Even if one method is way better than other ones, the law of diminishing returns means it will start to be less effective if you do it exclusively. Mixing it up keeps your brain fresh, and ready to learn.
Learning a language is like finishing a table full of food. People always argue how to eat it, which side to start which side to finish etc. But all you need to do is to just start eating and figure it out later.
Ohhh I like this analogy. I've also had people comment on how I like to finish one dish at a time while others love to munch on multiples. I'm gonna steal this analogy for future use :D
Heres a quote from the AJATT community, "all the time you spend talking about how good AJATT is for learning a language could be spent on actually learning the language"
I am good at pronunciation - it comes to me much faster than to other people, BUT because I know this is an exception, not the rule I come up with ways to help my friends in learning pronunciation, even if I myself don't need it. When anybody approached me and ask for lessons my first question was always: how do YOU prefer to learn, what is difficult for YOU. I am not them, learning is a very individual thing.
To be pedantic... Comprehensible Input is input that is comprehensible. If you take active steps to make the input understandable, you are creating comprehensible input. Explicit learning. The Method touted as comprehensible Input is passive (implicit learning) and has vast amounts of it that are not actually comprehensible until your brain figures it out. The stuff commonly pushed as comprehensible input does not fit the I+1 ideal of Comprehensible Input.... in the same way people throw about Shadowing but they really mean listen and repeat which would be more echoing or mimicking than shadowing. The only true shadowing we do in real life is when we sing along to songs, everything else is a delayed repeat. True I+1 is impossible for each stage of language learning. And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter the names, if you take active steps to understand the language, and also passively experience the language, you Will acquire it.
"and has vast amounts of it that are not actually comprehensible until your brain figures it out. " -if the brain figures it out. Sometimes even context won't tell you what that one words means and knowing what the rest of the sentence means won't help you in any way. CI for me is a flawed theory, based on how children learn. Children don't understand anything in the beginning and learn by trial and error (mom says: honey, give me your teddy bear - kids hands a toy car situation) which takes ages. If someone wants to do that - cool, I have better ways of using my limited time that I have. However, CI is excellent for improving skills such as listening or reading, when what you don't understand is less than 20%, ideally less than 10% (more or less).
Truly appreciate that video! And I also need to watch that type of thinking in my own comments. Hack, even incompressible input has some minor benefits.
After some introspection, I think along the following lines: It's not radical to say that a particular method is ineffective but rather to say that there is only one single correct method.
This might be a weird one but hear me out. I think as English native speakers we tend to fetishise language learning. Here in the UK at least, we take on as a dubious honour the fact that as a nation we're useless at learning languages. Anyone who does learn is often seen as exceptionally clever and we love to hate on ourselves around people from other countries who settle in the UK or when abroad for not being clever enough to learn the language. So, when an effective method is found, it's so easy to evangelise, sell a product promising a shortcut etc because it capitalises on that perception. I think the sad reality is that true language learning as an adult isn't glamorous, isn't quick, nor easy. It's long, scary, embarrassing and hard. And I imagine eventually incredibly rewarding.
Maybe you're right haha. I'm guessing someone from India would be like "Bro, this your first second language? I learned 6 before turning 12 without trying".
@@Evildea haha right!? And (in my uninformed opinion) that would just be because of a mixture of technique and attitude right? I'll bet you won't find Indian kids sitting around memorising conjugation tables. Rather, they'll be surrounded by their languages, practising them, thinking in them etc, making mistakes and repeating repeating repeating.
It's also not really necessary to learn languages other than English in an Anglo country. Germans, French and Hungarians for example are also bad at language learning because even movies get dubbed, they have no practical reason to learn another language.
@@throughthewoods416 sorry, from my limited interaction over the years, I don't see them as being so free with their acquisition. And it makes no sense, they have such a high-pressure competition to get somewhere for a career, they don't have time for wishy-washy foo foo stuff... they have to be focused and by the letter or numbers. If say Depak wants to outshine Kamal (and Kamal knows ABC) then Depak will need to know ABCD, and the only way to do that is if everyone sticks to the same script. Again, this is just from my limited interactions over the years and watching Indian centric comedy where they joke about it often, they tend not to be "color outside the box" culture or else they would get full ire from their parents. So yeah, like @Evildea said, we probably need an Indian to chime in.
