worst ways to learn a foreign language

[Kraut]

https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-wors ... n-language

worst ways to learn a foreign language

Teresa Baker, PhD Education (UCL), DipTESOL, BSc Economics
Answered Jun 18, 2018

There have been many methods which were discarded as useless, including:

The (old) grammar translation method: study abstract rules, apply them to sentences. Deadly boring: no creativity or communication. Absolutely useless in practice La plume de ma tante n'est pas très utile si vous avez besoin de commander une bière en France.


The audio-lingual method: you listen and repeat, but there’s no focus on meaning, understanding or creating sentences. It was based on behaviourism. Remember ecoutez et repetez from school in the 1970s? Did anyone actually learn from this? I actually remembre weird frases like le relais du midi se trouve sur un coin pittoresque de la rive gauche. Great line when I was trying to chat up Pierre on a French campsite in 1978.


The direct method: the teacher shows you objects or gives you phrases to repeat, focusing on accuracy, and what the teacher is telling you rather than anything you might want to learn, for example “This is a pen, this is a book, what is this? Ask me”, then wonderful phrases like “can you see the back of my neck?” Well, that would be useful in a restaurant in Italy.

Total physical response: you listen to the teacher’s commands and act out a response e.g. stand up, sit down, pick up the red pen… Great if you want to learn to dance the Hokey Cokey, no good for when you are lost in Paris and need to catch a train.

Suggestopedia: relaxation to make students more receptive, but focused on input rather than output. Quite nice though. I wish it were possible to learn language through suggestion. I’d be multilingual by the end of the week. Just a note: when I first came to Portugal, and spent hours relaxing under the vines listening to chattering Portuguese, I did actually start dreaming in Portuguese, but I didn’t understand what I was dreaming about… very strange.


Memorising vocabulary lists, grammar structures: Not a single method, but seems to be used a lot in schools. Our brains don’t work well with lists, which are good for short-term memory. I can still remember declining the Latin word for war, but no idea what any of it meant: Belli, Bello, Bellum, Bello, Bellum, Bella, Bellorum, Bellis, Bella, Bellis, Bella

Any methodology that claims that you can learn like a child, even though you are an adult. This is basically a combination of some of the above methods. We don’t learn like children because we already have a language, through which we see the world and other languages. Seriously, children spend 18 months learning how to say mummy biccy, daddy give! I’ve no intention on giving myself or my students a lobotomy in order to pretend we have no language in my brain with which to make sense of the world.
Programmes and Apps like Memrise and Duolingo: useful for creating familiarity with a language, they basically use a combination of the above out-of-date methods, memorisation, repetition, translation, no creativity, and frustratingly, no creativity or interaction. So, in my recent attempt to learn Italian on Duolingo I’ve learnt balena e ape (whale and bee), but not numbers, directions and ordering food, which didn’t help when I was lost in a small town in Tuscany last week. (Luckily a charming old Italian in a felt hat stopped to help, and I managed to survive by using gestures, and a mixture of Spanish and Italian, or I might still be wandering the streets of Prato)

[Cavesa]

I think the author of this list has never learnt a language successfully. Most of these are good methods, if used together with other elements. Grammar translation is good for many things, the audio-lingual and direct methods as well. Memorisation is a good element of learning too.

The author says everything is wrong because it cannot be used in a restaurant and in similar situations. Well, they can buy a phrasebook instead or just use English.

Really, the person is trashing lots of useful things in such a post, disregarding all the successful learners who have used them. They just want to appear interesting and modern, without having a clue actually. I have heard lots of similar opinions in real life, usually from people who have achieved absolutely nothing, when it comes to language learning.

[Ani]

Yeah it doesn't sound like she has ever successfully learned a language...

If you read the answers further down, I liked "being imprisoned in a foreign country" Effective, but definitely the worst.

[Iversen]

Like the previous commentators I think several things in the Quora rant betray the lack of linguistic skills and confused thinking of the writer.

For instance that she is looking for a grammar to help her inflect Italian verbs the next time she'll be talking to her multilingual friend Pedro in a bar - but this is followed up with the caveat "or they are not naturally acquired". Hello! If you have to use a grammar then it shows that certain grammatical patterns haven't been acquired naturally, and it is symptomatic that she in this situation thinks about secretly using some of the methods she just has declared useless, but which have the advantage that they work WHEN USED IN CONJUNCTION WITH OTHER APPROACHES (like the communicative methods).

I also noticed that her conversations so far haven't included complicated topics like bees and whales - but what CAN she then discuss with Pedro? Well, maybe they talk about the drinks in the bar - or the weather? Ah dunno... but if your language learning is limited to things that automatically pop up in simple bar conversations then that must be a prime example of a bad learning strategy. And if she learnt "balena e ape (whale and bee), but not numbers, directions and ordering food" from Duolingo then it is her own fault that she didn't look those things up in a relevant source, like for instance a small language guide like those from Berlitz or Lonely Planet.

Furthermore she states that "Our brains don’t work well with lists, which are good for short-term memory. I can still remember declining the Latin word for war, but no idea what any of it meant: Belli, Bello, Bellum, Bello, Bellum, Bella, Bellorum, Bellis, Bella, Bellis, Bella". Ahem, then rote memorization worked, but she just didn't go one step further to attach meanings and functions to the different cases. That's also a bad omen for the method used by her teacher (and herself), but she just proved how efficient raw memorization can be...

[golyplot]

And if she learnt "balena e ape (whale and bee), but not numbers, directions and ordering food" from Duolingo then it is her own fault that she didn't look those things up in a relevant source, like for instance a small language guide like those from Berlitz or Lonely Planet.

