I think Refold does invent some of the details of their method, in order to differentiate themselves from just pure immersion. But overall, I think 95% of their method is right. Just immerse, and make your immersion as comprehensible as possible.
@@emisnikki-polygloddess Yes! S. Khashen says comprehension should be your level + 1, witch makes sense. Matt on the other hand says you have more opportunities to learn if your comprehension is around 30%-50%, and that makes sense too. But at the end of the day, Khashen's advice is superior in the long run, because you'll have less stressful moments, trying to enjoy something you don't understand well.
@@learninglanguages744 It depends on personality, I think. I prefer listening to more advanced, but real life stuff even if I understand way less than zoning out listening to simplified things I already know I understand really well
I completely agree with you about reading. It’s probably the single best way to learn a language. Obviously you have to listen and speak but you can achieve an enormous vocabulary just through reading. After 5 years of reading French I understand 99.9% of the words when reading classic French literature. And, yes, I regularly measure my percentage of unknown words. I’m sure other people can achieve that with enough time spent reading, especially if you love to read.
@@endouerick7519 I count the words on the first ten lines, take the average and multiply it by the number of lines. I assume that every page has the same number of words. A typical book has about 300 words per page, so 20% unknown is 60 per page. The classics often have a smaller font with 400 words per page, so 80 unknown words.
@@ashmorris4067 And the sad part is that no one told you the brutal truth: there will never be a moment when it "clicks" and you can understand what you can read. Rather, you have to build your listening skills up from scratch essentially. Be prepared to put in 1000 hours+
10:30 this is actually a really good point and something I realized at one point myself. I conditioner myself to be so comfortable with not understanding the content I was immersing in that I would catch myself not even attempting to understand. I would basically just watch whatever it was passively and my brain wouldn’t even try to decipher what was being heard. I don’t think this is an issue with the method itself so much as a danger of becoming too comfortable with not understanding and falling into the trap of thinking you don’t need to make any kind of effort and can watch shows purely for enjoyment. If you get too comfortable I think your brain just tunes out the dialogue as background noise, so I think you need to actively pay attention so your brain realizes that what you are listening to is important enough to be puzzled out. I think this is an advantage of doing sentence mining, because every time you make a sentence card, you are signaling to your brain that this is important information. All this is in Refold I believe but I can see how the community might focus too much on being comfortable and having fun and neglect the focused attention component.
Yea you're absolutely right! There has to be a balance between enjoying what you watch, but you really can't neglect being engaged and mindful of what you're watching. And I agree that it's not a problem inherent to the method, but the way LL is marketed in the Refold community.
You've managed to articulate many of the grievances I've noticed myself following the Refold method fairly religiously. Like you I'd still consider myself a Refolder (seen you around in the German discord), but I think the roadmap needs another rework with these points in mind. I've added about an hour of reading per day and my German vocabulary has skyrocketed. And heavily wishing I'd started outputting 6 months ago, but what can you do except know better going forward and for the next language. Great video!
Yea I think it's easy to fall into the trap of wanting to do it exactly like the Roadmap says, when in reality it's supposed to be used as a guide, giving you a direction. I have definitely become more open to experimenting and changing things up a bit here and there as I'm learning new languages. 👍
@@emisnikki-polygloddess Yes -- I think Refold is pretty good -- but your video is right on target -- where Refold breaks down a bit -- is in the details -- I think they try to make some things black & white -- when they really aren't -- almost everything you covered is a matter of opinion (like at what point should you start to speak? Refold btw: does say you need to practice speaking -- the $1M dollar question is when?). If you try to be dogmatic with Refold it will fail you.
A key point to make concerning the 5th point at 15:11 of discrediting education, is that modern language teaching actually does immerse students in a natural process as a large part, if not the majority of the lesson. It's a question basically of what kind of methodology you've been getting. Good language teaching classes focus on a constant fusion of the meaning with the language, so the conveyance of that meaning is the priority always, and needs to be happening pretty much all the time, and also with every student simultaneously. Basically comprehension deepens and broadens and sharpens during the class, with attention to the features and forms of the language happening in relation to making better sense of it, so any noticing of structural issues comes in in that framework where it's fused with meaning, and then there are elements of processing and expressing meaning in relation to the same, with any structural issues being related to how to correctly communicate, so its immersion in meaning all the way through, with attention to feature and form being inseparable from that, and focused on meaningfully and manageably in that context. It's true that many courses, and many materials used for those courses, are still unbalanced somehow, often being too analytical and learning form too distant from meaningful communication (either receptively or productively), but better courses and materials do do that, and the trend has been in that direction for decades. True, it's a bit slow, because stuff is created to sell, and students themselves often prefer the look of more old fashioned courses and materials, because they miss the point that by far the biggest thing is the meaning of the language, and less so the 'grammar rules'., etc., etc., that they expect to see and understand throughout the courses. They kind of do it to themselves by creating a demand for a more mechanical approach to learning languages, but language teaching professionals often surprise them by doing things differently. Sadly this even can create conflict, where language students, or school admin who don't know the process properly, think the teacher 'isn't teaching', but 'just making us read and listen to and talk about stuff a lot', etc., etc., etc.
Idk, I took a college language class last year and they still were just doing textbook teaching and no immersion. I think Refold is still a somewhat good change in philosophy for people that still don't have access to language classes that do include immersion, because there are still many places that are completely outdated.
I was already a veteran language learner before refold came along so I was looking to integrate what made sense to me and discard what didn’t. It isn’t the first time I’ve heard the argument that you need to be super careful about learning bad habits while speaking. I’m personally against it. I think mistakes are inevitable but people who keep trying to improve will fix their mistakes over time while people who think their output is good enough won’t. They’re obsessed with this idea that you’re going to build bad habits but really you already have bad habits from your native language and it’s going to take a lot of work to mitigate this. I agree with you 100% that reading is fantastic but many many people don’t like reading even in their native language. Good luck convincing them to read a foreign language.
Yea I think that's a good strategy for any LL method really. It should be treated as a guideline, rather than the ultimate word of truth. If someone doesn't WANT to speak then that's fine, but I don't think you need to avoid it like the plague just because someone claims you'll end up with a bad accent. As you said, the difference seems to mainly lie in the willingness to improve/awareness of ones current ability, though there seem to people that are generally more in tune with how things *should* sound, and I'm not yet sure how much of a factor that is... 🤔
Honestly the Mandarin companion graded readers are very compelling and use very few words (starting at 150 words). It's definitely possible to write a graded reader series for beginners (who know a few hundred words) that incrementally builds up words hitting a 2-3% target. That said, I also generally read things outside the 2-3% range. Lookups on my phone are definitely not instantaneous, and if there were too many words to lookup in a sentence it would definitely be a problem, but it's still pretty doable. That said, 50% unknown words sounds very challenging and frustrating even with a pop up dictionary. I think I'd forget half the words that I'd looked up in the sentence by the time I'd gotten to the end of it. That's literally every other word unknown. On the other hand, it's also pretty hard for the percentage of unknown words to be down that low since the most common words are so common.
Wow it's great they exist for Mandarin. I read some really compelling ones for Spanish too, but I have unfortunately also read quite a few boring ones... Balancing comprehension and compellingness can be hard, especially in the beginning. Some people have a really low tolerance for unknown words and some people would rather enjoy a good story, even if that means looking up every other or so word. I think the sweet spot is somewhere in between at around 10-20ish % (only with a pop-up dictionary though!)
Maybe it's a recent addition, but a large part of the refold roadmap deals with reducing the ambiguity/incomprehension. Obviously not every language will have perfect tools available for doing this (like graded readers or subbed children shows), but the same could be said about every learning method.
wow, you really made some great point in this. I believe refold has gained approval mostly due to its inclusive 'just immerse' philosophy. From my experience, some people are simply not willing to put in the work to learn something. The learning process is arduous and you fall down and get back up several times. It takes courage and a bunch of other super powers. Additionally, people have different learning curves and it might not be enough for certain individuals to 'just immerse'. It might take them many years
@@Eng-vz7dw no they dont, you clearly havent watched Matt's videos , they recommend filling as many hours a day as possible with input, and most of it you will have no idea what youre hearing. Refold does not recommend only comprehensible input either, in fact that is impossible for anyone new, you have no vocabulary or understanding of anything. Matt is misusing an idea of immersion and pushing a methodology that "works" but has plenty of wasted effort/energy. Traditional lessons combined with immersion for a beginner are much much more effective than just plain immersion/anki cards.. also output early on is not bad as matt implies.
@@MElixirDNB also you re learning vocaab and grammar that increases your comprehension as well. Babies also learnt a language with 0% comprehension. I recommend you to watch this video as well ruclips.net/video/yeOmc1nRGG4/видео.html
Hey, great job addressing all of this stuff! A 30 minute video with so few cuts and just talking is an impressive feat by itself! Sorry my post is gonna seem ridiculously long... but I like to be thorough in these things. 😂 (it's not to hate, it's just because your video has a lot of stuff in it). The point at 6:49 - that sometimes it's fun just to notice stuff etc., I would say that Refold just hasn't publicised their views on that quite as well, because Ethan actually helped me work on a video that specifically talked about having fun in a language you're still not good at. The video was kind of a cross of one that I had wanted to make, and the fact that Ethan wanted to be able to point to a video addressing your exact point here. I won't link it but it's about 5 videos back in my timeline (with the thumbnail "I suck"). It's true that Refold misuses the term "ambiguity" and when Matt initially said that, he may have misunderstood the word or he may have been using it to just mean "ambiguous TO to learner". His English wasn't actually that great when he was doing a lot of the earlier Q and As that formed the basis of Refold. (Yeah, I know he's a native speaker but his English sounded like someone who went through school half in a different language... because he did.) But it's not really a big deal because everyone in the community has come to think of "tolerate the ambiguity" as meaning what it means in that context. I think what Refold is saying is: You won't increase comprehension by JUST knowing more words. I don't think they're saying "You will get to 100% comprehension by watching and doing nothing else". There are quite a few different pieces of Refold addressing that very question (e.g. "How much time spent watching/reading vs studying words/phrases?") When it comes to the early output thing... I'm not sure who is banning anyone from speaking. Maybe there are some elitists in the community but no one has come after me with a pitchfork even though I'm a confessed early outputter and recently stated that I'm trying to go to Mexico after what will be barely 5 months of learning Spanish. Again, in multiple Q and As and videos on his channel, Matt has addressed the difference between output based on what YOU want to say, vs just copying certain sentences from natives etc. Again, maybe they need to make it more public, but I don't think they are as draconian on it as you seem to think. About the hours per day thing... I actually think that someone who learns for 4 hours a day may actually learn MORE than twice as much as the person who learns for 2. Maybe that's extreme but certainly 2 will be more than twice as good as 1. It's complicated to explain but basically picture a car on a hill going slowly up, but whenever it stops (i.e. you stop learning for the day), it actually slips back a bit. By going up for twice a long, you also reduce the amount of time you slip back down the hill. I think a LOT depends on the methodology and the language in question (e.g. is it Chinese for an English speaker, or Spanish for an Italian speaker?), but from my experience, the weeks that I did a LOT of Swedish were the ones that pushed me to a whole different level that I had previously felt was a door that continued to get further away. I am also not saying that it's realistic to spend 8 hours a day, or even 3. I have kids and work for myself (which means working a LOT). At the moment I spend an average of about an hour a day on Spanish. But I do think I'd progress more than twice as fast if I spent 2. I agree with your point about reading. To be honest, I'm not good at reading without any audiobooks or anything, and I mean even in English. Not because I can't read, but because I have destroyed my attention span like many others have this century. It's just hard to get yourself to keep going, but I do think it's important, EVEN IF only from a mental strength point of view. So because I can barely get myself to just sit and read in English or Swedish, I don't much like my chances in Spanish. I need to meditate more, use my phone less and basically develop a better attention span. But I do think that at first, reading along with an audiobook is great. I don't know what Refold says about graded readers but yeah, I don't have a problem with graded readers. I think children's books are normally way too hard. I was easily a B2 in Swedish before I could comfortably read children's books. I also completely agree with you about new tools that allow you to look up words quickly. One problem I have with many of these tools is that they need an active internet connection. Honestly, my best chance of doing ANYTHING is when I go into a different room and turn my modem off. Anyway, again, great job addressing all of this. I'd be interested to see what Ethan and the team had to say about it.
It was interesting to hear her opinion about the Refold method and then yours, both are intelligent and interesting opinions, and thoughts. Thanks for being lengthy! :) I will need some time to think about these things myself as well, but my first reaction to the 2 hours vs 4 hours thing is that maybe you are just talking about something different, or in other words, both of you might be right. Learning a language after a while comes down to knowing a huge amount of words. Grammar, pronunciation, etc., etc. are important, but eventually, you will be able to communicate about everything only if you know a LOT of words, and that's what will just need a LOT of time. She is using Lingq (that I'm using myself, too) and Steve (the creator) talks about this often, and I tend to agree. Now, if you accept that, then the next thing you have to be aware of is that as you know more and more words the frequency of those words in spoken language is going to fall drastically. It is not hard to learn the first few thousand words as they appear so frequently in the language, but later it is the opposite way around. This means that it is harder and harder to learn new words by input as these rare words appear way less frequently -> therefore your time spent learning evidently cannot be as effective as earlier. Hm... tho now I feel like she wasn't talking about this. As then it wouldn't make much sense to compare learning hours PER DAY. But if that's what she meant, then your statement can still be true at the same time. Tho there I don't know about any evidence, just anecdotal experience as far as I know.
Hi and thank you for having taken the time to write this thorough response (and for watching the video in the first place). Before I respond to the individual points you made I thought I'd just mention that it seems like I mixed my criticism of the Refold Roadmap with my criticism of the Refold community, which in hindsight I probably shouldn't have done, because it led to confusion about which one I was actually talking about for each of the points (I noticed this after reading many other comments who pointed out similar things). I saw the video you mentioned and I agree what you say in it, I just think that there are still (too) many people (in the Refold community) that don't share the same understanding of what fun means, which results in them watching "fun" things, that are highly incomprehensible (which I still don't understand how anyone could have fun not understanding any of what's going on, but maybe that's just me), and then get disappointed when they make little to no progress, despite putting in the hours. You'd be surprised how often people just watch stuff because it's fun and they don't like grammar and don't like this and that and won't do hardly anything else. I agree though that that is probably the minority of the Refold community these days and that most people have adopted a more balanced approach. There used to be some really harsh no early output policies in the early Refold days, and some traces of it still show here and there where people are discouraged from speaking. It's just the remaining underlying attitude or undertone(?) that comes with some of the messaging, not so much going after anyone with a pitchfork anymore. I have admittedly also not seen any of the Q&As, so I can't speak for what is said in them ... The whole topic of diminishing returns is super interesting, because what you say seems to be a plausible scenario. I can totally see where you are coming from, and the car analogy makes a lot of sense. Other arguments I have also heard are that if you spend 2 hours a day you are more likely to encounter words more often than if you studied just 1 hour, which would lead to more repetitions faster, which would lead to more reviews of the same word faster, which would equal more progress... in theory. But I still believe that there is an upper limit to this, where diminishing returns start to kick in, I'm just not sure yet where this theshold would be. Definitely something I want to think about and look into more this year. I also feel you on the attention span problem. I just recently started to read more again, and it's definitely rough, but I like reading too much to give up on it. I do better when I don't have audio with my texts, but it seems a lot of people like to have audio while reading. Not a problem, but I still think it's a different activity than just reading. I also agree with your points on children's books. They are just too hard for someone who barely knows some basic words and sentence structures, graded readers truly are a blessing. And I also wish that more readers/tools supported an offline mode or something. It would definitely help to avoid distractions as much, because really what else do you do without internet 😂 Thanks again for sharing your thoughts, I really appreciate it! Looking forward to watching your videos in the new year 🎉
@@AndrisGameDev Hello! I just got around to replying to the comments, and what you are saying about word frequency is true, but it is not what I meant in the video. As I typed up my response to Days of French ’n’ Swedish I realized that maybe the problem isn't that we fundamentally disagree (maybe we do though) about diminishing returns, but about at which point they happen. Here are just some of my thoughts: It is quite obviously true that someone learning for an hour a day will make proportionally more progress than someone learning just 30minutes a day. I also agree that someone studying for 4 hours a day makes more progress than someone just studying for 2 hours a day, I'm just not sure whether at this point it's still proportionally more (aka twice as much). I understand though how one would come to this conclusion as it makes sense in theory. What I've been wondering though is that things like attention span, input =/= intake, diminishing returns should play a role in this. Especially for the diminishing returns it's really hard for me to think of any other skills where past a certain point you would still get the same returns. If you think of sports for example, you won't get twice as strong, fast, etc. if you spend 4 hours at the gym vs 2 every day. I haven't fully thought this through yet, but it's definitely an interesting topic, as both sides seem to at least make somewhat sense.
@@emisnikki-polygloddess Thanks for taking the time and clearing this up, I really appreciate it! I'd love to read some scientific papers about this being tested! If you happen to find something about this in the future, definitely let us know about it, please. :) I wish you a great year!
@@AndrisGameDev I'm afraid there won't be too much (any) research on this exact topic, but I'm planning on looking into it and I'll definitely report back my findings 🧐
Yes -- the high level philosophy that Refold has are really good -- it's basic immersion / comprehensible input theory -- where it breaks down is they then creates a pretty dogmatic framework -- and the framework is just their opinion in a few cases (in something that can't be proven). For example: Not speaking initially is a good idea -- but we all know that you have to practice speaking to learn how to speak. So when should you start learning to speak? Ask 10 different people and you will get 10 different opinions. I say (my opinion) -- the 11th person -- is build up a vocab of about 4K to 5K words and then add speaking practice to your routine, i.e. don't start too early -- and don't wait forever. And learning to pronounce is not speaking practice -- IMO you should learn to pronounce from day 1 as you build up your vocab.
I deep dove into the refold stuff a year ago and watching this video is really strange for me. All the "wrongs" in refold derive in my opinion from "ambiguity". Some of the people misinterpreting the refold guidelines isn't really refold's fault. Why haven't I interpreted those that way? Why do I have a different idea? These title would be more accurate: "Some mistakes those make who use the Refold method" or "What you might have gotten wrong about Refold".
I've already been in my Japanese learning journey on and off for a few years now so I would call myself an intermediate to pre-advanced level. I discovered Refold recently and I do agree with the comprehensible input part, where it encouraged me to take the plunge and start consuming more native media with the TL subtitles, focusing more on getting the meaning and not stressing out about getting everything 100% first time. This works for me because I already have a basis of vocab/grammar which allows me to understand at least 40-50% of what was being said. I think what makes immersion hard for beginners is the lack of toolbox words in the TL that they already know. I think there's no shame in looking to traditional language study resources like textbooks to learn those basic grammar structures and vocab until they get that down. I think immersion with native media is better placed for intermediates and above. I do agree with you that their advice not to speak until fluent seemed contrary to other language learning advice I've heard, even from other comprehensible input practitioners. I have heard people say hold off on writing until fluent particularly for languages with different scripts (because you can easily waste time learning how to write kanji strokes when it's more useful to learn reading listening and speaking first), but I think speaking is crucial to learn early on because what's the point of language? To communicate! I think the hardest part of learning a language when you live in a country that doesn't speak it is finding native speakers who will help you practise their language at your level. I haven't tried the refold discord yet so not sure if it's possible to find language learning 'parents' there, but that's been my main struggle at the moment for language learning. My listening's thankfully been improving thanks to the immersion technique by Refold, but my speaking definitely needs more work.
Kudos to you for speaking your mind about Refold! I thought you raised these problems with great clarity and thoughtfulness. I'm well acquainted with Refold's methodology and have a few things I think are off as well. As you mentioned, making early output a taboo because it will lead to poor speaking habits I think is way overblown. The only way you would cement bad speaking habits is if you didn't study the phonetics of the language at all, don't do any listening immersion, and only communicate with other non-native speakers who also speak with poor pronunciation or poor grammar. This is a very specific circumstance that I think most learners would have enough common sense to avoid. Will Hart is a great example of someone who did early output and had great results learning Mandarin Chinese. I also think the reluctance to study grammar is somewhat misguided. I think if your target language is similar to your native language, you could get by and pick up grammar from immersion. I'm learning Japanese and as an English speaker, if I didn't spend time studying grammar, I'm sure that certain grammar structures would never be acquired because they are so different from my native language. It could take hundreds or thousands of hours of immersion before a grammar structure becomes clear, if ever, but if I spend ten minutes studying the grammar point, it basically clears up immediately. Honestly, I think some of these strongly held opinions in the Refold community is a product of the dogma of MattvsJapan. He helped bring immersion learning to the forefront, which was a great benefit to the language learning community, but he has such a strong conviction that his way is the ONLY way, it created a little bit of a toxic culture in that community. Just my perception! Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
I totally agree with what you're saying. Especially the point about grammar study is very true. We don't know what we don't know and studying grammar can fill those gaps a lot faster than waiting for days, weeks or even months to come across a specific construction/phrase, in a specific context, while also being (mentally) ready to pick up on it. Refold has luckily come a long way since I filmed this video and they changed and adapted their stances as they gathered more feedback from their community (and once Matt became less of a core part of Refold), which is think is great!
I don't know if it's just me, but I genuinely think you have to learn the language in your own way. It's okay to listen to others' tips and avoid some of their mistakes, but at the end of the day, it's your own journey! You'll eventually figure out what works best for you. I really can't bring myself to follow someone else's steps, even if they're helpful. I've tried that before, and I found myself getting really bored and almost giving up on the whole language. Thanks for the video ❤
I think a key point in this video that shed missing is the emphasis on intensive active immersion. Refolds method says intensive active immersion takes work. Trying to genuinely have fun with that is next to impossible but if you embrace the pain and challenge and that becomes fun. With that said the one area I think needs to be updated is the emphasis on understanding multimedia like Netflix shows without subtitles before moving on to output. Multimedia these days has shown to be difficult to understand without subtitles even in your target language. She also brings up a great point about there being a lack of content for less popular 2nd languages
For me, learning grammar on my own was really hard, but taking classes made it much more bearable. People say that school is too inefficent, but I think that its really useful because it gives you direction while you lay the foundation for your knowledge, making it easier to move on to immersion and sentence mining afterwards.
I totally agree withy you! I think taking classes with this mindset is probably the best thing you can do, especially those of us who like a little more structure and direction in our learning journeys.
Hey, that's me at 13:13 :) I agree that at some point, you do have to start speaking in your target language to improve your speaking. That said, I think the point at which you're sufficiently ready to speak varies based on your target language and the language you're learning. Personally, I'm 683 hours into my Russian immersion (including 484 hours of listening), and as a native English speaker I know that if I put that same amount of time into French, I'd be a much farther along with French since it's closer to English than English is to Russian. Just my 2 cents!
@@kingofthejungle2894 Hi there, I just posted a new update on my channel last week! I'm somewhere at an A2 level for listening and reading if I had to guess. I've put just over 1,000 hours in so far, though frankly my ability would be higher than that if I had spent the past 100 to 200 hours focusing on acquiring new vocab instead of just listening.
In my experience with Refold, the idea is solid, it can just lack the nuance sometimes necessary that may throw people off. And be too harsh on straying from the set path. One example is how it emphasizes T+1 sentences. If you're a beginner not much will have just one unknown word. That got me stuck for a while because I try and follow things exactly. Or downplaying grammar. Sure you don't NEED it. But it helps massively speed up comprehension in some cases. All that being said, I would still tend to be hard on classroom learning in general. There's a reason why Americans all have to take a language in highschool, yet almost no one can speak anything besides English. There's a reason Japanese are required to learn English, and yet almost no one can speak it. So it's important to have "good" classroom learning, because there's a lot out there that won't help at all. Korea and Europe are examples of successful classroom learning.
Yes - my point exactly. I think there are some diminishing returns - in the sense that I think after 4-5 hours a day -- hours beyond that are not as "efficient" just to burn out. But you are right the Army with their DLI program in Monterey proves that people can learn languages (at very high levels of proficiency) in a very short period of time. I also believe that the Army practices total immersion meaning that most of the time they are not allowed to speak in their native language. French Foreign Legion I believe practices total immersion as well -- believe me when you have to speak in the target language to speak -- you're going to learn how to speak.
I agree with a lot of this, but I completely disagree with your take on subtitles. Reading target language subtitles is extremely hard for certain languages, like Japanese in particular. I actually think it's harder to read Japanese subtitles than it is to read a book (depending on the book obviously, so I mean harder than reading a level appropriate book) in Japanese, because it's so hard to get your Japanese reading speed up high enough to read the subtitles while they're on screen, at least in my experience. And while I agree that you should read books as well, I think this is actually an advantage of subtitles, since it forces you to work on your reading speed and really concentrate on what's going on.
