📲 The app I use to learn languages 👉🏼 bit.ly/3QtSQFb 🆓 My 10 FREE secrets to language learning 👉🏼 www.thelinguist.com ❓What has been your experience learning language rules? Have you found natural exposure more effective than instruction? 👇🏼
I would argue that adults can use their logical mind to supplement their ability to absorb language. To help along the pattern formation, if you will. When studying a new language I focus on input but find that reviewing grammar tables helps to cement the patterns. I'm sure I could pick up the conjugations of Italian words eventually just from listening and reading but stopping occasionally to see the tables written out speeds up the process. Especially because I still remember many Latin conjugations that I learned in school decades ago and can see the similarities. I don't mean studying verb tables. It's more that seeing them written out helps to seed the pattern in my brain and helps me puzzle out new forms logically in a way that a three year old child wouldn't be able to do.
It's baffling for me this constant returning to: learn like a baby. The baby learns the language, to which it is exposed for about 4-6 years and it is still a very diminished knowledge of the language. Also, the critical age says for me all - the brain changes a lot during that time, kids start to understand abstract concepts, including rules of the language, maths etc. Why on Earth should we constantly say that knowing rules in the languages is unnecessary when it, as you pointed out, can help with speeding up the process of learning? Rules help to recognise patterns (which adults can do way better than children - exposure to thousands of patterns that are not limited to the language) and quickly apply them to the learning process. English is my second language and even though I at first was learning it by a lot of exposure, understanding how the rules, regarding tenses, work and I was finally able to use them correctly. No amount of exposure helped me with comprehending how I was supposed to use them, but rules helped me immensely. Funnily enough, German is a very rule-based language. I often joke that they even have rules for exceptions (which is quite true) and remembering those rules helps with the language usage. Adult brains works differently and constant comparison to a way the child's brain works is, in my humble opinion, like comparing commodore to the newest PC or Mac.
@@marikothecheetah9342 I think people are overthinking it. A person like you have done absolutely a perfect job, learning English. And this video is not valid for you anymore lol.
@@marikothecheetah9342 The theory is that explicit learning speeds up the process in the early stages but that it causes fossilization later on. So if you learn only via implicit learning, you'll progress slower at first but ultimately reach higher levels of proficiency. Not saying I subscribe to that view. Just that that's what the idea is.
I've found that what works best for me is a combination of lots of input and the occasional grammar points. That way, if I've come across that particular grammar structure enough, I'll be able to understand it and use it comfortably fairly quickly. And if I don't remember reading or hearing it, then it's probably not going to stick and I'll just come back to it later, when I've had enough input. When I reach an advanced level though, I don't bother to study any grammar anymore, because my inate understanding of it through input is going to be much better than what I could get with grammar rules.
Languages have always been my passion and I can speak around six languages. I create content in Brazilian Portuguese in my channel and when it comes to learning this very language, I have never used any grammar book, never learned any rules (unlike for example when I studied Arabic and I did all of that) and I learned to speak Portuguese by chatting and speaking with Brazilians, trying to "imitate" their pronunciation, listening to Portuguese language content to get used to the language even when I hadn't had a rich vocabulary so gradually I came to the point where I was able to speak it.
Learning languages of similar grammar structures of one’s own mother tongue doesn’t require learning grammar. When learning a language of different grammar rules we tend to ask what is the rules as an adult, because adults like rules. If we want to speak naturally a new language, imitation and abondante inout is maybe the best method.
I've been learning Spanish on LingQ for 6 weeks now, and have already started seeing the main patterns of the language through input. I've yet to review the grammar rules. The plan is that when I eventually look at the grammar rules, I'll have some of the practical language in me to better understand the theory.
The balance I found for myself, is to not actively study grammar or at least not in order. I´d go for input most of the times, then when I notice a pattern and I get curious about it, I will look up the related grammar. Slowly I cover the most important aspects, meaning the things I actually need, depending on how I want to use the language. For example if I learn because I like reading, one of the first thing I would notice and look up is the past tense... if I learn to speak to people, I´d quickly learn frequent informal expressions and how to use the first and second person present tense. I may learn the second person plural later, because it´s not used as much. More often than not you speak to one person, not two. So it´s a mix of learning more naturally, like Steve suggests and getting some specific useful insights into grammar in the process.
Yeah, I do it the same way! I even ask my friends/language partner which past tense (there can be more than just one 😅) I should concentrate first. Or what's the common use. And when I often see another "version" of that past tense I look it up in a grammar book. Best way (for me) to learn a language. Reading and listening are much more important than forcing to learn grammar rules before you even have a "feeling"/sense for that language. That's just my opinion...
I feel like I am putting my head into the lion’s mouth by leaving a comment. 🙂 I tried to learn French naturally, by living in a French community in Montreal and sharing a flat with francophones. I had studied French for years before, but I didn’t study while in Montreal, I tried to acquire the language. I failed to pick up the grammar, or much vocabulary. I could understand a lot of what was said, but I could not speak at all well as my grammar was poor. Fast forward 30 years , and I decided to relearn French. I followed courses for 6 months, then listened to podcasts, all the while studying the grammar as I encountered it. I have made massively more progress. I can happily listen to podcasts for native speakers and understand almost everything, not always, sometimes a speaker is hard to follow or speaks very fast, but usually. I must be a weirdo, but I cannot guess the rules, they have to be explained to me. Once they are explained, it makes sense, and I can then learn them by listening to lots of input. It might be because I am a more reserved person. You seem to be an extrovert, more at ease socially with strangers. Just a guess. There are differences between adults and children. Scientists have discovered several biochemical reasons why kids learn faster. But as you know, studies have shown that adults can learn a language as well as a child, in terms of vocabulary and grammar.
I don't recommend just being around speakers of the target language. A major investment of time in listening and reading is always necessary. I have always done that and it is made easier and more efficient today with the abundance of content available online, online dictionaries and sites like LingQ. When we want to refer to grammar rules we should do so to reinforce what our brains have learn naturally. It's not all or nothing.
@@Thelinguist Sadly back then I didn’t have access to audio content, language courses were stale and formal. Today is so different, of course. What you say makes sense. Thanks.
I agree that rules shouldn’t be the focus point of learning, but I think the learner should at least be aware of them..even if they can’t use the rules themselves… babies take years to learn very basic language rules…adults don’t usually have that kind of time. Of course, language learning never ends….but being at least aware of a decent amount of rules will definitely make language consumption, or input, much easier
True, I observe my kid (now he’s 7 and he started speaking english when he was 4) done the same thing, he used to say seed when he meant saw and then I corrected him multiple times until he realized himself that there are some irregular verbs that don’t take -ed. It’s natural process.
I agree, whats matters is the exposure in the language, in only two month my imput has improved alot by listening podcast and youtube videos with people with a native English.
Hello everyone. I’m Negot SERAPHIN from Haiti and I’m English teaching with some seven (7) years of experiences working as an English teacher. Nevertheless, this video about how to learn languages is really outstanding because I experience such things with my two daughters learning their mother tongue and also learning French and English. This thing is quite simple. Just place the child into an environment where s/he may get access to what s/he is learning because the information as well is concretely exposed to the child. This approach of your really targets me to rethink my language teaching strategies. Be blessed,
Sure, don't worry about perfectly memorizing grammatical rules, and don't make the perfect memorization and application of these rules a precondition to further exploration of the language. But by all means do acquaint yourself with the existence of rules! Casually browse a good grammar guide from time to time, one that explains rules in simple non-academic terms with loads of simple plausible examples. Having this prior acquaintanceship with (not mastery of) the core rules makes immersion in the language so much more efficient and less disorientating, in my experience. You notice so much more and consequently your attention is engaged more and you acquire more. Otherwise one has little to no idea what's going on and it is so easy for an adult learner (with competing life responsibilities and interests) to get discouraged and give up.
Yes! I’ve been learning Russian for the last two years and no matter how much I look at the cases and conjugations it never seems to help me progress. I have found reading and just listening to Russian vlogs and simple words and phrases most beneficial. Music I think is helping too but it’s more subtle in the nature of its benefit. Repetition and attitude is key 🔑
Interesting. In my experience I believe you need a base at the beginning. Once you have it, it is a matter of start talking, understanding, and reading. You never stop learning one language. Thanks.
As an english learner myself, even though I totally agree with what you say, Steve, about the focus on input learning material, I wouldn't downplay thevstudy of grammar rules and advanced structures. In fact, I would go as far as saying that they are paramount provided that you make the extra effort to put them in practice as much as you can in your every day life, and notice them in every piece of writing that you come across, that's my opinion off course. Making the whole process of learning enjoyable is key as well as you say.
I blieve that grammar can be so useful specially for adults because they can learn how to form different sentences with different structures in a short time which a child will be able to do after 5 years of listening to the language all the time. And a person who should learn the language in 6 months has no other choise but to learn grammar Grammar is the rule of the language. If you learn the grammar the only thing you should do after is learning vocabulary to be able to speak that language. I blieve in case you want to learn a language just for fun, then it really doesn't matter how to learn the language because the result is not the important thing for you. But if you are in rush and you should be able to speak the language in a short amount of time, then grammar is so essential.
Thank you so much for this video when I was young I was studying English with just grammar and all teachers were talking of we don't learn grammar correctly we'll fall in the exam and I'm still learing English by listening and taking as I can I'm in high school and with sorry I'm still learning grammar to pass my exam specially I'm in Arab country so God with us🖤
Badly taught grammar is the problem. Nothing wrong with studying the grammar rules, and in fact it can be a shortcut to fluency for many learners like me. After months of watching dramas and videos just to get exposure, I finally started to take up Chinese grammar courses for intermediate level, and it immensely accelerated the speed of my improvement. She was simply an amazing teacher.
That doesn't work for everyone. I'm learning english and I've never read an english grammar book. I notice that muy english improves a lot when I watch english series or listen to podcast etc. Of course i try to understand the structure of the english grammar but only that.
I honestly partialy agree what you said. I believe that language came first before the grammatical rules. We don't know grammar in our native language but we do know to speak and write it without many grmmatical errors. So I do 'partially' agree that being exposed (that includes reading, listening with books, etc) to a language that we intend to learn makes us fluent in that language without taking lessons soley on grammar. But I want to point out the fact that grammar learning is one of the important things to do when learning a foreign language. It shouldn't be soley focused towards language learning, but I am very sure that studying grammar will acclerate language learning greatly.
Thanks for the video, Steve. I think that that there is no one size fits all approach. What you're saying absolutely makes sense, the best way to learn a language is to immerse in it - the results can be incredible. However what I found while learning Greek was that reading up on grammar and word etymology (I love this part) accelerated the process (after one year of learning I was able to have a smooth conversation with a taxi driver in Athens on various topics). My brain is very good at recognising patterns and reading up on the grammar helped me leverage the patterns that I had created while learning other languages and utilise them - where it made sense - to create new patterns more quickly. What I mean is that everyone should find the right balance for themselves. I agree on the general point though that language exposure the most important part.
At this point of my life I really believe in the words of Steve, because that is happening with me right now, I was two years in an English school and I understood the very basic stuffs but then, three years later I started to "study" watching series, movies and reading books in two years as well and then I was able to speak with a English native speaker, with problem and mistakes but it'ssomething that in the past seemed unreachable. Thanks to Mr. Salas and Steve.
I think it depends. I'm a Polish native speaker. Rules in my mother tongue are little bit similar to Russian, but not to English. So, I had to learn English grammar, becouse it contains the other way of thinking about the language structures.
Adults can earn Languages like children. One key component of language acquisition is pattern recognition. The brain excels at identifying recurring patterns in the linguistic input it receives. This process involves the activation and strengthening of neural connections related to language processing. Over time, as the brain encounters various words, phrases, and sentence structures, it begins to form a mental representation of the language's grammar, vocabulary, and syntax.