It's also her fault for not continuing Duolingo past the first 5-10 lessons, because numbers and directions are covered in every Duolingo course later on.

[Axon]

That list, in that order, is most of the syllabus for an excellent class I took in college called "Theories of Language Learning and Teaching." All of us students were assigned a particular method to research and eventually demonstrate for the class. I did German by the Direct Method, and I remember experiencing Cantonese by The Silent Way (missing from her list). It was one of my favorite classes.

Perhaps entire courses using these methods have been "discarded as useless" but any language teacher with formal training has learned about the pluses and minuses of these methods in order to integrate them into their own lessons.

It sounds like the author's main issue is that she wanted her courses to simulate more interaction and cover different communicative scenarios. If you want to chat up Pierre, though, you need to be a quite competent user of the language already, able to rapidly form sentences about lots of different things as well as understand his responses. You can't rapidly pick up the words and phrases you need for that without memorization, and to start from zero you need to use simple and perhaps "nonsensical" exercises at the beginning.

I'm sure many teachers (myself included) have thought "In my class, students will learn the real spoken language on the street, useful from day 1!" And then they realize how complicated the real spoken language is, and before they know it they've written out a semester's worth of lesson plans just to get the students able to talk about themselves correctly - let alone actually interact in conversation!

[Deinonysus]

Reading through her list, I thought she had listed basically every possible learning method as bad, and I wondered if there were any good methods.

However, while I'm not sure I agree with what she says, the excerpt above cuts off around half-way through the post and removes all context and nuance. I'll post the rest so nobody else has to go to Quora. She goes on:

The most useful methods are based on communicative methods (conversations, listening to the language in context, including films and music) and these have been shown to be most effective, So, my multilingual friend Pedro now speaks to me every day in Italian. Bees and whales don’t arise in the conversation.

But some attention also needs to be paid to structures, or they are not naturally acquired. So I’m looking for a grammar book so I can understand how to conjugate some verbs for next time I chat to Pedro in the café.

However, with time, the previously discarded methods can be useful too:

1. Translation: most people translate, at least partially, when they are learning a new language and it can be useful to compare the construction of sentences in different languages. Phillip Kerr and Guy Cook have been leading the way in new methods that draw on translation but are still essentially communicative. I still translate ideas to and from Portuguese to see how they compare, and it helps students.
   
2. Audio-lingual methods and repetition: we do actually need to hear and say language a few times before we remember it. This is useful if we have a context and opportunities for communication.
   
3. Direct method: it’s actually great for getting you going in a language, giving you a bit of confidence, especially beginners.
   
4. Total physical response: I learnt quite a lot in the gym in Portugal from following the teacher’s instructions. Children like this too. Not great for advanced language.
   
5. Relaxation: Essential for learning anything.

I’ve had students who have learnt English in all types of ways; playing computer games online, watching TV, listening to music, using computer programmes, traveling.

In conclusion, if it works for you, do it! Vá em frente! avanti! Arriba!

So, the good methods basically consist of extensive use (input and output), plus a grammar book. And the "bad" methods aren't completely bad but can be tolerated to an extent in certain circumstances.

I do need to defer to her higher qualifications in two areas: she has a PhD in Education and she has learned a foreign language (Portuguese) to fluency. After reading her full post, I can't say that I completely disagree with what she says, but I would qualify it. Past a certain point, beginner resources and instruction will no longer help and extensive use is the only thing that will help; that much is uncontroversial. However, I think she's massively underestimating the gap between absolute beginner and the point where you can extensively use a language. You can't just page through a grammar book and then be able to get the most out of native materials or conversation partners. I've listened to plenty of Japanese and Italian media with some understanding of the basic grammar, but I'm still nowhere close to being able to have anything past the most basic interactions in these languages.

[Cainntear]

Let me translate the post to it’s simplest form....

“I am a communicative approach teacher. My way is the right way.”

Except she actually isn't a communicative approach teacher, because the TESOL/TEFL industry has incorporated a lot of non-communicative activities into mainstream teaching (eg grammar tables).

Quite simply, good teaching is varied and any method that presents one type of activity as the holiest of holies is not going to work.

[Cainntear]

Oh, and just as a side note, the reason the English teaching industry got so hung up on the communicative approach is that it works reasonably well in a language with little morphological complexity. But even English still has suffixes that get dropped by CA students, hence the non-CA activities.

There’s a related problem that high school language teachers in the U.K. often come from a TEFL background and don’t appreciate how much less effective CA is with a complex language like German.

[Speakeasy]

What I find most distressing about this type of exercise is that it is apparently insufficient to promote the merits of some new approach in a field of human activity. For the exercise to be complete, whatever what was once deemed not only acceptable but actually quite progressive is subjected to being ritually discredited. To ensure compliant acceptance of what-is-new, anyone who chooses to adhere to the previous theories or practices is deemed to be an apostate and treated as such. This process extends to every area of human activity, not just to the theory of language learning.

Don’t get me wrong here, I readily admit that true progress does exist. Nevertheless, I have a “healthy scepticism” as to the claims that absolutely nothing about the past is remotely possible of possessing even the most infinitesimally small merit, that the past should not be viewed in its own context, that it has nothing to teach us, or that some past theories and practices are worthy of retention either unchanged or modified to meet changing circumstances.

The requirement to accept (as an article of faith) “that which is new” and that which has the endorsement of the would-be-shapers-of-opinion is not an example of intellectual inquiry. The ritual discrediting of the past and the attempts at silencing all dissenters who dare to speak in favour of previous theories and practices are quite common.

Harrumph!