Poly-glot-a-lot's "How to Acquire any language NOT learn it!"

[mentecuerpo]

I have watched this video a few times and I love it. It always pops up automatically on my youtube artificial intelligence recommendations. I like how Jeff B. shares his technique to learn a language and the results he gets.

I like the approach he uses by using a timeline for beginner levels till his travels to Egypt as an intermediate level and showing us the process.

I think his take home message is "I can learn Arabic, one of the most difficult languages for an English speaker. At my adult old age, starting to learn it from scratch. I am not a language genius (He is, but he is being humble.). I am an ordinary American guy who has learnt a few languages and this is how I do it, and If I can do it, you can do it too." Try it for yourself, I am not selling language courses, I am not selling books, I am a language teacher who believes in practicing what I preach.

[Cainntear]

@Cainntear, some great points here. In particular, that we can't truly learn like a child because our adult brains have irreversibly changed.

(Also worth noting that the process described is clearly different from how kids learn anyway.)

I've opined this elsewhere on the forum, but if you take any method, including Jeff's, the success of any learner is going to depend mostly on other factors besides the method itself, such as the learner's commitment, motivation, perceptiveness, receptiveness etc. And if anything, we need more methods, or teachers who can improve learners outcomes in those areas.

My take on this is that individual differences influence what the actual method is. When I talk about "actual method", my point is that the superficial activities we engage in aren't where the learning takes place.

To me, the fact that so many techniques differ drastically in effectiveness from person to person tells me it's what the student does beyond the superficial features of the activity that makes the learning.

For example, in Duolingo I can answer multiple choice questions with a fair degree of success without really "doing language". Here's a fake example:
What's Madeupese for "The cat has three legs"?
1) Brk Zapon trat-trot jinky wawoo.
2) Brk Zapon trat-trot kanky wawoo.
3) Brk Krakaton trat-trot jinky wawoo.

It's most likely that the correct answer is number 1 -- the word "Zapon" appears in 2 answers, and the word "jinky" appears in 2 answers. Where this happens, the answer with both of the two differences is almost always the correct answer.

This might seem tangential when discussing Krashenite teaching, but my point is that this is a clear example where the activity itself doesn't force learning, although if you go beyond the needs of the task itself, you can learn from it.

My biggest issue with the "different techniques for different people" argument is that it always accompanies discussion of the superficial features and fails to help us understand what people are actually doing beyond the superficial task.

Of those people who have successfully achieved near native pronunciation, no matter what method they were following, I have a feeling that a key driving factor that differentiates them from others may be that they have an ability to notice more,

Yes. The job of the teacher isn't to help the students who don't need help, it's to help those that do.

If you notice everything, you don't need a teacher and you don't need much advice. But if you don't notice things until they're pointed out to you, you need them pointed out to you -- and that's where actual lessons come into it.

Even if they have a teacher who corrects their mistakes in the ideal way, whatever that may be, or even if the learner is going to just use comprehensible input, I would suggest that success will still depend more on the learner's commitment, motivation, perceptiveness and receptiveness. In Jeff's second video (where he does Korean), I can tell he's not noticing the pronunciation very well, and if others' comments on Reddit about his Arabic are anything to go by, I would speculate that by the end of 1 year, he probably will still not notice his pronunciation mistakes in Korean.

To me, anything that helps him to "notice" would be a good thing. If that's a teacher, then great. If someone prefers to notice things on their own, but is actually good at it, then also great. There are many on YouTube who for fun do impressions of famous actors, or do impressions of the various English accents of the world, and even though they don't have teachers, some of them are really good. You can see something going on here that must explain why some of them are better than others, in the absence of teachers, and it seems to me to be just how motivated and perceptive they are. That to me points not to one approach being superior to the other approach, but rather to both approaches being potentially successful depending primarily on qualities of the learner. I happen to think there is more power in noticing things yourself, but that's not for everybody, and if you're not very good at it, having a teacher point things out to you will probably work better.

Regarding motivation, one reason I think stories are so powerful for some people, particularly for stories the learner has chosen on their own, is that they tap into the learner's natural motivation.

That sounds like "blame the student" to me. Again, why are we giving advice to people who are going to succeed regardless of advice?

