Why input trumps output in language learning.

Some arguments in favour of input. I am sure there are many more.

• We need to understand before we can speak.
• I would rather understand well and stumble when I speak than the reverse.
• If we can produce intelligible phrases and do not understand the answers, our conversations will not last long.
• Passive vocabulary is powerful, necessary, and always much larger than our active vocabulary of the words we like to use.
• The more we understand, and the more words we have, even passively, the more interesting our interaction with the language and the more words we can acquire.
• If we understand most of a text, or conversation, it is easier to pick up the words and phrases we do not yet know.
• The acquisition of passive vocabulary through input, is like putting the pieces of the jig-saw together. Gradually the picture becomes clearer.
• Input is easy to arrange. We can listen and read anywhere and anytime.
• Input is interesting, if we choose content that is meaningful to us.
• If we develop the habit of input learning we become independent.
• Input learning makes it easy to review our languages, and maintain them.
• Through input learning, especially with authentic content. we learn not only the language, but many more things.
• At any time in our input learning activities, we can decide to speak or write, to practice what we have learned.
• Of course we need to speak a lot, in order to speak well, but our progress in speaking will be smoother if we invest time in input, and continue doing so.
• Our interaction with any language, including our own, is mostly as listeners and readers.
• If we are good listeners and readers, our output skills will have a sound base.

One of my goals in any language learning project is to read a full length book in that language. Getting there is a powerful moment of achievement, an Everest.

I could go on....

Posted via email from Lingosteve's place

Comments

[Hape]

If you just start to speak a new language, only using a phrasebook (like Benny), with no further knowledge of the language, what do you do if the other person answers in the new language and you don't understand anything? Do you start using English or any other language you assume the other person knows? Or will you ask: What does XYZ mean? What does ABC mean? No.

We need to understand before we can speak!

[Jim Morrison]

Yes, but I agree with this post:
http://52languages.blogspot.com/2010/04/how-much-input-do-you-need.html
'Very little. Very, very little. Under two dozen flash cards, plus knowledge of a few key features of the grammar, and you're good to go.'
Jim

[Steve Kaufmann]

Jim, I guess it depends on your goals. I know from my own experience that it takes much much longer to gain enough of a based in a language to be able to converse meaningfully. If you want to order a beer and find the bathroom in 52 languages, then your approach might work, but even there I doubt it. You simply need to invest a lot of time in one language in order to learn it and keep it. At least that is my experience.

Besides, what is the rush? Learning a language should be an enjoyable voyage of exploration and discovery, not an instant fix. At least that is my perspective.

[Jim Morrison]

Steve, I know what you mean but what I was saying is that if someone wants to start speaking early on, it can be done after only a very small amount of input.
For example, if my mum wants to go to Greece on Holiday and be able to exchange a few pleasantries with shop keepers and waiters, she can just learn a handful of phrases and just use them. I don't think she should be discouraged from doing that. And then if she enjoyed the experience of actually speaking a tiny bit Greek, she might take her studies further. So I think it is up to the individual, but I think if a person wants to start speaking after only a very small amount of input, there's nothing stopping them.

[Harry]

Dark Lord Kaufmann,

You are always talking about reason and logic, but the justification you almost always give for your statements is that it is your experience.

Other people have other experiences.

Also-- I wasn't able to post anymore on the other thread (that's the second time it's happened). Is there a cap on posts or have I been banned from that thread?

[Katie]

I agree with Sir Harry. Yes, Steve, we are all aware of how you like to learn languages. We know that LingQ was developed around how you like to learn languages. Some of us aren't like you. Please forgive us.

[Steve Kaufmann]

Typepad does strange things. You can post here if you want.

I offer my experience, not scientific proof. Other people can offers theirs and form their own opinions.

[Deko]

LOL, some experience you have! It's like claiming to be a top F1 mechanic just because you've driven cars for 35 years. Be real, you went to France, Hong Kong and Japan, stayed there for many years and had the opportunity to immerse yourself and learn. That doesn't make you experienced linguist, every mediocre would succeed without bothering about learning strategies at all. You never ever spend some significant time to think about how to learn better. So why bother us with your "experience"? What experience? You're very short of it. Khatzumoto for example is light years in front of you when it comes to learning hints, just because you're an old fart it doesn't make you Einstein you know.