You raise a good point. I think the point is not whether to learn rules or not, because you're learning them anyway. The issue is whether to learn them explicitly or implicitly. But learning "implicitly" does not mean "not learning at all." In fact, when you start to learn a language (especially a much different one), learning implicitly (generalizing rules) may be more difficult than learning explicitly (through translation and explanation). Comparing adults with children's brains is not a valid point in my opinion, since children learn the language at the same time as they develop their subcortical areas, and adults are already past the critical period.
I agree that adults have tools, knowledge and experience children don't have. Their existing language knowledge can be an obstacle and an advantage. However, in both cases we learn mostly from examples, not from explanations of the rules. By learn, I mean develop the ability to use the language, rather then learning what the rule is which may not enable us to use the language correctly.
@@Thelinguist imho, learning is much more complex that just learning by examples. We learn by a lot of means: by auditory processing, visual processing, writing, reading and using our experience to recognise patterns, by elimination of mistakes, even by combining learning with what we like. Also, learning in adulthood is conscious, while children learn things more unconsciously, especially when it comes to language learning. Assuming children can speak their native language quite well at the age of 5, it is 5 years of constant exposure to that language. If learning like a baby worked, people who live in other countries would pick up the language just by exposure and we know it doesn't work that way. Adults do not learn like children, so there is little sense in trying to learn like them.
@@marikothecheetah9342 Children at 5 years old sound terrible, and people living in other countries for 5 years generally spend very little time listening to the language and stick to their native language in their free time (look at Chinese immigrants in the US/Canada who stick to their in-group in Chinatowns). whereas Europeans who spend most their time watching RUclips or browsing the internet can understand English very well in my experience. My dad moved to America and learned English from watching shows and trying to communicate with musicians he worked with (0 formal education, he only had studied German before in the army), and he had great success: but it was slow and he never fully mastered grammatical articles after years of using the language(but he can use them ~90-95% correctly.)
Honestly, i think that the situation for a child and an adult are really different. A child only hears that one language every day and with much more context. Im not saying that rules should be the only way of learning, But that learning rules can be used in addition to exposure. Especially since most of us aren't in a position to have a constant flow of exposure. Personally, learning rules helps me understand the context of the spoken language much faster.
Nothing wrong with referring to rules. But to be able to easily understand and then produce the language, you need to expose your brain to a lot of input. Lots.
@@Thelinguist Input has its time and place, so do the rules. As adults we unconsciously look for patterns and rules mean patterns. If input alone was working people living in other countries would learn the language in no time, max those 4-6 years like a child does but we all know it doesn't work that way and such adults can still barely function in the language after ten years of living abroad. Input makes sense IF it is supported by rules, imho. If I know, that in German modal verbs have this rule: 1 person sing.=3rd person sing. I don't have to think about creating the form, my brain associates the rule with my usage. If input was everything, my friends would not be making cardinal mistakes in English, while claiming they are watching films without subtitles on Netflix.
@@Thelinguist yes. Exposure is probably the most crucial point. I'm just saying that it doesn't necessarily have to be either or. You can both learn the rules and have sufficient exposure. Adults have capabilities that children don't after all. I think the rules should be learned to complement exposure but of course everyone has a different way of learning as well. Some people are intuitive learners. I definitely am not.
@@marikothecheetah9342 Keep in mind "the brain" isn't one unit but many pieces working together to some capacity. The part of the brain that processes language is likely different than the part that actively thinks about rules. I know for a fact that when you think in your native language you don't actively piece together each segment of a sentence together. You simply think and then a sentence is formed which you can adjust before speaking . That's because the part of your brain that processes language is mainly unconscious and is exactly why native speakers of a language struggle to explain rules to foreign learners but can use them with ease. As for your friends, they probably have spent tens or hundreds of hours tops immersing in input... you need thousands to really model the language in your brain. In my opinion rules should be looked up when you notice a pattern and want context behind it.
I'm in agreement, yes. Don't deliberately study rules only as the main bulk of language learning. Find what work for you of course, but generally I don't think many people will find this effective. Instead of memorizing an entire writing system all at once (like the English alphabet), it's better to learn the letters while learning words and grammar, which is where listening and reading strategy becomes the way to go. Things start falling into place. Personal example, I started learning Japanese several years and what I did as a first-time language learner was learn words and grammar points and then basically look around for listening and reading material hoping they contained the words and grammar I just learned. While it worked out in the end, it was largely inefficient.
I really don't like the logic of "children learn it this way". Children also take years to learn basic sentences. When I learned a new tense in Spanish as an adult, I looked up the regular conjugation of that tense. This made it a lot easier for me because I could easily understand which person was being referred to in a text, which is very important because in Spanish you don't normally use pronouns in a sentence. For example, if a sentence in Spanish started with 'Hablé', I would know that it meant 'I spoke', whereas otherwise I would have just known that it was probably some form of 'hablar' (to speak), but without seeing the pattern I had to hope for context to explain who was speaking and whether it was in the past, present or future.
No doubt looking up grammar satisfies our curiosity and can help us notice. However, to be able to produce the correct form of the verb while speaking relies more on lots of input, rather than studying conjugation tables.
I want to ask how you learned Spanish tenses. Please give me some tips because they are too much. It's pretty hard to learn all tenses and confusing also.
You may say that children take years, but that long period of listening is _exactly_ what eventuallly produces such high quality output. We adults want shortcuts and hacks, which as we've seen, tends to produce a _much_ inferior end product.
I still get them wrong. Look at the tables is comforting while looking at them, but if I want to use the right form on the fly, I need to have some phrases, some patterns, stored in my memory and just hope they come out right.
@@futurez12 It still doesn't make sense. No one really learns like a child. Or did you spend a year listening to random conversations in your learning language before you started speaking a word? I also don't understand Steve's "Look at the tables is comforting while looking at them" argument. Looking at the tables gives us a first idea of the tense. As a result, we perceive this tense - whether consciously or unconsciously - much better when we encounter it in our subsequent input.
Something you might wanna check out in regards to that book is the language learning method of the German lecturer Vera f. Birkenbihl. She kind of systemized the entire process of comprehensible input and combined it with what you said about Manfred spitzers book "Geist im Netz" on how the hippocampus has a continuous repetitive "dialogue" If you look for her videos on RUclips make sure you look for one where SHE explains it. Not someone else.
RULES ABSOLUTELY DO MATTER!!! 😄 Just not all of them that we learn in school and certain other places. Native speakers make the rules, and ALL learners of the various languages HAVE TO follow them...
Great video Steve! It is a pity that more people are not aware of the fact that rules are not so important for mastering the language so that most of their time they focus on learning the rules consciously. I totally agree that exposure is the key and the comprehensible input. Thanks for sharing this 👏🏻
That’s it. I’m from Brazil and I’m an English teacher. I only focus on conversation, I teach them the correct structure but I focus on the conversation. I totally agree with you, rules are not so important. This same idea happens to a baby, they learn how to speak any language just by listening to the people around him/her.
@@moronicirne4800 have you heard how unintelligible children can be? If their grammar is too off, or their word usage is wrong it is very difficult to understand what they are talking about.
@@marikothecheetah9342 That doesn't matter. These babies acquire all of the grammar patterns internally in the end and become better than any adult learner. From the other side, you can learn all rules you want, but it doesn't automatically mean you could speak language without errors, because you don't have time to think about all of these rules in a real conversation. Finally you will also internalize these rules and forget about grammar. Here's an example. There're two types of verb conjugation in Japanese. You can try to learn which verb is of which one, and then try to follow "the rules". But in fact, only after consuming a lot of input, you can do it naturally and you never think about types of conjugation at this point.
@@KnightOfEternity13 "These babies acquire all of the grammar patterns internally in the end and become better than any adult learner." - mhm... yeah... no. But whatever you want to believe - you do you.
Ich habe gleiches Buch von Manfred Spitzer. In einem Radiobeitrag Ö1 habe ich mal darüber gehört. Nur ohne "Rules" ist es schwer, durch die Tests und Zertifizierungen zum Studium oder zu guten Jobs zu kommen.
Yes, of course if you are talking about a bad high school language class and just rules for rules sake, sure. But "grammar" is also how a language works, how it fits together. "Rules" and "Grammar" are not only a bad high school class. Because they are sometimes taught badly doesn't make them unimportant. They can be integrated, which a good teacher will do.
For example, with more focus on input, still spending time with a teacher on Russian grammar is much faster than simply thinking I'm going to learn it all in my lifetime just by listening. They fact is, they inform each other. You spend some time on grammar and then you recognize the pattern, and so, "oh", I remember this. And, so it goes. That's if you want to use it well. If all you care about is the basics, then sure, you can speak badly and still communicate. I taught English to foreign speakers for many years, and one can speak very badly, and if they really want to communicate they can. So, OK, there is certainly worth to that. On the other hand, some people want to learn a language well; they may want to read literature in that language. It's not so black and white.
I know many people who have lived in India for 50+ years and yet don't speak a word of their language. So I certainly don't agree with the idea that it's all about exposure.
Thank you so much Steve for your excellent videos. Actually I'm practising listening with them and learning at the same time interesting things about hippocampus and cortex 🙏😃
Your explanation of the relationship of the hippocampus with the cortex was spot on and moreover gave me a deeper understanding of that. Really awesome!
I usually don’t comment on RUclips, but I wanted to mention that I listened to your intro playlist and then immediately bought a year subscription to LingQ. I knew Spanish when I was young, but lost it due to lack of use as I got older, and every time I tried to get it back I got inundated with like… the tenses of tener, and I couldn’t stick with it. It was confusing, you know? I have a great ear. I’m a voracious reader. I love to learn. I’d studied Spanish, French, and Greek, so why didn’t I know a darn thing in any of those languages? This. This is why. Thank you so much for posting these videos. I feel significantly less like a crazy person.
Great insight! That's why feeding grammatical rules to learners is not an effective way of learning and it is very annoying. I believe learning language should be by feeling and living instead of studying. Now I understand why I cannot master English even i have been studying it more than 30 years.
I agree with all of this and have personally experienced learning another language in this way. But for one to be able to write correctly in a language the correct grammar must be observed. To go further one has to study the grammar. .
I'm still not sure about that. I remember myself at school, and know that reading lots of books made much more for my native writing (which is very hard) than all the theory we used to learn. From the other side, there were some hard situations when I had to resort to rules. I forgot all of them later though, and don't know can I still write those correctly.
as i learning English i never look up the rules of grammar, it makes mr confused, the rules should't be our focus instead, enjoying the proscess, the rules would come towards us by itself. agreed with you mr. steve.
I agree that enough immersion (like the 1000s of hours baby get) will teach you the patterns and rules. However, not all of us have access to this level of immersion, either because we lack the time or we study a language where there are no native speakers around, or not much in the way of input that has 80%+ comprehensiblity. Rules are therefore a useful shortcut in these circumstances.
You can look at rules and explanations. With enough exposure to the language you start to understand them end even remember them. Without tons of input you won't be able to apply them. If you try to refer to the rules while speaking you will never speak naturally.
Steve, I would suggest that you check out the Lexical Approach. It completely changes the way we view 'grammar' and 'vocabulary' in languages. Instead, it emphasizes the importance of lexical chunks. Language is grammaticalized lexis, not lexicalized grammar.
I've been learning English for 2 years, something that I learned is, as much rules you learn ,less english you can speak, as a self student our task is to make our journey more easy and not difficult.
I have found that doing some of what you say, but also taking some time to study how a word stem changes in Ukrainian helps me spot a word I might know in one form, in a new form. Learning on rules alone won't work though.
