Like the Chinese room thought experiment but your brain is the Chinese room

I remember the author of AJATT encapsulating the necessity of understanding over outputting like this: you can use output to ask someone where the train station is, but if you don't understand their reply, good luck.

I guess is just the perfect amount of both

@@AlvaradoGuitar well that makes no sense. comprehension and speaking are both equally important because if you remove any of them communication is impossible. whether input will teach you how to speak is a different question altoghether

Jobs require you to speak and write foreign languages. Most of them are entry level but the demand for them shows how many people don't want to learn every skill in a language.

Omg, yes!!! I remember when I tried to learn the multiples of four as a kid and spent an evening rehearsing it wrongly. Took me YEARS to not sometimes at first glance thinking 4*4=15

Terrific quote!

An alternative but related version I heard as a kid was "practice doesn't make perfect; perfect practice makes perfect." (Implying that practicing the wrong thing/wrong way will not lead to perfection.) It makes logical sense, but I found it demotivating because I thought "how the fuck am I supposed to know what constitutes perfect practice?"

It is one of the truest … erm … truisms ever :nods:.

My middle school band teacher said the same exact thing....

Exactly

@María de los Ángeles Mena Beethoven wasn't deaf from birth. He started having hearing issues around the age of 26.

@María de los Ángeles Mena Yes, like the first reply said. Letters from Beethoven indicate that he could hear a bit until about 35 and he also wore out his pianos by bashing the keys hard enough to hear them. Don't get me wrong - he is more brilliant than brilliant and I'm sure if he'd lived another one year even, he'd have written yet another insanely good piece or three. But he knew what his music sounded like.

Exactly!! I love the way you put it!! « Input is practice on how to understand a language »

Except that it's not entirely true. The brain itself, the place where a significant portion of the learning occurs, has no idea whether or not you're actually doing something versus thinking about it. Yes, it's often better to actually practice, but it's hardly a prerequisite in most cases. Sure for things that require muscular control, it's helpful to physically practice, but just simply imagining the process will get you a lot further than people often realize.

@@SmallSpoonBrigade what exactly do you mean by imagining the process?

@@SmallSpoonBrigade Imagining the process hmm... that reminds the story of the pianist guy that got in prison and he practiced using "air piano" (playing piano in the air basically lol) and everything he played he could hear it in his mind. After he got out of prison he was able to keep playing good and even improved in certain areas like fingerings and ear.

@@BallisticaMetal noice

Reminds me of someone I once heard say, "Oh, I'm fluent level now, but it's hard to understand a lot of the time because so many of them don't speak their language properly." I nearly had a stroke trying to process that.

@@sandwichbreath0 lol

@@sandwichbreath0 While I wouldn't agree with such a comment, I do understand it. That person has been taught the standard language, and is complaining when someone speaks a non-standard variety.

​@@bigscarysteve Therein lies the error, though, it's not the standard language: it's an artificial spin-off that exists only in the classroom, stripped of all connected-speech, effective pronunciation, morphology, etc. Grammar rules are helpful, but they're also incredibly imprecise, because they're a conscious attempt to describe unconscious processes. That's why textbooks have such long lists of exceptions to the rules. When we learn via the grammar/skills-building model, we're lulled into the false assumption that we're accessing the language in its 'pure' form, the way it was 'designed' to be used. That's wrong. What's 'standard' is how natives use it at work, school and play. The guy in my example wasn't talking about slang, he was blaming newsreaders, government officials, co-workers, etc. Like Lamont's misguided critic, his problem wasn't natives deviating from standard usage; his problem was mastering a 'standard' that never actually existed.

@Dapz Fanboy Yes--that's why I said I wouldn't agree with such a comment.

Depends on the language in my opinion! I think it can be useful to be practically monologuing or being interviewed in a way so that you can use the opportunity to really blab as much as possible. You can use all the other time you have to practice listening, etc. Conversation practice is better to have with tandem partners (i.e. free resources). With a paid resource it makes more sense to focus on speaking practice so they can identify your errors and correct them. In my experience, this has been the most effective.

