Thanks for checking out my video about ALG! I made it five years ago for my blog Beyond Language Learning. Its mission is to make language learning much easier and much more enjoyable for everyone. At the time, the video and blog didn't get much response, so I didn't make any more videos and eventually stopped blogging. It's great to see this video start to get so many views after so long. However, this has happened in the middle of a difficult few weeks for me. I want to respond to your comments, questions, etc. as much as I can, but that may take some time. In the meantime, I'd be grateful if you check out my related work that I've linked to below. -Kristian Beyond Language Learning blog: beyondlanguagelearning.com Comprehensible English is my UA-cam channel with many ALG-style comprehensible input videos for English beginners: ua-cam.com/users/ComprehensibleEnglish I also teach and coach professionals who speak English as a second language, applying what I've learned about second language acquisition and teaching to help them improve their English for their careers. Here's an article I wrote about it: www.linkedin.com/pulse/problem-english-study-practice-what-do-instead-improve-peltonen/ If you'd like to support my work further, you can through these links: Patreon: www.patreon.com/BeyondLanguageLearning PayPal: paypal.me/BeyondLangLearn
I didn't know, until your presentation, that my second year German teacher in 1967 used immersion techniques. From day 1 of her class only German was used. All other communication was in her attire, props and acting out. The last part of each class was our congregating in a 'hof' or neighborhood gathering chatting, drinking, ordering food and singing "pub" songs. It made learning a language into enjoying a culture.
This is exactly how I learn every languages as an adult. Just mimic the sound, sometime you need to wait a while to develop new muscle to pronounce a particular words. If you do not have the chance to be in the environment of the language you are learning, just turn on a tv show, the language is less natural but at least it’s better than the text book, just play it again and again and again… Also pop songs… learning to sing really helps too. Good luck everyone !
@@tanyachou4474 I also watch the ads since I can easily translate and use currency. Watching mystery shows also helps since I can figure who done it along with the detectives.
I wish I could go back to eating, pooping, sleeping, and learning language all day without worrying about dumb silly adult stuff Those were the days....
As adults we definitely have more things to do and think about than children, and this can make it more difficult to dedicate so much time to acquiring another language and getting the input we need in it. I think a big part of the solution to this is for adults to have many more opportunities to do things that they enjoy, do things that they have to do, and do things that they would be doing anyway in the language they want to acquire in ways that are interesting and understandable to them.
@@fryloc359what do you mean? These days kids have a lot more options available to them. Bored of being a boy? Get castrated, put some makeup on, now you’re a girl. What a time to be alive!
This is basically how I learned Japanese in my early 30s. I went to Japan alone, basically deaf, dumb, and mute, and just soaked for 3 months. Always listening, always watching, 24/7. Even while sleeping I had the TV or Radio on. I learned like a baby. Upsides: 3 years later my speech sounds and feels native enough that people don’t know I’m not Japanese unless we’re speaking in person. I think in Japanese, and can use it without thinking about the mechanics of how it works, same as in English. Downsides: since I never studied officially my writing is atrocious. I know waaay more vocabulary than I know how to even write. Reading is considerably better than writing, but nowhere near as good as speaking and listening comprehension.
That's kind of funny - I had a similar experience with Thai, and got to the point where I can pass as Thai on the phone. Then moved to Japan and started learning Japanese... Made several of the mistakes mentioned in this video and my Japanese sucks.
@@ezekielrast7807 I highly recommend you try it yourself for whatever language you want to learn. Go to the native country of that language. Don’t try to start speaking and interacting right away, just exist. Watch native TV (news, variety shows, kids shows, etc) at LEAST 4 hours a day every single day. Go outside and observe people interact in different environments at LEAST 8 hours a day, every single day. Listen to native language podcasts or talk radio at LEAST 4 hours a day every day, and also while sleeping. After a few months it’ll be harder NOT to pick up the language than to learn it. Try it and you’ll make yourself a believer.
@SebastianBlix Very interesting story, thanks for sharing it! Did you do that first three months of Japanese in Japan totally from scratch, and without looking up words or anything like that, but rather just getting the meaning of words from the contexts and environments? Also how would you describe your comprehension after the three months, and how did your speaking develop?
I learned a crap ton of French by being a bad student. I was taking college French, but would skip my homework to instead watch French UA-cam videos, starting with French In Action, but slowly worked my way towards more and more fluent French. No translation, no speaking, just absorption. Over time I began to understand a lot of French with such ease and even occasionally started to automatically formulate sentences without consciously thinking. Unfortunately the semester ended and I got busy with life and didn't keep up with it, but I know I can always continue what I was doing and get better at it again.
As a student of Dr Brown in Bangkok from 1985 his method is the only way to learn a language for adults. Listen, understand and don't speak. Now as a 74 year old Thai Citizen my Thai is fluent, but I became fluent 5 years after studying with Dr Brown.
@michaeljcarneyjr.6187 Thank you, Michael, for sharing about your experience with the AUA Thai Program! I have been trying to find more fluent alumni of the program but it has been difficult, in part because the program generally did not keep in touch with past students and vice versa. I would like to talk to those who followed the ALG approach and went on to attain high levels of ability in Thai, and people who were students when Dr. Brown was there. Unfortunately, I only learned about ALG in 2009 and first went to Thailand to attend the program in 2013, long after he had passed away.
You learn as a child learns a 1 year old hears his parents talk to them by 2 he understands some of what's been said by age 3 they're talking up a storm, in this method your first 3 months are listening and understanding, that way you will have proper pronunciation when you begin speaking. It works wonderfully if you follow the program but to many people are impatient start speaking and can't be understood by native speakers.
@@michaeljcarneyjr.6187 Thanks for the answer, I guess I would be one of those impatient people too, if I don't practice something immediately it won't stay in my head.
" We master a language not through study and practice, but by understanding the things that are in that language ”. This, in my opinion, is the most beautiful thing ever said!
And it's so true. I learned English as an adult entirely through reading and listening, not because I tried to learn the language, I was simply very interested in what I was reading (and listening to, or watching), and I didn't bother with translations. No dictionary ever. Lately I've been pondering what happened back then, and the really important step is: not stopping at words you don't understand while reading. It's essential to just go on, and then at the point where words stop being words on a page, but instead a story in your mind.. then that's when the magic happens. Before that point the brain doesn't really connect meaning to words. At the end of every book I understood most of what I didn't understand in the beginning, my brain had figured it out after more exposure. The trick is to not consciously try to understand it (but it's also necessary to use what Dr. Krashen calls "comprehensible input" - I always read something I knew something about or had a great interest in. Tech magazines at first - I was intensely interested in the content. And then other stuff later). Part of this though is that my exposure to the language was quite enormous, even though I've never lived in an English-speaking country. English has a particular advantage there, compared to other languages. I learned another language years later, to a low intermediate level - I didn't have more time (but it was enough to get by) using essentially the same method. I had a hard time believing I could do the same with Japanese, as I couldn't just start reading.. but as I'm slowly getting over that problem it seems it'll work the same. I should have believed more in this method at the start, and saved some years. Still "speechless", but from what I remember from the past it'll work out - at some point, with enough exposure, phrases and sentences will start echoing in the mind and they'll come out. At least I hope so for this language too.
It's Not True In Japanese Though as you might encounter different pronunciation and Different expressions as You might not have heard the Phrase in English "Read The Air" on top of Memorising thousands of Kanji and Combinations of Kanji. How do you distinguish between Different Kanji Pronunciations and Kanji Itself - 昨夜十六夜、どこは十六りんごと魔理沙霧雨？
This is fascinating! This is how I learned English as a 2nd language. I tried textbooks first but it got really boring and confusing really quickly, so I decided to just read and listen to whatever content online that I liked, and translate when I can't understand from context alone. Over time I repeatedly found myself surprised at how much I can understand from context without translation. And then at some point without even realizing it I stopped translating in my head entirely, and I started picking up words and phrases at a rate I didn't think was possible, because I was very interested in the content that I was consuming. I also didn't speak much for years, since I had no one to speak to in English but myself, never thought that might have actually helped me pick up the language faster. I think this "automatic" language learning that critical thinking can interfere with can be likened to muscle memory, sometimes if you try to consciously think about a skill or behavior that you have developed a muscle memory for, you can actually confuse yourself and momentarily forget how to do it. It's like you need to let the brain build and use whatever circuits it thinks best for the job. And I think it's in our best interest to let that part of our brains figure out stuff like language, after all if we had the chance to think critically with higher brain functions about how to walk for the first time we will all be still crawling around LOL I use this for learning math and physics too, instead of trying to do it the textbook way of memorizing and going through things in specific order, I just launch myself into the topic and consume whatever content seems interesting enough. There's plenty content online on every topic, so it's just a matter of browsing around. Eventually I come back to things in a more systematic way but only when I get that feeling that the "automatic" phase is done and I have a vague initial foundation to build upon. And just like with English, I get the "learning things rapidly" phase eventually. And as the difficulty increases, I find that with this method I'm much less confused and more able to keep up. But I'm no genius, I just give my brain time at the start to get a look around and not rush it into understanding things prematurely.
@@may_0reo816 Same as AI do. You don't give a grammar book nor vocabulary one but throw a lot of language imput straight into language model's face in order to learn it
Language learning should not be seem as goal, but a tool. Tool to access everything you like, you unable to get in your language. This is how it started, just wanted to see memes first, and not miss any content about my fav fandoms, because as it turned out everything was Reddit reposts There's only 2 years passed, but for already a year 80% of my UA-cam is in English and I can understand most of speech without translating And this is with 0$ and 0 hours spend on google play education apps
As someone who moved very young to Canada from a Spanish-speaking country very young, I noticed this in my family. I came to Canada knowing basic English. Almost nothing. My parents had a bit more experience from university. And my little siblings knew none. Six months later, I was communicating very well with my peers at school. I remember how I'd quietly listen to the grammatical patterns that I heard in their speech, the way they pronounced the words, and everything they said while participating in class. There are words that when I say them, remind me of how I first learned them. During the same time, I remember how much my parents were struggling. Now, almost 7 years later, I speak the language fluently. I don't struggle to find words like I did in my early childhood. My dad, who works, has improved significantly but my stay-at-home mom struggled as much as she did when we first moved countries. That was until six months ago. She started interacting with people who spoke the language in an English course that had a similar teaching method to the one in the video. She is now on her way to dominate the language more. As for my little siblings, they are fluent, but since they are still young they commit grammar mistakes any child their age would, in both English and Spanish. Ever since I learned English, I have acquired a love for language learning. I'm hoping to become fluent in French in the next 4 years and I hope to become a polyglot someday.
Thanks for sharing your experience! It sounds like you were quite conscious of the process of acquiring English as a second language, even though you started when you were very young.
I teach English in Cambodia. I'm Honduran. I had moved to the US at six years of age, and tried making sense of English. I gave up, and decided to memorize everything, copying the natives' way of speaking instead of the "proper" way. I also plan to be a polyglot even though I do it more for the power and beauty of languages than to communicate, especially since most people are superficial, and their small talk bores me. To learnyiu have to 1. Practice of course; 2. Put your mind to it because this is how to memorize well; and 3. Do as natives do, paying attention to detail because the slightest difference can make you sound wrong or even say the wrong word. Many students and Asian teachers are satisfied with their imperfect English such as not finishing a word. For example, some say "studen" instead of "students." The muscle memory I have in English is a problem for when I speak Spanish. I have to make an effort to move my mouth parts more for correct Spanish pronunciation. To learn another language is a war against ignorance but also against one's own biology. You have to be reborn and live life again, experiencing everything again at least in your imagination, to acquire another "tongue." There is no shortcut to being fluent. One must change the way they think in order to incorporate a new grammar.
Thanks so much for this video! I decided to start my channel to teach Thai in Thai largely due to this video and the old Krashen Spock video. It might not be an exaggeration to say this video changed my life. Great work! It is greatly appreciated!
Update: 7 months later my progress with this method has been insane! Now listening to native content and understanding around 90% many times (Dhamma talks, health/fitness vlogs, and news). Amazing! For more about my progress and how I used ALG to do it, check this out: ua-cam.com/video/IRK3dNIKEEQ/v-deo.html&t
This makes so much sense. I've also come to the conclusion that school is doing it all wrong after realising I could speak english only thanks to internet, tv shows and video games. There's a lack of comprehensible content in other languages though but Dreaming Spanish is doing an awesome job.
Absolutely, it seems that few schools do much to provide comprehensible input when it comes to teaching languages (apart from immersion programs or classes where the subject matter is being taught in the second language). I think many, if not most, people who really succeed with learning to speak English outside of countries where English is commonly spoken are doing it through English media and the internet. Dreaming Spanish is great at providing comprehensible content in Spanish! Its creator Pablo also attended the AUA Thai Program that I talk about in the video, like I did. I've started a channel to provide English comprehensible input to beginners no matter what language they speak, including those who don't know any English at all yet: ua-cam.com/channels/SW8FB6e8tUGEaDsoe7SlWw.html If you know anyone who wants to start learning English or wants to improve their English and is looking for comprehensible content in English, please share it with them! I would like to get more feedback to keep improving it for beginners and low-level English learners.
This is so true, when my family moved to America I couldn’t speak or understand anything. I was 7 and my brother was 6, my mom dropped us off at school and I remember that whole school year I didn’t say a word but I could understand everything at the end of the year. I just watched what everyone else was doing and somehow I managed to learn English that way. I’m so fluent now that I would consider myself to be at the level as a native speaker. As for my mom and dad, my mom already knew a bit of English before coming here but she is basically at the same level as me and my brother are. My dad on the other hand still is like a beginner, I think it’s because he keeps and keeps trying to speak and translate everything instead of listening.
Thanks for sharing your experience Krisi! Your experience sounds like what I described in the video, that children often get environments with many experiences that they can connect with the language they are hearing, and in this way they can understand and pick up the new language. The problem for many adults learning new languages, especially when they are beginners or at low levels, is difficulty finding opportunities to hear the language in ways that are both highly understandable and interesting for them. Without this kind of understandable experience available to them, it becomes easy to fall back on adult abilities like trying to speak and translate when confronted with content that is either not very understandable, or is understandable but not that interesting or meaningful. I am creating English videos that are meant to be both understandable and interesting for adults, even if they don't know any English at all yet: ua-cam.com/channels/SW8FB6e8tUGEaDsoe7SlWw.html From some of the comments I have received, it sounds like this kind of material might help adults get out of habits like trying to translate everything and instead just listen and understand more and more.
Do you and your brother have a foreign accent when speaking english? And what about your mom, does she sound the same as you or has a distinct foreign accent?
@@thesmokecriminal5395 no me and my brother don’t have accents but my mom does. People are often surprised when I tell them English is my second language. My moms accent is pretty distinct but I correct her most of the time so she’s getting better at it.
@@krisimanasieva422 interesting I have heard that kids before the age of 7 can distinguishing better than kids after this age but I guess it's not the case, btw how old was ur mom when u moved to the states
This is so true! After living in Thailand for 9 years, I never thought of enrolling into a Thai language school. I picked up all the Thai I know through simply listening...to my students while they interacted, to my fellow colleagues, to families I made friends with. When I speak the language to a local, they're always shocked at how "fluent" I sound, saying I sound like a Thai person
@lauramolisho2715 Thanks for sharing that! Did you start acquiring Thai as an adult? I would be interested to know how much exposure to Thai with understanding you got and how your listening and speaking developed over those 9 years.
@BeyondLanguageLearning yes, I was 24 when I moved to Thailand. It took me roughly 3-4 years to have the ability to have a general conversation with a Thai speaker. Granted, I could only string several worlds together to form a sentence, and my listening comprehension far exceeded my speaking ability, but it took another year or so to be able to hold a decent length conversation. The fluency came naturally within those 3-4 years of acquiring the language
As a Thai person learning English by listening to UA-cam videos and later talk to online English speakers. It took me some years, now I can confirm that this way works and whenever I find someone they'd think I'm a native 😂
As a person who learnt 99% of their English from UA-cam I can totally agree. We currently are living in the best time to learn languages, because now we have short funny videos on tiktok, youtube, Instagram, everywhere you go you're able to find short content in the target language. People try to make it only as a bad thing, but gosh, this is the best way to learn the language! I now started learning Polish and Japanese watching short skits, and watching streamers play simple games I already know^^ Best way to chill and passively learn language as well!
@@CelestinWIDMER but an issue with Welsh it that every UA-camr from Wales will use English to get a larger audience (at least as far as I've found) which greatly reduces the interesting content I can find, essential to zero.
This is absolutely true, it’s how I learned English. I’m from the Netherlands, the country with the best non-native English speakers in the world. Movies and shows aren’t dubbed over, unlike most other countries. My English classes never helped me, constantly watching movies and shows and playing games did. I’ve always known this is the way to do it, immerse yourself in the language as much as possible. But that’s a hard with any language that is not English, unless you go live in that country.
I think I read somewhere that many people in the Netherlands started picking up English as children passively from hearing it in media so much and so they mainly listen when watching English TV, relying on the Dutch subtitles rarely or never, but also that there are some people who have always focused on reading the Dutch subtitles and as a result their English is poor. Does that sound accurate? I think it helps a lot that Dutch and English are so similar, with some sentences even sounding almost identical in both languages. With cases like that involving learning closely related languages, there is less of a need for creating the kind of highly understandable content and experiences for learners that I talk about in the video. However it's still important to create those things for languages like English and Dutch, especially to help beginners whose first languages are very different.
Based on my completely anecdotal experience as a Norwegian who learned English in the same way, I would disapprove this theory. The way I see my English learning I gained a basic foundation at school, then I went home and consumed massive amounts of games and movies in English. When playing games we had no choice, but when watching movies I always had Norwegian subtitles on. At first I'm sure I was fully relying on the Norwegian subtitles, but over time I got less and less reliant on them and eventually I didn't need them at all no matter what movie it was. But the thing is, I still keep the Norwegian subtitles on because it is convenient in case I don't hear what is being said due to sound effects etc. and my English isn't worse off because of it. Of course I also consume a lot of media on UA-cam without subtitles, but thinking back to when I was a kid I probably wouldn't have consumed as much English speaking media if there were no subs, so I do think there is a time and place for native language subtitles.
@@AlotOfSunInHeavenDo you ever think of using English subtitles instead of Norwegian? I miss things even when the content is in my native language, so regardless I have subtitles on for whatever I'm consuming if possible.
@@Lensynth I do if there aren't Norwegian subtitles available, but I've never thought about doing it for language learning purposes since I've never been actively trying to learn English outside of school. I would just do what was most comfortable for me.
@@AlotOfSunInHeavenAnother anecdote, but I disagree with you. I am Hungarian, a language that's further away from English than either Norwegian or Dutch. I grew up watching everything dubbed, and only ever played games in English. And that was really all I needed. My elementary and middle school English classes were a joke. We were doing paint-by-numbers at 13 years old. They didn't help me almost at all. I think the only thing I can attribute to learning there (and only there) are the past tenses of verbs, including the common irregulars. By the time I actually sought out English media on the internet, I was already pretty fluent because of games. I think the first thing I watched was ATLA. With English voices, and crucially, English subtitles. (Seasons 1 and 2 were on TV with Hungarian dub, but the latest was a year behind at the time, and there were no Hungarian fan subs) So I didn't even have a phase where I watched anything with English voice and Hungarian subtitles. I skipped straight to full English. And I feel like it would have only held me back.
