Why one earth would ANYONE label this as spam?

This is the first I've ever seen about this particular method. It seems really appealing - thanks for getting me interested in it.

Direct link to the roundup of all the threads about it on HTLAL:
http://learnlangs.com/Listening-Reading … ssages.htm

iSoron wrote:

it does not follow the i+1/comprehensible input principle; you are bombarded with new things to learn;

And the problem with that is what, exactly?

i+1 is hardly religious dogma.  It's a made-up rule-of-thumb suggested by one academic at the fringe of his field, and advocated by a rag-tag group of bloggers...

I've followed a method not identical, but related to L-R for learning German: reading 1,000,000 words without a dictionary, translation, or any reference material at hand.  It's prooved highly efficient and it has absolutely not been harmful.  The human mind is well adapted to making sense of uncomprehensible input.  It's how we all learned our native languages, afterall.

As for being time consuming, people have gained fluency via L-R in months, far faster than Khatz did with the methods advocated on this board.  Of course it remains to be seen how useful L-R is for very distant languages like Japanese.  But I wouldn't dismiss out out-of-hand.  Alyks advoated a similar approach many years ago before he left the forum.

On HTLAL people who have tried it/are using it with Japanese have suggested starting from a position of at least being able to recognise a good number of Kanji (e.g. after RTK) and both syllabaries.

Not following the i+1 method is hardly a criticism - that's only one, slow way of learning a language. L+R is appealing precisely because it inundates your brain with the language  on two fronts whilst also taking advantage of your L1. We know humans can learn language by inundation, it's how we all learned as babies.

Wouldn't L-R be a bit similar to doing English and Japanese subtitles with Subs2srs? If so, there's bound to be people on this forum that can offer up their opinion on that process.

I tried it myself early on with subs2srs and quickly deleted the English translations. It was too easy to get a false sense of understanding which was painfully evident when the reviews rolled around. However, it may be useful for the early portions of studying where there's both simple and complex grammar/vocabulary being used. Probably one of those depends on the person and their ability things.

iSoron wrote:

(1) it does not follow the i+1/comprehensible input principle; you are bombarded with new things to learn;

Wait.  Are we talking about Krashen? 

Dr. Krashen wrote:

A third part of the input hypothesis says that input must contain i + 1 to be useful for language acquisition, but it need not contain only i + 1. It says that if the acquirer understands the input, and there is enough of it, i + 1 will automatically be provided. In other words, if communication is successful, i + 1 is provided. As we will discuss later, this implies that the best input should not even attempt to deliberately aim at i + 1.

- Principles and Practice, p 21.  Emphasis added.

Later in the book, he does suggest teachers aim for i+1, but only as a stepping stone to real media.  If you can handle Harry Potter, I'd say you've reached that point.

(2) it requires specific, and hard to find, media. Manga, anime, light/visual novels, songs, blogs, podcasts, newspapers can't be used since they don't have audio, transcripts, translations or are not long enough.

Very true that, but there might be enough to experiment with the method.  FantaJikan comes to mind; they've got hours and hours of Miyazawa Kenji.  I haven't tracked down English translations, but I know there are at least some.  Enough to try the method with native-written Japanese at least.

It may work for intermediate and advanced learners [since i+1 is less an issue], but then step one is useless. Step three contradicts recent research [1].

Agreed.  If Step 3 is the heart of L/R and there isn't some massively fundamental difference between text and subtitled TV then L/R is strikingly similar to watching anime with English subtitles.  A lot of people do that and don't learn Japanese at all, so...

Step five is very time-consuming and even potentially harmful. If you take these out, the method reduces to shadowing.

Hmm.  Maybe.  It's certainly time-consuming and probably doesn't have much if any benefit.  I have a hard time seeing it as "harmful," though.  I think Antimoon-style advice to avoid wrong output can be more harmful than helpful if it encourages students to avoid correspondence/conversation altogether.

But, hey, that's all theory.  Deeds, not words.  I'm interested in seeing what Ryan's experience is since I'm a lazy bum who doesn't want to try L/R for myself.

wildweathel wrote:

If you can handle Harry Potter, I'd say you've reached that point. [...] I have a hard time seeing [step five] as "harmful," though.

As I said, the method may work for intermediate and advanced learners. It is being proposed for complete beginners, though, in place of grammar, textbooks, flashcards and even RTK (I'm not joking; read the original thread). Beginners can't handle Harry Potter. Beginners can't output anything but heavily broken Japanese. That's the problem.

If you restrict the method to intermediate and advanced learners, then you still need to justify steps one and three. I think you can safely skip them. In fact, I think you should. You also need to justify step five because it's very time-consuming and, as you said, doesn't have much if any benefit. If you choose instead to remove these steps, then you get shadowing, which we all already know and love.

wildweathel wrote:

If Step 3 is the heart of L/R and there isn't some massively fundamental difference between text and subtitled TV then L/R is strikingly similar to watching anime with English subtitles.  A lot of people do that and don't learn Japanese at all, so...

There are many fundamental differences between consuming a book with the L-R method and watching shows with subs. I can think of a few obvious one off the top of my head. Firstly, step 3 involves reading in L2 and listening in L2, but with occasional reference to a parallel L1 text, whereas watching with subs is just L2 audio with L1 text. Secondly, you can read ahead in the L-R method but you must interpret subs as they appear on screen - this means you can be expecting each sentence ready to pick out the meanings of words and phrases. Thirdly, subtitles generally only contain dialogue, whereas a good, long book will contain a variety of types of prose including inner monologue, descriptive prose, dialogue, etc.

iSoron wrote:

(2) it requires specific, and hard to find, media. Manga, anime, light/visual novels, songs, blogs, podcasts, newspapers can't be used since they don't have audio, transcripts, translations or are not long enough.

There are 5 or 6 appropriate texts in the first place I thought to look - the audiobooks thread on this forum. Pretty much any of the full length novel audiobooks is appropriate if you buy a translation instead of using a free one (which are only available for a few books).

Blahah wrote:

.I reckon Harry Potter is a good choice of modern text. You will probably come out of it with an unfortunate amount of fantasy vocabulary, but throughout the whole series of books you will get a good general coverage of situational vocab too.

Wait wait. You're saying I won't be able to use "Defense Against the Dark Arts" in a typical conversation?

I'm hesitant to use a book translated from English to Japanese instead of J->E but I have a hard copy of the Japanese with me, I'm in Australia, and I was able to find the Audio and an English hard copy online (I own them both, but they're in the States). So it seems like my best option. Afterwards I was thinking of doing こころ as well.

There are a lot of words in there that are uncommon and rare, but the majority of the dialogues and situations use pretty common words. I've gone through the first 5 chapters so far (reading the English, then listening to the Japanese while reading the Japanese) and there are definitely unique words like 灯消（ひけ）しライター　and magic related vocab that aren't that useful, but overall it's been kind of fun having this guy read to me in funny voices

Bummer.  I hate reading novels.  Give me history, science, math, economics, linguistics, sociology, biography, politics, short stories even, just about anything but novels.

I suppose that for the sake of learning Japanese I'm willing to slog through a few novels, but if anyone knows of some non-novel sources that would be suitable for this Listening-Reading method, please let me know.

I read A Short History of Nearly Everything in English a few years ago- what a great book!