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Learning a language in two days | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5434 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 9 of 49 19 May 2011 at 5:00am | IP Logged | |||||
Why reinvent the wheel? Paul Noble explicitly credits the MT courses with changing his perception of language learning (see the link above). It would only seem natural that he would build on, and hopefully improve, the MT method. I have to say that I was never a fan of the original courses with the master himself. That thick Polish accent always turned me off. But the method works for many people, and I respect that. If someone can make it better, I can only encourage them. On a more serious note, I really wonder if there is really anything new and effective in self-study systems. I emphasize the word effective because there is a ton of packages that make the most outlandish claims despite rather mediocre results. And then we have an old workhorse like Assimil that has been going strong for over 80 years and the American series FSI that one can get for next to nothing. Maybe it's all about hype, marketing and packaging. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Keilan Senior Member Canada Joined 5090 days ago 125 posts - 241 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 10 of 49 19 May 2011 at 5:10am | IP Logged | |||||
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Ya, if we're talking about learn as in "Speak confidently to native speakers on a wide range of topics" then it's absolutely impossible in 2 days. In any language (besides something like Toki Pona maybe). I don't care if we're talking about a Romance language when you have native level fluency in every other Romance language, you still can't do it. I think this method is interesting, and not necessarily bad. The only issue is the claim that you're learning Mandarin. That implies you can speak it... and you simply can't.
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| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5385 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 11 of 49 19 May 2011 at 5:56am | IP Logged | |||||
Isn't that what I've been saying all along? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6707 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 12 of 49 19 May 2011 at 9:35am | IP Logged | |||||
Taken at face value this is rubbish. If Noble had presented it as a method to learn just enough to survive a tourist trip somewhere it could be defended, and the idea of teaching people some framework (= grammar) soon in the learning process is sound. But giving people a minimal vocabulary and telling them they have learnt a language is the same as lying to them. They have got a travel survival kit, not a hospital. A language is the size of a hospital. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Welltravelled Diglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5866 days ago 46 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 13 of 49 19 May 2011 at 12:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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What's Toki Pona?
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| slav Bilingual Triglot Groupie United States Joined 5011 days ago 43 posts - 54 votes Speaks: Slovak, Czech*, English* Studies: Spanish, Swedish | Message 14 of 49 19 May 2011 at 1:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
Some artificial language with less than 200 words. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5434 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 15 of 49 19 May 2011 at 1:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think this harsh judgment is unfair and mixes up two things. When the language school says "Learn to speak a language with confidence in just two days...", we all take this with a grain of salt. Most of us here at HTLAL roll our eyes and laugh. But we have to recognize that this is advertising for a business that has to compete with dozens of schools and teachers in London. He's not saying "We're going to give you a CEFR B2 in two days." Just as we argue all the time here over what it means to speak a language, Paul Noble is not exactly saying what he means by "speak with confidence." I think the true value of this approach is that it probably demystifies the language learning process and empowers the student to keep on learning. To me it sounds like two days of fun that could produce better results than eight weeks in a boring class two hours a week. A totally separate issue is the teaching strategy. What do you do in two days? I know that our wordlist maven Iversen probably went ballistic when he read "One of the worst things you can do with language teaching is teach someone a massive number of words". But you have to read the rest of the quotation. Paul Noble is saying that in a first approach to a language you have to lay the foundation of grammar or discourse before you introduce the massive amount of vocabulary. I think he's totally right. What would be an alternative approach? Hand out 900 flashcards and spend two days trying to memorize 60 words an hour? What will the students be able to do at the end of two days? Recite 900 words? Very unlikely. Instead, the idea is to give the student a sense of how the language works, let them get a feel for it, discover the excitement of learning. You show them that there is a pretty simple logic behind basic phrases. Obviously, you don't go heavy on the grammar terminology. You get the students talking right away and you show them how to understand entire sentences. At the end of two days, people leave saying "Well, maybe it's not as complicated as I thought. Sure, there's a lot more to learn, but it's not impossible. And I had a good time. I got my money's worth." When they go back to the office Monday morning and people ask, "Well, what did you learn?", they can say a couple of phrases and people will say "Wow, all that in two days? Cool." That's what Paul Noble is trying to do. Plus make a ton of money. Edited by s_allard on 19 May 2011 at 3:19pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6707 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 16 of 49 19 May 2011 at 3:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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S_allard has not quite reacted to the things I actually wrote:
Taken at face value this is rubbish. If Noble had presented it as a method to learn just enough to survive a tourist trip somewhere it could be defended. If the situation is that you will be dropped in your bare shirt somewhere in the middle of nowhere in two days time, then it is a sensible idea to learn a bare minimum of words plus a few rules for making questions, negating phrases and indicating who the subject is in a sentence. And then cross fingers that the natives understand the resulting utterances and react in a suitable manner. But this is not the same thing as learning a language, it is barely scratching the surface. And telling people explicitly that they don't have to learn a lot of words is snakeoil. Noble could just have called his courses "An introduction to..." Edited by Iversen on 19 May 2011 at 4:53pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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