I’m interested in hearing people’s views on Stephen Krashen’s “Second Language Acquisition” theory, which I’m presuming is somewhat similar to the method used by Steve and people using LingQ. For my first “second language”, I used the traditional exercise book approach, learning how to order train tickets, and answering lots of grammar questions etc… Although in the end, I obtained a good grasp of the grammar and a fairly large vocabularly, I still couldn’t produce anything at speed, because my mind was constantly looking-up words and grammars rules. I’ve since gone back to the drawing board, and instead I’m using Steve/Stephen Krashen’s method.
Since my target language isn’t yet on LingQ, I’m using whatever input I can find on the Internet. At the moment, I’m reading and listening to Harry Potter, watching TV and reading discussions in forums. I’m making sure that what I’m reading is understandable, but also a little over my current level. Whenever I see a sentence which contains words or grammatical constructs I have difficulty understanding on the first pass, I add the entire sentence to a flashcard. When I later review the flashcard, I can indeed read the sentence easily, but only because I put in the effort earlier to understand it. I also add definitions to the words I don’t know in the target language, as suggested in the AJATT method. After a few weeks, I’m trying to review whether this method is working for me. At the moment, it’s not helping me produce faster, it has helped me pick up idioms and some common sayings which I’m seeing repeated everywhere. My question is whether it is worth continuing down this road, and whether people have had success just by doing this. My own brain is fighting with me, saying that I’m not learning anything, I’m learning just to recognize a sentence that I’ve seen before. I’m so used to memorizing words and grammar rules, that I’ve convinced myself that just getting input is like pouring water into a bucket with a hole.
I’ve now started using LingQ to learn German, and because I learnt some German in school, I can understood the input somewhat. However, do I try to memorize the sentences and phrases without trying to understand the grammar behind them, or do I analyze everything and try and produce similar sentences. I’m not actually 100% sure how to effectively use LingQ in this regard.