I am learning French (B2+) and German (B1) and have from the outset struggled to remember German words. The weakness is primarily in active recall, rather than passive recognition. Recently I’ve noticed a marked improvement in my ability to recall words, in both languages, especially German, but also French. In French I am finding that can recall words the day after I encounter them for the first time. In German words that were a nightmare to recall, now come to me relatively easily.
I’m curious if others notice step improvements in long term memory recall. Does it become easier to remember words the more one studies languages, or the more languages one knows, even for distant languages?
I am aware that ability to recall words improves as one’s language skills improve. Luca Lampariello has likened it to building a spider’s web. At first the holes are large, and flies pass through. Later on the holes are small, and flies get caught. I believe this reflects the fact that we do not remember words as distinct well defined objects. Rather a word is stored as a mass of connections to other memories in the same language. Thus as a simple example the German word Fahrstuhl is easier to remember when we know both Fahr and Stuhl. Thus the more items we have in our memory, the easier it is to make connections, and hence store the word. In other words, previous knowledge acts as a frameword for new words.
That said, my recent improvements seem to be more about my ability to retrieve memories, it’s almost as if language learning is improving my ability to recall items from long term memory.
We know from studies that London taxi drivers have a significantly enlarged brain region - the hippocampus - resulting from long term training.
One possible outcome is that experienced language learners might be better at learning in part due to physical changes in their brains resulting from long term language study and use. And it could be that some language learning methods are better suited to experienced learners, whilst others are better for novices.
Interesting study I looked at before starting Language learning. Probably a correlation based on sample size but worth a look.
The final sample consisted of 184 patients diagnosed with dementia, 51% of whom were bilingual. The bilinguals showed symptoms of dementia 4 years later than monolinguals, all other measures being equivalent.
Before starting my own language learning journey, like many others I severely underestimated the amount of time it would take to be on par with a native speaker. It’s like when you see someone who makes something look easy and you think. “I could do that, no problem”. Reality is often a kick in the nuts as a lesson in humility.
The process is easy, translate the word, translate the sentence, listen, read, speak… Like Luca’s analogy with more time spent with these foundational things the easier it will be over time to add new layers. I have vague memories learning English, but still remember the pain of completing assignments and using a thesaurus.
Emotions are something else to think about. I remember most conversations I’ve had in Finnish. Especially strong when its embarrassing because I’ve said the wrong thing or the native didn’t understand part of my translated sentence.
Yes health benefits are often given as a reason to learn foreign languages. Clearly something about learning and using an L2 is beneficial, although mental exercise per se has not been proven to be beneficial.
I’m sure most of us, like you, underestimate the amount of work that it requires. I certainly did.
Unfortunately this fallacy is encouraged by language learning adverts, and videos on YouTube by so-called language teachers.
I never felt that I had any competence in German.
I had a lot of trouble with German for the first 18 months or so, which I believe was due to a combination of bad learning methods (online apps auch as Babbel) and, later on, unstructured input material (LingQ).
My belief is that a beginner benefits greatly from a structured course, with curated materials that introduce the language gradually, with significant repetition. Most online apps including Duolingo, Busuu and Babbel have insufficient input, and a simplistic approach to language learning. I completed the Babbel German course, which claimed to take me to a B2 level. Two years later and I am a B1 level.
Indeed, negative emotions severely reduce one’s ability to focus and hence the ability to learn. Some people can happily babble along in an L2, and not worry about mistakes, others including myself find such situations unpleasant and stressful.
An interesting topic.
I expect you have come across the book “Make it stick; the science of successful learning”? [Peter Brown, Henry Roediger, Mark McDaniel; Harvard University Press, 2014]. Some interesting perspectives there on memory.
One of the particular problems with learning German is coping with gender, compounded when you then have prepositions dictating the case of the following noun or pronoun in the mix too!
For some learners all this can easily produce “pronunciation paralysis”, or indeed “memory issues”, as you struggle to overcome these hurdles.
