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10,000 hours of input | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| carlonove Senior Member United States Joined 6014 days ago 145 posts - 253 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 25 of 60 14 February 2011 at 12:04am | IP Logged | ||
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The original post is actually incorrect. The basis for the AJATT method is learning 10,000 SRS sentences, not 10,000 hours of exposure to the language. On the website he actually points out that he only SRS'd something like 8500 sentences. Also, Malcolm Gladwell didn't invent the significance of the number 10,000, it's always had a special meaning in various religions and philosophies.
That said, the FSI has studied this stuff to death and their figures for attaining "fluency" are no where near the 10,000 hours mark even for the category 3 (most difficult) languages. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5158 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 26 of 60 14 February 2011 at 1:27am | IP Logged | ||
I can honestly say I've never heard a single teacher claim that. Typically what drags a class down is the slowest student, not the number of hours needed to learn a language. And teachers readily recognize that, at least the teahers I know. R. == 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Akatsuki Triglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 6326 days ago 226 posts - 236 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, French, English Studies: Norwegian | Message 27 of 60 14 February 2011 at 1:35am | IP Logged | ||
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I've now understood what you meant Cainntear, and I'll have to agree with you on that. I'm sure teachers could take advantage of this 10,000 hours to earn some extra cash, but that's rule for everything in life - people try to fool others non-experienced on the matter to their own benefit. Thankfully, not everyone is like that!
Carlonove, there is the 10,000 sentences method and there is another, independent, theory about 10,000 hours of input. You can read it here. Hope it helps. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| carlonove Senior Member United States Joined 6014 days ago 145 posts - 253 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 28 of 60 14 February 2011 at 1:52am | IP Logged | ||
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In his more recent posts, Khatz discusses what he calls "critical frequency" over massive input all day every day. The idea is that you don't need to constantly bombard yourself with target language audio/video, you only have to expose yourself to it enough that you can keep it buzzing around in your head all day.
Here's a link. Edited by carlonove on 14 February 2011 at 1:52am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Huliganov Octoglot Senior Member Poland huliganov.tvRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5383 days ago 91 posts - 304 votes Speaks: English*, Polish, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Esperanto, Czech Studies: Romanian, Turkish, Mandarin, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 29 of 60 14 February 2011 at 2:05am | IP Logged | ||
I'm not suggesting that Pareto's principle always holds good any more than you can force everything into a normal or poisson distribution, or that every living thing has some reflection of Fibonacchi's sequence. I don't think it is wildly inaccurate like the 10,000 hour 'rule' at all, I think it is more similar to a reasonable approximation to what we can expect from reality in most cases. It's like if we use only 8 points of the compass for a compass built into a car's navigation system, this is only very crude but it still helps the driver. You also spoke of a law of diminishing returns, which is another truism. Sometimes the return doesn't diminish in a straight line, it's an overall tendency. It's much more reasonable to apply Pareto to language learning than to use a blind 10,000 words. The only ten thousand I would recommend is a "mannenhitsu" to write out the words in a vocab book! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5326 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 30 of 60 14 February 2011 at 10:46am | IP Logged | ||
As you did not like my first answer I'll make another try: Yes, it is possible. I finally had a look at this AJATT site, and it is cute to see where some people get their strange ideas from, like it is a great mile stone when you dream in (or about) your target language (I am dreaming about Sophie Marceau all the time, and guess what happens ...) or that you need 10 000 hours of listening, all the time, in your sleep, does not really matter if you understand and so on blablabla until you reach the stage of listening comprehension. The audio input I need for a language I can read is about 1% of this, make it 5 % if you think I am bragging or are kind of a slow learner. What is there to discuss? What he says is equivalent to a statement like you have to wear underwear for listening comprehension. You'll do it, but it is not a causal connection. Just as well you can of course listen to any bullsh.. input for however long you want, and some day when you know more about your language you'll happen to understand it, but there is only a very weak connection. (Very weak, yes, some connection there is: we hear it all the time, get used to the rhythm, get a feel for I don't know what, this is not useless, but the amount of time this should take is much, much smaller than these fictive random figures). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Akatsuki Triglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 6326 days ago 226 posts - 236 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, French, English Studies: Norwegian | Message 31 of 60 14 February 2011 at 1:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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I see your point. And I have to agree that it might be possible to understand "everything", at last, when you grasped the language by other means rather than just raw 10,000 hours of input. Still, it's proven science that one's brain needs to get used to the new language (the sooner we do, the better) and I was wondering if this 10,000 hours was roughly the time needed for the brain to do that, but it seems people tend to disagree.
So you say we'll take about 5% of that time frame to reach a native level? And why wouldn't you consider dreaming in a foreign language a milestone? I'm interested in your answer. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Huliganov Octoglot Senior Member Poland huliganov.tvRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5383 days ago 91 posts - 304 votes Speaks: English*, Polish, French, German, Russian, Spanish, Esperanto, Czech Studies: Romanian, Turkish, Mandarin, Japanese, Hungarian | Message 32 of 60 14 February 2011 at 1:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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I thought I'd add a couple of thoughts to the ones I already gave in this thread.
Let's imagine the case of what, for an Englishman, may be one of the hardest linguistic challenges, namely to become functionally literate in Japanese. Japanese offers a particular challenge to those seeking to be literate in that there are four systems of writing which intertwine with themselves and a misuse will immediately show up a lack of education on the part of the writer. I refer to hiragana and katakana as two of these, kanji as a further one although within kanji you have onyomi and kunyomi mainly at least one each for each character, and some have like a dozen different yomis and atejis. You have to be aware of stroke order and okurigana also. Finally you have cases when Japanese will lapse into Roomaji. That's the easy bit, but not so common. JLPT 1 is the exam which is supposed to prepare you for normal life in Japan and represent the crowning achievement of a foreign learner learning Japanese. The amazing site http://www.readthekanji.com offers drilling and testing all the way through the 7000 words produced based on nearly 2000 kanji and it does so using a spaced repetition algorithm which you can adjust in the settings to suit your learning style. The quiz is a great way of learning, really quite addictive, and you soon find yourself making progress. It would be hard to start using it form the first day of learning Japanese, but within the first 100 hours of study a person would be well able to get onto this and make it their main way of learning the language. From the rate of progress I have achieved so far, I would estimate that to get to the knowledge required for JLPT 1 would be on average 12 reps of 7000 words at the rate of about 2 per minute, even factoring in the fact that the first time you see a card, you will read it more carefully. This is 42,000 minutes. Which is less than 750 hours. If you allow as much time again for writing practice and another lot for all the words that exist that you may need which are without kanji, and for a decent grounding in grammar, another 200 just for writing praactice and another 100 hours on top for activation, you will see that with well under one third of the amount of 10,000 hours of a person can achieve really advanced results in a language seen as very difficult and certainly different to his or her own. If 10,000 hours of language learning are spent optimally, a person could be literate with 15,000 words in up to ten different languages or even more and not just the one. Alternatively, using a different set of methods and materials, in 10,000 hours of study time a person could be able to make themselves understood with the basic stock phrases that you get in a Pimsleur course or a Michel Thomas in about fifty or more languages. You could stand there and do what the previous Pope did, reading out texts in a passable accent in languages from all over the world in far less than 10,000 hours study time, if you know what you are about. It's not magic, it's what human beings do, if they go about it the right way. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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