Thank you for sharing your experiences from the encounter with the Polish language. It's really inspiring to have a sneak-peek into your learning process 👀 And we're really glad to hear our videos turned out to be helpful 🧡 I can't help but notice though, that you chose some very challenging videos for the challenge 😅 Please feel free to get in touch if you need help next time you're picking out content for one of your Polish-learning challenges. I know that a part of the fun is picking them out on your own, as a regular viewer would do. But we know these videos almost by heart - we could also help you choose some easier/more repetitive ones that will serve the purpose of the challenge best 😉Or prepare a final test for you 😛 Uściski z Katowic! Justyna
What a treat to get a comment from your team! I hope my admiration for your channel and work came through in the video, since your work is absolutely excellent. I'll reach out, as I'm thinking about a 30 day challenge to really show how powerful your content is.
Polish native speaker here: First of all, props for trying to even learn this language. It's horribly difficult, especially for people who have no Slavic language background to fall back on. Regarding the lemmatization, I think you hit the nail on the head here. There is A LOT of inflection in Polish. I didn't notice it when I was learning English, but even when English words are inflected, they still look more or less the same, with some endings here and there (not counting the irregulars, but there aren’t that many), so if you know what the endings indicate, it's soooo much easier to pick out the words' meaning and make them stick. Now when I'm trying to learn German and encounter all the endings and article changes, it makes me realise how much easier is to pick up English vocab in comparison. But Polish? The inflection goes so much... deeper into the word, to the point where the root of the word can be one letter, and there are so many versions of it. Frankly, if I were to learn Polish as a non-native speaker, I'd wanna claw my eyes out by the end of week 1 ;) I think there might be one additional factor in your low rate of acquisition when it comes to Polish. When I was in primary and middle school I was learning both English and German at the same time, with the same amount of lessons. I remember being able to memorise English words so, so, soooo much more easily than German ones, and it baffled me endlessly. After some time, I came up with a pet theory, which is completely unscientific and I didn't bother to check if there is any research regarding that, but: I think it came down to me being exposed to English at every turn, while I had basically no exposure to German outside of classroom. Music and movies/tv shows in English could be found everywhere here, and I think listening to them since I was very young, even without understanding, managed to instill in my brain its cadence and sounds. I distinctly remember learning a word by checking out a Polish translation to the lyrics and basically instantly remembering its meaning and spelling; it just clicked. I'm not sure how much of such exposure to Polish you had, but if not much, it could be a factor. And you definitely did not disrespect any Polish person by trying to learn our language; it's always a joy and a delight to see anyone even attempt it, because we know how difficult it is. Also, "Polish sounds like Russian spoken in Italian" is by far the funniest goddamn thing I've heard this year so far. Pure gold, I'll repeat it to every person I know now xD
Regarding German: I had already a pretty good level when I understood that words Verein and vereinbaren are actually related! It’s so obvious for a native speaker but a foreigner just doesn’t have that basic feeling of connection between all the roots regardless of what endings have specific words :) And when languages are related (e.g. Polish and Ukrainian) it’s also so easy to see these connections!!
I think that for this idea of 20 (10, 12, 15, 60, whatever) exposures to work, the content needs to be 95-98% comprehensible. At least, that's what I remember from Steven Krashen's and Paul Nation's lectures. I wouldn't discount the results of your experiment, though. Considering how little of the language you knew going into it, you figured out plenty. I believe those words you recognized at the end will stay with you should you continue learning and the snowball would just keep growing. Also the number of repetions is always going to be arbitrary at worst and an educated guess at best. There's no telling how many exposures an individual learner will need for a particular word/expression to become internalized/recognized, as you yourself experienced.
Yeah I think it comes from Paul Nation, and is actually an average from a set of studies which each got slightly different number of exposures needed. I would expect the number of exposures needed is much higher with lower comprehension rates since context is a big part of it.
@@brianmitchell2202 Definitely right, Paul Nation for sure spoke about particular studies. I think Stephen Krashen mentions it too on more than one occasion. Regardless, this idea concerns extensive reading with very high comprehension, as you said. I'm not sure how it applies in a situation where one knows very little or nothing of the language, and intensive reading and listening/watching probably makes more sense. Without trying to be a dick to this One word at a time guy (sorry, I don't know your name, not sure if you introduced yourself anywhere :), I don't think that this experiment, although interesting to watch, have tested the idea of 20 exposures in any meaningful way.
You did it! I'm super impressed by how quickly you came through with this one. I also really love how transparent honest you were with the whole process. Your goal was clearly to experiment, not to impress. You reminded me how humbling it is to start a language from scratch, because it's that same feeling every time! The biggest thing I'm thinking is that at the beginning, input has to be suuuuper comprehensible. My rule of thumb is that if you feel frustrated while watching it, it means it's not comprehensible enough to be in your zone of proximal development. What do you think?
Thanks - yeah this was a humbling experience 😂. I definitely agree this content was waaay to advanced but I wasn't aware of other Polish resources that could better match my level so I just got started. I need to think more about the rule of thumb because it's so difficult to know what's on the other side of frustration: discovery or just more frustration? A few times in German, I had to read a sentence 15 times before a big eureka moment!
In this context, 'failure' in Polish would be 'porażka', not 'awaria'. 'Awaria' is more malfunction, damage, accident. Falling to do something or to achieve something is 'ponieść porażkę'.
