1) Classes with other students are just about the least effective way to learn a foreign language. You just reinforce each others' bad accents, grammar mistakes, etc.
2) Duolingo is okay for some things, but not for others. But discounting all apps after having tried one or two, though, is a lot like the famous Gates quote: "640k should be enough for anybody" (which he claims to have never said), or the nineties articles as to why no one would shop online.
3) Pimsleur is brilliant for developing basic conversational ability. It works really, really well.
4) The Pimsleur model could take you all the way to fluency, but it stops at a half-year of lessons for the most developed languages (and 2 weeks for some of the less developed ones). Developing four years of lessons at this level of quality is hard and expensive.
5) BUT: Moving on beyond Pimsleur, there is a range of tools which are passable. Things like Duolingo, Memrise, Supermemo, etc. can help build vocabulary. There are apps for watching movies for language learning (which adds subtitles, dictionaries, etc.) which can help build comprehension. Etc. Picking-and-choosing, you can get something which, while not as good as going there, is much better than classes.
6) This field is progressing super-quickly on the whole. What we have today is much better than five years ago, and we'll have much better things five years from now. I'd be surprised if apps weren't the best way to learn a language in not too long.
Well, sure a private tutor is better, but that's a lot more expensive.
Without a teacher of some sort that can provide feedback, I have no idea how I could have learned elementary Mandarin (that is produce and listen to sounds radically different from my native English).
From what I've seen the ability for computers to give feedback on what you are doing wrong is far away from a trained human's.
> The Pimsleur model could take you all the way to fluency,
I've been looking over their website - it seems like it is just audio lessons and no tutor is provided? If that is correct, how would someone learn to correctly pronounce words in say Mandarin using this?
One of the points made in The Language Instinct is that children pick up their languages without using any explicit feedback. That is, people in the child's life who can already speak are liable to ignore errors in the child's speech, and when they do point out errors, the child will essentially always ignore the feedback.
But I wouldn't say children don't get feedback at all. They get a lot of important feedback, such as whether the thing they wanted to happen when they spoke did happen, or whether the person they were talking to appeared to understand them. However, this kind of feedback is generally not the kind provided by a "teacher"; everyone automatically provides it.
The issue is that it is very difficult for adults to learn new phonemes (individual units of sound that distinguish words from each other) - an adult hearing a novel phoneme tends to map it to one existing in their native language.
Children however aren't handicapped by this problem -- they actually learn the phonemes of their language before they understand the words.
In the Mandarin context, this means it is difficult to learn the ü sound - it just is perceived as something like "u" (resulting in inability to distinguish lü from lu). Tones are another category, where it is just plain hard for adults to distinguish words by tonality. Needless to say, production of the novel sounds is also incredibly hard.
Point being - it's difficult to bridge this gap - and I'd imagine near impossible for most without a teacher. I find Pimsleur's claim of learning a language "effortlessly" with a "near-native accent" - with only the aid of a CD - absurd in this context.
A source that goes into this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2846316/
E.g. the ü sound is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_front_rounded_vowel , which means that it only differs from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_front_unrounded_vowel (the English ee sound) by the lips being rounded instead of unrounded. English also has rounded vowels, for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_back_rounded_vowel (the oo sound). So you can learn to consciously pronounce ü by pronouncing ee and then rounding your lips as when pronouncing oo while keeping the tongue in the ee position.
Most teachers don't know enough about phonology to give that kind of explanation. My Mandarin teacher certainly didn't. I can only credit Wikipedia with helping me perfect my pronunciation to the point where I can be mistaken for a native speaker on the phone.
This is accurate, but it's worth pointing out that infants are born recognizing every potential phoneme, and what they learn to do is to ignore the differences between sounds that their language considers equivalent. They don't learn to make distinctions they weren't formerly able to make. (This supports the idea that learning foreign sounds is much harder for adults -- I mention it because most people intuitively believe that things happen the other way around.)
Adults do preserve the ability to learn to ignore the difference between two sounds, but that's much less useful than learning a distinction would be. :(
> Tones are another category, where it is just plain hard for adults to distinguish words by tonality.
English features tones pretty heavily, most prominently in the usually-obligatory tonal marking for yes/no questions, but interestingly also in the I-don't-know tonal sequence.
> I find Pimsleur's claim of learning a language "effortlessly" with a "near-native accent" - with only the aid of a CD - absurd in this context.
Agreed.
Interesting, I've some previous and am currently in a situation where I actively correct a child learner, and they respond well to that correction wrt language, less so in behavioural aspects unfortunately ;o)
For clarity, what I do with mispronunciations is break down the word in to phonemes. Yellow is a classic, that a lot of kids struggle with, current child subject has a propensity to say "lellow", though he gets it right more often than not now (age 3) -- I break that down as "yuh-ell-oh" and have him say other words that he can pronounce like "yes" and "yum". So I go "yes, yes, yes, yes, yellow" whilst he listens, then we do it together.
Most early language acquisition is done at home, and for us that has meant away from other parents so I'm not really sure how others do it. I have seen the "aw that's cute" reaction to mispronunciation in the wild, which I guess is a blocker for some.
In the environment of evolutionary adaptedness language acquisition would not primarily occur in a nuclear family, children would spend a lot of time around not just their immediate family but also with other nursing mothers and children close in age and as they get older with children close on age more generally. They pick up pronunciation from the environment and all the other elements of a language too. This is why children will reject a language spoken only by one person in their environment starting around age three[1] and how you get distinct school/social class accents, like international school English or public school English in the U.K.
[1]http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2012/08/a-man-once-t...
This guy spoke only Klingon to his son for the first three years of his life. The same rejection occurs with natural languages if only one person speaks it to a child so if you want your child to grow up bilingual they better hear your language from other people too.