I need some advice. I’ve joined a Discord group that is intended for the Thai community. When I join their conversation, they switch from their native language to English. As a beginner, should I stay in the conversation or should I wait until I feel more comfortable with Thai?
With certain methods I see the positives but I don’t know with me it boils down to personal preference and what I enjoy having time with i.e: listening to music ( children songs or folk songs) , reading poetry, or graded readers. Stuff like anki, watching tv shows, and listening to podcast are what I’m so used to hearing now when it comes to language advice on the internet that I’ve gotten used to it even though I don’t enjoy as a way to learn a language and it makes me feel like I’m in the super minority cause most of the materials I use no one talks about online. But I have opened up more to using other methods along with the ones I enjoy so I’m not totally against them but I’m naturally gonna seek out what I like whenever I learn a new language
You're right, personal preference is basically what it boils down to for most people. Some people, however, then start thinking along the lines of what 's good for the goose is good for the gander (i.e. this is the best for everyone). Those are the ones I'd say go radical.
The reason I could learn Lithuanian was because I had failed so many times. What it taught me was to look at the principles behind the method. Why are people doing it that way and esp., why do they claim success. Like our differences are from our backgrounds and what we can memorise and what we can get Anki to do. Other than that, we agree. A friend comes from an oral culture and so no reading method works for him. And then there are some methods that work for some languages for some people, like CI. The question then becomes why did it work in those cases. I have you on black bell, all notices, but this video did not appear in my feed. I have been having trouble with a channel that releases three a day (team working there), but I was hoping it would not effect normal posters. Oh, well.
I’m not sure why TH-cam does that. Sometimes it just doesn’t notify people even when they ask to be. Yeah, like I’m not a bigger reader myself and only get to reading after I’ve already hit a nice level. However, recently I found a way to start earlier and that’s via video games because I love games and many games force some form of reading.
It seems useless at first but you’ll find it super powerful later on when it comes to poetry and story writing. As the language won’t follow the normal Subject Verb Object pattern.
I agree. There is no ultimate mega method for learning, even within single branch, like a language, or maths or physics. For example - learning geometry will be totally different from learning algebra because of their nature - they are two distinct things. So are speaking, listening, reading and writing in language learning. What makes me avoid language communities and "gurus" especially is that they often behave like they've discovered THE method and others don't count. Bashing traditional learning is especially "cool" nowadays, with extreme denial of any usefulness of any traditional methods, which is more than untrue, because some old methods are still very effective, but because of the association with school (in which most gurus didn't pay any attention anyway, otherwise they might have learned something) they are dismissed a priori. I did research on learning as a skill for my thesis and some methods are older than these guys' grand-grandparents and they are still effective. Years of learning different languages for different amounts of time and sticking to those I like the most taught me there is really no one true tested method. You will approach learning Asian languages differently, especially those with complicated writing system than you will approach languages from the same family as yours. For example, I dabbled in Chinese as a coping mechanism after my father's death and I learned that in Chinese it's good to think more in metaphors, compound nouns and descriptive approach (rather than naming something Chinese describes it, like computer - electric brain, telephone - electric conversation etc.) which is somewhat lost in European language, because we don't think of telephone as "distant sound". So I think learning languages is more of a patchwork rather than just one, huge fabric of concepts and depending on language different things can be a challenge - in one it will be writing, in another it will be pronunciation, and in yet another - grammar. Sometimes two of these at the same time, but percentage will differ from language to language. You like Anki? Study from Anki, but don't tell people Anki is the only way. It's your way, and they might like it or not - not your call. You think you make progress with CI only? Cool, just don't tell others they do it wrong, if they don't find CI appealing as a universal solution to everything. In learning a language these things are certain, and only these: - you need to learn the vocab - you need to learn the grammar - you need to learn to read and preferably also how to write - you need to learn expressing yourself in a language both verbally and in writing BUT how you will go about it - it's your choice.
You're 100% spot on! On a side note, Chinese is full of 成语 (four-character idioms), and they pop up in nearly every second natural spoken sentence lol. They’re also very hard to learn from context since they’re tied to history and literature and usually mean an entire sentence. You really have to study them in a specific way to get a grasp of them.
@ yes, the tetrads :) exactly this - it's a skill on its own and no method will provide you with a ready solution for all aspects of Chinese language (focusing here merely on Mandarin)
@@Evildea Ive always heard of base systems when learning languages like French, but never actually looked into the idea until yesterday. So I've got a new hyper fixation lol.