But the good news is what I think you have found; it does get a little easier the more you work at a language. And particularly when you start to have “aha” moments like your “Farstuhl” revelation and make connections in a “lego” language like German…
Yes I read it a while back. It’s only somewhat applicable though, as it deals with semantic or declarative memory - learning facts - which we use for example when cramming for an exam. Language learning uses both semantic and procedural memory, arguably procedural is more important.
Gender isn’t so difficult especially as compound nouns take the gender of the root component e.g. der Vorteil. The endings on articles and adjectives are tricky but logical and regular. Knowing which preposition goes with each verb is a pain. As for word order, yet another interesting challenge.
Indeed, it is a Lego language. Learning suffixes such as heit, schaft, lich etc takes time, but is doable. Cases are just a case [no pun intended] of practice makes perfect.
But as I mentioned earlier, I’ve noticed a step change in my memory in both languages. It’s as if ability to both notice and focus have improved. I do wonder if others have this experience while learning.
Yes, I’ve noticed something similar. I think that what happens is the root words in a language start to stick and recombine for you at some point, and your “Abstraktionsvermogen” (capacity for abstract thinking) is able to fill in meaning from context.
Another thing I am noticing with age is that it becomes more important to “prime the pump” for things to stick. In other words, you need to look over the vocabulary and go away for a while-- a day or two, a week or two, a month or two, or more. When you come back to the vocabulary, the brain says, “OK, we’ve come across this stuff before, so we’ve decided it’s not just more junk and information overload.” Because this information is somewhat familiar, the brain is now convinced it is worthwhile to put the new information into your memory storage. As an example, I went back recently and looked at a language I haven’t done much with for 5 years. Suddenly, it’s looking familiar, and the words stick, the way they did when I was 20.
My doctor says that her bilingual brain stores both her languages in the Broca’s area, because she learned them as a very small child. She says I only have one language in my Broca’s area due to learing my additional languages later in life. I have tried to get around this issue by listening to videos from the sister YouTube channels of “Epic History” in German, Spanish, Russian, and French, listening to the same video repeatedly, and moving from my strongest to my weakest languages, without ever listening to the Engilsh. The idea is that I am trying to get my memory of the content into my Broca’s area, without activating memory storage in the English language.
Tried this multilingual (no English) history video approach for a few hours a day for 2-3 weeks, and then I went in to a doctor’s appointment. It was quite surprising how much more fluently I could speak during my appointment, without feeling limitations of “this language I’m speaking is harder than English”.
I imagine it more like a well-done mind map and if the new word only has one or two connections, it will just automatically disappear after a short amount of time, but if the word has many connections, then the amount of time before it automatically disappears is longer. I imagine it also as the size of the arrows also indicate the strength of those connections, which also plays a role.
These connections don’t necessarily need to be in the same language though. Full and partial cognates are the easiest words to learn generally cause you connect the new word with a word/s in another language/s you already know. An illustration of connections across languages is that I can tell you the German word for information is very similar to the English, French, Italian, and Russian words for information, but I can’t remember in this very moment how to exactly say it with a good German accent. The details of the ending of the German word are fuzzy and I can’t tell you what the pronunciation is.
Another example of connections going across languages is the fact that I confuse words in other languages all the time. I imagine this is quite common, as, for instance, Steve himself used words in different languages than the language he was trying to speak when he was doing his speaking in 10+ languages video. He was speaking and didn’t even realise he used a word from the wrong language (he pointed this out in his critique of his own video). This happens to me too. It’s good when you realise that the word which popped into your head is of a different language, because then you can hold your tongue, but you don’t always realise this. Sometimes, if I realise this, I just need to keep trying and the word in the desired language will pop into my head, but other times the word in the desired language doesn’t even pop up at all, only words in even more other languages.
