Was language learning easier 20-30 years ago?

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Re: Was language learning easier 20-30 years ago?

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Sun Nov 28, 2021 4:48 pm

Was language learning easier 20-30 years ago?

I don't know, but three of my very few target languages I can actually use were learned before Internet was around. This being said, now I have easier access to almost anything I want. Whether that is helpful or just makes the monkey mind even more distracted, I cannot say.
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Re: Was language learning easier 20-30 years ago?

Postby BeaP » Sun Nov 28, 2021 5:09 pm

jeff_lindqvist wrote:I don't know, but three of my very few target languages I can actually use were learned before Internet was around.

I didn't want to go into personal details in my opening post, but I'm in the same situation. Even the number 3 is common in our experience. It's true that my Spanish (learnt with internet) is almost C2, but it has taken me 15 years to reach this level. And I'm a more experienced learner than I used to be, so I wasn't really expecting this rate. This realisation is what made me think that although it seems to be obvious that language learning is easier now, there can be another side to the story.
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Re: Was language learning easier 20-30 years ago?

Postby Iversen » Sun Nov 28, 2021 7:45 pm

I have learnt most of my Germanic and Romance languages between 1960 and 1980, and I would not say that it was easier back then - except in one respect: the textbooks were better (and definitely better than the alternatives now), and the paper dictionaries were smaller without being less comprehensive. I have for instance an Italian-Danish dictionary from Gyldendal in an old and in a somewhat newer version, and they have more or less the same number of words, but the new one is twice as thick and heavy. And my antiquated Greek<->German Langenscheidt is so small that I can keep it in one hand while I write with the other - the newer one (in yellow plastic) is twice as thick and closes automatically. These things may sound like unimportant details, but I still use my old dictionaries, and if I had to use a Teach Yourself then I would definitely prefer an old bluish one and not the new thick ones.

But today I have got Google and Wikipedia and Google Translate (for my bilingual prints), and I can listen to speech snippets on Youtube, which also has given me access to an immense number of obscure composers which I never would have known if I had been restricted to libraries, radio and concerts. It is evident that all these things also may tempt you to waste your time and flicker through different low-class sources without ever learning anything, but it's up to you to keep those tendencies under control.

The main difference for me personally (except that I was younger, but hadn't invented three-column wordlists yet) is that I had people to speak to in school and at the university, at least in some of my languages. I'm aware that there are homepages that offer oral communication with other speakers (including native speakers if you are lucky), but I have never got that thing organized - otherwise I would have been speaking half a dozen Slavic languages fluently by now. And even though I travelled a lot (at least before covid), there would be long periods between each speaking opportunity.

However as a whole I would say that I have better resources now than I had during my first language learning period.
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Re: Was language learning easier 20-30 years ago?

Postby Le Baron » Sun Nov 28, 2021 7:58 pm

Despite the endless number of new material possibilities: audio, video, reading, language exchanges, forums...everything discussed here, it seems to me there is a still a huge number of people with all the same old language learning problems as the pre-internet world. So if it's so much easier now, why would that be?

A couple of replies have indicated that it's six of one and half a dozen of the other; that there's more stuff to use, but that it doesn't guarantee you success. I'm inclined to agree with that. There may be more stuff, but some things have not altered, particularly: the amount of time and effort you can and do expend. Also how good you get at guiding your own learning vs professional guidance vs following the latest guru theories.

It's common to relate doing the old-school 3 years of a language under ordinary teaching (school or college) circumstances, yet being unable to understand or use the language under real circumstances. However this also happens under modern self-teaching circumstances. It's reported all over the internet all the time. "Why can't I learn Spanish? What's wrong with me?!" Also people living in TL countries who have as much difficulty learning as ever.

There are clearly more opportunities and more materials available, but the way people learn means they might not always make judicious use of them. Or worse still may well just binge on things in a haphazard way hoping for an awakening, rather than extracting value in a targeted way. This is no doubt due to the way competing views are touted as golden tickets to language mastery.

Personally I think it's probably easier now if you're serious and organised and willing to accept some cul-de-sacs in your learning. Serious, organised and intelligent learners in the past also learned languages though, we know this because we've seen it. It may have been harder to hunt down opportunities, but that meant the person was determined. There's really not much difference between someone in 1978 purchasing the complete Linguaphone Italian and letting it gather dust in a corner and the person in 2021 downloading the complete Linguaphone Italian (among 2 dozen other materials) and not doing much with it.
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Re: Was language learning easier 20-30 years ago?

Postby BeaP » Sun Nov 28, 2021 8:19 pm

Iversen wrote:The main difference for me personally is that I had people to speak to in school and at the university, at least in some of my languages.

