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#Post#: 16597--------------------------------------------------
Learning a language or acquiring it?
By: Aliph Date: June 6, 2019, 7:28 am
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YouTube insisted on serving me a (too long) vidéo about
acquiring Arabic in one year.
It basically illustrates the theory of Stephen Krashner. In
order to acquire a language one just has to speak it and
eventually read it, no grammar.
I must say that the results of this guy here in the video aren’t
brilliant at all, though he is a verbose communicator with some
histrionic talent.
I wonder if the language learners on this board agree with the
idea that a language shouldn’t be learned.
HTML https://youtu.be/illApgaLgGA
#Post#: 16611--------------------------------------------------
Re: Learning a language or acquiring it?
By: Alharacas Date: June 6, 2019, 11:05 am
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Wow! The sheer amount of chutzpah this guy has... Are US
Americans really that nice? Because I can tell you one thing -
this approach of asking co-workers to put in tens, no, hundreds
of hours being your "language parent" would never, ever work in
Germany. Depending on the kind of job you or they have, your
co-workers will either ask you how much you're paying, will
avoid you like the plague, or simply tell you to go ****
yourself.
Thus, so much for x hours a week. Because if you have language
partners instead of "parents" (poor sods), it's going to be x
hours times 2 per week.
And did I miss something due to profound boredom, or is there a
slight contradiction in there? Didn't the guy say how important
reading in your target language was? And didn't he also say that
students spending such inordinate amounts of time on reading and
writing was a waste of time?
Thank you, Sofia. An excellent lesson in how to make a video,
which should have taken 3 minutes at most, last for almost an
hour. (yawn)
The bit about story-telling was interesting, though. I might try
that with a language partner at some point, although skype is
definitely not the best medium for this - you'd want to be able
to both look at the picture you're talking about AND watch your
language partner's body language.
Even though in my experience, about 9 out of 10 people simply
hate describing pictures (let alone tell stories about what they
see) and usually run out of things to say after about one and a
half sentences.
#Post#: 16618--------------------------------------------------
Re: Learning a language or acquiring it?
By: Irena Date: June 6, 2019, 11:57 am
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Okay, I don't have an hour to watch this video, but this comment
made me laugh:
[quote author=Alharacas link=topic=1138.msg16611#msg16611
date=1559837159]
Wow! The sheer amount of chutzpah this guy has... Are US
Americans really that nice? Because I can tell you one thing -
this approach of asking co-workers to put in tens, no, hundreds
of hours being your "language parent" would never, ever work in
Germany. Depending on the kind of job you or they have, your
co-workers will either ask you how much you're paying, will
avoid you like the plague, or simply tell you to go ****
yourself.
[/quote]
Germans are wise people. ;)
Seriously now: the way I see it, it's my job to get myself to a
solid B2 level. Once I get there, I can reasonably expect native
speakers to communicate with me in some substantial sort of way.
Before that, well, I might expect patience from native speakers
in some limited contexts (e.g. shopping), but I certainly don't
expect people to communicate with me for more than, oh, 2 min at
most. I mean, if they really, truly need to communicate with me
(because they want something from me and are willing to suffer
my poor language skills in order to get it), then okay. But
otherwise, I don't expect random people to put any effort into
helping me. (I mean, sure, I might ask what this or that word
means, but that's something that can be answered within
seconds.) Unless, that is, the person is getting paid (or
otherwise compensated, as in a language exchange) for
teaching/helping me.
#Post#: 16620--------------------------------------------------
Re: Learning a language or acquiring it?
By: Irena Date: June 6, 2019, 1:57 pm
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I've heard of Krashen's theory. What do I think of it? Well,
what I think of it is that I see no reason to study that way. I
see no reason to abandon the study of grammar, for instance. For
each language that I reached a reasonably high level in, I spent
a ton of time on grammar, especially in the early stages. On the
other hand, I conducted something of a natural experiment with
learning German in a Krashen-esque way (mostly because my
teacher didn't like teaching grammar, and I lacked the
initiative to either compensate on my own or simply find another
teacher), and all that happened was that I burned out and quit.
The problem was that I simply wasn't improving. I did a lot of
reading (mostly graded readers), and while I could understand
more and more, I kept making the same mistakes over and over
again, and I grew increasingly frustrated. After a while, I
tried to make some changes (and I even started working with a
different teacher), but by that point, I'd developed fairly
strong negative feelings toward German (not because of German as
such, but because I'd come to associate it with all that
frustration), and it was simply too late. That was a pity. For a
while, I very much regretted it. Nowadays, though, I mostly see
it as a useful learning experience: I gained a better
understanding of what does and doesn't work for me as a language
learner, and I get to apply it to learning Czech, a language
that I simply cannot afford to fail at.
So... When someone tells me not to "study" a language, but to
"acquire" it, my answer is: "No. Been there, done that, didn't
work." If the person insists, I might add something to the
effect of "Get out of my way, and stop wasting my time." >:(
That said, I think it may indeed be possible to learn using
Krashen's approach. The reason I say that is because I've heard
credible stories of people learning ("acquiring") languages that
way to a reasonably high level. But there's a catch: it seems to
require quite a bit more time than more traditional approaches.