Maybe you were referring to me? I’d call this a mischaracterization. Were the round Earth believing folks radical at one point? Sure, but the claim I’m making is of this sort. I’m talking about the subject of Language Acquisition and I’ve been making testable, universal scientific claims about a domain of human understanding which is testable. If not by a huge, rigorous study at this point in time, by individuals like you and I. I’m interested in facts, not ideology. CI boosters like me just see it as OBVIOUS that natural language acquisition (the kind we specifically evolved over 100s of thousands of years to do) does not occur without input. Normal development of language competence does not occur without having acquired an L1 outside of a critical developmental period. There are hard facts like this and more which were just discovered in the last century. Not a matter of method. The first principles of acquiring a language are what I hope to be able to iron out. Things like what explains GENERALLY across all natural language (sign language, braille, etc.) the requirements of acquisition. Input is academically uncontroversial in its importance in LA. The thing that is the source of dispute from anyone who knows this discipline from an academic standpoint is the stuff about COMPREHENSIBLE input, Krashen, etc.
One of your comments said something about Bogan accent? Im not an Aussie so i don't know what that means? Is that a good thing? Do you speak with Bogan accent? Is that ideal accent in AU? What about that popular Aussie, Durian Rider, does he speak the Bogan dialect?
Bogan is basically the Australian word for redneck. Basically an uneducated country person who has a strong country accents. It has been years since I’ve heard about Duran Rider haha. I’d need to go find one of his videos again to check.
I figure a lot of that dogmatism come from professionals. I've seen it in different fields. You make your name on "the theory of _____" and build your career on that rock. Any contrary data threatens their meal ticket (and ego I'm sure) so they have to stick to their guns.
The immersion community sometimes comes off as cultish to me 😅 I like language books, some grammar, find anki boring but not other flashcard platforms, I prefer reading above speaking, I think speaking as soon as possible is important and I think not everyone is learning a language to converse with strangers. I will now get staked 😂 But most importantly: I agree with taking a bit from everything and everyone has their own best path.
As an introvert, I agree with you, not everyone's objective is to converse. One third of the world population are introverts and many of them are probably not seeking conversations just for fun. I like learning new things and learning a new language is not different for me from learning about astronomy. I just want to know the unknown, to know how it works and to be able to decipher it piece by piece, like a secret code. It makes me happy when I can understand something. If I can also use it to talk to someone when I need to, that's just a bonus, a little tool.
@@ESCLuciaSlovakia as an introvert that prefers to chat in foreign languages than my mother tongue I agree. My goal with Japanese isn't necessarily speaking with people in Shibuya - I want to read some books in original that I read in translation, I want to watch fav dramas and anime without translation.
Hold on bro ... so if I understand you right, you encountered some folks online who are very opinionated and just *must* be right and post oft unkind comments to this end ... and you dub this 'radicalisation'? For me that's just plain old Internet commenting behaviour, since 1995 it's always been that way. I think online we're missing those subtle social signals that in person can convey the message "dude can you kindly shut the bleep up" without even needing to open one's mouth.
My take on language learning is simple: spend a shitload of time actively trying to understand material in that language. Do it every day for the next decade, and you'll reach a fairly decent level. Everything else doesn't matter that much. Grammar books and text books are simply a way to get your foot in the door. Perhaps helpful at the very beginning, but only account for even less than 1% of the learning process. The same goes for any other study methodology any online cult may worship. In the end, the practical totality of the acquisition process will happen as you interact with the language in the way a language is supposed to he used, as a means of communication.
@@maxhatush5918 Fairly decent is feeling comfortable enough to speak your mind about any general topic (plus those in your expertise domain, I guess) and getting all the nuances across, even if you feel slightly handicapped in comparison with your native language. A good level would be reached when you don't feel particularly handicapped and even see the language as an extension of yourself and your identity: it's no longer a foreign language. After that, we could speak about near-native levels of fluency, where even writing literature becomes possible. That is the highest possible level for a non-native. Native-like intuition of the language is, as far as I know and according to the studies I've read, simply not possible after a certain age. It should go without saying but the "10 years" I mentioned are simply a rough estimation of how long it takes the average person to get to that level for an average language. If your target language happens to be fairly close to your native language, and/or you have time in spades and/or live surrounded by the language, your mileage might vary. But the point remains: it takes a long ass time, and consistency should be the priority, rather than some magical method that will get you to fluency in 3 months. That sort of thinking will only make you quit after the inevitable disappointment. You are here for the long run. Welcome to the mines. Embrace them. Prepare your mind for what's to come. You never stop learning a language, you'll be a student for the rest of your life. The successful student is the one who enjoys the process.
