Was language learning easier 20-30 years ago?

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Was language learning easier 20-30 years ago?

Postby BeaP » Sun Nov 28, 2021 10:41 am

I've been writing about this topic lately in my log, but as I can't get to a conclusion that would help me in a practical way, I'd like to ask for your opinion. Language learning is considered to be way easier now thanks to the internet, but I don't see a huge gap between the knowledge of young people and my generation (40-something). My personal impression is that although the availability of materials is a huge benefit, before the internet I could learn languages more easily from various aspects:

1. Books (materials) were more thorough, they provided more content, now everything is watered down.
2. We didn't have a lot of choices, so we stuck to one material, and learned the whole book, repeating every lesson ad nauseam. Now it's very difficult to stick to one resource. Hopping from resource to resource is not always efficient, and we can remain eternal beginners.
3. We didn't have internet, but we had cable TV with native materials to watch. One important difference: we didn't have subtitles, and it might have helped the development of listening comprehension.
4. No social media meant better concentration.
5. We didn't want to measure our efficiency or change our methods all the time because of gurus, we did what the book or the teacher told us to do.

I don't want this to turn into a nostalgia group for the ancient, but I'm really interested in your views on the following:
1. Did you experience the same or is it utterly subjective (just my problem)?
2. If yes, what do you think we can keep from the old-school methods / possibilities to help our learning now?

Thanks a lot in advance for all comments.
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Re: Was language learning easier 20-30 years ago?

Postby 白田龍 » Sun Nov 28, 2021 11:12 am

BeaP wrote:1. Books (materials) were more thorough, they provided more content, now everything is watered down.

There are many deluded ppl trying to get some revenue by releasing poor quality materials, but the availability of good quality books have also increased.

BeaP wrote:2. We didn't have a lot of choices, so we stuck to one material, and learned the whole book, repeating every lesson ad nauseam. Now it's very difficult to stick to one resource. Hopping from resource to resource is not always efficient, and we can remain eternal beginners.

We don't need to hop between resources, we can thouroughly use many resorces, and If we leave a resource behind it's because we have found something better (more effective).

BeaP wrote:3. We didn't have internet, but we had cable TV with native materials to watch. One important difference: we didn't have subtitles, and it might have helped the development of listening comprehension.

Other than a few major languages, the offer was very scarce.

BeaP wrote:4. No social media meant better concentration.


This has nothing to do with language learning.

BeaP wrote:5. We didn't want to measure our efficiency or change our methods all the time because of gurus, we did what the book or the teacher told us to do.


The worst thing about gurus is that they have a knack for finding this forum.

BeaP wrote:1. Did you experience the same or is it utterly subjective (just my problem)?

You seem to be in denial about how learning language have become extremely easier in recent years.
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Re: Was language learning easier 20-30 years ago?

Postby daegga » Sun Nov 28, 2021 11:17 am

There are still thorough books around. Material for less commonly learned languages was not available on TV (and all foreign content has always been dubbed here anyway). Instead of using useless apps people used to go to useless group courses and failed to go beyond the basics.
I'd say things improved for the intelligent and determined and stayed the same for the rest. The toys are different, the mentality problem is the same.
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Re: Was language learning easier 20-30 years ago?

Postby tractor » Sun Nov 28, 2021 11:26 am

No, it wasn't easier before. Cassettes and records aren't easier than MP3s. VCRs aren't easier than YouTube. Going to the library isn't easier than searching the web. Going to a bookshop with a small collection of resources isn't easier than shopping online. And if we forget about the pandemic for a while, international travel wasn't easier; it was more expensive.
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Re: Was language learning easier 20-30 years ago?

Postby gsbod » Sun Nov 28, 2021 12:28 pm

Back in the 90s I was studying French at a second rate high school in south east England. The textbooks used by the school were dire. The ones in my local bookshop would get you to A1 at best, with no audio. I couldn't get hold of newspapers, magazines or novels. If I wanted to listen to French, my options were whatever I could pick up on short wave or long wave radio, and a handful of French films on VHS tape (with hard subs, of course) at the local Blockbusters.

Compared to that, things are much easier now.

BeaP wrote:2. If yes, what do you think we can keep from the old-school methods / possibilities to help our learning now?