Excellent video -- anyone can vouch for a learning method because they *feel* like it's working, but you took it one step further and properly investigated it. I really hope you continue your journey in Polish because it's by far the most fun I've ever had learning a language! What surprised me the most is that those consonant clusters eventually make sense and it's extremely rewarding to encounter a new word like "szczególności" and think "yeah I totally know how to pronounce this". I've been doing it for ~300 hours with no previous knowledge in Slavic languages, and at this point my stable vocabulary is somewhere around 600-900 words.
My new favourite language related channel! Another excellent video, thank you. It would be interesting to see the results over a longer period of time, or perhaps, at a different rate of material consumption. I wonder how much the video element disrupts the results. By that I mean, by its very nature watching videos is a passive activity. Perhaps if you heard words 20 times in various real life contexts and/or situations the results may differ due to the very real importance they may have on you - i.e. in acquiring food, locating a toilet etc. Looking forward to future videos!
Your videos are amazing! Not only are you presenting interesting facts about language learning, you are also testing them and showing the real results, even though they might not completety align with the points you have made yourself in your previous videos! The quality of these videos is also really good, keep making these and you will sure get a bigger audience in no time!
When I was a kid between 4 and 13 I guess, I heard my mother and her sister speak Hungarian a lot almost every day, and after all those years, I knew nothing in Hungarian because I didn't understand a word they said. I could hear the words to tell them apart, but I had no understanding.
I find these kind of experiments quite interesting. What I would say is, an input only approach can definitely work if the content is made specifically for that purpose. If you understand 85-95%, you will pick up a lot more, and a lot more quickly. I started learning thai with the Comprehensible Thai youtube channel. No subtitles, you just rely on the visual clues given by the teachers to figure things out (pictures, drawing, gestures, facial expressions.... ), and there are hundreds of video per level, one level being quite narrowed down. The first 15 minutes, I had no idea what I was listening to. Towards the end of the first video (30min), I finally realized what they were talking about, what some of the gestures meant and suddenly figured out quite a few words. After a couple of hours, I had figured quite a lot about sentence structure, word order, verb conjugation (or lack thereof), usage of counters... (I think it definitely helped that I learned or dabbled in so many different languages before). After maybe 20 hours, it really started to sound like language, and I started picking up and remembering new words quite easily. But I tried jumping one level a few time, and with the percentage of understanding dropping, the experience was quite different. It can probably work as well the way it was done here, as per the fact that you managed to figure out some keywords already. But because the content is not optimized, too fast, too complex, It's just very very very slow. If there are no comprehensible input content for absolute beginners, then I find it much more efficient to learn the absolute basics before jumping into input only. It's (tens of) hours not spent trying to figuring it out. I'd add: the experience is (obviously?) quite different depending on the languages you already know. Knowing french, english, and german, I started learning dutch by listening to native content straight away (podcasts on subjects I know a lot about), putting my phone in dutch, and reading the news, and it worked out quite well for me in the end.
Very fair point about starting with the basics if you don't have well optimized content. Tbh, I've enjoyed the chaos of trying to learn as I continue with this Polish challenge
As a beginner, it goes so much faster if you just learn a lot of words and phrases using Anki or some kind of bilingual memorization. Relying only on comprehensible input without any memorization is slow going as a beginner, although it is fine for an intermediate or advanced learner.
Well done on another quality video. This is quite interesting... I think, basically, the comprehensible input approach is a bit like the melting ice thing that James Clear talks about. If you take an ice cube and put it in a room that is -5 degrees, it will stay an ice cube, even if you heat the room up to -4, then -3, then -2 etc. I think 7 days of input in Polish just isn't enough to have a measurable effect. In Swedish or Dutch or Spanish or something, maybe, but in Polish it might be more like 30 days, and then it would do something. But yeah, love your approach with data and testing... Stuff I just cannot be bothered with haha.
Yeah I’m in the middle of a extending this Polish challenge to 30 days and am seeing things pan out more. And yeah it’s hard to stay bothered with the busyness of life but it’s been hella fun exploring
Research i read suggested 40 to 60 repeat exposures before it sinks in automatically. But also keep in mind, Goldlist Dave says leave the "expression" for 2 weeks before reviewing it. Such that you do not make it stay in short term memory and it is allowed to move to long term memory. Anyways, thanks again.
From my 3 months learning Japanese, I can say confidently that pure input is close to useless without fundamentals, and that is especially true with stuff like inflection or conjugations, which you touched upon a little with the scientist/scientists example. Like a random thing, just imagine how much time it could take you to figure out just through input that いかなかった ("ikanakatta") and いきませんでした ("ikimasendeshita") have essentially the same meaning (didn't go), except that the latter is formal. And that's almost nothing compared with the difficulty of finding out what the verb いく ("iku", to go) actually goes through to get to the two forms.
You are the millionth RUclipsr that believes in incomprehensible input, which is exactly what this is. First get to A1 and then try this challenge again. You will succeed.
Great video. It would be very interesting if you did a similar experiment, but took, for example, a German tv series with several seasons. Perhaps the results would be more encouraging :)
As someone who’s learned languages myself, I’ve always said that I needed to be explained/reminded what a word was about 4 to 7 times before I could remember the word by myself, and at that point, I would consider it a word I had learned forever. I personally hate memorizing and/or studying. I have learned through speaking and hearing and jotting notes on Apple notes. I’ve always said that if it works for children growing up, why wouldn’t it continue to work for adults learning a new language?
incredibly interesting. Regarding verbs - obviously 20 "unique recognizable forms" words are meant, so "the sounding" & "the meaning" are connected in the brain. What I've learned learning Portuguese, is that listening and parroting is important. You can do it with language reactor chrome extension for netflix or youtube videos.