And by the way, progress through the beginner levels is a lot more rapid than it is through the intermediate to advanced stages,

That makes big assumptions on what is beginner language and the notion that sophisticated language is difficult.

Krashen dismisses the difficulty in picking up modals and hypothetical language through his techniques with "it's difficult", but adults learners already have a sophisticated understanding of hypothetical meaning, and Michel Thomas could teach someone to produce complex hypothetic sentences in a matter of hours, and once you can produce them, you can notice them.

so to me that makes it a bit easier to enjoy briefly re-experiencing things as a child.

One common explanation for toddlers' tantrums is frustration at not being able to express themselves due to limited language. That's surely not a part of the childhood experience that we want to relive...?

I think we just have to recognise here that not every approach is for everybody, and the learner's characteristics matter.

It perhaps didn't come across clearly in my original summary, but I'm more interested in the practical techniques than the theory, and that's because I think the practical techniques transcend the theory. The theory could be wrong, and yet the practical techniques may still work (e.g. because there may be a different theory that explains why aspects of techniques work).

That's all well and good, but whether you're interested in theory, practice or both, detail is important. With an overly simplistic or superficial description, the technique is not repeatable.

If someone can deliberately make an ineffective course while following the process as described, then someone could just as easily unintentionally make an ineffective course while following the process.

At that point, the process's success relies on a mixture of luck and talent -- if the person following the process fills the gap with things that work, they will be successful; if they fill the gaps wrong, they will be unsuccessful.

I might be able to share my views on some of your other questions (but I don't know how Jeff would answer beyond what he's said in his video). Reading through your questions, I think you might not have quite the same understanding as Jeff about what constitutes a correction, but let's see.

They will ask you yes/no questions about the pictures in the magazine.

What should they do if you get it wrong?

If you mean that your partner asks you a yes/no question and you answer "yes" when the correct answer should have been "no", I'm confident this is not an example of where Jeff would say "don't correct me.".

I wasn't taking that in terms of "no correction". My point is that (to use a phrase my dad quotes from an old trainer of his) "feedback isn't feedback until it is incorporated into the system". Knowing I'm wrong is valueless without knowing why I'm wrong and how to avoid being wrong in the future. Circuitous explanations with mimes and pointing take a long time to highlight what is probably a very simple thing, and by the time I understand the explanation, all the mental strain in trying to understand the explanation has moved the initial error in processing out of my brain.

And now I'm going to change my mind and say that I am talking about correction, and Jeff is talking about correction because any clarification of the intended meaning inherently corrects the misunderstanding.

Correction can only be effective if the erroneous process is still "live" in a person's head. We learn how not to fall off a bike because the process of losing balance occurs right before the physical sensation of falling and/or hitting the ground. The feedback is timely and unambiguous, and can be learned into the system.

Riding a bike is often used as an analogy for Krashenite teaching because it demonstrates that we "learn by doing", but it's a false analogy, because the feedback from an error in language processing is not always immediate, and it's more often than not highly ambiguous.

If it's correcting an answer to a yes/no question, watching Jeff in action in the Korean demo, I can see that he's quite creative in how he navigates this game, and surely that creative ability is an important part of this which I wish he would give more examples of.

And there we have it. He's creative -- he does something more than just follow the procedure. What is the step required to replicate what he actually does?

It may help to also give an example of a yes/no question in context. Your partner may begin by describing the tree that the girl is sitting under, may describe the house over there to the side (nouns in this case), and then later come back and ask you while pointing at the tree, "Is this a house?" The point is that the questions should be the kind that you can answer, but then if you get it wrong, your partner may say the word for "no", using body language to go along with that "no", and go back and point at the house and say "THIS is a house", and so on. I think the same can be done not just with nouns, but also with adjective, verbs and adverbs. E.g. "Is this car red?", "Do you think she is happy?", and so on.

This restricts you to extremely simple language, when you could teach all of that in no time at all with use of the L1.

From what I understand, the magic from this particular approach would happen after your partner has asked you questions so many times that you yourself have acquired how to ask a question, and then one day spontaneously out pops a question from your mouth to your partner, or your partner has described things so often that one day spontaneously you find yourself describing something back to them without thinking about it.

