Input only

[reineke]

---

[James29]

The ... quality of coffee [is] easily quantified.

Please explain. How do you "easily quantify" the "quality" of a taste? How is it possible that anyone can tell me I am wrong about my taste preference?

[IchBinEinPoly]

Regarding your first sentence, how do you quantify "effectiveness" into precise numbers? It seems to me that numbers do not work that way. What does it mean to say something is "100% effective"? Additionally, do you think doing the "100% effective" thing for one hour and then the "10% effective" thing for 11 hours would be better than both?

Are you saying it's impossible to operationalize language proficiency? We do that all the time. See the CEFR rating system as an example.

100% effective means the making maximum possible rate of progress towards a language. It's theoretical, I know; but theoretical doesn't mean useless. It's an abstraction, but a useful abstraction.

Regarding your second sentence, are you suggesting that everyone is the same or are you open to the idea that other people might learn more effectively with 50% input based?

It's certainly possible, but that's not the point I'm making. Sure input may have different levels of utility for every person, but unless that utility is zero (i.e., that person gets no benefit from input), which seems ludicrous, adding input into parts of their life where. Think of all the empty time in your life. Now imagine filling even some of that with listening. I'm talking about time spent driving, walking, cleaning the house, etc. It's time that can be spent listening but can't be spent doing other tasks that may be more productive, but likewise require more attention.

Also, I believe doing something is always better than doing anything, and many forms of intensive language study can bore people to death, even if you think they're more productive than just watching TV. So it's better to just watch TV. The point is to have fun.

Please explain. How do you "easily quantify" the "quality" of a taste? How is it possible that anyone can tell me I am wrong about my taste preference?

I don't understand this kind of numerical fetishism. Just because things aren't precisely quantifiable doesn't mean they're not useful or real concepts.

It's totally possible to quantify taste by asking people to rate it. It's subjective, but so what?

[IchBinEinPoly]

In any case, I'm not at all sure that it's the concentration that burns you out. Many people work at jobs which they are good at for 8 hours per day or more without burning out. I think burning out is to do with things like working at too fast a pace, trying to do too many things at once, continually working against a deadline, and simply being overloaded and working too long without a break.

Americans hate their jobs. Indeed, I reckon most people to do everywhere in the world. I, for one, would hate to make language learning like work.

All of the factors you listed can exacerbate or increase the odds burn out, but simply applying mental effort for prolonged periods of time is sufficient to cause burnout.

Further, in my experience most of the people you claim aren't burned out actually are. We live in a burned out society that glorifies work for its own sake.

[reineke]

---

[James29]

I'd love to see how "language proficiency" can be quantified into precise numbers. The example of CEFR does not do that. CEFR is an ordinal scale. Is B1 twice as good as A2 or ten times as good? Is C1 112.5% better than B2? Attributing "precise numbers" to language proficiency does not work any more than other things that are on ordinal scales. A1 is worse than A2 which is worse than B1 but that's about all the "math" you can get out of the CEFR.

If "100% effective means making the maximum possible rate of progress towards a language" is there no point in using our brains to becoming more efficient? This remind me of why 0 is 0 on the Fahrenheit thermometer. Or when it was "impossible" to run a four minute mile. If methods improve does something become 110% effective?

The point of the coffee concept was merely to show that different quantities of inputs work differently for different people. There is no perfect mixture of coffee ingredients and there is no perfect mixture of language learning ingredients. To claim otherwise is ridiculousness. The coffee, cream and sugar are merely ingredients that make up the final product. Cream could just as easily be the input. If Benny can learn a language most efficiently from nearly all active work from day one that is fine. His mixture is not "wrong" because someone else learns most efficiently with a long silent period.

[ThumbWar]

Some ways I can think of are:
Size of vocabulary
Number of tenses you can understand/produce
Number of sentence structures you can understand/produce

[reineke]

---

[Iversen]

I am not going to discuss cofee - I don't drink the stuff. I am going to discuss Swedish.

For many years I didn't attempt to speak or write this arcane communication system for the simple reason that I expected its users to understand my Danish and vice-versa. In reality some of us have problems understand Swedish, mostly because they haven't watched enough TV from over there. And even more Swedish have problems understanding us Danes. The use of English between Scandinavians would in my eyes be tantamount to high treason so after years of pure input I decided to learn Swedish as an active language. Of cause I had to do some actual study to convert it from passive into an active language, but it went much faster than it would have done if I hadn't been listening to Swedish since the 70s. But input alone wouldn't have resulted in real Swedish, but possibly in the ghastly concoction called Scandinavian.

[nuncapense]

Iverson, interesting story -- what kind of study did you do to activate your passive Sweish?