A band teacher told me this when I was young. "Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent." You need to know what perfect is in order to practice in such away that you achieve perfection.
Omg, yes!!! I remember when I tried to learn the multiples of four as a kid and spent an evening rehearsing it wrongly. Took me YEARS to not sometimes at first glance thinking 4*4=15
An alternative but related version I heard as a kid was "practice doesn't make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect." (Implying that practicing the wrong thing/wrong way will not lead to perfection.) It makes logical sense, but I found it demotivating because I thought "how the fuck am I supposed to know what constitutes perfect practice?"
I remember the author of AJATT encapsulating the necessity of understanding over outputting like this: you can use output to ask someone where the train station is, but if you don't understand their reply, good luck.
@@AlvaradoGuitar well that makes no sense. comprehension and speaking are both equally important because if you remove any of them communication is impossible. whether input will teach you how to speak is a different question altoghether
Jobs require you to speak and write foreign languages. Most of them are entry level but the demand for them shows how many people don't want to learn every skill in a language.
I'm a software developer. There's a saying: "Garbage in, garbage out." While speaking practice is important, I temper that with listening to authentic native speech as well. Otherwise I'd be regurgitating what "rubbish" I think is correct. I know some italki tutors state they allow maximum "student talk time", like 80% to 90% of the lesson. And I'm like, no good lord gracious, I need to hear you speak Russian for goodness sake! (I'm learning Russian) A conversation is a two-way street. If I speak most of the time, I'd be monologuing. If we're trying to be more precise, it should be “conversation practice" (which involves listening and appropriate responses), and not "speaking practice". But any further than this, and we'd be arguing over semantics...
Depends on the language in my opinion! I think it can be useful to be practically monologuing or being interviewed in a way so that you can use the opportunity to really blab as much as possible. You can use all the other time you have to practice listening, etc. Conversation practice is better to have with tandem partners (i.e. free resources). With a paid resource it makes more sense to focus on speaking practice so they can identify your errors and correct them. In my experience, this has been the most effective.
@@OpqHMg I agree that monologues can be useful. My goals just happen to include “have meaningful conversations with native speakers”, which means I have to understand what they said in real-time and have an appropriate response, and exchange ideas. One of my tutors said he likes working with me because he can talk about more complicated topics (rather than the basic grammar and beginner phrases). So in this respect, I find having a meaningful exchange of ideas harder than doing a monologue, because I’m not just trying to express myself but also to pick up communication cues and common phrases that my tutor uses. I’ve thought of tandem partners but I’ve also heard horror stories of people just not turning up, and also the basic point of language exchange. I’d rather my entire session in my target language (and switch to English if need be on my own terms).
The problem with the surgeon example is that if you just flip the example, gave a scalpel to someone who never seen someone else do an operation, and just explain what they need to do, they would probably fail. In order to to a succesful operation, you need to get an explanation of what to do, see someone else do it and then try yourself (on a doll preferably).
Medicine, Math & Science generally are skills where we need to surpass human intuition. Language is literally born of human intuition and only exists within it. Language is a framework of which we can learn other skills. I'm less and less convinced that treating language acquisition/learning as a traditional skill makes any sense.
@@cadian101st Except motor skills aren't similar to language at all in terms of learning. There's a definite right way and a definite wrong way to walk. The right way gets you where you need to go, in a fairly short amount of time, and without tiring yourself out or injuring yourself (it's a bit wider than this, since there are reasons you might want to run or jog instead of walk, but the point is that we all do it more or less the same way). With speech, there isn't any "right" way. There is an "English" way, a "Greek" way, a "Swahili" way, a "Hindu" way, and thousands of other additional ways, each one commonly being termed a "language". Indeed, each of these ways is so different from the other ways that if someone were to try to communicate to someone else in a way they were not familiar with, neither one would have a clue what the other was saying. What this means in terms of learning is that while we can in principle learn something like how to walk without outside input by virtue of there only being a handful of sensible gaits as dictated by human physiology, this does not apply to language. I may be able to *create* a language without outside input, and it might even be an effective language if anyone else were to use it, but it would take an incredible chain of coincidences for it to just happen to be perfect French.
@@Keldor314 Except that's wrong. There definitely _is_ a right way to speak. The right way is to speak in a way the other person understands. And more specifically, there is a right way to speak English and there is a wrong way to speak English. Especially if you are trying to speak English to a specific group of people. Australian English is different from American English. It's the same thing if you wanted to walk like everybody else, or if the purpose of wanting to walk a specific way like walking slowly, fast, lower to the ground (like crouching), etc etc. These are what you would dub "languages". You wouldn't walk fast if you wanted to be quiet, and you wouldn't walk slowly if you need to walk underneath a trailer or something so you would need to crouch. It's the wrong type of walk.
@@HoraryHellfire Learning to walk in different ways, like to pick your way through a thick forest for instance, is like speaking about different subjects, not like speaking in different languages. If it were the latter, than we'd be expected to speak German when talking to someone in a movie theater, Italian in order to talk about gardening, Japanese whenever sports come up, and so on and so forth. As for there being a "right" way to speak, I might ask what it is. Is it American English? British English? Maybe the right way to speak is in Afrikaans? Since we can conclude that there isn't one universally correct master tongue, then correctness is subjective, and is about how well we can match the language of other speakers. Thus, correctness in language only exists in the sense of comparing yourself to something external, to other speakers and writers - you can not figure it out in a vacuum.
@María de los Ángeles Mena Yes, like the first reply said. Letters from Beethoven indicate that he could hear a bit until about 35 and he also wore out his pianos by bashing the keys hard enough to hear them. Don't get me wrong - he is more brilliant than brilliant and I'm sure if he'd lived another one year even, he'd have written yet another insanely good piece or three. But he knew what his music sounded like.
Imagine being an author who doesn't read a lot of books or a musician who doesn't listen to a lot of music. How would they know, that they dont just produce mediocre bs? In fact, all successful artists of any kind consume A LOT of work from their peers. Meaning A LOT of input. But its also true that you have to start producing output at some point in order to become better. Btw. Imagine being a language learner who criticizes a native speaker for his bad grammar :DDD
Exactly this. All teaching on writing encourage the learner to read their chosen genre too - so they know what good looks like. If you don't know what good looks like, how can you ever expect to achieve it. And many musicians learn to play without reading music - they listen and copy, but *listen* comes first.
It baffles the mind that a non native English speaker was so arrogant that they couldn’t conceive that they’ve misunderstood English grammar and were so bold to tell you that your English was full of errors. That’s someone that will likely never speak another language at a very high level. Their arrogance is too much of a barrier.
Reminds me of someone I once heard say, "Oh, I'm fluent level now, but it's hard to understand a lot of the time because so many of them don't speak their language properly." I nearly had a stroke trying to process that.
@@sandwichbreath0 While I wouldn't agree with such a comment, I do understand it. That person has been taught the standard language, and is complaining when someone speaks a non-standard variety.
@@bigscarysteve Therein lies the error, though, it's not the standard language: it's an artificial spin-off that exists only in the classroom, stripped of all connected-speech, effective pronunciation, morphology, etc. Grammar rules are helpful, but they're also incredibly imprecise, because they're a conscious attempt to describe unconscious processes. That's why textbooks have such long lists of exceptions to the rules. When we learn via the grammar/skills-building model, we're lulled into the false assumption that we're accessing the language in its 'pure' form, the way it was 'designed' to be used. That's wrong. What's 'standard' is how natives use it at work, school and play. The guy in my example wasn't talking about slang, he was blaming newsreaders, government officials, co-workers, etc. Like Lamont's misguided critic, his problem wasn't natives deviating from standard usage; his problem was mastering a 'standard' that never actually existed.
That sheet music analogy was rock-solid. I think that really drove the point home. You need an expectation to compare your experience to. Fantastic point.
I think the analogy only goes so far. When playing a piece of sheet music, you're aiming for the same output every time. Everyday language use isn't like that. You can't predict what someone is going to say, and thus, you can't predict your responses. This is what Chomsky meant by the poverty of the stimulus. Comparing language use to musical improvisation would have been a better analogy.
@@bigscarysteve You can't even predict what you yourself is going to say in a conversation, nor if you are going to hit the note you want to sing, or decide on the next step in a dance you know - we hear what we say or sing after we have spoken or sung, we dance in a flow or we stumble and get out of sync... but you have to practice skills first to be able to shift your body and mind into the flow that we call speaking, listening, singing, dancing, playing...
@@DNA350ppm You've partially understood what I was saying, and you've partially failed. You are correct that you can't even predict what you're going to say in conversation because you have no idea what your interlocutor will say, thus you can't know ahead of time what responses you will need to produce. That was my point exactly. However, when it comes to sheet music, you do know what the next note you want to produce actually is. Whether you actually hit the note or fluff it is a separate question altogether.
@bigscarysteve - you've misunderstood the point of the analogy though. Imagine I said "Walking is a bit like driving, in that going faster means using more energy." Does this mean that EVERY part of walking is exactly like driving? No. But is the analogy solid? Yes. My point was you would need to know what sounds right and what doesn't. Although there may be several correct options in speaking, there are still several wrong ones.
To be honest, I think the most valuable thing I took from this video is an explanation for why I struggled so hard to learn to play the piano. I don't think I had sufficient musical input, and I didn't know how to practice well, so my practice wasn't very efficient.
By far your best video man, everything you said was so accurate! I will probably make a video myself about the Input Hypothesis because it is an absolutely crucial topic in SLA and it is important for people to realize how important it is and how it works. Keep rocking and shining!
I think music is a great analogy to language learning. There are absolutely people who learn to play guitar without any ear training at all and just rely on tabs to tell them what to play (I was one of them). They'll sound bad until they "acquire" their ability to hear intervals and chords. Ear training is also completely unconscious. Once you've "acquired" the ability to hear a minor third interval, you can't really lose it. You can't NOT hear it as a minor third interval, even if you wanted to.
And then you go to music college and have to stop hearing intervals lest you get smoked by the people who hear it as tonal centres like myself. 😃 Haha, jokes. You're still allowed to hear intervals, they just don't mean much (this is the subject about which I am the BIGGEST nerd of all the things I am a nerd in. I got literally 100% in a few of our aural exams at uni... but I'm the first to admit it's a pretty useless skill!)
@@daysandwords that's strange. How can an interval be a tonal center? Or are you talking about how tonal centers can shift every chord change, like in jazz? Intervals (and chords) are just the relationship of physical vibrations that we can perceive. The idea of forgetting them doesn't make any sense to me, unless you're talking about perfect/absolute pitch.
No no. I just mean that when I got to uni, I had no idea of what "aural skills" were and I was learning everything for the first time. I was up against a bunch of people who had learned to do melody dictation but most of them had done it by INTERVAL and after a few weeks I was absolutely smoking them in class, and by the second exam (end of semester 1) there were two separate races: Me and the other people using tonal centres/harmony to do it, and those using intervals. You don't have to forget intervals, but the problem is, they trick you as our lecturer explained really well. The other problem is, the marks were done backwards - you started with 500 and lost a mark for every mistake you made. If you used intervals and made a mistake after 2 bars, then every single note for the next two bars would also be wrong. I feel like it's intuitive to anyone properly good at music anyway, but basically if you hear something like the opening of Beethoven's 5th, it's easier to work out that it's the 5th down to the third, and then the 4th down to the 2nd. I mean that's a SUPER basic example, but if I had enough time I could sit and write out the entirety of the melody for that symphony and I doubt I'd make a mistake - but someone doing it by intervals would be shot after a few bars.
@@daysandwords I'm going to be honest, I'm not really following your explanation very well... Are you saying that you could hear the melody in the context of the key center, and then used that to transcribe? Or you just can intuitively hear the melody as a whole and have a very good ear/hand connection? None of this really changes my original point though. For someone without a natural ear like yours or ear training, a major third or a minor third sound very similar. But you can definitely train it, and once you've developed your ear to hear certain things (major key vs minor key, cadences, chords and their inversions and alterations, etc), you can't really unhear them. A plagal cadence will always sound like a plagal cadence, you can't not hear it that way, even if you tried. You've "acquired" the ability to hear those things.
That's how it feels after having mastered Mandarin tones years back. You can't "unhear" them, and hearing audio of myself speaking from my first semester in China feels...disturbing.
Some of his aversion to the input method may just come down to a difference in learning styles, but the whole Language Parasite thing was pretty extra. I’m about six months in to learning Spanish and have found constant input to be tremendously helpful - grammar rules in English or Spanish make zero sense to me unless I’ve first seen or heard them in their natural habitat.
There is absolutely no evidence that learning styles actually exist. "Despite the popularity of learning styles and inventories such as the VARK, it’s important to know that there is no evidence to support the idea that matching activities to one’s learning style improves learning. It’s not simply a matter of “the absence of evidence doesn’t mean the evidence of absence.” On the contrary, for years researchers have tried to make this connection through hundreds of studies." cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/learning-styles-preferences/
I also found it a bit odd that he said most language learners don't want to simply comprehend a language. With some languages my main goal is to simply comprehend it well, so be able to read books and watch films. Speaking is more of a by product there. I'm not sociable enough to want to speak in every language I (plan to) learn :D Find the music analogy really good as someone who plays the piano too. Hearing a piece repeatedly gives you an auditory image of how it sounds right and makes you aware of mistakes! Language input does a very similar thing, you can hear/see the "correct" pronunciation, word usage, sentence structure and get a mental image of the language
The funny thing about this, is that the people I know who learned a language through the traditional way, they usually can't talk. While the ones I know who learned it through acquisition, they are usually very fluent. The best example I can give is my Austrian friend, whom I play games with online. He was pretty bad at school, and failed English. He went on to learn English through video games and media consumption. Then you have his girlfriend, who was very good at school. Once every now and then there will be a word he doesn't know and he will turn to his girlfriend and ask in German; what is the English word for ___? And his girlfriend always knew the answer. But his girlfriend can't speak English. I have played with her as well, and she understands most of the things being said, but she can't reply in English. All these words she knows in theory, she can't ever use them. She has learned English, but she has never aquired it. I should be a good example myself as well. I speak fluent English, I don't make that many grammar mistakes(not much more than I do in my native tongue anyways). Yet I never learned any grammar. I don't know what a noun is, and I don't know what an adjective is. Yet, I seemingly know how to use them in a language I learned as an adult. The traditional way of learning a language is a waste of time. Everyone in France had English in school; but try to go to France and speak English with them. The only ones who you will be able to talk to, are the ones who have watched movies in English, played games, had friends or read books in English. Learning languages the traditional way is a huge failure, and schools just needs to rethink how they teach languages.
As a french native I can confirm 100%. I also experienced it myself, I always watched movie with subtitles at home(had no choice!), And watched lots of English content, so I was more familiar with the language. I remember very clearly at university we had a pretty advanced English class compared to high school, and my friends asked me to help fill in the answers to the complex grammar rules. I knew all the answers naturally, just because it sounded right or wrong, I had no effort at all to do, while my classmate, even the ones able to fill the answers had to try to remember a rule and check if it applied in the specific context. And yes we all learn English at school and noone is able to speak English...
Well then you must have run into a very particular set of people, people learn things through various methods, and there are some of us, who, even though exposed to a language naturally, still enjoy going over rules, learning about grammar and are still able to develop just as much fluency as anybody else.
@@andrestrigo4618 Well, he doesn't say that it's forbidden to learn the rules. But his point is that learning the rules doesn't make you improve, exposition does, and you say it yourself, you were exposed to it.
@@andrestrigo4618 sure, for a select few it can be a good thing, but it's setting most people off language learning. just because some nerds like grammar doesn't mean it's helpful in general.
@@andrestrigo4618yeah, it is weird to me that people keep suggesting there is a particular way. I know a lot of people who incorrectly think they understand the language I am learning from TV. They are repeatedly wrong though, and speak (at best) "like a TV show character" (according to my friends who are native). I have gotten multiple compliments in much less time for having greater (and less weird / hammy) speech and (MUCH greater) reading comphrension because I did study the rules. I'm hoping to get to a point where I can do more exposure (I thus far haven't been ABLE to learn much of anything from just watching native content) soon, but without this foundation, I wouldn't be as far as I am. I'm sure it goes both ways, depending on the person. I think following the rules to, as they're saying, construct a sentence, is a necessary step for some beginners, which will eventually blossom into a more natural understanding. I'm already seeing that in my own speech. The concepts I learned at the beginning are now entrained and I don't have to think to construct simple sentences. For complex ones, though, for now I still have to. I dunno, it feels like people are taking multiple steps towards fluency and claiming some are more wrong just because beginners are suboptimal?
