Feedback for Study Plan Needed

[PeterMollenburg]

leosmith puts forward a lot of strong points here.

I would go absolutely nuts listening to 800 hours of audio before being permitted to participate!

Pronunciation does need to be focused on intently early on, imo. I would add that pronunciation should be focused on at all times throughout the learning phases and beyond when one is at ease with the language, but with particular emphasis required in the beginning. No matter how advanced one becomes, always paying attention to the way you produce the language through speech seems logical to me. Listening to 800 hours of audio prior to attempting to articulate the sounds of a language does not seem logical, or in any way motivating, despite the supposed rationale.

One ought to be training their mouth to produce the sounds of the language throughout the learning process through mimmicking and evaluation- it keeps you present/alert/on your toes! with regards to enunciating sounds correctly. I would lose interest 5 hours into an 800 hour mission, and I doubt i'd be that much better equipped at the end of 800 hours for producing speech if I've done none or very little up to that point.

I'm with leosmith, it's a D.

[Theodisce]

Having made a dog's breakfast of my Russian studies, I'm hoping to get more streamlined and organized for Italian and future languages.

One of reineke's posts led me the blog of Antonio Graceffo, who learned a number of languages using some modified form of ALG. His method, as I understand it, is:

1. Learn 1500 words any way you can (duolingo, frequency list, assimil, whatever)
2. Commence 800 hours of listening. Material has to be more than 50% comprehensible. Can't listen to anything more than once a month, but relistening counts. TL subtitles are allowed.
3. Commence speaking. 200 hours Italki, glossika and fsi as needed.
4. Read 100 books in the TL extensively. Can't read any book more than three times a year, but rereading counts.

For the purpose of this thread, please respond with any feedback you like but include a letter grade for the plan (A through F). Thank you!


Edited some particulars in items #2 and #3 as I found a better description of Graceffo's "ALG home study"
Edited again to correct order of steps (speaking before reading).

1. In more transparent languages you can pick up even the very basic vocabulary from the context. Learning it in a more systematic way is not bad in and of itself, but I've always found it extremely boring.
2. 50%... Hmm. I would say it depends on how much incomprehensible input you can tolerate. Could be probably less than 50% for more transparent languages. Limitations on re-listening are arbitrary, seem to serve no purpose and can even be damaging to some extent. I never watch with subtitles, they tend to distract me from the spoken language and I end up reading a movie instead of watching it.
3. From my experience you are bound to speak Italian after 800 hours of listening to (more or less) comprehensible input. 200 hours of speaking in artificial situations seems like an overkill. After 700 hours of Czech input and no prior speaking practice I was able to converse quite freely, follow university lectures and translate short texts from Latin into Czech in a classroom context. 1400 hours of German input plus 10 hours of Skype conversations just before a job interview were enough to pass it. Of course the more the better, and it's definitively worth doing if you can handle it, but it also means an hour every second day or so if you want to do it in one year.
4. Limitations on re-reading- see above. 100 books is an overkill.

I would give it a C. Too many arbitrary limitations plus the emphasis on books and speaking transforming a language learning walk into a death march. Massive listening (and input in general) is the key and would also enable you to use the language after 700 (800? 900?) hours.

[BOLIO]

If I am not allowed to look at the written word before the 800 hrs is completed then how do I learn the words.


If I started Thai or Mandarin as a native English speaker, what do I listen to? What type of graded content? To me both of those languages have zero transparency. Listening without any idea would be madness for me. I am not discrediting it in any way and it may be the absolute best way to learn, but I would like some clarification from someone who uses this strategy.

Just a thought but would L-R with L2 audio and L1 text be a useful way to try to develop some sort of understanding during this 800 hour phase?

[Adrianslont]

If I am not allowed to look at the written word before the 800 hrs is completed then how do I learn the words.


If I started Thai or Mandarin as a native English speaker, what do I listen to? What type of graded content? To me both of those languages have zero transparency. Listening without any idea would be madness for me. I am not discrediting it in any way and it may be the absolute best way to learn, but I would like some clarification from someone who uses this strategy.

Just a thought but would L-R with L2 audio and L1 text be a useful way to try to develop some sort of understanding during this 800 hour phase?

The OP says that the 800 hours listening is step 2. Step 1 is learn 1500 words any way you can eg Assimil, duolingo, anything. That should be plenty to get you going.

[BOLIO]

I see. However OP's version and the version linked in this thread about the method seem to differ.

"In ALG, students learn through listening. They don’t read, write or even speak until hundreds of hours into the course."

If that is the case, what method would be used to learn the first 1500 words? Would one have to listen to Audio only drills such as "Cat is Gato. Dog is Perro. Table is Mesa. ".

I learned them as a child after years of listening and being talked to like a baby. The problem is after five years of that method, i spoke like a five year old.

I agree with OP as it seems one would have to use word list, SRS, flash cards or whatever to learn a foundation but that seems to go against the subject of the listed article on page two of this thread. Again, please don't take my questions as being negative towards the process as I have become a firm believer in listening from the beginning. I have to work daily in my own language learning to offset the mistake I made in Spanish by putting off listening and only focused on reading.

