Just for the records. We aren't building a math formula. We can't select pieces from other math formulae and expect that the resulting set, even if correct, will actualy work.

We are talking about the misterious human mind that needs training for every bit of knowledge that it aspires. Computers can transfer data at gigabytes/s, humans can assimilate a few bits/s.

mentat_kgs Wrote:Just for the records. We aren't building a math formula. We can't select pieces from other math formulae and expect that the resulting set, even if correct, will actualy work.

We are talking about the misterious human mind that needs training for every bit of knowledge that it aspires. Computers can transfer data at gigabytes/s, humans can assimilate a few bits/s.

Of course, true. You have to realize though that just as in Math, a beginner can't jump to the top right away. You need knowledge of the basics to understand the stuff above basics. If I don't understand particles, I shouldn't be working with transitive/intransitive verbs, because the knowledge of the latter depends on the knowledge of the first to an extent. Building on others experience is seeing that "Ok, these guys learned this over a year, and they understood that if you learn it in this order instead, you can learn it in 5 weeks". Of course, you should follow their order instead of doing their mistake all over. Same in math... you can really start in any area of math and then work out the rest as you go, but it will take much longer. If you don't understand how + and - works, starting with / and * might not be such a good idea, even if it's possible to learn that way too.

So I agree, the human mind needs extreme amounts of training, minimizing the time and effort is the key we're all working on here on this forum, right? I mean, that's why we use Heisigs method instead of writing the kanji over and over. Both ways work fine, one just happens to be much faster. Instead of us learning kanji from exposure in real sources, we take the experience of Heisig and his method and use it to get done faster.

@ Tobberoth:
Awesome, thanks.

phauna Wrote:Grammar instruction is not risky. 'No instruction' is risky. Are you seriously saying that learning a language from first principles is easier and more effective? It is extremely difficult and error prone I should think. Imagine being dropped in the Amazon and having to decipher the language of a tribe. It would take many many years. Now imagine being dropped in the jungle holding a grammar book with English explanations of that tribe's language. Congratulations, you have saved yourself years of work.

If you are dropped there, you can learn quickly and be functional faster. While were in this imagined example, I'll say this:
What kind of perspective would he have on the language? Learning for yourself gives a much deeper connection with the language. It wouldn't take years to do it without explanations.

I'm going to go out and say something you all hate:
Babies don't learn grammar and have 100% success at learning to native fluently. Not very many adults learn a language to native fluency.

And for the record, I do know several adults personally who qualify as "native fluent" in learning English as a second language. They learned the language by being "dropped in the Amazon", or in this case England, without a textbook or grammar book. I know personally several adults who learned English in school throughout college. Terrible English.

Tobberoth Wrote:Instead of us learning kanji from exposure in real sources, we take the experience of Heisig and his method and use it to get done faster.

Quite an effective point here, Tobberoth!

When learning Spanish, for the first two or three months, I studied grammar. Getting the conjugations, pronouns, prepositions, etc. stuck in my head. Now that I understand all of this, it's much easier to understand sentences put in my deck -- it's mostly vocabulary -- learning what words mean, how they're used, when to use them, their subtle nuances, idioms, that kind of stuff.

alyks Wrote:And for the record, I do know several adults personally who qualify as "native fluent" in learning English as a second language. They learned the language by being "dropped in the Amazon", or in this case England, without a textbook or grammar book. I know personally several adults who learned English in school throughout college. Terrible English.

And I know people who has been living in another country for over 10 years who still can't speak the language at all. The only foreigners I know who speak Swedish well are the ones who moved here at a very early age. It also took them very long time, one guy I know speaks Swedish well now but it took him over 3 years going to regular Swedish school before he could talk decently.

Trying to learn a language without explanations takes even more time than it does a baby, and it takes them several years. How many 5 year olds have you met who are natively fluent? Not many.

Tobberoth Wrote:How many 5 year olds have you met who are natively fluent? Not many.

Seriously? Ok, I am done arguing. I give up. I have better things to do.

Meh, false assumpitons everywhere. By the age of 5, kids are already reading. Some do it even earlier.

