Pablo from Dreaming Spanish: Language can’t be explained

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Pablo from Dreaming Spanish: Language can’t be explained

Postby Kraut » Mon Jan 27, 2020 5:31 pm

Pablo from Dreaming Spanish: Language can’t be explained

https://dreaminglanguages.wordpress.com ... /#more-164



The myth is that language can somehow be transferred from the brains of a speaker to the brains of a learner by explaining the grammar and the vocabulary. However, in this post we’re going to see how that doesn’t make a lot of sense.

To do that, first we have to explain what language is.

What is language?

Language has many forms. Literature, songs, jokes, etc. In the end, all those are expressions of the author’s mental image of the language which exists only in their brain. Native speakers acquire that brain structure through the spoken language when they’re babies.

All the experiences that native speakers go through when growing up contribute to shape their mental image. They form brain connections by hearing a word used in a specific context and referring to a particular meaning. Those connections keep on forming to all the different meanings a word can have, to all the contexts a word can be used in, and to all the possible grammatical usages of the word.

That mental image is formed without the need for explicit teaching. Sometimes parents and teachers try to teach and correct children. However, research shows that teaching and corrections don’t really have an effect on children, and it also shows that they’re too infrequent anyways to account for the tens of thousands of words that native speakers learn.

More about mental images in the post How to play a foreign language.
Language can’t be taught

So, the problem has revealed itself. How do we transfer this mental image, which natives have built naturally through experience, to a person learning the foreign language?

Traditional language education and their supporters will say that you need to use explanations in your own language to learn about the grammar and the meaning of words. Let’s look at what happens in the brain of the learner when doing that.
It’s bad

When you try to learn a word by means of other words (be it in the foreign language or in your own language), you’re making connections to the words that are being used to explain it. You’re not just lighting up the connections that native speakers have in their brain for that word.

Creating all those extra connections that native speakers don’t have means that rather than learning the actual meanings and usage of that word, you’re being affected by the meanings and the usage of the words that are being used to describe it, which are never the same. That brings mistaken assumptions about the meaning and the grammar. If those connections are reinforced over time they become fossilized and almost impossible to get rid of.
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Re: Pablo from Dreaming Spanish: Language can’t be explained

Postby Cainntear » Tue Jan 28, 2020 8:43 pm

I hate (hate hate hate hate hate) people making total blanket statements of controversial personal opinions as fact. What winds me up particularly is reading through a whole page of opinions presented as fact, then reaching a minor aside that sort of (but not quite) admits that it's all just opinion. Case in point (the opening sentence of the conclusion):
In this post I’ve explained my thoughts on why I believe that learning a language using traditional language education is fundamentally flawed.


No: he doesn't explain his thoughts. He states his beliefs as fact with very little depth of explanation. Hell, his first sentence is:
Today I’m here to debunk a myth (again).


His entire argument starts and ends with "I'm right, they're wrong".

The myth is that language can somehow be transferred from the brains of a speaker to the brains of a learner by explaining the grammar and the vocabulary.

No-one of any importance believes that. Some learners do, but no teachers do. Have you ever seen a language learning book or a course that presents explanations without offering some opportunities for practice? No -- because no-one seriously proposes that as a way of learning.

All the experiences that native speakers go through when growing up contribute to shape their mental image. They form brain connections by hearing a word used in a specific context and referring to a particular meaning. Those connections keep on forming to all the different meanings a word can have, to all the contexts a word can be used in, and to all the possible grammatical usages of the word.

This has a flaw that is carried through the whole article -- he ignores the concept of concept formation. Infants have to learn to categorise the world, both in the general sense of what categorisation is and the specific sense of what categories are.

While concepts may not always be identical across languages, they often are. Like a "car" in the sense of a four-wheeled passenger automobile is an "Auto", a "voiture", a "coche". It is literally the same concept, even if the words have additional senses that don't transfer across (e.g. a "railway car" isn't an "Auto" -- it doesn't drive itself, after all). So yes, learning individual words without any reference to concept is a bad idea... which is why no major commercial course is just a set of Anki flashcards. (Oh wait... I forgot about Rosetta Stone, didn't I? :lol: )

When you try to learn a word by means of other words (be it in the foreign language or in your own language), you’re making connections to the words that are being used to explain it. You’re not just lighting up the connections that native speakers have in their brain for that word.

Are you? Or are you using the L1 word to evoke the concept that you hook the L2 concept to? You cannot label a concept until you have evoked the concept (or "raised the schemata", to use an alternative term).

In a monolingual beginner's class, I'll use picture flashcards to evoke the concept. I'll even often do this in a bilingual class. But I'll clarify with words too. Like maybe I'll do the flashcards without translation then include the translation afterwards when noting down vocabulary. But if I say "I was driving the car", I've evoked the concept/raised the schema of a personal 4-wheeled automobile just as well as with my little monochrome icon of a car on a laminated piece of plastic, and I can now tell them it's voiture, coche, whatever.

