The silent period – a comfortable way to waste time

Open Forum in English
61

The silent period isn’t, I think, meant to be an instruction or a command. I think it’s just a description of what naturally happens when children learn a second language. The teaching method that Krashen helped develop, The Natural Approach, does assume a silent period where students are mostly receiving comprehensible input and not speaking so much, but it doesn’t ban speaking and gives students some (low anxiety) opportunities for interaction with each other and with the teacher.

For independent adult language learners, I agree that people should speak whenever they want. But I also appreciate Benny’s reminders that it’s not necessary to wait until you are “ready”. I haven’t read his book, and I’m not familiar with his “hacks”. However, I know that he talks about his transition from a shy person to a more extroverted person. It’s really easy to fall into the trap of avoiding speaking, so it can’t hurt to have a cheerleader encouraging people to speak.

But I agree with Steve that it’s unfortunate that Benny seems to downplay extensive reading and listening. I also wonder if Benny’s admirers are trying to learn their languages by going to international restaurants and bothering the staff…

62

I believe in the ‘silent period’ and I feel that it has been under fierce attack in the past week or so. I just feel compelled to defend it. So I wrote this short post titled “Speaking too early is a waste of time”. If you find the title resembling some other post, it is just pure coincident.

http://www.towerofconfusion.com/2011/02/08/speaking-too-early-is-a-waste-of-time/

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Forgot about a feature of this forum.

Here is the shorten URL: http://bit.ly/fRAmAJ

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An excellent article Edwin and I essentially agree on all fronts.

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I agree with all the points in the article too - it seems very sensible. I think the 2,000 hours of TV dramas was just an experiment in using non-comprehensible input right from the beginning. Whether it was worthwhile or not won’t be apparent for a while yet. Maybe in a year Keith can comment on whether or not it was a worthwhile enterprise.

I suspect that if a native English speaker watched 2,000 hours of French TV, they’d pick up a lot - So many words are the same, and the structure isn’t all that different. But listening right off the bat to Chinese dramas? It seems like a hurdle too high. If you watched 2,000 hours of Chinese Sesame Street - maybe…

Anyway, the fact that people are not impressed with Keith’s speaking ability in his first and second ever conversations has no bearing, I think, on the importance of either comprehensible input or the silent period. As for the accent, I’m sure that 2,000 hours of listening, even if you don’t really understand, will produce a decent accent - but you’d still get a decent accent if you listened to 2,000 hours of input that was highly comprehensible.

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Hello, maths! You are largely right about the “talent” for language. But I think there is some natural (in-born) ability to language. For example, one foreign language is easy studied, and other is more difficult for us. Do you think so?

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Umm, I’m not sure, and I’m quite new to language learning. I would only say that it must be easier to learn a language you really love, and that a language in the same family (English-Germanic / Russian-Slavic) must also be easier.

Circumstances like this might present themselves to people and make them a “naturally talented” language learner. For example, a Spanish person, with an interest in Italian and French will learn their languages much more easily than maybe an English person who must learn Turkish and Chinese without really wanting to.

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@edwin: good post, my experience entirely. The emphasis is listening to “comprehensible” input. Skyblueteapot wrote another very good blog on this topic (link, Helen? Sorry, I’m just too lazy).

I admire Keith for his 2,000 hour experiment, not only for actually completing it, but for opening it up to public scrutiny and the inevitable criticisms that have followed from it. It has led to a lively and very interesting debate on the efficacy of this method. Keith has clearly had a good time on his journey and has benefitted from it linguistically. For that he cannot be faulted.

I just wonder if instead he had spent the first 200 hours on raising his comprehension level through other methods, then 1,800 hours on TV drama, where would he be now ? At a much higher level I would bet.

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That would be my guess too Jamie. As Krashen says, comprehensible input and low anxiety. But people will do what they like to do.

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I too would bet on that. There’s no reason to deliberately postpone comprehension, in my opinion.

71

Benny has made a comment on his post:

“… so far I don’t see a shred of evidence in the silent-period crowd producing anything better than communicative-learners would. Keith has just proven this further in my view.”

Does anyone have any good evidence?

72

Edwin, three points.

  1. I have learned Russian essentially from scratch and with a minimal amount of speaking which began after two years or so of straight input activities mostly at LingQ, typically about one hour a day with stretches of no activity. I would happily engage in a Russian conversation for recording, with all of my wrong cases and mistakes.

