I’m a language teacher as well, and I don’t quite understand what you’re taking issue with. As @MegaZeroX pointed out, the comments that were made on here mostly refer to his grandstanding about having cracked the code of language learning, all the while implying that people have been doing it wrong, despite the fact that the “approach” he is presenting is neither very practical for the vast majority of learners nor does it even seem to do what it says on the tin.
Producing a video that is mostly serving the purpose of promoting yourself is very different from a classroom situation in which people of different levels and aptitudes (and, in your context, with different first languages) are learning a language together. Having said that, I assume you also use some kind of metric to gauge your students’ levels or to help them self-assess their language ability?
Any kind of measurement tool, corrective feedback, scaffolding etc. is ultimately nothing but a form of judgement, and I’m sure you’d agree that it’s more about creating an atmosphere in which people are comfortable with the idea that producing output is always going to lead to mistakes and that being corrected is supposed to help them get to a point where they speak more accurately and confidently and that they may never reach otherwise.
That is not to say that feedback strategies don’t sound different for ninth graders than they do for college kids or adult learners, but at the core of it, it remains an assessment or judgement of the acceptability of their language output.
He is making the claim that one doesn’t need study beyond practicing a language display partner, and in fact (at least implying) that it is the better way to learn. This is something they are making money off of from YouTube. As such, it is fair to criticised their approach, and note “hey, maybe if you are still at a beginner level after 500 hours, this approach isn’t something you should be selling”
Yeah, I think it’s perfectly fair to evaluate his level after using his method, I just think some of the ways it was done was pretty harsh. I personally didn’t get that he was saying his method is the best and you shouldn’t bother with any other methods, so I was a little surprised at the some of the reactions here. His method of getting i+1 content is interesting, if unfeasible for most people.
What these programs (or whatever you want to call them) fail to mention is that babies take almost a decade to learn a language without sounding like… a baby. They also don’t start outputting anything comprehensible for the first 2-3 years, and anything written takes another 2-3 years. Think about the kind of writing you could do 6 years into learning your native language (not 6 years of schooling). Would you like to learn a different language at that pace?
What babies possess in their absorption skills is lost in literally every other area of cognitive ability, and you can’t “hack” your brain to work in ways your biology won’t allow for.
I’m shocked that this kind of stuff floats around wanikani when the forum has a large number of active users that LIVE in Japan and yet are using wanikani. If all these immersion only methods were remotely true why on earth would we need wanikani or this forum? My husband doesn’t speak much English, My MIL and FIL don’t speak at all. I watch TV with them or just hand out with them all the time and yet… my Japanese is solidly B1. I can bullshit about random things until the cows come home but I wouldn’t consider myself fluent. Hell I’m having a hard time getting a non-shit non-English teacher job and I’m having a hell of a time because my Japanese level is high enough but not high enough (yes I know huh?)
Maybe I’m going to sound like a brat but everytime I see these smug hucksters faces I want to spit. They almost certainly edit their videos to take out mistakes and use scripts. Their man on the street interviews are most certainly set up. Plus it seems their actual language ability is around B1 which makes sense to me since with immersion that’s about where I ended up. Though as others noted some are even lower.
As for a note on how babies learn. Maybe some people haven’t really been around babies or it’s been a long time. I have a three year old and two year old. They are native speakers of Japanese and any member that studied Japanese for more than a few months can certainly speak and understand better then they can. A child has a child’s understanding of the world. After 3 years of being in a Japanese environment my son is just now learning how to conjugate and read some hiragana. He probably won’t have any conversations of any importance until he is well over 4 years old. I mean think of little kids in your own language… would you hold them up to any sort of linguistic gold? No, they talk like they have a mouth full of potatoes. I don’t think kids are much for a language until at least 6 or 7 years. And that is with their plastic brains and immersion 24/7. Sound achievable or desirable for an adult? Nope.