Great video, I love these experiments. Just looking at the Easy Polish channel, they currently have 282 videos up; if I assume an average length of 10 minutes, then they currently offer 46 hours of content in Polish. I wonder what a 30 day challenge would look like, watching 90 minutes of video every day, with no pausing. How far would you get? I'm personally very inclined to a high-grammar approach to learning language, which is why I'm curious how far you can get with just input.
In one of his books, memory champion Dominic O'Brien mentions that some memory contestants have a "Rule of Five" when they are preparing for a competition.
Well done. Interesting and rather reassuring. I tried learning Spanish via the Dreaming Spanish channel, which argues that a new language can be acquired with verbal input only. This did not work for me. I think your task was too hard because there was much too much input for your chosen method. It needed to be much more restricted. It would be interesting to see you spend a week or two using the 'fake polyglot' method of learning a very restricted set of words used in highly defined circumstances eg buying food. I'd like to see you do Greek in this way.
When I started learning Spanish I found dreaming Spanish extremely useful but I agree that if you start with no knowledge your progress may initially be slow. It's so much faster to learn some basic words in any way you can and then use dreaming Spanish to apply and solidify your knowledge. In this way I found that I got the same results but quicker.
Yep if you're just relying on videos to learn, it can be tough to stick with if the people / content isn't engaging enough and is just a source of frustration. Since I don't have any interest in "shocking natives," I'm hesitant with the polyglot method, though like I mentioned, some non-video content would've helped
I have been trying to pickup on German the past year. I take words I find and make a list of say 20 on notebook paper with English trans on the other side, look and study if there is relate one with the other easy some do some don't I fold it and the next day write what I think it means. I get about half right I kept that up till I had went though 300 words and probably remember 100. I keep doing things that make me look up words
This sentence is key: "I keep doing things that make me look up words." Activities like that are the best way to identify gaps in your knowledge. If you feel your vocab growing, that's great and I'd just encourage you to continue. if you can stomach Anki, then that would be more efficient and make you learn faster.
I always thought Polish sounded like general Slavic speaking French while having their mouth stuffed with vegetables and having a language complexity competition with a German at the same time. No wonder Esperanto was invented by a Pole! (I also intend to learn Polish for the same reason - my dad's side was Polish). I've learned 4 other languages, and have heard just enough Polish to recognize it. Also, I wonder if watching Polish at a comprehensible level may also help. For example, watching a children's education video where they show pictures for months, seasons, weather, colors, or use simple expressions, verbs, and so on, will stick a lot more in the early stage than watching a documentary on philosophy. Granted, I think this is hard to find for Polish. I've also been checking out Dreaming Spanish to learn how CI works (Pablo has a similar video where he mentions you have to hear the word in context maybe 100 times), then use things I learned there to learn Polish.
I love your explanation of what does Polish sound like😂 As far as I remember Polish, French and Portuguese, they all have nose sounds. Maybe that's what makes them a little bit similar.
😂 and I thought MY description of Polish might offend someone. Just kidding just kidding. I know comprehensible input would've been better, but having 100% vetted transcripts from the Easy Polish team was more important for me (at least here), in addition for the simpler videos being harder to find.
I think the #1 reason for few words "learned" was the short time period (7 days). I don't consider "what I've learned in one week" meaningful in any way. Language learning is about learning, then forgetting, then being reminded. It is NOT "learn something once and know it always".
What do you think about the order of acquisition being also a function of a perceived usefulness of the words? Or maybe a function of how important the word is to understanding the overall message?
Great stuff! Based on your programming and data science prowess, I'm curious about your opinions on the "AI Language Tutors / Conversation Partners". Could be an interesting video that helps you target more of the "output" side of things.
I imagine that 20 rule is very loose and varies greatly depending on how well you understand the surrounding words. Just like decrypting a key takes less effort when you already know some combinations already.
I wonder if watching a specific video or 2 several times in 1 week would yield better retention? Even if so, no matter how you slice it, any time in your target language is not time wasted. Great video!
I thought about repeating videos here but opted not to, since I generally avoid repetition (except Anki 😅). I think it would totally help retention to reinforce things
I think this challenge confirms that language learning is slow as hell and when we just consume content we have no control over what words we learn. You can't even go by word frequency. Yeesh.
I can echo the "slow as hell" point, though it should be reassuring that sticking with it is a great indicator for success. I would say that if you select specific content/books or add in Anki / concerted vocab work then you can better shape where your skills grow. I know astronomy terms in German because I watched science channels and made cards for new words.
Do I understand correctly, that you make Anki cards before you "know" a word? I can understand how Anki might be a useful tool to review words that you know, but I've never figured out how to make it a useful tool for acquisition. What do you do so that it's interesting and effective?
100% I make Anki cards without “knowing” the word yet. Depending on the word, they hover in the learning phase for a couple of days or weeks, but slowly the interval grows as I learn the cards through exposure. I’m planning to analyze my cards to find out how many Anki exposures it takes
Religa is a surname. Kobiór probably also. Max is a name, but it's not polish. I would say that it's not good to pick those words to the test. But nonetheless good job :)
Please learn microphone technique. The quantity and excessiveness of the plosives in this recording make you nearly unlistenable. A slight adjustment would eliminate ALL of them.
