Ahah thanks. I think I got kiitos but I also think I knew it beforehands from a long time ago
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Thatâs it! Good to see that someone else here had to watch it in school. I had educational studies as a subject on three different schools, and all of them showed that movie in class. Itâs been on my mind a lot, but I just couldnât remember the name. Thanks for bringing it up.
Thatâs quite a project youâve got there. It is certainly an interesting method to learn a language that should work in theory, but actually pulling it off seems like a hell of a task.
Sadly, as much as Iâd like to support you, I must admit I donât really have much faith in it. I just think thereâs too much to learn in a language for it to be successful. But I admire your effort nonetheless and wish you best of luck. Hope you can prove me wrong!
It proves that an infant brain can learn a language in a way that a developed brain physically cannot. You were wondering what I meant when mentioning âlearning like a toddlerâ. This is what I mean.
I think I should have worded my explanation differently.
Of course youâll also acquire the sound of a word as well if youâre having someone verbalize it as opposed to reading it yourself on a sheet of paper. Thatâs not the point Iâm trying to make though. Iâm not even arguing which way is more effective. What Iâm trying to say is youâre acquiring new information the same way as when you would be studying: by context. We can discuss whether or not we can regard that method as studying or not, Iâd say itâs in a weird space right between regular immersion and studying, but that is all just semantics sidetracking us from the actual point Iâm making:
The point is that the video can help you learn new things because it tries to get you to understand it. Heâll introduce a concept, make sure you get it, and move on to the next concept. This stands in complete contrast to standard immersion material, which doesnât care if you, a non-native speaker, understand it or not. And thatâs probably why youâre watching his videos as opposed to, say, a regular Spanish youtuber.
Iâm sure you know what I mean now, but I feel like having to elaborate an analogy might sidetrack us even more and even Iâll forget the original point Iâm trying to make if this goes on, so let me backtrack a bit.
I mentioned that we cannot learn like toddlers, in response to the common argument âwe never had to study our native langueâ that particularly influencers use to give their viewers the false hope of learning a language the âeasyâ and âfunâ way, being learning purely by immersion. But we canât learn purely by immersion - toddlers can, they have to. We need comprehensible input, and your video is comprehensible input. I assume you posted it to put my statement on toddlers learning differently into question, but itâs comprehensible input. Youâre certainly learning the language, but youâre not learning like a toddler, whoâs learning the language along with the context that you, as an adult, need to learn the language.
Hopefully I could get my point better across this time. If not, Iâll just surrender the point. After all, all I was just trying to say is that the idea to learn a language through immersion only is non-sensical, and this discussion is starting to get a little too convoluted for me to argue for a statement like that.
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Sorry for the derail, but I actually took a class that talked about this case a bit, it was super interesting! I think someone else mentioned it, but there is a difference between trying to learn a language after growing up with no language, versus trying to learn a new language as an adult. I donât know the science super well, but I think they said that language is an instinct which means we can pick it up easily as children without structured teaching. But, in order to pick it up, we need exposure to it. You see this in certain behaviors in other animals too, one example I remember is cats: cats who grew up around mothers who hunted pick up hunting without specific teaching, just observation. But if cats are not exposed to hunting early on, they can never learn it. Itâs the same with humans and language; unless we are exposed to language before the age of 10 or so (I think) we can never completely pick it up. (Although obviously the research on this is limited, because itâs incredibly unethical to do experiments about it, so the research is limited to a handful of specific cases, most of which also involve trauma.)
But, once we have one language, I donât believe thereâs any barrier to picking up more. My Japanese teacher (who is also a linguist) told me there is currently a debate about how effective immersion alone actually is, but the idea that adults find it more difficult or even impossible to become fluent in a new language is an old idea, that linguists no longer believe.
But in any case, children have 100% immersion for several years before they are able to talk. Probably for adults, as is true for almost everything, a combination of methods is actually best, as long as you find something that works for you.
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I agree with you it is going to be a hell of a task 
I already have close to 100 pages which I estimate covers 2/3 of the N5. My plan is to cover all of the N4. It is going to take a lot of time but I am happy with it. When I will look back at it 10 years time hopefully Iâll be proud of my achievement lol
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That part I would disagree with. I think the science that attempts to explain away language acquisition with âchildren do it betterâ and point to those examples disregard the trauma that those children experienced. It turns out, trauma is a pretty effective blocker of acquiring many skills and adjusting normally.
Most of the research I have done strongly points to adults actually having a superior capacity for language learning, and that makes sense, given there are so many more adult polyglots than there are toddler ones.
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For me it was a bit of a general study lesson, and it was also personal to me. But I found that taking notes to study grammar was mostly just a waste of time.