@@OpqHMg I agree that monologues can be useful. My goals just happen to include “have meaningful conversations with native speakers”, which means I have to understand what they said in real-time and have an appropriate response, and exchange ideas. One of my tutors said he likes working with me because he can talk about more complicated topics (rather than the basic grammar and beginner phrases). So in this respect, I find having a meaningful exchange of ideas harder than doing a monologue, because I’m not just trying to express myself but also to pick up communication cues and common phrases that my tutor uses. I’ve thought of tandem partners but I’ve also heard horror stories of people just not turning up, and also the basic point of language exchange. I’d rather my entire session in my target language (and switch to English if need be on my own terms).

As a french native I can confirm 100%. I also experienced it myself, I always watched movie with subtitles at home(had no choice!), And watched lots of English content, so I was more familiar with the language. I remember very clearly at university we had a pretty advanced English class compared to high school, and my friends asked me to help fill in the answers to the complex grammar rules. I knew all the answers naturally, just because it sounded right or wrong, I had no effort at all to do, while my classmate, even the ones able to fill the answers had to try to remember a rule and check if it applied in the specific context. And yes we all learn English at school and noone is able to speak English...

Well then you must have run into a very particular set of people, people learn things through various methods, and there are some of us, who, even though exposed to a language naturally, still enjoy going over rules, learning about grammar and are still able to develop just as much fluency as anybody else.

@@andrestrigo4618 Well, he doesn't say that it's forbidden to learn the rules. But his point is that learning the rules doesn't make you improve, exposition does, and you say it yourself, you were exposed to it.

@@andrestrigo4618 sure, for a select few it can be a good thing, but it's setting most people off language learning. just because some nerds like grammar doesn't mean it's helpful in general.

​​@@andrestrigo4618yeah, it is weird to me that people keep suggesting there is a particular way. I know a lot of people who incorrectly think they understand the language I am learning from TV. They are repeatedly wrong though, and speak (at best) "like a TV show character" (according to my friends who are native). I have gotten multiple compliments in much less time for having greater (and less weird / hammy) speech and (MUCH greater) reading comphrension because I did study the rules. I'm hoping to get to a point where I can do more exposure (I thus far haven't been ABLE to learn much of anything from just watching native content) soon, but without this foundation, I wouldn't be as far as I am. I'm sure it goes both ways, depending on the person. I think following the rules to, as they're saying, construct a sentence, is a necessary step for some beginners, which will eventually blossom into a more natural understanding. I'm already seeing that in my own speech. The concepts I learned at the beginning are now entrained and I don't have to think to construct simple sentences. For complex ones, though, for now I still have to. I dunno, it feels like people are taking multiple steps towards fluency and claiming some are more wrong just because beginners are suboptimal?

The only other comparable 'skills' are motor skills, like Lamont showed his example with a baby walking

@@cadian101st I think music is a great parallel as well.

@@cadian101st Except motor skills aren't similar to language at all in terms of learning. There's a definite right way and a definite wrong way to walk. The right way gets you where you need to go, in a fairly short amount of time, and without tiring yourself out or injuring yourself (it's a bit wider than this, since there are reasons you might want to run or jog instead of walk, but the point is that we all do it more or less the same way). With speech, there isn't any "right" way. There is an "English" way, a "Greek" way, a "Swahili" way, a "Hindu" way, and thousands of other additional ways, each one commonly being termed a "language". Indeed, each of these ways is so different from the other ways that if someone were to try to communicate to someone else in a way they were not familiar with, neither one would have a clue what the other was saying. What this means in terms of learning is that while we can in principle learn something like how to walk without outside input by virtue of there only being a handful of sensible gaits as dictated by human physiology, this does not apply to language. I may be able to *create* a language without outside input, and it might even be an effective language if anyone else were to use it, but it would take an incredible chain of coincidences for it to just happen to be perfect French.

@@Keldor314 Except that's wrong. There definitely _is_ a right way to speak. The right way is to speak in a way the other person understands. And more specifically, there is a right way to speak English and there is a wrong way to speak English. Especially if you are trying to speak English to a specific group of people. Australian English is different from American English. It's the same thing if you wanted to walk like everybody else, or if the purpose of wanting to walk a specific way like walking slowly, fast, lower to the ground (like crouching), etc etc. These are what you would dub "languages". You wouldn't walk fast if you wanted to be quiet, and you wouldn't walk slowly if you need to walk underneath a trailer or something so you would need to crouch. It's the wrong type of walk.

