Language Transfer (Split from discussion in Programs and resources)

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garyb
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby garyb » Mon Jan 21, 2019 11:15 am

The main points of basic courses IMO is to get the student to a point where they can actually benefit from native input. Watching Youtube videos with subtitles is great once you already know some basics, but given the choice between a course (imperfect as it may be) specifically designed to teach these basics and trying to guess them from incomprehensible full-speed speech I'd hazard that most inexperienced beginners will do far better with the former. There are methods based on using native materials from day 1, but they're a niche tool for people with plenty language learning experience already under their belts, and preferably knowledge of a related language too. People who're very experienced in a field sometimes struggle to put themselves in the shoes of a genuine beginner, which along with a religious-like devotion to a particular philosophy seems to be what's happening here. I could surely learn basic Portuguese just from watching videos, but just because it would work for me doesn't mean I'm going to tell someone who only knows English and has never studied a language beyond high-school level to try it.
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby reineke » Tue Jan 22, 2019 12:58 am

Random Review wrote:
Cainntear wrote:
Now, one of the big problems of hard-line CI is that it actually denies students access to genuine target language for a very long time, because most human language uses a hell of a lot of the grammar. I mean, try going a day without saying "My name is ..." -- dead easy. But try going a day without saying "can", "could", "would" and "should" -- it's a lot harder. Essentially, there is no truly authentic material that isn't grammatically complex, so there can be no "i+1" in grammar from authentic materials.

One of the things I liked about Michel Thomas Spanish was the fact that after I'd done it, I found myself getting a lot out of Spanish-language films as a learning resource. I was still watching with subtitles, but I was able to recognise large chunks of what I heard and see why it matched the subtitles... because of the grammar. That left me able to learn vocab from context or from a dictionary. But vocab is much, much easier to learn from context than grammar, as has been shown many times.

So why deny people access to native materials by not teaching them grammar early and thoroughly, as Michel Thomas did in a surprisingly short amount of time?


Actually that's a really great point I missed. With the time I had available per day at that time, it took me 18 months actually living in the country to reach the point where I could i+1 anything remotely interesting in Chinese (and when I say remotely interesting,I'm talking Peppa Pig, Dora and Pocoyo here, not a Particle Physics lecture or something high level, where obviously the number of cognates in Spanish becomes a massive advantage); it took me a few days with Spanish and German* using Thomas (and I personally think LT is trying to achieve the same thing). Now I know Chinese is supposed to be a bit harder than German or Spanish...


Native materials offer plenty of i+1 opportunities. That's about as informative as saying that they don't and I'll leave it at that. See below regarding claims about cognate languages.

garyb wrote:The main points of basic courses IMO is to get the student to a point where they can actually benefit from native input. Watching Youtube videos with subtitles is great once you already know some basics, but given the choice between a course (imperfect as it may be) specifically designed to teach these basics and trying to guess them from incomprehensible full-speed speech I'd hazard that most inexperienced beginners will do far better with the former. There are methods based on using native materials from day 1, but they're a niche tool for people with plenty language learning experience already under their belts, and preferably knowledge of a related language too. People who're very experienced in a field sometimes struggle to put themselves in the shoes of a genuine beginner, which along with a religious-like devotion to a particular philosophy seems to be what's happening here. I could surely learn basic Portuguese just from watching videos, but just because it would work for me doesn't mean I'm going to tell someone who only knows English and has never studied a language beyond high-school level to try it.


Only some basic Portuguese?

What to do after Michel Thomas?
(From 2005 - but it could have been posted yesterday)

"Hi group,
I've almost completed all that's on offer in the Michel Thomas French
range
* 8 cd course
* Language builder
* Advanced course

I'm wondering what would be a good next step. What have other people done
at this stage of study?

Answer 1

"If you are certain that you have mastered the advanced french course,
and you are comfortable with the Language builder, then you are like
me. You can probably hold your own speaking french to a point as long
as you can keep talking. BUT what the Michel Thomas program doesnt
prepare you for is LISTENING to french, understanding what you hear.
I've begun listening to Pimsleur french II, just to hear the conversations, also I get a lot more from the French In Action series, and reading whatever french comic books I can get."