The idea that grammar halts your thinking process seems to me like utter malarkey. For longer sentences in the early stages, yeah that could be a problem–but no one is going to start off on level 100 unless they want to fail that hard. Is there anyone else here who catches themselves thinking in their target language from time to time? That’s all the proof you need.
Regarding comprehensible input, ask a young child native to America to listen to someone with a heavy Scottish accent speaking English. They will think it’s another language. Or take my nephew for example, who was playing with a bilingual toy that teaches colors. “Naranjado” sounded like “avocado” to him. He still couldn’t say it right after I corrected him and said it slowly. At certain speeds, even in your native language it can be hard to catch the correct syllable sound.
If all you do is listen and read the language:
you won’t hear where a word starts and ends
you won’t be able to distinguish words that sound close
you will get easily confused when word sounds are blended together or modified
varying native accents will also be confusing
with Japanese, due to levels of politeness in the language, you won’t know what to use when, and might not even know that certain words and phrases mean the same thing on different levels
with Japanese you might mistake the particles as part of the word rather than words with specific functions
with Japanese, you actually cannot read until you know the two syllabaries and some kanji
This is probably as debated a topic as the input hypothesis, and the research is still divided, so I wouldn’t count it on as a straight fact. I also remember Dogen talking about how this hypothesis is a bit outdated and mostly has merit in the phonology department.
However, general second-language research has failed to support the critical period hypothesis in its strong form (i.e., the claim that full language acquisition is impossible beyond a certain age)
also:
much research into SLA has focused on monolingual communities, whereas multilingual communities are more of a global norm, and this impacts the standard of competence that the SLA speaker is judged by
I don’t think this is fair at all. This is like saying you forgot what a single word means (or mix it up), so your language ability is discarded. Hell, I consider myself quite proficient at this point in Japanese, and I still have to think a bit about the days of the week. During this past year I’ve probably had to think about names of days maybe a handful of times? No wonder they are not drilled in my brain. Thinking you’ll have to drill weekdays, months or numbers to be considered “proficient” is honestly a pretty toxic standard, as it doesn’t really have anything to do with overall comprehension. (this reminds me of a study group session, where the teacher basically printed out tables for us to fill in the readings with different counters )
With that said, one year is still quite a short time for learning a new language, so it’s not like he’s super far yet.
I admit that this was rather harsh and somewhat flawed in hindsight. I was just echoing some of the criticism earlier in this thread. However, I’d just like to point out that this happened in a context in which he had literally just asked, no more than twenty seconds ago, what day of the week it was. It’s clear from the way he asked the question that the names of the days of the week were not new to him, even if he wasn’t necessarily very familiar with them. This, in a sense, reflects a possible consequence of his ‘don’t bother with grammar and vocabulary, just focus on input and immersion’ approach: mistakes that could have been avoided through practice and a bit of hard study happen because, or so it seems, he didn’t bother to drill such knowledge.
Before you tell me again that drilling has nothing to do with fluency, or that at the least, you shouldn’t have to drill ‘rote’ knowledge’ to be considered fluent, let me just say a few things:
Yes, definitely, this is true! If you go back to the beginning of the post from which you quoted my statement, you’ll see that I initially tried to give Jeff Brown a chance, not wanting to jump to conclusions about his overall Arabic ability at that point. However…
I lost my patience with this guy. Look, the reason I was being so harsh is that here he is, basically presenting his method, or rather, Krashen’s method, as the best, essentially stating that all other things are a waste of time. We already know that research that came after Krashen’s input hypothesis showed that it was incomplete, and in particular, that ‘acquisition’ and ‘learning’ aren’t clearly separate. For that matter, I can’t fathom why Krashen didn’t consider the possibility that (consciously) ‘learned’ knowledge gradually becomes (subconsciously) ‘acquired’ knowledge with experience and practice. That happens in mathematics. It happens in sports. It even happens in music. Why can’t it happen with language? In essence, though I can’t quote the data myself, I know that more recent second language acquisition research has superseded the input hypothesis. Such research has been presented on these forums by members more knowledgeable than me, showing that Professor Brown’s entire premise is an outdated theory. However, putting all that aside, here we have a man making outlandish claims, and then making mistakes that are easily avoidable with a little extra practice. Perhaps I’m just abnormal, but for your information, I don’t put a ton of effort into drilling days of the week and other things that are learnt by rote and with experience – I write them down a few times on paper, and subsequently, I simply test myself when I have the urge. I do all that testing mentally with no tools, running off to find my book or checking with Google if I have a memory lapse. I come up with ideas and means to check myself even without a reference book, like by linking the names of days to their names in other languages, noticing which days I tend to mix up and finding ways to keep them straight. All these things happen because I’m determined and I want to master the basics quickly. Again, I repeat: I do not invest hours and hours and hours into drilling these things: I simply find ways to make memorisation more intuitive, and far more importantly, more meaningful. I don’t shy away from these things just because they seemingly require learning by rote.
