Good post. 

Everyone who I know who got really good at Japanese really quickly did tons of output.

If a music teacher were to tell his or her students to only play music when they've had sufficient input--a silent incubation phase--the landscape of music education would be markedly different.

An interesting passage I took note of in "Achieving Success in Second Language Acquisition". I think it's relevant here...

Read voraciously

One might be tempted [...] to say that one learns to speak by speaking, as we have said about other skills, and that would be true in general. However, research studies are beginning to show something else that is quite interesting. Many good speakers did not acquire their speaking skills by a lot of speaking practice; rather, they acquired them by doing a lot of reading (Badawi, 2002; Leaver, 2003a), then using what they had read in speaking.

This also might be obvious to everyone here, but I took better notice of it after seeing it written. Input and output are mutually reinforcing so it only makes sense to bring them together as much as possible.

nadiatims wrote:

After all his theorising, did Nest0r actually succeed at learning Japanese? I guess we'll never know.

Whether or not Nest0r achieved anything from the collected information does not reflect the value of the information- which, is very strongly based on a collection of data and research, insights and concepts from a range of people, as indicated in the ever present list of links to papers and what not. If you were to make the statement, it would be more accurate to point out that it was not "his theorising" (or hypothesizing, realistically) but the collective work of many others in which the individual merely explained their ideas, along with his own opinion of them, in a format accessible to those without the related scientific papers, articles, etc. Whether or not you find these sources useful or not, it would be at least a basic measure to acknowledge that the ideas stem from others, and are not entirely original ideas and concepts of the blog author.

This personalizing is hardly relevant, if anything, entirely misses the focus of the information presented. The individual success or failure to utilize a tool or tool set correctly does not provide a casual assessment of the value of the tools.

TwoMoreCharacters wrote:

Input in this case would be listening to music, which we all do. I get the feeling that if someone who'd been living under a rock and never been hearing music would go to a music teacher to learn, the teacher would first and foremost give him something to listen to.

If listening to music is analogous to listening to a language in terms of the learning process, it shows how little simply listening to input does.  Most people can't distinguish intervals despite a lifetime of listening to music, even though with a couple of weeks worth of dedicated practice they can start to do it pretty easily (when limited to two notes).  In fact, a lot of people can't even tell you which of two pitches is higher without having ever gotten instruction in music (unless, of course, the two pitches are very far apart).

But yeah, probably if you wanted to start teaching someone music who didn't know any, you would begin by having them listen to songs which illustrate specific intervals to get them started on ear training (something like Silent Night, Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas, Here Comes the Bride, and Star Wars, to start going down the major scale).

Last edited by Tzadeck (2013 March 06, 5:55 am)

mmhorii wrote:

If a music teacher were to tell his or her students to only play music when they've had sufficient input--a silent incubation phase--the landscape of music education would be markedly different.

If a Physics teacher were to tell his students to start designing airplanes before learning all the relevant laws of Physics, he'd be wasting everyone's time.

See how easy it is to come up with an arbitrary association that seems to validate any side of an argument? That's why using analogies as evidence is a logical fallacy.

Language and music are just as far apart as language and physics. Using either to try and make an argument about language is pointless.

darkjapanese wrote:

Learning through input alone is relatively slow and fragile. As Nation and other researchers have noted, words are learned through input at a very low rate, even with graded readers and glossing, and learning a word through context requires knowing around 98% of any given stream of input, and fully learning it this way requires seeing the word many times (10-20) in different contexts.

The 98% claim is false. I know, because I haven't read a single Japanese text, nor have I listened to or watched a single Japanese piece of media where I knew 98% of it. And yet, I learned new words from reading and listening to Japanese. (I also haven't seen any mention of that number, anywhere in the free link he provides, so, as it stands, it's just an arbitrary claim; arbitrary claims have the same value as false claims).

Having to see something 10-20 times before learning it doesn't seem like a "very low rate". I'd love to compare it to the efficiency of the methods he proposes. Unfortunately, I can't find any links to studies that measure that efficiency, which is odd, since he starts out the article by calling the other side "unscientific". That's fine, so long as you then hold your own advice to the same standard, and make sure it's scientific.

