I strongly disagree with #1 and #2 being myths. I've never met someone good at Japanese who hasn't spent at least some time in Japan, and speaking a lot (aka production) is the best way to internalize the language. Of course we don't want any false dichotomies, so I'm not at all saying ONLY speak it and never study. One can do both speaking and studying. Speak what you've studied and get feedback! And of course simply by being in Japan you're not going to improve your Japanese, just like owning a textbook but never using it won't help you.

Being good at a language doesn't just mean that you can read something or watch a tv show. Production is as important as comprehension, but much more difficult to master.

Hell, #3 is BS too. If you insist on never making mistakes, you'll never be able to produce since you'll be paralyzed with fear. No speaks perfectly, not even Japanese people. Learning from mistakes is the best way to cement knowledge.

"Facts" like these I think just serve as a way for people to avoid their insecurities. Speaking is difficult, uncomfortable, and embarrassing - especially at first. You can sweep it all under the rug by just saying "it's unimportant" or "I can leave it for later". One of the biggest negatives about classes (both JSL and ESL), which everyone around here loves to hate on, is that they don't focus on creative production enough.

KristinHolly Wrote:Learning a second language like French or Spanish in the States and learning English as a second language are different things in terms of practical utility for communication with the rest of the world. Almost everybody in the US is walking around with some rusty Spanish or French or German, but as long as you can make it through the menu in a Mexican restaurant, you're probably fine for all practical purposes. Nobody really cares if you've forgotten how to conjugate verbs -- not because they don't care about the world but because there is no pressing need for the skill.

Spanish is quickly growing in the United States as a dominant language, and, in the future, could make this entire paragraph false.

Quote:Even being fluent in a foreign language doesn't mean that you will carefully follow world events, think critically about politics, make good economic choices, and consider cultural differences. Social studies might help, though . . . or literature or history or comparative religious studies . . .

These are things you have to actively seek to learn as human being.

Social studies was nothing more than extended history class while I was in school. Had I learned anything significant from it, I think I would have come to hate pre-modern Europeans rather than have a broader cultural understanding. Also, like all history classes I've taken, it was a subject taught specifically for the test, ie a joke.

History is generally written by those still alive to write about it and published with the newly acquired wealth pillaged from the vanquished.

Jarvik7 Wrote:I strongly disagree with #1 and #2 being myths. I've never met someone good at Japanese who hasn't spent at least some time in Japan, and speaking a lot (aka production) is the best way to internalize the language.

I did meet someone in Japan who was completely fluent in English and had never been overseas. He was a former computer programmer who lost his job five years earlier and had been doing his own form of All English All The Time. With access to media, video chatting and online study, I am not so sure that being in Japan is so important anymore. If you live in an area (like Hawaii) that has a large Japanese population it helps as well. If you go to Japan to be an English teacher it may actually be a hindrance especially if you live in a company apartment with other teachers.

Tobberoth Wrote:

Antimoon by way of musigny Wrote:Myth #1: "The best way to learn a foreign language is to go to a foreign country"

1# Of course it is. Where can you get better exposure? Nowhere. A determined student living in Japan will learn faster than a determined student outside of Japan, there's no way around this fact.

I wonder. The use of "automatically" early in the actual rebuttal suggests that you're misreading this.

Consider: which is the better way to learn Japanese?

a) Live in Japan (and just that)
b) Study Japanese (by any non-awful method)

I'm pretty sure you wouldn't say a. I think the idea isn't "don't go to a foreign country until you're fluent, you'll damage your learning", but that there are a big stack of things that help your learning better than moving to that country. If you happen to get through that stack then sure, go right ahead and it'll help, but it's not a sufficient condition.

Basically, I think people are reading the myth as being a much weaker claim than it actually is, and consequently the rebuttal as a much stronger claim.

~J

I'd just like to point out that critical thinking, problem solving, giving your opinion, writing essays and reports, group work etc. are not solely the domain of US education, it is Western education, coming down from Greece and Rome. Europeans and English speakers worldwide, and those influenced by them, are taught this way.

Last I heard the US school system sucks big time. Getting into Harvard seems to be hardly a difficult affair, Bush went to Harvard, didn't he? I thought you could buy your way into American universities, lots of them are private anyway. Try doing that in Australia, you either get the mark or you don't get in. The way I see it, all universities should be meritocracies and definitely not private, when they are private there begins a conflict of interests between academic standards and what the customer wants.