(A quick but relevant aside:
Yes, this would have irked me too, and in fact, that was what I hated back in French class. I would, however, certainly look for ways to make the counters I’ve already encountered intuitive for me to remember. I don’t like rote learning either, but I don’t think learning and remembering new words should be left entirely to the power of immersion.)
To return to what you quoted me on, yes, I was wrong: the fact that he mixed up Thursday and Friday could have been an honest mistake or a simple lapse in attention, and does not in any way prove whether or not his method allows one to attain fluency. However, it highlights the fact that the weakness of immersion-based learning is that many forms of ‘basic knowledge’ won’t be encountered enough through immersion for rapid acquisition, for the simple reason that much of this knowledge is acquired by natives in their childhood, and that it’s not necessarily that useful for general conversation. These things can be acquired through immersion, but the immersion environment will have to be artificially constructed in order to increase repetition of these words and structures.
Separately, I can’t stand the fact that he’s peddling the idea that studying grammar early is not only unnecessary, but harmful. HARMFUL. What’s genuinely harmful is allowing yourself to become paralysed by a fear of mistakes, not learning the rules that allow you to spot those mistakes. Sure, you might not need to study grammar immediately or directly, but why is it bad? The entire monitor hypothesis is based on the idea that it’ll be ‘too hard’ for learners to keep track of everything, just as Professor Brown asserts that it’ll be ‘too hard’ to try learning to read and write in a Level 5 language (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic) from the get-go. The irony is that he’s literally covering the one language whose writing system is said to be so simple and logical ‘even a stupid man can learn them [the characters] in the space of ten days’: Korean. Hangul. Why not encourage students to practise difficult skills so they become proficient? Everyone drops balls when they first start juggling, but shortly after, you start to realise that keeping track of three balls isn’t all that hard. Who’s to say the same thing won’t happen when it comes to tracking grammatical correctness in one’s speech? It certainly did for me, but perhaps I’m just an anomaly who shouldn’t be accounted for. Just as I was ‘unfair’ in my assessment of his Arabic ability, Professor Brown is being unfair to students who need structure in order to understand language, and to students who progress faster with structure. His attitude towards grammar is ridiculously dismissive: ‘study it only when you’re fluent’ or ‘just browse grammar’. Both of these statements indicate that grammatical study is nothing but a waste of time. Nothing could be further from the truth! What he should be suggesting is that targeted, brief grammatical study be undertaken with relevance to structures encountered during immersion, thus facilitating comprehension. That’s how grammatical study becomes purposeful, and that’s how I’ve studied grammar ever since my ‘breakthrough’ in French, and that’s what’s allowed me to accelerate my language learning. Professor Brown’s suggestions, on the other hand, relegate grammatical knowledge to nothing but leisure reading. He might as well have stood firmly by his stance that grammar shouldn’t be studied, instead of suggesting novel ways for students to do what he believes is a waste of time, in a manner that likely is a waste of time. I could even give examples of how the bizarre delight I take in picking up grammatical terms I come across – knowledge that should be strictly useless for ‘language acquisition’, according to most input hypothesis proponents – has allowed me to rapidly acquire knowledge on general patterns of usage and as such use fairly advanced and rare structures with a level of confidence that even many natives don’t have, but I don’t think that’s of interest to many people, so I’ll stop with the illustrations.