Furthermore, these memory connections don’t only happen with other languages, but with any kind of memory. As an example, I was trying to remember a Russian word the other day. I had a mental image of what I imagine when I think of the word (based on an image from a Russian movie I watched), I remembered some details about the movie associated with the image I have, I remembered the literal English translation (which would be a non-sensical translation), I remembered the English definition of the word, and I remembered the second half of the word, but for the life of me I couldn’t remember the first half of how to pronounce the word. This just illustrates that the word I was thinking of was associated with an image, a story, a translation, and a bilingual definition, but the word itself was broken up into at least two separate parts in my brain (the first half and the second half) which were associated separately. The ‘Lego’ of the word is more fundamental than Fahrstuhl = Fahr + Stuhl, but sometimes much tinier, seemingly-non-sensical-but-really-based-on-pattern-recognition-or-other chunks. Eg. information = in + for + ma + tion. But really it’s probably also chunked as information = infor + mation and probably several other ways too.
In sum, at least in my brain, the web of connections consists of all sorts of memories interconnected together, not solely limited to the one language. Eg. I try and think of an Italian word, and instead an image from a movie, the location where I was when I watched that movie, the sound of a Russian word, and the definition in English all pop in my head and in the end I simply fail to recall the Italian word in that moment. However, perhaps the next time I try, I may actually recall the Italian word accurately and quickly.
Me too. My opinion these days is the Foreign Services Insitute probably gives a very decent estimate of how long it will take (if you double the number of classroom hours to take into account the amount of homework they do!). Eg. FSI’s estimate for the average person to reach a decent level in Italian is 552 class hours means that it’ll be ~1,104 hours to get to a decent level of fluency for an average English speaker (some more, some less, but a good estimate).
I dunno about a step improvement, but improvement is definitely more noticeable around A2+/B1ish to lower B2ish. It depends on how exactly you’re studying, but this period can be incredibly satisfying because you notice such obvious improvements. This can be a particularly addictive part of language learning and I think those who dabble haven’t experienced it or haven’t experienced it very strongly - the fact that after every session you leave and you realise you have actually learnt several things and you remember them is a powerful experience. Really I think this is half got to do with noticing, but it’s definitely coupled with some sweet spot of you can actually remember stuff now without a hundred repetitions and you still have plenty of high-frequency words to learn. Even if you do it correctly and the intermediate plateau is non-existent (i.e. always increase the difficulty of content), there comes a point where Zipf’s law becomes so much more obvious, and it feels like that constant sense of everyday achievement isn’t as obvious. On the positive side, at this point, you can replace it with consuming actually interesting content you understand.
In theory, yes. Previous knowledge is the framework of all new knowledge (and new words). From my understanding, related previous knowledge is the biggest predictor of speed of acquisition of new knowledge.
In practice, yes, mildly so. But alas, it’s just not as easier as you’d hope it would become. One benefit is increasing the amount of partial cognates which other new languages can draw on. For distant languages, this would be less so, but there’s still a little something in it because the previous knowledge is only a little bit related (such as maybe similar sounds or a new expression might remind you of a similar expression in different language, etc.).
Absolutely. Presumably the most often encountered and used words have more connections, thus they are easier and quicker to retrieve.
Presumbly.
No doubt words involve all kinds of connections to facts, events, and other memories. I remember that the French word for bone, os, can also mean hitch or snag, because I recall a scene in a famous French film where a well known actor says y a un os chef.
it certainly sounds about right for my French. I had doubts about German, after a slow start, but progress is speeding up at the B1 level.
I’m seeing an improvement in German at B1, it’s reassuring to hear that others have a similar experience in other languages. It is becoming much more enjoyable as I see and understand more of the structure.
I’m convinced that once one can consume real content, progress speeds up as you are building more and richer connections i.e. a deeper knowledge.
I think the intermediate plateau is really a recognition that one has learnt a foundation in the language, but that is only a tiny fraction of the knowledge required to understand clear native speech. It is akin to adding more layers to a football, at first it grows rapidly, but as it gets larger, it takes more and more work to increase the radius by a fixed amount,
It sounds like my idea that learning languages leads to changes in the brain that facilitate learning does not really pan out, or at least you don’t perceive such improvements. That said, my experience with German is teaching me improved learning strategies, discovered empirically.
I did wonder if learning a language with SOV word order, or cases would make it easier to learn another language with those features. I do also wonder if it is harder at age 60 say compared to age 20. We know children learn more quickly than adults, but Steve Kaufmann seems to do just fine.