I've started learning Swedish almost two years ago and right out the gate I've immersed myself completely in the language- listened to a lot of podcasts, watched shows and movies with swedish subs, read picture books at first, then novels and non fiction, made an audiobook subscription, always took notes when I saw or heard something interesting. I'm not fluent or anything, but there's a lot more to engaging with a language then just producing it. I think that being able to read and appreciate a book in Swedish has value in itself, and I don't see why I should feel like a tick for it. Yeah, that parasite bit really rubbed me the wrong way.
It would be interesting to hear your level of Swedish because you've kind of been immersing for longer than I have and you wouldn't have had to correct a bunch of bad habits like I did.
Yes, you get good at what you practice. That's why learning by reading, listening and speaking is better than studying rules and doing grammar exercises. The brain surgeon example doesn't make any sense. You're not putting anyone's health or wealth in danger learning languages. Learning with input + speaking is learning by doing with incremental difficulty, which is the best way to learn.
The snippets you played of this guy (I've never heard of him or even seen any of his stuff before this) were pretty damning for him. He made a pretty shoddy argument all around.
Like Lamont said, he's a pretty decent guy in the community otherwise, but yeah, that video was basically full of strawman arguments and responses to claims that no one in the input/immersion community even makes. The comments on that video were an absolute circus too!
The common saying that "Practice makes perfect." is false. Practice makes habit. If you cannot tell if you are doing it wrong then there is no point repeatedly performing an activity and expecting to get better at it. In reality it can do active harm (you acquire deeply ingrained bad habits that you will struggle to overcome).
Many of us approach input as a form of deliberate practice in it's own right. I am paying my full attention to what I am hearing or reading. If I lose track of the meaning I double back and redo that part. I make a conscious effort to actually notice the occurrence of whatever my current pain points are rather than just letting it slip past me as unnoticed noise. I often feel like I'm expending more effort when I'm consuming the language even compared to when I'm speaking it.
I think that his analogy of a neurosurgeon not being able to learn neurosurgery by watching videos is actually a point for input: you won't understand native movies, tv shows and books without watching lots of native movies and tv shows and reading lots of books.
Yea plus the equivalent to speaking right away for a brain surgeon would be taking some random guy off the street who has watched all the seasons of Grey’s Anatomy to literally perform brain surgery on a live human day one and have him learn by trial and error. Compare that too the med student who has studied the anatomy for years… watched videos, done sit ins on someone performing surgery and then had multiple practice sessions on a dummy or a rat or something to get a feel for how precise you need to be. I’m taking the med student all day. At least they would instantly recognize any mistake they would make while the random dude would just keep cutting unaware of how badly they were butchering the patient. Input is needed in order to make sure you are practicing properly. Trial and error is so much more frustrating and time consuming and you may never actually get it right unless someone who has had the input can identify the mistakes you make.
I didn't like that example... I believe in terms of language the music example given in the video is even clearer. Composers, performers, and musicians in general don't rely heavily on theory or harmony, because it is implied in the music even if you don't know what you are "doing". Haven't you played some chord progression or melody and asked yourself why does it sound so good? Our ears tell us is good and without knowing we applied "theory". The theory is important and harmony too, they are great tools to expand our vocabulary and to visualize what we do and what we can do or change but it's not mandatory in order to create music... I believe these thoughts can be related to this video topic
This reminds me of my Japanese class, sometimes she will try to quiz us on what certain particles are called and on grammar rules and stuff and I'm terrible at it and often forget how to explain them, yet I'm still ahead of the majority of the class in terms of actually forming the language, reading speed, etc.
Lol, reading that comment brought back some very unpleasant memories. "Pluscuamperfecto", "preterito" - the fuck? I can't even name this shit in English, is it REALLY supposed to matter so much?
I think input forces you to understand the culture/s that your target language is connected to which is a great point of it imo. Skill building doesn’t really do that. You’re only really in the world of grammar, textbooks and speaking your thoughts and not listening to others as much. When immersing in you target language heavily you learn to understand the world more and empathise with people more. Immersion has made me want to share with people around me how beautiful language is, my love for Japanese culture and how language can enrich one’s life.
Ideally, you'd be building a bridge here. Bridges are often built from each end at the same time. Some types of bridges have to be built from both ends in order to be built. The Golden Gate Bridge just outside of San Francisco is a good example, they built the towers, and then built from each tower to the other as they'd run out of cables if they tried to build from one to the other. Unless you've got a short span on the bridge, it was likely built from both sides rather than from just one side. Ideally, you'd be skill building and immersing yourself so as to avoid the wasted time that children spend trying to learn via induction for years before they can communicate enough to learn in more sophisticated ways.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade I agree. I didn't make it clear but I believe everyone should do some level of skillbuilding and traditional language learning alongside immersion to speed up language acquisition. If you understand how a grammar point works a little bit you'll probably pick it up quicker than people who only immerse and have to acquire it like a baby does. However I don't agree with only skillbuilding or having it as the main way to learn a language. Immersion should always be the bulk of what you do. That's the point I was making. Skillbuilding is not that fun for most people, it's slow & you get little or no exposure to the culture/s connected to the language which I think is one of the main reasons people start learning a language anyway. For people learning Japanese a lot of them start learning it because they want to understand anime to enjoy it more instead of learning what a conjunctive is in Japanese.
You have a remarkable mind, man: Objective analysis, clear explanations, analogies on point, and a strong, down-to-earth intuition. You could be (and de facto you are) a great philosopher.
Love the music analogy! To learn viola, I used a method called the suzuki method. You first learn to play the song, and you listen to it constantly, and then memorize it. I went through the first two books barely doing the second and third steps and had no problem. And on book three I hit a wall. It's easy to progress rapidly as a beginner, but then you need more input.
I am nearly fluent in a second language because I watched tons of TV in that language as a kid. Much more than in my native language due to more and better content in the language. I have never practiced speaking it. I never spoke it to a native (I was shy about it). And yet, to this day I can produce it on a nearly native level. Despite never actually practicing or speaking it actively. Input works.
Same I have been "learning" English for 8 years (i am an Indonesian) I just watch random things on RUclips everyday in English and now i just realized that i can speak English without trying to speak it 😂
That's how most Scandinavians learn English, as a French person living there it's surprising to hear them speak perfect English and say "wow iI haven't spoken since highschool ahah", in France where we don't typically watch movies, medias etc in English we learn it only in school with grammar and minimal input and output, and to say that it doesn't quite work is an understatement ^^
The acquisition-only approach definitely works well with kids but not necessarily that well with adults. An adult could get full immersion in a language for many years and still wouldn't be able to speak it at a near native level if they don't deliberately study and practise it. They might be fluent but chances are they will be making tons of mistakes.
Lamont I really appreciate you doing these videos. The original video popped up on my recommended and I was really frustrated because I felt it was something that required a serious response, but I didn't feel able to respond to it in a proper way, particularly with his pinned comment about how anyone disagreeing with him in the comments was just drinking the kool aid.
I've started learning many languages the traditional way and after a short time I was able to construct basic sentences. When I tried them with native speakers they often didn't seem to understand and I certainly didn't understand anything they said back to me. That was really useless. So now I'd rather get massive input until I understand what people are saying to me, and with that, even basic speaking abilities will get you very far. Apart from the built-in self-correction ability allowing for rapid progress in language production as well.
Sensible and on point. I loved it. There's a widespread lack of self-awareness. I've met countless people that are experts in different fields, and they've done so by understanding the trade intuitively. Yet they are unable to back-track and understand how they absorbed that knowledge. Keep up the great work!
16:05 - did he forget that language immersion is a thing?! You can acquire language by listening to it _in person_, not just from recording or texts. It's literally what small children do.
Yeah I feel like he has some misunderstandings about the whole input idea. In-person interaction with real people is in many ways some of the highest quality input out there, provided you're able to at least partially understand what the speakers of your target language are saying. I don't think anyone is saying input is only books and media.
Your reply just points up what I find to be the deep misunderstanding in Lamont's video. Yes, CHILDREN can learn language just fine by immersion. The problem is, you're not taking into account developmental psychology. After a certain age, the window for language learning by mere exposure closes. Some people may be able to reopen that window, but most can't. What about the immigrant who's been immersed in a foreign language environment for DECADES and still can't speak or understand a word of it?
Most immigrants who speak the national language poorly do so because they spend AS MUCH TIME AS POSSIBLE in their native language. They output more often than they get input, and they seek only to "survive" the national language as much as possible.
@@daysandwords That may be true for some immigrants, but it's certainly not true for all. Many immigrants hear the language of their adopted country around them all day, every day--yet they don't pick it up. Why? First, because the input is not comprehensible, and second, because their language acquisition faculty is not the same as it was when they were children--so they don't pick it up. Many of these people were eager to become a part of the wider society of their adopted country, but when they find they can't pick up the language, they retreat into a ghetto of their native language--usually a ghetto of their own making.
I think input approach is so "rare" in other fields because we naturally receive input in everything we do. When a child draws with crayons, they often draw the things they see around them. Professional artists use reference images religiously for the same purpose. I often times find myself improving at art even when I'm not drawing, but instead looking at other people's art and dissecting their style. Its just that we so rarely come into contact with other languages when its not relevant to us. Now, all skills do not quite work this way. Some skills are too abstract for input (certain mathematics or sciences), and some skills are too motor/physically focused (sports, stacking card towers). But I think reading is important for writing, eating is important for cooking, and likewise listening is important in language. Thanks for the insight on this video, always brightens up my day when your content comes out. Looking forward to part 3 and any bonus content that comes from this on patreon!
Sports receive input too. The actual process of moving your body is input because your brain notices what you're doing and what effect it has on the ball.
One thing I've noticed about input based learning, is that it doesn't feel like your learning at all. But a month later you go back to something you've listened to and you will notice a big difference! Also, there is a sweet spot of comprehensibility that is necessary. So consider his surgery analogy, watching 100 hours of surgery videos would be comparable to listening to100 hours of lectures on surgery as a beginner in a foreign language you don't understand (very ineffective and not watch input advocates would recommend). BUT that still isn't even accurate as a comparison because watching surgery isn't a core skill of surgery but listening is!
Impressed not just with his thoughts on language learning, but using his experience with music to draw such a clear connection to how it is learned. Thank you for your service to the industry with this one!
18:44 I think this point is just further emphasizing the humility you just spoke on. "It doesnt contribute." Obviously! You dont have anything to contribute yet! Imagine having the mindset that drilling basic sentences over and over or knowing the difference between a noun and verb is a contribution to an entire language/culture.
The other guy is SO WRONG! Input is not so important? I have literaly learnd German by listening to TV and repeating some sentences out loud. If there was no input, how could I repeat anything and eventualy learn the language? Is reading a book also an INPUT? If I just knew this long time ago, I would avoid ANY input all my life and I would not be able to speak any language, apart of maybe being strong A1 in my own mother tounge... That would be just great :) PS. No, It would be not.
I believe that Christian made an honest mistake when making his point about minority languages. He's correct to point out that most of the world's languages don't have standardized writing systems, and that input material is more widely available for the ones that do, but this is not the strike against the input hypothesis he seems to think it is. The fact of the scarcity of material for non-written languages doesn't relate to the question of whether the input hypothesis applies to those languages, though it does mean a pretty big headache for anyone outside of those language contexts hoping to learn. Also, for a conversation about the input hypothesis to be productive, a distinction should be made between different kinds of input. I don't think any proponent of the input hypothesis has in mind that input is merely that which is televised, written, and published. When my (very patient) friends describe pictures in magazines to me in Taiwanese, this, as well as the recordings they graciously allow me to make, is input, too. It's just input that requires proximity to and connection with speakers themselves to access. It's not that the input hypothesis is not generous- it's that Christian's interpretation of it and what constitutes input isn't.
Arguing that comprehensible input is an invalid theory because most languages aren't written is like arguing that evolution can't be true because not every species has legs. It doesn't address the argument at all, it just tries to make sense of a consequence of it without actually understanding it.
In fact, if the language isn't written down and recorded how are you going to learn it other than finding native speakers to get input from? It seems more fitting as an argument against other methods.
I've been playing piano for about 5 years and i can guarantee that i learned through input. My grandma is a world class pianist and played in churches. She has a piano in her home and i would listen to her play everyday since i was a baby. I was able to play piano pretty well after a few months of being self taught and i believe it was the input of hearing my grandma play(who has perfect pitch) for years that allowed me to pick up piano fast and easily. Even today, I can a play a piece that i think i played perfect but my grandma can hear all every mistake i make. So i agree, input is very important to get better.
i am an elderly lady and i am always interested, how people learn......so i like to listen to what musicians and all kind of artists have to say.....the ones, who are really good, would say.....expose yourself, listen, watch, observe how the best do it.....then copy them.......and eventually you might try yourself......compose, dance, paint, write.....whatever........
I absolutely agree with you. I find it strange when people aren't sold on the input hypothesis, when we all know traditional language learners who study ONLY using textbooks and courses never truly reach a level where they speak naturally. You learn how to speak through input, you dont learn how to speak through speaking. You get better at speaking, but unless you have input and know how to say something, essentially you are making up how you THINK the language should sound. I think a flaw in his argument is we arent saying you dont learn how to speak through input, in fact, quite the opposite. Ever since Ive adopted an input learning approach, I can understand so much more and speak better even though I go months without speaking a single word of my target language. If what he were saying true, I shouldnt be able to speak it at all. Due to input, I now know how something SHOULD sound and can self correct, if I hadnt inputted, I would just be speaking the way I think I should while simultaneously making mistakes. Its kind of sad to me that I feel we are going backwards sometimes, so Im glad you made this video because input should be celebrated, we should be encouring input more, lets change our mindset.. Its still a minority, most people who learn a language dont even think about it and just do the traditional study route. I think its good to make these videos and get the message out there
how can you write a book if you don’t read books? how can you make art if you don’t view art? how can you produce and film a movie if you don’t watch movies? how can you cook if you don’t try new foods? you could do all these things, but would you hit a wall eventually and stop progressing? yes. because there’s only so much you can know on your own without input. same with language learning. you have to be able to process it and be extremely comfortable listening to it. practicing speaking and writing is important too, but they must both be practiced in order to have a well rounded understanding of a language.
This is eye openning. I'm so glad I listened to your as well as others' advice to play the long game and do input routines even though it was very arduous. After a year, I noticed that when I make spontaneous conversations, I instantly pull vocabulary and the right grammar from my subconcious which I remember was added due to me listening intently to input videos. I learned Italian the 'school" way too but I know quite well that I learned a whole other set of things there which was complementary to my utilization of acquired input. Safe to say I did a lot of things which seemed like a fruitless effort but in the end, they both sprang from the same roots.
Can I ask you how exactly you found using input methods "arduous"? Do you mean that it implied countless hours of doing nothing but listening with no obvious goal or endpoint to it - like a long road-trip without a clear destination - or were you getting at something else? I agree with your comment about drawing from your subconscious. I've often surprised myself by coming up with sentence constructs and phrases that I have no conscious recollection of ever having "studied."
@@danieltemelkovski9828 Oh input routines such as watching a 20 minute show with both english and italian subtitles took an hour on average because I have to pause in between to take note of common phrases and understanding the grammar being used. Also, I play those shows, RUclips videos, and movies in slow motion since I cannot comprehend fast and fluent speakers. This is very arduous and taxing to me because of how much content consumption I was doing. From their advice, I pushed through because I believed them and wouldn't you know it, all that input paid off after many months. The first few months were painful for my brain and progress was slow. I can compare it to playing an instrument. You practice your piece 1 hour a day slowly, it is not difficult mechanically since you do it slowly but it takes a really long time until you make decent progress. At first, you can only play a few notes and your still at the second bar, just like how miniscule your vocabulary still is in the first few months. But after a long time, you can play a few pages at the right tempo and because some notes are repeated, they are easier. Those note repetition are like carry overs in language learning, you learn a certain phrase or future tense and when you meet a similar phrase in the future, you know exactly how the grammar should be because of the input you already had being ingrained in your subconcious. The difficulty comes with the time it takes and thus I see language learning, especially input routines, as an arduous task. Not a difficult task like solving problems on the spot or beating a difficult game.
@@JV-km9xk Oh, I see, thanks. I understand perfectly what you mean now. I have done a lot of the twin subtitles stuff myself, including rewinding (is that still a word? lol) certain sentences fifty times because I couldn't believe that what was written in the target language subtitle is what the character actually said lol. It definitely pays off, much more than the equivalent time spent studying grammar rules or vocab lists. I can relate to what you're saying about playing an instrument too. I spent years playing the organ (don't ask) as a kid, and now as an adult have decided to learn piano. There's a huge amount of crossover between the two, but there are still important differences which require reducing learning to baby steps. (And in my case, there are some very bad fingering habits I developed as a kid that I now have to unlearn.) I agree there are strong similarities between this and learning a language.