@@HoraryHellfire Learning to walk in different ways, like to pick your way through a thick forest for instance, is like speaking about different subjects, not like speaking in different languages. If it were the latter, than we'd be expected to speak German when talking to someone in a movie theater, Italian in order to talk about gardening, Japanese whenever sports come up, and so on and so forth. As for there being a "right" way to speak, I might ask what it is. Is it American English? British English? Maybe the right way to speak is in Afrikaans? Since we can conclude that there isn't one universally correct master tongue, then correctness is subjective, and is about how well we can match the language of other speakers. Thus, correctness in language only exists in the sense of comparing yourself to something external, to other speakers and writers - you can not figure it out in a vacuum.

Exactly this. All teaching on writing encourage the learner to read their chosen genre too - so they know what good looks like. If you don't know what good looks like, how can you ever expect to achieve it. And many musicians learn to play without reading music - they listen and copy, but *listen* comes first.

There are actually a lot of musicians that wont listen to much of their direct peers music, or even listen to music in general, since they spend so much of their time making it. But for sure when they were learning and coming up, they are completely absorbed.

Haha, "best" and "best". You hurt the feelings of my video "IMMERSION". 😂

I think the analogy only goes so far. When playing a piece of sheet music, you're aiming for the same output every time. Everyday language use isn't like that. You can't predict what someone is going to say, and thus, you can't predict your responses. This is what Chomsky meant by the poverty of the stimulus. Comparing language use to musical improvisation would have been a better analogy.

@@bigscarysteve You can't even predict what you yourself is going to say in a conversation, nor if you are going to hit the note you want to sing, or decide on the next step in a dance you know - we hear what we say or sing after we have spoken or sung, we dance in a flow or we stumble and get out of sync... but you have to practice skills first to be able to shift your body and mind into the flow that we call speaking, listening, singing, dancing, playing...

@@DNA350ppm You've partially understood what I was saying, and you've partially failed. You are correct that you can't even predict what you're going to say in conversation because you have no idea what your interlocutor will say, thus you can't know ahead of time what responses you will need to produce. That was my point exactly. However, when it comes to sheet music, you do know what the next note you want to produce actually is. Whether you actually hit the note or fluff it is a separate question altogether.

@@bigscarysteve Right! - and when you read you follow the text, too, if you are a good reader. Spontaneous speech is a complex thing.

@bigscarysteve - you've misunderstood the point of the analogy though. Imagine I said "Walking is a bit like driving, in that going faster means using more energy." Does this mean that EVERY part of walking is exactly like driving? No. But is the analogy solid? Yes. My point was you would need to know what sounds right and what doesn't. Although there may be several correct options in speaking, there are still several wrong ones.

Yea plus the equivalent to speaking right away for a brain surgeon would be taking some random guy off the street who has watched all the seasons of Grey’s Anatomy to literally perform brain surgery on a live human day one and have him learn by trial and error. Compare that too the med student who has studied the anatomy for years… watched videos, done sit ins on someone performing surgery and then had multiple practice sessions on a dummy or a rat or something to get a feel for how precise you need to be. I’m taking the med student all day. At least they would instantly recognize any mistake they would make while the random dude would just keep cutting unaware of how badly they were butchering the patient. Input is needed in order to make sure you are practicing properly. Trial and error is so much more frustrating and time consuming and you may never actually get it right unless someone who has had the input can identify the mistakes you make.

I didn't like that example... I believe in terms of language the music example given in the video is even clearer. Composers, performers, and musicians in general don't rely heavily on theory or harmony, because it is implied in the music even if you don't know what you are "doing". Haven't you played some chord progression or melody and asked yourself why does it sound so good? Our ears tell us is good and without knowing we applied "theory". The theory is important and harmony too, they are great tools to expand our vocabulary and to visualize what we do and what we can do or change but it's not mandatory in order to create music... I believe these thoughts can be related to this video topic

Really?? I don’t really understand though

There is absolutely no evidence that learning styles actually exist. "Despite the popularity of learning styles and inventories such as the VARK, it’s important to know that there is no evidence to support the idea that matching activities to one’s learning style improves learning. It’s not simply a matter of “the absence of evidence doesn’t mean the evidence of absence.” On the contrary, for years researchers have tried to make this connection through hundreds of studies." cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/learning-styles-preferences/

or anybody that moves to the place where its spoken.