@@nokts3823in my limited experience you’re pretty spot on. People get tricked by TH-camrs, thinking mastering a language can be done in 30 days, one year, 5 years etc. To truly master something like a foreign language? Yeah, 10 years sounds fair, when you’re actively trying to improve. I have a foreign coworker who has been living in the US for over 20 years and they definitely haven’t “mastered” English. Also, what you said about interacting with the language as the best way of learning, I agree as well. It took me 10 months into learning French to finally accept that and stop the grammar drills 😂.
@@nokts3823 Totally agree. Language is more about perseverance than anything else. And as you pointed out - enjoying the process itself, the results will come as a side effect of that enjoyment.
Want to chat languages?
Join our Discord: discord.gg/tPbQTtU2Zt
sorry it's now all relegated to meeting up in the virtual pub - discord - with us radicals 😉
@@atoms.channelThat will have to do haha
"I'm elated about this thing I found, so I feel compelled to be insufferable about it until the burnout kicks in."
Haha
Even if one method is way better than other ones, the law of diminishing returns means it will start to be less effective if you do it exclusively.
Mixing it up keeps your brain fresh, and ready to learn.
Interesting way of putting it.
Learning a language is like finishing a table full of food. People always argue how to eat it, which side to start which side to finish etc. But all you need to do is to just start eating and figure it out later.
Ohhh I like this analogy. I've also had people comment on how I like to finish one dish at a time while others love to munch on multiples. I'm gonna steal this analogy for future use :D
Heres a quote from the AJATT community, "all the time you spend talking about how good AJATT is for learning a language could be spent on actually learning the language"
Good quote!!!
There is everywhere and always a tendency to confuse what is personally easy with universally good.
That is very true and succinctly said.
I am good at pronunciation - it comes to me much faster than to other people, BUT because I know this is an exception, not the rule I come up with ways to help my friends in learning pronunciation, even if I myself don't need it. When anybody approached me and ask for lessons my first question was always: how do YOU prefer to learn, what is difficult for YOU. I am not them, learning is a very individual thing.
To be pedantic... Comprehensible Input is input that is comprehensible. If you take active steps to make the input understandable, you are creating comprehensible input. Explicit learning. The Method touted as comprehensible Input is passive (implicit learning) and has vast amounts of it that are not actually comprehensible until your brain figures it out. The stuff commonly pushed as comprehensible input does not fit the I+1 ideal of Comprehensible Input.... in the same way people throw about Shadowing but they really mean listen and repeat which would be more echoing or mimicking than shadowing. The only true shadowing we do in real life is when we sing along to songs, everything else is a delayed repeat. True I+1 is impossible for each stage of language learning. And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter the names, if you take active steps to understand the language, and also passively experience the language, you Will acquire it.
"and has vast amounts of it that are not actually comprehensible until your brain figures it out. " -if the brain figures it out. Sometimes even context won't tell you what that one words means and knowing what the rest of the sentence means won't help you in any way.
CI for me is a flawed theory, based on how children learn. Children don't understand anything in the beginning and learn by trial and error (mom says: honey, give me your teddy bear - kids hands a toy car situation) which takes ages. If someone wants to do that - cool, I have better ways of using my limited time that I have. However, CI is excellent for improving skills such as listening or reading, when what you don't understand is less than 20%, ideally less than 10% (more or less).
Amusingly, I just watched this on my way to meet up with you and chat about languages. Them post-esperanto pub chats were so good, dude. I miss them
Truly appreciate that video! And I also need to watch that type of thinking in my own comments. Hack, even incompressible input has some minor benefits.
Thanks!
After some introspection, I think along the following lines: It's not radical to say that a particular method is ineffective but rather to say that there is only one single correct method.
@@Reflekt0r Yes, exactly
This might be a weird one but hear me out. I think as English native speakers we tend to fetishise language learning. Here in the UK at least, we take on as a dubious honour the fact that as a nation we're useless at learning languages. Anyone who does learn is often seen as exceptionally clever and we love to hate on ourselves around people from other countries who settle in the UK or when abroad for not being clever enough to learn the language. So, when an effective method is found, it's so easy to evangelise, sell a product promising a shortcut etc because it capitalises on that perception. I think the sad reality is that true language learning as an adult isn't glamorous, isn't quick, nor easy. It's long, scary, embarrassing and hard. And I imagine eventually incredibly rewarding.
