You’ve ascribed to me numerous negative characteristics without any evidence. I do not have a low tolerance for ambiguity. I do not expect very simple sentences. I do not have a passive “Don’t make me think attitude”. You’ve suggested I use the wrong tools at the beginning. I find your post rather condescending and offensive.
You’ve also stated that you’ve checked romance and germanic stories, and they are all OK. It sounds like you are saying “I’ve checked this, I’m an authority, and you are wrong”. You do realise that is your opinion, not fact? Are you a native English speaker? I suspect you are not a native English speaker, so you don’t appreciate the challenges.
My language learning experience goes back 50 years. Over just under two years I’ve got my French to a level where I can understand native content as long as it is not too ‘street’. Thus a French soap would be hard, but a current affairs debate easy. German is a new language that I started a year ago.
I’m a fan in the broad sense of Stephen Krashen’s theories, as they agree with my own experiences. Thus he states that one learns by having input that is mostly comprehensible e.g. 95%. Having a story where the learner understands almost nothing requires that the learner spends large amounts of time deconstructing the text word by word. I find that tedious and it’s not a good way to learn. That in my opinion is the problem with using the German short stories as a new beginner. I don’t agree with Krashen that the material needs to be 95% comprehensible, but the key is quantity. Huge amounts of largely comprehensible input is key. I have listened to countless hours of French input where my comprehension was low, maybe 50%. That can be useful. If the issue is the pronunciation, then listening can tune the ear to that speaker. Thus it can be useful to listen to a text while reading a transcript even when one does not understand much, in order to train the brain to recognise the (largely meaningless) words. But in general I have found it far more useful to use input with a higher level of comprehensible content.
Thus I am not saying someone needs lots of simple sentences, rather I am saying they need large amounts of material which gradually gets harder. I am pretty much putting forward Krashen’s approach, which is hardly controversial these days.
As regards apps such as Duolingo, well my view is that Duolingo is [censored]. Tools such as Babbel are okay, they have the advantage that they guide the user, but my experience is that they are not very effective for countless reasons I won’t go into here.
LingQ is very powerful but it’s very unstructured, which makes it hard to use for complete beginners to language learning. I suspect LingQ is not suitable for someone with little or no experience of language learning. That though is an opinion, it would be interesting to hear from anyone who has used it as a beginner, and if so, how they went about learning.