That's very true and I realized this while studying on BBC Learning English. Recently I encountered with exercises and explanations that despite I don't know how to explain the rules, I already understand its meaning and more or less how they are structured. This made realize and wonder how many people get discouraged by grammar. I mean, if it weren't I already know some "structures" that I don't know how to explain them but they are correct and I'm completely sure natives also couldn't explain them, how they expect a beginner learn all that in a unit? I'm not saying don't study grammar, but I think it's more important to understand something even if you don't know how to explain it rather than completely understand a grammar rule.
"This made realize and wonder how many people get discouraged by gramma" - they are discouraged, because it is taught in the wrong way, like most things at school. "I'm not saying don't study grammar, but I think it's more important to understand something even if you don't know how to explain it " - how can you say you understand something but cannot explain it? Also, natives use the rules but not necessarily remember the grammatical rule (and sure as hell they did learn that in school), but through constant usage they remember the patterns, although not necessarily correctly every time. You can be used to the usage, remember the pattern, but do not mix it up with understanding. Pattern recognition is not the same as understanding the concept behind that pattern.
@@marikothecheetah9342 I agree with you, even as a native Spanish speaker, I wouldn't know how to explain many grammar rules in Spanish. And yeah, my bad that's what I wanted to convey. I'm able to recognize the patterns. I think I got mixed up with understanding texts, movies, etc. I truly recommend BBC Learning English, but what I'd advise to other people is not get too stuck on grammar rules. I mean, I didn't even know for years simple things like what a verb, an adjective, or a pronoun was until recently lol. Yet, I was able to read and listen to intermediate to advanced texts and audios. But at the end, each person's learning process is going to be different. It depends on a lot of factors. The most important thing is to have fun in the process 💪
@@UroborosB Input is great, no doubt about it, but rules help with finding order in chaos and when you don't know something it's easier what the thing is if you need to find it somewhere :) I think both rules and input have their place in learning. And as you mentioned - each person's learning is different, so some will find learning rules in the beginning useful, some will want to refer to rules only when they need them, and some will blissfully ignore the rules and focus on learning the patterns of the language. And that's fine. Rules do matter to some people, to some they will matter later, or not at all. But there can be place for them in the learning process. And yes, fun is the key ingredient in any learning process. :)
I'm basically agree with you. It's especially evident when you try to learn a language similar to one you already know, if they belong to the same language group. For example, as a Russian speaker, I have never felt the need to learn Ukrainian rules to understand the meaning of a given sentence. The same is also true for French vs Spanish. For more obscure languages, I think learning basic rules may help. But it's mostly useful on the first stage, and even then you'd better ignore all the details, like which sound changes happen when you append a suffix etc.
on the other hand,the purpose of learning languages is getting a tool to deal with somethings or get results what the learner want.languages arent arts need to be mastered,but the ways to help us connecting with others.
most schools teaching put very large weights to grammers,if students spell wrong or misprogram,they will lose allof the score of test(when i was a student i also hate learn english but i like to talking with others).this experience make someone afraid of learn language and make them fear to talking with others cause of making mistakes
I have learned English language on traditional method, I agree that the path is not easy. I started to learn Espanish language using this Kaufman"s method , I realize that this method is very enjoyable and funny. I like to learn Espanish watching news on you tube, in my opinion I learn the language and what happining around the world.
I hope into my own force in studying english language, can sometime my english will improve skill speaking and auding, honestly I'm shy to write in english without translate because i think what I will shamed by native speaker for incorrectly english. I feel difficult to formulate thought to everyone got me. Good luck everybody studying your favorite language
I don’t know that I study Spanish efficiently- Probably not! I tend to go back and forth between what you are describing and the grammar rules. I have probably spent too much time on grammar-amazing what you can get across with sign language and the right words. Amazing what a dog can tell you, in fact. Maybe we should understand that people use all means at their disposal to communicate and focus not just on language?
Please in the future make a video on the cognitive differences of reading an eBook vs an actual book. I know you have Videos on this subject but not super in depth, just that personally you like paper books more. And this is actually encouraging me to start reading books in a foreign language. I haven't really read for years because school ruined my appetite for reading since I had to do a lot of it with tests and homework and such 😒 and when I was young I loved reading.
If you read a book to learn a language, you need a different type of book. Not just an electronic one but also a notebook, a dictionary, and other tools/functions.
E-books have the advantage that we can look up words. Paper books are a different experience. All of our learning should be as varied as possible. The brain prefers variety.
I agree but only partially ! A "one size fits all" rule (ergo: ignoring the grammar) is not to be used here ...UNLESS it is specified that it is 1. a general rule and 2. it is to apply to and therefore concern ONLY learners who have....UNLIMITED TIME , who do not really care WHEN they will be able to speak, in a year, two years or five years. However, when one is under pressure to deliver (to SPEAK) , the learner MUST begin to learn the rules early in the game., beginning simultaneously or not much later than learning words ! Two examples . EXAMPLE No 1: On November 1 2023 I began learning SPANISH from scratch. Intended to make Spanish my FIRST foreign language acquired totally via reading and listening and , yes, ignoring the grammar. I had a GOAL, a mission to accomplish, which required me to speak (not necessarily fluently but to speak!) Spanish in Spain by the very beginning of the New Year-- 2024. And guess what: when I opened my mouth the first, second, fifth and end even the tenth time ....I went MUTE. I could hardly utter a word ! It was a total failure which shocked me and the Spaniards I wanted and needed to communicate with. A tough, unpleasant lesson. It has made me devote the entire February so far (ca an hour per day) in Poland, my native country to...., o yes, to learning the Spanish grammar, especially the conjugation. And guess what: three weeks down the road I already COULD speak Spanish. With nobody to speak to and be reassured by, I KNOW it from relative ease with which I write in my calendar my Spanish daily entries. And what I can write I CAN SAY. EXAMPLE No2 : I had lived and worked for long stretches of time (on and off) in the U.S. While there, as an ESL teacher as well as a passionate participant and observer of life and people I got to know hundreds if no thousands of immigrants at various levels of their aquisition (or...the lack of it) of English. And guess what? I have NOT met one who would achieve even the lowest level of English without the grammar learned first. And I met many immigrants who came to the U.S. without any knowledge of English (both grammar and vocabulary). -- They either seamed disencouraged (by the lack of any foundation) to even just begin learning the language or were unable to pick up the language. Learning a foreign language without knowing any grammar is like.... building a house without any plan from dozens of elements chaotically stored.
Hmm, I think i just had an awe-ha moment! I always struggled with you saying not to learn grammar rules or focus on them and then you said patterns were good! I think i confused this as to you meaning just listen and i thought how on earth would you make sense out of what your listening to by just listening with out studying words and phrases but that is not grammar rules! I love your advice Steve! and i'm a member of lingq i sometimes struggle finding content that i enjoy in french to learn from..
You will have to search the web for content of interest. Google in French. Search RUclips. You can import with one click of the Browser extension. You can even import an audio file and it will be transcribed automatically and converted into a lesson.
Steve, hello!, thank you so much for your advices, you are really a master in learning languages and speaking it, of course we all are learning everyday and this never ends, for my learning speaking languages is a passion, but my biggest problem is when i try to learn, i always have been followed the traditional metodoloy as you mentioned, english i learnt for many years from school of course but if i wouldnt practice it i really just can greet haha, my native language is spanish, but with portuguese was different, i learnt portuguese to hold a conversation in just 3 months...only speaking with a friend, and that was amazing, i never forgot the words i learnt and i tried to improve it....thats why i see your videos and i say is amazing, thats why a very strict and boring methodoly step by step doesnt...work so well... but there is when i have another question, if you can answer me thank you so much, i am tottally agree about learning by building u our own rules, but for example i am looking for learning in the best way my two favorite languages: chinese and japanese, they have tottally different characters..., if i go to listen a song or read a book i wont understand anything, in that case i need to check for basics until i mastered to be able to understand?, i even cant hold a conversation yet, i would like your opinion thank you so much
You need access to online dictionaries and you need to learn the writing systems, not an easy task. You will gradually increase your vocabulary and comprehension. It takes time.
@@Thelinguist thank you so much Steve I thought you wouldn't answer me so fast, yes I am agree I just need to be patient, but is a nice clue about only use dictionary and writing system, thanks so much I will apply
I came to US when I was 6, now 59. I spoke Spanish my native language and obviously learned English being in US all my life but never took Spanish “class” learned From speaking Spanish all the time at home, so I guess I learned them at the same time. Now started learning Italian, and I feel like I need to learn some grammar rules cause I want to change the soooo many words alike and exactly the same spelling the wrong way and make it sound Italian.
Grammatical rules are descriptive, not prescriptive. They just convey information about how words have grown to be used. Unhealthy attention to rule adherence leaves you in a can't see the forest for the trees situation. Which is a pointless predicament to be stuck in seeming that patterns naturally become apparent with persistent exposure.
Could you please point me to more research about the natural order of acquisition? I have heard this concept before and it makes total sense, but couldn't find detailed papers or examples that lay out what the natural order is. Thank you Steven! Great video as always!
What about _apophatic_ explicit instruction for grammar? E.g. you know that rule about order of adjectives, Spanish doesn't have that, so don't bother trying to discover a pattern. Agree with the part about play. Play researcher Peter Gray is fully against compulsory schooling and Steven Pinker wrote the praise for his book. Amazing the conclusions you can reach when you actually look into something instead of just assuming what the right answer must be.
I didn't acquire that many languages as for example Steve, but I have experience in language learning. I speak German, English, Russian fluently and I learned French (A2) and I am currently learning Spanish. From my experience, we should not focus so much about child language learning and try to recreate that circumstances for the most "brain-freindly" and "natural" learning experience. A child do not speak well. The proficient language usage is later shaped in school also with grammar drills, text production, text analyses over a period of many years. The main advantage of children is the ability to produce the native sounds. We as adults should use all methods to make fast progresses. Sometimes it is needed to work through some grammar drills or learning some vocabulary lists. For example, in French, I would still don't know the main location prepositions if I would wait until may brain acquire them through input and context. Or, I would still struggle to negate sentences if I haven't sat down for two hours and haven't done an exercise for negation.
There is NO language other than computer code that a group of people sat down and built from the ground up. By the time we had teachers ALL languages were already built and running perfectly, we just had to backwards rationalize how they work and create rules around what we found.
It is unbelievable that people are still claiming that an adult learns in the same way as a child. Basically you're saying that adults should expect to be able to express themselves as well as one-year-olds after one year of uninterrupted exposure to a language. Who has that kind of time to waste?
This is not news to me.I have always taught like this. I teach English. Almost all my colleagues do nothing more than teach grammar ... even to little kids of 9 and 10 years old or younger. But trying to tell them that they are wasting everyone's time is impossible. They cannot give it up and it is a massive frustration.
When I was student in my University have been students and friends around the world wide latin america City Iquitos peru but my University have been done cooperation in Education with University of cambridge and others universities around the world wide
It makes me wonder how this would apply to other topics such as learning mathematics. Could one learn from comprehensible input in mathematics and learn the rules that way?
Pragmatically: consider ideas from all teachers and find what works for you. I’m finding after an eight week 8 hours a day five days a week course on Russian grammar that comprehension and memory are greatly enhanced. This need not be considered counter to what Steve is saying. There should be no argument against consuming lots of input. It’s absolutely necessary. Nor should there be an argument against understanding how a language works.
