emer1ca wrote:To put the time into perspective, I am turning 7 lessons a week into "active" cards and 7 (further on in the course) lessons into "passive" cards. This is costing me about 3 hours a week on my day off!!!!!
The reviews themselves are daily and take around 45 minutes a day at present.
I urge you to have a glance there :
https://huliganov.tv/2014/05/31/the-pro ... #more-3900TL;DR: passive > active
If continually activating during the process of language learning is something that keeps you motivated in which you enjoy doing, then it’s valuable. Anything which keeps you going in the marathon of learning languages, is your friend. Anything which you find demotivating which detracts from the pleasure of doing it, is not your friend.
Now I personally think, and this is based on 40 years of learning languages (not quite as much as Monsieur Kaufman, for example, but it’s still a reasonable quarantanna) that time spent during the language learning process on activating partly learned languages is usually a waste of time.
Unless your goal is to speak the language ASAP, you're better off sticking to the passive learning plateau.
Well, I'm living in the country; so I'd maybe quite like to speak it TBH.
I've been here a year, so I don't think I'm jumping the gun to be fair.
FWIW (and while I can't go all the way with this gentleman or, indeed, the guys at ALG), I do think a long phase of mostly passive work is useful. I see so many people here rushing to speak ASAP and ending up speaking terrible Chinese in a horrible accent. I have actually been ridiculed by colleagues for resisting this temptation. Luckily my experience with Spanish enabled me to ignore it: whenever I started to doubt myself (all these smart people telling me I was silly for not talking as much and as soon as possible), I was able to remind myself that not one of these people recommending this had ever learned any language to a decent level and I had, so I stuck to my guns. Looking at where we all are a year on, I'm glad I did.
Interestingly the foreigners that actually
can speak Chinese to a decent level are not particularly interested in telling other people how and how not to learn it. In hindsight I should have seen that earlier.
It's true that a very few people seem able to learn quite well by (to give one prominent example) speaking from day 1; but AFAIK they've never adequately been able to explain how they do this.
My original plan was to try for a long purely passive period along the lines of ALG and I think my pronunciation would be better if I had succeeded; but in practice I wasn't doing it at all, because it was too boring. So my actual method has been a compromise. Having said that, the beauty of Assimil's wave method is that I can already
easily understand passively every sentence that goes into my active "deck" (I have heard and understood all of these sentences dozens of times).
Also TBH (and sorry if I'm derailing the thread), my main focus is not on activating the knowledge but on exploring the complex interaction of lexical tone and sentence level stress and intonation. Indeed I'm learning a lot about English! Why, for example, does my brain really not like the high tone (1) or the low tone (3) in strongly stressed syllables in longer sentences? It is hard to resist the temptation to turn them into falling (4) or (less commonly) rising (2) tones! Since English doesn't have a pitch accent, I feel I have *"discovered" some complex link between sentence level stress and intonation in English that I was previously unconscious of.
* Yes, I know that academic linguists have surely been exploring these things for many decades behind the academic pay wall, hence the scare quotes. I have at least read all the EFL stuff on intonation and stress that I could find and it explains some patterns but leaves a lot unexplained. If there any linguistics majors reading this who fancy firing me a PM...