Story and narrative, not comprehensible input

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In my experience, it is narrative or ‘story’ which is the best to learn a language best (aside of the grammar issue). ‘Comprehensible input’ is anything you can forget the next moment. There are tons of materials which are ‘comprehensible’, but comprehensibility does not necessarily amount to the ‘attention of the mind’ which is required to learn a language. Aside of that it is an overly technical sterile phrase.
A child learns spontaneously because for a child anything is interesting, anything is a story to a child, anything of the spoken language is narrative. Narrative makes the mind pay attention without artificial force, it makes the mind present, involved, attached. Humans need narrative.
Of course for children about anything is narrative and consequently meaningful as they are new to the world, adults may need to select something which is more personally meaningful.

Narrative has a certain magic to the mind, it’s that magic which is an aid to remembering. The word narrative should not be taken too strictly, even a mundane conversation can become narrative. Narrative is a mysterious thing, it seems to be mostly in the mind, it seems to be about totality, something becoming interwoven, having a special attraction to the mind.

Those interested in a philosophy behind pedagogy could read the essay’s of Herbert Spencer about education on:

Already in the nineteenth century they started to have a grasp that invocation of natural interest is the best way to teach and to learn, that the methods of teaching were too artificial, even killing the natural interest, the natural capacity.

Personally I also avoid AI voices, it is always artificial, it does not invoke my best attention. Another thing which I avoid on LingQ is human speech without esprit, when someone speaks like your accountant, or your manager at work, some people do not have the skills to make a narrative of a text, or they make no effort. Spoken narrative or story falls flat dead without natural rhythm and expression of feeling, it’s worse than hearing your accountant, landlord, or manager, in that case one could better read the text instead of listening.

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In other words you are saying “Read and listen to something which interest you”?

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“Comprehensible input” means that you know almost all the words in the text, but not all of them. This helps you understand the rest of the text. That’s all.

Yeah, most of the texts I’m interested in aren’t comprehensible. So I have to read graded readers.

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The word ‘interest’ is every day language, unqualified.., you may take an interest in something for a few seconds, for instance, a stop sign when you are in your car, a stone before your feet, to avoid it. If you’d remember all things due to interest based attention you’d soon need a doctor. Interest can range from the totally random, accidental, ephemeral to the long lasting. It does not necessarily imply narrative, not a ‘web of related’ things or associations or meaningfulness which are an aid to remembering.
It is not a suitable concept for this kind of philosophical theory, if any.

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I’ve heard a lot of language teachers say that you need to focus your attention on what you are listening to, and yet it seems to me that I have learned words through repeated exposure to them without always particularly or exclusively focusing attention on them.

I’m not sure what to make of that.

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People here have described many different ways of learning a language which they find effective. I suspect the key is finding it interesting hence you pay attention and learn. Thus the details of the method are secondary.

As for children, they seem to spend their days observing the world around them, and studying it.

The so-called Grammar Translation Method was developed for dead languages, such as ancient Greek and Latin. Memorising grammar tables is one approach, and it did seem to work for scientists and philosophers. But it isn’t appropriate for living languages.

It certainly used to be commonplace to use someone who speaks the prestige dialect to create the audio for a language course. English as a Second Language learners would be treated to terribly nice people speaking a rather formal received pronunciation or RP. French courses were just as stiff. I find such language scary. I listen to it in awe, wondering how anyone could speak such a cut crystal accent.

I think we’ve improved a lot since then, but there is still a tendency to use a phone voice. I’m with you, audio has to have feeling and seem natural. I suspect studies would show that more natural speech is more effective for learners, but that is a supposition on my part. It might also be true that the sample L2 should ideally approximate one’s own social class. A French plumber who speaks English like King Charles would be interesting!

As an aside, there is a video of the late Prince Phillip speaking German. He sounds much more animated and likeable in German, perhaps because it was associated with his youth and school friends.

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I searched the video and he actually sounded pretty average. Surely below the level in which he could express himself in English, of course, but he didn’t speak like a teenager or such, just like an average adult.

But we Germans are generally pretty likeable. So speaking our language may causes one to appear more like us. :wink:

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The usual faulty approach is ‘pay attention and put something in the storage’.
I propose that the ‘mind’ is a highly complex web of associations, not simply a storage place where you can put things, which is a faulty metaphor. And there is the conscious mind and the unconscious mind, the latter being the bigger part.

So I can imagine that less forced attention works better.

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I wasn’t suggesting he was talking like a child. Rather, in English he sounds rather stiff and formal. Here he seems much less formal. I am thinking that perhaps he has only spoken German in informal settings with friends, hence lacks a formal register.

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It is well established that the brain stores associations rather than discrete items. That is why repeating a word over and over is a poor way to remember it. In general it is better to have a word in context, as that builds up associations. For the same reason, our ability to remember words improves as we get better at a language. Basically there is more for a new word to stick to.

I am sure it helps to pay attention, but as you say forced attention might not be so effective. I find the problem when I am paying attention to audio, is that I focus on understanding the message, and individual words tend to fly past. Of course once I hear them many times, they eventually start to enter my consciousness.

