To ALG or Not to ALG
A Language Learner’s Dilemma
By Antonio Graceffo
"Automatic Language Growth (ALG) has many advantages over other language learning methods, but the cost in time and dedication is high. You need to first determine your own personal goals and level of commitment before deciding which rout to take.
In ALG, students learn through listening. They don’t read, write or even speak until hundreds of hours into the course. The idea is to get your listening to a high level first, so you know what the words should sound like, then later you start producing the sounds yourself. Much later, if you chose that option, you learn to read and write.
Using ALG concepts, you would first learn to listen and speak. You wouldn’t look at a printed page till you were competent in the language.
This is exactly how Vietnamese children learn. They have a good size functional vocabulary before they learn to read or write at age six or seven. They know what the words mean and how to use them. Then they learn to read...
This is how we should learn Chinese or Vietnamese. But the bonus in Vietnamese is that if you were already competent in the language, learning to read and write would probably only take a few weeks of study, as opposed to years, as it would with Chinese...
The problem that we keep running into with exporting ALG outside of the classroom in Thailand is that it takes 800 hours of listening to learn Chinese, Thai or Vietnamese. Most ex-pats, on a one year contract wouldn’t be willing to or simply couldn’t put in the 16 hours a week that it would take to reach 800 hours by the end of their one year contract...
When I posed this point to David Long, he countered, asked what people hoped to gain by studying only four hours a week by any method.
“They would learn their numbers, hello, how are you, and be somewhat functional if not very, very badly.” I answered. David and I are strictly in agreement on the importance of listening and on proper pronunciation.
"In reality, most of the foreigners who believe they are functional are actually living with the illusion of functionality. But, they feel they learned something, so they feel their money was well spent. And really bad, traditional teaching methods continue to sell well.
David’s answer was, “But they wouldn’t be fluent.”
He is absolutely right. If you take a traditional approach, and if you only do a few hours per week, you would never achieve fluency. In fact, you would never achieve correct pronunciation. The National Language Service, Defense Language Institute, The Foreign Service Institute and ALG (Automatic Language Growth) all agree that you need 800 – 2,000 hours to learn Thai, Chinese, or Vietnamese. For ALG the first 800 hours would be spent listening, you would need an additional 1,200 hours for reading and writing.
These organizations can’t all be wrong.. "
https://www.google.com/amp/s/brooklynmo ... o-alg/amp/