Answer 2
"I'm a beginner also. Both MT and pimsleur to saturation over a period
of time - and you're absolutely right, listening and understanding
what you hear is still far and away the most difficult; you can always
cobble together some fractured version of what you want to say but
making sense of a reply is something else entirely. I would recommend
getting a software DVD player for your PC (so that you can play/play
slow/replay) and start watching bilingual DVDs, playing and replaying
what you can hear until you can figure out the dialogue - or at least
some of it - from the subtitles..."

"MT starts his intro for the first 8-CD course by 'reassuring' us that even raw
beginners know a lot of french because we 'know' several thousand french words which happen to correspond more or less exactly with the english - pronunciation notwithstanding."

They're all happy customers just like several participants here and that's probably the most positive thing I can say about MT. However, after having examined a number of informative discussions conducted by people who had both completed several MT courses, supplemented with Pimsleur and even Assimil, I see no evidence to support the claim that Michel Thomas or LT are effective beginner courses in the above-mentioned mentioned sense. Furthermore, after having examined the material contained in these courses, the total number of running hours of audio, I have concluded that these courses are a poor choice for cognate languages. On the other hand I have for a long time been hoping that these courses (including Pimsleur) might be a good introduction for more distant languages. The jury is still out on that one but as I have mentioned before, I was not particularly impressed with MT Japanese Advanced.

Finally, please wean yourselves off the idea that as English speakers you are especially challenged or disadvantaged when it comes to languages.
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby Random Review » Tue Jan 22, 2019 1:59 am

reineke wrote:Native materials offer plenty of i+1 opportunities. That's about as informative as saying that they don't and I'll leave it at that. See below regarding claims about cognate languages.


I'm not sure if that was directed at me or Cainntear, but FWIW I haven't personally found that to be the case for me as a beginner (once I hit a low A2 or perhaps even a very solid A1, yes; but as an absolute beginner, no). Especially with Chinese I struggled for a long time to find any native i+1 (or even i+2 or i+3 lol) materials, let alone ones that didn't bore me out of my skull. Since leaving China I've had a lot more luck finding CI (being outside the Great Firewall makes that much, much easier), but nothing I would have been able to use as an absolute beginner.

I don't doubt that you have had success with this; but I personally wouldn't be able to and I am pretty motivated compared to the average learner and very much in favour of high levels of input. I'm so much in favour of it that I am very interested in trying any method that claims to deliver i+1 for beginners: the LR method (which I have used and liked with German but couldn't succeed with for Mandarin), the TV method, and I also really hope one day to have the opportunity to try the ALG method*, growing participator method, (HTLAL member) Bakunin's hybrid of these approaches, etc.

But actual BUNFUN native materials as an absolute beginner, no, I've never had any success with that. You might ask if I've ever tried and funnily enough initially with Chinese I hoped to have a long silent period of pure CI and I did manage to use the Chinesetools website and Chinesepod for i+1 as a total beginner; but unlike native materials it was boring the absolute bejeezus out of me and I had to abandon it and started Pimsleur. I did this with regret, because I personally believe my final level in Chinese would be better with that; but I was literally starting to hate the language I was so bored and finding all sorts of excuses not to listen. I would have loved to use native content, that wouldn't have been boring; but I could immediately see it was like i+1000 at the time.




* ALG is for Thai and out of my price range, but there is a YouTube channel using its principles for Spanish. I'm hopeful there may be a similar channel for a language on my wish list one day.
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby David1917 » Tue Jan 22, 2019 4:26 am

reineke wrote:Finally, please wean yourselves off the idea that as English speakers you are especially challenged or disadvantaged when it comes to languages.


We have a couple: a cultural aversion to both languages and learning. Add to that a bloated market of language materials that are specifically advertised as not being "boring yucky learning stuff." We also speak the lingua franca, so failure to successfully learn a language does not really have too many repercussions. So, while we are not challenged with languages specifically, these mental hurdles do unfortunately exist. Monolingual English speakers will tell me how they struggle with languages and my response is always "You weren't taught right."

