Has anyone learnt a language well without trying to learn it?

[aokoye]

I agree that it is easy for individuals to overstate their L2 language capacities. I just don't think that any of us are entitled to proof that another person can speak a language (save for situations like, "I'm hiring this person for a job where they need to know X language" or "this person wants to go to school in a language that isn't their first language(s)"). The question that your post brought up for me isn't "how do we know your claim is founded" but, "why do we need to know it's founded".

I think if the claims the author of the blog was making were a bit more grand then I might be more inclined to want to see some sort of proof (but would remind myself that really there's no reason for me to be privy to it), but his descriptions of what he's able to do in his posts seem pretty realistic. For what it's worth I'm generally a lot more sceptical of just about everything I hear from or about Benny Lewis in part because of how he words things and in part because of his showman like attitude.

As an aside, I'm now (again) tempted to study Norwegian - I really don't have time to learn Norwegian but I really want to sigh.

[reineke]

---

[smallwhite]

I have already posted some educated third-party estimates for C1-level language competence: the range is from 1,520 hours (fast learners) to 4,490 hours (slow learners).

Do "fast learners" and "slow learners" mean they're inherently fast/slow, eg. Fast Peter is already known to be fast and Slow Paul is already known to be slow and they used the exact same method and Fast Peter learned faster than Slow Paul, or is "fast" and "slow" a description applied after the test results came out, eg. some subjects learned in 1520 hours and we now label them "fast learners"? (I'm interested in knowing whether there are inherently fast learners who always learn faster).

[Keys]

Wouldn't this be the Natural Method? Learning Norwegian without translation just absorbing native material? Also, if you know German and English as the author does this method is a lot easier/more logical than if you only speak a non-Germanic language.

I learned read and understand Italian quite fluently "without trying very hard" because I knew French and Spanish at the time. I did leaf through an Italian-Spanish comparative grammar before that.

I learned to read and understand Hungarian at intermediate level "without trying very hard" just by reading stories that had every word translated correctly and in appropriate conjugation, and daily practice of low frequency words, so I absorbed the most vocabulary in the shortest time possible learning to recognize roots and sentence structures on the way because those words were part of stories.

But I agree with most here that there's an amount of trying involved no matter what

[reineke]

---

[s_allard]

I think we have to return to the original question, i.e. Has anyone learnt a language well without trying to learn it? It's not a question of explicit instruction or not. It's a question of not making an effort to learn it well. I think most people believe that some method must be made.

[reineke]

---

[s_allard]

To my knowledge Krashen never said people can learn a language well without trying to learn it. But without dragging Krashen into this debate, we can question this whole idea of an adult learning any skill, especially a language, well without trying to learn it. Could this be learning by accident? No study, no books, no active listening, no grammar, no practicing, no nothing, just doing whatever other activities one has and the language naturally grows on you to a high level.

This is a silly notion that doesn't warrant any debate here.

[NIKOLIĆ]

I think we have to return to the original question, i.e. Has anyone learnt a language well without trying to learn it? It's not a question of explicit instruction or not. It's a question of not making an effort to learn it well. I think most people believe that some method must be made.

I learned English without trying to learn it. When I was 3 years old I got "Muzzy in Gondoland" as a birthday present from my aunt. I believe this was the first cartoon I watched in English. When I was around 9-10 years old, I wrote a letter in English to my (other) aunt that lived in Miami at that time. My older sister told me (in Serbian) what to write, and I translated it into English. I don't exactly remember the contents of that letter nor how good my spelling was. I don't know if my aunt still has it, I should probably ask her. Up until that point in time, my only contact with English was through countless hours of watching cartoons and animated movies on an old VCR. My rough guess would be that I watched around 4-5 hours of cartoons/movies a day, often rewatching them several times. My first English class was in 5-th grade at the age of 11(?). I don't even remember uttering a single word or talking to anybody in English, and yet I was somehow magically able to read flawlessly in class while the other pupils where stammering and utterly mangling the text they were reading, and I never even had to memorize a single irregular verb conjugation. I never had that problem since I already knew exactly how those words are supposed to be pronounced because I heard them a bunch of times. I don't even recall looking up singe a word in the dictionary. Actually I didn't even have a dictionary. I slept through most of my English classes (elementary and high-school) because I wasn't learning anything new. Zero, squat, nada.

One of the reasons I tend to stay away from these "is it possible" discussions is because I already know the answer, but there are probably gonna be people going: "But had it been Chinese or Xhosa, would you have been able to learn it? HA! Gotchya!".

I also firmly believe that one of the precursors of learning a language solely through massive input is to not care about the end result, but enjoy the content.
(So much wisdom in one sentence. I cringe every time I write something like this).

I hope this answers your question.

[s_allard]

.... Up until that point in time, my only contact with English was through countless hours of watching cartoons and animated movies on an old VCR. My rough guess would be that I watched around 4-5 hours of cartoons/movies a day, often rewatching them several times. My first English class was in 5-th grade at the age of 11(?). I don't even remember uttering a single word or talking to anybody in English, and yet I was somehow magically able to read flawlessly in class while the other pupils where stammering and utterly mangling the text they were reading, and I never even had to memorize a single irregular verb conjugation. I never had that problem since I already knew exactly how those words are supposed to be pronounced because I heard them a bunch of times. I don't even recall looking up singe a word in the dictionary. Actually I didn't even have a dictionary. I slept through most of my English classes (elementary and high-school) because I wasn't learning anything new. Zero, squat, nada.

One of the reasons I tend to stay away from these "is it possible" discussions is because I already know the answer, but there are probably gonna be people going: "But had it been Chinese or Xhosa, would you have been able to learn it? HA! Gotchya!".

I also firmly believe that one of the precursors of learning a language solely through massive input is to not care about the end result, but enjoy the content.
(So much wisdom in one sentence. I cringe every time I write something like this).

I hope this answers your question.

This does answer my question. A child watches "4-5 hours of cartoons/movies a day, often rewatching them several times" Then English classes starting at age 11. These seemed to have been very easy but they still were classes. All this qualifies as "learning well without trying"? Gimme a break. It sounds like a lot of trying to me. Just like in the OP's story of someone learning Norwegian without trying, we see that in reality a lot of effort and trying went into learning the language.

What people are mixing up is not trying with not studying the language in a systematic and formal way. I am open to the idea of non-formal ways of study, including some form of natural method but this still involves a lot of trying,

Let's for a moment think of an adult learner using the method that this poster here used. I watch 4-5 hours of Spanish movies a day, rewatching many of them several times. After six months I take Spanish classes for a year and breeze through them. The results are spectacular. Should I conclude that I learned Spanish without trying?

As someone has pointed out, one attempt of learning without trying was this idea of watching an hour of video in Mandarin Chinese a day with no formal study. I gather this person gave up after a couple of months.

Instead of all these apocryphal stories of learning a language effortlessly as a child, let's hear from adult learners here who have learned a language to a B2 level without making any effort.