Lawyer&Mom wrote:Sorry I’m late to this conversation, because I’m going to disagree with everyone. 500 hours of passive Portuguese immersion will be more than enough to understand Portuguese. Now by “passive” I mean actually watching the TV show, not just having it playing in background. I did 500 hours of French TV and I was able to go from barely following anything to able to listen to foreign affairs podcasts. Now I did Assimil first and lots of Clozemaster during, but I don’t think it’s required. When it was time to repeat the experiment with my kids I just dumped them in front of French TV because I knew they wouldn’t sit still through Assimil or any other course work for that matter. Several hundred hours later (I can’t keep track of their hours as well as I did with my own), and my kids just understand French.
Thank you for sharing your experience! It sounds like with French, you actually did what everyone else is recommending, which is tossing in some Assimil and/or sentence flashcards in the beginning. You say that Assimil wasn't required, which is interesting. But I would expect Assimil by itself to get you 50% of the way to muddling through RFI's world affairs shows, even without the hundreds of hours of TV. Assmil followed by easy news shows is a very popular progression.
The case with the kids is super interesting, though. Were they old enough to read? Did you give them subtitles, and if so, in which languages? My kids have always understood spoken French, but at least one of them learned to read it fairly well at a young age by playing Zelda. I don't actually think kids are super-magically gifted at languages (except for accents), so I would expect anything that works for them to be worth investigating for adults.
Iinterestingly, the various northern European countries that broadcast lots of English-language TV with local subs almost all have excellent levels of English. But that's an entire childhood of TV, combined with years of classroom instruction. It certainly works better than in countries like France, which have similar levels of classroom instruction, but which do an amazing job of dubbing everything into the local language.
FumblngTowardFluency wrote:That's a great idea. Listening to the same actors with the same accents day after day. Brazilian accents vary widely, because it's a huge country with 26 states and 214M people. A Paulistano sounds very different than a Carioca.
Yes, focusing on a specific series can give you a huge boost early on! Krashen called this "narrow listening" (PDF), and it's a great short-cut to reach the point where you can learn automatically from binge-watching TV. Then, of course, you'll switch to another TV series, and it will all come crashing down. But you'll get up to speed much faster with the second series, and you'll improve again with each switch. It took me maybe 10 seasons across 4 series before I could comfortably handle any easy French TV I wanted. (I also muddled through a couple books at the same time, which gave me a lot of vocab.)
I undertand that Brazillian Portuguese and Spanish both have extremely long-running series with relatively clear audio? This would help a lot.
orlandohill wrote:Do you have any more insight into why you think that's the most efficient use of the first 50 hours? Is it the 50 hours of TV audio and subtitles, made more comprehensible by the on-screen visual narrative, compared to only 3 hours of Assimil audio?
There are a lot of things you could do in 50 hours in Romance or Germanic language (assuming you have solid English):
- A complete Assimil "passive wave", 100 lessons, 30/minutes a day. This would get you to A2 comprehension in a Category I or II language. Which puts you oh-so-close to understanding 50% "News in Slow Language X" or a super easy native series. There's a gap there, but you would have a starting point.
- Enough Michel Thomas or Pimsleur "hands free" audio courses to understand a lot of the core grammar.
- 50 hours with bilingual subtitles in Language Reactor, which is at least worth something? If you find the right material and the right workflow, this should probably match Assimil.
- 1,500–2,000 Subs2SRS-style audio cards (reviewed to maturity), allowing you to watch a specific ~150 minutes of a specific easy TV series with 80+% comprehension. And you'd be able to at least sort of follow a 30–40% of the dialog in other episodes that you didn't study. (A different series would wreck you because you won't have enough vocab and you'll only know a few voices.) Doing this with a long-running telenovella would still give you a huge amount of material.
If someone wanted to do pure, casual TV watching from day 1, I would at least recommend bilingual subs. I think Language Reactor can do that with Netflix?
Basically, almost any small tweak to the "just watch TV" plan should dramatically raise the productivity. Do some Assimil. Do some Anki cards. Or even just turn on bilingual subs. When it comes to learning languages by binge-watching TV, I am a true believer. But given a choice of "binge-watching 500 hours of incomprehensible TV without subs" versus "do something clever for 50 hours before binge-watching the next 450", I would personally go with the latter plan every time.
(More than 50 hours on other stuff would probably help even more! But I'm trying to respect FumblngTowardFluency's constraints. Being a company founder is no joke.)