I agree with this point. Furthermore, I think something she left out is the "purpose" of why someone is learning a language in the first place. . It makes a lot of sense for someone who enjoys reading books to read MORE books as thats what they'll likely want to do using their target language. In other words, reading contributes directly to their real life use of the target language. . However, if someone's goal is to watch anime or speak the language, it makes LESS sense to read without having any audio to support it. If this person does NOT enjoy reading in the first place and would NOT pick up a book to read for fun, why would developing their reading skill help them in any meaningful way? And I don't mean this to say "it's fine to be 100% illiterate", I'm just saying you don't need to spend a lot of time practicing and getting good at reading if you don't read in the first place. At what point realistically would someone like this actually need to read anything other than like a restaurant menu? . Alongside what you brought up, I also believe people should have a solid baseline ability to read, but unless you want to, there's no specific need to specifically go out of your way to read more if you don't like reading.
Hello! I guess I don't exactly understand your point. In the video I say that I don't think reading subtitles is the best form of reading, because you're not really reading yourself, you are just following along the text with your eyes. And you're saying that in Japanese reading subtitles is extremely hard, because it's hard to get your reading speed up high enough (or as I would put it: you can't yet map the sounds that you are hearing to the characters you are seeing fast enough, which btw, I totally agree with). But then why would we recommend something that is *harder to read* to beginners who are just starting to read (who are arguably also the worst readers, because they're super slow, barely know any words etc.)?
Being a good reader actually does influence the other skills too! You learn to parse the grammar of the language, you're learning many many more words than if you never read, it exposes you to different ways of expressing ideas... But ya, if someone absolutely hates reading then obviously that's not the way to go... 😂😅😬
I learnt to speak and listen to Mandarin from just watching chinese tv series and movies and having chinese friends growing up. I wasn't even trying to learn Mandarin. I am also not sure how many years it took since I just acquired the language naturally. I can't read and write mandarin and am still not interested in learning Mandarin.
@@emisnikki-polygloddess IMO watching videos with subtitles (in target language) is somewhere in-between reading and watching videos without subtitles. Reading is the pure most efficient method for learning vocab -- but watching videos with subtitles does have its uses. How I use it is just by occasionally looking at the words to help me catch a word I just can't get just by listening alone. So, I look at subtitles as just assisting with the listening process. My problem with watching videos without subtitles -- is that in the beginning it is just too hard -- subtitles are like training wheels -- until your vocab and listening skills are good enough that you can finally ditch the training wheels. This is all opinion but when staring I think it should be like 90% reading and 10% watching videos -- and then gradually maybe transitioning to about 70% reading to 30% listening. I do agree with you reading is so efficient -- you just have to do some listening -- as I feel it is also a skill you have to develop -- being able to process sounds and words quickly.
During covid I discovered Matt’s RUclips channel and really bought in to the immersion doctrine. It really felt like every other way to learn a language had flaw after flaw that immersion learning fixed. Plus it was “fun” and “fast”. So I started learning Japanese because that was what everyone was learning. I did it for a good bit, I got through the entire 1k rtk deck over a couple months and started the tango n5 deck. The immersion was always an after thought to be honest. It was so un enjoyable I told myself I could put it off till I had some more vocab and my higher % known would finally make things comprehensible. But this would ultimately be the cause of the end of my learning. I straight up quit learning Japanese because I had a talk with myself of “the refold guide says you have to be immersing 5+ hours per day to become fluent within 2-3 years (anything longer felt like forever at the time), your basically wasting your time if you aren’t working on it that much so are we able to commit to that or not?” (Just checked in the refold guide (I still knew exactly where they say this lol) and they still say 5/5 active/passive to reach fluency in 2 years, 3/3 in 4, and 2 hours is the minimum to “make real progress” and doesn’t even give a years estimate) The answer obviously was no. I couldn’t bring myself to watch hours of content and listening to podcasts with all the free time I had understanding maybe 5%. I remember rewatching Matt’s “having fun in a language you suck at” video regularly because immersion was hours of, as you correctly point out, incomprehension, not ambiguity. And refold is very elitist in the way where I felt (and still do) that traditional learning will never work (or at least is super inefficient/counterproductive in comparison) so it’s insane immersion or nothing. For me it would be nothing. It’s been 2 years since then and it has really been hitting me recently how what 2 years ago felt like literally forever kind of flew by, and had I stuck with it (even for 1-2 hours a day) I could’ve made a lot of progress. Obviously not fluent but a far place from where I am now, sitting monolingual with regret. I love languages and linguistics, I want to learn a language. I think it’s just so cool of a skill to have. This video really helped me look at the refold methodology in a more reasonable way. I’ve been really into kpop recently so might start fresh with Korean. Still struggle to free my mind from the feeling that if I’m not immersing for hours as they recommend am I really learning? But I guess I should save my future self in a few years from feeling how I feel now with Japanese. Thank you for making this video.
You started learning Japanese... because everyone was doing it? I think this was the ultimate cause of your quitting Japanese. Why? Because you had extrinsic motivation but lacked the actual intrinsic drive to support it. Motivation, especially the kind that comes from other people doing cool stuff and you being inspired by it, is a great tool. It helps you start doing stuff because you know it can be done (if he can do it, so can I). But motivation is a fleeting thing. At some point it's gonna go away and you have to be ready for that which brings me to my next point. You should ask yourself "why am I doing it in the first place?". The answer you provide is the actual thing that keeps you going. That thing can weather storms that make other people quit like no other, because it comes from the inside. It's intrinsic to you. It's the core reason you're passionate about something. You are driven by it and you can't help but be driven by it. Would you say "everyone was doing it" really is that too? Somehow I doubt it. Matt had an earlier video, on his second channel I think, where he's at the start of his journey and he's talking to his future self. He says something like "hi future me, see ya in 5 years when we've both mastered Japanese and watch raw anime with no subs". Watching that vid, you just know that he had some near-infinite source of motivation inside of him by the way he speaks and talks. I'm not trying to bash you or anything. I totally agree with the main points of the video too. And I, too, discovered Matt and became obsessed with his vids. But before all that I had an absolutely undying desire to be good and fluent at the language. Way before I started looking up how to learn it.
@@rivershy I agree with what you are saying and I think the original comment reflects that. Learning a language, especially through intensive immersion will never work without strong motivation, period. I wrote the first comment kind of on a whim on the way to class one morning, so I left out some details. I was required to pick a language at school to complete my 2 year language credit. The choices were spanish, french, mandarin, or japanese. I had taken spanish and french before and didn't really click with them, mandarin's tones and 20k characters were a bit offputting, which left japanese... which just so happened to be the same language all this great immersion stuff I had discovered was centered around. So I chose it. Did I have the motivation to go to a advanced or even intermediate level, clearly not. But I will acknowledge in retrospect that the 2 mandatory years of language classes were a breeze because of the RTK and minimal vocab/grammar I had done. Since writing the original comment I have actually started learning korean, a language I do feel significant motivation for, and its been great. I have been doing 20 new anki words a day for 40 days straight, and as much grammar as I can. This is already past my peak of japanese and I can feel it in the immersion. I'm already at the point where I don't feel the need to have native subs on because I see a word, or even a whole phrase/sentence I understand pretty often and it keeps me engaged. Still now I think asking beginners to do 3-5 hours of immersion a day is a bit excessive and more likely to turn new learners away. I'm definitely not doing that much: Most days I do my anki 30min, watch some grammar videos 30mins, watch a kpop variety video 30min and read a graded reader 30mins, and some days parts get left out because I'm busy. With that I feel like I am making tons of progress. Could I be making MORE, sure I guess, but there are obviously diminishing returns which probably aren't worth the burnout potential this early. All in all, you are right to point out choosing to learn a language just because "everyone else was" sounds dumb because it is. My story in reality is a bit more complex, but either way a lack of internal motivation is not what you want as a language learner. Now with Korean I see that firsthand and I look forward to the rest of my language learning journey.
@@whatplan4335 Glad to hear you found what works for you. I agree, 3-5 hours is a bit much for me personally. Actually I've been doing 20 new words of Anki every day too and today was my 40th day since I started so I got a bit spooked when I read the exact same numbers from you haha. My routine is somewhat similar too. 80 minutes of Anki (vocab + a bit of kanji, just to learn the meanings), a grammar vid and 20 to 60 minutes of graded readers every day and it's working for me also. I used to watch way more grammar vids but lately I kinda got tired of them so I keep it to a minimum, some days not watching any altogether. I already started noticing I'm getting faster with reading. Although easy anime with jp subs is still a mountain I can't climb yet, given my measly 1k vocab. So I substitute it with an occasional beginner podcast episode now and then. I'm also thinking of starting to consistently read more, as I feel 20 minutes a day is a bit low for how much I enjoy it. btw do you mind sharing a few kpop songs that you like?
That's why I'm doing immersion and going through Genki textbook to build foundations and grammar alongside just incomprehensible immersion. Also the more you understand in the sentences the more fun it is, that is pretty motivating imo. I think this girl and refold both are correct in their own ways. If you do refold while building structure with elementary textbooks and a little Anki (I mean little) a day with consistency you have the bag. Once I can start reading basic things then I can immerse even more and better, so it only get's better? ha
@@rivershy sorry didnt see this reply until now. Hope your learning has been going well. I just finished this beginner stories book today so that was very exciting. as for kpop: here are my favorite groups: newjeans, csr, lesserafim, fifty fifty, ive good songs to try out: newjeans-omg, ive-after like, lesserafim- blue flame, 5050- tell me, csr- shining bright kpop has like countless subgenres so if what I like is not your thing its not your thing no big deal
Correct me if I'm wrong on the ambiguity tolerance part, but "aquiring" language is when your brain _subconciously_ acquires it. You can definitely _learn_ certain words or grammar points, but you acquire the language via the input hypothesis with your brain creating the neural pathways and figures out the patterns. Also if you are doing early output, is just hurting your pronunciation in the long run. Output comes naturally and easily after having a good bank of input inherently.
Yes, acquisition happens subconciously, but only if we feed our brain the right type and amount of information. If all it took was "input" then everyone would be fluent after watching a few shows, which is clearly not how it works. Our brain takes up information best, when only a small amount of it is incomprehensible (i.e. i+1 or 1T etc), which is hard to get by as a beginner. So in the beginning (and sometimes beyond that), it is super advisable to _learn_ some words and grammar patterns, to make input more comprehensible which in turn allows for better _acquisition_. At the same time, Refold is right that we shouldn't stress about understanding every little detail. My criticism is just that Refold has pushed this view to such an extreme that many people now watch things that aren't comprehensible at all, which is not an ideal situation for acquisition to happen.
Hello! I wouldn't consider myself a "refolder" (like I don't follow refold to a tee) but I do use it for reference every now and then. I agree with most points of this video! . The only thing I'd like to make a comment about is your comment on traditional education. . The first thing you say is that "people underestimate what they accumulate over 4 years of classes". I can't say for who "people" are but I personally don't underestimate what I've learned over 10+ years of Chinese while living in Hong Kong. Again, me personally, but I am very realistic and upfront with my Chinese ability and how bad I am at it. I was born and raised in Hong Kong, yet I cannot order from a Chinese menu, tell the Taxi driver to go to a Chinese address, or watch/listen to Chinese films and music without English subtitles. . The next thing you say is that "school is essentially priming your brain, which is also what Refold advises". So the thing with this is that Refold is free and allows learners to achieve much better results, school costs a lot of money and does not allow learners to achieve Refold's results. Both will prime your brain, but when you lay out the pros and cons, it's clear which has the advantage. . As a third point, Krashen has quoted a study comparing traditional skillbuilding vs comprehensible input (search "Krashen EDiversity" for his lecture). The research showed that students who focused on comprehensible input performed BETTER on grammar tests than students doing traditional skill building. . Fourthly, from my experience, schools tend to lean more towards making sure you pass a test than actually helping you develop any real skill- yet they lie to you as if they're helping you develop some skills. What ends up happening is that they are inefficient at both. Take JLPT for example, JLPT never tests your speaking. Traditional teaching will follow the curriculum laid out by some JLPT textbook and fit some speaking practice into it, and the end of the year/semester/curriculum students will take a JLPT test. So here we have students learning not what's necessarily the most common/useful stuff to learn, but instead, just random bits of info someone arbitrarily decided would be at a certain level. Then we also have people trying to pass the JLPT without solely focusing on the JLPT (by taking away the speaking). We end up with people having sub par JLPT scores, sub par speaking abilities, and not much actual skills. . Finally, and this is my biggest problem. Traditional teaching does not try to actually teach people the language the way it actually is. They always try to use some textbook that innacurately represents the language. Japanese for example- so many schools use Genki, which is just known to be absolute dog water. Why do schools not take this into consideration and look at other options ("Making Sense of Japanese" by Dr.Jay Rubin, or Cure Dolly's Japanese Structure curriculum based on Dr.Rubins book)? I believe it's because they're not interested in actually giving you the education, but more interested in following their curriculum, not innovating, and just taking your money. . I definitely agree that Refolders who attack "studying" in general instead of just traditional skill building is not such a great thing as studying can learn to more comprehension, which then can lead to more acquisition. My belief is that these people confused Krashen's words of "studying does not lead to acquisition" and take that as "studying does not help at all". . To conclude, I think schools that follow a really traditional skill building way of teaching and uses outdated textbooks when clearer, better methods exist; those schools DON'T get enough hate and all learners should be heavily advised to stay AWAY from them. As an alternative, any method that engage students with immersion combined with teaching more useful structures of the target language leads to much greater results- whether that be a more modern language school that uses this approach, or Refold. . **EDIT: One thing I have a problem with in your video is 13:22 where you use screenshots of people questioning their own fluency and saying they're "not fluent" but make the comment that "they can't speak the language". I have no clue whether the contents of all those videos actually have people saying they can't speak- but from an outsider's perspective, this comment feels very disingenuous. Just because someone isn't fluent, doesn't mean they can't speak the language. They may be able to convey what they mean in a slow/not smooth way- this means they're not fluent, but they can definitely still speak it. . Again the contents of the video may support your point, but the screenshot don't help here. It looks like you made a point and went out of your way to find screenshots for it instead of doing the research first and making a point. Furthermore, you CAN actually find many examples of people immersing for a lot of time and being able to speak perfectly fine. . I agree with your main point that more time investment doesn't necessarily = more results, but this one point in particular is a miss for me.
Thank you for this very in-depth comment, lots to unpack! I don't know your exact situation, but from what I was given if you were born and raised in Hong Kong and have had 10+ years of language education and you still claim to have learned nothing then (without trying to sound offensive) I don't think the learning method was the only problem. I think the next point might be a misunderstanding because of our different understandings of what we understand as course (because I don't think I ever specified it in the video). What you said is absolutely valid for paid courses and the like, but many people (in highschool/college) are not in a situation where they get to choose whether they do or do not take a course. I think in those situations it's a lot better to think of the course as an aid that can at least help you prime the knowledge than to think of it as this completely useless evil waste of time. Your following two points I'd give the same reply as I already did pretty much. Yes, school is not ideal, their methods outdated and they're very focused and having you produce visible (gradeable) results. It's far from ideal, yet there are people that managed to get to a decent level with school and self learning. I don't think this way of thinking of school as a waste of time is going to make classes more enjoyable/helpful. Besides, classes can offer accountability, which is arguably one of the biggest struggles for many learners (staying consistent etc), and can aid as a guide, or a primer, as I said before. Lastly about the screenshots and the fluent/speaking the language part. If after over 2000 hours of learning the criteria for whether a language learning works or doesn't work/is effective or not is "they may be able to convey what they mean in a slow/not smooth way- this means they're not fluent, but they can definitely still speak it", then by that standard there are many many methods that work just as fine as Refold. After over 2000 hours of investing our time into something I feel like we should have higher standards than "yea they can kinda convey what they mean". There are people in the community that reach fluency (usually not strictly following the Refold guide) sure, but there is also a suspiciously high number of people that have spend thousands of hours and show very underwhelming results for the time they invested (for what Refold promises). I appreciate the time you took to write up your comment, it definitely gave me some things to think about.
Most of the problems with Refold stem from Matt trying to repackage AJATT to appeal casual learners as a means to make money, which just fundamentally doesn't work since AJATT's entire ideology is aimed at a demographic of people who see fluency as mastery over the language and is one of the reasons why Matt was even drawn to it in the first place. Matt himself got as good as he did in Japanese by spending most of his time reading in the beginning and became heavily focused on listening when he wanted to try and perfect his accent which is not representative of what kind of narrative he started pushing once he realized he could repackage AJATT into a dumbed down version that is more broadly appealing in MIA and then repeating it by dumbing it down even to appeal to almost anyone with Refold, by advocating that people instead spend a lot of their time listening early on to avoid instilling bad habits like sub-vocalizing the incorrect enunciation of words. Though I will say that some of the issues you bring up like people expecting to get results from doing nothing but white noising Japanese or whatever other language for multiple hours a day has never been something anyone was ever encouraged to do, and that is something that any experienced AJATTer/MIAer/Refolder/whatever pointless tag someone refers to themselves as/etc, would always make abundantly clear to be completely unhelpful, because looking up what you don't know is the basis of turning something incomprehensible into something comprehensible.
That is a really good point. While I'm all for immersion becoming more popular / accessible to casual and/or traditional learners, it seems like a lot of the methodology that Refold adopted from AJATT hasn't been adjusted yet for differences in time spent/available to learn a language. I agree that white noising is not something anyone should be encouraged to do, but there still seems to be a number of people that just want to enjoy their time, or are very sold on the idea that enough input will be sufficient to learn the language. I might've said this somewhere before, but a lot of people also seem to forget the "comprehensible" in "comprehensible input".
Nice video. I just made a similar comment about reading on one of Matt's videos. Reading early is grueling (I buy an English version of a book and the target language version to read them sude by side as needed). But it allows you to take all the time you need to fully comprehend every sentence. Doing an hour a day, I finished my first novel in 70 days. The 2nd one in 36 days. My third in just under 30 days. I'm now averaging just 4 word lookups per page, no longer needing the English version to cross reference, and understanding extremely well at probably 120 words per minute. Watching native content with target language subtitles is already plenty comprehensible to be fun and effortless for hours a day on top of the reading. And both reading and TV continue to get more fun every day because of that hard work at the beginning. To me, massive amounts of comprehensible input is the key, but active, intense study is the express lane to reach comprehensibility faster and shave many months off of your time to reach comfortable fluency.
Wow this sums up the whole reading process really well & I so agree that reading and listening should work in tandem. And I'm glad you managed to reach a level where you can read native material comfortably 👍
This is the most balanced video I have seen on languages learning. I am far from an expert on rhe topic but what has never convinced me is too much focus on comprehension vs other skills. This falls short of a very important concept about knowledge and skill building acquisition known as interleaving. To me a bit of grammar and bir of pronunciation at the beginning can only help. However I did not understand your point about the importance of read only. I believe reading an audio book while listening is a better practice than reading only. I would be interested too hear why you do not think so.
I think for Japanese specifically, some of the worry of the Refolders vis a vis reading is that you can very realistically be in the process of memorizing a vast swathe of kanji, starting with the meaning rather than the reading, and the chance that you're going to subvocalize those meanings in your native language is super high because you'll be looking at 紙 and your mind's eye will immediately jump to seeing the word "paper" instead of seeing the word かみ. Which again shows Refold's primary target to be Japanese learners, since a native English speaker learning Spanish, for example, isn't really going to have a problem seeing the word "papel" and subvocalizing the English word instead.
Dk, I’m always reading kanji not understanding them, maybe it’s another problem, I see kanji, I try to recall the reading and only then I understand what does it mean most of the time
Huge fan of graded readers, so agree with you. The one thing though sometimes it's hard to find or purchase graded readers -- so kids books IMO to have their place due to accessibility. My girlfriend gave me a whole box of kids books in Portuguese that she'd used to teach her daughter -- and I devoured them at the beginning of my language learning journey -- they may be a little less efficient than graded readers -- but they work -- and they are a lot easier to find. I did have one graded reader -- and loved that book -- but yeah just not as easy to acquire or as inexpensive as used kids books.
20:40 I agree that reading a book is WAY better than reading subtitles BUT if u r going to watch a TV show w/out ur TL subs the learning will be less than if you use the TL subs. And It's an easier approach to reading if u are just listening, like refolders tend to do.
Hey, just wanted to say it is amazing and refreshing to see someone with a balanced mindset that has more experience with a number of languages talking about stuff and not making up any scientific theories out of their head. You are amazing, for me you were right about 100% of the stuff you said. I think people who made criticism, for what I read down here, are just people on sunken cost fallacy being in deny.
I’m not doing Renfold but a comprehensive immersion program that doesn’t want you to speak until like 600 (but more like 1000) hours. If I just watch the input at 3 hours a day I’m earliest six months before I speak. I understand the concept as I don’t know much vocabulary to form sentences after 30 hours in but a vow of silence doesn’t make sense to me. So I’m trying to figure out how to use the Anki decks for vocabulary, I have a basic grammar book I’ll be studying daily, I’m reading a little, words I’m not sure of I’ll look up as you suggested and I’m repeating words and learning short phrases, eventually I’ll find a native speaker or tutor to chat with. Prior to the internet, when access was much more limited, people learned languages through classroom study. Most who say they studied for years, never got to use it in real life settings, if they did while learning traditionally I’m sure it would have been very helpful. I guess I wish there was a program that leaned on CI while understanding balance is needed.
The theory behind not speaking is that you only acquire a language though comprehension. Speaking is just a side effect of your comprehension. So speaking should have no benefit and only potential harm. However, if speaking allows you to engage in a comprehensible conversation that would be a different story (see How to acquire any language NOT learn it! by Poly-glot-a-lot). I think the main take away is not to worry about your speaking level, speak when you need to, but if you want to get better at speaking you need to improve your comprehension mainly though more immersion. Weather or not this is true is up for debate, but that is the idea.
Interesting takes. Thanks for sharing, and I tend to agree with a lot of it. Especially the more intensive study style being more useful in the beginning, and the importance of reading.
Wow I didn't realize refold didn't put emphasis on reading. I've been doing immersion for almost 1.5 years after I found out about refold and I think I kinda subsconsciously don't follow refold as it is despite using the guide as my starting point. After finding refold, I try look more things up and ended up watching a lot of talks from Stephen Krashen which really, really put heavy emphasis on reading that made me assume refold also does. Maybe all this time I was only listening Stephen Krashen advice 🤷♂️
I think the way you are using the Refold method is actually the way it is supposed to be used! It's a guide, not the laws of language learning 😂 But yea, the Roadmap doesn't put a lot of emphasis on reading, but it's just as a valid of a form of immersion as watching TV, so I'm glad you are doing what works for you 💪
@@emisnikki-polygloddess Not that familiar with them -- but yeah I was also surprised that they don't put heavy emphasis on reading. For me immersion is lots of reading!!
I'm not a huge fan of the refold community since I think they over exaggerate its effectiveness though I do believe it to be better than going to school. I did get to fluent Chinese reading and Cantonese speaking from purely watching Chinese Dramas with Chinese subtitles. Never ever have I read a Chinese book of any sort or taken any classes. (Before I discovered refold) I've also taken 8+ years of French in school and private tutors, and 5+ years of Japanese in college and private tutors and my french level has basically been reading level only cause that's all we did, I'm not able to understand any french speakers. For Japanese due to me having already learned to read Chinese the kanji was easier and there were some words that were similar sounding. I do think school was a waste of time cause we learned all the grammar and conjugations that has nothing to do with my goal of becoming fluent. I learned to become fluent in Chinese without ever knowing any of the grammar rules. If you think about it that's how we all learned our native languages too. If I spent all the time learning how to conjugate words and grammar for french and Japanese in school and focused more on immersion immediately like I did with Chinese I'd probably be fluent in those two languages by now too. Most native English speakers would fail grammar tests that non native speakers take I'm about ~280 hours into immersion for Japanese and what you described at 15:16 is basically me. I finished the JP1K anki deck and just went straight into immersion with 0 sentence mining due to lack of time, and I'm finding myself already able to listen to podcasts on my commutes and understand ~30% of what they are talking about. I know the refold methods website kinda doesn't emphasize on the importance of reading enough, but if you watch all the youtube reviews of people who are doing the refolds method, and go on their discord, everyone there emphasizes how important reading is and how it gives you the best return on investment on your time spent. I need to get on this myself too but as you said I don't have much free time so podcast on my commute is the best medium for me right now, and I struggle to find interesting material to read, NHK easy news is to the extent of what keeps my attention. In the end just like any other hobbies, do the method that makes you keep showing up / practicing. To some people having fun is important, while to others doing the boring grind makes them feel productive, and some people like my wife need to pay someone to kick their butts and keep them accountable by showing up to class.
Hi, thanks for your comment. I really like your last paragraph and wished that people would take Refold more as a guideline, while still being curious about what might and might not work for them. Good luck with your Japanese (and I hope you eventually find some time to read 😉)
It's called Migaku! They have a whole bunch of tools for languages learning; I pretty much only use their reader and their Anki extension, but it's been such a different reading experience for Japanese. The screen you see at 29:11 is in Cantonese though.
Subtitles: In English shows subtitles usually match very well, but subtitles do not usually match when listening in Spanish. I have found a few shows where the Spanish spoken matches with subtitles in Spanish, but they are rare.