I think you've answered your own question already. Choose your coursebooks well (good, thorough courses do still exist) and use them thoroughly. Take advantage of all the unsubtitled TV available on the internet from around the world, it's better than cable TV ever was. Close your social media accounts. Avoid apps that measure success in terms of engagement/clicks rather than how well you are actually learning. And stop wasting precious time and attention on language gurus ;)
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Re: Was language learning easier 20-30 years ago?

Postby RyanSmallwood » Sun Nov 28, 2021 2:32 pm

I mean more modern materials aren't some guarantee that everyone will learn better, of course there's more distractions, marketing gimmicks, and misinformation floating around than ever. But for anyone who is dedicated and can find good information, yes its way easier. So many of the most beneficial and materials and tools I've ever used have only been produced fairly recently. It would be unfathomable for me to try and learn all the things I'm learning 20-30 years ago.

Time is still probably one of the biggest components though, so I'm sure even without the internet, if I stumbled upon decent materials I could've still seen good progress, but the options would've been much more dreary. Even better old materials are so much easier to track down and use now. A lot of people prefer the design of the older Assimil courses for instance, but if we didn't have the digitized audio and still relied on the original records, they would've been much more limiting in terms of how and when they could be listened to. And some courses that never had audio now do thanks to more easily available recording technologies.
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Re: Was language learning easier 20-30 years ago?

Postby iguanamon » Sun Nov 28, 2021 2:38 pm

BeaP wrote:1. Books (materials) were more thorough, they provided more content, now everything is watered down.
2. We didn't have a lot of choices, so we stuck to one material, and learned the whole book, repeating every lesson ad nauseam. Now it's very difficult to stick to one resource. Hopping from resource to resource is not always efficient, and we can remain eternal beginners.
3. We didn't have internet, but we had cable TV with native materials to watch. One important difference: we didn't have subtitles, and it might have helped the development of listening comprehension.
4. No social media meant better concentration.
5. We didn't want to measure our efficiency or change our methods all the time because of gurus, we did what the book or the teacher told us to do.

I won't go through the list, point by point but I believe we currently live in the golden age of language learning. I couldn't have learned Ladino/Djudeo-espanyol 30 years ago. While there would've been materials available, I wouldn't have had access to them without the internet. Without the La Biblioteca Virtual del Patrimonio Bibliográfico virtual library site hosting a bunch of books in Ladino Rashi script; the Ladinokomunita forum; the youtube Ladino channels; twitter; the ability to order books online in Ladino; it would've been nearly impossible for me to learn Ladino. I wouldn't have even known that these resources existed, let alone have been able to gather them. Thanks to the easy availability of resources the web brought me, I was able to consolidate and expand my knowledge and skills. I simply wouldn't have been able to do this 20-30 years ago.

While I did have cable TV, I only had one channel in a language other than English and it was Univisión. It certainly helped me to consolidate my Spanish.

The same goes for my other languages as well, including Portuguese and especially Catalan. While resources existed back then, there is so much more available now online at the reach of my fingertips that can take me so much farther than a textbook with audio ever could.

Where I agree with the OP, is that many of the older materials were more thorough. Despite their age, they can still be used effectively today... as long as there is exposure to the more modern language outside of the course.

The "gurus" who include some of the high profile youtube polyglots, are a mixed bag. They have the skills but they are not to be put on a pedestal and followed slavishly. As the Zen Buddhist koan says: "When you meet the Buddha on the road, you must kill him"- meaning that one must not put all their faith in any one particular teacher and we must find our own path for ourselves to follow towards enlightenment. Translated in a language-learning context- "nobody died and left "Prof A", "Luka", or anyone else, boss".

Social media as distraction in our L1 can lead to distraction... unless one uses it to enhance language-learning. I use twitter to help me with TL's. A curated twitter (I follow writers, poets, journalists, language academies, musicians, regular people) feed in TL will lead the learner to spend even more time with interesting content in TL, which I have in six languages. It is at easy reach on my laptop and phone. My twitter feed helps me with language maintenance, writing, discovering new material... even making friends.

Having too many resources can be detrimental to language-learning. My observations on the forums over the past almost dozen years are that more beginners are starting to spread themselves too thin. I always say, pick one or two complimentary courses, work through them, get a good grammar book and/or workbook series, gradually expose yourself to native materials as you go through your courses.

Now I see learners, start a course and watching a TL series with L1 subs. They seem to overuse SRS to the point that they work for SRS instead of having SRS work for them. Some don't follow the path of those who went before them, but know it all because they've learned about language-learning from youtube videos.

