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> Classes with other students are just about the least effective way to learn a foreign language. Well, sure a private tutor is better, but that's a lot more e

> Classes with other students are just about the least effective way to learn a foreign language. Well, sure a private tutor is better, but that's a lot more expensive. Without a teacher of some sort that can provide feedback, I have no idea how I could have learned elementary Mandarin (that is produce and listen to sounds radically different from my native English). From what I've seen the ability for computers to give feedback on what you are doing wrong is far away from a trained human's. > The Pimsleur model could take you all the way to fluency, I've been looking over their website - it seems like it is just audio lessons and no tutor is provided? If that is correct, how would someone learn to correctly pronounce words in say Mandarin using this?

laGrenouille 8y ago
>> Classes with other students are just about the least effective way to learn a foreign language. > Well, sure a private tutor is better, but that's a lot more expensive. In my experience, a private tutor really is not any more expensive than an classroom environment when you factor in the reduced number of hours needed. I have been taking language lessons online with 1-on-1 tutors (via Skype) through italki. You can easily find good native speakers with teaching qualifications for under $15 / hour. I find that I get more out of a dedicated hour with a tutor than half-day course in a classroom.
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  My brother and sister get individual Japanese lessons from a UCSC professor for 60 minutes a week. They apparently progress faster than the actual Japanese class. (I believe a normal UCSC class has 3-4 hours / week of classroom time.)
- trixie_ 8y ago
  +1 for italki, being able to talk with a native speaker on demand for a low price is so awesome.
thaumasiotes 8y ago
> Without a teacher of some sort that can provide feedback, I have no idea how I could have learned elementary Mandarin One of the points made in The Language Instinct is that children pick up their languages without using any explicit feedback. That is, people in the child's life who can already speak are liable to ignore errors in the child's speech, and when they do point out errors, the child will essentially always ignore the feedback. But I wouldn't say children don't get feedback at all. They get a lot of important feedback, such as whether the thing they wanted to happen when they spoke did happen, or whether the person they were talking to appeared to understand them. However, this kind of feedback is generally not the kind provided by a "teacher"; everyone automatically provides it.
- usaar333 8y ago
  Agreed. By "people" above, I should have clarified "adults". The issue is that it is very difficult for adults to learn new phonemes (individual units of sound that distinguish words from each other) - an adult hearing a novel phoneme tends to map it to one existing in their native language. Children however aren't handicapped by this problem -- they actually learn the phonemes of their language before they understand the words. In the Mandarin context, this means it is difficult to learn the ü sound - it just is perceived as something like "u" (resulting in inability to distinguish lü from lu). Tones are another category, where it is just plain hard for adults to distinguish words by tonality. Needless to say, production of the novel sounds is also incredibly hard. Point being - it's difficult to bridge this gap - and I'd imagine near impossible for most without a teacher. I find Pimsleur's claim of learning a language "effortlessly" with a "near-native accent" - with only the aid of a CD - absurd in this context. A source that goes into this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2846316/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2846316/
  - thaumasiotes 8y ago
    > Children however aren't handicapped by this problem -- they actually learn the phonemes of their language before they understand the words. This is accurate, but it's worth pointing out that infants are born recognizing every potential phoneme, and what they learn to do is to ignore the differences between sounds that their language considers equivalent. They don't learn to make distinctions they weren't formerly able to make. (This supports the idea that learning foreign sounds is much harder for adults -- I mention it because most people intuitively believe that things happen the other way around.) Adults do preserve the ability to learn to ignore the difference between two sounds, but that's much less useful than learning a distinction would be. :( > Tones are another category, where it is just plain hard for adults to distinguish words by tonality. English features tones pretty heavily, most prominently in the usually-obligatory tonal marking for yes/no questions, but interestingly also in the I-don't-know tonal sequence. > I find Pimsleur's claim of learning a language "effortlessly" with a "near-native accent" - with only the aid of a CD - absurd in this context. Agreed.
gibba999 7y ago
> I've been looking over their website - it seems like it is just audio lessons and no tutor is provided? If that is correct, how would someone learn to correctly pronounce words in say Mandarin using this? Audio lessons vary widely in how they're designed. In the context of Pimsleur, it's an interactive back-and-forth. Tape: "Tell her your flight is tomorrow." [30 second pause. I say "你的航班是明天。"] Tape: "你的航班是明天。" [30 second pause. I correct "你的航班是明天," based on the feedback] Tape: "你的航班是明天。" [30 second pause. I repeat again] And then the tape goes on. That is feedback. It's prescriped, but it's incredibly effective. After I say something, I hear it pronounced back at me by a native speaker. That's 90% of the feedback a tutor or teacher would give you, only it's there for everything you say. I found my pronunciation after a couple of months of Pimsleur to be dramatically better than people who've been in classes for a year or two. Indeed, when I tried stepping into a class, I left, since my pronunciation got worse. That, combined with spaced repetition (which Pimsleur uses), combined with a half-dozen other research-based techniques, makes it ultra-effective.
- usaar333 7y ago
  > After I say something, I hear it pronounced back at me by a native speaker. I imagine that being sufficient is going to vary a lot by individual learning styles and ability to mimic. I'm guessing you are rather good at mimicking sounds/music/etc. > That's 90% of the feedback a tutor or teacher would give you, only it's there for everything you say. I'm not so great at mimicking, so without someone telling me I'm actually pronouncing the words wrong, I'm just going to converge on an incorrect pronunciation. I cannot self-assess the accuracy; I need a tutor to point out that what I mistakenly believe is correct is not correct -- that is provide feedback to me. (I've tried similar exercises to what you describe and it just results in incorrect convergence) This is especially an issue with Chinese where my native English brain naturally ignores tonality. Since the information is being stripped away, it's borderline impossible to self-ascertain whether my tones match or not.
  - gibba999 7y ago
    Try it. You might be surprised. I thought I was really lousy at that sort of thing too. It turns out the back-and-forth has a big impact. That's not just me. Lots of my friends use it. Nice thing about CDs is you can get them from the library free too (or interlibrary loan).

