I feel you. Spanish went into my brain easily. French less easily but still easily. Russian has been like hammering nails into rock. And then after a few weeks if I stop hammering the nails fall out.
The learning process is pretty similar for most languages but the lack of cognates to individual sounds as well as words makes it a grind.
That said, in my estimation it’s still 5X faster than a child does it. So there’s that.
Yeah the confidence gained from learning one language cannot be understated.
I learned French after Spanish just to see if my new method (audio first) would work. It did. I tackled Russian next. And although it has been a harder lift (at least 2-3X slower for vocab to stick) it has definitely worked. Which is unbelievable to me. I can understand Russian: Holy crap!!!
My thesis is that it’s the same in SLA: just listening / reading more and more (being comfortable) is like jogging at a slow pace and then hoping that you’ll survive a highly intense basketball game (well: you won’t!).
That is, it’s probably better (at least if a high level of fluency and / or literacy is your L2 goal) not simply to increase the exposure time (in the sense of a “mass immersion approach”), but to increase the level of L2 intensity (as early as possible).
Wait, are you saying that you can’t get a high degree of literacy in Mandarin without speaking? I respectfully disagree… (god the amount of internet slang I encounter…looking up words in baidu > talking to a random language exchange partner about your pet)
There’s an entire community of webnovel fans that have a high degree of reading & listening comprehension and only do reading & listening & SRS and barely any output.
And doing a lot of listening while reading an audiobook (like Steve recommends) has been the most obvious boost to my listening skills recently. Not doing “drills” (ugh)
If you want to speak, practice speaking, but if you don’t care about it’s perfectly fine to ignore, better to just read and listen a lot to enjoyable content.
I think part of the argument is that even “just reading” or input we will naturally cap if we simply remain comfortable. Even reading and listening are skills that require intention and some amount of dedicated practice to get better at.
If the goal is bring input to a high level, near native, whatever. Then we still have to keep pushing us beyond our comfort zone. Reading things that are more challenging or more actively engaging with what’s being read.
Well, an actual vocabulary of 9 000 words is supposed to be the starting point for HP. However depending on the language you are learning there can be a multiplier effect. Russian is so highly inflected that a word may be in your LingQ vocabulary 10 or 20 times over, with different endings. If you know 98% of words on a page you can read comfortably without a dictionary. If you know 85% you can chew your way through with a lot of dictionary lookups. Less that that and you probably need a bilingual version so you can keep comparing your target language with the same thing in your native language. All of which, of course, LingQ now provides.
Hi, Paul!
“the biggest problem most people have is being consistent”
When it comes to processes of practical skills acquisition (sports, language learning, entrepreneurial skills, programming, math, etc.), learners have “many” problems, e.g.:
However, “consistency” isn’t one of them. Why? Because it’s a consequence of the issues mentioned above.
unless we´re talking about highly motivated people with a lot of time on their hands"
No. Wrong perspective, wrong attitude and completely wrong approach! 
Learners should never rely on fleeting operations of the mind (feeling like it, motivation, fun, etc.)- at least if they want to master a practical skill.
However, if they do, they’ll create countless problems for themselves:
In order to avoid all those self-created problems, it’s better to rely on seven things:
And that’s your “basic receipe” for having success in all processes of practical skills acquisition (but, of course, we could add a few other things to the list as well: for example, a network / community of fellow learners, tracking tools, etc.).
BTW, there´s no contrast “habit” versus “fun” because the simple habit-based idea is:
BTW, that’s also against Master Steve’s idea that language teachers should mainly be motivators (see one his recent LingQ posts), which is from my teaching experience in SLA, math, and programming also the completely wrong, because teacher- and motivation-centric approach.
Instead, (language) teachers should act as coaches and mentors who help people become independent learners who can acquire practical skills effectively and efficiently on their own.
Nowadays, we need more and more this type of learner because only such learners are well-equipped for “lifelong” learning.
However, I’ve met many people in my life who said that “lifelong” learning wasn’t their thing. Unfortunately, these people either have no future in the job market, especially if they want to be knowledge workers, or they have implicitly chosen to disqualify themselves…
“you almost automaticcaly end up with an input-heavy approach”
Yes, I agree. Time constraints are definitely an issue for many people, esp. adults.
However, there’s a difference between “input-heavy” and “input-only”
The more language learners include self-talk, artificial SRSes, speaking and writing activities in their general “input orientation”, the better they’ll get in their L2s (and, when it comes to writing, even in their L1 )
The problem with “input-only” isn’t that it’s completely passive, because that 's impossible. Rather, the problem is that reading/listening are (pattern) recognition operations in which the degree of engagement with the L2 is less than in speaking and/or writing activities in which the language material is “used” (which, of course, requires pattern recognition operations).
[Nota bene: the distinction “recognition / use” (or something similar) replaces the traditional distinction “passive / active” because there’s no completely “passive” listening (or reading)].
In short, reading / listening is mentally less intense than speaking / writing. That’s why it’s a good idea not to rely exclusively on an “input-only” approach.
But how you do that as a “busy bee” … well, that’s another story
I’d be surprised if HP was 9000 words because it’s a kids book.
