4 ms·
> What lengths people go just to avoid reading a book and talking to people. odd take, do you have the same negative sentiment for the entire field of language
by zzzeek 1y ago
> What lengths people go just to avoid reading a book and talking to people.
odd take, do you have the same negative sentiment for the entire field of language instruction? introductory German class at a local college? 7th grade French ? things like that?
- whyowhy3484939 1y agoWhat introductory German class does not use books and does not talk to people?
- zzzeek 1y agooh, so you only mean like the gamified nature of duolingo? Lots of language apps have lessons that are interactive versions of language books and they also include conversational practice with language models. Conversational practice with humans is not necessarily easily available nor is it that appropriate if you are just learning a language and can't have simple conversations yet. Babbel for example is pretty comparable to a traditional language class in how it's structured. It's pretty convenient that I can use it any time of day and as often as I want, from my car or whatever.
- pessimizer 1y agoI suggest that they meant that the process does not involve "reading a book" or "talking to people."
- watwut 1y agoIn most of them, you talk to people with an equally horrible accent as you have.
- cpmsmith 1y agoSurely those things entail reading books and talking to people.
- croes 1y agoYou definitely meet other people in local colleges
- sumeno 1y agoAnd few of them are native speakers of the language you're learning.
- zahllos 1y agoI don't think it is an odd take. I live in Switzerland, which has 4 national languages (Swiss German is spoken in dialect form that varies between towns, while Romansh has well-defined idioms with distinct spelling, although the 5 or so idioms are mutually intelligible). I speak French, passable German and one of the Romanshes, and I'm a native of none of them. Between French and Romansh I can more or less read Italian, although I can't understand it when spoken. The same thing that has worked for me as a method for learning languages has always been the same. Get books, particularly short stories or children's stories aimed at A2/B1 level, and read them. Practice grammar. Get a pen and paper and learn vocab by repeatedly writing it down. Boring but effective. And of course practice listening and talking, which means either having native friends, doing a course, using audio materials from somewhere, etc. Courses with actual humans make learning go faster (in the case of Romansh, it would have been impossible without the course). I don't find duolingo to be effective at all, as others mention beyond the A1/A2 level. I'd be a bit more skeptical and say even A2 you need to expand your horizons.
- zzzeek 1y agoSo I think people who grew up in Europe surrounded by many languages have a huge language learning advantage over mono-lingual Americans. Also exercises like "get a pen and paper and learn vocab by repeatedly writing it down" this is exactly what language applications have you do, just minus the pen and paper. (I'm not a young person so I have deep familiarity with pens and paper)
- djeastm 1y agoIn my own personal experience, the pen and paper is actually a very important tool of memory to which tapping on a phone doesn't compare.
- skeaker 1y agoOpposite for me, I struggled with courses that required thorough notes until college where they didn't care if I brought in a laptop. Once I could take digital notes I excelled thanks to the speed and organization of it. I don't think the physical instrument for note-taking matters so much as the act of note-taking.
- wannadingo 1y agoAll your counter-examples directly depend on the part you quoted and are presumably arguing against.