At their fastest, children easily learn 10 new words, plus the relevant grammar, plus the usage context, plus object/verb properties, a day, with no effort.
Essentially, one week they don’t know what a kettle is and the next week they’re telling you it’s not boiling because it’s not plugged in.
How much of that is actually new learning, though?
That is, if you understand how to express “the kettle isn’t boiling because it isn’t plugged in,” then you can create any sentence of the form “A has/doesn’t have property B because C/not-C.”
And how much of it is language learning, rather than just learning about the world? That is, understanding that plugging the kettle in is necessary to make it get hot is information about the properties of the physical object, independent of what the object is called.
I don’t know if they all use ( or abuse ) Kranshen’s research. It’s just that there’s an overwhelming amount of Polyglots / SLA experts showing up that are hurting students without realizing it. It’s perfectly fine to suggest an immersion approach. It’s not fine to tell them that other methods (that have also proven to be successful for some students) are harmful. It’s not fine to tell people that learning a second language will be this magical acquisition via osmosis process. It’s not fine to make students feel like failures, because if you look in the YouTube video comments there’s always the “Wow, he’s fluent in X amount of time, but I’ve been studying for years and I feel like I’ll never be fluent”.
This isn’t any different than adults, honestly. When I was a public educator we taught seven subjects a day, so I promise you that our high school students learned more than 10 new words, plus the usage, context, etc. a day. College students probably retain and contextualize even more information if they’re in a demanding major.
Yeah, I’m not going to say it can’t work (certainly some people have gotten it to work) but people on the internet treat Krashen as if he is some god and the lone voice of the entire field is SLA research.
It occurs to me that this entire discussion of how children learn is taking place from an adult point of view. No one is talking about how it feels to the child.
If you actually spend time around small children, though, you see that there are a lot of times when they’re tongue-tied, a lot of times when they get frustrated by their inability to express themselves, to the point of screaming and reverting to “less mature” communication methods.
Part of that is because young children don’t self-regulate the way adults do. But they’re getting frustrated because communicating in a new language is hard. What adults see as “wow, children learn so fast” is, from the point of view of the child, more like “darn it, I’ve been working on this for three full years and still can’t make them understand I want a farking cookie!”
But then as adult learners, we’re seeing the frustration from the inside. And for self-learners, there’s really no external authority to say, “Wow, you know a lot more than you did a month ago.”
It’s taken me several weeks to make my 3 year old son to say marmite sandwich instead of marmite cheese sandwich - I’d explained that it contains no cheese, but as far as he’s concerned, the word sandwich doesn’t exist, there’s only cheese sandwich.
I concur that most people talking about how children learn language haven’t spent all that much recent time around one who is actively learning how to express themselves. Their rate of acquisition is amazing, sometimes, and when they come out with words and expressions that you didn’t know they’d been exposed to, it blows your mind a little, but they aren’t magic and they spent a lot of time learning to apply words correctly.
This is one reason I’m finding it motivating to show my husband my wkstats.com item list with all of the kanji I’ve learned. Because he’s telling me exactly this.
That’s really nice to hear - it’s great to have your partner encouraging you like that. I’ll be honest, my wife is usually “that’s nice dear” - but she’s seen me get enthusiastic about many, many things over the years, so she’s become a bit numb to my excited mini-lectures about how it’s fascinating that the days of the weeks are elemental, or whatever.
I wish I could like this twice! This made my day, that’s so precious! 
Warning : This post is quite long and rambley, my question is surmised at the bottom 
Just gave a quick look through the thread, and while I’m not a big fan of pure immersion [even though I learned English this way, it was a long and laborious process, it took me a decade with many hours of daily exposure, that, while enjoyable with concentrated study would probably have seen results a lot quicker (especially when considering it’s pretty darn similar to my native language)]
I would however like to open up one aspect of this type of tutor-heavy approach that I honestly don’t know if it’s well studied or anything, but that I started doing aroung a month ago as a test that helped me, namely gesticulating and facial expressions. And I am just hoping that maybe one of the smart people here know something about it, because I’m quite interested, but don’t even know what terms to use to look this up.
For example : I always have had a hard time in any language apart from Dutch and English keeping track of whether I’m talking about the present or the future, short sentences aren’t a real problem, but once the sentences become longer or this “time-scale” starts encapsulating entire paragraphs, I completely lose track. Ever since I started gesturing (often simple things, just a small hand gesture that is behind me, at me, ahead of me, …) I find that I can keep track of these things a lot better. I had the same trouble in English before I started conversing with people over the internet and meeting people from other countries (actually “outputting” so to speak), where I would do this type of gesturing naturally.