Maybe you're right haha. I'm guessing someone from India would be like "Bro, this your first second language? I learned 6 before turning 12 without trying".
@@Evildea haha right!? And (in my uninformed opinion) that would just be because of a mixture of technique and attitude right? I'll bet you won't find Indian kids sitting around memorising conjugation tables. Rather, they'll be surrounded by their languages, practising them, thinking in them etc, making mistakes and repeating repeating repeating.
We need an Indian kid in the chat haha
It's also not really necessary to learn languages other than English in an Anglo country. Germans, French and Hungarians for example are also bad at language learning because even movies get dubbed, they have no practical reason to learn another language.
@@throughthewoods416 sorry, from my limited interaction over the years, I don't see them as being so free with their acquisition. And it makes no sense, they have such a high-pressure competition to get somewhere for a career, they don't have time for wishy-washy foo foo stuff... they have to be focused and by the letter or numbers. If say Depak wants to outshine Kamal (and Kamal knows ABC) then Depak will need to know ABCD, and the only way to do that is if everyone sticks to the same script. Again, this is just from my limited interactions over the years and watching Indian centric comedy where they joke about it often, they tend not to be "color outside the box" culture or else they would get full ire from their parents. So yeah, like @Evildea said, we probably need an Indian to chime in.
many ways up the mountain just find the way you don't mind too much, maybe even enjoy
Totally!
I need some advice. I’ve joined a Discord group that is intended for the Thai community. When I join their conversation, they switch from their native language to English. As a beginner, should I stay in the conversation or should I wait until I feel more comfortable with Thai?
Pretend you don’t speak English. That’s what I do.
Nothing as fanatical as a new convert
Neophytes are always the most scary ones. :/
That is so true!
With certain methods I see the positives but I don’t know with me it boils down to personal preference and what I enjoy having time with i.e: listening to music ( children songs or folk songs) , reading poetry, or graded readers. Stuff like anki, watching tv shows, and listening to podcast are what I’m so used to hearing now when it comes to language advice on the internet that I’ve gotten used to it even though I don’t enjoy as a way to learn a language and it makes me feel like I’m in the super minority cause most of the materials I use no one talks about online. But I have opened up more to using other methods along with the ones I enjoy so I’m not totally against them but I’m naturally gonna seek out what I like whenever I learn a new language
You're right, personal preference is basically what it boils down to for most people. Some people, however, then start thinking along the lines of what 's good for the goose is good for the gander (i.e. this is the best for everyone). Those are the ones I'd say go radical.
The reason I could learn Lithuanian was because I had failed so many times. What it taught me was to look at the principles behind the method. Why are people doing it that way and esp., why do they claim success. Like our differences are from our backgrounds and what we can memorise and what we can get Anki to do. Other than that, we agree. A friend comes from an oral culture and so no reading method works for him. And then there are some methods that work for some languages for some people, like CI. The question then becomes why did it work in those cases.
I have you on black bell, all notices, but this video did not appear in my feed. I have been having trouble with a channel that releases three a day (team working there), but I was hoping it would not effect normal posters. Oh, well.
I’m not sure why TH-cam does that. Sometimes it just doesn’t notify people even when they ask to be.
Yeah, like I’m not a bigger reader myself and only get to reading after I’ve already hit a nice level. However, recently I found a way to start earlier and that’s via video games because I love games and many games force some form of reading.
Out of context: starting learning Esperanto. The "n" suffix is really a pitty.
It seems useless at first but you’ll find it super powerful later on when it comes to poetry and story writing. As the language won’t follow the normal Subject Verb Object pattern.
I agree. There is no ultimate mega method for learning, even within single branch, like a language, or maths or physics. For example - learning geometry will be totally different from learning algebra because of their nature - they are two distinct things. So are speaking, listening, reading and writing in language learning.
What makes me avoid language communities and "gurus" especially is that they often behave like they've discovered THE method and others don't count. Bashing traditional learning is especially "cool" nowadays, with extreme denial of any usefulness of any traditional methods, which is more than untrue, because some old methods are still very effective, but because of the association with school (in which most gurus didn't pay any attention anyway, otherwise they might have learned something) they are dismissed a priori. I did research on learning as a skill for my thesis and some methods are older than these guys' grand-grandparents and they are still effective.
