Kraut wrote:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VYfpL6lcjE
Talking With Stephen Krashen: How Do We Acquire Language?
It's a shame Matt didn't push back more on some of the issues of contention with Krashen. I understand he admires Krashen but his actual methods are extremely far from Krashenite theory and practice (the latter I'd say is just TPRS for beginners and extensive reading later, since these are the only practices Krashen has endorsed so far). Matt vs Japan recommends more explicit vocabulary study than almost anyone else, but all the comments to the video are about how great and perfect the input hypothesis is. Krashen is categorically against explicit vocabulary study, and even looking up words while reading.
In fact I'd say Matt puts more emphasis on explicit vocabulary memorisation than the evil language schools and publishing industry Krashen attacks. He's even further from Krashenite dogmatism than Steve Kauffman is ("to be able to speak well, you have to speak a lot", says Steve in almost every one of his videos about input; Krashen doesn't agree), who at least doesn't believe in using flashcards.
Krashen's theory regarding accents also contradicts Matt's interpretations of his own experience and his observations of other advanced Japanese speakers. If you can't reliably perceive the phonemic nature of pitch in Japanese, you're not going to acquire it. In other videos Matt argues that Japanese learners can end up acquiring all of the pitch accent patterns from listening, but almost never acquire the actual system since they seem to apply these patterns randomly (pronouncing the same word with varying pitch in the same handful of sentences, but always using
legal patterns). The problem here is that they haven't picked up on how these patterns are an element of the lexicon and not just intonation. He suggests that focusing on learning to perceive phonemic pitch accurately helps you learn to self-correct (which is my experience in Serbian, too); this is AFAIK much closer to mainstream views on how to go about accent acquisition (i.e. that phonetic consciousness is important) than it is to Krashen's view that the only impediments to acquiring native-like accents are psychological (given "enough" input, whatever that means), and that we have "the perfect accent inside of us", the sort of assertion worthy of a self-help guru.
sporedandroid wrote:Parallel texts are a nightmare in Hebrew. Hebrew is not only right to left, it’s also far more concise than English. The Hebrew text will end up looking several paragraphs shorter.
Personally I make "parallel paragraphs", only plopping sections of articles into Google Translate. But I use this as a study aid, not really as a form of assisted extensive reading.
(But it's a lot more cheerful than "Pobol y Cwm"...).
