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Krashen & some failures for Massive Input | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4710 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 9 of 67 26 October 2014 at 4:37pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I find that input is a very bad source of correcting grammar mistakes, especially
extensive reading, because your focus is not on the details but on enjoying the story. Input, however, is a great source of vocabulary, which is a really important part of learning and which is why I do devote a good amount of time to it. But it doesn't teach you the grammar, and I think grammar study warrants some separate input. It doesn't necessarily mean "here's the book, do the exercises", but rather that you need to do exercises in context, writing and speaking, and spot the patterns and truths that make up the grammar of a certain language. I am not simply talking about verb conjugations, which is one thing - you need to know some basic tables of course, that never hurts, but what I am thinking more about is actively being able to conjecture in your brain why authors use certain structures, not others, and what these structures imply. This can be in a broad sense like noticing that in Russian, when verbs take endings in -л(а/о/и), that it is something that marks the past tense, but also more nuanced and subtle structures which become more important at higher levels. For example, I do not think pure input could tell me why Russian word order varies so much and what all the internal variants mean. In principle the meaning is the same because the case endings denote function, word order is more a matter of emphasis (or even preference of the speaker), but study and use of word order in context will tell you why Russians sometimes put the subject after the verb (often this is done to put emphasis on the person doing it - решаю я! "I decide!" (and not you, meaning I'm the one in charge). Of course in speech this is somewhat softened by intonation, but things like this is stuff input will not necessarily tell you. This you need to see happening, you need to experience it with your own eyes and be shown how it functions in context. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5265 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 10 of 67 26 October 2014 at 4:59pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
This makes a lot of sense to me. With "massive input" and much less focus on output, I believe we tend to go for understanding content rather than form, form being explicit grammar. When I start to move my focus to "noticing" the form of what I am hearing instead of focusing on pure comprehension, that's when I notice progress at this stage.
I reckon I am significantly less scientific in my approach to language-learning. I tend to come at this with a more zen-like approach. I haven't read Krashen, but I agree with this conclusion. That's why, I have had a Portuguese tutor for conversation with corrections. Like you, patrickwilken, I don't write much at all. This is a weakness I need to rectify. So, my theory is that you are not noticing your declensions because in your massive input phase your brain skipped over them because it needed comprehension as opposed to creation which is needed for output. You didn't "notice" them so much because you didn't need to for what you were doing. I think you've come up with a good course of action to fill in these holes. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4536 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 11 of 67 26 October 2014 at 6:26pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
This was also my observation before I started studying. All the people I know who are C2 in English are avid readers. The data from Test your Vocab strongly reinforces this showing that that vocabulary knowledge increases for decades until peaking in the mid-30s (there is no way a single SC will give you this sort of input). This data also shows how dependent this learning is on reading: heavy readers learn 4-words per day; light readers 1-word/day.
Good point! I do find it reassuring that children don't really get the hang of gender until five or six. If you again consider the data here it looks like a native English five year old who does this test scores about 5000 words (perhaps these kids are particularly precocious, but still), and so by seven or eight years old have the same vocabulary range as the average C1-L2 speaker. However, I have trouble working out how children could get to the higher range you quote (78 million words in 6 years = 13 million words a year from birth). Obviously this can't be by reading, which I think is a richer form of input anyway. I am working pretty hard, but I can't do more than about 15000 pages per year (3.8 million words read - you could perhaps double/triple for speaking, but I would be surprised if I could get up to 13 millions/year - but perhaps I am discounting/underestimating some form of input.
But that's not my experience. I did learn lots of grammar from extensive/intensive reading/listening: Just not declinations. Of course, I am trying to learn an easy language: I have no idea how far I would get by trying the same experiment in Russian or Lithuanian. I am pretty sure the cases would completely break me.