Years of learning different languages for different amounts of time and sticking to those I like the most taught me there is really no one true tested method. You will approach learning Asian languages differently, especially those with complicated writing system than you will approach languages from the same family as yours. For example, I dabbled in Chinese as a coping mechanism after my father's death and I learned that in Chinese it's good to think more in metaphors, compound nouns and descriptive approach (rather than naming something Chinese describes it, like computer - electric brain, telephone - electric conversation etc.) which is somewhat lost in European language, because we don't think of telephone as "distant sound".
So I think learning languages is more of a patchwork rather than just one, huge fabric of concepts and depending on language different things can be a challenge - in one it will be writing, in another it will be pronunciation, and in yet another - grammar. Sometimes two of these at the same time, but percentage will differ from language to language.
You like Anki? Study from Anki, but don't tell people Anki is the only way. It's your way, and they might like it or not - not your call. You think you make progress with CI only? Cool, just don't tell others they do it wrong, if they don't find CI appealing as a universal solution to everything.
In learning a language these things are certain, and only these:
- you need to learn the vocab
- you need to learn the grammar
- you need to learn to read and preferably also how to write
- you need to learn expressing yourself in a language both verbally and in writing
BUT how you will go about it - it's your choice.
You're 100% spot on!
On a side note, Chinese is full of 成语 (four-character idioms), and they pop up in nearly every second natural spoken sentence lol. They’re also very hard to learn from context since they’re tied to history and literature and usually mean an entire sentence. You really have to study them in a specific way to get a grasp of them.
@ yes, the tetrads :) exactly this - it's a skill on its own and no method will provide you with a ready solution for all aspects of Chinese language (focusing here merely on Mandarin)
Try using a duodecimal system or base 12 for math. That is a different language for math I recently started learning. Your the best bro.
When I was working on a conlang ages back with a bunch of others we used a base 6 system. That was fun haha
@@Evildea Ive always heard of base systems when learning languages like French, but never actually looked into the idea until yesterday. So I've got a new hyper fixation lol.
Hahaha
Maybe you were referring to me? I’d call this a mischaracterization. Were the round Earth believing folks radical at one point? Sure, but the claim I’m making is of this sort.
I’m talking about the subject of Language Acquisition and I’ve been making testable, universal scientific claims about a domain of human understanding which is testable. If not by a huge, rigorous study at this point in time, by individuals like you and I. I’m interested in facts, not ideology.
CI boosters like me just see it as OBVIOUS that natural language acquisition (the kind we specifically evolved over 100s of thousands of years to do) does not occur without input. Normal development of language competence does not occur without having acquired an L1 outside of a critical developmental period. There are hard facts like this and more which were just discovered in the last century. Not a matter of method. The first principles of acquiring a language are what I hope to be able to iron out. Things like what explains GENERALLY across all natural language (sign language, braille, etc.) the requirements of acquisition.
Input is academically uncontroversial in its importance in LA. The thing that is the source of dispute from anyone who knows this discipline from an academic standpoint is the stuff about COMPREHENSIBLE input, Krashen, etc.
Your comments are mild compared to some. However, you did once become radical and you and I know which comment that was. Your other comments are fine.
Ĉu vi nun iras al Esperantaj kunvenoj?
Jes mi ĵus iris pasintvendrende
What happened to your local Esperanto domo?
It’s still there but most of my good friends have moved to other locations and I’m too lazy to make new ones right now.
One of your comments said something about Bogan accent?
Im not an Aussie so i don't know what that means? Is that a good thing? Do you speak with Bogan accent? Is that ideal accent in AU? What about that popular Aussie, Durian Rider, does he speak the Bogan dialect?
Bogan is basically the Australian word for redneck. Basically an uneducated country person who has a strong country accents. It has been years since I’ve heard about Duran Rider haha. I’d need to go find one of his videos again to check.
@Evildea ohhhh, I see. So you speak Bogan style dialect?
I grew up speaking a bogan accent but I no longer do as I went through actor training and that standardised my accent.
I figure a lot of that dogmatism come from professionals. I've seen it in different fields. You make your name on "the theory of _____" and build your career on that rock. Any contrary data threatens their meal ticket (and ego I'm sure) so they have to stick to their guns.