I do not understand this argument. Using a textbook by itself with no outside reinforcement is bad, using it in conjunction is not. People are acting as if textbooks and immersion are mutually exclusive.

I see arguments of "these people did immersion and they're better than the one's who studied at school". I studied English at school and immersion and I correct native speaker's English essays at college. How is that for an example? Actually, the whole point of anecdotal stories is useless.

Immerse yourself. If you can't understand something at all just look it up in your text, think about it for a bit, then move on. Done.

Why is the old saying "a little bit of both" seemingly unknown to people on this website.

mentat_kgs Wrote:Meh, false assumpitons everywhere. By the age of 5, kids are already reading. Some do it even earlier.

And since when are you natively fluent just because you can read? I can read Japanese, I wouldn't call myself natively fluent. There are 5 year olds who speak great, I'm just saying there's tons of 5 year olds who still speak like babies... you know, toddlerspeak. Not "gaga gogo" but you know, use only very simple words, speak grammatically incorrect etc. Like I do when I speak Japanese from time to time.

I'm following the input hypothesis here.

Read -> Listen -> Write -> Speak

When I get confotrable with my reading and listening skill, I'll try to write. When I'm ok with writing, I'll speak.

Actually I'm already chatting ocasionally in japanese. I still write only simple things that I'm 95% sure about, but they are slowly getting better.

But seriously, I have still not met any child that could not speak perfectly with 5 yo. They allways surprise you with something (good or bad) that should be way above their age.

It's a bit late but I wanted to add my apologies to Miaow. I'm sorry for jumping to conclusions, and I'm glad you're so happy with the text. I hope you can keep up the study schedule and get every drop of goodness from the books you have.

As for textbooks and input: the more the better. Why not try to get every benefit of the textbooks and all the input you can get? I've taken a lot of classes, gotten a lot of textbooks, and spent a lot of time in Japan. I found that what I learned from textbooks provided a foundation that supported my attempts to deal with what I was hearing and seeing. Sometimes the grammar explanations would come back to me and "click" after some particular conversation. I'm not bad, but I would be a lot better at Japanese if I weren't shy about speaking and if I hadn't spent so much time emailing home and watching/reading English things in my JET years -- but that's the textbooks' fault. I'm back in Japan now after studying Japanese at a more advanced level, and this time I'm determined to get benefit of RtK, input from videos and leisure reading, and practice speaking with people. I'm also taking modern and classical grammar classes.

Native speakers learn grammar from textbooks, too, that's part of how they progress from sounding like little kids to sounding like educated adults. For all the trouble I am putting into studying Japanese, I want to aim for sounding like an educated adult rather than a 10-year-old.

I met a few young native speakers yesterday at a science museum. After some pleasantries "外国人!　外国人だ! . . . ああ!　日本語しゃべってる!　(Foreigner! It's a foreigner! . . . She's speaking Japanese!)", I learned that they were in sixth grade. We were in a round room of flashing blue light bulbs, and I asked what it was. The kids ran around in circles, found a sign about the exhibit but quickly gave up: "なんだろう?　わっかんない?読めない！読めない! (What is it? I don't know. . . . Oh, I can't read it. I can't read it either.)" Then they ran in circles again, and I went on to the next exhibit. I'm sort of paraphrasing here, but you get the idea.

The sign they couldn't read wasn't directly related to the blue light bulb room, but the handy English translation was full of words like "quark" and "proton" and "neutron." The kids seemed taken aback by the many kanji -- and maybe nervously excited about speaking with a foreigner -- and I don't think they really tried to deal with the unfamiliar words.

mentat_kgs Wrote:Computers can transfer data at gigabytes/s, humans can assimilate a few bits/s.

Think for a moment at the enormous data transfer rate it would take to filter in all of the human senses. The vision is at an enormously high resolution -- add in crystal clear sound to that -- not to mention countless other senses inside and outside the body -- and we're talking some heavy electrical traffic there.

I was talking about long term memory, specificaly to text. Sorry for the lack of disclaimers.

mentat_kgs Wrote:I'm following the input hypothesis here.