[Steve Kaufmann]

deko,

I explain in my book that I have learned languages in different environments. BTW, Hong Kong was not a Mandarin speaking environment, but in France and Japan, I was able to use the language altho most of my learning time was spent listening and reading. I think my most recent experience learning Russian is most relevant since I started from scratch in an unrelated language. I will do that again when we add languages to LingQ.

Out of curiosity, why is trying to insult people such a big part of your discussion style? Where do you learn this? What is your occupation? Are you a student? Just curious.

[Steve Kaufmann]

Of course Jim. As I said it depends on your goals. If you goal is fluency then I think a lot of input activity is inevitable.

[ed]

harry

Have you gotten a start on learning Mandarin yet?

[Friedemann]

Great topic, your right on the money there. This is something Benny could never answer to my satisfaction: What do you do when you get off the plane and say your phrases and you don't understand a thing what your counterpart says? In a Benny setting smiling back or using phrase 342 would maybe work but it doesn't work for me who uses the language at work.

Here is a question for Steve and potentially Harry, who seems to have mastered Chinese as well: When we listen, is the listening effective even if we only understand fragments? In Chinese there are some news programs that I regularly watch on the web where they provide transcripts. Without them I am often lost and couldn't make out what it was I heard . In Chinese because of the strangeness of the sounds I often feel that listening is only of value if am able to fully disect and analyse the text (using the transcript).

Do you believe that the language is absorbed somehow subconsciously even if we don't fully understand it? I always held the believe that I would constantly improve in any given foreign language through imitation and determination, provided I fully understand what I hear. If your output isn't fully correct but you fully understand the input you have already reached your goal in my opinion. The rest is only vanity, a little attention to minor details. However if you havn't reached that level yet, is listening still as powerful?

Friedemann

[Deko]

and why you deleted my comment containing the list of blogs that banned you? Are you ashamed now?

Here they are again
antimoon
tim ferris
fluent in three months
how to learn any language
fluent every year
chinese.ipod
to be continued...... ;)

[Steve Kaufmann]

Deko,

I do not delete comments unless they contain vulgarity. Typepad seems to do strange things when there are a lot of comments. Sorry about that. Your comments are not the only ones affected.

As for being ashamed at seeing this list, not at all. I am not aware of being banned at most of these sites, and in fact continue to get notice of comments and Tim Ferris' site and occasionally comment there. I doubt that I am banned at chinese.ipod and "fluent every year" is run by Randy, the avid Esperantists who likes to spew vulgarity on my blog..I should care?

Now that I have answered your questions, would you answer mine? I repeat.

Out of curiosity, why is trying to insult people such a big part of your discussion style? Where do you learn this? What is your occupation? Are you a student? Just curious.

[victor]

Harry, it's my fault.It was my poor English that happened to become the cause of troubles in previous thread.

[Steve Kaufmann]

Friedemann,

I have found listening to things I don't understand to be not too useful. I prefer to listen to content where I can access the text and work on the vocabulary, hence LingQ. I prefer to listen repeatedly to content where I am trying to understand more and more, until I get about 70% or more, rather than just have the language as background noise. I do not believe that I learn subconsciously.

As I get better I listen less often and often do not need the text. Then casual listening becomes more effective.

[Harry]

Friedemann,

I struggled with comprehension in Chinese, as well. As I'm sure you know, the way people in Zhejiang speak and the way people in Beijing speak are very different. One could understand close to 100% of what's being said in Taiwan, then visit Chengdu for a week and be completely lost. Each speaker seems to be on a spectrum between official Mandarin and hometown dialect. The younger generation is strongly moving toward the official side, but meeting someone with a strong regional accent is a daily occurence. At my job even now, I have a slight fear a Chinese client will come in with a regional accent I've never encountered before and I'll have a hard time understanding him/her.

In my experience, passive listening you don't comprehend is invaluable. Once I started leaving my TV or radio on in the background, my listening comprehension leaped up. I had it on while even sleeping and taking a shower. I never actually actively tried to improve my listening comprehension. I just kept the radio on at home and went out and lived my life-- talking to people, reading newspapers, working, etc.

I went from almost understanding nothing on the news to understanding almost everything on TV and radio in about four or five months doing that.

So, like I said before. Just set the preconditions and the rest will take care of itself. Stop trying to learn Chinese. Just do what Chinese people do, and language ability will naturally follow.

As for dialect issues, trying watching shows that are based in a certain region, or listen to the call-in shows on your local radio station. They always have some old people calling who speak heavily accented Mandarin.

