What the snake oil salesmen will tell you
Nowadays there is an endless array of apps, software, and courses that claim to teach you Spanish in days or weeks. Many of them claim to be “science-backed” and offer plenty of convincing testimonials to convince you that they are the real deal.
But at the end of the day, these wild claims are just their way of hooking you in. If it sounds too good to be true, then it probably is.
So what’s the harm in exaggerating a bit in order to get people started?
The problem is that people will start using the app or software, and inevitably won’t improve as fast as they thought they would. They’ll compare themselves against the results promised by the program, and ask, “Why am I not getting this?”
When this happens, many people will end up blaming themselves. This leads to a loss of confidence that can manifest itself in various harmful ways.
What the snake oil salesmen will/won't tell you
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What the snake oil salesmen will/won't tell you
https://verbalicity.com/how-long-does-i ... n-spanish/
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Re: What the snake oil salesmen will/won't tell you
And immediately author of this article tries to sell some oil of his own. He is bashing FSI for their estimates on how long to learn Spanish:
AndAccording to an FSI study, it should take 600 classroom hours to achieve conversational fluency in Spanish. Furthermore, they suggest an approximate 1:1 ratio between time spent in the classroom, and time spent studying independently (most people miss this part).
Therefore, the total time spent will actually be around 1,200 hours! (If that seems like a lot, it is!)
Now, assuming you’re enrolled in a typical college Spanish class that runs 3-hours per week, that means it will take you 4-years to learn Spanish!
Basically, he tries to sell Benny Lewis-esque approach as the way to fast acquired fluency. Sorry, for the general case (no other context provided except that the learner is English native speaker) I would believe FSI more. If one does not want to spend 4 years to learn Spanish, he might want to increase number of hours in a week.In other words, if you’re focusing on having conversations (practice doing / immediate use), you could be learning up to 15-18 times more efficiently than in a traditional classroom (lecture).
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- moonlyrics
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Re: What the snake oil salesmen will/won't tell you
what the snake oil salesman won't tell you is that people learn differently. one-size-fits-all method is nonsense from day one. "In other words, if you’re focusing on having conversations (practice doing / immediate use), you could be learning up to 15-18 times more efficiently than in a traditional classroom (lecture)."..... yeahhh for audial learners like myself that's fine. visual learners not so much.
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Re: What the snake oil salesmen will/won't tell you
Intensity also matters. FSI never said you can stretch the number of hours over 4 years. It applies only to their students, not a random native speaker of English taking a Spanish class.
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Re: What the snake oil salesmen will/won't tell you
Serpent wrote:Intensity also matters. FSI never said you can stretch the number of hours over 4 years. It applies only to their students, not a random native speaker of English taking a Spanish class.
Sticky this post forever. Not all hours are created equal.
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Re: What the snake oil salesmen will/won't tell you
moonlyrics wrote:yeahhh for audial learners like myself that's fine. visual learners not so much.
Except that there's absolutely no evidentiary basis for categorising learners by learning style. It's just another form of snake oil.
Pashler et al. 2008. Learning styles: concepts and evidence
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Re: What the snake oil salesmen will/won't tell you
I know that the FSI numbers shouldn't be taken as gospel for many reasons, but it always amazes me how often they will be brought up as a starting point, their obvious limitations in accuracy pointed out, and then they are thrown completely out like the proverbial baby in the bathwater and some WILDLY smaller number will be presented with pretty much zero backing evidence.
While this isn't my field of profession, in all my years of HTLAL/LLORG lurking, I don't think I've come across much other data on learning times from beginner to B2/C1 that wasn't anecdotal/N=1 or of dubious rigor. Yes, the FSI numbers aren't perfect, but (from my understanding) they do come from a lot of experience getting batches of people from 0 to 'fluent'(-ish?)... which most other estimates I've seen don't.
And particularly when one considers random rank beginners vs what I understand to be the typical FSI student, not to mention the intensity pointed out above... the assertion that a beginner can learn, not just faster, but 3x, 4x, 5x...10x faster is just nonsense to me.
So, do I think, for example, a rank beginner can learn Spanish in a lot less than 600 hours of effort/learning/exposure?
It may be _possible_, but I think it is FAR more likely for the overwhelming majority of people that this is a minimum and most people will actually take longer.
“The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but that is the way to bet.”
This is why the "just 15 minutes / day" type drivel from all the language learning app/websites is so hard for me to stomach. Especially when we start to talk about languages like Mandarin. Don't get me wrong, I totally see the value in people building A1/A2 skills for fun and profit. But I agree with the original comment that this can be REALLY discouraging when someone plays with one of these apps for a year (<100 hours) and realizes they still aren't much beyond the "where's the bathroom?" stage and they can't understand almost anything said to them in the TL. (I won't get into the scarcity of comprehensible input in many of these tools.) It just perpetuates the myth of 'learning a language (as an adult/outside the country/without supernatural talent/etc) is impossible'.