I moved to Korea when I was 18 and really struggled with the language until I went to a Muay Thai gym where no one spoke English. It was a great environment to learn a language because almost every word that was used was able to be pointed to or acted out. Only when topics were abstract (for example, asking me if I would like to compete in a local competition in a few months) was I unable to understand what was going on. After a few months in the gym I started getting way better at Korean than the first year of just trying to talk with friends and family.
This absolutley happened to me with several languages before I started taking lessons on them in duolingo. Japanese (because of Japanese entertainment), German (Listening to rammstein) and Spanish (being around a lot of people that speak it in high school). It was as if I was merely wiping away the mystery to words I've heard so many times. When I tried out other languages I had no familiarity with (Chinese, Russian, and Arabic) it took an unbelievable amount focus and brain power for me to finish beginner level lessons.
Your comment illustrates the importance of getting lots of experience with the spoken language. Many people seem to overlook this. For example, an ESL teacher might not realize that the students who have a much easier time with English vocabulary, grammar, and so on are the ones who have a lot of experience with English through things like watching TV in English and having had schooling in English. Or they do realize that, but they don't actually act on that realization, for example by finding ways to help the students who are struggling to get more experience listening and understanding spoken English.
Yeah, I had similar experience. I learned english by myself just by watching UA-cam as a kid without even knowing it in the first place. I am thankful that I did that. The videos were just too intriguing that I was absorbed by them to the point I managed to learn English at a fast pace without even knowing that I learned it. 😅
@@BeyondLanguageLearning way back in the 80s there was a TV show I was interested in that was only available as a dub on a French TV channel and my school French wasn't so good, so I tape recorded the audio (this was before home video became really affordable) and listened to it over and over until I understood all that happened in the latest episode. I think I became pretty fluent in French just from that, though I also got regular French lessons in school besides so I also learned about the grammar and stuff.
I learned Mandarin Chinese to a decent level this way. Eventually I find its like listening to songs without knowing how to read music. I may not understand what the notes are but I know when a note fits or doesn't fit. And in a lot of cases, some sounds and phrases become so familiar like repeating catch phrases. And when I began to get into grammar later, things were even quicker due to the familiarity.
That seems to be just learning grammar by inference. Hearing something correctly so many times, that when it is said wrong, then you recognize it does not make sense. Then formal grammatical study is done later on understanding why it wasn't correct.
Did you attend a school like the one Marvin Brown was instructing at or did you find videos online? I am very curious about your method for acquiring Chinese.
😀 That is the way I would like to speak Chinese. I noticed that even now, I can recognize some words that they say. And besides, I know that every word have a special tone that would influence the meaning of it... I am looking forward for when I would start with it. I know that writing is another issue, because with its non phonetic structure it unites several other Chinese languages. I am now leaning Esperanto at Duolingo. And Iike the way they are teaching. Perhaps their Chinese lessons are as easy as the ones in Esperanto.😆
in Chinese it's even more important to separate where something would fit or not or the word order and propositions. So many homophones. You need it to be easy to follow for listeners yes.
@@alanguageshere's a thing: completely covering all the use cases and exclusions isn't practical when you study. Actually no conscious thought is required which is why native speakers have blindspots to certain illogical rules they know them so well they don't even formulate the exclusion from the rule. It's like "duh" for them
Yes it's amazing, I had to go halfway around the world to see the program I describe in this video because I couldn't find anything like it anywhere else, even though it had been teaching Thai using the ALG approach for about three decades. But I think that things are going to change soon, and I and others are working to bring this about!
@@josuefuentes659 the point is, there are very few people/programmes who guide learners through this approach, and only for the most-studied languages. If you want to learn a language which is not even rare, but let's say just not among the most common ones, then good luck with really being able to do it with this method from scratch
@@BeyondLanguageLearning He gets up early in the morning and studies it from books. Then he tries his best to interact and socialize with mother speakers during the course of the day. He taught himself and speaks Zulu which is far from the Latin and Germanic streams. The locals in the area call him the white Zulu and named him, 'Bapzie'
When I moved to France, my inlaws were a bit frustrated that I wasn't "learning" French and wasn't speaking to them in French even after a year being here. Instead, I was listening. And trying to understand, to make connections, to get the flow. I was speaking English with them(which was my third language and French was 4th), and they were displeased. And suddenly, after a year and a half I started talking in french. Fluently. With quite good grammar and pronunciation. Not like native, but better than many foreigners. And I knew it's gonna be like that, they just didn't believe it and thought I'm lazy. I just followed my guts. I read comics in French (visual context+fun), played videogames, watched youtube videos and listened to my inlaw family talk to each other. That's it. No grammar books, no boring lessons. I intuitively know how to speak, without knowing the rules by heart. I did the same with English before and I know that typical school program never worked as good as immersion and listening without being forced to speak. Good to see the proofs of that.
Finally someone is saying what I have always thought! I learned to speak a second language to a pretty high standard because I live with my spouse who speaks that language. When I took up a third language I was baffled by the difference in my absorption of the new language. It was much slower. I have never believed that it was because I started the third language late but that I do not have that environment to immerse myself in. I have to go out and actively find people and experiences to use that third language. Whereas I can speak my second language every day. It’s still not ideal because I need to speak with others besides my spouse but it’s better than not having him to speak with! Let us remember that the usual situation for children learning a second language in most countries is that they are in school ALL DAY LONG HEARING the language as mentioned in this video. They are listening, listening and listening! My perpetual challenge is to find a method that helps me WRITE better in my two other languages. But all I hear is “just practise”. As a music educator that would be like saying to my students ‘just practise’ ….practise WHAT? HOW? When I do that with language all I do is reinforce my bad writing. I am still seeking a method that gives me exact ways to improve my writing. Maybe I’ll end up inventing it🤔
That's like telling a music student to practise by listening. The question is not answered. But HOW by reading> HOW is it done, what is the methodology. It can't just be some process of magica absorption only. There needs to be a step by step process. I teach music, I know what it is to "practise", you have to learn HOW to practise. WHAT is practice. I have not found anything yet that gives clear instructions, telling what precise things I can do to write better. There is nothing out there that is specific. @@mrelephant3462
@laurabernay I'm sorry if my earlier short reply to your detailed comment came off as rude in any way-that was not my intention. I haven't had time to reply at length to many of the comments, and asking about reading in your other languages seemed like the obvious question based on what you said, given that you hadn't mentioned reading. I think there was a quote on a website for the AUA Thai Program (the program I feature in the video) that said something like: "If you want to speak well, listen. If you want to write well, read." If you're reading a lot in your two other languages, especially content similar to what you want to write, that should provide a great foundation for being able to write well. Can I ask what specifically you find challenging when writing in your other languages compared to English? In terms of writing in a second language, one thing I've found is that some people speak English as a second language clearly enough but their English writing (e.g. letters or essays) is very difficult to understand. I think often what happens is they are trying to write in English using more complex sentences and more sophisticated vocabulary because they're used to doing that when writing in their first language or they think that is necessary to writing well, but they haven't yet gained command of the necessary English structures and vocabulary. Their writing would probably be much clearer if they started by expressing their thoughts in writing more simply, similar to how they speak English conversationally.
Our family came to an English-speaking country when I was 5 and my oldest brother 14. I don't remember learning English, it just happened, my siblings experienced the same. But my parents never lost their German accent.
Having native accent when speaking English, is not necessary. In fact, I would state that it is one of the languages where wide accent is very acceptable. And does not equate to the language skill. Perhaps it has more to do with the fact that when you reach 100% understandability in a language, reaching perfect accent have very low return value for the effort you have to put in. Different for a child that is often (continuously) socially judged for accent.
As a child, I listened to the news in English, German, French, Serb-Croatian and Greenlandic. I had no idea what they were saying but knowing what I call “the song of the language”, helped me learn the three first one faster than my class mates. More the pronunciation than the vocabulary, but the former assisted the latter. Having said that, I think the video and the theory on which it was made both overlook some things: Pride: Grownups don’t like to fumble for words and use overly simple terms. Children lack pride and don’t mind making grammatically errors. Expectations: Children don’t need to discuss mortgages or geopolitics. They talk about sweet animals, candy, food and other simple things so they don’t need an advanced vocabulary. Motivation: If you feel something is hard, your motivation goes down. A learning method which gets you from 0 to 10 in an hour or two, motivates you because you realise that you “can” and it’s not so hard after all. It could learning to make a dentist’s appointment.
I can agree to this as a receptive bilingual to spanish for 20 years, I could only understand the language. And from the start I could speak about a lot of things and never had to studied them. However input alone wasn't enough 20 years of input and 0 years of output my grammar to this date is still not perfect but it's getting there 😅. On top of this, natives who I've spoke to and didn't about my situation were completely in awe with my accent, although I feel like its not perfect. Lots of people have told me if I never told them I wasn't a native they'd assume I was.
Thanks for sharing your experience! Depending on the particulars of your experience and what you've done, your grammar might become more and more accurate on its own over time. I think that there are many stories out there similar to yours but they haven't been very well-documented yet.
Do you feel like all the amounts of listening input you've received throughout those 20 years made the transition to speaking easier than if one were to have an intermediate level understanding of a language?
Glad I'm not crazy and this is an actual method, turns out I've been unknowingly using it. I recently started learning Turkish and I am lucky to have a large Turkish friend group in the states but they are all pressuring me to speak. I've been standing my ground and sticking to my silent period of listening and observing, but it's hard because then none of them believe that I'm actually learning 🙃oh well, they'll see eventually lol
Visual and audio comprehension immersion through different contexts, being around the language being learnt even if it's just listening really makes a difference for adult language learning. Without giving or teaching vocabulary lists, my students were eventually able to use new words in communication in English as their second language. Thank you for sharing this video!
I just got back to England after 9 years teaching English in China. I wrote an 8000 word paper on second language acquisition in Chinese kindergartens. My philosophy was always create an enjoyable environment that is language rich through contextual clues, give the children months and years without pressuring them to speak and they will know far more English than kids from other schools. I was right every time. Our kids were always put in top English set when they went to primary school! The funny thing is, other kindergartens did the opposite, and followed strict English language programs that followed specific weekly topics in structured English lessons. It was counterintuitive to their goals.
I am a retired Spanish and Linguistics Professor whose mentors in grad school were Tracy Terrell and Stephen Krashen, authors of The Natural Approach. Terrell and I and two other Spanish speakers went on to write and publish a Spanish text using Natural Approach. When we began giving workshops about this approach, we found many teachers were openly hostile . I began to do language teacher training in California and other states and used myself as a guinea pig, picking up Hebrew quite naturally. Your video is expertly done and spot on. I have shared it with my colleagues and will publicize it whenever I can. I found it on the UA-cam channel Comprehensible Russian (I attempt to acquire a new language about every ten years). Thank you, thank you!
@ProfesoraVerdura-ch7p Thank you so much for sharing your experiences with Krashen and Terrell and the Natural Approach! I really appreciate you sharing this video with your colleagues and others. You might also like my other UA-cam channel @ComprehensibleEnglish (English Comprehensible Input for ESL Beginners). On that channel, I use techniques from methods and approaches like ALG, TPR, TPRS, and the Natural Approach to make English highly comprehensible and easy to acquire for beginners, regardless of their L1. One reason I started that channel is because I saw many ESL learners struggling to find spoken English that they could easily understand at their level. Another reason is because I want to help advance research on CI and develop ways to provide it more effectively and enjoyably through video and other contexts. Thank you again for your encouragement and support!
What amazes me the most about this video is that over the years that I've been trying to learn Spanish in school and Japanese on my own to various levels of failure (😅), I came to a similar conclusion as this: I need to immerse myself in the language first, speaking should come naturally, just like for children. If I try to associate things or concepts 1:1, it requires so much processing power on the spot that it's extremely inefficient. Learning "subconsciously" the concepts first is primordial, but it becomes impossible as adults.
This is on point. I learned French this way. I started learning at 23 and am 27 now; however, I have never gone to school or taken a class in French. At the moment, I am B2. I can understand the majority of what is being said on TV and practically everything in person (like, I can even understand Verlan). I learned from the getgo that it was all about listening (listening to phrases that people use frequently and to songs). Eventually, my brain would pick it up in chunks. For example, I kept hearing "Il faut" applied to situations where people were trying to give me advice. I deduced that this meant should automatically. And I was right. I have so many other examples. I cannot stress it enough. I also got to A1+/A2 in Czech without really trying (although I took some courses and was in 2 1/2 years). Tip: Go become a farmer in the country where you wanna learn the language.
Thanks for sharing your experience! Your example of picking up language in chunks through the context in which they were used in conversations reminds me of how when I tried to apply ALG to acquiring Mandarin by watching Chinese TV dramas, I started to pick up common phrases used in conversations that way. Becoming a farmer or something similar where the language you want to learn is spoken can be a great idea provided you have the time to do it and you are going to be getting a lot of understandable experience in the language constantly that way without having to speak it right away. For example, if every day on the job as a farmer, other people are constantly instructing you or telling what to do in the language while also showing you exactly what they are talking about, you could pick up the language very quickly. Because doing things like going to another country and getting a job there to be immersed in a language is often not practical for people who want to acquire a language, I want to develop more opportunities and content that will provide people with understandable experience with languages so they can acquire them to very high levels wherever they are.
Thank you both for your interaction here. I lived in a small town in northern France for 6 months when I was 18 years old. That helped me with my French more than living in Paris. However, many of my French friends used me to work on their English so my progress got stunted. And then 20 years later, I was on a train in southern France for vacation and a big group of French people (who were a lot of fun) sat next to me. Out of nowhere, without having any exposure to French in 20 years, I just started engaging with the group both in listening and speaking. It just came out of me like magic. I was shocked.
Today, I am looking to acquire through this methodology the European Portuguese language. Not Brazilian. The problem is there is almost no comprehensible input (using the ALG method) out there. Do you think it's possible for me to cobble my own program together for myself (while I'm still in the US)? Believe it or not, I am considering working on a farm in Portugal someday vs living in a big city. And interacting with local people who speak very little English which might be difficult as many Portuguese people do speak English very well. So thanks for the Tip!
Hi @Nomadic, sure, you could create comprehensible input by finding Portuguese speakers to do Crosstalk with (you speak English and they speak Portuguese, and you each use non-verbal tools as needed to make yourselves understood) or by having tutors record themselves talking about things like pictures (see my blog post beyondlanguagelearning.com/2019/06/17/how-to-acquire-a-language-with-tutors-and-language-exchanges-and-speak-it-like-a-native-speaker/ for some ideas). It should also be easy to get a lot from Portuguese shows and videos because you have English and French, another Romance language. You could start with Portuguese content such as cartoons and UA-cam videos that have a lot of visuals and go from there.
Yeah, I'm myself an unconscious user of this technique cause I've been consuming English speaking content for years just because I liked it more. Definitely see a difference between myself and others from my country in fluency and comprehension who are studying more conventionally
Yes, there's a dramatic difference in the fluency of those who consume English content regularly compared with those who don't in many non-English speaking countries where people study English in school. Recently I've talked to quite a few English learners who say they couldn't speak English several months ago but now are quite comfortable conversing in English, even though they have only been speaking maybe a couple hours a week or so. In all these cases it appears they had all been consuming many hours of spoken English content for a long time, giving them a good foundation of understanding.
I've been learning Japanese for 3 weeks now and something I was told was to watch childrens shows. as mind numbing as it might be that's the best way to learn.
Thanks for following! Turn on notifications if you haven't and stay tuned for more videos. You can read more about the ALG approach and language acquisition on my blog beyondlanguagelearning.com and you can see videos where I teach English using ALG on my other UA-cam channel: ua-cam.com/channels/SW8FB6e8tUGEaDsoe7SlWw.html
I studdied language learning for few years and learned and learning a language. This video is a great video at showcasing this way of learning a language, other videos are longer but goes into more deep into this idea, but this video tells the necessary things, while being short. Nice video!
@boriskalashnikov8595 Thanks! That's what I was trying to do with this video, keep it short but cover the most important points regarding this approach. I think I did a pretty good job, but now that I'm getting many more comments on it, I'm thinking of making a short follow-up video to address the most common questions, misunderstandings, and so on.
The same can be said from differences between adults and children to learn music. I have kids and adults as students, and the adults are often frustrated because they "sound bad", while the kids just don't expect anything and have fun.
I just realized I said this in the video: "we become fluent in a language not through study and practice, but through understanding things in the language." I had forgotten about that line! Did you translate that into Arabic?
@@BeyondLanguageLearning My native language is Standard Arabic. But I learned English and French at school, frankly by following different languages on the Internet. I loved Standard Arabic in the first place because it is easy and understandable, followed by Spanish and Farsii - as It is pronounced and written like this, with an tighten end in Standard Arabic - ( Persian ) because they are a tonal languages, Chinese because it is a different language, Japanese because I like isolation, and English because I like Britain ( especially the English countryside ). Noting that in all of what I mentioned, I love the language of the educated ( the standard language ) and I do not like the dialects!. Your video is very, very cool, and that phrase I quoted was the best phrase I've ever heard about learning languages and I knew that!
(Please excuse my English, it's my 7th language...) this is precisely how I started to learn Polish. I decided (without knowing that such approach exist), just to listen. Nothing else. For 6 months. No single word spoken. I read a lot - newspapers, comics (GREAT APPROACH), I watched TV, watched polish films… Many years later, I am an editor-in-chief of a polish magazine! (tech stuff), I am correcting my Polish colleagues now :), It really works!
Very interesting Testowy! Did you speak a related language before starting to learn Polish? Regarding correcting your Polish colleagues, I am guessing maybe you were getting mainly "standard" Polish input through various media while their Polish may have been influenced by "non-standard" dialects, so by following an input-first approach you may have gotten a better intuition for standard Polish.
@@BeyondLanguageLearning Well, it's tricky to say... It's yes and no. I am speaking several south Slavic languages, but when I "started" with Polish language I was unable to find obvious similarities which I can find today. My level of understanding Polish when arrived in Poland was ZERO. I was thinking that people are talking so fast, and that the language is full of sz, cz, ść, żć and other strange sounds, that seemed to me that it will be impossible to learn that language. But the "method" (more like feeling, or intuition) proved just the opposite. Regarding "standard" vs "non-standard" dialects… It's again a bit different. When I discovered my own, internal method, of how to better understand and associate certain words in Polish - with similar sounds or words in other Slavic languages i know (Serbian, Croatian, Russian), I was able to use somehow that "system/pattern" and "transfer" it to Polish. Maybe it will be too boring to explain what i mean, but here is a small example: In Polish, the word for RIVER is RZEKA. In Serbian is: REKA, in Croatian: RIJEKA in Russian (Cyrillic): РЕКА (phonetically: R'yeka'h). The tricky part here is that in Polish language you are pronouncing "RZ" which sounds like "G" in French pronunciation of the word "garraGe" or the English "meaSUre". The exactly same sound is spoken, when you want to say another letter - "Ż" (also sounds like French "G" in "garraGe" or "meaSUre" in English). The problem for Polish people is following: should I write RZeka or Żeka (river) which SOUNDS identical, but orthographically just one way is the correct one (RZ). And this is a HUGE difficulty for Polish speakers. BUT, if you know other Slavic languages, it's easy. Since in Serbian is only R, in Croatian is only R in Russian is only Р (Cyrillic R), it MUST also be R (+Z) in Poland. So, to make a long story short, thanks to that "method" of proper listening, you are hearing MORE than others, and you can use it in normal situations. But, of course, my advantage in this situation is that I speak also other Slavic languages. Nevertheless, from the other side, I can ensure you, that I know many people from other Slavic countries which are not "listeners" :) and speak Polish with a strong accent. And, if you don't mind - one more thing, which is NOT connected with the main topic of the approach you are talking about (maybe some of your readers will be interested in this): If you are thinking of learning any Slavic language, try also (google it) INTERSLAVIC (artificial language, kind of Slavic Esperanto), and ALL Slavs will understand you easily. It's easy to learn, and you can use it in any Slavic country.
