The reason is that it's "all or nothing". You either know and recognize all of the words in a sentence, or you can't cope with the sentence at all.

The first phase of language learning is mostly theory. Mostly vocabulary and grammar. The second phase is mostly reading, reinforcing the theory, forming a good understanding of how the language is used. Additionally writing things, chatting and the like. Third phase is immersion with speaking and listening.

Those phases overlap, of course, but in my opinion that's the overall process. I've used it successfully for English and Spanish (though I haven't completed phase 3 in Spanish yet). In Mandarin I'm currently struggling towards mastering HSK 4 vocabulary, though relatively advanced.

To clarify: This is the way skills develop when people extensively study but barely learn a foreign language, the way typically happens in classrooms. It is a cruel method with poor results.

All of the actual learning of the language per se happens from listening to (or reading) comprehensible input, which should start from day 1 (yes this takes considerable effort for teachers to implement). Front-loading explicit study of grammar is a total waste of time. Memorizing atomized vocabulary words is also relatively ineffective.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis

I am far more competent in written Japanese than spoken, both reading and writing it, essentially through understanding grammar. "Total waste of time" seems a harsh appraisal.

The first person is going to learn something, but it’s not an efficient use of their time if the goal is language fluency.

If you want to learn to read, then by far the most effective use of time is to practice reading, with whatever minimal bootstrapping is necessary up front to start reading very basic material.

This is not just speculation. There has been a ton of scholarly research on this topic.

It doesn’t work like that. For the student to make any progress he need to be able to understand most of the things in the speech (this is called comprehensible input, and the theory is both applicable to listening and reading). That’s why there are people living in foreign country for years yet cannot speak or understand the language at all.

Also it’s kinda stupid to say that language learning must be either grammar/voc learning or listening: it needs to be both. Classes are needed because they make portion of listening material comprehensible, which is impossible by listening only.

Notice the link I put in my first comment.

Yes, the more comprehensible the early exposure, the faster the student will advance at the beginning. If content is too advanced learning will be much slower.

It would be great if more language teachers and curricula put more significant effort into developing hiqh-quality materials aimed at being largely comprehensible to complete beginners. Many extant materials and courses do a very poor job at this.

> there are people living in foreign country for years yet cannot speak or understand the language at all.

Learning a language takes consistent deliberate effort.

> kinda stupid to say that language learning must be either grammar/voc learning or listening: it needs to be both

Grammar lessons have low marginal value for language learners, and are by no means necessary. Many people learn a foreign language without any formal grammar instruction whatsoever.

I mean, it may depend on your goals. If you are focused on communicating, and don't actually intend on using the language efficiently and competently, then maybe formal grammar is a waste of time.

Otherwise you need to have this information. You have a choice to get it in a systematic way or to decipher it on your own.

http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/teaching_grammar_w...

> Research on the relationship between formal grammar instruction and performance on measures of writing ability is very consistent: There is no relationship between grammar study and writing (Krashen, 1984). Perhaps the most convincing research is that of Elley, Barham, Lamb and Wyllie (1976). After a three year study comparing the effects of traditional grammar, transformational grammar and no grammar on high school students in New Zealand, they concluded that " ... English grammar, whether traditional or transformational, has virtually no influence on the language growth of typical secondary students" (pp. 17-18).

> In addition, research is equally consistent in showing that writing ability and reading are related: Those who read more, write better (Krashen, 1993a). The reform school boys in Fader's Hooked on Books study who read self-selected paperback books for two years outperformed comparison boys on writing fluency, writing complexity, and reading, as well as on measures self-esteem and attitude towards school (Fader, 1976).

> It is well-established that one can become an excellent writer with very little formal instruction in grammar, and those who do often give reading the credit for their writing ability: "I wanted to write and I did not even know the English language. I bought English grammars and found them dull. I felt I was getting a better sense of the language from novels than from grammars" (Wright, 1966, p. 275).

> Finally, our ability to consciously learn the rules of grammar is very limited. Linguists have told us that they have not yet succeeded in describing the rules of language, and anyone who has studied linguistics will attest to the complexity of the rules linguists have described. Studies in second language acquisition show that even experienced students have an incomplete knowledge of the rules they are taught, do not remember the rules well, and have difficulty applying them (Krashen, 1993b, Alderson, Clapham, and Steel, 1997).

> [...]