Ok, angry rant over.
While this isn't my field of profession, in all my years of HTLAL/LLORG lurking, I don't think I've come across much other data on learning times from beginner to B2/C1 that wasn't anecdotal/N=1 or of dubious rigor. Yes, the FSI numbers aren't perfect, but (from my understanding) they do come from a lot of experience getting batches of people from 0 to 'fluent'(-ish?)... which most other estimates I've seen don't.
And particularly when one considers random rank beginners vs what I understand to be the typical FSI student, not to mention the intensity pointed out above... the assertion that a beginner can learn, not just faster, but 3x, 4x, 5x...10x faster is just nonsense to me.
So, do I think, for example, a rank beginner can learn Spanish in a lot less than 600 hours of effort/learning/exposure?
It may be _possible_, but I think it is FAR more likely for the overwhelming majority of people that this is a minimum and most people will actually take longer.
“The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong; but that is the way to bet.”
This is why the "just 15 minutes / day" type drivel from all the language learning app/websites is so hard for me to stomach. Especially when we start to talk about languages like Mandarin. Don't get me wrong, I totally see the value in people building A1/A2 skills for fun and profit. But I agree with the original comment that this can be REALLY discouraging when someone plays with one of these apps for a year (<100 hours) and realizes they still aren't much beyond the "where's the bathroom?" stage and they can't understand almost anything said to them in the TL. (I won't get into the scarcity of comprehensible input in many of these tools.) It just perpetuates the myth of 'learning a language (as an adult/outside the country/without supernatural talent/etc) is impossible'.
Ok, angry rant over.
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Re: What the snake oil salesmen will/won't tell you
Cainntear wrote:Except that there's absolutely no evidentiary basis for categorising learners by learning style. It's just another form of snake oil.
is that article specific to language learning?
learning spoken languages vs math is quite different regarding the audial learning component.
"There is also plentiful evidence arguing that people differ in the degree to which they have some fairly specific aptitudes for different kinds of thinking and for processing different types of information.".... quote from the article
edit: just reading on reddit about housing prices going down and someone commented "Still waiting on that hear in Los Angeles." mistake of here vs hear homonyms. it indicates that the writer processes language primarily by sound which not everyone does. musicians do this, too.... kurt cobain's writing contains mistakes based on processing language by sound.
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Re: What the snake oil salesmen will/won't tell you
moonlyrics wrote:Cainntear wrote:Except that there's absolutely no evidentiary basis for categorising learners by learning style. It's just another form of snake oil.
is that article specific to language learning?
No. But of course learning styles as a theory originated in general education, not in the second language acquisition field. If your argument starts with "language is different", your argument begs the question of why learning style theory was ever applied to SLA in the first place.
learning spoken languages vs math is quite different regarding the audial learning component.
Very much so, which is why applying learning styles to language always seemed absurd to me anyway: are we going to say "no point teaching him pronunciation -- he's a visual learner" or "no point teaching her to write -- she's an auditory learner"?
it indicates that the writer processes language primarily by sound which not everyone does.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Language is first and foremost a spoken phenomenon, making it seem unlikely that any language processing doesn't involve sound.
Also, last I'd heard, brain studies had failed to find a single individual who could read or write without their auditory cortex being activated.
So unless we're talking about completely deaf people (who may still use the auditory cortex, I don't know), everyone processes language primarily by sound.
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Re: What the snake oil salesmen will/won't tell you
Not only all hours, but also not learners are not equals. Intelligence plays a role.
Don't get me wrong, I am not gonna spread some myths about IQ being the main part of intelligence, or the talent being more important than work. Nope (I am a living proof that high IQ can be absolutely useless to you and more of a complication in getting education than asset). Intelligence has many parts, some of them measurable, some not. And these "subtalents" affect how fast and how well we learn certain things with certain methods.We are all unique and are more talented in some aspects and less in other ones. Some learners have easier time with pronunciation then others. Some memorise vocabulary faster. And so on. Some people simply need less time to learn something and others more. One of the main advantages of individual independent learning is, that your pace is important, not how your pace compares to that of anyone else.
That's why we need to take all those time estimates with a huge grain of salt. They are nice for orientation (especially as long as they break those silly extreme myths of having to study for ten years to get to B1, or 15 minutes a day for a few months being sufficient). But it is naive to think, that the estimate of 600 hours to get certain results won't mean 500 hours for some learners and 800 for others. And that is not necessarily anyone's failure (neither the learner's, nor the course maker's )
The FSI has experience with taking whole classes of learners to a certain level in a certain amount of time. But what doesn't get said too often: they are not classes of random learners. They are classes of preselected people, who qualify for a certain kind of jobs. People with a certain level of education, perhaps people having passed some entrance testing, and so on. The method is meant and created for a certain kind of learners with a probably similar set of intellectual and personal characteristics.
