Cainntear wrote:Iversen wrote:If you have spent 800 hours in a classroom then you will probably have heard your native language far more than the target language,
If you spend 800 hours as a student in a monolingual classroom (as with the ALG 800 hours claim) you will not have heard your native language at all in theory, and if you hear it at all you will hear it far, far less than the target language.
I didn't say that it was a monolingual class - and I doubt that the majority of language classes have become monolingual since I left school aeons ago. That being said, my French teacher in the 'Gymnasium' (lycée, high school or whatever it's called in other countries) tried his best to teach a class of math(ematical)-phys(ics) students French by speaking French and only French (plus occasionally Italian or Spanish to me), but NO Danish and definitely abolutely NO English or German . He had three years to do it, but after 2½ years he one day shocked us all by suddenly speaking Danish, and the message was clear: we had (as a group) learned absolutely nothing during the first 2½ years, and he didn't want to witness a bloody massacre at the exam so from now on it was good old black school pedagogics. And during that last semester much less French was spoken, but most of us passed the exam -and a few might even have learned to speak the language. Since then I have been rather sceptical about the socalled natural method, at least in its pure undiluted form.
On the other hand grammar-translation is also deficient because it treats dead languages as passive, mostly written languages, and that way they stay dead as the dodo. In all other language classes I had in school (including the gymnasium) we spoke mostly Danish, the teacher sometimes said something in the target language, but the pupils only tried to utter something in it when they were forced to do so by the teacher, otherwise it was Danish über alles. That's where I got my ideas about class teaching, and I got it confirmed by asking people who attended evening school what precisely they did during those two hours once a week - they spoke mostly Danish of course just as in school, and then they gnashed cake (and spoke more Danish) in the pause. So basically you have the choice between not understanding anything during a monolingual class and understanding the mother tongue parts in oldfashioned black school teaching, but being shocked out of your wits if asked to say something in the target language. The important thing for me has always been to study at home, and then classes were just a place where you maybe would hear the target language spoken 10% of the time.