That said, I don't think coddling every would-be learner with 8 CD's of English and patronizing encouragement is a great solution. However, I recognize that sometimes you need to meet people where they're at, and in those cases I'll suggest an MT-style course with the explicit direction that it is only an introduction and they will need something more rigorous after the fact.
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby Cavesa » Tue Jan 22, 2019 1:22 pm

The "i+1" native input for a beginner is a problem. I am not saying it is impossible, no. But there are a few catches:

1.you need to compromise elsewhere. I simply don't want to waste my free time on horrible brain melting trash I cannot stomach, and Peppa Pig and similar stuff that seems to be in the comprehensive input for absolute beginners category falls there. I am learning languages to get to interesting and fun content. I don't think beginner comprehensive input gives me enough advantages to weigh out the suffering during using it. I don't think there is anything wrong or harmful about using courses up to B1 and going to the native input after that, when you can actually get to the good quality stuff. We often advocate here starting with native input as soon as possible. Well, I spent almost no time with native input in French until B2. Starting earlier would have been beneficial, yes. But not starting earlier didn't harm me in the long run.

If the LT courses are helping people get much closer to using native input they actually want to use, they are doing awesome job. Replacing them with trashy native input at all costs doesn't serve a purpose. Plus, while I am definitely willing to believe that a learner using i+1 native videos right away instead may have better comprehension skills faster, I simply don't believe their active skills match someone able to use at least a part of the LT course content actively.

2.I get it, some people prefer to use courses, some don't. But we are getting here sometimes to the argument of the courses in general being useless and to be avoided and unnatural. No, there are good and bad courses. And a good one is an advantage. That's why I think LT (or MT and Pimsleur here) should be compared primarily to other beginner courses, not to the approach without them.

And when we do this:

"I'm a beginner also. Both MT and pimsleur to saturation over a period
of time - and you're absolutely right, listening and understanding
what you hear is still far and away the most difficult; you can always
cobble together some fractured version of what you want to say but
making sense of a reply is something else entirely. I would recommend
getting a software DVD player for your PC (so that you can play/play
slow/replay) and start watching bilingual DVDs, playing and replaying
what you can hear until you can figure out the dialogue - or at least
some of it - from the subtitles..."


Where is the problem? This actually sounds like MT and Pimsleur are having excellent results! Really, this is the normal result of good A1 or A1/A2 courses and hardworking learners, including those learning in person in classes. A person after a few dozen hours spent learning is NOT supposed to be particularly good at listening comprehension. I don't know where this fairy tale expectation comes from.

A beginner's course is supposed to give the explanations of the basics and train the learner in them. Whether you choose to also work on the listening comprehension with native input aside of that course right away or after finishing that course, that is a personal choice and both options are valid. It is not any fault of the course, no resource is supposed to teach everything. Again, this is the "but the bycicle is horrible because it cannot fly" kind of judgement in my opinion.

And it is a normal learning phase of most people. Yes, I recommend the intermediate learners tons of tv shows exactly for this reason: we can say a lot just using the structures and vocab from coursebooks, but the natives will throw much more on us. But that is a problem at B1 (and a huge problem at B2 and C1 for many people), not at A1 or A2. LT or MT are not getting people that far, it is not their job. For a beginner, being able to put together a sentence but not understanding full speed speech is not a tragedy, it is success. I don't know why are the courses criticised to such an extent for it.

Furthermore, after having examined the material contained in these courses, the total number of running hours of audio, I have concluded that these courses are a poor choice for cognate languages. On the other hand I have for a long time been hoping that these courses (including Pimsleur) might be a good introduction for more distant languages
This is an excellent point I hope to hear more about in future.