@Testowy thanks for your detailed reply! I think that knowing several Slavic languages probably helped you with acquiring Polish through media even if the similarities weren't obvious at first. It might be something like how acquiring Dutch from media would be for me as an L1 English speaker-right now it seems to have some strange or unfamiliar sounds, but with a lot of listening I think they will become familiar and the language might seem more similar to English. But some similarities should help on a subconscious level even before noticing them. For someone who only knows a language like English or Japanese, it would probably take much more time to gain understanding of Polish content starting from no knowledge of Polish. In my video and writing I call for more content and opportunities that present languages in ways that beginners can easily understand them no matter what language they speak. That makes sense that your knowledge of other Slavic languages would help you know the correct spelling of words in Polish that could be written a number of ways and sound the same. Regarding learning Interslavic, that sounds interesting but my preference would be to acquire a Slavic language from media and people speaking it. Do you know if any Slavic languages are particularly easy for most or all Slavs to understand?
@@BeyondLanguageLearning Yes, you are right - knowing several other Slavic languages helped me, for sure. But I think that the most important thing is to LISTEN and find those "invisible" connections between the languages. I mean - if you don’t listen, you don’t receive proper “amount” of feedback / knowledge of that unknown language. Regarding Slavic language, which is particularly easy for most of the Slavs to understand… Well, INTERSLAVIC is that language. Study case (one of the authors is working as an academic teacher in informatics) shows that Interslavic is 86% understandable for ALL Slavic groups. Immediately, before any prior knowledge. Contrary to the Esperanto, which you MUST learn to understand. IT really works, and YES, this is spoken language. Every Saturday and Sunday there is a group of people on Discord Interslavic channel who speaks about different topics. So, you can hear the sound. There are many topics on the UA-cam channels as well. Just google it using INTERSLAVIC LANGUAGE or MEDŽUSLOVJANSKY JEZYK (which is the original name for that language). Most of the films are with English and Interslavic subtitles to get used to the language more easily. There are tons of it. For now, you cannot find typical “lessons” for learning the language, but (I am also in this group of people connected with Interslavic) we are working on it. There is a HUGE parallel dictionary with ALL Slavic languages included (with English included, as an additional, control language), which means 15 languages x 18,000 words. You can check a grammar written in English if you google Interslavic - Introduction - Jan van Steenbergen. The dictionary itself is online (or one can use an Android version from Google play). If you type Interslavic (and then “-”) dictionary (and then “.com”) you can use it online. The result is immediate, with suggested word/s with proper declension / conjugation. On UA-cam, you can find more than 100 different films regarding this language. If you want to check for yourself, do the experiment. Find several people from different Slavic countries and show them one of the UA-cam films in Interslavic. They will be shocked, that all of them will understand it, despite the fact that between them (f.e. in Czech - Russian - Bulgarian - Croatian group) they are using ENGLISH to communicate within that mixed group. Enjoy,
@@bardzobardzowredna Yes, listening is definitely the most important thing. I will check out that Interslavic group. One thing that the ALG approach would propose when you have speakers of different languages together is something called "Crosstalk", where each person speaks their own language and uses non-verbal tools like gestures, paraphrasing, etc. as needed to make themselves understood. Gradually the speakers gain understanding of the other languages this way so they need less and less non-verbal communication and so on to help them understand. It sounds like Crosstalk would be easy for speakers of different Slavic languages. I think they might be able to communicate that way from scratch using audio only and just paraphrase or restate what they mean using different words in their own languages when they aren't understood.
This is how I learned English as my 3rd language. Growing up as Indonesian Javanese, my parents talk to me with Javanese through my father and Indonesian through my mother. About 10 years old I wanders on youtube for god knows why and started to watch many English speaking video game youtubers. Because I enjoyed them, I don't feel like I'm learning a language and couple of years go by I have the highes English proficiency score in my university. Currently I'm learning Japanese and hoping to acquire it the same way as how I learn English, but adult life doesn't have that much free time so it slows down how much I'm learning now.
@Pribumi1 Thanks for sharing your experience. It sounds like it really paid off for you! Your story reminds me of the Indonesian rapper Rich Brian, who said he learned English without realizing it after starting to watch UA-cam videos like tutorials and unboxing videos when he was around 10 years old. Maybe with Japanese if you find videos like gaming videos too difficult right now you can find easier content in Japanese, such as children's cartoons that many adults enjoy like Peppa Pig. You can also search for Japanese comprehensible input on UA-cam to find some beginner content to pick up Japanese from.
I began studying Gujarati 5 weeks ago. The idea to begin with learning nursery rhymes and letting my ego go has been awesome. Have fun first and reap the results later. Record yourself speaking everyday and upload to YT. This will show your progress and allow you to hear EXACTLY how you sound. Keep the uploads private if you don't want others involved.
Have you found any good comprehensible beginner content for Gujarati? This blog post I wrote can give you some ways to create this kind of content yourself with the help of language partners or tutors: beyondlanguagelearning.com/2019/06/17/how-to-acquire-a-language-with-tutors-and-language-exchanges-and-speak-it-like-a-native-speaker/ The ALG approach would recommend just listening a lot and not trying to practice speaking the language at first. In my experience with the AUA Thai Program where ALG was used, the Thai sounds and words became clearer and clearer to me as I heard and understood them more and more. After several months, I started to speak, first with a few common words and phrases, and gradually more and more. I found I didn't have to try to practice the pronunciation or tones to get them right, and I didn't need correction. Because I had listened to Thai so much first, the correct pronunciation and sounds were already in my head, so my speaking would automatically come to sound like it. In contrast, many students who were trying to speak Thai from the start had problems with things like tones and pronunciation influenced by their first language, I think because in speaking without first listening much, they ended up "borrowing" or falling back on the more familiar sounds of their first language.
@@BeyondLanguageLearning Gujutots is a channel on YT with a English/Gujurati female educator. The progress has slowed as I became enthralled with many languages. Swahili has recently begun and the ALG technique has been followed. Thank you for the upload and question. My YT channel and Instagram share this journey I have taken in 25 languages. Not trying for native levels at all, just conversational fluency. Have a great day.
I’m a part of a language learning club that implements everything that is said on this video, it’s called Hippo Family Club and even though it started by the hunch of a Japanese guy, it has become validated by the research of MIT Dr Suzanne Flinn, we typically see each other every week and we sign and dance in multiple languages and listen and act already existing stories in different languages as well. Being there has changed the way I see language and language acquisition, it has also sped up my learning of Japanese, though I probably still speak like a baby 😅
This is how I have learnt English, i rarely opened a grammar book though I know almost all the English grammar and can create sentences easily because i have absorbded the language in the past 3 years unconsciously and this is how I think that having fun and patience is the best way to learn a foreign language but a little practice is indeed necessary
I learned English (at the C1 level) by purely just watching UA-cam videos as a young kid. As soon as school started, both teachers and my parents were surprised that I could speak and write a language so fluently and easily. I did the same with Spanish too. Watch relatable videos in topics that interest you. The understanding will just come.
This is how I learned English, actually. I never really spoke the language at first, I only was listening to UA-cam videos and playing video games with English language setting, and I used a little bit of google to help translate. Now I can read Novels just fine, I do struggle with some pronunciations, but that's due to lack of practice!
For 6 years I have struggled to learn Spanish. I have asked everyone I could 'how did you learn this?'. No one could answer my question to my satisfaction so I failed and quit all the time. Then I got re-energized to find an answer and it has led me here and to Dreaming Spanish who use these techniques. I feel so inspired that I can get this language now. WOW.
...And all this happened without touching a single book. This happened to me in case of Korean language. Since Hallyu wave , ive been consuming korean content like songs and dramas movies and youtube content. Now i can speak the language fluently. I learned the letters even by writing lyrics of songs and famous movie dialogues. Thus I'm atleast 35/100 good in korean considering 100 is extreme level difficult scientific language. And all this happened without touching a single book.
same for me, i never intended to learn korean but i found out one day i can imitate korean and sound exactly like im speaking korean. i dont really watch korean dramas or films as much so i dont think my korean is as well developed but i have definitely noticed it. lots of people who consume korean media regularly and dramas say they can basically watch dramas with no subtitles now, so i wonder if this is similar to alg
Alan Watts spoke on the perceptual differences between children and adults. As we learn words to describe experiences as children we trade our awareness of true reality for concepts and models. That hard, rough, unique, heavy, bumpy, object that we experience for the first time becomes "rock". It takes a while for us to see all similar objects as rocks. When we have adequate experiences we trade the complex multi dimensional experience for "rock". Additionally, take note that experience is different than the words I used to describe the "rock". Then in the future, when we see something similar, our brain sees "rock". "Rock" is seen instead of the raw experience of something novel. It becomes narrow and defined. I think what the ALG program has found, is that we must go back to raw experience first and build new concepts naturally. Versus building upon the models and concepts we have previously constructed. I genuinely believe a state of mindfulness brings us back to the present reality and allows us to drop concepts and models. Keep in mind what I'm writing is in words and concepts and is detatched from the reality I attempt to communicate. I'm taking a new approach in my language learning journey, thank you.
This genuinely works!!! For a long time, I took English courses and learned the rules of the language, but I never felt comfortable with it - not until I became obsessed with UA-cam and started watching a lot of videos. Back then, there were very few videos in my native language, so I had to watch English ones. I barely translated any words; instead, I just listened, and that was enough to make me proficient over time. In fact, most young people in my country are good at English because they consume so much of the language through social media, movies, TV shows and videogames. Though I know this method works, now that I'm learning German, I keep gravitating towards more traditional approaches for some reason, and, as expected, I constantly get disappointed by how slowly I make progress. I know German is more difficult, but I'm making it harder than it should be by not sticking to what works. However, this video inspired me to immerse myself in German media without overthinking it:) Any recommendations for good German movies, TV shows, or UA-cam channels are appreciated!!
Great video. I'm from Argentina but when I was like 3 years old I started to use the computer to watch UA-cam videos. Most of them were in english instead of spanish, so I kind of accidentally learned english. When my parents saw this they sent me to various english schools to improve it. They were so EASY, I passed all exams without studying once. Sometimes I got errors, but since I was still watching UA-cam in english, my english was getting better. I can confirm that ALG does in fact work and I recommend it. 👍
Were there other students at the schools who didn't get as much exposure to English through things like watching English videos, and did they have more difficulty with the class activities and exams?
Thank you so much for giving me hope that I can become fluent like a native. 12 years of learning English seriously and I still can't speak or understand English like a native. All the best! 😊
More like: "We master a language not through study and practice, but by listening to people talking about pooping in the language in ways we can understand, through the use of visuals and other context as needed." That's what many of the beginner ALG Thai classes in the program Dr. Brown created were like.
This is why I learned English so fast! Only listening and watching interesting UA-cam videos. This really works great. Even though now I can’t translate well between my native language and english for school lessons. But this way is much better.
This theory makes sense. My mother grew up in the Netherlands but her English in later years was impeccable. She could communicate in either language with no thought about it, however if you wanted something translated she was stumped. It seemed the two languages lived in separate parts of her brain. She didn't look at a hond then change that to dog or visa versa, they were 2 different choices depending who she was talking to. If that's how it works for someone then this learning method is ideal. You're not translating, you're opening that extra spot.
FINALLY someone who talks about this! I did a bit of amateuristic research into this a couple of years ago and it was so hard to find any articles about it
From personal self observation, I came to the following explanation as to why. When we were kids, our parents repeated some words slowly and pretty much talked down to us. Repeating the process aided our subconscious into storing those words and phrases. “No Tim, stay away from the door” Tim didn’t knew what that sentence meant. But if were told in serious tone, and if his Mom pointed at the door and identified it as “Door” then Tim’s subconscious picks it up. Before long, Tim would be like…”Door”. Also picks up the command “stay” and perhaps noticed the similarity in the word “away” when he heard it from another person “go away” connecting the dot. Another reason why we pick a language when younger is because it is the language of the area. Where you are born, the language of the area is what you pick up. Wether your native country or another. Children of immigrants play with natives kids. Listen to natives commercial. The language factor kicks in. Whereas adults can speak like natives, but either complicates it or refuses out of pride. That being said, there is a reason why adults have accents. Due to the amount of years speaking native language, your brain accustomed to its vowels and tone. If you were to learn a language that is the complete opposite of your native, you will find it like re-training your brain. Kids don’t have that many years of talking, let alone speaking a language. When they do learn, the language is not conflicted with an already existing one.
this is true, but there is more to learning a language than simple understanding at the time. You have to remember what each words means for a long time. I remember as a kid hearing a word just once and I'd remember it days or even months later. Now I try to learn a word in a foreign language and I'm lucky if I can remember is for a few hours or even minutes. You also have to get used to different grammar rules when forming a sentences. Recognizing what someone says in one thing, but trying to form a sentence is vastly more difficult.
@@williampennjr.4448 I do understand where you come from. Something I struggled with as well. But, I came to realize that we associate words to certain moments that occurred along with it. Therefore, technically, your mind remembers the incident associated with the word, rather than the word itself. As kids, our lives are full of such moments. Whereas as adults, we have few when it comes to language and rely on language being theoretical from books and pre-recorded videos.
I moved to Germany almost two years ago and attended a couple language courses. I could say basic stuff but I didnt seem to be improving at all. I only did when I started volunteering in a place where I got tons of input and not a lot of speaking was involved. After eight months, I started actively trying to speak and somehow I had picked some grammar rules without textbooks, I didnt have to think a lot when answering or looking for words. I still struggle a little but I can manage very well only after a year. The difference between my experience and other volunteers who didnt have this kind of enviroment -and did language courses instead- is huge! I really recommend this methode. I feel so lucky I had this opportunity
My parents moved around a lot and as a child, I picked up some languages this way. As I grew older, I became more conscious of the way I acquire languages. As the video mentioned, listening is very important to get a vibe of the language. I first listen to people talk and try to make out different words, e.g, if a person spoke a sentence, I would count the number of words in it, and my brain would automatically remember the more commonly used words. Sometimes I would figure out the meaning of these words from the context, and sometimes I'd ask my friends for meanings. After I got more comfortable with the way words and sounds are said, my focus would shift to pronouns and 1st person/2nd person/3rd person verbs and stuff. And in the end I would shift to tenses. I clearly remember doing this when I was in 2nd grade with Punjabi. I then did this with Bangla in 4th grade, and in 9th grade I did this with Nepali. Here is when I realized I do this. Currently I am 18 and I am doing the same with Telugu.
@kimdokja5720 Thanks for sharing about your experiences! It sounds like you acquired these languages mainly through listening to them a lot in real-life contexts, with more conscious awareness of the process of acquisition and more conscious focus on certain parts of the languages you were acquiring as you grew up. Have you seen other people acquiring languages similarly as they grow up without as much conscious awareness?
@@BeyondLanguageLearning Yes! I grew up around kids like me, and I have seen a great deal of kids pick up a language this way. One of my neighbours, who is around my age used to do the same. That is actually how I realized that it is something I had been doing my whole life.
one thing i found that where people talk about whats happening right now is horror game playthrough videos on youtube. they are entertaining, nerve wrecking and very easy to understand and follow. amazing!
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Thank you. It agrees with what I've noticed about children - they pick up a language just by being in an environment that the language is constantly being spoken. They listen, and their brains assimilate the language structure without their being aware of it.
Just watch Peppa Pig in the language of your choosing, they do exactly that, act out scenes and describe them, I cannot stress how helpful that shit has been.
Yes, Peppa Pig seems like one of the best shows available today for adults to acquire a language starting from scratch following ALG because of all the visuals that go with what characters are saying and the narration, along with the fact that many adults like it even though it's made for preschool children.
Children grow up in a family. That family are native speakers. The child is surrounded by native speakers at home and in the world. And those native speakers are constantly feeding the child input and when the child's muscleture can form sounds, the surrounding native speakers constantly help the child with the language acquisition. All of this is to say, learning like a child as an adult would require that adult to be living in a society whose main language is the one being acquired and that adult learner needs a team around them 24-7. So, I guess it's doable but it would be an extremely expensive experiment.
The feedback is different too. People are real jerks to adults who don't speak well. They're WAY more patient and even helpful when kids don't speak well.
Yes, that happens too often to adult learners. Besides that, people will also interact and talk to kids a lot about the things around them even if the kids aren't speaking much or at all. It's much rarer for people to interact like that with adults who don't know their language well and aren't speaking it.
Exactly my thoughts too. Plus think about how easy life is as a child. Parents comfort and care for you, you're put into social structures where you are mostly free to learn by playing along with others, you get a lot of different input but also time to rest. You don't (have to) think about bills, where to get food and what to eat etc - how to survive basically. The only thing you do is "learning". If the stress were taken off of adults many would performe nearly as well as children or teenagers do, if not even better. Considering how much time, comfort and ease children have they're pretty slow.
1:50 "... learn *about* grammar". It may seem just a detail, but it is quite important to distinguish between learning *about grammar* and learning *grammar*. People usually just obliterate that distinction when they speak about language learning.
That's the distinction I try to make. Young children acquiring their first or second languages learn the grammar subconsciously and will be able to use it correctly in speaking, and only later consciously learn about the grammar rules, if ever (and even then, even linguists don't know what all the rules of grammar are, even for well-documented languages like English). Some adults, such as the ones that Dr. J. Marvin Brown observed, pick up languages much like children do without formal study, can speak them much like native speakers, and would have difficulty explaining the rules of grammar that they use correctly when speaking. Meanwhile, many adults have formal knowledge of grammar rules in languages like English from years of study and yet they fail to use the rules correctly when speaking the language.
Thank you! I have always thought, "I don't think it's an age thing. Babies get 24/7 immersion with feeding, playing, and watching everybody do stuff at home. Maybe if adults got turned into a baby, or treated like a baby, they'd get that." Now I know there isn't much research on it, and it was just ASSUMED that adults were different. Wild. We live in a world where only 60 or 70 years ago, medical schools taught that if you touched someone's heart, it would automatically stop. But that isn't true. We have heart surgery. So why did they teach that?
You're welcome! I don't know about the heart thing, but in general I would say there can be a lot of resistance to challenging established ideas in various fields, and even, it seems, resistance to moving forward with research and also applying what is already known. Regarding the idea of many treating adults like a baby, with ALG I think of it kind of like you want to treat adults learning new languages as adults, but treat the language part of them as babies, in the sense of nurturing the new language by giving them lots of the spoken language in rich contexts and experiences so they can easily acquire it.
THANK YOU!!! The hardest part about learning a new language is not having enough speakers from said language. I need people to listen to and practice with.