Creating all those extra connections that native speakers don’t have means that rather than learning the actual meanings and usage of that word, you’re being affected by the meanings and the usage of the words that are being used to describe it, which are never the same. That brings mistaken assumptions about the meaning and the grammar.

Speaking of mistaken assumptions, it looks like he's assuming that avoiding L1 means avoiding mistaken assumptions.
Just because we don't use the L1 word, doesn't mean that the concept the L1 word describes isn't evoked. If you hold up a card that evokes the concept of apple, my preformed concept is evoked. You give me a word, I attach it to "apple".

What is the best tool humans have to challenge assumptions? Language! If you talk about assumptions, you can correct them.

It is especially bad when learners keep remembering the explanation or the translation of a word every time they encounter it.

Yes, and that shouldn't be the goal of explanations in teaching. I personally try to reduce my explanations over time, and I deliberately don't have a formulaic, memorisable explanation that I repeat every time.

The mixing of the native language, the target language, together with some extra mistaken assumptions is what results in interlanguage.

Yes, and immersive methodologies consider interlanguages as a natural part of language development, just as babies go through erroneous forms in their own language development -- "me want" etc.

His assumption that you avoid interlanguage by avoiding L1 during the learning process is completely baseless.

By trying to learn the grammar and the vocabulary using explanations, we’re doing something much more difficult than what natives do when they learn their first language.

Yes, but that's fine because we're at a much higher state of cognitive development by this point. Many adults can plan out a whole meal based on a 30-second look at the contents of a kitchen cupboard, and read and critically respond to newspaper articles.

Babies look at things and decide if they like it, want it, are scared of it etc.

So, when kids learn a language they start by knowing the context and hearing the word, and they just have to learn the meaning in that particular context.

...which means they've got to hear it loads of times to know what it means.

Meanwhile, as adults, we've got preformed concepts in our heads to apply words to, and within 5-10 repetitions we can have a good grasp of a new word.

So, how can we successfully transfer language from the minds of native speakers onto ours? Not with explanations and translations, since, as we’ve seen, those are always going to make us end up with a mental image that’s very different from that of a native speaker.

Really?

Now what if I start talking about a strange creature.
It's covered in purple fur and has a green mane. It walks on five feet -- it has two hind legs and three front legs, one on each side and one in the middle. It only has a short stub of a tail, like a bear's. It's head is a bit like a gorilla's, but it has whiskers like a cat's. It eats fruits and eggs and lives in snowy forests. In made-up-ese it's called a Wobwibber.

There's an entirely new concept. For those of you with strong visualisation skills, you can probably picture it quite well -- congratulations, you now have a new concept. OK, so the explanation isn't perfect, and even I can't resolve the colour of the head -- does the mane go up to the top of the head, ie. a green head of hair? Is the mane only on the neck, and the hair on its head purple? And what about the unhairy portion of its face? There's nothing in the explanation to describe that.

But you know what? That's OK -- I've given you enough information that you're going to recognise a Wobwibber when you see a photo, and you'll refine your idea of what one is then.

The point is that human language is used all the time to teach new concepts that we've never ever experienced before. That's what language is, what it does. It's massively efficient, which is why average people can now drive cars and operate sophisticated computer software.
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Re: Pablo from Dreaming Spanish: Language can’t be explained

Postby Cavesa » Tue Jan 28, 2020 9:59 pm

Yes, this is another of those articles.

There are whole books describing the differences between baby brains and adult brains. So nope, you can't learn like a baby. Be grateful you don't have to.

And where does this stupid idea that children=babies, and they are the opposite of adults, come from? Really, there is a long continuous progress from birth to adulthood (and then it continues by ageing). It is not true that a child learns just from exposure and listening, and then they speak like a normal native adult. They start from the typical baby learning process. But as they grow up, they also learn tons of vocabulary, grammar, style, phrases, and so on through ways not that different from the foreigners. They learn by reading (textbooks and normal books), by writing and being corrected, by being explained the grammar of their native language (no matter how differently), by learning tons of new concepts in the language while also learning the relevant language.

Really, do all those people aged 5-20 not exist?

And I don't get it. Why are the textbook haters still criticising some imagined books, that they are forced to just read in their nightmares? Even the very old grammar and translation based coursebooks expected activity from the learner and gave some exercises. And these days, the problem is the exact opposite: the coursebooks are supposedly full of activities, but without enough content to base those activities on.