> I am proposing, in other words, a two-step procedure: 1. Students first acquire (absorb subconsciously) a great deal of grammatical competence through reading. 2. Students are taught to use a grammar handbook to increase their grammatical accuracy further, using consciously learned rules. The grammar handbook can be introduced in junior high school or high school. If a great deal of reading has been done, and continues to be done, the grammar handbook will need to be used only occasionally.

And the thing Krashen seems to be talking about is actually phase 2 in my model. The students may have taken the long way towards basic knowledge in English, but in order to advance, they need to spend time reading text to assimilate the grammar and vocabulary more.

Sometimes even the definition of "grammar" is confusing. If you study Indoeuropean languages, they are so similar that "studying" grammar is mostly getting the conjugation and declination right. Sometimes you only have to switch some endings between languages. With other languages, the entire system of morphology is different, because for example they have more "persons" or whatever.

Additionally, English or Chinese may seem to have easier grammar, but then the complexity is hidden in the vocabulary or usage patterns.

You may have some success in a language related to your native language. Good luck with something truly foreign...

That's how I started reading. Basic grammar, and some vocab. Vocab I didn't know was simple to look up; grammar I didn't know rendered the entire sentence incomprehensible and looking up the individual words did very little to help. If I knew the grammar but not the vocab, thirty seconds to comprehension. If I knew the vocab but not the grammar, order of magnitude more time to understand, often requiring assistance from someone else. Knowing the grammar felt like doing it on easy mode.

Not knowing the grammar rendered it a waste of time. THAT was the "total waste of time".

It was basically how it worked. "Here is some more reading to do, in order to comprehend it, here is some grammar that you will need." Literally front-loaded. My experience of effective learning is basically the complete opposite of what you advocated; no front-loading of grammar rendered it extraordinarily inefficient.

I dread to think how long even the basic sentence structure of "topic - comment" in Japanese would have taken me to realise if I'd had to learn it by just listening to people use it; like I'm meant to be some kind of linguistic detective. Telling me that before hearing the sentence spoken rendered it SO much more understandable, right from the start. I was able to start making valid, meaningful sentences in Japanese within sixty seconds. Topic - comment. Here's some nouns, here are some words that are like adjectives, here's how you mark the "topic" which you could think of as similar to the "subject" in English grammar, but go easy on that because the grammar is different, here's the copula, off you go.

Great work, that was a nice sixty seconds of comprehensible and correct Japanese, none of which you had ever heard before - you constructed it all yourself. Pretty good for someone who's been studying the language less than ten minutes. Here's the copula in the past tense, off you go with that.

My God, I genuinely flinch to think about how long that would have taken me without any front-loading of grammar. If I was meant to just guess how the language worked based on listening to it. What a waste of time that would be.

I reckon someone could listen to Japanese for a very long time before realising that some of the things that are kind of like adjectives can change depending on tense, but for some of them the copula changes. A native English speaker would have to really be good to spot that quickly. What a waste of time that would be compared to simply learning that piece of grammar.

I estimate you need around 20k of common words, characters and phrases for understanding a large variety of vocabulary for everyday use (e.g. watching television, reading newspapers, daily conversation, business discussions, books, songs, poetry, etc.). This takes a considerable amount of time to commit to memory, so doing it efficiently is important - at 2000 hours a year, this is two years of memorising 5 items an hour, which is ambitious. While learning, it is necessary to take into account the fact that the same word might be used in different ways in different contexts.

I agree grammar is relatively irrelevant from a wider perspective - there's just not that much of it compared to vocabulary, and an intuitive understanding is fine for the most part. However it is also typically taught at a beginner level with basic vocabulary and varied sentence structures, which are useful in themselves (not "a total waste of time"). Understanding the terminology also makes using reference materials easier in some cases.

In practical terms then, carefully graded tuition and listening practice might be the ideal, but in practice this is an expensive route for most people when you are looking at two years of full-time learning. Realistically drilling vocabulary will get you a long way towards understanding native materials (e.g. movies with subtitles), and allows you to self-study by looking up definitions in the native language. It also allows this to happen relatively cheaply, as you can study yourself.

You're not going to get to fluency without a wide vocabulary, and from a vocab / time unit level, drilling vocab is not a bad way to get there.

I completely disagree, partly because studying grammar is an effective shortcut to making input more comprehensible. If I memorise the verb conjugations for Spanish verbs, for example, I now understand more information about every sentence (e.g. omitted verb subjects and tense/mood information). It will still be necessary to listen and read extensively in order to internalise the formation and meaning of the verb forms, but it skips a lengthy process of reverse engineering. Ditto for producing your own sentences, which I think is also fundamentally important for learning a language.