We all acquire our first language via aural input. Aural input - is input. Languages needn’t be recorded - recorded languages are simply more accessible.
Another thing that works implicitly rerher than explicitly is social etiquette. Sure, you could memorize rules on how to behave properly (and there are lots of guides and manuals) but most people learn by observation and osmosis. Someone can memorize rules of behavior in Japan or one could learn the same rules implicitly by watching Japanese people behave, the way they address older and younger people, how they greet one another, how they toast or eat or say goodbye. Careful observation and repetition is how most gain a feeling of what is proper and what is not. It’s even a fun game to try to make these rules explicit. There’s what Larry David did in Seinfeld and Curb. There are so many unwritten rules that can basically only be learned by comprehensible input.
I'm working on Spanish and am native English and B2 French. French was through the typical classroom model through uni and Spanish has been more input based. My italki tutor has asked me several times where I learned a concept that is typically hard for learners. My reply was usually something like "I think I saw it on this show a bunch of times or maybe the news, not really sure..." Other times it's something that is close to French and my brain made the connection. Watching a TV show is input but I'm engaging with the content. I'm seeing words matched to sounds, understanding unspoken context, and stopping to lookup or mimic cool/new words. I'm goofing off but I'm being exposed to things that end up surfacing with my italki tutor. Thanks to having the dual cheat codes of Eng and Fr, mass input has helped maximize my newbie gains.
I don’t understand why people argue against the comprehensible input model. We all aquire our first language that way. I myself aquired two more languages to a very high level, but never once studied grammar. Friends and colleagues of mine has done exactly the same and had much success.
He was talking in the context of defining "Acquisition" differently to "Learning" which a specific definition. It seems Krashen coined the term "Acquisition" to mean X thing, rather than the word being used in Linguistics.
@@alice_hml Acquisition was typically just used in the context of normal language development, as in getting better at language. Like "skill acquisition" is. However, Krashen used the word specifically in a different way from all of this. Instead, "acquisition" is the subconscious and intuitive development of concepts in a language without even having to consciously think about them. While "learning" is all about consciously increasing your knowledge to manually recall, typically by memorization. Prior to Krashen's "Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis", the word "acquisition" in Linguistics was not used like Krashen uses it.
You analogy with music it's outstanding. I'm a musician too and my approach was always more intuitive than relying on reading chords and such. Thank you for reminding me of that.
I know someone (another anecdote) who spoke from the beginning, spoke a lot, and got to a pretty high level of speaking. That person had 2 big problems, always making certain (very basic) mistakes without any idea that they were mistakes (as in your "wanna to" example) and difficulty in understanding native speakers. Once those mistakes become ingrained, it's extremely difficult to correct them. Another benefit of input based language acquisition is that your comprehension is much better. It's completely impossible to have a conversation if you can't understand the responses to your speech, even if your speech is perfect. Seek first to understand is the basis of all real communication.
@@daysandwords That is often how it turns out, so you definitely have the correct instincts. :+ ) I recognize that he is in practice a very generous person, and that is commendable.
For deliberate practice what I do is always this: Take In Input > Ask a Question > Get the Answer > Attempt to Notice and Leverage It (Both in Input & Output) > Take In Input This is a very small minority of the time, but it makes a big difference. What I'm practicing today is word order in subordinate clauses as I've recognized it's a gap of mine in Swedish.
You know what I think a good anecdotal example of why input works very, very well is: I grew up in the Netherlands, where we had to learn English in school as our second language. Now as a 25-year-old adult I read, write and understand English on an academic level, I have no trouble speaking with natives about complex issues all night long (sure I have an accent and I make mistakes here and there) but in my 15 years or so of learning the language, _speaking_ naturally has taken up the least amount of time; I learned English IN my native country, with few opportunities to speak it hours and hours on end. Our lectures at school consisted of learning plain grammar rules and repeating sentences from textbooks. Of course, that taught me valuable things about the language, but how I _really_ got fluent at the language was by endlessly watching nickelodeon shows and movies that got broadcasted in their original language, English, with Dutch subtitles. These subtitles always moved way too fast for me and my siblings, so we could only read like 50% or so of the translation, forcing us to listen, listen, listen and putting together the missing pieces of the translation intuitively. And by playing many games in English, and later on, reading books in English. Only later in my English-learning process, did I start actively talking in English, again with my siblings, after we finally understood the language pretty well. We had heard the language for so many hours, had so much input, that we really developed a feeling on how to speak correctly or if we said something not quite right; therefore we could even correct each other or knew when to ask an adult for a correction. Half of the lectures at my university and the reading we have to do are in English, and I have no trouble at all with that! It's not any harder for me than dutch lectures. I have NOT reached this level by speaking as much as possible, but by MAINLY having lots of input, for years.
Yeah, and it's very similar in the other European countries which don't dub, like Denmark, Sweden etc. Meanwhile in France where everything's in French, generally lower level of English.
7:55 late to the video but I discovered your channel very recently! I'm a physical therapist, and these principals are so similar to the difference of learning motor skills as an adult. I.e. if you had a stroke add an adult, the way you aquire the skill of walking will be different from what you did as a baby, but nevertheless intuition is still a big part of the process 😊 (PS, jag är svensk, och blir så varm i hjärtat av hur du tar till dig svensk kultur. Det visar att språk inte bara ska användas för att förstå så -många- som möjligt, utan att ta del av en kultur bara för intressets skull!)
In West Africa where most people are multi-lingual they do not call themselves a language speaker rather language hearer. One does not ask Do you speak X rather Do you hear X.
Incisive excellence as usual, thanks. To those of us who are becoming bogged-down in options, could you make a video, simplistic and generic and without too many caveats, about the most effective programme for language learning? For example, split your time 5:3:2:1 with listening, speaking, writing, app. I can imagine your mind spinning with the difficulties but please give it a go!
As a very amateur pianist myself, I really appreciated the music analogy. It's so much easier to play a piece if you know what it's supposed to sound like. Now, a skilled sight reader can produce a piece of music without having heard it first, but then take into account that language is kind of like a super complex improvisational music that we take part in throughout our whole lives and is governed by a very strict set of mostly unstated rules. Might be good to just "listen" a for a while to get a sense of what that's supposed to "sound like", no?
One interesting point is the "improvisational" bit. A professional pianist will spend many hours practicing the same piece over and over until they can play it perfectly. But this doesn't make sense in a language context. It would be like you had memorized all of Shakespeare's plays, and could recite them perfectly, and yet that was all the English you knew. In this case, while having you over at a dinner party would no doubt be an interesting experience, it would not be accomplishing the typical goals we expect of a language. Language is improvisational in a way that few musicians can hope to approach.
@@Keldor314 That's assuming that the "practice" is for the purpose of just outputting. The whole point of deliberate practice (that the expert pianists in the example do) is not to output with no feedback. The whole point of practice is to get feedback, and that feedback is input. The form of this feedback is the information of what your fingers are doing, in what order, at what angle, at what strength, at what time, etc etc and also hearing the result (the notes in sequence). Literally the whole point of deliberate practice is so your brain can get input. So, _just_ like an expert pianist practicing a specific segment paying attention to the details of it, a language learner would want to focus only on a subset of comprehensible input until they "get it down" and then move onto another section of comprehensible input. And this keeps happening until they've acquired enough input where they can make general statements fully improvised at a whim. But just like a novice pianist can improvise a little bit, a novice in a language would be able to improvise simple sentences.
@@HoraryHellfire When you do deliberate practice too early when learning a language, you actually do not have feedback. That is, yes, you can hear yourself speak, but you really have no idea if you're doing it correctly, you're just making an educated guess. Once you've mastered basic pronounciation, your ability is largely dependent on intuitive knowledge. This is very different from piano, since for piano the "pronounciation" is difficult. That is, in the more difficult pieces, learning the complex finger gymnastics to produce the music accurately and expressively is far harder than understanding or memorizing the music itself. If a language used these sorts of difficult to pronounce phrases, no one would be able to speak it. It's for this reason that there are very few pianists in the world who are capable of performing improvised music more difficult than what would be considered intermediate-advanced. This is where the music/language analogy breaks down - the only people who practice speaking in anything remotely similar to the way musicians do playing are actors learning lines for a play or a movie.
@@Keldor314 Languages do not have feedback from any amount of "practice" except the ability to make basic sounds. No amount of output directly results in input. That's the difference between languages and most skills. However, that doesn't change the fact that the purpose of deliberate practice in those aforementioned skills is to acquire input. The idea is that the "Input Hypothesis" applies to all skills, including language learning. But since most skills require you to interact with something to get input, most people think it's the interaction that results in improvement, not the input. "Learning the complex finger gymnastics" is also about input. When you move your fingers, the angle, force, speed, etc etc are all details that your brain notices when executing it. And your brain notices the result in the environment (e.g. sound) from that. This is input. Changing the details like moving your fingers at a different time at a slightly different angle is new information for your brain to watch and then notice the result. Just like seeing a word you somewhat know the meaning of in a new context, your brain has to notice the way your fingers move slightly differently (in a new context). The analogy doesn't break down. It only breaks down because you still misunderstand what is actually "comprehensible input". A pianist doesn't get better by doing the same thing over and over again, especially at the highest ability. They get better by deliberate practice facilitating input for their brain to understand. Again, deliberate practice is all about maximizing comprehensible input so you can understand how and/or why you should do something different than you were doing it before. That's why so many people are "bad" at any skill, because almost nobody actually knows the concept of deliberate practice. It's also the same reason why the vast majority of people take a language class, receive skill-building approaches, and then can't speak it after 2-3 years. Because the whole point of improvement in _ANYTHING_, including other skills, is comprehensible input. If your brain doesn't subconsciously understand how "X" is better to do, then it will never improve.
@@HoraryHellfire Well, there are two big aspects to learning a difficult piece of music. One is the technical, which is indeed learned through careful repetition, starting very slow, then gradually faster until you can play them at the intended speed. If you are ever to tackle any of the truly spectacularly difficult piano works, such as just about anything written by Liszt, you have to do this. And yes, it is every bit as much of a grind as it sounds. The second component is the all important expression. Getting good expression on a piece is more intuitive, more like learning language would be, and is the part of practice most like what you're describing. But the approach you take to piano practice still isn't the sort of approach that would be good for learning a language. Let me give you an example to demonstrate: Imagine that you want to learn to recite Shakespeare's "To be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet. To do this, you would go through it line by line, memorizing it all, and after that, keep going through it, analyzing each phrase, feeling out the precise meaning and figuring out how to accent the words just so. You would try saying each phrase a few different ways, picking the one you like best to use in the end, and in places wonder what Shakespeare was smoking when he choose a word that you feel just doesn't sit right. In the end, after much careful analysis and a lot of practice, you would be able to deliver the soliloquy with such eloquance that it would bring your audience to tears over the tragedy of it all. This is the way in which pianists practice their music. But it still isn't a very good way to learn English.
That’s like trying to learn school work by taking the tests. Obviously the end goal, just like speaking your target language, is to do well in the test but if you don’t know enough content it is counter productive. You can only start doing practice tests to improve once you have learned the content’s solid foundational knowledge, or else you won’t get anywhere and just become demotivated. I believe that when learning any language you should dedicate a certain amount of time in the beginning to just getting familiar with the language (writing system and pronunciation rules, listening to speech patterns, basic grammar/syntax, essential vocab words like pronouns, essential verbs like to be, to sleep, to go etc.. and basic nouns) once you have those, that is when output is most effective.
I play classical piano too and learning a language is exactly like that. learn a few measures and sometimes I have to go back to Hanon to get a solid muscle memory in order to play the music fluidly. Also, practice slow but accurately.
Amazing video man, very interesting. There is definitely a place for actively practicing production of a language from an early stage along side all the input. At the beginning, it's just drilling the sounds, and later calling the words to mind. This is effective long before one is attempting "fluent" speaking.
Regarding learning the languages of Australia, listening to native speakers IS the input. Input does not require recorded materials, it just requires a native source, i.e., people speaking the language in this case.
I’m a native speaker of American English and grew up hearing my dad’s Mexican parents speaking Spanish. Since he had a hard time assimilating, my dad wanted his kids to be “full American” and only speak English. He forbade his family from speaking Spanish to my brother and me, but it was around, so we’d get the gist-especially commands, like, “sit”, “eat”, “come”, “quiet”. Fortune had us move to Spain when I was 8. We lived in a small town in Andalucía, and learned Spanish on our feet while taking classes at school. Just like English, it came quickly… Spanish all around, studying in school, one learns the ins and outs of everyday interactions, while also learning the finer points of grammar. It’s SO hard to learn a language from a book or in a class without any real-world experience. If I know I’m going to visit a place where I don’t speak the language, at the very least I will learn basic polite phrases before I visit. A little “please” or “thank you”, and especially “cheers!” will take one far. In my case, I had the opportunity to visit Japan for a month in 2015. With plenty of notice, I set about learning what I could before arriving. I could barely say anything but “please” “thank you” and “good morning/day”, but I was able to read basic signs and understand the tiniest bit of what was going on. It was an extraordinary trip and I kept-up my book/internet study of Japanese in hopes of returning in the future. I went back for a month in 2017 and was MUCH more able to communicate and understand Japanese. I started to pick-up phrases from everyday exchanges. Like how clerks at 7-11 will say “ki otsukete, ne” for “take care”. I was singing karaoke in Japanese, reading the katakana from the screen. Another trip back two years later, I was talking to a guy in this tiny bar in Gunma prefecture when I realized, “I just told my first story in Japanese!”. Long story short, it’s entirely possible to get the basics of a foreign language, but it really takes living in a place where that language is spoken to truly become fluent and speak like a local. Ultimately, communication and understanding are the goals. I’m never bothered when someone speaks less than perfectly. I very much appreciate any effort and won’t correct someone unless they ask me to.
I’ve been learning/studying/acquiring languages (using many different methods) for 45 years (since I was seven years old), and I’ve been teaching a few of them (Irish, Italian, French) for most of my adult life. You’re pretty much on the mark.
I would say the “tiny language” issue cuts against the deliberate practice school far more than the comprehensible input school. All you need to learn a language doe comprehensible input is a single competent speaker of that language to talk to you simply but in a way that interests you. That is all. If you can find Latgalian to teach you, you can learn by CI. So theoretically, you could learn all living languages using that method. But to use the more standard method, you could only learn a language if it has a written lexicon and a defined grammatical system. That cuts out 90 percent of languages. Imagine we meet an alien civilization, the only way we could learn to communicate would be Comprehensible Input. There are no flash cards or phrasebooks or grammar charts. The alien would make noises and point to different things. That’s literally what Krashen did to demonstrate his theory. “Das ist mein kopf”.
My favorite analogy I like to use is that of driving a car. Obviously to drive one it requires gas. Obviously there are other things needed such as electricity. To speak a language we need knowledge of vocabulary and everything else required to speak. Trying to speak from the start is like filling up the tank a little bit then hitting the road over and over because the gas (knowledge/vocabulary) keep running out. You can only practice what you know. People rely too much on speaking to teach us but there are simply too many patterns and nuances. It leads to always needing to translate or have every single thought checked for accuracy. The opposite is taking the time to fill the tank up or simply take in the language and let those who speak it natively do all of the thinking for us. Like you said it is more valuable to listen and copy than to try to always speak and have to form and translate our thoughts.
Even for those for whom speaking early leads to some success, they can only speak if they have acquired something to say, that is, input, even if that input comes through speaking itself. Lamont, this is just wonderful. Successful language learning is more than words coming out of your mouth!
I'm 29 yo now and I have started to learn English a couple of months before. Never wrote in this language before, never watched RUclips or movies, very rare listened podcasts in English, because it was hard for me to understand them. BUT - I always adore books and reading. In fact, I'm a copywriter and an editor in Russian, my native language. So, I read books in English approximately from 23 years old. I did this regularly but no so much, maybe I have read about 6-10 books in a year. At first it was really hard but with time I started to understand more and more, so now I understand about 70-80% of book in English without effort. Recently, my Italki teacher told me I'm pretty fluent in English speaking and have a big vocab. Also, my English writing is not as bad as I thought. Ofc, I make errors but I EXPLAIN my own THOUGHTS in English text and do this at least NORMAL. Again - no speaking, no watching videos, almost no listening. No courses or apps, nothing. From 23 y o I did only READING from time to time. After a couple of months of listening and watching youtube, from July 2022, I started to understand a lot more than I did before. Conclusion? Input is the king.
