Only if the adult is in an intense crash course, and can take six months off work, and pay the large course fees. I worked for two years in a foreign country, with intermediate language skills, and most of my time was spent behind a desk doing work, not using the language, and even back home I didn’t spend much time talking to flat mates, they didn’t want to act as unpaid language tutors.
It is a myth that an adult learns best by immersion in the target country, learning can be more effective in one’s own country. That has been my experience anyway,
Watching TV and listening to stories is language learning. They will spend most of the day at school, listening and talking, time at the dinner table, time at clubs and so on.
I agree but you’re just repeating what you wrote earlier.
One of the big problems as an adult is that other adults expect correct language. I find that some French people are obnoxious as they correct every mistake, making it impossible to communicate. They don’t realise that people do not correct mistakes made by children unless they say something inappropriate. I also found that when I used the same informal language they did, I was told off, I was expected to speak like a text book. I don’t know if that is true of Germans, Spaniards, Chinese etc. I never see English people doing that with non native speakers, unless the meaning is lost.
FWIW, my experience with Chinese in China has been that they are thrilled when someone attempts to learn their language and are generally very patient with learners. Visits are very, very good for language learning.
I’m sorry to hear you’ve had such a bad experience with French.
I would assume that this heavely depends on how much the people are used to foreigners. We have a lot here in Germany, so my assumption would be that we don’t tend to do it. I for one only correct native germans
Here, I think the french are a bit different then others (a less sympathetic trait of the french I must say). Britts and Americans are so used to the whole world butchering, or mastering, their own language, that they don’t care. Natives from smaller languages are just happy, or amazed that somebody have taken the time to learn their language.
A suggestion to solve the ematter when the situation arises:
Excusez-moi monsieur/madame, mais je crois que cette rencontre serais un peu fastidieuse, se vous m’interrompez chaque fois lorsque je fais un petit erreur.
Une erreur c’est féminin. Donc, c’est pas je fais un petit erreur. C’est je fais une petite erreur. Désolé, je n’ai pas pu résister à la tentation de réagir.
That was just an example. It doesn’t have to be that much. It’s not like children spend the time they have change to be in contact with the language effectively. I’m sure an adult can get similar amount in hour of active practice.
Are you really counting it as immersion if you are not immersing yourself in the language? You hardly can blame immersion for lack of immersion.
I think original question was when children are learning language slowly eg L1. At that time the amount that they spend with the language is really small and they might not even spend attention to it. They are busy growing up. It’s only once they grow up that there is more immersion, although even then the actual active contact with the language might be surprisingly small. At least easily achievable to adults that are actively trying to expose them to the language. At this point immigrant children under proper conditions learn L2 really fast. Only trouble learning is when the conditions don’t encourage learning the language, like learning L2 in your home country. That’s fault of the method and conditions, not that they wouldn’t pick it up fast.
French themselves probably have one of the worst english skills and pronunciation from western countries.
I admit I don’t find this with passive understanding, but that’s just one subjective experience. What problems did you personally have with Anki? Was it with passive understanding, active usage or both? And was it will all words, or just some? What would be examples of words that you could recall with Anki, but not in real usage?
I’m curious what your method is for learning vocabulary and maybe grammar. You seem to use a lot of input. Is this just listening and reading as per your L1. Or do you pause and rewind so to speak? Do you have methods to increase noticing or the likelihood of transfer to long term memory? I sometimes play with words, I don’t know if that is common practice.
It seems to me that often people say they are doing similar things, but the details differ, and in learning details can make a big difference. We see that some people refer to using comprehensible input, but in reality they don’t.
Picking of on an “SP” [ I think meaning SR; spaced reptition] point.
Reading is a form of communication and spaced repetition isn’t great (little meaning/ message). The following book backs communication based approaches strongly.
“The simplest definition of language acquisition is: the (mostly) implicit process of building a linguistic system by making form-meaning connections from the input. Basically, acquisition is what happens to you while you’re busy understanding messages.”
Henshaw, Florencia G.; Hawkins, Maris D… Common Ground (p. 3). Hackett Publishing Company, Inc… Kindle Edition.