Others may want to offer themselves in example. I believe that Aineko in New Zealand would be a good example.

  1. Keith’s TV only approach is not typical of input based learners who usually spend most of their time listening and reading and working on vocabulary, like we do at LingQ. It is not an approach that I would recommend. But it is what he chose to do, and he enjoyed it.

  2. I do not know what Benny means by communicative learners. I consider listening and reading, especially when the content is interesting, is communicating. I have read and listened to Russian literature, and countless hours of commentary and political debate. I have learned a huge amount about Russia. I have communicated, deeply.

  3. If Benny refers to his language hacking techniques, I would like to see one example of where this worked for him. From what I can see he learned his languages in more traditional ways, and where he tried this 3 month to fluency speaking blitz the results were not very satisfactory.

  4. One day, if I have the time, I will go to a country where I do not speak a related language, and if we have the language on LingQ and I can get access to lots of content, and can spend all day studying, listening and reading, and after two weeks I will try to meet with locals, mostly listening at first and gradually speaking, and I am sure that I will do better than Benny if he just spends him talking to people.

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I haven’t read all of Benny’s posts, and I haven’t bought his book, but I’ve read a fair number of his posts and I think I understand where he’s coming from. But still, many things are unclear. He sometimes mentions that he studies, but I don’t think he’s talked much about that - what materials does he study (except for phrasebooks), how often, etc.

He’s also talked about communicative language learning, but CLL doesn’t just mean talking to people - it’s more about placing interaction at the heart of learning. So, you read something not just to read it, but in order to discuss it with someone, or to write a blog post about it, to which people will respond. It’s mostly a term that is used in the context of classroom learning.

The idea is that interaction will improve learning. So, Steve says that he has communicated deeply with Russian langauge materials, and that’s true, but the sort of communication involved in CLL means interacting with other people. If you read something, and then discuss the reading with someone, you will absorb more and remember the vocab and sentence structures from the reading better, even if you are interacting with other non-native speakers – according to the theory anyway.

So, if Benny’s point is that interacting with native speakers will improve your results, then I agree with him. If his point is that listening and reading by yourself (ie solitary input) is not helpful, then I deeply disagree with him (as I assume everyone on this forum does).

If his point is that interacting with, and learning primarily from, native speakers is better than learning from primarily listening and reading, then I disagree, but I don’t really know. I suppose that if one were friendly and charismatic enough, and if one could find enough willing and patient native speakers, and if one were not really interested in reading novels or newspapers or watching movies or doing business, one could develop casual oral competence in a language that way.

And that seems to be Benny’s goal. He describes himself as a language tourist, and his goal seems to be that he wants to interact with people and make friends. But, considering that he did very well on the C2 German exam (although he didn’t pass it), he clearly also doesn’t, or hasn’t, ignored elements besides casual conversation.

Anyway, I take it that Benny’s emphasis is that forcing yourself to speak before you are “ready” will, in the long run, help you.

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My main issue with him has always been the fact that without comprehension your output is pretty much useless because you won’t be able to understand what a native will say or ask you in response to your memorized phrasebook sentence. As I have said many times, comprehension is the big challenge in my current language project, which is Chinese. In Chinese I had to work on comprehensible input on my own to gradually get accustomed to the unfamiliar sounds of the language.

I also saw him many times discounting reading as a sort of elitist, non social activity which I think is a stupid thing to say. I also don’t think that the fear of talking is what is holding most learners back. I think it is the lack of stamina and endurance necessary to improve. I think most people don’t want progress badly enough so that they put in the hours.

I think he studied a lot the old fashioned way to do as well as he did in his German exam, which is kind of ironic if you think about it. But as Steve had pointed out, he was already “conversational” (to use Benny’s terminology here) before he came to Germany.

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I subscribe to Benny’s blog, and I think he’s got some good tips, but I’m not going to read his anti-silent period posts because I can tell you right now I think he’s wrong about that. This silent period totally works. If he likes “talking his way to fluency,” I won’t try to stop him, though. But I personally find speaking without knowing the words to be a waste of time. When I first started learning French, I forced myself to meet with a native French speaker once a week, and that was a total waste of time. So I focused on reading, listening, and growing my vocabulary instead, and this effort paid off hugely when I finally was able to spend a few days in France. Of course I struggled, but I had a huge head start, and was able to understand so much more. I had some words already in store that I could actually use. It was an amazing time! I’m continuing with French in this way, and I can’t imagine changing it. I also continue to learn Spanish this way, and while I rarely engage in conversations, when I do, I find I’m still improving. What I do like about speaking is it helps me grow comfortable using the words I already know. The words flow more easily. But it’s not vital. It’s more important just to learn all the words!