Finally, what I find most irksome about his method, the increased likelihood of minor, completely avoidable mistakes aside (yes, I’m a perfectionist, so I’d rather avoid these things, particularly since they can draw contempt and even vitriol from native speakers unless you’re an obvious foreigner, even as I recognise that at higher levels of language use, no one is truly ‘perfect’, and there is no one model), is the fact that it’s nigh impossible for the average person to put into practice without a substantial budget. Few people can just take off for an immersion trip in another country, and I strongly doubt that ‘language parents’, as Professor Brown calls them, are easy to find. Furthermore, I believe most conversation partners would be unwilling to engage in a conversation in which they do 80% of the talking without compensation, making the ‘immersion budget’ necessary for this approach that much larger. I never thought I’d say this, but this is one of the instances in which I prefer the methods proposed by Matt vs Japan on Refold, because at least they’re something the average person can implement without many special tools or much money.
To conclude, I don’t deny that immersion is important. I also don’t deny that what Professor Brown has accomplished in a year seems impressive. (I say ‘seems’ because I do not speak Arabic, and am hence incapable of evaluating his proficiency.) I will even affirm that immersion is a great accelerator, because the moment when I started ‘figuring French out’ was a moment of desperate translation on the Eiffel Tower after about a week of immersion in Paris. However, I don’t like the idea of putting immersion front and centre in learning while lambasting all the other traditional tools of language learning and labelling them as useless, when they have proved useful at various points, both anecdotally and in studies of second language acquisition. Doing so, in my opinion, handicaps learners by depriving them of tools that might accelerate their learning, since these tools are condemned before they can even be used, often on the basis of stereotypical models used to employ them. Why not aim to improve them so they’re more effective instead? Finally, I’d just like to point out that most language teachers don’t include elements with simplifying effects like mnemonic devices or intuitive, language-wide patterns in their lessons, meaning that many studies on the usefulness of explicit instruction are likely fundamentally flawed in that they may be asking the wrong question: it might not be so much a question of whether explicit instruction is effective as it is one of whether the teaching methods employed are the most effective for learning. If those methods were employed independently of the domain of instruction (languages, in this case), perhaps we’d see a jump in the effectiveness of so-called ‘useless’ explicit instruction. This is, of course, nothing but a hypothesis on my part, and I can do nothing to prove it beyond pointing to the apparent effectiveness of mnemonics in contexts such as WaniKani, and to the fact that many students have an easier time absorbing a vast amount of detail when it has been structured around several core ideas.
I think if you want to acquire a language, it is a different goal than learning a language.
Acquisition is useful for immediate use of a language.
This is why travel guides will you give you phrases without grammar and will often only use rōmaji. They may give you some kanji to recognize, but only so you can know what they mean when you see them. You’re acquiring language rather than learning language.
I acquired many kanji over the years before WaniKani. Now that I’m learning kanji, I can see the difference between acquiring kanji and learning kanji.
The following is one of the very few videos on language learning that I ever found myself more in agreement with than not, despite the focus on listening/speaking being something that I’m not really keen on since I believe that many of the same results can be gained through reading and written communication:
The very key and essential argument made in this video that most YouTubers in the language learning community fail to grasp and convey, including the one in this thread, is this:
Every polyglot(person) has their own method, that works best for them.
There are certainly helpful principles, tools and research regarding language acquisition; but those are just the building blocks of a much bigger picture, because each individual, ultimately, learns a little differently. There is no ‘best’ method when it comes to a personal and lifelong journey such as this; unless one counts the method that has taken all these blocks and been tailored to each person’s strengths, interests, goals and circumstances.