"Magic" -- that's another word for "I don't know". Here we have a technique that is built on articles of faith, and whenever empirical evidence shows it to be inefficient or ineffective, the defence presented is always those same articles of faith and "student didn't do it right". But if you can't tell the student what "right" is, how can it be the student's fault?

Then you are going to ask some super simple questions (make a list of these questions beforehand, and ask your partner to teach you how to ask these questions), too:

• What is this?
• What's that?
• What's he/she doing?
• Why? (The most important question)

What are you going to do if you don't understand the answers?

I don't think Jeff discussed this in his video,

And therein lies the problem -- nobody ever describes the full learn-by-immersion-only process in a way that is properly replicable. If my instructions on how to do chemistry were "pour different things into the same beaker and see what happens" and you lost your face to an exploding glass container of potent acid, that would be my fault. If a driving instructor told you "turn the big circular thing, press the pedals with your feet, move that stick thing beside you about a bit and sometimes press some of the buttons up there" then they could be legitimately sued by your family and the family of anyone you ran over.

If I'm going to propose a technique, I'm going to be as explicit as possible... which is why theory is so important to me. If you don't understand the theory on some leve, you cannot control the technique. You don't know what you can change and what needs to stay the same.

so again I'll do my own brainstorming. The approach I would probably use is add "I don't understand" or variations on that to your set of seed expressions. If they try to express it a different way and you still don't understand it, you can use the "It's not important" expression and move on, because surely moving on and covering more ground will be the way to get more opportunities to learn new things that you CAN understand.

But I could understand it if it was explained in English.

The prime limitation on learning is that you can't learn if you don't understand, at least on some level (i.e. you might not be able to explain how you keep your balance on a bicycle, but on a fundamental physical level, your brain understands). Denying ourselves our greatest tool for understanding, our native language, delays understanding so delays learning.

[ryanheise]

My biggest issue with the "different techniques for different people" argument is that it always accompanies discussion of the superficial features and fails to help us understand what people are actually doing beyond the superficial task.

And therein lies the problem -- nobody ever describes the full learn-by-immersion-only process in a way that is properly replicable.

I definitely agree that it's important to hear what people are actually doing beyond the superficial task. It's a prime motivator behind a lot of the questions I'm asking on this forum. I'd like to uncover more of what people are actually doing and that which often goes unsaid, and I want to welcome a sharing of such details. I see that as part of what this forum is great for. The reason I'm not as heavily critical of Jeff for what he hasn't shown in his demo is that I really appreciate what ideas he has shared. It may not be comprehensive, but when it comes to trying to uncover ideas, I welcome even partial ideas because the way ideas work is that they can spark further ideas in the listener's mind, and there is value in that.

I think I can pinpoint where our views differ, and it's not on the technical points but rather on goals, which will naturally vary for the individual. Some people have a goal to learn independently and may enjoy doing a lot of figuring out on their own, and others are more inclined to prefer a really good teacher who has great skill in helping you to understand and apply the language. For me, I learnt Korean from a teacher, and made a conscious decision to learn Japanese independently because I wanted to experience what the other way would be like (I'm finding it more fun learning independently, but that's something that will vary for the individual). You seem to have acknowledged that some independent learners can be successful at figuring things out on their own and don't need a teacher. But you should also be able to recognise here that the sort of person who in the first place is motivated to figure things out on their own is the same sort of person who would not demand a comprehensive course plan. So your criticism that what we need is a fully detailed process that is replicable is something that simply doesn't apply to the independent learner because their motivations are more compatible with starting with an incomplete picture.

I think if someone is really excited to try self learning, or to try learning from a teacher, in both cases, we should not harm their motivation. I know both can be fun, and it really is up to the individual.

Even if they have a teacher who corrects their mistakes in the ideal way, whatever that may be, or even if the learner is going to just use comprehensible input, I would suggest that success will still depend more on the learner's commitment, motivation, perceptiveness and receptiveness.

That sounds like "blame the student" to me. Again, why are we giving advice to people who are going to succeed regardless of advice?

