Is Refold actually going to make me fluent?

Hm… ok, fair enough. I used to listen and repeat my French lessons in the shower, so I can’t say that’s ineffective. I guess I just think it should be coupled with an activity that doesn’t require as much mental focus? Otherwise you’ll probably just make mistakes in the task at hand while failing to pick up much from what you’re listening to.

I took a quick look at the site. While I know Matt’s Japanese is excellent, I’m kinda disappointed by the fact that he chose to use Steve Kauffman’s testimonial: for goodness’ sake, sure, he’s a famous polyglot, but how do you know he’s any good in Japanese? Does he at least live in Japan, for instance? Is a member of his family Japanese? That’s just not credible. As far as the basic outline goes (I couldn’t be bothered to go through the different ‘stages’ in detail because I noticed that the final two are unfinished, when those are the ones that I feel we should be most concerned about), I agree with some of the principles: memorisation is extremely boring and probably rather frustrating, so avoiding reliance on it is good. (This is coming from a guy – me – who memorised 200+ digits of pi and the entire periodic table for fun, so it’s not as though I can’t memorise things if I have to.) Immersion is also good and essential to rapid mastery and getting a handle on how people actually speak. However, some of the things I don’t agree with/think are too extreme:

  1. Insisting on learning to ‘understand’ before ‘speaking’. That’s just not sensible, because speaking is a skill like everything else. You should at least practise imitating the correct sounds and pitch accent with a few basic, everyday words. You don’t want to spend hours learning to understand what you’re hearing, only to be unable to imitate what you’ve heard. That’s frustrating. The fact is that you’re very likely to understand more than you can produce on your own initially. It’s a natural thing: I can understand about 60% of the conversations my mother has with her parents in Teochew. I’m not able to speak the dialect though. Similarly, I can understand around 50% (sometimes more, depending on what I’m watching) of what’s being said in the anime I watch, even without subtitles. That doesn’t mean I can reproduce all that orally or in writing. This shouldn’t be a principle of language learning. It’s just a fact. HOWEVER, I completely agree that unguided practice is a bad thing at the lower levels. Before reaching the sort of ‘critical mass’ of knowledge that will allow you to identify whether or not you’re using new words and structures correctly, you’ll need help from a friend or teacher. Practice with correction is a good way to improve your ability to express yourself while cementing what you already know. The only thing I can praise Matt’s idea for here is that insisting people ‘understand’ before ‘speaking’ is very practical for self-learners who have no one to talk to. It’s as simple as that. Not cultivating expressive ability will mean that you will have little ability to identify incorrect/poorly constructed sentences, simply because you’ve never needed to avoid mistakes. It also means that you’ll absorb common mistakes made by native speakers without question, which might make you sound more natural, but mean you’ll look bad in formal/academic contexts where someone more educated/attentive to language use might catch you out.
  2. Whoever wrote the page outlining the basic idea behind Refold clearly hates the idea of having to learn ‘grammar and vocabulary’. Look, I hate vocabulary lists and brain-dead grammar study too. However, learning grammar is not bad. Rather, studying the grammar points that are relevant to you helps you to learn faster while improving your comprehension and retention. Knowing the logic behind a particular grammatical structure and deconstructing it will help you gain an intuitive understanding of it and allow you to apply it across sentences, including to your own. Building awareness of structure can even help you spot meta-patterns that might make remembering everything you already know even easier. Plus, some things can’t be absorbed through immersion alone. Don’t believe me? Ask anyone who’s tried to learn French conjugation, including native French speakers. Notice how many errors native speakers themselves make on social media. You’ll never learn how to conjugate everything through immersion alone. Even native speakers can’t do it. However, by diligently looking up conjugations verb by verb over just 5-6 years of study (which could have gone by faster if I had figured out how to learn languages effectively earlier), especially in the final 2-3 years of my formal French lessons, I found a pattern that works across every single tense and mood in French. It’s quite a loose pattern, I’ll grant you that, but it’s enough for avoiding the most common mistakes in French conjugation, the ones that everyone makes. The only exceptions? The imperative mood and perhaps the participles, which I didn’t account for in my pattern in the first place. And this is for a language that has about 40 forms for each and every verb, not counting compound tenses. Tell me again why studying grammar is bad for you? Study it intelligently, and it’ll bear fruit. Also, some studies have apparently shown that ‘explicit grammar instruction does not improve production’. Well, in that case, either I’m an exception, or those people were doing something wrong. Notice that the word used is ‘instruction’ i.e. teaching, not studying. Learn grammar for the sake of understanding it, and do so in conjunction with what you’ve encountered. Don’t learn random lists of structures that you’ll never remember precisely because you’ve never seen them, especially when they come without example sentences. That’s pointless and painful.

