>> Bluntly, it seems likely that such people are fooling themselves, confusing a sense of enjoyment with any sort of durable understanding. ... You'd think thei

>> Bluntly, it seems likely that such people are fooling themselves, confusing a sense of enjoyment with any sort of durable understanding. ... You'd think their claim to have a broad conceptual understanding of French was hilarious. The way people learn French (or any language) is not by memorizing atomized vocabulary definitions on flash cards, but by listening to / reading a large amount of comprehensible input, which is to say, meaningful grammatically correct sentences in their context. Memorizing vocabulary might help some self-studying language students bootstrap enough very basic understanding to make a wider variety of inputs comprehensible, in the absence of a teacher or properly-designed curriculum, but in and of itself does not comprise learning the language. People who encounter a large amount of appropriate-level language in context do end up with what might be called “intuitive understanding” of language (or maybe “subconscious understanding”; “conceptual” is not a great label, IMO). They know how to recognize and later how to form grammatical sentences because they have been exposed to a wide variety of such sentences. They learn the subtle connotations of words (beyond the definitions offered in an English–French dictionary) by seeing the words used many times in context. Etc. From what I have read, speaking per se is just not that useful at the earliest stages (at least the first several months) when learning a language. >> It seems plausible, though needs further study, that the mnemonic medium can help speed up the acquisition of such chunks, and so the acquisition of mastery. This whole argument basically boils down to speculation.