Does Krashen’s Input Hypothesis & Comprehensible Input Work for Learning Mandarin Chinese?

Open Forum
41

“Ugh. You mean to say you spent a bunch of time specifically learning tone pairs and combinations of these for different syllables? That has to be hundreds of combinations.”

Try tens of thousands. But the point is there are only 20 possible combinations of tone pairs and you quickly get into the mental habit of attaching vocabulary to tone pairs. After a while it becomes no more difficult to memorise the tones of a new piece of vocabulary than it does the initial or final.

So you need to put in the legwork to build the right mental habits but once you’ve done this it becomes much easier.

42

“I’ve listened to two of your podcasts and you’re 2 for 2 for them being interesting!”

Thank you very much! And you’re in luck because there’s a back catalogue of around 20 previous episodes waiting for you to listen to :slight_smile:

43

I’m not convinced. For example, until recently I had never even heard of the concept of stress accent. It is not taught in school as far as I know. So I, and probably most learners of English, at least if they come from a Germanic language background get good enough by being ignorant about the topic. If listening to Dutch or Scandinavian people speak English I don’t notice their stress accent being particularly bad. I did hear some French people struggle though.
To me that means that we are dealing either with an innate / early childhood / critical period thing, where one has to be exposed to it before a certain age to be able to notice and/or produce it, or it can be learned intuitively later on even without deliberate study. The latter would weaken your argument.
As I said above, my belief is that, if one is unfamiliar with the concept of tones in Language, it seems sensible to first explicitly learn about it, learn to notice it especially by breaking it down into digestible chunks so as not to overload the brain with too much new information. Trusting your brain to pick out this particular, still unfamiliar concept, out of a stream of incomprehensible input of language intended for native speakers seems optimistic.

If there is a spectrum ranging from total immersion learning, eschewing any deliberate practice on the one side, to doing grammar drills and vocabulary memorization on the other; this seems to be rather close to the latter end. Personally I believe in the virtues of moderation…
But of course I realize, different people have different goals. For me communication and understanding are primary goals, tones and pronunciation are secondary, perfection isn’t a goal at all :slight_smile: Certainly, others like Mischa are much more ambitious and it is quite natural they require a different kind of regimen to reach their goals. What I’m a bit uncomfortable about is to recommend this kind of approach to the general learner, who might just be fine with good enough.

44

“So I, and probably most learners of English, at least if they come from a Germanic language background get good enough by being ignorant about the topic.”

Right. But the key point here is it depends which language your coming from. Syllable stress in Mandarin works very differently than in English - there are even debates about whether syllable stress even exists in Mandarin. So when Chinese people learn English their brains usually don’t pick up syllable stress. In this sense it is directly analogous to the way our brains don’t pick up tones.

“If there is a spectrum ranging from total immersion learning, eschewing any deliberate practice on the one side, to doing grammar drills and vocabulary memorization on the other; this seems to be rather close to the latter end. Personally I believe in the virtues of moderation…”

So do I. I think much more time should be spent on immersive listening and reading activities than on anything else. But I also maintain there are key issues which require intervention through drills and tones is one of them.

“Certainly, others like Mischa are much more ambitious and it is quite natural they require a different kind of regimen to reach their goals.”

This is a common misconception about me. I don’t think my goals are that ambitious. I only ever wanted to be able to speak clearly. Sounding exactly like a native has never been my goal.

But I have found that speaking clearly is quite challenging in Chinese for two reasons:

  1. Tones are not taught well from the start leading to learners having to take corrective measures afterwards. That’s hard work.

  2. In Chinese teaching, standards and expectations placed on learners are generally far lower than for other languages. There is a wider culture that says for foreigners, being minimally comprehensible is good enough.

It’s a vicious cycle. Teachers don’t teach tones properly, then their expectations on new learners are set by their encounters with learners whose tones are bad. As a result many teachers and ordinary native speakers will tell you you’re excellent and can stop practicing tones way before the point you have genuinely become easy to understand (a goal many believe to be unattainable and unrealistic).

I refuse to accept that expectations of Chinese learners should be any different from those placed on learners of any other language, e.g. English.

45

“It’s not a question of which is more efficient. It’s clear there are some aspects of pronunciation in all languages which are never acquired. Not “late acquired” - the term Krashen is fond of using. But NEVER acquired.
I have met Chinese academics who have lived and worked in the UK for decades. They have read thousands of academic papers, hundreds of millions of words. They are surrounded by native speakers and have been exposed to tens of thousands of hours of the language. Yet they speak with very thick Chinese accents. No amount of further input will change that.”

Never acquired? Wow. Only a Sith deals in absolutes, haha.

Just another unscientific comment from me as well: I´ve seen the opposite many times in my life as well. I remember vividly a Chinese professor that lived in Brazil and he had a PERFECT pronunciation and Brazilian Portuguese accent, nobody would never say he was Chinese.

In the 20 years I´ve been living in Japan, I´ve seen many Chinese people with perfect Japanese as well (I hope nobody will say they are similar and therefore easier to learn, because despite the kanji/hanzi, there isn´t much similarity) that even Japanese people couldn´t identify they weren´t Japanese.

After having such a musical developed brain, I always thought they had a bigger advantage in learning different sounds in less phonologically complex languages. Maybe it´s more difficult the other way around for us poor atonal creatures :slight_smile:

46

Yes, never acquired. Literally never ever ever acquired. People can continue immersing in comprehensible input continuously for hours a day for the rest of their life and there will always be aspects of the language they never acquire. They have no choice but to resort to learning.

