Is Dreaming Spanish massively inefficient?

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anitarrc
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Re: Is Dreaming Spanish massively inefficient?

Postby anitarrc » Fri Apr 14, 2023 10:16 am

Irena wrote:Okay, I just took a quick look at that PDF, and it says:

Level 7
You are, for all
practical purposes, comparable to
a native speaker
Hours of input: 1500
Known words: >12000


:lol: :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:


I really like the conclusion
Listen and read A LOT. Add variety to what you read and listen
to. By this point it's easy to find media in the target language that
you understand very well, but it's also easy to get comfortable
and not seek new challenges. If you want to continue improving, simply do things that you have never done before. Try
reading a book by a new author, try watching a show about a
topic that you're unfamiliar with (about space, about the Middle
Ages, about lawyers, etc). ....

Who understands lawyers in any language?
I tend to hide whenever a legal text comes in :mrgreen: :mrgreen:

Personally. I think speaking IS very important from day 5..
Like asking for directions in Banja Luka, 1983 with about 50 words under my belt..
Same in Perlis or Kelantan, Malaysia.

After a few visits I could at least talk confidently about cooking and cats :)
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Re: Is Dreaming Spanish massively inefficient?

Postby Cainntear » Fri Apr 14, 2023 12:20 pm

rowanexer wrote:So what gives? I like comprehensible input but I can't understand how they neglect other language skills, or why they think that speaking can be improved by listening. It's bringing back bad memories of the AJATT cult. Any thoughts?

Basically, it's all just another attempt to flesh out out Krashen's "Comprehensible Input" hypotheses despite decades or counter-evidence. The internet loves pseudoscience that's easy to fool yourself you understand and doesn't want to go any deeper.

I want to make it very clear that I am not against listening to things that are appropriate to your level; I'm only against "comprehensible input" as a reified concept the way Krashen pushes it.

The fact of the matter is... well you've already hit the nail on the head with one word: cult. People invest themselves so heavily in it that they refuse to critically examine evidence, and when anyone attempts to discuss inconvenient evidence, they're decried as a heretic who has been brainwashed by the "language teaching industry", which is presented as being a big conspiracy that's only interested in making money.
Le Baron wrote:I don't really see much use in listening like that at the start. My own view tallies with that 'Word Brain' fellow Sebastian Kamps. That especially at the beginning you should read what you're listening to (dialogue transcripts ideally). At least for a few rounds before you listen to it unassisted. The idea that you just listen and an unknown language, whose word separations you can't instinctively divine, unravels itself before you seems to me just voodoo rubbish. Best to make the link between the sounds and the written language from the start.
I agree with this... as might be expected from a sporadic Assimil user...! :D
But I would say that I'm firmly in the camp that says learning to produce is quite simply the best way to get grammar right (as might be expected from a Michel Thomas fan) and that I've had far more success with the Assimil style where the new language is similar to a language I already know (for example, having good French, passable Italian and excellent Spanish under my belt,I found Assimil Catalan excellent, and Assimil Corsican pretty good, but I struggled with Assimil Basque to the point that I never got even halfway through it).

The big thing with learning new languages is the need to pick up the sound system, and I don't think that can be reliably done without speaking. I suspect that people who do well with Assimil-like methods (heavy listening content supported by reading) are going to be unconsciously engaging in subvocalisation of what they're reading. That means they're anticipating what they're going to hear, and the act of listening proves or disproves the hypothesis they've formed about pronunciation. But it still leaves a gap as to how learning to pronounce should get started. Assimil falls into the familiar trap of having a single chapter on pronunciation. Reading that just overloads your brain, so why doesn't Assimil follow its own logic and only tell students what they need at the time they need it?
Le Baron wrote:I know about the fossilised mistakes thing and whilst it's sometimes a bother to undo some things, I think it's very exaggerated. It's really not what happens. Does anyone learn any new skill and then make the mistakes they made at the start even though they kept on learning and practising? No.

I think it's important to recognise that this depends on the nature of the mistakes, but I do think the word "fossilised" misleads something chronic.