Partially. It’s definitely true that content that is interesting, exciting, and emotional results in richer connections. Though, you can get this from graded readers and pedagogical content too though.
A difference between learning in a classroom vs. self-learning with pedagogical content vs. self-learning with native content is the sheer amount of content you encounter per unit time. In a classroom, you might end up hearing/reading 2k words per hour. Going through pedagogical content, you might end up listening to or reading 4k or 5k words per hour. But with certain types of native content like podcasts, etc. you can be exposed to 8k+ words per hour. You just get in so much more testing “What’s Wahrheit mean again?” etc.
Obviously, there’s such a thing as too fast, but as long as you have to try and maintain your focus and constantly testing yourself (“What does X mean?” and you find out the answer by looking up the word, reading the translation, or whatever), you might be able to find a sweet spot that is faster than pedagogical content.
This is the reason why I moved onto pretty much solely native content in Russian very early on, at about 150h or so.
To some extent, yeah. There are definitely people who can legitimately get stuck at a particular intermediate level though. I’m sure you’ve met foreigners who have lived in a country for many years and are still limited in the local language.
I remember trying to talk to a former co-worker about non-work stuff once and they really struggled. Discussions around work-related content was completely fine, but they just didn’t have the vocabulary to discuss content outside of work. It’s definitely a thing. In this case, they simply didn’t care to learn it nor was interested to. Their friends were all compatriots and they spoke in their mother tongue together. This person watched and read media in their mother tongue. They only used the language for work and the work didn’t require complex conversations about a wide range of topics. They became good at what they practised. That is, listening to, and talking about, work-related content in their specific job. They had reached a point of minimal improvement aka they’d plateaued.
Yeah, that’s transferable.
In all cases except languages with a high percent of cognates, such as sister languages, in my experience, the biggest hurdle is vocabulary. It’s just the slowest thing to learn and you just need so much of it to actually be competent.
Steve reckons passive vocabulary to be the best indicator of your potential in a language. I think he’s right here.
Already having a familiarity with SOV word order or cases definitely helps, but they only make up a small part of the whole picture, as the biggest grind is vocabulary acquitision. And I mean this in the holistic sense, not just knowing that laufen translates to to run, but you have to have rote learnt the many forms of the word well enough to recognise them in many different contexts.
The whole idea of those people claiming that word families are a good measure for foreign language acquisition are bullshit. Their claim is that native speakers think in word families, so therefore it’s a good measure for foreign language learners. An anology to that is like saying that native readers can read whole words out loud, so therefore kids who are learning to read should be judged by their ability to read whole words out loud. This is just wrong. In English, teaching reading through phonetics has very strong research support, as far as I’m aware.
For most of my life I assumed that learning another language would be quite a lot of work. And I was right! By the time I retired, I figured my window for learning a language had closed.
However, when I started learning French a couple years ago, I got excited by all the internet buzz that one could one could get pretty far into fluency within a year or two.
That hasn’t been true for me. But I can tell I continue to progress. I can read a paperback novel slowly and get about 90%.
So I’ve recalibrated to think in terms of thousands of hours as LG once recommended. The journey is the reward.
The spider’s web is real. I’ve noticed it grow and improve with several languages I’ve studied. The big question is, how do you grow and improve it. I often wonder if doing lots of flash cards helps me remember words better in general even if I forget the specific words I was studying. I have no idea. I’m quite sure reading books and listening to content, and having real conversations with real people is a good way to grow your language web. I’m really on the fence on whether I should quit flash cards though. I also think going to the country where the language is spoken can help a lot too.
Absolutely. However, speaking personally there is a certain level where content consumption increases markedly. That presumably occurs when there is sufficient understanding of basic concepts, that the learner can start to infer meaning, and see deeper meaning. With my German my vocabulary is so limited that most input is far beyond my level and there is little point listening to something unintelligible. I have found a few videos where I can follow most of the dialogue, but not many, It did however work for me in French because there is so much shared vocabulary that can be guessed.
