Fundamentals vs Osmosis

[Inst]

@Inst FWIW I agree there is a place for rote, skilfully used, by adult and teen learners. I absolutely don't think it should be used by people without a foundation in the language. It's a tool for intermediate learners, though, not "the fundamentals" for beginners. I also have my doubts about whether it is ever useful for young children.

With regards to Chinese characters, I genuinely don't know whether rote learning is an effective method or not. I confine my above opinions to learning spoken language and the writing of languages with an alphabet.

There's actually experimental computer-aided learning aimed to get Chinese students proficient in the 3.5k Hanzi of standard Chinese in only two years, instead of the 9 years of primary and lower secondary education. The point being made is that traditional rote instruction's main benefit lies in handwriting, which is actually a practiced skill.

For beginners, I agree that rote memorization of vocabulary is not only useless, but dangerous, for beginners. The problem is weak pronunciation and oral skills. As I said earlier, practice makes permanent, and practicing bad ths or static tones in English is a bad idea. Rote training of pronunciation, on the other hand, is just drill.

[Cainntear]

To emphasize, the debate is in what order learning occurs.

You really don't need to emphasise that, because that is the debate we're all having. We're simply negotiating the terms of the debate. I don't know why you're insisting on making this strong dichotomy when you seem to naturally understand that language learning benefits from a balanced approach.

I'll point out that, for instance, the vocabulary list I bought for French contains example sentences and serious vocabulary study requires examples and experience in actual use.

You seem to be saying that as though it counters my point about needing to learn how words combine. No vocabulary list I have ever seen contains enough examples to fully explore the way words combine and interact.

Besides, the notion that you can learn any linguistic variables by looking at examples is the principle of learning by osmosis -- your dichotomy is already disproven.

Fundamental focus / fundamentalism is more focused on bootstrap capability, i.e, reducing a given language to an already solved problem (native language acquisition).

I don't follow. The whole angle of the un-/sub-conscious natural/direct(/by osmosis) philosophy is that it's the same as first language acquisition, and conscious study is different from first/native language acquisition.

Of course, the practical difficulty is that any language learning system "works" as long as the learner can commit to it and keep up the schedule.

This is simply not true. I could easily write a language learning system that doesn't work. If that's too much of a straw man (because it's done deliberately) then what about the many forgotten systems that died because they didn't work? What about the untold number of people who watched hours and hours of TV in the belief that they would eventually learn but didn't?

So we're forced to modify this to "any language learning system that works works", which is a circular definition, so isn't going to help much.

My hypothesis is more that Category 4s, which take a lot of time to learn, are better learnt by splitting the fundamentals from the practicals, because you're not going to be making much practice in practicals anyways if you opt for a synthetic / osmotic approach because it takes too long to reach a basic level of competence wherein practice actually works. And for less-labor intensive languages, phasing language study to split practice and fundamental study (pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary) might actually be more efficient, contingent that the learner can actually put in the effort to deal with spending weeks or months of grind with no practical skills to show for it.

Be careful about inventing new terminology, because it makes discussion harder. If you're going to use your own terminology, you need to make sure that other people understand the same thing as you by what you're saying.

For example, you just introduced "synthetic" here as an alternative to "osmotic". Now "osmotic" is more or less self-explanatory (or at least it is after previously discussing it in the noun form "osmosis") but even though I thought I understood what you were trying to get at, I have no idea what you mean by "synthetic", and now I feel unsure I do actually understand what you're trying to say, because I simply cannot see the relationship between the two terms.

There's a whole lot of variables that you're conflating into two things here.

Conscious study vs learning by exposure vs repeating phrases until you come to understand the construction.
Monolingual (target-language-only) teaching vs bilingual (explanations in L1)
Learning for long-term reasons vs survival language vs learning for specific purposes.

Going back to your last point, though, you are correct in that learning a language that is very different from yours requires a lot more conscious study than one that is similar to yours, and that learning one with a complex inflectional system (i.e. lots of prefixes, suffixes and infixes) needs more conscious study than one with simply isolated words with specific meanings.

That similar languages need less doesn't mean that they need none, and my general feeling is that people who promote these no-conscious-study approaches are too ready to dismiss the faults their students make as "natural" rather than a result of poor teaching.

To me, the logic is simple:
A new language has new concepts. Conscious study makes you aware of these concepts. Once you're aware of them, you can learn them.
Without conscious study, learning them relies on you noticing them. If you don't notice them, you probably won't learn them.