This is a more focused follow up to a question I had the other day about moving to other countries. I’m wondering what the best options are for learning a new language at the moment. I’m vaguely aware of companies like Duo-lingo losing their reputation lately and it’s hard to trust the top google results nowadays with all the SEO junk. So does anyone have suggestions for trustworthy/useful sites for learning a new language? If it matters, in particular I’m interested in trying (In roughly this order) Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, or Spanish.
As far as I know, the current best practice for language learning is called Krashen’s Hypothesis or Comprehensible Input. Basically, we can learn a language best by hearing words that are slightly more complicated than what we already know. I am learning Korean and there is a nice YouTube channel where a guy makes videos of himself playing games and he talks about what’s on the screen at different levels of complexity. You could look for something like that in the language you want to learn.
CI is the correct answer. The ppl at dreamingspanish have a great breakdown of why it works. Chinese is a bit tougher because its much harder to find CI content, especially for beginner, but I’ve made faster progress in both spanish and chinese than I have with any other method.
I tried all the other methods people suggested below for years (flash cards, audio courses, reading); none of them worked. You might memorize words, but you won’t actually be able to understand someone speaking to you. I have a friend who has a duolingo 3+ years streak (meaning she uses it every day), and still can’t understand a native speaker talking at a beginner level. If she’d have spent even 1% of that time doing comprehensible input she’d be much further along.
Thanks for the recc. I was half expecting it to force a pay gate to simply watch any of the videos (the internet can make me cynical like that!) and better yet, they have a superbeginner video on an exact topic I was interested in learning about after some South American immigrant friends had brought it up. Immersion almost seems ‘too good to be true’ because one can learn interesting content more enthusiastically than studying it formally, I’ve found the same with history and political theory.
I’ve never seen any persuasive evidence to support Krashen’s hypotheses.
Krashens hypothesis is just that people acquire languages by understanding messages. Not by studying grammar, memorizing vocab, and “traditional” learning (IE based on skinner’s method, of error=punish, correct=reinforce).
Not only is CI backed up by evidence, and by the many polyglots who have successfully learned many languages through CI / immersion, you’d also need to show evidence of babies not learning their first language this way to refute it (IE show evidence of babies learning their first language by studying grammar and doing flashcard study).
Adults are different from babies.
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