How to Learn a Language without Studying

[tastyonions]

Interesting enough, the video he made before is titled: "The Best Language Learning Apps (and Why Most Don't Work)"
Now I only skimmed through to find out which apps he mentions, I have not listened to the rest he was saying. Later noticed someone already listed the apps in the comments:

Beginner: Duolingo
Audio-based: LearningTransfer (free and limited) and Pimsleur (paid)
Vocab Building: Anki (traditional) and Glossika (listening, more advanced)
Speaking Skills: HelloTalk (free) and Preply (paid with teachers)
Reading: BeeLingua
Fluency: Podcasts (with active listening using Google Translate)

How are some of those apps "not studying"?

I guess some people think anything done without books can't possibly count as "studying."

[Le Baron]

How is Anki 'traditional'? And why is Glossika 'more advanced'? I tried it for Spanish and it doesn't at seem 'more advanced' to me. They also make mistakes, as I found later on.

[Cainntear]

How is Anki 'traditional'? And why is Glossika 'more advanced'? I tried it for Spanish and it doesn't at seem 'more advanced' to me. They also make mistakes, as I found later on.

Cos anything older than the writer is considered "traditional" these days, particularly if it installs on a computer!!!

[Le Baron]

How is Anki 'traditional'? And why is Glossika 'more advanced'? I tried it for Spanish and it doesn't at seem 'more advanced' to me. They also make mistakes, as I found later on.

Cos anything older than the writer is considered "traditional" these days, particularly if it installs on a computer!!!

I knew I was old when someone told me e-mail is 'old-fashioned'. And indeed I have also been questioned as to why I am installing things on a computer.

[MorkTheFiddle]

Agreed that Mr. K could and does count. Thanks for reminding me of him.

[MorkTheFiddle]

I use Proton VPN (paid, about $5 USD per month) to watch region-locked public broadcasting available online. Works for Netflix and the like, too. I'm happy to help troubleshoot for anyone who wants to try this and has issues getting it working.

I've said in another thread that I use the free version of Proton VPN, and it works well for me.

[jeff_lindqvist]

Is that because of the distract cause by the Internet and reading forums.

How did you know?

Maybe having only two books and an audio cassette wasn't such a bad thing.

Indeed. Almost five years ago:

The material may be everything you need, just not everything you want. What can you do under the "worst" circumstances?

What if the audiobook + book was all you had access to?

And six years ago:

we have everything you need just not everything you want

[alcarazesco]

The user says you can learn well without courses, textbooks, or wordlists. To each their own, I guess. But don't toss away your textbooks because this guy said so. It would take a lifetime to learn a language well with just stickers, weekly lessons on Preply from tutors who are often unqualified, and internet users with spelling problems. Even then, this method is a twisted, roundabout way to learn the same things you could've learned quickly and efficiently in a structured textbook. How many stickers and tutor lessons before you learn introductions, question formation, adjective placement, conditional statements, and relative pronouns? And a lot of things can't be stickied or babbled about, like ideas and things you can't touch. Study materials from qualified sources do a much better job of not only organising but presenting information you need at the lower levels.

The user is right about one thing, though: At some point, you should talk to natives to make progress. But that comes after you grasp the basics.

[Saim]

Self talk

Although I rarely do this, I understand the benefits of it, and he explains them pretty well – you can do it any time, it’s free, less stressful, etc., when compared to conversing with a human. However, I don’t feel that this is necessary if you have a human, and he seems to indicate that this is a required step to get to the point where you can talk to people, or should be used to supplement real conversations, or something like that. That’s where we disagree.

Funnily enough, Krashen believes self-talk is the product of acquisition but doesn’t accelerate it (since that would be “learning”, which can never do anything other than affect the language monitor).

[Cainntear]

Self talk

Although I rarely do this, I understand the benefits of it, and he explains them pretty well – you can do it any time, it’s free, less stressful, etc., when compared to conversing with a human. However, I don’t feel that this is necessary if you have a human, and he seems to indicate that this is a required step to get to the point where you can talk to people, or should be used to supplement real conversations, or something like that. That’s where we disagree.

Funnily enough, Krashen believes self-talk is the product of acquisition but doesn’t accelerate it (since that would be “learning”, which can never do anything other than affect the language monitor).

Yep, and I do think Krashen's kind of the start of the mindset that leads us to this point.

Krashen's "acquisition learning distinction" kind of implies that studying means "learning", and if Krashen's point that learning doesn't work was to stand up to scrutiny, that fact that studying would only lead to learning would therefore imply it doesn't lead to language skill.

And then the corrupting logical follow-on from this appears:
If studying can't work, then by definition anything that does work can't be studying, so we have bro science influencers in the language sphere pointing to 40-year-old papers that don't actually give any data (if they point to any papers at all) and then adding "real world experience" that disagrees with the 40-year-old paper and then twist and reanalyse so that an illogical argument sounds sensible if looked at in a totally superficial fashion -- ie. "study doesn't work; this works; therefore this isn't 'study'."