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@Freidemann,

I see. I hadn’t read him dismissing reading like that. I can’t understand why someone would do that.

As for Chinese, I don’t think Benny would get very far with his approach. I read on one of his posts that he wanted to try Japanese in Tokyo someday, and I really doubt he’ll do well unless he finds a very dedicated and unemployed girlfriend who, for whatever reason, is willing to spend all her time talking to him in baby Japanese. But, Japanese is at least not tonal and the kana can be learned pretty easily. How you would learn Chinese by talking to random Chinese people is beyond me.

Also, with Benny, I think it’s important to remember that he started with Spanish and then learned the other Romance languages. Not that that’s easy to do, but if you speak Spanish, and land in Rome with an Italian phrasebook, that’s quite a bit easier than landing in Beijing with a phrasebook.

With the exception of German (which he already had a background in), his non-Romance “missions” don’t seem to have come anywhere close to fluency. However, my Hungarian friends were genuinely impressed by the Hungarian video he made. So, while he didn’t achieve fluency, he reached an impressive level for the length of time he was in Budapest.

I can’t speak for Czech as I didn’t follow that mission, but his Thai didn’t go well. He blamed it on having to work too much, which I’m sure was true, but I suspect that even if he’d spent all his time out talking to Thai people, he still wouldn’t have learned much. I’ve been to Thailand a couple of time, I bought a couple learning Thai books, and I even took a class there, and I can tell you - Thai is haaaarrrrd. All the enthusiasm in the world isn’t going to get you to conversational fluency in 3 months, and I’ve no doubt the same is true of Chinese.

None of his missions have actually involved learning a language from nothing to fluency in 3 months. I believe he’s currently in the Philippines learning Tagalog. We’ll see how that goes. It’s also hard to judge someone’s fluency from non-spontaneous videos.

Nevertheless, Benny seems like a nice and enthusiastic guy to me. I’m also interested in language tourism and blending in with local people and making friends and whatnot. So, given that I’m likely to take off to a new place for a month, or a couple weeks, some of his advice is very relevant to me.

77

As a follow-up, if you did find a dedicated and unemployed girlfriend/boyfriend who was willing to spend most/all of his/her time with you and speak to you entirely in his/her language, you’d probably learn a lot in 3 months - even for a language like Chinese. Perhaps that is, or should be, a “hack”.

78

I am sure it is easier to record a few minutes talking about a topic inside your comfort zone than being really put to the test. But I am sure his Hungarian was quite good given the short time he was there. However, he didn’t add Hungarian to his list of permanent languages though and I am sure he has a reason for that.

Here is another thing that really bugged me: he totally dismisses the notion of hard vs. easy language. Like any motivational guru he says it is all in your head, it’s all attitude and so forth. And I can tell you after having learned English, French, Spanish, Norwegian and now Chinese, this is NOT TRUE! Climbing Mount Everest is harder than taking a stroll in the park no matter how much you motivate yourself and no matter how positive you are about it.

79

“…if you did find a dedicated and unemployed girlfriend/boyfriend who was willing to spend most/all of his/her time with you and speak to you entirely in his/her language…”

Ahahaha, I love seeing the word “unemployed” !

80

@Friedemann,

Here is another thing that really bugged me: he totally dismisses the notion of hard vs. easy language.

Yes, true enough. Although, on the other hand, he seems to want to challenge people when they say that to justify not learning a language. I’m sure you hear that from foreigners in China a lot - it’s too hard so why bother.

I always feel like I don’t take advantage of enough opportunities to speak. Or, at least, I don’t especially seek them out. I just live my normal life. If I were more focused on speaking, I might go out for dinner at a local cheap eatery rather than fixing food at home. If I went out regularly for dinner at the same place, I’d probably have lots of conversations with the owners and maybe other regulars and whatnot. But it wasn’t my habit to go to bars/restaurants by myself back home, so I don’t do it here. But Benny, if nothing else, has caused me to think more about going out and deliberately seeking/creating opportunities to speak rather than just taking the ones that come my way. I think that if I’d done that in the early stages, I might have progressed more quickly.