I tried writing this comment before, but somehow I lost it. Have you heard about a language called Toki Pona? It has about 130 words and has trivial grammar. There is a series of videos called o pilin e toki pona that teaches you the language via comprehensible input. The videos are 20 minutes long and there's 30 of them. Each word is used way more than 20 times and even after watching the whole series, it still is hard to truely grasp their meaning. Here is the list of videos in case you want to try it. ruclips.net/video/j_a0s0wowhE/видео.html
I hope you thoroughly enjoyed that experience. It’s not for me. I’m high-strung and, I get pissed when I don’t understand what is being said. My method was based on my goals: C1 level fluency with the ability to comprehend and express philosophical topics. Just not into talking like a tictoc 14 year old. So, I did two large advents: First, what IS language at its base and second, how do humans PERMANENTLY learn these components. Turned out to be super easy to say, extremely difficult to achieve! Language is 66% vocabulary including idioms and 34% grammar. Learning involves extremely coherent Right and Left brain stimuli resulting in comprehension through super-tight logical context OR emotional experience/visualization. Turns out, I was able to construct a lexicon which just by reading offers all of this. Only took 10,000 hours.
Thank you very much! I am super happy that you are doing this and being so analytical about it. Take a look at the videos actually produced as comprehensible input for learners, like these two: "Think in Polish" ruclips.net/video/ZJI7kIqfyn8/видео.htmlsi=KdlN3pXtduOIV8rn and "MrRealPolish" ruclips.net/video/23J1bGXm020/видео.htmlsi=MhA72jZyHp1mngCV As others mention below, I think the problem is the material you're working with isn't very comprehensible without the English subtitles, which I suspect is a low quality form of comprehensible input. What's better is to directly associate words to meanings or to figure them out in context. I love the Easy Languages people but the street interviews and podcasts are very advanced.
Very fair points. The reason I went with them is because for the cost of a 1 month membership (~$5), I got access to all of their videos transcripts so I could easily figure out how many times I had seen each word.
@@OneWordataTime1Thanks for your response, and thank you again for your analytical approach. There are a lot of mysteries remaining about vocabulary and languages acquisition, imho. You might not have transcripts, but I wonder if you took a look at those other videos, and then compared the rate per hour by which you learned vocabulary? How would the rates compare? I like to think the more naturally comprehensible videos would fare better, but honestly I don't know. And I think this is a great area for research, but a tricky one too--for instance, there's the "natural order, i->i+1" hypothesis too, and if you try to learn things out of order that might bias results. And flash card like tests are good for testing flash-card-like situations, but might not represent real acquisition. I've also seen one paper on extensive reading (with 90%+ comprehensibility) where they seemed to have acquired only 1 word per hour of reading. Which is a little depressing... Sorry for talking your ear off, but this is super interesting to a lifelong (50+ year) language learner such as myself.
@@kipcarson3240 you've clearly thought a lot about language acquisition! I'm inclined to agree that the more comprehensible videos you linked to would probably be more effective. The challenge I see with the comprehensible input approach is that there just isn't enough of it that's easily accessible and it feels more stilted that just watching TL content. I'll keep experimenting and documenting 😉
@@OneWordataTime1Thank you very much for the response (and the compliment.) Absolutely, finding good content is the number one challenge. Thankfully the internet has made this a golden age for language learning and more and more great content is appearing. I wonder if you've come across the Dreaming Spanish channel? The founder Pablo Roman himself is a language learner and he is putting out really good material. He also I think explains the method more thoughtfully than anyone I know of: ruclips.net/video/E2wd0zuR5uQ/видео.htmlsi=np5-HkGKCboCD6_U ( You can use English subtitles if necessary.) I agree too that the early material can be "stilted" or like baby-talk; a better approach is "storytelling"--which can be really entertaining/interesting. Beniko Mason made that discovery to help bridge her beginning students before they could read adapted readers.
The fact that "One word at a Time" contains the word data is truly incredible. I just noticed it.
And it contains "emit" and "tata" and "tad" and "row" in reverse order
Thank you for sharing your experiences from the encounter with the Polish language. It's really inspiring to have a sneak-peek into your learning process 👀 And we're really glad to hear our videos turned out to be helpful 🧡
I can't help but notice though, that you chose some very challenging videos for the challenge 😅 Please feel free to get in touch if you need help next time you're picking out content for one of your Polish-learning challenges. I know that a part of the fun is picking them out on your own, as a regular viewer would do. But we know these videos almost by heart - we could also help you choose some easier/more repetitive ones that will serve the purpose of the challenge best 😉Or prepare a final test for you 😛
Uściski z Katowic!
Justyna
What a treat to get a comment from your team! I hope my admiration for your channel and work came through in the video, since your work is absolutely excellent.
I'll reach out, as I'm thinking about a 30 day challenge to really show how powerful your content is.
@@OneWordataTime1I can't wait to see this
Polish native speaker here:
First of all, props for trying to even learn this language. It's horribly difficult, especially for people who have no Slavic language background to fall back on.
