Better to do passive immersion before studying? First time learner

[Cainntear]

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:

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?

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.

[FumblngTowardFluency]

I just want to weigh in here to add to what others have said

Thank you for the detailed list. I saved it and will investigate every option that you mentioned.

[FumblngTowardFluency]

Just to put this into perspective, there's 564 episodes of a Brazilian telenovela As Aventuras de Poliana (loosely based on the classical children's novel Pollyanna by American author Eleanor H. Porter) as well as 307 episodes of the continuation Poliana Moça. They just happen to be available on Youtube for, ahem, informational purposes.

That's a great idea. Listening to the same actors with the same accents day after day. Brazilian accents vary widely, because it's a huge country with 26 states and 214M people. A Paulistano sounds very different than a Carioca.

I really need to internalize the language first, but that telenovela is on the list.

[Khayyam]

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. Now by “passive” I mean actually watching the TV show, not just having it playing in background. 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. 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. 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.

But don't you think that Assimil (I won't ask about Clozemaster because I've never used it) probably helped you get to the point where you could actually understand the shows faster than just watching the shows would've done? And if your kids had started with it, and finished it, isn't there every reason to think they would've done even better than they have? When they started watching French TV, they would've immediately recognized most of the common, backbone words that get repeated over and over. They wouldn't have had to watch however many shows in order to reach that level. Since Assimil is specifically designed to teach all those words, wouldn't it have likely happened sooner?

I'm not necessarily recommending Assimil as such; I'm only advocating for some kind of preparatory work to build the "receptive vocabulary" faster than jumping straight into the pool would do. If I'd just jumped into consuming material aimed at native speakers (consuming it without taking any special measures) as a total beginner, I'm quite sure my receptive skills would be a sad shadow of what they are. With German, I would've spent a lot of unnecessary time scrabbling at the base of the cliff before I gained a foothold and began to climb. And with Persian, which is such an alien beast and challenges so many of my assumptions, I wouldn't be surprised if I never gained a foothold at all.

I do agree that jumping straight in is likely to work to some degree for FumblingTowardFluency because his TL is a close relative of his native language. I just don't think that's the best way to spend an hour a day as a total beginner, regardless of how familiar or alien the language is.

[orlandohill]

Now I did Assimil first and lots of Clozemaster during, but I don’t think it’s required.

As others have said, that kind of targeted learning can go a long way towards bootstrapping comprehension.

A couple of other resources worth mentioning:

The Fluent Forever app and YouTube videos covering Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation and spelling.

Mango Languages. It can be used in hands-free mode as if it were a Pimsleur lesson, and you might already have free access through your public library.

[Lawyer&Mom]

With a closely related language like German or a Romance language I do think jumping straight into native materials is the most efficient method for a native English speaker, even more efficient than Assimil. That said, I have an absurdly high tolerance for ambiguity which helps get through the first 50 or so hours which are the most painful. I have nothing against Assimil and it would be a great addition to immersion. Doing some Clozemaster or Anki to learn the 2000 most common words would also be great. But if I only had an hour a day for a closely related language I would just watch TV.

[orlandohill]

With a closely related language like German or a Romance language I do think jumping straight into native materials is the most efficient method for a native English speaker, even more efficient than Assimil.

Do you have any more insight into why you think that's the most efficient use of the first 50 hours? Is it the 50 hours of TV audio and subtitles, made more comprehensible by the on-screen visual narrative, compared to only 3 hours of Assimil audio?

I'm not specifically advocating for the use of Assimil or any other predefined course. As I've posted here before, I'm very interested in finding the most time efficient language learning techniques.

I've noticed a common trap that language learning enthusiasts fall into is to conclude that, because they've found a system of learning that works for them and is enjoyable, it must therefore be the most efficient possible.

[Lawyer&Mom]

With a closely related language like German or a Romance language I do think jumping straight into native materials is the most efficient method for a native English speaker, even more efficient than Assimil.

Do you have any more insight into why you think that's the most efficient use of the first 50 hours? Is it the 50 hours of TV audio and subtitles, made more comprehensible by the on-screen visual narrative, compared to only 3 hours of Assimil audio?

I'm not specifically advocating for the use of Assimil or any other predefined course. As I've posted here before, I'm very interested in finding the most time efficient language learning techniques.

I've noticed a common trap that language learning enthusiasts fall into is to conclude that, because they've found a system of learning that works for them and is enjoyable, it must therefore be the most efficient possible.

I think that mass immersion is probably most efficient way to learn a closely related language, if only because it exposes you to so much more of the language than any other approach. Assimil has a limited vocabulary. Watch enough TV and you get all the Assimil vocabulary plus a lot more. Also, there is always a learning curve with native input. No matter how much studying you do ahead of time you have to adjust to native input. Might as well tackle that problem sooner rather than later.

The first 50 hours of immersion is the most painful, but really you need at least 250 hours to really get somewhere and 500 hours to be solidly B2/C1 listening. (Again this is with closely related languages.) I think you need to do these hours regardless of how much you study beforehand. Conscious language learning doesn’t replace subconscious language acquisition. It helps, but its not a substitute.