In my experience, a private tutor really is not any more expensive than an classroom environment when you factor in the reduced number of hours needed. I have been taking language lessons online with 1-on-1 tutors (via Skype) through italki. You can easily find good native speakers with teaching qualifications for under $15 / hour. I find that I get more out of a dedicated hour with a tutor than half-day course in a classroom.
Audio lessons vary widely in how they're designed. In the context of Pimsleur, it's an interactive back-and-forth.
Tape: "Tell her your flight is tomorrow."
[30 second pause. I say "你的航班是明天。"]
Tape: "你的航班是明天。"
[30 second pause. I correct "你的航班是明天," based on the feedback]
Tape: "你的航班是明天。"
[30 second pause. I repeat again]
And then the tape goes on.
That is feedback. It's prescriped, but it's incredibly effective. After I say something, I hear it pronounced back at me by a native speaker. That's 90% of the feedback a tutor or teacher would give you, only it's there for everything you say.
I found my pronunciation after a couple of months of Pimsleur to be dramatically better than people who've been in classes for a year or two. Indeed, when I tried stepping into a class, I left, since my pronunciation got worse.
That, combined with spaced repetition (which Pimsleur uses), combined with a half-dozen other research-based techniques, makes it ultra-effective.
I imagine that being sufficient is going to vary a lot by individual learning styles and ability to mimic. I'm guessing you are rather good at mimicking sounds/music/etc.
> That's 90% of the feedback a tutor or teacher would give you, only it's there for everything you say.
I'm not so great at mimicking, so without someone telling me I'm actually pronouncing the words wrong, I'm just going to converge on an incorrect pronunciation. I cannot self-assess the accuracy; I need a tutor to point out that what I mistakenly believe is correct is not correct -- that is provide feedback to me. (I've tried similar exercises to what you describe and it just results in incorrect convergence)
This is especially an issue with Chinese where my native English brain naturally ignores tonality. Since the information is being stripped away, it's borderline impossible to self-ascertain whether my tones match or not.
It turns out the back-and-forth has a big impact.
That's not just me. Lots of my friends use it. Nice thing about CDs is you can get them from the library free too (or interlibrary loan).
In almost all cases the primary reason for learning another language is conversation. The richness of interaction trumps the fact of picking up an accent or grammar errors.
I learned French by living in France for half a year, and was relatively decent at it at the end of my stay. Over the last few years I've tried to learn several languages by book or through apps, and progress is significantly slower, maybe as much as ten times slower.
There's so much richness in real world interaction, including visuals, sounds, connecting words and phrases to specific tasks, it's impossible to replace with an app.
And yet, hundreds of millions of people have learned a foreign language that way.
In this corner of Europe it's de rigueur for everyone to study 2 or more foreign languages during middle and high school, and (some very rich kids with private tutors aside) everybody does it at foreign language schools with classes of 10-15 other people. It still works just fine.
I've been searching for such apps (for watching movies/audio-visual content). Got any names to share? Thanks.
You get a nice overview of movies in a certain language available in your country. I don't use their Chrome extension though, so I can't say anything about that
We're working on YouTube support now for the extension.
Something else I've been working on: https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?t=8699
It follows a hype cycle. The idea is promoted. People get excited. It comes out. It fizzles. Later, educators rediscover the idea. They implement it. It has a small positive impact for small number of learners in a small number of cases.
To give some examples: - Native English Speaking Teachers - English immersion villages in South Korea - English robots in South Korea and Japan - The Audio-lingual Method - Berlitz Method - Rosetta Stone Immersion Based Learning Method - MUDs, MOOs, MUSHs - MOOCs - Blended learning - Badges - Gamification - Second Life
There's no reason to think VR+AI will be any different. It's simply what's hot right now.
Also I'd recommend looking at Memrise. Their voice seems a lot better than duolingo's at least.
busuu[1] have setup a network where users can send exercises to other members (native speakers of the language you are trying to speak) and they will correct and rate them. The network is very active, as soon as I submit my exercise, a couple of minutes later someone will have corrected it. (Premium plan though, I made a 3 months plan, hopefully it will be enough to get me on track).
I would suggest everyone to give busuu a try.
[1]: https://busuu.com [2]: https://imgur.com/a/3PrxDBH
You also for languages distant from ones you know really need a teacher (which is a problem with Duolingo), at least to break into the elementary levels.
> You speak the words, but the vendor doesn't understand. Your tones are off.
The immersion is critical to having repetitive practice and exposure, but few adults (at least I'm not one) will get this far (that is being capable of extending knowledge via immersion) without the initial aid of a teacher. e.g. Learning to hear/speak sounds that don't exist in your native language requires both extensive instruction and feedback more detailed than just "I don't understand".
I do believe that language learning can improve a lot using new technologies such as AR and VR. VR experiences as you described above can really impact how students aquire new skills.
But immersing yourself in the environment in which you’ll use the language should eventually help with cued recall.
https://www.reddit.com/r/MUD/comments/bhxejm/muding_for_span...
VR has potential to really make a difference here. Imagine you load a VR level. It's a busy outdoor market in Taipei. In your inventory you have some cash. NPCs with AI and chat logic are around you interacting. Your goal is to buy some bread and get to the subway. You see a vendor with some bread, but don't remember the word for bread. You hear a NPC talking to the vendor and buying some bread. Now you remember. You speak the words, but the vendor doesn't understand. Your tones are off. You try again, this time the vendor smiles and says how much it costs. You give cash, take the bread, and walk to the subway. The next level, buying a subway pass...
This basically already exists in RPG games. It just needs mic support so you can speak and good "game" design that's designed to help learn the language. Playing this for an hour a day would be more effective than an hour of flashcards. And also a lot fun.