Just pick it up?

[Guest realmayo]

I should preface this by saying that of course, "whatever works for you is cool" but: online I often see people talking about learning Chinese via some "immersion" method on the grounds that this is how babies learn to speak languages and we should do the same, avoiding our native language or any structured learning from expert sources.

If I am short and bald, should I sit around in a nappy all day drinking breast milk because that's what babies do, & they grow very quickly, as does their hair?

Now, rejecting the whole baby idea, I can however see that if you live in the country where the target language is spoken, then plunging headfirst into life there you may well learn the language very fast. But for someone living elsewhere, do people really think that 2 hours watching a Chinese film is better than, say, 30 mins reading exercises, 30 mins writing, 30 mins grammar, 30 mins watching a Chinese film?

My real question is, particularly for people at an intermediate level: do you find text books and grammar books helpful and do you follow them in an organised, thorough way -- or do people generally favour the "pick it up as you get exposed to the language" way? Have people become disillusioned with one approach and shifted to the other, with improved results? And, more particularly, what to people think of the notion that you should avoid using your native language in any shape or form as it will "pollute" your new language?

[renzhe]

But for someone living elsewhere, do people really think that 2 hours watching a Chinese film is better than, say, 30 mins reading exercises, 30 mins writing, 30 mins grammar, 30 mins watching a Chinese film?

It will depend. For me, it is, at least at the moment, because I find that my listening comprehension is lagging.

My real question is, particularly for people at an intermediate level: do you find text books and grammar books helpful and do you follow them in an organised, thorough way -- or do people generally favour the "pick it up as you get exposed to the language" way?

I still follow a textbook (on my own) and finish one lesson each week. I dedicate a few hours every weekend to this. I also find that, for me, this is sufficient. If I had serious trouble with the lessons, I'd need to dedicate more time to them, but I don't, so I divert my time to other things. At the moment, it's listening/watching and reading.

But personally, I don't think I could "just pick it up". I find grammar explanations important.

[Xiao Kui]

But for someone living elsewhere, do people really think that 2 hours watching a Chinese film is better than, say, 30 mins reading exercises, 30 mins writing, 30 mins grammar, 30 mins watching a Chinese film?

The second option is better b/c the 90 minutes of language study is what allows you to understand the 30 minutes of film.

Whose attention span is long enough to take in 2 hrs of Chinese film if you're missing most of the plot and dialogue through your ignorance of the language? (actually I now speak fluent Mandarin, and have difficulty sitting through a lot of longer Chinese films anyway, especially the slow art films abt rural life (or BJ life, for that matter))

[Guest realmayo]

ha, the slow films about rural life I've seen have little enough dialogue anyway! I suppose I don't just mean 2 hours of a film, but a good chunk of time of any "passive" input in the target language. Some people try to listen to loads and loads of radio, for example, even though they say they may only understand 20% of it.

Edited August 21, 2008 at 01:36 PM by realmayo

[renzhe]

In my opinion, the exposure to the language (like listening, immersion, etc.) can help in two ways:

- developing an ear for the language which helps you identify important sentence structures, distinguish between different sounds, and improve your own pronunciation and tones.

- actually learning the language, acquiring vocabulary, understanding, usage in context, nuances, etc.

The first one can be done even if you don't understand much, but for the second, you need to understand most of what's going on. Whenever I do a lot of listening, I go for material that I can mostly follow, but which is still challenging because I don't understand it 100%.

If you think about it, when you are immersed, your discussion partners (or the parents of the child) also try to speak at a level you can understand.

[Alewife]

Also the child isn't just picking up words and grammar by osmosis. The adults are talking to him and correcting his language. If the child says "Me goed grandma", the adult is going to respond something like "You went to see grandma?" and the child will learn from that.

[jslee]

True, if you go somewhere as an adult to immerse in a language/culture, people will probably say how well you are doing and not even correct your basic mistakes.

[Hedge]

Using the "immersion" method doesn't necessarily mean substituting structured learning (textbooks, lessons, etc) with movies, TV series and radio. For me it means that instead of watching English TV while eating dinner or relaxing I will watch a Chinese movie. When walking on the street, instead of listening to English music I will listen to Chinese music or podcasts, etc. You get the point.

[Guest realmayo]

But what I don't get is whether people have had really good experiences learning the language by focusing on these activities, or whether their main focus is always on more traditional methods, supplemented by listening to radio/watching tv etc... ie can the latter replace the former?

[liuzhou]

If the child says "Me goed grandma", the adult is going to respond something like "You went to see grandma?" and the child will learn from that.

Nearly all English speaking children go through a sequence of using "went" first, working out the +ed rule for past tenses by themselves then logically switching to "goed". They later learn about irregulars and switch back, but many still go through a "wented" phase

Almost every published linguistic research of observed and recorded conversations between child and carer suggests that carers seldom correct grammar. They only correct meaning.

The most famous example is along the lines of*

Child says: "Mummy not a boy. He a girl"

Mother answers: "Yes"

If child had said "She a boy", it is probable that mother would have answered, "No." It is highly unlikely she would correct the grammar.