It is called Migaku! It's a browser extensionthat lets you do a whole bunch of stuff - I pretty much only use their reader function, but they're working on adding a lot of other functionality to make immersion easy
While I agree that immersion is very beneficial, my eyebrows totally left my forehead when I, too, stumbled over the 'words will magically pour out of you'. Was this former strict output restriction stance based on any real data? I grew up in a multilingual environment and am pretty decent in listening comprehension in a couple of languages, but never have sentences started pouring out of me. Many fellow third culture kids, who share the same language background as I do, can attest to this. It is a common topic among us that by neglecting output, we have never gained fluency in conversation.
I think about diminishing returns like this: yes the returns are diminishing but I think you can cover more ground this way, meaning someone who only does 1-2 things over a couple hours will likely not be as well rounded. Someone who reads for two hours, watches shows for two hours, and reads articles or watches youtube for 2 hours will probably be more well rounded overall. At the end of the day people should put in the time they have but i still think more is better
15:45 “took classes for 5 years learned nothing” I call bullshit I’m studying Japanese again but I’m high school I took 2.5 years. I don’t consider myself as skilled as I was back then but even if my skill was less than it was, the classes gave me familiarity with the language. Even if you don’t build a lot of skills, formal education of a language will give you familiarity with it that will boost your ability to study. Idk how to describe it. But it’s easier to study on your own after taking classes for a year or more.
I find that your points are valid critiques, but they are not specific in what they are criticizing. I.e. they do not specify clearly when they are criticizing the main road map, the larger body of refold associated content, or the community. Some of the criticisms (e.g. the "fear or output", over-prioritization of 'fun', underestimating the importance of intention in active immersion) also seem to be aimed at misconceptions of the community that are contradicted by either the main guide or other official publications. More generally, I think that many of these flaws are present only when focusing on a particular point of their recommendations while ignoring the wider context they were made in. (Note: This should not be construed as saying these criticisms are not important, they are, but I think they should be re-framed as problems with the clarity of the guide rather than problems with the 'method' as a whole. Ironically this is the same problem with Matt's earlier videos--that one had to watch hours of content from different videos to get a good understanding of what exactly he was advocating for.) As an example, take the point on the importance of reading. Your criticism seemed to be rooted in the community (that there are many Japanese learners with an interest in Anime) and the refold guide not dedicating more space (or importance) to reading in the acquisition process. While these are both things you can criticize (although the first seems more like ad hominem against the relevant group rather than a critique of the 'Refold') the second feels predicated on hyper-focus on that particular section (ignoring other relevant materials). Looking just at material from the guide, they don't seem to imply that reading is not effective, on the contrary, it states that more immersion is better, and it's suggestions for active immersion and study inherently favor written content where dictionary lookup is simple and fast. Leaving the guide, other refold publications such as Q&As repeatedly state that the particular balance of listening and reading for a given person is dependent on their goals, that more listening based immersion (especially early on) may lend to better pronunciation in the long run, whereas reading is extremely effective at improving your language ability (he likened it to a drop of ink in a glass of water--even a little bit can have a drastic impact), it does have an impact of how you parse the language (which can lead to poorer grasp of more intricate pronunciation (more precisely, writing is an abstraction of the spoken language and there is inherent loss of information (i.e. many different ways of saying things are transcribed the same)). Matt also points out that he mainly did textual immersion (he states that was reading various novels including classic Japanese literature) and his problem with his approach was that his reading ability far outpaced his listening and speaking ability. He does not imply that it is not a powerful tool for language learning, in fact, he suggests the exact opposite--that it was so powerful that it takes more listening immersion relative to reading immersion to have balanced listening/spoken language ability. Additionally I think that it is important to consider that the aim of Refold is to teach normal people an effective way to learn languages including teachings about mindset and more general aspects of the approach (which are inherently not the only way of learning). This further implies that the guide is not some sort of manifesto of scientifically supported facts about language, but rather a call to informed action. Thus suggestions to do things like 'be comfortable with ambiguity' need to be considered in context. It is a mindset to help you stay motivated to keep immersing even when you know you are missing something and not get hung up on analyzing everything. This is an important suggestion because analysis can only produce hypotheses; only immersion can verify them. This should also be understood with the sister suggestion of getting the metaphorical low-hanging fruit. Assuming this is saying you shouldn't try to understand understand or that you should be complacent with not understanding feels like an uninformed bad faith interpretation to me. Similar things could be written for some of your other points (although, I don't have the time). In closing, I think that the 'Refold Method' has a extremely effective and somewhat adaptable approach to language acquisition. Despite this, the central resources should be more comprehensive, as the current guide misses many nuances discussed in the broader set of Refold resources. However, as with most everything else, the key to understanding the finer points of Refold is to get a good understanding of the underlying principles, as they are more important than any of the specifics.
Hard to find accurate subtitles? If you use Language Reactor, they have a speech to text feature that gives you accurate subtitles (and yes, it works well)
I agree, especially, with your point about time. Watching Matt’s streams can be quite discouraging because he attributes a lot of his success to binge-watching 8 hours of Japanese content per day while avoiding English like the plague. Which is not only unrealistic, but unappealing. I like English lol, I don’t want to feel repulsed by it. However, on your other point, I think the roadmap is more than clear with what it means by tolerating ambiguity. For so many of us immersion learners, that map gave us direction. It gives you strategies to keep up your comprehension while the language still sounds like gibberish. It tells you to look the plot up ahead of time, google words while you watch, and always focus on noticing the words you’ve already learned. I don’t think it suggests you just sit on the couch, put on a show, and let the words float in one ear and out the other. I do appreciate this video though. The Refold community can feel a bit culty/elitist at times, and it's a good reminder that other methods of learning are valid and can lead to success.
Yea, the thing about Matt is that the 8 hour binge watching probably helped *a lot*, but I believe that that is not the only reason he managed to reach such an extremely high level. I think some other factors to be considered is his passion to get better, even after he reached "fluency", his willingness to actually grind those hours, but also having had formal classroom instruction (despite claiming that that didn't change much) and having been to and living in Japan. I appreciate that you pointed that out. I think what I'm starting to notice with many of the comments is that I didn't always make it clear whether I was criticizing the roadmap, the community, or both. Because I agree that the roadmap provides many aids to combat/tolerate ambiguity and make immersion a better/more successful experience. However, people in the *community* have taken that to mean "sit on the couch, put on a show, and let the words float in one ear and out the other", which is what I was criticizing, because I believe that that leads to a lot of wasted time, frustration, minimal learning... Thank you for your friendly comment 🙏
@@emisnikki-polygloddess Yes -- he did 8 hours of "inefficient" learning (worth maybe 3 hours of "efficient" learning) which he backed up by 4 hours of "efficient" learning doing other things. 🤣
My girlfriend is American but didn’t socialize much and learned most of her words though reading, and she honestly pronounces like 10-15% of her active vocabulary completely incorrectly… in her native language, though, her vocabulary is bigger than the average Americans, so it’s kind of a trade off, that being said I’ve decided to start reading in my TL because pronunciation be dammed I’m tired of my vocabulary being so small lol.
As with everything, it really doesn't have to be one or the other. I think anyone doing a reasonable amount of listening while reading will not end up with bad pronunciation.
It's not a manga, it's the Japanese translation of a book called "The Joy of Mathematics - Discovering Mathematics All Around You" 数学の楽しみ、身のまわりの数学を見つけよう by Theoni Pappas. I have yet to read it though... 😆
what got me is that their introductory video makes it seem so rudimentary and that they'll kinda be a guide, and then I go to their site and see the price tag. wowzer
Their guide (they call it roadmap I believe) on how to go about learning a language should still be free, unless they changed it. Or were you referring to something else?
Solid video. Really well done. I’m still afraid of sub-vocalisations.. We say it doesn’t matter if we take 10 years to learn a language but I also know there is little foundation for me being worried.. but I can’t get rid of it and I’m not in a rush ! But if anyone had any advice I’m all ears (😉)
I agree with the Tolerate ambiguity stuff in the sense of media bit it is some of the best advice I can give to someone for irl immersion. I teach English in Korea. Too many times I've seen Korean friends and students just get terrified when around native English speakers talking amoungst themselves. It's like they feel like all there years English study has failed because they can't understand native speech. While on my side as a Korean learner most of the Korean I hear is native speech and there is so much I don't I understand at times. But because of my willingness to try and listen no matter what and put up with not understanding my ability to understand native speech has improved massively.
I agree that a certain amount of tolerance is definitely necessary. I don't think however that ideal immersion should only happen with incomprehensible input. At the end of the day we are not trying to become okay with not understanding, we are trying to get to a point where we do understand.
I think the point Refold is trying to make is that the most important factor is to make it enjoyable. Watching a show you don't understand isn't really that fun, but it's not that boring. It's not about the whole process being fun, just being fun enough to where you're able to follow through with it day after day, which is the hardest and most important part of it all. Sure, it's not super fun, but I don't think people mind having to watch shows they don't understand because it's at least entertaining with the visuals and sound. Same with the "you should do the same things you do in your target language". The point is that you should do what you find at least somewhat enjoyable. If you enjoy something once, it means you at least don't hate it. If you like to read at times then if someone points a gun at you and tells you to read, even though you might not be in the mood, you won't really mind doing it. It'd be like "okay fine..?". Refold is emphasizing fun because it's trying to drive the point home that being able to do it day after day is the most important part. Not how fast, not how efficient, because if you're not even able to go through with it, none of that matters. The reason for this emphasis on consistency is that it is the key to fluency, and it's trying to make that daily grind (which looking from the outside is a very try-hard way of learning) as casual and available to the general public as possible. Since the beginning, AJATT and immersion type methods are seen as big commitments and an intense process, only for those whose lives' mission is to learn that particular language. Of course, this isn't really true, and Refold is trying to make this method as widely accepted as possible. On the point of tolerating the ambiguity: First is the fact that it is not nearly as extreme as you paint it to be. They do mention that searching up is good, but you should do it occasionally and only in specific situations. This connects to the previous point of prioritizing fun, but also in a way that makes sense. Searching up all the time is not fun, and it's also not even effective. Those 'specific situations' I mentioned are when looking up said word allows you to comprehend the entire sentence, or close. This is actually effective, achieving that i+1 effect, allowing for higher comprehension, because you just understood that sentence now, which makes you enjoy it more because you've just deciphered more of the language, and that word is more likely to stick because of the full comprehension of the context that surrounds it and the way it is used in context. Meanwhile, if you hear one of those long ass sentences with many words you don't know, looking up each word and trying to understand is not fun and also completely ineffective, because it's too much new information. Incomprehension is not solved by looking up every word you don't know, because these don't stick. Incomprehension, especially at the beginner stages, is solved by vocab decks, which are actually effective for learning vocab unlike searching up every single word, and also just immersing without looking up, which brings me to my next point. Surprisingly, "staring at your screen and praying for progress" actually works. I've personally experienced it immersing in japanese where after a while you start getting a feel for what certain words or expressions mean, what certain verb suffixes mean, etc... You've also definitely experienced it in your mother tongue when you hear a word you don't know and after a while you just get the meaning. An example is modern slang like 'to rizz'. I can assure you most people did not look up in the dictionary what 'rizz' means, and just started getting it from context. I'm gonna be honest, I haven't watched the whole video, but I agree with your points of infinitely delaying output. Output is nothing bad as long as your input is at least like twice the amount, and also after you gain a certain level of understanding with your language. Refold is trying to make those super try-hard immersion methods into something the general public can start doing casually, and I think the cool UI and way it breaks down immersion into a daily, yet casual commitment. The reading point is also true, but again, if you don't really enjoy it, you shouldn't do it. What I mean by 'enjoy' here, is if you just don't like reading (not if you sometimes don't feel like it or if you don't like not understanding or anything), if reading is something you really don't like doing in your native language, then you shouldn't do it. And that's the Refold way, prioritze being able to do it consistently and following through on it. If you don't like reading but would do anything to get good and so you're able to read daily, then go for it. It's all about what you're able to withstand on your way to fluency. But yeah, reading is really effective to get to higher levels. Anyway, good video, I like when people critize with valid points things like this. As I mentioned, I don't agree with everything, but yeah there are definitely some flaws with Refold.
I've watched this so many times, and I completely agree! It's strange how some Japanese learners just want to watch anime for 8 hours a day. Obviously, if you watch native content for 8 hours a day, it might work if you use Anki for an additional 4 hours on top of that. But doing 12 hours a day for 5 years seems like a waste of time. Very few people talk about reading and comprehensible input, especially graded readers or tools like LingQ. In Chinese, there are a lot of graded readers, but all Chinese learners know that watching a Chinese movie or show or reading a native graphic novel won't work, as native content requires at least 3,000 characters to get through smoothly. Tutors and classes can be effective too, but yes, graded readers are a more affordable option.
I think input is a necessity to learn a language and of course, studying the language too could be very efficient and speed up the acquiring part I 100 percent agree with that but it's still not a necessity like input, as for speaking i disagree that you necessarily have to speak to be able to output for example I'm not a native speaker of English and i did english for ~2 years in 1-2 grade we learned basic stuff like i am ..... you are ... and stuff like that but other than that no studying but something that i did was that i started watching a lot of english content on youtube every day, stuff that i found interesting to watch (compelling input) and i did that for years and i could understand the language without trying or studying (i technically did study after,but in class i already knew everything that the teacher was saying and teaching so i never learned something there) and how im a able to speak without talking to anyone in english is because of course i got a lot of input, and i understand the language first but i also i did a lot of whats called "shadowing" in the language learning community,so basically it's a bit embarrsing to admit but im quite a parasocial person when im bored or distracted i do talk a lot with myself or with other people (i promise you im not crazy) in english, that's why i think to some extent i can talk and write english to a good amount of level with all that being said im not saying im fluent or that i have no struggles sometimes when reading about topics such as philosopy or politics but when i do have the chance to talk or express myself with people in english i can do it quite comforably
Thanks for your insights! I don't think anyone is arguing that input is not a necessity or that studying is more important, but as of right now studying (or the active engaging with the language) are kind of thrown under the bus, when they do make a huge difference to how fast we can start to actually acquire and learn from out input only. Also you said you disagree with my statement that you'd have to speak to be able to speak better, yet you said yourself that you talked to yourself, that you shadow etc, which is exactly what I was referring to. You need to practice speaking to get better at speaking. So isn't what you said a bit contradictory? Maybe just a misunderstanding. (just a suggestion, but adding paragraphs and punctuation would make your text quite a bit easier to read)
@@emisnikki-polygloddess When I said talking to myself I didn't mean literally mean speaking out loud to myself but more like a parasocial thing that I do in my head that wasn't even for language learning purposes, for the Learning vs Acquiring part like a lot of people in the comments have said I have followed more people like Krashen and Mattvsjapan(even if matt is in refold, in a lot of his videos he suggests to study if you want to speed up the process), I kind of linked those people to refold, because like refold they recommend a more immersion type approach that I agree with so I might have to reread it. But one thing that i disagree with in a lot of immersion-based communities is that early output is kind of like sin,i understand their concerns and they should definitely be said because a lot of people have been lied to that "the only way to learn a language is if you speak it", i still think that early output is not as bad as they think/say so, I have learned 2 languages by early outputting and i did develop some bad habits but just like any language it is almost impossible to not develop those bad habits even in your native languages, they may not be as bad or "long lasting" as those habits that you get when you learn a new language but its still a human thing to develop those habits and they slowly but surely will go away, still if someone asks that question because they like outputting activities or whatever the reason may be, its good to teach them about the input hypothesis and the consequences of early output but then it should be their choice on what they want, if they want to output so kinda of like 50% output+50% input or more of a input over output approach, whatever their preferences will be at that point, it becomes more of a preference/their choice thing and not like the biggest mistake that they could make in their language learning journey.
I think this video was a good criticism. For me personally on the point of delay speaking and weeb centred learning is that pure input anki cards worked great for me in mandarin but in european languages i felt that output cards really helped me learn more effectively. Maybe something to do with reading characters being more difficult. On the points about 'tolerate the ambiguity' vs 'you should understand almost every word' it never occured to me when I was reading through their stuff that they meant literally sit with content you dont understand at all, especially because of the influence of Krashen on the method I thought the point is having as few unknown elements as possible and progressing with an x+1 type immersion, but yeah I agree that is not always possible at all finding resources like that becomes almost impossible once you're past the beginner phase and not yet super advanced either. With tolerate the ambiguity maybe a better way of putting it would be increase your tolerance to cognitive load.
Hi Emis, I am would like to start with two disclaimers 1) I am very new to refold. 2) I have failed every attempt to learn a language German, French, Japanese, Russian, Swedish, Korean, Japanese. With traditional methods. Now my thoughts: 1)Though many folks are weebs - I don't think the refold method is suitable for just Japanese. I think the community has just begun from the Japanese learning community. And over time more folk will join. 2) Fun - hard work can be fun ... I don't think refolders expect language learning to be relaxing sort of fun. Hard work there's a difference between drudgery and honing. Both are hard how ever one is aligned with purpose. There's that sweet spot in music practice where you do just a little bit harder than what you know and that is what makes you grow. I see a lot of parallels in learning a musical instrument with learning a language. Time required, deliberate practice on the edge of your ability to grow. listening to music before playing yourself etc. 3) Tolerating ambiguity - I didn't take it to mean I must consume incomprehensible input. To me it was clear that comprehensible input is what is required and that to grow you need to take input which is mostly comprehensible with a little bit of stuff you don't know and your brain will work magic. How to get that comprehensible language that is the rub which I am trying to figure out. 4) Delayed speaking - I am must admit I find it hard not to shadow speaking the vocab. Yet I take great comfort that I will be speak ok when I start working with a native speaker. That speaking will just happen easier after I do tonnes of input. Is very appealing to me. I don't want to waste my time with native speakers with "my name is" 5) Traditional grammar instruction is useless. Language is alive - languages aren't lego you can't build sentences. Language just comes out of your head like magic. Some grammar can be assistive but once you know the shape of the language more. English speakers get taught grammar after they have been acquiring the language for years. That grammar process is more about formalising and standardising a written form of the language as opposed to being descriptive of spoken language constructs. And yes reading is the most effective way to acquire the grammar of written language. Yet speaking is needed prior to the ability to write. 6) Agreed about how many adults have no idea about the lives of other adults who have responsibilities that make 3 hours of study impossible. 7) I have no trouble parsing languages basic meaning in text I find picking up words and patterns visually very easy .... what I do find incredibly hard is the listening - listening is what I need to spend most of my time doing. My focus for language learning is interactions with real people. So reading can go jump till I have got the listening down. I am still new to refold. My situation is: my TL is Mandarin; I have limited time; I'm just listening for 15 - 30 mins a day for now. I'm not doing an anki deck yet. Nor, switching my youtube profile yet.... I'm watching a kids show I am familiar with - ABC kids has Bluey episodes in Mandarin. It's mostly incomprehensible which is not ideal. Yet I needed a resource that I was familiar with that I could use with an app I already use. i'm trying to hum the tones of small phrases as watch and for looking out for the few words I know. Main point for me is to establish a pattern of engagement and then grow from there. Would recommend Bluey as a great language resource - it's quite fun not just for parents but for anyone who has been a child - it's delightful. Don't care how long it takes many people in my local community speak mandarin - I've got time to take my time I'll get there.
Welcome to Refold and thank you for this detailed response 😉 1. It's not suitable for *only* Japanese, however, some of the suggestions on the Refold roadmap might be harder to realize for learners of other languages (e.g. with less media available) 2. I absolutely agree that hard work and grinding can be fun, but I'm afraid there are some people in the community that would not agree, and actually do expect language learning to always be happiness and relaxation. Your explanation for time required and deliberate practice is spot on btw! 3. Same as above, the roadmap doesn't recommend to consume incomprehensible input, but to some it's not that clear... I heard there are really good graded readers for Mandarin, maybe those could help! 5. I think thinking of language as lego in the beginning is actually quite a helpful approach. You learn some basic grammar (learn = you can recognize the grammar for/know what it does), which will make your comprehension better, which makes immersion easier and more effective. Ofc no grammar resource will perfectly portray language, but imo it's better starting to learn knowing for example whether verbs conjugate, nouns decline, basic sentence structure, whether the language uses articles, etc. 7. I think as a beginner reading is incredibly helpful. You learn new words super quickly, can go at your own speed etc. Better use of your time than only doing listening imo. Keep it up! Would be exciting to see how things are going for you in a few months 😊
Brilliant observations!! I enjoyed watching this video. I have had some of the same thoughts, so it was very interesting to hear from someone with insider observations. I'm studying Levantine Arabic, so it has always been frustrating for me to hear people learning well-resourced languages talk about the need to find interesting material at just the right level for them WITH accurate subtitles and transcripts. I personally don't think that you can study Levantine Arabic on your own without a tutor or an amazing language exchange partner. There are so many translation mistakes in the few things that are even transcribed verbatim that a completely independent learner would learn a lot of mistakes. Not to mention all the nuances to how words are used, who uses certain words and phrases, etc. . . I also think that their rigid ideas about when to speak are 1) highly biased towards high introverts who like to watch a lot of TV and 2) really selling short the effectiveness of asking a knowledgeable native speaker or trained teacher the powerful question, "How do you say [blank] in [target language]?" To me, this is a really important question to learn early on and it allows you to bypass a lot of mistakes you would otherwise make trying to rely on the linguistic logic of your native language and a dictionary. As an extrovert, I have always been motivated by interactions with Arabic speakers, even when I could only say hello and good-bye. Without those interactions where I got to practice my growing vocabulary and communication skills, I would've given up on Arabic a long time ago. I don't like TV enough to put in hundreds of hours of watching before trying to speak. Not that hundreds of hours of suitable, translated content for beginners even exists. . . And I don't have any bad speaking habits, and native speakers often compliment me on my pronunciation and understanding of the language. I think that the Refold method can be used at the beginning or intermediate stages of learning a language, and I hope someday that they openly make this concession--that different people need different things to achieve learning success and that there's more than one way to skin a cat!
Thank you for sharing your view as someone who is learning a language with few (learner) resources. I don't think that there is anything wrong with the method Refold promotes, but at the end of the day we have to make it work for our circumstances and our goals rather than trying to blindly follow what someone else says. Since I uploaded this video almost two years ago at this point, Refold has luckily had a lot of time to change and I think they're a lot more accomodating now.
@@emisnikki-polygloddess Good to know! On a whole, though, in even their most recent videos, many of the things you highlighted in your video are still promoted or reinforced without caveat.
I personally don't find most of your criticism an accurate representation of the bulk of Refold's guidance. I think, in particular, that they're proposing that no part of the process is "work" and is (or should be) entirely "fun". You repeatedly give the impression otherwise, which I don't think is very accurate at all. My understanding is that Refold takes a very holistic approach and that's uncomfortable for those that want or expect (or want, if you're spergy) more of a bootcamp approach. I think that the most important point that you don't appreciate is the same one that pervades every other facet of life -- the best intervention is the one that's practicable. A diet that is not sustainable is NO solution to the problem (and actually can be detrimental) versus the one that you're willing to follow that's sustainable -- unless you really do have a hard/fixed endpoint that you have to meet. Having watched most of their 2021 content, I can't fit together your reservations (criticisms) from late 2022 from what I've heard them saying. Perhaps the bulk of your information comes solely from the roadmap and you haven't gone through the same set of monthly Q&As from around 2021 that are on RUclips. I'll leave it for others to form their own judgements about why that material and yours are incongruent. I'm assuming zero malice on your part though and that perhaps you haven't either kept up with them by not having seen the full breadth of their stated approach(es).
I'm testing the refold methodology with japanese. I never studied it and I have zero previous knoledge. I'm a native portuguese speaker and my most developed second language is English. Last two years I spent studying german and now I'm taking some rest from it and I'll spend some time with refold method and learning Japanese. Im taking it easy, I'm not obsessed with learning fast and not willing to spend 5h+ per day with immersion. But i learned a lot of valuable concepts with Matt that are helping me with learning Japanese from zero
My take on the tolerating ambiguity, is that while starting learners may atart off with childrens stories and other things that will always be at their comprehension, if a mew leaner get bored pr wants to watch a show that is higher level but more fun for them, they shouldnt stress about wjat they cant comprehend and just focus on picking out the words they can comprehend. As for the little focus on reading, i kinda agree. Matt more recently with his obsession with having perfect pronunciation has the, maybe true, idea that tour accent will turn out better if you immerse with hearing more than speaking. For the average learner though, it is not worth slowing your progress in comprehension just to come out with a better accent, and reading is definitely a vital tool in gaining comprehension.
the only thing i really disagree with is the words ´spilling´. im not sure how applicable this is for other people, but for me. its a very simple concept. if you can think in the language, you can speak in the language
That does sound like a pretty simple concept! The question is how do you go from learning grammar concepts, vocabulary, the sounds of the language, phrasing to thinking in the language? Is that something that just happens to you?
I'm struggling to get the criticism you are trying to give you seem to agree with the majority and sometimes when you do criticise it you are contradicting yourself or your taking the examples to the extreme
That is because I do agree with the majority of what Refold is doing. I think they're doing a great job of getting people to include more things into their study routine other than just textbook drills. But as with any methodology there are things that I don't agree with, and this video is there to point them out. Where am I contradicting myself? Some confusion might stem from me not clearly pointing out whether a given point criticises the community or the roadmap, I should've made the clearer for sure...
