Robot language: Why is textbook/classroom training simultaneously both formal & simplified?

[scrambledeggs]

I noticed something recently that always bothered me, but could not express easily; classroom / textbook standard language training always seems to be in a robotic, borderline fake version of the language, that is an unholy combination of too formal and too simple: theoretically correct but never heard aloud from native speakers, nor written outside of non-native speakers taking tests,

For instance, I noticed the linguist John McWhorter, in one of his lectures, mentioned that when he learned French he was taught "nous" instead of "on" (which was given only in a footnote as an alternative), but in country, he was only tolerated as a "nous" speaker, until finally a girl told him "we have to get you to stop with the nous". (French isn't one of my languages, so I cannot confirm the actual pronouns). He implied this "classroom" language was typically artificial but not go into conclusions as to why or what to do about it, besides never trusting it. Certainly though, the books, especially today with more frequent updates, are not merely lagging behind usage due to circumstance, but consciously or flagrantly ignoring existing practices, years after they are evident. The robot language is not just old, which would be forgivable, but artificial.

I also recently bought the Glossika module (in Castilian) and had to endure sentences that were the English equivalent of "Allow me to Bring your Coat from the Hanger", notice the robot behind the fleshy mask: too formal, and too simplistic, never to be said since it would be blatantly telegraphed in real life, nor never needed to be written down. Also, "The sun is shining", not just an excellent song lyric but something that would be said as a routine conversation, on say, a trip to Miraflores, Lima, if you were a robot.

I also got burned by Pimsleur when trying Russian, literally getting laughed at by my Soviet era phrases, all of which were too formal but goofily simplified. For example, in a store, they taught Дастатачна, but using it as directed got laughter, when I asked why, they said it was too clunky, that the practical meaning was "do not sell me anymore", and told me a replacement phrase that is actually used by living people. I spoke to another person who (tried to have) learned Russian years ago, but all they could remember is the phrase translated as, "I love to speak Russian", the first thing they learned, and a useful phrase indeed, if you lie.


I do not believe the formal/simple robot-language-melange is required for teaching, as, for example, the dialogue in "Beyond the Basics" for Spanish seems to be fairly realistic, avoiding internet slang but not being artificial. Nonetheless, it seems universal that this is done. I am not sure why, so will ask, though my secret thought is that it is done for the benefit of the institution as opposed to the student. It is easier to create and teach robot language than real. I notice this roboticness springs from institutions (or their books) and never individual tutors, at least not native speakers.

I am open to thoughts, but for now I have to accept it as the way of the world, and avoid the robotspeak as I avoid McDonalds overseas.

[blaurebell]

I think the biggest mistake is to try to learn "content" from courses. Courses are for grammar, not for getting phrases to use in everyday life, because usage simply changes much faster than courses can be adapted and usage is usually far more informal or lazy in real life. Often the stuff that is commonly said isn't even correct. I still find the best source for first forays into a language to be Assimil, because a lot of the sentences are simply useless and won't even make you attempt to use them in a real world situation. Something about barking dogs certainly won't be very useful, but at least I can learn some grammar from it! After Assimil I tend to dive into native content, simply to get exposure to real language early on. First I read, then later I start with TV. And TV is truly where I source most of my expressions for speaking at first until I have enough real people around me speaking every day. I only resume courses once I had tons of native input to know what sounds natural and what sounds artificial.

I'm also very sceptical about Glossika. Generally I find the idea not bad, but taking always the same source sentences without any cultural specificity is of limited use in my opinion. Originally the Glossika guy was making his own material for shadowing from TV I believe and that makes much more sense to me. This artificial attempt to make sure all the different structures are drilled makes it really weird, especially when the language logic of the source language doesn't really fit the target language. In the Russian Glossika a lot of the "no, it isn't", "No he hasn't" is simply translated as "Нет", because there simply is no need to be so wordy. So, in the end, good idea, bad implementation. I'll have to make my own Glossika from movies in the end, and there at least I can be sure that the sentence is actually used in real life.

[Xmmm]

I'm also very sceptical about Glossika. Generally I find the idea not bad, but taking always the same source sentences without any cultural specificity is of limited use in my opinion. Originally the Glossika guy was making his own material for shadowing from TV I believe and that makes much more sense to me. This artificial attempt to make sure all the different structures are drilled makes it really weird, especially when the language logic of the source language doesn't really fit the target language. In the Russian Glossika a lot of the "no, it isn't", "No he hasn't" is simply translated as "Нет", because there simply is no need to be so wordy. So, in the end, good idea, bad implementation. I'll have to make my own Glossika from movies in the end, and there at least I can be sure that the sentence is actually used in real life.

