Yeah. It's kinda sad when you have a romantic idea of something, but reality paints a totally different picture.

I'm learning a new language at the moment. The romantic idea I had in my head was being able to speak it fluently with friends from that culture, read books, etc. The reality is that learning a language is difficult and and takes a lot of effort and patience.

Thankfully, I love studying it. But then if I didn't and then gave up I'd still be painting that romantic image in my head thinking i "shoulda, coulda, woulda..".

I kinda forgot where I was going with this... sorry :-(

With languages, my experience has usually been that it's easy and gratifying at first. Then it gets tough and demoralizing. And then you sort of break through that wall and it becomes quite gratifying again. So hang in there. :)

Oh, and to get past the level where you can hold a simple conversation I have found immersion necessary. My Hebrew improved as much in a month in Israel this past summer as it had in the previous year.

"I have found immersion necessary."

This is the only practical way to learn a language. There is an oft repeated cliche about playing quarterback in the NFL, that no matter how much you practice or try to simulate game conditions, the speed and chaos of actual game conditions is something you can't understand, really, until you experience it.

Well, learning a foreign language does not involve 300 pound men coming at you at high velocity, but the real experience of trying to communicate something you really want to say to a real human being is a very different experience than learning words or even grammar structure from a book, audio, video, or lecture. Even interacting with classmates is somewhat contrived, because you are probably trying to say something your teacher prepared for you, instead of getting own ideas across.

So, to summarize: learning a language with out immersion (or something close to it) will likely never amount to anything more than an academic experience.

Well, most of what you say is true, but doesn't require immersion. For example, I have Israeli friends here in the States, and I keep in touch with a couple cousins in Israel. So it's possible for me to have real conversations (as opposed to contrived conversations with classmates or workbook exercises etc.) without actually going to Israel.

I found immersion useful because when you hear a language all day, every day, it seems to seep into your subconscious. Also, I think that language learning is a function of density rather than just volume, so to speak. That is to say, spending ten hours speaking a language every day for a month is more effective than speaking it for half an hour a day for 600 days.

Perl is the programming language that's closest to a natural language that I've seen.

It's very aggravating knowing that there are 20+ ways to say the exact same thing, and in order to understand most people you need to learn all 20+ ways and completely memorize them.

Along with immersion, which is crucial, I've found it's useful to color-code as much textual information as you can, and aim for a "lossy" understanding of the language. Read a passage or listen to someone and just try to get some vague meaning from it, don't get caught up on particular words or grammar.

Also, if you are just starting, I find the traditional method of flinging a few phrases and a bunch of completely random vocabulary is inane. Learn those phrases, sure, but try to learn pronouns and modal verbs as soon as possible, followed by the most common form of past tense. Pulling figures out of thin air, I'd say 90% of the time people talk about what they need, want, should do, or can do, or about things that have already occurred.

Some languages are handy in that you get a free "immediate future" tense by learning the present tense; if you ask a question like 'Are you eating?' it's understood as 'Are you about to eat?' in the right context.

Once you have this framework of expressing most of your thoughts, you can start to dump in all the vocabulary and extra grammar. Eventually, after learning all the grammar and other random bits of knowledge, the learning game plateaus and you are basically just learning vocabulary, idioms, and slang.

kentosi, I wanted to talk to you about language learning. I am working on a site to help people learn foreign languages and am trying to find people to give me feedback. Would you be interested? I couldn't find your contact info. My email is my name at gmail.

I think you love the idea of being an engineer working on things you like, doing them the way you want instead of forcing yourself to do what other people want, doing them the way they insist upon.

Everyone likes making cool new stuff. No-one likes deathmarches and debugging race conditions and writing documentation and sitting in meetings and dealing with incomplete or ambiguous specs or having their project cancelled after working on it for a year or having an idiot for a boss who doesn't understand what you do. But that's what engineering is really like for most people, most of the time.

Doing something professionally often takes the joy out of it. Especially when you are doing it for someone else.

"Amateur" comes from the Latin word for "lover" - amator.

There's that old quote (don't know where from) that when your hobby becomes your job, you need to find a new hobby.

-eur seems French. The meaning is the same anyway.

There's a reason French, Spanish, Italian, and others are called 'Latin languages'.

Oh, I know, maybe because Spanish is my first language and I took three years of Latin at high school :-)

Aha, "replaced by F -teur"