I find this sort of explanation quite tempting, but I don't believe it is a full answer simply because I learnt a lot of grammar stuff that also "wasn't needed" from reading. In fact what I find really fascinating is that I learnt the inflection of verbs (conjunction), but not the inflection of nouns (declension) purely from massive input. Those of you who want to argue, for instance, that output is necessary to learn grammar need to explain this difference. So to disagree (reluctantly) with most of what people are saying: I am confident you can learn a lot of grammar simply from reading. In this sense Krashen is absolutely right. Is this the fastest way to learn? I have no idea. At this point I tend to favor the majority (the unanimity?) that explicit grammar study plus output plus input is more efficient (perhaps much more efficient). However, I am absolutely convinced after collecting data for more than two years that you do learn a lot of grammar solely from reading and listening. I am also completely certain that both this grammar knowledge and my vocabulary will continue to strengthen and deepen as I continue to read books and watch movies independently of whatever explicit grammar study I do. So I guess I keep coming back to the idea that the grammar that I did not learn from input was not learnt because it was simply too complex to be picked up incidentally from reading/listening as it required keeping track of multiple independent facts in different parts of the sentence simultaneously (e.g., number, gender, case). Other grammar that didn't have this constraint seems have been slowly learned quite naturally over time without any active output on my part. I wonder given this whether some languages are simply easier to learn because their grammar lends itself to being learnt from input more easily. Or to put it the other way around: Perhaps some languages are particularly difficult to learn as so much of the grammar must be learnt by explicit explanations and grammar drills as it cannot be learnt from reading/listening. Edited by patrickwilken on 26 October 2014 at 8:28pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| cpnlsn88 Triglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5040 days ago 63 posts - 112 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Spanish, Esperanto, Latin | Message 12 of 67 26 October 2014 at 6:41pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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For me, there is a difference between foregrounding and backgrounding of grammar and
they are intertwined. Just mere (albeit massive) exposure to a language will help you pick up heaps of grammar, though probably not in a totally co-ordinated way. Exposure to explicit grammatical rules brings them to the foreground so one is conscious of them. This is likely to produce more accurate speech but at the cost of fluency due to the slowness of the conscious checking. But with significant input the rules return to the background and are kind of 'there', without there being much in the way of conscious control. In this way (to my way of thinking at least) there should be a small amount of grammar which kind of pulls together what you already know and makes it explicit, giving you an 'aha' moment which will then be reinforced with further input and gradually acquired as a 'background' rule. In this way grammar should be reasonably basic and be a small component of learning activity, rather than the mainstay. As an example with German in spite of a lot of learning of the language the rules around Konjunktiv II (past subjunctive required for the conditional amongst other uses) have remained completely opaque and once I worked on them explicitly with a tutor it kind of clicked into place and this has enormously helped for those sentences. Input alone would not have got me there in a month of Sundays. So hear grammar has helped me. Now I know the rule I will readily identify it when I see or hear it and that will more powerfully embed it in my mind. For me personally I would just say that each language is different. With French I have little difficulty with genders, likewise in Spanish. But bear in mind that German has 3 genders and, if I remember correctly, 8 ways of forming a plural. I wouldn't put any thought at all to learning French plurals because they are reasonably regular but (for me at least) I use Anki to revise both plurals and genders for German - though admittedly input alone will fix a lot, though not all of them. As for the ein/einen differentiation problem I think that a lot of modern speech does not emphasise the difference so it is either not there at all or it is relatively muted so that one can speculate that it is in the process of being lost. The problem I have is adding -en for adjectival endings in plurals even when I totally know they belong there and that probably does make a difference in meaning and may be more easily picked up as a mistake by a native speaker. It isn't the end of the world and I don't worry too much about it but it's something I'd like to correct. So sometimes knowing the rule doesn't always totally solve the problem! One idea I might try is to take some text to work on and then highlighting each time the particular form occurs. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6600 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 13 of 67 26 October 2014 at 7:18pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I don't doubt this, and I admire you for being able to continue your advanced challenges. I wasn't speaking of the total volume but the timeframe. Although with the total volume there's also the issue of stuff that doesn't "count", like music. It can't substitute your listening or reading but it combines the best of both worlds. Speaking of music, I love using lyricstraining for focusing on the little things and also spelling. Anyway, I'm one of the few who agree that grammar can be learned from input. You remind me on Carla who's described in this PDF, really (the 3rd learner) And seems like she had a happy ending :-) Basically I don't think that your experience means that the German cases are inherently impossible to learn from input. You just sacrificed them for something else along the way, maybe for not using SRS or not doing enough extensive reading. I'm not saying that's what you need to do now, just that I think it could have worked. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4710 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 14 of 67 26 October 2014 at 7:37pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Many things you can learn, but some things just work quicker if you point them out. It saves you a lot of headaches. I think Iversen said something to this effect at some point and I completely agree with him - sometimes, just bite the bullet and learn a few ground rules. I'm not saying, spend 10 hours memorizing the tables and prepositions. You don't need to drill. Just looking at some declension tables and understanding them is enough. In Russian, I know the declension tables by heart, excluding some rare exceptions. Verbs are much more irregular though, and in this case it's a bit tougher. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4257 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 15 of 67 26 October 2014 at 7:41pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I'd be curious to know what kind of effect memorizing audio has on learning grammar through input via repeated shadowing like Professor Arguelles does, or using methods like subs2SRS decks.
I don't know the name of the phenomenon but it seems after you listen to the exact same audio file a certain number of times it just suddenly lodges itself in your brain. If you have enough sentences stuck in your head, can you start mixing and matching various sections to form new sentences, and does having a bunch of sentences perfectly memorized help you noticed their grammatical features better when getting additional extensive input?
I think this might happen because you always have a certain pronoun with a certain verb conjugation that always appear together and so after a decent amount of input it sounds wrong to hear the wrong pairs together. I've noticed with languages that tend to omit the subject when the verb conjugation conveys it, it's much harder to learn to use the right verb conjugation through passive input. Because when speaking you have to chose the correct conjugation to convey certain information rather than the conjugation following automatically from the subject of the sentence. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6600 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 16 of 67 26 October 2014 at 8:03pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
But patrickwilken already did that? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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