It isn't necessary to be that wordy in English, either. Some of the base sentences are pointless. For example "Is your friend Chinese?" (ok) and answer "Yes, he's Chinese" (unnecessary). In that particular case, the Russian translation matches the English but most of the time they don't bother.

Even weirder ... sometimes prices are given in dollars or euros, and Russian translations are in rubles. Like we are all supposed to have the exchange rate from 2014 memorized.

That being said ... the woman that did the Russian recordings gets nothing but praise for her accent and delivery. And you get 3000 sentences in a can.

I would much rather learn "Che grande spina del culo" or "совсем мозги пропил" than "Migumi usually plays tennis on Sundays", but I shudder to think of the work involved splicing together thousands of snippets, or putting them all on (yuck) Anki cards.

[Cavesa]

1.A part of the resources is old. This is true especially about the content of brain of some teachers or textbook authors who didn't bother to update. That leads both to formality or to the weird informality, when people are learning stuff that was "cool" twenty years ago.

2.Textbooks and teachers treat informal language like something inferior, partially in good faith (and partially right), because the standard language must be learnt and needs to be learnt first. But the second step, learning both, often never arrives, students are out of class before the teacher got to it. ("Nous" is used by natives too, just in a bit different cases than "on". A good teacher/course teaches both. These days, "on" is definitely part of the courses, but I don't think it gets explained and practiced enough, it is like a less important variant. Or leaving out "ne" while speaking French. A typical thing that often looks too formal in real life, but teachers won't introduce it much,in order not to confuse people). I think this is one of the problems tied with too little input that most students get, and to underestimation of students.

3.Learning to speak informally includes also learning to "make mistakes" without actually making them. It requires a lot of exposure. It is ok that the classes teach formal language. It is not ok that teachers or coursebooks do not encourage people enough to consume native input. Real input out in the wilderness, in huge doses, not just the filtered selected tiny pieces of real resources modern courses are so proud of. If they did encourage students more, some students wouldn't bother anyways, true, but many would. If only they knew where to start and not to worry. No class, teacher, or textbook can replace the hundreds and hundreds (and later thousands and thousands) of hours of exposure.

4.I think many teachers (including those in private langauge schools) actually don't believe their students could speak naturally one day, unless they moved to the country. So, why confuse people, who will only need to ask for directions to the bathroom in an understandable manner anyways. It is less so in English teaching, but I am trully convinced an important part of the French teachers believes it (perhaps subconsciously, perhaps totally openly, depends on the individual).

[zenmonkey]

Mostly agree with Cavesa.

Old stuff sometimes.
Formal register is important, especially as a foreigner. If you generally can't master different registers, you should speak more formally and not drop 'wanna' (or the equivalent) all the time.
Exposure.

However, I've yet to meet a teacher or see a course book that actively discourages seeking our native material. On the contrary most good teachers push native material pretty early.

Lower registers or regional dialects aren't really the intent of general course material. Period.

[Cainntear]

Often the stuff that is commonly said isn't even correct.

This sentence goes to the heart of problems with language material, not because it's true, but because people believe it.

The notion of teaching "real language as people speak it" results it a reliance on colloquial phrases that aren't universally used. These often don't follow the full rules of grammar, having been reduced over time... but that doesn't make them incorrect (consider that no-one uses the full "if you please" anymore, and "please" isn't incorrect).

The other end of the spectrum is courses that are so focusd on teaching correct grammar, that they present sentences that are devoid of meaning, and completely unnatural. The problem with a lot of it (and bringing in the other recent discussion on whether understanding linguistics is helpful for learning languages!) is that it ignores rules about the density of information in natural sentences, and patterns of new and old information.

Take a seemingly simple example from scrambledeggs's post:
The sun is shining
Why am I saying this? If I intelletualise about it, I could say that I'm on the phone to someone from a holiday resort and they've asked me what the weather's like.... but I don't feel it naturally -- I have to reason about it. Without any context, "the sun" is new information to me, and so is "shining", so the sentence is all new information, and no old information, but a natural sentence normally ties previously-known information and new information together.
Where colloquial language looks "ungrammatical", it's often because the known information is skipped -- eg. "[are you] coming?" -- I know you're talking to me, and I know who I am.

But this high density is actually pretty meaningless, and even where it has meaning, it is extremely difficult to process -- even native speakers can't do it.