You should focus on meaning instead of the language when understanding and speaking the new language. As a language learner, it helps to have experiences and content that are so interesting that you even forget they're in another language. This content should also be highly understandable at your level. As a lower-level learner, this means there should be lots of context such as visuals to help you get the meaning of what's being said. With enough of this context you can understand what is being said right away without any need to translate it. ALG is about providing content and experiences that are both highly understandable and interesting even for total beginners in new languages.
Watching videos on UA-cam is a great way to learn a language. I got to a certified C1 level of English by just watching UA-cam. I have never sat down to study English actively, even at school, but, for example, I had a pretty easy time understanding what the Oxford comma is, just from a UA-cam video.
Thank you for this great video! I hope that ALG brings adult students the freedoms to play and to learn. In future, people might ask why wasn't ALG and comprehensible input bigger sooner?
You're welcome! I hope so too and I believe it will, and that people will wonder why people didn't get the chance to acquire languages this way all along.
in other words, kids learn by translating sign language into words and sentences instead of translating words and sentences to other words and sentence of a different language. charade games would be an example where one person would have to act out a situation and the other person has to guess what the first person is trying to say. if you are good in charade games, you will be good at learning a language.
Not really. How do you use sign language to convey concept like: fun, interesting, inspiring, unbelievable? What movement would you use to convey the meaning of: engage, acceptance, responsibility?
Thank you for sharing this. Happy to know there is a name for this type of immersive learning. By recreating the native language acquisition process I was able to learn Mandarin Chinese and reach native level in less than 7 years. I started learning the language close to my 30s. So I am a living example that the adult brain learns as well as the child brain if willing to overcome the "I don't understand, so what's the point in listening" type of mindset. Another thing I found is very helpful and there is also research about it is to listen to the language you want to learn while sleeping, as it helps the brain consolidate the knowledge.
+ Kids are allowed to fail. If adults make mistakes even with advanced words, they are looked at as if they‘re stupid, discouraging them. Meanwhile even native speaker children can mispronounce a word 10+ times and usually their caregiver will patiently correct them until they get it right.
Love the vid, its making me realize why I am not having a difficult time learning Japanese even when I used to absolutely suck at foreign languages. While not quite the same the way that I am learning now is try to avoid connecting Japanese and English too closely, instead trying to "think" in Japanese, or at the very least hearing a phrase and trying to intuitively understand it without ever going word by word and thinking of the equivalent word. It's not super successful in making me learn the language, but it is making it more fun and less tedious. If anyone is looking for material specifically for Japanese I recommend the show "Nights with a Cat", which you can watch on youtube (with and without subs, I recommend without, its pretty simple). Each ep is about a minute long, and while not focused on teaching a language it fulfills much of the things described in this video: its simple, its interesting, and concepts are demonstrated both through voice and through images quite clearly. If anyone knows of anything similar, please respond as I would love to find more stuff like this.
It all depends on what you want to do in the target language. If you want to be able to speak like an educated adult, to be able to read and write to a high standard, to feel at home in the culture, or to be able to work above a menial level, then you are going to need to put in some effort. You are going to need to study and get educated. If this means your speaking skills are serviceable, but less than native-like, many people find that an acceptable trade-off. If, on the other hand, you just want to enjoy entertainment, to be able to chat with acquaintances in a context-tied way, to get by on holiday, or to work in a low-paid job, then ALG would probably work. It might take longer, though, as most adults, unlike most children, have other demands on their time, such as earning a living, taking care of their needs independently and bringing up their own children. When a child leaves school, they may be fluent, but they are only at the *beginning* of true mastery of their language, whether it is a primary or secondary one.
As I'm sure many commenters have pointed out, a good way to learn languages a bit more like this is by watching movies/shows/etc in your desired language (without subtitles in your native language). Gives you an opportunity to listen without being expected to reply, as well as associate visuals with sounds. Another one I find helps a bit, tho generally only with the written word and vocab rather than speaking (since less likely to hear the pronunciations): playing video games in your target language! For example, I have my Minecraft set to Swedish, so every word has a visual reference right there with it. (Admittedly I don't know if this works as well if you're unfamiliar with the script your target language uses. All the languages I've seriously studied/learned have used roman characters; I have little experience with other scripts.)
I actually learned english this way by accident xD and some native speakers say, they wouldn't even realise I'm german if they didn't knew otherwise. But I have to say, that I still was in school at the time, where I also learned english. But looking at other students, that learned english just through school, I cann telly that it was not school teaching me english, as the other can't even form a sentence. What I did? Basically german content on youtube got boring, so I started watching english let's plays. And what do you do in let's play? Smalltalk and explaining what you are doing ;) I didn't realise until now through, that it was what they were talking about, rather then me just listening. I hope I'll be able to replicate this in my japanese studies going forward
I think a lot of people are acquiring English nowadays without even intending to though watching videos like let's plays. It helps that English and languages like German are relatively similar. For Japanese, you'll probably want to find content to start with where there are more visuals and more of a match between what you're hearing in Japanese and what you are seeing, more repetition, and simpler language.
This is a bit cringe to say, but with the recent prevalence of vtubers, who generally do hours upon hours of let's plays with audience interactions and kayfabe that helps contextualize what they're saying, learning Japanese via UA-cam entertainment is at its easiest lol
This is true! I’m a living proof of this learning method. When I was a teen I had an interest for learning piano, especially in funk and jazz style but there’s no piano teacher in my area teaches these styles so I went on UA-cam and started watching other American/British UA-camrs teaching these styles, my English back then was veryyy limited, just enough to do some greetings and I couldn’t hold a normal conversation, no understanding of grammar neither, I couldn’t do well in English classes at school like nearly failed. So, after just watching UA-cam Videos for years to learn piano, I accidentally improved my English a ton! especially in listening and writing; then I realized I could understand other UA-camrs in other random subjects (daily life, vlogs…) after years just watching UA-cam videos I can hold medium conversation with other English speakers (both native and non-native), then I started learning grammar again but this time I felt so much easier learning it. I know lots of people learning English through games and watching shows such as “Friends”, basically it’s just the same method, we just emerge ourselves by English naturally with subjects, things we like.
@hunghoangmusic Thanks for sharing your story! This reminds me of how J. Marvin Brown (the linguist who developed ALG) observed that when people tried to learn a language through study, they struggled, but when they spent enough time doing things they enjoyed in the language, they ended up fluent without really trying.
I can understand a lot of Occitan, Italian, Spanish, as well as Ukrainian, Belarusian and Polish without ever learning any of these langauges because I've consumed some content in that langauge. However it was still made easier by the fact I already speak French and Russian. I assume it's not that easy for unrelated languages, you'll have to specifically search for very easy and simple videos first to have comprehensive input in the language.
Yes, people can benefit much more from content like TV shows, which are made for fluent and native speakers of the language they're in, when they already have a closely related language. Part of what I'm saying is we need more content and experiences that are highly comprehensible for beginners in a language even when their first language is a completely different language.
I was failing English class in 6th grade, until I suddenly did a 180 and became fluent in about 6 months. All I did was watch UA-cam videos by English speaking creators. I simply listened, and tried to understand what was happening based on the visuals of the video. I also watched cartoons in English this way. Recently, I dropped out of French class. I got the worst possible grade you could get and never participated in class, because due to a 6 month hospital stay followed by the 2020 lockdown, I missed over a year of French class and couldn't keep up. After that I stopped trying to do my homework or speak in class, because it just felt pointless to try to catch up now. And yet, now that I stipped taking French after failing it spectacularly, I'm able to understand texts written in French to a decent degree. I did nothing, yet somehow I still learned the language. I still don't understand spoken French, but I'm better at the language than I expected after years of simply being present in French class and otherwise doing nothing.
My whole life changed after I started using Dreaming Spanish to learn Spanish. I realized I had done similar things in order to learn English, now I'm learning German by watching tv shows and I'm also producing comprehensible input content in my native language, which is Portuguese.
Little kids, babies even, do communicate with their parents. Their vocab and pronunciation improve over time. But yes, they generally do get a lot of "ear time" and of course do not study as we tend to .
I think the key word there is "communicate". Young children and babies communicate with their parents with whatever abilities they have available to them. Early on this is limited to simple gestures like reaching and sounds like laughing and crying. As they acquire language, their ability to use it becomes a greater and greater part of their communicative ability. But their focus is on communication, with language just one part of communicating, rather than on the language itself. They can't try to use language or analyze it in the ways that adults and even older children can begin to. What this video is saying that the use of abilities to try to use a new language and analyze it can interfere with language acquisition and prevent older learners from approaching the same levels of fluency and ability as younger learners, even when they get a lot of "ear time" or understandable experience with the language. A problem though is that, as adults, we often find we have to do things like study to make things in a new language understandable to us, and try to speak in the new language in order to get people to speak it to us. It would be better if we could just get a lot of content and experiences that are understandable and interesting to us in the new language at our level that would enable us to pick up the language automatically.
I think that is one reason why a lot of people learn English relatively easily: All over the world they hear it in songs, maybe movies There might be more social media content about a topic available in English, than in one's own language. Streamers and UA-camrs who speaks English. And so people learn how the language works because they want to watch, listen to, and read the interesting and/or fun content, which is in English.
I have a question regarding potential of a silent period to potentially reverse any damage that may have been caused by slightly early speaking. I started speaking Japanese before I had fully aquired the language, however I had acquired a large proportion of pronunciation naturally and hence sounded much better than other foreigners I heard. But then I realised that maybe I should have waited even longer before speaking, as I may have gained a few small bad habits, like my pronunciation isn't entirely perfect. I have never studied grammar, nor have I thought consciously about the language and have done very minimal reading, learning mostly through listening. I would estimate my "ceiling" as described by Brown's ALGIE formula to be 95%. I believe I did a bit of damage. I am semi-fluent but for the next 18 months I intend to stop speaking altogether and get purely listening input for around 8 hours a day, not looking anything up, no thinking about language, no reading, no writing, no speaking. The complete ALG way. Is there a chance my ceiling can go back up to 100% given that I have some minor bad habits already? Have you ever observed "damaged" students reversing some of that "damage" through implementing a period of silence after they had already started speaking?
Anecdotally, I've heard of people who started learning languages using "traditional" methods where they were speaking from the start, then after they learned about comprehensible input, they decided to undergo a "silent period" and focus on listening for at least a few months, and they reported that their pronunciation was much better when they started speaking again. I think if someone had been speaking and reading and so on from the start of their learning for a much longer time than they had, undergoing such a "silent period" wouldn't have as much of a positive effect because their pronunciation habits influenced by their first language would be more entrenched from that much more early speaking. To be clear, it isn't early speaking itself that's a problem but rather "forced speaking" where someone is consciously trying to produce language beyond what they've acquired from input. So one could be speaking quite a bit from early on while still following the ALG approach. In practice, this might be things like very common phrases one has heard many times, one- or two-word sentences, and so on. Also, even when following the approach, everything won't necessarily come out correctly at first. If one has gotten enough input first to get "clear mental images" of the pronunciation and other features of the language, over time one's output will conform to those naturally. I can't say for sure about your case, but it seems to be like it would be unnecessary and extreme for you to stop all speaking, etc., for that long. At most I would say you might want to limit speaking if you have been "pushing" it beyond what you've acquired through listening and what comes out naturally. Continuing to get a lot of listening input you enjoy is of course good. When reading, you could focus on reading content that has audio so you can hear the correct pronunciation. Another thing to consider is how much would you be giving up by entirely stopping doing things like speaking Japanese, for example in terms of your social life? Is that worth it for what in your estimation is a small percentage of possible improvement? On that note, I would also say that being overly concerned about speaking "perfectly" as a goal vs. being able to speak and communicate clearly also can be detrimental in terms of creating anxiety and so on. Going back to my earlier point though, from what you've described it sounds like it would be necessary at most to limit your speaking to what comes naturally for you based on input, if you have been pushing speaking beyond that a lot, rather than to stop speaking entirely for so long.
@@BeyondLanguageLearning Thanks for your reply, sorry I only just saw it now! I think it's still worth for me to stop outputting for at least another year, since when i move to Japan I won't have the opportunity to run this "experiment" ever again. I am genuinely curious to see how much higher my ceiling can reach once I start outputting again. The lack of social interaction isn't a big issue as I'm an introvert, and I'm willing to make sacrifices now to maximise my future potential. I'll let you know how it goes. Thanks for your advice :)
@Kougami Shinya maybe you could find mainly conversational partners or social situations where you can be more of a listener and there's not much pressure to speak a lot
When I was like 12 I would watch so many DIY videos in english and it helped me learn so so much. Later those videos became makeup and fashion videos and as I grew up more I would watch more medical, political and other more toughtful content and through out I would always want to talk to natives. Now I started learning korean and I have already listened to kpop since 2017 and watch kdramas since 2020 so I'm pretty familiar with the language for long time but I only started learning the language this year and I'm learning fast by watching korean content and learning grammar sometimes.
I started all wrong and now I can understand tv shows and movies with english subtitles which is my target language. but when I take them off it’s jaw dropping how my comprehension drops. any tips to improve listening comprehension?
To develop English listening comprehension it's important to listen to English a lot without relying on reading English subtitles for understanding too much. Try to find and watch content that is easier for you to understand without subtitles. Movies can often be quite difficult to understand, sometimes even for many native speakers, because of how many actors talk and all the other loud sounds and music. Some TV series have much clearer speaking and much more dialogue that is easy to follow. You can also watch and listen to a lot of other content like podcasts and UA-cam videos you find interesting and not too difficult to understand. I also have a UA-cam channel with lots of English videos that are easy to understand even for beginners: ua-cam.com/users/ComprehensibleEnglish It may also help to work on your ability to hear and pronounce any English sounds that you have difficulty with. This could help you to hear spoken English more clearly.
Disable those subtitles. I was in your position and that's what made it for me. If you understand shows with subtitles, you don't need them anymore. You just need to have a courage to do it, because the very first time it could be hard.
A child starts from a point of no language and then adds the language/languages that are in their environment. This is a form of imprinting. Adults struggle to learn foreign languages because we are already habituated to our native, imprinted language, and so when we try to acquire other languages, we tend to study them through the lens of our native tongues, which is inhibiting. Children, if they start early enough, can acquire other languages along with their accents. Adults cannot, for all intents and purposes, learn a foreign language accent-free. The muscles of our tongues and mouths are conditioned in ways that are almost impossible to alter without focused, intense speech therapy. Does this mean adults shouldn't attempt to learn other languages? Not at all. But we need to be honest about our limitations: children do indeed have a physiological advantage. This is the best argument for promoting foreign language instruction in the lowest grades, rather than waiting until the kids are adolescents and see themselves as doing just fine with the language they already have.
"Adults struggle to learn foreign languages because we are already habituated to our native, imprinted language, and so when we try to acquire other languages, we tend to study them through the lens of our native tongues, which is inhibiting." This is exactly the point of the ALG approach described in the video: the fact that "we tend to study them through the lens of our native tongues" when learning languages as adults is the very thing that causes many of our struggles with them and inhibits us from approaching more native-like levels of ability. Therefore, the ALG approach advocates *avoiding* studying the new language through the lens of our first language by getting lots of understandable experience with the new language without involving our first language. For example, with regards to accent, ALG theorizes that adults typically speak second languages with foreign accents because they almost always try to speak and read them a lot *before* they've heard them enough to sufficiently internalize their sounds. This forces them to fall back on the sounds and habits of their first language. The ALG approach advocates listening to a new language for hundreds of hours in ways that we can understand it *before* speaking it much, and listening without trying to compare it with or filter it through our first language. The result of all these hours of listening with understanding is that we internalize the sounds of the new language, developing a "clear mental image" that we have as a reference as we speak more and more. Although we're used to speaking our first language with its accent and the "muscles of our tongues and mouths are conditioned", having that clear reference through listening first will allow our speaking in the new language to automatically conform to the sounds and accent that we have heard and internalized, instead of "falling back" on the characteristics of our first language. I and others who have attended the AUA Thai Program described in the video and followed the ALG approach have experienced this firsthand. By listening a lot before speaking much, we've found that as we started to speak more we could automatically speak with a more native-like pronunciation and accent in a "difficult" language without any special practice, despite beginning to acquire the language well into adulthood.
actually it is possible for adults to learn the accent, check out Matt vs Japan i also know some teachers in my school (i live in 廣東 area) who have learned mandarin or cantonese (or both) very well and they have the accent also the other way around, i have some native 廣東話 friends who can barely speak and/or speak with a huge accent
Thanks for checking out my video about ALG! I made it five years ago for my blog Beyond Language Learning. Its mission is to make language learning much easier and much more enjoyable for everyone. At the time, the video and blog didn't get much response, so I didn't make any more videos and eventually stopped blogging. It's great to see this video start to get so many views after so long. However, this has happened in the middle of a difficult few weeks for me. I want to respond to your comments, questions, etc. as much as I can, but that may take some time. In the meantime, I'd be grateful if you check out my related work that I've linked to below. -Kristian
Beyond Language Learning blog: beyondlanguagelearning.com
Comprehensible English is my UA-cam channel with many ALG-style comprehensible input videos for English beginners: ua-cam.com/users/ComprehensibleEnglish
I also teach and coach professionals who speak English as a second language, applying what I've learned about second language acquisition and teaching to help them improve their English for their careers. Here's an article I wrote about it: www.linkedin.com/pulse/problem-english-study-practice-what-do-instead-improve-peltonen/
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Do you have any advice or sources I can use to apply this method to learn another language, such as say Spanish?
This is where art and theater can grow by creating stories and entertainments for the audience to become part of they can learn the language
I didn't know, until your presentation, that my second year German teacher in 1967 used immersion techniques. From day 1 of her class only German was used. All other communication was in her attire, props and acting out. The last part of each class was our congregating in a 'hof' or neighborhood gathering chatting, drinking, ordering food and singing "pub" songs. It made learning a language into enjoying a culture.
This is exactly how I learn every languages as an adult. Just mimic the sound, sometime you need to wait a while to develop new muscle to pronounce a particular words.
If you do not have the chance to be in the environment of the language you are learning, just turn on a tv show, the language is less natural but at least it’s better than the text book, just play it again and again and again…
Also pop songs… learning to sing really helps too. Good luck everyone !
@@tanyachou4474 I also watch the ads since I can easily translate and use currency. Watching mystery shows also helps since I can figure who done it along with the detectives.
I wish I could go back to eating, pooping, sleeping, and learning language all day without worrying about dumb silly adult stuff Those were the days....
As adults we definitely have more things to do and think about than children, and this can make it more difficult to dedicate so much time to acquiring another language and getting the input we need in it. I think a big part of the solution to this is for adults to have many more opportunities to do things that they enjoy, do things that they have to do, and do things that they would be doing anyway in the language they want to acquire in ways that are interesting and understandable to them.
I don't want to be a kid now, I want to be a kid back in the 70/80s.
I hear ya
@@fryloc359what do you mean? These days kids have a lot more options available to them. Bored of being a boy? Get castrated, put some makeup on, now you’re a girl. What a time to be alive!
Be careful what you wish for...
This is basically how I learned Japanese in my early 30s. I went to Japan alone, basically deaf, dumb, and mute, and just soaked for 3 months. Always listening, always watching, 24/7. Even while sleeping I had the TV or Radio on. I learned like a baby.
Upsides: 3 years later my speech sounds and feels native enough that people don’t know I’m not Japanese unless we’re speaking in person. I think in Japanese, and can use it without thinking about the mechanics of how it works, same as in English.
