Limit Passive Learning Activities (reading and listening)

[Serpent]

When I did flashcards, I did L1-L2 only. There were some words I could recall easily but if I saw them in a text I had no idea what they meant (though I definitely knew that they were on my list, and often I also knew which unit of my textbook they were from).

I find that interesting because it's the opposite of my experience. The amount of words I can understand has always vastly exceeded those I can recall. I suppose it shows that you get better at what you train.

Overall, that's certainly my experience too, especially if I speak a related language.

It's possible that this is because of the nuances of the word.

No, these were some fairly specific words that I hadn't come across outside my textbook. Nowadays I probably wouldn't have bothered to put them into my deck at all (but I don't do SRS anyway). I just wanted to add all the vocab from my textbook for some reason.

I don't know how you could possibly do one word to one definition flashcards to learn all the nuances of a word.

The most important part is figuring out the common core of those different definitions. For short words it's also good to find out if some "meanings" are actually unrelated etymologically.
But yeah that's one of the reasons why I don't bother with flashcards/SRS anymore.

[cpnlsn88]

I think it's wholly wrong.

If you write or speak (maybe you should do a lot of these) you need to get the content to do so. You could absorb them through input or tons of lists (lists are fine to start with but only take you so far).

It also sounds horrible. In any case, the majority of speaking is in conversation which implies you can listen and understand what is said.

Notably, you need to have absorbed a lot of language in order to be able to do so.

If your language needs are limited you can learn scripts - indeed sounds a good idea to do and gives a learner a basic ability in quite a lot of situations but to go beyond this and develop a good feel for the language (idiom, accent, tonality and so on) you need some exposure, the more the better (time is our limit).

I don't say Krashen is 100% correct but he helpfully outlines that the 'passive' content should be comprehensible and enjoyable. Seems logical. Some exposure to language you don't understand is OK but there have to be strategies to get at some meaning otherwise you won't get anything from it. If it's not enjoyable you'll not persist enough to make progress, the enjoyment/interest is important to make time pass and be absorbing enough to engage you and make it feel valuable.

True, listening to radio broadcasts you don't understand for hours on end, by definition, won't get you very far.

Of course others have pointed out listening and reading are not 'passive' and entail a lot of brain activity. I don't think there's anything wrong with having your language on in the background and zoning in and out according to your interest and other activities. The main thing with anything is availability and if it's going on around you you're a second away from some input (it does though need to be comprehensible and compelling).

As for thimble..... what can one say? you won't get this from speaking and writing. You might get it from reading a novel (a lot of novels....). If you use one or want one (pass me the thimble please....) you can look it up or ask someone!

[reineke]

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[Cenwalh]

https://universeofmemory.com/optimize-your-language-learning/

This goes against the credo of many language learning sites.

You mean like these:

....

It's not like those. The post linked to in the OP is claiming that listening and reading (including when paying attention) is not very beneficial. The quoted sections in your post discuss listening when not paying attention.

[reineke]

https://universeofmemory.com/optimize-your-language-learning/

This goes against the credo of many language learning sites.

You mean like these:

....

It's not like those. The post linked to in the OP is claiming that listening and reading (including when paying attention) is not very beneficial. The quoted sections in your post discuss listening when not paying attention.

The quoted articles also discuss extensive activities while paying attention and at least one calls them "feel good activities" just as this one. The common theme is that they struggle with the definition of passive listening. You'll also read things like:

"With passive listening you simply listen to a recording of your target language or watch a movie. The idea is that even though you don’t understand it now, over time you will start to understand more and more through a natural process of absorption.

The problem is…it doesn’t really work."

Fluentin3months

Here you're paying attention to things you don't understand. In an earlier example the author was listening with the help of foreign and native subtitles which he called passive and unhelpful.

This article is mostly just as bad and uninformative as the others and includes a "funny" picture of a kid trying to read blindfolded, colorful expressions like no f*** way, how this or that "sucks" and the inevitable offer to "Supercharge Your Language Learning With
A Proven Memory System".

Many thanks to the Administrator for redacting my post for calling Benny jokingly "the big jerk" and advising me that I shouldn't call people names.