There are definitely more ways to approach vocab acquisition and other parts of learning. But saying that the RS style is the only way and L1 is evil, that is really too much. Show me one high level learner, who has managed to get there without ever using their native language while learning. :-D

I just don't think people like this blogger deserve so much attention. But yeah, anybody can say "I'm an expert" on the internet, especially if they're trying to sell something.
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Re: Pablo from Dreaming Spanish: Language can’t be explained

Postby Kraut » Tue Jan 28, 2020 10:49 pm

Well, he is not just a blogger, but has tested out the method he is promoting in his "Dreaming Spanish" courses in Thailand learning Thai. But I think it is not realistic to repeat this via the Internet under limited circumstances.

https://dreaminglanguages.wordpress.com ... l-aua-2-3/

Before those first 300 hours had gone by, still in the beginner class, I had already noticed though that I had acquired quite a bit of the syntax of the language. I regularly noticed errors when other students spoke because they intuitively sounded wrong and not how the teachers would say that same thing. It was usually a problem with the word order, or with the students forgetting a word or adding a word that was not necessary.

Through the intermediate and advanced levels I continued learning words that were progressively more abstract. Some words that I noticed I had learned close to the end of my study were words for “for example”, “in general”, and “definitely”.
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Re: Pablo from Dreaming Spanish: Language can’t be explained

Postby Cainntear » Wed Jan 29, 2020 11:28 am

Kraut wrote:Well, he is not just a blogger, but has tested out the method he is promoting in his "Dreaming Spanish" courses in Thailand learning Thai. But I think it is not realistic to repeat this via the Internet under limited circumstances.

So he's not just a blogger, he's a total charlatan and snake-oil merchant. He knows he's not invented anything new, but talks like he has so he can get people to give him money.

(Not that he's necessarily aware he's doing this, of course. There are plenty of people out there on the internet who genuinely believe their vague fuzzy understanding of a well-researched field is actually more highly valuable than the knowledge of the people who've done all that research.)

Now, specifics he's said about AUA
That’s how I decided to move to Bangkok for 1 year while hoping to be able to live off some money I had saved. I planned on attending the AUA Thai program every day on weekdays, while avoiding speaking Thai, and completely ignoring the written language.

So this is a one-year full-time job, in country, but hiding from opportunities for actual immersion. If that's the cost of learning a language learning, we should all give up our dreams of polyglottery.

The teachers ask for the students’ opinions and experiences all the time, but the students are allowed to reply in English, and actually encouraged to not try to speak Thai until it comes out naturally (in their experience this starts happening naturally after around 800h of listening for western people learning Thai).

800 hours. That's almost half a year of full-time teaching. So language learning is clearly only possible for very rich people and literal domestic slaves.

I was surprised to still see students at the advanced level who were totally incomprehensible when speaking Thai because of totally messed up pronunciation.

... but he makes no attempt to critically engage with this. The usual "natural" methods rationalisation is "they started speaking too soon and developed bad habits". Personally I think it's impossible to learn to pronounce without pronouncing, because if you don't, your ear will make false assumptions about phonemes.

Even though it took me less time than average to go into the higher levels, progress never really felt fast. I did realize many times that I was understanding specific words here and there that I wouldn’t have understood the day before, but it took me at least 30 to 50 hours of class to really notice a significant difference in how much I was understanding.

The first words that I noticed I was understanding were nouns that refer to concrete things, like “person”, “pineapple”, or “pants”. Verbs that refer to physical actions also became clear quite early on. Things like “to walk”, “to eat”, “to speak”. Many things for which there’s a universal gesture were also easy to guess, so for example I learned “to think” and “to like” way earlier than “to be called” (used to say “my name is …”) or “to want”, for the simple reason that the latter are harder to convey using gestures or drawings.

That's slow and demotivating. But also predictable. Yes, if your only clues to meaning are concrete props, the only vocabulary you can learn is concrete vocabulary. How do you demonstrate "would" or "might" without sophisticated language?

You can't explain "would" to an infant with no language, so they have no choice but to just pick it up when they're ready, but speakers of most languages will already have developed a concept of "hypotheticals" that you can use to teach it. As I've said many times -- I would never teach if-conditionals English-only to speakers of Spanish, French or Italian. I've seen them make near-inexplicable mistakes on so many occasions, even though the entire construction is directly analogous to the point of being almost a literal translation. You could teach a Spanish speaker If sentences in the first week of a course if you wanted to -- it's not difficult stuff.

Many times I noticed that I had learned the meaning of a whole sentence as a chunk, without really knowing each of the words inside it. I eventually did learn those separate words, but it never really bothered me since I wasn’t trying to analyze the language.

It's an inefficiency, so it should have bothered him.

It was very interesting to see that many words that are typically taught right at the start of typical language courses weren’t acquired until far later. After attending 120 hours of class I didn’t even know whether Thai had personal pronouns (I, you, he, she).
Because they are not concrete vocabulary, so they're impossible to teach. Avoiding pronouns because they're difficult means that the language that is presented in the course isn't an accurate model. This is the thing that has always bugged me about immersion-from-day-one: when the students can't understand the natural language, the teacher can't speak the natural language. If the teacher isn't speaking the natural language, the students can't learn the natural language. If they're not learning the natural language, what are they learning? Errors.