That's why I find it ridiculous, that the numbers are being taken as a fact and either glorified or disputed so often.
I instinctively doubt anything promissing me 15-18 times better or faster results. No matter what is the subject, whether language learning, weight loss, or electricity prices
And I totally agree with the "he might want to increase number of hours in a week" idea. That is universal, no matter what the number of hours I am gonna need to learn a language actually is.
This is what I really dislike about the article. The language exams are not just fill-in-the-blanks. And the solution to transfering the "academic" skills to the real life is actually doing it, actually trying, and building on the foundation. Take the basics learnt in a coursebook and apply them. This is what I hate about a lot of these "let's revolutionize langauge learning" bloggers.To sell their products, they create this beautiful lie, that most language learners are best, if they just talk and talk without any real learning and become fluent neanderthals.
Don't get me wrong, I am not gonna spread some myths about IQ being the main part of intelligence, or the talent being more important than work. Nope (I am a living proof that high IQ can be absolutely useless to you and more of a complication in getting education than asset). Intelligence has many parts, some of them measurable, some not. And these "subtalents" affect how fast and how well we learn certain things with certain methods.We are all unique and are more talented in some aspects and less in other ones. Some learners have easier time with pronunciation then others. Some memorise vocabulary faster. And so on. Some people simply need less time to learn something and others more. One of the main advantages of individual independent learning is, that your pace is important, not how your pace compares to that of anyone else.
That's why we need to take all those time estimates with a huge grain of salt. They are nice for orientation (especially as long as they break those silly extreme myths of having to study for ten years to get to B1, or 15 minutes a day for a few months being sufficient). But it is naive to think, that the estimate of 600 hours to get certain results won't mean 500 hours for some learners and 800 for others. And that is not necessarily anyone's failure (neither the learner's, nor the course maker's )
The FSI has experience with taking whole classes of learners to a certain level in a certain amount of time. But what doesn't get said too often: they are not classes of random learners. They are classes of preselected people, who qualify for a certain kind of jobs. People with a certain level of education, perhaps people having passed some entrance testing, and so on. The method is meant and created for a certain kind of learners with a probably similar set of intellectual and personal characteristics.
That's why I find it ridiculous, that the numbers are being taken as a fact and either glorified or disputed so often.
Ezra wrote:Basically, he tries to sell Benny Lewis-esque approach as the way to fast acquired fluency. Sorry, for the general case (no other context provided except that the learner is English native speaker) I would believe FSI more. If one does not want to spend 4 years to learn Spanish, he might want to increase number of hours in a week.In other words, if you’re focusing on having conversations (practice doing / immediate use), you could be learning up to 15-18 times more efficiently than in a traditional classroom (lecture).
I instinctively doubt anything promissing me 15-18 times better or faster results. No matter what is the subject, whether language learning, weight loss, or electricity prices
And I totally agree with the "he might want to increase number of hours in a week" idea. That is universal, no matter what the number of hours I am gonna need to learn a language actually is.
Fluency isn’t an exam
Most organizations measure fluency on the basis of reaching a certain academic level or obtaining a certification. So when the FSI says it takes 1,200 hours to learn Spanish, they’re really talking about passing a Spanish exam.
Even the most popular software and apps use this as a benchmark. Rosetta Stone, Duolingo, and Babbel have all funded their own studies claiming that their app can help you cover the requirements of one college semester of Spanish.
Now there’s nothing wrong with trying to learn Spanish for academic reasons, but there are many people who have passed a test, or have received a Spanish certification, but can’t actually speak Spanish with confidence.
The truth is, the vast majority of people want to learn Spanish for REAL LIFE. They want to speak with and understand REAL PEOPLE, not just fill-in-the-blanks on a test paper.
As you can see, there is a gigantic disconnect between how languages are taught, and the results that people are looking for when they decide to pick up a new language.
So if you want to learn Spanish for the real world, then you should devote as much time as possible to learning via real human interaction.
This is what I really dislike about the article. The language exams are not just fill-in-the-blanks. And the solution to transfering the "academic" skills to the real life is actually doing it, actually trying, and building on the foundation. Take the basics learnt in a coursebook and apply them. This is what I hate about a lot of these "let's revolutionize langauge learning" bloggers.To sell their products, they create this beautiful lie, that most language learners are best, if they just talk and talk without any real learning and become fluent neanderthals.
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