(Note: Extremely hypothetical)
Although, how do you know if what they’re doing is the best way or not (or at least a more optimal way than most other ways)? Just because something gets you to fluency doesn’t make it the best way, so it’s perfectly possible you may share your learning method with a lot of people and have that method still not be ideal.
It also leaves out the portion of people who started but haven’t made it yet. Maybe most fluent speakers used method A, but it’s hard to tell if it’s effective or not without knowing how many learners as a whole use method A. It’s a vastly different picture if 80% of learners use method A but only 60% of fluent speakers used method A compared if 20% of learners use method A and 60% of fluent speakers used method A.
Although even then it’s imperfect because you don’t have control over any of the variables surrounding method A. Maybe method A wasn’t even actually the solution and it just correlated heavily with method B because they were popular in the same circles. Or it might be like how ice cream sales correlate with the time since December without “time since December” causing ice cream sales.
I’d say it’s still hard to reach a solid conclusion without having some sort of controlled study
That’s not to say that doing what you’re planning on wouldn’t lead to any helpful results but more to say that I don’t think it will provide results that can be called solidly substantiated
Although that might speak more to the nature of studying human behavior more than it does to the reliability of your hypothesis. Humans are messes of variables. It’s impossible to find a “control human.” It’s why the R2 values on graphs for studying human behavior and such have more leeway than in say chemistry.
People will naturally come at language learning from different levels of experience. Some may take off like a rocket on their first attempt. Some, like me, may be on their third or fourth attempt to learn the language and have decided that a different approach is necessary.
Fluency within a certain timeframe that is observably less than average time to fluency is the primary metric for determining if a particular technique is successful? People will learn at different rates, but the average time to fluency of a sufficiently large sample size should graph observably better and outside of margins for error.
Well, there’s accounting for bias, and then there’s rabbit-holing. At the end of the day, is every bias or variable TRULY eliminated, and how would we know, or know how the data points were affected by the unknown? And thus we have invalidated all observable metrics.
I mean isn’t that kinda the point I’m making? People are so variable that it’s hard to say that anything works for absolutely everyone.
I agree, but you never said particularly that you’d graph it. Just asking people wouldn’t give you that kind of viewpoint. We also don’t have clean metrics for the average time to fluency, and I still think it’s difficult to tell if someone who’s fluent faster is fluent because of their specific method or fluent because of anything else.
That’s why I’m not saying your method is absolutely non-helpful. It’s just that it won’t lead to absolute results. I think that’s something that should always be stated when it comes to methods that involve people.
It’s kind of a personal point for me. It’s a long story that I don’t want to type out since it’s 12am (although I’d be happy to tomorrow if you’d like), but I have a rare subtype of autism that made my therapist’s methods (and by extension my parents’ because she had them in her control) more harmful than effective and drove me further into a slump rather than out of it. If she had stopped with her “but the data says it works for most people” rhetoric at any time during that, maybe I wouldn’t have sunk so low.
Autism throws a monkey wrench into a lot of metrics. It’s the ultimate outlier. People that are usually bright and capable, but neurodivergent. When outliers are adequately accounted for, data points do tend to line up. Neurodivergence necessarily means that one lives in a space outside of central tendencies, and statistics need to be re-evaluated for inclusion. There are hangups that can occur with certain modes of thinking, certain stimuli, and certain feedback with neurodivergent people. I can understand the frustration. I don’t pretend that I offer any “one-size-truly-fits-all” experience. I do believe that the methods I am experimenting with will be effectual for most (understanding that most literally means 51% or more).
Just out of curiosity, what methods have you used so far that you found to be effective for you? I have not had the opportunity to speak with many people on the spectrum that are fellow learners, although I would think that there would be a lot of them, given the generally inquisitive nature and drive for understanding a thing completely that often accompanies neurodivergence.
As an aphantasic (for all senses not just visual) I envy that.
Sorry about that (‘.’ ") I just love hearing how different people approach the topic of learning a language I’m not really trying to argue for a side (although my wording in my first post definitely suggests that oops).
What’s a mora? This thread has gotten me to wonder if I actually have the ability to notice pitch accent I haven’t really gave it much thought before, I feel like I might’ve picked up on it naturally though probably kind of as far as I know.
Okay well it’s time to go to sleep I might come back to this tomorrow might not ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
When the moon hits your eye like a big a pizza pie, that’s a mora. It’s also the unit of measurement for sound duration in spoken Japanese, roughly equivalent to the English syllable.
Interesting that people are sort of deaf initially when it comes to pitch accent, I’ve had it since the get go. Maybe because Swedish also uses pitch accent, idk.
From what I am reading, Swedish and Norwegian both have a type of pitch accent, so that could very well explain it. English uses stress accent, which is a combination of pitch, length and volume increase on certain syllables, and doesn’t really change the meaning of our words in most cases, but is something that can instantly be used to tell if a person isn’t a native English speaker, just as Japanese do with pitch accent.
Just realized I had a typo in here and put tone of length. I was going to lead into “And applying stress accent to Japanese, a common American mistake, WILL alter the meaning of words and make them more difficult to be understood”.
@Chocobits got it, but I wanted to point out that it’s much easier to track mora in Japanese since they correspond to kana versus syllables in English. The only things to keep in mind are the following:
拗音 like きゃ and しょ are considered one mora
Elongated sounds like the ー in コーヒー are considered one mora. コーヒー itself is 4 mora.
The ん sounds like in 円 are considered one mora. 円 itself is 2 mora.
Wish I had been taught the Japanese terms for those when I first started learning kana. I was taught “digraphs” and “diacritics”, and now those lodged in as the first words I think of for compound and voiced kana.
I’ve found myself doing this quite unconsciously, now I have a name for it! Helps pick up the sentence structure without knowing all the vocabulary, and I think it’s how we pick up most of our native vocabulary once we have a bit of grammar down.
Funnily enough, I subconsciously did this while watching Squid Game in Korean. The grammar is similar enough that I was able to pick out particles and honorifics fairly well even without understanding the actual words, although I suppose watching with English subs also helped to prime my brain for when a particle was likely to show up.
For sure. I’ve just taken an unconscious process and made it a conscious one. This is just a practical application of what is often referenced when people speak of adults having an advantage in language learning.
Pretty much this. The difference between attenuated immersion and passive immersion is that the effect increases in strength, from what I have seen so far.
Yeah, it’s hard to describe how the line blurs as your facility with the language improves. It’s like how an English speaker can’t listen to English without understanding it. For Japanese, there are still quite long stretches where I don’t fully understand and can practice active listening, but those keep getting shorter, albeit very slowly. At some point, immersion just turns into regular watching. That’s the hope, at least.