laGrenouille 8y ago

>> Classes with other students are just about the least effective way to learn a foreign language. > Well, sure a private tutor is better, but that's a lot more expensive. In my experience, a private tutor really is not any more expensive than an classroom environment when you factor in the reduced number of hours needed. I have been taking language lessons online with 1-on-1 tutors (via Skype) through italki. You can easily find good native speakers with teaching qualifications for under $15 / hour. I find that I get more out of a dedicated hour with a tutor than half-day course in a classroom.

thaumasiotes 8y ago
My brother and sister get individual Japanese lessons from a UCSC professor for 60 minutes a week. They apparently progress faster than the actual Japanese class. (I believe a normal UCSC class has 3-4 hours / week of classroom time.)
trixie_ 8y ago
+1 for italki, being able to talk with a native speaker on demand for a low price is so awesome.

thaumasiotes 8y ago

> Without a teacher of some sort that can provide feedback, I have no idea how I could have learned elementary Mandarin One of the points made in The Language Instinct is that children pick up their languages without using any explicit feedback. That is, people in the child's life who can already speak are liable to ignore errors in the child's speech, and when they do point out errors, the child will essentially always ignore the feedback. But I wouldn't say children don't get feedback at all. They get a lot of important feedback, such as whether the thing they wanted to happen when they spoke did happen, or whether the person they were talking to appeared to understand them. However, this kind of feedback is generally not the kind provided by a "teacher"; everyone automatically provides it.

usaar333 8y ago
Agreed. By "people" above, I should have clarified "adults". The issue is that it is very difficult for adults to learn new phonemes (individual units of sound that distinguish words from each other) - an adult hearing a novel phoneme tends to map it to one existing in their native language. Children however aren't handicapped by this problem -- they actually learn the phonemes of their language before they understand the words. In the Mandarin context, this means it is difficult to learn the ü sound - it just is perceived as something like "u" (resulting in inability to distinguish lü from lu). Tones are another category, where it is just plain hard for adults to distinguish words by tonality. Needless to say, production of the novel sounds is also incredibly hard. Point being - it's difficult to bridge this gap - and I'd imagine near impossible for most without a teacher. I find Pimsleur's claim of learning a language "effortlessly" with a "near-native accent" - with only the aid of a CD - absurd in this context. A source that goes into this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2846316/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2846316/
- thaumasiotes 8y ago
  > Children however aren't handicapped by this problem -- they actually learn the phonemes of their language before they understand the words. This is accurate, but it's worth pointing out that infants are born recognizing every potential phoneme, and what they learn to do is to ignore the differences between sounds that their language considers equivalent. They don't learn to make distinctions they weren't formerly able to make. (This supports the idea that learning foreign sounds is much harder for adults -- I mention it because most people intuitively believe that things happen the other way around.) Adults do preserve the ability to learn to ignore the difference between two sounds, but that's much less useful than learning a distinction would be. :( > Tones are another category, where it is just plain hard for adults to distinguish words by tonality. English features tones pretty heavily, most prominently in the usually-obligatory tonal marking for yes/no questions, but interestingly also in the I-don't-know tonal sequence. > I find Pimsleur's claim of learning a language "effortlessly" with a "near-native accent" - with only the aid of a CD - absurd in this context. Agreed.

gibba999 7y ago

> I've been looking over their website - it seems like it is just audio lessons and no tutor is provided? If that is correct, how would someone learn to correctly pronounce words in say Mandarin using this? Audio lessons vary widely in how they're designed. In the context of Pimsleur, it's an interactive back-and-forth. Tape: "Tell her your flight is tomorrow." [30 second pause. I say "你的航班是明天。"] Tape: "你的航班是明天。" [30 second pause. I correct "你的航班是明天," based on the feedback] Tape: "你的航班是明天。" [30 second pause. I repeat again] And then the tape goes on. That is feedback. It's prescriped, but it's incredibly effective. After I say something, I hear it pronounced back at me by a native speaker. That's 90% of the feedback a tutor or teacher would give you, only it's there for everything you say. I found my pronunciation after a couple of months of Pimsleur to be dramatically better than people who've been in classes for a year or two. Indeed, when I tried stepping into a class, I left, since my pronunciation got worse. That, combined with spaced repetition (which Pimsleur uses), combined with a half-dozen other research-based techniques, makes it ultra-effective.

usaar333 7y ago
> After I say something, I hear it pronounced back at me by a native speaker. I imagine that being sufficient is going to vary a lot by individual learning styles and ability to mimic. I'm guessing you are rather good at mimicking sounds/music/etc. > That's 90% of the feedback a tutor or teacher would give you, only it's there for everything you say. I'm not so great at mimicking, so without someone telling me I'm actually pronouncing the words wrong, I'm just going to converge on an incorrect pronunciation. I cannot self-assess the accuracy; I need a tutor to point out that what I mistakenly believe is correct is not correct -- that is provide feedback to me. (I've tried similar exercises to what you describe and it just results in incorrect convergence) This is especially an issue with Chinese where my native English brain naturally ignores tonality. Since the information is being stripped away, it's borderline impossible to self-ascertain whether my tones match or not.
- gibba999 7y ago
  Try it. You might be surprised. I thought I was really lousy at that sort of thing too. It turns out the back-and-forth has a big impact. That's not just me. Lots of my friends use it. Nice thing about CDs is you can get them from the library free too (or interlibrary loan).