Language Transfer

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romeo.alpha
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby romeo.alpha » Mon Feb 25, 2019 9:50 am

rdearman wrote:You realise that the tapes are shortened by the publisher and that the actual elapse time of the recordings were much longer?


I do. You do realize that it's not relevant, right? When she's forgotten a word, she's forgotten the word. There's no going to be retreiving a word you've forgotten with any amount of time. The only way you're going to get it again is by being told, or looking it up. What Michel should have been doing is on the first error, go back to the beginning and explain everything again. The notion that you can explain something just once, and have everyone understand it is absurd. Every good teacher knows that even very simple things you need to explain again, and again, and again. If you're going to explain something just once for a reference manual, that's fine, but it's also completely different from a guided lesson that he's proposing. The problem is also that he says you shouldn't try to remember, which again means he expects you to calculate the word in the target language, somehow each time. That's a bad idea.

When Paul Noble does it, he also says not to remember, that forgetting is fine, but he also tells you what it is when he revists the topic. Mihalis' approach with Arabic was to remember the first root, and then see if the rest comes back to you. Michel didn't present anything like that with French (especially considering the word in question was "comme", which isn't one of the cognates you can transform from English into French).
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Cainntear
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby Cainntear » Mon Feb 25, 2019 8:01 pm

romeo.alpha wrote:
Cainntear wrote:I don't think he does, otherwise he'd have included some practice. I'll agree that it's not handled brilliantly, but I suspect his goal here was something that a few people here do as part of their own learning strategy -- get a rough overview of a concept before starting the actual learning so that it makes more sense when you come across it in practice.


That's exactly what he expects. In fact he says "try to guess it" based on those "3 strings" as he calls them, that he had presented earlier (and in the French course he said he doesn't want you to guess...).
OK, it's been a while, so you may well be right.

Well you certainly shouldn't be declaring something two 8-hour courses are completely different based on listening to the first 20 minutes of one of them. I completed the original German course and I did most of the Dutch course, and they are extremely, extremely similar. Where they diverge is more or less just where the languages diverge.


Well since you've done both, how about you tell me the exact point where they converge and become nearyl identical, or extremely similar - as you're now saying. Because that's a rather bold claim to make when they're starting out quite differently in some very meaningful ways.
It's been a good few years so I couldn't tell you exactly, and right now I'm kind of busy with a number of projects (a job and a masters simultaneously doesn't leave much time for anything else) but as I recall it, the order of introduction of grammar points and vocabulary in the Dutch is taken straight from the German course.

The core of what Thomas did is that it's what you see in the middle of the courses, and what is shared across the courses. I think it's to his credit that he made such efforts to treat each language in its own terms, rather than applying an identical rigid template to all 4 languages.


Yes, if you're comparing MT to Pimsleur, that's a strength. But Pimsleur and Glossika are the odd ones out. Most courses if they are offered across a line of languages are tailored to the language in question to some degree. Giving him credit for doing what was the norm is kind of like handing out a participation award.

Absolutely true, but I was trying to be subtle, rather than just saying yet again that in focusing on the features that are entirely different between the courses (German's sound-change strings vs regular Latinate vocabulary transformations) you are missing what the core of what his method actually is.
You are clearly a very intelligent person, which makes it all the more baffling that you don't understand that point and continue to argue the superficial details as the core.

It's entirely fair that you personally are put off by the superficial details, but that doesn't have any bearing on whether they are the core mechanics of the method or not.

It's the prosody that's the issue. Now he's by no means unique in screwing that up (the vast majority of French courses get it wrong), but he still gets it wrong, and the other issues just compound it. When you're starting with English (ie, bad for French) prosody, you make yourself difficult to understand to begin with. Then you add in the way English pronunciation will creep its way in when you're speaking French, and you very quickly have built up two bad habits.

What in the prosody was so bad? I'll be honest: the MT French course is simultaneously the one I am least qualified to comment on and the one I consider the worst of his 4 courses. Least qualified because me French was passable before I started it and because I'd already followed the similar Spanish and Italian courses, so my experience is pretty far from the target market; worst because I think it was wrong that he deliberately taught students to underpronounce le and la, which does create problems later.
But in the case of the -ation words, I don't recall him accepting the English stress pattern ("-ation"), so I don't see where any bad habits were given the opportunity to form...

