This is a more focused follow up to a question I had the other day about moving to other countries. I’m wondering what the best options are for learning a new language at the moment. I’m vaguely aware of companies like Duo-lingo losing their reputation lately and it’s hard to trust the top google results nowadays with all the SEO junk. So does anyone have suggestions for trustworthy/useful sites for learning a new language? If it matters, in particular I’m interested in trying (In roughly this order) Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, or Spanish.
As far as I know, the current best practice for language learning is called Krashen’s Hypothesis or Comprehensible Input. Basically, we can learn a language best by hearing words that are slightly more complicated than what we already know. I am learning Korean and there is a nice YouTube channel where a guy makes videos of himself playing games and he talks about what’s on the screen at different levels of complexity. You could look for something like that in the language you want to learn.
CI is the correct answer. The ppl at dreamingspanish have a great breakdown of why it works. Chinese is a bit tougher because its much harder to find CI content, especially for beginner, but I’ve made faster progress in both spanish and chinese than I have with any other method.
I tried all the other methods people suggested below for years (flash cards, audio courses, reading); none of them worked. You might memorize words, but you won’t actually be able to understand someone speaking to you. I have a friend who has a duolingo 3+ years streak (meaning she uses it every day), and still can’t understand a native speaker talking at a beginner level. If she’d have spent even 1% of that time doing comprehensible input she’d be much further along.
Thanks for the recc. I was half expecting it to force a pay gate to simply watch any of the videos (the internet can make me cynical like that!) and better yet, they have a superbeginner video on an exact topic I was interested in learning about after some South American immigrant friends had brought it up. Immersion almost seems ‘too good to be true’ because one can learn interesting content more enthusiastically than studying it formally, I’ve found the same with history and political theory.
do you have any you can recommend for chinese?
Lazychinese is really the only good channel / site that I’ve found. But it needs a lot more content, especially at the beginner levels. I’m having trouble making the jump from beginner to intermediate, because there isn’t enough content there yet.
There’s a YT channel called comprehensible mandarin that has a lot of content, but unfortunately none of it is organized by difficulty, which makes it impossible to use. You should really be understanding like 90% of the content, and if you can’t, you should bump down to a lower difficulty.
If anyone has any other good recs, I’d also like to know.
I’ve never seen any persuasive evidence to support Krashen’s hypotheses.
Krashens hypothesis is just that people acquire languages by understanding messages. Not by studying grammar, memorizing vocab, and “traditional” learning (IE based on skinner’s method, of error=punish, correct=reinforce).
Not only is CI backed up by evidence, and by the many polyglots who have successfully learned many languages through CI / immersion, you’d also need to show evidence of babies not learning their first language this way to refute it (IE show evidence of babies learning their first language by studying grammar and doing flashcard study).
By that logic, it’s refuted. Children produce language during the learning phase.
Children babbling then being able to talk after a long time period of input doesn’t disprove anything. CI just says that talking isn’t learning, which is true, because you’re not receiving any information. That’d be like trying to learn geography without looking at a map, or how to play a musical instrument without hearing anyone play it before.
Are you saying musical instruments are learned entirely by observation, not by production?
There’s no way I can stretch to believing that.
Both of course, but as a life-long musician, listening / reading / getting input is the first and most important step.
If someone has never heard a guitar before, and you hand them one, they’ll have no basis for how or what to play. Instead how people learn, is they listen, then imitate, just like language. Mastery comes not through try / fail / correction, but through listening then playing a lot of different music, so that it becomes completely internalized and occurs without active thought. They call this the suzuki method, and its much preferred nowadays over the traditional method of memorizing scales, the circle of fifths, , which I unfortunately wasted years of my early music learning through.
After playing jazz for a few years now, I couldn’t even imagine how skinner’s method would work for that. Jazz is too complicated to think about or logic your way through, just like language.
Adults are different from babies.
Sus.
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