“Output does not build the system, and neither does learning about the language.”
Henshaw, Florencia G.; Hawkins, Maris D… Common Ground (p. 4). Hackett Publishing Company, Inc… Kindle Edition.
“Repetition and imitation are not the driving forces of acquisition.”
Henshaw, Florencia G.; Hawkins, Maris D… Common Ground (p. 12). Hackett Publishing Company, Inc… Kindle Edition.
It is only a few that were obnoxious, most French people that I have met have been very pleasant, especially in the provinces where I found them really lovely people when I was inter-railing 35 years ago. I am a fan of French culture, but not their philosophers. To be fair to them, English and French are phonetically quite distant. We love our diphthongs, stress timing and relatively large number of tones, the French love pure vowels, syllable timing and far fewer tones. Us Brits are pretty naff when it comes to speaking French.
I think we will have to disagree on your earlier points. I’m only an interested amateur giving his opinions. It would be interesting if there was some relevant research in this area.
I haven’t read that book, but Amazon gives access to the contents, and they discuss the Input Hypothesis, which has been discredited, and the Output Hyphothesis. If you are interested in SLA, I recommend this book:
Approaches and Methods in Language Teaching by Richards & Rodgers.
It summarises theories of SLA, including the Input Hypothesis. There are a lot of theories, some such as behaviourism have long since been discarded. I am always open to book suggestions if anyone has some good ones.
There are also some excellent interviews with SLA researchers on YouTube.
This chap does say that Anki can be of use, but he takes a nuanced viewpoint:
I only use the SRS occasionally when I feel like it to get some more exposure to vocabulary words. Mostly, though, I don’t really study vocabulary at all… I just keep reading/listening/watching content that interests me (this is at the upper intermediate/lower advanced level) and when a word seems particularly useful I’ll try to use it in a sentence that day (talking to myself, usually.)
What I have learned, though, is that if I actively filter out known words and then scan through my vocab list (usually one letter at a time since the list is extensive) I will find that I do in fact know a lot of words that I didn’t study. So I am clearly learning vocabulary through exposure, but I don’t necessarily get to choose which words stick and which ones don’t.
There are some words that just seem to take forever to stick and I don’t know why, LOL.
When I was a small children (age 3) I only spoke Finnish. But as we lived in Sweden, and I started to play with Swedish children, I learnt Swedish very fast. I don’t remember how fast, probably in only a few months. I don’t remember I ever had problems talking with the Swedish children.
I’ve tried out using Anki for language learning on two separate occasions.
Once was using the Fluent Forever method with German where you go through a frequency dictionary and add vocabulary cards (recognition, production, and spelling). I did this when I was at an A2/B1 level for maybe around six months.
Production front: picture of an onion
Production back: die Zwiebel | die Zwiebeln + audio pronunciation + IPA
Recognition front: Zwiebel
Recognition back: picture of an onion + die Zwiebel | die Zwiebeln + audio pronunciation + IPA
Spelling front: picture of an onion + audio + IPA
Spelling back: die Zwiebel | die Zwiebeln
Problems included:
Pattern recognition
Huge amounts of time spent creating the cards
Failure to recognise/produce the word when speaking to someone or reading, etc. (i.e. in a real context)
I was using Anki as my sole method for language learning then. If you do other language learning methods simultaneously (eg. input, etc.), it goes without saying that your experiments might not pick up the true effects.
The positive effects were:
I rote learnt the genders and plurals of all the nouns
I mostly rote learnt the various conjugations for common irregular verbs (eg. fährt | fuhr | ist gefahren)
My pronunciation of individual words was very good (as I’d speak the word for every card out loud)
I also did some minimal pairs, which I think was quite useful too (but can’t say with certainty)
My second trying of using Anki for language learning was doing the Mass Immersion Approach (MIA) aka the Refold method, where you do something similar to above (but doing only the recognition vocabulary cards because your focus is initially only on recognition) while watching TV series and movies without subtitles (they call this immersion, which is just Stephen Krashen’s comprehensible input of guessing from context). They also want you to use some mnemonics to help remember the words. I did this for Russian at an A0 level after going through a few lessons on DuoLingo.