@@emisnikki-polygloddess I really liked your video! Yes -- I get what you were trying to do. Yes, Refold in general is not bad -- big problem is that they take a lot of good ideas and then try to create a dogmatic framework, when I think language learning is not so black and white.
Holaaa!. Este fue un gran video. Cuando descubrí la metodología de Refold, creí que era lo más revolucionario que había encontrado para el aprendizaje de idiomas. Pero cuando la puse en práctica me di cuenta que tal vez llevaban un poco al extremo sus planteamientos. Lo que realmente llevo conmigo es que también es posible aprender mediante la inmersión comprensible y no solo los libros dedicados a este fin.
Yo tambien he seguido los consejos de refold pero también los de Steve Kaufmann , cuanto tiempo pasaste aprendiendo con refold , yo cumplí un año ahora puede entender un 60 a 75 con audio inglés y subtítulos en inglés estoy cómodo cuando veo un anime o ciertas películas y series pero siento que aún me falta mucho hablar hasta el momento no lo echo
That's why they ask you to read their philosophy first... I feel it's important to listen to incomprenhensible material to get acostummed to the intonation and sounds of the language. Then you read up on phonetics and compare how much you notice from what you've heard. I feel it works for me because I'll make it a habit and whenever I get to understand bits and pieces of my target language, I'll get a boost on motivation. Because I'm listening my incomprensible language in my dead time while I start on the basics
You are wrong at around 20:00. Not only progress is proportionate (to time spent with target language) you get more progress (per hour) when you allocate more time per day. This is absolutely essential for beginners. Spending 2 hours a week just gets you nowhere. You end up forgetting half or 3/4 of everything just because of passage of time. On another hand, once you reach upper intermediate, it's relatively easy to maintain language skills and just use language FOR FUN and ENTERTAINMENT. I speak from experience. I started with low intensity school program approach, and what a WASTE of an opportunity it was. School kids have the best opportunity to learn a second language to a NATIVE level. YET most will WASTE this valuable learning opportunity before they reach adulthood. Eventually I did learn English to a near native level as an adult. But it only gets more difficult if you WASTE valuable time before adulthood. This mostly pertains to learners of English. Most of us WANT to become near native speakers EVENTUALLY.
I've had this discussion many times before and it seems that people are quite divided on this topic. I will eventually make a video going into why I don't think this is true. Obviously I agree that 2h of low effort language contact a week is not enough, but in that case even 10h a week of low effort language contact wouldn't make that big of a difference.
@@emisnikki-polygloddess If you are interested, let me introduce you to another extreme, 24/7 prolonged L2 immersion, and what miracles in Second Language acquisition it creates. This isn't just me saying it, Middlebury Language school have been using this approach for decades. And I hear their students achieve remarkable progress in an 8 week course. But my personal story is more unbelievable. Sorry, if this is a long read, but here is my story. ... I had spent 7 years learning a second language the conventional way (grammar, translation), some in school and some as individual hobby. This was just before the Internet, so my options were limited. And even though i did well in school, realistically my final level was barely a beginner. (A1-A2, as was confirmed by the lowest TOEFL score) Then as a 19 year old I was a part of this experiment. I was placed in a foreign MILITARY academy with very strict guidelines. Foreign students were only allowed to use L2 (English). Native language (Slavic) wasn't allowed, it was absolute 100% immersion environment 24/7. (Kinda similar to Middlebury Language school or French Foreign Legion approach) And even though I was already an adult, I learned a second language to a near native level within a year. I could physically feel the development of a second language. After 3 months i was thinking in L2 full time, i had near native listening comprehension in 6 months. And obviously i wasn't studying a second language exclusively, I was learning science, engineering, humanities, doing sports. I was having a rich learning experience while acquiring a second language at a rate that seemed magical. There are very important conditions that allow adults to learn on par with immigrant kids. One condition really. Temporarily abstain from native language and dedicate all the remaining time to a second language. Regarding deliberate study of grammar. Nobody was teaching me any of that. Well, I had a tutor for a few sessions, but then a school decided to forgo tutoring because our progress was too fast to keep track of. Yes, our progress, because there were 5 of us. And we all exhibited remarkable rates of improvement. We were separated to different dorms and we weren't allowed to communicate. As far as explicit knowledge of L2 grammar, I FORGOT everything I knew as a beginner. I ACQUIRED grammar the same way native speakers do and I was reasonably grammatically correct. A Grammatically correct sentence SOUNDS right, incorrect sounds funny. I don't know any of the textbook grammar explanations. That being said, studying L2 grammar using ONLY L2 when you are more advanced could be a USEFUL tool, though not entirely necessary. Cheers 🍻.
Toddlers speak very poorly for several years before achieving fluency in their mother language. Later, they have their speech polished in school with grammar lessons. This is a natural part of the process of learning any language. If you aren't speaking in a language, then you aren't learning to speak that language. Practice speaking and writing for output, reading and listening for input.
I was somewhat on board with at least some of your points but when you said you can "check your pronunciation with IPA charts" I lost it. This is super misguided for a number of reasons: 1. IPA is a lot coarser than human speech. Consult any of your IPA sources about words containing らりるれろ and you'll notice that they just describe it as [ɾ]. The reality? The Japanese /r/ is super complex and its exact realization depends on a number of factors, including whether the mora is utterance-initial, whether it is followed by an /i/ (i.e. り), whether it follows an ん etc. ん is coincidentally even harder to transcribe in IPA and many sources just write /N/. Good luck figuring out which realization to pick. Oh and of course the vowels: tongue position is a continuum whereas the IPA vowels are just a finite set. You may get close to the true vowel but even if the same IPA symbol is used for a vowel in two different languages, they are regularly pronounced slightly differently. 2. IPA cannot properly represent pitch accent. While I have seen some notation where IPA is used in combination with the overline to denote high morae, this still falls flat when it comes to higher level concepts like tone terracing. 3. There is no resource that gives you the IPA while also respecting connected speech. Connected speech is something like palatalizing the t in "don't you", i.e. saying it something like "dontchu". Connected speech happens A LOT in extremely many places in every single language. If you pronounce every word as though in isolation, you will sound very foreign. The way different words connect in speech is an essential part of a language's phonology but no resource is going to give you the exact IPA while respecting every single connected speech phenomenon. Doesn't help that this is a seriously underresearched topic. TL;DR: IPA does NOT tell you how to pronounce something correctly. Even if you are an IPA god who can pronounce every IPA symbol 100% accurately, you'll still sound non-native in most languages.
Just because a resource isn't perfect doesn't mean it can't be helpful. Dictionaries don't tell you the exact meaning and nuance of a word in every single context, but does that mean you shouldn't recommend them to be used? IPA is especially useful to people that don't get as much input or already have a bad accent. There are so many people that are just not even aware of sounds and the IPA can help people be more mindful. IPA is not a perfect tool. You still have to get exposure to lots of native speech.
I disagree with you on that, while IPA has some problems for language learning, like how much it's system for transcribing tone/pitch sucks, or how some symbols are incorrectly used on the case of many languages, i do think it can be a quite useful tool in aproching a native pronunciation in a target language or even in mimicking other accents within your native language, at least for me, learning IPA had a very big impact learning to better produce certain sounds and picking up subtle diferences and quantifiyng aspects of pronunciation and speech that I used to find very blurry, and also in disvinciliating pronunciation from the phonetic system of my native dialect. I don't think basing all your pronunciation on IPA is worthwhile, native input is important, but it can be useful in noticing certain things you hadn't picked up on if you decide to iron out some pronunciation mistakes. People with a decently in-depth understanding of phonology, alongside those with a musical background and those who spent an inordinate amount of time learning tend to be ones able to get the closest to native pronunciation in their target languages.
@@precisa_ I don't think they meant that IPA is a bad tool. I think the idea was that just looking up IPA transcriptions of words while you read, as promoted in the video, isn't really enough to have good pronunciation.
Hi, I agree that the IPA charts do not perfectly represent human speech, but that doesn't change my recommendation to have a look at them. As others have already pointed out it can still give you a better idea/get you closer to how certain letters/sounds etc. are supposed to sound. The goal is not to perfectly learn the sound, but to be(come) aware of the differences. So while the Japanese /r/ may not perfectly be described with [ɾ], it'd certainly be closer to reality than just pronouncing it [ɹ].
In my opinion, people who are sitting through hours of shows not understanding anything or very little are not following refold. Refold says to tolerate ambiguity. But it also says to do everything you can to make whatever you enjoy watching comprehensible. Watch it with NL subs first. Intensive immersion sessions where you look up everything. Look up the episode synopsis beforehand. People who are sitting through hours of tv without understanding anything are wasting their time. And it’s not refold’s fault. The guide is there for everyone to read and it’s not terribly difficult to understand. Heck it even has a short version for people who are not familiar at all with it. If someone goes to the refold sight and tried to read the full guide but stops reading after the first few pages thinking they see where this is going and now they think that they can just absorb a language by just sitting in front of a screen doing nothing but listening to gibberish then that’s their own fault. I’m not saying Refold is perfect. Your point about the community being Japanese learner dominant is a good point and something that it could stand to acknowledge and possibly improve on. But i don’t think it was necessary to spend that long talking about tolerating ambiguity and framing it as an issue with the ideology of the method.
It's called Migaku and it's a browser extension: www.migaku.io/ They have amazing language support for Japanese & Cantonese. (Their Korean and Mandarin support is supposedly pretty good too, but I can't verify that myself)
As a full-time working person with a large circle of friends, a social life and multiple hobbies, I just couldn't relate to a community that includes people who say they spend 12+ hours a day consuming their target language and then give advice on how to learn languages to people who only have 1-2 hours a day, which is just ridiculous. For me, Refold would only make sense if I had a lot of time every day and was willing to invest that time in learning a language (this is was the roadmap imo indicates as a given fact). The latter would never be the case, as even if I had the time, I rather build my carrer or business and social circle and when I take off a longer time from responsibilities, travel the world and make precious memories.
Idk, personally, I think that just means it's not very important to you. There's no magic way to become fluent in a language faster and yeah, if you'd prefer to spend your free time doing something other than learning the language, you're *probably* going to learn a lot slower. I agree that "DO 30 HOURS IMMERSE A DAY AND MAKE 400 BILLION CARDS A DAY" in an elitist tone is terrible advice but I think it's reasonable for them to assume that the language is important enough to you that you will *make the time* to become fluent in it within a reasonable amount of years.
Wow I just found this video and you expressed exactly my thoughts about refold. So many of your points of view I also had them in the back of my head but for some reason I didn't realise I needed to listen to them from someone else. By the way, what is your native language? You give me strong German vibes but your English is really good!
I think when I tried the ~tolerate the ambiguity~ it really didn't work for me. I thought it was a me pproblem, but I agree with your point there. Specially in reading.
Definitely not a you problem. I think a little bit of ambiguity won't hurt, but most people don't even get to that point until upper intermediate or maybe even advanced level, because there will always be so many unknown words.
I appreciate someone providing a different perspective on the Refold framework. You do make some good points. However, I am not a die hard user of Refold, I found the framework refreshing because it provided a framework - scaffolding if you will. I see Refold as a framework for acquiring a language. Refold came from the Mass Immersion Approach (MIA) as put forth by Matt vs Japan. As one comment stated - a re-work of AJATT with more accessibility. I don't limit myself to just the Refold method. I do my best to incorporate ideas and frameworks from other people such as Stephen Krashen, Steve Kaufman, Olly Richards, and Rocky Rodriquez. What Refold has pushed me to do is listen more. I agree that the Refold community does have some die hard adherents - the Refold way or no way. I do think Ethan and contributors are open to improving their framework. I would suggest people checkout their RUclips channel as well. They do have discussions about the method and other topics. Overall, I would recommend people checkout the framework and see what they can take away. Refold does provide A WAY, NOT THE WAY, to approach language acquisition using a deliberate approach.
I agree with you. I made so much more progress by doing the opposite of what Refold was suggesting and maximizing focused learning over immersion. I don't see a point to maximizing immersion unless you're very far along. Beyond the points you gave, the Refold communities are also toxic and possess a zero-tolerance policy on different opinions on... well, anything. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think Reddit actually had the less toxic community for once.
I think the major disadvantage of the immersion approach is that as adults we are really not as good at picking out subtle details of a language as children if such details do not hinder our understanding, for example, my native language is Chinese which lacks tense and inflection, but not noticing tense or inflection doesn't hinder our understanding most of the time, so I am the most likely to make this kind of mistake, so for adults, we need really some sort of deliberate learning or some conceptual understanding of your target language. it is really not as different from practicing a sport or learning an instrument when you are not a super genius. I would actually go as far as to suggest that we should popularize some basic linguistics in the language community (syntax, phonology, and IPA) which at the beginning stage of learning a language can help us to analyze our target language to make it more comprehensible and at a later stage can help us to fix some of our more subtle mistakes.
Totally agree with you! It's good to have a more balanced view of the refold method out there on the internet for people to see. Btw a "timely investment" would be an investment made at a good time, e.g. if the stocks of a company were about to skyrocket, it would be timely to invest. I think you wanted a phrase like "a big investment of time". Only commenting to try and be helpful, because i know if it were me I would like to be told :) but apologies if you prefer not to be corrected. Btw your english is really good :)
I have some things to say on these matters: 1- 4:34 where? 4:44 ok. 4:50 yes. 5:00 yeah. 5:10 yeah. 5:45 you still haven't pointed out what the problem is exactly, you say it's the "heavy amount of jp learners" but why is that even a problem? And then you say that tools don't exist for other languages, and... yeah?? Is that a problem with refold?? No, it's just what happens when there's limited supply of people developing language tools and huge demand for jp tools. 2- 6:14 Why do you say limited to? 7:27 nobody said that tho?? Refold just said it didn't have to feel like work, not that it must *always* be fun 8:29 who is that, tell me their name so I can get them on a hitlist. 3- Hmm. I think that there's nothing wrong with sitting for 4 hours watching an incomprehensible show. Is it wrong to not have fun? No. Is it wrong to not understand something? No. Is it wrong to use a slightly inefficient method? No. There's nothing wrong with doing that. 10:57 you're contradicting yourself. First you say we shouldn't stress over comprehending every word, and then you say we should decrease comprehension. So which is it? Do I lookup every word or do I not look-up every word? 4- I agree. Output isn't *that* detrimental It will internalize. But it's not *that* hard to get rid of later. I don't think it prevents you from speaking. Just get to 2C, stay there for 1 or 2 months, and then start speaking! 15:03 wait is there somebody that _actually_ expects people to shut up during class? 5- 17:16 Wait, hundreds?? Let me calculate for a sec: 10 years. Every year 120 days of school time Average time per day is 30 minutes. (Some days we have no English study some days the teacher's out) 120 × 30m × 10 12 × 3 × 1000m 36000m (36000/60)h (3600/6)h (600)h Okay, fine... 🙄 I guess I did have *600* hours of English education, but half of the time we were just repeating stuff! We probably spent like 10% of that time just on the present simple tense! So I still school only gave a minor benefit, like, 3 months' worth. Though it did give a lot of bad habits, can you believe the awful pronunciation we have gone through in those 600 hours?? Rant done. 6- I straight up don't agree. 21:34 have you considered that some people (a lot) are learning languages for their careers? It *does* matter if you reach fluency in 2 years vs 10 years. Overall, this section is way too clickbaity. 7- I agree It said "aim for" not "you HAVE to read at 2-3%", so basically it's saying "look for comprehensible things to read" which you can't really disagree with, can you?
Desafortunadamente te entiendo poco, estoy adquiriendo el idioma (ingles) por metodo refold, desearia entender lo que estas diciendo saludos desde Mexico
Refold literally say you have to learn grammer, on top of immersion and vocab. It is not totally immersion immersion is consumption of content. Working on skill and repetition is fun. Refold will adapt and grow based on new info and research.
What Refold says and what the community does are two different things. While it's true that they do mention to learn some grammar and vocab, they don't mention it nearly enough in comparison to all they have about immersion. And this is reflected in the community. Many people don't see grammar or vocab study as a beneficial thing to language learning, so they don't do it.
I'm always wary of any approach that claims to be the "one true way". Effective language learners use a very wide range of approaches that suit their preferences and abilities. For example in adults there is a very wide range of ability to learn by induction. People with strong induction abilities can do well with immersion-focused approaches. People like me, at the opposite end of the scale, need to spend more time on structured vocabulary, grammar and output work (which I personally enjoy - because I feel I'm getting a handle on the shape of the language). It's interesting to note that agencies like the FSI, who have studied effective learning with thousands of students over decades and simply have to produce results, use an eclectic approach. Obviously there is a good deal of focus on input, but also on structured learning and output. For most people, the middle path will work best.
People follow Matt and his methodology because he sounds like a native speaker.. they don't wanna follow someone that still sucks at the language and speaks like a robot after 20+ years of language study.. a native like level is unrealistic and I guess people have to lower their expectations.
Yea it's always a good idea to listen to people that have reached at least some level of proficiency in a language, but I think it's also important to look at the factor that went into reaching that level. The level Matt reached is certainly impressive, but he did spend many years studying, obsessing over getting better and just generally spending a lot of time with Japanese, which isn't exactly reflected in the methodology he preaches.
@@emisnikki-polygloddess We human beings like to be polite and politically correct so we lie to each other with a happy face.. nobody wants to hear the truth.. learning a new language is extremely time consuming and in most cases a waste of time.
"because he sounds like a native speaker" Problem being: how do we gauge whether that's true or not? I don't doubt that he has reached some level of proficiency in the language. But what exactly that level is and whether it's anywhere near native-likeness, I honestly have no idea. All I can do is rely on other people's opinion, and even then I rarely have a benchmark to compare their opinions to. E.g. if I hear someone call Steve Kaufmann's French "native-like", and then call Matt's Japanese "native-like", then I'd have a rough idea of what exactly they mean by that, because with French (my native language) I'm in a position to have my own opinion already. But otherwise I just don't know how I'm supposed to gauge his level in a language I'm just a beginner in. That disconnect opens the door to all sorts of deceptive practices for language gurus who have a financial interest in portraying themselves as being better than they actually are. In the meantime, I just follow a few refolders recording their own progress in languages I'm proficient in, just to see whether there's really any remarkable difference in outcomes compared to other methods I've used. So far no dice.
I don't know what to think yet of audiobooks / reading with listening to the audio at the same time. I'm not sure if I would say one is better than the other, it really just depends on what you want to achieve. They are definitely different activities though.
15:15 Anti-school is the informed position you just haven't heard of Short; ruclips.net/video/JEO8DEj6oXs/видео.html Long: ruclips.net/video/FLPuCWX5atM/видео.html
My opinions have altered over the years. AJATT proposed an immersive framework for learning. It's one interpretation of comprehensible input. A lot of progress can be done with quite a little. Periods of immersion sound good but it underestimates the ability of the brain to process language and generate both grammatical knowledge and vocab learning between study sessions. My opinion is knowledge is not obliterated. Sometimes it is consolidated in sleep and cleaning the house. Comprehensible Input is a good guide. Once you're bored or tired it's time to move on. Dont scrimp on sleep or exercise. Ever. In the early days less time is probably better. Some every day. Language learning should be pleasant. Your brain is your friend. It's already primed to acquire languages, no trickery or forcing is required. Also falliw time is OK. Consolidation is OK. It all helps in the long run.
Totally agree with that! I actually meant to make a video about the construct of "consistency" in the sense that we don't need to do X hours every day in order to see progress - a few times a week is fine if that's all we can do. And breaks can absolutely be beneficial, even necessary and I think most people underestimate that.
Great video! What most disturbed me with these Refold type immersion learning sites is that they are always presented by guys who have zero exprerience of actually teaching a language, nor do they have any professional education of teaching. Why? Because if our goal is to promote immersion the Refold style, you don't need any skills. Just ask people to watch hours of anime and play with an anki deck, and make them pay for this "advice". I speak five languages and I consider myself to be fluent in three. But never would I consider myself to be a teacher, nor have the skills to teach any of the languages I master myself. The immersion itself is a false promise on learning a language without any active effort, just by watching tons of anime and listening to crappy jpop. Instead of learning basic grammar ,speaking in a real situation, reading, or writing something correct and meaningful. Think just of all native english speakers who can live decades abroad without mastering the language. Passive listening is just not enough. Learning a language takes time and a lot of work. Not just hours spent with the target language but effective hours where you try to make an effort. That said reading is hugely important, but only when you understand what you are reading ,the words and the way they are connected in a meaningful way, grammar.
I can tell from your comment that you haven't done more than skim the site, and probably know basically nothing about Refold, but I'll entertain you with a response anyway. 'Because if our goal is to promote immersion the Refold style, you don't need any skills. Just ask people to watch hours of anime and play with an anki deck, and make them pay for this "advice".' - Refold does not advocate for watching content without trying to understand it. Many articles break down exactly what to look for when consuming content, and how to tailor it to your level. Every piece of advice in Refold is entirely free. The Anki decks are what cost money, and for the record I think they're very overpriced for what they are. 'The immersion itself is a false promise on learning a language without any active effort, just by watching tons of anime and listening to crappy jpop. Instead of learning basic grammar ,speaking in a real situation, reading, or writing something correct and meaningful.' - Refold is very clear that passive consumption of content will not help you very much; focusing on understanding will yield far better results. One of the first things it tells you to do is learn basic grammar. The difference is that the goal is to recognise it in content to help with comprehensibility, not be able to use it yourself. It's also very clear that reading is important, and you'll likely understand more when reading than listening. They recommend getting your reading level slightly ahead of your listening purely because you'll learn more vocabulary that way. As for speaking and writing, the point is to wait until you at least know what the language is supposed to sound like before you start coming up with your own sentences. Not doing that is like learning to play piano entirely by reading sheet music without ever listening to the piece you're trying to learn. 'Think just of all native english speakers who can live decades abroad without mastering the language. Passive listening is just not enough.' - No one at Refold is claiming it is. These are also the kind of people who likely consume exclusively English content at home, and talk to most people they know in English. I have my own share of problems with Refold, such as the elitism which still exists in the community thanks to Matt's influence, and the very overpriced flashcard decks. I also think stage 1 is paced quite poorly. Pushing through the initial 1K words is a hump a lot of people don't get over. Luckily Matt's gone from the company now, and they're making a bunch of steps to improve.
I absolutely love your channel and your honesty. You always tackle very interesting and original topics unlike many channels which seem to copy/paste their contents. Well done!
I am with you on the power of reading. But man, it sure is intimidating seeing a paragraph of Japanese text. Just have to go through it one character at a time.
Oh ya in the beginning looking at a page of all Japanese can definitely seem like an impossible task to tackle, but don't worry, with time you'll learn to chunk words and phrases and learn how to "skip" certain characters, as your brain recognizes them as one unit rather than single characters stuck together 💪
I think Refold does invent some of the details of their method, in order to differentiate themselves from just pure immersion. But overall, I think 95% of their method is right. Just immerse, and make your immersion as comprehensible as possible.
comprehensible input ftw! (unfortunately some people seem to forget about the comprehensible part, haha) 😅
@@emisnikki-polygloddess Yes! S. Khashen says comprehension should be your level + 1, witch makes sense. Matt on the other hand says you have more opportunities to learn if your comprehension is around 30%-50%, and that makes sense too. But at the end of the day, Khashen's advice is superior in the long run, because you'll have less stressful moments, trying to enjoy something you don't understand well.
@@learninglanguages744 It depends on personality, I think. I prefer listening to more advanced, but real life stuff even if I understand way less than zoning out listening to simplified things I already know I understand really well
@@LimemillYeah, it's definitely personality. Motivation is a huge factor, and for some people it might just be demotivating.
I just made a video about refold. I have some criticisms too.
I completely agree with you about reading. It’s probably the single best way to learn a language. Obviously you have to listen and speak but you can achieve an enormous vocabulary just through reading. After 5 years of reading French I understand 99.9% of the words when reading classic French literature. And, yes, I regularly measure my percentage of unknown words. I’m sure other people can achieve that with enough time spent reading, especially if you love to read.
I'm confused I can read japanese not great but I hardly understand any listening I have to see subtitles
@@ashmorris4067 Same for me.
If you are aware of measuring things, how much words are unknown to me in a content I understand 80?
@@endouerick7519 I count the words on the first ten lines, take the average and multiply it by the number of lines. I assume that every page has the same number of words. A typical book has about 300 words per page, so 20% unknown is 60 per page. The classics often have a smaller font with 400 words per page, so 80 unknown words.
@@ashmorris4067 And the sad part is that no one told you the brutal truth: there will never be a moment when it "clicks" and you can understand what you can read. Rather, you have to build your listening skills up from scratch essentially. Be prepared to put in 1000 hours+
10:30 this is actually a really good point and something I realized at one point myself. I conditioner myself to be so comfortable with not understanding the content I was immersing in that I would catch myself not even attempting to understand. I would basically just watch whatever it was passively and my brain wouldn’t even try to decipher what was being heard. I don’t think this is an issue with the method itself so much as a danger of becoming too comfortable with not understanding and falling into the trap of thinking you don’t need to make any kind of effort and can watch shows purely for enjoyment. If you get too comfortable I think your brain just tunes out the dialogue as background noise, so I think you need to actively pay attention so your brain realizes that what you are listening to is important enough to be puzzled out. I think this is an advantage of doing sentence mining, because every time you make a sentence card, you are signaling to your brain that this is important information. All this is in Refold I believe but I can see how the community might focus too much on being comfortable and having fun and neglect the focused attention component.