Read -> Listen -> Write -> Speak

When I get confotrable with my reading and listening skill, I'll try to write. When I'm ok with writing, I'll speak.

Actually I'm already chatting ocasionally in japanese. I still write only simple things that I'm 95% sure about, but they are slowly getting better.

But seriously, I have still not met any child that could not speak perfectly with 5 yo. They allways surprise you with something (good or bad) that should be way above their age.

You're saying that if i let a 5 year old dictate posts on this forum, you wouldn't recognize right away that a 5 year old wrote it from choice of words and sentence structures? I would, without any doubt. I can usually even recognize when people are under 15, and this isn't even in my native language. And no, i'm not talking about immaturity, I'm talking about how advanced the language use is.

I've seen this argued a few times already, so I'll just repost this link: (for the third time, I think)

http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/rw/krashenbk.htm

It's a good summary of Krashen's language learning hypotheses. The site has a lot of interesting articles on language learning and acquisition. (Which are apparently two different things.)

In the end, it's all about results. If your method gets results, then it's worthwhile. If it doesn't, it isn't. If it isn't, stop, research, revise, and go at it again until you do.

Meanwhile, arguing about it doesn't really help you learn anything at all. A lesson I have taken to heart of late.

Post less, study more.

5 year olds don't speak perfectly, but they do speak a lot and effortlessly. Mostly gramatically correct. They can say everything they want. Their language is 100% acquired. No rule parsing going on when they speak or listen.

Ofcourse children have more learning to do - they not only have to develop language but they have to develop skills like paying attention, and gaining knowledge and reason of the world from scratch. The input level they can hold an interest in and comprehend is limited.

A 3 y/o can't pay attention long enough to learn how to tie her own shoes, but I think she may kick the butt of most people that just completed a basic course on Japanese .

For their level of understanding of the world, and their level of input, children speak remarkably.

Quote:I can usually even recognize when people are under 15, and this isn't even in my native language. And no, i'm not talking about immaturity, I'm talking about how advanced the language use is.

Yet that 15 year old likely sounds totally fluent and natural for his age. In fact, does a child ever sound like a foreigner in his native tongue?

Do you want to wait five years though? Five years seems a long time.

vosmiura Wrote:5 year olds don't speak perfectly, but they do speak a lot and effortlessly. Mostly gramatically correct. They can say everything they want. Their language is 100% acquired. No rule parsing going on when they speak or listen.

And this is the kind of conversational ability I've been speaking about from just going through MnN and then having experience in conversation. You can speak a lot. You can speak effortlessly. You can say anything you want, you just have to keep it to simple vocabulary (just like 5 year olds). If you have conversed enough, you should not be spending any time at all parsing rules, it should come naturally. As long as you stick to the stuff you learned early, the grammar should be correct almost always.

I'm not saying childrens language learning isn't extremely impressive, just saying that the fluency we are trying to attain in Japanese is adult fluency which is VERY different from 5 year old fluency which some of us are probably close to already (obviously depending on situation, I would never compare my vocabularysize to that of a 5 year old.. I may know advanced adult-words like 保険 and 労災認定 but there's so many words a 5 year old knows I probably won't learn for ages.

vosmiura Wrote:Yet that 15 year old likely sounds totally fluent and natural for his age. In fact, does a child ever sound like a foreigner in his native tongue?

I don't really know, honestly. Maybe. Depends on what you mean by "sound like a foreigner" and "fluent and natural for his age". Going to some swedish community site like lunarstorm, i could probably not tell whether a post is written by a very skilled foreigner och a lazy 13 year old. That might also be because foreign Swedish is sort of... working it's way into normal Swedish since we have quite a high degree of immigration. Kids often use foreignstyle Swedish even though they are natives.

phauna Wrote:Do you want to wait five years though? Five years seems a long time.

Never said that you would, unless you were a newborn trying to catch up to a 5 y/o .

It's not like you have to re-learn all concepts from scratch like a newborn. Concepts are harder to learn than language.

For example kids take years to learn how to count numbers. It's not because learnnig 10 number words is hard at all; it's just that it takes them a long time to learn the concept and usefullness of counters.

