Better to do passive immersion before studying? First time learner

[emk]

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.

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.

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):

1. 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.
2. Enough Michel Thomas or Pimsleur "hands free" audio courses to understand a lot of the core grammar.
3. 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.
4. 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 we look at Category V languages, the language blogger who spent his time watching Mandarin children's TV logged a large number of hours before he started picking up lots of common phrases. Compare that with Sprachprofi's almost unreal progress in Japanese, which she did with audio flashcards. (Sprachpofi is very good at learning languages, far better than I am. Which I will happily admit after trying to imitate her feats. )

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.)

[Le Baron]

With a closely related language like German or a Romance language I do think jumping straight into native materials is the most efficient method for a native English speaker, even more efficient than Assimil. ...

This is an extraordinary statement. What does 'closely related language' mean here? Whatever the evidence of language families says the fact is still that if someone is a native speaker of English and not of German, but they want to be (or vice-versa), it's not just a matter of 'exposure'. Jumping directly into native materials as learning advice from scratch is quite frankly bizarre as advice. If this was true I would be speaking at least some Japanese now because I've seen shedloads of Japanese films over 30-odd years.

Mere listening exposure for the magic '500 hours' is NOT suitable for being able to understand a language. At best it gets a person's foot in the door for untangling flows of words. Completely hampered by the fact that they have no idea how it is spelled, what pronunciation curiosities there are, grammar/syntax rules which aren't intuitive (and as an L2 learner your existing structures interfere with this greatly); no intuitive way of unravelling slang, idioms, ordinary word truncations in vernacular speech, accent oddities, formal/informal tone...and on and on.

French is only superficially 'like English'. Once the links have been made between similar vocabulary that's basically it. So many words used for common speech, and in fact the core basis, are ones which don't exist in English and they're the ones you need! Also word order and grammatical structures are almost entirely different.

[emk]

Also, I suspect that FumblngTowardFluency accidentally invoked Cunningham's Law when he wrote the original title for this thread.

The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.

The original idea so close to something that many people have done successfully (learning by watching TV). But a few small tweaks would make it work 10x better. So I would not be surprised to see this thread continue for a while yet!

[Le Baron]

Also, I suspect that FumblngTowardFluency accidentally invoked Cunningham's Law when he wrote the original title for this thread.

The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a question; it's to post the wrong answer.

The original idea so close to something that many people have done successfully (learning by watching TV). But a few small tweaks would make it work 10x better. So I would not be surprised to see this thread continue for a while yet!

I like the idea of Cunningham's law, it seems to ring true.

However I vehemently reject the idea of listening as it is often proposed: the '500 hours' holy grail and all the unexplained 'magic'. I would argue that over time when someone is following a listening-heavy approach they lose track of all the extra things they actually do over a long period of time. Let us say years. This is one of the reasons for making hazy statements about e.g. 'what (finally) made me fluent', as though there is a 'hack' you do and it gets you there. Whereas the more likely, but boring, answer is: everything hitherto, plus time and familiarity. It's too easy to associate a breakthrough with something which only looks like a direct cause, especially if it was recent decision or occurrence.

The thing for this thread is that two things collide. That someone would have to do more than just listen passively, but that to listen actively there has to be insight into what you're doing and looking out for. And that to do this there needs to be other types of learning and investigation going on. So it just comes full circle, where we find out that 'just listening' doesn't cut it and that just doing grammar/translation doesn't cut it.
It's more than tweaks necessary and bigger rather than small. Whilst it's not always good to be rigidly prescriptive - e.g. you MUST study the grammar, you must listen for hours a day - once we fall into the error of trying to derive the whole from parts, and especially though all these crackpot 'methods' people have dreamed up, it ends up as disagreements involving 'yes/no to grammar', 'don't think, just listen', 'you need subtitles, you don't need subtitles, subtitles hinder/help you...' and all the rest of it. Few seem to want to admit that no matter the language there are the same few requirements:

1. Motivation, habit, curiosity and tenacity.
2. Repetition.
3. Obligatory receptive (listening and reading) and active (talking) efforts.
4. Time and more time.

There might be more, but not much more. All the rest is hazy discussion fodder.

[Cainntear]

The original idea so close to something that many people have done successfully (learning by watching TV). But a few small tweaks would make it work 10x better. So I would not be surprised to see this thread continue for a while yet!

I totally agree with Le Baron on this one, and I'm kind of surprised to see this coming from you, given that you talked today about something that seemed like a very different take in another thread.

