Lawyer&Mom wrote:Sorry I’m late to this conversation, because I’m going to disagree with everyone. 500 hours of passive Portuguese immersion will be more than enough to understand Portuguese.
Are you disagreeing with everyone, or disagreeing with what you imagine everyone thinks...? I didn't mention whether I thought 500 hours of Portuguese would result in being able to understand Portuguese, and regardless of specific numbers, I do feel that listening lots can lead to understanding. Without talking about specific numbers, my view is fundamentally similar to emk's:
emk wrote:Yeah, it seems like that should work. But I know of a couple of people who have tried, including someone who watched a massive amount of Mandarin children's TV. And it's ridiculously inefficient. It's like 10x more hours than Assimil for worse results.
If you can learn to understand a good amount of Portuguese comprehension by 500 hours of listening, you can do better quicker by doing a solid bit of conscious study as well watching videos.
But my point isn't just that this makes comprehension skills easier to acquire (which I'm pretty confident it does) but also that it's very easy to make things harder for yourself in the long-term when it comes to productive skills.
If you try to comprehend first, your brain can take short-cuts on comprehension: there is lots of redundancy in language, and you don' nee to notiz everthi to unnastan de messige an u can recanise the wurds evn if they's rong. I've just demonstrated that with letters, but the same goes for phonemes, which are more or less the "letters" of spoken sound [Sidenote: strictly speaking, the equivalent of a phoneme in the written mode is called a grapheme, and there are languages where the orthography uses a single letter for each grapheme. English is not one of them: eg CH is a grapheme composed of two letters and the letters C and H can represent a different grapheme.]
Basically, we as adults are able to understand things in dialects and accents we don't speak in. Your brain may well have read "unnastan" as an accent variation on "understand" and just shrugged it off as equivalent to a non-native error.
The problem with "immersion first" is that it requires "comprehension first", and if we're comprehending, we do it by comparison to our own speech, and we end up trying to map phonemes of the new language to the phonemes of our own language. I strongly believe that this stores up problems for later. If you're hearing a phoneme as "an English phoneme just in an accent", how are you going to build up a genuine model of the phoneme map of your target language?
Lawyer&Mom wrote:I did 500 hours of French TV and I was able to go from barely following anything to able to listen to foreign affairs podcasts. Now I did Assimil first and lots of Clozemaster during, but I don’t think it’s required.
But you are saying that you did exactly what other people recommend as a foundation first and it worked for you, but you are making the claim that what you did before is not required. You opened with a confident statement of your conclusion and only later in the message included the fact that you don't have any real reason to believe that to be true, except for your kids...
When it was time to repeat the experiment with my kids I just dumped them in front of French TV because I knew they wouldn’t sit still through Assimil or any other course work for that matter. Several hundred hours later (I can’t keep track of their hours as well as I did with my own), and my kids just understand French. My older one can read French books and is comfortable speaking. The younger one isn’t as comfortable speaking, but can still follow a conversation.
FumblingTowardsFluency isn't a child, though. There's a persistent urban myth that kids are better than adults at learning languages and therefore younger is better, but the truth is far more nuanced. Infants are great at learning language, and adolescents are better at learning pretty much everything -- including languages.
Basically, young children need to learn from exposure and interaction, and only after puberty can they start using rules. There's a line of thought that says the worst time to start language is in the early years of schooling (roughly from age 6 to 10) because the ability to learn from exposure and interaction is diminished, but the ability to learn from rules hasn't kicked in. If you have something that works for your children, that's great, but the fact that they didn't study rules is in no way evidence that you didn't need to.
Now Portuguese isn’t quite as close to English as French, but it’s still a Romance language. Your brain will be able to make connections between English and Portuguese vocabulary. (60% of English vocab comes from Romance languages! You’ve got a huge head start!) If I only had an hour a day I would watch TV. Save the textbooks etc. for after you have a solid foundation and you want to firm up your grammar when you have more time.
You would probably find you were wasting your time, then.
At the end of the 19th and start of the 20th century, there was a strong trend towards what they called the "natural approach", modelled on how kids learn language through exposure and interaction. The big thing came in 1910 when an international conference of language teachers in Paris came out as a majority against it, because both lived and empirically-measured experience showed it wasn't working. One of the main things to note is that (as I understand it) there were even people who were ideologically in favour of natural learning who saw it as impractical under the school system, because there was never enough intensity for it to be successful. Getting lots of input in a short time probably makes it easier for the brain to make comparisons and draw conclusions and hypotheses for testing. Getting a couple of one hour classes per week in a school was not enough.
FumblingTowardsFluency is pushed for time, and has a limited time to do exposure, and that's all in and around meal times.
I just can't see that providing the intensity for natural methods to work... particularly when he's doing intellectually demanding work in between, because a lot of language learning is what the brain does in the background between the actual language sessions, and if he's not got much headspace, he's not going to be thinking about language except during the actual language time.