The problems with this were:
Cards were incredibly hard to get correct and I just kept failing card after card
When a new card was added which was similiar-ish in pronunciation/spelling to an older card, I would continuously get both cards wrong because they would never appear side by side so I could compare the differences between the two words (think of two words like sand vs. send)
(On the ‘immersion’ side, guessing meaning from context when I knew so few words was incredibly rare.)
I didn’t get very far with this method. I can’t remember how long I did it for but perhaps only a month or two. It is an incredibly frustrating method as I just kept getting card wrong after card wrong due to all the words sounded or looked similar. Re-reading the Mini Stories on LingQ is so much more satisfying and felt like so much more progress than all the words mixing together in my head using the flashcards for a language with very foreign sounds as a complete beginner.
The ways how I used flashcards are not ways I’d recommend to anyone. Sure, the way you are using flashcards is different (fill-in-the-blank cloze cards), but I still don’t imagine that if you used this technique in isolation, you’d have great transfer unless you are already at an advanced level. I imagine sentence cards are better than isolated vocabulary cards, but from my experience and thoughts, the transfer of understanding and being able to use the word in many contexts comes from variability (the same concept is called variable practice in the scientific literature, though I haven’t read much about it). Unless you are using Anki in a rare, unorthodox way, you don’t get variability from Anki at all. The reason you wouldn’t be experiencing a failure to recognise and produce words outside of Anki is not because of Anki, but because you are getting variability from LingQ (i.e. input + ability to look up definitions). I just think that if input is doing the heavy lifting of deep understanding and application of the words, what benefit is Anki providing? And is it worth it? Can I get the same benefit from other techniques?
My methods to grow my vocabulary are reading while listening to YouTube videos with dual subtitles for Russian and reading bilingual books in Italian (because my level is higher in Italian, so I need content with more unknown words). These are methods which do many things at the same time (drilling in words you already know, exposing you to grammar, learning cultural nuances, etc.) and that’s part of the reason why vocabulary remains a key weakness as other aspects of the language get better at the same time as I’m focusing on it.
To learn grammar, my preference is either a grammar textbook (including all the exercises) or grammar videos by YouTubers, but I kinda procrastinate these things as they are kinda boring. Plus input to really drill all that grammar theory in due to encountering it in a large variety of contexts and usages.
To improve speaking, you need to speak a lot. For Italian, if I randomly meet an Italian, I switch to Italian and try and meet up with them again. I also text or sometimes send voice messages to people I know who speak Italian. Alas, I do this minimally for Russian. To see a level up in my Russian, I need to get around to hiring a tutor/conversation partner, as I’m at a level where I would be a frustratingly incompetent conversation partner. Though, production of Russian is still done when I’m trying to speak Italian, as sometimes Russian words pop into my head and I have to ignore them.
For pronunciation (which is not great in either Italian nor Russian as I’ve never focused on it), I should get around to doing lots of listening to a sentence and repeating it out loud. I was considering shadowing as a method, but after hearing Alexander Arguelles speaking Russian, I reconsidered it as a good technique to improve pronunciation.
Thank you for your response, it’s very interesting. There really is no one size fits all method of learning a language.
I recently came across a theory of learning called Multiple Intelligences. In essence it says that we have many forms of intelligence, including linguistic, logical and spatial, and we differ in our abilities. Sometimes we can develop a given intelligence, such as logical by doing exercises and having tuition. And perhaps there are underlying differences that cannot be overcome. MI might have some relevance to language learning, as it would explain why we all seem to prefer our own distinct learning methodologies.
I don’t think anyone would recommend using Anki or a similar tool on its own. You have shown that it does not work. I used Duolingo on its own for eight months, and it is little more than Anki with sentences and childish pictures. I was unimpressed.
I can see that would be tedious.
I agree, Anki in isolation would not work at all well.
I have settled on a method that incorporates lots of input and some Anki. The input helps me develop a deep understanding of the language, as you say Anki will not do that.
