3 ms·
Specific anecdote: I've been acquiring a new language over the past year or so. I went from beginner to a decent (for my purposes) level of fluency in about a
by mumblemumble 7y ago
Specific anecdote:
I've been acquiring a new language over the past year or so. I went from beginner to a decent (for my purposes) level of fluency in about a year. The other day we had a friend we hadn't seen in a while over for dinner. She's a school teacher in the very language I had been learning, so, naturally, the bulk of the dinner conversation between us proceeded in that language. And, naturally, she commented on my rapid progress, when most her students can't read a comic book after eight years of study, and wanted to know more about my study technique.
I kept it positive because I didn't want to trash her whole career, but I can say that my only real secret sauce was that I studiously avoided just about every practice in mainstream language education. I didn't do what schools do, and I didn't do what Duolingo and Rosetta Stone do. Because, at the start, I spent a while reading up on the academic research on how people learn new languages. There's a lot of it, it's about as well established as any sub-field of psychology can be, and it is, to a remarkable degree, summarily ignored. The mainstream has no choice but to ignore it, because most of what's been discovered does not lend itself well to the establishment of standardized curricula or easy, objective assessment criteria. That means schools don't want to take that advice because it's incompatible with their mandate to assign letter grades, and Duolingo doesn't want to take that advice because it's impossible to gamify.
- wrinklytidbits 7y agodo you have any articles that summarized the research or that you thought supported your learning style the best. I'm curious and I would like to know more about what you did versus mainstream grading/gamification please.
- mumblemumble 7y agoI don't know of any good summaries offhand, but you can probably find something good if you google "comprehensible input".
- reubenswartz 7y agoWell don't leave us hanging-- what's the secret sauce? ;-)
- Kaiyou 7y agoI learned English in about a year after having failed to make any progress in ten odd years of learning the language formally through school. The secret sauce is (1) completely ignore grammar, (2) never have your mistakes corrected and (3) just look up every word you don't know. Of course, the most important thing is to have a motivation for reading English text in the first place and wanting to understand it. If you don't have that motivation you won't have any lasting success. Though, I know of methods that allow you to learn any language in six weeks, but it involves talking to a native speaker.
- ikeyany 7y agoI was under the impression that the best way to learn is complete immersion. My mind immediately goes to Bart Simpson learning French to thwart his captors (season 1 spoilers, sorry!).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mumblemumble 7y agoMy best guess about why that idea has so much staying power is that it's useful for consoling oneself after having been failed by mainstream language education. The people I know of who've successfully learned a second language that way are invariably characters on TV shows. Having spent much of the past few years of my life helping two small children learn their first language, I have my doubts about whether the "immersion is magic" approach is really even the most efficient way to pick up language number one.
- Kaiyou 7y agoNo, that is a movie lie. You can learn stuff during total immersion, but you can also learn nothing while being totally immersed. It doesn't affect your learning.