Yeah I feel like he has some misunderstandings about the whole input idea. In-person interaction with real people is in many ways some of the highest quality input out there, provided you're able to at least partially understand what the speakers of your target language are saying. I don't think anyone is saying input is only books and media.

Your reply just points up what I find to be the deep misunderstanding in Lamont's video. Yes, CHILDREN can learn language just fine by immersion. The problem is, you're not taking into account developmental psychology. After a certain age, the window for language learning by mere exposure closes. Some people may be able to reopen that window, but most can't. What about the immigrant who's been immersed in a foreign language environment for DECADES and still can't speak or understand a word of it?

Most immigrants who speak the national language poorly do so because they spend AS MUCH TIME AS POSSIBLE in their native language. They output more often than they get input, and they seek only to "survive" the national language as much as possible.

@@daysandwords That may be true for some immigrants, but it's certainly not true for all. Many immigrants hear the language of their adopted country around them all day, every day--yet they don't pick it up. Why? First, because the input is not comprehensible, and second, because their language acquisition faculty is not the same as it was when they were children--so they don't pick it up. Many of these people were eager to become a part of the wider society of their adopted country, but when they find they can't pick up the language, they retreat into a ghetto of their native language--usually a ghetto of their own making.

Straw

Like Lamont said, he's a pretty decent guy in the community otherwise, but yeah, that video was basically full of strawman arguments and responses to claims that no one in the input/immersion community even makes. The comments on that video were an absolute circus too!

It's not even snippets. It's pretty much what he says in chronological order. Very few things are omitted.

@@sandwichbreath0 His pinned comment in that video doesn't paint a good image of him.

@@jamesmccloud7535 That one where he doubles-down and throws shade at everyone who disagrees, yeah? I agree.

And then you go to music college and have to stop hearing intervals lest you get smoked by the people who hear it as tonal centres like myself. 😃 Haha, jokes. You're still allowed to hear intervals, they just don't mean much (this is the subject about which I am the BIGGEST nerd of all the things I am a nerd in. I got literally 100% in a few of our aural exams at uni... but I'm the first to admit it's a pretty useless skill!)

@@daysandwords that's strange. How can an interval be a tonal center? Or are you talking about how tonal centers can shift every chord change, like in jazz? Intervals (and chords) are just the relationship of physical vibrations that we can perceive. The idea of forgetting them doesn't make any sense to me, unless you're talking about perfect/absolute pitch.

No no. I just mean that when I got to uni, I had no idea of what "aural skills" were and I was learning everything for the first time. I was up against a bunch of people who had learned to do melody dictation but most of them had done it by INTERVAL and after a few weeks I was absolutely smoking them in class, and by the second exam (end of semester 1) there were two separate races: Me and the other people using tonal centres/harmony to do it, and those using intervals. You don't have to forget intervals, but the problem is, they trick you as our lecturer explained really well. The other problem is, the marks were done backwards - you started with 500 and lost a mark for every mistake you made. If you used intervals and made a mistake after 2 bars, then every single note for the next two bars would also be wrong. I feel like it's intuitive to anyone properly good at music anyway, but basically if you hear something like the opening of Beethoven's 5th, it's easier to work out that it's the 5th down to the third, and then the 4th down to the 2nd. I mean that's a SUPER basic example, but if I had enough time I could sit and write out the entirety of the melody for that symphony and I doubt I'd make a mistake - but someone doing it by intervals would be shot after a few bars.

@@daysandwords I'm going to be honest, I'm not really following your explanation very well... Are you saying that you could hear the melody in the context of the key center, and then used that to transcribe? Or you just can intuitively hear the melody as a whole and have a very good ear/hand connection? None of this really changes my original point though. For someone without a natural ear like yours or ear training, a major third or a minor third sound very similar. But you can definitely train it, and once you've developed your ear to hear certain things (major key vs minor key, cadences, chords and their inversions and alterations, etc), you can't really unhear them. A plagal cadence will always sound like a plagal cadence, you can't not hear it that way, even if you tried. You've "acquired" the ability to hear those things.