Yea you're absolutely right! There has to be a balance between enjoying what you watch, but you really can't neglect being engaged and mindful of what you're watching. And I agree that it's not a problem inherent to the method, but the way LL is marketed in the Refold community.
You've managed to articulate many of the grievances I've noticed myself following the Refold method fairly religiously. Like you I'd still consider myself a Refolder (seen you around in the German discord), but I think the roadmap needs another rework with these points in mind. I've added about an hour of reading per day and my German vocabulary has skyrocketed. And heavily wishing I'd started outputting 6 months ago, but what can you do except know better going forward and for the next language. Great video!
Yea I think it's easy to fall into the trap of wanting to do it exactly like the Roadmap says, when in reality it's supposed to be used as a guide, giving you a direction. I have definitely become more open to experimenting and changing things up a bit here and there as I'm learning new languages. 👍
Reading is part of refold.
@@emisnikki-polygloddess Yes -- I think Refold is pretty good -- but your video is right on target -- where Refold breaks down a bit -- is in the details -- I think they try to make some things black & white -- when they really aren't -- almost everything you covered is a matter of opinion (like at what point should you start to speak? Refold btw: does say you need to practice speaking -- the $1M dollar question is when?). If you try to be dogmatic with Refold it will fail you.
A key point to make concerning the 5th point at 15:11 of discrediting education, is that modern language teaching actually does immerse students in a natural process as a large part, if not the majority of the lesson. It's a question basically of what kind of methodology you've been getting. Good language teaching classes focus on a constant fusion of the meaning with the language, so the conveyance of that meaning is the priority always, and needs to be happening pretty much all the time, and also with every student simultaneously. Basically comprehension deepens and broadens and sharpens during the class, with attention to the features and forms of the language happening in relation to making better sense of it, so any noticing of structural issues comes in in that framework where it's fused with meaning, and then there are elements of processing and expressing meaning in relation to the same, with any structural issues being related to how to correctly communicate, so its immersion in meaning all the way through, with attention to feature and form being inseparable from that, and focused on meaningfully and manageably in that context. It's true that many courses, and many materials used for those courses, are still unbalanced somehow, often being too analytical and learning form too distant from meaningful communication (either receptively or productively), but better courses and materials do do that, and the trend has been in that direction for decades. True, it's a bit slow, because stuff is created to sell, and students themselves often prefer the look of more old fashioned courses and materials, because they miss the point that by far the biggest thing is the meaning of the language, and less so the 'grammar rules'., etc., etc., that they expect to see and understand throughout the courses. They kind of do it to themselves by creating a demand for a more mechanical approach to learning languages, but language teaching professionals often surprise them by doing things differently. Sadly this even can create conflict, where language students, or school admin who don't know the process properly, think the teacher 'isn't teaching', but 'just making us read and listen to and talk about stuff a lot', etc., etc., etc.
Idk, I took a college language class last year and they still were just doing textbook teaching and no immersion. I think Refold is still a somewhat good change in philosophy for people that still don't have access to language classes that do include immersion, because there are still many places that are completely outdated.
I was already a veteran language learner before refold came along so I was looking to integrate what made sense to me and discard what didn’t. It isn’t the first time I’ve heard the argument that you need to be super careful about learning bad habits while speaking. I’m personally against it. I think mistakes are inevitable but people who keep trying to improve will fix their mistakes over time while people who think their output is good enough won’t. They’re obsessed with this idea that you’re going to build bad habits but really you already have bad habits from your native language and it’s going to take a lot of work to mitigate this. I agree with you 100% that reading is fantastic but many many people don’t like reading even in their native language. Good luck convincing them to read a foreign language.
Yea I think that's a good strategy for any LL method really. It should be treated as a guideline, rather than the ultimate word of truth. If someone doesn't WANT to speak then that's fine, but I don't think you need to avoid it like the plague just because someone claims you'll end up with a bad accent. As you said, the difference seems to mainly lie in the willingness to improve/awareness of ones current ability, though there seem to people that are generally more in tune with how things *should* sound, and I'm not yet sure how much of a factor that is... 🤔
Then they don’t need to acquire a language then. If someone wants to LL and hates reading - then find a new HOBBY, ok bye !
I like being literate, personally, but that’s just me. 🥴
@@caffeinated4671 I never read much books by myself but when I started language learning and reading books in my target language, I read all the time.
@@Geo_Babe well, children have acquired languages and they certainly don't read.
Honestly the Mandarin companion graded readers are very compelling and use very few words (starting at 150 words). It's definitely possible to write a graded reader series for beginners (who know a few hundred words) that incrementally builds up words hitting a 2-3% target. That said, I also generally read things outside the 2-3% range. Lookups on my phone are definitely not instantaneous, and if there were too many words to lookup in a sentence it would definitely be a problem, but it's still pretty doable.
That said, 50% unknown words sounds very challenging and frustrating even with a pop up dictionary. I think I'd forget half the words that I'd looked up in the sentence by the time I'd gotten to the end of it. That's literally every other word unknown. On the other hand, it's also pretty hard for the percentage of unknown words to be down that low since the most common words are so common.
Wow it's great they exist for Mandarin. I read some really compelling ones for Spanish too, but I have unfortunately also read quite a few boring ones...
Balancing comprehension and compellingness can be hard, especially in the beginning. Some people have a really low tolerance for unknown words and some people would rather enjoy a good story, even if that means looking up every other or so word. I think the sweet spot is somewhere in between at around 10-20ish % (only with a pop-up dictionary though!)
Maybe it's a recent addition, but a large part of the refold roadmap deals with reducing the ambiguity/incomprehension. Obviously not every language will have perfect tools available for doing this (like graded readers or subbed children shows), but the same could be said about every learning method.
wow, you really made some great point in this. I believe refold has gained approval mostly due to its inclusive 'just immerse' philosophy. From my experience, some people are simply not willing to put in the work to learn something. The learning process is arduous and you fall down and get back up several times. It takes courage and a bunch of other super powers. Additionally, people have different learning curves and it might not be enough for certain individuals to 'just immerse'. It might take them many years
ts also to do with, telling ppl to listen to hours of incomprehensible input per day doesnt have any good proof it works in itself.
@@MElixirDNBdid you read the guide? There wasnt anything about "incomprehensible input" They recommended to find comprehesible input from day 1
@@Eng-vz7dw no they dont, you clearly havent watched Matt's videos , they recommend filling as many hours a day as possible with input, and most of it you will have no idea what youre hearing. Refold does not recommend only comprehensible input either, in fact that is impossible for anyone new, you have no vocabulary or understanding of anything. Matt is misusing an idea of immersion and pushing a methodology that "works" but has plenty of wasted effort/energy. Traditional lessons combined with immersion for a beginner are much much more effective than just plain immersion/anki cards.. also output early on is not bad as matt implies.
@@MElixirDNB also you re learning vocaab and grammar that increases your comprehension as well. Babies also learnt a language with 0% comprehension. I recommend you to watch this video as well ruclips.net/video/yeOmc1nRGG4/видео.html
@@MElixirDNB I learnt polish to a good level when i can speak and understand pretty much fluently. So i think this method actually works
Hey, great job addressing all of this stuff! A 30 minute video with so few cuts and just talking is an impressive feat by itself!
Sorry my post is gonna seem ridiculously long... but I like to be thorough in these things. 😂 (it's not to hate, it's just because your video has a lot of stuff in it).
The point at 6:49 - that sometimes it's fun just to notice stuff etc., I would say that Refold just hasn't publicised their views on that quite as well, because Ethan actually helped me work on a video that specifically talked about having fun in a language you're still not good at. The video was kind of a cross of one that I had wanted to make, and the fact that Ethan wanted to be able to point to a video addressing your exact point here. I won't link it but it's about 5 videos back in my timeline (with the thumbnail "I suck").
It's true that Refold misuses the term "ambiguity" and when Matt initially said that, he may have misunderstood the word or he may have been using it to just mean "ambiguous TO to learner". His English wasn't actually that great when he was doing a lot of the earlier Q and As that formed the basis of Refold. (Yeah, I know he's a native speaker but his English sounded like someone who went through school half in a different language... because he did.)
But it's not really a big deal because everyone in the community has come to think of "tolerate the ambiguity" as meaning what it means in that context. I think what Refold is saying is: You won't increase comprehension by JUST knowing more words. I don't think they're saying "You will get to 100% comprehension by watching and doing nothing else". There are quite a few different pieces of Refold addressing that very question (e.g. "How much time spent watching/reading vs studying words/phrases?")
When it comes to the early output thing... I'm not sure who is banning anyone from speaking. Maybe there are some elitists in the community but no one has come after me with a pitchfork even though I'm a confessed early outputter and recently stated that I'm trying to go to Mexico after what will be barely 5 months of learning Spanish. Again, in multiple Q and As and videos on his channel, Matt has addressed the difference between output based on what YOU want to say, vs just copying certain sentences from natives etc. Again, maybe they need to make it more public, but I don't think they are as draconian on it as you seem to think.
About the hours per day thing... I actually think that someone who learns for 4 hours a day may actually learn MORE than twice as much as the person who learns for 2. Maybe that's extreme but certainly 2 will be more than twice as good as 1. It's complicated to explain but basically picture a car on a hill going slowly up, but whenever it stops (i.e. you stop learning for the day), it actually slips back a bit. By going up for twice a long, you also reduce the amount of time you slip back down the hill. I think a LOT depends on the methodology and the language in question (e.g. is it Chinese for an English speaker, or Spanish for an Italian speaker?), but from my experience, the weeks that I did a LOT of Swedish were the ones that pushed me to a whole different level that I had previously felt was a door that continued to get further away.
I am also not saying that it's realistic to spend 8 hours a day, or even 3. I have kids and work for myself (which means working a LOT).
At the moment I spend an average of about an hour a day on Spanish. But I do think I'd progress more than twice as fast if I spent 2.
I agree with your point about reading. To be honest, I'm not good at reading without any audiobooks or anything, and I mean even in English. Not because I can't read, but because I have destroyed my attention span like many others have this century.
It's just hard to get yourself to keep going, but I do think it's important, EVEN IF only from a mental strength point of view. So because I can barely get myself to just sit and read in English or Swedish, I don't much like my chances in Spanish. I need to meditate more, use my phone less and basically develop a better attention span. But I do think that at first, reading along with an audiobook is great.
I don't know what Refold says about graded readers but yeah, I don't have a problem with graded readers. I think children's books are normally way too hard. I was easily a B2 in Swedish before I could comfortably read children's books.
I also completely agree with you about new tools that allow you to look up words quickly. One problem I have with many of these tools is that they need an active internet connection. Honestly, my best chance of doing ANYTHING is when I go into a different room and turn my modem off.
Anyway, again, great job addressing all of this. I'd be interested to see what Ethan and the team had to say about it.
It was interesting to hear her opinion about the Refold method and then yours, both are intelligent and interesting opinions, and thoughts. Thanks for being lengthy! :)
I will need some time to think about these things myself as well, but my first reaction to the 2 hours vs 4 hours thing is that maybe you are just talking about something different, or in other words, both of you might be right.
Learning a language after a while comes down to knowing a huge amount of words. Grammar, pronunciation, etc., etc. are important, but eventually, you will be able to communicate about everything only if you know a LOT of words, and that's what will just need a LOT of time. She is using Lingq (that I'm using myself, too) and Steve (the creator) talks about this often, and I tend to agree.
Now, if you accept that, then the next thing you have to be aware of is that as you know more and more words the frequency of those words in spoken language is going to fall drastically. It is not hard to learn the first few thousand words as they appear so frequently in the language, but later it is the opposite way around. This means that it is harder and harder to learn new words by input as these rare words appear way less frequently -> therefore your time spent learning evidently cannot be as effective as earlier.
Hm... tho now I feel like she wasn't talking about this. As then it wouldn't make much sense to compare learning hours PER DAY.
But if that's what she meant, then your statement can still be true at the same time. Tho there I don't know about any evidence, just anecdotal experience as far as I know.
Hi and thank you for having taken the time to write this thorough response (and for watching the video in the first place).
Before I respond to the individual points you made I thought I'd just mention that it seems like I mixed my criticism of the Refold Roadmap with my criticism of the Refold community, which in hindsight I probably shouldn't have done, because it led to confusion about which one I was actually talking about for each of the points (I noticed this after reading many other comments who pointed out similar things).
I saw the video you mentioned and I agree what you say in it, I just think that there are still (too) many people (in the Refold community) that don't share the same understanding of what fun means, which results in them watching "fun" things, that are highly incomprehensible (which I still don't understand how anyone could have fun not understanding any of what's going on, but maybe that's just me), and then get disappointed when they make little to no progress, despite putting in the hours.
You'd be surprised how often people just watch stuff because it's fun and they don't like grammar and don't like this and that and won't do hardly anything else. I agree though that that is probably the minority of the Refold community these days and that most people have adopted a more balanced approach.
There used to be some really harsh no early output policies in the early Refold days, and some traces of it still show here and there where people are discouraged from speaking. It's just the remaining underlying attitude or undertone(?) that comes with some of the messaging, not so much going after anyone with a pitchfork anymore. I have admittedly also not seen any of the Q&As, so I can't speak for what is said in them ...
The whole topic of diminishing returns is super interesting, because what you say seems to be a plausible scenario. I can totally see where you are coming from, and the car analogy makes a lot of sense. Other arguments I have also heard are that if you spend 2 hours a day you are more likely to encounter words more often than if you studied just 1 hour, which would lead to more repetitions faster, which would lead to more reviews of the same word faster, which would equal more progress... in theory. But I still believe that there is an upper limit to this, where diminishing returns start to kick in, I'm just not sure yet where this theshold would be. Definitely something I want to think about and look into more this year.
I also feel you on the attention span problem. I just recently started to read more again, and it's definitely rough, but I like reading too much to give up on it. I do better when I don't have audio with my texts, but it seems a lot of people like to have audio while reading. Not a problem, but I still think it's a different activity than just reading.
I also agree with your points on children's books. They are just too hard for someone who barely knows some basic words and sentence structures, graded readers truly are a blessing. And I also wish that more readers/tools supported an offline mode or something. It would definitely help to avoid distractions as much, because really what else do you do without internet 😂
Thanks again for sharing your thoughts, I really appreciate it!
Looking forward to watching your videos in the new year 🎉
@@AndrisGameDev Hello! I just got around to replying to the comments, and what you are saying about word frequency is true, but it is not what I meant in the video.
As I typed up my response to Days of French ’n’ Swedish I realized that maybe the problem isn't that we fundamentally disagree (maybe we do though) about diminishing returns, but about at which point they happen.
Here are just some of my thoughts:
It is quite obviously true that someone learning for an hour a day will make proportionally more progress than someone learning just 30minutes a day. I also agree that someone studying for 4 hours a day makes more progress than someone just studying for 2 hours a day, I'm just not sure whether at this point it's still proportionally more (aka twice as much). I understand though how one would come to this conclusion as it makes sense in theory. What I've been wondering though is that things like attention span, input =/= intake, diminishing returns should play a role in this. Especially for the diminishing returns it's really hard for me to think of any other skills where past a certain point you would still get the same returns. If you think of sports for example, you won't get twice as strong, fast, etc. if you spend 4 hours at the gym vs 2 every day.
I haven't fully thought this through yet, but it's definitely an interesting topic, as both sides seem to at least make somewhat sense.
@@emisnikki-polygloddess Thanks for taking the time and clearing this up, I really appreciate it! I'd love to read some scientific papers about this being tested! If you happen to find something about this in the future, definitely let us know about it, please. :) I wish you a great year!
@@AndrisGameDev I'm afraid there won't be too much (any) research on this exact topic, but I'm planning on looking into it and I'll definitely report back my findings 🧐
Refold has already come a long way, but it definitely still has a lot of room to improve! Very comprehensive video!
I'm glad you liked the video 🤭 Excited to see where Refold will be in another 2 years
Yes -- the high level philosophy that Refold has are really good -- it's basic immersion / comprehensible input theory -- where it breaks down is they then creates a pretty dogmatic framework -- and the framework is just their opinion in a few cases (in something that can't be proven). For example: Not speaking initially is a good idea -- but we all know that you have to practice speaking to learn how to speak. So when should you start learning to speak? Ask 10 different people and you will get 10 different opinions. I say (my opinion) -- the 11th person -- is build up a vocab of about 4K to 5K words and then add speaking practice to your routine, i.e. don't start too early -- and don't wait forever.
And learning to pronounce is not speaking practice -- IMO you should learn to pronounce from day 1 as you build up your vocab.
I deep dove into the refold stuff a year ago and watching this video is really strange for me. All the "wrongs" in refold derive in my opinion from "ambiguity". Some of the people misinterpreting the refold guidelines isn't really refold's fault. Why haven't I interpreted those that way? Why do I have a different idea?
These title would be more accurate:
"Some mistakes those make who use the Refold method" or "What you might have gotten wrong about Refold".
I've already been in my Japanese learning journey on and off for a few years now so I would call myself an intermediate to pre-advanced level.
I discovered Refold recently and I do agree with the comprehensible input part, where it encouraged me to take the plunge and start consuming more native media with the TL subtitles, focusing more on getting the meaning and not stressing out about getting everything 100% first time. This works for me because I already have a basis of vocab/grammar which allows me to understand at least 40-50% of what was being said.
I think what makes immersion hard for beginners is the lack of toolbox words in the TL that they already know. I think there's no shame in looking to traditional language study resources like textbooks to learn those basic grammar structures and vocab until they get that down. I think immersion with native media is better placed for intermediates and above.
I do agree with you that their advice not to speak until fluent seemed contrary to other language learning advice I've heard, even from other comprehensible input practitioners. I have heard people say hold off on writing until fluent particularly for languages with different scripts (because you can easily waste time learning how to write kanji strokes when it's more useful to learn reading listening and speaking first), but I think speaking is crucial to learn early on because what's the point of language? To communicate!
I think the hardest part of learning a language when you live in a country that doesn't speak it is finding native speakers who will help you practise their language at your level. I haven't tried the refold discord yet so not sure if it's possible to find language learning 'parents' there, but that's been my main struggle at the moment for language learning. My listening's thankfully been improving thanks to the immersion technique by Refold, but my speaking definitely needs more work.
Kudos to you for speaking your mind about Refold! I thought you raised these problems with great clarity and thoughtfulness. I'm well acquainted with Refold's methodology and have a few things I think are off as well. As you mentioned, making early output a taboo because it will lead to poor speaking habits I think is way overblown. The only way you would cement bad speaking habits is if you didn't study the phonetics of the language at all, don't do any listening immersion, and only communicate with other non-native speakers who also speak with poor pronunciation or poor grammar. This is a very specific circumstance that I think most learners would have enough common sense to avoid. Will Hart is a great example of someone who did early output and had great results learning Mandarin Chinese. I also think the reluctance to study grammar is somewhat misguided. I think if your target language is similar to your native language, you could get by and pick up grammar from immersion. I'm learning Japanese and as an English speaker, if I didn't spend time studying grammar, I'm sure that certain grammar structures would never be acquired because they are so different from my native language. It could take hundreds or thousands of hours of immersion before a grammar structure becomes clear, if ever, but if I spend ten minutes studying the grammar point, it basically clears up immediately. Honestly, I think some of these strongly held opinions in the Refold community is a product of the dogma of MattvsJapan. He helped bring immersion learning to the forefront, which was a great benefit to the language learning community, but he has such a strong conviction that his way is the ONLY way, it created a little bit of a toxic culture in that community. Just my perception! Would love to hear your thoughts on this.
I totally agree with what you're saying. Especially the point about grammar study is very true. We don't know what we don't know and studying grammar can fill those gaps a lot faster than waiting for days, weeks or even months to come across a specific construction/phrase, in a specific context, while also being (mentally) ready to pick up on it.
Refold has luckily come a long way since I filmed this video and they changed and adapted their stances as they gathered more feedback from their community (and once Matt became less of a core part of Refold), which is think is great!
I don't know if it's just me, but I genuinely think you have to learn the language in your own way. It's okay to listen to others' tips and avoid some of their mistakes, but at the end of the day, it's your own journey! You'll eventually figure out what works best for you. I really can't bring myself to follow someone else's steps, even if they're helpful. I've tried that before, and I found myself getting really bored and almost giving up on the whole language.
Thanks for the video ❤
I think a key point in this video that shed missing is the emphasis on intensive active immersion. Refolds method says intensive active immersion takes work. Trying to genuinely have fun with that is next to impossible but if you embrace the pain and challenge and that becomes fun.
With that said the one area I think needs to be updated is the emphasis on understanding multimedia like Netflix shows without subtitles before moving on to output. Multimedia these days has shown to be difficult to understand without subtitles even in your target language. She also brings up a great point about there being a lack of content for less popular 2nd languages
For me, learning grammar on my own was really hard, but taking classes made it much more bearable. People say that school is too inefficent, but I think that its really useful because it gives you direction while you lay the foundation for your knowledge, making it easier to move on to immersion and sentence mining afterwards.
I totally agree withy you! I think taking classes with this mindset is probably the best thing you can do, especially those of us who like a little more structure and direction in our learning journeys.
26:56 I disagree with that translation. Selva goes better with "jungle" as translation. The options shown go better with "bosque".
Hey, that's me at 13:13 :) I agree that at some point, you do have to start speaking in your target language to improve your speaking. That said, I think the point at which you're sufficiently ready to speak varies based on your target language and the language you're learning. Personally, I'm 683 hours into my Russian immersion (including 484 hours of listening), and as a native English speaker I know that if I put that same amount of time into French, I'd be a much farther along with French since it's closer to English than English is to Russian. Just my 2 cents!
How is your Russian today? How many hours have you invested so far? I have watched your update, but the newest one is one year old
@@kingofthejungle2894 Hi there, I just posted a new update on my channel last week! I'm somewhere at an A2 level for listening and reading if I had to guess. I've put just over 1,000 hours in so far, though frankly my ability would be higher than that if I had spent the past 100 to 200 hours focusing on acquiring new vocab instead of just listening.
In my experience with Refold, the idea is solid, it can just lack the nuance sometimes necessary that may throw people off. And be too harsh on straying from the set path.
One example is how it emphasizes T+1 sentences. If you're a beginner not much will have just one unknown word. That got me stuck for a while because I try and follow things exactly.
Or downplaying grammar. Sure you don't NEED it. But it helps massively speed up comprehension in some cases.
All that being said, I would still tend to be hard on classroom learning in general. There's a reason why Americans all have to take a language in highschool, yet almost no one can speak anything besides English.
There's a reason Japanese are required to learn English, and yet almost no one can speak it. So it's important to have "good" classroom learning, because there's a lot out there that won't help at all. Korea and Europe are examples of successful classroom learning.
Diminishing returns is not really true the US Army has a program that forces people to learn languages and they do it at an incredible rate.
I was going to point out how many government agencies use *both* immersion and drills (including early speaking) to teach languages.
Yes - my point exactly. I think there are some diminishing returns - in the sense that I think after 4-5 hours a day -- hours beyond that are not as "efficient" just to burn out. But you are right the Army with their DLI program in Monterey proves that people can learn languages (at very high levels of proficiency) in a very short period of time.
I also believe that the Army practices total immersion meaning that most of the time they are not allowed to speak in their native language. French Foreign Legion I believe practices total immersion as well -- believe me when you have to speak in the target language to speak -- you're going to learn how to speak.
I agree with a lot of this, but I completely disagree with your take on subtitles. Reading target language subtitles is extremely hard for certain languages, like Japanese in particular. I actually think it's harder to read Japanese subtitles than it is to read a book (depending on the book obviously, so I mean harder than reading a level appropriate book) in Japanese, because it's so hard to get your Japanese reading speed up high enough to read the subtitles while they're on screen, at least in my experience. And while I agree that you should read books as well, I think this is actually an advantage of subtitles, since it forces you to work on your reading speed and really concentrate on what's going on.
I agree with this point. Furthermore, I think something she left out is the "purpose" of why someone is learning a language in the first place.
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It makes a lot of sense for someone who enjoys reading books to read MORE books as thats what they'll likely want to do using their target language. In other words, reading contributes directly to their real life use of the target language.
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However, if someone's goal is to watch anime or speak the language, it makes LESS sense to read without having any audio to support it. If this person does NOT enjoy reading in the first place and would NOT pick up a book to read for fun, why would developing their reading skill help them in any meaningful way? And I don't mean this to say "it's fine to be 100% illiterate", I'm just saying you don't need to spend a lot of time practicing and getting good at reading if you don't read in the first place. At what point realistically would someone like this actually need to read anything other than like a restaurant menu?
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Alongside what you brought up, I also believe people should have a solid baseline ability to read, but unless you want to, there's no specific need to specifically go out of your way to read more if you don't like reading.