When I learn new languages, I don't want to figure everything by trial and error. I also want to be shown the basics regarding things like word order and verb conjugation. At the same time, I don't want to be taught "the basics" as if they are something separate from the language I am studying. I get the sense that Steve sees this as some kind of either/or dichotomy (top down vs. bottom up) and I don't see it that way (why not use both?). I want access to explanations of how the basics of a language works, with each "lesson" being accompanied by explanations (whenever it isn't self-explanatory) as to when these rules are applicable and ought to be used , so that when I start engaging in lessons, I have working schemas that I can use to make sense of the language. For instance, I don't want to try to figure out what a simple sentence from the bottom up. I want somebody to explain what a simple sentence looks like in the language I am studying, so that when I see simple sentences I can quickly apply this framework. Ditto for simple questions. Ditto for verb conjugations. As I encounter more complex phrases, and sentences, I will want explanations of how these things work and when they should be applied, and I will also want to be given examples of what it looks like when these rules are applied. Present tense, and past tense are relatively easy, but it's a lot harder to keep all the tenses straight and to remember when to use the other tenses. We definitely need to get more practice working with other tenses, so that we get more practice figuring out what tenses we're looking and what verb forms we need to use. Lessons on how to pronounce letters and dipthongs are also welcome, as are explanations regarding things like how to locate syllable breaks in words. At the same time, in practice, I find grammar guides more frustrating than useful because they tend to be terse, tend to have few (if any examples), and you're just expected to figure out how and when they apply to the language you're learning. I'd rather not have to critically engage with a grammar guide which offers me fragmented bits and pieces and then expects me to synthesize everything into a whole, when the author can take a bit more time to explain things clearly and provide examples. If LingQ isn't going to do this sort of thing, I'd like to see Duolingo do more of this, because there are things that neither Duolingo nor LIngQ are doing for me now, and I'd rather not waste months or years trying to reinvent the wheel when someone with more expertise can provide me with explanations and with examples, so that I can grasp more tenses and more complex sentence forms faster and begin to consolidate what I learn considerably earlier. One of the reasons why language acquisition is so hard is that we're expected to figure out the gaps in our language programs. Do you really want to create/generate an implicit grammar book for yourself as you learn a language? Steve seems to be suggesting that we do exactly that, and that is what we ought to be doing. And I know that this is something I really do not want to do unless I really have to.
According to Spitzer, the brain is not so good at learning explanations or individual details. The brain is best at creating patterns, getting used to associations. That is how the neurons learn and connect with each other. What you like to do is of course something else.
If you don't want to figure anything yourself, and dislike grammar guides, why don't you try to skim through a beginner language textbook? It does exactly what you want. It gives you simple texts, and explains the grammatical patterns behind them. If you want you can also input these texts into Lingq, that's what I use to do.
@@KnightOfEternity13 Thank you for the suggestion. To some extent I have done exactly that when Duolingo was my primary tool for language practice. I recommend Duolingo to people who want to acquire the rudiments of a language, but when I do so, I strongly recommend that they acquire basic language texts in their target language and use them in conjunction with Duolingo. And other resources, if they can find any which are suitable. I haven't really made much use of these basic and advanced language texts since I got a LIngQ account for Dutch in December of 2022, not least because the LIngQ Dutch course has been sucking up enough of my time and energy as it is - and I have also have some writing projects which I require a great deal of focus and attention. I have been thinking of doing this for a while though. Sure, I can input the Dutch text, and eventually I will do that, but I don't want to mess up my language stats by incorporating lessons with English vocabulary and sentences into the Dutch course. I have also thinking that I can look at how Duolingo explains English to Dutch speakers, and that I can turn these into private lessons. In addition to that, I am thinking that I can and should get Dutch language texts for native speakers, so that I can input both texts and examples/sample text as private lessons. I also have some books in Dutch, and I started transcribing small chunks and turning them into private lessons a couple of months ago. All of this requires a considerable amount of time and (more importantly) focus, so I expect that I will probably end up doing this on a small scale and doing it for months or years.
@@Thelinguist To me, it sounds like Spitzer is talking primarily about subconscious information processing, and especially context sensitive subconscious information processing. I do not deny that when that subconscious information processing can be brought to bear, it can work wonders. For example, providing scaffolded native language audio, video, and reading lessons as the basis for acquiring competency in reading and listening for people who already have down the rudiments of a language is nothing less than brilliant. However, it does not equally well for everyone or for every kind of task. I think of what I am proposing more as a suggestion that more of a certain kind scaffolding be provided for people who think that they can benefit from it, and which people who aren't interested in, can choose to ignore. If others do not put in these kinds of lessons in the LingQ Dutch course (which is the only one I am working on right now), chances are that I will eventually start creating some of these kinds of lessons myself.
I think that except when studying rules we cannot help but invent our own rules and mythologies of how things work, no matter if it is false or true. We observe morphemes, see them again elsewhere, and intuit the meaning of hitherto unseen words. Otherwise I think it would be impossible to learn so many 10s of thousands of words that we need. I have started to believe there are much fewer morphemes in a language to get used to than we initially think when we are told our language has such and such vast number of words, and that even in our native language our fluency with words is limited only to the ones we use a lot, but with our so called 10 dollar words it takes a bit of mental effort and a literal pause to think of them, reason about their meaning and say them. One wug two wugs, she wugs, he wugged. You wug to see it.
This reminds me of how much some cultist learners in the Japanese community push how "important" it is to nail down the pitch accent. Although it's at least worth recognizing, it's not as crucial as they make it out to be and native speakers will tell you that, and I have some arguments against deliberate effort for it, but it comes down to internalizing the pronunciation through lots of exposure by listening and reading, defeating the purpose of memorization. First, several languages have various dialects and Japanese is no exception. All of these dialects and accents are technically correct, thus there is no one correct way to speak, and debunks the myth that all natives sound the same. They don't. North Americans say "friend" while Brits and Australians say "mate", this is not wrong, just different. Second, pro-pitch accent people fail to consider/avoid using as an example single words that have multiple meanings like ロケット which can mean "rocket" or "locket" depending on context. They also never consider how the pronunciation works in various forms of the words like 新しい、新しくて、新しかった...does it really matter? Also for particles in the language as well. What's the pitch accent for の？If you tell me "it doesn't really matter" or "it depends on context", it just proves my point: Context matters a lot more than the rules that govern pronunciation. As long as there's mutual understanding, who the hell cares about all these rules? Much less preaching about memorizing them? It's like if you're learning English, why is it that Canada has the stress on the first syllable and Canadian has it on the second? As a native, I don't know why this happens and frankly nobody cares. Even if there are rules, it's better to internalize pronunciation and grammar through repeated exposure. Plus, many Japanese I've heard speak English makes some mistakes, albeit unintentionally. Why is it we cut them slack (as we should) but then when it comes to non-natives speaking Japanese, all of a sudden mistakes are cringy and all hell breaks loose? You cultists support a double standard, all for what?
If you could give up work move to the target country pay some one to talk to you for 15 hours a day for one year I am sure one could even learn russian in that time but with just one hour every day at home, I might need to study rules maybe
The problem is that what you do with Italian is not available for other languages: Italian is spelled and written the way it is pronounced, once you get over pronouncing gli (gli spaghetti) and gn (montagna/e al plurale). If you live in the South, you deginitely need passato remoto, a real nightmare as every voice is different! Then there's the subjunctive (when you can substitute the imperfect (se sapevo lo facevo instead of se avessi saputo l'avrei sicuramente fatto), and tight rules about determiners especially before masculine nouns beginning with vowels. Thank heavens for observing usage (pragmatics). Since every neighborhood speaks Italian differently, you just absorb the cadences by living there, but your brand of Italian pronunciation will instantly brand you as Venetian, Florentine, Romanaccio, Neapolitan etc. Luckily, Italians are thrilled when people attempt to learn "The Language of Dante" and willingly help with joy and friendship. Nothing snooty about it!🇮🇹
The way babies learn as opposed to adults is very, very different. With a baby, that initial language is being imprinted where no language yet exists. This is what makes their language learning so fascinating and rapid. In an adult, however, there is already an imprinted language, and learning additional languages means competing with this first native, imprinted language. This is what creates a degree of tension, and what makes learning as an adult a real challenge. As for rules, many of them are helpful indeed. For example, as a rule, Spanish nouns that end in "a" are feminine. There is a handful of exceptions, but these can be learned very quickly (e.g., "El mapa"). When the language learner consciously ignores rules, he makes life that much more difficult for himself.
I used to think the same way, but as I've been studying Korean (like the 6th language I've ever tried to learn) I've been taking a listening heavy approach and I found that I'll get used to many grammar patterns before I get formally taught about them in the textbook I've been working through simultaneously. As a matter of fact, I noticed I struggled early on when I wasn't comfortable with the alphabet and pronunciation but once I broke that my learning process sped up drastically. for sure rules are great to reinforce what you've noticed but I don't think a bottom-up skill building approach is very practical or efficient for language learning
@Kyle-uo5bg Ah, the operative word in your comment is "tried." Have you attained fluency in any of these 6 languages by simply listening to them? I've always been suspicious of approaches that ask nothing on the part of the learner, treating language learning like sun bathing: if you just lie there you'll get a tan / if you just listen you'll soon be speaking like a native. I've never seen evidence that this works
Just learn French. You won't be able to tell the difference. Later on if you want to specialize you can. First you'll need words. At LingQ you can filter languages by accents if you want.
I have an off subject question Steve. When Should we start reading an ACTUAL book in a language. Is it still beneficial to read a book if you only know 20-30% of the vocabulary? A few months ago I couldn't read anything in Portuguese and then I managed to get my hands on a 9 Portuguese stories for beginners eBook and I understood NOTHING. But I just started to read the words and eventually just started to learn. By book 9 these were still super difficult and the 9th book was very difficult but some of them I understood 60-80% of the words so it was enjoyable. 9th book maybe 20% idk. But these books were meant to be "easy" for learning but still real stories nothing "easy" or random like "an elephant had a blue shirt and rode a bicycle" type of story.
I don't find most children's stories easy. That's why we created our mini-stories at LingQ with lots of repetition, especially of the most frequent verbs and conjunctions. I only read away from the computer if there are fewer than 5% unknown words.
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❓What has been your experience learning language rules? Have you found natural exposure more effective than instruction? 👇🏼
I would argue that adults can use their logical mind to supplement their ability to absorb language. To help along the pattern formation, if you will. When studying a new language I focus on input but find that reviewing grammar tables helps to cement the patterns. I'm sure I could pick up the conjugations of Italian words eventually just from listening and reading but stopping occasionally to see the tables written out speeds up the process. Especially because I still remember many Latin conjugations that I learned in school decades ago and can see the similarities. I don't mean studying verb tables. It's more that seeing them written out helps to seed the pattern in my brain and helps me puzzle out new forms logically in a way that a three year old child wouldn't be able to do.
It's baffling for me this constant returning to: learn like a baby. The baby learns the language, to which it is exposed for about 4-6 years and it is still a very diminished knowledge of the language. Also, the critical age says for me all - the brain changes a lot during that time, kids start to understand abstract concepts, including rules of the language, maths etc. Why on Earth should we constantly say that knowing rules in the languages is unnecessary when it, as you pointed out, can help with speeding up the process of learning?
Rules help to recognise patterns (which adults can do way better than children - exposure to thousands of patterns that are not limited to the language) and quickly apply them to the learning process. English is my second language and even though I at first was learning it by a lot of exposure, understanding how the rules, regarding tenses, work and I was finally able to use them correctly. No amount of exposure helped me with comprehending how I was supposed to use them, but rules helped me immensely.
Funnily enough, German is a very rule-based language. I often joke that they even have rules for exceptions (which is quite true) and remembering those rules helps with the language usage.
Adult brains works differently and constant comparison to a way the child's brain works is, in my humble opinion, like comparing commodore to the newest PC or Mac.