It does though sound like we are on the same wavelength. I believe that a good way to learn would be with huge amounts of curated input. In principle one could start with native like input early on given sufficient curated input, that gradually adds new words. This seems to the point you’re making above, and later on. However, in practice I can’t find suitable input in German. And I’m not referring to comprehensible input, as the student would study grammar, memorise some words and phrases and practise output including writing out phrases to develop understanding.
I think we all have. It is common for older people who move to a new country, and a wife, or a parent never learns the national language. A friend of Ugandan origin spoke fluent English and Gujurati. His father struggled with English, his mother did not speak English at all. Many adults just don’t sit down and study the target language, they think they can absorb it, or perhaps they lack the resources and the determination. I made that mistake in Quebec.
I agree, vocabulary is key. Once you have that, you can listen, and figure out the word order and conjugations.
As an aside, there seems to be a belief among some polyglots that there are no special learners, just people who use their supposedly better (and paid for) methods. Steven Kaufmann is on record as saying that we all learn the same way. That may or may not be true, and I am not aware of evidence either way. But I suspect some people are more adept at languages than others. I found school maths easy, and got bored after doing the class work in 5 minutes. I was not alone, some friends were bored too. Others struggled and needed help from the teacher. I’m far from a maths genius, but I got top grades in maths and science exams, as did some others. I suspect there is a similar situation with sports, languages and other skill domains. I was awful at sports, I learnt to ice skate well in my fifties, but I learnt slowly. Some people do find languages easy, whereas I don’t. And it may well be ease of learning vocabulary, a task you talk about above, that separates good language learners from others. I’ve seen scientific studies that demonstrate a spread in long term memory ability, so differences do seem to exist. My memory is awful, though curiously enough it seems to be improving. I seem to be getting better at recalling information. Whether this is unconscious development of retrieval strategies, or actual physical improvements in the associated brain areas, I know not.
And it might be that differences in abilities, such as semantic long term memory and procedural long term memory favour different learning strategies.
As I mentioned earlier, in the past month or so I’ve started learning French and German words and phrases much more easily. I’m starting to think I’ve somehow unconsciously learnt how to learn words more effectively. I think a major reason for this in German is the addition of output to my learning methodology. My LingQ scores have plummeted, often I learn 0 words in an hour session, according to the statistics. But we both know the old adage about statistics.
Exactly. Unless I am mistaken, you are learning your first L2, and you’re no youngster. So it must be extra challenging for you, but extra rewarding too. I often wonder if an older learner - which includes us both - can reach a near native level of comprehension i.e. listen to a film in the L2 as if it was in the L1, albeit with an occasional unknown word. I can understand most radio broadcasts, but I still usually have to focus hard otherwise it passes me by, Then again, we compare ourselves to native speakers with a decade of more immersion,
I sometimes wonder about flashcards, as some words seem to take forever to sink in. We know that some language is stored in semantic memory i.e. long term memory where we store facts such as dates. And some language is stored in procedural memory i.e. long term memory for processes such as riding a bike. I think flash cards can work for simple nouns e.g. the names of birds, which go in semantic memory. With verbs flash cards might work, but you have to use phrases unless the meaning is simple. Thus in French saboter is to sabotage, and saborder is to scuttle, nice and easy. But words like réclamer and revendiquer are more nuanced. In fact some verbs can only be used in a few contexts e.g. legal ones.
I use flashcards to learn set phrases and prepositions with verbs. I think they work.
This has a lot to do with the method people choose to use. If people choose to wait until they are decently competent in the language before they engage with native content, then the amount of content density (i.e. words per hour) will follow a step function.
There are several methods which don’t require your presumption. Eg. bilingual texts (or dual subtitles), studying content you already know the plot of, actively studying content and repeating it (the first time will be slow, but you’ll have much higher wph during the repeats).
Though, if you want to do extensive reading/listening as a method to improve your language, then I agree, it’s definitely better to wait until you have a “sufficient understanding of basic concepts” prior to using this method.
Considering the research done on learning styles has continuously failed replication, Steve’s statement about we all learn the same way seems to be in line with this.