Yeah, that's definitely an issue where people literally can't accept change anymore because they staked their entire career on an idea or concept.
Have you ever watched Stuart Jay Raj's Videos on TH-cam?? I would be very interested in your comments?
He’s on my review list :)
Good
The immersion community sometimes comes off as cultish to me 😅
I like language books, some grammar, find anki boring but not other flashcard platforms, I prefer reading above speaking, I think speaking as soon as possible is important and I think not everyone is learning a language to converse with strangers. I will now get staked 😂
But most importantly: I agree with taking a bit from everything and everyone has their own best path.
Beware dark alleyways. You just put a bullseye on your back.
As an introvert, I agree with you, not everyone's objective is to converse. One third of the world population are introverts and many of them are probably not seeking conversations just for fun. I like learning new things and learning a new language is not different for me from learning about astronomy. I just want to know the unknown, to know how it works and to be able to decipher it piece by piece, like a secret code. It makes me happy when I can understand something. If I can also use it to talk to someone when I need to, that's just a bonus, a little tool.
@@ESCLuciaSlovakia as an introvert that prefers to chat in foreign languages than my mother tongue I agree. My goal with Japanese isn't necessarily speaking with people in Shibuya - I want to read some books in original that I read in translation, I want to watch fav dramas and anime without translation.
Please review:I Will Learn 30,000 Japanese Words in 2025 - Livakivi 11K views Jan 25, 2025
I’ll add it to the list!
Hold on bro ... so if I understand you right, you encountered some folks online who are very opinionated and just *must* be right and post oft unkind comments to this end ... and you dub this 'radicalisation'? For me that's just plain old Internet commenting behaviour, since 1995 it's always been that way. I think online we're missing those subtle social signals that in person can convey the message "dude can you kindly shut the bleep up" without even needing to open one's mouth.
This is more a monologue on not letting yourself fall into radicalisation in beliefs. Which is actually very easy to do.
My take on language learning is simple: spend a shitload of time actively trying to understand material in that language. Do it every day for the next decade, and you'll reach a fairly decent level.
Everything else doesn't matter that much. Grammar books and text books are simply a way to get your foot in the door. Perhaps helpful at the very beginning, but only account for even less than 1% of the learning process. The same goes for any other study methodology any online cult may worship. In the end, the practical totality of the acquisition process will happen as you interact with the language in the way a language is supposed to he used, as a means of communication.
10 years to get to a “fairly decent level”? Sorry but what do you define as fairly decent?
@@maxhatush5918 Fairly decent is feeling comfortable enough to speak your mind about any general topic (plus those in your expertise domain, I guess) and getting all the nuances across, even if you feel slightly handicapped in comparison with your native language. A good level would be reached when you don't feel particularly handicapped and even see the language as an extension of yourself and your identity: it's no longer a foreign language. After that, we could speak about near-native levels of fluency, where even writing literature becomes possible. That is the highest possible level for a non-native. Native-like intuition of the language is, as far as I know and according to the studies I've read, simply not possible after a certain age.
It should go without saying but the "10 years" I mentioned are simply a rough estimation of how long it takes the average person to get to that level for an average language. If your target language happens to be fairly close to your native language, and/or you have time in spades and/or live surrounded by the language, your mileage might vary. But the point remains: it takes a long ass time, and consistency should be the priority, rather than some magical method that will get you to fluency in 3 months. That sort of thinking will only make you quit after the inevitable disappointment. You are here for the long run. Welcome to the mines. Embrace them. Prepare your mind for what's to come. You never stop learning a language, you'll be a student for the rest of your life. The successful student is the one who enjoys the process.
@@nokts3823in my limited experience you’re pretty spot on. People get tricked by TH-camrs, thinking mastering a language can be done in 30 days, one year, 5 years etc. To truly master something like a foreign language? Yeah, 10 years sounds fair, when you’re actively trying to improve. I have a foreign coworker who has been living in the US for over 20 years and they definitely haven’t “mastered” English. Also, what you said about interacting with the language as the best way of learning, I agree as well. It took me 10 months into learning French to finally accept that and stop the grammar drills 😂.
@@nokts3823 Totally agree. Language is more about perseverance than anything else. And as you pointed out - enjoying the process itself, the results will come as a side effect of that enjoyment.
The grind baby!