Krashen crashes his future (makes mistakes in Spanish)

[El Forastero]

Well, it is. At least in most accents. I never say i·ne·ga·ble, always in·ne·ga·ble. Some caribbean accents have even longer N sounds

[Deinonysus]

As you know, there is no gemination in Spanish.

Indeed, there is. When you want to put prefix like "in" or "en" and the next word begins by an N. The N sound is double, each syllable has an N.

Innecesario: Unnecesary
Innegable: Undeniable
Ennegrecer: Turn Dark
Ennoblecer: To Ennoble

I think it's clear from context that Hashimi meant there is no gemination within a morpheme in Spanish. This contrasts with languages like Italian where gemination forms minimal pairs within a morpheme, such as penne (pens, or penne pasta) vs pene (penis, which is why I am very particular when I order pasta).

In languages like Spanish and English, you do get some gemination as a byproduct of one morpheme ending with the same consonant that the next morpheme begins with, such as "penknife", "midday", or "unnecessary" but it doesn't often form a minimal pair the way it does in Italian, and it is much more rare.

Contrasting "pagar" with "paggar" would almost certainly be gemination within a morpheme, which doesn't happen in Spanish. The only way it could be geminated is if it's a combination of two morphemes "pag" and "gar", which are not words in Spanish.

[Random Review]

I can't believe I'm defending Krashen here, because I'm usually one of the first to criticise him (I remember Cainntear once saying that he was totally anti-Krashen for beginners and I agreed with him 100% at the time and still do today); but really some of this picking apart his languages is a bit unfair. Look at the guy's age for goodness sake: he didn't have YouTube, Spotify, a smorgasbord of affordable audiobooks on Audible, movies and series on Netflix and a million apps on his phone back in the 60's and 70's. What do you think massive comprehensible input meant back then? It meant moving to a country that speaks that language or extensive reading.

Unless my memory is playing tricks on me, in his case it was extensive reading, for which he I believe he has always been a massive advocate.

I'm sorry this sounds a bit aggressive, I really don't mean it that way. You guys are great. I just genuinely think some of the criticism in this thread is a bit unfair. Of course back then there were tapes with the better language courses and he probably used them; but that is not massive CI. He should not be expected to have wonderful pronunciation.

Now, if he's screwing up his grammar or misusing words on some video somewhere, I'm all ears. Like I say, I'm not his biggest fan.

[tarvos]

Of course it's ganging up on somebody for a minor mistake. Honestly, really, did you expect anybody to be perfect? Most linguists aren't even polyglots... many of them don't speak anything besides English.

[sirgregory]

In the video Krashen says language classes should be taught almost entirely in the target language. There are other videos of him where he makes the same points: 1) learners need lots of authentic input, 2) the input must be made comprehensible, 3) this should be done with pictures, gestures, etc. The "comprehensible input" just seems like common sense. The last part is the most debatable point and personally I think there are a lot more ways to do it including translation and direct explanation. If we're talking about language education in schools, I think the real reason classes in the US are taught with textbooks and mostly in English is as much due to practical constraints as any sort of linguistic theory. The "traditional" style is relatively inexpensive and doesn't require all the teachers to even be fluent in the language. This makes it realistic to implement on a mass scale.

Interestingly, according to Wikipedia Krashen's most notable practical accomplishment in language education seems to be campaigning aggressively against English immersion for immigrant children in California.

My approach is counter-intuitive: Teach children in their primary tongue, so that you can get them to learn English? It sounds funny, but as the research shows, it's the best way to do it.

Seems like the opposite of what he says in this video and elsewhere.

[Cainntear]

If you do conscious grammar study, though, you can gain first exposure to the rules and patterns as rules and patterns -- this means that you have them to hand without having to see hundreds of examples first, and you can use input and exposure to improve and refine your understanding of the grammar.

I don't understand why this always has to turn into a "there is only one right way to learn a language for everybody".

Maybe because some people choose to interpret other people's messages that way...?

My message above was an assertion that explicit grammar instruction is quicker -- whether that makes it "the right way" or not is a separate question
When direct/natural methods went out of fashion in the early 20th century, there were many who believed this was proof the methods were intrinsically wrong, but there were also many who still believed that they were the "best" or "right" way to learn languages, but that practical and pragmatic concerns ruled them out of use -- i.e. you didn't get enough time in the classroom for them to be effective. For most people, time is always going to be a limiting factor, so the problem still stands:

To derive the rules of a language from exposure, whether explicitly or implicitly, you need to have concentrated exposure, because you need to be comparing, contrasting and resolving multiple references at once. If there's a long forgetting time between sessions, that's not going to happen. But even where there isn't that forgetting time, no-one has ever convincingly demonstrated that CI is better.

Just because I learn best through CI first and then studying some grammar once I have a feel for the language and enough vocabulary to actually apply those grammar rules to doesn't mean that everyone has to do it that way.

And even then, the fact that you believe you learn best through CI first doesn't actually mean that you do. Krashen claims that people who believe they learn best through grammar study are simply misled by their expectations, and only fail to learn through CI because their disbelief in it "raises their affective filter"... but a totally symmetrical claim can be made the other way round.

The "grammar first" strategy never worked for me; I tried it several times and it produced nothing but frustration.

My argument there would be that most grammar-based teaching is bad, but that's not a direct consequence of teaching grammar.

There are multiple factors in teaching language and any methodology tends to bundle lots of them together.

One of the most common problems with explicit grammar instruction is one of compartmentalisation. A whole pile of things are described as "one thing" and then other groups of things are presented as unrelated single "things". These things are learnt separately, practiced separately, talked about separately... but the groups are really linked in multiple subtle ways.

