Zlarp Wrote:You speak English, don't you? (or whatever your native language is)

There's plenty of evidence that shows children and adults do not learn language in the same way (for example, the way that children learn to distinguish sounds important to their language is not something that adults can do).

So, you can't assume that what works for a child will work for an adult second language learner. You need evidence.

So growing up suddenly changes your magic genius child brain into an boring old adult brain with less capabilities? I don't buy it. Show me the adult who spends as much time with a language as a child growing up - without being a lot better at it than the child - and I'll believe your "evidence"

For me, what this ultimately comes down to is that beyond a certain point, if you're not learning meaning you're not really learning anything. Whether you're an adult or a child you need to be getting meaning from somewhere so you can map it too the words/phrases you're hearing or reading. Kids I think get this from bucket loads of observation and interaction in real life situations. I don't really think there's anything stopping adults from learning like that either other than lack of time, other commitments etc.

I could go listen to nothing but swahili (or any other language I know nothing about) radio for a year, but if that is all I'm doing, I will learn approximately nothing. I'd develop a good ear for how it sounds, but that is all.

I agree with everything you said except the way you seem to underestimate the importance of developing "an ear for how it sounds".

How is that important if it still doesn't teach you how to recognize actual words?

You're going to rack up enough hours of listening eventually anyway, might as well spend it on recognizable input (or audio with text) so that you have a chance to learn something from the context.

Cognitive Psychology has shown through brain dye tests and the like that the area of one's native language and languages learned as adults are different. Pretty good indication that child learning/adult learning should be taken as two different beasts. The lack of conclusive studies on passive listening effectiveness only strengthens this idea.

My source in this case is a physical university textbook "Cognitive Psychology and its Implications" seventh edition by John Anderson.

Chigun Wrote:Cognitive Psychology has shown through brain dye tests and the like that the area of one's native language and languages learned as adult are different. Pretty good indication that child learning/adult learning should be taken as two different beasts. The lack of conclusive studies on passive listening effectiveness only strengthens this idea.

Actually it discredits your argument. Different learning styles will lead to different areas of the brain being used, so if you compare adult learnears learning languages by study and children learning it... well, like children, of course you're going to have different results. The lack of studies on passive listening effectiveness merely means that not enough people are doing it for a study to be possible.

mourei Wrote:How is that important if it still doesn't teach you how to recognize actual words?

You're going to rack up enough hours of listening eventually anyway, might as well spend it on recognizable input (or audio with text) so that you have a chance to learn something from the context.

I don't know about you, but I don't really like "racking up the hours". Sometimes when I go for a jog I just put a Japanese audio book on my MP3 player and listen to it while I run. It doesn't mean I'm not doing anything else Japanese on the side, it's just another piece added. I'm having fun with it and it's not hurting.

Also, I think while it might not help you to understand things, it helps you, surprisingly, with grammar. I've already happened upon occasions where I went "wait, that sounds wrong" and what I was reading indeed turned out to be a mistake.

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My argument is that you should do every one of those things along with learning deliberately. And you want to disprove it by limiting me to only listening/watching stuff? That's kind of weird.

Anyway, you're pretty much describing what I'm doing right now except that I also did Tae Kim and RTK and might be adding some sentences to Anki at some point, and, of course, dictionary lookups. I'm watching anime and movies and youtube videos without subtitles without understanding them, listening to audio books, etc., I'm reading manga and play video games, both sometimes with and sometimes without dictionary, whatever I feel like at any particular time.

And I procrastinate on these forums a lot.

hard to criticise the scientic studies without knowing exactly how they were conducted, but I think Zlarp does have a point.

I imagine if you monitored an adult's brain activity while reading a picture book in a foreign language it might be lighting up parts of the brain associated with use of their first language as their translation chip goes into overdrive and they're thinking to themselves "oh...that must mean apple...and that word must mean sky.." etc, where as a kid would just be 'absorbing.' That wouldn't necessarily prove the adult is learning in a different way, just that they are doing something else (translation) in parallel that might be distracting them.

@Arupan
but videos do provide some context. I agree that it wouldn't be optimal but you would learn something.

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Arupan Wrote:I have no doubt he'll learn something but I just don't feel it will be a lot.

With the weird idea you suggested or with what I'm doing? Because I'll be happy to prove you wrong once I've been doing this for a year or two, but if you're talking about your straw man argument you built up, then of course not.

Zlarp Wrote:Actually it discredits your argument. Different learning styles will lead to different areas of the brain being used, so if you compare adult learnears learning languages by study and children learning it... well, like children, of course you're going to have different results. The lack of studies on passive listening effectiveness merely means that not enough people are doing it for a study to be possible.