Hello! I guess I don't exactly understand your point. In the video I say that I don't think reading subtitles is the best form of reading, because you're not really reading yourself, you are just following along the text with your eyes. And you're saying that in Japanese reading subtitles is extremely hard, because it's hard to get your reading speed up high enough (or as I would put it: you can't yet map the sounds that you are hearing to the characters you are seeing fast enough, which btw, I totally agree with).
But then why would we recommend something that is *harder to read* to beginners who are just starting to read (who are arguably also the worst readers, because they're super slow, barely know any words etc.)?
Being a good reader actually does influence the other skills too! You learn to parse the grammar of the language, you're learning many many more words than if you never read, it exposes you to different ways of expressing ideas...
But ya, if someone absolutely hates reading then obviously that's not the way to go... 😂😅😬
I learnt to speak and listen to Mandarin from just watching chinese tv series and movies and having chinese friends growing up. I wasn't even trying to learn Mandarin. I am also not sure how many years it took since I just acquired the language naturally. I can't read and write mandarin and am still not interested in learning Mandarin.
@@emisnikki-polygloddess IMO watching videos with subtitles (in target language) is somewhere in-between reading and watching videos without subtitles. Reading is the pure most efficient method for learning vocab -- but watching videos with subtitles does have its uses.
How I use it is just by occasionally looking at the words to help me catch a word I just can't get just by listening alone. So, I look at subtitles as just assisting with the listening process. My problem with watching videos without subtitles -- is that in the beginning it is just too hard -- subtitles are like training wheels -- until your vocab and listening skills are good enough that you can finally ditch the training wheels.
This is all opinion but when staring I think it should be like 90% reading and 10% watching videos -- and then gradually maybe transitioning to about 70% reading to 30% listening. I do agree with you reading is so efficient -- you just have to do some listening -- as I feel it is also a skill you have to develop -- being able to process sounds and words quickly.
During covid I discovered Matt’s RUclips channel and really bought in to the immersion doctrine. It really felt like every other way to learn a language had flaw after flaw that immersion learning fixed. Plus it was “fun” and “fast”. So I started learning Japanese because that was what everyone was learning. I did it for a good bit, I got through the entire 1k rtk deck over a couple months and started the tango n5 deck. The immersion was always an after thought to be honest. It was so un enjoyable I told myself I could put it off till I had some more vocab and my higher % known would finally make things comprehensible. But this would ultimately be the cause of the end of my learning.
I straight up quit learning Japanese because I had a talk with myself of “the refold guide says you have to be immersing 5+ hours per day to become fluent within 2-3 years (anything longer felt like forever at the time), your basically wasting your time if you aren’t working on it that much so are we able to commit to that or not?”
(Just checked in the refold guide (I still knew exactly where they say this lol) and they still say 5/5 active/passive to reach fluency in 2 years, 3/3 in 4, and 2 hours is the minimum to “make real progress” and doesn’t even give a years estimate)
The answer obviously was no. I couldn’t bring myself to watch hours of content and listening to podcasts with all the free time I had understanding maybe 5%.
I remember rewatching Matt’s “having fun in a language you suck at” video regularly because immersion was hours of, as you correctly point out, incomprehension, not ambiguity.
And refold is very elitist in the way where I felt (and still do) that traditional learning will never work (or at least is super inefficient/counterproductive in comparison) so it’s insane immersion or nothing. For me it would be nothing.
It’s been 2 years since then and it has really been hitting me recently how what 2 years ago felt like literally forever kind of flew by, and had I stuck with it (even for 1-2 hours a day) I could’ve made a lot of progress. Obviously not fluent but a far place from where I am now, sitting monolingual with regret.
I love languages and linguistics, I want to learn a language. I think it’s just so cool of a skill to have.
This video really helped me look at the refold methodology in a more reasonable way.
I’ve been really into kpop recently so might start fresh with Korean.
Still struggle to free my mind from the feeling that if I’m not immersing for hours as they recommend am I really learning?
But I guess I should save my future self in a few years from feeling how I feel now with Japanese.
Thank you for making this video.
You started learning Japanese... because everyone was doing it? I think this was the ultimate cause of your quitting Japanese. Why? Because you had extrinsic motivation but lacked the actual intrinsic drive to support it. Motivation, especially the kind that comes from other people doing cool stuff and you being inspired by it, is a great tool. It helps you start doing stuff because you know it can be done (if he can do it, so can I). But motivation is a fleeting thing. At some point it's gonna go away and you have to be ready for that which brings me to my next point.
You should ask yourself "why am I doing it in the first place?". The answer you provide is the actual thing that keeps you going. That thing can weather storms that make other people quit like no other, because it comes from the inside. It's intrinsic to you. It's the core reason you're passionate about something. You are driven by it and you can't help but be driven by it. Would you say "everyone was doing it" really is that too? Somehow I doubt it.
Matt had an earlier video, on his second channel I think, where he's at the start of his journey and he's talking to his future self. He says something like "hi future me, see ya in 5 years when we've both mastered Japanese and watch raw anime with no subs". Watching that vid, you just know that he had some near-infinite source of motivation inside of him by the way he speaks and talks.
I'm not trying to bash you or anything. I totally agree with the main points of the video too. And I, too, discovered Matt and became obsessed with his vids. But before all that I had an absolutely undying desire to be good and fluent at the language. Way before I started looking up how to learn it.
@@rivershy I agree with what you are saying and I think the original comment reflects that. Learning a language, especially through intensive immersion will never work without strong motivation, period.
I wrote the first comment kind of on a whim on the way to class one morning, so I left out some details. I was required to pick a language at school to complete my 2 year language credit. The choices were spanish, french, mandarin, or japanese. I had taken spanish and french before and didn't really click with them, mandarin's tones and 20k characters were a bit offputting, which left japanese... which just so happened to be the same language all this great immersion stuff I had discovered was centered around. So I chose it.
Did I have the motivation to go to a advanced or even intermediate level, clearly not. But I will acknowledge in retrospect that the 2 mandatory years of language classes were a breeze because of the RTK and minimal vocab/grammar I had done.
Since writing the original comment I have actually started learning korean, a language I do feel significant motivation for, and its been great. I have been doing 20 new anki words a day for 40 days straight, and as much grammar as I can. This is already past my peak of japanese and I can feel it in the immersion. I'm already at the point where I don't feel the need to have native subs on because I see a word, or even a whole phrase/sentence I understand pretty often and it keeps me engaged.
Still now I think asking beginners to do 3-5 hours of immersion a day is a bit excessive and more likely to turn new learners away. I'm definitely not doing that much: Most days I do my anki 30min, watch some grammar videos 30mins, watch a kpop variety video 30min and read a graded reader 30mins, and some days parts get left out because I'm busy. With that I feel like I am making tons of progress. Could I be making MORE, sure I guess, but there are obviously diminishing returns which probably aren't worth the burnout potential this early.
All in all, you are right to point out choosing to learn a language just because "everyone else was" sounds dumb because it is. My story in reality is a bit more complex, but either way a lack of internal motivation is not what you want as a language learner.
Now with Korean I see that firsthand and I look forward to the rest of my language learning journey.
@@whatplan4335 Glad to hear you found what works for you. I agree, 3-5 hours is a bit much for me personally. Actually I've been doing 20 new words of Anki every day too and today was my 40th day since I started so I got a bit spooked when I read the exact same numbers from you haha.
My routine is somewhat similar too. 80 minutes of Anki (vocab + a bit of kanji, just to learn the meanings), a grammar vid and 20 to 60 minutes of graded readers every day and it's working for me also. I used to watch way more grammar vids but lately I kinda got tired of them so I keep it to a minimum, some days not watching any altogether.
I already started noticing I'm getting faster with reading. Although easy anime with jp subs is still a mountain I can't climb yet, given my measly 1k vocab. So I substitute it with an occasional beginner podcast episode now and then. I'm also thinking of starting to consistently read more, as I feel 20 minutes a day is a bit low for how much I enjoy it.
btw do you mind sharing a few kpop songs that you like?
That's why I'm doing immersion and going through Genki textbook to build foundations and grammar alongside just incomprehensible immersion.
Also the more you understand in the sentences the more fun it is, that is pretty motivating imo.
I think this girl and refold both are correct in their own ways. If you do refold while building structure with elementary textbooks and a little Anki (I mean little) a day with consistency you have the bag. Once I can start reading basic things then I can immerse even more and better, so it only get's better? ha
@@rivershy sorry didnt see this reply until now. Hope your learning has been going well. I just finished this beginner stories book today so that was very exciting.
as for kpop:
here are my favorite groups: newjeans, csr, lesserafim, fifty fifty, ive
good songs to try out: newjeans-omg, ive-after like, lesserafim- blue flame, 5050- tell me, csr- shining bright
kpop has like countless subgenres so if what I like is not your thing its not your thing no big deal
Correct me if I'm wrong on the ambiguity tolerance part, but "aquiring" language is when your brain _subconciously_ acquires it. You can definitely _learn_ certain words or grammar points, but you acquire the language via the input hypothesis with your brain creating the neural pathways and figures out the patterns. Also if you are doing early output, is just hurting your pronunciation in the long run. Output comes naturally and easily after having a good bank of input inherently.
Yes, acquisition happens subconciously, but only if we feed our brain the right type and amount of information. If all it took was "input" then everyone would be fluent after watching a few shows, which is clearly not how it works. Our brain takes up information best, when only a small amount of it is incomprehensible (i.e. i+1 or 1T etc), which is hard to get by as a beginner. So in the beginning (and sometimes beyond that), it is super advisable to _learn_ some words and grammar patterns, to make input more comprehensible which in turn allows for better _acquisition_.
At the same time, Refold is right that we shouldn't stress about understanding every little detail. My criticism is just that Refold has pushed this view to such an extreme that many people now watch things that aren't comprehensible at all, which is not an ideal situation for acquisition to happen.
Hello! I wouldn't consider myself a "refolder" (like I don't follow refold to a tee) but I do use it for reference every now and then. I agree with most points of this video!
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The only thing I'd like to make a comment about is your comment on traditional education.
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The first thing you say is that "people underestimate what they accumulate over 4 years of classes". I can't say for who "people" are but I personally don't underestimate what I've learned over 10+ years of Chinese while living in Hong Kong. Again, me personally, but I am very realistic and upfront with my Chinese ability and how bad I am at it. I was born and raised in Hong Kong, yet I cannot order from a Chinese menu, tell the Taxi driver to go to a Chinese address, or watch/listen to Chinese films and music without English subtitles.
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The next thing you say is that "school is essentially priming your brain, which is also what Refold advises". So the thing with this is that Refold is free and allows learners to achieve much better results, school costs a lot of money and does not allow learners to achieve Refold's results. Both will prime your brain, but when you lay out the pros and cons, it's clear which has the advantage.
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As a third point, Krashen has quoted a study comparing traditional skillbuilding vs comprehensible input (search "Krashen EDiversity" for his lecture). The research showed that students who focused on comprehensible input performed BETTER on grammar tests than students doing traditional skill building.
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Fourthly, from my experience, schools tend to lean more towards making sure you pass a test than actually helping you develop any real skill- yet they lie to you as if they're helping you develop some skills. What ends up happening is that they are inefficient at both. Take JLPT for example, JLPT never tests your speaking. Traditional teaching will follow the curriculum laid out by some JLPT textbook and fit some speaking practice into it, and the end of the year/semester/curriculum students will take a JLPT test. So here we have students learning not what's necessarily the most common/useful stuff to learn, but instead, just random bits of info someone arbitrarily decided would be at a certain level. Then we also have people trying to pass the JLPT without solely focusing on the JLPT (by taking away the speaking). We end up with people having sub par JLPT scores, sub par speaking abilities, and not much actual skills.
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Finally, and this is my biggest problem. Traditional teaching does not try to actually teach people the language the way it actually is. They always try to use some textbook that innacurately represents the language. Japanese for example- so many schools use Genki, which is just known to be absolute dog water. Why do schools not take this into consideration and look at other options ("Making Sense of Japanese" by Dr.Jay Rubin, or Cure Dolly's Japanese Structure curriculum based on Dr.Rubins book)? I believe it's because they're not interested in actually giving you the education, but more interested in following their curriculum, not innovating, and just taking your money.
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I definitely agree that Refolders who attack "studying" in general instead of just traditional skill building is not such a great thing as studying can learn to more comprehension, which then can lead to more acquisition. My belief is that these people confused Krashen's words of "studying does not lead to acquisition" and take that as "studying does not help at all".
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To conclude, I think schools that follow a really traditional skill building way of teaching and uses outdated textbooks when clearer, better methods exist; those schools DON'T get enough hate and all learners should be heavily advised to stay AWAY from them. As an alternative, any method that engage students with immersion combined with teaching more useful structures of the target language leads to much greater results- whether that be a more modern language school that uses this approach, or Refold.
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**EDIT:
One thing I have a problem with in your video is 13:22 where you use screenshots of people questioning their own fluency and saying they're "not fluent" but make the comment that "they can't speak the language". I have no clue whether the contents of all those videos actually have people saying they can't speak- but from an outsider's perspective, this comment feels very disingenuous. Just because someone isn't fluent, doesn't mean they can't speak the language. They may be able to convey what they mean in a slow/not smooth way- this means they're not fluent, but they can definitely still speak it.
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Again the contents of the video may support your point, but the screenshot don't help here. It looks like you made a point and went out of your way to find screenshots for it instead of doing the research first and making a point. Furthermore, you CAN actually find many examples of people immersing for a lot of time and being able to speak perfectly fine.
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I agree with your main point that more time investment doesn't necessarily = more results, but this one point in particular is a miss for me.
Thank you for this very in-depth comment, lots to unpack!
I don't know your exact situation, but from what I was given if you were born and raised in Hong Kong and have had 10+ years of language education and you still claim to have learned nothing then (without trying to sound offensive) I don't think the learning method was the only problem.
I think the next point might be a misunderstanding because of our different understandings of what we understand as course (because I don't think I ever specified it in the video). What you said is absolutely valid for paid courses and the like, but many people (in highschool/college) are not in a situation where they get to choose whether they do or do not take a course. I think in those situations it's a lot better to think of the course as an aid that can at least help you prime the knowledge than to think of it as this completely useless evil waste of time.
Your following two points I'd give the same reply as I already did pretty much. Yes, school is not ideal, their methods outdated and they're very focused and having you produce visible (gradeable) results. It's far from ideal, yet there are people that managed to get to a decent level with school and self learning. I don't think this way of thinking of school as a waste of time is going to make classes more enjoyable/helpful.
Besides, classes can offer accountability, which is arguably one of the biggest struggles for many learners (staying consistent etc), and can aid as a guide, or a primer, as I said before.
Lastly about the screenshots and the fluent/speaking the language part.
If after over 2000 hours of learning the criteria for whether a language learning works or doesn't work/is effective or not is "they may be able to convey what they mean in a slow/not smooth way- this means they're not fluent, but they can definitely still speak it", then by that standard there are many many methods that work just as fine as Refold. After over 2000 hours of investing our time into something I feel like we should have higher standards than "yea they can kinda convey what they mean".
There are people in the community that reach fluency (usually not strictly following the Refold guide) sure, but there is also a suspiciously high number of people that have spend thousands of hours and show very underwhelming results for the time they invested (for what Refold promises).
I appreciate the time you took to write up your comment, it definitely gave me some things to think about.
Most of the problems with Refold stem from Matt trying to repackage AJATT to appeal casual learners as a means to make money, which just fundamentally doesn't work since AJATT's entire ideology is aimed at a demographic of people who see fluency as mastery over the language and is one of the reasons why Matt was even drawn to it in the first place. Matt himself got as good as he did in Japanese by spending most of his time reading in the beginning and became heavily focused on listening when he wanted to try and perfect his accent which is not representative of what kind of narrative he started pushing once he realized he could repackage AJATT into a dumbed down version that is more broadly appealing in MIA and then repeating it by dumbing it down even to appeal to almost anyone with Refold, by advocating that people instead spend a lot of their time listening early on to avoid instilling bad habits like sub-vocalizing the incorrect enunciation of words.
Though I will say that some of the issues you bring up like people expecting to get results from doing nothing but white noising Japanese or whatever other language for multiple hours a day has never been something anyone was ever encouraged to do, and that is something that any experienced AJATTer/MIAer/Refolder/whatever pointless tag someone refers to themselves as/etc, would always make abundantly clear to be completely unhelpful, because looking up what you don't know is the basis of turning something incomprehensible into something comprehensible.
Hey can ı ask you some questions?
That is a really good point. While I'm all for immersion becoming more popular / accessible to casual and/or traditional learners, it seems like a lot of the methodology that Refold adopted from AJATT hasn't been adjusted yet for differences in time spent/available to learn a language.
I agree that white noising is not something anyone should be encouraged to do, but there still seems to be a number of people that just want to enjoy their time, or are very sold on the idea that enough input will be sufficient to learn the language. I might've said this somewhere before, but a lot of people also seem to forget the "comprehensible" in "comprehensible input".
No, it literally says in the Refold guide to not look stuff up.
Nice video. I just made a similar comment about reading on one of Matt's videos. Reading early is grueling (I buy an English version of a book and the target language version to read them sude by side as needed). But it allows you to take all the time you need to fully comprehend every sentence. Doing an hour a day, I finished my first novel in 70 days. The 2nd one in 36 days. My third in just under 30 days. I'm now averaging just 4 word lookups per page, no longer needing the English version to cross reference, and understanding extremely well at probably 120 words per minute. Watching native content with target language subtitles is already plenty comprehensible to be fun and effortless for hours a day on top of the reading. And both reading and TV continue to get more fun every day because of that hard work at the beginning.
To me, massive amounts of comprehensible input is the key, but active, intense study is the express lane to reach comprehensibility faster and shave many months off of your time to reach comfortable fluency.
Wow this sums up the whole reading process really well & I so agree that reading and listening should work in tandem.
And I'm glad you managed to reach a level where you can read native material comfortably 👍
This is the most balanced video I have seen on languages learning.
I am far from an expert on rhe topic but what has never convinced me is too much focus on comprehension vs other skills. This falls short of a very important concept about knowledge and skill building acquisition known as interleaving. To me a bit of grammar and bir of pronunciation at the beginning can only help.
However I did not understand your point about the importance of read only. I believe reading an audio book while listening is a better practice than reading only. I would be interested too hear why you do not think so.
I think for Japanese specifically, some of the worry of the Refolders vis a vis reading is that you can very realistically be in the process of memorizing a vast swathe of kanji, starting with the meaning rather than the reading, and the chance that you're going to subvocalize those meanings in your native language is super high because you'll be looking at 紙 and your mind's eye will immediately jump to seeing the word "paper" instead of seeing the word かみ. Which again shows Refold's primary target to be Japanese learners, since a native English speaker learning Spanish, for example, isn't really going to have a problem seeing the word "papel" and subvocalizing the English word instead.
Dk, I’m always reading kanji not understanding them, maybe it’s another problem, I see kanji, I try to recall the reading and only then I understand what does it mean most of the time
I learned English mostly by reading and to this day my accent is complete dogshit, so nope.
Huge fan of graded readers, so agree with you. The one thing though sometimes it's hard to find or purchase graded readers -- so kids books IMO to have their place due to accessibility. My girlfriend gave me a whole box of kids books in Portuguese that she'd used to teach her daughter -- and I devoured them at the beginning of my language learning journey -- they may be a little less efficient than graded readers -- but they work -- and they are a lot easier to find.
I did have one graded reader -- and loved that book -- but yeah just not as easy to acquire or as inexpensive as used kids books.
Very impressive young lady! Lots of common sense and wisdom at such a young age. Earned a new subscriber.
20:40 I agree that reading a book is WAY better than reading subtitles BUT if u r going to watch a TV show w/out ur TL subs the learning will be less than if you use the TL subs. And It's an easier approach to reading if u are just listening, like refolders tend to do.
what app do you use for reading? like at 28:45 or 26:55
LingQ
It's a website called LingQ!
Hey, just wanted to say it is amazing and refreshing to see someone with a balanced mindset that has more experience with a number of languages talking about stuff and not making up any scientific theories out of their head. You are amazing, for me you were right about 100% of the stuff you said. I think people who made criticism, for what I read down here, are just people on sunken cost fallacy being in deny.
Appreciate your insights. What's the e reader you use here in the video 29:25
It's called Migaku reader; they make software and resources for language learners. It is paid though.
I’m not doing Renfold but a comprehensive immersion program that doesn’t want you to speak until like 600 (but more like 1000) hours. If I just watch the input at 3 hours a day I’m earliest six months before I speak. I understand the concept as I don’t know much vocabulary to form sentences after 30 hours in but a vow of silence doesn’t make sense to me.
So I’m trying to figure out how to use the Anki decks for vocabulary, I have a basic grammar book I’ll be studying daily, I’m reading a little, words I’m not sure of I’ll look up as you suggested and I’m repeating words and learning short phrases, eventually I’ll find a native speaker or tutor to chat with.
Prior to the internet, when access was much more limited, people learned languages through classroom study. Most who say they studied for years, never got to use it in real life settings, if they did while learning traditionally I’m sure it would have been very helpful.
I guess I wish there was a program that leaned on CI while understanding balance is needed.
The theory behind not speaking is that you only acquire a language though comprehension. Speaking is just a side effect of your comprehension. So speaking should have no benefit and only potential harm. However, if speaking allows you to engage in a comprehensible conversation that would be a different story (see How to acquire any language NOT learn it! by Poly-glot-a-lot). I think the main take away is not to worry about your speaking level, speak when you need to, but if you want to get better at speaking you need to improve your comprehension mainly though more immersion. Weather or not this is true is up for debate, but that is the idea.
Interesting takes. Thanks for sharing, and I tend to agree with a lot of it. Especially the more intensive study style being more useful in the beginning, and the importance of reading.
Thank you Luke, I appreciate that 🙏
Wow I didn't realize refold didn't put emphasis on reading. I've been doing immersion for almost 1.5 years after I found out about refold and I think I kinda subsconsciously don't follow refold as it is despite using the guide as my starting point. After finding refold, I try look more things up and ended up watching a lot of talks from Stephen Krashen which really, really put heavy emphasis on reading that made me assume refold also does.
Maybe all this time I was only listening Stephen Krashen advice 🤷♂️
I think the way you are using the Refold method is actually the way it is supposed to be used! It's a guide, not the laws of language learning 😂
But yea, the Roadmap doesn't put a lot of emphasis on reading, but it's just as a valid of a form of immersion as watching TV, so I'm glad you are doing what works for you 💪
@@emisnikki-polygloddess Not that familiar with them -- but yeah I was also surprised that they don't put heavy emphasis on reading. For me immersion is lots of reading!!
This video was fantastic. A lot of great points argued well and sums up some problems I had with refold but hadn't really put fully into words yet.
I'm glad you liked it 😊
I'm not a huge fan of the refold community since I think they over exaggerate its effectiveness though I do believe it to be better than going to school. I did get to fluent Chinese reading and Cantonese speaking from purely watching Chinese Dramas with Chinese subtitles. Never ever have I read a Chinese book of any sort or taken any classes. (Before I discovered refold)
I've also taken 8+ years of French in school and private tutors, and 5+ years of Japanese in college and private tutors and my french level has basically been reading level only cause that's all we did, I'm not able to understand any french speakers. For Japanese due to me having already learned to read Chinese the kanji was easier and there were some words that were similar sounding. I do think school was a waste of time cause we learned all the grammar and conjugations that has nothing to do with my goal of becoming fluent. I learned to become fluent in Chinese without ever knowing any of the grammar rules. If you think about it that's how we all learned our native languages too. If I spent all the time learning how to conjugate words and grammar for french and Japanese in school and focused more on immersion immediately like I did with Chinese I'd probably be fluent in those two languages by now too. Most native English speakers would fail grammar tests that non native speakers take
I'm about ~280 hours into immersion for Japanese and what you described at 15:16 is basically me. I finished the JP1K anki deck and just went straight into immersion with 0 sentence mining due to lack of time, and I'm finding myself already able to listen to podcasts on my commutes and understand ~30% of what they are talking about. I know the refold methods website kinda doesn't emphasize on the importance of reading enough, but if you watch all the youtube reviews of people who are doing the refolds method, and go on their discord, everyone there emphasizes how important reading is and how it gives you the best return on investment on your time spent. I need to get on this myself too but as you said I don't have much free time so podcast on my commute is the best medium for me right now, and I struggle to find interesting material to read, NHK easy news is to the extent of what keeps my attention.
In the end just like any other hobbies, do the method that makes you keep showing up / practicing. To some people having fun is important, while to others doing the boring grind makes them feel productive, and some people like my wife need to pay someone to kick their butts and keep them accountable by showing up to class.
It works. Find me a native speaker who didn't learn their native language via immersion.
Hi, thanks for your comment. I really like your last paragraph and wished that people would take Refold more as a guideline, while still being curious about what might and might not work for them.
Good luck with your Japanese (and I hope you eventually find some time to read 😉)
@@Maidaseu my whole comment was about how immersion works, not sure what you are trying to say.
Well said, I agree with basically all of your points.
btw what is the tool/website shown at 29:11 and elsewhere in the video?