The good thing about the forum is being able to get almost real-time help. To see what other learners are doing to learn a language in their logs- even if they are not learning the same language. Sometimes their methods are good and can be adapted successfully. Sometimes some of these learners' logs show what not to do... which is also helpful.
BeaP wrote:... what do you think we can keep from the old-school methods / possibilities to help our learning now?

If a learner's goal is to gain a high level in a language, be consistent. No learning resource is perfect. Using a decent resource(s), sticking with it, finishing it, is preferable to letting one's self jump off into too many distractions.

A course may be old. The audio may be far from perfect or even non-existent. The language taught may be somewhat dated, but these courses still have value. Modern language can be picked up without difficulty. A good foundation is not picked up so easily. The two DLI Basic Courses (Haitian and Portuguese) I did were the most thorough and complete courses I have ever done for any language. I supplemented both with Pimsleur... and my multi-track approach. Just because a course is old doesn't mean that it is useless... far from it.

Self-learning a language is not hard, nor is it "easy". People have been doing it for a long time, even before the internet, when it was arguably somewhat more difficult without the ease of access, materials and resources we have now (I listened to Spanish over static and fading shortwave radio, pre-internet). The key is being consistent- "showing up" is 90% of life" and not spreading yourself too thin. A learner must accept that the process takes time and effort, more time and effort than the learner may want to accept or believe- especially if it's a first second language. There are many ways/methods to use to get there that will work... as long as the learner is consistent and persistent. There's one sure way NOT to learn a language- quitting. Being persistent means keeping going when the going gets tough. Life gets in the way sometimes, rough patches in learning happen. Being persistent, not giving up, and being consistent is how to get through them.
Last edited by iguanamon on Sun Nov 28, 2021 6:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Was language learning easier 20-30 years ago?

Postby Diomedes » Sun Nov 28, 2021 3:48 pm

I agree with some isolated points of the OP. When we have too many resources, it's much easier to get lost in them. Fewer options certainly contribute to greater focus. Also, social media and other online stimuli are most definitely a challenge to focused learning, which includes language learning.

So, if the goal is choose the better materials and focus on it in our current era... well, I'm afraid this is much easier said than done.

I also believe that reading thoroughly any good book can be way better than alternate between a lot of good books just because they are all available.

But even so, looking at the big picture, I still strongly disagree with the conclusion that language learning was easier 20-30 years ago and before, for the following reasons.

First of all, according to the then predominant mindset, it was impossible to trully learn a foreign language without moving to another country for years. We are talking about a non-globalized world. Or, if you had a lot of money and were a bit eccentric, you could invest in a great private teacher, if you had the luck of having one of them in your town. The third option was to engage in group classes in institutions like British Council, Alliance Française, Goethe-Institut and so on, but this was also quite expensive and seen mostly as a preparation to an international travel, usually for academic purposes.

Secondly, and because of the previous point, those great self-teaching courses/books we now adore were mostly frowned upon by the mainstream language community. The "serious language learners" just didn't believe in the efficacy of Assimil and its equivalents. As far as I know, they were not bestsellers.

Also, the whole majority of self-teaching books were not that good. They had no audio, to begin with. If you had the money to purchase the good ones with audio (Linguaphone, etc.), you probably would not do it, but apply to those group classes instead. If you had not, you would probably end up with some cheaper book with "figurative pronunciation", like the Berlitz ones. There was no "internet guru" or forum to advise you to choose Linguaphone, Assimil, TY, FSI or anything else. It was way harder to separate the wheat from the chaff.

Yes, cable TV (and, before it, VHS) easied things a bit IF you already had a strong foundation. But to learn a new language with no subtitles at all is quite a high expectation. I tried it back then, with mixed results (mostly bad results).

As someone pointed out, there were also long wave radio. I also tried this in those days and it was fascinating, but very cumbersome.

To be fair, there were also some really good courses that you could purchase in newsstands for a reasonable price, in the De Agostini style. But they were sold in thin fascicles (usually with a cassette tape), usually more than 70, and so it required a lot of motivation and discipline to keep purchasing it every single week. Sometimes the prices went higher and you couldn't buy it anymore, sometimes the new fascicle just didn't reached your local newsstand and you had no time to search in every other newsstand, sometimes they were discontinued in the middle of the course due to low sales, sometimes they were not discontinued but they were not distributed to your town anymore... So it was difficult to have all the fascicles, let alone study them. Even if you did it, it was quite overwhelming and you probably would quit before reaching the middle of it.