So is Anki worth it? For me it is. I tend to misremember noun phrases, verbs and their prepositions and so on. In German I often remember a verb wrongly, it almost looks right, but a vowel might be wrong say. In other words, I get the details wrong. And often I just cannot remember words, my brain is like a sieve. Anki allows me to polish my understanding of the language, and yes it does help me learn words and grammar.
I see language learning as going through two stages. The first is explicitly learning a language element, be that a noun, a verb, a verb conjugation or whatever. The second is automatising that element. Anki helps me with that first stage. The second stage, automatising the element, comes through consuming input, mainly podcasts. And of course consuming input develops a deeper understanding as the elements move from declarative (conscious) memory into procedural (unconsious) memory.
Haha, yes it pays to see how well a technique works before committing to it. Arguelles is as far as I can tell respected, but if it didn’t work wonders for him …
I do like Anki, and I think it can be very useful, but it’s not for everyone. I tried just consuming input and looking up words, and it just didn’t work.
I agree completely. I wasted a LOT of hours with SRS and now just keep reading, reaching especially not for something in which I know almost all the words, but something in which I know about 75% of the words. Keeps my vocabulary growing nicely and gives me a lot of enjoyable reading.
Accidentally deleted my post. I’ll make one shorter.
Don’t worry about the stats, nobody will require you to present them to apply for a citizenship or a University. Just learn. Use LingQ to understand written and spoken language and then actively try to use it, write/speak wherever you can. It takes a long time for your ability to express yourself to catch up with your ability to understand.
Yeah, with input alone these little details often don’t get filled in. My preferred method to fill them in is some form of output. A conversation partner (generally one you pay for or trade time with as at the start as you are frustratingly incompetent and no one wants to deal with you) can really do the heavy lifting here. There’s just something about a real human interaction which really adds a special spice. Writing is another form which is also very poweful (Reddit, ChatGPT, grammar book exercises, etc.) as the testing is very varied, and highly useful (you need the detail right now). If you’re consistently getting specific details wrong though, that’s when repetition of the same flashcard can come in handy. If you don’t have any output from speaking or writing, then output/production cards could suffice. Fill-in-the-missing-detail cloze cards also work too. Equally, though, how important is it to focus on this specific detail in this particular moment? A lot - but not all - of these details will usually auto-correct and fill themselves in eventually with just standard output (while continuing input).
I think this is the probably the more common process, but it’s not across the board. For instance, people with amnesia and dementia as far as I’m aware can learn procedural knowledge, but not declarative. On the language learning side, from consuming large amounts of input (with dual subtitles), I also notice that I can get the ‘vibe’ of certain words, but I’d have to think a bit what the actual word means. We have the same in our native language, where you can’t explain what a word means, you just know that it is appropriate in this particular situation and it has this very particular vibe.
Has anyone made noticeable progress in language learning using the LinqQ platform? I’d love to hear about your experiences—both positive and negative. Any success stories, challenges, or tips to share? I’m curious how effective it has been for others
I’ve read through the stories on this forum, and without pointing fingers, I noticed something interesting. It seems like a good number of success stories or negative reviews come from users who have read less than 10,000 words in total on the platform (I checked their profiles on LinqQ). They’re either praising or criticizing the platform after such limited use.
I’ve been studying Spanish since November or 2023. I started from zero and can now understand any video on Dreaming Spanish, some dubbed TV, Radio Ambulante, navigate daily situations, and have long conversations with native speakers. I’ve read through B2 test questions, and they don’t seem hard, but I haven’t done much writing.
LingQ has been a part of my studies (700k words read, 8k words known). I enjoy reading, have faith that it’s valuable, and (even with the headaches) I find LingQ a useful tool to read N+1 content. It’s also handy to track podcast hours.
Also… I’ve also been living in a Spanish-speaking county, have 500 hours of class hours, another 500 hours of comprehensible input videos, and 200 hours of Anki. It’s been a busy year.
How much of my skills are due to LingQ? It’s impossible to say. I doubt there are many LingQ purists.
