What’s the first thing you do (not including learning pronunciation/alphabet)?

[Le Baron]

Some combination. Like everyone else; even those who claim not to.

[leosmith]

learning about the country, the people and the traditions is essential for me

Absolutely. To be clear, I wasn't trying to downplay it; I knew a lot of people would vote for that option, and I'd be much more interested in what they'd do next in that case, so I omitted it.

Why are you so suprised many of us start with grammar right away?

Rather than the approach you described, which was more of a combination I think, I was picturing someone picking up a grammar right off the bat and just doing that. That may be a naïve assumption, now that I think of it. But that would surprise me because, if I did that, I'd feel divorced from the language. To be fair though, I'd feel the same way about just memorizing thousands of words/listening to hundreds of videos/reading dozens of books/etc. I freak out when I can't be connected to the language in multiple ways. I'm funny that way.

[Iversen]

If I decided to do a new language I would start learning vocabulary through wordlists AND compiling my personal minigrammar AND studying belingual texts in parallel - so I have chosen the combination option.

But there is a problem: until I had taken that decision I could have done words, grammar or texts or any combination thereof (without being really serious about it), and it is unlikely that I would arrive at the decision making stage without having done at least one of those three things already, which in a sense would invalidate my first answer.

The latest language I have started to take seriously is Ukrainian, and there I did all three things, although the grammar part was reduced because I don't own a good grammar yet. On the other hand: I started out with Bulgarian by reading a text about the Bulgarian Copper age (which preceded the bronze age) and being surprised at how easy it was to understand. And I learnt my first steps in Indonesian by studying a bilingual guide to Singapore with the help of a dictionary. And there a whole string of languages where I have already have read a grammar (or the grammar section of a language guide), so if I ever decide to learn one of them I would have to mark that I had started out with the grammar. But at first I also included a wordlist with Finnish words when I did the first round of my mega wordlist campaign with 30 languages - and even though I dropped that part of the project I would still have to acknowledge that I had done some early vocabulary learning if I ever decided to learn Finnish (and that thought is not totally unrealistic).

So my first answer (and eo ipso vote in the query) was an oversimplification.

[Cavesa]

But I have simply no clue, why there is such a passion and so many discussions about it.

Oh, that's one is easy. Because he promises fluency without sweat — just read, listen, and absorb and sooner or later your receptive skills will be transformed into active ones. It's like a fad diet — shred you pounds and see your six pack grow without counting calories and lying on the couch.

Aaaaand that was exactly how I got to C1 passive Italian with A2ish active Italo-Spanish hybrid It was a rude awakening early in the 2022.

Don't get me wrong. I am a huge believer in tons of input. But the magic of transforming passive to active happens only after some level, based on my experience. Learning mistakes and a highly approximative version of the language is simply a huge risk. And I don't know how anyone finds the tons of time to consider whether everything is n+1. Sometimes, you just get the best and most intersting available option, and deal with n+2 or n+5. And the n+1 simply clashes with the "input right from the start" idea, especially as the same people looking for simple content tend to hate textbooks (=books filled with simple n+1 content). And you also get many more n+1 difficulty options, when you are B1 or B2...

To me, it simply makes too little sense in the real world.

But back to the totally original part of the thread: I definitely find it interesting, that some people front load tons of vocabulary. I tried that in the past, but didn't have the patience for it. But I think it is one of the approaches that make a lot of sense, at least as long as people understand it is just one part of the process and won't be disappointed like "I know 5000 words and cannot speak, what is wrong with me". But it requires a bit different brain from mine. I simply don't have the patience to just do tons of srs without the rest.

[einzelne]

Aaaaand that was exactly how I got to C1 passive Italian with A2ish active Italo-Spanish hybrid It was a rude awakening early in the 2022.

Well, every time someone says Krashen, one just simply needs to reply: "Receptive multilingualism!" If Krashen were right, receptive multilingualism wouldn't exist as a phenomenon, especially among immigrant kids.

[Cavesa]

Why are you so suprised many of us start with grammar right away?

Rather than the approach you described, which was more of a combination I think, I was picturing someone picking up a grammar right off the bat and just doing that. That may be a naïve assumption, now that I think of it. But that would surprise me because, if I did that, I'd feel divorced from the language. To be fair though, I'd feel the same way about just memorizing thousands of words/listening to hundreds of videos/reading dozens of books/etc. I freak out when I can't be connected to the language in multiple ways. I'm funny that way.

That's an interesting point, but I actually cannot imagine anyone learning grammar in such an isolated way.
For example, I can definitely imagine starting a langauge with a grammarbook. For example Una grammatica italiana per tutti, Grammatik aktiv, Grammaire Progressive. Or even a bit more traditionally looking ones. But even if a beginner grabs that as the first resource, they won't be learning just grammar. They will also be learning vocabulary, even though there will be fewer words than in a general coursebook. They will also get to learn listening and pronunciation, as many of these books come with audio these days, it is up to them to use it or not. They will also practice reading right away, as many grammar books focus a lot on tons of examples, and sometimes the examples are not isolated senteces but whole paragraphs.