On the other hand, an adult can learn to count in Japanese in a day. But they probably need lots of practice to get used to the concept of breaking down numbers into 10000s. An adult can also quickly learn to count in Hexadecimal, but learning to do Hex arithmetic quickly would take much longer.

Here's what I think:
- Drop a newborn in a different country - and he's already fluent in any language, for his age, ie. zero .
- 1 y/o in a different country - speaks nothing - still normal for his age.
- 2 y/o in a different country - maybe lagging behind by a few words but within a few months he can be fluent for his age.
- 10 y/o in a different country - lagging behind by about 2 years (I did that).

And so on. The older the person the longer it would take to catch up to native level for his/her age, but it's not like it would take 5 years to reach the level of a 5 y/o.

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blo...e-textbook

Le Shock!

Read the whole thing, or at least the part where he talks about the good of textbooks.

I'm not sure about this whole "5 year old" argument. Babies and toddlers learn languages through immersion because they don't have the mental capacity or attention span to study with textbooks or dictionaries. I really don't think it's surprising that a 5 year-old can have such a good grasp of its language since its effectively been "studying" it for every waking hour of its entire life. If an intelligent adult learner put as much time into studying a foreign language as a five year-old had exposure to its native one, I think the adult would progress much faster and more effectively.

I believe that one of the main reasons why people feel textbooks are ineffective is because learners just don't devote as much time to them as a lot of other people spend in immersion.

It's hard to compare post-adolescent learners and babies of 5 years old because we don't understand much about the 'critical period' of learning.

tylerdevlin Wrote:I'm not sure about this whole "5 year old" argument. Babies and toddlers learn languages through immersion because they don't have the mental capacity or attention span to study with textbooks or dictionaries. I really don't think it's surprising that a 5 year-old can have such a good grasp of its language since its effectively been "studying" it for every waking hour of its entire life. If an intelligent adult learner put as much time into studying a foreign language as a five year-old had exposure to its native one, I think the adult would progress much faster and more effectively.

I believe that one of the main reasons why people feel textbooks are ineffective is because learners just don't devote as much time to them as a lot of other people spend in immersion.

textbooks are effective, but a lot of people have trouble with them is pretty much one thing. Retaining what has been learned for the long-term. Since we have the srs, we can pretty much learn all the necessary vocab/context and have it in our long-term memory for later use.

Tobberoth Wrote:How many 5 year olds have you met who are natively fluent? Not many.

Just wanted to add my experience... by 18 months I knew many short phrases. By the time I was 2 or 3 I was fluent (came into a back room at my aunt's wedding and said "I am so stressed out!" I kid you not.) and I would say by 5 I was natively fluent. Granted not ALL the big adult words. But I watched things like Star Wars and Star Trek, so I did know a lot of words my friends didn't. Also this was speaking not reading, though could read fairly well by the time I was 5. (Even better once my mom took me out of school and started homeschooling me.) Then again I was reading hard core 600 page novels by the time I was 12.
Maybe I'm just an oddity.

Tobberoth Wrote:

mentat_kgs Wrote:Meh, false assumpitons everywhere. By the age of 5, kids are already reading. Some do it even earlier.

And since when are you natively fluent just because you can read? I can read Japanese, I wouldn't call myself natively fluent. There are 5 year olds who speak great, I'm just saying there's tons of 5 year olds who still speak like babies... you know, toddlerspeak. Not "gaga gogo" but you know, use only very simple words, speak grammatically incorrect etc. Like I do when I speak Japanese from time to time.

THIS is the fault of the parents. When I was 5 I HATED it when my friends talked this way and I ALWAYS corrected them and tried to get them to pronounce things right. Man that drove me nuts. My parents NEVER baby talked to me, even when I was an infant. And my mom never let anyone baby talk to me.
I also have no doubt that I talked grammatically incorrect every once in a while. I still do it. Though usually it's either A) I'm trying to get a rise out of my mom, or B) I'm in too big of a hurry to use correct grammar so I leave stuff out. And then there are those rare occasions when I don't know how to use a word and I use it wrong. And then my mother promptly corrects me.