Hi there! Steve Kaufmann here again. Time to do another little chat.
You know, I put up that last little discussion,
and I notice that, you know how it is on Youtube,
if you look up the... some other, some... web video chat
you have just done you will see some related... youtubes.
And so I saw to... Some there were quite interesting.
One was something by a British professor,
or a language teacher who talked about language learning in Web 2.0.
And you might find that, if you look up one of my videos you might see his.
But my impression of his presentation, and it was a 9 minute presentation,
it was much appreciated by all the teachers.
But I think he misunderstood and he saw Web 2.0 as...
as yet, another tool by which the teachers can...
sort of control the activities of students and learners.
And I think Web 2.0 is about the learners taking over.
And the differences between learners and teachers are kind of blurred.
Everyone contributes, everyone is a consumer, everyone is a producer,
people made sound files, people learn from what they are interested in
They don't have to follow the teacher's agenda;
they don't have to do, sort of, make-work projects that the teacher assigns them.
Ideally, they get out of the classroom, which is a
relatively inefficient place to learn languages.
So... But you might have a look at it. I was not that impressed with what was there.
The other... There were a series of a...
of a webcams by a professor, Alexander Arguelles.
I don't know how he pronounces his name.
And a... Oh! No, before I go into that one.
There was a discussion of Michel Thomas.
Of his very successful method. He has sold lots.
He taught movie stars and charged a fortune for doing so.
I have listened to Michel Thomas trying to teach...
or teaching German, which is his native language.
He also does them in Italian and Spanish and French.
Where apparently he has a pretty bad accent, because his accent in English is a...
...sort of a very strong Central European accent.
But he's been tremendously successful.
And... But I listened to this explanation to his theory and...
Yeah, I mean, I'm not...
It is obvious that different people learn in different ways,
and many people are very happy with Michel Thomas' and his method of teaching.
But there's many things that I just don't agree with.
And he says, for example, that there are no bad students, there are only bad teachers.
If you can't learn it's my fault, the teacher.
Well, I just don't believe that.
I think the teacher is irrelevant.
I wouldn't say irrelevant, but the teacher in terms of teaching the language is not necessary.
The teacher as a...
...as a resource, as a person who encourages, as a person who provides feedback,
who inspires, who stimulates; all of those things, yes.
And I see that more as the role of a tutor,
as someone looking over someone else, someone who is, already, learning languages
and is providing some support and encouragement of someone else.
All of that is great.
Teaching the language; I just don't see it.
I think you'll learn the language from the language.
He works very hard on getting people to say things very quickly.
But he doesn't cover a lot of vocabulary,
and to me the whole thing about language learning,
and if you want to be able to speak and...
converse and be comfortable in any situations,
you need a lot of words. He doesn't cover a lot of words.
He tries to get you to speak from the beginning, ok.
Some people want to do that. It's not what I want to do.
I'm not interested in constructing whole sentences early, just so that I can say...
You know, what is the color of your white horse.
I want to learn words.
Some of the things that I do agree with, he says it's important to relax.
I think there are many people who create these mental blocks for themselves, that they are too nervous.
To relax, to enjoy the language. He says "Get out of you own way", I agree.
Sometimes people are their own worst enemy they are hung up
about grammar, they're hung up about how they sound, they're hung up about
being able to get out of their own culture, and so forth.
So, I agree with all of that.
Another major part of his approach is that: no reading.
Well, I think reading is a tremendous way to access
the culture on the language and learn words and so forth.
So, Michel Thomas, obviously, is very popular and... But so there was a youtube of a lady explaining his system.
Now, there was another series of youtubes where a person by the name of
Professor Alexander Arguelles reviews a number of the more popular language learning books.
Teach Yourself, Assimil, Colloquial, I don't know if he did Pimsleur, Hugo.
He goes literally through all of them. And he gives you a sort of a nine minute explanation,
going back to the earlier versions of the 1920's and the 1930's.
Interesting if you are interested in the history of different language learning methods.
He deplores the fact that the methods are becoming simpler, with a greater emphasis on phrases.
And I agree with him there. You can't teach through unconnected phrases.
You want interesting dialogue.
He likes the idea that some of the earlier versions of some of these
systems, seem to follow the same format in every language, so that they would teach
pronouns in lesson 1, verbs in lesson 2 and numbers in lesson 3 and so forth.
To me that's of a limited benefit, because every language is different,
some language don't have articles, some languages don't have the
same range of tenses as other languages.
He suggested that by learning language A,
if the second book follows the same format that will help to learn language B, I don't see that at all.
I don't think it really matters in what order you learn the grammar.
You learn through interesting content. Some grammar concepts, in say,
Japanese or Chinese or Russian, are going to stick early, some later.
With some people than withÉ.. I don't see that at all.
He is very found of the, sort of, artificial scenarios:
at the bank, at the post office, at the train station,
and I've always felt those to be... to the extent that those dialogues
are artificial they're not that useful, I mean, you need obviously in the beginning,
you need some artificial dialogue, as you can't deal with authentic content.
It almost doesn't matter what that artificial dialogue is,
they can be on anything.
It doesn't have to be at the train station. You won't, or the the bank,
you won't be able to operate at bank based on the scenario you learn.
So, you could be learning anything. It could be, you know, "How are you?",
"What did you do with your children today?", it could be anything.
It really doesn't matter. So having, sort of, parallel scenarios
that he talks about, I don't see the benefit.
He talks about some of them having a 30 page glossary at the end of the book
and therefore you've learned all these words. Well no, you haven't learn the words
because there's a glossary, that's not how you learn words.
You can't learn words by reading a glossary.
The fact that some of the dialogues have all these words in them, are fine.
There's just so much better ways now to deal with learning words;
some of the things we think we're doing at LingQ that are good.
I have never been able to learn words from a glossary.
It's distracting to keep on having to look back
to a glossary; that's the advantage of reading on the web.
But I'm going to, on my blog post,
I'm going to post the URL for his website and for his youtubes.
And one of the things he's very fond of, is what he calls shadowing,
where you walk around, you know, reciting these phrases and so forth and...
I mean, I'm sure it works for people, doesn't work for me, but everyone is different.
So yeah, I just put these... mention these things
so that you can have a look and see what you... what you think. I think it... a lot of this is...
It just points out again to me how different people have different ways of learning,
but I think it might be of interest to some people to explore.
Some of the YouTubes that seem to collect around my Youtubes for, you know,
whatever reason having to do with how Youtube organizes itself.
So, if you go to the blog post you will see some of these URLs.
Thank you for listening.