Thanks to OP for posting the topic. I find it very interesting and am doing more research on the method.

BOLIO

[Xmmm]

I see. However OP's version and the version linked in this thread about the method seem to differ.

"In ALG, students learn through listening. They don’t read, write or even speak until hundreds of hours into the course."

If that is the case, what method would be used to learn the first 1500 words? Would one have to listen to Audio only drills such as "Cat is Gato. Dog is Perro. Table is Mesa. ".

I learned them as a child after years of listening and being talked to like a baby. The problem is after five years of that method, i spoke like a five year old.

I agree with OP as it seems one would have to use word list, SRS, flash cards or whatever to learn a foundation but that seems to go against the subject of the listed article on page two of this thread. Again, please don't take my questions as being negative towards the process as I have become a firm believer in listening from the beginning. I have to work daily in my own language learning to offset the mistake I made in Spanish by putting off listening and only focused on reading.

Thanks to OP for posting the topic. I find it very interesting and am doing more research on the method.

BOLIO

The confusion comes from the fact that I was describing Antonio Graceffo's language learning method, and then the topic of ALG came up. Graceffo is a fan of ALG, he agrees with its core concepts, but his method is not exactly ALG. I don't see how you could do ALG outside a classroom setting. For self study, some compromises have to be made.

Here is the original article that reineke linked to that triggered my interest: Learning Languages in Your Pajamas

----------------------------------------------

By the way, thanks to everyone for the great input! I will reflect ...

[reineke]

Graceffo wrote: "I probably understood less than 20%, but I knew that I was learning" .

Edit: to be fair, he also wrote : "But living in a country is not enough. No one learns a language by osmosis. You have to have comprehensible input. This means you need to be able to understand about 60% of what you are hearing for it to do you any good. So, plopping in front of the TV for 800 hours, when you have no prior knowledge of the language probably won’t work. But after 200 hours or 400 hours, watching TV might be helpful." (To ALG or not ALG).

He started with dubbed shows since native movies are harder to follow. This is kind of the opposite of what you are doing.

You should take note of Graceffo's language learning history::

"My family is Sicilian, but I was born in the USA. My mother died when I was young and I lived with my maternal grandmother, who was a polyglot. She had two masters degrees and spoke Italian, Spanish, English, French, German, and Yiddish. I grew up exposed to all of these languages.

I graduated with a BA in German with a minor in English.

I wound up spending four years at Germersheim, attending classes, working as a translator and teacher, and doing professional translation research under Dr. Kiraly, who was exploring various methodologies of second language acquisition with the goal of creating artificial intelligence computer programs for translation.

In retrospect, the mistake that I made in Germersheim was that I broke off my formal studies too early, thinking that my work as a translator and as an academic researcher were adding to my knowledge sufficiently. In some ways, they were, and I was learning things that my former classmates might never learn. But, on the other hand, I wasn’t getting the boring classroom fundamentals. I really should have completed more formal language education because sometimes my professional translations were spot-on and sometimes they weren’t. The proof that I needed more academic training was when I failed the certification examination for the American Translators association. I was the head translator for Warner Bros. Germany at the time and also did freelance work for a number of large clients, including German government agencies. But what I realize now, and what I apply to my study of Vietnamese is: No matter what level you are functioning at, even if you are so highly functioning that you can translate or interpret at international conferences, you MUST complete ALL of your academic training, including grammar and writing exercises.

"Afterwards, I would field questions from investors in those languages. It was during this time that my Italian improved greatly, as it was the first time since I was small child that Italian was part of my everyday life."

Since coming to Asia, more than ten years ago, one of my primary goals has been to learn an Asia language to 100% fluency, both academic and functional, reading, writing, speaking and listening at the level of a native speaker, college graduate, and to go back to work as a translator, researcher, and academic.

Sadly, I still haven’t achieved this goal. Along the way, I have attended classes in Mandarin, Thai, Korean, Khmer, Vietnamese, and Bahsa Malaysia.

Of those, I have learned Mandarin to an academic level of intermediate, (in all four skills: reading, writing, speaking, and listening) but with a communication level which is advanced.

To learn Mandarin, I attended six months of private lessons, 15-20 hours per week, at Taipei Language Institute, Kaohsiung, Taiwan. Because I wanted to learn as much vocabulary, grammar and usage as quickly as possible, I didn’t learn any Chinese characters or pinyin. My teacher and I practiced only listening and speaking. I read texts written in Taiwanese phonetic script (Bopomofo). And I didn’t do any writing at all.

The advantage to not learning the writing straight away was that I could learn faster. The downside was that without writing, there was no way to practice at home or to do homework. Most foreigners believe that living in the country where the language is spoken you will be immersed, or that you could just go to the park and practice conversation with strangers. But it takes months for you to be able to speak beyond a silly inane level that would bore a native speaker to distraction.