What you need to do is actually approach each language as its own thing, not just superficially. French is a language where you need to explain the prosody, French euphony, liasons and enchaînments. You should be practicing it with foreign words, so you're not having L1 intrusions, and develop a sense of the rhythm, the melody, and just how it sounds in general.

But these are foreign words, and he was, as I recall, fairly active in discouraging L1 intrusions. If you want to talk about habits, L1 intrusion is already a habit, and how do you break that habit if you're not doing it? I'm not saying MT made the absolute best decision on this, but I do think you're being too rigid and absolutist.

My philosophy is to look beyond reasons why things shouldn't work, but also to look for reasons why they could work, even if I disagree, because you can't argue against a theory you don't understand. Right now, I don't see any evidence that you've tried to understand anything other than what you think is the one true path.

Once you've got everything else solid, focusing on getting the pronunciation of cognates right isn't as much of a cognitive load as it is right at the beginning. There's no way almost anyone could hope to get that right when they're dealing with so much new information. With the type of overload you're getting at the beginning it's nigh impossible to avoid falling back to the comfort of your mother tongue.

Cognitive load? But there is virtually no cognitive load in the recall of a close cognate, which frees up cognitive resource for the student to pay attention to the pronunciation.

Think about one of the tradition learner activities -- counting to ten. That's bloody hard, because numbers have evolved to be maximally distant within a language (for example, in English, you don't repeat a vowel phoneme until you hit 9). Here you've got to recall a typically unfamiliar word form alongside a phoneme or two that you still haven't encountered in any other word. If it's a disyllabic word, you might also have to overcome your L1 habits for stress placement.
But with "information", you've got a pegged out set of phoneme categories, and all you have to do is find the right French phones to fit the phonemes and remember where the stress goes. You're dealing with repeating patterns too, unlike with numbers.
So would you prefer the "honest" approach of starting lesson one with "French is a bloody difficult language with really complicated pronunciation and a spelling system almost as Byzantine as English's. You'd better keep coming back for more lessons, because it'll take you about three years of hard graft before people are happy to speak to you."?


Yes, definitely. Although if you go about it right you're looking at about 6 weeks to start having simple interactions with French speakers rather than 3 years. Maybe a bit longer for an absolute beginner who doesn't have a knack for languages. And as far as I gather, The Language Master was released in 1997, and the first MTM courses were from 2000. So it had been more than a quarter century since the FSI had released their course which showed the right way to go about teaching French.

"The right way". There's been a lot of research and literature since the New Key/Army Method/Audiolingual Approach, and... it doesn't reflect well on FSI and its contemporaries. The core philosophy was pure behaviorist psychology and that's a poor model of language. But more: what they did in their own classrooms was far more diverse and nuanced than what they wrote up on paper.
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romeo.alpha
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby romeo.alpha » Mon Feb 25, 2019 9:13 pm

Cainntear wrote:
Absolutely true, but I was trying to be subtle, rather than just saying yet again that in focusing on the features that are entirely different between the courses (German's sound-change strings vs regular Latinate vocabulary transformations) you are missing what the core of what his method actually is.
You are clearly a very intelligent person, which makes it all the more baffling that you don't understand that point and continue to argue the superficial details as the core.


Since he opens up talking about how you already know a lot of French/German based on shared history and cognates, spends a lot of time talking about cognates and expecting you to calculate them yourself, and his builder CDs are basically him saying a sentence with a cognate in English and then in French/German I find it hard to believe someone could think anything else is the core of the method.

What in the prosody was so bad? I'll be honest: the MT French course is simultaneously the one I am least qualified to comment on and the one I consider the worst of his 4 courses. Least qualified because me French was passable before I started it and because I'd already followed the similar Spanish and Italian courses, so my experience is pretty far from the target market; worst because I think it was wrong that he deliberately taught students to underpronounce le and la, which does create problems later.
But in the case of the -ation words, I don't recall him accepting the English stress pattern ("-ation"), so I don't see where any bad habits were given the opportunity to form...


The same thing that's wrong with almost every French course. He doesn't explain that word boundaries and syllable boundaries don't line up in spoken French, and with the way it is spoken a word can disappear entirely if you think about words in an English (or German, or Italian, or Spanish, or...) sense, but if you learn to think of them in a French sense you'll hear they're still there. It's not a unique failing of his course by any means, but it ends up compounding the other problems.