The outliers you mention almost certainly relied to a high degree on learning (not merely acquisition through comprehensible input). I’ve interviewed multiple of such people on my podcast and they all took time out of their comprehensible input schedule to learn. Shadowing, feedback from a teacher, memorisation, echoing etc.

That has also been my own experience getting to a high level of Mandarin pronunciation.

As for Chinese people having advantages learning Japanese pronunciation well, actually there is some evidence that they do. Since Mandarin is a tonal language Chinese people may have a strong advantage picking up pitch accent. This was something Matt Vs Japan mentioned when I interviewed him.

47

Oh, so you are just using acquiring as a synonym of comprehensible input? I didn’t mean to say they did that only through input, I have no idea how they did.

Couldn’t care less for Matt Vs Japan and I never studied pitch accent to get to a high level of Japanese, that was the least important topic of all concerning learning it, but that’s a different topic.

48

I’m using the Krashenite distinction between “acquisition vs learning”. Acquisition is the unconscious proccess of internalising the language through comprehensible input. Learning is applying the conscious brain to deliberate study e.g. memorisation, grammar study, tone drills etc.

I mentioned Matt because you brought up examples of people who had flawless accents in different languages. Matt has come close to native with Japanese pronunciation and did so by spending ages learning pitch accent which he was unable to acquire through input alone.

He observed Chinese people tend to have better pitch accent than students from non-tonal backgrounds and were able to acquire it to a high level in a way that English native speakers were not.

Unlike tones you don’t need pitch accent to be understood but you do need it to speak with a native or near native accent like the people in the examples you raised.

49

I feel like Krashen’s theory will only work (for fluency) if you get the volume a native would during the first 4-5 years. I genuinely believe that’s the issue. The fact that no adult, or hardly any adult, can afford that kind of time immersed in L2 (let alone replicate the environment) means that we very rarely see the results to back it up.

Therefore, 99.9% of people either give up, or else they go down the feedback/corrections ‘skill building’ route, just to get themselves saying something.

FWIW, IMO, doing so will improve their ability to speak, but it comes at the price of skipping the HUGE volume needed for it to come naturally, and ultimately, much more fluently. If you have the hours spare to go ‘allin’ with immersion, that’s going to produce far better results in the long run than to skill build your way.

All that said, there’s a huge reason why 99% of people look to skill build, which is the amount of time they have available. If you can only spend an hour or so a day (or probably even up to 3 hours), you’re probably never going to reach a truly high level using comprehensible input, so skill building will at least get you speaking/understanding to an acceptable level.

For me, personally, I’m not that interested in just being ‘OK’ at a language, I’d much rather reach the highest level possible, or else not bother. But I know other people are different, and actually most are quite happy to get themselves to a conversational level, and accept that some movies/literature will forever be out of reach, which is fine BTW.

50

To be fair michilini is some kind of sith.

51

Had to look this one up:

“The Sith Order are depicted as an ancient monastic and kraterocratic cultist organization of supernaturally gifted Force-wielders driven by a machiavellian-imperialist agenda of galactic domination and revenge against the Jedi Order.”

So it’s a compliment. Awesome.

52

I’m going to throw my sample-of-one 2c into the ring here:
I believe there is a most efficient method at least as far as getting to intermediate is concerned. It’s this:
If you don’t have five years of free time or a year in jail you need to optimize.
98% of all spoken language consists of the top 5,000 most frequent words.
It therefore stands to reason that deliberately memorizing those words (somehow) instead of waiting for them to appear should be more efficient.
Here’s why… The human brain (and the rest of the human organism) has evolved to not use more effort than strictly necessary in order to do anything.
Therefore we have evolved to accumulate the minimum necessary number of words in the most likely scenario that a human being would have (small village worth of input). Lets say it’s the average 10 year old villager’s level we would consider to be advanced fluent. We can speculate how many hours of input that is (X total hours to get 5,000 words memorized).

If brute memorization gets you those 5,000 words memorized in less than X total hours of effort then it is de facto more efficient. If it does not, then it isn’t. Just math.

Likewise, the same can be said of output. The average 10 year old villager will have Y hours of natural outputting in a stress free non-drill environment. If your deliberate practice method will get you the equivalent output in less than Y hours then it’s more efficient.

In both cases I believe you can. The question is “by how much”?

That’s a more tricky answer and the devil is in the details. The first point is deciding what is the baseline. We’re all over the map here.

For that reason I think it’s important to define what is your goal specifically.

I can say with 100% confidence that I can get to listening comprehension of classroom style speech in any language with just input and anki memorization in six months.

I will not be able to get to classroom language level of output with only that. Nor will I get to my eventual goal of being able to understand netflix shows without subtitles. Something else is required for the two additional goals and I haven’t figured out what it is yet.

We may speculate but I think deliberate practice is likely part of it. Steve Kaufmann for example tends to start talking to natives when he “feels ready” to improve his output. Clearly Steve does not believe his input will magically enable him to speak perfectly or else he wouldn’t do his output piece

Michilini said (probably correctly) that native Chinese won’t understand you unless you drill tones. His English university buddy drilled tones (among other things) and is “wow he’s so amazing” levels of speaking.

In my own case I believe cases in Russian cannot be acquired for active output without drilling.

TLDR
Anyhow end result yes I believe some combo of deliberate practice and input is absolutely necessary to get past intermediate.