I've seen a lot of people say that they've learned a lot by watching TV, but whenever I've probed a little by asking questions, it always falls into the territory of being dubious at best.

"I learned from watching TV."
But you're from a country where almost everyone gets taught English at primary school!
"Yeah, but the school classes were no use!"
How do you know that?
"Because the rest of the class can't speak it as well as me. They didn't watch TV like I did."
...and so on.

But this sort of person often doesn't accept that what they've done is basically fill in the gaps in the teaching, and they attribute their success *in its entirety* to things they did outside class.

I've also seen people say on their third or fourth language "I learned this language just by watching TV. I wish I'd known about this ages ago -- the other languages would have been so much easier." What they're ignoring is that they've gone through a lot of the hardest stuff already -- they've already gone through the process of identifying conjugations and declensions, and they've (hopefully!) already overcome the urge to calque phrases literally from L1.

I do not believe that I have ever met anyone (whether online or in person) whose claim of learning their first foreign language from listening only held up to that.

I have met people who claimed that they learned Spanish without books, by travelling through South America and talking to people, and I did, in fact, believe them. I believed them because their Spanish was extremely bad.
(I met one person who claimed to have learned English through interaction with native speakers, and his English was pretty good, admittedly. That said, I would never recommend getting jailed for carrying a small quantity of a controlled substance as a means of learning a language....)

[Lawyer&Mom]

There is a lot to reply to here, I will do my best. Yes, I did Assimil before I started mass immersion. I thought you had to, after my experience with my kids I now know that you don’t. I am not against mass immersion plus simultaneous extras like Assimil, Anki, Clozemaster etc. But the ratio should be 80/20 in favor of immersion, if not 90/10. In the scenario where the OP only had an hour a day for Portuguese I would just do immersion. If he had an hour and a half, sure devote 15 minutes to Assimil or Anki, it will totally help. But these are add-ons to immersion, not things to do before starting immersion.

I am *not* advocating for just TV in the long run. Once you have solid passive skills you will have some active skills without trying. Brains work that way. But you will make mistakes. But solid passive skills make learning active skills so much easier. Grammar workbooks are much less painful when you already understand the language. It’s like when you were taught grammar for your native language in school. You were already deeply familiar with the patterns and you could follow along when your teachers explained the details.

I think there is a common misunderstanding that comprehensible input needs to be 99% comprehensible and 1% new material. You do have to understand something, and a native English speaker will already understand some Portuguese. But it totally works if you only understand 23%. Your brain will work on making that 24% and then 25% etc. etc. A lot of people won’t keep watching at 23% because they get frustrated. But it does work. If you can push through the first 50 hours you will notice a big difference, and leaps up every additional 50 hours. I know this from personal experience. (Yes, I had Assimil first. I can’t undo that. But the naturally leveling up experience is real, no matter where you start.)

[emk]

However I vehemently reject the idea of listening as it is often proposed: the '500 hours' holy grail and all the unexplained 'magic'. I would argue that over time when someone is following a listening-heavy approach they lose track of all the extra things they actually do over a long period of time.

So, first let me make a clarification: Watching TV can make you better at watching TV. (And at understanding conversations, and maybe at reading books.) Watching TV will not magically teach you to speak. If you want to speak, you're going to have to eventually go out there and speak. At best, TV is an excellent source of casual, spoken language, which is hard to find significant amounts of in books.

But with that caveat out of the way, I absolutely believe that massive amounts of comprehensible input will dramatically improve someone's comprehsion. I'm going to tell my personal story again, because I had really good experiences with watching and reading.

I was one of the people who finished the first 10,000-page Super Challenge. When I started, I could muddle my way through non-fiction very slowly and with great pain. When I finished 20 months later, I could comfortably read 40 pages of French/hour, looking up a word in a pop-up dictionary every couple of pages.

During the Challenge itself, which started just as I was on the verge of B2, my "study" consisted of:

1. Reading French books.
2. Watching French TV and movies.
3. 1,500 Anki sentence cards, captured from things I was reading. This was as close as I came to "study". If I saw something weird, I might Google it and paste an explanation on a card. These cards were responsible for a fairly small fraction of my vocabulary; the rest was cognates and osmosis.
4. Speaking French with my wife, and occasionally her family. This is where my active skills come from, not from TV.
5. Listening to enough MC Solaar to annoy everyone around me.

My grammar study before my B2 exam was haphazard at the very best. Some of it came from writing 50-100 words/day and exchanging corrections at Lang-8 for 30 days. But once I finished the exam and started the Super Challenge, I basically abandoned any official study outside making occasional Anki cards, and I sunk a huge number of hours into reading.