You can't just ignore his point like that without backing up your own claims.

I never said that you shouldn't listen to stuff you don't understand, like music for example. I just think you're overestimating what you're actually learning by watching stuff without subtitles, etc.

I think it's fair to assume that you have to pay attention while listening in order to actually learn something. You could make the case that a passive listening environment increases the occurrence of you doing this, which can't exactly hurt you. Doesn't mean it's crucial. Or subconscious for that matter. Or that you don't learn more by also using text and a dictionary.

Quote:My argument is that you should do every one of those things along with learning deliberately. And you want to disprove it by limiting me to only listening/watching stuff? That's kind of weird.

That wasn't your argument from the start. It was that subconscious learning occurs, and that it matters enough for us to be concerned about it. That's a little too close to the 'learning while you sleep' stuff for my taste. There are far better things to worry about.

This thread is getting hugely off track.

I never meant passive listening to imply that you don't pay attention to it. I agree that that's probably a load of bull. Subconscious learning still happens, though. I can read a manga one day with furigana and a few days later read the same passages again and suddenly I can sound out the words without ever "actively" doing anything. I'm starting to be able to see or hear what "sounds" right and what doesn't without resorting to any kind of formal grammar I learned. That's what I mean by subconscious.

And yes, sorry, for bringing this thread off track. I just felt that it was an important point to make that anything you do in Japanese helps, even if you don't feel like you're not learning anything.

Thank you all for your nice advice so far!

I believe we're derailing a little here, though...
May I summarize your discussion by saying audio is a helpful tool, both passive and active. The latter being more effective and recommended, but the passive being great for maintaining your immersion nonetheless.

Is that okay? ^^

mourei Wrote:That wasn't your argument from the start. It was that subconscious learning occurs, and that it matters enough for us to be concerned about it. That's a little too close to the 'learning while you sleep' stuff for my taste. There are far better things to worry about.

He already responded to this, but, yeah, what he originally said sounded like a bunch of woo-woo. 'Subconscious' is a big woo-woo word, after all. Also, I find it strange that he seems to be basing his opinions on neither personal experience nor science, which he implies when he says that he will prove us wrong in a year or two.

Well, Zlarp, if we can use personal experience--which I'm not so fond of as evidence, but you can easily look up studies yourself if you're interested--I've been studying Japanese for more than 6 years and have lived in Japan for four and a half of them. I've had two long term relationships entirely in Japanese. I've gotten tons and tons of passive and active listening every day for the past four years. And through that time I've found that what improves your Japanese is active and focused study. Passive listening helps not at all, and even everyday active listening like in conversations or on TV improves your Japanese at a painfully slow rate (which is why you get tons of people who live in Japan and yet never get good at Japanese). Rather, active listening reinforces what you learned during more focused studying. Structured active listening for the purpose of studying improves your Japanese, just as other focused studying does.

Children do not learn language through structured studying. But that sure is what seems to work for adults. You just did some of it with RTK and a grammar guide.

I think it might be useful to make a distinction between two types of learning, 'initial learning', and 'practicing' which leads to something becoming automatic.

Listening is great practice. You hear the things you learned at some point used again and again and those things gradually become automatic. And the more the language has become automatic, the more you will comprehend and the easier it will be regardless of whether the listening is passive or active. I really don't like these terms passive and active. How can listening be passive if you're comprehending it? If you don't recognise enough of what you're hearing to comprehend it, then how does being 'active' in your listening help exactly? I don't think you can make incomprehensible audio radically more comprehensible by concentrating or through an act of will power.

Initial learning is when you find out for the first time what particular things mean. This can not occur in the absence of some context which tells you meaning. This goes for listening or reading or having a conversation. And the context could be anything. A textbook, a dictionary, a real life situation, video, subtitles, pictures, partial understanding or whatever. Listening to something you do not understand without any context through which to learn something from it is pretty useless as a learning activity whether 'passive' or 'active.'

nadiatims Wrote:How can listening be passive if you're comprehending it? If you don't recognise enough of what you're hearing to comprehend it, then how does being 'active' in your listening help exactly? I don't think you can make incomprehensible audio radically more comprehensible by concentrating or through an act of will power.

Well, passive listening does exist though. I work in a big staff room with maybe 40 people, so I hear them speaking Japanese all day, but I usually am ignoring them. But then if a student is looking for a teacher or something I can sometimes recall where they went from just having overheard in the background. I would guess that this type of listening does not reinforce my Japanese as much as more carefully listening to other teachers have a conversation with some interest on my part.

Another example is when my girlfriend has the TV on or something, and I am sitting on the couch doing something else. I'm not watching TV, and I'm not trying to listen, but my comprehension is not at 0%.