There are several ways to get into famous universities. Generally one of them involves being very hard-working, and another of them involves being someone likely to inherit gobs of cash that you can donate as an alumnus. The key is that the size of "gobs of cash" is large enough that that's not going to account for a whole class.

The US public school system is of severely mixed quality. The private school system, from what I know if it, is similarly mixed with less depth to the valleys. The universities, though, are quite strong.

~J

Tobberoth Wrote:This is interesting, can't help but give my opinion on those:

1# Of course it is. Where can you get better exposure? Nowhere. A determined student living in Japan will learn faster than a determined student outside of Japan, there's no way around this fact.
2# Agreed, it is not. It's a great way to solidify however.
3# Of course it's okay to make mistakes, as long as you're aware of that fact.
4# Not if you stick to beginning levels, a beginner trying to speak at a high level however = mistakesだらけだ.
5# Not really a myth, getting 100% perfect accent takes even a determined student of pronounciation ages. I mean sure, live in Japan for 20 years focusing on pronounciation constantly and you'll probably perfect it. In 5 years just because you try your best? I don't think so.
6# This I agree with 100%, THIS is a myth.
7# Depends on language and your goals. If you just want to be able to get around etc, it might be fine to ignore it mostly. If you want fluency, you can't. If you want to learn Chinese, it's fundamental. In some other languages, it is not.

Tobberoth, I would discuss this with you but I've viewed much of what you've written on this site and it appears that your original viewpoint is fixed and doesn't change. Last time you started lecturing me like an expert on elementary Japanese grammar and pronunciation like the Harvard grad student the bar in Good Will Hunting (

). If you can be open-minded and civil I'd be glad to discuss.

phauna Wrote:Last I heard the US school system sucks big time.

The Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University did a ranking of the world's top 500 universities. Eight of the top ten were American.

http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2005/ARWU2005_Top100.htm

wccrawford Wrote:And what makes world events so necessary to follow? Do I need to know anything about iraq's history to understand that there's a war there? I don't have any effect on the situation, so my knowledge of their history is useful only as entertainment.

...and so you're "condemned to repeat it"


[Edit:changed "doomed" to condemned" after looking up the actual quote, and not the one in my head]

musigny Wrote:

phauna Wrote:Last I heard the US school system sucks big time.

The Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University did a ranking of the world's top 500 universities. Eight of the top ten were American.

http://ed.sjtu.edu.cn/rank/2005/ARWU2005_Top100.htm

And slightly over half of all of them (57 from North America, four from Canada that I saw and none from Mexico, Central America, or the Caribbean).

~J

There is no such thing as a "best" university. Depending on what faculty you study under, different universities have better programs.

Jarvik7 Wrote:There is no such thing as a "best" university. Depending on what faculty you study under, different universities have better programs.

This is just one ranking done by an institute in China. It's true that a university is made up of different departments that are of varying esteem, like a sports team is made up of various players or an orchestra of various musicians. I don't believe that negates attempting to evaluate universities as a whole. If we follow on that train of logic, each department in fact could be further broken down to professors and so on.

There absolutely is such a thing; simply define goodness as any partial ordering such that there exists a maximum element and a "best" falls right out.

~J

musigny Wrote:Myth #1: "The best way to learn a foreign language is to go to a foreign country"
Myth #2: "The best way to learn a foreign language is to speak it"
Myth #3: "It is OK to make mistakes"
Myth #4: "As a beginner, you're bound to make a lot of mistakes"
Myth #5: "You are a foreigner, therefore you will always have a foreign accent"
Myth #6: "If you didn't learn a foreign language as a child, you will never be fully proficient in its grammar"
Myth #7: "Studying pronunciation is not important"

I agree with 5, 6 and 7.

The first 2 are misleading and 3 and 4 are more about how you want to view your efforts.

#1 It is certainly true that going to a foreign country is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for becoming proficient in that country's language. However, declaring statement 1 to be a myth suggests that going to a foreign country won't help you learn the language. This is demonstrably false. If you go to a foreign country, you gain more exposure and therefore more practice. It helps.

#2 Reading the entry on the site for this, they say that you should imitate rather than make stuff up and guess. This is true. However, declaring statement 2 to be a myth suggests that speaking won't help you learn the language. Speaking by itself doesn't help. Saying something, getting feedback and adjusting according to that feedback helps. Speaking is therefore part of the process and extremely important.