Downsides: since I never studied officially my writing is atrocious. I know waaay more vocabulary than I know how to even write. Reading is considerably better than writing, but nowhere near as good as speaking and listening comprehension.
That's kind of funny - I had a similar experience with Thai, and got to the point where I can pass as Thai on the phone. Then moved to Japan and started learning Japanese... Made several of the mistakes mentioned in this video and my Japanese sucks.
I don’t believe you
@@ezekielrast7807 I don't believe that you don't believe him.
@@ezekielrast7807 I highly recommend you try it yourself for whatever language you want to learn. Go to the native country of that language. Don’t try to start speaking and interacting right away, just exist. Watch native TV (news, variety shows, kids shows, etc) at LEAST 4 hours a day every single day. Go outside and observe people interact in different environments at LEAST 8 hours a day, every single day. Listen to native language podcasts or talk radio at LEAST 4 hours a day every day, and also while sleeping.
After a few months it’ll be harder NOT to pick up the language than to learn it. Try it and you’ll make yourself a believer.
@SebastianBlix Very interesting story, thanks for sharing it! Did you do that first three months of Japanese in Japan totally from scratch, and without looking up words or anything like that, but rather just getting the meaning of words from the contexts and environments? Also how would you describe your comprehension after the three months, and how did your speaking develop?
I learned a crap ton of French by being a bad student. I was taking college French, but would skip my homework to instead watch French UA-cam videos, starting with French In Action, but slowly worked my way towards more and more fluent French. No translation, no speaking, just absorption. Over time I began to understand a lot of French with such ease and even occasionally started to automatically formulate sentences without consciously thinking. Unfortunately the semester ended and I got busy with life and didn't keep up with it, but I know I can always continue what I was doing and get better at it again.
Yes, actually when you learn that natural way, you don't really forget it and can easily refresh the language very quickly
so no subtitles just pure watching?
I should try… wish me luck :D
did you watch stuff with captions or just the french
captions in the learning language, NOT your language @@FroggWizzard
thx@@rambunctiousvegetable
As a student of Dr Brown in Bangkok from 1985 his method is the only way to learn a language for adults. Listen, understand and don't speak. Now as a 74 year old Thai Citizen my Thai is fluent, but I became fluent 5 years after studying with Dr Brown.
@michaeljcarneyjr.6187 Thank you, Michael, for sharing about your experience with the AUA Thai Program! I have been trying to find more fluent alumni of the program but it has been difficult, in part because the program generally did not keep in touch with past students and vice versa. I would like to talk to those who followed the ALG approach and went on to attain high levels of ability in Thai, and people who were students when Dr. Brown was there. Unfortunately, I only learned about ALG in 2009 and first went to Thailand to attend the program in 2013, long after he had passed away.
Marty is that you!!!
by this method, how do you start talking when you're not practicing?
You learn as a child learns a 1 year old hears his parents talk to them by 2 he understands some of what's been said by age 3 they're talking up a storm, in this method your first 3 months are listening and understanding, that way you will have proper pronunciation when you begin speaking. It works wonderfully if you follow the program but to many people are impatient start speaking and can't be understood by native speakers.
@@michaeljcarneyjr.6187 Thanks for the answer, I guess I would be one of those impatient people too, if I don't practice something immediately it won't stay in my head.
" We master a language not through study and practice, but by understanding the things that are in that language ”.
This, in my opinion, is the most beautiful thing ever said!
That's a beautiful quote about language acquisition!
And it's so true. I learned English as an adult entirely through reading and listening, not because I tried to learn the language, I was simply very interested in what I was reading (and listening to, or watching), and I didn't bother with translations. No dictionary ever. Lately I've been pondering what happened back then, and the really important step is: not stopping at words you don't understand while reading. It's essential to just go on, and then at the point where words stop being words on a page, but instead a story in your mind.. then that's when the magic happens. Before that point the brain doesn't really connect meaning to words. At the end of every book I understood most of what I didn't understand in the beginning, my brain had figured it out after more exposure. The trick is to not consciously try to understand it (but it's also necessary to use what Dr. Krashen calls "comprehensible input" - I always read something I knew something about or had a great interest in. Tech magazines at first - I was intensely interested in the content. And then other stuff later). Part of this though is that my exposure to the language was quite enormous, even though I've never lived in an English-speaking country. English has a particular advantage there, compared to other languages.
I learned another language years later, to a low intermediate level - I didn't have more time (but it was enough to get by) using essentially the same method.
I had a hard time believing I could do the same with Japanese, as I couldn't just start reading.. but as I'm slowly getting over that problem it seems it'll work the same. I should have believed more in this method at the start, and saved some years. Still "speechless", but from what I remember from the past it'll work out - at some point, with enough exposure, phrases and sentences will start echoing in the mind and they'll come out. At least I hope so for this language too.
You have been exposed to relatively few ideas then.
It's Not True In Japanese Though as you might encounter different pronunciation and Different expressions as You might not have heard the Phrase in English "Read The Air" on top of Memorising thousands of Kanji and Combinations of Kanji.
How do you distinguish between Different Kanji Pronunciations and Kanji Itself - 昨夜十六夜、どこは十六りんごと魔理沙霧雨？
As if understanding couldn't happen through study and practice! OKAY...
This is fascinating! This is how I learned English as a 2nd language. I tried textbooks first but it got really boring and confusing really quickly, so I decided to just read and listen to whatever content online that I liked, and translate when I can't understand from context alone. Over time I repeatedly found myself surprised at how much I can understand from context without translation. And then at some point without even realizing it I stopped translating in my head entirely, and I started picking up words and phrases at a rate I didn't think was possible, because I was very interested in the content that I was consuming. I also didn't speak much for years, since I had no one to speak to in English but myself, never thought that might have actually helped me pick up the language faster.
I think this "automatic" language learning that critical thinking can interfere with can be likened to muscle memory, sometimes if you try to consciously think about a skill or behavior that you have developed a muscle memory for, you can actually confuse yourself and momentarily forget how to do it. It's like you need to let the brain build and use whatever circuits it thinks best for the job. And I think it's in our best interest to let that part of our brains figure out stuff like language, after all if we had the chance to think critically with higher brain functions about how to walk for the first time we will all be still crawling around LOL
I use this for learning math and physics too, instead of trying to do it the textbook way of memorizing and going through things in specific order, I just launch myself into the topic and consume whatever content seems interesting enough. There's plenty content online on every topic, so it's just a matter of browsing around. Eventually I come back to things in a more systematic way but only when I get that feeling that the "automatic" phase is done and I have a vague initial foundation to build upon. And just like with English, I get the "learning things rapidly" phase eventually. And as the difficulty increases, I find that with this method I'm much less confused and more able to keep up. But I'm no genius, I just give my brain time at the start to get a look around and not rush it into understanding things prematurely.
Very well explained. Thanks for sharing your experience with us.
it's scary to see how flent u are its like ur an alien lol. what ur first language and when did u start learning english
This literally sounds like it was written by me, i can relate to literally everything you just said...
How is it going in 2077?
@@may_0reo816
Same as AI do. You don't give a grammar book nor vocabulary one but throw a lot of language imput straight into language model's face in order to learn it
Language learning should not be seem as goal, but a tool. Tool to access everything you like, you unable to get in your language.
This is how it started, just wanted to see memes first, and not miss any content about my fav fandoms, because as it turned out everything was Reddit reposts
There's only 2 years passed, but for already a year 80% of my UA-cam is in English and I can understand most of speech without translating
And this is with 0$ and 0 hours spend on google play education apps
As someone who moved very young to Canada from a Spanish-speaking country very young, I noticed this in my family. I came to Canada knowing basic English. Almost nothing. My parents had a bit more experience from university. And my little siblings knew none. Six months later, I was communicating very well with my peers at school. I remember how I'd quietly listen to the grammatical patterns that I heard in their speech, the way they pronounced the words, and everything they said while participating in class. There are words that when I say them, remind me of how I first learned them. During the same time, I remember how much my parents were struggling. Now, almost 7 years later, I speak the language fluently. I don't struggle to find words like I did in my early childhood. My dad, who works, has improved significantly but my stay-at-home mom struggled as much as she did when we first moved countries. That was until six months ago. She started interacting with people who spoke the language in an English course that had a similar teaching method to the one in the video. She is now on her way to dominate the language more. As for my little siblings, they are fluent, but since they are still young they commit grammar mistakes any child their age would, in both English and Spanish. Ever since I learned English, I have acquired a love for language learning. I'm hoping to become fluent in French in the next 4 years and I hope to become a polyglot someday.
Thanks for sharing your experience! It sounds like you were quite conscious of the process of acquiring English as a second language, even though you started when you were very young.
U can do all things through Christ who strengthens you
@@renarich4942Christ gave me the strength to work for money to buy hookers and blow
I teach English in Cambodia. I'm Honduran. I had moved to the US at six years of age, and tried making sense of English. I gave up, and decided to memorize everything, copying the natives' way of speaking instead of the "proper" way. I also plan to be a polyglot even though I do it more for the power and beauty of languages than to communicate, especially since most people are superficial, and their small talk bores me. To learnyiu have to 1. Practice of course; 2. Put your mind to it because this is how to memorize well; and 3. Do as natives do, paying attention to detail because the slightest difference can make you sound wrong or even say the wrong word. Many students and Asian teachers are satisfied with their imperfect English such as not finishing a word. For example, some say "studen" instead of "students." The muscle memory I have in English is a problem for when I speak Spanish. I have to make an effort to move my mouth parts more for correct Spanish pronunciation. To learn another language is a war against ignorance but also against one's own biology. You have to be reborn and live life again, experiencing everything again at least in your imagination, to acquire another "tongue." There is no shortcut to being fluent. One must change the way they think in order to incorporate a new grammar.
Bon courage pour le français, ce n'est pas la langue la plus facile à maîtriser 😆
Thanks so much for this video! I decided to start my channel to teach Thai in Thai largely due to this video and the old Krashen Spock video. It might not be an exaggeration to say this video changed my life. Great work! It is greatly appreciated!
Update: 7 months later my progress with this method has been insane! Now listening to native content and understanding around 90% many times (Dhamma talks, health/fitness vlogs, and news). Amazing!
For more about my progress and how I used ALG to do it, check this out:
ua-cam.com/video/IRK3dNIKEEQ/v-deo.html&t
This makes so much sense. I've also come to the conclusion that school is doing it all wrong after realising I could speak english only thanks to internet, tv shows and video games. There's a lack of comprehensible content in other languages though but Dreaming Spanish is doing an awesome job.
Absolutely, it seems that few schools do much to provide comprehensible input when it comes to teaching languages (apart from immersion programs or classes where the subject matter is being taught in the second language). I think many, if not most, people who really succeed with learning to speak English outside of countries where English is commonly spoken are doing it through English media and the internet.
Dreaming Spanish is great at providing comprehensible content in Spanish! Its creator Pablo also attended the AUA Thai Program that I talk about in the video, like I did. I've started a channel to provide English comprehensible input to beginners no matter what language they speak, including those who don't know any English at all yet: ua-cam.com/channels/SW8FB6e8tUGEaDsoe7SlWw.html If you know anyone who wants to start learning English or wants to improve their English and is looking for comprehensible content in English, please share it with them! I would like to get more feedback to keep improving it for beginners and low-level English learners.
What if school is doing it wrong *because* it's school? I.e. its need to test people necessarily forces output.
This is so true, when my family moved to America I couldn’t speak or understand anything. I was 7 and my brother was 6, my mom dropped us off at school and I remember that whole school year I didn’t say a word but I could understand everything at the end of the year. I just watched what everyone else was doing and somehow I managed to learn English that way. I’m so fluent now that I would consider myself to be at the level as a native speaker. As for my mom and dad, my mom already knew a bit of English before coming here but she is basically at the same level as me and my brother are. My dad on the other hand still is like a beginner, I think it’s because he keeps and keeps trying to speak and translate everything instead of listening.
Thanks for sharing your experience Krisi! Your experience sounds like what I described in the video, that children often get environments with many experiences that they can connect with the language they are hearing, and in this way they can understand and pick up the new language.
The problem for many adults learning new languages, especially when they are beginners or at low levels, is difficulty finding opportunities to hear the language in ways that are both highly understandable and interesting for them. Without this kind of understandable experience available to them, it becomes easy to fall back on adult abilities like trying to speak and translate when confronted with content that is either not very understandable, or is understandable but not that interesting or meaningful.
I am creating English videos that are meant to be both understandable and interesting for adults, even if they don't know any English at all yet: ua-cam.com/channels/SW8FB6e8tUGEaDsoe7SlWw.html From some of the comments I have received, it sounds like this kind of material might help adults get out of habits like trying to translate everything and instead just listen and understand more and more.
@@BeyondLanguageLearning thank you very much
Do you and your brother have a foreign accent when speaking english? And what about your mom, does she sound the same as you or has a distinct foreign accent?
@@thesmokecriminal5395 no me and my brother don’t have accents but my mom does. People are often surprised when I tell them English is my second language. My moms accent is pretty distinct but I correct her most of the time so she’s getting better at it.
@@krisimanasieva422 interesting I have heard that kids before the age of 7 can distinguishing better than kids after this age but I guess it's not the case, btw how old was ur mom when u moved to the states
This is so true! After living in Thailand for 9 years, I never thought of enrolling into a Thai language school. I picked up all the Thai I know through simply listening...to my students while they interacted, to my fellow colleagues, to families I made friends with. When I speak the language to a local, they're always shocked at how "fluent" I sound, saying I sound like a Thai person
@lauramolisho2715 Thanks for sharing that! Did you start acquiring Thai as an adult? I would be interested to know how much exposure to Thai with understanding you got and how your listening and speaking developed over those 9 years.
@BeyondLanguageLearning yes, I was 24 when I moved to Thailand. It took me roughly 3-4 years to have the ability to have a general conversation with a Thai speaker. Granted, I could only string several worlds together to form a sentence, and my listening comprehension far exceeded my speaking ability, but it took another year or so to be able to hold a decent length conversation. The fluency came naturally within those 3-4 years of acquiring the language
As a Thai person learning English by listening to UA-cam videos and later talk to online English speakers. It took me some years, now I can confirm that this way works and whenever I find someone they'd think I'm a native 😂
@rickyanthony 😨
Asian people are always sayinf that you sound great/fluent, they're just too nice
As a person who learnt 99% of their English from UA-cam I can totally agree. We currently are living in the best time to learn languages, because now we have short funny videos on tiktok, youtube, Instagram, everywhere you go you're able to find short content in the target language. People try to make it only as a bad thing, but gosh, this is the best way to learn the language! I now started learning Polish and Japanese watching short skits, and watching streamers play simple games I already know^^ Best way to chill and passively learn language as well!
Hmm I really want to learn Welsh (actually being Welsh) I will try that.
no attention span moment
@@abyssaljam441bruh in what world is learning Welsh useful
Nowadays, the hardest thing in learning a language is just getting the algorithm to give you content in your target language
@@CelestinWIDMER but an issue with Welsh it that every UA-camr from Wales will use English to get a larger audience (at least as far as I've found) which greatly reduces the interesting content I can find, essential to zero.
This is absolutely true, it’s how I learned English. I’m from the Netherlands, the country with the best non-native English speakers in the world. Movies and shows aren’t dubbed over, unlike most other countries. My English classes never helped me, constantly watching movies and shows and playing games did. I’ve always known this is the way to do it, immerse yourself in the language as much as possible. But that’s a hard with any language that is not English, unless you go live in that country.
I think I read somewhere that many people in the Netherlands started picking up English as children passively from hearing it in media so much and so they mainly listen when watching English TV, relying on the Dutch subtitles rarely or never, but also that there are some people who have always focused on reading the Dutch subtitles and as a result their English is poor. Does that sound accurate? I think it helps a lot that Dutch and English are so similar, with some sentences even sounding almost identical in both languages. With cases like that involving learning closely related languages, there is less of a need for creating the kind of highly understandable content and experiences for learners that I talk about in the video. However it's still important to create those things for languages like English and Dutch, especially to help beginners whose first languages are very different.
Based on my completely anecdotal experience as a Norwegian who learned English in the same way, I would disapprove this theory. The way I see my English learning I gained a basic foundation at school, then I went home and consumed massive amounts of games and movies in English. When playing games we had no choice, but when watching movies I always had Norwegian subtitles on. At first I'm sure I was fully relying on the Norwegian subtitles, but over time I got less and less reliant on them and eventually I didn't need them at all no matter what movie it was. But the thing is, I still keep the Norwegian subtitles on because it is convenient in case I don't hear what is being said due to sound effects etc. and my English isn't worse off because of it. Of course I also consume a lot of media on UA-cam without subtitles, but thinking back to when I was a kid I probably wouldn't have consumed as much English speaking media if there were no subs, so I do think there is a time and place for native language subtitles.
@@AlotOfSunInHeavenDo you ever think of using English subtitles instead of Norwegian?
I miss things even when the content is in my native language, so regardless I have subtitles on for whatever I'm consuming if possible.
@@Lensynth I do if there aren't Norwegian subtitles available, but I've never thought about doing it for language learning purposes since I've never been actively trying to learn English outside of school. I would just do what was most comfortable for me.
@@AlotOfSunInHeavenAnother anecdote, but I disagree with you.
I am Hungarian, a language that's further away from English than either Norwegian or Dutch.
I grew up watching everything dubbed, and only ever played games in English.
And that was really all I needed.
My elementary and middle school English classes were a joke. We were doing paint-by-numbers at 13 years old.
They didn't help me almost at all. I think the only thing I can attribute to learning there (and only there) are the past tenses of verbs, including the common irregulars.
By the time I actually sought out English media on the internet, I was already pretty fluent because of games.
I think the first thing I watched was ATLA. With English voices, and crucially, English subtitles. (Seasons 1 and 2 were on TV with Hungarian dub, but the latest was a year behind at the time, and there were no Hungarian fan subs)
So I didn't even have a phase where I watched anything with English voice and Hungarian subtitles. I skipped straight to full English.
And I feel like it would have only held me back.
When I put down the dictionaries and textbooks and started hanging out, dating, and playing online games, my language skills got a whole lot better!
I moved to Korea when I was 18 and really struggled with the language until I went to a Muay Thai gym where no one spoke English. It was a great environment to learn a language because almost every word that was used was able to be pointed to or acted out. Only when topics were abstract (for example, asking me if I would like to compete in a local competition in a few months) was I unable to understand what was going on. After a few months in the gym I started getting way better at Korean than the first year of just trying to talk with friends and family.
This absolutley happened to me with several languages before I started taking lessons on them in duolingo. Japanese (because of Japanese entertainment), German (Listening to rammstein) and Spanish (being around a lot of people that speak it in high school). It was as if I was merely wiping away the mystery to words I've heard so many times. When I tried out other languages I had no familiarity with (Chinese, Russian, and Arabic) it took an unbelievable amount focus and brain power for me to finish beginner level lessons.
Your comment illustrates the importance of getting lots of experience with the spoken language. Many people seem to overlook this. For example, an ESL teacher might not realize that the students who have a much easier time with English vocabulary, grammar, and so on are the ones who have a lot of experience with English through things like watching TV in English and having had schooling in English. Or they do realize that, but they don't actually act on that realization, for example by finding ways to help the students who are struggling to get more experience listening and understanding spoken English.