I’m self teaching myself French and I’m doing that by using Duolingo an hour or so a day (just to learn some vocabulary and short sentences) but the majority of my learning goes into watching cartoons, series, and listening to podcasts and topics I like. I don’t understand every single thing, I’ll catch certain words and sentences and although I’ve only been learning for a few weeks, I’m starting to get used to the sound of the language for all the hours I put into just hearing the language. For speaking wise, I’m mute most of the time because I’m early in the learning stage but I’ll repeat certain words sometimes and short sentences. I find myself thinking in French also even if it’s just “I don’t know why I’m tired today”…. I plan on trying to communicate in French when I feel like I’ve reached a good enough level because right now I wouldn’t get passed the hello, how are you stage of basic conversation.
Maybe one way to explain it could be to talk about the "it just sounds right" intuition. How do you know that "lovely little old lady" is correct and "little old lovely lady" isn't? Because "it just sounds right" that way. OK! So now! Why does it "just sound right" to you? Did you ever stop to think about it? Did you study a rule in school? Did your parents constantly correct you when you got it wrong? No. You just only ever heard it that way and your brain worked it out. _Your brain works it out! Your brain built a model of the language for you all by itself!_ Whenever you listen, you understand because you're using that model. When you speak, you always speak correctly because you're accessing that model. Do consciously learned rules contribute to that model? No. You know they don't. If you're making a "mistake" in your native language, how many times does the teacher at school have to "correct" you? Lots of times! When do you stop making the "mistake"? When "it just sounds right" to you, and it only sounds right to you once you've _heard it used like that in real life_ enough times. So when you learn another language, sure, if you need to speak early go ahead and try learning some rules. But be very careful. Don't trust what comes out of your own mouth, because what comes out of your mouth is not going to be right. Don't allow what comes out of your mouth to "sound right" to you. Only trust what native speakers say. If you can imagine a native speaker saying it, that's what should "sound right" to you. Only allow your brain to use that to build its model.
This is just outstanding!!! The idea you express at the very end of the video is eye-opening for me. It makes a lot of sense and it definitely will impact my language learning technique!
Input and listening are how we learn as children. Like music, we listen and engage holistically. However, as we learn and become more self aware of how we and others are expressing themselves, our approach to improvement changes as we change
Thanks for watching! Something I didn't address clearly enough in this video was why Christian's analogy of brain surgery isn't quite the same. - Assuming you were to see a specific brain surgery operation performed enough times, and really did comprehend it at the deepest possible level, then you WOULD actually be to ready to perform the operation, to a much greater degree than most other people, who would only be guessing about they were doing. There are two things about this analogy that need to be unpacked a bit: 1. "Comprehend". Normally, when we see someone do something, we've understood WHAT has happened, but probably not really WHAT they've done. You can understand that someone replaced the RAM in a computer, but if you don't actually know what doing it entails, then you haven't really understood it properly. If you saw it done a few times in enough detail, then you could do it yourself. If you can't replace RAM yourself, then you haven't understood what was being done when you saw it. What I'm saying is that if you REALLY comprehend the surgeon you're watching, down to every move they make and exactly why they made that move, then yes you've understood it. Until then, you are just somewhere between "What's brain surgery?" and "Oh I kinda get it..." - and this is not a yes/no thing. You gradually comprehend more and more, and indeed, surgeons absolutely DO train by watching videos or surgery done well AND surgery gone wrong, to understand why every move is made the why it is. This is input. 2. Although I would argue that the above paragraph shows that more than half the difficulty with brain surgery lies in understanding what to do (because the human brain is the most complex assortment of matter that we've ever found), there is still significant difficulty (after full comprehension) which is steadiness and skilfullness of hand. This is why surgeons value the steadiness of their hands and do exercises to specifically train this, as well as avoiding caffeine etc. in the hours before surgery. The task itself is more physically difficult than producing words with your mouth, and has MUCH more serious consequences for getting it wrong. This can be practiced much more effectively once the surgeon understands every move they are supposed to make and why. Personally, if I had a choice between a surgeon who had worked on 300 people's brains with extremely steady hands but wasn't actually sure what they were doing (and therefore some patients had died), or a surgeon who understood the operation they needed to perform to a full 100% level but had only practiced that operation on real patients three times, I would take the latter. My dad actually had brain surgery a few years ago and went with a surgeon who had a 98% success rate on that operation, but he was more convinced by the recommendation of the neurologist who could perfectly explain everything they do and why (despite the neurologist not being a surgeon himself). Did that clear things up?.... Probably not. Cool.
"Probably not" 🤣 I believe that I got your point, and I feel it like the difference between execution of instructions to achieve a result and actual ability to solve problems as they appear.
It did make sense, lol, and further underscores the point that language learning is distinct from almost all other endeavours. To build on that, something else that occurred to me while watching the vid -- another flaw in that analogy is that he (appears to) assume that our brain does nothing but observe the surgery, when in fact we know it's practicing the whole time: parsing syntax, grammar, phonemes, pronunciation, comparing, contrasting, experimenting. In reality, the brain is training to output from the day we start immersing: we just don't see all the dummies it carves up along the way, only the fine-tuning it does at the end, when we start training our mouth muscles to 'hold the scalpel steady'. We've all seen young children absent-mindedly talking under their breath as they develop language too, which just further proves the brain is anything but a passive recipient in input/acquisition. Perhaps this misconception of passivity is what informs Christian's/others' skeptism?
@Dapz Fanboy Yes, but I think if you think about that, you'll realise why experienced musicians can play music they've never seen before. Think about the analogy with a language and you'll see that it works perfectly.
"because the human brain is the most complex assortment of matter that we've ever found" Just adding a little joke here: the brain is the most important organ according to the brain :)
You know what's ironic. I believe a lot of surgeons do just this... They learn how to perform a certain surgery from watching a video or reading a book without necessarily ever having a surgeon skilled in that specific surgery guide them through it step by step numerous times until it's done. I saw someone do this MID SURGERY recently in a documentary where they were in India and literally rang someone in Europe to have them show them what to do. They then finished the surgery successfully after performing something they hadn't done before. So, I felt like this was a total straw-man as well as a misunderstanding of learning and of surgery.
I appreciate the time you put in to make videos, and analyze the language learning process. I don't know if you made this analogy in your holistic approach video. But in order to acquire/speak/use a language, there will be the right approach at the right time. There are times when you want more grammar, there are times when you want more passive acquisition, and there are times you want more speaking.
Yes! And the time for more informal teaching by simple exposure is in childhood. By the teen years, that window is closing, and by adulthood, it's shut.
You've spouted that nonsense enough now Scary Steve. You can stop. If it's true, explain to me why my proficiency in Swedish DOUBLED from getting a lot of exposure to it at the age of 34. Still going through puberty am I?
Thanks for making this video. I completely agree on the value of the input method. It was a bit hard to watch though because of the original video’s lousy arguments that make no sense. The pity is that the author didn’t even try to do a proper research on the input method. This would’ve hopefully improved his understanding and maybe even arguments. I doubt he speaks any foreign language fluently. I totally support the input method because it’s kinda how I inadvertently learned English. I didn’t know about the theory at the time of course, I just enjoyed doing everything in English - it was a means to an end. I loved listening to podcasts the most. I didn’t even speak a lot, but I found that once you have this intuitive understanding of the language, an internal map of it, appropriate responses just jump into your mind without giving it much thought. Therefore, it’s kinda suspicious to me when people claim having learned some language to fluency in 1 week, 3 months, etc. Learning German now :)
Learning music/learning a language shows the difference between learning and acquiring. Any piano method book will teach you to read music and explain music theory to you. It will teach you , for example, that the scale of E has 4 sharps in it. And then you practice until you acquire in your subconscious the fact that F,G,C and D will be played sharp whenever something is in E. Of course, you can also play by ear. Once you have enough input and know how the major scale sounds, it is easy enough to work out which notes need to be sharp. You have acquired the knowledge by input without opening a method book and learning.
Great response videos so far, looking forward to the last. Concerning acquiring a language with little written or recorded materials and without speaking early, have you ever heard of an unusual type of language exchange called crosstalk? I'm curious what you think of it. The way how it works is that both language exchange partners only speak their L1s with one another and use drawings, gestures, modified/sheltered language and other techniques to make everything more comprehensible. Best wishes to you and your family. Thanks again for the lovely vids.
I have heard of it and I've "seen" it but not where the parties were uncomfortable in the L2s, rather just each of them perfectly understood L2 but would rather just speak L1. It was Finnish/Swedish.
Most people would think it inconsequential but when you said "all abled body people have a model for how to walk" instead of just "everyone has a model for how to walk" you earned my sub ; )
Thank you. Honestly I HATE having to abbreviate, so even saying things like "And every native Swedish speaker can do this", I always want to add a subtitle or something that says 99.5%* or something haha.
12:15 -> "generative adversarial neural networks". train your brain into recognizing what it should sound like, so when you produce it yourself the feedbackloop can be closed and regulate back.
Speaking is not output … speaking is process … meaning it’s throughput - you hearing the language is your perception of the result/output. There’s always a series of unconscious processing that’s occurring when someone is speaking … whether they are trying to “acquire” a language or not … and anything we practice enough begins to become a part of a subconscious feedback model where there’s an interaction between the conscious and subconscious parts of the brain - even when speaking one’s native language.
This series is amazing! As someone who spends a lot of time practicing writing in her target languages (simply because I enjoy writing and I value that skill highly), my routine is quite input-heavy. For example, I always make sure to use some sort of native material as reference when I practice writing. I would gather articles, essays, etc - high-quality native input basically - on the topic I want to write about, study them thoroughly, write down sentences that I like (so I can work them into my own text later on) before I even begin to work on the first draft. Like you said, how else can I learn to write well if I don't even know what 'well' looks like? Can I write without references and get my point across? Sure, but will I improve my writing skills by doing that? Not really, at least not by much, because I'll just be outputting stuff I already know. I do write without references sometimes, but I consider that play, not study, (like how the pianist felt he was just messing around) because it's not deliberate. It has to feel like I'm at least stretching my current limits, so if I don't feel that slight 'mental' soreness that usually results from conscious, deliberate practice, then it's just play for me, maybe maintenance at best (which is also important, but not the point).
lol in my zoology degree we learned how to disect animals by watching HEAPS of videos first, so that we didn't have to waste like, 10 animal carcasses per student per animal type in order to "get it" His 'brain surgeon' analogy is sooo wrong like... do you think students would learn on living humans and mistakes are just "oh no, he ded, well there's more humans where this one came from" F no. Even human cadavers for practice would be in short supply.
Haven't watched the video, just saw the title and I thought I'd drop something here as someone who has been immersing for a while now. The more I've learned through immersion, the more I've realized this can be extended to EVERY skill. It's hard to see it if you haven't immersed, but the consumption to production, input till plateau to output cycle is applicable everywhere. I've noticed it when producing music where everyone has heard music enough to where they basically understand any piece of music in the genre they're most familiar with, but it's only when you try composing that you realize you don't really know that much, like for example the chords or how the bass goes. That then feeds the input, making it more valuable as now you know what to focus on, and so on. A great example is when I first tried making my own movie I had watched enough to where I knew how the film would go and how the angles would look and the story, but then when I actually recorded it and got to editing I realized that I didn't know what music to use and that, no matter what piece of music I chose, nothing fit. This was because I could choose a slow music for the sad scene, but the shots and cuts were too quick for the scene. After that, when I got to watching another movie I started paying attention to the length of the shots and the music chosen and how the synced up. If there's something you don't pay attention to, you're not gonna be learning about it. Interestingly, it's the same for immersion too. I've seen a lot of people too focus on "tolerating the ambiguity" to the point they just essentially ignore what they're saying. It's a blurry line, but it's there. This is the reason why some people hit a plateau on things, even if they spend thousands of hours. That's where the conscious mind comes in and guides the subconscious pattern recognition. Anyways, sorry if this comment doesn't fit with the video, but I'm not watching another 30 min video about immersion learning. I've seen WAYYYY too many on the topic already so I can already guess what he'll most likely say.
"It's hard to see it if you haven't immersed, but the consumption to production, input till plateau to output cycle is applicable everywhere." Yep, exactly. Without watching the video, you are agreeing with everything I said. The "difference" between language learning and everything else is actually just one of envrionment, not a difference in application or process. If you had grown up in France, you'd be fluent in French... and people take from this that it's because of "speaking it from birth" but it's actually because of HEARING it a lot. BTW, no matter how long a video is... it's still pretty arrogant to comment on it (especially a comment of this length) without watching at least some of it. This series of videos was very well received by my audience because of how many things I said that HADN'T been said before.
great video! i’ve kind of passively understood why input can be useful (much like how comprehensible input passively trains the brain) but i haven’t seen a good explanation/analogy like your toddler example until now.
I don't think the toddler analogy is that good. I toddler's brain is wired differently than an adult's. Of course a toddler never says, okay, this is a noun and this is a verb, and I put them together like this. But a toddler's brain is ready to absorb language simply by exposure. During the teenage years, this ability starts to shut down. By adulthood, it's over. Language learning must them be approached differently.
@Big Scary Steve - there is a massive error in your understanding of my analogy. Honestly I don't have time to explain it to you, but yeah... Like I said, you're on thing ice anyway.
@Nomadic Vegan - yeah it's my favourite part too because I get to watch my son go full throttle in the park. (That other kid who falls over heaps is just some clip I found on RUclips because I don't have any video of my son "toddling").
Im so glad I stumbled across your channel when I was looking for stuff on duolingo. I’ve been studying danish for about three weeks now and I’m currently reading stories on linq as well as listening to Harry Potter in danish (I had a bit of a headstand as I’m fluent in English and German), and I can see improvement every single day. I’m also working with a teacher on italki, because I need a lot of help with pronounciation, as danish is kinda hard. When thinking about telling him what I’ve been doing this week I realised how much my vocabulary has grown through the input I’m getting, like I can form scentences with words I definitely didn’t realise I’ve learned. If I had my focus on using the language I know I’d still be working on remembering very specific replies to very specific questions.
You don't have to know the grammar inside out though it helps. People use their native language more or less accurately without necessarily knowing tables of declensions or even which words are adverbs.
So this is what I have gathered from watching a bunch of videos on language and my own experience. Nothing to A1: this part you need to study, get a couple 100 words of vocab, a few set lines for conversations, understand how to pronounce written words, and a basic understanding of the grammar as a foundation to work with. A1 to B1: don't bother studying anymore, instead listen, speak, read, and write in roughly equal amounts till all the common words and grammar are intuitive. B1 to B2: here is the intermediate plateu and the only way past is listen, listen, listen, read, read, read, just all the input possible. B2 to C1: lots of listening and reading still with more advanced stuff but it is worth doing conscious studying to master what is now intuitive.
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A band teacher told me this when I was young.
"Practice doesn't make perfect. Practice makes permanent."
You need to know what perfect is in order to practice in such away that you achieve perfection.
Omg, yes!!! I remember when I tried to learn the multiples of four as a kid and spent an evening rehearsing it wrongly. Took me YEARS to not sometimes at first glance thinking 4*4=15
Terrific quote!
An alternative but related version I heard as a kid was "practice doesn't make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect." (Implying that practicing the wrong thing/wrong way will not lead to perfection.) It makes logical sense, but I found it demotivating because I thought "how the fuck am I supposed to know what constitutes perfect practice?"
It is one of the truest … erm … truisms ever :nods:.
My middle school band teacher said the same exact thing....
People who like to talk a lot think that they're being generous when often the most generous thing you can do is just listen.
I cannot fathom why someone would value speaking a language over understanding it. It is just an empty shell if all you do is speak it.
Like the Chinese room thought experiment but your brain is the Chinese room
I remember the author of AJATT encapsulating the necessity of understanding over outputting like this: you can use output to ask someone where the train station is, but if you don't understand their reply, good luck.
I guess is just the perfect amount of both
@@AlvaradoGuitar well that makes no sense. comprehension and speaking are both equally important because if you remove any of them communication is impossible. whether input will teach you how to speak is a different question altoghether
Jobs require you to speak and write foreign languages. Most of them are entry level but the demand for them shows how many people don't want to learn every skill in a language.
I'm a software developer. There's a saying: "Garbage in, garbage out." While speaking practice is important, I temper that with listening to authentic native speech as well. Otherwise I'd be regurgitating what "rubbish" I think is correct.
I know some italki tutors state they allow maximum "student talk time", like 80% to 90% of the lesson. And I'm like, no good lord gracious, I need to hear you speak Russian for goodness sake! (I'm learning Russian) A conversation is a two-way street. If I speak most of the time, I'd be monologuing.
If we're trying to be more precise, it should be “conversation practice" (which involves listening and appropriate responses), and not "speaking practice". But any further than this, and we'd be arguing over semantics...