I certainly would not in a million years want say that it must be the student's "fault" if they measure low in any of these characteristics, don't misunderstand me, but only that these individual characteristics I believe play a significant role in helping a student to succeed. I'm open to suggestions on how I can reword this so as not to sound like I'm blaming, but also at the same time, if you disagree with the factual content, I invite you to tell me which of these learner characteristics you think have a weak relation to successful learning and I will see if there's any relevant research to support that particular claim.

I also want to restate an earlier comment here that I believe teachers have an important role to play in elevating these characteristics within students (in reality, good parenting and society may also play a large part in shaping our young people in these positive ways).

And by the way, progress through the beginner levels is a lot more rapid than it is through the intermediate to advanced stages,

That makes big assumptions on what is beginner language and the notion that sophisticated language is difficult.

We can study this question in a number of ways, but one way is to purely consider vocabulary acquisition. I recently used word frequency data to analyse a bunch of different texts, and on the easy end of the scale, some texts fell entirely within the top couple thousand most frequent words, and to understand only 98% of the text, the number of required words fell to the hundreds. At the high end of the scale, targeted at adults, the vocabulary exceeded words that were above #100,000 in the frequency list, and to pass at 98% comprehension you would still need to know 50-60,000 words to cover that. It has been estimated based on vocabulary size estimation tests that both natives and foreigners learn on average roughly around 1,000 words per year, and that continues through to adulthood for the rest of our lives (I read this yesterday but a browser certificate issue is not letting me get back there right now), and so your vocabulary acquisition is rather linear in progression while the frequency of words is most definitely not. In effect, you are going to be able to get to the point where you can understand beginner material quite quickly in comparison to the time it will take you to progress through the intermediate and advanced brackets. This observation is robust even if you want to argue about where the brackets should be, because it relates to the difference in the nature of the two curves.

They will ask you yes/no questions about the pictures in the magazine.

What should they do if you get it wrong?

If you mean that your partner asks you a yes/no question and you answer "yes" when the correct answer should have been "no", I'm confident this is not an example of where Jeff would say "don't correct me.".

I wasn't taking that in terms of "no correction". My point is that (to use a phrase my dad quotes from an old trainer of his) "feedback isn't feedback until it is incorporated into the system". Knowing I'm wrong is valueless without knowing why I'm wrong and how to avoid being wrong in the future. Circuitous explanations with mimes and pointing take a long time to highlight what is probably a very simple thing, and by the time I understand the explanation, all the mental strain in trying to understand the explanation has moved the initial error in processing out of my brain.

That's all great and I agree on a technical level. Maybe it will require some creativity to make it work, maybe it will take longer, maybe it will be harder to do than having a teacher just explain things to you in your L1, but none of these arguments against it will make any difference to the learner who thinks there will be an element of fun in that creative part, or who is excited by the rules of the game that Jeff laid out, or who is inspired by practitioners who say they've found that avoiding explicit grammar study makes it easier to think in the language without having to consciously apply grammar.

It's true that this is not "exactly" how a child learns, but you could say this approach is inspired by the way children acquire a language, adapted in a way that adults can apply.

It may help to also give an example of a yes/no question in context. Your partner may begin by describing the tree that the girl is sitting under, may describe the house over there to the side (nouns in this case), and then later come back and ask you while pointing at the tree, "Is this a house?" The point is that the questions should be the kind that you can answer, but then if you get it wrong, your partner may say the word for "no", using body language to go along with that "no", and go back and point at the house and say "THIS is a house", and so on. I think the same can be done not just with nouns, but also with adjective, verbs and adverbs. E.g. "Is this car red?", "Do you think she is happy?", and so on.

This restricts you to extremely simple language, when you could teach all of that in no time at all with use of the L1.

Completely agree, but again this argument will not be meaningful to the independent learner who has different goals, such as to experience the fun of figuring things out yourself, and to experience what it's like to "get a feel for grammar" without being explicitly taught it.

From what I understand, the magic from this particular approach would happen after your partner has asked you questions so many times that you yourself have acquired how to ask a question, and then one day spontaneously out pops a question from your mouth to your partner, or your partner has described things so often that one day spontaneously you find yourself describing something back to them without thinking about it.

"Magic" -- that's another word for "I don't know". Here we have a technique that is built on articles of faith, and whenever empirical evidence shows it to be inefficient or ineffective, the defence presented is always those same articles of faith and "student didn't do it right". But if you can't tell the student what "right" is, how can it be the student's fault?