Regarding the lemmatization, I think you hit the nail on the head here. There is A LOT of inflection in Polish. I didn't notice it when I was learning English, but even when English words are inflected, they still look more or less the same, with some endings here and there (not counting the irregulars, but there aren’t that many), so if you know what the endings indicate, it's soooo much easier to pick out the words' meaning and make them stick. Now when I'm trying to learn German and encounter all the endings and article changes, it makes me realise how much easier is to pick up English vocab in comparison. But Polish? The inflection goes so much... deeper into the word, to the point where the root of the word can be one letter, and there are so many versions of it. Frankly, if I were to learn Polish as a non-native speaker, I'd wanna claw my eyes out by the end of week 1 ;)
I think there might be one additional factor in your low rate of acquisition when it comes to Polish. When I was in primary and middle school I was learning both English and German at the same time, with the same amount of lessons. I remember being able to memorise English words so, so, soooo much more easily than German ones, and it baffled me endlessly. After some time, I came up with a pet theory, which is completely unscientific and I didn't bother to check if there is any research regarding that, but: I think it came down to me being exposed to English at every turn, while I had basically no exposure to German outside of classroom. Music and movies/tv shows in English could be found everywhere here, and I think listening to them since I was very young, even without understanding, managed to instill in my brain its cadence and sounds. I distinctly remember learning a word by checking out a Polish translation to the lyrics and basically instantly remembering its meaning and spelling; it just clicked. I'm not sure how much of such exposure to Polish you had, but if not much, it could be a factor.
And you definitely did not disrespect any Polish person by trying to learn our language; it's always a joy and a delight to see anyone even attempt it, because we know how difficult it is.
Also, "Polish sounds like Russian spoken in Italian" is by far the funniest goddamn thing I've heard this year so far. Pure gold, I'll repeat it to every person I know now xD
Regarding German: I had already a pretty good level when I understood that words Verein and vereinbaren are actually related! It’s so obvious for a native speaker but a foreigner just doesn’t have that basic feeling of connection between all the roots regardless of what endings have specific words :)
And when languages are related (e.g. Polish and Ukrainian) it’s also so easy to see these connections!!
Yeah, exactly! :D
Your English is unbelievable
Thank you, I hope 🤭
I think that for this idea of 20 (10, 12, 15, 60, whatever) exposures to work, the content needs to be 95-98% comprehensible. At least, that's what I remember from Steven Krashen's and Paul Nation's lectures. I wouldn't discount the results of your experiment, though. Considering how little of the language you knew going into it, you figured out plenty. I believe those words you recognized at the end will stay with you should you continue learning and the snowball would just keep growing.
Also the number of repetions is always going to be arbitrary at worst and an educated guess at best. There's no telling how many exposures an individual learner will need for a particular word/expression to become internalized/recognized, as you yourself experienced.
Yeah I think it comes from Paul Nation, and is actually an average from a set of studies which each got slightly different number of exposures needed. I would expect the number of exposures needed is much higher with lower comprehension rates since context is a big part of it.
@@brianmitchell2202 Definitely right, Paul Nation for sure spoke about particular studies. I think Stephen Krashen mentions it too on more than one occasion. Regardless, this idea concerns extensive reading with very high comprehension, as you said. I'm not sure how it applies in a situation where one knows very little or nothing of the language, and intensive reading and listening/watching probably makes more sense. Without trying to be a dick to this One word at a time guy (sorry, I don't know your name, not sure if you introduced yourself anywhere :), I don't think that this experiment, although interesting to watch, have tested the idea of 20 exposures in any meaningful way.
You did it! I'm super impressed by how quickly you came through with this one. I also really love how transparent honest you were with the whole process. Your goal was clearly to experiment, not to impress. You reminded me how humbling it is to start a language from scratch, because it's that same feeling every time! The biggest thing I'm thinking is that at the beginning, input has to be suuuuper comprehensible. My rule of thumb is that if you feel frustrated while watching it, it means it's not comprehensible enough to be in your zone of proximal development. What do you think?
Thanks - yeah this was a humbling experience 😂. I definitely agree this content was waaay to advanced but I wasn't aware of other Polish resources that could better match my level so I just got started. I need to think more about the rule of thumb because it's so difficult to know what's on the other side of frustration: discovery or just more frustration? A few times in German, I had to read a sentence 15 times before a big eureka moment!
In this context, 'failure' in Polish would be 'porażka', not 'awaria'. 'Awaria' is more malfunction, damage, accident. Falling to do something or to achieve something is 'ponieść porażkę'.
Excellent video -- anyone can vouch for a learning method because they *feel* like it's working, but you took it one step further and properly investigated it. I really hope you continue your journey in Polish because it's by far the most fun I've ever had learning a language! What surprised me the most is that those consonant clusters eventually make sense and it's extremely rewarding to encounter a new word like "szczególności" and think "yeah I totally know how to pronounce this". I've been doing it for ~300 hours with no previous knowledge in Slavic languages, and at this point my stable vocabulary is somewhere around 600-900 words.
My new favourite language related channel! Another excellent video, thank you. It would be interesting to see the results over a longer period of time, or perhaps, at a different rate of material consumption. I wonder how much the video element disrupts the results. By that I mean, by its very nature watching videos is a passive activity. Perhaps if you heard words 20 times in various real life contexts and/or situations the results may differ due to the very real importance they may have on you - i.e. in acquiring food, locating a toilet etc. Looking forward to future videos!
Totally agree with this! I also know that reading can be a more productive activity for me.
