Re: Examples of Input Only
Posted: Wed Feb 27, 2019 2:28 am
walldepartment wrote:Hello. I have trouble finding this information. I am curious about some differences between input and output. I would like to read some examples of people who have had a lot of input ONLY and no output. Can anyone give me some links to this?
Oh, I miss HTLAL in some ways (though not in others). I was always inspired by solidsnake and was sad when he stopped posting; he was the closest adherent on the forums to the AJATT approach, but with Mandarin, and his posts were inspiring with regards to the results that were possible if you did one thing, and took it exceptionally seriously. It took me several years to learn the lesson, but when I did, along came the languages. I now know I could take on any language and learn it well if I made it my overwhelming focus, and that knowledge--or rather, that self-efficacy--is powerful.
To return to the OP's topic, however, the approach is one that lots of people have pursued with success; reineke has, as usual, posted plenty of wonderful anecdotes and references. To those I'd add the Antimoon and AJATT fellows. They both were (are) advocates of focusing on input and not worrying about output, with the idea being that if you get enough input, the output will come.
I'd also count myself as an example; while I did speak to people here and there in Spanish while learning it, 99% of the work was simply listening to the radio, watching telenovelas, and reading kids' books. I also self-spoke and read aloud, which I found far more useful than talking to people, as there wasn't the pressure of speaking correctly and processing responses.
With French, my "output" was teaching it to my kids while learning it. So in that sense, again, yes there was output, but it was more general use of the language. At first I was saying things like J'ai faim. Je vais manger. The goal was simply to start getting the kids to repeat things back to me in French instead of in Spanish. Thankfully, things got better from there.
Xmmm wrote:https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/19/health/l ... index.html
All these people learning from TV using native language subtitles ... makes me wonder why I do it the hard way, lol ...
This is lovely. I used subs in Spanish when watching telenovelas, but it was the same idea. I also remember that after a while, I turned off the subs because I'd gotten to the point where I could understand most of what was said without them, and I didn't want to read and watch at the same time. It was pretty cool.
My core shows were Amores Verdaderos, Porque el Amor Manda, and Por Ella Soy Eva. I started Mentir Para Vivir but never finished it; I don't actually have the attention span to watch TV on my own 99% of the time, as I'd rather be looking stuff up on the Internet. Listening to the radio came much easier, as I could do other things while doing it.
As a result, in French, although I watched some shows here and there, it was much less than with Spanish, especially since I preferred listening to RMC over watching any TV, which, for me, took too much attention. But I'm in full agreement with the idea that people can learn any language from 99% input. There's that story of the fellow who learned native-level Hebrew from scratch over the course of a decade in an Israeli restaurant in LA; I've posted it elsewhere on the forum here.
There are always going to be folks who say it's not possible or who pooh-pooh the idea. That's just life; most folks think doing anything beyond what they already do is impossible. If you want to do something difficult, in general, it's best to take advice from people who've done it successfully. That's not to say that this is the only way to learn a language; any time on this forum or others will show that there are as many ways as there are people. But for me, I can easily say that focusing on input and either reading aloud or talking to myself for output is more than sufficient, given enough time and effort, to pick up a language.
Oh, and as a final point, Stephen Krashen, while not necessarily a believer in 100% input for SLA, has written a boatload arguing for free voluntary reading in an L2 for mastery. To me, this is just the literary equivalent of telenovela-binging; he's even shared examples of people who developed fluency through reading all of the Hardy Boys / Nancy Drew-type series. This is much more up my alley and more descriptive of my approach. I went through series like Dork Diaries, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and the Hunger Games in Spanish and French, and still read those books for fun. The overarching point across both media forms is to get obsessed; AJATT mentioned this a lot. Find something that you'd do all day long in your L1, and do it in your L2. Repeat until the language is buzzing around in your head so much you want to start spontaneously speaking it.