A lot of this compartmentalisation is a side-effect of the paper or whiteboard the instruction comes from.

For example -- verb tables. These are usually 2 dimensional (number vs person) and then each tense, mood, voice or aspect is presented as an individual, distinct table. But the patterns in Spanish are much more interrelated. For example, most informal 2nd person singular verbs are just the 3rd person singular + S, and 3rd person plural is almost always 3rd person singular + N.

Paper-led teaching can become fragmented and focus on arbitrary distinction rather than the real distinctions of the language, but this is a problem of teacher mindset and the misleading effects of paper, and not an argument against grammar instruction per se.

Clearly it works for you, though. Why not just agree that there are different ways to approach language learning and people can choose what works for them?

I never said people couldn't choose which materials and methods to use, did I?

[Cainntear]

I can't believe I'm defending Krashen here, because I'm usually one of the first to criticise him (I remember Cainntear once saying that he was totally anti-Krashen for beginners and I agreed with him 100% at the time and still do today); but really some of this picking apart his languages is a bit unfair. Look at the guy's age for goodness sake: he didn't have YouTube, Spotify, a smorgasbord of affordable audiobooks on Audible, movies and series on Netflix and a million apps on his phone back in the 60's and 70's. What do you think massive comprehensible input meant back then? It meant moving to a country that speaks that language or extensive reading.

But surely that would mean that when he started proposing it, he was proposing the impossible? Like "this is the only way to learn languages. We've tried everything else and nothing works. So we have to do it this way. We can't do it this way, as there isn't the material available. But we have to do it this way anyway."

Plenty of people contemporary to Krashen learned without those mistakes.

[StringerBell]

But even where there isn't that forgetting time, no-one has ever convincingly demonstrated that CI is better.

Out of curiosity, has anyone ever demonstrated that a grammar-first or grammar-only approach is better?

[sirgregory]

Yesterday I watched an entertaining video that I found somewhat relevant to the grammar/no grammar debate. They approached non-Japanese looking people in the streets of Tokyo to see if any of the gaijin could actually speak Japanese. Most of them seem to have not even bothered to pick up a phrase book . But a few could speak well including one Italian guy who was very impressive.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8-YLAKW7DU&t=215s

He offers some advice for learning Japanese that I found to be interesting and rather unexpected. He recommends that you "study grammar in detail first in your own language." I'm not exactly sure if he meant you should study grammar generally including the grammar of your native language or if you should study Japanese grammar specifically, mostly in your native language. Either way, it's pretty clear he's a "grammar guy" and apparently a successful one.

Most professional and academic fields develop their own elaborate jargon and terminology because it's a more precise way to refer to specific concepts and it helps to systematize the subject. Even without the terminology and structure of an academic discipline you can still appreciate and use the concepts, but you can access the ideas more rapidly and reliably if you have well-established, conveniently labelled mental categories for them. Accordingly, I do find academic tools and terminology (the little that I've picked up) useful for language learning. Even if I'm not studying a "grammar" book, now that I've learned some basic grammatical concepts I can't help but analyze a new language grammatically. When I look at a sentence, I think consciously about parts of speech, inflections, etc. I did not have this instinct back when I studied Spanish in high school because I hadn't established the concepts well enough at that time. Words like "third person plural" or "past participle" just didn't mean much at that point. But now I have a hard time suppressing the instinct to analyze, label, etc. using the bit of grammar I'm comfortable with. At the same time I'm not that comfortable with phonetics and many other areas, so if I see words like "fricative" and "labial" whatever I tend to skim over it. Potentially useful, but I'm not there yet.

Even if you live in a country and use a language everyday, my experience has been that once you become functional and can "get by" in the language there's a tendency to plateau at an unsatisfactory level without deliberate study. Some errors will take you a long time to fix "naturally," and some you might never fix. For me, I found hitting the books to be essential for improving.

Some people say learning grammar rules and thinking consciously about grammar will interfere with your ability to speak (in fact, the guy in the video in the OP claims this). I can believe this in the early stages. Someone who "lets it fly" might speak relatively better than someone who's trying to work out the grammar in his head (which is very cognitively demanding in real time). But in the early stage you'll speak poorly regardless and later on it I doubt it will be a problem once you get more practice.

[Random Review]

I can't believe I'm defending Krashen here, because I'm usually one of the first to criticise him (I remember Cainntear once saying that he was totally anti-Krashen for beginners and I agreed with him 100% at the time and still do today); but really some of this picking apart his languages is a bit unfair. Look at the guy's age for goodness sake: he didn't have YouTube, Spotify, a smorgasbord of affordable audiobooks on Audible, movies and series on Netflix and a million apps on his phone back in the 60's and 70's. What do you think massive comprehensible input meant back then? It meant moving to a country that speaks that language or extensive reading.

But surely that would mean that when he started proposing it, he was proposing the impossible? Like "this is the only way to learn languages. We've tried everything else and nothing works. So we have to do it this way. We can't do it this way, as there isn't the material available. But we have to do it this way anyway."

Plenty of people contemporary to Krashen learned without those mistakes.

That's just a separate debate altogether, mate. I am not advocating Krashen's views on language learning (at least not for beginners anyway), in fact my own views are much closer to yours; but since he didn't learn his pronunciation with CI (as opposed to grammar, etc), his mediocre pronunciation shouldn't be held up as disproving him.

It's also worth pointing out that, although by the standards of this forum his Spanish pronunciation is pretty meh, it is actually considerably better than the vast majority of anglophone gringos/guiris that I have heard speaking Spanish. It's much better, for example, than that of a certain Polish teacher whose ideas on teaching beginners we both consider much better than Krashen's (and for similar reasons no doubt).

Honestly, attacking his pronunciation is a total irrelevance.