I love how analytical you went about testing this. Thanks for sharing your experience with us!
Thank you for putting efforts in experimenting and sharing your learnings !
Your videos are amazing! Not only are you presenting interesting facts about language learning, you are also testing them and showing the real results, even though they might not completety align with the points you have made yourself in your previous videos! The quality of these videos is also really good, keep making these and you will sure get a bigger audience in no time!
When I was a kid between 4 and 13 I guess, I heard my mother and her sister speak Hungarian a lot almost every day, and after all those years, I knew nothing in Hungarian because I didn't understand a word they said. I could hear the words to tell them apart, but I had no understanding.
I find these kind of experiments quite interesting. What I would say is, an input only approach can definitely work if the content is made specifically for that purpose. If you understand 85-95%, you will pick up a lot more, and a lot more quickly. I started learning thai with the Comprehensible Thai youtube channel. No subtitles, you just rely on the visual clues given by the teachers to figure things out (pictures, drawing, gestures, facial expressions.... ), and there are hundreds of video per level, one level being quite narrowed down. The first 15 minutes, I had no idea what I was listening to. Towards the end of the first video (30min), I finally realized what they were talking about, what some of the gestures meant and suddenly figured out quite a few words. After a couple of hours, I had figured quite a lot about sentence structure, word order, verb conjugation (or lack thereof), usage of counters... (I think it definitely helped that I learned or dabbled in so many different languages before). After maybe 20 hours, it really started to sound like language, and I started picking up and remembering new words quite easily. But I tried jumping one level a few time, and with the percentage of understanding dropping, the experience was quite different.
It can probably work as well the way it was done here, as per the fact that you managed to figure out some keywords already. But because the content is not optimized, too fast, too complex, It's just very very very slow. If there are no comprehensible input content for absolute beginners, then I find it much more efficient to learn the absolute basics before jumping into input only. It's (tens of) hours not spent trying to figuring it out.
I'd add: the experience is (obviously?) quite different depending on the languages you already know. Knowing french, english, and german, I started learning dutch by listening to native content straight away (podcasts on subjects I know a lot about), putting my phone in dutch, and reading the news, and it worked out quite well for me in the end.
Very fair point about starting with the basics if you don't have well optimized content. Tbh, I've enjoyed the chaos of trying to learn as I continue with this Polish challenge
As a beginner, it goes so much faster if you just learn a lot of words and phrases using Anki or some kind of bilingual memorization. Relying only on comprehensible input without any memorization is slow going as a beginner, although it is fine for an intermediate or advanced learner.
Well done on another quality video.
This is quite interesting... I think, basically, the comprehensible input approach is a bit like the melting ice thing that James Clear talks about. If you take an ice cube and put it in a room that is -5 degrees, it will stay an ice cube, even if you heat the room up to -4, then -3, then -2 etc.
I think 7 days of input in Polish just isn't enough to have a measurable effect. In Swedish or Dutch or Spanish or something, maybe, but in Polish it might be more like 30 days, and then it would do something.
But yeah, love your approach with data and testing... Stuff I just cannot be bothered with haha.
Yeah I’m in the middle of a extending this Polish challenge to 30 days and am seeing things pan out more. And yeah it’s hard to stay bothered with the busyness of life but it’s been hella fun exploring
Research i read suggested 40 to 60 repeat exposures before it sinks in automatically. But also keep in mind, Goldlist Dave says leave the "expression" for 2 weeks before reviewing it. Such that you do not make it stay in short term memory and it is allowed to move to long term memory. Anyways, thanks again.
awesome - will keep this in mind as I think of longer term experiments
keep it up bro i love these styles of videos
From my 3 months learning Japanese, I can say confidently that pure input is close to useless without fundamentals, and that is especially true with stuff like inflection or conjugations, which you touched upon a little with the scientist/scientists example.
Like a random thing, just imagine how much time it could take you to figure out just through input that いかなかった ("ikanakatta") and いきませんでした ("ikimasendeshita") have essentially the same meaning (didn't go), except that the latter is formal. And that's almost nothing compared with the difficulty of finding out what the verb いく ("iku", to go) actually goes through to get to the two forms.
You are the millionth RUclipsr that believes in incomprehensible input, which is exactly what this is.
First get to A1 and then try this challenge again. You will succeed.
Great video. It would be very interesting if you did a similar experiment, but took, for example, a German tv series with several seasons. Perhaps the results would be more encouraging :)
As someone who’s learned languages myself, I’ve always said that I needed to be explained/reminded what a word was about 4 to 7 times before I could remember the word by myself, and at that point, I would consider it a word I had learned forever. I personally hate memorizing and/or studying. I have learned through speaking and hearing and jotting notes on Apple notes.
I’ve always said that if it works for children growing up, why wouldn’t it continue to work for adults learning a new language?
That's quite impressive to have stuck without it without concerted "studying" efforts.
Great video. I'd love to see the 30 day challenge.
incredibly interesting. Regarding verbs - obviously 20 "unique recognizable forms" words are meant, so "the sounding" & "the meaning" are connected in the brain. What I've learned learning Portuguese, is that listening and parroting is important. You can do it with language reactor chrome extension for netflix or youtube videos.