@@marikothecheetah9342 I think people are overthinking it. A person like you have done absolutely a perfect job, learning English. And this video is not valid for you anymore lol.
@@dorgan4548 yeah, I learn other languages as well. :P
@@dorgan4548 your eloquence astounds me. You bark better than my dog.
@@marikothecheetah9342 The theory is that explicit learning speeds up the process in the early stages but that it causes fossilization later on. So if you learn only via implicit learning, you'll progress slower at first but ultimately reach higher levels of proficiency. Not saying I subscribe to that view. Just that that's what the idea is.
I've found that what works best for me is a combination of lots of input and the occasional grammar points. That way, if I've come across that particular grammar structure enough, I'll be able to understand it and use it comfortably fairly quickly. And if I don't remember reading or hearing it, then it's probably not going to stick and I'll just come back to it later, when I've had enough input.
When I reach an advanced level though, I don't bother to study any grammar anymore, because my inate understanding of it through input is going to be much better than what I could get with grammar rules.
Languages have always been my passion and I can speak around six languages. I create content in Brazilian Portuguese in my channel and when it comes to learning this very language, I have never used any grammar book, never learned any rules (unlike for example when I studied Arabic and I did all of that) and I learned to speak Portuguese by chatting and speaking with Brazilians, trying to "imitate" their pronunciation, listening to Portuguese language content to get used to the language even when I hadn't had a rich vocabulary so gradually I came to the point where I was able to speak it.
Hey! I'm Brazilian and I've watched some of your videos! I didn't expect to find you here heheh
@@kelvinrangel8044 Hey! Haha Small world! This channel is popular among language-learning people.
Learning languages of similar grammar structures of one’s own mother tongue doesn’t require learning grammar. When learning a language of different grammar rules we tend to ask what is the rules as an adult, because adults like rules. If we want to speak naturally a new language, imitation and abondante inout is maybe the best method.
You don’t learn a language by only vocabulary and being around people who speak the language
I've been learning Spanish on LingQ for 6 weeks now, and have already started seeing the main patterns of the language through input. I've yet to review the grammar rules. The plan is that when I eventually look at the grammar rules, I'll have some of the practical language in me to better understand the theory.
Sigue adelante no te detengas es hermoso ver que alguien aprenda tu lengua materna, don't give up I learn English now for me it's a beautiful language
The balance I found for myself, is to not actively study grammar or at least not in order. I´d go for input most of the times, then when I notice a pattern and I get curious about it, I will look up the related grammar. Slowly I cover the most important aspects, meaning the things I actually need, depending on how I want to use the language. For example if I learn because I like reading, one of the first thing I would notice and look up is the past tense... if I learn to speak to people, I´d quickly learn frequent informal expressions and how to use the first and second person present tense. I may learn the second person plural later, because it´s not used as much. More often than not you speak to one person, not two. So it´s a mix of learning more naturally, like Steve suggests and getting some specific useful insights into grammar in the process.
That is the best way to refer to grammar rules, when we are curious. That way the rule reinforces what we already know.
Yeah, I do it the same way! I even ask my friends/language partner which past tense (there can be more than just one 😅) I should concentrate first. Or what's the common use. And when I often see another "version" of that past tense I look it up in a grammar book. Best way (for me) to learn a language. Reading and listening are much more important than forcing to learn grammar rules before you even have a "feeling"/sense for that language. That's just my opinion...
I feel like I am putting my head into the lion’s mouth by leaving a comment. 🙂 I tried to learn French naturally, by living in a French community in Montreal and sharing a flat with francophones. I had studied French for years before, but I didn’t study while in Montreal, I tried to acquire the language. I failed to pick up the grammar, or much vocabulary. I could understand a lot of what was said, but I could not speak at all well as my grammar was poor. Fast forward 30 years , and I decided to relearn French. I followed courses for 6 months, then listened to podcasts, all the while studying the grammar as I encountered it. I have made massively more progress. I can happily listen to podcasts for native speakers and understand almost everything, not always, sometimes a speaker is hard to follow or speaks very fast, but usually. I must be a weirdo, but I cannot guess the rules, they have to be explained to me. Once they are explained, it makes sense, and I can then learn them by listening to lots of input. It might be because I am a more reserved person. You seem to be an extrovert, more at ease socially with strangers. Just a guess. There are differences between adults and children. Scientists have discovered several biochemical reasons why kids learn faster. But as you know, studies have shown that adults can learn a language as well as a child, in terms of vocabulary and grammar.
I don't recommend just being around speakers of the target language. A major investment of time in listening and reading is always necessary. I have always done that and it is made easier and more efficient today with the abundance of content available online, online dictionaries and sites like LingQ. When we want to refer to grammar rules we should do so to reinforce what our brains have learn naturally. It's not all or nothing.
@@Thelinguist Sadly back then I didn’t have access to audio content, language courses were stale and formal. Today is so different, of course. What you say makes sense. Thanks.
@@Thelinguistc est difficile de trouver de bon vidéos en arabe classic
I agree that rules shouldn’t be the focus point of learning, but I think the learner should at least be aware of them..even if they can’t use the rules themselves…
babies take years to learn very basic language rules…adults don’t usually have that kind of time. Of course, language learning never ends….but being at least aware of a decent amount of rules will definitely make language consumption, or input, much easier
True, I observe my kid (now he’s 7 and he started speaking english when he was 4) done the same thing, he used to say seed when he meant saw and then I corrected him multiple times until he realized himself that there are some irregular verbs that don’t take -ed. It’s natural process.
You needn't correct him. It has little effect.
I agree, whats matters is the exposure in the language, in only two month my imput has improved alot by listening podcast and youtube videos with people with a native English.
Hello everyone.
I’m Negot SERAPHIN from Haiti and I’m English teaching with some seven (7) years of experiences working as an English teacher.
Nevertheless, this video about how to learn languages is really outstanding because I experience such things with my two daughters learning their mother tongue and also learning French and English.
This thing is quite simple. Just place the child into an environment where s/he may get access to what s/he is learning because the information as well is concretely exposed to the child.
This approach of your really targets me to rethink my language teaching strategies.
Be blessed,
Sure, don't worry about perfectly memorizing grammatical rules, and don't make the perfect memorization and application of these rules a precondition to further exploration of the language. But by all means do acquaint yourself with the existence of rules! Casually browse a good grammar guide from time to time, one that explains rules in simple non-academic terms with loads of simple plausible examples. Having this prior acquaintanceship with (not mastery of) the core rules makes immersion in the language so much more efficient and less disorientating, in my experience. You notice so much more and consequently your attention is engaged more and you acquire more. Otherwise one has little to no idea what's going on and it is so easy for an adult learner (with competing life responsibilities and interests) to get discouraged and give up.
Yes! I’ve been learning Russian for the last two years and no matter how much I look at the cases and conjugations it never seems to help me progress. I have found reading and just listening to Russian vlogs and simple words and phrases most beneficial. Music I think is helping too but it’s more subtle in the nature of its benefit. Repetition and attitude is key 🔑
Interesting. In my experience I believe you need a base at the beginning. Once you have it, it is a matter of start talking, understanding, and reading. You never stop learning one language. Thanks.
As an english learner myself, even though I totally agree with what you say, Steve, about the focus on input learning material, I wouldn't downplay thevstudy of grammar rules and advanced structures. In fact, I would go as far as saying that they are paramount provided that you make the extra effort to put them in practice as much as you can in your every day life, and notice them in every piece of writing that you come across, that's my opinion off course. Making the whole process of learning enjoyable is key as well as you say.
It's really about accumulating memories which are experiences until more and more memories become procedural. I think all learning is really like this
I blieve that grammar can be so useful specially for adults because they can learn how to form different sentences with different structures in a short time which a child will be able to do after 5 years of listening to the language all the time.
And a person who should learn the language in 6 months has no other choise but to learn grammar
Grammar is the rule of the language. If you learn the grammar the only thing you should do after is learning vocabulary to be able to speak that language.
I blieve in case you want to learn a language just for fun, then it really doesn't matter how to learn the language because the result is not the important thing for you. But if you are in rush and you should be able to speak the language in a short amount of time, then grammar is so essential.
Thank you so much for this video when I was young I was studying English with just grammar and all teachers were talking of we don't learn grammar correctly we'll fall in the exam and I'm still learing English by listening and taking as I can I'm in high school and with sorry I'm still learning grammar to pass my exam specially I'm in Arab country so God with us🖤
Badly taught grammar is the problem. Nothing wrong with studying the grammar rules, and in fact it can be a shortcut to fluency for many learners like me. After months of watching dramas and videos just to get exposure, I finally started to take up Chinese grammar courses for intermediate level, and it immensely accelerated the speed of my improvement. She was simply an amazing teacher.
are you learning the new language online or offline?
That doesn't work for everyone. I'm learning english and I've never read an english grammar book. I notice that muy english improves a lot when I watch english series or listen to podcast etc. Of course i try to understand the structure of the english grammar but only that.
I honestly partialy agree what you said. I believe that language came first before the grammatical rules. We don't know grammar in our native language but we do know to speak and write it without many grmmatical errors. So I do 'partially' agree that being exposed (that includes reading, listening with books, etc) to a language that we intend to learn makes us fluent in that language without taking lessons soley on grammar. But I want to point out the fact that grammar learning is one of the important things to do when learning a foreign language. It shouldn't be soley focused towards language learning, but I am very sure that studying grammar will acclerate language learning greatly.
Thanks for the video, Steve. I think that that there is no one size fits all approach. What you're saying absolutely makes sense, the best way to learn a language is to immerse in it - the results can be incredible. However what I found while learning Greek was that reading up on grammar and word etymology (I love this part) accelerated the process (after one year of learning I was able to have a smooth conversation with a taxi driver in Athens on various topics). My brain is very good at recognising patterns and reading up on the grammar helped me leverage the patterns that I had created while learning other languages and utilise them - where it made sense - to create new patterns more quickly.
What I mean is that everyone should find the right balance for themselves. I agree on the general point though that language exposure the most important part.
At this point of my life I really believe in the words of Steve, because that is happening with me right now, I was two years in an English school and I understood the very basic stuffs but then, three years later I started to "study" watching series, movies and reading books in two years as well and then I was able to speak with a English native speaker, with problem and mistakes but it'ssomething that in the past seemed unreachable. Thanks to Mr. Salas and Steve.
I think it depends. I'm a Polish native speaker. Rules in my mother tongue are little bit similar to Russian, but not to English. So, I had to learn English grammar, becouse it contains the other way of thinking about the language structures.
Adults can earn Languages like children.
One key component of language acquisition is pattern recognition. The brain excels at identifying recurring patterns in the linguistic input it receives.
This process involves the activation and strengthening of neural connections related to language processing. Over time, as the brain encounters various words,
phrases, and sentence structures, it begins to form a mental representation of the language's grammar, vocabulary, and syntax.
You raise a good point. I think the point is not whether to learn rules or not, because you're learning them anyway. The issue is whether to learn them explicitly or implicitly. But learning "implicitly" does not mean "not learning at all." In fact, when you start to learn a language (especially a much different one), learning implicitly (generalizing rules) may be more difficult than learning explicitly (through translation and explanation). Comparing adults with children's brains is not a valid point in my opinion, since children learn the language at the same time as they develop their subcortical areas, and adults are already past the critical period.
I agree that adults have tools, knowledge and experience children don't have. Their existing language knowledge can be an obstacle and an advantage. However, in both cases we learn mostly from examples, not from explanations of the rules. By learn, I mean develop the ability to use the language, rather then learning what the rule is which may not enable us to use the language correctly.
