How far have you gotten *all* by yourself?

General discussion about learning languages
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Re: How far have you gotten *all* by yourself?

Postby keineAhnung » Tue Jul 12, 2022 9:54 pm

Here's my two cents, my own personal experience:
My question is how far can someone go all alone with a language?

I started learning English all by myself on a whim when I was about 12. I fell in love with the language from the start, and just dived into it. Basically, when I started, I only had whatever knowledge they'd imparted to me at school at that age, and as is typical, I'd say it really wasn't remotely much. I don't remember much from that time but essentially I think I only knew the most basic grammar and vocabulary.

I started my journey just by reading. I overcame the hurdle of having too many new words to check out in the dictionary by starting with a series of books I knew almost by heart in my native language at the time, Harry Potter (who'd have thunk :D I'm not nearly as big of a fan as I used to be though). Basically I read those books *without* a dictionary, without checking out grammar rules or lists of irregular verbs. I literally learned words from context alone, aided by my pretty good memory of what was supposed to happen in each scene of each chapter. I've never studied English grammar formally beyond what was mandatory in my (second-language) English classes at school and at university.

Later on I started watching movies and TV shows. I probably used subtitles at first, probably in English (since I remember telling quite early on to some of my family members that you can't really learn a new language by using subtitles solely in your own native language). Even further on, let's say 7 years in, I started reading what I'd classify as very advanced books, that greatly held my interest at the time (the kind in which words like 'hermeneutics' come up basically in every other sentence). I think that that, more than most of what else I may have read in English, has managed to teach me very advanced grammar and vocabulary. Obviously at that point I had started to need to use a dictionary whilst reading. I used a pop-up dictionary add-on for my browser, and the invaluable, as yet unsurpassed (in my opinion, for learning English, Spanish, and most recently German) Wordreference online dictionary.

After that period I started reading a lot of fanfiction. Half of it, clearly written by non-natives, or by people making a lot of spelling mistakes, but by then I recognized spelling mistakes easily (seem/seam, effect/affect, would of/would have, its/it's, etc) and it still taught me a great deal of slang and colloquial language, not to mention of cultural knowledge.

In 2019, about 11 years since I started learning English, I took the Cambridge C2 exam only because an English teacher at my university at the time told me to try. It was the first exam I even entertained taking. I got 226/230 (200 is the lower bound for C2). Since then I've improved even more, still on my own, all by myself, barely speaking more than a couple hours a year with a native English speaker, if even that.

I wanna stress out the crucial point that I didn't read anything because I wanted to learn English. I read things that I wanted to read. I never doubted that I might achieve a high level in English because I never even asked myself whether it was possible or not, thanks to the blissful, and perhaps wise naivety of youth. I never spent time thinking about or seeking a specific technique to study or learn vocabulary more efficiently, or to remember grammar points. I just read a ton, watched/listened to a ton, without any linguistic goal in mind (other than "getting better at understanding English", and even then that wasn't a conscious goal I was thinking about at the time), and let time do its magic.

In terms of phonology, besides listening to native speakers in TV shows and later on panel shows, I extensively made use of the IPA to correct my own pronunciation (thanks again to wordreference!). I learned how to read the IPA (for pleasure, I was and remain very interested in phonology in general) and from then on I would sometimes check not the meaning of a word but whether I knew/remembered how to pronounce it. English might be atrociously non-phonetic in a completely unpredictable way, but once you get an IPA transcription, if you already know the right sounds and how to make them, you'll know how to pronounce any new word you encounter with perfect accuracy, just by reading said IPA transcription.

In terms of accents, I currently got a mix of Standard American blended with, I'd say, a few different British accents (I think you can even hear it in the way I write :lol: ). To this day I think my accent is still very fluid, it tends to mimic the last accent(s) I've listened to extensively the most. These days I mostly listen to British panel shows, so that's what's coloring my accent the most. Before that it was American TV shows. I'd wager if I worked on it I could stabilize it but I recently came to the conclusion that it's more work than it is worth. I'm fine with my maybe-weird accent. Besides, I like all accents of the English language, I wouldn't want to have to choose one and have to stick to it.