Great video, I love these experiments. Just looking at the Easy Polish channel, they currently have 282 videos up; if I assume an average length of 10 minutes, then they currently offer 46 hours of content in Polish. I wonder what a 30 day challenge would look like, watching 90 minutes of video every day, with no pausing. How far would you get? I'm personally very inclined to a high-grammar approach to learning language, which is why I'm curious how far you can get with just input.
I don't have 90 minutes a day to dedicate towards this but I'm thinking of extending this challenge to try this out.
Very interesting. I'd say doing this for a while longer could work. Probably not a month, though
really felt that oy...
In one of his books, memory champion Dominic O'Brien mentions that some memory contestants have a "Rule of Five" when they are preparing for a competition.
Great video top guy
Well done. Interesting and rather reassuring. I tried learning Spanish via the Dreaming Spanish channel, which argues that a new language can be acquired with verbal input only. This did not work for me. I think your task was too hard because there was much too much input for your chosen method. It needed to be much more restricted. It would be interesting to see you spend a week or two using the 'fake polyglot' method of learning a very restricted set of words used in highly defined circumstances eg buying food. I'd like to see you do Greek in this way.
When I started learning Spanish I found dreaming Spanish extremely useful but I agree that if you start with no knowledge your progress may initially be slow. It's so much faster to learn some basic words in any way you can and then use dreaming Spanish to apply and solidify your knowledge. In this way I found that I got the same results but quicker.
Yep if you're just relying on videos to learn, it can be tough to stick with if the people / content isn't engaging enough and is just a source of frustration. Since I don't have any interest in "shocking natives," I'm hesitant with the polyglot method, though like I mentioned, some non-video content would've helped
2:26 not all of those are "english loanwords". "delikatny" for example is a latin loanword (dēlicātus).
I have been trying to pickup on German the past year. I take words I find and make a list of say 20 on notebook paper with English trans on the other side, look and study if there is relate one with the other easy some do some don't I fold it and the next day write what I think it means. I get about half right I kept that up till I had went though 300 words and probably remember 100. I keep doing things that make me look up words
This sentence is key: "I keep doing things that make me look up words." Activities like that are the best way to identify gaps in your knowledge. If you feel your vocab growing, that's great and I'd just encourage you to continue. if you can stomach Anki, then that would be more efficient and make you learn faster.
I always thought Polish sounded like general Slavic speaking French while having their mouth stuffed with vegetables and having a language complexity competition with a German at the same time. No wonder Esperanto was invented by a Pole! (I also intend to learn Polish for the same reason - my dad's side was Polish). I've learned 4 other languages, and have heard just enough Polish to recognize it.
Also, I wonder if watching Polish at a comprehensible level may also help. For example, watching a children's education video where they show pictures for months, seasons, weather, colors, or use simple expressions, verbs, and so on, will stick a lot more in the early stage than watching a documentary on philosophy. Granted, I think this is hard to find for Polish. I've also been checking out Dreaming Spanish to learn how CI works (Pablo has a similar video where he mentions you have to hear the word in context maybe 100 times), then use things I learned there to learn Polish.
I love your explanation of what does Polish sound like😂 As far as I remember Polish, French and Portuguese, they all have nose sounds. Maybe that's what makes them a little bit similar.
😂 and I thought MY description of Polish might offend someone. Just kidding just kidding.
I know comprehensible input would've been better, but having 100% vetted transcripts from the Easy Polish team was more important for me (at least here), in addition for the simpler videos being harder to find.
I think the #1 reason for few words "learned" was the short time period (7 days). I don't consider "what I've learned in one week" meaningful in any way. Language learning is about learning, then forgetting, then being reminded. It is NOT "learn something once and know it always".
100% agree 7 days was too short. What you said totally resonates for my German learning
Great video
Wait, you picked up the word Religa and wrote a correct translation of this word? Religa is a surname
Nice topic!
What do you think about the order of acquisition being also a function of a perceived usefulness of the words? Or maybe a function of how important the word is to understanding the overall message?
Another excellent video. Maybe you need more context when testing. Recognizing single words are hard.
Great stuff! Based on your programming and data science prowess, I'm curious about your opinions on the "AI Language Tutors / Conversation Partners". Could be an interesting video that helps you target more of the "output" side of things.
I'd really need to dig in on the topic, but definitely something interesting to chew on
Why did n't you slow the videos down? If you are watching on RUclips it seems like a reasonable thing to do.
I imagine that 20 rule is very loose and varies greatly depending on how well you understand the surrounding words. Just like decrypting a key takes less effort when you already know some combinations already.
I agree. 20 times doesn't always mean youve learned it. I watch Iron Man 1 12 times, in the span of 3 weeks, and didn't learn hardly anything
I wonder if watching a specific video or 2 several times in 1 week would yield better retention?
Even if so, no matter how you slice it, any time in your target language is not time wasted. Great video!
I thought about repeating videos here but opted not to, since I generally avoid repetition (except Anki 😅). I think it would totally help retention to reinforce things
It would work if your exposures would span 4 month period
I think this challenge confirms that language learning is slow as hell and when we just consume content we have no control over what words we learn. You can't even go by word frequency. Yeesh.
I can echo the "slow as hell" point, though it should be reassuring that sticking with it is a great indicator for success.
I would say that if you select specific content/books or add in Anki / concerted vocab work then you can better shape where your skills grow. I know astronomy terms in German because I watched science channels and made cards for new words.
Great video! I wonder how would be the results if you re-watch the videos a couple of times during the week.