It's funny because as I wrote "Will these practical techniques work for me? I'm willing to try them to find out." I was thinking that someone would call this out as faith rather than going on evidence. (e.g. Just have faith and you'll see, it will come good.)

I don't actually think like that.

Let me put it this way. I don't claim to know whether something will work for me until I try it. I want to first understand what the hypothesised result is, but then I want to do an experiment to confirm the hypothesis. Unlike a researcher who may be aiming for a reproducible experiment that can be written up in a journal paper, I'm really just a guy, having fun learning a language, and wanting to experiment with and measure different techniques on myself. If it turns out that something measurably worked for me but it didn't work for someone else, that doesn't mean it was useless (although perhaps it would prevent a researcher from publishing any meaningful results). I think there are a lot of people out there who are similar-minded who are happy to try things out to see what works for them, and given the large variance in success between different learners, it is easy to contemplate that even systems that are not comprehensively detailed or reproducible may still have interesting ideas within them that you might want to try out and make them work for yourself.

[ryanheise]

I recently did my first language exchange session using this method and wrote about it in my experiment log. I'm reposting here in case anyone finds it helpful or interesting.

First, I just want to recognise how fortunate I was to have an excellent language exchange partner who very quickly grokked the rules of the game and skillfully stayed within the framework to help me acquire new expressions and vocabulary while keeping me engaged. I could imagine it being less effective otherwise, so YMMV, and perhaps you may wish to try out several partners. Second, at the moment, I only have one session scheduled per week, and I'll need to realistically find more exchange partners to fill in the other days if I want to fully benefit from this immersive method.

Here are my observations and reflections after the first session:

• Going into this, I was a bit skeptical that I could be as creative as Jeff Brown clearly is in his demo video, but now that I've had my first session, with a good partner, I can say that the framework Jeff has provided makes it easier for creativity to thrive. If there's word or expression you don't understand, there are many creative ways for your partner to compare and contrast what's going on in this picture to what went on in other pictures where you already comprehended his description.
• The fact that there are lots of pictures means that pointing becomes a very efficient way to link words to comprehension.
• The format of descriptions followed by engaging questions and answers is brilliant. The fact that you have these rules set in place where the questions you ask are short but may have long answers, whereas the questions he asks may be long but have short answers, essentially means that the conversation flows, covers more ground, allowing you to ultimately hear and acquire more words and expressions.
• The fact that you're covering simple material means that you are much more able to notice sentence patterns when they keep getting used over and over again, and because of this repetition effect, before long, you feel like you know the pattern so well that it's natural for you to output a sentence with that pattern. When I did output sentences based on a new pattern I had heard repeatedly, I felt I could do it because of that repetition and the fast turnaround time between hearing it and being able to apply it. This framework makes it really easy to do that.

[Adrianslont]

Interesting update, Ryan - Jeff’s methods looked promising to me, too and it’s interesting to see your experience confirming that.

I look forward to hearing more from you as you use them some more - I’m wondering if it continues to work well - or if it peaks. It seemed to work for Jeff for a year!

I will try them myself next time I’m in Indonesia.

[RedBeardVII]

I saw this video last week and it was both entertaining and inspiring. I think that part of the attraction here is the lack of "work", or anything that looks like work. Or homework, none of that either. Though, reviewing the lessons is homework, but it does seem easy enough.

I hate to be "that guy", but here goes. This learning approach probably works or fails based on you, the learner. Specifically, what are your strengths / weaknesses? What are your goals or interests?

It won't work if you have a lack of local speakers and limited internet for online partners. Probably not suited for a classroom, especially if the class is mandatory, where some students will be jerks - or disinterested.

I suppose it works best if you are really motivated to speak with people, a people person rather than an introvert. So in this case he was, in fact going to speak to locals in their language. That's terrific. He achieved his specific goals. (and made it look easy!)

But can he read the menu? Street signs? A novel or a newspaper?

If he doesn't want to, that's OK. But for some of us we realize that the travel and hanging out with locals isn't going to happen. So reading and watching movies are probably the end goal and where we should focus our effort. Perhaps the results of his one-on-one approach, but going through a "proper" course would yield even better results.