That's how it feels after having mastered Mandarin tones years back. You can't "unhear" them, and hearing audio of myself speaking from my first semester in China feels...disturbing.

It would be interesting to hear your level of Swedish because you've kind of been immersing for longer than I have and you wouldn't have had to correct a bunch of bad habits like I did.

Lol, reading that comment brought back some very unpleasant memories. "Pluscuamperfecto", "preterito" - the fuck? I can't even name this shit in English, is it REALLY supposed to matter so much?

@@danieltemelkovski9828 jajajajaja

Pretty much

That is THE point 👏🏻

@Gytis Stankevičius Exactly

Hahaha, here I was thinking Olly didn't have time to watch my videos. He is hiding in the replies! 😂

@@daysandwords lol

"Probably not" 🤣 I believe that I got your point, and I feel it like the difference between execution of instructions to achieve a result and actual ability to solve problems as they appear.

It did make sense, lol, and further underscores the point that language learning is distinct from almost all other endeavours. To build on that, something else that occurred to me while watching the vid -- another flaw in that analogy is that he (appears to) assume that our brain does nothing but observe the surgery, when in fact we know it's practicing the whole time: parsing syntax, grammar, phonemes, pronunciation, comparing, contrasting, experimenting. In reality, the brain is training to output from the day we start immersing: we just don't see all the dummies it carves up along the way, only the fine-tuning it does at the end, when we start training our mouth muscles to 'hold the scalpel steady'. We've all seen young children absent-mindedly talking under their breath as they develop language too, which just further proves the brain is anything but a passive recipient in input/acquisition. Perhaps this misconception of passivity is what informs Christian's/others' skeptism?

@Dapz Fanboy Yes, but I think if you think about that, you'll realise why experienced musicians can play music they've never seen before. Think about the analogy with a language and you'll see that it works perfectly.

"because the human brain is the most complex assortment of matter that we've ever found" Just adding a little joke here: the brain is the most important organ according to the brain :)

You know what's ironic. I believe a lot of surgeons do just this... They learn how to perform a certain surgery from watching a video or reading a book without necessarily ever having a surgeon skilled in that specific surgery guide them through it step by step numerous times until it's done. I saw someone do this MID SURGERY recently in a documentary where they were in India and literally rang someone in Europe to have them show them what to do. They then finished the surgery successfully after performing something they hadn't done before. So, I felt like this was a total straw-man as well as a misunderstanding of learning and of surgery.

Same I have been "learning" English for 8 years (i am an Indonesian) I just watch random things on KZfaq everyday in English and now i just realized that i can speak English without trying to speak it 😂

That's how most Scandinavians learn English, as a French person living there it's surprising to hear them speak perfect English and say "wow iI haven't spoken since highschool ahah", in France where we don't typically watch movies, medias etc in English we learn it only in school with grammar and minimal input and output, and to say that it doesn't quite work is an understatement ^^

I think you're mistankly thinking "fluent" means "native." If you can write this comment and understood every word in this video you're probably 100% fluent even if you've got the thickest accent on earth.

@@windrose5988 By "native", I mean that I can speak it with a nearly native accent. Including sounds that do not exist in my native language.

@@HM-hu4hu Yeah, I was mostly speaking about the part at the beggining of the comment "I am nearly fluent." if you're near native level you've probably been fluent for a very long while.

Ideally, you'd be building a bridge here. Bridges are often built from each end at the same time. Some types of bridges have to be built from both ends in order to be built. The Golden Gate Bridge just outside of San Francisco is a good example, they built the towers, and then built from each tower to the other as they'd run out of cables if they tried to build from one to the other. Unless you've got a short span on the bridge, it was likely built from both sides rather than from just one side. Ideally, you'd be skill building and immersing yourself so as to avoid the wasted time that children spend trying to learn via induction for years before they can communicate enough to learn in more sophisticated ways.