Yeah, I had similar experience. I learned english by myself just by watching UA-cam as a kid without even knowing it in the first place. I am thankful that I did that. The videos were just too intriguing that I was absorbed by them to the point I managed to learn English at a fast pace without even knowing that I learned it. 😅
@@errebusaetherSame. In my case it was tv. I watched cartoon network a lot.
@@BeyondLanguageLearning way back in the 80s there was a TV show I was interested in that was only available as a dub on a French TV channel and my school French wasn't so good, so I tape recorded the audio (this was before home video became really affordable) and listened to it over and over until I understood all that happened in the latest episode. I think I became pretty fluent in French just from that, though I also got regular French lessons in school besides so I also learned about the grammar and stuff.
I learned Mandarin Chinese to a decent level this way. Eventually I find its like listening to songs without knowing how to read music. I may not understand what the notes are but I know when a note fits or doesn't fit. And in a lot of cases, some sounds and phrases become so familiar like repeating catch phrases. And when I began to get into grammar later, things were even quicker due to the familiarity.
That seems to be just learning grammar by inference. Hearing something correctly so many times, that when it is said wrong, then you recognize it does not make sense.
Then formal grammatical study is done later on understanding why it wasn't correct.
Did you attend a school like the one Marvin Brown was instructing at or did you find videos online? I am very curious about your method for acquiring Chinese.
😀 That is the way I would like to speak Chinese. I noticed that even now, I can recognize some words that they say. And besides, I know that every word have a special tone that would influence the meaning of it... I am looking forward for when I would start with it. I know that writing is another issue, because with its non phonetic structure it unites several other Chinese languages.
I am now leaning Esperanto at Duolingo. And Iike the way they are teaching. Perhaps their Chinese lessons are as easy as the ones in Esperanto.😆
in Chinese it's even more important to separate where something would fit or not or the word order and propositions. So many homophones. You need it to be easy to follow for listeners yes.
@@alanguageshere's a thing: completely covering all the use cases and exclusions isn't practical when you study. Actually no conscious thought is required which is why native speakers have blindspots to certain illogical rules
they know them so well they don't even formulate the exclusion from the rule. It's like "duh" for them
April of 2021 and we still don’t have these kinds of classes for adults learning new language. This is fantastic. How have we NOT done this yet?
So frustrating right. I feel this industry would have good money behind it if it was implemented. So many people want to learn languages as adults
Yes it's amazing, I had to go halfway around the world to see the program I describe in this video because I couldn't find anything like it anywhere else, even though it had been teaching Thai using the ALG approach for about three decades. But I think that things are going to change soon, and I and others are working to bring this about!
You have to look up "comprehensible input Spanish or English and so on
If you are interested in Thai you can also check out this:
ua-cam.com/channels/WBek-qVDuFNsvFbRClPjrA.html
@@josuefuentes659 the point is, there are very few people/programmes who guide learners through this approach, and only for the most-studied languages. If you want to learn a language which is not even rare, but let's say just not among the most common ones, then good luck with really being able to do it with this method from scratch
My Father is 84 and is still learning new languages better than most teenagers can.
Cool, pops! 👴
Nice! How does he learn them?
@@BeyondLanguageLearning He gets up early in the morning and studies it from books. Then he tries his best to interact and socialize with mother speakers during the course of the day. He taught himself and speaks Zulu which is far from the Latin and Germanic streams. The locals in the area call him the white Zulu and named him, 'Bapzie'
Most teenagers these days seem to be learning-impaired.
@@truthseeker471By travelling or does he use the web? Zulu is a bit far.. Very cool, though!
When I moved to France, my inlaws were a bit frustrated that I wasn't "learning" French and wasn't speaking to them in French even after a year being here. Instead, I was listening. And trying to understand, to make connections, to get the flow. I was speaking English with them(which was my third language and French was 4th), and they were displeased. And suddenly, after a year and a half I started talking in french. Fluently. With quite good grammar and pronunciation. Not like native, but better than many foreigners. And I knew it's gonna be like that, they just didn't believe it and thought I'm lazy. I just followed my guts. I read comics in French (visual context+fun), played videogames, watched youtube videos and listened to my inlaw family talk to each other. That's it. No grammar books, no boring lessons. I intuitively know how to speak, without knowing the rules by heart. I did the same with English before and I know that typical school program never worked as good as immersion and listening without being forced to speak. Good to see the proofs of that.
It makes senses that it is much easier to paint on a blank canvas than on one thats already filled
My thoughts as well. Once you have "flashed" your initial software, you will be inevitably build above on it.
Finally someone is saying what I have always thought! I learned to speak a second language to a pretty high standard because I live with my spouse who speaks that language. When I took up a third language I was baffled by the difference in my absorption of the new language. It was much slower. I have never believed that it was because I started the third language late but that I do not have that environment to immerse myself in. I have to go out and actively find people and experiences to use that third language. Whereas I can speak my second language every day. It’s still not ideal because I need to speak with others besides my spouse but it’s better than not having him to speak with! Let us remember that the usual situation for children learning a second language in most countries is that they are in school ALL DAY LONG HEARING the language as mentioned in this video. They are listening, listening and listening! My perpetual challenge is to find a method that helps me WRITE better in my two other languages. But all I hear is “just practise”. As a music educator that would be like saying to my students ‘just practise’ ….practise WHAT? HOW? When I do that with language all I do is reinforce my bad writing. I am still seeking a method that gives me exact ways to improve my writing. Maybe I’ll end up inventing it🤔
Have you tried reading?
All the time!!!@@BeyondLanguageLearning
You practice writing by reading
That's like telling a music student to practise by listening. The question is not answered. But HOW by reading> HOW is it done, what is the methodology. It can't just be some process of magica absorption only. There needs to be a step by step process. I teach music, I know what it is to "practise", you have to learn HOW to practise. WHAT is practice. I have not found anything yet that gives clear instructions, telling what precise things I can do to write better. There is nothing out there that is specific.
@@mrelephant3462
@laurabernay I'm sorry if my earlier short reply to your detailed comment came off as rude in any way-that was not my intention. I haven't had time to reply at length to many of the comments, and asking about reading in your other languages seemed like the obvious question based on what you said, given that you hadn't mentioned reading.
I think there was a quote on a website for the AUA Thai Program (the program I feature in the video) that said something like: "If you want to speak well, listen. If you want to write well, read." If you're reading a lot in your two other languages, especially content similar to what you want to write, that should provide a great foundation for being able to write well. Can I ask what specifically you find challenging when writing in your other languages compared to English?
In terms of writing in a second language, one thing I've found is that some people speak English as a second language clearly enough but their English writing (e.g. letters or essays) is very difficult to understand. I think often what happens is they are trying to write in English using more complex sentences and more sophisticated vocabulary because they're used to doing that when writing in their first language or they think that is necessary to writing well, but they haven't yet gained command of the necessary English structures and vocabulary. Their writing would probably be much clearer if they started by expressing their thoughts in writing more simply, similar to how they speak English conversationally.
Our family came to an English-speaking country when I was 5 and my oldest brother 14. I don't remember learning English, it just happened, my siblings experienced the same. But my parents never lost their German accent.
Same thing happened to my mom and her parents
Having native accent when speaking English, is not necessary. In fact, I would state that it is one of the languages where wide accent is very acceptable. And does not equate to the language skill. Perhaps it has more to do with the fact that when you reach 100% understandability in a language, reaching perfect accent have very low return value for the effort you have to put in. Different for a child that is often (continuously) socially judged for accent.
As a child, I listened to the news in English, German, French, Serb-Croatian and Greenlandic. I had no idea what they were saying but knowing what I call “the song of the language”, helped me learn the three first one faster than my class mates. More the pronunciation than the vocabulary, but the former assisted the latter.
Having said that, I think the video and the theory on which it was made both overlook some things:
Pride: Grownups don’t like to fumble for words and use overly simple terms. Children lack pride and don’t mind making grammatically errors.
Expectations: Children don’t need to discuss mortgages or geopolitics. They talk about sweet animals, candy, food and other simple things so they don’t need an advanced vocabulary.
Motivation: If you feel something is hard, your motivation goes down. A learning method which gets you from 0 to 10 in an hour or two, motivates you because you realise that you “can” and it’s not so hard after all. It could learning to make a dentist’s appointment.
I can agree to this as a receptive bilingual to spanish for 20 years, I could only understand the language. And from the start I could speak about a lot of things and never had to studied them. However input alone wasn't enough 20 years of input and 0 years of output my grammar to this date is still not perfect but it's getting there 😅. On top of this, natives who I've spoke to and didn't about my situation were completely in awe with my accent, although I feel like its not perfect. Lots of people have told me if I never told them I wasn't a native they'd assume I was.
Thanks for sharing your experience! Depending on the particulars of your experience and what you've done, your grammar might become more and more accurate on its own over time. I think that there are many stories out there similar to yours but they haven't been very well-documented yet.
Do you feel like all the amounts of listening input you've received throughout those 20 years made the transition to speaking easier than if one were to have an intermediate level understanding of a language?
Glad I'm not crazy and this is an actual method, turns out I've been unknowingly using it. I recently started learning Turkish and I am lucky to have a large Turkish friend group in the states but they are all pressuring me to speak. I've been standing my ground and sticking to my silent period of listening and observing, but it's hard because then none of them believe that I'm actually learning 🙃oh well, they'll see eventually lol
Nice, let us know how it goes! Maybe in the meantime you can find at least a couple people who are more supportive of the approach you are taking.
Nice thing about Turkish is there is so much Turkish series you can watch on UA-cam like payitaht abdulhamid or filinta
Dreaming Spanish used this method! Anyone seeking to learn Spanish ought to go there
Visual and audio comprehension immersion through different contexts, being around the language being learnt even if it's just listening really makes a difference for adult language learning. Without giving or teaching vocabulary lists, my students were eventually able to use new words in communication in English as their second language. Thank you for sharing this video!
I just got back to England after 9 years teaching English in China. I wrote an 8000 word paper on second language acquisition in Chinese kindergartens. My philosophy was always create an enjoyable environment that is language rich through contextual clues, give the children months and years without pressuring them to speak and they will know far more English than kids from other schools. I was right every time. Our kids were always put in top English set when they went to primary school!
The funny thing is, other kindergartens did the opposite, and followed strict English language programs that followed specific weekly topics in structured English lessons. It was counterintuitive to their goals.
I am a retired Spanish and Linguistics Professor whose mentors in grad school were Tracy Terrell and Stephen Krashen, authors of The Natural Approach. Terrell and I and two other Spanish speakers went on to write and publish a Spanish text using Natural Approach. When we began giving workshops about this approach, we found many teachers were openly hostile . I began to do language teacher training in California and other states and used myself as a guinea pig, picking up Hebrew quite naturally. Your video is expertly done and spot on. I have shared it with my colleagues and will publicize it whenever I can. I found it on the UA-cam channel Comprehensible Russian (I attempt to acquire a new language about every ten years). Thank you, thank you!
@ProfesoraVerdura-ch7p Thank you so much for sharing your experiences with Krashen and Terrell and the Natural Approach! I really appreciate you sharing this video with your colleagues and others.
You might also like my other UA-cam channel @ComprehensibleEnglish (English Comprehensible Input for ESL Beginners). On that channel, I use techniques from methods and approaches like ALG, TPR, TPRS, and the Natural Approach to make English highly comprehensible and easy to acquire for beginners, regardless of their L1.
One reason I started that channel is because I saw many ESL learners struggling to find spoken English that they could easily understand at their level. Another reason is because I want to help advance research on CI and develop ways to provide it more effectively and enjoyably through video and other contexts. Thank you again for your encouragement and support!
What amazes me the most about this video is that over the years that I've been trying to learn Spanish in school and Japanese on my own to various levels of failure (😅), I came to a similar conclusion as this: I need to immerse myself in the language first, speaking should come naturally, just like for children. If I try to associate things or concepts 1:1, it requires so much processing power on the spot that it's extremely inefficient. Learning "subconsciously" the concepts first is primordial, but it becomes impossible as adults.
This is on point. I learned French this way. I started learning at 23 and am 27 now; however, I have never gone to school or taken a class in French. At the moment, I am B2. I can understand the majority of what is being said on TV and practically everything in person (like, I can even understand Verlan). I learned from the getgo that it was all about listening (listening to phrases that people use frequently and to songs). Eventually, my brain would pick it up in chunks. For example, I kept hearing "Il faut" applied to situations where people were trying to give me advice. I deduced that this meant should automatically. And I was right. I have so many other examples. I cannot stress it enough. I also got to A1+/A2 in Czech without really trying (although I took some courses and was in 2 1/2 years).
Tip: Go become a farmer in the country where you wanna learn the language.
Thanks for sharing your experience! Your example of picking up language in chunks through the context in which they were used in conversations reminds me of how when I tried to apply ALG to acquiring Mandarin by watching Chinese TV dramas, I started to pick up common phrases used in conversations that way.
Becoming a farmer or something similar where the language you want to learn is spoken can be a great idea provided you have the time to do it and you are going to be getting a lot of understandable experience in the language constantly that way without having to speak it right away. For example, if every day on the job as a farmer, other people are constantly instructing you or telling what to do in the language while also showing you exactly what they are talking about, you could pick up the language very quickly.
Because doing things like going to another country and getting a job there to be immersed in a language is often not practical for people who want to acquire a language, I want to develop more opportunities and content that will provide people with understandable experience with languages so they can acquire them to very high levels wherever they are.
Thank you both for your interaction here. I lived in a small town in northern France for 6 months when I was 18 years old. That helped me with my French more than living in Paris. However, many of my French friends used me to work on their English so my progress got stunted. And then 20 years later, I was on a train in southern France for vacation and a big group of French people (who were a lot of fun) sat next to me. Out of nowhere, without having any exposure to French in 20 years, I just started engaging with the group both in listening and speaking. It just came out of me like magic. I was shocked.
Today, I am looking to acquire through this methodology the European Portuguese language. Not Brazilian. The problem is there is almost no comprehensible input (using the ALG method) out there. Do you think it's possible for me to cobble my own program together for myself (while I'm still in the US)? Believe it or not, I am considering working on a farm in Portugal someday vs living in a big city. And interacting with local people who speak very little English which might be difficult as many Portuguese people do speak English very well. So thanks for the Tip!
Hi @Nomadic, sure, you could create comprehensible input by finding Portuguese speakers to do Crosstalk with (you speak English and they speak Portuguese, and you each use non-verbal tools as needed to make yourselves understood) or by having tutors record themselves talking about things like pictures (see my blog post beyondlanguagelearning.com/2019/06/17/how-to-acquire-a-language-with-tutors-and-language-exchanges-and-speak-it-like-a-native-speaker/ for some ideas). It should also be easy to get a lot from Portuguese shows and videos because you have English and French, another Romance language. You could start with Portuguese content such as cartoons and UA-cam videos that have a lot of visuals and go from there.
ask me how I came to know the word solive.
Yeah, I'm myself an unconscious user of this technique cause I've been consuming English speaking content for years just because I liked it more. Definitely see a difference between myself and others from my country in fluency and comprehension who are studying more conventionally
Yes, there's a dramatic difference in the fluency of those who consume English content regularly compared with those who don't in many non-English speaking countries where people study English in school.
Recently I've talked to quite a few English learners who say they couldn't speak English several months ago but now are quite comfortable conversing in English, even though they have only been speaking maybe a couple hours a week or so. In all these cases it appears they had all been consuming many hours of spoken English content for a long time, giving them a good foundation of understanding.
I love the animation! Has it's own sort of humor to it, aswell as getting the point across in a smooth way!
Thanks, glad you enjoy it! That's exactly what I was going for with the animation! 😊
I've been learning Japanese for 3 weeks now and something I was told was to watch childrens shows. as mind numbing as it might be that's the best way to learn.
Wow, this video impressed me a lot. It's a shame you don't have more videos in your YT channel, I'll follow you from now!
Thanks for following! Turn on notifications if you haven't and stay tuned for more videos. You can read more about the ALG approach and language acquisition on my blog beyondlanguagelearning.com and you can see videos where I teach English using ALG on my other UA-cam channel: ua-cam.com/channels/SW8FB6e8tUGEaDsoe7SlWw.html
@@BeyondLanguageLearning Very good content. Please upload more videos!
@@BeyondLanguageLearning so listening is the key to learning a new language?
@@kokidchaz4790 Yes! Check out this playlist for more in-depth explanation:
ua-cam.com/play/PLgdZTyVWfUhlcP3Wj__xgqWpLHV0bL_JA.html
@@salonisharma5406 Yes, Kris! Please make more...
I studdied language learning for few years and learned and learning a language.
This video is a great video at showcasing this way of learning a language, other videos are longer but goes into more deep into this idea, but this video tells the necessary things, while being short.
Nice video!
@boriskalashnikov8595 Thanks! That's what I was trying to do with this video, keep it short but cover the most important points regarding this approach. I think I did a pretty good job, but now that I'm getting many more comments on it, I'm thinking of making a short follow-up video to address the most common questions, misunderstandings, and so on.
The same can be said from differences between adults and children to learn music. I have kids and adults as students, and the adults are often frustrated because they "sound bad", while the kids just don't expect anything and have fun.
" نتقن اللغة ليس من خلال الدراسة و الممارسة، إنما بفهم الأشياء الكائنة في تلك اللغة ".
هذا في رأيي أجمل ما قيل على الإطلاق!
I just realized I said this in the video: "we become fluent in a language not through study and practice,
but through understanding things in the language." I had forgotten about that line! Did you translate that into Arabic?
@@BeyondLanguageLearning
My native language is Standard Arabic. But I learned English and French at school, frankly by following different languages on the Internet. I loved Standard Arabic in the first place because it is easy and understandable, followed by Spanish and Farsii - as It is pronounced and written like this, with an tighten end in Standard Arabic - ( Persian ) because they are a tonal languages, Chinese because it is a different language, Japanese because I like isolation, and English because I like Britain ( especially the English countryside ).
Noting that in all of what I mentioned, I love the language of the educated ( the standard language ) and I do not like the dialects!.
Your video is very, very cool, and that phrase I quoted was the best phrase I've ever heard about learning languages and I knew that!
(Please excuse my English, it's my 7th language...) this is precisely how I started to learn Polish. I decided (without knowing that such approach exist), just to listen. Nothing else. For 6 months. No single word spoken. I read a lot - newspapers, comics (GREAT APPROACH), I watched TV, watched polish films… Many years later, I am an editor-in-chief of a polish magazine! (tech stuff), I am correcting my Polish colleagues now :), It really works!
Very interesting Testowy! Did you speak a related language before starting to learn Polish?
Regarding correcting your Polish colleagues, I am guessing maybe you were getting mainly "standard" Polish input through various media while their Polish may have been influenced by "non-standard" dialects, so by following an input-first approach you may have gotten a better intuition for standard Polish.
@@BeyondLanguageLearning Well, it's tricky to say... It's yes and no. I am speaking several south Slavic languages, but when I "started" with Polish language I was unable to find obvious similarities which I can find today. My level of understanding Polish when arrived in Poland was ZERO. I was thinking that people are talking so fast, and that the language is full of sz, cz, ść, żć and other strange sounds, that seemed to me that it will be impossible to learn that language. But the "method" (more like feeling, or intuition) proved just the opposite.