But these are foreign words, and he was, as I recall, fairly active in discouraging L1 intrusions. If you want to talk about habits, L1 intrusion is already a habit, and how do you break that habit if you're not doing it? I'm not saying MT made the absolute best decision on this, but I do think you're being too rigid and absolutist.


Familiar vocabulary, which is familiar by virtue of it being a cognate, isn't foreign. As an example you should be starting out with "fin de semaine" and not "weekend", because you're absolutely going to say weekend wrong (in French). In English it's week-end. In French it's wee-kend. It's very rare for someone to figure that out for themselves hearing a native speaker speak, even harder when the teacher isn't a native speaker themselves.

My philosophy is to look beyond reasons why things shouldn't work, but also to look for reasons why they could work, even if I disagree, because you can't argue against a theory you don't understand. Right now, I don't see any evidence that you've tried to understand anything other than what you think is the one true path.


For free resources, and for languages which aren't well served with resources. Sure. But when French has a wealth of resources out there, free, and very good. Why try to figure out what you can draw of value out of Michel Thomas? By the point you have enough of a grasp of the language to figure out what's of value and what isn't you're well past the stage where you could possibly benefit from it anyway.

Cognitive load? But there is virtually no cognitive load in the recall of a close cognate, which frees up cognitive resource for the student to pay attention to the pronunciation.


There's more cognitive load to get it right. Because you'll be immediately thinking of the English pronunciation. It's easier to learn a completely novel word correctly, because you don't have any interference. It would also theoretically be the advantage of an audio only course, but there he goes telling you the spelling of everything (Mihalis makes that same mistake in LT French).

Think about one of the tradition learner activities -- counting to ten. That's bloody hard, because numbers have evolved to be maximally distant within a language (for example, in English, you don't repeat a vowel phoneme until you hit 9). Here you've got to recall a typically unfamiliar word form alongside a phoneme or two that you still haven't encountered in any other word. If it's a disyllabic word, you might also have to overcome your L1 habits for stress placement.


I don't think learning to count to 10 to start is a remotely good idea. Perhaps three so you can start working it into sentences with plurals and such. Vocabulary should be presented in an order that lightens the load. So words which are more complex come after ones that have been presented. So in French you wouldn't start with any words that have nasals and an r. One or the other, but they both give learners of French a hard time, so a word like "rentre" would be a pretty bad idea. But learning "or" and "allons" seperately would be good.

But with "information", you've got a pegged out set of phoneme categories, and all you have to do is find the right French phones to fit the phonemes and remember where the stress goes. You're dealing with repeating patterns too, unlike with numbers.


There's a lot more to it than just figuring out where the stress goes. You need to figure out in which syllable the consonant goes, and that changes depending on the preceding and following words.

"The right way". There's been a lot of research and literature since the New Key/Army Method/Audiolingual Approach, and... it doesn't reflect well on FSI and its contemporaries. The core philosophy was pure behaviorist psychology and that's a poor model of language. But more: what they did in their own classrooms was far more diverse and nuanced than what they wrote up on paper.


It doesn't matter what the specific approach is, it just matters that they made it very clear how French prosody works. Whether you think the FSI Basic course is worth your or anyone else's time is another matter, but their phonology course did more than just cover French phonemes and stress. It explained how French words fit into a sentence, and how they change in that sentence.
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Cainntear
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby Cainntear » Mon Feb 25, 2019 11:08 pm

romeo.alpha wrote:
Cainntear wrote:
Absolutely true, but I was trying to be subtle, rather than just saying yet again that in focusing on the features that are entirely different between the courses (German's sound-change strings vs regular Latinate vocabulary transformations) you are missing what the core of what his method actually is.
You are clearly a very intelligent person, which makes it all the more baffling that you don't understand that point and continue to argue the superficial details as the core.


Since he opens up talking about how you already know a lot of French/German based on shared history and cognates, spends a lot of time talking about cognates and expecting you to calculate them yourself, and his builder CDs are basically him saying a sentence with a cognate in English and then in French/German I find it hard to believe someone could think anything else is the core of the method.

The builder CDs aren't the core method. Why are you pointing at something that is not the core of his method and claiming it's the core?

