Krashen and "Krashenite"

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Cainntear
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Re: Krashen and "Krashenite"

Postby Cainntear » Tue Oct 04, 2022 7:42 am

Le Baron wrote:I'll add... I knew an Iranian fellow here who lived more than half his life in the U.S. (after leaving Iran at age 18 in 1980) and he used to claim he'd 'forgotten how to speak Farsi'. All the time. 'Can't do it any longer...!' Then when we were renovating his house a woman came round from a company selling management software and he'd invited her in because she was also Iranian (and lovely) and by dint of some cupidinous miracle he was speaking Farsi with her.

I think this is where we need to make a distinction between "memory" and "recall".

Native speakers who go a long time without speaking their language do experience difficulties with recall -- they haven't forgotten the language, they find it harder to access it.

I imagine your Iranian friend's experience was that he couldn't choose to recall it consciously, but as you saw, he hasn't forgotten anything.

So yes, you're right, but there is a little more to it than "lose" vs "not lose".
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Re: Krashen and "Krashenite"

Postby TopDog_IK » Tue Oct 04, 2022 4:35 pm

Cainntear wrote:OK, but what is the "lower level stuff"? There is nothing* available for natives that is comprehensible to learners, because native speakers don't learn their language from TV, but from one-on-one interaction*.


Lower level stuff for me was children's TV shows and books for very young kids. The books were simplified versions of Brothers Grimm fairytales, Aesop's fables, that kind of thing. For video, mostly shows aimed at preschoolers, like "Meine Schmusedecke":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW-DGLkz79Q
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Cainntear
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Re: Krashen and "Krashenite"

Postby Cainntear » Wed Oct 05, 2022 1:24 pm

TopDog_IK wrote:
Cainntear wrote:OK, but what is the "lower level stuff"? There is nothing* available for natives that is comprehensible to learners, because native speakers don't learn their language from TV, but from one-on-one interaction*.


Lower level stuff for me was children's TV shows and books for very young kids. The books were simplified versions of Brothers Grimm fairytales, Aesop's fables, that kind of thing. For video, mostly shows aimed at preschoolers, like "Meine Schmusedecke":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xW-DGLkz79Q

When you started watching it, did you understand it?
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Re: Krashen and "Krashenite"

Postby Le Baron » Wed Oct 05, 2022 4:12 pm

It doesn't make sense anyway. Why would anyone hoping to make rapid progress in learning for an adult put hundreds of hours into simplified TV for children (something also purpose-created for a particular audience), rather than listening to simplified, purpose-directed input for adults? Is it because that would be 'doing a course' and therefore anathema to the fiction-led idea that it isn't comprehensible 'native' content?
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Re: Krashen and "Krashenite"

Postby luke » Wed Oct 05, 2022 4:22 pm

Le Baron wrote:Why would anyone hoping to make rapid progress in learning for an adult put hundreds of hours into simplified TV for children, rather than listening to simplified, purpose-directed input for adults?

You're starting to sound like an educator. :mrgreen:

You said, "listening", with respect to "simplified, purpose-directed input", but you're making me think of graded readers, which sounds a little Neo-Krashenite".
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Re: Krashen and "Krashenite"

Postby Iversen » Wed Oct 05, 2022 5:58 pm

Where do you find "simplified, purpose-directed input"? First and foremost in non fiction, - and then you can add the flowery expressions from literature and advanced smalltalk later.

I'm midway through the Assimil Occitan textbook which I use as goodnight reading, and as usual I'm also doing textstudies based on articles from wikipedia, popular science and tourism articles and sometimes even news from the internet. The Occitan thing is special insofar that it has short texts that are full of idiomatic phrases and special words from the popular spoken language - but luckily with a French translation. It's the kind of language you would expect to find in a novel rather than a textbook, and I frankly think that I'm better served with my non fiction articles when it comes to learning. Idioms can be hilarious, and if you can remember them you might even be able to put them to use in the unlikely case that you were confronted with an native Occitan speaker - but if I got in that situation I would be more confortable using a more boring kind of style with lots of 'international' words in the hope that my interlocutor also would refrain from exploring the most arcane corners of his/her native language.
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Re: Krashen and "Krashenite"

Postby TopDog_IK » Wed Oct 05, 2022 9:40 pm

Cainntear wrote:When you started watching it, did you understand it?


Naturally it was a mixed bag. Those children's cartoons are designed so you can still figure out what's going on if you can't understand everything being said. With books I just did a lot of dictionary or machine-learning lookups. After children's shows there are some fairly easy German anime dubs that learners can move on to, like K-On!, Girls Last Tour, Comic Girls, etc.
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Cainntear
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Re: Krashen and "Krashenite"

Postby Cainntear » Thu Oct 06, 2022 7:09 am

TopDog_IK wrote:
Cainntear wrote:When you started watching it, did you understand it?


Naturally it was a mixed bag. Those children's cartoons are designed so you can still figure out what's going on if you can't understand everything being said. With books I just did a lot of dictionary or machine-learning lookups. After children's shows there are some fairly easy German anime dubs that learners can move on to, like K-On!, Girls Last Tour, Comic Girls, etc.

And my point here is that this is not "comprehensible input". As Le Baron and Iversen discuss above, comprehensible input is about selecting and producing material and spontaneous input targeted to be immediately understandable to the listener.

There has never been any support by academics for incomprehensible input, except as a means of "tuning in your ear", and even that is hypothetical, with no experimental basis.
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Re: Krashen and "Krashenite"

Postby s_allard » Thu Oct 06, 2022 2:50 pm

Just this morning, I spent 20 minutes listening with my Mexican tutor to a video of a conversation. I had listened to this video on my own a few times and thought I could understand nearly everything. But going over little details opened a whole different level of understanding. I suddenly realized that I hadn’t understood all the conversation. Plus I got a much better idea of how to use the various structures and idioms that we discussed.

This valuable experience of working with a native tutor, something I have alluded to in an earlier post, made me think that the notion of understanding or comprehension requires some exploration or clarification in the debate of this thread.

I don’t have the time to delve into this arcane subject right now but I will say that a fundamental question is how do you know that you really understand the so-called comprehensible input. My own thinking, for the time being, is that there are obviously different levels of understanding of the same material. This leads me to believe that rather than thinking about comprehensible input we should be thinking about necessary comprehension ability in the sense of what does it take to truly comprehend a given artefact. To be explored.
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Re: Krashen and "Krashenite"

Postby TopDog_IK » Thu Oct 06, 2022 4:05 pm

Cainntear wrote:And my point here is that this is not "comprehensible input". As Le Baron and Iversen discuss above, comprehensible input is about selecting and producing material and spontaneous input targeted to be immediately understandable to the listener.

There has never been any support by academics for incomprehensible input, except as a means of "tuning in your ear", and even that is hypothetical, with no experimental basis.


Here is a pretty good explanation of how this work.

'Does Input Have to Be "Comprehensible"?'
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yeOmc1nRGG4
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