9000 words will get you 99% or higher comprehension for any given text.
It’s more like 5000 words for 97%.
But tbh if you’re reading in lingQ, 3000 words might be enough because it gets you 94% which is a relatively easy lift since all you have to do is click on it.
That said, you’re right about a very important point: lingQ counts all forms of a word as a word. So as you correctly pointed out, a word might not be a word as far as the research is concerned. On the other hand, it’s relatively easy to get the gist even if you don’t know the new ending based on a previously learned different version of a word.
Actual stats (for English) can be found here:
“are you saying that you can’t get a high degree of literacy in Mandarin without speaking”
It depends on what you mean by “high degree”.
Based on my experience in quite heterogeneous academic disciplines, I take the following position regarding literacy:
In short, you may develop an ok or even good reading comprehension both in your L1 and L2 with a “reading (while listening) only” approach, but your degree of literacy will never be “great” without any writing activities.
Mutatis mutandis, the same is true for speaking and listening: if you want to achieve a high level of fluency, then you have to practice both. Listening alone (with or without reading) isn’t sufficient. But, of course, some learners are happy with just developing their listening comprehension
Apart from that, orality and literacy influence each other, but that’s another (more complicated) story that leads directly to linguistics and communication research (see, for example, LANGUAGE OF IMMEDIACY - LANGUAGE OF DISTANCE: ORALITY AND LITERACY FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF LANGUAGE THEORY AND LINGUISTIC HISTORY | Semantic Scholar).
“Reading things that are more challenging or more actively engaging with what’s being read.”
Both
Ultimately, it’s about finding the sweet spot between challenging and overwhelming.
Exactly. The “N+1”. Challenging ourselves just beyond the comfort zone.
After a point with literature where the language is no longer the barrier, then I would challenge myself to think about the work critically. Not just what happened, but what does it mean or what was the author trying to say?
Critical Lenses can be a great exercise for those who want something to get started with.
Literature is not generally best taken at face value or a simple summary of events that happened. Crime novels or YA fiction can be great fun or escapism, and a great means to break into a new language, but they do not typically challenge adult readers much.
I’m reading the narnia series. Set in the 40s so a bit dated but probably about the same level as Harry Potter.
“Crime novels or YA fiction can be great fun or escapism, and a great means to break into a new language, but they do not typically challenge adult readers much.”
Couldn’t agree more.
I like Stephen King novels (“It”, “The Dark Tower”, etc.), for example. For learning American English, they’re great. However, they’re not intellectually challenging.
If I want to read something challenging, I’ll read novels by Thomas Pynchon, etc.
It’s the same in other languages…
Besides, a problem with “popular” fiction is often that it contains too many clichés. For example, I love World history and European history and, a few months ago, I wanted to read more about Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages.
The books by historians like Chris Wickham or Peter Heather were great, but when I switched to a novel about Aetius/Attila, I had to stop reading after about a hundred pages because I couldn’t take it anymore.
Yes, I know my mantra is “get comfortable with the uncomfortable”. But if I want to bang my head on my Kindle because the novel is so intellectually depressing … well, I guess I’m still too “soft” mentally
Maybe listening to 100 speeches by Donald Trump, watching 100 flat earth videos on YT, or reading 100 Doc Savage novels in a row will make me stronger.
I want to see how you write English after 100 Trump speeches.
“Good writers are always good readers.”
I’ve always been a pretty average reader, at least in terms of speed and accuracy, since I read quite slow and misread quite a bit. However, I write like William Shakespeare and George Orwell spitroasting an angel.
“I want to see how you write English after 100 Trump speeches.”
One word:
MEGA = make English great again… because the real downfall of the American Empire began in 1066.
Since then English sounds like French with the wrong pronunciation
I talked about this a year ago, but I have not slowed down (even if I have not been on LingQ much in the past few months).
But I went from just starting in Swedish and Norwegian (A0-A1 at that time) and maybe an A2 level in German to in the past week: I taught my Swedish class, met a retired geology professor from Germany who invited me to a networking group he organizes (in German) and met an Author/Biographer from Hamar who gave me her card (no idea to what end).
The path is long, but if you continue to challenge yourself, you will continue to get better.
To put it as succinctly as possible:
This video is not directly about language learning, but I think it is very applicable for those that have not seen it.
I am not a stoic, so I won’t advocate that discomfort is a good thing in-and-of itself. So the discomfort of listening to 100 Trump speeches with a goal of learning good American is not advisable by any measure.
“MEGA = make English great again… because the real downfall of the American Empire began in 1066.
Since then English sounds like French with the wrong pronunciation :-)”
Decolonising Enlgish? This is an idea I can get behind.
“Maybe listening to 100 speeches by Donald Trump, watching 100 flat earth videos on YT…” - I actually started a language exchange with a brilliant polyglot who turned out to be a flat earther. I was in utter disbelief. Goes to show you can be really smart in one field and utterly dumb and delusional in another. I gave up talking to them very quickly since there is only so much an aspie like myself can take of that kind of nonsense before I totally sperg out.