Do you have a preferred Natural Order?

[luke]

This survey is NOT about Stephen Krashen's "Natural Order" hypothesis, per se. It's asking what is your preferred "natural order".

Learn what seems easy first - if something is hard, focus on it later - do what's doable now - learn what's learnable now.
Just follow the order of your textbook - it's done by professionals.
Don't think about "order" - trust your intuition.

[Le Baron]

This was difficult, because I do follow the order of presentation in textbooks, but quickly start jumping into other things alongside it once I get a feel for what's going on. I do finish the textbooks, but about halfway I am working on some level of intuition.

I really wanted to choose the last option.

[Iversen]

It's hard to answer this. I'm inclined to follow my intuition, but my intuition tells me to learn easy things first - and LOTS of them! But often I have to work my way through a lot of semi-difficult things to find the easy things (whole dictionaries and whole grammars), and then it's myself that cut the semi-difficult things down to size so that they become easy. With this in mind, I have to say that I'm equally suspicious of textbooks and Krashen so my choice must be that I follow my intution - however my intuition tells me to jump the fence where it is lowest and grab the lowest-hanging fruits first.

PS: I can read, but it wasn't Krashen who taught me to do so.

[galaxyrocker]

I admit I generally follow the order of a textbook as it gives me a good structure to my studies. Otherwise, I'd jump around to the most interesting grammatical features, and never learn something as simple as the past tense! Following a textbook/course gives me that guide I need, and once I hit B1 or so I can start exploring other things and diving into native content if I wish.

[jmar257]

My main book has been Assimil so far and I've only studied IE languages so I can't speak for another where almost everything seems hard. But I generally just follow Assimil and trust the order, although I voted "Learn what seems easy first" because if there are things giving me a hard time I may do a cursory Google search but I don't stress over rote memorization or anything. If it's important I assume I'll see it over and over and I will do it in FSI (and I can always revisit those units as well). But I'm kind of a lazy language learner--I do this for fun and don't have any tests planned/am not moving countries/etc, basically I have no need to cram or force knowledge to stick. That doesn't mean I avoid hard work (I do FSI, after all) but I'm not gonna stress myself out over a hobby too much.

[lingua]

I'm afraid I've skewed your results because I couldn't resist answering "Krashen's a crackpot and I can't read" besides which I know nothing about Krashen other than what people here may mention and even then it's not something I retain.

I don't have a preferred order. It depends on the language. With Thai I started off immediately with a tutor using the book Thai for Beginners by Benjawan Poomsan Becker and supplemented with Memrise. With French I happened to watch French films (and realized I understood quite a bit thanks to Italian) so ended up playing around with Kwiziq because I was enamored with the Brainmap. With German it was online using DeutschWelle supplemented with some PMP books and then other grammar books. With the minority Romance languages/dialects I use whatever I can get my hands on. With Italian I took three years of courses using the textbook assigned by the professor. WIth Portuguese I started off with Memrise and PMP books but eventually switched to PTLab.

I prefer online courses with regular feedback now and that is probably going to become my preferred method for any new languages (assuming they're mainstream enough). I also prefer grammar books in the native language and will lean towards using those as soon as my level allows it. Due to my procrastinating self I need the structure of some kind of textbook or course. Along with that I have a short attention span so I often change direction which is probably apparent to anyone reading my log.

[RyanSmallwood]

I dunno where I would put myself, I guess "not caring about order", but its more jump into interesting difficult stuff, see how much I can pick up, then backtrack to beginner stuff go in textbook order, see if any easy stuff I missed consistently, don't worry about being perfect, go back into interesting difficult stuff and repeat.

I think Alexander Arguelles says he goes through courses like "peeling onion" i.e. not trying to be perfect but just picking up more layers in each pass. Also the “Lessons learned from fifty years of theory and practice in government language teaching” article had a pretty key insight here I think:

Learners may not learn a linguistic form until they are “ready,” but FSI’s experience indicates that teachers and a well designed course can help learners become ready earlier.

So from what I understand the criticism of the old "audio-lingual" drill format, was that it was expected students would complete a lesson and acquire the linguistic form, which didn't work so well in practice. But from the article mentioned above, I believe they still use drills, but its more when students feel they need them, its not expected that drills will automatically lead to acquisition, but as the quote says, they help acquisition happen sooner. As an independent learner outside a structured course, this is pretty much how I use textbooks/exercises, I don't expect I can just instantly absorb everything in textbook order, but going through may help me absorb certain things sooner than going at random.

[jeff_lindqvist]

It varies.

• Textbook (with the aim to finish it) - I usually do the lessons in order.
• Audio - I might take a global approach to listening or shadowing - perhaps in order (but that's still something very different from studying lesson 1, and the lesson 2 and then lesson 3...), perhaps randomly. (For an audio course such as Michel Thomas or Pimsleur - in order.)
• Grammar book - I might read it back to back (it has happened), or have a look at a certain chapter or even rule. Maybe I'll use it as reference material.
• Book with exercises - I probably do them in order.

[aaleks]

I chose the "Don't think about "order" - trust your intuition" option but in reality I just learn what comes my way, so to speak, or just what I find interesting at the moment. And, normally, at those moments, I don't care about such things like easiness or intuition .