I hardly ever looked at my notes. So instead of taking the extra time and making the learning process less fun, I learned that Iâm better off just consuming more content. The only time I found taking notes useful was when it helped reorganize or restructure information in a way that was simpler for me to grasp.
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When I started learning Japanese I tried that too. Watched his content and thought it sounded like solid advice, but in the end it only frustrated me because I knew way too little vocabulary, I couldnât read any of the Kanji really, and it was hard for me to really understand the grammar structure because everything was just too fast and I wasnât yet able to differentiate between what was its own word and what was part of grammar. I was N5 at that time, so no wonder I couldnât understand anything.
I think that method is for intermediate level learners and only becomes useful for your actual learning when you already have a few years of studying behind you. A proper foundation and already practice with reading and listening individually. Otherwise it goes straight over your head. It took me 3 years of studying to start watching Anime in Japanese with Japanese subtitles and get any practice out of it, because before that, the gaps where just too huge, and I would only ever recognise a few odd words here and there.
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Alright, I can see that were mostly on the same page but just have a bit different definitions on what constitutes as study and what immersion.
But thatâs not really what happens when watching. You are supposed to miss a lot of stuff and you gradually start to understand more and more. In my definition, this is learning by pure immersion. This is the fun and easy way instead of boring textbooks. Iâve always considered immersion to mean comprehensible input. What good could immersion ever be if you donât understand it? The whole concept of immersion is useless if it doesnât mean we at least understand something with which to progress. Honestly, I donât understand your definition of immersion. Iâve seen this come up in other places, and find that definition just very outdated. I donât think anyone who advocates for immersion means listening to something day-long which you cannot understand. Not saying itâs happening here, but it just sounds like a straw-man against immersion-based learning?
How is toddlers learning a language not comprehensible input? They also need comprehensible input to learn the language, they donât do it by some magic; everyone needs context. If you just confined a toddler in a chair for years and blasted it with the audio from news, I hardly think it would learn to speak.
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Did you find anything about recognition of phonemes? My impression is that the consensus is that as a young child your brain specialises into recognizing the various different speech sounds of the language or languages youâre exposed to. So correctly distinguishing English ârâ and âlâ is trivial if you grew up in a bilingual Japanese/English household but much harder to acquire if you are a monolingual Japanese learning English as a second language, for instance. I think this also connects to speaking â isnât there research about children who immigrate to the US at various ages that finds typically they do or donât have noticeable accents depending on the age they were when they arrived?
Like I say, this is just my impression rather than a carefully researched theory, so Iâm curious whether what you found backs it up or if Iâve absorbed out-of-date or dubious informationâŠ
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I think you have a view on what constitutes effective immersion, which is probably a correct one. But that doesnât mean we should redefine âimmersionâ to only mean âeffective immersionâ. If you get lost up the Amazon and youâre rescued by a small tribe who speak only their own language and have to stay with them for years, then youâre going to be learning their language by immersion. But that doesnât mean theyâre necessarily going to be helpfully spoon-feeding you only comprehensible input â you get the input you get, and hopefully you gradually figure out what it meansâŠ
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Realistically they will talk to you using very simple words to make the input as simple as possible.
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Yes, but thatâs going to be quite a small amount of the available input. Most of it will be them talking to each other, and they wonât slow that down on your account.
Heh. Youâre probably still going to learn it little by little. I think the other side was arguing this was an impossible task, which I donât agree with. Or maybe them then talking to you in simple words then counts as studying? I donât know anymore. That sounds more nonsensical to me than the possibility of learning purely through immersion.
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Iâm not a linguistic scholar by any means. My Comp II thesis did happen to touch on SLA with particular respect to the neurological changes that result from attempting to acquire language. The thesis was that SLA (second language acquisition) improved memory and cognitive function and may be a method of combating degenerative conditions such as Alzheimerâs. Although it wasnât central to my paper, researching this lead me down many rabbit ones, one of which was the discussion about adult SLA learners vs child SLA learners.
There is an event in childhood during which many of the synaptic connections in the brain are âprunedâ for efficiency. When this happens, for instance, the ability to hear L & R for many people in Asian regions, and the ability to hear pitch accent in westerners is somewhat lost, along with thousands of other things that you will literally never notice (because your brain has instructed you not to).
In fact, this is precisely what Autism is - that pruning process doesnât complete in Autistic children and their synaptic connections light up light Christmas trees, making them more susceptible to fixation and hyperstimulation.
Nothing about the pruning process actually removes SLA ability - language acquisition is a dedicated, deeply-rooted system in the brain that doesnât degenerate with age. This is why, when we get Amnesia, and forget literally everything about who and what we are, we donât lose language in the slightest.