> Memorizing atomized vocabulary words is also relatively ineffective.

This is absolutely true; when using flashcards or spaced repetition, it is vastly better to have a full sentence with the target word blanked out compared to only having the definition.

Studying grammar can be fun - and it feels like an accomplishment to be able to say some pretty complex things in Chinese.

Sure my listening isn't that great.. but on the other hand being limited to a two year old's conversation ability isn't particularly enticing.

Also, fwiw, reading and listening is a way different skill... Thanks to the ability to rewind when reading

Self studied Japanese to fluency that way. AJATT method but largely concentrated on front loading all the grammar in 4 months then built 10k vocab over the following year. Worked like an absolute charm.

You have to learn the grammar rules somehow. If you want to do it through assimilation, as supposed to somebody telling you how it works, well, that's possible but takes a lot longer and is more error prone.

I'm not saying you shouldn't do "output" exercises. I'm just saying that in order to learn information, you better receive it somehow. And you can receive that information either in an orderly fashion ("front-loading") or in a random incomplete fashion. You can't guess your way through language learning.

It is not that there’s no value whatsoever in formal study of grammar. It might come in handy if you want to be a linguist, an editor, a high-level writer, a lawyer, or the like. If students want to take a grammar course in high school or college that seems okay with me.

It just doesn’t teach basic language fluency.

Native speakers don’t start studying grammar until they have had 10+ years of full-time experience with the language. And anecdotally, the students who spend a lot of time reading independently don’t really need the grammar lessons (they already have a subconscious understanding of what is or isn’t grammatical, and the typical school grammar lesson is very slow and obvious for them), and the students who don’t spend any time reading independently and regularly speaking with educated adults would get more value out of instead spending the time reading or listening to someone read. YMMV.

Untrue; formal grammar instruction begins not later than first grade in many curricula, which is age 6-7, which would require using the language several years before birth to reach 10+ years prior use. Native speakers begin studying grammar about as soon as they have the intellectual capacity to comprehend the concepts associated with grammar.

When primary schools try to teach grammar it is boring, stressful, and generally unhelpful to the students.

The dominant factor affecting students’ reading comprehension and writing ability is how much time they spend listening and reading, especially to material which is at an appropriate level to slightly stretch their abilities.

If schools want to spend a relatively small amount of time formally teaching grammar to 12–17 year old students there’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but it’s mostly only useful insofar as it attaches names to concepts so that students can have conversations with each-other about what makes communication effective of ineffective, or more explicitly discuss their existing subconscious grammatical knowledge. Formal instruction in grammar (or other kinds of formal analysis) is still no substitute for practice listening and speaking and reading and writing (ideally with effective feedback), which should be the main focus of language arts instruction.

Maybe we need to bring back grammar school.

I am not knowledgeable enough about the topic to say how efficient or helpful medieval Latin schools were at teaching Latin as a second language, but the idea of “grammar” as part of the “trivium” (alongside logic and rhetoric) meant something substantially different than the modern usage of the word.

On the other hand, once you know a few specific instances, it's helpful to explicitly point out that they're governed by the same rule and give an abstract statement of how the rule works. That way you can check yourself without relying on a teacher to point out your mistakes.

The first time you see an example of the rule, there's no need to explain the rule yet. You can just memorize the example. The same is probably true of the second and third example. Explaining the rule only makes sense once remembering the explanation becomes easier than remembering the set of examples you need to know.

When I'm into a new language I can learn 20-50 words a day, sustainably. Short term more.

By the time a child is 2.5 or 3 years old they can be learning dozens of words per day.

The most efficient way to teach new words to kids is to spend as much time as possible reading books with them.

That said, brute force practice work reeeeally well for language. And naturally people will build a kind of internal grammar anyway. But knowing what is what can help with that too.

That's by necessity because you can't explain perfect tense to a newborn.

Speaking from experience, I gained basic conversational fluency in Spanish from English in a few months by spending a ton of time with LingQ (essentially reading and listening to untranslated passages and creating digital flash cards), obsessively practicing pronunciation, and listening to lyrics in Spanish music for hours on end. I focused on grammar to the extent that I had to, but no more than that. For instance, I learned only those conjugations I actually needed for simple speech. I compiled the ones I needed to study based on what I actually encountered in real passages.

Now, by no means did that render me fully fluent in the language. But, case in point, I took two years of Spanish instruction in school with lots of grammar front-loaded and I gained more or less no speaking or listening ability at all. For me there was a dramatic difference in efficiency between the two approaches to language learning.