Depends on the language in my opinion! I think it can be useful to be practically monologuing or being interviewed in a way so that you can use the opportunity to really blab as much as possible. You can use all the other time you have to practice listening, etc. Conversation practice is better to have with tandem partners (i.e. free resources). With a paid resource it makes more sense to focus on speaking practice so they can identify your errors and correct them. In my experience, this has been the most effective.
@@OpqHMg I agree that monologues can be useful. My goals just happen to include “have meaningful conversations with native speakers”, which means I have to understand what they said in real-time and have an appropriate response, and exchange ideas. One of my tutors said he likes working with me because he can talk about more complicated topics (rather than the basic grammar and beginner phrases). So in this respect, I find having a meaningful exchange of ideas harder than doing a monologue, because I’m not just trying to express myself but also to pick up communication cues and common phrases that my tutor uses. I’ve thought of tandem partners but I’ve also heard horror stories of people just not turning up, and also the basic point of language exchange. I’d rather my entire session in my target language (and switch to English if need be on my own terms).
The problem with the surgeon example is that if you just flip the example, gave a scalpel to someone who never seen someone else do an operation, and just explain what they need to do, they would probably fail. In order to to a succesful operation, you need to get an explanation of what to do, see someone else do it and then try yourself (on a doll preferably).
Medicine, Math & Science generally are skills where we need to surpass human intuition.
Language is literally born of human intuition and only exists within it.
Language is a framework of which we can learn other skills. I'm less and less convinced that treating language acquisition/learning as a traditional skill makes any sense.
The only other comparable 'skills' are motor skills, like Lamont showed his example with a baby walking
@@cadian101st I think music is a great parallel as well.
@@cadian101st Except motor skills aren't similar to language at all in terms of learning. There's a definite right way and a definite wrong way to walk. The right way gets you where you need to go, in a fairly short amount of time, and without tiring yourself out or injuring yourself (it's a bit wider than this, since there are reasons you might want to run or jog instead of walk, but the point is that we all do it more or less the same way).
With speech, there isn't any "right" way. There is an "English" way, a "Greek" way, a "Swahili" way, a "Hindu" way, and thousands of other additional ways, each one commonly being termed a "language". Indeed, each of these ways is so different from the other ways that if someone were to try to communicate to someone else in a way they were not familiar with, neither one would have a clue what the other was saying.
What this means in terms of learning is that while we can in principle learn something like how to walk without outside input by virtue of there only being a handful of sensible gaits as dictated by human physiology, this does not apply to language. I may be able to *create* a language without outside input, and it might even be an effective language if anyone else were to use it, but it would take an incredible chain of coincidences for it to just happen to be perfect French.
@@Keldor314 Except that's wrong. There definitely _is_ a right way to speak. The right way is to speak in a way the other person understands. And more specifically, there is a right way to speak English and there is a wrong way to speak English. Especially if you are trying to speak English to a specific group of people. Australian English is different from American English.
It's the same thing if you wanted to walk like everybody else, or if the purpose of wanting to walk a specific way like walking slowly, fast, lower to the ground (like crouching), etc etc. These are what you would dub "languages". You wouldn't walk fast if you wanted to be quiet, and you wouldn't walk slowly if you need to walk underneath a trailer or something so you would need to crouch. It's the wrong type of walk.
@@HoraryHellfire Learning to walk in different ways, like to pick your way through a thick forest for instance, is like speaking about different subjects, not like speaking in different languages. If it were the latter, than we'd be expected to speak German when talking to someone in a movie theater, Italian in order to talk about gardening, Japanese whenever sports come up, and so on and so forth.
As for there being a "right" way to speak, I might ask what it is. Is it American English? British English? Maybe the right way to speak is in Afrikaans? Since we can conclude that there isn't one universally correct master tongue, then correctness is subjective, and is about how well we can match the language of other speakers. Thus, correctness in language only exists in the sense of comparing yourself to something external, to other speakers and writers - you can not figure it out in a vacuum.
Imagine writing a song without ever having heard music
Exactly
@María de los Ángeles Mena Beethoven wasn't deaf from birth. He started having hearing issues around the age of 26.
@María de los Ángeles Mena Yes, like the first reply said. Letters from Beethoven indicate that he could hear a bit until about 35 and he also wore out his pianos by bashing the keys hard enough to hear them. Don't get me wrong - he is more brilliant than brilliant and I'm sure if he'd lived another one year even, he'd have written yet another insanely good piece or three. But he knew what his music sounded like.
Imagine being an author who doesn't read a lot of books or a musician who doesn't listen to a lot of music. How would they know, that they dont just produce mediocre bs? In fact, all successful artists of any kind consume A LOT of work from their peers. Meaning A LOT of input. But its also true that you have to start producing output at some point in order to become better.
Btw. Imagine being a language learner who criticizes a native speaker for his bad grammar :DDD
Exactly this. All teaching on writing encourage the learner to read their chosen genre too - so they know what good looks like. If you don't know what good looks like, how can you ever expect to achieve it.
And many musicians learn to play without reading music - they listen and copy, but *listen* comes first.
It baffles the mind that a non native English speaker was so arrogant that they couldn’t conceive that they’ve misunderstood English grammar and were so bold to tell you that your English was full of errors. That’s someone that will likely never speak another language at a very high level. Their arrogance is too much of a barrier.
Reminds me of someone I once heard say, "Oh, I'm fluent level now, but it's hard to understand a lot of the time because so many of them don't speak their language properly."
I nearly had a stroke trying to process that.
@@sandwichbreath0 lol
@@sandwichbreath0 While I wouldn't agree with such a comment, I do understand it. That person has been taught the standard language, and is complaining when someone speaks a non-standard variety.
@@bigscarysteve Therein lies the error, though, it's not the standard language: it's an artificial spin-off that exists only in the classroom, stripped of all connected-speech, effective pronunciation, morphology, etc. Grammar rules are helpful, but they're also incredibly imprecise, because they're a conscious attempt to describe unconscious processes. That's why textbooks have such long lists of exceptions to the rules. When we learn via the grammar/skills-building model, we're lulled into the false assumption that we're accessing the language in its 'pure' form, the way it was 'designed' to be used. That's wrong.
What's 'standard' is how natives use it at work, school and play. The guy in my example wasn't talking about slang, he was blaming newsreaders, government officials, co-workers, etc. Like Lamont's misguided critic, his problem wasn't natives deviating from standard usage; his problem was mastering a 'standard' that never actually existed.
@Dapz Fanboy Yes--that's why I said I wouldn't agree with such a comment.
That sheet music analogy was rock-solid. I think that really drove the point home. You need an expectation to compare your experience to. Fantastic point.
I think the analogy only goes so far. When playing a piece of sheet music, you're aiming for the same output every time. Everyday language use isn't like that. You can't predict what someone is going to say, and thus, you can't predict your responses. This is what Chomsky meant by the poverty of the stimulus. Comparing language use to musical improvisation would have been a better analogy.
@@bigscarysteve You can't even predict what you yourself is going to say in a conversation, nor if you are going to hit the note you want to sing, or decide on the next step in a dance you know - we hear what we say or sing after we have spoken or sung, we dance in a flow or we stumble and get out of sync... but you have to practice skills first to be able to shift your body and mind into the flow that we call speaking, listening, singing, dancing, playing...
@@DNA350ppm You've partially understood what I was saying, and you've partially failed. You are correct that you can't even predict what you're going to say in conversation because you have no idea what your interlocutor will say, thus you can't know ahead of time what responses you will need to produce. That was my point exactly. However, when it comes to sheet music, you do know what the next note you want to produce actually is. Whether you actually hit the note or fluff it is a separate question altogether.
@@bigscarysteve Right! - and when you read you follow the text, too, if you are a good reader. Spontaneous speech is a complex thing.
@bigscarysteve - you've misunderstood the point of the analogy though. Imagine I said "Walking is a bit like driving, in that going faster means using more energy."
Does this mean that EVERY part of walking is exactly like driving? No. But is the analogy solid? Yes.
My point was you would need to know what sounds right and what doesn't. Although there may be several correct options in speaking, there are still several wrong ones.
To be honest, I think the most valuable thing I took from this video is an explanation for why I struggled so hard to learn to play the piano. I don't think I had sufficient musical input, and I didn't know how to practice well, so my practice wasn't very efficient.
By far your best video man, everything you said was so accurate! I will probably make a video myself about the Input Hypothesis because it is an absolutely crucial topic in SLA and it is important for people to realize how important it is and how it works. Keep rocking and shining!
Haha, "best" and "best".
You hurt the feelings of my video "IMMERSION". 😂
I think music is a great analogy to language learning. There are absolutely people who learn to play guitar without any ear training at all and just rely on tabs to tell them what to play (I was one of them). They'll sound bad until they "acquire" their ability to hear intervals and chords. Ear training is also completely unconscious. Once you've "acquired" the ability to hear a minor third interval, you can't really lose it. You can't NOT hear it as a minor third interval, even if you wanted to.
And then you go to music college and have to stop hearing intervals lest you get smoked by the people who hear it as tonal centres like myself. 😃
Haha, jokes. You're still allowed to hear intervals, they just don't mean much (this is the subject about which I am the BIGGEST nerd of all the things I am a nerd in. I got literally 100% in a few of our aural exams at uni... but I'm the first to admit it's a pretty useless skill!)
@@daysandwords that's strange. How can an interval be a tonal center? Or are you talking about how tonal centers can shift every chord change, like in jazz?
Intervals (and chords) are just the relationship of physical vibrations that we can perceive. The idea of forgetting them doesn't make any sense to me, unless you're talking about perfect/absolute pitch.
No no.
I just mean that when I got to uni, I had no idea of what "aural skills" were and I was learning everything for the first time. I was up against a bunch of people who had learned to do melody dictation but most of them had done it by INTERVAL and after a few weeks I was absolutely smoking them in class, and by the second exam (end of semester 1) there were two separate races: Me and the other people using tonal centres/harmony to do it, and those using intervals.
You don't have to forget intervals, but the problem is, they trick you as our lecturer explained really well. The other problem is, the marks were done backwards - you started with 500 and lost a mark for every mistake you made. If you used intervals and made a mistake after 2 bars, then every single note for the next two bars would also be wrong.
I feel like it's intuitive to anyone properly good at music anyway, but basically if you hear something like the opening of Beethoven's 5th, it's easier to work out that it's the 5th down to the third, and then the 4th down to the 2nd. I mean that's a SUPER basic example, but if I had enough time I could sit and write out the entirety of the melody for that symphony and I doubt I'd make a mistake - but someone doing it by intervals would be shot after a few bars.
@@daysandwords I'm going to be honest, I'm not really following your explanation very well... Are you saying that you could hear the melody in the context of the key center, and then used that to transcribe? Or you just can intuitively hear the melody as a whole and have a very good ear/hand connection?
None of this really changes my original point though. For someone without a natural ear like yours or ear training, a major third or a minor third sound very similar. But you can definitely train it, and once you've developed your ear to hear certain things (major key vs minor key, cadences, chords and their inversions and alterations, etc), you can't really unhear them. A plagal cadence will always sound like a plagal cadence, you can't not hear it that way, even if you tried. You've "acquired" the ability to hear those things.
That's how it feels after having mastered Mandarin tones years back. You can't "unhear" them, and hearing audio of myself speaking from my first semester in China feels...disturbing.
Some of his aversion to the input method may just come down to a difference in learning styles, but the whole Language Parasite thing was pretty extra. I’m about six months in to learning Spanish and have found constant input to be tremendously helpful - grammar rules in English or Spanish make zero sense to me unless I’ve first seen or heard them in their natural habitat.
There is absolutely no evidence that learning styles actually exist.
"Despite the popularity of learning styles and inventories such as the VARK, it’s important to know that there is no evidence to support the idea that matching activities to one’s learning style improves learning. It’s not simply a matter of “the absence of evidence doesn’t mean the evidence of absence.” On the contrary, for years researchers have tried to make this connection through hundreds of studies."
cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/learning-styles-preferences/
I also found it a bit odd that he said most language learners don't want to simply comprehend a language. With some languages my main goal is to simply comprehend it well, so be able to read books and watch films. Speaking is more of a by product there. I'm not sociable enough to want to speak in every language I (plan to) learn :D
Find the music analogy really good as someone who plays the piano too. Hearing a piece repeatedly gives you an auditory image of how it sounds right and makes you aware of mistakes! Language input does a very similar thing, you can hear/see the "correct" pronunciation, word usage, sentence structure and get a mental image of the language
The funny thing about this, is that the people I know who learned a language through the traditional way, they usually can't talk. While the ones I know who learned it through acquisition, they are usually very fluent.
The best example I can give is my Austrian friend, whom I play games with online. He was pretty bad at school, and failed English. He went on to learn English through video games and media consumption. Then you have his girlfriend, who was very good at school. Once every now and then there will be a word he doesn't know and he will turn to his girlfriend and ask in German; what is the English word for ___? And his girlfriend always knew the answer.
But his girlfriend can't speak English. I have played with her as well, and she understands most of the things being said, but she can't reply in English. All these words she knows in theory, she can't ever use them. She has learned English, but she has never aquired it.
I should be a good example myself as well. I speak fluent English, I don't make that many grammar mistakes(not much more than I do in my native tongue anyways). Yet I never learned any grammar. I don't know what a noun is, and I don't know what an adjective is. Yet, I seemingly know how to use them in a language I learned as an adult.
The traditional way of learning a language is a waste of time. Everyone in France had English in school; but try to go to France and speak English with them. The only ones who you will be able to talk to, are the ones who have watched movies in English, played games, had friends or read books in English. Learning languages the traditional way is a huge failure, and schools just needs to rethink how they teach languages.
As a french native I can confirm 100%.
I also experienced it myself, I always watched movie with subtitles at home(had no choice!), And watched lots of English content, so I was more familiar with the language.
I remember very clearly at university we had a pretty advanced English class compared to high school, and my friends asked me to help fill in the answers to the complex grammar rules.
I knew all the answers naturally, just because it sounded right or wrong, I had no effort at all to do, while my classmate, even the ones able to fill the answers had to try to remember a rule and check if it applied in the specific context.
And yes we all learn English at school and noone is able to speak English...
Well then you must have run into a very particular set of people, people learn things through various methods, and there are some of us, who, even though exposed to a language naturally, still enjoy going over rules, learning about grammar and are still able to develop just as much fluency as anybody else.
@@andrestrigo4618 Well, he doesn't say that it's forbidden to learn the rules.
But his point is that learning the rules doesn't make you improve, exposition does, and you say it yourself, you were exposed to it.
@@andrestrigo4618 sure, for a select few it can be a good thing, but it's setting most people off language learning. just because some nerds like grammar doesn't mean it's helpful in general.
@@andrestrigo4618yeah, it is weird to me that people keep suggesting there is a particular way.
I know a lot of people who incorrectly think they understand the language I am learning from TV. They are repeatedly wrong though, and speak (at best) "like a TV show character" (according to my friends who are native). I have gotten multiple compliments in much less time for having greater (and less weird / hammy) speech and (MUCH greater) reading comphrension because I did study the rules.
I'm hoping to get to a point where I can do more exposure (I thus far haven't been ABLE to learn much of anything from just watching native content) soon, but without this foundation, I wouldn't be as far as I am.
I'm sure it goes both ways, depending on the person. I think following the rules to, as they're saying, construct a sentence, is a necessary step for some beginners, which will eventually blossom into a more natural understanding. I'm already seeing that in my own speech. The concepts I learned at the beginning are now entrained and I don't have to think to construct simple sentences. For complex ones, though, for now I still have to.
I dunno, it feels like people are taking multiple steps towards fluency and claiming some are more wrong just because beginners are suboptimal?
I've started learning Swedish almost two years ago and right out the gate I've immersed myself completely in the language- listened to a lot of podcasts, watched shows and movies with swedish subs, read picture books at first, then novels and non fiction, made an audiobook subscription, always took notes when I saw or heard something interesting. I'm not fluent or anything, but there's a lot more to engaging with a language then just producing it. I think that being able to read and appreciate a book in Swedish has value in itself, and I don't see why I should feel like a tick for it. Yeah, that parasite bit really rubbed me the wrong way.
It would be interesting to hear your level of Swedish because you've kind of been immersing for longer than I have and you wouldn't have had to correct a bunch of bad habits like I did.
Yes, you get good at what you practice. That's why learning by reading, listening and speaking is better than studying rules and doing grammar exercises.
The brain surgeon example doesn't make any sense. You're not putting anyone's health or wealth in danger learning languages. Learning with input + speaking is learning by doing with incremental difficulty, which is the best way to learn.
The snippets you played of this guy (I've never heard of him or even seen any of his stuff before this) were pretty damning for him. He made a pretty shoddy argument all around.
Straw
Like Lamont said, he's a pretty decent guy in the community otherwise, but yeah, that video was basically full of strawman arguments and responses to claims that no one in the input/immersion community even makes. The comments on that video were an absolute circus too!