The problem with known information, though, is that out of context, there is none. One of the things that Michel Thomas did better than anyone I've seen before or since is produce sentences that relied on prior information that was missing, but still felt meaningful out of context.
I want it but I don't have it. I can't do it today because I don't have the time.
It? What is "it"? It doesn't really matter - even without knowing, the sentences are near enough to natural constructions that my brain doesn't scream 'WHY AM I SAYING THIS????' like it does with other courses. eg. Translate: "the swan is on the lake". What swan? What lake? What is the purpose of the message -- i.e. what useful information does it provide to the person who hears it?

"The swan is on the lake" is the sort of sentence that's picked because it supposedly demonstrates grammar, but if you don't know what message it conveys, you don't know what the grammar means.

[blaurebell]

That being said ... the woman that did the Russian recordings gets nothing but praise for her accent and delivery. And you get 3000 sentences in a can.

I would much rather learn "Che grande spina del culo" or "совсем мозги пропил" than "Migumi usually plays tennis on Sundays", but I shudder to think of the work involved splicing together thousands of snippets, or putting them all on (yuck) Anki cards.

The Russian Glossika is indeed the best one I've seen yet, with the Mexican Spanish being quite possible the most horrible one. Still, an awful lot of sentences are translated as "Да" and "Нет" only, which means it's not actually 3000 sentences. And I don't really see how "My brother and I are good tennis players" will ever be more useful to me than any random sentence from a dialog I might snip from some movie. I actually don't even need to snip or splice stuff either, just extract the audio, feed it into audacity, go to the right time index and start shadowing. You only need to learn the sentences - repeat them and therefore splice them or put them in Anki - if you actually want to remember them and frankly, I'm not sure that's a wise use of my time and brain space. I'm somewhat appalled that I still remember such a useless sentence as "Мы с братом хорошо играем в теннис" a sentence that is really very very far from my reality. I can see myself shadowing stuff from Solaris that are similarly close to my life, if not even closer.

This sentence goes to the heart of problems with language material, not because it's true, but because people believe it.

The notion of teaching "real language as people speak it" results it a reliance on colloquial phrases that aren't universally used. These often don't follow the full rules of grammar, having been reduced over time... but that doesn't make them incorrect (consider that no-one uses the full "if you please" anymore, and "please" isn't incorrect).

Well, what about Leísmo, which is so common in Spain? It's grammatically incorrect, Argentinians see it as uneducated and still, it is so common that you hear it on TV. Same goes with Dativ / Akkusativ in German. In certain regional accents people will consistently use the wrong case. My favourite example in German is also "dem seine", which is simply wrong and sounds terribly uneducated. German teachers in schools in the region where I'm from will correct this until they are blue in the face and still, everyone says it all the time! In other regions commonly used phrases coming from migrants have found their way into the language and are now used by Germans too, although they are wrong to such an extent that no German would ever even make such a mistake. And I actually caught myself a few times almost saying "Erzähl nicht Märchen", not because it's a phrase that is universal, but because my mum has been saying this phrase 10 times every day since the day I was born, it's one of her fossilised mistakes. If you hear something often enough it might just tumble out of your mouth no matter whether it's correct or even makes sense. And in certain regions people will even get pissed off at you for speaking correctly when the regional dialect contains grammar mistakes. Grammar is only a standardisation, it's not universal, which means that what is "correct" in the standardisation of the language doesn't always match common usage in dialects.

The sun is shining

Actually, in some situations this is rather common. I say stuff like that often when I talk to people on skype. Just the other day I had this exchange: "The sun is shining over there?" - "No, that's just the crappy camera, it's actually raining." I do know what you mean though. Let's take "The swan is on the lake", a particularly silly example. Yet, part of it is simply that you start to introduce too many variables as soon as you employ a more natural way of speaking with more sensible examples.

"Where are the keys?"
"They're on the table."

Suddenly you don't have one variable but two - on / in / behind / under etc. and replacing "keys" correctly. In English that's not so tough, but in other languages things can get a little more complicated when you have to conjugate verbs or use the right case too.

"Where are the keys?"
"John has them."

Now, this seems easy enough too. But then, "to have" for example is a genitive construction in Russian, so that easy second example wouldn't quite be such an easy transfer if you don't handle cases well yet. The more elements are modified, the more likely it is to make mistakes. It's easy to get frustrated if there are too many variables. I personally hate it when courses introduce 3 different concepts at once and expect me to understand all of them before I can do the exercises. I have a Russian course like that and it almost went out of the window once. So, sample sentences might make little sense, but they help to keep people from giving up because it's all too confusing. I rather have objectively meaningless sentences that demonstrate how the grammar works rather than meaningful sentences that I can't parse because too many things have changed at once.