In language learning, I generally consider most people (those with specific disorders aside) are held back by a small number of changeable aspects, such as mentality (eg. not having a too-high expectation of your speed of progress to not risk demotivation), method/technique, priorities, or ability to turn language learning into something habitual. Obviously there are other situations, but the aforementioned aspects probably cover a good chunk of the aspiring language learners, such as the median person who downloads DuoLingo on their phone.
I can’t tell you how many times people have told me I must be good at languages cause I learnt a foreign language as an adult and they haven’t, yet they don’t know how many thousands of hours I’ve actively dedicated to it. I’m sure if they too invested ~2,000 hours into learning Italian, instead of refusing to try, they’d get to a competent level as well.
Personally, my guess is that the spread for language learning ability outside of the main changeable factors while holding for other known languages/cognates isn’t super great (excluding those with certain disorders). But I think there’s probably actually data out there to indicate what the spread may actually be.
Just as the Foreign Service Institute has white papers which specify the average (median?) number of classroom hours for a student to reach their specified level, they should also have the data on the spread of these students. If you’re keen, you could send them an email or search through their website to see if you can find it. If you find it, I’d also be interested in what you find.
The New Zealand linguist Professor Paul Nation did research which he published in 2014 on how much input is needed to gain enough repetition of the first 9,000 words in English before a word “sticks” in longterm memory and can be easily recalled. He suggested that for a word to be retained it must be encountered multiple times, with around 12 exposures being a suggested minimum where students are learning through reading. That is an awful lot! And as has been suggested, and agreed several times on this thread, it is very easily possible to underestimate the sheer amount of time you need to learn a language…
Secondly, as nfera indicated, “full and partial cognates are the easiest words to learn”. That may be one aspect of the success of polyglots when picking up another target in a “language family”, although it does not explain some of their seemingly preternatural expertise in picking up other languages far away in script and style from their own native language. The original point made by LeifGoodwin, learning French and German, was that he “from the outset struggled to remember German words”. I would certainly endorse a perspective that French is “easier”. As someone with native English I am continually astonished with the volume of cognates in French; the Norman Conquest in 1066 certainly helped. With estimates of some 30% of French words in the English language, suggesting that English is just a “super Creole”, then it assists going in the other direction! As I am currently in Paris and yesterday used the word “terrible” to discuss rush hour conditions on the Métro I have just looked up the synonyms for that word. Of the twelve suggested I doubt an English speaker would have much difficulty with the first eight: horrible, atroce, terrifiant, exécrable, abominable, déplorable, odieux, lamentable. They can then add on effroyable, affreux, épouvantable, effrayant with 12 exposures?
Thirdly, that leads on to pronunciation issues. Just when you think you are getting somewhere, particularly in French, you stumble across silent letters, elision, liaisons, enchâinement etc. It could be worse; you might be learning English pronunciation from a French background? But this is certainly reason enough to be focussing on “reading and listening” as a method… I smiled wryly when I read LeifGoodwin’s comment about the “intermediate plateau” as a recognition that one has only learnt a foundation in the language because “that is only a tiny fraction of the knowledge required to understand clear native speech (my italics).” Add on to that “clear native speech” all sorts of dialects, colloquialisms, contractions, argot, slang, youth cultural expressions etc and you have even further to go to understand anything! There is an apocryphal German joke of a student heading to Paris and writing home “Mama, they do not speak French here the way I was taught…”
I disagree with this, and I don’t think you have any evidence beyond personal experience. I think we all tend to generalise our own experiences, and of course it’s highly subjective. I certainly do that. Guilty as charged, M’Lud.
I referred to Luca Lampariello’s spider web analogy in the original post. This is something he has observed as a language teacher i.e. he has seen this with his students. With German I now see so many connections that passed me by, but which now help me learn. I didn’t see this with French, and I think that is because English shares so many words with French. When one starts a language, there are no hooks, no cheats, unless there are cognates. As you progress, you find it much easier to learn because there are more hooks. In German it gets easier once you realise the meaning of word components. Thus sich vorstellen is translated as imagine or introduce. Once you see vorstellen can be broken down into place in front, the meaning is clearer. What’s more it’s then apparent why Ich stelle mich vor means I introduce myself whereas Ich stelle mir vor means I imagine. I do wonder why courses translate German words as they do, rather than using this sort of analysis, Or maybe it’s gobbledygook to most people. Does this sort of analysis form part of your study?