What in the prosody was so bad? I'll be honest: the MT French course is simultaneously the one I am least qualified to comment on and the one I consider the worst of his 4 courses. Least qualified because me French was passable before I started it and because I'd already followed the similar Spanish and Italian courses, so my experience is pretty far from the target market; worst because I think it was wrong that he deliberately taught students to underpronounce le and la, which does create problems later.
But in the case of the -ation words, I don't recall him accepting the English stress pattern ("-ation"), so I don't see where any bad habits were given the opportunity to form...


The same thing that's wrong with almost every French course.

...and there we have it. Quite simply everything is wrong.

He doesn't explain that word boundaries and syllable boundaries don't line up in spoken French, and with the way it is spoken a word can disappear entirely if you think about words in an English (or German, or Italian, or Spanish, or...) sense, but if you learn to think of them in a French sense you'll hear they're still there.

I agree with that in principle, but I don't see any way to really deal with that unless either:
A: you're working with a teacher in a one-to-one or small group setting
or
B: you're a language geek, which most of us here are, but the majority of people aren't.
It's not a unique failing of his course by any means, but it ends up compounding the other problems.

...which would be fine if you included a fair assessment of the strengths of his course, but you've been talking as if there aren't any, and when we point them out you just flat out deny that he ever did that.

But these are foreign words, and he was, as I recall, fairly active in discouraging L1 intrusions. If you want to talk about habits, L1 intrusion is already a habit, and how do you break that habit if you're not doing it? I'm not saying MT made the absolute best decision on this, but I do think you're being too rigid and absolutist.


Familiar vocabulary, which is familiar by virtue of it being a cognate, isn't foreign.

This is a matter of mindset. If you learn to think of them as foreign, problem solved.
As an example you should be starting out with "fin de semaine" and not "weekend", because you're absolutely going to say weekend wrong (in French). In English it's week-end. In French it's wee-kend. It's very rare for someone to figure that out for themselves hearing a native speaker speak, even harder when the teacher isn't a native speaker themselves.

… and the same problem will occur with non-cognate vocabulary, as the listener will presume a syllable structure more like L1, so this really isn't a criticism of cognates at all, just a criticism of the lack of explicit teaching of syllable structure in French.

My philosophy is to look beyond reasons why things shouldn't work, but also to look for reasons why they could work, even if I disagree, because you can't argue against a theory you don't understand. Right now, I don't see any evidence that you've tried to understand anything other than what you think is the one true path.


For free resources, and for languages which aren't well served with resources. Sure. But when French has a wealth of resources out there, free, and very good.

OK, suggest some of them then.
Cognitive load? But there is virtually no cognitive load in the recall of a close cognate, which frees up cognitive resource for the student to pay attention to the pronunciation.


There's more cognitive load to get it right.

Here we're into very subjective territory, because neither or us has data. But unlike you, I didn't suggest that either had a higher cognitive load than the other. Instead I suggested that by removing the cognitive load on recall, the learner could focus their cognitive resources on the pronunciation.
Now I actually do believe that this lightens cognitive load, because as a general rule, the more subtasks you have, the heavier the load -- reduce the number of variables, reduce the cognitive load.
However, that's a side issue, because the total cognitive load is a very abstract idea -- clearly, if all your
attentional resources are dedicated to pronunciation, you're thinking about pronunciation more. Whether that compensates for interference or not is open to question -- I suspect it might, you are convinced it doesn't.

Whether you think the FSI Basic course is worth your or anyone else's time is another matter, but their phonology course did more than just cover French phonemes and stress. It explained how French words fit into a sentence, and how they change in that sentence.
It's not whether it covers it that is the issue, it's whether it conveys it to the learner. The two biggest issues I have with the FSI and DLI as a model for teaching are firstly (as I've already said) that the materials we see are only a fraction of their course, and secondly that they were very selective in their intake -- the people who make it into the FSI are people with a background that makes it likely that they'll do well following the FSI's methods. The average person who buys their language materials on the high street isn't in their target demographic.
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romeo.alpha
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby romeo.alpha » Mon Feb 25, 2019 11:27 pm

Cainntear wrote:The builder CDs aren't the core method. Why are you pointing at something that is not the core of his method and claiming it's the core?


It's Michel himself doing it. And it's also not the only example of it. As I've said repeatedly, cognates are the first thing he talks about. He says that by the end of the course you'll be able to speak 2000-3000 words in French (and disingenuously suggests that it's all you'll need as we use between 500 and 1500 words in everyday speech).

