I’m Andy and I’ve been learning languages for decades, but keep changing my mind about which one(s) to focus on. I live near Portland, Oregon, US. My favorite other pastimes are hiking, the sport of orienteering, and reading about local history and the sciences. I taught English in South Korea and Japan but now work as a computer technician. My strongest language is French. I’m strong enough to take Udemy courses on various subjects from French-speaking instructors. However, my main project now is Indonesian, which I started 3 months ago. I’m experimenting with the Mass Sentence Method to learn it, and so far it’s working well for me. On social media, I go by and_e_r, PNW Linguaphile, pdxMountHood, and (formerly) Oregon Polyglot. I’m most active on Twitter, but most people know me from my encouraging comments on other people’s YouTube videos. This is my first Polyglot Conference. Nice to meet you all!
Hello and welcome!
I also work with computers, but I think my work is quite different than yours, though, because I’m a programmer. I build websites and mobile apps.
I don’t know this method, could you explain how it works?
Greetings from Brazil.
Hi, Estevao. (Sorry, I haven’t learned how to type accents in Linux yet.) There might be more than one Mass Sentence Method, but the one I follow is advertised by Glossika. Instead of studying grammar and memorizing vocabulary, you figure out the grammar for yourself and gradually acquire vocabulary by studying a lot of sentences in your target language. The sentences can come from anywhere as long as they have audio, a written transcript, and a translation into English or another language you know. You repeat after thousands of sentences, many times each over days or weeks. I’m up to 420 sentences so far, and can make a lot of meaningful sentences of my own and talk to myself sometimes in Indonesian. Granted, Indonesian grammar is easier than most languages, but not always obvious. I’ve lined up about 6000 sentences from a variety of sources: Vocabooster (by LanguageBoost), the old Glossika course, IndonesianPod101, and Book2.
No problem, what distro do you use? I use Ubuntu 
This method seems interesting. It also seems to be similar to my approach: I do Anki Flash cards. So far, I’ve done about 500 flash cards to learn French. It’s being very effective. I know that because when I was learning English, I didn’t do flash cards consistently - in fact, I think I made at most 10. Now that I’m making them on a daily basis, for about 3 months, I can see that it helps a lot.
I installed UbuntuMATE 20.04. I used Lubuntu before this. I recently switched from Windows 10 to Linux and like these lightweight distros that run so much faster than Windows.
The main difference between the Mass Sentence Method and memorizing is that I’m not trying to memorize the sentences–merely get a lot of repetitions. That’s different from Anki, too, which tries to get the minimum number of repetitions to memorize them. My main focus, though, is not on the sentence input but on forming my own sentences using words from various sentences I’m learning. This is what’s allowing me to learn Indonesian much faster than any language I’ve been learning beforehand. But, I’m still tweaking the method. Because I’m not memorizing, I often forget vocabulary that I thought I already mastered. I think it just means I’m not getting enough repetitions in, or that I haven’t studied enough sentences yet, but time will tell.
Is the mass sentence method what is offered by 50 languages? Bahasa Indonesia is included there. If you want to look it up:
Bonjour monsieur Andy,
Enchanté! Je m’appelle Zeina et je vis aussi aux États-Unis. Je ne suis pas fier de ma connaissance de la langue française mais je pense toujours que c’est la pratique qui fera la différence.
Alors, let’s switch to English. My mind doesn’t function too long in French before it starts melting.
I find your knowledge in computer very interesting. I recently volunteered at Coursera to translate courses on machine learning and machine translation. This is by far the coolest topic I have read about yet.
As a polyglot, I also began learning Python, not that I can use it in Python Land somewhere as tourist or anything, but I figured for someone who speaks 4 languages, how hard could it be? Well turns out I probably would have learned Chinese faster.
Do you perhaps have any suggestions how to make the best of my Python learning journey? Have you worked with Python before? Any study material/YouTube channels you recommend?
Not sure if you speak German, but “Danke sehr” for your time!
Zeina
Hi, Ron. Thanks for mentioning it. 50 Languages is another name for Book2. It’s one of the four sources of sentences I use for the Mass Sentence Method, and I often recommend it to others. I didn’t realize they had multiple websites and apps. The one I use is https://www.goethe-verlag.com/book2/EM/EMID/EMID002.HTM
It is great material to start a language adventure after you have learned some basics. I like to compare languages sometimes. The excellent audio helps to study the languages.
Hello, fellow Oregonian. I live just south of you, in Eugene. It’s nice to see people from my home state here. I hope you enjoy the conference.
Hi, Zeina. I’m a computer technician, not a programmer. Another name for my profession is desktop support. That means that my specialties are hardware, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office (especially Outlook), etc. I actually got my current job because I know how to configure and troubleshoot Lotus Notes (to a certain extent–not as an expert).