(I agree with your final point though)

I find it hard to imagine something that does not have context, though. If you listen to a radio show, you have context - it's a radio show. You also have the context of tone and the ways people talk. I can understand that a Japanese person is excited without knowing Japanese, because the excited way of talking seems to explain itself and provide context by itself.

As for people living in Japan and never learning the language. Are you sure those people actually watch Japanese television and have Japanese friends?

Also, why do people keep banging on their point as if focused study and "passive" listening (whatever that may be, as exemplified by Nadiatims) were mutually exclusive? I know more than a child, so of course I'm going to make use of that knowledge. Doesn't mean I can't learn the other way as well to complement it.

Zlarp Wrote:As for people living in Japan and never learning the language. Are you sure those people actually watch Japanese television and have Japanese friends?

Also, why do people keep banging on their point as if focused study and "passive" listening (whatever that may be, as exemplified by Nadiatims) were mutually exclusive? I know more than a child, so of course I'm going to make use of that knowledge. Doesn't mean I can't learn the other way as well to complement it.

Well, I actually don't know any foreigners that enjoy watching Japanese television, including myself. I find daily television in Japan to be extremely boring, and I think most of my foreign friends agree with me. I only watched when I had a host family way back when, and with girls who enjoyed it--and I still do with my current girlfriend a bit, but we usually watch movies.

But yeah, they certainly have Japanese friends and are regularly exposed to attempts to speak to Japanese people (Here in Kyoto a lot of people frequent places like A-Bar, where it's set up so you'll share tables with people you don't know. Thus, you end up meeting people regardless of language ability). But, because their Japanese is not yet good enough on its own to hold a real friendship their most lasting friendships seem to be with people who know at least some English. Even when I first moved here it was a while before I really had good friends that I only spoke Japanese to. I had a bunch of mix-language friends at first.

Not to mention, it's hard to make friends at first for cultural reasons too. Now I know how to act around Japanese people who haven't had a lot of exposure to foreigners and foreign culture. I can put my Japanese-ness up and down like it were on a dial. But at first I couldn't do that at all and I imagine I could be off-putting to people who weren't used to American culture. People who first come here also haven't learned to do this.

さて、nobody is saying that any form of listening and studying are mutually exclusive. Rather, I think you should be realistic about which types of studying really improve your Japanese and which ones do so barely or not at all. I think a lot of learning styles that work for infants, such as listening to something vastly beyond your level, simple do not work for adults.

[RawToast]

nadiatims Wrote:Initial learning is when you find out for the first time what particular things mean. This can not occur in the absence of some context which tells you meaning. This goes for listening or reading or having a conversation. And the context could be anything. A textbook, a dictionary, a real life situation, video, subtitles, pictures, partial understanding or whatever. Listening to something you do not understand without any context through which to learn something from it is pretty useless as a learning activity whether 'passive' or 'active.'

This is where there is a big differnce between watching anime, films, listening to music, radio, etc and what a child does.

Pre-school children do not consume the anime, the films, or the music that we are consuming for practice. They are watching programmes like Barney and the Teletubbies which give context, their parents may hold things up to them and tell them what they are called, etc. You 'might' be able to reproduce this if you can find tv shows for preschoolers in japanese.

Study grammar in your own language, then study Japanese grammar.

Zlarp Wrote:So growing up suddenly changes your magic genius child brain into an boring old adult brain with less capabilities?

That's exactly what probably happens. I recommend this book.
http://www.amazon.com/Language-Instinct-...e+instinct

Err, guys, can we please stay on-topic?
I have reduced all your arguments (though I enjoyed reading them!) to this:

Prior to listening to something, try to understand the context first.
Try listening to things you can focus on as much as possible, but regardless, just leave the audio playing even if you can't.

Every little bit helps. Try to maximize exposure to things that help most, and fill the gaps with the rest.

RawToast Wrote:Pre-school children do not consume the anime, the films, or the music that we are consuming for practice. They are watching programmes like Barney and the Teletubbies which give context, their parents may hold things up to them and tell them what they are called, etc. You 'might' be able to reproduce this if you can find tv shows for preschoolers in japanese.

I watched regular cartoons when I was in preschool... My favorite show was apparently Ninja Turtles.

Learn grammar first. Through examples is the most effective way to me. It makes it much easier to pick up words after that. IMO.

Also some good ideas are bad for you. Some bad ideas are good for you. So you might have to experiment with what works for you best.

P.S. If anyone wanted an experiment of just listening its at Keith's Extreme Language Learning Blog under TV Method.
The results showed that you can learn that way, but it is slow just going by itself.