...and there we have it. Quite simply everything is wrong.


Now you're just being disingenuous (again). First of all that's something I've said already in this thread, so it's not something that you've just got me to say as a "gotcha". Now the question is why are you being so deliberately disingenuous in this discussion?

I agree with that in principle, but I don't see any way to really deal with that unless either:
A: you're working with a teacher in a one-to-one or small group setting
or
B: you're a language geek, which most of us here are, but the majority of people aren't.


Or C, do the FSI French Programmed Introduction.

...which would be fine if you included a fair assessment of the strengths of his course, but you've been talking as if there aren't any, and when we point them out you just flat out deny that he ever did that.


So far your specific claims of the course have turned out not to be the case. First it was that the Dutch course is a "near clone", then "very similar" and when I pointed out it wasn't even that you admitted that you haven't gone through them in years. I think you're viewing the course with rose tinted glasses because it gave you a confidence boost. And sure, if you go on to study with better resources that can be seen as a strength of it. But why put up with all the downsides when you can get that confidence boost from Paul Noble (and in the course of it get an actually solid foundation in French grammar).

This is a matter of mindset. If you learn to think of them as foreign, problem solved.


Oh, so it's the student's fault for not having the right mindset? I thought Michel Thomas said there are no bad students.

… and the same problem will occur with non-cognate vocabulary, as the listener will presume a syllable structure more like L1, so this really isn't a criticism of cognates at all, just a criticism of the lack of explicit teaching of syllable structure in French.


It's less of a problem with non-cognates if you're just doing listen and repeat. Since you don't have an established preference on how to say a word.

OK, suggest some of them then.


I already did, many times. But here we go again.

FSI French Programmed Introduction. Accent Addition by Olle Kjellin. Speechling. French in Action. Without paying a cent you'll get way farther in French than you ever would with Michel Thomas, and have at least an order of magnitude better odds of speaking French in a fashion that will have native French speakers not recoil in disgust at hearing you butcher their language.

Here we're into very subjective territory, because neither or us has data. But unlike you, I didn't suggest that either had a higher cognitive load than the other. Instead I suggested that by removing the cognitive load on recall, the learner could focus their cognitive resources on the pronunciation.


It's always harder to unlearn bad pronunciation than to just learn it right the first time. With a cognate you always have that bad pronunciation to unlearn (with a few exceptions, in Dutch credit card is said like in English).


It's not whether it covers it that is the issue, it's whether it conveys it to the learner.


It does.

The two biggest issues I have with the FSI and DLI as a model for teaching are firstly (as I've already said) that the materials we see are only a fraction of their course, and secondly that they were very selective in their intake -- the people who make it into the FSI are people with a background that makes it likely that they'll do well following the FSI's methods. The average person who buys their language materials on the high street isn't in their target demographic.


Irrelevant. The FSI French Programmed Introduction can be used to self study, going through the drills (half an hour a day for a few weeks) and you will understand how French prosody works. It explains it explicitly, it gives you examples to practice, breaking it down syllable by syllable (properly), and audio to listen to. That's way more than you'll ever get from a Michel Thomas Audio course (or even in person, you can tell listening to him speak that he doesn't even understand it himself).
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby mokibao » Fri May 07, 2021 5:27 pm

Been listening to his lessons from the Complete Greek course just to see what it's like (we all know how that goes) and I kind of got sucked up - damn, I guess I have to learn Greek now. I'll probably have to postpone that though.

So my understanding is that he speaks English as a native language, Cypriot Greek as a heritage language and Spanish as a working, everyday language, right? And apart from Arabic and Turkish he's said that he hasn't had a conversation in the other languages he teaches. Isn't that kind of strange? For what it's worth, an actual Swahili speaker reviewed the course and found it to be very good and accurate (https://www.alllanguageresources.com/language-transfer/) but skimming the thread people seemed to have very strong opinions on the other FIG courses. I know he gets glowing reports from learners but I'd like to have reports of success, aka people who listened to his courses and then moved on to engage native materials and/or have conversations with natives, however basic.
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby jmar257 » Fri May 07, 2021 6:00 pm

mokibao wrote:So my understanding is that he speaks English as a native language, Cypriot Greek as a heritage language and Spanish as a working, everyday language, right?
If I recall from reading about him several years ago, Cypriot Greek is his heritage language and he's spent time living in Argentina and England, hence his ability with Spanish and English. I believe he's in Spain nowadays.

mokibao wrote:And apart from Arabic and Turkish he's said that he hasn't had a conversation in the other languages he teaches. Isn't that kind of strange? For what it's worth, an actual Swahili speaker reviewed the course and found it to be very good and accurate (https://www.alllanguageresources.com/language-transfer/) but skimming the thread people seemed to have very strong opinions on the other FIG courses. I know he gets glowing reports from learners but I'd like to have reports of success, aka people who listened to his courses and then moved on to engage native materials and/or have conversations with natives, however basic.