So that's my English story. No idea if my journey is reproducible or not. All I know is, reading extensively, coupled with listening to a ton of content, is the only way I know how to learn a language to a high level. It took me perhaps more than 12 to 15 years but I've reached something very, very close to a native level (including the academic stuff), without a single textbook or teacher. Obviously I learn new slang every day, new cultural references every day, and I even learn new basic vocabulary every day that simply wasn't an extensive-enough part of my input journey so far.

In this thread there's been a lot of worry expressed about what is often called "fossilized mistakes". There's this idea that if you don't get corrected all the time, and especially from the start, your mistakes (in grammar, pronunciation, vocabulary) are gonna be impossible to fix later on, because an "old" mistake is somehow harder to fully exorcise than a "fresh and new" one. I don't know if I'm an exception, but I believe that it's largely a myth. Here's my personal experience:
- for a long time I pronounced "arisen" [əraizən] instead of [ərizən], simply because I'd started by reading Harry Potter without any auditory guiding, and so I just guessed at the pronunciation of a lot of words. Perhaps 5 years ago I realized I was wrong, endeavored to fix it, and fixed it. This is just one example among many. For years I've kept checking and fixing the pronunciation of a ton of pretty basic words, because I'd first encountered them without knowing how to pronounce them. I still check the pronunciation of words regularly, and I don't believe any mistake is ever likely to be impossible to uproot just because it'd have made its home for too long in my system.
- Only a couple months ago(!) did I realize that "every day" should be two words, not one (when it's not an adjective, of course). I dunno if too many people have made that mistake so often that I've never caught up on that. Maybe I just didn't pay attention. Since then I think I've managed to fix that, and if I have an occasional slip-up, I'm fine with that. In the long run I know it'll fully get fixed.

Here's my personal opinion on mistakes: we make the vast, vast majority of them when we haven't assimilated enough content, especially written content. I could be wrong, but I think getting actively corrected by someone else only helps so far, because there are millions of mistakes to make (spelling mistakes, tense mistakes, word usage mistakes, pronunciation mistakes, particle mistakes...) and only so many hours every day to spend with a teacher who's going to have to find all those mistakes, which you then later on will have to try to remember every time you try to compose a sentence. I could be massively wrong but I have the strong feeling that what a teacher can help you fix will only ever be just the tip of the iceberg: the rest you'll have 'fixed' all by yourself, possibly without realizing it.

I've personally noticed around me that many people who make a lot of mistakes even in their native language tend to not read much or at all (I'm not counting reading short, everyday articles on the net or technical stuff on narrow topics you only need to read for your job). I'd wager most people who read a lot of varied content easily score higher in terms of grammar and spelling, not because they spend their weekends poring over grammar books and doing grammar exercises but simply because they've lived with the written word a lot more. And the reality of language, as far as I can tell, is that the spoken word is extremely rarely as complex and varied as the written word. Largely, perhaps, because the written word is the result of more thinking time than the spoken word, because there's ever so much time you can spend carefully composing your next utterance before your audience starts looking for the exit.

I've also experienced a reverse phenomenon to that of obtaining a new language mostly through reading: I've mostly stopped reading French books since I was about 16 I think, and since then my French, spoken and written, has deteriorated a lot. [As the saying goes: "Bilingual? Bye Lingua!" :? :lol: ]
Some spelling mistakes that many French natives make, I still don't make, but some others, which I'd never have made before (I used to have an excellent French, which I was proud of), I've started making. My brain tricks me a lot. When words sounds the same when you pronounce them, if you don't read enough, the distinction fades away, and your brain starts thinking they're the same, probably because, pragmatically speaking, they might as well be the same from your personal experience with them. Not all words will blend with all their homonyms, thankfully, but some problems might arise like it did for me. Likewise my vocabulary, even my passive vocabulary, has dramatically shrunk. Anything you don't use enough will tend to wilt, and furthermore, I believe, anything you don't spend enough time with, will not stick.