Meanwhile, I was binge-watching Buffy. First seaon, I had maybe 40% listening comprehension. (But when I checked a transcript, I could understand more.) Fifth season, I had 95+% listening comprehension. That's 60-70 hours of television, I think? A lot of this was me turning reading skills into listening skills. But I got those reading skills mostly by reading French books.

1. Motivation, habit, curiosity and tenacity.
2. Repetition.
3. Obligatory receptive (listening and reading) and active (talking) efforts.
4. Time and more time.

I do like this list. Basically, you improve the skills you practice, and almost any activity that involves "wrestling with the language" will help.

I totally agree with Le Baron on this one, and I'm kind of surprised to see this coming from you, given that you talked today about something that seemed like a very different take in another thread.

Well, in the other thread, I was focusing on the problem of teaching a diverse class of students. And in that case, sometimes the answer is that someone just isn't learning from input, because they don't know the difference between an adjective and adverb, and they only do the work if it's being graded. In this case, the answer is a grammar book and some graded exercises. In another classroom, you might have 5th-year French students who struggle through L'Étranger and who can't hold a 3-minute conversation about visiting a friend. But they're really good at doing worksheets! In that case, I might recommend a mix of more casual reading, and more conversational practice. I've known teachers who were amazing at pointing students where to go. And someone with a single, rigid theory will struggle to help people learn.

But in this thread, I was talking about a rather odd set of constraints: how to use 500 1-hour dinners when your brain is fried by 80-hour work weeks, and your hands are probably busy eating. Under these constraints, I wouldn't expect to make any real progress on speaking, at all. But if you spend 50 of those hours on something like Assimil's passive wave, then you'll know the core of the language. You'll have some listening ability. You'll have seen some grammar notes. And Assimil's passive wave is easy enough that you can probably work through it even when brain-fried. And once you finish Assimil, you'll be trying to do extensive listening starting with A2 listening skills. It's still going to be inefficient and painful, but it's vastly more likely to work quickly than starting from zero. If you only have a 1-hour block at the end of a 12-13 hour work day, you need to make some tradeoffs.

And I do think you can get a lot out of TV, once you're over that initial hump. Turing 0% listening comprehension into 40% listening comprehension is hard. But turning 40% into 95% can be done by watching TV, and reading trashy books for fun. Wouldn't hurt to make some Anki cards and Google explanations for the weird bits.

I hope this clarifies what I was saying! Now I'm going to go back and try to fix these #$%!! subtitles.

[Khayyam]

And Assimil's passive wave is easy enough that you can probably work through it even when brain-fried.

I worked through almost all of the passive wave of the Persian Assimil course for German speakers (I'm not a native German speaker) during 15-minute work breaks in a somewhat noisy environment. The lessons are so short that I usually finished one and moved on to the next in that time. Assimil really does make it as easy as it could possibly be to build your receptive-skills base, IMO. I'm totally in favor of going all-in with mass input once the base has been built, but why reject a tool that's so well designed to build the base? Jumping straight to mass input with ~0% comprehension sounds extremely frustrating and motivation-draining to me, and I say that as someone whose bread and butter is mass input.

FumblingTowardFluency, if you dedicated an hour a day to Assimil, I'll bet you could easily be done with the passive phase in under a month no matter how work-fried your brain is. (I'm assuming that your Assimil is of the same caliber as mine was, of course.) If you can concentrate well enough to follow a TV show at all, I'm sure you can concentrate well enough to do the passive wave of an Assimil course for a language where knowing English gives you an automatic advantage.

You can also use time when your body is engaged but your brain is more or less free (driving, doing chores, etc.) to repeatedly play the Assimil tracks you've already learned. Listening to the TL every chance you get is one of the best habits you can have, but I favor listening to things you mostly or entirely understand. If you're just starting, that means listening to things you've already read and studied. "I'll just listen to something I don't understand and see how many words I can pick out" is a fun game to play occasionally to test your progress, but repeatedly listening to things you understand well because you've already read them carefully along with the audio is a far better way to build the base, IMO.

[MapleLeaf]

For videos over meals, might I suggest 'comprehensive input'? Supposedly these should be easier to get started with than a TV series. https://comprehensibleinputwiki.org/wiki/Portuguese provides a few youtube links.

[Cainntear]

There is a lot to reply to here, I will do my best. Yes, I did Assimil before I started mass immersion. I thought you had to, after my experience with my kids I now know that you don’t.