IIRC the Swahili course was commissioned by someone so I'm not shocked he went the extra mile. I've only fully done his Spanish and French courses, the Spanish one was excellent but the French one was not so good, partially due to accent. I already had done other Spanish courses so I can't give you a really thorough review (and it was a few years ago), but I recall his explanation of ser vs. estar and the subjunctive were really good. I'd highly recommend the Spanish course.

I also don't know why he was doing these short intro courses only to have to go back and later do a full course. I've been a patron on their Patreon for a while now (granted, not a huge donation) and I'm kind of disheartened by the lack of anything recently. There's some course they're doing for music and I've seen him talk about video courses but I don't think there's actually been any full course published in a while, which makes me want to stop donating. I really liked the style of these courses and was hoping this could be something consistently putting out new courses, but it seems my meager donation is just going to a guy living in an RV in Spain not doing anything.
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby Cavesa » Fri May 07, 2021 6:16 pm

mokibao wrote:Been listening to his lessons from the Complete Greek course just to see what it's like (we all know how that goes) and I kind of got sucked up - damn, I guess I have to learn Greek now. I'll probably have to postpone that though.

So my understanding is that he speaks English as a native language, Cypriot Greek as a heritage language and Spanish as a working, everyday language, right? And apart from Arabic and Turkish he's said that he hasn't had a conversation in the other languages he teaches. Isn't that kind of strange? For what it's worth, an actual Swahili speaker reviewed the course and found it to be very good and accurate (https://www.alllanguageresources.com/language-transfer/) but skimming the thread people seemed to have very strong opinions on the other FIG courses. I know he gets glowing reports from learners but I'd like to have reports of success, aka people who listened to his courses and then moved on to engage native materials and/or have conversations with natives, however basic.


Honestly, I'd be glad if he focused on other than the FIG courses. I was not too attracted by the German one, not sure why (but similarly to you, I almost started learning Greek or Arabic, because the lessons I tried out of curiosity were so great!). Perhaps those will improve and LT will add less obvious languages again, if the creator manages to get the LT project into the next phase, which is finding new course authors and becoming a sort of a coach for them, instead of making everything himself. This will also completely solve the thing that you are (rightly) criticising, that he's teaching languages he may not shine at himself.

While I totally agree that success reports are better than reviews of people at unit 2, I don't share your standard for what is success. No beginner course is supposed to make you ready for normal native material, it's like judging a first grader maths book on the students' ability to pass gsce. The conversation with natives is still a bit too vague, and reliability of this kind of report has been totally destroyed in the last decade. There are simply too many youtubers with shady "hey, I speak with natives after X weeks" videos, to make this as trustworthy as it did sound years ago. I'd settle either for an honest sounding report on limited conversational ability ("honesty" being subjectively judged of course, we may not agree on trustworthiness of people), or even by reports on being able to continue with an intermediate coursebook right away, or something similar.

jmar257 wrote:I also don't know why he was doing these short intro courses only to have to go back and later do a full course. I've been a patron on their Patreon for a while now (granted, not a huge donation) and I'm kind of disheartened by the lack of anything recently. There's some course they're doing for music and I've seen him talk about video courses but I don't think there's actually been any full course published in a while, which makes me want to stop donating. I really liked the style of these courses and was hoping this could be something consistently putting out new courses, but it seems my meager donation is just going to a guy living in an RV in Spain not doing anything.


Well, I wouldn't hold the short courses against him, it is normal that a project evolves, as you go. But I'd partially agree with the rest.

It's not true that he's done nothing at all. He's recently published the vocab cards for Arabic learners (anyone can tell us, whether they are good, pls? To get more info in the thread). He has also made a methodology book for new teachers creating new LT courses, which took a lot of his time. And it was probably necessary, if we want more LT courses, as hiring new people for those is a must.

