Cainntear wrote:As for the point that youtube polyglots neglect their previous language studies... here's the thing. Does it really matter?
Yes, because...
Novices have to learn to notice, but that is also a skill you as a teacher have to impart.
... the giver of the advice generally rejects the role of teacher, giving the advice "this is all you have to do" without giving any help on how to do it. And usually the advice also includes "don't waste your money on a teacher," too.
I'm not sure the youtube polyglots all reject teachers. Certainly Benny Lewis doesn't, and I'm not sure about the others. (Just a sideways comment: Benny Lewis actually worked for Berlitz; he was a language teacher at some point).
Besides that, I think there's something to be said for the fact that people are responsible for their education themselves to some extent. You do not have to listen to everything a youtube polyglot says, nor do you have to listen to me.
When I teach I particularly draw attention to things that I feel students have to notice, especially morphological things, or words close to English, or spelling changes in different languages for words that have the same meaning. They may be better at this skill because they have more practice, but it doesn't mean that they are being disingenuous. They just learnt it earlier.
This isn't a counter-argument to anything that has been said so far -- it's an agreement. You are teaching new learners to do all the things that experienced learners can already do -- the new learners need that basic teaching. The problem with us polyglots (and with experts in most fields) is that we're inclined to forget the amount of training we got from teachers like yourself, and how much that molded our thinking.
I'm not really posting in order to disagree. I'm just drawing from my own experience.
One classic example you'll see in amateur produced material is the tendency to invent new grammatical terminology in the belief that changing the words is easier. Calling a verb the "it form" instead of "third person singular" is superficially simpler, but an inexperienced learner does think of language that way, and has to be taught it, regardless of what terminology you use.
When I mention that in Dutch, modal verbs are always followed by an infinitive, my American students are nearly always in for a shock, unless they have studied languages already. I then have to explain to them that "we call this form that ends in -en the infinitive. Just remember from now on, that when I say infinitive, I mean this basic form", and then I illustrate with an example such as "ik kan zwemmen" (I can swim). Sometimes I have to re-teach people what nouns and adjectives were. Perhaps it's because it's not widely taught in schools anymore, but to me not knowing it seems strange - given you spend hours in Dutch primary and secondary schools figuring out parts of speech.
The thing is that as a teacher I don't necessarily want someone to lose motivation by going over their head with terminology. But I do want to be correct about tense usage and I feel that learning the basic grammarese really does benefit students, because it gives them a better analytical look at the framework of a language and allows them to deduce instead of using rote memorization. Which is why I encourage learners that use deduction as opposed to memorization, because they'll be able to automatize those processes and produce fluent speech faster.
To get back to the original topic of the thread: SRS is a tool that is excellent for memorizing things, but the thing is that memorizing is a good technique when it comes to basic vocabulary, but not when it comes to understanding grammar constructs. There is a rhyme and reason behind grammar analysis and it doesn't go amiss knowing how to manipulate grammar analysis in your favour in order to produce better speech. You will still err, but you will err less often.
Which is why I find "just use massive input" a blunt way of dealing with a problem you are better off cutting down to manageable parts. The thing about massive input is that it's simply a brute way to amass more knowledge, but what it doesn't do is force you to segregate that knowledge into structures that you can use on your own. Grammar is a structural element of language and to me requires a more structured approach.
The problem with grammar is this; grammar is like building the framework of a house. However, people that just learn grammar only ever learn how to build concrete walls; it doesn't tell you whether the house has been decorated, adapted to its environment, shielded from rain, and so on and so forth. Language knowledge without grammar is like having a house of cards; you can have a lot of words but the structure is feeble, so any kind of resistance blows your structure to smithereens mercilessly.
But if you just learn grammar, then you've got the wood and concrete framework, but you're not actually living inside a house. You have to decorate the interior, the roof, the garden.
Which is why I recommend learning vocabulary simultaneously, and starting to piece the grammar together bit by bit (don't start with the roof if you haven't got the foundation, your house will collapse). And what constitutes somebody's foundation might differ - there's no one-size-fits-all solution to that, just like it matters whether you're building houses on stilts in a pretty lagoon or hammering poles into the ground in a peat bog.
Does massive input teach you some grammar? Probably, but does it teach you anything in an organized way? Probably not, and eventually, if you want to be thorough enough that proper grammar matters, you'll want to organize it somehow.