[Khayyam]

I wonder how watching 50 hours of TV would compare to my method of taking a novel in my TL that's quite simple but still aimed at native speakers and going after it like a pit bull until I can understand the whole thing (both audio and text) perfectly, or close enough. I didn't track the time, but I'd roughly estimate that doing this with a German translation of the first Harry Potter book (which I'd never read in English) took 50-70 hours. How much vocabulary do you really absorb from TV in that time--how many of the words that you've heard (and read, if using subtitles) are now lodged firmly in the "I not only understand these--I instantly recognize them whenever I see or read them" category? When I was done with the Potter book, I could understand a huge number of the words in the book--probably the vast majority--anytime I read or heard them in any context. Even if they only occurred in the book once, odds were that I'd fully absorbed them thanks to the sheer, masochistic number of repetitions. Since there are only so many words that get used over and over in all materials (IIRC, Steve Kaufmann said it's about 500 in most languages), that meant that a good chunk of my backbone-building work was done. I wonder how watching 50-70 hours of TV (I'm assuming it would be all different shows, no repetition) compares to my results from putting the same time into just one book. Probably impossible to know. And even if it could be proved that one or the other had better results in a given case, that wouldn't mean any general conclusions could be drawn. Someone could have better results with a certain method just because it's compatible with their preferences and temperament, not because it's a superior method per se.

[Cainntear]

I've noticed a common trap that language learning enthusiasts fall into is to conclude that, because they've found a system of learning that works for them and is enjoyable, it must therefore be the most efficient possible.

I think that mass immersion is probably most efficient way to learn a closely related language, if only because it exposes you to so much more of the language than any other approach.

Amd yet you are not falling into the trap orlandohill identifies, because you haven't even done this yourself, so you're not mistaking the system of learning that works for you as being efficient -- you are indentifying a system that you believe would be more efficient on the grounds of no evidence at all and saying that it is the best way. I mean, you've mentioned your French, and the only other language in your profile is German, but given the complication of the case system in German, I'm guessing you didn't get to where you are now through watching soaps!

Have any serious academics ever suggested that watching a TV series is ever going to lead to fluency in a language? Even Krashen, the guy who's always cited as evidence for every immersion-only approach was talking about comprehensible input, and in terms of "n+1". His claim was that you can learn unknown language when you understand the message, and he was talking about course of instruction that were scheduled in such a way that there's some "1" of language that you can learn from it co-occurring with some of the "n" you already know. A TV series flips that right round and is not comprehensible because with no known language, it's all unknown.

Assimil has a limited vocabulary. Watch enough TV and you get all the Assimil vocabulary plus a lot more.

Define "get" -- that's a very vague term.

Assimil gives you limited vocabulary so that the words can get repeated enough that you learn them.
But in a TV series there will be numerous words that appear so infrequently that you will never consolidate them.
And worse... there's the issue of Tarzan-speak: me Tarzan... me no speak good. The world over, we see the same pattern. When cognitive load increases, more attention is paid to vocabulary than grammar.
This is a problem for language learning, because in a new language we're always dealing with a high cognitive load, and how are we going to learn the grammar when we're constantly being distracted by unlearnt and half-learnt words?

One of the strengths of Assimil is that because it's based on texts, they don't fall into the trap of building wordlists, unlike more "standard" courses (in school we had lists of things like pets, fruit, colours, etc...) -- I believe this means Assimil often gets through the grammar more thoroughly than many other courses.

[Sidenote to my favourite courses: and MT seemed to follow this principle explicitly. He taught hardly any vocab and managed to cover a huge amount of grammar in very little time because of it. Sadly many of the courses released under his brand after his death fall into the trap of throwing in "useful" words that only really work in one or two combinations..]

Also, there is always a learning curve with native input. No matter how much studying you do ahead of time you have to adjust to native input. Might as well tackle that problem sooner rather than later.

Seems great, but how would you feel if one of your kids was given driving lessons by an instructor who said "No matter how much studying you do ahead of time, you have to adjust to highway traffic. Might as well tackle that problem sooner rather than later"...?
If your kid was (whether by miracle or just exceptionally good luck) still alive after all their lessons, would they be a good driver? I doubt it -- they would have picked up a lot of bad habits as they tried to avoid being in a fatal crash.
This is analogous to language learning: if you are thrown in at the deep end, your brain is like to develop a "good enough" survival strategy.

The first 50 hours of immersion is the most painful, but really you need at least 250 hours to really get somewhere and 500 hours to be solidly B2/C1 listening. (Again this is with closely related languages.)

(Again, this is something you cannot know from experience and you are absolutely just guessing -- stating it as fact isn't helpful.)

I think you need to do these hours regardless of how much you study beforehand. Conscious language learning doesn’t replace subconscious language acquisition. It helps, but its not a substitute.

See... here you're using the Krashen terminological distinction between "learning" and "acquisition" and even presenting a stance that is less hard-line than Krashen. However, as I said earlier, you're not actually following what Krashen said. Krashen didn't believe you could "acquire" just by watching TV serieses -- he was advocating for a change in the practices of teachers, not for replacing them with a TV set.

[Edit: fixed a broken quote tag.]