So, if you have poor analytic skills, or simply hate studying
grammar, then I suppose Krashen may be the way to go. For those
of us with a more analytic bent, I see absolutely no good reason
whatsoever to go down that road.
Caveat: of course grammar isn't enough. One way or the other,
you will need to read/listen quite a bit in order to reach a
reasonable level in a language. The question is: is
"comprehensible input" enough? For me, experience shows that it
most definitely isn't.
#Post#: 16639--------------------------------------------------
Re: Learning a language or acquiring it?
By: Alharacas Date: June 7, 2019, 5:48 am
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Since I suppose you were hoping for a more serious answer than
the one I gave in my first post, Sofia: yes, I'd heard of
Krashen before, I'd thought the concept sounded enticing, and
I'd been wanting to find out more about how it actually worked.
Otherwise I wouldn't have dreamt of wasting a whole hour of my
life on listening to this guy repeating himself over and over
again. :)
Having done so, I still find the concept appealing, but feel I'm
not really much wiser as to how it actually works. Okay,
storytelling. Great idea for acquiring listening skills and
enlarging your passive knowledge of vocabulary. But then, how do
you progress to actually speaking yourself?
It seems to me you'd either need to first become an expert in
the method of language acquisition, or you'd need
teachers/language partners who were experts.
Also, I can imagine only too well how acquiring German did not
really work out for Irena, just by thinking about the way I'm
learning Persian right now. My Assimil book doesn't ask me to do
grammar exercises, but it does provide explanations for
suffixes/particles, vowel changes and abbreviated forms as they
occur in the language as it's actually spoken. Without those, I
think I'd be slowly drowning in a sea of unanswered questions.
Of course, 8 times out of 10, that doesn't mean I'm adding the
right suffix/particle where appropriate, no. Not yet, at any
rate. But at least I know why I'm being corrected.
And that's another thing. The guy in the video says "no
corrections", right? Now, that makes me think the guy's never
observed parents with children at the age where they're learning
to speak, er, "acquiring their native language". Of course,
parents correct their children. Otherwise, all European
languages would have lost each and every one of their irregular
verbs long ago. No, I can't say that would have been such a bad
thing altogether, but a) we've still got them and b) it does
present a problem that in many countries, people who aren't able
to apply grammar and who can't use the correct verb forms are
automatically categorized as uneducated.
Which reminds me, Sofia: would you care to elaborate on how and
why you're unimpressed with this guy's Arabic?
#Post#: 16641--------------------------------------------------
Re: Learning a language or acquiring it?
By: Aliph Date: June 7, 2019, 6:24 am
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Sorry girls, I felt a bit guilty serving you that boring video!
Krashen’s method is very popular among teachers on Verbling, a
market place for language lessons. I must say that most of my
teachers apply it, without knowing the theory. I always felt
that they were lucky to have a student like me who just wanted
to make conversation, since I had learned the basics elsewhere
in a serious and challenging academic surrounding. Therefore I
am a student that doesn’t oblige teachers to do extra work
outside the classes.
About the difference between acquiring and learning...
I have the experience of acquiring two European languages
through total immersion. The result must be B2 or C1 level,
fluent at work, reading and speaking with ease. So I can
subscribe to the “no grammar” motto to a certain extent.
However with more “exotic” languages, I felt the need to have
some structure, it is a lot easier to analyze how the grammar is
built up ( with the help of good pedagogical material) than to
figure it out by oneself like a baby that starts learning to
speak.
@Alharacas, the guy in the video surely had a good plan learning
Arabic in one year! He learned Egyptian dialect (a lot easier
than Modern Standard Arabic or Coranic, literary Arabic). He
didn’t learn how to read and write. He surely can go around, as
a man, in Cairo and talk about simple matters with casual
acquaintances. I must give him credit for that.
But like so many Americans he has a very very heavy English
accent and tonality especially concerning vowels. He mixes
different sounds the H and the KH. In real life he is a Spanish
teacher in California. Probably a fairly good teacher but not
very keen on accent reduction.
#Post#: 16643--------------------------------------------------
Re: Learning a language or acquiring it?
By: Alharacas Date: June 7, 2019, 7:07 am
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[quote author=Sofia link=topic=1138.msg16641#msg16641
date=1559906677]
Sorry girls, I felt a bit guilty serving you that boring video!
[/quote]
As well you should! (No, no, only joking!) :D
[quote author=Sofia link=topic=1138.msg16641#msg16641
date=1559906677]
But like so many Americans he has a very very heavy English
accent and tonality especially concerning vowels. He mixes
different sounds the H and the KH. In real life he is a Spanish
teacher in California. Probably a fairly good teacher but not
very keen on accent reduction.
[/quote]
Ah, okay, thanks, Sofia. But then, accent reduction takes a lot
of patience and determination, doesn't it? And if you've got a
student who thinks it simply doesn't matter, then no amount of
teaching - by whichever method - is going to change it, at least
not in my experience.