@@SmallSpoonBrigade I agree. I didn't make it clear but I believe everyone should do some level of skillbuilding and traditional language learning alongside immersion to speed up language acquisition. If you understand how a grammar point works a little bit you'll probably pick it up quicker than people who only immerse and have to acquire it like a baby does. However I don't agree with only skillbuilding or having it as the main way to learn a language. Immersion should always be the bulk of what you do. That's the point I was making. Skillbuilding is not that fun for most people, it's slow & you get little or no exposure to the culture/s connected to the language which I think is one of the main reasons people start learning a language anyway. For people learning Japanese a lot of them start learning it because they want to understand anime to enjoy it more instead of learning what a conjunctive is in Japanese.

Arguing that comprehensible input is an invalid theory because most languages aren't written is like arguing that evolution can't be true because not every species has legs. It doesn't address the argument at all, it just tries to make sense of a consequence of it without actually understanding it.

In fact, if the language isn't written down and recorded how are you going to learn it other than finding native speakers to get input from? It seems more fitting as an argument against other methods.

Wow, I have never heard about this method before, seems quite interesting. I’ll try this in my language and musical skills, thanks for the comment!

Yep, exactly. And the more detail the video can show the surgery in, the better. I pinned a comment about this.

Thank you!

He was talking in the context of defining "Acquisition" differently to "Learning" which a specific definition. It seems Krashen coined the term "Acquisition" to mean X thing, rather than the word being used in Linguistics.

@@HoraryHellfire what is the difference with the way it is used by other linguists?

@@alice_hml Acquisition was typically just used in the context of normal language development, as in getting better at language. Like "skill acquisition" is. However, Krashen used the word specifically in a different way from all of this. Instead, "acquisition" is the subconscious and intuitive development of concepts in a language without even having to consciously think about them. While "learning" is all about consciously increasing your knowledge to manually recall, typically by memorization. Prior to Krashen's "Acquisition-Learning Hypothesis", the word "acquisition" in Linguistics was not used like Krashen uses it.

Well, they kinda do because it leads to more views but yeah, if they paid directly that'd be awesome haha

Sports receive input too. The actual process of moving your body is input because your brain notices what you're doing and what effect it has on the ball.

Yeah, and it's very similar in the other European countries which don't dub, like Denmark, Sweden etc. Meanwhile in France where everything's in French, generally lower level of English.

Fint KZfaq namn!

@@daysandwords Och det var i stort sett allt som var fint med den kommentaren från Någonsson. Självklart skiljer sig metoderna att lära sig och lära ut, mellan språk med skriftspråk och språk utan skriftspråk. Det måste man få granska som linguist! Tänk t.ex. på slang, hur lär man sig det? - Lärorikt! Håll ställningarna, Lamont! Hoppas jag skrev ditt namn rätt! Tummen upp!

Here in Mexico we said "campechanear" it comes from a taco with a mix of ingredients...you can aply it when you're given options and you want all of them in a small amount so...I pretty love to learn languages campechaneando métodos. My language journey seems to be pretty messy thou

@@DNA350ppm uhm, du förstod att Någonssons kommentar är riktad mot känguru eller? Jag håller med Någonsson att känguru verkar väldigt arg på nåt som han inte verkar ha förstått riktigt.

