian has been really tough.
I only started to "get" anything when I was learning from many sources at once (and speaking Norwegian regularly with native people).
If you wanted to just be able to read and/or listen though I think that would be easier and less exhausting, though I guess it depends on the content.