After so many years of reading/hearing it, I still don't understand at all the "learning the grammar is totally divided from learning the (real) language", that's simply impossible. Vast majority of the grammar books on the market for language learners simply doesn't let you do anything like that at all!

I'd say the idea that "picking up a grammar" right away = learning isolated grammar/learning about the language but not the language/learning complicated theory just comes from the fact that 99% of the language learners active in the online communities has never opened any such grammar book (or solid digital equivalent).

I would agree that learning the grammar from a typical reference book may be closer to that idea, but still very far from it. Even the most "reference type" grammarbook can give you a lot of context, vocab, etc, if you only use it well enough and not just skim through.

[garyb]

You can't really isolate grammar at the start; you'll need to learn at least a few words in order to learn how to put these words together into a sentence. I chose grammar because I like to start off with a method like Michel Thomas that is focused primarily on structure. I won't claim that it's right for everyone, but it's what I like.

The pendulum has really swung too far from the other extreme in the last decade.

I'm a bit more optimistic; my impression is that the input-only obsession is well past its (latest) peak now. I saw a lot more of it around five years ago, whereas now I'm seeing more balance and support for "traditional" methods in conjunction with lots of input. That's just based on this forum though; I don't follow YouTube much these days and I'm not masochistic enough to go on the likes of Reddit. It wouldn't surprise me if they're a few years behind the curve. I know that some of the "authentique/automatico"-type podcasts do still push for Krashen-like methods, but they've mostly been rehashing the same ideas for a good few years anyway.

[galaxyrocker]

That's just based on this forum though; I don't follow YouTube much these days and I'm not masochistic enough to go on the likes of Reddit

As one of the mods on r/languagelearning, lucky you it is very much still heavily biased towards input-only learners. I've seen it pick up recently where people are suggesting "Hey, learn some grammar and do input at the same time, it makes it easier", but certain subs are heavily input-only biased (learnjapanese). LL itself has a few good posters who often call out the "I learned English through input only", when the poster has also had classes, as well as the whole "Input is all you need", but it still tends to lean that way. I think this is because most people start with the YouTube polyglots, especially MattvsJapan for some reason (even if not learning Japanese)

[Erisnimi]

I probably study grammar without thinking of it as such. My focus is on syntax, the sentence structure. In less technical terms it comes down to, what is the natural flow of the language, what goes together with what.

The alphabet is not for me as simple as having learnt it and be done with it. I once took a (self-directed) crash course in spoken Russian and was able to get by okay in conversation for my travelling purposes, but I didn't bother with the alphabet. I still struggle with the Cyrillic alphabet when I encounter it. It's not that I don't know what the letters stand for but I simply have little familiarity with the words. I can decipher them but there's always that boundary between me seeing the letters and actually seeing the words. But it's not a language or an alphabet I have really spent time since, so for what it's worth my passive skill is that I know the alphabet but haven't internalised it or taken it on as a subject of my studies.

Similarly, I started learning Hebrew by listening to it and speaking it until I could hold a conversation and it getting to that awkward point where I had to admit, I don't know how to read. I can have a guess! Want me to write down my name? That's going to be a problem in Hebrew alphabet!

I actively study Hebrew and it really drove home the point of being familiar with the words, how they look. One might think Hebrew is a special case because many sounds are left out or not specified in writing but I realized that even when I'm reading a more familiar language, even my native tongue, I don't read it letter by letter but as a series of pictograms that make sense within the natural flow of the language.

[Iversen]

I still struggle with the Cyrillic alphabet when I encounter it. It's not that I don't know what the letters stand for but I simply have little familiarity with the words. I can decipher them but there's always that boundary between me seeing the letters and actually seeing the words.

For me it's the other way round. I started out learning the Russian Cyrillic alphabet for a study trip to Moscow and (then) Leningrad in the mid 70s. None of the others in the group knew any Russian, but for me it was practical at least to be able to read place names and similar things, I bought some grammars and dictionaries and textbooks a few years later, near the end of my French study (1981), but only just dipped my toes - enough to reach the word "преподавателйница" in a text book (and now it seems that I should have learnt the word "учительница" instead) - but then I stopped studying languages altogether until the mid noughties. And when I refueled them I found that I still could read Russian words, but didn't understand aught.

Later on I did the whole caboodle, i.e. wordlists, grammars and intensive textstudies and now I can at least read Russian and to some extent write it. But apart from a journey in 2008 to Russia and Belarus I haven't done much about the spoken version of it so for me Russian has become a primarily written language. So in a sense you could say that the last thing I have to do is to learn to speak it, and now it has become considerably less important to do so. By the way: Belarussian is almost like Russian, except that they write some of the sounds which the Russians just take for granted - like those 'o's that sounds like 'a' - and I'm not going to study it.