I don’t see the benefit of asking fifty strangers in the park: What’s your name? What country are you from? and What’s your job?

Until you have a level conducive of real conversation, it is not very helpful to engage in conversations with strangers in lieu of spending more time reviewing your lessons.

After six months of classes I went to Mainland China and lived in the Shaolin Temple for three months. It was the first and almost the only time I was fully immersed in a language in Asia. As a foreigner, it is very hard to create a situation where everyone around you is speaking to you in the Asian language and where you don’t have access to TV, internet or foreign friends. Those three months were crucial in the development of my communicative abilities in Chinese, but I knew that there were still major deficiencies in my language."

https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/20 ... -and-asia/

Elsewhere he wrote:

"Nearly 100% of people who graduate from a medical school can work as doctors. Nearly zero percent of people who graduate with a four year degree in a foreign language can speak at anything approaching fluency."

"If you don’t speak a particular language at all, practicing with a native speaker would be the absolute dumbest way to try and learn it."

"A parallel point I would like to make here is about the myth of immersion. Most foreigners living in a foreign country get less than twenty meaningful minutes of language exposure each day, eighteen of which are the same as the previous day."

"The only way to learn a language is through study, full stop. If living in a foreign country produced results the all of the foreigners living in Taiwan or Vietnam would be fluent. After only a few weeks of studying at university I passed people who were living in the country for ten years."

"... my theory that only academic study can get you real, adult fluency in a foreign language."

"David Long, the leading expert on Automatic Language Growth (ALG), a listening-based language acquisition method, said that one of the reasons listening isn’t taught in foreign language classrooms is that it can’t be measured. Education has become business. And if you can’t quantify something, you can’t sell it. Also, there is a perception that if the teacher is playing CDs and listening exercises for the students, then the teacher isn’t working. And no one wants to pay the teacher for doing nothing."

"I support David and believe that listening is extremely important. However, my background is in translation which has a slightly different goal than ALG. In ALG the goal is to produce adults with native-like pronunciation and usage."

"This is the same weakness in our Vietnamese program and in most of the ESL programs I have taught in. The main focus is always speaking. And by speaking, they mean conversation. In this way, you produce graduates who can’t listen to a native speaker, so their communication is bad. Next, they can’t read at native speaker level, so they can’t actually read a newspaper, let alone a novel. And of course, they couldn’t write a term-paper."

As you have seen, you cannot reduce Graceffo to an ALG-inflenced vocabulary + input... approach.

Both David Long (ALG) and Graceffo believe in comprehensible input and teaching methods. The ALG people provide a special service. Attending an ALG class is not the same as watching TV. The students watch and learn from real instructors.

I regularly spot the subjunctive and rare idioms in simple cartoons. TV programs can provide learners with a million running words of input that's less challenging than the first lesson of Pimsleur, but you'll need to be patient. You may also need to spend a lot more than 800 hours on this type of input. (Un)fortunately you are not a beginner in either Russian or Italian.

[Xmmm]

Graceffo wrote: "I probably understood less than 20%, but I knew that I was learning" . He started with dubbed shows since native movies are harder to follow. This is kind of the opposite of what you are doing.

Well, it's kind of the opposite of what I was doing. Over the last few days when I started reflecting on this, I've lowered my level of viewing. I'm now watching The Adventures of Puss 'n Boots dubbed, with > 60% comprehension. Similarly, for Russian.

Regarding your other comments, if you are saying that listening will take more than 800 hours and eventually I'll have to study grammar during the reading and writing phase, I am okay with both.

If you saying my whole plan is stupid and not going to work (always a possibility, your style is a bit oracular) ... that's not such good news.

[smallwhite]

For the purpose of this thread, please respond with any feedback you like but include a letter grade for the plan (A through F).

Did you follow this study plan and how is it going?

[Xmmm]

For the purpose of this thread, please respond with any feedback you like but include a letter grade for the plan (A through F).

Did you follow this study plan and how is it going?

Italian: Yes. Great! Listening and reading have improved a lot. Trying to wrap up the 800 hours of listening by end of summer and start Italki. Have read 2000 pages extensively, want to do more. I'm doing a touch of anki and grammar but am 90% in compliance with the original plan. I tested B1 in listening and reading months ago on Dialang (posted somewhere, along with an A1 in structures). Probably very close to B2 now in receptive skills.

Russian. Yes and no. So-so. Listening has improved somewhat. Out of frustration spending too much time with anki and Modern Russian. Not sure if that is a great idea. Maybe I am too stupid to learn Russian. Floundering somewhat and not really following the plan. I want to get back on target and maybe watch more TV with subtitles if necessary, even if that means watching Star Media productions ... if I listen without subtitles I still hit large blocks that sound like "Doozhwhoosh". I would self assess as B1+ in reading and a B1 in listening.

It's funny but relative success in Italian makes me want to do more Italian and relative failure in Russian makes it hard for me to do more Russian. There's the danger of a vicious cycle ensuing.