Effective Strategies for Learning a Second Language as a Scientist

[union68]

Hi,

I've always wanted to learn a little French. What's my first step? Does anybody have any experience with that Rosetta Stone thing (that thing's EXPENSIVE!)? Should I try to find a traditional course instead?

My main goal is to learn the language for scholarly reasons -- I've always wanted to study some of Euler's original papers. I assume the French that was written in scientic papers in 1749 is a little bit different than the "where's the bathroom?" stuff I'd be learning. Ha.

Any pointers?

 

[MotoH]

Move to France and force yourself to speak french.

 

[skeptic2]

Night courses are at least as important as the language software because you can get answers to questions you may have. Regardless, practice is more important than studying. You need to get access to French speech you can listen to every day. Another advantage of night classes is that you get to practice speaking and get corrected when you make mistakes.

 

[Kurdt]

Translated papers should have the same importance as the originals. Most courses will not have the vocabulary necessary for you to understand a technical paper. It is therefore important to get a good grasp of the grammar of French and learn the specialised vocabulary you would need later.

 

[zoobyshoe]

Move to France and force yourself to speak french.

I happen just now to be reading The Broker by John Grisham. The main character is spirited away to Italy where he is forced to learn Italian in a hurry to maintain a new identity. His handler (who might be CIA or NSA) relates how he, himself, was dropped down in various countries (France, Russia, Turkey) with no papers or identification that would allow him to leave, thereby forcing him to learn to pass as a native in the shortest possible time.

 

[union68]

Translated papers should have the same importance as the originals. Most courses will not have the vocabulary necessary for you to understand a technical paper. It is therefore important to get a good grasp of the grammar of French and learn the specialised vocabulary you would need later.

This is what I was thinking. I'd like to learn the language just for it's own sake, so I don't mind the work. I suppose being able to indulge my math-history interest would be a distant goal.

 

[skeptic2]

Translated papers should have the same importance as the originals. Most courses will not have the vocabulary necessary for you to understand a technical paper. It is therefore important to get a good grasp of the grammar of French and learn the specialised vocabulary you would need later.

However I have found that words that are less than a few hundred years old, as are most technical words, are very similar across the major languages. For instance I was able to read and understand a spec. sheet for a switching power supply written in German though I don't speak German. Now with translation sites on the internet it should be even easier.

 

[Jack21222]

Hi,

I've always wanted to learn a little French. What's my first step? Does anybody have any experience with that Rosetta Stone thing (that thing's EXPENSIVE!)? Should I try to find a traditional course instead?

My main goal is to learn the language for scholarly reasons -- I've always wanted to study some of Euler's original papers. I assume the French that was written in scientic papers in 1749 is a little bit different than the "where's the bathroom?" stuff I'd be learning. Ha.

Any pointers?

I did the french rosetta stone, and it was alright. The biggest complaint I have is that sometimes, you don't know exactly what sound you're making incorrectly, when on the speaking evaluation. It just tells you you're wrong. Meanwhile, in a class, they can better pinpoint exactly what part of the word is mispronounced.

 

[MotoH]

I guess the first three french words you learn are "retreat" and "we surrender"

 

[Desiree]

Just use "Google translate" and forget about learning a second language

 

[humanino]

I guess the first three french words you learn are "retreat" and "we surrender"

I guess I will never fully appreciate the subtleties in the american humor. By the way, which second language do you speak ?

 

[humanino]

Just use "Google translate" and forget about learning a second language

If you read the previous message beyond sarcasm, you may notice that learning a second language opens up your mind not only to a second culture, but a complete different way of thinking. If reading the headlines is enough for you to understand the newspapers, then yes, google translate will do the same job as learning a second language.

 

[KrisOhn]

If you're serious about learning a second language, I would suggest classes.

I am currently taking German along with my Physics degree and I could not imagine becoming fluent through a learning program like Rosetta.
I just wish my university had Japanese language courses, I'd take those too.

 

[Zantra]

I took 5 years of french.

French is one of the more difficult of the romance languages. There are around 60 commonly used tenses, including some used only in writing, and some that aren't in use anymore.(thinking of your translation from the 1700's). On top of that, every noun is masculine or feminine, and there's no rule- you just have to know what's what in most cases. If you are looking to be able to translate the written language, you'll need more than a few rosetta stone CD's. Not trying to scare you, but it's a big undertaking for just a few academic translations.

Take a class, and if you're still committed to learning it after that 1 class, then take more. Short of living in France, you'll need a few years of french study to learn enough for what you are looking for. Or just go to babelfish-much easier.

 

[vanesch]

My main goal is to learn the language for scholarly reasons -- I've always wanted to study some of Euler's original papers. I assume the French that was written in scientic papers in 1749 is a little bit different than the "where's the bathroom?" stuff I'd be learning. Ha.

Are you sure Euler wrote in French and not in German ?

 

[hamster143]

Are you sure Euler wrote in French and not in German ?

Euler spoke at least two languages, German and Russian, and, having been born in Switzerland, he may have spoken French too. But he wrote in Latin, as did all major scientists of his time.

As to the original question, Rosetta Stone and the likes (Pimsleur) are great if you want to learn to speak a language. Not so much if you want to learn to read or understand that language. As it turns out, those are two very different things. The way those audio courses are structured, after you spend a week working on one of those, let's say half hour a day, you'll know about 20 or 30 French words by heart (well enough to ask for directions to a restaurant in perfect French, even if you're woken up in the middle of the night.) After spending a similar amount of time with a textbook and a box of flash cards, you can memorize enough French to read children's folk tales and grasp the basic meaning of what's going on, but you may or may not be able to form coherent statements by yourself, and your pronunciation will likely be lacking.