[hnedka]

You may be interested in this article:http://www.physorg.com/news152292870.html

[Hape]

Harry wrote: "I went from almost understanding nothing on the news to understanding almost everything on TV and radio in about four or five months doing that."

IMHO this only works if you have already a VERY solid knowledge of Chinese. If you are a beginner or at intermediate level, than passive listening may not work or may not have very much benefit.

[Harry]

Hape,

First of all, even if you were right, I was making a suggestion for Friedemann, who I believe has the necessary foundation.

Secondly, I think it works from the get-go. Khatzumoto from AJATT is an example. He talks about this in much more detail here: http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/why-you-should-keep-listening-even-if-you-dont-understand

Also, I have been learning Korean this way for almost six months now. I had zero foundation in this language six months ago. Now I can understand a great deal. Most of the listening I've been doing has been passive.

[FluentCzech]

In terms of listening to stuff you don't understand. My own experience has been that it depends how you listen. Habitually, I inadvertently allowed my brain to treat non-comprehensible input as "noise" and so my brain would default to blocking it out (even when I assumed it was listening "in the background").

At least for me, it took a bit of forced practice to get my brain into the habit of listening to this background "noise" before it picked anything up from it.

[Ivana]

I agree with Harry on the benefit of passive listening. I often listen to the radio in Spanish and I treat it just as background noise, in the same way that I'd listen to music.

It seems to me that we do learn subconsciously, and the funny thing about lots of input is that your output can sometimes surprise you. There have been many times when I've used words and phrases in Spanish that I have never intentionally learned. :-)

I like the LingQ way better than any other system I've seen online but outside of that, most native audio doesn't come with text and vice versa, so usually the things I'm reading and listening to are completely different.

[Steve Kaufmann]

I do not think that any approach need to be exclusive. We can take advantage of whatever means we can use. If I were studying Spanish I would also have Spanish radio on, and the better my level , the more advantage I think I would take.

When I lived in Japan I always listened to Japanese radio in the car. I also did my deliberate listening and reading along the lines of LingQ.

[Friedemann]

Some very interesting aspects of the brain is pattern recognition and that goes for visual patterns as well as audio patterns. If you have internalised a pattern, you can make it fuzzy and still recognise it. You can recognise a known face from far away for example.

Now, in Chinese once I have internalised a certain phrase, I can make it out even if the speaker butchers it almost beyond recognition. I find that amazing. The same goes for the Hanzi, I am always amazed how the Chinese manage to recognize hand written characters.

I also believe that a lot in Chinese or any langauge for that matter is about the brain extrapolating a sentence while it hears it into the future based on patterns it is familiar with. I think I had seen some study on that somewhere on the net.

Harry, do you currently live in Zhejiang province? That would be very close by, I am located in Suzhou.

Friedemann

[Eze]

The comments by people have really gone down the tube as of recent (past several months). Its like every other comment is gibberish instead of constructive writing.

The insults which people type in their comment which are really useless. Comments like

" We know that LingQ was developed around how you like to learn languages. Some of us aren't like you. Please forgive us."

Then really, get off the blog :\. its Steve's Blog and obviously he'll post what works for him/his facts on how HE learns.

its interesting when people attack Steve's Experience in language learning as I am certain in the majority of cases those insulting him know a grand total of ONE language (their mother tongue).

As I know some persons who leave comments are greatly immature (probably because they are about 12-15 years old) will probably comment on how I am a kiss ass which isnt true. It just seems to much of the time that people post useless things in comments instead of contributing to them.

[Harry]

Friedemann,

I don't live in China anymore, but I was in Hangzhou for a month or so last year.

You asked about my Chinese background on the other thread, but I couldn't post anymore for some reason.

I've studied for six years. The first four years in college were mostly wasted. I went to China for a year after graduation and learned most of it there through talking to people, watching TV, reading books and listening to the radio.

[Chris]

Steve and Harry,

I know why Harry wasn't able to post on that other thread, it's because after 50 posts a new page is started in the comments section, but on Steve's blog there is no link to that next page. You have to edit the URL (the code for which I can't remember), to access it. The code is similar to that on the LingQcentral page, where you can vote for a new language. If you copy the code on the link that says "next page" in the comments section, and apply it to a link on Steve's blog, you'll be able to access it.

Is it possible to fix this? Otherwise it brings interesting discussions to a halt.

[Friedemann]

Yeah, please fix that,

Interesting to hear that Harry. In total I will maybe have one and a half years on the ground in China, so that gives me about the same exposure that you had.