TL;DR : Does anyone know of some research on proprioceptic feedback mechanisms in regard to language acquisition?
Not sure if there is a proprioception based mechanism, but gestures are also visual, and there is a proposed Visuo-spatial working memory component in Baddeley’s model of working memory that could be worth looking into. This concept really seems to be a good fit for what you’re describing, as “working memory” is kinda like the proposed “scratch pad” or “whiteboard” you use in your brain to process information as it comes in.
Well, yes. A child can, without any special effort, learn the existence of a thing, the forms that thing takes, several grammar-related words describing the thing, where you might find it, what it does, and some other related information in roughly the time it took me to go through the first SRS stage for some words related to 毒 this morning.
I don’t think learning a language is just about learning the sounds/symbols you can link to things, there’s also a lot of learning about the things and the relationships between them as well, otherwise you’re not going to know how to use the sounds sensibly. At best you’d be speaking some kind of pidgin.
High school students are still children. I’m not talking about 3 year olds here, their language learning is still ramping up. 5-15 I think is where the average person learns most of the words they’re ever going to use.
I did relatively demanding degrees, and, if you’d never read any Shakespeare, I think you’d come across as many new words in Macbeth as I did in my under & post grad degrees combined. Although you’d probably not remember any of them. It’s been a few years, but thinking about it, most of my undergrad degree was more correct and in depth treatments of things I’d already come across as a child.
I think there IS some skill when it comes to being able to speak on an simple level in a few languages but i think selling that as “fluent” is a bit dishonest and that’s where a lot of language learners get a little annoyed i think? They should have pride that they can say “hello, how are you” in 5 different ways but a good chunk of these people will do that but then make youtube videos about “how you too, can fluently speak 3+ languages in just a year!” or something just as silly.
So yeah- no shame in their skill, but acting like they are gurus that know how to tell people how to flawlessly learn a language in no time at all is also a bit of a stretch for me.
[sorry this is long] for sure. and i think i talked with someone about this before but I think a huge part of being fluent is understanding how and when rules are broken. usually the more casual or the younger the speaker more rules are broken but there’s kind of a science to it? At least i notice it a bit in both english and japanese (most people have at least heard of short form in japanese and masu/desu form) but i think fluentness can go even deeper then that.
I think most polygots, at least the ones we run into on social media, usually learn polite speash that works really well if you ever wanted to talk to a stranger, which is super neat, and a close friend might be impressed, but a close friend would probably think you speak odd or are overly polite if you speak like that to them non-stop. Immersion can help a bit with that but i’d argue there are other ways to find places to listen to casual speech if you want to be truly “fluent” in a native way but i haven’t seen too many polygots talk about that too much.
Critical period with respect to Language Acquisition is commonly believed to be between 2 to 13 years of age. Even with your range of 5 - 15, a large group of high schoolers fall outside of that, so for the purposes of this discussion, the point I was making is quite relevant. There are lots of adults outside of the Critical Period / childhood / adolescence / whatever that are learning more than 10 words a day. A lot of them are here on the WaniKani boards.
Anecdotes will land us all over the spectrum. I read Shakespeare in high school. I also underwent two major career transitions since becoming a fully fledged adult. I can guarantee that one of my books on infrastructure engineering has more new words and concepts than any standard Shakespearean work. I believe you, but your experience has been quite different from mine. 
When I taught high school, the kids didn’t effortlessly absorb new vocabulary. They had to study. If you, your children, or the people around you were able learn it effortlessly, be aware that that’s not the norm. Those are the kinds of kids that we didn’t really have to teach because they basically taught themselves. Appreciate the gift, whether it was due to very good education at an early age, or due to natural talent or genetics. Children may have some advantage, but I can promise you that it’s not this major leap of capability that some people are making it out to be. If that’s truly the case, I know at least a hundred students that were robbed from birth.
That’s my biggest issue with many of the methods coming out recently. It’s people who found a way and framed it as the way.
Certainly you need to know how words relate to things and their relationships. But my point is that simply encountering a cat creates a mental image, regardless of what words – if any – are ultimately applied to it. “Cat,” “le chat,” “el gato,” and “猫ーちゃん” are all the same creature. An adult doesn’t need to learn a new concept of “catness” in order to apply a new label to it. Learning about small friendly mammals who purr is not in itself a language task.
Bit of tangent, but it’s believed that this is the way machine learning for translating language ultimately works. Rather than learning to convert like for like from one language to every other, the system will distil concepts like “catness” so that it doesn’t think “cat = gato” it thinks “[cat concept] = {array of translations} - which is pretty fascinating and also extremely logical when you think abut it.
Would you happen to be involved in Natural Language Processing or analytics?