@@Thelinguist imho, learning is much more complex that just learning by examples. We learn by a lot of means: by auditory processing, visual processing, writing, reading and using our experience to recognise patterns, by elimination of mistakes, even by combining learning with what we like. Also, learning in adulthood is conscious, while children learn things more unconsciously, especially when it comes to language learning. Assuming children can speak their native language quite well at the age of 5, it is 5 years of constant exposure to that language. If learning like a baby worked, people who live in other countries would pick up the language just by exposure and we know it doesn't work that way.
Adults do not learn like children, so there is little sense in trying to learn like them.
@@marikothecheetah9342 Children at 5 years old sound terrible, and people living in other countries for 5 years generally spend very little time listening to the language and stick to their native language in their free time (look at Chinese immigrants in the US/Canada who stick to their in-group in Chinatowns).
whereas Europeans who spend most their time watching RUclips or browsing the internet can understand English very well in my experience. My dad moved to America and learned English from watching shows and trying to communicate with musicians he worked with (0 formal education, he only had studied German before in the army), and he had great success: but it was slow and he never fully mastered grammatical articles after years of using the language(but he can use them ~90-95% correctly.)
Honestly, i think that the situation for a child and an adult are really different. A child only hears that one language every day and with much more context.
Im not saying that rules should be the only way of learning, But that learning rules can be used in addition to exposure.
Especially since most of us aren't in a position to have a constant flow of exposure.
Personally, learning rules helps me understand the context of the spoken language much faster.
Yes! Thank you!
Nothing wrong with referring to rules. But to be able to easily understand and then produce the language, you need to expose your brain to a lot of input. Lots.
@@Thelinguist Input has its time and place, so do the rules. As adults we unconsciously look for patterns and rules mean patterns. If input alone was working people living in other countries would learn the language in no time, max those 4-6 years like a child does but we all know it doesn't work that way and such adults can still barely function in the language after ten years of living abroad. Input makes sense IF it is supported by rules, imho. If I know, that in German modal verbs have this rule: 1 person sing.=3rd person sing. I don't have to think about creating the form, my brain associates the rule with my usage. If input was everything, my friends would not be making cardinal mistakes in English, while claiming they are watching films without subtitles on Netflix.
@@Thelinguist yes. Exposure is probably the most crucial point. I'm just saying that it doesn't necessarily have to be either or. You can both learn the rules and have sufficient exposure.
Adults have capabilities that children don't after all.
I think the rules should be learned to complement exposure but of course everyone has a different way of learning as well. Some people are intuitive learners. I definitely am not.
@@marikothecheetah9342 Keep in mind "the brain" isn't one unit but many pieces working together to some capacity. The part of the brain that processes language is likely different than the part that actively thinks about rules. I know for a fact that when you think in your native language you don't actively piece together each segment of a sentence together. You simply think and then a sentence is formed which you can adjust before speaking . That's because the part of your brain that processes language is mainly unconscious and is exactly why native speakers of a language struggle to explain rules to foreign learners but can use them with ease.
As for your friends, they probably have spent tens or hundreds of hours tops immersing in input... you need thousands to really model the language in your brain.
In my opinion rules should be looked up when you notice a pattern and want context behind it.
I'm in agreement, yes. Don't deliberately study rules only as the main bulk of language learning. Find what work for you of course, but generally I don't think many people will find this effective. Instead of memorizing an entire writing system all at once (like the English alphabet), it's better to learn the letters while learning words and grammar, which is where listening and reading strategy becomes the way to go. Things start falling into place.
Personal example, I started learning Japanese several years and what I did as a first-time language learner was learn words and grammar points and then basically look around for listening and reading material hoping they contained the words and grammar I just learned. While it worked out in the end, it was largely inefficient.
I really don't like the logic of "children learn it this way". Children also take years to learn basic sentences. When I learned a new tense in Spanish as an adult, I looked up the regular conjugation of that tense. This made it a lot easier for me because I could easily understand which person was being referred to in a text, which is very important because in Spanish you don't normally use pronouns in a sentence. For example, if a sentence in Spanish started with 'Hablé', I would know that it meant 'I spoke', whereas otherwise I would have just known that it was probably some form of 'hablar' (to speak), but without seeing the pattern I had to hope for context to explain who was speaking and whether it was in the past, present or future.
No doubt looking up grammar satisfies our curiosity and can help us notice. However, to be able to produce the correct form of the verb while speaking relies more on lots of input, rather than studying conjugation tables.
I want to ask how you learned Spanish tenses. Please give me some tips because they are too much. It's pretty hard to learn all tenses and confusing also.
You may say that children take years, but that long period of listening is _exactly_ what eventuallly produces such high quality output. We adults want shortcuts and hacks, which as we've seen, tends to produce a _much_ inferior end product.
I still get them wrong. Look at the tables is comforting while looking at them, but if I want to use the right form on the fly, I need to have some phrases, some patterns, stored in my memory and just hope they come out right.
@@futurez12 It still doesn't make sense. No one really learns like a child. Or did you spend a year listening to random conversations in your learning language before you started speaking a word? I also don't understand Steve's "Look at the tables is comforting while looking at them" argument. Looking at the tables gives us a first idea of the tense. As a result, we perceive this tense - whether consciously or unconsciously - much better when we encounter it in our subsequent input.
Something you might wanna check out in regards to that book is the language learning method of the German lecturer Vera f. Birkenbihl.
She kind of systemized the entire process of comprehensible input and combined it with what you said about Manfred spitzers book "Geist im Netz" on how the hippocampus has a continuous repetitive "dialogue"
If you look for her videos on RUclips make sure you look for one where SHE explains it. Not someone else.
I will study rules
well,.. rules and how the words are formed in arabic helped me learning it easily. you remember thing well in my opinion if you go with the rules.
RULES ABSOLUTELY DO MATTER!!! 😄 Just not all of them that we learn in school and certain other places. Native speakers make the rules, and ALL learners of the various languages HAVE TO follow them...
It's about how the brain works.
@Thelinguist , you're right that our brains function differently. That's why we learn the rules are learned step by step in our journey.
When I started aquiring input , that was incredible
I have ALWAYS thought this is how it works! Nice to have confirmation.
You and Gabriel Poliglota are my idols on language learning.
Great video Steve! It is a pity that more people are not aware of the fact that rules are not so important for mastering the language so that most of their time they focus on learning the rules consciously. I totally agree that exposure is the key and the comprehensible input. Thanks for sharing this 👏🏻
That’s it. I’m from Brazil and I’m an English teacher. I only focus on conversation, I teach them the correct structure but I focus on the conversation. I totally agree with you, rules are not so important. This same idea happens to a baby, they learn how to speak any language just by listening to the people around him/her.
@@moronicirne4800 have you heard how unintelligible children can be? If their grammar is too off, or their word usage is wrong it is very difficult to understand what they are talking about.
@@marikothecheetah9342 That doesn't matter. These babies acquire all of the grammar patterns internally in the end and become better than any adult learner. From the other side, you can learn all rules you want, but it doesn't automatically mean you could speak language without errors, because you don't have time to think about all of these rules in a real conversation. Finally you will also internalize these rules and forget about grammar.
Here's an example. There're two types of verb conjugation in Japanese. You can try to learn which verb is of which one, and then try to follow "the rules". But in fact, only after consuming a lot of input, you can do it naturally and you never think about types of conjugation at this point.
@@KnightOfEternity13 "These babies acquire all of the grammar patterns internally in the end and become better than any adult learner." - mhm... yeah... no. But whatever you want to believe - you do you.
@@marikothecheetah9342 If you believe you're comparable to any native, you're delusional.
Excellent, i learnt a lot. That is a wise guy, gifted with the languages and how teach them.
Exposure and experiences are the best learning accelerators
Ich habe gleiches Buch von Manfred Spitzer. In einem Radiobeitrag Ö1 habe ich mal darüber gehört.
Nur ohne "Rules" ist es schwer, durch die Tests und Zertifizierungen zum Studium oder zu guten Jobs zu kommen.
Yes, of course if you are talking about a bad high school language class and just rules for rules sake, sure. But "grammar" is also how a language works, how it fits together. "Rules" and "Grammar" are not only a bad high school class. Because they are sometimes taught badly doesn't make them unimportant. They can be integrated, which a good teacher will do.
For example, with more focus on input, still spending time with a teacher on Russian grammar is much faster than simply thinking I'm going to learn it all in my lifetime just by listening. They fact is, they inform each other. You spend some time on grammar and then you recognize the pattern, and so, "oh", I remember this. And, so it goes. That's if you want to use it well. If all you care about is the basics, then sure, you can speak badly and still communicate. I taught English to foreign speakers for many years, and one can speak very badly, and if they really want to communicate they can. So, OK, there is certainly worth to that. On the other hand, some people want to learn a language well; they may want to read literature in that language. It's not so black and white.
It's about how the brain learns.
I know many people who have lived in India for 50+ years and yet don't speak a word of their language. So I certainly don't agree with the idea that it's all about exposure.
Thank you so much Steve for your excellent videos. Actually I'm practising listening with them and learning at the same time interesting things about hippocampus and cortex
🙏😃
Your explanation of the relationship of the hippocampus with the cortex was spot on and moreover gave me a deeper understanding of that. Really awesome!
I usually don’t comment on RUclips, but I wanted to mention that I listened to your intro playlist and then immediately bought a year subscription to LingQ. I knew Spanish when I was young, but lost it due to lack of use as I got older, and every time I tried to get it back I got inundated with like… the tenses of tener, and I couldn’t stick with it. It was confusing, you know? I have a great ear. I’m a voracious reader. I love to learn. I’d studied Spanish, French, and Greek, so why didn’t I know a darn thing in any of those languages? This. This is why. Thank you so much for posting these videos. I feel significantly less like a crazy person.
The brain learns through associations and by extracting patterns from what it sees and hears. But the brain learns slowly. Patience.
Great insight! That's why feeding grammatical rules to learners is not an effective way of learning and it is very annoying. I believe learning language should be by feeling and living instead of studying. Now I understand why I cannot master English even i have been studying it more than 30 years.
I agree with all of this and have personally experienced learning another language in this way. But for one to be able to write correctly in a language the correct grammar must be observed. To go further one has to study the grammar. .
I'm still not sure about that. I remember myself at school, and know that reading lots of books made much more for my native writing (which is very hard) than all the theory we used to learn. From the other side, there were some hard situations when I had to resort to rules. I forgot all of them later though, and don't know can I still write those correctly.
as i learning English i never look up the rules of grammar, it makes mr confused, the rules should't be our focus instead, enjoying the proscess, the rules would come towards us by itself. agreed with you mr. steve.
I agree that enough immersion (like the 1000s of hours baby get) will teach you the patterns and rules. However, not all of us have access to this level of immersion, either because we lack the time or we study a language where there are no native speakers around, or not much in the way of input that has 80%+ comprehensiblity. Rules are therefore a useful shortcut in these circumstances.
You can look at rules and explanations. With enough exposure to the language you start to understand them end even remember them. Without tons of input you won't be able to apply them. If you try to refer to the rules while speaking you will never speak naturally.
@@Thelinguist thanks for the reply. You make a very good case. And for speaking, and to lesser extent, listening, I suspect you are right.
Steve, I would suggest that you check out the Lexical Approach. It completely changes the way we view 'grammar' and 'vocabulary' in languages. Instead, it emphasizes the importance of lexical chunks. Language is grammaticalized lexis, not lexicalized grammar.
I've been learning English for 2 years, something that I learned is, as much rules you learn ,less english you can speak, as a self student our task is to make our journey more easy and not difficult.
Your such a good person and you love knowledge very much. i hope Allah give you hidaya
I have found that doing some of what you say, but also taking some time to study how a word stem changes in Ukrainian helps me spot a word I might know in one form, in a new form. Learning on rules alone won't work though.