However, I’m considering becoming a programmer myself because some programmers can work remotely from anywhere and can therefore travel the world (as expats or digital nomads) while they work. There’s a YouTube channel called Chris the Freelancer which talks about it.
Therefore, I, too, am beginning to learn Python. I bought some Udemy courses to learn it from–some courses taught in English and some taught in French. Normally Udemy courses cost about $100 each regardless of length or quality (both of which vary), however Udemy does have occasional sales where most courses cost either US $10 or $12. The course I’m taking in English is by Colt Steele, a professional teacher who converted his in-person class material into an online at-your-own-pace course with 29 hours of videos, 135 programming exercises, and a few projects (https://www.udemy.com/course/the-modern-python3-bootcamp/). Check back at that site once a week until there’s a sale. The French course I’m taking is less thorough but covers a lot of the same material. It’s by Stephane G. (https://www.udemy.com/course/apprendre-la-programmation-avec-python/). Udemy also has more advanced courses–such as about Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning–which I plan to buy and study afterward.
Continuing from my previous reply:
If you need free courses for learning Python, there are several websites that offer them now. Even Coursera has a few. Chris the Freelancer talks about some of them in his video “How I Learned to Code”. https://youtu.be/cySXdUEX0Xw
Now I got it 
That is so true. Besides that, Linux is more secure and it respects your privacy. Another thing is because you can install anything with their package manager, no need to go to a random website and download a software that you can’t trust. Also, Windows updating system is really bad for years. You can’t see what’s being really updated, and the scheduling of updates simply doesn’t work in my machine. It always want to update in the worst moments hehehe.
Hello, Zeina,
I’m a computer scientist and I can program in Python reasonably well. Machine learning isn’t my area of focus, but I took some classes on the subject at college. It’s cool that you’re translating those courses. I took some courses on Coursera myself. Not finished any of them though, because I only watched a few classes on the things that I needed to learn.
As for advice on learning Python, I recommend for you to learn the very basics (e.g.: data types, arrays, strings conditionals, boolean logic, handling input/output) and apply it in some project. It doesn’t need to be something very simple. For instance, one of my first programs in Python it was a game in the console (aka terminal) that the user should guess a password. If that password was in the list of the top 20 most used ones, then the user wins; otherwise, the user loses.
Once you have this foundation and, more importantly, have practiced it in a small project, you can learn some more intermediate stuff, like, while loops, for loops and functions.
Hope that helps you, take care!
Edit: actually, I think I that arrays is not a very basic topic, it’s more of a intermediate one.
Thank you so much for your input. Sorry if I mistook your profession for something else, but I don’t have much knowledge in these areas and am still trying to learn about them.
Thank you for your help and suggestions as well, which were very informative! I will make sure to check the YouTube channel you recommended.
I frankly used preply. com to hire a private tutor. I learned a lot but felt I needed more material to clarify whatever he was teaching. I think I learn best when I dig into new materials myself and so I think that the YouTube channel and coursera will help me more.
I wish you the best of luck with your learning journey. Perhaps we can later update eachother on where we are in the learning process and offer more suggestions as we explore this field of study.
Zeina
Hey Estevao!
Thanks for the reply! I am definitely going to keep your suggestions in mind.
I think as of now I established my knowledge in conditionals, functions, variables, parameters, and input/output. As for the others, I am still working on those. Loops in particular seem a bit more challenging, and I need more time to grasp those.
I think what helps the most is my background in Linguistics. I am quite a Grammar geek and I find a lot of similarities between syntactic reasoning and the logic needed to understand and implement Python.
But you know… it’s exactly like learning a foreign language. Once you understand the ABC of it, things would become easier or so I assume.
As to the coursera transcriptions I am doing, they are such a helpful way to not only learn more about MT and NLP and all those things, but you know, since I translate from English and German to Arabic, the real challenge is to convey those concepts in a language that doesn’t contain equivalent terms or definitions.
So that pushes me to actually research what I am transcribing more often than simply translating it, and this is how I proactively learn.
Do you use any particular website to put your programming skills to use? I know of one but I dont like it much.
Zeina
You’re welcome. It’s very interesting your approach to learn languages proactively. Wish the best of luck to you on that!
Currently I’m just doing some projects, so I don’t use any particular website (except just StackOverflow when I get stuck hehe). But I’ve used freecodecamp.org for some time to learn the basics of web development. But it also have some Python related courses, I didn’t took any of them, though. There’s also some competitive programming websites like Leetcode, Codewars, Codeforces… In those you’ll find code problems in various levels of difficulty to practice.
One last piece of advice is to try things out. What I mean by that is that there’s so many resources to learn things on the internet that sometimes we feel overwhelmed. Thus, the best we can do is experiment some things and stick with the ones that works best for us.
Take care!
Omg thank you so much for all this information! I will check out all that you listed and will get back to you here if I have any questions or if I get stuck.
You take care as well!
Zeina