What about the guy's vocabulary and grammar, though? Overall,
would you say they were more or less okay? Or is his Arabic
really crude?
#Post#: 16645--------------------------------------------------
Re: Learning a language or acquiring it?
By: Aliph Date: June 7, 2019, 7:34 am
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I do not speak Egyptian dialect, his conversational Arabic seems
ok to me. But it reminds me of teacher Tony Marsh who was
savagely mistreated by a Jordanian female teacher who analyzed
word after word he spoke and published her critics on one of
those big witch hunts that rallied up many people on a platform
that we all know
#Post#: 16650--------------------------------------------------
Re: Learning a language or acquiring it?
By: SHL Date: June 7, 2019, 9:43 am
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I have to agree with the others and I have to admit I didn’t
have the patience to listen through an hour long video like this
one. (By the why, how come the guy has a black eye in the video?
Did he have a honey-bee war like me?)
Anyways, I learned an expression long ago, which I have always
found to be true. If something sounds too good to be true, it
probably is.
What I think Kashan has done is take the Chomsky „language
acquisition model“ of learning Chomsky applied to CHILDREN and
tried to apply it to adults. It DOESN‘T work that way.
In the 1950s the leading linguist in the country was BF Skinner,
who postulated the „behaviorist“ model of language learning
among babies. It was the simplistic reward vs. punishment
theory, and Skinner backed it up with NO science or studies. He
just dreamed it up. It goes something like this. Children are
taught to speak their native language by a reward vs. punishment
system. If the child is hungry and learns the word „cookie“, and
says it corrects, his parents say „oh that is right. Good for
you. Hears a cookies.“ If they say it wrong, they are corrected
and maybe don’t get the cookie.
Chomsky, was a linguistics professor as the prestigious
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in Cambridge
Massachusetts the same time Skinner was at Harvard, also in
Cambridge. In 1959 Chomsky wrote a scathing paper critiquing
Skinner‘s behaviorist model, saying it was totally wrong, lacked
supporting studies, and was total nonsense. from Skinner‘s
theories you could argue that children „learn“ their first
language, again through this process of trial and error. This
has now been proven to be completely false. No one teaches you
your first language. In fact, children speak their native
language before they even go to school.
Chomsky started an academic war with Skinner that went on for
over a decade. Chomsky postulated that there was some kind of
human biological faculty in the brain that he called a „language
acquisition device“, not well understood but unique to humans
(in other words a little girl will learn to speak language
before even going to school, but her pet dog she grows up with
and has as much exposure to language as she does won‘t. Why? For
the same reason she has two legs and not 4. This is something
only humans have the capacity for. Sure a dog or cat can learn a
few commands and can communicate desires, but it can’t use
language.
Chomsky also learned that babies and children had a mind capable
of learning language and in interest in language which was truly
amazing. He noted that they learned a word on one single
exposure. That was another of Skinner‘s flaws. The sheer number
of words that children acquired in such so short a period of
time could never be explained by Skinner`s theory. Something
else had to be going on. Chomsky equates language acquisition to
simply human growth, much like growing an arm or leg. It just
happens. The child can’t stop it from happening, can‘t prevent
it and can‘t avoid it. I think we can all relate to that from
our experience.
BUT, Chomsky believed that at some point, probably at a young
age, like 10, this language acquisition abilities by babies and
young children seems to stop or significantly slow. That's´s
where learning grammar and new vocabulary has to come in for
teenagers and adults, and that‘s where the difficulty of
learning foreign languages comes in.
It seems to me, this is where Kashan seems to lose it. He
assumes this „language acquisition“ process never ends in an
adult. But it does. Kashan no studies to back up anything he
says (I‘ve hear him speak other languages and with his thick
American accent and sound terrible, with an extremely limited
vocabulary. That is NOT language acquisition. So, I think he is
simple wrong. To learn a foreign language as an adult, you have
to like grammar, love the language, and be willing to spend
years hearing, speaking and reading the new language. And, make
serious effort to master pronunciation. I did and it worked for
me. But in hindsight, it wasn’t easy. Learning any second
language isn’t easy and anyone who says it is is hustling you
for money and lying to you. There’s no simple solutions to
complicated questions.
Though this is a 28 minute clip, you might find it a lot more
interesting in shedding light on this topic:
HTML https://youtu.be/hdUbIlwHRkY
All Kashan has does is take Chomsky’s model and tried to say the
same language can apply in adults as in children and this is
false and not backed up by a single study.
#Post#: 16653--------------------------------------------------
Re: Learning a language or acquiring it?
By: Aliph Date: June 7, 2019, 10:08 am
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Thanks Steve for mentioning Chomsky (one of my favorite
intellectuals). I will watch the video later since I am outside
and do not have my headset.
I am not sure that children acquire a language with no effort.
It is real learning. They learn in a social interactive
environment but they are equipped with an innate propensity to
speak (unlike a dog)
However they really work on it. Some struggle some excel.
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