So not true. Maybe depends on the way you study but I focus on listening skills hardcore early on. It's what helps build the natural accent. It's definitely not all or nothing. There are islands of understanding. They tend to grow and grow. It starts out with single words, then grows to two words together then grows to partial sentences and then to full sentences among a paragraph. So on and so forth.

When I start learning a new language, I can totally "listen comprehend" stuff that's close to the material I already studied. But the same isn't true for random content at realistic speed.

And the "island" part is compatible with "all or nothing". Because yes, within those islands, you understand everything, and over time, as your proficiency in the language grows, there are more islands of knowing all the words. But it seems to be a lot easier at first to get told what a word means and how it is used, rather than depending on it to appear in a useful context a couple hundred times.

My definition is of listening comprehension is any information I can glean from listening. Information being a reduction in uncertainty. Doesn't need to be complete. Progress is directional.

I know my language learning algorithm well and I pound it on repeat until my goal is achieved.

I would suspect that in order to get up to HSK4 or even HSK5, just the audio portions of course, you'd need like double or triple the amount of lessons, which would be impractical.

Of course, most people will start speakind and listening, in various forms, in phase 1 and 2. And that is actually necessary. But I think you won't be able to really grok "random" speech before having a good grasp at pretty much all the vocabulary you would encounter.

> But I think you won't be able to really grok "random" speech before having a good grasp at pretty much all the vocabulary you would encounter.

But you will be able to grok small conversations about subjects you're familiar with. You can expand from there. When you try to learn a new language, you should be speaking from day one, no matter how limited the range of subjects you can speak about.

I've seen too many students who learn using the traditional theory-heavy approach and who, after years of study, are like deer caught in the headlights when they're confronted with the actual spoken language. They're also often saddled with poor pronunciation forever (which really degrades native speakers' perception of your language proficiency, regardless of how fluent you are).

Some theory is helpful, particularly for languages with lots of grammar (i.e., Indo-European languages with case, gender, agreement, etc.), but like playing an instrument, learning a language is 90% practice.

I have passed HSK4.

I am not competent in Mandarin listening comprehension, or in speaking (to be fair, speaking isn't a part of the test). Those skills aren't necessary to pass. The audio samples for HSK4 are a lot more generous with you than actual speech is.

The skills you develop are the skills you practice. If you practice listening comprehension, you'll develop it. If not, you won't.

That's all there is to the ordering.

Is that really practical with Mandarin and the crazy amount of Chinese characters?

I always assumed learning to speak/understand Chinese alone would be sufficiently difficult.

Writing, on the other hand, requires truly knowing each character, every little stroke in the right place. Totally different beast. It takes many years to master and constant practice to keep up (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_amnesia).

The thing about reading is that it is the fastest way to review and reinforce vocabulary and grammar.

You can read at your own pace and look up anything. You can't do it that easily when listening, speaking or writing. And with a certain minimum level of theory under your belt, reading will be faster than spaced repetition of vocabulary you mostly know already.

Of course, there are different levels of proficiency in Chinese you might want to achieve. If you want to be able to interact while traveling, you wouldn't need the full complement of HSK Level 4.

However, if you want to have more interesting conversations or you want to understand technical texts...

I feel like there are so many great books in English where it probably wouldn’t provide much value to fully commit. But I’m a big fan of China and Chinese. I even watched a stupid Chinese soap opera about rural people moving to Shanghai and was totally fascinated by the lifestyle and growth of the city. But only a few episodes were translated. It was called something like Narrows or living in small quarters.

Most of the most popular Chinese sitcoms I've read about seem to be a strange bunch as an outsider. Very much about boy-meeting girl following standard Chinese traditional get a job -> married + boy supporting girl and families. Which I find interesting from a cultural perspective of a maturing middle class economy. That plus a hundred awful period pieces about ancient China, which seems like 50% of their output, especially movie-wise - an easy way to ignore the tough realities of modern China.

But I don't know Chinese and only have a superficial grasp of what they are really like. So I've been interested in learning mandarin.

I've found close to nothing culturally worthwhile from the mainland.

Edit: actually, now that I think about it... I could never find anything when I was outside the mainland but I went there for a 3 month business trip one time and I signed up to various local services (Spotify / Netflix equivalents) and there f;r the first time I felt I had access to a decent amount of content I enjoyed.

This is an excellent description of the process I used to learn to speak 3 foreign languages to a level of professional fluency, and 3 others to conversational fluency (this was in my 20s, I now only maintain fluency in 2 languages, although sure I could regain it fairly quickly).