So on the topic of teaching your kids a foreign language which you don't speak well at all, I'd say that (1) like Lawyer&Mom said, it's likely to be at least as good as any average high school second-language course, if not much better, given how abysmal those courses typically are, and (2) if the kids keep reading and listening to native material, keep assimilating content left and right their whole childhood and then for the rest of their lives, no way will they carry around their mistakes from when they were 5 or even 10 years old that would have been caused by their parents not speaking the language very well. Let's never forget most kids are far from proficient in their own native language until they're pretty old. Most kids will make some grammatical mistakes, and will spend a ton of time each day with other kids who don't speak the language any better than themselves. Scary, is it? I don't think so.

I'm also thinking most parents don't correct their kids that much until they've basically sorted out all by themselves most of their native grammar. As long as what the kid says is understandable, I'd wager most parents of a 5-year-old would just reply to the kid as if they'd spoken with perfect grammar (I could be wrong, my niece is for now only 2 years old :D ). Only when they get older and repeatedly make the same handful of glaring mistakes do parents sometimes step up and try to help them fix those mistakes, and even then, there's only so much evidence that this semi-constant correcting is really doing the job, as opposed to those kids enjoying massive input (from their parents and anyone else around them who've already mastered their native language (older siblings, etc), from TV, nowadays from the internet) in a way that can't help but fix their mistakes naturally sooner or later. (It's just my opinion.)

And even those kids who enjoy being raised by native speakers of the language(s) they learn as children, might carry into their adulthood a ton of grammatical mistakes for no other reason than because they would never have cracked open a book during their whole childhood unless they literally had to.
In that context I believe that teaching a second language even badly to a very young kid will only do any sort of long-term damage if said kid growing up never tries to read any book or absorb any kind of content (but especially written, but that's my personal opinion) in that second language, in which case, their broken linguistic skills will pragmatically speaking be a completely moot point. And I believe that the day they would choose to pick back up that second language as an adult, they could still reach whatever level they wanted provided they'd just spend enough time (re)learning the language. I don't believe someone is condemned to be stuck with a horrible grammar or accent just because too early on that's what they've started out with.

There's one last thing to factor in: Lawyer&Mom's experience so far (from her testimony) is that her kids love to learn French and are actively trying to understand it better. It's miles away from most (older) people's attitude towards language learning. Therefore, I personally would say that the obvious benefits of getting your kids hooked on language learning young enough for them to naturally avoid developing hang-ups about languages, is a factor incomparably more potent than the potential negative consequences of an imperfect linguistic education. If they never stop learning, they'll never stop improving, and it's more likely to happen if they've started learning languages early on rather than later on.

Also, the fact that Lawyer&Mom also said sometimes they come to her with a question and she says "dunno, let's find out" suggests her kids will definitely use more than her as a source of knowledge about the French language, and they'll know not to trust all she says (or the way she says it in French) on blind faith. I think it's, in particular, very different from being raised by someone who speaks a broken version of a language but isn't trying to actively teach it to you like someone would teach you a second language, and is instead just passively transmitting their own mistakes, which is a more classical scenario, and perhaps the cause of all that fear of the idea of teach little kids foreign languages as non-natives of those languages.
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Re: How far have you gotten *all* by yourself?

Postby TeoLanguages » Fri Aug 12, 2022 4:17 pm

Lawyer&Mom wrote:I’m in my fifth year of teaching myself French. (I started in 2017, but there was a gap year at the start of the pandemic.) I’ve used all kinds of resources (Assimil, workbooks, Clozemaster, TV series, novels, Pimsleur, podcasts etc. etc.) But it’s been *all* me. No tutors, no conversation partners, no one checking my work besides me. This is a combination of frugality, laziness and a packed schedule. (I work! I have kids! I don’t want to deal with someone else just to do my own hobby!) I’ve always figured at some point I would need some feedback to in order to continue to improve, but I’m nowhere near that point yet. I keep moving forward, all by myself. (And with the kids! I’m teaching them French and they are the only other people I have had French conversations with! They get lots of native input, so I’m not worried there.)