I don’t see how that makes any difference. It is in any case what I do with German. What you are referring to is a better way to learn, using little stories that are curated to the learner’s level. I would also add from personal experience, and it is proven by research, simple input is not enough. In my own case I play around with the texts, and output new sentences. Clearly having a dedicated language partner would be even more effective. This is nothing new, it’s what students do in many language courses, and it is what I did 35 years ago. It took me a couple of years to find a method that works for me, after realising that input is inadequate, and the method promoted by some polyglots just don’t work for me.
You seem to advocate large amounts of input. How do you notice language features? If I just listen, I find myself understanding, but not learning subtleties. Thus I miss prepositions, or word order, or conjugations. These are the little things that are not needed to understand the message, as language usually if not always contains redundancy. That is why I have to spend some time actively studying the language, not just listening. Quantity of input per se is not a good measure of progress. I would go further and say that LingQ statistics are not good measures of progress other than very rough estimates,
I’m well aware of that research, and that studies do not support the existence of those learning styles. But that’s a long way from saying we all learn the same way. It’s akin to saying that studies have proven that monkeys are not green or purple, therefore they are all the same colour. It’s the same logical fallacy.
I know of one polyglot who loves to learn grammar tables. He does so in order to speed up his learning. Some people, such as myself, have very logical minds, arguably too logical. I enjoy breaking down language, and analysing it. Other people have very intuitive minds, they are presumably better at learning from example and context. I’ve seen this among friends who learn skating far quicker than I do, but give them a maths problem, and they would be stumped. This is akin to a difference between semantic and procedural learning. Some people claim to have photographic memories. For them it would make sense to learn structures and sentences, to act as a framework.
I took up ice skating and then ice hockey as an adult. It was a shock to do new activities and discover that I was a dullard. I had previously excelled in maths and science. Whilst far from being a genius or a prodigy, I was one of those lucky souls who found school maths straighforward. But I have a poor memory, and do not learn physical activities easily. Today I am a good ice skater, and better than most skaters at the rink, apart from figure skaters who train regularly, and the coaches of course. That said, I still learn slowly. A friend can learn a skating trick in the fraction of the time it takes me. I’ve been skating nine years, he started less than 18 months ago. I don’t know other language learners to compare myself with, so cannot comment on my relative ability to learn languages, but my impression is that I am a slow learner with German due to the reduced number of cognates.
There are differences between people, and yet research has shown that those who succeed in life are people who have grit. I’m not sure if that is the technical term, but I’m sure you understand the meaning. In other words, for the most part perseverance trumps ability. A friend and his wife did a martial art. His wife was a natural, she learnt fast. He learnt slowly. Their coach was an ex-Olympian for GB. He told my friend that he was not a natural, he was like my friend. I suspect we are largely in agreement about hard work.
However, my intuitive feeling is that there are differences between people in their ability to learn different kinds of skills, and that there are differences in the way they learn. Research proves that intelligence varies, thus IQ scores form a normal distribution in a random population, and that some of the observed differences are inherited, and some are environmental. I’ve also seen research that shows a spread in performance for semantic and procedural long term memory. It is conceivable that people who dislike academic study, but do well on the job, so to speak, have better procedural memory, but that’s supposition on my part.
I don’t doubt, as you suggest, that one can improve one’s performance, in other words, become a better language learner. And I don’t doubt the factors you mention play a part.
That would be very interesting data, although it could be argued that any spread simply reflected motivation rather than inate ability. That said, I think the data would still be of value, given that students on those courses are probably all highly motivated. But are they representative? They are likely to be people who are well heeled, and hence successful, or holding down high level jobs e.g. diplomats and senior managers.
But as I mentioned, there is a spread in IQ, in fact a very large spread between the most and least able in a random population of say 100 people.