That's very true and I realized this while studying on BBC Learning English. Recently I encountered with exercises and explanations that despite I don't know how to explain the rules, I already understand its meaning and more or less how they are structured. This made realize and wonder how many people get discouraged by grammar. I mean, if it weren't I already know some "structures" that I don't know how to explain them but they are correct and I'm completely sure natives also couldn't explain them, how they expect a beginner learn all that in a unit? I'm not saying don't study grammar, but I think it's more important to understand something even if you don't know how to explain it rather than completely understand a grammar rule.
"This made realize and wonder how many people get discouraged by gramma" - they are discouraged, because it is taught in the wrong way, like most things at school.
"I'm not saying don't study grammar, but I think it's more important to understand something even if you don't know how to explain it " - how can you say you understand something but cannot explain it? Also, natives use the rules but not necessarily remember the grammatical rule (and sure as hell they did learn that in school), but through constant usage they remember the patterns, although not necessarily correctly every time. You can be used to the usage, remember the pattern, but do not mix it up with understanding. Pattern recognition is not the same as understanding the concept behind that pattern.
@@marikothecheetah9342 I agree with you, even as a native Spanish speaker, I wouldn't know how to explain many grammar rules in Spanish. And yeah, my bad that's what I wanted to convey. I'm able to recognize the patterns. I think I got mixed up with understanding texts, movies, etc. I truly recommend BBC Learning English, but what I'd advise to other people is not get too stuck on grammar rules. I mean, I didn't even know for years simple things like what a verb, an adjective, or a pronoun was until recently lol. Yet, I was able to read and listen to intermediate to advanced texts and audios. But at the end, each person's learning process is going to be different. It depends on a lot of factors. The most important thing is to have fun in the process 💪
@@UroborosB Input is great, no doubt about it, but rules help with finding order in chaos and when you don't know something it's easier what the thing is if you need to find it somewhere :) I think both rules and input have their place in learning. And as you mentioned - each person's learning is different, so some will find learning rules in the beginning useful, some will want to refer to rules only when they need them, and some will blissfully ignore the rules and focus on learning the patterns of the language. And that's fine. Rules do matter to some people, to some they will matter later, or not at all. But there can be place for them in the learning process.
And yes, fun is the key ingredient in any learning process. :)
I'm basically agree with you.
It's especially evident when you try to learn a language similar to one you already know, if they belong to the same language group.
For example, as a Russian speaker, I have never felt the need to learn Ukrainian rules to understand the meaning of a given sentence. The same is also true for French vs Spanish.
For more obscure languages, I think learning basic rules may help. But it's mostly useful on the first stage, and even then you'd better ignore all the details, like which sound changes happen when you append a suffix etc.
Studying a foreign language is always about discipline and rules. If you want to properly speak language you have to study rules!
on the other hand,the purpose of learning languages is getting a tool to deal with somethings or get results what the learner want.languages arent arts need to be mastered,but the ways to help us connecting with others.
most schools teaching put very large weights to grammers,if students spell wrong or misprogram,they will lose allof the score of test(when i was a student i also hate learn english but i like to talking with others).this experience make someone afraid of learn language and make them fear to talking with others cause of making mistakes
and play also an important opportunity for adults,some PC games need player cooperating with other players,or exchanging items like Warframe.
I have learned English language on traditional method, I agree that the path is not easy. I started to learn Espanish language using this Kaufman"s method , I realize that this method is very enjoyable and funny. I like to learn Espanish watching news on you tube, in my opinion I learn the language and what happining around the world.
I hope into my own force in studying english language, can sometime my english will improve skill speaking and auding, honestly I'm shy to write in english without translate because i think what I will shamed by native speaker for incorrectly english.
I feel difficult to formulate thought to everyone got me.
Good luck everybody studying your favorite language
I don’t know that I study Spanish efficiently- Probably not! I tend to go back and forth between what you are describing and the grammar rules. I have probably spent too much time on grammar-amazing what you can get across with sign language and the right words. Amazing what a dog can tell you, in fact. Maybe we should understand that people use all means at their disposal to communicate and focus not just on language?
Please in the future make a video on the cognitive differences of reading an eBook vs an actual book. I know you have Videos on this subject but not super in depth, just that personally you like paper books more. And this is actually encouraging me to start reading books in a foreign language. I haven't really read for years because school ruined my appetite for reading since I had to do a lot of it with tests and homework and such 😒 and when I was young I loved reading.
eBooks are better, because it's so much easier to look for words meanings, especially using such tools as Lingq.
@@KnightOfEternity13 yes.. however with distractions such as notifications it breaks concentration
If you read a book to learn a language, you need a different type of book. Not just an electronic one but also a notebook, a dictionary, and other tools/functions.
E-books have the advantage that we can look up words. Paper books are a different experience. All of our learning should be as varied as possible. The brain prefers variety.
I agree but only partially ! A "one size fits all" rule (ergo: ignoring the grammar) is not to be used here ...UNLESS it is specified that it is 1. a general rule and 2. it is to apply to and therefore concern ONLY learners who have....UNLIMITED TIME , who do not really care WHEN they will be able to speak, in a year, two years or five years. However, when one is under pressure to deliver (to SPEAK) , the learner MUST begin to learn the rules early in the game., beginning simultaneously or not much later than learning words ! Two examples . EXAMPLE No 1: On November 1 2023 I began learning SPANISH from scratch. Intended to make Spanish my FIRST foreign language acquired totally via reading and listening and , yes, ignoring the grammar. I had a GOAL, a mission to accomplish, which required me to speak (not necessarily fluently but to speak!) Spanish in Spain by the very beginning of the New Year-- 2024. And guess what: when I opened my mouth the first, second, fifth and end even the tenth time ....I went MUTE. I could hardly utter a word ! It was a total failure which shocked me and the Spaniards I wanted and needed to communicate with. A tough, unpleasant lesson. It has made me devote the entire February so far (ca an hour per day) in Poland, my native country to...., o yes, to learning the Spanish grammar, especially the conjugation. And guess what: three weeks down the road I already COULD speak Spanish. With nobody to speak to and be reassured by, I KNOW it from relative ease with which I write in my calendar my Spanish daily entries. And what I can write I CAN SAY. EXAMPLE No2 : I had lived and worked for long stretches of time (on and off) in the U.S. While there, as an ESL teacher as well as a passionate participant and observer of life and people I got to know hundreds if no thousands of immigrants at various levels of their aquisition (or...the lack of it) of English. And guess what? I have NOT met one who would achieve even the lowest level of English without the grammar learned first. And I met many immigrants who came to the U.S. without any knowledge of English (both grammar and vocabulary). -- They either seamed disencouraged (by the lack of any foundation) to even just begin learning the language or were unable to pick up the language.
Learning a foreign language without knowing any grammar is like.... building a house without any plan from dozens of elements chaotically stored.
Hmm, I think i just had an awe-ha moment! I always struggled with you saying not to learn grammar rules or focus on them and then you said patterns were good! I think i confused this as to you meaning just listen and i thought how on earth would you make sense out of what your listening to by just listening with out studying words and phrases but that is not grammar rules! I love your advice Steve! and i'm a member of lingq i sometimes struggle finding content that i enjoy in french to learn from..
You will have to search the web for content of interest. Google in French. Search RUclips. You can import with one click of the Browser extension. You can even import an audio file and it will be transcribed automatically and converted into a lesson.
@@Thelinguist ok thank you :)
Steve, hello!, thank you so much for your advices, you are really a master in learning languages and speaking it, of course we all are learning everyday and this never ends, for my learning speaking languages is a passion, but my biggest problem is when i try to learn, i always have been followed the traditional metodoloy as you mentioned, english i learnt for many years from school of course but if i wouldnt practice it i really just can greet haha, my native language is spanish, but with portuguese was different, i learnt portuguese to hold a conversation in just 3 months...only speaking with a friend, and that was amazing, i never forgot the words i learnt and i tried to improve it....thats why i see your videos and i say is amazing, thats why a very strict and boring methodoly step by step doesnt...work so well...
but there is when i have another question, if you can answer me thank you so much, i am tottally agree about learning by building u our own rules, but for example i am looking for learning in the best way my two favorite languages: chinese and japanese, they have tottally different characters..., if i go to listen a song or read a book i wont understand anything, in that case i need to check for basics until i mastered to be able to understand?, i even cant hold a conversation yet, i would like your opinion
thank you so much
You need access to online dictionaries and you need to learn the writing systems, not an easy task. You will gradually increase your vocabulary and comprehension. It takes time.
@@Thelinguist thank you so much Steve I thought you wouldn't answer me so fast, yes I am agree I just need to be patient, but is a nice clue about only use dictionary and writing system, thanks so much I will apply
I came to US when I was 6, now 59. I spoke Spanish my native language and obviously learned English being in US all my life but never took Spanish “class” learned From speaking Spanish all the time at home, so I guess I learned them at the same time. Now started learning Italian, and I feel like I need to learn some grammar rules cause I want to change the soooo many words alike and exactly the same spelling the wrong way and make it sound Italian.
This guy is simple amazing.
Grammatical rules are descriptive, not prescriptive. They just convey information about how words have grown to be used. Unhealthy attention to rule adherence leaves you in a can't see the forest for the trees situation. Which is a pointless predicament to be stuck in seeming that patterns naturally become apparent with persistent exposure.
I am studying listening skill ~ this video was difficult because it has many difficult words~
Thank you so much for video!
Could you please point me to more research about the natural order of acquisition? I have heard this concept before and it makes total sense, but couldn't find detailed papers or examples that lay out what the natural order is. Thank you Steven! Great video as always!
Google for Stephen Krashen and natural order of acquisition.
What about _apophatic_ explicit instruction for grammar? E.g. you know that rule about order of adjectives, Spanish doesn't have that, so don't bother trying to discover a pattern.
Agree with the part about play. Play researcher Peter Gray is fully against compulsory schooling and Steven Pinker wrote the praise for his book. Amazing the conclusions you can reach when you actually look into something instead of just assuming what the right answer must be.
The best video that I've ever seen
lol.... PC is about not noticing patterns... about suppressing the patterns or associations that can be easily made...
I didn't acquire that many languages as for example Steve, but I have experience in language learning. I speak German, English, Russian fluently and I learned French (A2) and I am currently learning Spanish. From my experience, we should not focus so much about child language learning and try to recreate that circumstances for the most "brain-freindly" and "natural" learning experience. A child do not speak well. The proficient language usage is later shaped in school also with grammar drills, text production, text analyses over a period of many years. The main advantage of children is the ability to produce the native sounds. We as adults should use all methods to make fast progresses. Sometimes it is needed to work through some grammar drills or learning some vocabulary lists. For example, in French, I would still don't know the main location prepositions if I would wait until may brain acquire them through input and context. Or, I would still struggle to negate sentences if I haven't sat down for two hours and haven't done an exercise for negation.
Merci beaucoup I am from morocco in the time i write this comment is 8:48 pm
Like this video for acquisition yes right
There is NO language other than computer code that a group of people sat down and built from the ground up. By the time we had teachers ALL languages were already built and running perfectly, we just had to backwards rationalize how they work and create rules around what we found.
simply great!!
Thank you so much 👍
Excelente video son de mucha ayuda sus videos❤
Thanks
It is unbelievable that people are still claiming that an adult learns in the same way as a child. Basically you're saying that adults should expect to be able to express themselves as well as one-year-olds after one year of uninterrupted exposure to a language. Who has that kind of time to waste?
This is not news to me.I have always taught like this. I teach English. Almost all my colleagues do nothing more than teach grammar ... even to little kids of 9 and 10 years old or younger. But trying to tell them that they are wasting everyone's time is impossible. They cannot give it up and it is a massive frustration.