One of the things I disliked about trying Pimsleur and a bit of MT was the slow pace. It serves really well some learners! But it felt like waste of time to me. But I believe I might immediately change my perception to the opposite, if I try more difficult languages, where extremely slow progress is normal no matter what method you choose.
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby Random Review » Tue Jan 22, 2019 3:43 pm

Cavesa wrote:The "i+1" native input for a beginner is a problem. I am not saying it is impossible, no. But there are a few catches:

1.you need to compromise elsewhere. I simply don't want to waste my free time on horrible brain melting trash I cannot stomach, and Peppa Pig and similar stuff that seems to be in the comprehensive input for absolute beginners category falls there. I am learning languages to get to interesting and fun content. I don't think beginner comprehensive input gives me enough advantages to weigh out the suffering during using it. I don't think there is anything wrong or harmful about using courses up to B1 and going to the native input after that, when you can actually get to the good quality stuff. We often advocate here starting with native input as soon as possible. Well, I spent almost no time with native input in French until B2. Starting earlier would have been beneficial, yes. But not starting earlier didn't harm me in the long run.

If the LT courses are helping people get much closer to using native input they actually want to use, they are doing awesome job. Replacing them with trashy native input at all costs doesn't serve a purpose. Plus, while I am definitely willing to believe that a learner using i+1 native videos right away instead may have better comprehension skills faster, I simply don't believe their active skills match someone able to use at least a part of the LT course content actively.

2.I get it, some people prefer to use courses, some don't. But we are getting here sometimes to the argument of the courses in general being useless and to be avoided and unnatural. No, there are good and bad courses. And a good one is an advantage. That's why I think LT (or MT and Pimsleur here) should be compared primarily to other beginner courses, not to the approach without them.

And when we do this:

"I'm a beginner also. Both MT and pimsleur to saturation over a period
of time - and you're absolutely right, listening and understanding
what you hear is still far and away the most difficult; you can always
cobble together some fractured version of what you want to say but
making sense of a reply is something else entirely. I would recommend
getting a software DVD player for your PC (so that you can play/play
slow/replay) and start watching bilingual DVDs, playing and replaying
what you can hear until you can figure out the dialogue - or at least
some of it - from the subtitles..."


Where is the problem? This actually sounds like MT and Pimsleur are having excellent results! Really, this is the normal result of good A1 or A1/A2 courses and hardworking learners, including those learning in person in classes. A person after a few dozen hours spent learning is NOT supposed to be particularly good at listening comprehension. I don't know where this fairy tale expectation comes from.

A beginner's course is supposed to give the explanations of the basics and train the learner in them. Whether you choose to also work on the listening comprehension with native input aside of that course right away or after finishing that course, that is a personal choice and both options are valid. It is not any fault of the course, no resource is supposed to teach everything. Again, this is the "but the bycicle is horrible because it cannot fly" kind of judgement in my opinion.

And it is a normal learning phase of most people. Yes, I recommend the intermediate learners tons of tv shows exactly for this reason: we can say a lot just using the structures and vocab from coursebooks, but the natives will throw much more on us. But that is a problem at B1 (and a huge problem at B2 and C1 for many people), not at A1 or A2. LT or MT are not getting people that far, it is not their job. For a beginner, being able to put together a sentence but not understanding full speed speech is not a tragedy, it is success. I don't know why are the courses criticised to such an extent for it.

Furthermore, after having examined the material contained in these courses, the total number of running hours of audio, I have concluded that these courses are a poor choice for cognate languages. On the other hand I have for a long time been hoping that these courses (including Pimsleur) might be a good introduction for more distant languages
This is an excellent point I hope to hear more about in future.

One of the things I disliked about trying Pimsleur and a bit of MT was the slow pace. It serves really well some learners! But it felt like waste of time to me. But I believe I might immediately change my perception to the opposite, if I try more difficult languages, where extremely slow progress is normal no matter what method you choose.



This post was so good, I wished I could give it more than one like. You said a lot of the things I have desperately been struggling (and failing) to say. Thank you for that. However, that last bit I have put in bold still isn't quite there yet IMO.

I have read a lot of your posts over the years and dipped into your various logs from time to time and trust me, you are not a typical learner. The insights and ideas you share are excellent and additionally, as much as you can know someone online, you are one of the posters on here who I really like; but to be brutally frank, I'd rather people like you had to suffer frustration at slow pace than the alternative of less experienced learners failing. To you (and, although I'm nowhere near your level, nowadays even for me) an LT, Pimsleur or Michel Thomas course is a just convenient and pleasant short cut that you don't actually need and you will still succeed if you decide to ignore them in future; to newer learners, however, they can be the difference between success and failure.