So yeah, that’s about it. In principle, it’s a very good method, but in practice, it’s a little too dogmatic. Feel free to mix it up. That will give you the best results, in my opinion.

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“The vast majority of these “polyglots” aren’t actually fluent”

Two sentences later…

“Your Japanese is probably the best I have heard a foreigner speak” - Steve Kaufmann Polyglot"

:thinking:

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That’s not passive listening. Do you really have to concentrate so much on wiping the table, that you can’t listen to someone speak? Passive listening is when you can’t focus on whole sentences and the audio is there only as background.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had huge progress just listening to podcasts, and my focus definitely wanders sometimes while walking or shopping. I just think most of the benefits come from when you are actually focusing a majority of your concentration in it. E.g. 80% listening 20% monotonous cleaning/dishes.

Regarding the site, the marketing speak and tooting their own horn is just so off putting. Any language program that screams “We make you fluent!” sounds like a scam to me. Although, I guess that’s how you trick the majority of language learners to start their program. Beginners are what brings language learning products their money.

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To be fair, he lived in Japan for 8 years while working for a Japanese company in Japanese. While his accent has something left to be desired, he’s quite “fluent”.

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Ah, ok, that explains things. I wasn’t trying to discredit Steve Kaufmann (though I was on LingQ a few years ago and didn’t like it very much). However, well, this sort of thing out to be mentioned on the site. No point quoting somebody whose expertise in the relevant field isn’t widely known/clear to people new to language learning. It’s bad marketing, at the very least.

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Yeah, I agree. I guess I was a bit too eager to point that fact out, while it wasn’t even the point of your argument :smile:. I don’t agree with everything Steve says (though quite a bit), and usually watch his videos for motivation.

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Eh, it’s OK. It was interesting to know, and I had no idea Steve had learnt Japanese. ドンマイ! :stuck_out_tongue:

There isn’t any learning method that works for well for everyone. If that was the case we wouldn’t have so many different methods of learning. Building my own teaching environment with tools I gather online is part of the fun of learning. It’s kinda insane to see how inefficient schools really are.

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My main issue with MattvsJapan is that he presents his method as the best one approved by science, imitating the way babies/kids learn their native language. I know I oversimplified it, but it’s all I have time for. But.

  • I don’t see kids learning their native language digging sentences for Anki on Netflix
  • He insists on never saying something you’re not 100% sure of, to avoid mistakes. Actually kids before 6 make a lot of mistakes in their native language, doesn’t mean they won’t get better along the way. I believe making mistakes is part of the process.
  • He always presents himself as the living proof that his method is working.
    Actually, he’s the living proof that his method is working on himself, that doesn’t make it an universal truth. For all I know, he’s not neurotypical, or I might not be. Claiming a method’s superiority, solely based on success stories isn’t very honest.

Well I tried and failed his method. I guess he could do it because he’s really hardcore into animes, and I am not. I like talkative shows like madmen, House of cards. But I am bored to death watching those when I don’t understand, so I quickly phase out. I strongly believe that immersion is a great tool, but to me, if you can’t understand at least 50% of what being said, even with target language subtitles, it’s kind of pointless. I really enjoyed watching Six feet under and the Sopranos when I was learning Hungarian, but I was advanced enough to understand most of it.
It also depends what’s your goal with Japanese. Matt gets his ya-yas when passing for a native, and I couldn’t care less.
But it’s certainly not all garbage, he has interesting insights. But I’d take some, and leave some others.

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I agree with you. Thought since i have tried several methods, I even spent 1.5 years in japan at a language school an my Japanese was still so bad afterwards lol. Schools are really just trash imo. The system they got is just set up to make money. Not to find the best way to teach something.

:eye: :droplet: :lips: :droplet: :eye:

:running_man::dash:

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From what I have experienced, you should take what is offered there and mold it into a system that works for you.

This advice works for a lot of products and options out there, not just Refold.
Anything you can mold to what you need, and then ACTUALLY stick to, is worthwhile.

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I have my nitpicks about a few things, but the general principles behind MIA and this new framework, Refold, are generally sound. The main issue that I think will limit most people’s success is the sheer amount of labor and tedium that is required. Besides myself, I personally don’t know anyone who can keep up with the tedium of sentence mining. I used to maintain and study via large Anki decks, but as I started bringing more people into learning the language, I realized that it was not a scalable, repeatable strategy for most students. I’ve since began investigating and developing other strategies.

This. The fastest path to fluency is the system that you can wake up use everyday without getting burned out on.

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Immersion for language learning is of course very important no matter what. But with this method, it seems immersion takes the cake on what your time will be poured into. Because of this it’s interesting to me, but like I previously mentioned, in the back of my mind I can’t help being a bit skeptical.