A philosophy that declares that conscious study causes errors but then presents erroneous language as a model to be followed...?!?!

After I finished my goal at AUA, I got a teacher to sit down with me and have a conversation for 10 minutes. That was the longest conversation I had had in Thai until that moment. I got several insights from that conversation.

The words that I knew well, the ones that I had heard hundreds of times after having first learned them, came very naturally and without me having to think at all. What that tells me is that there is no need for any kind of production exercises or speaking practice to move words from your passive vocabulary to your active vocabulary, it’s just a matter of knowing the vocabulary well enough, so that the current context and the meaning in your head will trigger that particular word.

So he knew very few words, but the ones he knew, he knew well. There are many methods that could make identical claims. The point is that he spent a very long time learning those few words when he could have been learning more words with a more efficient method.

He then goes on to say that the school's biggest problem is that students just don't understand comprehensible input. It's the classic excuse. "If people only understood how wonderful this method is, they wouldn't complain that it was frustrating and ineffective. If they would only just believe..."


....and after his experience showed him "this can be effective if you dedicate a reeeeeeaaaaaaally long time to it and spend a lot of time interacting with committed and experienced teachers" he goes out and somehow thinks he can make a bunch of videos to achieve the same results quicker.
Take out the good stuff and hope that the basics are enough.

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Re: Pablo from Dreaming Spanish: Language can’t be explained

Postby Voytek » Wed Jan 29, 2020 11:56 am

I feel the author had a bad day while writing the article. Oh well.

Any optimist could write an article now, please?
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Re: Pablo from Dreaming Spanish: Language can’t be explained

Postby Kraut » Wed Jan 29, 2020 12:00 pm

He sells nothing, it's free. Although my approach in the beginning/intermediate stage is 100 per cent the opposite (via mother-tongue) the videos are excellent for consolidation/comprehensible input.
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Re: Pablo from Dreaming Spanish: Language can’t be explained

Postby Cavesa » Wed Jan 29, 2020 1:01 pm

Well, his claims are really not logical. Why on earth would you pay for an in country program without using the advantages of being in the country? :-D

And yes, that's no surprise that you will have a hard time learning the more abstract words without use of your native language. What is so surprising about that? In the end, his method failed horribly and he had to return to teachers. So, his method was wasting time and then returning to the classroom. So, perhaps it might be more interesting to read a blog by one of his Thai teachers instead of his blog. :-) I am often defending different approaches from what many teachers tend to do, based on experience, and based on the fact I've succeeded in spite of them and without them. He didn't, but he complains.

But the blog is really weird. He exposes his thoughts in several articles, and he is by far not the only one believing this nonsence.

A comment on the blog:
OH MY GOSH! This is GOLD! This really puts into words what I am trying to tell my advanced students. They are reading, reading, reading, and write really well. But they are suddenly asking for conjugation charts and grammar. I think they are at an in between point of not quite enough input & confidence to soar, but big hearts and desires. They think the grammar will get them there. I am not going to give in! I am just going to move on to higher levels of language. I want them to continue growing IN the language and not learning ABOUT the language.


Ouch. This person is teaching languages. Sorry C., but your students can (and should) read a lot without you holding their hand, they don't need to sit in a class for that. And yes, while grammar is not everything, they are absolutely right that a good grammar book can move them closer to their goal and supplement their reading really well (so that it is much more efficient). So, if you refuse to teach and explain stuff, you are basically useless. And if you treat them with the condescendence shown in this comment (really, are your advanced students just stupid babies with big hearts and desires?), I really hope they'll get rid of your classes soon, and you'll have to find a job more fitting your negligible abilities and weird character traits. By not "giving in", you are not defending them from some harmful stuff, you are just being stupid and stubborn.

Really, I think this comment shows a lot of what is wrong with today's language teaching. We've got to the other extreme. From the grammar translation method (which was good, it just needed tons of exposure and input to complete it, which was difficult to do a few decades ago), we've gotten to lots of "teachers" like this one, who basically refuse to teach. I've met them in real life. They teach kids and adults, beginners and advanced learners, they are bad for everybody. If the students are asking questions, they deserve answers, not discouragement from looking for them.
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Re: Pablo from Dreaming Spanish: Language can’t be explained

Postby tarvos » Wed Jan 29, 2020 1:50 pm

O por Dios, not again with this language like babies tripe.
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Re: Pablo from Dreaming Spanish: Language can’t be explained

Postby Cainntear » Wed Jan 29, 2020 11:00 pm

Kraut wrote:He sells nothing, it's free.

Is this a different guy then?
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