It's not even snippets. It's pretty much what he says in chronological order. Very few things are omitted.
@@sandwichbreath0 His pinned comment in that video doesn't paint a good image of him.
@@jamesmccloud7535 That one where he doubles-down and throws shade at everyone who disagrees, yeah? I agree.
The common saying that "Practice makes perfect." is false. Practice makes habit.
If you cannot tell if you are doing it wrong then there is no point repeatedly performing an activity and expecting to get better at it. In reality it can do active harm (you acquire deeply ingrained bad habits that you will struggle to overcome).
I think it's important to remember that you have to know a lot (get a lot of input) to produce something good.
Pretty much
That is THE point 👏🏻
@Gytis Stankevičius Exactly
Hahaha, here I was thinking Olly didn't have time to watch my videos. He is hiding in the replies! 😂
@@daysandwords lol
Many of us approach input as a form of deliberate practice in it's own right. I am paying my full attention to what I am hearing or reading. If I lose track of the meaning I double back and redo that part. I make a conscious effort to actually notice the occurrence of whatever my current pain points are rather than just letting it slip past me as unnoticed noise. I often feel like I'm expending more effort when I'm consuming the language even compared to when I'm speaking it.
I think that his analogy of a neurosurgeon not being able to learn neurosurgery by watching videos is actually a point for input: you won't understand native movies, tv shows and books without watching lots of native movies and tv shows and reading lots of books.
Yea plus the equivalent to speaking right away for a brain surgeon would be taking some random guy off the street who has watched all the seasons of Grey’s Anatomy to literally perform brain surgery on a live human day one and have him learn by trial and error. Compare that too the med student who has studied the anatomy for years… watched videos, done sit ins on someone performing surgery and then had multiple practice sessions on a dummy or a rat or something to get a feel for how precise you need to be. I’m taking the med student all day. At least they would instantly recognize any mistake they would make while the random dude would just keep cutting unaware of how badly they were butchering the patient. Input is needed in order to make sure you are practicing properly. Trial and error is so much more frustrating and time consuming and you may never actually get it right unless someone who has had the input can identify the mistakes you make.
I didn't like that example... I believe in terms of language the music example given in the video is even clearer. Composers, performers, and musicians in general don't rely heavily on theory or harmony, because it is implied in the music even if you don't know what you are "doing". Haven't you played some chord progression or melody and asked yourself why does it sound so good? Our ears tell us is good and without knowing we applied "theory". The theory is important and harmony too, they are great tools to expand our vocabulary and to visualize what we do and what we can do or change but it's not mandatory in order to create music... I believe these thoughts can be related to this video topic
Really?? I don’t really understand though
This reminds me of my Japanese class, sometimes she will try to quiz us on what certain particles are called and on grammar rules and stuff and I'm terrible at it and often forget how to explain them, yet I'm still ahead of the majority of the class in terms of actually forming the language, reading speed, etc.
Lol, reading that comment brought back some very unpleasant memories. "Pluscuamperfecto", "preterito" - the fuck? I can't even name this shit in English, is it REALLY supposed to matter so much?
@@danieltemelkovski9828 jajajajaja
I like Days' vibe of constant anger simmering just underneath the surface while he's giving us lessons he's learned through harsh experience
I think input forces you to understand the culture/s that your target language is connected to which is a great point of it imo. Skill building doesn’t really do that. You’re only really in the world of grammar, textbooks and speaking your thoughts and not listening to others as much.
When immersing in you target language heavily you learn to understand the world more and empathise with people more. Immersion has made me want to share with people around me how beautiful language is, my love for Japanese culture and how language can enrich one’s life.
Ideally, you'd be building a bridge here. Bridges are often built from each end at the same time. Some types of bridges have to be built from both ends in order to be built. The Golden Gate Bridge just outside of San Francisco is a good example, they built the towers, and then built from each tower to the other as they'd run out of cables if they tried to build from one to the other. Unless you've got a short span on the bridge, it was likely built from both sides rather than from just one side.
Ideally, you'd be skill building and immersing yourself so as to avoid the wasted time that children spend trying to learn via induction for years before they can communicate enough to learn in more sophisticated ways.
@@SmallSpoonBrigade I agree. I didn't make it clear but I believe everyone should do some level of skillbuilding and traditional language learning alongside immersion to speed up language acquisition. If you understand how a grammar point works a little bit you'll probably pick it up quicker than people who only immerse and have to acquire it like a baby does.
However I don't agree with only skillbuilding or having it as the main way to learn a language. Immersion should always be the bulk of what you do. That's the point I was making.
Skillbuilding is not that fun for most people, it's slow & you get little or no exposure to the culture/s connected to the language which I think is one of the main reasons people start learning a language anyway. For people learning Japanese a lot of them start learning it because they want to understand anime to enjoy it more instead of learning what a conjunctive is in Japanese.
You have a remarkable mind, man: Objective analysis, clear explanations, analogies on point, and a strong, down-to-earth intuition. You could be (and de facto you are) a great philosopher.
Love the music analogy! To learn viola, I used a method called the suzuki method. You first learn to play the song, and you listen to it constantly, and then memorize it. I went through the first two books barely doing the second and third steps and had no problem. And on book three I hit a wall. It's easy to progress rapidly as a beginner, but then you need more input.
Wow, I have never heard about this method before, seems quite interesting. I’ll try this in my language and musical skills, thanks for the comment!
I am nearly fluent in a second language because I watched tons of TV in that language as a kid. Much more than in my native language due to more and better content in the language. I have never practiced speaking it. I never spoke it to a native (I was shy about it). And yet, to this day I can produce it on a nearly native level. Despite never actually practicing or speaking it actively.
Input works.
Same
I have been "learning" English for 8 years (i am an Indonesian)
I just watch random things on RUclips everyday in English and now i just realized that i can speak English without trying to speak it 😂
That's how most Scandinavians learn English, as a French person living there it's surprising to hear them speak perfect English and say "wow iI haven't spoken since highschool ahah", in France where we don't typically watch movies, medias etc in English we learn it only in school with grammar and minimal input and output, and to say that it doesn't quite work is an understatement ^^
@Wind Rose By "native", I mean that I can speak it with a nearly native accent. Including sounds that do not exist in my native language.
The acquisition-only approach definitely works well with kids but not necessarily that well with adults. An adult could get full immersion in a language for many years and still wouldn't be able to speak it at a near native level if they don't deliberately study and practise it. They might be fluent but chances are they will be making tons of mistakes.
You claim you sound like a native speaker but yet you've never spoken the language before? That doesn't even make sense
Lamont I really appreciate you doing these videos. The original video popped up on my recommended and I was really frustrated because I felt it was something that required a serious response, but I didn't feel able to respond to it in a proper way, particularly with his pinned comment about how anyone disagreeing with him in the comments was just drinking the kool aid.
I've started learning many languages the traditional way and after a short time I was able to construct basic sentences. When I tried them with native speakers they often didn't seem to understand and I certainly didn't understand anything they said back to me. That was really useless. So now I'd rather get massive input until I understand what people are saying to me, and with that, even basic speaking abilities will get you very far. Apart from the built-in self-correction ability allowing for rapid progress in language production as well.
Sensible and on point. I loved it.
There's a widespread lack of self-awareness. I've met countless people that are experts in different fields, and they've done so by understanding the trade intuitively. Yet they are unable to back-track and understand how they absorbed that knowledge.
Keep up the great work!
16:05 - did he forget that language immersion is a thing?! You can acquire language by listening to it _in person_, not just from recording or texts. It's literally what small children do.
or anybody that moves to the place where its spoken.
Yeah I feel like he has some misunderstandings about the whole input idea. In-person interaction with real people is in many ways some of the highest quality input out there, provided you're able to at least partially understand what the speakers of your target language are saying. I don't think anyone is saying input is only books and media.
Your reply just points up what I find to be the deep misunderstanding in Lamont's video. Yes, CHILDREN can learn language just fine by immersion. The problem is, you're not taking into account developmental psychology. After a certain age, the window for language learning by mere exposure closes. Some people may be able to reopen that window, but most can't. What about the immigrant who's been immersed in a foreign language environment for DECADES and still can't speak or understand a word of it?
Most immigrants who speak the national language poorly do so because they spend AS MUCH TIME AS POSSIBLE in their native language. They output more often than they get input, and they seek only to "survive" the national language as much as possible.
@@daysandwords That may be true for some immigrants, but it's certainly not true for all. Many immigrants hear the language of their adopted country around them all day, every day--yet they don't pick it up. Why? First, because the input is not comprehensible, and second, because their language acquisition faculty is not the same as it was when they were children--so they don't pick it up. Many of these people were eager to become a part of the wider society of their adopted country, but when they find they can't pick up the language, they retreat into a ghetto of their native language--usually a ghetto of their own making.
Glad you decided to address the video Lamont, I knew your take on it would be quality.
I think input approach is so "rare" in other fields because we naturally receive input in everything we do. When a child draws with crayons, they often draw the things they see around them. Professional artists use reference images religiously for the same purpose. I often times find myself improving at art even when I'm not drawing, but instead looking at other people's art and dissecting their style. Its just that we so rarely come into contact with other languages when its not relevant to us. Now, all skills do not quite work this way. Some skills are too abstract for input (certain mathematics or sciences), and some skills are too motor/physically focused (sports, stacking card towers).
But I think reading is important for writing, eating is important for cooking, and likewise listening is important in language. Thanks for the insight on this video, always brightens up my day when your content comes out. Looking forward to part 3 and any bonus content that comes from this on patreon!
Sports receive input too. The actual process of moving your body is input because your brain notices what you're doing and what effect it has on the ball.
This is a masterpiece explanation of language learning.
Thank you!
One thing I've noticed about input based learning, is that it doesn't feel like your learning at all. But a month later you go back to something you've listened to and you will notice a big difference!
Also, there is a sweet spot of comprehensibility that is necessary. So consider his surgery analogy, watching 100 hours of surgery videos would be comparable to listening to100 hours of lectures on surgery as a beginner in a foreign language you don't understand (very ineffective and not watch input advocates would recommend).
BUT that still isn't even accurate as a comparison because watching surgery isn't a core skill of surgery but listening is!
The Moonlight Sonata story gave me motivation to practice guitar again haha, thanks for that
Impressed not just with his thoughts on language learning, but using his experience with music to draw such a clear connection to how it is learned. Thank you for your service to the industry with this one!
18:44 I think this point is just further emphasizing the humility you just spoke on. "It doesnt contribute." Obviously! You dont have anything to contribute yet! Imagine having the mindset that drilling basic sentences over and over or knowing the difference between a noun and verb is a contribution to an entire language/culture.
The other guy is SO WRONG! Input is not so important? I have literaly learnd German by listening to TV and repeating some sentences out loud. If there was no input, how could I repeat anything and eventualy learn the language? Is reading a book also an INPUT? If I just knew this long time ago, I would avoid ANY input all my life and I would not be able to speak any language, apart of maybe being strong A1 in my own mother tounge... That would be just great :) PS. No, It would be not.
I believe that Christian made an honest mistake when making his point about minority languages. He's correct to point out that most of the world's languages don't have standardized writing systems, and that input material is more widely available for the ones that do, but this is not the strike against the input hypothesis he seems to think it is. The fact of the scarcity of material for non-written languages doesn't relate to the question of whether the input hypothesis applies to those languages, though it does mean a pretty big headache for anyone outside of those language contexts hoping to learn.
Also, for a conversation about the input hypothesis to be productive, a distinction should be made between different kinds of input. I don't think any proponent of the input hypothesis has in mind that input is merely that which is televised, written, and published. When my (very patient) friends describe pictures in magazines to me in Taiwanese, this, as well as the recordings they graciously allow me to make, is input, too. It's just input that requires proximity to and connection with speakers themselves to access. It's not that the input hypothesis is not generous- it's that Christian's interpretation of it and what constitutes input isn't.
Arguing that comprehensible input is an invalid theory because most languages aren't written is like arguing that evolution can't be true because not every species has legs. It doesn't address the argument at all, it just tries to make sense of a consequence of it without actually understanding it.
In fact, if the language isn't written down and recorded how are you going to learn it other than finding native speakers to get input from? It seems more fitting as an argument against other methods.
I've been playing piano for about 5 years and i can guarantee that i learned through input. My grandma is a world class pianist and played in churches. She has a piano in her home and i would listen to her play everyday since i was a baby. I was able to play piano pretty well after a few months of being self taught and i believe it was the input of hearing my grandma play(who has perfect pitch) for years that allowed me to pick up piano fast and easily. Even today, I can a play a piece that i think i played perfect but my grandma can hear all every mistake i make. So i agree, input is very important to get better.
i am an elderly lady and i am always interested, how people learn......so i like to listen to what musicians and all kind of artists have to say.....the ones, who are really good, would say.....expose yourself, listen, watch, observe how the best do it.....then copy them.......and eventually you might try yourself......compose, dance, paint, write.....whatever........
I absolutely agree with you. I find it strange when people aren't sold on the input hypothesis, when we all know traditional language learners who study ONLY using textbooks and courses never truly reach a level where they speak naturally. You learn how to speak through input, you dont learn how to speak through speaking. You get better at speaking, but unless you have input and know how to say something, essentially you are making up how you THINK the language should sound. I think a flaw in his argument is we arent saying you dont learn how to speak through input, in fact, quite the opposite. Ever since Ive adopted an input learning approach, I can understand so much more and speak better even though I go months without speaking a single word of my target language. If what he were saying true, I shouldnt be able to speak it at all. Due to input, I now know how something SHOULD sound and can self correct, if I hadnt inputted, I would just be speaking the way I think I should while simultaneously making mistakes. Its kind of sad to me that I feel we are going backwards sometimes, so Im glad you made this video because input should be celebrated, we should be encouring input more, lets change our mindset.. Its still a minority, most people who learn a language dont even think about it and just do the traditional study route. I think its good to make these videos and get the message out there
how can you write a book if you don’t read books? how can you make art if you don’t view art? how can you produce and film a movie if you don’t watch movies? how can you cook if you don’t try new foods?
you could do all these things, but would you hit a wall eventually and stop
progressing? yes. because there’s only so much you can know on your own without input.
same with language learning. you have to be able to process it and be extremely comfortable listening to it. practicing speaking and writing is important too, but they must both be practiced in order to have a well rounded understanding of a language.
This is eye openning. I'm so glad I listened to your as well as others' advice to play the long game and do input routines even though it was very arduous. After a year, I noticed that when I make spontaneous conversations, I instantly pull vocabulary and the right grammar from my subconcious which I remember was added due to me listening intently to input videos. I learned Italian the 'school" way too but I know quite well that I learned a whole other set of things there which was complementary to my utilization of acquired input. Safe to say I did a lot of things which seemed like a fruitless effort but in the end, they both sprang from the same roots.
Can I ask you how exactly you found using input methods "arduous"? Do you mean that it implied countless hours of doing nothing but listening with no obvious goal or endpoint to it - like a long road-trip without a clear destination - or were you getting at something else? I agree with your comment about drawing from your subconscious. I've often surprised myself by coming up with sentence constructs and phrases that I have no conscious recollection of ever having "studied."
@@danieltemelkovski9828 Oh input routines such as watching a 20 minute show with both english and italian subtitles took an hour on average because I have to pause in between to take note of common phrases and understanding the grammar being used. Also, I play those shows, RUclips videos, and movies in slow motion since I cannot comprehend fast and fluent speakers. This is very arduous and taxing to me because of how much content consumption I was doing. From their advice, I pushed through because I believed them and wouldn't you know it, all that input paid off after many months. The first few months were painful for my brain and progress was slow.
I can compare it to playing an instrument. You practice your piece 1 hour a day slowly, it is not difficult mechanically since you do it slowly but it takes a really long time until you make decent progress. At first, you can only play a few notes and your still at the second bar, just like how miniscule your vocabulary still is in the first few months. But after a long time, you can play a few pages at the right tempo and because some notes are repeated, they are easier. Those note repetition are like carry overs in language learning, you learn a certain phrase or future tense and when you meet a similar phrase in the future, you know exactly how the grammar should be because of the input you already had being ingrained in your subconcious. The difficulty comes with the time it takes and thus I see language learning, especially input routines, as an arduous task. Not a difficult task like solving problems on the spot or beating a difficult game.
@@JV-km9xk Oh, I see, thanks. I understand perfectly what you mean now. I have done a lot of the twin subtitles stuff myself, including rewinding (is that still a word? lol) certain sentences fifty times because I couldn't believe that what was written in the target language subtitle is what the character actually said lol. It definitely pays off, much more than the equivalent time spent studying grammar rules or vocab lists.