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I don’t think there’s a good answer to “does Refold work?” since it’s an approach to learning. It leaves up to you what you learn, how fast etc. I’m sure it can work but it doesn’t guarantee success.

That said there’s a lot of good advice in there that’s pretty consistent with my own experience, especially the focus on immersion and enjoyment as major factors. I only really have two major issues with what I read:

  • I may be biased since I’m a grammar nerd, but I strongly disagree with the idea that you only need to actively study basic grammar and you pick up the rest through immersion.
    I’d go as far as to say that it’s slightly more important to learn grammar than vocabulary in a structured way since unlike individual words it’s usually pretty difficult to identify and look up grammatical constructs. Now, I’m not saying that you need to master grammar but you at least should be aware of what to look out for, so that you can go back to it if it’s giving you trouble “in the wild”
  • I have no idea why you’d wait with production until you’re able to watch an episode of a series in real time. Sure, it doesn’t hurt the learning process to wait, but being able to communicate is one of the major advantages of learning a language, so if you have a use for it why hold back?

Also the site really needs a tl;dr. That took me like 2 hours to read.

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Let’s not get carried away. It would be hard to find them on YouTube, but I’ve met plenty of people in person that are quite fluent in Japanese, working in Japan and even holding pretty high level positions in companies there. They’re just busy doing their jobs and living their lives instead of marketing a language learning program.

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Speaking again from personal experience, it’s not actually a bad idea for immersion to take the lion’s share of your study time. However, I really think language learning requires some structure for it to be rapidly effective and useful, which is why I prefer textbooks at the lower levels. It’s obviously not wrong to use textbooks and attempt to immerse yourself in other material, but my point is that using immersion very early on may lead to your acquiring knowledge haphazardly, leaving you with huge knowledge gaps as far as basic vocabulary is concerned. I think spending more time on immersion than textbooks and other ‘pre-structured’ material only becomes useful at the upper intermediate/advanced level, because that’s where Japanese textbooks start to become rare and have difficulty teaching you much more than you already know. I personally only started ‘pure’ immersion after I finished a textbook for French that was supposed to bring me to the C1 level, at which point I could read most things without much difficulty, allowing me to simply target words and expressions I didn’t know. That’s when I started spending several hours a day on news articles in order to learn more words. Below that level, immersion wasn’t very helpful aside from allowing me to gain confidence in listening comprehension. (Not counting my school trip to Paris, during which I had the chance to speak French. That was life-changing, but we’re discussing ‘at home’ immersion here, so it’s not relevant.)

If ‘sentence mining’ is broadly defined as ‘attempting to learn words encountered in a given form of media’, well, I do it too! I refuse to use flashcards though, so after I look a word up in the dictionary and read through the example sentences, it’s really up to my memory and chance to see how well I’ll remember it. It works fairly well though, I find, and when I have, say, an anime I really enjoy, I’m quite happy to watch episodes while pausing them every few seconds to look up another word I didn’t understand, ideally with the help of a transcription. Still, it’s true that not everyone wants to do such things.

I guess this sounds rather silly, but I’m genuinely quite curious: did Matt really use a lot of anime to learn Japanese? Because I’ve been thinking that I should start watching some TV series as well in order to hear more of the slightly more formal/realistic registers of everyday speech, but they’re much harder to find with subtitles than anime. However, if anime worked for Matt… let’s just say that I feel reassured, because maybe that means it’s not a problem if I can’t get hold of dramas and whatnot. I tend to find anime more entertaining anyway, and I also try to read NHK news from time to time, so it’s not my only source. I mean, I don’t really agree with how he tells people to do things, but since I also like to dive into native materials to hunt for words, I won’t mind taking a look at what he did in that area.

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Just to add on: another fairly high-profile example might be the man called ‘Bu Sensei’ on NHK’s programmes. I’ve never actually listened to him speaking Japanese, but he’s supposed to be a kanji expert (which is the whole reason he appears on NHK), and given that most kanji research is in Chinese or Japanese… yeah, well, it’s fairly likely that his Japanese is really good too, and he might know more than Matt since he can explain where kanji come from. There are definitely other examples out there. We just don’t see them on TV or other media as much.

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One other thing: the method seems to prioritize learning a language as fast as possible and if my primary goal in life was to learn a language I’d probably approach it more or less like this, but I think most people don’t have enough free time to do 1-2 hours of immersion + Anki every day.
Personally I’d rather sacrifice some efficiency and make the process more relaxed and enjoyable.

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From what I can tell, at a basic level MIA / refold describes sentence mining as creating flash cards from “one target” sentences you find in your preferred media. “One target” referring to sentences that only have one unknown word / structure. I’ve stopped using Anki flashcards and take a similar approach to you now.

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