Last edited by Stansfield123 (2013 March 06, 9:10 am)

Hi Stansfield123,

I understand where you’re coming from, and I agree with you in principle. I also appreciate feedback so I can improve my thinking. Most of my days are spent in a muddle of confused and illogical ideas and thoughts, so any suggestions are helpful. My post wasn’t intended to support an argument or to make an argument; it was simply an observation. However, I can certainly see how it might be read as such, so chalk that up to my writing style: I’ll work on making my prose more “scrutable,” at least when I intend to be “scrutable.”

Not to delve too far into best practices in pedagogy, but I must ask: Are you so sure that if a physics professor were to teach introductory physics via a hands-on approach of building an airplane, rather than force-feeding Newtonian physics to students, that the students wouldn’t have a better understanding and intuition of physics concepts by the end of the course?

To expand on Tzadeck’s comments about the similarities between language learning and music, there is a strong relationship between language learning and music improvisation—in particular, jazz improvisation—and insights can be gained by looking at how jazz improvisation is taught. As an example of this, consider the following link that discusses jazz improvisation. I find that the ideas resonate equally for language learning and music improvisation.
http://jazzadvice.com/10-jazz-improvisa … -remember/

^^... While it is easy to tell a pop song from a death metal song, it is not so easy to differentiate more similar genres if you have little to no music knowledge. Talk about a single instrument and it's basically impossible. Similarly, it is preeeety easy to tell when a person is speaking, say, French as opposed to Chinese, though Spanish as opposed to Italian would be harder.

Also, if you listen to a language just like you listen to music normally, you would not advance any more than you would with your knowledge of music playing. Listening to music for the purpose of enhancing your ear and music skills is a completely different thing from listening to music in general. Listen to enough of a language and you'll pick up a thing or two (all the anime kids learning terms like baka, omae and whatnot are a good analogy here imgo), listen to music and you'll pick up some very basic aspects. But as a whole, it's useless. Listening to music whilst focusing on an instrument or on the way it works, or listening to a language whilst paying attention is a different thing. Add some basic theoretical knowledge and the benefit increases. And, eventually, you can make your own. People rarely compose or improvise when they're beginners; they focus on input and on mimicry. Real output starts later on. Of course, the finer line between types of output is harder to place in music.
Am I truly singing if I just read a score and mechanically assort it to my previous knowledge and play it accordingly? Or if I hear a song and repeat it by ear (which is a buttload of a task for many people, mind you)? Or is it only true output if I am composing, feeling or making my own version?

Similarly, you can read a sentence out loud and it's not necesarily "true" output, or shadow. Talking on your own is a whole different deal though.

Man, you can really go everywhere with the language-music simile. Let's hope the language part works out for me better than the music part did*.

*despite all the "work hard enough and you'll get there" things people tell you, if you're as truly talentless in music as I am, no matter how hard you work you won't get anywhere...

Exactly! No matter how well you can mimic what's on the sheets, working with other instruments is a completely different thing. Not to mention if it's the kind of jam where you're not doing a practiced cover.

It's funny that some tend to see his posts as the truth (or at least as very precise) because he supports his claimings using research and scientific papers.
Seriously, when out of the natural sciences fields, you can pretty much find a whole bunch of articles to support whatever it is that you believe.
Learning language is not exact, it's different for everybody, and I sincerely doubt you can define what is best and what is faster in this subject.

@Tyreon

I'm having difficulty understanding your argument.
Especially since he does not define that there is a "best" method.

Whatever argument you seem to be making, output is still necessary to... output.

Also, there's a difference between forming a conclusion based on research papers, and making something up and finding articles to prove your opinion.

Judging his arguments with conjectures is no better than using research papers.

Also, people believe his post because they find it reasonable. Believe what you will, but I find it more odd how someone would doubt something because research was used

Last edited by Aspiring (2013 March 06, 9:44 pm)

Why not just practice output by speaking with people..? you know when there are people to speak with.

When you're actually speaking, there is not necessarily any one correct way of saying something and besides how can you predict what kinds of sentences you'll actually have the opportunity/need to say?

The best way to develop speaking skills is by conversing with people and having solid listening skills. This way you're forced to think on the spot and come up with unrehearsed sentences quickly and without reference to a "correct" answer.

Last edited by nadiatims (2013 March 06, 9:28 pm)