Believe it or not, I haven't recognised the importance of this before. On the contrary, I thought that stammering with fellow students was just a waste of time. Now that you've burst my bubble, I recall that it wasn't always stammering. It's funny how subjective one's own reflections upon the learning process are.
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Re: Was language learning easier 20-30 years ago?

Postby BeaP » Sun Nov 28, 2021 9:16 pm

Le Baron wrote:Also how good you get at guiding your own learning vs professional guidance vs following the latest guru theories.

There are clearly more opportunities and more materials available, but the way people learn means they might not always make judicious use of them.


I often get the impression that people need guidance, and it's much harder to get it now than in the past. I don't think they don't want to take responsibility for their own learning, it's rather that making choices all the time (especially from an unlimited number of possibilities) is a huge task that requires energy. When I was young and had a teacher, I had no choice, and I didn't have to make choices. Now teaching yourself is not just a valid option, but the better option for a lot of people. However, the place of the teacher or authority is empty. Teachers haven't been replaced by anyone or anything who can save you these choices.

Once I wrote a blog in Hungarian about language learning, and I received a lot of comments, questions and requests. There were two major types: the first group told me that I was stupid and they knew everything better (they usually didn't elaborate on this), and the second group consisted on self-proclaimed anti-talents who wanted me to give them a clear guidance with titles, numbers and promises. When I told them that it was impossible, and they needed to figure out things for themselves, they were extremely disappointed. I couldn't react to this in any constructive way, but I'm beginning to think that some people just need a teacher, no matter how good the available resources are.

I've also recently realised that during learning I assume a lot of things, and I might assume badly. So even though I was a bit against teachers for a long time, now I start to see their benefits again.
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Re: Was language learning easier 20-30 years ago?

Postby Iversen » Sun Nov 28, 2021 9:16 pm

@beaP Well, I also spoke to my teachers... Actually I didn't like having those silly amateur comedy conversations with classmates, but just hearing the language spoken by living humans may have left an imprint. And when I studied at the university the other students mostly had learnt to speak their target languages, just not well enough.

Today the thing that would help me most with my weak languages would be conversation classes opportunities with very limited guidance, and then I would do the vocabulary and grammar learning at home using my own methods.
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Re: Was language learning easier 20-30 years ago?

Postby Le Baron » Sun Nov 28, 2021 10:00 pm

BeaP wrote: When I was young and had a teacher, I had no choice, and I didn't have to make choices. Now teaching yourself is not just a valid option, but the better option for a lot of people. However, the place of the teacher or authority is empty. Teachers haven't been replaced by anyone or anything who can save you these choices.

[...]I'm beginning to think that some people just need a teacher, no matter how good the available resources are.

I agree with the above. It's unpopular among some learners, but a teacher can save you a lot of time and effort from either reinventing the wheel or taking a lot of pointless detours.

In general the same old rule applies: good guidance is always good, but the bulk of work you have to do yourself.
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Re: Was language learning easier 20-30 years ago?

Postby SpanishInput » Sun Nov 28, 2021 10:23 pm

BeaP wrote:1. Books (materials) were more thorough, they provided more content, now everything is watered down.

This reminds me of this video by prof. Arguelles:


My two cents: I'm also nostalgic about my time in the Bénédict school of languages, where I learned English. The books were nice, with short stories and drills, and the atmosphere was friendly and informal (max 9 students per class). We also had a lab where we did listening exercises. But I was a kid and had lots of free time to devote to English, so my perception might not be objective. I think I was lucky enough to have that school in my area back then.

Regular English lessons in my school, on the other hand, were not helpful. Compared to those, any of today's resources is a lot better.
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Re: Was language learning easier 20-30 years ago?

Postby zgriptsuroica » Mon Nov 29, 2021 9:47 am

One thing that seems to be different to me (though I can't comment with any certainty owing to my age) is the obsession with efficiency that seems to me to have popped up within perhaps the last 10-15 years. I've seen people elsewhere talk about abandoning a particular approach/resource not for any concrete fault, but that they heard of another method that was more efficient. It can be a negative for learners in a number of ways, in my opinion, not least of which is that it encourages resources hopping rather than settling in and engaging with one set of materials at length, as well as giving pseudo-scientific legitimacy to nonsense about being able to learn a language to advanced competency in ridiculously short amounts of time.

While I don't think there was really a time where language courses advertised as saying "This one is going to be a real pain, you'll hate it," we've also gone further than ever down the path of convincing people that, not only might they have fun learning a language, they could even do it effortlessly via some app, turning all their video games to Spanish or something. This goes hand-in-hand with the efficiency obsession and internet gurus selling magic methods to establish unreasonable expectations of what learning a language should or will be like, and the amount of time that must actually be committed to get results, which can definitely contribute to muddying the waters for the would be student.
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