Way to learn foreign languages

Question

It's my first post here.

I was planning for a long time to learn another foreign language. Polish is my mother tongue and I also speak english. Not on a professional level of course but I'm pretty satisfied with it. I can understand and I'm understood most of times.

Anyway, yesterday I came across a youtube video made by a man who speaks 8 languages. He stated that today's methods of teaching languages at schools are completely incorrect.

He said that learning grammar in the beginning was a bad idea. As an example, he mentioned his daughter who was 4 years old and spoke polish, spanish, english and portuguese. Such a kid mustn't have a clue about any grammar. Kids don't know about adjectives, attributives and stuff like that and still they are able to wield those languages. It's stunning, isn't it?

His suggestion was to:

• Find 1000 most common words in a given language and memorize them
• Do something he called "absolute immersion" which can be listening for 4-8 hours a day to some news radio channel even without fully understanding it (not music, because it stimulates other part of brain or sth like that)
• Reading texts with phonetic notation and physically repeating it

So here come my questions:

1. What do you think about that way of learning new languages?
2. Has anyone tried this? If yes, how would you describe the result?
3. Do you know any good websites where I can find XXXX most commom words in a given language?
4. Have you got any other good and rather fast method?

Answer 1

Any advice on learning an additional language is kind of like dieting advice. It has probably worked for a few people at some point. But it generally involved unrealistic expectations about behavior and resources. This particular advice is more than a little kooky because it completely ignores communication but it would certainly take you some of the way towards learning the language. But memorizing 1,000 words is not trivial. Also, completely unfiltered radio or TV is probably not very useful without at least some initial guidance.

If you really want to devote that much time and effort to learning a language, Benny, the Irish polyglot offers more comprehensive advice in the same vein on his website here: http://www.fluentin3months.com.

Language learning is hard and it takes a lot of time. So whichever way you slice it, you will have to put in the hours. The internet is certainly a helpful resource for that.

As to the point about adults modelling their learning after that of children, that is completely unrealistic. Children have different motivations, life experiences and generally not as fully developed cognitive strategies as adults. Giving up on those (such as by ignoring any grammar at all) is foolish. However, the biggest obstacle will be inhibitions and trying to maintain your linguistic identity. So that's certainly a lesson, you can learn from children. Simple immersion without marshaling at least some of your adult cognitive advantages would be unwise. There is also a lot of individual variation in how well different adults learn without some sort of guidance.

Perhaps an even better resource is therefore Rebecca Oxford's learning strategy inventory.

Answer 2

In my own experience as an English teacher, I'd like to share that I've thought using both methods: Teaching without giving any grammar structures and teaching guided by grammar, and the outcomes in both situations haven't been good enough. In the first case the students were given a lot of vocabulary per class, but they didn't know how to use it in the right way, on the other hand when I taught following grammar points, the students learned in a mechanical way, that's way I think the best way to learn another language is doing it following a natural approach.

Answer 3

Learning grammar in the beginning is a great idea. It's true, we before learning any formal grammar can be great in our native languages but didn't you ever notice that after learning grammar our communicative abilities get even better?

To me, fluency of a language means expressing your thoughts in words as exactly as possible and without knowing well the rules that govern the usage of the words you cannot reach that goal. Then again you can learn some rules unconsciously, as you learn constructions that are common in the language but in this way your mastery of the rules is limited simply because speech is a much more active activity than most people think - we have to be (consciously) aware of the rules to explore them the best.

Now, I don't mean to say that you should learn grammar first and vocabulary after. It's just that grammar doesn't and shouldn't be completely left out as the guy from your video suggested.

Answer 4

*Is very interesting your post although it isn´t a discussion board I will give my opinion. Firstly, I think the learning depend of the student´s motivation, if he wants to learn a new language will do everything to achieve it. Second, is important to have study habits (adult learners) to learn out of classes and to dedicate many hours to the study.

Also there are many strategies and methods to teach and learn a L2 and currently the technology advances give us many tools to self manage our learning.

On the other hand, the psycholinguistic areas that explain the acquisition of language. Based on their conceptual baggage and researches about that, teaching and learning strategies are developed and improved.

The idea of "total immersion" is great but difficult ´cause the context influences a lot, but as much as possible we can seek to be in contact with the language we are trying to learn.