I knew a professional French tutor who could pronounce English phonemes perfectly, but sounded totally French when speaking casually. 'E said ziss sort of teeng habitually. We could have totally logical conversations about it, because he identified the source of the problem partially correctly (he blamed the non-native teacher, but accepted that he couldn't rule out that he wouldn't have had the same problem with a native teacher based on his classmates' errors) and he knew the way he could solve it. He argued that breaking the merger of two distinct phonemes into a single one would work, but would take over a year as it involved relearning every single word in the TH-vs-Z and the TH-vs-T group and just had no obvious reward because he was very high level and everyone understood him anyway. Given how many words he knew, it was no small feat, so I absolutely couldn't argue with that. He basically just reinforced my view that it's really important to make sure it's learned correctly from the start....
I've never met a cabinet maker who said: I made my first cabinet 6 weeks into my apprenticeship and now 20 years on all my cabinets look like those of a 6-week apprentice. It's just nonsense. I made loads of speaking errors in both German and Dutch, but they've disappeared over time. Quite quickly in fact.

The thing is, you probably were aware when your brain was letting two different phonemes "fall together" (eg "u" and "ü"), and you probably took action against it; and even if that action wasn't successful in that you might have pronounced them the same, because you were aware of it you filed it.

The problem with a "mistakes aren't important" mindset is that it encourages students to stop paying attention to their errors, so the phonemes fall into one box, which means the words all fall into one box. E.g. classmates on the OU French course who would not be able to tell the difference between E, É and È, and would ask which of the three to write, or would ask the pronounciation of words written with them, even though they were allegedly at the B1 or B2 level by that point.

Jethro Tull's frontman and flautist played for over 25 years with self-taught wrong fingering, then rapidly relearned with correct fingering in the 90s. Nothing is too ingrained to relearn. These are second languages not first languages.

Yes, and that's why I think the "fossilisation" talk is potentially dangerous, but changing the fingering is really more analogous to learning correct pronunciation when you already make the correct distinction between phonemes. There's a one-to-one mapping of "wrong fingering" to "right fingering", but if the phoneme map is wrong when you learn words, you're actually ending up having to split one phoneme into two, which means splitting all the words learned using the false phoneme into the correct box. Not easy, and as I said, I completely understood my French pal not putting the effort in and couldn't argue against it.

I still never see any convincing reasons for all the precise hour numbers these 'don't speak' gurus throw out.

Me neither. And I've seen a convincing reason for speaking early: if you don't test your hypothesis, you won't change your hypothesis. Therefore if you learn without speaking, you might well learn your false assumptions. Despite agreeing with you that there's no such thing as fossilisation, I think that learning false assumptions is just creating a heck of lot of work for yourself to unlearn the errors later.
So don't let the errors form.
Even six months might be shaky, but a year in if a person hasn't said a dicky bird they'll have a lot of catching up to do once they open their mouth, because the assumption that the vocal apparatus required to produce new sounds simply falls into place on the strength of listening is imaginary.

Seconded. I learned how to pronounce retroflex consonants be a regimen of physical stretch exercises in my tongue on the walk to work in the morning and home in the evening. Before I did it, I genuinely couldn't tell a retroflex T and a dental T apart. If nothing else, I learned to pronounce my colleagues names right if they were Indians in the Bangalore office. I couldn't have done that by listening.
[quoet]I assume their theory is that after this massive input something somewhere in your brain has primed you for making the right sound rather than the wrong sound, but there's no explanation of this. All this is just stretching the process out longer than it needs to be.[/quote]
Agree wholeheartedly.
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Re: Is Dreaming Spanish massively inefficient?

Postby Le Baron » Fri Apr 14, 2023 1:13 pm

anitarrc wrote:After a few visits I could at least talk confidently about cooking and cats

I hope that wasn't a discussion about the method and the ingredients! :shock:
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Re: Is Dreaming Spanish massively inefficient?

Postby Picaboo » Fri Apr 14, 2023 3:04 pm

I assume it is somewhat inefficient. But given you do zero actual studying or memorizing it may be worth it if you enjoy watching the videos. If it works and you like it, it seems like a good pastime. I'm sure people can speed up the process if they want through studying or memorizing vocab, early on.
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Re: Is Dreaming Spanish massively inefficient?

Postby Le Baron » Fri Apr 14, 2023 3:17 pm

Picaboo wrote:I assume it is somewhat inefficient. But given you do zero actual studying or memorizing it may be worth it if you enjoy watching the videos. If it works and you like it, it seems like a good pastime. I'm sure people can speed up the process if they want through studying or memorizing vocab, early on.

Or a pretty bad investment if turns out not to work quite as well as supposed. I wouldn't want to be 5000 hours down the line and having to get serious.
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Re: Is Dreaming Spanish massively inefficient?