Believe it or not, there are actually methods which allow you to study native content as a beginner. Whether you choose to use those methods or not because you like or dislike them is your perogative.
As a complete beginner in a language, I could open up LingQ, go through the text of native content looking up every word, repeat the lesson as reading while listening a few times, then after that be able to relisten to that content and understand what’s being said in that audio. I could relisten to that native content audio many times and continue to learn from studying that material.
There are a few other methods I could use too. However, I agree that it’s probably faster to have at least a small study session to understand the basic grammatical concepts, but it isn’t strictly necessary per se.
To be honest, even though I know the word in German, I have never thought of it like that.
If you like the method or enjoy looking up the etymology, I’m sure it’ll help your German.
I am not, no. Input for input’s sake is garbage. It all depends on what you are doing with it. There are multiple methods which use input and each have their strengths and weaknesses. You need to think what your goal or sub-goal is and select the method which best achieves it. There is no panacea in language learning. You most likely need multiple methods to achieve your goal.
I am an advocate for certain input-based methods though, yes. They are tools though, so they need to suit the goal you’re trying to achieve. The right tool should be selected to fit the job at hand.
Extensive listening with no relistens to novel content is only one method of using input. If your goal is to understand the subtleties in prepositions, word order, and conjugations of spoken/written content at a conscious level, this is definitely not the method I would recommend.
A better method would be intensive reading, where you get a text and as you go through it all the areas that you have issues with compare those sentences with the translation, look them up in the dictionary, and read about them in a grammar book. Use AI to help you out too. If you already know the areas which you are having issues with, you can just jump straight to a grammar book about it.
Though, I have other goals as well, such as speaking, so I actually learn some of these subtleties through actual speaking practice. I get self-feedback (i.e. when I notice I don’t know or I suspect I made a mistake) or feedback from the other person (such as when I clearly notice they don’t understand, etc). I may get feedback directly from my interlocutor on what the correct subtlety is or next time I’m doing whatever method I’m using to practise reading or listening, I may actually notice it now that my brain considers it an important detail.
Input is not “just listening.” There are many ways you can use input. To limit yourself to just using extensive listening with no relistens to novel native content is not ideal. This method has its place in the toolbox, but it’s no panacea. If you were using this method to learn the subtleties of the language, it seems you were using the wrong tool for the job. Input-based methods are a suite of techniques, each with their own advantages, disadvantages, and limitations.
The main uses of extensive listening with no relistens to novel content is to further drill in words you already know and to improve your listening comprehsion, such as to deal with different accents, speed, etc. I do not use this method to learn new vocabulary (there are better techniques), grammar subtitles, speaking abilities, etc. It has it’s place, but should be used deliberately for its primary purposes.
Are you implying that there are no universal learning principles across all humans? I.e. the testing effect, desireable difficulties, feedback, etc. only apply to a subset of the population?
I’m mainly interested in the majority of the population, not the extremes of the distribution. I suspect that within a standard deviation or a bit more from the median, the spread of language learning ability (controlled for changeable aspects, such as methods, mentality, etc.) is not crazy large. Sure, there’s something, but nothing severe to stop them reaching a decent level in Italian with 2,000 hours of study. That’s my hypothesis anyways.
In your hypothetical scenario of 100 random people, I suspect language learning ability would be bottom heavy, due to the prevalance of certain disorders and disabilities. For instance, an estimated 1 in 10 Australians have dylexia while an estimated 1 in ~33 Australians have ADHD (~3% prevalence). I’m talking about after controlling for such factors.
Where do you reckon Steve sits on this spread of language learning ability (changeable aspects aside)?
This assumption in the paper was definitely one of the more dubious ones. The issue is that the number of required exposures is definitely not constant.
Luca actually has a good video from way back in the day discussing learning rate as we progress.
One benefit is increasing the amount of partial cognates which other new languages can draw on. For distant languages, this would be less so, but there’s still a little something in it because the previous knowledge is only a little bit related (such as maybe similar sounds or a new expression might remind you of a similar expression in different language, etc.).