bela_lugosi wrote:You can most certainly learn a foreign language without any iThis or appThat. Actually the modern technological innovations might even be detrimental to our language learning abilities. I firmly believe that the only way to learn a language is to communicate - doing that online is simply not the same thing as doing it IRL. Heck, I do not own a smartphone, and I'm doing just fine, probably even better than most of the people I know (who have been enslaved by their smartphones, cars, and such). I bet I have more free time to dedicate to language studies which means I study more efficiently + Facebook, instant messages, and stupid games do not interrupt my studies every two seconds.
I think the overall impacts of technology are getting to the border of the rules of the forum perhaps. I'd say nothing is either bad or good. Actually, today's technology is helping us improve what we've messed up with the previous technology, and making things less harmful is actually a real trend in the evolution now.
While I agree I could in general learn without a particular app or most of them, I disagree that the technology is bringing us more harm than profit. Without technology, without internet, without movie streaming, withing ebooks, without wordlists for SRS, without lots of such stuff, I would have certainly failed at learning languages. It is nice to idealistically say that the real in person conversation is the best and the traditional paper+CD courses are the most efficient. I cannot disagree. But sometimes you just don't have the people around, especially when you decide to learn a different language than most people in your area. The classic resources don't usually go too far either, at least when you leave the safe area of the one or two most popular langauges in your country. Without the technology, I would be mostly dependent on the content of czech bookstores. Can you imagine that? Good luck finding resources for an exotic langauge. And forget about media in the langauge. Those times are still surviving in the naive widely spread idea that teachers are actually the best source of real resources and the best medium of contact with the culture. It dates back to the days in which it was the only resource.
Really, I remember learning French in the Czech Republic during those times before the internet boom, therefore sometime around 2000. French, not Xhosa or Welsh or Ainu! And it was already a problem. Spanish was totally exotic back then, I cannot imagine whether people were learning Chinese in other settings than at the university. And don't forget that the flood of gadgets and apps and websites has as well made way for lots of cheap or free stuff. In the Middle Ages, a noble could have learnt a foreign langauge. These days, even quite a poor person can.
I agree you need to get rid of the training wheels at some points. And thanks to internet and various resources there and various tools, I can. Without skype and everything, people never get rid of the worst training wheels of them all: a teacher.
It is all about how we use it all. It is not Facebook or a stupid game, what interrupts my studies. It is my weak will. It is not a bad app, that is slowng me down. I am no longer a newbie in language learning, no excuses for me, it is a well disguised laziness slowing me down. (which is why I have seriously left duolingo for now. Normally, it is a usefull collection of exercises. Recently it has become basically an excuse not to open a real course).
And we cannot blame smarphones for stupidity. Before that, there was television. Before that, there have been other stupid things. The only difference is that stupid lazy people were usually likely to die quite soon in past. Now they don't, the world is much safer.
Really, I am not actually annoyed about the flood of low quality resources. Basically, quality is more likely to appear somewhere in the quantity than on a desert. What I hate is false advertising, and the language app business is full of it.