Yep that's definitely a point of interest for me. I may incorporate re-watching in a future challenge
Thank you for the video. I wonder what the results would be if you actually took a month to carry out this experiment without Anki
Do I understand correctly, that you make Anki cards before you "know" a word? I can understand how Anki might be a useful tool to review words that you know, but I've never figured out how to make it a useful tool for acquisition. What do you do so that it's interesting and effective?
100% I make Anki cards without “knowing” the word yet. Depending on the word, they hover in the learning phase for a couple of days or weeks, but slowly the interval grows as I learn the cards through exposure. I’m planning to analyze my cards to find out how many Anki exposures it takes
Religa is a surname. Kobiór probably also. Max is a name, but it's not polish. I would say that it's not good to pick those words to the test. But nonetheless good job :)
Can you share the code you used in this video and your last video on using Friends to learn a language?
Please learn microphone technique. The quantity and excessiveness of the plosives in this recording make you nearly unlistenable. A slight adjustment would eliminate ALL of them.
I tried writing this comment before, but somehow I lost it. Have you heard about a language called Toki Pona? It has about 130 words and has trivial grammar. There is a series of videos called o pilin e toki pona that teaches you the language via comprehensible input. The videos are 20 minutes long and there's 30 of them. Each word is used way more than 20 times and even after watching the whole series, it still is hard to truely grasp their meaning. Here is the list of videos in case you want to try it. ruclips.net/video/j_a0s0wowhE/видео.html
Bruh, I have no idea how articles work after 5 years of immersion of English immersion. Bad 1st example. D:
Bruh, I have no ideas how articles work after 30 years of speaking English 😜
IS the code open sourced anywhere?
the japanese word for failure isnt 不良 its 失敗. I dont even know what 不良 means
A ridiculously absurd way to test the premise.
in what way?
cool flick. I didn't know the spacy and natsort libraries.
I hope you thoroughly enjoyed that experience. It’s not for me. I’m high-strung and, I get pissed when I don’t understand what is being said. My method was based on my goals: C1 level fluency with the ability to comprehend and express philosophical topics. Just not into talking like a tictoc 14 year old. So, I did two large advents: First, what IS language at its base and second, how do humans PERMANENTLY learn these components. Turned out to be super easy to say, extremely difficult to achieve! Language is 66% vocabulary including idioms and 34% grammar. Learning involves extremely coherent Right and Left brain stimuli resulting in comprehension through super-tight logical context OR emotional experience/visualization. Turns out, I was able to construct a lexicon which just by reading offers all of this. Only took 10,000 hours.
Lolol “only took 10,000 hours”. I hear you and agree that vocab is a huge part of what helps you grow.
Thank you very much! I am super happy that you are doing this and being so analytical about it.
Take a look at the videos actually produced as comprehensible input for learners, like these two: "Think in Polish" ruclips.net/video/ZJI7kIqfyn8/видео.htmlsi=KdlN3pXtduOIV8rn and "MrRealPolish" ruclips.net/video/23J1bGXm020/видео.htmlsi=MhA72jZyHp1mngCV
As others mention below, I think the problem is the material you're working with isn't very comprehensible without the English subtitles, which I suspect is a low quality form of comprehensible input. What's better is to directly associate words to meanings or to figure them out in context. I love the Easy Languages people but the street interviews and podcasts are very advanced.
Very fair points. The reason I went with them is because for the cost of a 1 month membership (~$5), I got access to all of their videos transcripts so I could easily figure out how many times I had seen each word.
@@OneWordataTime1Thanks for your response, and thank you again for your analytical approach. There are a lot of mysteries remaining about vocabulary and languages acquisition, imho. You might not have transcripts, but I wonder if you took a look at those other videos, and then compared the rate per hour by which you learned vocabulary? How would the rates compare? I like to think the more naturally comprehensible videos would fare better, but honestly I don't know. And I think this is a great area for research, but a tricky one too--for instance, there's the "natural order, i->i+1" hypothesis too, and if you try to learn things out of order that might bias results. And flash card like tests are good for testing flash-card-like situations, but might not represent real acquisition. I've also seen one paper on extensive reading (with 90%+ comprehensibility) where they seemed to have acquired only 1 word per hour of reading. Which is a little depressing... Sorry for talking your ear off, but this is super interesting to a lifelong (50+ year) language learner such as myself.
@@kipcarson3240 you've clearly thought a lot about language acquisition! I'm inclined to agree that the more comprehensible videos you linked to would probably be more effective. The challenge I see with the comprehensible input approach is that there just isn't enough of it that's easily accessible and it feels more stilted that just watching TL content. I'll keep experimenting and documenting 😉
@@OneWordataTime1Thank you very much for the response (and the compliment.) Absolutely, finding good content is the number one challenge. Thankfully the internet has made this a golden age for language learning and more and more great content is appearing. I wonder if you've come across the Dreaming Spanish channel? The founder Pablo Roman himself is a language learner and he is putting out really good material. He also I think explains the method more thoughtfully than anyone I know of: ruclips.net/video/E2wd0zuR5uQ/видео.htmlsi=np5-HkGKCboCD6_U ( You can use English subtitles if necessary.) I agree too that the early material can be "stilted" or like baby-talk; a better approach is "storytelling"--which can be really entertaining/interesting. Beniko Mason made that discovery to help bridge her beginning students before they could read adapted readers.
fyi...Pablo Roman is a computer programmer by background too...