[Speakeasy]

Without wishing to cause a digression in the present discussion, I find myself wondering how “passive listening”, or even active listening for that matter – in either case without comprehension – works while one is working/living as an adult in a true “full immersion L2 environment” as I experienced following my relocation to the Quebec interior.

Initially, no matter how hard I tried to understand the locals, it was all mush. I’m pretty sure that, owing to mental fatigue, I must have “tuned out” a lot of what was being said around me. Nevertheless, I do recall (gradually) grasping bits and pieces of the spoken language -- in a passive mode -- most particularly words and phrases which recurred at a fairly high frequency. Does this type of experience fall into the current discussion as anecdotal evidence that passive listening works or is it part of an entirely different process?

EDITED
Typos, as usual. Paragraphing.

[reineke]

"Warren Fellows, another Australian who spent an incredible eleven years in various prisons in Thailand, reported that his ability to communicate in Thai developed rapidly. He had no one to talk to, so in his first few months incarcerated, he forced himself to learn the local language. Fellows reported, “During the many long days sitting in the crowded yard of Maha Chai prison, I did my best to try to converse with as many Thais as possible, learning a phrase here and there” (1998, p. 76).

Within three years, Fellows knew enough Thai that he rarely needed the help of a translator at his court hearings. At one of his hearings, he reported that “I understood quite a bit of the Thai language, so I basically knew what was being said” (Fellows, 1998, p. 114). The most amazing aspect of Fellows’ language development was that by his fifth year in prison, guards were utilizing him to serve as a Thai to English translator for newly arrived English-speaking prisoners."

"Publisher William Jovanovich, in his 1998 biography, tells of how as a young boy he was surprised to see his Tata [Papa] launch into a conversation in Serbian with an elderly black man in Denver. Jovanovich’s Tata explained that the black man had worked ‘with us Montenegrins in a coal mine...and nobody spoke English. He learned our language in self-defense."

"It should be noted that not all negative motivational situations are a matter of life or death. The author came across one adult language learner whose experiences acquiring Italian were quite humorous. Whizkid, an adult male from Slovakia, began to learn Italian when he moved to Rome and lived in a boarding house with 200 people who only spoke Italian. He increased his target language skills by “watching cartoons in Italian, which were aimed at children, so they used very short sentences” (Whizkid, 2000). All of this helped his language skills, but he reported the following as his key to learning the Italian language:

I really graduated into accelerated learning of Italian when I always ended up sharing the dining room table with a real jerk who prided himself about being a bilaureato [a person with two doctor’s degrees] and thought no one was smarter than him. We ended up in serious theological arguments twice a day: At lunch and supper. He had one big advantage: He was Italian and we argued in Italian. You’d be surprised how fast I learned Italian just to make him lose!"

Adult Second Language Acquisition in Natural Environments

[dicentra8]

I find myself wondering how “passive listening”, or even active listening for that matter – in either case without comprehension – works while one is working/living as an adult in a true “full immersion L2 environment”

I would say that without comprehension it's really hard. Lately I've been noticing and believing that the mush/gibberish becomes a little more understandable when I keep learning, adding up knowledge and checking what something means. If I didn't do that, and were just listening and watching lots of videos, I don't think I would be able to slowly increase the amount of things I end up picking up. Usually it happens slowly but the fact I keep doing that has been useful for me. From my experience if I'm hearing the TL but I don't do any additional learning to help, I won't understand it. When something is repeated a lot, if I don't go search or ask what it means, I'll only be aware that that something is repeated a lot. The only thing I seem to get often from that sort of passive listening is the greetings and some interjections that are used frequently.

Embarrassing moment:
There was this one time when I was in Finland, one classmate started talking in finnish...and I started staring really hard, trying desperately to pick anything! At some point he looked, giggled and said "you're trying to understand what I'm saying, aren't you?". I didn't get anything of what he was saying of course.

[reineke]

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[Remarkablemusician9]

I am myself a big fan of extensive learning. And there is no question : it does work.
And it obviously goes faster if it is supplemented by active learning.

To add to the discussion : what mainstream media call AI is actually statistics on massive datasets.
If you throw enough high quality data / input into a not-so-complex algorithm it will find patterns. I don't see why humans would not be able to do the same.

I am so convinced by the idea that I am working on creating content that is meant to be digested in a 'passive learning way'
but is designed to make the reader actively learn. So you get the best of both world.