Postby Picaboo » Fri Apr 14, 2023 4:16 pm

Le Baron wrote:
Picaboo wrote:I assume it is somewhat inefficient. But given you do zero actual studying or memorizing it may be worth it if you enjoy watching the videos. If it works and you like it, it seems like a good pastime. I'm sure people can speed up the process if they want through studying or memorizing vocab, early on.

Or a pretty bad investment if turns out not to work quite as well as supposed. I wouldn't want to be 5000 hours down the line and having to get serious.


I imagine if anyone goes 100 hours and feels like they aren't getting anywhere they will naturally stop. As an immersion-plus sentence mining learner right now, it is pretty obvious that I am making good gains despite never speaking and never intending to speak and no longer "being serious".
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Re: Is Dreaming Spanish massively inefficient?

Postby Le Baron » Fri Apr 14, 2023 4:37 pm

Picaboo wrote:I imagine if anyone goes 100 hours and feels like they aren't getting anywhere they will naturally stop. As an immersion-plus sentence mining learner right now, it is pretty obvious that I am making good gains despite never speaking and never intending to speak and no longer "being serious".

That's good for you or me or members of a forum like this, but don't underestimate how long people will go fooling themselves that everything is around the corner. Or comes after the magic number of hours. We already know there are thousands on apps like Duolingo who think that 3+ years down the line that their A1/A2 game doodling is progress.

The very point of these things mentioned in OP is that all the believers support their beliefs in collective justifications and delusion. So despite possibly not getting anywhere very quickly they will not naturally stop.
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Re: Is Dreaming Spanish massively inefficient?

Postby rowanexer » Fri Apr 14, 2023 6:07 pm

Picaboo wrote:
Le Baron wrote:
Picaboo wrote:I assume it is somewhat inefficient. But given you do zero actual studying or memorizing it may be worth it if you enjoy watching the videos. If it works and you like it, it seems like a good pastime. I'm sure people can speed up the process if they want through studying or memorizing vocab, early on.

Or a pretty bad investment if turns out not to work quite as well as supposed. I wouldn't want to be 5000 hours down the line and having to get serious.


I imagine if anyone goes 100 hours and feels like they aren't getting anywhere they will naturally stop. As an immersion-plus sentence mining learner right now, it is pretty obvious that I am making good gains despite never speaking and never intending to speak and no longer "being serious".


The thing is, the program specifically tells you not to study, or learn vocabulary. So they are not doing anything apart from watching the videos. I think the videos are good. They're like graded readers, or extensive reading materials, but in video format, so the person in the video will explain things in a way you can understand without using English. But I would use it as one part of a language learning plan, not as the only thing.

There seem to be a lot of people on reddit who are convinced that it is "settled science" that Comprehensible Input of this sort is the only way to learn a language, and that it's been "proved" that grammar instruction doesn't work at all, you can only acquire it through comprehensible input. They don't want to start reading or listening or using textbooks because they believe it will lead to fossilised mistakes, or that they won't get a native-like accent, they will associate Spanish with English and translate in their head, and that grammar instruction will harm their abilities.

And I guess if you're enjoying watching gradually graded videos, and you trust the guy telling you that this will help your speaking/reading abilities, and you never try to actually put the language into practice in real life situations, then you can probably keep going for several hundred hours without realising it's not that great.
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Re: Is Dreaming Spanish massively inefficient?

Postby rowanexer » Fri Apr 14, 2023 6:14 pm

I think I agree with Caintear and Iverson about fossilisation. The classic example I see thrown out is of a foreign language speaker who has lived decades in a country and still speaks the language poorly. From people I've seen, it's simply the case that they have learned enough to communicate, and they don't want to put in any extra study to improve their skills. It's already sufficient for them.

But definitely it's a good idea to start learning these things earlier, such as doing a proper Phonology course (one with plentiful productive and receptive exercises, not just a page illustrating all the vowel sounds). And you can still improve later on, but depending how long it's been, it might be quite a bit harder and understandably, some people just don't want to put in the effort.
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Re: Is Dreaming Spanish massively inefficient?

Postby luke » Fri Apr 14, 2023 6:18 pm

rowanexer wrote:There seem to be a lot of people on reddit who are convinced that it is "settled science".

You may want to let them know that those in know know that "settled science" is pseudoscience.
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