For the first 'myth', I would question the source of the material. Is it a language learning website? Perhaps they want to convince you that all you need is the website and you don't need to go to the country in question.

musigny Wrote:Tobberoth, I would discuss this with you but I've viewed much of what you've written on this site and it appears that your original viewpoint is fixed and doesn't change. Last time you started lecturing me like an expert on elementary Japanese grammar and pronunciation like the Harvard grad student the bar in Good Will Hunting (

). If you can be open-minded and civil I'd be glad to discuss.

Personal attacks are rarely the way to win an argument.

wccrawford Wrote:Personal attacks are rarely the way to win an argument.

Agreed.

woodwojr Wrote:There absolutely is such a thing; simply define goodness as any partial ordering such that there exists a maximum element and a "best" falls right out.

I define goodness as "sucking" and thus the list becomes reversed.
It's silly to compare departments with football players. Players must work as a team to get a win, departments do not. Having an awesome law faculty doesn't help you one bit when you're in the biology faculty.

If, for example, Harvard has a bad computer engineering department, they might be the very worst university for you to goto.

You could say something like "Harvard has a higher number of excellent faculties than other universities and thus it is the best", but that means absolutely nothing to a student if their faculty isn't one of those excellent ones.

And before anyone says "but what if all of Harvard's faculties are #1", they aren't. No university is the best at everything. If you were a computer engineer for example MIT would probably be a much better choice.

I think the loaded word in Myth #1 is "Best". How can that way be called the "best" when it involves a major life change (Job, location, funds, etc). It is a way to learn a foreign language, but not the best if you take into account all other factors.

Myth #3 forgets to add "that go uncorrected". Everyone that uses an SRS hopefully is making a mistake 10% to 20% of the time. However, those mistakes get corrected on the spot, and the card gets recycled earlier.

These seem to be myths that encourage not learning a language ("Hey, I could learn Japanese if my family was rich enough to send me to Japan. Guess I can't learn it") and staying mediocre. Yeah, it feels like strawmen arguments however I think I've read each of the above in other forums. Like I others, I tend to agree with them in part or with condition.

wrightak Wrote:For the first 'myth', I would question the source of the material. Is it a language learning website? Perhaps they want to convince you that all you need is the website and you don't need to go to the country in question.

Conflict of interest would be a more compelling argument if they had something material to gain; as far as I can tell, AntiMoon sells nothing and has no ads (to be fair, I do block ads, so I may simply not be seeing them), so I don't really buy it. They could still be wrong, but I see no case for conflict of interest here.

I also think that insufficient attention is being paid to the "best" in the myths; similar to my comment on the first one, substituting "a good" in for "the best" makes a meaningfully weaker claim that requires a stronger claim to refute.

Edit: NukeMarine: I don't think the argument is that the cost and hassle is excessive, it's rather that by living there you won't learn the language via osmosis; there still has to be active study. There are demonstrably people who have minimal competence in the language of the country in which they live. The use of the word "automatically" early on in the rebuttal is very important, IMO.

~J

woodwojr Wrote:Conflict of interest would be a more compelling argument if they had something material to gain; as far as I can tell, AntiMoon sells nothing and has no ads (to be fair, I do block ads, so I may simply not be seeing them), so I don't really buy it. They could still be wrong, but I see no case for conflict of interest here.

They have ads. Your blocker is doing a good job. They're also peddling their software: http://www.antimoon.com/perfectp/perfectp.htm?footer

For what it takes to become good at anything, check out this famous post by the Freakonomics authors on the work of Anders Ericsson:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/magazi...77&ei=5070

also:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/sto...17,00.html

What you need is "Deliberate practice".

Jarvik7 Wrote:

woodwojr Wrote:There absolutely is such a thing; simply define goodness as any partial ordering such that there exists a maximum element and a "best" falls right out.

I define goodness as "sucking" and thus the list becomes reversed.
It's silly to compare departments with football players. Players must work as a team to get a win, departments do not. Having an awesome law faculty doesn't help you one bit when you're in the biology faculty.

If, for example, Harvard has a bad computer engineering department, they might be the very worst university for you to goto.

While I don't agree that the comparison to sports players is "silly"; even if it were, it doesn't negate the point. It's not worth debating as I can see you're quite firm in your opinion.

A physics department's reputation could very well be based on the research of one faculty member among ten, a nobel laureate for example, who doesn't lecture. I studied Economics as an undergrad in a department that was ranked 8th in the US at the time. I had one class with one of the two professors who made the reputation of the department over my four years. I was not impressed with many of the professors in fact.

I do see your point that you consider an individual department more important than an overall school. I would tend to agree with that, particularly if it is grad school. For a high school senior deciding which university to attend and who is not sure of what to major in, the overall quality of the university may be more important.