I understand you're feeling disheartened. I was considering donations (right now I cannot, but I will hopefully be able to in a few months again), but this was one of the things holding me back. There are no news not only about courses I'd be interested in learning from myself, but even about other courses I'd consider supporting. I thought his alternative and very non profit way of doing things was supposed to make space to focus on the underserved learners, to fulfill the original role of the LT (which was communication without barriers, like on Cyprus). Then he focused fully on the not needed languages (I'd like a better and Complete German, but I objectively see there is very little need for it, compared to various other languages.). And now there is no new primary content at all.
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mokibao
Orange Belt
Posts: 123
Joined: Wed Mar 10, 2021 2:44 pm
Languages: Studying: way too many
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby mokibao » Fri May 07, 2021 6:55 pm

What I mean is, how equipped are you once you're done with the course? Can you, like, start reading small texts or listen to slow podcasts with the help of a dictionary or something? This is usually what I expect when I finish something like an assimil booklet.

I don't think he's been inactive, but things are simply going very slowly because he has extremely little time and money to devote to everything people expect from him. People are basically asking that he learn and dissect an entire new language (several, in fact) from scratch and then write and record an audio course for it with a bunch of students by doing live lessons. This would normally take years even for a mid-sized company with a studio and money to hire native teachers, and he's just a single person. I would have thought the request ridiculously hard to satisfy if he hadn't actually gone and done it. But then I still find it a bit strange and unusual that he offers to teach a language that's not his native/heritage/professional one. It's fortunate that his Swahili course got approved by an actual speaker of it, but that also kind of happened randomly.

Regarding the direction of the project, I guess he directs his time where people vote, since he relies on them, and people want FIG courses. It's a bit of a shame, especially when you hear him in interviews lamenting that money is the main driver of most efforts, but he has little power over that. Still, props to whoever commissioned the (complete!) Swahili course, it's such as neglected and interesting language.
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Cavesa
Black Belt - 4th Dan
Posts: 4960
Joined: Mon Jul 20, 2015 9:46 am
Languages: Czech (N), French (C2) English (C1), Italian (C1), Spanish, German (C1)
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby Cavesa » Fri May 07, 2021 7:45 pm

Yes, you're totally right. That's why I am convinced (as I said), that the transformation of LT and his shift from the role of the sole creator to the role of a director is totally critical. But hard to tell, how it will go.

It's great someone commissioned the Swahili course, it shows on the quality and on the pace at which it was created.

mokibao wrote:But then I still find it a bit strange and unusual that he offers to teach a language that's not his native/heritage/professional one.

Regarding the direction of the project, I guess he directs his time where people vote, since he relies on them, and people want FIG courses. It's a bit of a shame, especially when you hear him in interviews lamenting that money is the main driver of most efforts, but he has little power over that.


This all should be solved, if he manages to hire course creators. But the demand for the FIG, while possibly bringing in the most money, is at the same time damaging the chances of finding candidates:

There are currently two models: there’s $500 per month to offer as a base wage to one new teacher (which can be supplemented with paid test classes). This new teacher will write for German, Japanese or Mandarin.
There are also five more positions for self-generated wages, i.e. teachers who earn exclusively through their test classes, these are for:
-German, Mandarin or Japanese (two positions)
-Existing Introduction courses—French, Italian, Turkish or Arabic—to be made Complete (two positions)
-A ‘mystery language’, where the new writer is selected entirely on merit (i.e. the potential demonstrated to create an awesome course!).


Most native German teachers aren't likely to live in places, where you can live of 500 dollars a month. And most Japanese and Mandarin teachers can earn much more than that. So do the German teachers in poorer countries than Germany/Austria/the Switzerland/Luxembourg.

He's also looking for people, who will do this as a part time job, as they won't be paid for course creation. I guess generating income only through LT test classes isn't that viable, probably people will need a more stable job (=teaching whatever a language school giving them a normal contract dictates), but it would probably show on the pace at which the course would be created.

So, it is a problem. There are plenty of places, where 500 dollars are enough of a salary for a qualified teacher, or enough to be your main income with just a bit of extra from something else. But those places mostly don't speak the FIG and therefore won't attract enough people to donate. Finding a language that fits both criteria (attractive enough for donation, but with cheap enough living conditions for the course creators to not starve) would be very hard.
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