 

[hamster143]

I happen just now to be reading The Broker by John Grisham. The main character is spirited away to Italy where he is forced to learn Italian in a hurry to maintain a new identity. His handler (who might be CIA or NSA) relates how he, himself, was dropped down in various countries (France, Russia, Turkey) with no papers or identification that would allow him to leave, thereby forcing him to learn to pass as a native in the shortest possible time.

This has always amused me in spy novels/movies. In reality, every language has enough subtleties that it takes years of constant practice to be able to pass for a local. Furthermore, there are always accent/pronunciation issues which are incredibly hard to beat when you learn a language as an adult. Generally speaking, unless you're immersed in the environment when you're young enough, even an intensive accent reduction course isn't going to get all traces of your native language out. Quite often the issue as that the "new" language has sounds which are simply not part of the "old" language. For example, Eastern Europeans have a lot of trouble with English words that contain 'th'. The Japanese language does not distinguish between 'l' and 'r'. And so on.

In this aspect, what I find more plausible is the scene in "The Beekeeper's Apprentice" where Sherlock Holmes talks to the protagonist for a while, then correctly identifies her as having grown up in London and spent two years in California.

 

[magpies]

Watch a few movies with english subs but in french. Will at least give you a feel for it.

 

[union68]

Are you sure Euler wrote in French and not in German ?

"Recherches sur le Mouvement des Corps Celestes en General." Printed in "Memoires de l'Academie des Sciences" in 1749.

According to some literature I have read, it was the first time Newton's second law was written in modern form with Leibniz notation -- we'd recognize it as a second-order ODE today.

Most of Euler's work I have seen has been in Latin, but a good portion is written in French too.

 

[zoobyshoe]

This has always amused me in spy novels/movies. In reality, every language has enough subtleties that it takes years of constant practice to be able to pass for a local. Furthermore, there are always accent/pronunciation issues which are incredibly hard to beat when you learn a language as an adult. Generally speaking, unless you're immersed in the environment when you're young enough, even an intensive accent reduction course isn't going to get all traces of your native language out. Quite often the issue as that the "new" language has sounds which are simply not part of the "old" language. For example, Eastern Europeans have a lot of trouble with English words that contain 'th'. The Japanese language does not distinguish between 'l' and 'r'. And so on.

The book is fiction of course, but the point made is not: that the fastest way to learn a foreign language is to have no recourse but to use that language. language students I know who've gone abroad for four months or more all report a kind of threshold or crisis where they realize that they have to stop thinking in English and translating to the native tongue, and start generating sentences directly in the native tongue. Likewise they have to start understanding the language directly without first translating it into English in their heads. Once that threshold is crossed their learning accelerates tremendously.

 

[Kajahtava]

If you read the previous message beyond sarcasm, you may notice that learning a second language opens up your mind not only to a second culture, but a complete different way of thinking. If reading the headlines is enough for you to understand the newspapers, then yes, google translate will do the same job as learning a second language.

This is so true, I've so noticed that people that only know one language have a very limited conception of the difference of language and culture.

Now, French is by far not going to solve this problem, because it's extremely similar to English, it's just the same thing with word order and some suffixes swapped though, it's just a standard nominative-accusative Indo European language, once you've learned things like topic-comment or split-ergative languages do you appreciate the diversity that languages can have. I've seen people that basically live in the ignorance that ll languages have the exact same word order and grammar, but just words swapped.

Esperanto is also a failure because of the creator's ignorance of the diversity of languages. It's supposed to be a neutral language for all people to learn without playing favourites, but god, it's just a standard nominative-accusative Indo-European language, the grammar is so similar to English and French that if some linguist spotted this spoken on an Island he or she would immediately assume it's Indo-European and just be puzzled why it's so regular. Regular doesn't make easy to learn per se, and in fact, I'd reckon there are more languages on the world that have no irregular forms than there are which do have them.

Also, one of the most important things for me is the appreciation of a different phonemic system, many people seem ignorant of this, take Japanese above as an example, the r and l sound in Japanese is not distinguished, r and l are said to be allophones of the same phoneme, which is completely normal in different languages, that one sound has different realizations in different contexts, this doesn't hold across the barrier of languages, so while English speakers hear 'sushi', 'ninja' and 'fujisan', Japanese speakers here 'susi', 'ninzya' and 'huzisan', the s is simply pronounced with an ever so slight sliss if it's followed by a i or y, same for the z. The 'h' is softer before a 'u', leading to Englishmen mistaking it for an 'f'. And English does comparable things without speakers of English realizing it, leading for speakers of Hindi for instance to hear king as 'khing'. Learning a new language can help one appreciate this.

 

[Freddy_Turnip]

As your in the US do you have different languages on say shampoo bottles or something? Sounds silly but it's a good way of learning the language of another country.

 

[lisab]

As your in the US do you have different languages on say shampoo bottles or something? Sounds silly but it's a good way of learning the language of another country.

Especially if you need to know how to say: "Lather, Rinse, Repeat."

 

[rootX]

My friends speak about over 10 languages in total and we all are quite close (and will be for next year and half). Learning any language is easier for me only if I want to.

Most US colleges should have similar atmosphere?