My question is how far can someone go all alone with a language? Probably a lot farther than you could do before massive input, but how far? Wow me with your tales of solo-linguistic success!


I take this initial post as a starting point to say that in my humble opinion it is possible to get MUCH from self-learning (I'm an independent learner myself) but, according to my personal experience, there will always be a certain time in which you will be "in need" of human interaction or even feedback in order to sharpen your skills. This is not due to a lack of resources, lack of discipline, or whatever but just due to the fact that our own perception of ourselves will always be biased without anyone giving us feedback, putting us to test, or just interacting with us. So, in a nutshell, I think it's possible to reach a comfortable level just by learning and living the language isolated from any other native speaker but by no means this approach will make you a fluent speaker (or even a fluent writer) of that language. Just my opinion.
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Re: How far have you gotten *all* by yourself?

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Fri Aug 12, 2022 8:20 pm

TeoLanguages wrote:
I take this initial post as a starting point to say that in my humble opinion it is possible to get MUCH from self-learning (I'm an independent learner myself) but, according to my personal experience, there will always be a certain time in which you will be "in need" of human interaction or even feedback in order to sharpen your skills.


I don’t disagree with you at all. I was just curious how far people have been able to go *before* they reach that point.
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Re: How far have you gotten *all* by yourself?

Postby Iversen » Fri Aug 12, 2022 8:49 pm

I agree that to become a fluent speaker of a language you need at some point to interact with other speakers - preferably native ones, but advanced learners will do in a pinch. And for some learners there may be a psychologic reason for this - a need to communicate with real living people rather than books or computer screens. But for me the basic thing is that you are challenged to use the skills and savvy you have accumulated, and that you get enough input to make you dizzy so that your brain starts producing fragments of utterances by itself. And once you have become permanently productive you can easier absorbe new knowledge and train your skills.

Maybe you get depressed if you don't interact with anyone, but if it only was that then the interaction could be in another than your target language. The point that it has to be in the target langage shows that the thing you need is hardcore language training, not contact for its own sake.

That being said, if you don't have any reason to learn a language it is much easier to drop it. And speaking could in itself be such as reason.
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Re: How far have you gotten *all* by yourself?

Postby leosmith » Sat Aug 13, 2022 12:36 am

Lawyer&Mom wrote:I take this initial post as a starting point to say that in my humble opinion it is possible to get MUCH from self-learning (I'm an independent learner myself) but, according to my personal experience, there will always be a certain time in which you will be "in need" of human interaction or even feedback in order to sharpen your skills.
Yup. I don't try to get as far as possible "all by myself" before interacting with natives because I don't find it very efficient. Then again, although I value all the skills, conversation is the most important to me, so ymmv. For example, whenever I post that I speak a language pretty well, but I only understand half of what I hear in a movie, some people know exactly what I'm talking about, but others will say "I wouldn't dream of conversing before being able to understand just about everything".

I know that some people have reasons for not starting earlier, so no offense intended to anyone, haha. It's just funny some times how much our learning methods differ.
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Re: How far have you gotten *all* by yourself?

Postby TeoLanguages » Sat Aug 13, 2022 8:12 am

Lawyer&Mom wrote:
TeoLanguages wrote:
I take this initial post as a starting point to say that in my humble opinion it is possible to get MUCH from self-learning (I'm an independent learner myself) but, according to my personal experience, there will always be a certain time in which you will be "in need" of human interaction or even feedback in order to sharpen your skills.


I don’t disagree with you at all. I was just curious how far people have been able to go *before* they reach that point.


In this case, I guess it depends much on what goals people want to reach. To me, being able to interact with natives has always been a goal as well as a huge boost when it comes to learning a language. That's why I've always tried to incorporate "social interactions" as soon as I learned the basics, regardless of speech fluency and flawless conversations. I'm utterly convinced that interacting with people, whatever level you have, help you strengthen and boost your skills. So, in a nutshell, I think it's even possible to reach a high level in a foreign language without relying on human interaction but in my humble opinion, it would take twice as long, and probably your speaking skills would never be as sharp as they were thanks to human interaction.
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