Or even better is:

"if a child says to his mother, "I loves you, Mommy," it's a very unusual parent who would say, "Oh, no. The verb agreement is mistaken. You've added a redundant ‘s.' It's not appropriate." Similarly, if a child is to say, "I hate your guts, Mother," it's an unusual mother, "That's wonderful. There's a subject, verb, object. The whole thing's structurally fine.""

*Sorry, Don't have my source materials here. Will edit to cite later.

[flemnos]

My knee-jerk reaction would be to point you toward the success of the guy from "alljapaneseallthetime.com" as well as the chinese success story in there among the posts.

The best approach, especially as a beginner without the sort of foundation of vocabulary that would facilitate being able to figure things out through context (there's no context if you don't understand anything at all), doesn't make "immersion" and "traditional study methods" mutually exclusive. Sure you're using your native language, but only as a means to learn enough of the target language to get somewhere with it.

It's also important to look at it as "immersion." That doesn't mean, as in earlier post to this thread, "two hours of watching a movie versus 90 minutes of structured study" it's "90 minutes of study, plus exposure to chinese for the other 22.5 hours of the day as well.

Granted, I'm speaking largely from anecdotal evidence and personal bias, but as a middling-to-intermediate learner of Chinese, I've found I get far better results from mixing a formal-training-type language class with watching Chinese movies/tv/music at home versus only being exposed to the language in class, then coming home to English-land until class the next morning (excepting, of course, homework).

[Guest realmayo]

heh! agree with that. I think the whole thing about us trying to learn as babies do is silly because, as I suggested at the top, babies learn language differently --at least, much better-- than we do.

[imron]

Besides a year at Beida, most of my language learning has been unstructured. I've never even gone through a full text book (started many though ). My learning as such has been a mix of spending time with non-English speaking Chinese people doing various activities, sport, cooking etc. Watching movies, listening to the radio, reading, and looking up the things I don't know etc. Every time I attempt to do something more structured, I usually last a month or two before getting too lazy and stopping.

As for where this type of learning gets you, I have reasonable speaking and listening abilities, ok-ish reading, and writing skills that need a lot more work (talking about composition of lengthy texts here rather than handwriting). It also leaves you with the feeling that your Chinese could be much better than it is, if only you'd bothered to put more time into learning it in a more structured way.

[Luobot]

I watched a short video on Youtube from USC College about some research they did into the subject of

. (Warning: you've got to be real interested in this subject to stay awake through the video.) Towards the end of the video, I woke up and gathered something about babies having facilities to learn things particular to the language they're exposed to in their environment, which adults may no longer have as these facilities may not outlast the baby’s use for them. The research looked into harmony patterns, such as vowel harmonies, which are used in many other languages, but not in English. So an English speaking baby can easily learn vowel harmonies if their environment calls for it, but once the baby grows up as a native English speaker, that facility, or sensitivity to vowel harmonies, will eventually fade out of existence as it isn’t required for English language acquisition. In short, all babies have innate facilities to learn whatever language they need to learn in their environment, even a completely made up language, as in the research discussed, but infants don’t retain facilities that aren’t necessary for language acquisition after a certain point.

This research helps to explain why trying to imitate a baby will not work, though it may get you some attention, which is probably what you already knew. However, I’m not sure if anyone’s actually done research into dressing adults up in diapers, breast feeding them, and speaking to them in vowel harmonies to see if that sensitivity wasn’t totally lost, after all.

[imron]

There is also real world evidence however that doing such things as an adult is possible.

[Luobot]

I thought the following was interesting:

This judge guessed that Armando was Moroccan, which is quite interesting, because the owners of the restaurant are from Morocco

Which makes me think that, over time, a lot of people, both men and women, are going to be running around sounding something like Jenny Zhu, host of ChinesePod.

I think Armando is just one of the exceptions, few in number and highly publicized. Apart from those exceptions (or exceptional language learners, to give them their fair due), most of us native English speakers who are trying to learn Mandarin will not be very efficient at "just picking it up" the way babies do. We aren't babies any longer, so there's no point pretending we can learn like them any more than they can learn like adults.

It would be interesting to see the results of controlled studies of adult English speakers learning Mandarin using different learning strategies. If I'm wrong and Armando isn't the exception, then I'll consider dropping everything and going to work in a Chinese kitchen for a few years.

Edit: I just checked the article to see how long I'd have to work in a Chinese restaurant. Armando was there for 12 years. That's too long. Forget about it.

Edited August 24, 2008 at 03:29 AM by Luobot

[Guest realmayo]

Well, as I said, I do agree that if you're completely involved all day in an environment where a different language is spoken, you'll pick the basics up quick enough, and after that will probably have a group of people around you to correct and improve your language. But lots of people learning Chinese in China, and most people learning it elsewhere, don't have that environment.

As for children, Stephen Pinker reckons it makes genetic sense (ie was helpful as our species was evolving) for children to be able to learn a language or languages easily or quickly, but not really for older adults.