Regarding "standard" vs "non-standard" dialects… It's again a bit different. When I discovered my own, internal method, of how to better understand and associate certain words in Polish - with similar sounds or words in other Slavic languages i know (Serbian, Croatian, Russian), I was able to use somehow that "system/pattern" and "transfer" it to Polish. Maybe it will be too boring to explain what i mean, but here is a small example:
In Polish, the word for RIVER is RZEKA. In Serbian is: REKA, in Croatian: RIJEKA in Russian (Cyrillic): РЕКА (phonetically: R'yeka'h). The tricky part here is that in Polish language you are pronouncing "RZ" which sounds like "G" in French pronunciation of the word "garraGe" or the English "meaSUre". The exactly same sound is spoken, when you want to say another letter - "Ż" (also sounds like French "G" in "garraGe" or "meaSUre" in English). The problem for Polish people is following: should I write RZeka or Żeka (river) which SOUNDS identical, but orthographically just one way is the correct one (RZ). And this is a HUGE difficulty for Polish speakers. BUT, if you know other Slavic languages, it's easy. Since in Serbian is only R, in Croatian is only R in Russian is only Р (Cyrillic R), it MUST also be R (+Z) in Poland.
So, to make a long story short, thanks to that "method" of proper listening, you are hearing MORE than others, and you can use it in normal situations. But, of course, my advantage in this situation is that I speak also other Slavic languages. Nevertheless, from the other side, I can ensure you, that I know many people from other Slavic countries which are not "listeners" :) and speak Polish with a strong accent.
And, if you don't mind - one more thing, which is NOT connected with the main topic of the approach you are talking about (maybe some of your readers will be interested in this): If you are thinking of learning any Slavic language, try also (google it) INTERSLAVIC (artificial language, kind of Slavic Esperanto), and ALL Slavs will understand you easily. It's easy to learn, and you can use it in any Slavic country.
@Testowy thanks for your detailed reply! I think that knowing several Slavic languages probably helped you with acquiring Polish through media even if the similarities weren't obvious at first. It might be something like how acquiring Dutch from media would be for me as an L1 English speaker-right now it seems to have some strange or unfamiliar sounds, but with a lot of listening I think they will become familiar and the language might seem more similar to English. But some similarities should help on a subconscious level even before noticing them.
For someone who only knows a language like English or Japanese, it would probably take much more time to gain understanding of Polish content starting from no knowledge of Polish. In my video and writing I call for more content and opportunities that present languages in ways that beginners can easily understand them no matter what language they speak.
That makes sense that your knowledge of other Slavic languages would help you know the correct spelling of words in Polish that could be written a number of ways and sound the same.
Regarding learning Interslavic, that sounds interesting but my preference would be to acquire a Slavic language from media and people speaking it. Do you know if any Slavic languages are particularly easy for most or all Slavs to understand?
@@BeyondLanguageLearning Yes, you are right - knowing several other Slavic languages helped me, for sure. But I think that the most important thing is to LISTEN and find those "invisible" connections between the languages. I mean - if you don’t listen, you don’t receive proper “amount” of feedback / knowledge of that unknown language.
Regarding Slavic language, which is particularly easy for most of the Slavs to understand… Well, INTERSLAVIC is that language. Study case (one of the authors is working as an academic teacher in informatics) shows that Interslavic is 86% understandable for ALL Slavic groups. Immediately, before any prior knowledge. Contrary to the Esperanto, which you MUST learn to understand. IT really works, and YES, this is spoken language. Every Saturday and Sunday there is a group of people on Discord Interslavic channel who speaks about different topics. So, you can hear the sound. There are many topics on the UA-cam channels as well. Just google it using INTERSLAVIC LANGUAGE or MEDŽUSLOVJANSKY JEZYK (which is the original name for that language). Most of the films are with English and Interslavic subtitles to get used to the language more easily. There are tons of it. For now, you cannot find typical “lessons” for learning the language, but (I am also in this group of people connected with Interslavic) we are working on it. There is a HUGE parallel dictionary with ALL Slavic languages included (with English included, as an additional, control language), which means 15 languages x 18,000 words. You can check a grammar written in English if you google Interslavic - Introduction - Jan van Steenbergen. The dictionary itself is online (or one can use an Android version from Google play). If you type Interslavic (and then “-”) dictionary (and then “.com”) you can use it online. The result is immediate, with suggested word/s with proper declension / conjugation. On UA-cam, you can find more than 100 different films regarding this language. If you want to check for yourself, do the experiment. Find several people from different Slavic countries and show them one of the UA-cam films in Interslavic. They will be shocked, that all of them will understand it, despite the fact that between them (f.e. in Czech - Russian - Bulgarian - Croatian group) they are using ENGLISH to communicate within that mixed group. Enjoy,
@@bardzobardzowredna Yes, listening is definitely the most important thing. I will check out that Interslavic group.
One thing that the ALG approach would propose when you have speakers of different languages together is something called "Crosstalk", where each person speaks their own language and uses non-verbal tools like gestures, paraphrasing, etc. as needed to make themselves understood. Gradually the speakers gain understanding of the other languages this way so they need less and less non-verbal communication and so on to help them understand. It sounds like Crosstalk would be easy for speakers of different Slavic languages. I think they might be able to communicate that way from scratch using audio only and just paraphrase or restate what they mean using different words in their own languages when they aren't understood.
This is how I learned English as my 3rd language. Growing up as Indonesian Javanese, my parents talk to me with Javanese through my father and Indonesian through my mother.
About 10 years old I wanders on youtube for god knows why and started to watch many English speaking video game youtubers. Because I enjoyed them, I don't feel like I'm learning a language and couple of years go by I have the highes English proficiency score in my university.
Currently I'm learning Japanese and hoping to acquire it the same way as how I learn English, but adult life doesn't have that much free time so it slows down how much I'm learning now.
@Pribumi1 Thanks for sharing your experience. It sounds like it really paid off for you! Your story reminds me of the Indonesian rapper Rich Brian, who said he learned English without realizing it after starting to watch UA-cam videos like tutorials and unboxing videos when he was around 10 years old.
Maybe with Japanese if you find videos like gaming videos too difficult right now you can find easier content in Japanese, such as children's cartoons that many adults enjoy like Peppa Pig. You can also search for Japanese comprehensible input on UA-cam to find some beginner content to pick up Japanese from.
I began studying Gujarati 5 weeks ago. The idea to begin with learning nursery rhymes and letting my ego go has been awesome.
Have fun first and reap the results later. Record yourself speaking everyday and upload to YT. This will show your progress and allow you to hear EXACTLY how you sound. Keep the uploads private if you don't want others involved.
Have you found any good comprehensible beginner content for Gujarati? This blog post I wrote can give you some ways to create this kind of content yourself with the help of language partners or tutors: beyondlanguagelearning.com/2019/06/17/how-to-acquire-a-language-with-tutors-and-language-exchanges-and-speak-it-like-a-native-speaker/
The ALG approach would recommend just listening a lot and not trying to practice speaking the language at first. In my experience with the AUA Thai Program where ALG was used, the Thai sounds and words became clearer and clearer to me as I heard and understood them more and more. After several months, I started to speak, first with a few common words and phrases, and gradually more and more. I found I didn't have to try to practice the pronunciation or tones to get them right, and I didn't need correction. Because I had listened to Thai so much first, the correct pronunciation and sounds were already in my head, so my speaking would automatically come to sound like it.
In contrast, many students who were trying to speak Thai from the start had problems with things like tones and pronunciation influenced by their first language, I think because in speaking without first listening much, they ended up "borrowing" or falling back on the more familiar sounds of their first language.
So, almost the opposite of what's suggested here. One year later, how did that work out?
@@BeyondLanguageLearning Gujutots is a channel on YT with a English/Gujurati female educator. The progress has slowed as I became enthralled with many languages. Swahili has recently begun and the ALG technique has been followed. Thank you for the upload and question. My YT channel and Instagram share this journey I have taken in 25 languages. Not trying for native levels at all, just conversational fluency. Have a great day.
I’m a part of a language learning club that implements everything that is said on this video, it’s called Hippo Family Club and even though it started by the hunch of a Japanese guy, it has become validated by the research of MIT Dr Suzanne Flinn, we typically see each other every week and we sign and dance in multiple languages and listen and act already existing stories in different languages as well. Being there has changed the way I see language and language acquisition, it has also sped up my learning of Japanese, though I probably still speak like a baby 😅
This is how I have learnt English, i rarely opened a grammar book though I know almost all the English grammar and can create sentences easily because i have absorbded the language in the past 3 years unconsciously and this is how I think that having fun and patience is the best way to learn a foreign language but a little practice is indeed necessary
I learned English (at the C1 level) by purely just watching UA-cam videos as a young kid. As soon as school started, both teachers and my parents were surprised that I could speak and write a language so fluently and easily.
I did the same with Spanish too. Watch relatable videos in topics that interest you. The understanding will just come.
This is how I learned English, actually.
I never really spoke the language at first, I only was listening to UA-cam videos and playing video games with English language setting, and I used a little bit of google to help translate. Now I can read Novels just fine, I do struggle with some pronunciations, but that's due to lack of practice!
That's great! Do you have any idea how much time you spent, for example, how many hours listening to English over how many months?
For 6 years I have struggled to learn Spanish. I have asked everyone I could 'how did you learn this?'. No one could answer my question to my satisfaction so I failed and quit all the time. Then I got re-energized to find an answer and it has led me here and to Dreaming Spanish who use these techniques. I feel so inspired that I can get this language now. WOW.
...And all this happened without touching a single book.
This happened to me in case of Korean language. Since Hallyu wave , ive been consuming korean content like songs and dramas movies and youtube content. Now i can speak the language fluently. I learned the letters even by writing lyrics of songs and famous movie dialogues. Thus I'm atleast 35/100 good in korean considering 100 is extreme level difficult scientific language.
And all this happened without touching a single book.
same for me, i never intended to learn korean but i found out one day i can imitate korean and sound exactly like im speaking korean. i dont really watch korean dramas or films as much so i dont think my korean is as well developed but i have definitely noticed it. lots of people who consume korean media regularly and dramas say they can basically watch dramas with no subtitles now, so i wonder if this is similar to alg
Alan Watts spoke on the perceptual differences between children and adults. As we learn words to describe experiences as children we trade our awareness of true reality for concepts and models.
That hard, rough, unique, heavy, bumpy, object that we experience for the first time becomes "rock". It takes a while for us to see all similar objects as rocks. When we have adequate experiences we trade the complex multi dimensional experience for "rock". Additionally, take note that experience is different than the words I used to describe the "rock".
Then in the future, when we see something similar, our brain sees "rock". "Rock" is seen instead of the raw experience of something novel. It becomes narrow and defined.
I think what the ALG program has found, is that we must go back to raw experience first and build new concepts naturally. Versus building upon the models and concepts we have previously constructed.
I genuinely believe a state of mindfulness brings us back to the present reality and allows us to drop concepts and models. Keep in mind what I'm writing is in words and concepts and is detatched from the reality I attempt to communicate.
I'm taking a new approach in my language learning journey, thank you.
This genuinely works!!! For a long time, I took English courses and learned the rules of the language, but I never felt comfortable with it - not until I became obsessed with UA-cam and started watching a lot of videos. Back then, there were very few videos in my native language, so I had to watch English ones. I barely translated any words; instead, I just listened, and that was enough to make me proficient over time. In fact, most young people in my country are good at English because they consume so much of the language through social media, movies, TV shows and videogames. Though I know this method works, now that I'm learning German, I keep gravitating towards more traditional approaches for some reason, and, as expected, I constantly get disappointed by how slowly I make progress. I know German is more difficult, but I'm making it harder than it should be by not sticking to what works. However, this video inspired me to immerse myself in German media without overthinking it:) Any recommendations for good German movies, TV shows, or UA-cam channels are appreciated!!
I would also appreciate any recommendations because I’m in the same boat as you
Great video. I'm from Argentina but when I was like 3 years old I started to use the computer to watch UA-cam videos. Most of them were in english instead of spanish, so I kind of accidentally learned english. When my parents saw this they sent me to various english schools to improve it.
They were so EASY, I passed all exams without studying once. Sometimes I got errors, but since I was still watching UA-cam in english, my english was getting better.
I can confirm that ALG does in fact work and I recommend it. 👍
Were there other students at the schools who didn't get as much exposure to English through things like watching English videos, and did they have more difficulty with the class activities and exams?
Yep@@BeyondLanguageLearning
Thank you so much for giving me hope that I can become fluent like a native. 12 years of learning English seriously and I still can't speak or understand English like a native.
All the best! 😊
" We master a language not through study and practice, but by pooping ”.
This, in my opinion, is the most beautiful thing ever said!
More like: "We master a language not through study and practice, but by listening to people talking about pooping in the language in ways we can understand, through the use of visuals and other context as needed."
That's what many of the beginner ALG Thai classes in the program Dr. Brown created were like.
This is why I learned English so fast! Only listening and watching interesting UA-cam videos. This really works great. Even though now I can’t translate well between my native language and english for school lessons. But this way is much better.
You learned the natural and best way. Translating all the time gets in the way of acquiring a language.
This was one of the BEST videos I've ever seen! Why doesn't it have more views??
This theory makes sense. My mother grew up in the Netherlands but her English in later years was impeccable. She could communicate in either language with no thought about it, however if you wanted something translated she was stumped. It seemed the two languages lived in separate parts of her brain. She didn't look at a hond then change that to dog or visa versa, they were 2 different choices depending who she was talking to. If that's how it works for someone then this learning method is ideal. You're not translating, you're opening that extra spot.
FINALLY someone who talks about this! I did a bit of amateuristic research into this a couple of years ago and it was so hard to find any articles about it
Were you researching ALG specifically or just related questions and issues? In my blog I discuss those things further: beyondlanguagelearning.com
From personal self observation, I came to the following explanation as to why.
When we were kids, our parents repeated some words slowly and pretty much talked down to us. Repeating the process aided our subconscious into storing those words and phrases.
“No Tim, stay away from the door”
Tim didn’t knew what that sentence meant. But if were told in serious tone, and if his Mom pointed at the door and identified it as “Door” then Tim’s subconscious picks it up. Before long, Tim would be like…”Door”. Also picks up the command “stay” and perhaps noticed the similarity in the word “away” when he heard it from another person “go away” connecting the dot.
Another reason why we pick a language when younger is because it is the language of the area. Where you are born, the language of the area is what you pick up. Wether your native country or another. Children of immigrants play with natives kids. Listen to natives commercial. The language factor kicks in. Whereas adults can speak like natives, but either complicates it or refuses out of pride. That being said, there is a reason why adults have accents. Due to the amount of years speaking native language, your brain accustomed to its vowels and tone. If you were to learn a language that is the complete opposite of your native, you will find it like re-training your brain. Kids don’t have that many years of talking, let alone speaking a language. When they do learn, the language is not conflicted with an already existing one.
this is true, but there is more to learning a language than simple understanding at the time. You have to remember what each words means for a long time.
I remember as a kid hearing a word just once and I'd remember it days or even months later. Now I try to learn a word in a foreign language and I'm lucky if I can remember is for a few hours or even minutes. You also have to get used to different grammar rules when forming a sentences. Recognizing what someone says in one thing, but trying to form a sentence is vastly more difficult.
@@williampennjr.4448 I do understand where you come from. Something I struggled with as well. But, I came to realize that we associate words to certain moments that occurred along with it. Therefore, technically, your mind remembers the incident associated with the word, rather than the word itself. As kids, our lives are full of such moments. Whereas as adults, we have few when it comes to language and rely on language being theoretical from books and pre-recorded videos.
I moved to Germany almost two years ago and attended a couple language courses. I could say basic stuff but I didnt seem to be improving at all. I only did when I started volunteering in a place where I got tons of input and not a lot of speaking was involved. After eight months, I started actively trying to speak and somehow I had picked some grammar rules without textbooks, I didnt have to think a lot when answering or looking for words. I still struggle a little but I can manage very well only after a year. The difference between my experience and other volunteers who didnt have this kind of enviroment -and did language courses instead- is huge! I really recommend this methode. I feel so lucky I had this opportunity
My parents moved around a lot and as a child, I picked up some languages this way. As I grew older, I became more conscious of the way I acquire languages. As the video mentioned, listening is very important to get a vibe of the language. I first listen to people talk and try to make out different words, e.g, if a person spoke a sentence, I would count the number of words in it, and my brain would automatically remember the more commonly used words. Sometimes I would figure out the meaning of these words from the context, and sometimes I'd ask my friends for meanings. After I got more comfortable with the way words and sounds are said, my focus would shift to pronouns and 1st person/2nd person/3rd person verbs and stuff. And in the end I would shift to tenses.
I clearly remember doing this when I was in 2nd grade with Punjabi. I then did this with Bangla in 4th grade, and in 9th grade I did this with Nepali. Here is when I realized I do this. Currently I am 18 and I am doing the same with Telugu.
@kimdokja5720 Thanks for sharing about your experiences! It sounds like you acquired these languages mainly through listening to them a lot in real-life contexts, with more conscious awareness of the process of acquisition and more conscious focus on certain parts of the languages you were acquiring as you grew up. Have you seen other people acquiring languages similarly as they grow up without as much conscious awareness?
@@BeyondLanguageLearning Yes! I grew up around kids like me, and I have seen a great deal of kids pick up a language this way. One of my neighbours, who is around my age used to do the same. That is actually how I realized that it is something I had been doing my whole life.
one thing i found that where people talk about whats happening right now is horror game playthrough videos on youtube. they are entertaining, nerve wrecking and very easy to understand and follow. amazing!
This is the quality information one pays for
Thanks Antara! Anyone who would like to support my work monetarily can do so through my Patreon at www.patreon.com/beyondlanguagelearning or through PayPal at www.paypal.me/beyondlanglearn
"How we learn languages is more important than when." 🧡
Very interesting insight! The findings and ideas make a lot of intuitive sense to me.
I love that PFP
Thank you. It agrees with what I've noticed about children - they pick up a language just by being in an environment that the language is constantly being spoken. They listen, and their brains assimilate the language structure without their being aware of it.
Just watch Peppa Pig in the language of your choosing, they do exactly that, act out scenes and describe them, I cannot stress how helpful that shit has been.
Yes, Peppa Pig seems like one of the best shows available today for adults to acquire a language starting from scratch following ALG because of all the visuals that go with what characters are saying and the narration, along with the fact that many adults like it even though it's made for preschool children.
Children grow up in a family. That family are native speakers. The child is surrounded by native speakers at home and in the world. And those native speakers are constantly feeding the child input and when the child's muscleture can form sounds, the surrounding native speakers constantly help the child with the language acquisition. All of this is to say, learning like a child as an adult would require that adult to be living in a society whose main language is the one being acquired and that adult learner needs a team around them 24-7. So, I guess it's doable but it would be an extremely expensive experiment.
The feedback is different too. People are real jerks to adults who don't speak well. They're WAY more patient and even helpful when kids don't speak well.
Yes, that happens too often to adult learners. Besides that, people will also interact and talk to kids a lot about the things around them even if the kids aren't speaking much or at all. It's much rarer for people to interact like that with adults who don't know their language well and aren't speaking it.