I can relate to what you're saying about playing an instrument too. I spent years playing the organ (don't ask) as a kid, and now as an adult have decided to learn piano. There's a huge amount of crossover between the two, but there are still important differences which require reducing learning to baby steps. (And in my case, there are some very bad fingering habits I developed as a kid that I now have to unlearn.) I agree there are strong similarities between this and learning a language.
@@danieltemelkovski9828 Yeah man. Happy to know that you understand and even relate to what I meant.
We all acquire our first language via aural input. Aural input - is input. Languages needn’t be recorded - recorded languages are simply more accessible.
Another thing that works implicitly rerher than explicitly is social etiquette. Sure, you could memorize rules on how to behave properly (and there are lots of guides and manuals) but most people learn by observation and osmosis. Someone can memorize rules of behavior in Japan or one could learn the same rules implicitly by watching Japanese people behave, the way they address older and younger people, how they greet one another, how they toast or eat or say goodbye. Careful observation and repetition is how most gain a feeling of what is proper and what is not.
It’s even a fun game to try to make these rules explicit. There’s what Larry David did in Seinfeld and Curb. There are so many unwritten rules that can basically only be learned by comprehensible input.
I'm working on Spanish and am native English and B2 French. French was through the typical classroom model through uni and Spanish has been more input based.
My italki tutor has asked me several times where I learned a concept that is typically hard for learners. My reply was usually something like "I think I saw it on this show a bunch of times or maybe the news, not really sure..." Other times it's something that is close to French and my brain made the connection.
Watching a TV show is input but I'm engaging with the content. I'm seeing words matched to sounds, understanding unspoken context, and stopping to lookup or mimic cool/new words. I'm goofing off but I'm being exposed to things that end up surfacing with my italki tutor.
Thanks to having the dual cheat codes of Eng and Fr, mass input has helped maximize my newbie gains.
I don’t understand why people argue against the comprehensible input model. We all aquire our first language that way.
I myself aquired two more languages to a very high level, but never once studied grammar.
Friends and colleagues of mine has done exactly the same and had much success.
@@fabian-rutter Of course I did. Similar to a child asking their parent what an unknown word means.
Language acquisition is a field of linguistics that definitely preexisted Krashen. Many linguistics researchers specialise in language acquisition.
He was talking in the context of defining "Acquisition" differently to "Learning" which a specific definition. It seems Krashen coined the term "Acquisition" to mean X thing, rather than the word being used in Linguistics.
@@HoraryHellfire what is the difference with the way it is used by other linguists?
@@alice_hml Acquisition was typically just used in the context of normal language development, as in getting better at language. Like "skill acquisition" is. However, Krashen used the word specifically in a different way from all of this. Instead, "acquisition" is the subconscious and intuitive development of concepts in a language without even having to consciously think about them. While "learning" is all about consciously increasing your knowledge to manually recall, typically by memorization. Prior to Krashen's "Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis", the word "acquisition" in Linguistics was not used like Krashen uses it.
You analogy with music it's outstanding. I'm a musician too and my approach was always more intuitive than relying on reading chords and such. Thank you for reminding me of that.
I know someone (another anecdote) who spoke from the beginning, spoke a lot, and got to a pretty high level of speaking. That person had 2 big problems, always making certain (very basic) mistakes without any idea that they were mistakes (as in your "wanna to" example) and difficulty in understanding native speakers. Once those mistakes become ingrained, it's extremely difficult to correct them. Another benefit of input based language acquisition is that your comprehension is much better. It's completely impossible to have a conversation if you can't understand the responses to your speech, even if your speech is perfect. Seek first to understand is the basis of all real communication.
I commend you for being as polite as you are. He is being extremely arrogant, despite clearly not understanding the idea he is critiquing.
More stuff came out after the video that made me glad I didn't get into a flaming war with him.
@@daysandwords That is often how it turns out, so you definitely have the correct instincts. :+ )
I recognize that he is in practice a very generous person, and that is commendable.
For deliberate practice what I do is always this:
Take In Input > Ask a Question > Get the Answer > Attempt to Notice and Leverage It (Both in Input & Output) > Take In Input
This is a very small minority of the time, but it makes a big difference. What I'm practicing today is word order in subordinate clauses as I've recognized it's a gap of mine in Swedish.
Man your comments per view ratio is really stunning. Especially in under 24 hours. If only RUclips rewarded that with coin.
Well, they kinda do because it leads to more views but yeah, if they paid directly that'd be awesome haha
Excellent analogy.
You know what I think a good anecdotal example of why input works very, very well is: I grew up in the Netherlands, where we had to learn English in school as our second language. Now as a 25-year-old adult I read, write and understand English on an academic level, I have no trouble speaking with natives about complex issues all night long (sure I have an accent and I make mistakes here and there) but in my 15 years or so of learning the language, _speaking_ naturally has taken up the least amount of time; I learned English IN my native country, with few opportunities to speak it hours and hours on end. Our lectures at school consisted of learning plain grammar rules and repeating sentences from textbooks. Of course, that taught me valuable things about the language, but how I _really_ got fluent at the language was by endlessly watching nickelodeon shows and movies that got broadcasted in their original language, English, with Dutch subtitles. These subtitles always moved way too fast for me and my siblings, so we could only read like 50% or so of the translation, forcing us to listen, listen, listen and putting together the missing pieces of the translation intuitively. And by playing many games in English, and later on, reading books in English. Only later in my English-learning process, did I start actively talking in English, again with my siblings, after we finally understood the language pretty well. We had heard the language for so many hours, had so much input, that we really developed a feeling on how to speak correctly or if we said something not quite right; therefore we could even correct each other or knew when to ask an adult for a correction.
Half of the lectures at my university and the reading we have to do are in English, and I have no trouble at all with that! It's not any harder for me than dutch lectures. I have NOT reached this level by speaking as much as possible, but by MAINLY having lots of input, for years.
Yeah, and it's very similar in the other European countries which don't dub, like Denmark, Sweden etc.
Meanwhile in France where everything's in French, generally lower level of English.
7:55 late to the video but I discovered your channel very recently! I'm a physical therapist, and these principals are so similar to the difference of learning motor skills as an adult. I.e. if you had a stroke add an adult, the way you aquire the skill of walking will be different from what you did as a baby, but nevertheless intuition is still a big part of the process 😊
(PS, jag är svensk, och blir så varm i hjärtat av hur du tar till dig svensk kultur. Det visar att språk inte bara ska användas för att förstå så -många- som möjligt, utan att ta del av en kultur bara för intressets skull!)
Also!! Watching others is a huge part of learning in medicine too, but learning is a complex thing and of course you cannot use just one part of it.
In West Africa where most people are multi-lingual they do not call themselves a language speaker rather language hearer. One does not ask Do you speak X rather Do you hear X.
Incisive excellence as usual, thanks. To those of us who are becoming bogged-down in options, could you make a video, simplistic and generic and without too many caveats, about the most effective programme for language learning? For example, split your time 5:3:2:1 with listening, speaking, writing, app. I can imagine your mind spinning with the difficulties but please give it a go!
As a very amateur pianist myself, I really appreciated the music analogy. It's so much easier to play a piece if you know what it's supposed to sound like. Now, a skilled sight reader can produce a piece of music without having heard it first, but then take into account that language is kind of like a super complex improvisational music that we take part in throughout our whole lives and is governed by a very strict set of mostly unstated rules. Might be good to just "listen" a for a while to get a sense of what that's supposed to "sound like", no?
One interesting point is the "improvisational" bit. A professional pianist will spend many hours practicing the same piece over and over until they can play it perfectly. But this doesn't make sense in a language context. It would be like you had memorized all of Shakespeare's plays, and could recite them perfectly, and yet that was all the English you knew. In this case, while having you over at a dinner party would no doubt be an interesting experience, it would not be accomplishing the typical goals we expect of a language.
Language is improvisational in a way that few musicians can hope to approach.
@@Keldor314 That's assuming that the "practice" is for the purpose of just outputting. The whole point of deliberate practice (that the expert pianists in the example do) is not to output with no feedback. The whole point of practice is to get feedback, and that feedback is input. The form of this feedback is the information of what your fingers are doing, in what order, at what angle, at what strength, at what time, etc etc and also hearing the result (the notes in sequence). Literally the whole point of deliberate practice is so your brain can get input.
So, _just_ like an expert pianist practicing a specific segment paying attention to the details of it, a language learner would want to focus only on a subset of comprehensible input until they "get it down" and then move onto another section of comprehensible input. And this keeps happening until they've acquired enough input where they can make general statements fully improvised at a whim. But just like a novice pianist can improvise a little bit, a novice in a language would be able to improvise simple sentences.
@@HoraryHellfire When you do deliberate practice too early when learning a language, you actually do not have feedback. That is, yes, you can hear yourself speak, but you really have no idea if you're doing it correctly, you're just making an educated guess. Once you've mastered basic pronounciation, your ability is largely dependent on intuitive knowledge.
This is very different from piano, since for piano the "pronounciation" is difficult. That is, in the more difficult pieces, learning the complex finger gymnastics to produce the music accurately and expressively is far harder than understanding or memorizing the music itself. If a language used these sorts of difficult to pronounce phrases, no one would be able to speak it. It's for this reason that there are very few pianists in the world who are capable of performing improvised music more difficult than what would be considered intermediate-advanced. This is where the music/language analogy breaks down - the only people who practice speaking in anything remotely similar to the way musicians do playing are actors learning lines for a play or a movie.
@@Keldor314 Languages do not have feedback from any amount of "practice" except the ability to make basic sounds. No amount of output directly results in input. That's the difference between languages and most skills. However, that doesn't change the fact that the purpose of deliberate practice in those aforementioned skills is to acquire input. The idea is that the "Input Hypothesis" applies to all skills, including language learning. But since most skills require you to interact with something to get input, most people think it's the interaction that results in improvement, not the input.
"Learning the complex finger gymnastics" is also about input. When you move your fingers, the angle, force, speed, etc etc are all details that your brain notices when executing it. And your brain notices the result in the environment (e.g. sound) from that. This is input. Changing the details like moving your fingers at a different time at a slightly different angle is new information for your brain to watch and then notice the result. Just like seeing a word you somewhat know the meaning of in a new context, your brain has to notice the way your fingers move slightly differently (in a new context).
The analogy doesn't break down. It only breaks down because you still misunderstand what is actually "comprehensible input". A pianist doesn't get better by doing the same thing over and over again, especially at the highest ability. They get better by deliberate practice facilitating input for their brain to understand. Again, deliberate practice is all about maximizing comprehensible input so you can understand how and/or why you should do something different than you were doing it before. That's why so many people are "bad" at any skill, because almost nobody actually knows the concept of deliberate practice. It's also the same reason why the vast majority of people take a language class, receive skill-building approaches, and then can't speak it after 2-3 years. Because the whole point of improvement in _ANYTHING_, including other skills, is comprehensible input. If your brain doesn't subconsciously understand how "X" is better to do, then it will never improve.
@@HoraryHellfire Well, there are two big aspects to learning a difficult piece of music. One is the technical, which is indeed learned through careful repetition, starting very slow, then gradually faster until you can play them at the intended speed. If you are ever to tackle any of the truly spectacularly difficult piano works, such as just about anything written by Liszt, you have to do this. And yes, it is every bit as much of a grind as it sounds.
The second component is the all important expression. Getting good expression on a piece is more intuitive, more like learning language would be, and is the part of practice most like what you're describing.
But the approach you take to piano practice still isn't the sort of approach that would be good for learning a language. Let me give you an example to demonstrate:
Imagine that you want to learn to recite Shakespeare's "To be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet. To do this, you would go through it line by line, memorizing it all, and after that, keep going through it, analyzing each phrase, feeling out the precise meaning and figuring out how to accent the words just so. You would try saying each phrase a few different ways, picking the one you like best to use in the end, and in places wonder what Shakespeare was smoking when he choose a word that you feel just doesn't sit right. In the end, after much careful analysis and a lot of practice, you would be able to deliver the soliloquy with such eloquance that it would bring your audience to tears over the tragedy of it all. This is the way in which pianists practice their music. But it still isn't a very good way to learn English.
That’s like trying to learn school work by taking the tests. Obviously the end goal, just like speaking your target language, is to do well in the test but if you don’t know enough content it is counter productive. You can only start doing practice tests to improve once you have learned the content’s solid foundational knowledge, or else you won’t get anywhere and just become demotivated. I believe that when learning any language you should dedicate a certain amount of time in the beginning to just getting familiar with the language (writing system and pronunciation rules, listening to speech patterns, basic grammar/syntax, essential vocab words like pronouns, essential verbs like to be, to sleep, to go etc.. and basic nouns) once you have those, that is when output is most effective.
I play classical piano too and learning a language is exactly like that. learn a few measures and sometimes I have to go back to Hanon to get a solid muscle memory in order to play the music fluidly. Also, practice slow but accurately.
The bit about piano practice is absolutely true, I should show that to my piano students here in China
Amazing video man, very interesting. There is definitely a place for actively practicing production of a language from an early stage along side all the input. At the beginning, it's just drilling the sounds, and later calling the words to mind. This is effective long before one is attempting "fluent" speaking.
Regarding learning the languages of Australia, listening to native speakers IS the input. Input does not require recorded materials, it just requires a native source, i.e., people speaking the language in this case.
I’m a native speaker of American English and grew up hearing my dad’s Mexican parents speaking Spanish. Since he had a hard time assimilating, my dad wanted his kids to be “full American” and only speak English. He forbade his family from speaking Spanish to my brother and me, but it was around, so we’d get the gist-especially commands, like, “sit”, “eat”, “come”, “quiet”. Fortune had us move to Spain when I was 8. We lived in a small town in Andalucía, and learned Spanish on our feet while taking classes at school. Just like English, it came quickly… Spanish all around, studying in school, one learns the ins and outs of everyday interactions, while also learning the finer points of grammar. It’s SO hard to learn a language from a book or in a class without any real-world experience. If I know I’m going to visit a place where I don’t speak the language, at the very least I will learn basic polite phrases before I visit. A little “please” or “thank you”, and especially “cheers!” will take one far. In my case, I had the opportunity to visit Japan for a month in 2015. With plenty of notice, I set about learning what I could before arriving. I could barely say anything but “please” “thank you” and “good morning/day”, but I was able to read basic signs and understand the tiniest bit of what was going on. It was an extraordinary trip and I kept-up my book/internet study of Japanese in hopes of returning in the future. I went back for a month in 2017 and was MUCH more able to communicate and understand Japanese. I started to pick-up phrases from everyday exchanges. Like how clerks at 7-11 will say “ki otsukete, ne” for “take care”. I was singing karaoke in Japanese, reading the katakana from the screen. Another trip back two years later, I was talking to a guy in this tiny bar in Gunma prefecture when I realized, “I just told my first story in Japanese!”. Long story short, it’s entirely possible to get the basics of a foreign language, but it really takes living in a place where that language is spoken to truly become fluent and speak like a local. Ultimately, communication and understanding are the goals. I’m never bothered when someone speaks less than perfectly. I very much appreciate any effort and won’t correct someone unless they ask me to.
You're right of course about the music. One of the most successful methods of teaching music is the Suzuki method - heavily input based!
I’ve been learning/studying/acquiring languages (using many different methods) for 45 years (since I was seven years old), and I’ve been teaching a few of them (Irish, Italian, French) for most of my adult life. You’re pretty much on the mark.
I would say the “tiny language” issue cuts against the deliberate practice school far more than the comprehensible input school.
All you need to learn a language doe comprehensible input is a single competent speaker of that language to talk to you simply but in a way that interests you. That is all. If you can find Latgalian to teach you, you can learn by CI. So theoretically, you could learn all living languages using that method. But to use the more standard method, you could only learn a language if it has a written lexicon and a defined grammatical system. That cuts out 90 percent of languages.
Imagine we meet an alien civilization, the only way we could learn to communicate would be Comprehensible Input. There are no flash cards or phrasebooks or grammar charts. The alien would make noises and point to different things. That’s literally what Krashen did to demonstrate his theory. “Das ist mein kopf”.
My favorite analogy I like to use is that of driving a car. Obviously to drive one it requires gas. Obviously there are other things needed such as electricity. To speak a language we need knowledge of vocabulary and everything else required to speak. Trying to speak from the start is like filling up the tank a little bit then hitting the road over and over because the gas (knowledge/vocabulary) keep running out. You can only practice what you know. People rely too much on speaking to teach us but there are simply too many patterns and nuances. It leads to always needing to translate or have every single thought checked for accuracy. The opposite is taking the time to fill the tank up or simply take in the language and let those who speak it natively do all of the thinking for us. Like you said it is more valuable to listen and copy than to try to always speak and have to form and translate our thoughts.