I know you do acknowledge that in the post I quote, but I really feel it needs to be emphasised, because the language of some posts on here still show a lack of empathy with absolute beginners (especially beginners of their first L2). Extra support for people learning something for the first time compared to others who have previous experience is not "coddling", as some have said; it is simply basic pedagogy.

I like the "slow" student on the Michel Thomas tapes and I like the overkill of Pimsleur for FIGS languages even though they frustrated me too sometimes. Why? Because I was a zero beginner of my first L2 too once. I had no idea what I was doing and had laughable misconceptions about both the nature of language and my own learning process. Michel Thomas guided me over that and I am pleased to see others such as Mihali continuing this tradition. I am immensely grateful to them.
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby Cainntear » Tue Jan 22, 2019 5:32 pm

reineke wrote:Native materials offer plenty of i+1 opportunities. That's about as informative as saying that they don't and I'll leave it at that.

I'm surprised at you being so dismissive, particularly given that I did give a short justification of my point which you yourself actually included in your message as quoted text:
Cainntear wrote:Now, one of the big problems of hard-line CI is that it actually denies students access to genuine target language for a very long time, because most human language uses a hell of a lot of the grammar. I mean, try going a day without saying "My name is ..." -- dead easy. But try going a day without saying "can", "could", "would" and "should" -- it's a lot harder. Essentially, there is no truly authentic material that isn't grammatically complex, so there can be no "i+1" in grammar from authentic materials.


My point is that at an early stage of learning, and if you subscribe to Krashen's idea of a natural order of acquisition, any native text will contain a significant number of "advanced" parts of the grammar. If that's "i+1", then "1" can only really represent the number of new languages you're trying to learn.

How many native texts don't use modals? And how many have no complex sentences? And how many of those stick entirely to the present tense (or present and simple past/preterite, at a push)?

Every native text is several levels of complexity higher than a beginner, not "1". But of course, us teachers are trained to lie to ourselves here by "grading" our native texts -- i.e. stripping out lots of the native features and replacing them with things at the learners' level, while kidding ourselves on that it remains "authentic language".

You're unlikely to see or hear truly "authentic" language in a textbook before advanced level, because it's just so complex. Everything is "graded".


Furthermore, after having examined the material contained in these courses, the total number of running hours of audio, I have concluded that these courses are a poor choice for cognate languages. On the other hand I have for a long time been hoping that these courses (including Pimsleur) might be a good introduction for more distant languages.

The jury is still out on that one but as I have mentioned before, I was not particularly impressed with MT Japanese Advanced.

That's not real MT. I hated the beginner -- it confused me by introducing three things at once. In fact the most benefit I drew from MT Japanese was that it firmed up my understanding of how vocab learning can confuse learners.

So, the thing that I kept getting confused with was (excuse me if I've forgotten the exact words) sore, kore, are -- either this, that and the other or here, there and yonder (can't remember).
These were introduced simultaneously, and I could never remember them individually.
The problem was that they have (at least) 3 degrees of similarity: form (clear similarities in sound), grammatical function (identical) and meaning. That last one's the one that trips a lot of people up, thinking they have completely different meaning, but the underlying concept is the same in all but one dimension -- the specific location.
The course then added in a 4th degree of similarity: co-occurrence. The brain remembers words that pop up together frequently, which is why a native English speaker will always ask for "bread and butter" and never "*butter and bread", and will always talk about "growing" or "getting" old, and never "*going old". By always practicing all of the three forms within the space of a few minutes, the teacher made them so strongly associated that you couldn't recall one without recalling the others.
In the end, the only way I could get the correct answer was to memorise them as a list and run through that list until I hit the one I needed... and that's not what I call learning a language.

Anyway, I have to say I'm surprised that you don't think it's good for close languages.