So because your kids didn't need it, that means that you didn't need it and that no-one] does...? That's a bit of a leap of logic, and you haven't given any information on what ages your kids were at the time.

I am not against mass immersion plus simultaneous extras like Assimil, Anki, Clozemaster etc. But the ratio should be 80/20 in favor of immersion, if not 90/10.

And you'll find that very few of us would disagree with that, and in fact of those of us who would disagree with that, it doesn't usually take much questioning to establish that they are simply more conscious of their conscious study and less conscious of their conversation and/or materials immersion (which seems obvious when the word "conscious" appears so often).

The issue that I often say is that when we're driving a car, we only start the car for a fraction of a percent of the time we actually drive the car somewhere. We spend a fairly small percentage of the time turning a corner than driving down a straight road, and we spend less time switching on the indicator than actually turning the corner. We spend less time switching on and off our winscreen wipers than turning corners.
The fact that we spend about 95% of our time following a road doesn't mean we can ignore these other things -- just because we do them less doesn't make them less important!

In the scenario where the OP only had an hour a day for Portuguese I would just do immersion. If he had an hour and a half, sure devote 15 minutes to Assimil or Anki, it will totally help. But these are add-ons to immersion, not things to do before starting immersion.

Then why is it that so many of us do it before immersion?

I am *not* advocating for just TV in the long run. Once you have solid passive skills you will have some active skills without trying. Brains work that way. But you will make mistakes. But solid passive skills make learning active skills so much easier.

Yo cn unnastan whout hering evritin. If yo do passiv lissning, dere ill bee no impetus to bild a fool modle ov de langwidge. Yo cn unnastan by taking short cuts and only listening to the bits that make you understand the message -- see also the many English learners who drop the the S in third-person singular conjugations. They don't hear it (often because their language doesn't allow complex consonant clusters like CTS in "instructs" or doesn't allow S after N ("runs") and they don't *need* to hear it, because conjugation for person is redundant in any language that isn't pro-drop, and in English, it is literally only in the present tense and in the past of the irregular verb "to be" that verbs are conjugated for person -- English is losing conjugation for person, so learners don't tend to notice it.

If an adult does passive stuff, it can reinforce flawed strategies and make it harder when it finally comes to learning productive skills.

Grammar workbooks are much less painful when you already understand the language. It’s like when you were taught grammar for your native language in school. You were already deeply familiar with the patterns and you could follow along when your teachers explained the details.

Grammar in your own language should be grammar awareness. It's a useful thing because it allows you to start learning a new language from grammatical rules. If you know what an adjective is, you can learn how French uses adjectives by talking about them.

I think there is a common misunderstanding that comprehensible input needs to be 99% comprehensible and 1% new material.

Why do you think that? Who has said anything like that to you>

You do have to understand something, and a native English speaker will already understand some Portuguese.

Words. But learning a language isn't just about learning words.

But it totally works if you only understand 23%.

That's not "comprehensible input". "Comprehensible Input" is a term defined by Stephen Krashen, and it specifically means input where you can understand the message even though there are language items that you do not understand. If you only understand 23% of that language, how can you understand the message?

Your brain will work on making that 24% and then 25% etc. etc.

Or possibly you will believe you are understanding more and more, but you will have made false assumptions that lead to reasoning to false conclusions and believing that something means something it doesn't. Going down dead-ends is easy... getting out of them isn't.

A lot of people won’t keep watching at 23% because they get frustrated. But it does work.

This is one of my typical bugbears -- blaming the learner: "It's your fault -- you didn't do it right." I've seen people in tears because they have tried really hard and done exactly what they're told, and still didn't manage to learn. Then there are people that the teachers take credit for who are following the teacher's instructions far less closely.

You're saying "if you do what I advise (but have never tried) you will learn, as long as you don't give up." That is basically telling people to ignore their own brain telling them it's not working, and to trust you on something you have neither done yourself or ever studied in any depth at all.

If you can push through the first 50 hours you will notice a big difference, and leaps up every additional 50 hours. I know this from personal experience. (Yes, I had Assimil first. I can’t undo that. But the naturally leveling up experience is real, no matter where you start.)

You.
Do.
Not.
Know.
That.
From.
Personal.
Experience.
Your personal experience was starting with Assimil. You have no personal experience of learning from listening. And that is something you absolutely cannot undo.

You cannot pretend that you are speaking from personal experience when you advise doing something that you have not experienced.