It's called Migaku! They have a whole bunch of tools for languages learning; I pretty much only use their reader and their Anki extension, but it's been such a different reading experience for Japanese. The screen you see at 29:11 is in Cantonese though.
Subtitles: In English shows subtitles usually match very well, but subtitles do not usually match when listening in Spanish. I have found a few shows where the Spanish spoken matches with subtitles in Spanish, but they are rare.
How fast do you think u can learn to read japanese using lingq?
Sorry to be that guy but what is the app being used a 18:22 😅
It is called Migaku! It's a browser extensionthat lets you do a whole bunch of stuff - I pretty much only use their reader function, but they're working on adding a lot of other functionality to make immersion easy
While I agree that immersion is very beneficial, my eyebrows totally left my forehead when I, too, stumbled over the 'words will magically pour out of you'. Was this former strict output restriction stance based on any real data? I grew up in a multilingual environment and am pretty decent in listening comprehension in a couple of languages, but never have sentences started pouring out of me. Many fellow third culture kids, who share the same language background as I do, can attest to this. It is a common topic among us that by neglecting output, we have never gained fluency in conversation.
where does one aquire these translated e-texts?
I think about diminishing returns like this: yes the returns are diminishing but I think you can cover more ground this way, meaning someone who only does 1-2 things over a couple hours will likely not be as well rounded. Someone who reads for two hours, watches shows for two hours, and reads articles or watches youtube for 2 hours will probably be more well rounded overall.
At the end of the day people should put in the time they have but i still think more is better
Well thought out points.
15:45 “took classes for 5 years learned nothing” I call bullshit
I’m studying Japanese again but I’m high school I took 2.5 years. I don’t consider myself as skilled as I was back then but even if my skill was less than it was, the classes gave me familiarity with the language. Even if you don’t build a lot of skills, formal education of a language will give you familiarity with it that will boost your ability to study. Idk how to describe it. But it’s easier to study on your own after taking classes for a year or more.
I find that your points are valid critiques, but they are not specific in what they are criticizing. I.e. they do not specify clearly when they are criticizing the main road map, the larger body of refold associated content, or the community.
Some of the criticisms (e.g. the "fear or output", over-prioritization of 'fun', underestimating the importance of intention in active immersion) also seem to be aimed at misconceptions of the community that are contradicted by either the main guide or other official publications.
More generally, I think that many of these flaws are present only when focusing on a particular point of their recommendations while ignoring the wider context they were made in. (Note: This should not be construed as saying these criticisms are not important, they are, but I think they should be re-framed as problems with the clarity of the guide rather than problems with the 'method' as a whole. Ironically this is the same problem with Matt's earlier videos--that one had to watch hours of content from different videos to get a good understanding of what exactly he was advocating for.)
As an example, take the point on the importance of reading. Your criticism seemed to be rooted in the community (that there are many Japanese learners with an interest in Anime) and the refold guide not dedicating more space (or importance) to reading in the acquisition process. While these are both things you can criticize (although the first seems more like ad hominem against the relevant group rather than a critique of the 'Refold') the second feels predicated on hyper-focus on that particular section (ignoring other relevant materials). Looking just at material from the guide, they don't seem to imply that reading is not effective, on the contrary, it states that more immersion is better, and it's suggestions for active immersion and study inherently favor written content where dictionary lookup is simple and fast. Leaving the guide, other refold publications such as Q&As repeatedly state that the particular balance of listening and reading for a given person is dependent on their goals, that more listening based immersion (especially early on) may lend to better pronunciation in the long run, whereas reading is extremely effective at improving your language ability (he likened it to a drop of ink in a glass of water--even a little bit can have a drastic impact), it does have an impact of how you parse the language (which can lead to poorer grasp of more intricate pronunciation (more precisely, writing is an abstraction of the spoken language and there is inherent loss of information (i.e. many different ways of saying things are transcribed the same)). Matt also points out that he mainly did textual immersion (he states that was reading various novels including classic Japanese literature) and his problem with his approach was that his reading ability far outpaced his listening and speaking ability. He does not imply that it is not a powerful tool for language learning, in fact, he suggests the exact opposite--that it was so powerful that it takes more listening immersion relative to reading immersion to have balanced listening/spoken language ability.
Additionally I think that it is important to consider that the aim of Refold is to teach normal people an effective way to learn languages including teachings about mindset and more general aspects of the approach (which are inherently not the only way of learning). This further implies that the guide is not some sort of manifesto of scientifically supported facts about language, but rather a call to informed action. Thus suggestions to do things like 'be comfortable with ambiguity' need to be considered in context. It is a mindset to help you stay motivated to keep immersing even when you know you are missing something and not get hung up on analyzing everything. This is an important suggestion because analysis can only produce hypotheses; only immersion can verify them. This should also be understood with the sister suggestion of getting the metaphorical low-hanging fruit. Assuming this is saying you shouldn't try to understand understand or that you should be complacent with not understanding feels like an uninformed bad faith interpretation to me.
Similar things could be written for some of your other points (although, I don't have the time).
In closing, I think that the 'Refold Method' has a extremely effective and somewhat adaptable approach to language acquisition. Despite this, the central resources should be more comprehensive, as the current guide misses many nuances discussed in the broader set of Refold resources. However, as with most everything else, the key to understanding the finer points of Refold is to get a good understanding of the underlying principles, as they are more important than any of the specifics.
Hard to find accurate subtitles? If you use Language Reactor, they have a speech to text feature that gives you accurate subtitles (and yes, it works well)
I agree, especially, with your point about time. Watching Matt’s streams can be quite discouraging because he attributes a lot of his success to binge-watching 8 hours of Japanese content per day while avoiding English like the plague. Which is not only unrealistic, but unappealing. I like English lol, I don’t want to feel repulsed by it.
However, on your other point, I think the roadmap is more than clear with what it means by tolerating ambiguity. For so many of us immersion learners, that map gave us direction. It gives you strategies to keep up your comprehension while the language still sounds like gibberish. It tells you to look the plot up ahead of time, google words while you watch, and always focus on noticing the words you’ve already learned. I don’t think it suggests you just sit on the couch, put on a show, and let the words float in one ear and out the other.
I do appreciate this video though. The Refold community can feel a bit culty/elitist at times, and it's a good reminder that other methods of learning are valid and can lead to success.
Yea, the thing about Matt is that the 8 hour binge watching probably helped *a lot*, but I believe that that is not the only reason he managed to reach such an extremely high level. I think some other factors to be considered is his passion to get better, even after he reached "fluency", his willingness to actually grind those hours, but also having had formal classroom instruction (despite claiming that that didn't change much) and having been to and living in Japan.
I appreciate that you pointed that out. I think what I'm starting to notice with many of the comments is that I didn't always make it clear whether I was criticizing the roadmap, the community, or both. Because I agree that the roadmap provides many aids to combat/tolerate ambiguity and make immersion a better/more successful experience. However, people in the *community* have taken that to mean "sit on the couch, put on a show, and let the words float in one ear and out the other", which is what I was criticizing, because I believe that that leads to a lot of wasted time, frustration, minimal learning...
Thank you for your friendly comment 🙏
I heard that Michael Jordan liked burgers...
@@emisnikki-polygloddess Yes -- he did 8 hours of "inefficient" learning (worth maybe 3 hours of "efficient" learning) which he backed up by 4 hours of "efficient" learning doing other things. 🤣
My girlfriend is American but didn’t socialize much and learned most of her words though reading, and she honestly pronounces like 10-15% of her active vocabulary completely incorrectly… in her native language, though, her vocabulary is bigger than the average Americans, so it’s kind of a trade off, that being said I’ve decided to start reading in my TL because pronunciation be dammed I’m tired of my vocabulary being so small lol.
As with everything, it really doesn't have to be one or the other. I think anyone doing a reasonable amount of listening while reading will not end up with bad pronunciation.
The "Tolerate the ambiguity" part is what I needed to hear. Thank you.
I think a lot of people could benefit from realizing what ambiguity actually is and how it's different from incomprehension. Glad you liked it! 😊
22:14 manga?
It's not a manga, it's the Japanese translation of a book called "The Joy of Mathematics - Discovering Mathematics All Around You" 数学の楽しみ、身のまわりの数学を見つけよう by Theoni Pappas. I have yet to read it though... 😆
Any recommendations for Japanese e-texts?
Just read manga
what got me is that their introductory video makes it seem so rudimentary and that they'll kinda be a guide, and then I go to their site and see the price tag. wowzer
Their guide (they call it roadmap I believe) on how to go about learning a language should still be free, unless they changed it. Or were you referring to something else?
Wait, are you not a native English speaker? I just read your channel description. You have a very good accent though 😂
Solid video. Really well done.
I’m still afraid of sub-vocalisations.. We say it doesn’t matter if we take 10 years to learn a language but I also know there is little foundation for me being worried.. but I can’t get rid of it and I’m not in a rush !
But if anyone had any advice I’m all ears (😉)
I agree with the Tolerate ambiguity stuff in the sense of media bit it is some of the best advice I can give to someone for irl immersion. I teach English in Korea. Too many times I've seen Korean friends and students just get terrified when around native English speakers talking amoungst themselves. It's like they feel like all there years English study has failed because they can't understand native speech. While on my side as a Korean learner most of the Korean I hear is native speech and there is so much I don't I understand at times. But because of my willingness to try and listen no matter what and put up with not understanding my ability to understand native speech has improved massively.
I agree that a certain amount of tolerance is definitely necessary. I don't think however that ideal immersion should only happen with incomprehensible input. At the end of the day we are not trying to become okay with not understanding, we are trying to get to a point where we do understand.
I think the point Refold is trying to make is that the most important factor is to make it enjoyable. Watching a show you don't understand isn't really that fun, but it's not that boring. It's not about the whole process being fun, just being fun enough to where you're able to follow through with it day after day, which is the hardest and most important part of it all. Sure, it's not super fun, but I don't think people mind having to watch shows they don't understand because it's at least entertaining with the visuals and sound. Same with the "you should do the same things you do in your target language". The point is that you should do what you find at least somewhat enjoyable. If you enjoy something once, it means you at least don't hate it. If you like to read at times then if someone points a gun at you and tells you to read, even though you might not be in the mood, you won't really mind doing it. It'd be like "okay fine..?". Refold is emphasizing fun because it's trying to drive the point home that being able to do it day after day is the most important part. Not how fast, not how efficient, because if you're not even able to go through with it, none of that matters. The reason for this emphasis on consistency is that it is the key to fluency, and it's trying to make that daily grind (which looking from the outside is a very try-hard way of learning) as casual and available to the general public as possible. Since the beginning, AJATT and immersion type methods are seen as big commitments and an intense process, only for those whose lives' mission is to learn that particular language. Of course, this isn't really true, and Refold is trying to make this method as widely accepted as possible.
On the point of tolerating the ambiguity: First is the fact that it is not nearly as extreme as you paint it to be. They do mention that searching up is good, but you should do it occasionally and only in specific situations. This connects to the previous point of prioritizing fun, but also in a way that makes sense. Searching up all the time is not fun, and it's also not even effective. Those 'specific situations' I mentioned are when looking up said word allows you to comprehend the entire sentence, or close. This is actually effective, achieving that i+1 effect, allowing for higher comprehension, because you just understood that sentence now, which makes you enjoy it more because you've just deciphered more of the language, and that word is more likely to stick because of the full comprehension of the context that surrounds it and the way it is used in context. Meanwhile, if you hear one of those long ass sentences with many words you don't know, looking up each word and trying to understand is not fun and also completely ineffective, because it's too much new information. Incomprehension is not solved by looking up every word you don't know, because these don't stick. Incomprehension, especially at the beginner stages, is solved by vocab decks, which are actually effective for learning vocab unlike searching up every single word, and also just immersing without looking up, which brings me to my next point. Surprisingly, "staring at your screen and praying for progress" actually works. I've personally experienced it immersing in japanese where after a while you start getting a feel for what certain words or expressions mean, what certain verb suffixes mean, etc... You've also definitely experienced it in your mother tongue when you hear a word you don't know and after a while you just get the meaning. An example is modern slang like 'to rizz'. I can assure you most people did not look up in the dictionary what 'rizz' means, and just started getting it from context.
I'm gonna be honest, I haven't watched the whole video, but I agree with your points of infinitely delaying output. Output is nothing bad as long as your input is at least like twice the amount, and also after you gain a certain level of understanding with your language. Refold is trying to make those super try-hard immersion methods into something the general public can start doing casually, and I think the cool UI and way it breaks down immersion into a daily, yet casual commitment. The reading point is also true, but again, if you don't really enjoy it, you shouldn't do it. What I mean by 'enjoy' here, is if you just don't like reading (not if you sometimes don't feel like it or if you don't like not understanding or anything), if reading is something you really don't like doing in your native language, then you shouldn't do it. And that's the Refold way, prioritze being able to do it consistently and following through on it. If you don't like reading but would do anything to get good and so you're able to read daily, then go for it. It's all about what you're able to withstand on your way to fluency. But yeah, reading is really effective to get to higher levels. Anyway, good video, I like when people critize with valid points things like this. As I mentioned, I don't agree with everything, but yeah there are definitely some flaws with Refold.
I've watched this so many times, and I completely agree! It's strange how some Japanese learners just want to watch anime for 8 hours a day. Obviously, if you watch native content for 8 hours a day, it might work if you use Anki for an additional 4 hours on top of that. But doing 12 hours a day for 5 years seems like a waste of time.
Very few people talk about reading and comprehensible input, especially graded readers or tools like LingQ.
In Chinese, there are a lot of graded readers, but all Chinese learners know that watching a Chinese movie or show or reading a native graphic novel won't work, as native content requires at least 3,000 characters to get through smoothly.
Tutors and classes can be effective too, but yes, graded readers are a more affordable option.
I think input is a necessity to learn a language and of course, studying the language too could be very efficient and speed up the acquiring part I 100 percent agree with that but it's still not a necessity like input, as for speaking i disagree that you necessarily have to speak to be able to output for example I'm not a native speaker of English and i did english for ~2 years in 1-2 grade we learned basic stuff like i am ..... you are ... and stuff like that but other than that no studying but something that i did was that i started watching a lot of english content on youtube every day, stuff that i found interesting to watch (compelling input) and i did that for years and i could understand the language without trying or studying (i technically did study after,but in class i already knew everything that the teacher was saying and teaching so i never learned something there) and how im a able to speak without talking to anyone in english is because of course i got a lot of input, and i understand the language first but i also i did a lot of whats called "shadowing" in the language learning community,so basically it's a bit embarrsing to admit but im quite a parasocial person when im bored or distracted i do talk a lot with myself or with other people (i promise you im not crazy) in english, that's why i think to some extent i can talk and write english to a good amount of level with all that being said im not saying im fluent or that i have no struggles sometimes when reading about topics such as philosopy or politics but when i do have the chance to talk or express myself with people in english i can do it quite comforably
Thanks for your insights!
I don't think anyone is arguing that input is not a necessity or that studying is more important, but as of right now studying (or the active engaging with the language) are kind of thrown under the bus, when they do make a huge difference to how fast we can start to actually acquire and learn from out input only.
Also you said you disagree with my statement that you'd have to speak to be able to speak better, yet you said yourself that you talked to yourself, that you shadow etc, which is exactly what I was referring to. You need to practice speaking to get better at speaking. So isn't what you said a bit contradictory? Maybe just a misunderstanding.
(just a suggestion, but adding paragraphs and punctuation would make your text quite a bit easier to read)
@@emisnikki-polygloddess When I said talking to myself I didn't mean literally mean speaking out loud to myself but more like a parasocial thing that I do in my head that wasn't even for language learning purposes, for the Learning vs Acquiring part like a lot of people in the comments have said I have followed more people like Krashen and Mattvsjapan(even if matt is in refold, in a lot of his videos he suggests to study if you want to speed up the process), I kind of linked those people to refold, because like refold they recommend a more immersion type approach that I agree with so I might have to reread it. But one thing that i disagree with in a lot of immersion-based communities is that early output is kind of like sin,i understand their concerns and they should definitely be said because a lot of people have been lied to that "the only way to learn a language is if you speak it", i still think that early output is not as bad as they think/say so, I have learned 2 languages by early outputting and i did develop some bad habits but just like any language it is almost impossible to not develop those bad habits even in your native languages, they may not be as bad or "long lasting" as those habits that you get when you learn a new language but its still a human thing to develop those habits and they slowly but surely will go away, still if someone asks that question because they like outputting activities or whatever the reason may be, its good to teach them about the input hypothesis and the consequences of early output but then it should be their choice on what they want, if they want to output so kinda of like 50% output+50% input or more of a input over output approach, whatever their preferences will be at that point, it becomes more of a preference/their choice thing and not like the biggest mistake that they could make in their language learning journey.
I think this video was a good criticism. For me personally on the point of delay speaking and weeb centred learning is that pure input anki cards worked great for me in mandarin but in european languages i felt that output cards really helped me learn more effectively. Maybe something to do with reading characters being more difficult.
On the points about 'tolerate the ambiguity' vs 'you should understand almost every word' it never occured to me when I was reading through their stuff that they meant literally sit with content you dont understand at all, especially because of the influence of Krashen on the method I thought the point is having as few unknown elements as possible and progressing with an x+1 type immersion, but yeah I agree that is not always possible at all finding resources like that becomes almost impossible once you're past the beginner phase and not yet super advanced either. With tolerate the ambiguity maybe a better way of putting it would be increase your tolerance to cognitive load.
Hi Emis, I am would like to start with two disclaimers
1) I am very new to refold.
2) I have failed every attempt to learn a language German, French, Japanese, Russian, Swedish, Korean, Japanese. With traditional methods.
Now my thoughts:
1)Though many folks are weebs - I don't think the refold method is suitable for just Japanese. I think the community has just begun from the Japanese learning community. And over time more folk will join.
2) Fun - hard work can be fun ... I don't think refolders expect language learning to be relaxing sort of fun. Hard work there's a difference between drudgery and honing. Both are hard how ever one is aligned with purpose. There's that sweet spot in music practice where you do just a little bit harder than what you know and that is what makes you grow. I see a lot of parallels in learning a musical instrument with learning a language. Time required, deliberate practice on the edge of your ability to grow. listening to music before playing yourself etc.
3) Tolerating ambiguity - I didn't take it to mean I must consume incomprehensible input. To me it was clear that comprehensible input is what is required and that to grow you need to take input which is mostly comprehensible with a little bit of stuff you don't know and your brain will work magic. How to get that comprehensible language that is the rub which I am trying to figure out.
4) Delayed speaking - I am must admit I find it hard not to shadow speaking the vocab. Yet I take great comfort that I will be speak ok when I start working with a native speaker. That speaking will just happen easier after I do tonnes of input. Is very appealing to me. I don't want to waste my time with native speakers with "my name is"
5) Traditional grammar instruction is useless. Language is alive - languages aren't lego you can't build sentences. Language just comes out of your head like magic. Some grammar can be assistive but once you know the shape of the language more. English speakers get taught grammar after they have been acquiring the language for years. That grammar process is more about formalising and standardising a written form of the language as opposed to being descriptive of spoken language constructs. And yes reading is the most effective way to acquire the grammar of written language. Yet speaking is needed prior to the ability to write.
6) Agreed about how many adults have no idea about the lives of other adults who have responsibilities that make 3 hours of study impossible.
7) I have no trouble parsing languages basic meaning in text I find picking up words and patterns visually very easy .... what I do find incredibly hard is the listening - listening is what I need to spend most of my time doing. My focus for language learning is interactions with real people. So reading can go jump till I have got the listening down.
I am still new to refold. My situation is: my TL is Mandarin; I have limited time; I'm just listening for 15 - 30 mins a day for now. I'm not doing an anki deck yet. Nor, switching my youtube profile yet.... I'm watching a kids show I am familiar with - ABC kids has Bluey episodes in Mandarin. It's mostly incomprehensible which is not ideal. Yet I needed a resource that I was familiar with that I could use with an app I already use. i'm trying to hum the tones of small phrases as watch and for looking out for the few words I know. Main point for me is to establish a pattern of engagement and then grow from there.
Would recommend Bluey as a great language resource - it's quite fun not just for parents but for anyone who has been a child - it's delightful.
Don't care how long it takes many people in my local community speak mandarin - I've got time to take my time I'll get there.
Welcome to Refold and thank you for this detailed response 😉
1. It's not suitable for *only* Japanese, however, some of the suggestions on the Refold roadmap might be harder to realize for learners of other languages (e.g. with less media available)
2. I absolutely agree that hard work and grinding can be fun, but I'm afraid there are some people in the community that would not agree, and actually do expect language learning to always be happiness and relaxation. Your explanation for time required and deliberate practice is spot on btw!
3. Same as above, the roadmap doesn't recommend to consume incomprehensible input, but to some it's not that clear... I heard there are really good graded readers for Mandarin, maybe those could help!
5. I think thinking of language as lego in the beginning is actually quite a helpful approach. You learn some basic grammar (learn = you can recognize the grammar for/know what it does), which will make your comprehension better, which makes immersion easier and more effective. Ofc no grammar resource will perfectly portray language, but imo it's better starting to learn knowing for example whether verbs conjugate, nouns decline, basic sentence structure, whether the language uses articles, etc.
7. I think as a beginner reading is incredibly helpful. You learn new words super quickly, can go at your own speed etc. Better use of your time than only doing listening imo.
Keep it up! Would be exciting to see how things are going for you in a few months 😊
Brilliant observations!! I enjoyed watching this video. I have had some of the same thoughts, so it was very interesting to hear from someone with insider observations. I'm studying Levantine Arabic, so it has always been frustrating for me to hear people learning well-resourced languages talk about the need to find interesting material at just the right level for them WITH accurate subtitles and transcripts. I personally don't think that you can study Levantine Arabic on your own without a tutor or an amazing language exchange partner. There are so many translation mistakes in the few things that are even transcribed verbatim that a completely independent learner would learn a lot of mistakes. Not to mention all the nuances to how words are used, who uses certain words and phrases, etc. . . I also think that their rigid ideas about when to speak are 1) highly biased towards high introverts who like to watch a lot of TV and 2) really selling short the effectiveness of asking a knowledgeable native speaker or trained teacher the powerful question, "How do you say [blank] in [target language]?" To me, this is a really important question to learn early on and it allows you to bypass a lot of mistakes you would otherwise make trying to rely on the linguistic logic of your native language and a dictionary. As an extrovert, I have always been motivated by interactions with Arabic speakers, even when I could only say hello and good-bye. Without those interactions where I got to practice my growing vocabulary and communication skills, I would've given up on Arabic a long time ago. I don't like TV enough to put in hundreds of hours of watching before trying to speak. Not that hundreds of hours of suitable, translated content for beginners even exists. . . And I don't have any bad speaking habits, and native speakers often compliment me on my pronunciation and understanding of the language. I think that the Refold method can be used at the beginning or intermediate stages of learning a language, and I hope someday that they openly make this concession--that different people need different things to achieve learning success and that there's more than one way to skin a cat!
Thank you for sharing your view as someone who is learning a language with few (learner) resources. I don't think that there is anything wrong with the method Refold promotes, but at the end of the day we have to make it work for our circumstances and our goals rather than trying to blindly follow what someone else says. Since I uploaded this video almost two years ago at this point, Refold has luckily had a lot of time to change and I think they're a lot more accomodating now.
@@emisnikki-polygloddess Good to know! On a whole, though, in even their most recent videos, many of the things you highlighted in your video are still promoted or reinforced without caveat.
I personally don't find most of your criticism an accurate representation of the bulk of Refold's guidance. I think, in particular, that they're proposing that no part of the process is "work" and is (or should be) entirely "fun". You repeatedly give the impression otherwise, which I don't think is very accurate at all.
My understanding is that Refold takes a very holistic approach and that's uncomfortable for those that want or expect (or want, if you're spergy) more of a bootcamp approach. I think that the most important point that you don't appreciate is the same one that pervades every other facet of life -- the best intervention is the one that's practicable. A diet that is not sustainable is NO solution to the problem (and actually can be detrimental) versus the one that you're willing to follow that's sustainable -- unless you really do have a hard/fixed endpoint that you have to meet.
Having watched most of their 2021 content, I can't fit together your reservations (criticisms) from late 2022 from what I've heard them saying. Perhaps the bulk of your information comes solely from the roadmap and you haven't gone through the same set of monthly Q&As from around 2021 that are on RUclips. I'll leave it for others to form their own judgements about why that material and yours are incongruent. I'm assuming zero malice on your part though and that perhaps you haven't either kept up with them by not having seen the full breadth of their stated approach(es).
I'm testing the refold methodology with japanese. I never studied it and I have zero previous knoledge. I'm a native portuguese speaker and my most developed second language is English. Last two years I spent studying german and now I'm taking some rest from it and I'll spend some time with refold method and learning Japanese.
Im taking it easy, I'm not obsessed with learning fast and not willing to spend 5h+ per day with immersion. But i learned a lot of valuable concepts with Matt that are helping me with learning Japanese from zero
Refold definitely brings up a lot of solid advice. And you can definitely still learn a language with way less than 5 hours of learning each day!!