When I was about to start Spanish, I was hugely sceptical of the blurb on the packet and nearly didn't buy the course at all, but I read a lot of reviews of both the Spanish and the French (my only strong language at the time) and there was a review or two that gave examples of the sort of things they'd learned in an 8-hour course and I compared that to 5 years of high school and was impressed enough to try it, while still remaining sceptical. I was very, very pleased with the Spanish course when I got it -- I think I went nearly to the end of the 2nd CD in my first sitting.
Last edited by Cainntear on Tue Jan 22, 2019 8:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby David1917 » Tue Jan 22, 2019 5:44 pm

Random Review wrote:I know you do acknowledge that in the post I quote, but I really feel it needs to be emphasised, because the language of some posts on here still show a lack of empathy with absolute beginners (especially beginners of their first L2). Extra support for people learning something for the first time compared to others who have previous experience is not "coddling", as some have said; it is simply basic pedagogy.

I like the "slow" student on the Michel Thomas tapes and I like the overkill of Pimsleur for FIGS languages even though they frustrated me too sometimes. Why? Because I was a zero beginner of my first L2 too once. I had no idea what I was doing and had laughable misconceptions about both the nature of language and my own learning process. Michel Thomas guided me over that and I am pleased to see others such as Mihali continuing this tradition. I am immensely grateful to them.


This is the type of disadvantage English-speakers have, the lack of perspective. Billions of people around the world learn multiple languages, including our own which is an actual trainwreck. Look at the different materials produced for foreign languages by publishers in France, Germany or Russia and listen to the audio of a Hindi, Persian, Arabic, etc. course and observe that it is not littered with inane L1 directions and remarks. I honestly don't even know if the mythical "learn in your car" phenomenon has pervaded these other countries because I've yet to come across any audio-only courses from these bases.

What I will say again is that conceptually these can be helpful supplements or quick introductions for more advanced language-learners and they can be great for beginners (look! empathy!) who have been indoctrinated to think "languages are hard and scary" to be prepared to take on more rigorous material. However, I still think the tweaks should be made to include a) better students (aka not actual students, but someone pretending to be one so that the listener doesn't hear bad accents) and b) a transition to more TL over the duration. MT actually does this from time to time in the French course, but it could certainly be done more - the way Assimil e.g. starts introducing notes in the TL.
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby Cainntear » Tue Jan 22, 2019 5:46 pm

Random Review wrote:However, it is difficult not to have a great deal of sympathy for Mihali, who has given so much and neglected himself in the process. In his videos it comes across very clearly that he is not in a good place right now. He definitely can't be reproached for rushing the process now, given that the stress and isolation are causing him health issues.

I would have more sympathy for him if he had made more use of the feedback he was receiving from members of the language learning community that said he was doing things in a way that wasn't going to succeed. It didn't help that a hardcore of supporters would "defend" him from useful feedback. Mihalis set up a business model that actively discouraged potential backers, and the defence was just "it's not a business", swatting away the fact that people didn't like what he proposed and failing to take the opportunity to make it more appealing and more backable.

Of course, I have sympathy with anyone who's suffering stress and financial difficulties, so I'm not saying he deserves what he got or anything, just that I can't muster "a great deal" of sympathy for him.
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby reineke » Tue Jan 22, 2019 7:06 pm

Regarding Japanese, I initially did the mud crawl under low barbed wire under heavy kanji fire and I died half way through Pimsleur I. I respawned years later to find that listening through a few bilingual phrasebooks (including stuff meant for native Japanese speakers) plus a bit of Vocabulearn was enough to place me into Pimsleur Ihree or four.I find Peppa Pig very helpful. If you're into courses, I like the NHK course and the video course called Let's learn Japanese basic (see the resources link). I have yet to go through either of these two courses but they definitely left a good impression.

If there's a significant overlap in grammar and vocabulary, an English-rich resource such as MT is a bad choice. The best thing I did for my Spanish was to simply watch a bunch of cartoons. A course such as MT Spanish will not cover any of the finer differences between Spanish and Italian but will instead concentrate on basic areas where there are obvious similarities. A MT Spanish course by Italians for Italians would make a lot more sense. It is unfortunate that many speakers of Romance, Slavic etc. languages simply mimic the approach that's really appropriate only for monolingual native English speakers.

Using cognates and creative expressions ('you dive") etc. to massage in some basic grammar points is a good idea.
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