Exactly my thoughts too. Plus think about how easy life is as a child. Parents comfort and care for you, you're put into social structures where you are mostly free to learn by playing along with others, you get a lot of different input but also time to rest. You don't (have to) think about bills, where to get food and what to eat etc - how to survive basically. The only thing you do is "learning". If the stress were taken off of adults many would performe nearly as well as children or teenagers do, if not even better. Considering how much time, comfort and ease children have they're pretty slow.
1:50 "... learn *about* grammar". It may seem just a detail, but it is quite important to distinguish between learning *about grammar* and learning *grammar*. People usually just obliterate that distinction when they speak about language learning.
That's the distinction I try to make. Young children acquiring their first or second languages learn the grammar subconsciously and will be able to use it correctly in speaking, and only later consciously learn about the grammar rules, if ever (and even then, even linguists don't know what all the rules of grammar are, even for well-documented languages like English). Some adults, such as the ones that Dr. J. Marvin Brown observed, pick up languages much like children do without formal study, can speak them much like native speakers, and would have difficulty explaining the rules of grammar that they use correctly when speaking. Meanwhile, many adults have formal knowledge of grammar rules in languages like English from years of study and yet they fail to use the rules correctly when speaking the language.
Every language has its own music, it’s own rhythm. Teaching the ear to listen to that harmony will make the process easier.
Thank you! I have always thought, "I don't think it's an age thing. Babies get 24/7 immersion with feeding, playing, and watching everybody do stuff at home. Maybe if adults got turned into a baby, or treated like a baby, they'd get that."
Now I know there isn't much research on it, and it was just ASSUMED that adults were different.
Wild. We live in a world where only 60 or 70 years ago, medical schools taught that if you touched someone's heart, it would automatically stop. But that isn't true. We have heart surgery. So why did they teach that?
You're welcome! I don't know about the heart thing, but in general I would say there can be a lot of resistance to challenging established ideas in various fields, and even, it seems, resistance to moving forward with research and also applying what is already known.
Regarding the idea of many treating adults like a baby, with ALG I think of it kind of like you want to treat adults learning new languages as adults, but treat the language part of them as babies, in the sense of nurturing the new language by giving them lots of the spoken language in rich contexts and experiences so they can easily acquire it.
THANK YOU!!!
The hardest part about learning a new language is not having enough speakers from said language. I need people to listen to and practice with.
@4:21 What can one do to keep themself from translating back into their first language?
You should focus on meaning instead of the language when understanding and speaking the new language. As a language learner, it helps to have experiences and content that are so interesting that you even forget they're in another language. This content should also be highly understandable at your level. As a lower-level learner, this means there should be lots of context such as visuals to help you get the meaning of what's being said. With enough of this context you can understand what is being said right away without any need to translate it. ALG is about providing content and experiences that are both highly understandable and interesting even for total beginners in new languages.
Watching videos on UA-cam is a great way to learn a language. I got to a certified C1 level of English by just watching UA-cam. I have never sat down to study English actively, even at school, but, for example, I had a pretty easy time understanding what the Oxford comma is, just from a UA-cam video.
Thank you for this great video! I hope that ALG brings adult students the freedoms to play and to learn. In future, people might ask why wasn't ALG and comprehensible input bigger sooner?
You're welcome! I hope so too and I believe it will, and that people will wonder why people didn't get the chance to acquire languages this way all along.
Thank you for the quality content
This is so cool. It has revived my hope to learn a new language or two.
in other words, kids learn by translating sign language into words and sentences instead of translating words and sentences to other words and sentence of a different language. charade games would be an example where one person would have to act out a situation and the other person has to guess what the first person is trying to say. if you are good in charade games, you will be good at learning a language.
Not really. How do you use sign language to convey concept like: fun, interesting, inspiring, unbelievable? What movement would you use to convey the meaning of: engage, acceptance, responsibility?
Oh bro, you sold me! What a great plug! I've wanted to learn Spanish for years now and I think you've finally given me the confidence!
Will you have a native accent like children if you become fluent in the language this way?
Thank you for sharing this. Happy to know there is a name for this type of immersive learning. By recreating the native language acquisition process I was able to learn Mandarin Chinese and reach native level in less than 7 years. I started learning the language close to my 30s. So I am a living example that the adult brain learns as well as the child brain if willing to overcome the "I don't understand, so what's the point in listening" type of mindset. Another thing I found is very helpful and there is also research about it is to listen to the language you want to learn while sleeping, as it helps the brain consolidate the knowledge.
+ Kids are allowed to fail. If adults make mistakes even with advanced words, they are looked at as if they‘re stupid, discouraging them. Meanwhile even native speaker children can mispronounce a word 10+ times and usually their caregiver will patiently correct them until they get it right.
So speaking from the beginning is fundamental
Love the vid, its making me realize why I am not having a difficult time learning Japanese even when I used to absolutely suck at foreign languages. While not quite the same the way that I am learning now is try to avoid connecting Japanese and English too closely, instead trying to "think" in Japanese, or at the very least hearing a phrase and trying to intuitively understand it without ever going word by word and thinking of the equivalent word. It's not super successful in making me learn the language, but it is making it more fun and less tedious.
If anyone is looking for material specifically for Japanese I recommend the show "Nights with a Cat", which you can watch on youtube (with and without subs, I recommend without, its pretty simple). Each ep is about a minute long, and while not focused on teaching a language it fulfills much of the things described in this video: its simple, its interesting, and concepts are demonstrated both through voice and through images quite clearly.
If anyone knows of anything similar, please respond as I would love to find more stuff like this.
It all depends on what you want to do in the target language. If you want to be able to speak like an educated adult, to be able to read and write to a high standard, to feel at home in the culture, or to be able to work above a menial level, then you are going to need to put in some effort. You are going to need to study and get educated. If this means your speaking skills are serviceable, but less than native-like, many people find that an acceptable trade-off. If, on the other hand, you just want to enjoy entertainment, to be able to chat with acquaintances in a context-tied way, to get by on holiday, or to work in a low-paid job, then ALG would probably work. It might take longer, though, as most adults, unlike most children, have other demands on their time, such as earning a living, taking care of their needs independently and bringing up their own children. When a child leaves school, they may be fluent, but they are only at the *beginning* of true mastery of their language, whether it is a primary or secondary one.
As I'm sure many commenters have pointed out, a good way to learn languages a bit more like this is by watching movies/shows/etc in your desired language (without subtitles in your native language). Gives you an opportunity to listen without being expected to reply, as well as associate visuals with sounds. Another one I find helps a bit, tho generally only with the written word and vocab rather than speaking (since less likely to hear the pronunciations): playing video games in your target language! For example, I have my Minecraft set to Swedish, so every word has a visual reference right there with it. (Admittedly I don't know if this works as well if you're unfamiliar with the script your target language uses. All the languages I've seriously studied/learned have used roman characters; I have little experience with other scripts.)
I actually learned english this way by accident xD and some native speakers say, they wouldn't even realise I'm german if they didn't knew otherwise.
But I have to say, that I still was in school at the time, where I also learned english. But looking at other students, that learned english just through school, I cann telly that it was not school teaching me english, as the other can't even form a sentence.
What I did? Basically german content on youtube got boring, so I started watching english let's plays. And what do you do in let's play? Smalltalk and explaining what you are doing ;)
I didn't realise until now through, that it was what they were talking about, rather then me just listening. I hope I'll be able to replicate this in my japanese studies going forward
I think a lot of people are acquiring English nowadays without even intending to though watching videos like let's plays. It helps that English and languages like German are relatively similar. For Japanese, you'll probably want to find content to start with where there are more visuals and more of a match between what you're hearing in Japanese and what you are seeing, more repetition, and simpler language.
This is a bit cringe to say, but with the recent prevalence of vtubers, who generally do hours upon hours of let's plays with audience interactions and kayfabe that helps contextualize what they're saying, learning Japanese via UA-cam entertainment is at its easiest lol
This is true! I’m a living proof of this learning method. When I was a teen I had an interest for learning piano, especially in funk and jazz style but there’s no piano teacher in my area teaches these styles so I went on UA-cam and started watching other American/British UA-camrs teaching these styles, my English back then was veryyy limited, just enough to do some greetings and I couldn’t hold a normal conversation, no understanding of grammar neither, I couldn’t do well in English classes at school like nearly failed. So, after just watching UA-cam Videos for years to learn piano, I accidentally improved my English a ton! especially in listening and writing; then I realized I could understand other UA-camrs in other random subjects (daily life, vlogs…) after years just watching UA-cam videos I can hold medium conversation with other English speakers (both native and non-native), then I started learning grammar again but this time I felt so much easier learning it. I know lots of people learning English through games and watching shows such as “Friends”, basically it’s just the same method, we just emerge ourselves by English naturally with subjects, things we like.
@hunghoangmusic Thanks for sharing your story! This reminds me of how J. Marvin Brown (the linguist who developed ALG) observed that when people tried to learn a language through study, they struggled, but when they spent enough time doing things they enjoyed in the language, they ended up fluent without really trying.
I can understand a lot of Occitan, Italian, Spanish, as well as Ukrainian, Belarusian and Polish without ever learning any of these langauges because I've consumed some content in that langauge. However it was still made easier by the fact I already speak French and Russian. I assume it's not that easy for unrelated languages, you'll have to specifically search for very easy and simple videos first to have comprehensive input in the language.
Yes, people can benefit much more from content like TV shows, which are made for fluent and native speakers of the language they're in, when they already have a closely related language. Part of what I'm saying is we need more content and experiences that are highly comprehensible for beginners in a language even when their first language is a completely different language.
I was failing English class in 6th grade, until I suddenly did a 180 and became fluent in about 6 months. All I did was watch UA-cam videos by English speaking creators. I simply listened, and tried to understand what was happening based on the visuals of the video. I also watched cartoons in English this way.
Recently, I dropped out of French class. I got the worst possible grade you could get and never participated in class, because due to a 6 month hospital stay followed by the 2020 lockdown, I missed over a year of French class and couldn't keep up. After that I stopped trying to do my homework or speak in class, because it just felt pointless to try to catch up now. And yet, now that I stipped taking French after failing it spectacularly, I'm able to understand texts written in French to a decent degree. I did nothing, yet somehow I still learned the language. I still don't understand spoken French, but I'm better at the language than I expected after years of simply being present in French class and otherwise doing nothing.
Awesome video
Me too, this video recently showed up in my recommendations.
My whole life changed after I started using Dreaming Spanish to learn Spanish. I realized I had done similar things in order to learn English, now I'm learning German by watching tv shows and I'm also producing comprehensible input content in my native language, which is Portuguese.
Little kids, babies even, do communicate with their parents. Their vocab and pronunciation improve over time. But yes, they generally do get a lot of "ear time" and of course do not study as we tend to .
I think the key word there is "communicate". Young children and babies communicate with their parents with whatever abilities they have available to them. Early on this is limited to simple gestures like reaching and sounds like laughing and crying. As they acquire language, their ability to use it becomes a greater and greater part of their communicative ability. But their focus is on communication, with language just one part of communicating, rather than on the language itself. They can't try to use language or analyze it in the ways that adults and even older children can begin to.
What this video is saying that the use of abilities to try to use a new language and analyze it can interfere with language acquisition and prevent older learners from approaching the same levels of fluency and ability as younger learners, even when they get a lot of "ear time" or understandable experience with the language.
A problem though is that, as adults, we often find we have to do things like study to make things in a new language understandable to us, and try to speak in the new language in order to get people to speak it to us. It would be better if we could just get a lot of content and experiences that are understandable and interesting to us in the new language at our level that would enable us to pick up the language automatically.
I think that is one reason why a lot of people learn English relatively easily: All over the world they hear it in songs, maybe movies There might be more social media content about a topic available in English, than in one's own language. Streamers and UA-camrs who speaks English.
And so people learn how the language works because they want to watch, listen to, and read the interesting and/or fun content, which is in English.
I have a question regarding potential of a silent period to potentially reverse any damage that may have been caused by slightly early speaking. I started speaking Japanese before I had fully aquired the language, however I had acquired a large proportion of pronunciation naturally and hence sounded much better than other foreigners I heard. But then I realised that maybe I should have waited even longer before speaking, as I may have gained a few small bad habits, like my pronunciation isn't entirely perfect. I have never studied grammar, nor have I thought consciously about the language and have done very minimal reading, learning mostly through listening. I would estimate my "ceiling" as described by Brown's ALGIE formula to be 95%. I believe I did a bit of damage. I am semi-fluent but for the next 18 months I intend to stop speaking altogether and get purely listening input for around 8 hours a day, not looking anything up, no thinking about language, no reading, no writing, no speaking. The complete ALG way. Is there a chance my ceiling can go back up to 100% given that I have some minor bad habits already? Have you ever observed "damaged" students reversing some of that "damage" through implementing a period of silence after they had already started speaking?
Anecdotally, I've heard of people who started learning languages using "traditional" methods where they were speaking from the start, then after they learned about comprehensible input, they decided to undergo a "silent period" and focus on listening for at least a few months, and they reported that their pronunciation was much better when they started speaking again.
I think if someone had been speaking and reading and so on from the start of their learning for a much longer time than they had, undergoing such a "silent period" wouldn't have as much of a positive effect because their pronunciation habits influenced by their first language would be more entrenched from that much more early speaking.
To be clear, it isn't early speaking itself that's a problem but rather "forced speaking" where someone is consciously trying to produce language beyond what they've acquired from input. So one could be speaking quite a bit from early on while still following the ALG approach. In practice, this might be things like very common phrases one has heard many times, one- or two-word sentences, and so on.
Also, even when following the approach, everything won't necessarily come out correctly at first. If one has gotten enough input first to get "clear mental images" of the pronunciation and other features of the language, over time one's output will conform to those naturally.
I can't say for sure about your case, but it seems to be like it would be unnecessary and extreme for you to stop all speaking, etc., for that long. At most I would say you might want to limit speaking if you have been "pushing" it beyond what you've acquired through listening and what comes out naturally. Continuing to get a lot of listening input you enjoy is of course good. When reading, you could focus on reading content that has audio so you can hear the correct pronunciation.
Another thing to consider is how much would you be giving up by entirely stopping doing things like speaking Japanese, for example in terms of your social life? Is that worth it for what in your estimation is a small percentage of possible improvement? On that note, I would also say that being overly concerned about speaking "perfectly" as a goal vs. being able to speak and communicate clearly also can be detrimental in terms of creating anxiety and so on.
Going back to my earlier point though, from what you've described it sounds like it would be necessary at most to limit your speaking to what comes naturally for you based on input, if you have been pushing speaking beyond that a lot, rather than to stop speaking entirely for so long.
@@BeyondLanguageLearning Thanks for your reply, sorry I only just saw it now!
I think it's still worth for me to stop outputting for at least another year, since when i move to Japan I won't have the opportunity to run this "experiment" ever again. I am genuinely curious to see how much higher my ceiling can reach once I start outputting again. The lack of social interaction isn't a big issue as I'm an introvert, and I'm willing to make sacrifices now to maximise my future potential. I'll let you know how it goes. Thanks for your advice :)
@@BeyondLanguageLearning Turns out you were right I need some social interaction to stay sane haha
@Kougami Shinya maybe you could find mainly conversational partners or social situations where you can be more of a listener and there's not much pressure to speak a lot
Good question.
When I was like 12 I would watch so many DIY videos in english and it helped me learn so so much. Later those videos became makeup and fashion videos and as I grew up more I would watch more medical, political and other more toughtful content and through out I would always want to talk to natives. Now I started learning korean and I have already listened to kpop since 2017 and watch kdramas since 2020 so I'm pretty familiar with the language for long time but I only started learning the language this year and I'm learning fast by watching korean content and learning grammar sometimes.
I started all wrong and now I can understand tv shows and movies with english subtitles which is my target language. but when I take them off it’s jaw dropping how my comprehension drops. any tips to improve listening comprehension?
Same boat
To develop English listening comprehension it's important to listen to English a lot without relying on reading English subtitles for understanding too much.
Try to find and watch content that is easier for you to understand without subtitles. Movies can often be quite difficult to understand, sometimes even for many native speakers, because of how many actors talk and all the other loud sounds and music. Some TV series have much clearer speaking and much more dialogue that is easy to follow. You can also watch and listen to a lot of other content like podcasts and UA-cam videos you find interesting and not too difficult to understand. I also have a UA-cam channel with lots of English videos that are easy to understand even for beginners: ua-cam.com/users/ComprehensibleEnglish
It may also help to work on your ability to hear and pronounce any English sounds that you have difficulty with. This could help you to hear spoken English more clearly.
Disable those subtitles. I was in your position and that's what made it for me.
If you understand shows with subtitles, you don't need them anymore. You just need to have a courage to do it, because the very first time it could be hard.
The part when you said about comparing it with our first language instead of just letting it become clear made me view a language more differently.
Interesting! How did it change your view?
A child starts from a point of no language and then adds the language/languages that are in their environment. This is a form of imprinting. Adults struggle to learn foreign languages because we are already habituated to our native, imprinted language, and so when we try to acquire other languages, we tend to study them through the lens of our native tongues, which is inhibiting. Children, if they start early enough, can acquire other languages along with their accents. Adults cannot, for all intents and purposes, learn a foreign language accent-free. The muscles of our tongues and mouths are conditioned in ways that are almost impossible to alter without focused, intense speech therapy. Does this mean adults shouldn't attempt to learn other languages? Not at all. But we need to be honest about our limitations: children do indeed have a physiological advantage. This is the best argument for promoting foreign language instruction in the lowest grades, rather than waiting until the kids are adolescents and see themselves as doing just fine with the language they already have.
"Adults struggle to learn foreign languages because we are already habituated to our native, imprinted language, and so when we try to acquire other languages, we tend to study them through the lens of our native tongues, which is inhibiting."
This is exactly the point of the ALG approach described in the video: the fact that "we tend to study them through the lens of our native tongues" when learning languages as adults is the very thing that causes many of our struggles with them and inhibits us from approaching more native-like levels of ability.
Therefore, the ALG approach advocates *avoiding* studying the new language through the lens of our first language by getting lots of understandable experience with the new language without involving our first language.
For example, with regards to accent, ALG theorizes that adults typically speak second languages with foreign accents because they almost always try to speak and read them a lot *before* they've heard them enough to sufficiently internalize their sounds. This forces them to fall back on the sounds and habits of their first language.
The ALG approach advocates listening to a new language for hundreds of hours in ways that we can understand it *before* speaking it much, and listening without trying to compare it with or filter it through our first language.
The result of all these hours of listening with understanding is that we internalize the sounds of the new language, developing a "clear mental image" that we have as a reference as we speak more and more.
Although we're used to speaking our first language with its accent and the "muscles of our tongues and mouths are conditioned", having that clear reference through listening first will allow our speaking in the new language to automatically conform to the sounds and accent that we have heard and internalized, instead of "falling back" on the characteristics of our first language.
I and others who have attended the AUA Thai Program described in the video and followed the ALG approach have experienced this firsthand. By listening a lot before speaking much, we've found that as we started to speak more we could automatically speak with a more native-like pronunciation and accent in a "difficult" language without any special practice, despite beginning to acquire the language well into adulthood.
actually it is possible for adults to learn the accent, check out Matt vs Japan
i also know some teachers in my school (i live in 廣東 area) who have learned mandarin or cantonese (or both) very well and they have the accent
also the other way around, i have some native 廣東話 friends who can barely speak and/or speak with a huge accent