Nukemarine Wrote:I think the loaded word in Myth #1 is "Best". How can that way be called the "best" when it involves a major life change (Job, location, funds, etc). It is a way to learn a foreign language, but not the best if you take into account all other factors.

Myth #3 forgets to add "that go uncorrected". Everyone that uses an SRS hopefully is making a mistake 10% to 20% of the time. However, those mistakes get corrected on the spot, and the card gets recycled earlier.

These seem to be myths that encourage not learning a language ("Hey, I could learn Japanese if my family was rich enough to send me to Japan. Guess I can't learn it") and staying mediocre. Yeah, it feels like strawmen arguments however I think I've read each of the above in other forums. Like I others, I tend to agree with them in part or with condition.

I regard these Myths being exposed as empowering. Regarding Myth #1, I've heard numerous times in my life that you have to go to the country to learn the language. I believe they are trying to debunk that myth. I once went to an "immersion" program in a foreign country. I was with foreigners all the time learning the language hearing the language spoken haltingly at best, butchered at worst. A_ATT could be argued as far more productive in one's home country.

With regards to Myth #3, I believe this is trying to debunk the idea that from the first day of class, you're are supposed to speak that language. Rather than butcher the language trying to speak as a beginner, it is far better to have massive input, ie listening and reading, and start speaking "correctly" when you've inputed enough to do so. It is very easy to go to a foreign country and just talk all the time (output) solidifying mistakes. Natives will rarely correct you. I don't think this is referring to not recalling the correct answer silently to an SRS.

wrightak Wrote:

woodwojr Wrote:Conflict of interest would be a more compelling argument if they had something material to gain; as far as I can tell, AntiMoon sells nothing and has no ads (to be fair, I do block ads, so I may simply not be seeing them), so I don't really buy it. They could still be wrong, but I see no case for conflict of interest here.

They have ads. Your blocker is doing a good job. They're also peddling their software: http://www.antimoon.com/perfectp/perfectp.htm?footer

Selling something doesn't invalidate tangential content. Because a teaching golf pro earns a living from lessons on the driving range doesn't invalidate his swing advice. You listen to his advice and try it out or not. If it you works for you, it is valid. If you got that advice for free, you could choose not to take lessons.

I hear this kind of talk from time to time and I don't get it. It is as if everyone expects no one to make a living in their area of expertise. I use Anki but the SuperMemo site has fantastic advice and research on SRS learning. I don't invalidate their site content because they are selling SRS software. I read it, analyse it and decide if it is of value to me. I'm grateful they have the research. I get it for free while using a competing product.

That site has referred me to the work of Stephen Krashen and others which has been invaluable. They sell pronunciation software for English which I don't need. But the author was kind enough to respond to my email and provide some advice for pronunciation improvement for foreign languages in general. I can evaluate a hypothesis with my own rational thinking and experimentation without prejudice as to whether someone is earning a living or not in their field of expertise.

wrightak Wrote:

woodwojr Wrote:Conflict of interest would be a more compelling argument if they had something material to gain; as far as I can tell, AntiMoon sells nothing and has no ads (to be fair, I do block ads, so I may simply not be seeing them), so I don't really buy it. They could still be wrong, but I see no case for conflict of interest here.

They have ads. Your blocker is doing a good job. They're also peddling their software: http://www.antimoon.com/perfectp/perfectp.htm?footer

For what it takes to become good at anything, check out this famous post by the Freakonomics authors on the work of Anders Ericsson:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/07/magazi...77&ei=5070

also:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/sto...17,00.html

What you need is "Deliberate practice".

10,000 hours, that is the magic number. This is why Khatzumoto demands 10,000 of listening and 10,000 sentences for AJATT.

kazelee Wrote:Spanish is quickly growing in the United States as a dominant language, and, in the future, could make this entire paragraph false.

This isn't really true, there are more and more people here that speak Spanish but there isn't a huge trend to switch over to Spanish. Also it's not like there is an unlimited supply of Spanish speaking people coming into the United States, even if all of Mexico came into the United States: English would still be the dominant language.

kazelee Wrote:These are things you have to actively seek to learn as human being.

Social studies was nothing more than extended history class while I was in school. Had I learned anything significant from it, I think I would have come to hate pre-modern Europeans rather than have a broader cultural understanding. Also, like all history classes I've taken, it was a subject taught specifically for the test, ie a joke.

Why would a language class be any different?