In fact, I’m of the school of thought that if schools focused more on teaching students about learning itself as a discipline and skill they need to develop and independently experiment/strategize with, students worldwide would benefit tremendously.
What really irks me the most about the modern Second Language Acquisition revolutionaries is that they are just using semantics / sophistry to make you feel like you’re doing something new or different, but you’re not.
to acquire knowledge of or skill in by study, instruction, or experience: to learn French; to learn to ski.
to become informed of or acquainted with; ascertain: to learn the truth.
to memorize: He learned the poem so he could recite it at the dinner.
to gain (a habit, mannerism, etc.) by experience, exposure to example, or the like; acquire: She learned patience from her father.
In summary, they basically mean the same thing, and if someone is telling you that you can “acquire” a language and not study / learn, they should actually look up the definition of the words.
How did I learn my first language?
Learning new speech patterns and vocabulary through exposure via media, human interaction, or explicit instruction.
Using those patterns and vocabulary while reading, listening, speaking, and writing.
Subsequently comparing, contrasting, and analyzing those speech patterns and vocabulary on my own via materials designed to provoke / stimulate that kind of thinking (workbooks, exercises, etc.), or in an instructional environment
How am I learning Japanese? Following the exact same process.
If you notice, this strongly correlates with Bloom’s Taxonomy, a widely supported theory / framework used in education that describes how people learn pretty much anything, let alone language:
Almost every modern educational system follows this process for a reason. It works, and it prepares you for the real world. Whenever someone proposes a “fast and easy” method, they are usually shortcutting this model in some form, which will often cause a pitfall in some area.
In summary, if you want to learn Japanese (or anything else) faster, learn how to learn first.
So, put yourself in a situation where you are utterly dependent on others for all of your daily needs, up to and including food and basic hygiene, and where learning their language is the only way you can communicate what those needs actually are. And it will still take three years for effective communication, and at least three more for anything an adult would call “fluency.”
Okay, maybe you can shave off a year or so because as an adult you already have the physical coordination needed to make word sounds, and another year because you already understand abstract concepts. But still.
Sounds like a quick way to become a YouTube millionaire. All you need is a GoPro and a cell phone for uploading all of that sweet footage of you immersing yourself in Japanese 24/7.
Apropos of this thread, I’m working through this book, which argues that the “children learn better” claim is largely inaccurate.
The big advantage children have (besides immersion) is that they aren’t self conscious about being wrong. But they argue that’s more than made up for by the cognitive tools that adult learners have.
I haven’t finished it yet – it’s a pretty dense read – but it’s an interesting contribution to the debate.
Jonapedia already covered it, but I think it is fair when the person is making a strong claim (the only real way to learn a language is to go into a country with no knowledge and learn by force, don’t do anything else or it will hurt you).
Is this the name to refer to Krashen’s clique? I was under the impression it was a small one at this point, but you make it sound like it is the entire field
In addition to all that, make sure you pester everyone you encounter with “Why?” Also, at the end of those 3 years, you will have the language skill of a 3 year old. Congrats. I guess for Japanese the children way you will need to spend another 10 years before you can read adult oriented books.
"OK - LEVEL FIVE - the most difficult languages on earth for an English speaker to acquire…
Japanese
Chinese
Korean
Arabic
…and according to the state department of the united states is should take to 2200 hours to acquire one of these languages"
Bah, knew I should have chosen Italian instead. Although I do like the way he specifies Earth languages, I hear Martian is exceptionally tricky. The problem for me with his method is that he doesn’t learn to read and that’s my primary reason for learning Japanese in the first place, with understanding spoken language second and speaking third.
Haha, I’ve learned (to varying competency) French, Italian, and Swedish before, as a naive English speaker, so it’s entirely logical that I’m now doing one of the hardest, right?
)