My take on the tolerating ambiguity, is that while starting learners may atart off with childrens stories and other things that will always be at their comprehension, if a mew leaner get bored pr wants to watch a show that is higher level but more fun for them, they shouldnt stress about wjat they cant comprehend and just focus on picking out the words they can comprehend. As for the little focus on reading, i kinda agree. Matt more recently with his obsession with having perfect pronunciation has the, maybe true, idea that tour accent will turn out better if you immerse with hearing more than speaking. For the average learner though, it is not worth slowing your progress in comprehension just to come out with a better accent, and reading is definitely a vital tool in gaining comprehension.
the only thing i really disagree with is the words ´spilling´. im not sure how applicable this is for other people, but for me. its a very simple concept. if you can think in the language, you can speak in the language
That does sound like a pretty simple concept! The question is how do you go from learning grammar concepts, vocabulary, the sounds of the language, phrasing to thinking in the language? Is that something that just happens to you?
I'm struggling to get the criticism you are trying to give you seem to agree with the majority and sometimes when you do criticise it you are contradicting yourself or your taking the examples to the extreme
That is because I do agree with the majority of what Refold is doing. I think they're doing a great job of getting people to include more things into their study routine other than just textbook drills. But as with any methodology there are things that I don't agree with, and this video is there to point them out.
Where am I contradicting myself? Some confusion might stem from me not clearly pointing out whether a given point criticises the community or the roadmap, I should've made the clearer for sure...
@@emisnikki-polygloddess I really liked your video! Yes -- I get what you were trying to do. Yes, Refold in general is not bad -- big problem is that they take a lot of good ideas and then try to create a dogmatic framework, when I think language learning is not so black and white.
Holaaa!. Este fue un gran video. Cuando descubrí la metodología de Refold, creí que era lo más revolucionario que había encontrado para el aprendizaje de idiomas. Pero cuando la puse en práctica me di cuenta que tal vez llevaban un poco al extremo sus planteamientos. Lo que realmente llevo conmigo es que también es posible aprender mediante la inmersión comprensible y no solo los libros dedicados a este fin.
Yo tambien he seguido los consejos de refold pero también los de Steve Kaufmann , cuanto tiempo pasaste aprendiendo con refold , yo cumplí un año ahora puede entender un 60 a 75 con audio inglés y subtítulos en inglés estoy cómodo cuando veo un anime o ciertas películas y series pero siento que aún me falta mucho hablar hasta el momento no lo echo
That's why they ask you to read their philosophy first... I feel it's important to listen to incomprenhensible material to get acostummed to the intonation and sounds of the language. Then you read up on phonetics and compare how much you notice from what you've heard. I feel it works for me because I'll make it a habit and whenever I get to understand bits and pieces of my target language, I'll get a boost on motivation. Because I'm listening my incomprensible language in my dead time while I start on the basics
You are wrong at around 20:00.
Not only progress is proportionate (to time spent with target language) you get more progress (per hour) when you allocate more time per day.
This is absolutely essential for beginners. Spending 2 hours a week just gets you nowhere. You end up forgetting half or 3/4 of everything just because of passage of time.
On another hand, once you reach upper intermediate, it's relatively easy to maintain language skills and just use language FOR FUN and ENTERTAINMENT.
I speak from experience.
I started with low intensity school program approach, and what a WASTE of an opportunity it was.
School kids have the best opportunity to learn a second language to a NATIVE level.
YET most will WASTE this valuable learning opportunity before they reach adulthood.
Eventually I did learn English to a near native level as an adult. But it only gets more difficult if you WASTE valuable time before adulthood.
This mostly pertains to learners of English.
Most of us WANT to become near native speakers EVENTUALLY.
I've had this discussion many times before and it seems that people are quite divided on this topic. I will eventually make a video going into why I don't think this is true.
Obviously I agree that 2h of low effort language contact a week is not enough, but in that case even 10h a week of low effort language contact wouldn't make that big of a difference.
@@emisnikki-polygloddess
If you are interested, let me introduce you to another extreme, 24/7 prolonged L2 immersion, and what miracles in Second Language acquisition it creates.
This isn't just me saying it, Middlebury Language school have been using this approach for decades. And I hear their students achieve remarkable progress in an 8 week course.
But my personal story is more unbelievable.
Sorry, if this is a long read, but here is my story.
...
I had spent 7 years learning a second language the conventional way (grammar, translation), some in school and some as individual hobby.
This was just before the Internet, so my options were limited.
And even though i did well in school, realistically my final level was barely a beginner. (A1-A2, as was confirmed by the lowest TOEFL score)
Then as a 19 year old I was a part of this experiment.
I was placed in a foreign MILITARY academy with very strict guidelines.
Foreign students were only allowed to use L2 (English).
Native language (Slavic) wasn't allowed, it was absolute 100% immersion environment 24/7.
(Kinda similar to Middlebury Language school or French Foreign Legion approach)
And even though I was already an adult, I learned a second language to a near native level within a year.
I could physically feel the development of a second language.
After 3 months i was thinking in L2 full time, i had near native listening comprehension in 6 months.
And obviously i wasn't studying a second language exclusively, I was learning science, engineering, humanities, doing sports. I was having a rich learning experience while acquiring a second language at a rate that seemed magical.
There are very important conditions that allow adults to learn on par with immigrant kids.
One condition really.
Temporarily abstain from native language and dedicate all the remaining time to a second language.
Regarding deliberate study of grammar.
Nobody was teaching me any of that.
Well, I had a tutor for a few sessions, but then a school decided to forgo tutoring because our progress was too fast to keep track of.
Yes, our progress, because there were 5 of us. And we all exhibited remarkable rates of improvement.
We were separated to different dorms and we weren't allowed to communicate.
As far as explicit knowledge of L2 grammar, I FORGOT everything I knew as a beginner.
I ACQUIRED grammar the same way native speakers do and I was reasonably grammatically correct.
A Grammatically correct sentence SOUNDS right, incorrect sounds funny.
I don't know any of the textbook grammar explanations.
That being said, studying L2 grammar using ONLY L2 when you are more advanced could be a USEFUL tool, though not entirely necessary.
Cheers 🍻.
Toddlers speak very poorly for several years before achieving fluency in their mother language. Later, they have their speech polished in school with grammar lessons. This is a natural part of the process of learning any language.
If you aren't speaking in a language, then you aren't learning to speak that language. Practice speaking and writing for output, reading and listening for input.
I like reading, but I only do it with audio from native speakers.
I know that some people swear by this method. It's certainly not bad, I just think it's different than reading without accompanying audio 🤔
I was somewhat on board with at least some of your points but when you said you can "check your pronunciation with IPA charts" I lost it. This is super misguided for a number of reasons:
1. IPA is a lot coarser than human speech. Consult any of your IPA sources about words containing らりるれろ and you'll notice that they just describe it as [ɾ]. The reality? The Japanese /r/ is super complex and its exact realization depends on a number of factors, including whether the mora is utterance-initial, whether it is followed by an /i/ (i.e. り), whether it follows an ん etc. ん is coincidentally even harder to transcribe in IPA and many sources just write /N/. Good luck figuring out which realization to pick. Oh and of course the vowels: tongue position is a continuum whereas the IPA vowels are just a finite set. You may get close to the true vowel but even if the same IPA symbol is used for a vowel in two different languages, they are regularly pronounced slightly differently.
2. IPA cannot properly represent pitch accent. While I have seen some notation where IPA is used in combination with the overline to denote high morae, this still falls flat when it comes to higher level concepts like tone terracing.
3. There is no resource that gives you the IPA while also respecting connected speech. Connected speech is something like palatalizing the t in "don't you", i.e. saying it something like "dontchu". Connected speech happens A LOT in extremely many places in every single language. If you pronounce every word as though in isolation, you will sound very foreign. The way different words connect in speech is an essential part of a language's phonology but no resource is going to give you the exact IPA while respecting every single connected speech phenomenon. Doesn't help that this is a seriously underresearched topic.
TL;DR: IPA does NOT tell you how to pronounce something correctly. Even if you are an IPA god who can pronounce every IPA symbol 100% accurately, you'll still sound non-native in most languages.
Just because a resource isn't perfect doesn't mean it can't be helpful. Dictionaries don't tell you the exact meaning and nuance of a word in every single context, but does that mean you shouldn't recommend them to be used?
IPA is especially useful to people that don't get as much input or already have a bad accent. There are so many people that are just not even aware of sounds and the IPA can help people be more mindful. IPA is not a perfect tool. You still have to get exposure to lots of native speech.
I disagree with you on that, while IPA has some problems for language learning, like how much it's system for transcribing tone/pitch sucks, or how some symbols are incorrectly used on the case of many languages, i do think it can be a quite useful tool in aproching a native pronunciation in a target language or even in mimicking other accents within your native language, at least for me, learning IPA had a very big impact learning to better produce certain sounds and picking up subtle diferences and quantifiyng aspects of pronunciation and speech that I used to find very blurry, and also in disvinciliating pronunciation from the phonetic system of my native dialect. I don't think basing all your pronunciation on IPA is worthwhile, native input is important, but it can be useful in noticing certain things you hadn't picked up on if you decide to iron out some pronunciation mistakes. People with a decently in-depth understanding of phonology, alongside those with a musical background and those who spent an inordinate amount of time learning tend to be ones able to get the closest to native pronunciation in their target languages.
@@precisa_ I don't think they meant that IPA is a bad tool. I think the idea was that just looking up IPA transcriptions of words while you read, as promoted in the video, isn't really enough to have good pronunciation.
Hi, I agree that the IPA charts do not perfectly represent human speech, but that doesn't change my recommendation to have a look at them. As others have already pointed out it can still give you a better idea/get you closer to how certain letters/sounds etc. are supposed to sound. The goal is not to perfectly learn the sound, but to be(come) aware of the differences. So while the Japanese /r/ may not perfectly be described with [ɾ], it'd certainly be closer to reality than just pronouncing it [ɹ].
In my opinion, people who are sitting through hours of shows not understanding anything or very little are not following refold. Refold says to tolerate ambiguity. But it also says to do everything you can to make whatever you enjoy watching comprehensible. Watch it with NL subs first. Intensive immersion sessions where you look up everything. Look up the episode synopsis beforehand.
People who are sitting through hours of tv without understanding anything are wasting their time. And it’s not refold’s fault. The guide is there for everyone to read and it’s not terribly difficult to understand. Heck it even has a short version for people who are not familiar at all with it.
If someone goes to the refold sight and tried to read the full guide but stops reading after the first few pages thinking they see where this is going and now they think that they can just absorb a language by just sitting in front of a screen doing nothing but listening to gibberish then that’s their own fault.
I’m not saying Refold is perfect. Your point about the community being Japanese learner dominant is a good point and something that it could stand to acknowledge and possibly improve on. But i don’t think it was necessary to spend that long talking about tolerating ambiguity and framing it as an issue with the ideology of the method.
What’s the app at the very end after lingq?
It's called Migaku and it's a browser extension: www.migaku.io/
They have amazing language support for Japanese & Cantonese. (Their Korean and Mandarin support is supposedly pretty good too, but I can't verify that myself)
As a full-time working person with a large circle of friends, a social life and multiple hobbies, I just couldn't relate to a community that includes people who say they spend 12+ hours a day consuming their target language and then give advice on how to learn languages to people who only have 1-2 hours a day, which is just ridiculous. For me, Refold would only make sense if I had a lot of time every day and was willing to invest that time in learning a language (this is was the roadmap imo indicates as a given fact). The latter would never be the case, as even if I had the time, I rather build my carrer or business and social circle and when I take off a longer time from responsibilities, travel the world and make precious memories.
Idk, personally, I think that just means it's not very important to you. There's no magic way to become fluent in a language faster and yeah, if you'd prefer to spend your free time doing something other than learning the language, you're *probably* going to learn a lot slower. I agree that "DO 30 HOURS IMMERSE A DAY AND MAKE 400 BILLION CARDS A DAY" in an elitist tone is terrible advice but I think it's reasonable for them to assume that the language is important enough to you that you will *make the time* to become fluent in it within a reasonable amount of years.
Wow I just found this video and you expressed exactly my thoughts about refold. So many of your points of view I also had them in the back of my head but for some reason I didn't realise I needed to listen to them from someone else. By the way, what is your native language? You give me strong German vibes but your English is really good!
I'm glad I'm not the only one that thought these things!
And you're right, I'm a vibing German 😎
I think when I tried the ~tolerate the ambiguity~ it really didn't work for me. I thought it was a me pproblem, but I agree with your point there. Specially in reading.
Definitely not a you problem. I think a little bit of ambiguity won't hurt, but most people don't even get to that point until upper intermediate or maybe even advanced level, because there will always be so many unknown words.
I appreciate someone providing a different perspective on the Refold framework. You do make some good points. However, I am not a die hard user of Refold, I found the framework refreshing because it provided a framework - scaffolding if you will.
I see Refold as a framework for acquiring a language. Refold came from the Mass Immersion Approach (MIA) as put forth by Matt vs Japan. As one comment stated - a re-work of AJATT with more accessibility.
I don't limit myself to just the Refold method. I do my best to incorporate ideas and frameworks from other people such as Stephen Krashen, Steve Kaufman, Olly Richards, and Rocky Rodriquez. What Refold has pushed me to do is listen more.
I agree that the Refold community does have some die hard adherents - the Refold way or no way. I do think Ethan and contributors are open to improving their framework.
I would suggest people checkout their RUclips channel as well. They do have discussions about the method and other topics.
Overall, I would recommend people checkout the framework and see what they can take away. Refold does provide A WAY, NOT THE WAY, to approach language acquisition using a deliberate approach.
I agree with you. I made so much more progress by doing the opposite of what Refold was suggesting and maximizing focused learning over immersion. I don't see a point to maximizing immersion unless you're very far along. Beyond the points you gave, the Refold communities are also toxic and possess a zero-tolerance policy on different opinions on... well, anything. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think Reddit actually had the less toxic community for once.
I think the major disadvantage of the immersion approach is that as adults we are really not as good at picking out subtle details of a language as children if such details do not hinder our understanding, for example, my native language is Chinese which lacks tense and inflection, but not noticing tense or inflection doesn't hinder our understanding most of the time, so I am the most likely to make this kind of mistake, so for adults, we need really some sort of deliberate learning or some conceptual understanding of your target language. it is really not as different from practicing a sport or learning an instrument when you are not a super genius. I would actually go as far as to suggest that we should popularize some basic linguistics in the language community (syntax, phonology, and IPA) which at the beginning stage of learning a language can help us to analyze our target language to make it more comprehensible and at a later stage can help us to fix some of our more subtle mistakes.
Totally agree with you! It's good to have a more balanced view of the refold method out there on the internet for people to see. Btw a "timely investment" would be an investment made at a good time, e.g. if the stocks of a company were about to skyrocket, it would be timely to invest. I think you wanted a phrase like "a big investment of time". Only commenting to try and be helpful, because i know if it were me I would like to be told :) but apologies if you prefer not to be corrected. Btw your english is really good :)
I have some things to say on these matters:
1-
4:34 where?
4:44 ok.
4:50 yes.
5:00 yeah.
5:10 yeah.
5:45 you still haven't pointed out what the problem is exactly, you say it's the "heavy amount of jp learners" but why is that even a problem? And then you say that tools don't exist for other languages, and... yeah?? Is that a problem with refold?? No, it's just what happens when there's limited supply of people developing language tools and huge demand for jp tools.
2-
6:14 Why do you say limited to?
7:27 nobody said that tho?? Refold just said it didn't have to feel like work, not that it must *always* be fun
8:29 who is that, tell me their name so I can get them on a hitlist.
3-
Hmm. I think that there's nothing wrong with sitting for 4 hours watching an incomprehensible show. Is it wrong to not have fun? No. Is it wrong to not understand something? No. Is it wrong to use a slightly inefficient method? No.
There's nothing wrong with doing that.
10:57 you're contradicting yourself. First you say we shouldn't stress over comprehending every word, and then you say we should decrease comprehension. So which is it? Do I lookup every word or do I not look-up every word?
4-
I agree. Output isn't *that* detrimental
It will internalize. But it's not *that* hard to get rid of later.
I don't think it prevents you from speaking. Just get to 2C, stay there for 1 or 2 months, and then start speaking!
15:03 wait is there somebody that _actually_ expects people to shut up during class?
5-
17:16 Wait, hundreds??
Let me calculate for a sec:
10 years.
Every year 120 days of school time
Average time per day is 30 minutes. (Some days we have no English study some days the teacher's out)
120 × 30m × 10
12 × 3 × 1000m
36000m
(36000/60)h
(3600/6)h
(600)h
Okay, fine... 🙄
I guess I did have *600* hours of English education, but half of the time we were just repeating stuff! We probably spent like 10% of that time just on the present simple tense!
So I still school only gave a minor benefit, like, 3 months' worth.
Though it did give a lot of bad habits, can you believe the awful pronunciation we have gone through in those 600 hours??
Rant done.
6-
I straight up don't agree.
21:34 have you considered that some people (a lot) are learning languages for their careers? It *does* matter if you reach fluency in 2 years vs 10 years.
Overall, this section is way too clickbaity.
7-
I agree
It said "aim for" not "you HAVE to read at 2-3%", so basically it's saying "look for comprehensible things to read" which you can't really disagree with, can you?
Desafortunadamente te entiendo poco, estoy adquiriendo el idioma (ingles) por metodo refold, desearia entender lo que estas diciendo
saludos desde Mexico
Creo que vale oro esta opinion que estas mencionando
@@ricardomendiola3947 Ni mucho, o sea, sí marca puntos pero algunos son exagerados, se pueden solucionar fácilmente con el tiempo.
Refold literally say you have to learn grammer, on top of immersion and vocab. It is not totally immersion immersion is consumption of content.
Working on skill and repetition is fun.
Refold will adapt and grow based on new info and research.
What Refold says and what the community does are two different things. While it's true that they do mention to learn some grammar and vocab, they don't mention it nearly enough in comparison to all they have about immersion. And this is reflected in the community. Many people don't see grammar or vocab study as a beneficial thing to language learning, so they don't do it.
I'm always wary of any approach that claims to be the "one true way". Effective language learners use a very wide range of approaches that suit their preferences and abilities.
For example in adults there is a very wide range of ability to learn by induction. People with strong induction abilities can do well with immersion-focused approaches. People like me, at the opposite end of the scale, need to spend more time on structured vocabulary, grammar and output work (which I personally enjoy - because I feel I'm getting a handle on the shape of the language).
It's interesting to note that agencies like the FSI, who have studied effective learning with thousands of students over decades and simply have to produce results, use an eclectic approach. Obviously there is a good deal of focus on input, but also on structured learning and output. For most people, the middle path will work best.
People follow Matt and his methodology because he sounds like a native speaker.. they don't wanna follow someone that still sucks at the language and speaks like a robot after 20+ years of language study.. a native like level is unrealistic and I guess people have to lower their expectations.
Yea it's always a good idea to listen to people that have reached at least some level of proficiency in a language, but I think it's also important to look at the factor that went into reaching that level. The level Matt reached is certainly impressive, but he did spend many years studying, obsessing over getting better and just generally spending a lot of time with Japanese, which isn't exactly reflected in the methodology he preaches.
@@emisnikki-polygloddess We human beings like to be polite and politically correct so we lie to each other with a happy face.. nobody wants to hear the truth.. learning a new language is extremely time consuming and in most cases a waste of time.
"because he sounds like a native speaker" Problem being: how do we gauge whether that's true or not? I don't doubt that he has reached some level of proficiency in the language. But what exactly that level is and whether it's anywhere near native-likeness, I honestly have no idea. All I can do is rely on other people's opinion, and even then I rarely have a benchmark to compare their opinions to. E.g. if I hear someone call Steve Kaufmann's French "native-like", and then call Matt's Japanese "native-like", then I'd have a rough idea of what exactly they mean by that, because with French (my native language) I'm in a position to have my own opinion already. But otherwise I just don't know how I'm supposed to gauge his level in a language I'm just a beginner in. That disconnect opens the door to all sorts of deceptive practices for language gurus who have a financial interest in portraying themselves as being better than they actually are. In the meantime, I just follow a few refolders recording their own progress in languages I'm proficient in, just to see whether there's really any remarkable difference in outcomes compared to other methods I've used. So far no dice.
So iiuc reading > reading with the same text as an audiobook?
I don't know what to think yet of audiobooks / reading with listening to the audio at the same time. I'm not sure if I would say one is better than the other, it really just depends on what you want to achieve. They are definitely different activities though.
15:15 Anti-school is the informed position you just haven't heard of
Short; ruclips.net/video/JEO8DEj6oXs/видео.html
Long: ruclips.net/video/FLPuCWX5atM/видео.html
this makes me feel pumped to go again thanks so much i was too busy stressing about every little thing
Let's gooo! I'm glad to hear that 🤓💪
My opinions have altered over the years. AJATT proposed an immersive framework for learning. It's one interpretation of comprehensible input.
A lot of progress can be done with quite a little. Periods of immersion sound good but it underestimates the ability of the brain to process language and generate both grammatical knowledge and vocab learning between study sessions. My opinion is knowledge is not obliterated. Sometimes it is consolidated in sleep and cleaning the house.
Comprehensible Input is a good guide. Once you're bored or tired it's time to move on. Dont scrimp on sleep or exercise. Ever.
In the early days less time is probably better. Some every day. Language learning should be pleasant. Your brain is your friend. It's already primed to acquire languages, no trickery or forcing is required. Also falliw time is OK. Consolidation is OK. It all helps in the long run.
Totally agree with that! I actually meant to make a video about the construct of "consistency" in the sense that we don't need to do X hours every day in order to see progress - a few times a week is fine if that's all we can do. And breaks can absolutely be beneficial, even necessary and I think most people underestimate that.
Nice video… I also like reading.
Grammar mistake: 2:04 I recommend you -to- check
Great video! What most disturbed me with these Refold type immersion learning sites is that they are always presented by guys who have zero exprerience of actually teaching a language, nor do they have any professional education of teaching. Why? Because if our goal is to promote immersion the Refold style, you don't need any skills. Just ask people to watch hours of anime and play with an anki deck, and make them pay for this "advice". I speak five languages and I consider myself to be fluent in three. But never would I consider myself to be a teacher, nor have the skills to teach any of the languages I master myself.
The immersion itself is a false promise on learning a language without any active effort, just by watching tons of anime and listening to crappy jpop. Instead of learning basic grammar ,speaking in a real situation, reading, or writing something correct and meaningful. Think just of all native english speakers who can live decades abroad without mastering the language. Passive listening is just not enough. Learning a language takes time and a lot of work. Not just hours spent with the target language but effective hours where you try to make an effort. That said reading is hugely important, but only when you understand what you are reading ,the words and the way they are connected in a meaningful way, grammar.
You make it sound like the hours that people spend listening to language is not going to help them at all in becoming fluent.
I can tell from your comment that you haven't done more than skim the site, and probably know basically nothing about Refold, but I'll entertain you with a response anyway.
'Because if our goal is to promote immersion the Refold style, you don't need any skills. Just ask people to watch hours of anime and play with an anki deck, and make them pay for this "advice".' - Refold does not advocate for watching content without trying to understand it. Many articles break down exactly what to look for when consuming content, and how to tailor it to your level. Every piece of advice in Refold is entirely free. The Anki decks are what cost money, and for the record I think they're very overpriced for what they are.
'The immersion itself is a false promise on learning a language without any active effort, just by watching tons of anime and listening to crappy jpop. Instead of learning basic grammar ,speaking in a real situation, reading, or writing something correct and meaningful.' - Refold is very clear that passive consumption of content will not help you very much; focusing on understanding will yield far better results. One of the first things it tells you to do is learn basic grammar. The difference is that the goal is to recognise it in content to help with comprehensibility, not be able to use it yourself. It's also very clear that reading is important, and you'll likely understand more when reading than listening. They recommend getting your reading level slightly ahead of your listening purely because you'll learn more vocabulary that way. As for speaking and writing, the point is to wait until you at least know what the language is supposed to sound like before you start coming up with your own sentences. Not doing that is like learning to play piano entirely by reading sheet music without ever listening to the piece you're trying to learn.
'Think just of all native english speakers who can live decades abroad without mastering the language. Passive listening is just not enough.' - No one at Refold is claiming it is. These are also the kind of people who likely consume exclusively English content at home, and talk to most people they know in English.
I have my own share of problems with Refold, such as the elitism which still exists in the community thanks to Matt's influence, and the very overpriced flashcard decks. I also think stage 1 is paced quite poorly. Pushing through the initial 1K words is a hump a lot of people don't get over. Luckily Matt's gone from the company now, and they're making a bunch of steps to improve.
@@innocenthedgehog8367 Matt left? why?
I absolutely love your channel and your honesty. You always tackle very interesting and original topics unlike many channels which seem to copy/paste their contents. Well done!
This might be the sweetest thing I have read in a while 😭
I am with you on the power of reading. But man, it sure is intimidating seeing a paragraph of Japanese text. Just have to go through it one character at a time.
Oh ya in the beginning looking at a page of all Japanese can definitely seem like an impossible task to tackle, but don't worry, with time you'll learn to chunk words and phrases and learn how to "skip" certain characters, as your brain recognizes them as one unit rather than single characters stuck together 💪