Barry Farber on learning grammar from the beginning

[Brun Ugle]

I think it’s important to remember that when he said to start with the first five chapters of your “grammar”, Mr Farber was just referring to an ordinary textbook, not a reference grammar or similar. In the chapter before the one where he explains his “Multiple Track Attack”, he refers to it as a basic textbook.

BASIC TEXTBOOK

Find a basic book (textbook, workbook) that gives you a good grounding in the grammar of the language. Never mind if it seems to give you grammar and little else.....

The Multiple Track Attack is not so unlike what Iguanamon preaches and what many of us actually do. I don’t do exactly what Mr Farber suggests, especially with advantages of the internet and modern technology, but it’s not so different. These days I like to start with a bit of listening to something simple (Peppa Pig, or similar) along with pronunciation work and after a few hours of that, move on to the textbook while continuing with the listening work and overlapping with other materials as I go.

One other point to remember is that even though the book was written in 1991 and is in many ways a bit out of date now because of the various new technology and materials available, it was actually already a bit out of date even when he wrote it. It was clear even when I read it the first time (my edition is from 1994), that he’d done much of his language learning in the 50’s and 60’s. For example, he suggested you might get ahold of some cassette tapes, but seemed to think that these would be something totally separate from your textbook and said that you shouldn’t even unwrap your tapes until you’d finished the “vegetables” that were the first five chapters of your textbook. Yet when I was buying language materials at that time, it was very common to find textbooks accompanied by one or two cassettes. And the textbooks would often begin with a dialogue that was recorded on the cassette. So, I always felt that that particular part was a bit out of date, even the first time I read the book. However, the general idea of the multiple track approach is good and he showed many of us living in monolingual areas that you didn’t need magical powers to learn a language, and that was probably one of the biggest barriers at the time — that learning a language seemed so mystical and impossible.

Although I no longer need his advice, I still have a lot of fondness for the book and remember the joy I felt the first time I read it and realized that I was not alone in my interest in languages and also that it was actually possible to learn a language without needing superpowers.

[seito]

Farber wrote his book pre-internet.

Is it really that old? I didn't think it came out until 1991. I became something of an Internet addict that year.

The first year I was able to access the internet was (autumn) 1996. It existed a few years before that; but it was around 96 that it became "a thing" IIRC. It also wasn't nearly as good for the language learner.

It was pretty widespread in college and universities by the time I started college in 1991. I became something of a multiplayer game addict that year.

But you're certainly right that we didn't have the language learning tools on the Internet then that we have now.

[golyplot]

It's not just a matter of the internet. For example, the rise of streaming video is a pretty big deal.

[sirgregory]

Here is Farber on technology, specifically audio cassettes.

As is the case with many technological breakthroughs, disappointment followed. The closets of many fine, otherwise strong willed people are littered with the wreckage of once beautifully packaged foreign language cassette courses. They thought technology had replaced study. They thought all you had to do was pop a cassette into the machine, press a button, and take in the language like a car takes in gasoline.

Remove that inflated expectation, resolve to do your part, and the invention of the portable cassette tape player will indeed fulfill its promise to the language lover endeavoring to become a language learner.

[Brun Ugle]

Here is Farber on technology, specifically audio cassettes.

As is the case with many technological breakthroughs, disappointment followed. The closets of many fine, otherwise strong willed people are littered with the wreckage of once beautifully packaged foreign language cassette courses. They thought technology had replaced study. They thought all you had to do was pop a cassette into the machine, press a button, and take in the language like a car takes in gasoline.

Remove that inflated expectation, resolve to do your part, and the invention of the portable cassette tape player will indeed fulfill its promise to the language lover endeavoring to become a language learner.

I don’t think it’s just technology. I think this has long been a problem. There are so many methods out there that tell you you will be fluent in 10 minutes per day or in three months or whatever, if you just use their method. And so many that sell themselves as a complete course for learning the language. It’s the same with schools. When I had Spanish in high school, I assumed if I went to class and did all the homework, I’d end up fluent, but I hardly learned anything. And there are plenty of internet polyglots that are completely adamant that their way is the only way to learn a language. In a way, Barry Farber was maybe the start of that. I listen to their advice and pick out the bits that work for me, but many beginners look on them as gods and think they must follow their advice to the letter.

There are some very good audio-only courses out there, but of course, no one course is going to be enough. I almost always find it necessary to overlap more than one course and to add in loads of native materials if I’m really going to get anywhere. And I often like to combine courses with completely different approaches, like Assimil and FSI.

[Brun Ugle]

Farber wrote his book pre-internet.

Is it really that old? I didn't think it came out until 1991. I became something of an Internet addict that year.

The first year I was able to access the internet was (autumn) 1996. It existed a few years before that; but it was around 96 that it became "a thing" IIRC. It also wasn't nearly as good for the language learner.

It was pretty widespread in college and universities by the time I started college in 1991. I became something of a multiplayer game addict that year.

But you're certainly right that we didn't have the language learning tools on the Internet then that we have now.

I started college in 1991 too, and there was internet, but nothing like even just a few years later. Some of my friends got together and set up a network with their computers in the dorm and played games, but I was, unfortunately, too far away and didn’t get to join in, nor did I have the money for my own phone line. Outside of colleges and a few other places, I don’t think it was very common to have internet until a few years later. Internet was still for the nerds back then. I remember in the mid-90’s (maybe 94 or 95), I still didn’t have my own internet, but I was able to use the computer room and access newsgroups and discovered language-learning newsgroups, the precursors to forums like this, and that was when I first encountered other people who were interested in languages. I spent a lot of time that year chatting with people and reading about different languages and study methods. But of course we still didn’t have all the wonderful things that would come later, like free FSI, YouTube and streaming sites, podcasts, e-books, online dictionaries and translators, SRS apps and other apps, etc. We are very lucky to have all these things available to use. It makes learning so much easier and more flexible. You are much freer today to choose a method that really suits you compared to before when maybe all you could find was one or two basic textbooks, with tapes if you were lucky, and maybe a novel or two and some very staticky news on your shortwave, and you had to make those work for you somehow or you were out of luck.

[seito]

Farber wrote his book pre-internet.

Is it really that old? I didn't think it came out until 1991. I became something of an Internet addict that year.

The first year I was able to access the internet was (autumn) 1996. It existed a few years before that; but it was around 96 that it became "a thing" IIRC. It also wasn't nearly as good for the language learner.

It was pretty widespread in college and universities by the time I started college in 1991. I became something of a multiplayer game addict that year.

But you're certainly right that we didn't have the language learning tools on the Internet then that we have now.

I started college in 1991 too, and there was internet, but nothing like even just a few years later. Some of my friends got together and set up a network with their computers in the dorm and played games, but I was, unfortunately, too far away and didn’t get to join in, nor did I have the money for my own phone line.

We had labs full of Sun workstations that we could use to play the graphical games over the internet and terminal clusters for text games. Of course, the web was extremely new, so people passed the Internet addresses of game servers around by email mailing lists. When the web took off, Yahoo made it a lot easier to find various resources.