I do think this depends on the individual. Some people successfully use other techniques.

If you want to speak a language in a useful but relatively broken way, as fast as possible (for example as a refugee), you might want to prioritize a smaller amount of theory and more practice early on. But that would actually prolong the time to proficiency.

My experience has been that listening is basically a way to learn the language with a minimum of effort. Context and non-verbal communication often make it clear what many unknown words in a sentence mean, making it not only possible to understand speech far above one's vocabulary level, but to actually to increase one's vocabulary through listening. These non-verbal cues and context are mostly absent in written texts.

Your method also seems counter intuitive as children learn languages primarily through listening, as they are for the most part illiterate.

And the context stuff doesn't work for me in audio, not until years into a language. It might be easier with a language close to my native, but otherwise...

Speaking is harder

> The reason is that it's "all or nothing". You either know and recognize all of the words in a sentence, or you can't cope with the sentence at all.

Disagree; you can make sense of parts of a sentence and infer the rest or get some clues; actually that's the normal state while learning.

Eg: "How do I go to the station?"

"It is XXXX, you YYYY ZZZZ walk there, you need to take a taxi WWWW KKKK Uber"

Your example isn't really random. You already seem to recognize the pattern. But there are a LOT of patterns.

Completely backwards, in my experience. Start with simple audiobooks, listen to them a million times, and you will be amazed by how much comprehension and speaking ability it gives you

Could you point me in the direction of some of these simple audio books?

* substudy is here: http://www.randomhacks.net/substudy/

Conversation practice with a native speaker is probably the ideal, but audiobooks are cheap and available. You can get around the disadvantage of not having a native trying to make themselves understood to you, by using an audiobook that you know well in translation. So I find that knowing the book well in my native language (or another language I know) is the most important initial requirement. Beyond that, it should be in simple language, though not boring. Maybe middle school or high school reading level.

On the first listen of chapter one, I find, I don't pick up more than the characters' names. After one or two dozen listens of chapter one, and I can follow the plot along pretty well (if it's a book I know), and can pick up words from context, and can start listening to the whole book.

Audio versions of the Bible are available in every language, and can be used as a first/last resort, depending on interest. If you can't find an audiobook Bible from the normal web apps, the Jehovah's Witnesses have audio versions in an insane number of languages (translated from their sometimes peculiar English version though). I like Tolkien, which is at about the right level, has audiobooks in many languages, and is familiar to me.

Grammar comes in very slowly using this method, and can use some augmentation using traditional methods. Pronunciation and comprehension, however, are supercharged.

Also, are you studying Chinese this way or a language more similar to English? With all the different grammar and word order in Chinese, I can't see how I could pick up the meaning without some reference, unless I was extremely familiar with the material.

Edit: Also because there are vocal sounds in English that aren't pronouncable in Chinese, even character names are not the same. “Gandalf” becomes “gan dow foo”, for instance

My method is to listen is small chunks (like a paragraph or so), a bunch of times, and gradually expand the length.

> I can't see how I could pick up the meaning without some reference, unless I was extremely familiar with the material.

You would be surprised at how good you are at it. The human brain is built for picking up a language from scratch by listening, and human languages are similarly built for being acquired in this way.

Only after years of studying more theoretically am I able to learn new words from context.

The "reference" comes from knowing the stories in English first. And also the reader's voice acting, etc.

And children don't have the level of language skill you normally want to achieve.

I think this is good advice. When I first started learning mandarin, I really emphasised the tones, I guess because my untrained ear found it difficult to distinguish between them, and also because I thought people might understand me better.

But the first time I went to China, it was immediately obvious that people had a hard time understanding my (then rudimentary) mandarin, which I believe was in large part because of the over-exaggerated way I was using tones.

In the 3 weeks I spent in China, my understanding and usage of the tones came on tremendously - way more than it ever could have if I wasn't immersion in the language. Your ear does need to kind of train before you hear and understand tones at a more intuitive level.

To anyone learning Chinese, my advice would be to get yourself out there, even if it's just for a short time.

https://chinese.yabla.com/chinese-tones-learn-the-right-way-...

1. You may realize that the tones are realized differently in a variety of ways depending on context, speaker, etc.

2. Just as you can parse a different accent, native speakers can still figure out what you're trying to say if your tones are slightly whack. After all, tonal information in Mandarin is lost when sung.

5

Though I also wouldn't really consider my formal Mandarin education to be particularly rigorous or thorough...