[Cavesa]

Mostly agree with Cavesa.

Old stuff sometimes.
Formal register is important, especially as a foreigner. If you generally can't master different registers, you should speak more formally and not drop 'wanna' (or the equivalent) all the time.
Exposure.

However, I've yet to meet a teacher or see a course book that actively discourages seeking our native material. On the contrary most good teachers push native material pretty early.

Lower registers or regional dialects aren't really the intent of general course material. Period.

I've met such teachers. One was very discouraging, when I asked for recommendations and unwisely tried to get advice on my choices (basically "but that is too hard for you", which was not true). And she was sometimes presenting some types of resources as a source of mistakes, with prejudices towards everything not british. She tried to include native input in her controlled way, yes. She read a few Harry Potter chapters with us in class in such a way that almost made me hate the book 1.

Others, who never said it openly, but systematically made whole classes of students underestimate themselves. If you treat people like incapables for long enough (even in good faith, trying not to stress them by too fast progress), they will stop aiming for more. When you only present native input in form of boringly dissected bits in a class, the students are not going to feel an urge to jump into it and devour the whole book. If you make a big deal of it, instead of presenting it as a natural part of life, the students are likely to be scared. That's where many of those people having passed exams but too shy to use the knowledge come from.

Never in my life did I get obligatory reading for an intermediate language class (and one or two well chosen books per semester would definitely be a good thing). Or recommended movies or tv series or even podcasts. Homework in form of native input, that could be worked with in class later.

The closest thing to an input advice was "listen to the radio", which I think is a terrible advice for an intermediate or beginner learner. Only one teacher was actively and often telling us to look for further exposure, speak better then him, even do other activites in English, when the class activity of the moment was too easy.

Up to B2, teachers simply seem not to consider this possible. The tutor before my C2 exam was surprised I was reading books a lot, but this should be the standard, not a surprise.

I agree that lower registers and regional dialects have no reason to be included in general courses, but the common generally used spoken language does have a place there. Or rather, it should have place in the self study that should accompany any class.

Also it is very true it is always better to be too formal than too informal. But making people sound too formal with the argument "speak as if you were to meet the Queen tomorrow", that was simply dumb, yet I've witnessed this.

[zenmonkey]

Oh, I'm sure they exist and you seem to have unusually bad luck with teachers, but I have not run into them. Or perhaps, I am the one to have good luck. Who knows?

My two younger kids are currently taking classes in school for English, Spanish and German (French natives with C1 level German) and self learning Italian/Spanish. They have required summer reading - choose a book, any book in the language(s). They are expected to read 4-5 native books per year in what corresponds to B1 classes. These are not my instructions but their teachers. And each class will be expected to interact with lots of native material including at least one trip. We can talk about privilege and all that, their experience with teacher tends to be positive - engaged, mostly capable and willing to admit to their limitations and weaknesses of a group activity. My only complaint is that, because of my kids home environment, they get off easy and rarely are expected to study my old 2:1 ratio of self study for class time.

In general, learning material is not made for the polyglot or the learner with prior language acquisition but for the least common denominator - an active learner, slowly acquiring experience in the L2 that needs drills, exercises and grammar that is watered down to a level assuming little prior grammar training. We need to keep that in mind.

[Cavesa]

Oh, I'm sure they exist and you seem to have unusually bad luck with teachers, but I have not run into them. Or perhaps, I am the one to have good luck. Who knows?

My two younger kids are currently taking classes in school for English, Spanish and German (French natives with C1 level German) and self learning Italian/Spanish. They have required summer reading - choose a book, any book in the language(s). They are expected to read 4-5 native books per year in what corresponds to B1 classes. These are not my instructions but their teachers. And each class will be expected to interact with lots of native material including at least one trip. We can talk about privilege and all that, their experience with teacher tends to be positive - engaged, mostly capable and willing to admit to their limitations and weaknesses of a group activity. My only complaint is that, because of my kids home environment, they get off easy and rarely are expected to study my old 2:1 ratio of self study for class time.

In general, learning material is not made for the polyglot or the learner with prior language acquisition but for the least common denominator - an active learner, slowly acquiring experience in the L2 that needs drills, exercises and grammar that is watered down to a level assuming little prior grammar training. We need to keep that in mind.

You and your kids are very lucky. I don't know anyone who had something like this. Vast majority of people I know had the same or worse luck. It is not about me having bad luck, it is simply the norm at least around here. And experience with classes that others on this forum share seems to indicate it is the norm in a lot of countries.