Last but not least, let's not forget that, even if internet didn't exist in our lives, TV did, most of us were insanely addicted to it just as we are now with social media, and there were a plethora of non-digital distractions, like unexpected visitors ringing your doorbel, telephone calls from friends and relatives, and so on. Social life was, in several ways, much more intense. As far as I can remember, to lock yourself in a room to self-study anything, 30 years ago, was a much bigger challenge than it is now.

Just another thing: now we have Skype (and equivalents)... need to say more?

[Edit: few words deleted, added some others]
Last edited by Diomedes on Sun Nov 28, 2021 4:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Was language learning easier 20-30 years ago?

Postby Steve » Sun Nov 28, 2021 4:02 pm

BeaP wrote:5. We didn't want to measure our efficiency or change our methods all the time because of gurus, we did what the book or the teacher told us to do.


I first learned a language (via two years of university German) back in about 1982 and 1983 in the Midwest US. I got straight A's so I thought I was a good language learner. About all I could do was introduce myself and ask where the bathroom was (and I'd have probably not understood the directions anyway). I could sort of "read" by looking words up in the dictionary and slowly working my way through a text. So I suppose from the standpoint of taking tests and quizzes and discussing grammatical topics, I had "learned" quite a bit of German and was quite good at it. I just had no useful skills to speak of other than getting good grades taking tests. So I'd say that the two years I took was much more rigorous than the Assimil courses I've used, but for the time and effort yielded a small fraction of the skills. Also, back then, native language materials were difficult to come by.

I would argue that the last part of this sentence "we did what the book or the teacher told us to do" is often the kiss of death for many (if not most) language learners. I wasted more than two decades of opportunity and countless hours in trying to acquire language skills because I assumed that the teachers and textbook authors and publishers knew the "best way" to teach a new language. I believed that lack of skills was because I wasn't working hard enough. As years went on and I wasted more and more time, I started to believe I lacked a critical level of talent for language learning. It wasn't until I realized that the methods I was using (as recommended by the professional education community) were not working for me that I could start moving ahead. As I experimented with different methods, I started making progress. Over time, I started to figure out what methods worked best at different levels of progress. I'm still doing that. It would be nice if someone could tell me "learn this and do that for this long" but there is no one who can. I have to take responsibility for that myself. I can get good advice and guidance from others, but I need to figure out how to apply it myself. Learning how to learn a new language is a science and art and skill in itself that must be acquired by individual language learners. The reality is that we are all different and move forward at different paces and have different goals. What works well for one person might not work well for another. Much of language learning is learning what methods work best for each of us individually and getting practice at doing that.

I would also argue that efficiency is one of the most important keys to language learning. Getting the most out of an hour per day will result in a lot more skills than not getting the most out of an hour per day. I will qualify this by saying that one has to define efficiency very carefully via good metrics and not merely trying to meet goals. But overall, I think efficiency is one of the most important aspects to successful language learning.

With regard to changing methods, my observation of successful versus yet-to-be-successful language learners is this. Successful language learners have a good sense of the difference between when a method is not working and when a method requires more time and effort to work. Two ways to guarantee lack of progress are throwing excessive time and effort into a method that is yielding few results and by giving up too quickly on a method before it has a chance to start working. Successful language learners have gained enough experience to know the difference. They know when to change methods because it isn't working at that stage of progress and when to put more time and effort into a particular method to get progress.
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Re: Was language learning easier 20-30 years ago?

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Sun Nov 28, 2021 4:39 pm

Nope.

I took two years of university German starting in 1997. Was enthusiastic. Got good grades. Read the one or two short novels assigned in my classes. Moved to Germany for my exchange year and didn’t understand *anything*.

Massive input back then was just impossible. Living in a university town I had access to a very respectable video store, which meant maybe 10 or 15 German movies with baked in English subs. I could go to the fancy newsstand and buy a $15.00 German magazine. Longwave radio existed, but I didn’t have one. The library had all the Goethe and Schiller you could ever want, but zero translated chick lit.

I would have loved podcasts, Anki, ThriftBooks, streaming television. My year abroad would have been wildly different if I could have arrived as at least a B1+ instead of an A2+, and massive input would have easily made the difference.

Kids these days need to get off my lawn and appreciate how good they have it!
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