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My bad, I misinterpreted your words, than. I would assume that a member of the royal family is expected to sound somewhat “stiff”, aren’t they? High politicians don’t tend to talk like normal human beeings either, at least in Germany. :smiley:

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I would take it even further, for the mind there is no such thing as a discrete item. For instance nouns of the type which describe physically existing things are bound to associations, starting with a history of the experiences of the physical thing in a context, and a history of related associations.

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Agreed, you can perceive the message, or focus on construction of the message. I think you first need to get the message, the meaning, and afterwards perhaps analyze the method of construction.

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It was ambiguous, and yes, they are a pretty stiff crowd. As an aside, a stiff is slang for a dead body.

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I am not well read in this area, but my understanding is that words represent concepts, and we all have similar versions of them, assuming we grow up in a similar culture. Thus the English preposition in represents the concept of containment, but it is not perfect when we say the flowers are in the vase. The French preposition à can indicate the indirect object of a verb. We recognise that a Western tea cup is a cup, not a bowl, and think we know what a cup is. A Japanese ceremonial tea cup in many respects is closer to the bowl concept, but at a dinner we would recognise it as a cup. We don’t have a hard coded bowl concept in our brains, as you say each one of us creates this concept from exposure.

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I have felt that words like “bowl”, “cup”, and “plate” are kind of zones with blurred borders, and in my family we have even made up words for some things that fall into the gray areas between them.

And I am sometimes not sure how their regions map up to similar words in some of the other languages.

And similarly with “glasses” and “cups” and “mugs” and suchlike things.

And similarly I think with “babies”, “infants”, “toddlers”, “children”, “teenagers”, etc.

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Concepts are an interesting subject.

    1. Medieval Latin: The word “concept” comes from the Medieval Latin term “conceptum,” which means “something conceived.”
    2. Latin Root: This, in turn, is derived from the Latin verb “concipere,” meaning “to take in and hold.”

The word points mostly to physical reality or belief, the concept is of the mind. The word itself is physical also, either vibrations in the air, or symbols on paper, or a screen.

So I think that it is not that words represent concepts, but concepts are built on words which in turn are representative of some sensually conceived reality (or belief). Thus the concept of containment is built with words representing realities or beliefs. The concept itself is a container, a web of associations in the mind, it has a name, a designation.
A concept is a high abstraction from reality, mutable and potentially expansive, a concept can be changed as of its content, depending on newly acquired knowledge.
The word ‘be’ from being for instance, from experience of being, becomes as a concept a container designation of the most broadest content, containment, and the basis of a whole philosophy of being.

Further more, concepts are collective (cultural) but also individual. The concept of the individual may not be wholly in agreement with the content of a concept as held by society. While to disagree about the meaning of a word would lead to practical problems..

For instance, for an atheist the concept ‘human’ does not include a soul and or spirit, while it does for the religious person. Here is also the mutability of concepts, some things may be dropped out of the concept by certain groups of people, or even a whole society.
On a more physical word level, the word human remains the same for both people though. Thus, the word as of practical usage.

Well, that’s as far I can think of it.

Back to practice and language
There are words which as words, not as concepts in the mind, have a pretty definite meaning, like the word ‘bicycle’, these are definite pointers to a type of thing, but there are lots of words which have a meaning depending on the function, depending on the context, an associative meaning.
In my experience so far the flash cards in LingQ contain too many words of which the meaning is contextual, associative.

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In German “a stiff” is slang, too. But for something else. :face_with_peeking_eye:

To add something constructive to the concept of words discussion:

It is the often the case that there are words in one language you don’t have a word for in another language. You can grasp the idea, but it can be hard to put into words in your mothertongue. Or there are words that all have the same translation, but different meanings. These can be nuances, but sometimes the difference is pretty big.

These days while reading a novel I learned that there are two words for “beeing proud” in Korean - one for beeing proud of yourself and one for beeing proud of someone else. I haven’t memorized the words, though. There are also two words for “memory”, depending on whether you mean a memory as in remembering a fact or remembering something emotionally connotated. So there is a diffence between remembering an appointment and remembering the day of your wedding.

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I was talking about how the brain represents words from a neuroscience point of view. They do correspond to concepts, even bicycle though that has less room for ambiguity than a broader concept such as cup.

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These are language based interpretations of the findings of neuroscience. The so called correspondence is interpretation when explaining it in terms of language. Comparable how quantum physics is explained, that is, popularized for the masses by means of language based interpretation. It is not the real science itself though.

Whether in quantum science or neuroscience, the further they go, the less words and concepts are actually available as descriptors because such language is based on a commonly known reality. Accurate descriptions of the findings would become too complex for popularization. Thus, the more it becomes language juggling for the sake of common understanding.

Also, the neuroscientist, translating his scientific findings into words, actually represents his findings in words. Thus, literally re-presentation, not the thing in itself. The catch.. :slightly_smiling_face:

All in all two problems, simplification for the sake of popularization, and the catch of thought based re-presentation.
The map, being re-presentation, is not the territory, it might be to an extend erroneous.