@@StarGirlJones "This guy" är faktiskt i så fall en missvisande anföring, och efter moget övervägande kom jag fram till att ifall Någonsson ville uttrycka sig så kritiskt som han gjorde, med någon som helst trovärdighet, så borde han veta hur han ska klargöra vem han talar om. Därför kan man tänka sig att han skulle kunna använda uttrycket "this guy" korrekt, och nämligen med det närmast hänvisa till videons skapare. Annars förväntar sig läsaren att han åtminstone skulle ha skrivit "that guy". Så för att svara på din fråga, Star Girl: jag förstod huvuddragen av debatten i videon, men tyckte att det var lite för snobbigt att utgå ifrån att Någonsson hade uttryckt sig fel. Hur kom du själv fram till din tolkning av Någonssons kommentar - läste du in din egen åsikt? Också jag anser att "känguru-mannen" bara delvis har rätt - jag vet nämligen att man måste öva sig mycket, för att träna munnen och hjärnan att prata på ett främmande språk, i synnerhet som vuxen. Men för ett gott resultat i det långa loppet, måste man ju öva in det rätta uttalet och den riktiga grammatiken, och då behöver man goda förebilder och hjälpsam respons, och tillgång till ett varierat ordförråd och en grundläggande grammatisk struktur - allt det är en komplicerad process, som kräver rätt stor begreppsapparat och mycket tålamod och precision att ha en meta-diskussion omkring. Mycket av vårt pratande är rent intuitivt, både på modersmålet och andra språk, så det är t.o.m. svårt att hitta begripliga ord för att uttrycka vad som sker. Jag är själv t.ex. inte lingvist nog att bena ut det, trots att jag rent praktiskt har hittat vägen till (tillräckligt) god språkkunskap, både som "elev" och "lärare". Förresten grälar experterna om hur språkinlärning och språkanvändning egentligen går till. En del som jag uppfattar som vettiga, menar att vi människor har en medfödd intellektuell beredskap att uppfatta och lära oss grammatiska mönster (paradigm), vilket t.ex. märks när barn säger *fådde och *gådde för att uttrycka preteritum, istället för fick och gick. Det har sin logik, för det heter ju ha och *hadde (stavat hade), må och mådde, titta och tittade. Det finns många liknande exempel på tidiga steg i inlärningen, en slags förförståelse. Då brukar ibland nån i närheten blixtsnabbt ge den rätta formen, liksom i förbigående, utan att avbryta fokus på innehållet i kommunikationen. Jag har t.o.m. hört bebisar jollra "meningar" med tydlig svensk satsmelodi, utan ett begripligt ord. Om man som vuxen inte pratar med någon som kan bättre, så behöver man kompenserande metoder för att lära sig att uttrycka sig språkriktigt, men bevare oss väl för språk-poliser i vardagliga sammanhang. Att läsa och att lyssna på ljudböcker samtidigt är en väldigt effektiv bidragande metod att förbättra sin språkliga repertoar, men om man inte också pratar, skriver, samtalar, debatterar, så får man aldrig någon riktig koll på vad man har lyckats lära sig aktivt. Då kan man t.ex. fortsätta och säga e i stället för ö och a i stället för å i svenskan, eller tappa tredje person singularis presens -s i engelskan och arrangera orden i fel ordning både i svenskan och tyskan, och inte bry sig så mycket om partitiv i franskan, finesser som man man inte har uppmärksammat, medvetet. Det är lätt hänt att man liksom fastnar kvar på fådde&gådde -nivån. På samma sätt som ett barn varken hör eller ser man alltid själv sina missförstånd. Och en del av svårigheten med distans och korrektion blir nog kvar hela livet. Våra bästa författare ges ut först efter att lektörer har granskat deras texter i detalj. Min generella hållning är att vi, trots många välmenande försök att ringa in språkinlärningens och språkpedagogikens komplikationer, ser många förenklingar och förhastade slutsatser på KZfaq. Också jag själv "skjuter från höften" ibland, och det blir lite si och så med träffsäkerheten i hastigheten. Ska det vara tillspetsad debatt, eller nyanserat i enlighet med ämnets natur?

Cheers!

i am an elderly lady and i am always interested, how people learn......so i like to listen to what musicians and all kind of artists have to say.....the ones, who are really good, would say.....expose yourself, listen, watch, observe how the best do it.....then copy them.......and eventually you might try yourself......compose, dance, paint, write.....whatever........

@@fabian-rutter Of course I did. Similar to a child asking their parent what an unknown word means.

Don't tempt me Frodo!

Thank you. Honestly I HATE having to abbreviate, so even saying things like "And every native Swedish speaker can do this", I always want to add a subtitle or something that says 99.5%* or something haha.

One interesting point is the "improvisational" bit. A professional pianist will spend many hours practicing the same piece over and over until they can play it perfectly. But this doesn't make sense in a language context. It would be like you had memorized all of Shakespeare's plays, and could recite them perfectly, and yet that was all the English you knew. In this case, while having you over at a dinner party would no doubt be an interesting experience, it would not be accomplishing the typical goals we expect of a language. Language is improvisational in a way that few musicians can hope to approach.

