It’s a double edged sword!
The internet is (as I keep saying!) A GOOD THING. It does open up possibilities, it makes things easier. Yet, especially when it comes to high performance learners like Steve, I do have to ask whether it could also take away their “edge”?
Anyone who has read Steve’s little book, “The Way of the Linguist” will know the lengths he went to learn Chinese back in circa 1970 in Hong Kong. I believe he was literally working out Bruce Lee style in a cramped apartment while listening to reel-to-reel tapes in the background. He was writing those badass characters by hand - for hours on end!
That’s the level of iron-hard commitment we need! That’s the level of near-fanaticism that will smash through the glass ceiling that keeps 99.9% of Westerners who try to attain fluency in Chinese right in their place (i.e. as damned failures!)
My fear is that we have things too easy today - almost - and that it can lead to a kind of mental flabbiness.
Steve is (as far as I understand?) more or less retired now, and living in some kind of Golden Oldie bungalow in California.
Okay, so he is logging on with his super-dooper tablet device, etc. He is getting Arabic resources online and expecting it all to come together in seamless digital format, etc.
If he had been learning Arabic in (let’s say) 1980, he wouldn’t have had his cosy feet up like this - he would have been road running while listening to Arabic on a Sony Walkman! He would have been writing Arabic by hand for X hours every day!
Maybe we actually need the pain?
Maybe the pain is how we learn?
I mean, I’m just thinking aloud here. I’m not a Luddite. I like technology. If technology can help me, bring it on!
But is it helping me? Or is it conning me into thinking I can do stuff?
(Example: 10 or 15 years ago I could write German reasonably accurately by hand. But now I have a nasty sneaking feeling that I would quickly feel the ‘Abwesenheit’ of my Macbook’s multilingual auto-correct typing if I tried to go bareback! That’s just one little example of how the computer can make us THINK we can do stuff…)