Regarding the listening approach, I kind of side with Steve's view on that. Whenever I dig into audio and I repeat it over and over again and suddenly I realize, oh this is this word or that word, I believe this heureka moment is key for improving. It also is a great motivator. I compare that to working your muscles: in order to increase mass you need to challenge and fatigue the muscle.

I cannot really disprove your approach but there are so many people with foreign background in my home country Germany who don't make an active effort to improve their German but who are constantly exposed to the langueage. Per your theory they all should improve but I am not sure that this is the case,

Thanks,
Friedemann

[Chris]

If you change the URL by deleting the word "#comments" at the end and replacing it with "comments/page/2/#comments" you can see what was said on the other blogpost, where there about an extra 25 posts that can't be seen. Hope that helps.

[Steve Kaufmann]

Chris, is this for each reader of the blog to do or is there something I can do?

[Chris]

Steve, what I wrote up above should work for each reader if they want to read posts above 50. But maybe there's a setting or something you can change to make further posts visible?

[Steve Kaufmann]

Thanks I will look into it.

[Friedemann]

There are some very computer savy people out there...

[Friedemann]

Chris I think you missed some backslash, the correct URL that works for me is:

http://thelinguist.blogs.com/how_to_learn_english_and/2010/04/banned-by-benny.html/comments/page/2/#comments

Many people tried to re-post because they thought their post wasn't accepted, so that's why it went to 75,

Friedemann

[Street-Smart Language Learning]

Steve, as a proponent of early output (well, certainly much earlier than you recommend, anyway), I couldn't resist taking your post above and turning it from an "input trumps output" argument into a "get output early argument". See here.

[Steve Kaufmann]

Vince,

You won't be surprised to hear that I am not persuaded. But to each his own.

[Street-Smart Language Learning]

Haha, not surprised at all!

[Ollie]

I'm not sold on this learning by speaking concept. How does this 'method' work? Do you just buy a phrase-book and then impose yourself upon whatever unfortunate native speaker comes your way: 'What's this in ...'
'How do you say...' "Say that again would you..." etc. Not convinced. I guess Benny the Irish polyglot is responsible for this debate but I have studied his blog but am really none the wiser as to the actual nature of the 'crazy' and 'unorthodox' methods he employs- guess I'll have to wait for the forthcoming 'hacking guide' - I'd like to see some videos of him engaging in the process, starting from scratch and armed only with a flights worth of phrase-book language skills, of initiating and sustaining a productive conversation with a native speaker. If he could demonstrate how he can use this type of interaction to go from scratch to fluent in 3 months I'd be mightily impressed, however as far as I can see he's never done it - the hypothesis remains untested...

[Estu]

Personally, I WHOLLY agree with this blog entry. On a scale of 1-10 with 10 being good, I'm barely a 2 at outputting (writing and speaking) Spanish. However, in terms of READING the language, I'm a strong 7.

I can't speak for others, but as a person who learns in baby steps, I feel immense frustration at having to focus so much on output in my Spanish classes. In turn, I am HATING that I have to take 4 semesters worth of Spanish for my major when I would rather learn Spanish the way I feel comfortable.

[Mark]

I like to show my students these kinds of articles. They always say, "I want to learn to speak." I always recommend various listening and reading resources. They don't want to make the effort or they act as if I'm not listening to what their desire is. I'm sticking to my guns whether they quit or not. They can't make ice without water.

[ochamocha]

From my own experience learning Japanese, everything is important, but especially speaking. While input is a requirement for output, output strengthens recall, grammar, vocabulary, and the ability to receive input as well. If you can write kanji, you can certainly read it but not the other way around. Similarly, if you can speak it, you can certainly understand it when you're listening.

Babies get a lot of input, but they are also constantly trying to output through their cries and babbles. Once they get a little older, they are also constantly thinking in the language which is output also. The output might be wrong but it can be corrected. On the other hand, if you're just focused on input, there won't be any output to correct. You're so worried about getting the grammar right but you're having trouble recalling the vocabulary. If you think about it, babies are starting from babbles that eventually turn into words. They don't wait until they can understand the grammar, a sentence, or even a word.

I would also argue that output is the limiting factor in most people learning a language. Input is naturally easy because it's much less passive. It's easy to watch anime but not very productive. I'm also finding out that there aren't a lot of occasions where I can practice output. You really need to find someone who is willing to converse with you like a baby. Ideally, you should be receiving input while outputting.