@@Keldor314 That's assuming that the "practice" is for the purpose of just outputting. The whole point of deliberate practice (that the expert pianists in the example do) is not to output with no feedback. The whole point of practice is to get feedback, and that feedback is input. The form of this feedback is the information of what your fingers are doing, in what order, at what angle, at what strength, at what time, etc etc and also hearing the result (the notes in sequence). Literally the whole point of deliberate practice is so your brain can get input. So, _just_ like an expert pianist practicing a specific segment paying attention to the details of it, a language learner would want to focus only on a subset of comprehensible input until they "get it down" and then move onto another section of comprehensible input. And this keeps happening until they've acquired enough input where they can make general statements fully improvised at a whim. But just like a novice pianist can improvise a little bit, a novice in a language would be able to improvise simple sentences.

@@HoraryHellfire When you do deliberate practice too early when learning a language, you actually do not have feedback. That is, yes, you can hear yourself speak, but you really have no idea if you're doing it correctly, you're just making an educated guess. Once you've mastered basic pronounciation, your ability is largely dependent on intuitive knowledge. This is very different from piano, since for piano the "pronounciation" is difficult. That is, in the more difficult pieces, learning the complex finger gymnastics to produce the music accurately and expressively is far harder than understanding or memorizing the music itself. If a language used these sorts of difficult to pronounce phrases, no one would be able to speak it. It's for this reason that there are very few pianists in the world who are capable of performing improvised music more difficult than what would be considered intermediate-advanced. This is where the music/language analogy breaks down - the only people who practice speaking in anything remotely similar to the way musicians do playing are actors learning lines for a play or a movie.

@@Keldor314 Languages do not have feedback from any amount of "practice" except the ability to make basic sounds. No amount of output directly results in input. That's the difference between languages and most skills. However, that doesn't change the fact that the purpose of deliberate practice in those aforementioned skills is to acquire input. The idea is that the "Input Hypothesis" applies to all skills, including language learning. But since most skills require you to interact with something to get input, most people think it's the interaction that results in improvement, not the input. "Learning the complex finger gymnastics" is also about input. When you move your fingers, the angle, force, speed, etc etc are all details that your brain notices when executing it. And your brain notices the result in the environment (e.g. sound) from that. This is input. Changing the details like moving your fingers at a different time at a slightly different angle is new information for your brain to watch and then notice the result. Just like seeing a word you somewhat know the meaning of in a new context, your brain has to notice the way your fingers move slightly differently (in a new context). The analogy doesn't break down. It only breaks down because you still misunderstand what is actually "comprehensible input". A pianist doesn't get better by doing the same thing over and over again, especially at the highest ability. They get better by deliberate practice facilitating input for their brain to understand. Again, deliberate practice is all about maximizing comprehensible input so you can understand how and/or why you should do something different than you were doing it before. That's why so many people are "bad" at any skill, because almost nobody actually knows the concept of deliberate practice. It's also the same reason why the vast majority of people take a language class, receive skill-building approaches, and then can't speak it after 2-3 years. Because the whole point of improvement in _ANYTHING_, including other skills, is comprehensible input. If your brain doesn't subconsciously understand how "X" is better to do, then it will never improve.

@@HoraryHellfire Well, there are two big aspects to learning a difficult piece of music. One is the technical, which is indeed learned through careful repetition, starting very slow, then gradually faster until you can play them at the intended speed. If you are ever to tackle any of the truly spectacularly difficult piano works, such as just about anything written by Liszt, you have to do this. And yes, it is every bit as much of a grind as it sounds. The second component is the all important expression. Getting good expression on a piece is more intuitive, more like learning language would be, and is the part of practice most like what you're describing. But the approach you take to piano practice still isn't the sort of approach that would be good for learning a language. Let me give you an example to demonstrate: Imagine that you want to learn to recite Shakespeare's "To be or not to be" soliloquy from Hamlet. To do this, you would go through it line by line, memorizing it all, and after that, keep going through it, analyzing each phrase, feeling out the precise meaning and figuring out how to accent the words just so. You would try saying each phrase a few different ways, picking the one you like best to use in the end, and in places wonder what Shakespeare was smoking when he choose a word that you feel just doesn't sit right. In the end, after much careful analysis and a lot of practice, you would be able to deliver the soliloquy with such eloquance that it would bring your audience to tears over the tragedy of it all. This is the way in which pianists practice their music. But it still isn't a very good way to learn English.

Haha maybe. Some people suggested that he's baiting but I don't think he is.

Probably mad cause input methods couldn't bring his hair back