When I was student in my University have been students and friends around the world wide latin america City Iquitos peru but my University have been done cooperation in Education with University of cambridge and others universities around the world wide
Hi Steve, how many more languages do you plan on learning?
Thank you Steve! I always learn a lot with you! Frank Smith's book on Understanding Reading points to the same direction!
It makes me wonder how this would apply to other topics such as learning mathematics. Could one learn from comprehensible input in mathematics and learn the rules that way?
Pragmatically: consider ideas from all teachers and find what works for you. I’m finding after an eight week 8 hours a day five days a week course on Russian grammar that comprehension and memory are greatly enhanced. This need not be considered counter to what Steve is saying. There should be no argument against consuming lots of input. It’s absolutely necessary. Nor should there be an argument against understanding how a language works.
When I learn new languages, I don't want to figure everything by trial and error. I also want to be shown the basics regarding things like word order and verb conjugation. At the same time, I don't want to be taught "the basics" as if they are something separate from the language I am studying. I get the sense that Steve sees this as some kind of either/or dichotomy (top down vs. bottom up) and I don't see it that way (why not use both?). I want access to explanations of how the basics of a language works, with each "lesson" being accompanied by explanations (whenever it isn't self-explanatory) as to when these rules are applicable and ought to be used , so that when I start engaging in lessons, I have working schemas that I can use to make sense of the language. For instance, I don't want to try to figure out what a simple sentence from the bottom up. I want somebody to explain what a simple sentence looks like in the language I am studying, so that when I see simple sentences I can quickly apply this framework. Ditto for simple questions. Ditto for verb conjugations. As I encounter more complex phrases, and sentences, I will want explanations of how these things work and when they should be applied, and I will also want to be given examples of what it looks like when these rules are applied. Present tense, and past tense are relatively easy, but it's a lot harder to keep all the tenses straight and to remember when to use the other tenses. We definitely need to get more practice working with other tenses, so that we get more practice figuring out what tenses we're looking and what verb forms we need to use. Lessons on how to pronounce letters and dipthongs are also welcome, as are explanations regarding things like how to locate syllable breaks in words. At the same time, in practice, I find grammar guides more frustrating than useful because they tend to be terse, tend to have few (if any examples), and you're just expected to figure out how and when they apply to the language you're learning. I'd rather not have to critically engage with a grammar guide which offers me fragmented bits and pieces and then expects me to synthesize everything into a whole, when the author can take a bit more time to explain things clearly and provide examples. If LingQ isn't going to do this sort of thing, I'd like to see Duolingo do more of this, because there are things that neither Duolingo nor LIngQ are doing for me now, and I'd rather not waste months or years trying to reinvent the wheel when someone with more expertise can provide me with explanations and with examples, so that I can grasp more tenses and more complex sentence forms faster and begin to consolidate what I learn considerably earlier. One of the reasons why language acquisition is so hard is that we're expected to figure out the gaps in our language programs. Do you really want to create/generate an implicit grammar book for yourself as you learn a language? Steve seems to be suggesting that we do exactly that, and that is what we ought to be doing. And I know that this is something I really do not want to do unless I really have to.
According to Spitzer, the brain is not so good at learning explanations or individual details. The brain is best at creating patterns, getting used to associations. That is how the neurons learn and connect with each other. What you like to do is of course something else.
If you don't want to figure anything yourself, and dislike grammar guides, why don't you try to skim through a beginner language textbook?
It does exactly what you want. It gives you simple texts, and explains the grammatical patterns behind them. If you want you can also input these texts into Lingq, that's what I use to do.
@@KnightOfEternity13 Thank you for the suggestion. To some extent I have done exactly that when Duolingo was my primary tool for language practice. I recommend Duolingo to people who want to acquire the rudiments of a language, but when I do so, I strongly recommend that they acquire basic language texts in their target language and use them in conjunction with Duolingo. And other resources, if they can find any which are suitable. I haven't really made much use of these basic and advanced language texts since I got a LIngQ account for Dutch in December of 2022, not least because the LIngQ Dutch course has been sucking up enough of my time and energy as it is - and I have also have some writing projects which I require a great deal of focus and attention. I have been thinking of doing this for a while though. Sure, I can input the Dutch text, and eventually I will do that, but I don't want to mess up my language stats by incorporating lessons with English vocabulary and sentences into the Dutch course. I have also thinking that I can look at how Duolingo explains English to Dutch speakers, and that I can turn these into private lessons. In addition to that, I am thinking that I can and should get Dutch language texts for native speakers, so that I can input both texts and examples/sample text as private lessons. I also have some books in Dutch, and I started transcribing small chunks and turning them into private lessons a couple of months ago. All of this requires a considerable amount of time and (more importantly) focus, so I expect that I will probably end up doing this on a small scale and doing it for months or years.
@@Thelinguist To me, it sounds like Spitzer is talking primarily about subconscious information processing, and especially context sensitive subconscious information processing. I do not deny that when that subconscious information processing can be brought to bear, it can work wonders. For example, providing scaffolded native language audio, video, and reading lessons as the basis for acquiring competency in reading and listening for people who already have down the rudiments of a language is nothing less than brilliant. However, it does not equally well for everyone or for every kind of task. I think of what I am proposing more as a suggestion that more of a certain kind scaffolding be provided for people who think that they can benefit from it, and which people who aren't interested in, can choose to ignore. If others do not put in these kinds of lessons in the LingQ Dutch course (which is the only one I am working on right now), chances are that I will eventually start creating some of these kinds of lessons myself.
I think that except when studying rules we cannot help but invent our own rules and mythologies of how things work, no matter if it is false or true. We observe morphemes, see them again elsewhere, and intuit the meaning of hitherto unseen words. Otherwise I think it would be impossible to learn so many 10s of thousands of words that we need. I have started to believe there are much fewer morphemes in a language to get used to than we initially think when we are told our language has such and such vast number of words, and that even in our native language our fluency with words is limited only to the ones we use a lot, but with our so called 10 dollar words it takes a bit of mental effort and a literal pause to think of them, reason about their meaning and say them.
One wug two wugs, she wugs, he wugged. You wug to see it.
Sensacional 👏🏻
This reminds me of how much some cultist learners in the Japanese community push how "important" it is to nail down the pitch accent. Although it's at least worth recognizing, it's not as crucial as they make it out to be and native speakers will tell you that, and I have some arguments against deliberate effort for it, but it comes down to internalizing the pronunciation through lots of exposure by listening and reading, defeating the purpose of memorization.
First, several languages have various dialects and Japanese is no exception. All of these dialects and accents are technically correct, thus there is no one correct way to speak, and debunks the myth that all natives sound the same. They don't. North Americans say "friend" while Brits and Australians say "mate", this is not wrong, just different.
Second, pro-pitch accent people fail to consider/avoid using as an example single words that have multiple meanings like ロケット which can mean "rocket" or "locket" depending on context. They also never consider how the pronunciation works in various forms of the words like 新しい、新しくて、新しかった...does it really matter?
Also for particles in the language as well. What's the pitch accent for の？If you tell me "it doesn't really matter" or "it depends on context", it just proves my point: Context matters a lot more than the rules that govern pronunciation. As long as there's mutual understanding, who the hell cares about all these rules? Much less preaching about memorizing them?
It's like if you're learning English, why is it that Canada has the stress on the first syllable and Canadian has it on the second? As a native, I don't know why this happens and frankly nobody cares. Even if there are rules, it's better to internalize pronunciation and grammar through repeated exposure.
Plus, many Japanese I've heard speak English makes some mistakes, albeit unintentionally. Why is it we cut them slack (as we should) but then when it comes to non-natives speaking Japanese, all of a sudden mistakes are cringy and all hell breaks loose? You cultists support a double standard, all for what?
If you could give up work move to the target country pay some one to talk to you for 15 hours a day for one year I am sure one could even learn russian in that time but with just one hour every day at home, I might need to study rules maybe
Get on LingQ. that is mostly where I learned Russian.
Understanding your videos is harder than understanding the black ops 3 campaign for the first time
The problem is that what you do with Italian is not available for other languages: Italian is spelled and written the way it is pronounced, once you get over pronouncing gli (gli spaghetti) and gn (montagna/e al plurale). If you live in the South, you deginitely need passato remoto, a real nightmare as every voice is different! Then there's the subjunctive (when you can substitute the imperfect (se sapevo lo facevo instead of se avessi saputo l'avrei sicuramente fatto), and tight rules about determiners especially before masculine nouns beginning with vowels. Thank heavens for observing usage (pragmatics). Since every neighborhood speaks Italian differently, you just absorb the cadences by living there, but your brand of Italian pronunciation will instantly brand you as Venetian, Florentine, Romanaccio, Neapolitan etc. Luckily, Italians are thrilled when people attempt to learn "The Language of Dante" and willingly help with joy and friendship. Nothing snooty about it!🇮🇹
Read Ten steps to complex learning
The way babies learn as opposed to adults is very, very different. With a baby, that initial language is being imprinted where no language yet exists. This is what makes their language learning so fascinating and rapid. In an adult, however, there is already an imprinted language, and learning additional languages means competing with this first native, imprinted language. This is what creates a degree of tension, and what makes learning as an adult a real challenge. As for rules, many of them are helpful indeed. For example, as a rule, Spanish nouns that end in "a" are feminine. There is a handful of exceptions, but these can be learned very quickly (e.g., "El mapa"). When the language learner consciously ignores rules, he makes life that much more difficult for himself.
If only all rules were as simple as this.
I used to think the same way, but as I've been studying Korean (like the 6th language I've ever tried to learn) I've been taking a listening heavy approach and I found that I'll get used to many grammar patterns before I get formally taught about them in the textbook I've been working through simultaneously. As a matter of fact, I noticed I struggled early on when I wasn't comfortable with the alphabet and pronunciation but once I broke that my learning process sped up drastically. for sure rules are great to reinforce what you've noticed but I don't think a bottom-up skill building approach is very practical or efficient for language learning
@Kyle-uo5bg Ah, the operative word in your comment is "tried." Have you attained fluency in any of these 6 languages by simply listening to them? I've always been suspicious of approaches that ask nothing on the part of the learner, treating language learning like sun bathing: if you just lie there you'll get a tan / if you just listen you'll soon be speaking like a native. I've never seen evidence that this works
Can you recomend me how to learn verbs tenses in french?
Listen and read a lot. Use LingQ. Occasionally check a conjugation table just for fun and as a reference, then forget about it.
@@Thelinguist thanks a bunch
Mister Kauffman. Do you know Hebrew. Which are your 20 + languages?! Please elaborate
Hi, Steve, I am interested in learning French. Canadian French or France French, which one should I learn first? thank you
Just learn French. You won't be able to tell the difference. Later on if you want to specialize you can. First you'll need words. At LingQ you can filter languages by accents if you want.
I have an off subject question Steve. When Should we start reading an ACTUAL book in a language. Is it still beneficial to read a book if you only know 20-30% of the vocabulary? A few months ago I couldn't read anything in Portuguese and then I managed to get my hands on a 9 Portuguese stories for beginners eBook and I understood NOTHING. But I just started to read the words and eventually just started to learn. By book 9 these were still super difficult and the 9th book was very difficult but some of them I understood 60-80% of the words so it was enjoyable. 9th book maybe 20% idk. But these books were meant to be "easy" for learning but still real stories nothing "easy" or random like "an elephant had a blue shirt and rode a bicycle" type of story.
I don't find most children's stories easy. That's why we created our mini-stories at LingQ with lots of repetition, especially of the most frequent verbs and conjunctions. I only read away from the computer if there are fewer than 5% unknown words.
@@Thelinguist okay. 5% words, got it. The perfect answer I wanted:)