What happens is simply this: Our brains are the pinnacle of efficiency. And what is the ultimate goal of efficiency? Laziness. Bill Gates famously said, âI choose a lazy person to do a hard job. Because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it.â (Went back and added the proper quote)
Our brain is in a state of panic/stress while we are acquiring our first language, because it understands that communication is critical to survival and is expending vast amounts of energy trying to achieve comprehensible exchange between our fellow bipedal primates. Once it achieves this, it prunes all the extra synaptic connections it created, goes on vacation and sips Mimosas on a beach.
This is also why many of us, despite having watched English subtitled anime for years or even decades, can barely string together a coherent short sentence in Japanese. With the subtitles there, our lazy brain has had its work done for it, and tunes out much of the Japanese audio as âbird chirpingâ, feeling little need to decipher it. Sure, youâll get a few hundred word vocabulary that defies active recall, but it would probably take an entire lifetime to absorb a second language using native language subtitles.
TL;DR: We learn language with a seeming efficiency as children because we need it to survive, and our brain is like Phoebe from Friends freaking the **** out. As adults, we donât have that survival instinct backing our motivation for second language acquisition.
Article that touches on this:
What are the benefits of learning a language at a young age? â Lingokids Help Center
ââSynaptic Pruning â is another cognitive process that occurs at the end of this phase for learners from 6 - 8 years of age. Synaptic Pruning, which takes place in the brain, is the process of synapse elimination. This process aims to eliminate the neural connections that are not frequently used to ensure that our brain capacity is available to make connections that are used more frequently. Thus, if children younger than 6 years old only use their brain for one language, they will lose neural connections for a second language . This is why when they try to learn it later on; they have to reactivate these connections. This is why adults learn a second language more slowly and in a less efficient way.â
I donât agree that we lose efficiency - rather, we need to recreate the events that gave us the enhanced efficiency to begin with. A panicked brain. One of the things I am currently looking into is if âoverloadingâ (trying to taking in way too much information at a time) actually has an effect on improving efficiency by artificially recreating this panic state.
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For around 10+ years, Iâve been an avid anime lover (always prefer the Japanese- instead of English-dub), even able to memorize the lyrics of a number of J-pop songs. Apart from picking up bits and pieces of vocab here and there, itâs in no way making me properly understand Japanese. Only after I started WK (and Genki I recently), things started to make sense. Itâs like the puzzle pieces are slowly fitting into the correct place. Of course, I still have a long long way to go. Basically, immersion isnât enough without putting the actual effort to study.
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there are so many things I wouldnât know even where to start 
thing is, I got what I needed with trial and error and it has been smooth so far.
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I agree that this is what immersion ideally should be. But if youâre watching a movie in a language that you donât understand, I donât see how thatâs not immersion. Itâs a terrible idea, but youâre totally immersing yourself in a foreign language.
Well Iâm not sure if theyâre serious about this shit either or if itâs just to click-bait desperate people. But you should definitely know which kind of videos and influencers Iâm alluding to. Thereâs no way these things donât pop up in your recommended, and I canât imagine you donât find them as ridiculous as I do.
This is alluding to the whole discourse of whether or not adults can acquire a language the way children do, and Iâm going to have to appeal to authority here: I urge you to do a quick Google search and I bet what youâre going to find is about 80% telling you adults cannot learn like children can and the rest of them influencers that want clicks.
Iâm not an educationalist and Iâll completely admit that I canât explain it to you, and that I probably donât get it either. I can keep providing you with theories, about how babies learn to comprehend along with acquiring the language and that this is where they differ from adults, but thatâs just what I assume the explanation is.
We donât really know that and, tell you what, I hope nobody tries to find that one out.
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So what youâre saying is, the more stress immersion puts on our survival, the easier it will be to learn a second language?
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Iâm saying itâs a factor, but yes, I would say that if you were on the streets in a foreign country and your actual survival depended on being able to communicate, you would acquire language at a rate you wouldnât have thought was possible. Kind of like how nobody thinks they can outrun a bull until theyâre staring down the horns.
There was an episode of The Simpsons were Bart was forced into child labor in France and, because his survival depended on it, he learned near-fluent French in 2 months (and then promptly forgot it and never mentioned it again through the run of the show that I can think of lol). Also, Simpsons tackled some heavy topics that we overlooked back in the dayâŠ!
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Hereâs a link to one of the sources I cited in my paper (itâs just a PDF download). Itâs an interesting read about synaptic pruning, learning vs acquisition and the role of executive function in language learning.
https://repository.stcloudstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1046&context=stcloud_ling
Also @pm215 because you specifically asked about phonology
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