Even for those for whom speaking early leads to some success, they can only speak if they have acquired something to say, that is, input, even if that input comes through speaking itself.
Lamont, this is just wonderful. Successful language learning is more than words coming out of your mouth!
I'm 29 yo now and I have started to learn English a couple of months before. Never wrote in this language before, never watched RUclips or movies, very rare listened podcasts in English, because it was hard for me to understand them. BUT - I always adore books and reading. In fact, I'm a copywriter and an editor in Russian, my native language. So, I read books in English approximately from 23 years old. I did this regularly but no so much, maybe I have read about 6-10 books in a year. At first it was really hard but with time I started to understand more and more, so now I understand about 70-80% of book in English without effort.
Recently, my Italki teacher told me I'm pretty fluent in English speaking and have a big vocab. Also, my English writing is not as bad as I thought. Ofc, I make errors but I EXPLAIN my own THOUGHTS in English text and do this at least NORMAL. Again - no speaking, no watching videos, almost no listening. No courses or apps, nothing. From 23 y o I did only READING from time to time.
After a couple of months of listening and watching youtube, from July 2022, I started to understand a lot more than I did before. Conclusion? Input is the king.
I’m self teaching myself French and I’m doing that by using Duolingo an hour or so a day (just to learn some vocabulary and short sentences) but the majority of my learning goes into watching cartoons, series, and listening to podcasts and topics I like. I don’t understand every single thing, I’ll catch certain words and sentences and although I’ve only been learning for a few weeks, I’m starting to get used to the sound of the language for all the hours I put into just hearing the language.
For speaking wise, I’m mute most of the time because I’m early in the learning stage but I’ll repeat certain words sometimes and short sentences. I find myself thinking in French also even if it’s just “I don’t know why I’m tired today”….
I plan on trying to communicate in French when I feel like I’ve reached a good enough level because right now I wouldn’t get passed the hello, how are you stage of basic conversation.
Maybe one way to explain it could be to talk about the "it just sounds right" intuition.
How do you know that "lovely little old lady" is correct and "little old lovely lady" isn't? Because "it just sounds right" that way.
OK! So now! Why does it "just sound right" to you? Did you ever stop to think about it? Did you study a rule in school? Did your parents constantly correct you when you got it wrong? No. You just only ever heard it that way and your brain worked it out. _Your brain works it out! Your brain built a model of the language for you all by itself!_
Whenever you listen, you understand because you're using that model. When you speak, you always speak correctly because you're accessing that model.
Do consciously learned rules contribute to that model? No. You know they don't. If you're making a "mistake" in your native language, how many times does the teacher at school have to "correct" you? Lots of times! When do you stop making the "mistake"? When "it just sounds right" to you, and it only sounds right to you once you've _heard it used like that in real life_ enough times.
So when you learn another language, sure, if you need to speak early go ahead and try learning some rules. But be very careful. Don't trust what comes out of your own mouth, because what comes out of your mouth is not going to be right. Don't allow what comes out of your mouth to "sound right" to you. Only trust what native speakers say. If you can imagine a native speaker saying it, that's what should "sound right" to you. Only allow your brain to use that to build its model.
Totally agree - this is Krashen's 'monitor hypothesis'. You need to be able to know enough to know when you're wrong.
This is just outstanding!!! The idea you express at the very end of the video is eye-opening for me. It makes a lot of sense and it definitely will impact my language learning technique!
Input and listening are how we learn as children. Like music, we listen and engage holistically. However, as we learn and become more self aware of how we and others are expressing themselves, our approach to improvement changes as we change
Thanks for watching! Something I didn't address clearly enough in this video was why Christian's analogy of brain surgery isn't quite the same.
- Assuming you were to see a specific brain surgery operation performed enough times, and really did comprehend it at the deepest possible level, then you WOULD actually be to ready to perform the operation, to a much greater degree than most other people, who would only be guessing about they were doing.
There are two things about this analogy that need to be unpacked a bit:
1. "Comprehend". Normally, when we see someone do something, we've understood WHAT has happened, but probably not really WHAT they've done. You can understand that someone replaced the RAM in a computer, but if you don't actually know what doing it entails, then you haven't really understood it properly. If you saw it done a few times in enough detail, then you could do it yourself. If you can't replace RAM yourself, then you haven't understood what was being done when you saw it.
What I'm saying is that if you REALLY comprehend the surgeon you're watching, down to every move they make and exactly why they made that move, then yes you've understood it. Until then, you are just somewhere between "What's brain surgery?" and "Oh I kinda get it..." - and this is not a yes/no thing. You gradually comprehend more and more, and indeed, surgeons absolutely DO train by watching videos or surgery done well AND surgery gone wrong, to understand why every move is made the why it is. This is input.
2. Although I would argue that the above paragraph shows that more than half the difficulty with brain surgery lies in understanding what to do (because the human brain is the most complex assortment of matter that we've ever found), there is still significant difficulty (after full comprehension) which is steadiness and skilfullness of hand. This is why surgeons value the steadiness of their hands and do exercises to specifically train this, as well as avoiding caffeine etc. in the hours before surgery. The task itself is more physically difficult than producing words with your mouth, and has MUCH more serious consequences for getting it wrong.
This can be practiced much more effectively once the surgeon understands every move they are supposed to make and why. Personally, if I had a choice between a surgeon who had worked on 300 people's brains with extremely steady hands but wasn't actually sure what they were doing (and therefore some patients had died), or a surgeon who understood the operation they needed to perform to a full 100% level but had only practiced that operation on real patients three times, I would take the latter.
My dad actually had brain surgery a few years ago and went with a surgeon who had a 98% success rate on that operation, but he was more convinced by the recommendation of the neurologist who could perfectly explain everything they do and why (despite the neurologist not being a surgeon himself).
Did that clear things up?.... Probably not. Cool.
"Probably not" 🤣
I believe that I got your point, and I feel it like the difference between execution of instructions to achieve a result and actual ability to solve problems as they appear.
It did make sense, lol, and further underscores the point that language learning is distinct from almost all other endeavours. To build on that, something else that occurred to me while watching the vid -- another flaw in that analogy is that he (appears to) assume that our brain does nothing but observe the surgery, when in fact we know it's practicing the whole time: parsing syntax, grammar, phonemes, pronunciation, comparing, contrasting, experimenting. In reality, the brain is training to output from the day we start immersing: we just don't see all the dummies it carves up along the way, only the fine-tuning it does at the end, when we start training our mouth muscles to 'hold the scalpel steady'.
We've all seen young children absent-mindedly talking under their breath as they develop language too, which just further proves the brain is anything but a passive recipient in input/acquisition.
Perhaps this misconception of passivity is what informs Christian's/others' skeptism?
@Dapz Fanboy Yes, but I think if you think about that, you'll realise why experienced musicians can play music they've never seen before. Think about the analogy with a language and you'll see that it works perfectly.
"because the human brain is the most complex assortment of matter that we've ever found" Just adding a little joke here: the brain is the most important organ according to the brain :)
You know what's ironic. I believe a lot of surgeons do just this... They learn how to perform a certain surgery from watching a video or reading a book without necessarily ever having a surgeon skilled in that specific surgery guide them through it step by step numerous times until it's done. I saw someone do this MID SURGERY recently in a documentary where they were in India and literally rang someone in Europe to have them show them what to do. They then finished the surgery successfully after performing something they hadn't done before. So, I felt like this was a total straw-man as well as a misunderstanding of learning and of surgery.
What a delight to have found this channel, incredible stuff.
I appreciate the time you put in to make videos, and analyze the language learning process.
I don't know if you made this analogy in your holistic approach video. But in order to acquire/speak/use a language, there will be the right approach at the right time. There are times when you want more grammar, there are times when you want more passive acquisition, and there are times you want more speaking.
Yes! And the time for more informal teaching by simple exposure is in childhood. By the teen years, that window is closing, and by adulthood, it's shut.
You've spouted that nonsense enough now Scary Steve. You can stop.
If it's true, explain to me why my proficiency in Swedish DOUBLED from getting a lot of exposure to it at the age of 34. Still going through puberty am I?
Thanks for making this video. I completely agree on the value of the input method. It was a bit hard to watch though because of the original video’s lousy arguments that make no sense. The pity is that the author didn’t even try to do a proper research on the input method. This would’ve hopefully improved his understanding and maybe even arguments. I doubt he speaks any foreign language fluently.
I totally support the input method because it’s kinda how I inadvertently learned English. I didn’t know about the theory at the time of course, I just enjoyed doing everything in English - it was a means to an end. I loved listening to podcasts the most. I didn’t even speak a lot, but I found that once you have this intuitive understanding of the language, an internal map of it, appropriate responses just jump into your mind without giving it much thought. Therefore, it’s kinda suspicious to me when people claim having learned some language to fluency in 1 week, 3 months, etc.
Learning German now :)
i gave the video a thumbs up before i was through......after finishing it, i would give at least ten thumbs up. very well said
Learning music/learning a language shows the difference between learning and acquiring.
Any piano method book will teach you to read music and explain music theory to you. It will teach you , for example, that the scale of E has 4 sharps in it.
And then you practice until you acquire in your subconscious the fact that F,G,C and D will be played sharp whenever something is in E.
Of course, you can also play by ear. Once you have enough input and know how the major scale sounds, it is easy enough to work out which notes need to be sharp. You have acquired the knowledge by input without opening a method book and learning.
Great response videos so far, looking forward to the last. Concerning acquiring a language with little written or recorded materials and without speaking early, have you ever heard of an unusual type of language exchange called crosstalk? I'm curious what you think of it.
The way how it works is that both language exchange partners only speak their L1s with one another and use drawings, gestures, modified/sheltered language and other techniques to make everything more comprehensible.
Best wishes to you and your family. Thanks again for the lovely vids.
I have heard of it and I've "seen" it but not where the parties were uncomfortable in the L2s, rather just each of them perfectly understood L2 but would rather just speak L1. It was Finnish/Swedish.
Really enjoying this series. Lots of great points!
Most people would think it inconsequential but when you said "all abled body people have a model for how to walk" instead of just "everyone has a model for how to walk" you earned my sub ; )
Thank you.
Honestly I HATE having to abbreviate, so even saying things like "And every native Swedish speaker can do this", I always want to add a subtitle or something that says 99.5%* or something haha.
You make very good points!
The analogy between music and language learning is great
12:15 -> "generative adversarial neural networks".
train your brain into recognizing what it should sound like, so when you produce it yourself the feedbackloop can be closed and regulate back.
Speaking is not output … speaking is process … meaning it’s throughput - you hearing the language is your perception of the result/output. There’s always a series of unconscious processing that’s occurring when someone is speaking … whether they are trying to “acquire” a language or not … and anything we practice enough begins to become a part of a subconscious feedback model where there’s an interaction between the conscious and subconscious parts of the brain - even when speaking one’s native language.
This series is amazing! As someone who spends a lot of time practicing writing in her target languages (simply because I enjoy writing and I value that skill highly), my routine is quite input-heavy. For example, I always make sure to use some sort of native material as reference when I practice writing. I would gather articles, essays, etc - high-quality native input basically - on the topic I want to write about, study them thoroughly, write down sentences that I like (so I can work them into my own text later on) before I even begin to work on the first draft. Like you said, how else can I learn to write well if I don't even know what 'well' looks like? Can I write without references and get my point across? Sure, but will I improve my writing skills by doing that? Not really, at least not by much, because I'll just be outputting stuff I already know. I do write without references sometimes, but I consider that play, not study, (like how the pianist felt he was just messing around) because it's not deliberate. It has to feel like I'm at least stretching my current limits, so if I don't feel that slight 'mental' soreness that usually results from conscious, deliberate practice, then it's just play for me, maybe maintenance at best (which is also important, but not the point).
"Perfect practice makes perfect." Better to practice something ten times right than a hundred times wrong.
lol in my zoology degree we learned how to disect animals by watching HEAPS of videos first, so that we didn't have to waste like, 10 animal carcasses per student per animal type in order to "get it"
His 'brain surgeon' analogy is sooo wrong like... do you think students would learn on living humans and mistakes are just "oh no, he ded, well there's more humans where this one came from"
F no.
Even human cadavers for practice would be in short supply.
Yep, exactly. And the more detail the video can show the surgery in, the better. I pinned a comment about this.
Haven't watched the video, just saw the title and I thought I'd drop something here as someone who has been immersing for a while now. The more I've learned through immersion, the more I've realized this can be extended to EVERY skill. It's hard to see it if you haven't immersed, but the consumption to production, input till plateau to output cycle is applicable everywhere. I've noticed it when producing music where everyone has heard music enough to where they basically understand any piece of music in the genre they're most familiar with, but it's only when you try composing that you realize you don't really know that much, like for example the chords or how the bass goes. That then feeds the input, making it more valuable as now you know what to focus on, and so on. A great example is when I first tried making my own movie I had watched enough to where I knew how the film would go and how the angles would look and the story, but then when I actually recorded it and got to editing I realized that I didn't know what music to use and that, no matter what piece of music I chose, nothing fit. This was because I could choose a slow music for the sad scene, but the shots and cuts were too quick for the scene. After that, when I got to watching another movie I started paying attention to the length of the shots and the music chosen and how the synced up. If there's something you don't pay attention to, you're not gonna be learning about it. Interestingly, it's the same for immersion too. I've seen a lot of people too focus on "tolerating the ambiguity" to the point they just essentially ignore what they're saying. It's a blurry line, but it's there. This is the reason why some people hit a plateau on things, even if they spend thousands of hours. That's where the conscious mind comes in and guides the subconscious pattern recognition. Anyways, sorry if this comment doesn't fit with the video, but I'm not watching another 30 min video about immersion learning. I've seen WAYYYY too many on the topic already so I can already guess what he'll most likely say.
"It's hard to see it if you haven't immersed, but the consumption to production, input till plateau to output cycle is applicable everywhere."
Yep, exactly.
Without watching the video, you are agreeing with everything I said. The "difference" between language learning and everything else is actually just one of envrionment, not a difference in application or process.
If you had grown up in France, you'd be fluent in French... and people take from this that it's because of "speaking it from birth" but it's actually because of HEARING it a lot.
BTW, no matter how long a video is... it's still pretty arrogant to comment on it (especially a comment of this length) without watching at least some of it. This series of videos was very well received by my audience because of how many things I said that HADN'T been said before.
great video! i’ve kind of passively understood why input can be useful (much like how comprehensible input passively trains the brain) but i haven’t seen a good explanation/analogy like your toddler example until now.
Yes, the toddler analogy was brilliant! My favorite part of the video. I'm really loving this series.
I don't think the toddler analogy is that good. I toddler's brain is wired differently than an adult's. Of course a toddler never says, okay, this is a noun and this is a verb, and I put them together like this. But a toddler's brain is ready to absorb language simply by exposure. During the teenage years, this ability starts to shut down. By adulthood, it's over. Language learning must them be approached differently.
@Big Scary Steve - there is a massive error in your understanding of my analogy. Honestly I don't have time to explain it to you, but yeah... Like I said, you're on thing ice anyway.
@Nomadic Vegan - yeah it's my favourite part too because I get to watch my son go full throttle in the park. (That other kid who falls over heaps is just some clip I found on RUclips because I don't have any video of my son "toddling").
Brilliant! It was a pleasure listening to you. Thank you, Lamont!
Cheers!
Im so glad I stumbled across your channel when I was looking for stuff on duolingo. I’ve been studying danish for about three weeks now and I’m currently reading stories on linq as well as listening to Harry Potter in danish (I had a bit of a headstand as I’m fluent in English and German), and I can see improvement every single day. I’m also working with a teacher on italki, because I need a lot of help with pronounciation, as danish is kinda hard. When thinking about telling him what I’ve been doing this week I realised how much my vocabulary has grown through the input I’m getting, like I can form scentences with words I definitely didn’t realise I’ve learned. If I had my focus on using the language I know I’d still be working on remembering very specific replies to very specific questions.
You don't have to know the grammar inside out though it helps. People use their native language more or less accurately without necessarily knowing tables of declensions or even which words are adverbs.
So this is what I have gathered from watching a bunch of videos on language and my own experience.
Nothing to A1: this part you need to study, get a couple 100 words of vocab, a few set lines for conversations, understand how to pronounce written words, and a basic understanding of the grammar as a foundation to work with.
A1 to B1: don't bother studying anymore, instead listen, speak, read, and write in roughly equal amounts till all the common words and grammar are intuitive.
B1 to B2: here is the intermediate plateu and the only way past is listen, listen, listen, read, read, read, just all the input possible.
B2 to C1: lots of listening and reading still with more advanced stuff but it is worth doing conscious studying to master what is now intuitive.