Hi, today I want to talk about Justin Sung and his advice on language learning.
Justin Sung is someone that I have been following.
He has some very useful advice about learning in general.
A lot of it has to do with the importance of relevance, the
importance of our curiosity.
The effectiveness of retrieval, the benefits of interleaving
and coming back to things.
His videos are very well done, very well illustrated.
I suggest you go and have a look if these are subjects of interest to you.
So, he did a video on language learning where he was responding to questions
from two Japanese learners of English, and he provided some advice to them,
which I don't consider very useful.
And so I'm going to talk about this because I think it illustrates perhaps
some of the misconceptions that are out there about language learning.
So, he begins by referring to three types of knowledge, declarative
knowledge, procedural knowledge, and conditional knowledge.
Declarative knowledge is sort of a fact.
Procedural knowledge is how to do something.
And the conditional is when to do something, and he tries
to apply this to language.
With most subjects in university and school and things, there's a lot
of declarative knowledge, lots of concepts, lots of things to learn.
And there is some procedural and there is some conditional, knowing
how to do it, solving an equation.
Knowing when to use the right formula, things like that.
With language learning, there is not that much declarative knowledge, but
there is a lot of conditional knowledge.
These distinctions do exist in a variety of languages.
Like you may know that in Spanish, we have saber, yo se hablar, as
opposed to say, conocer, which is to know as in palabras, you know, words
in different languages, they're the similar concepts of being able to do
something, knowing something, sometimes the different words are interchangeable.
But the fact of the matter is that when it comes to language, it's all the same.
It's something that you get used to.
You cannot get used to using the language, speaking the
language without knowing words.
Once you have some kind of familiarity with the patterns of the language, then
you know the procedural part of it.
It's all one and it's all absorbed in the same way.
Largely through input and then, eventually, by speaking the language.
So I think that bit of advice was not very useful.
The second part of the video then is where he suggests that if you're
going to learn some words, learn different forms of the same pattern.
It's better to think of all the variations.
So instead of saying, hello, my name is Justin.
Maybe you should also learn, I'm Justin.
Hi, or hi there.
Nice to meet you.
So these are all kind of the same message, but it's actually, they're
different words and they're different structures and they're different syntax.
And then based on that, someone could reply to you differently.
They might say I'm fine, or they could also say I'm stressed.
I'm tired.
So actually we should learn all of those as well.
But then the question is, how do you learn these words?
At no point does he sort of lay out the strategy for acquiring these words.
Do you just say them to yourself?
And then he very quickly, very quickly tries to apply this to
say, learning four different words around the subject of economics.
Instead of practicing them in isolation, we want to be practicing
them together and in different contexts.
So let's say you learnt the word economy, we don't want to put it
in a sentence and say, I feel that the economy is suffering right now.
And the other person responds with something and you have
no idea what they've said.
So we're always thinking about All the possible pathways that a
conversation can take so that when you do go and talk to someone, you're
able to carry that conversation for one more step or two more steps.
He sort of implies that if you learn these different words, then within a few weeks,
you'll be able to discuss economics.
That isn't simply not true.
And to say, well, just grab a few words that are, you think are relevant to you.
Or at some point he suggests you should go through the day.
And every time you think of a word that you may need, write it down.
And then put a little tally next to it.
By the end of the week, you'll have a list of words.
This word, I needed it 10 times.
This word, I needed to know it four times.
You just start with the ones that were most at the highest tally, right?
And you just learn those ones.
That's not very useful because the reality is that the very
frequent words show up quite often and are learned fairly quickly.
And I'm sure these Japanese girls know those words, but a lot of the.
Less frequent words that they need in order to discuss economics or
politics or anything that's serious.
They don't show up that often and the only way you're gonna learn them
is if you have a deliberate plan to do so much listening and reading and
that you come across these words in different contexts, not because you wrote
them down because you thought of it.
That's how you learn them.
If you have in your mind Words that you feel you're going to need, say on
economics, you can write a whole long text in your native language, put it on
Google Translate, get the translation, uh, imported into LingQ as a lesson.
LingQ will generate an artificial intelligence generated audio for that.
You can then listen to that, save words.
Review them, listen to it several times, if in fact you
are interested in economics.
But I think that's the final thing that's missing in Justin Sung's,
you know, advice to the girls is he talks a lot in other videos about
relevance, importance, curiosity.
Well, he never asks the girls, what are you interested in?
What would you like to hear?
Listen to read in English, because a key to success in input based learning
is this idea of not only comprehensible input, but compelling input, input
that maybe isn't that comprehensible can be made more comprehensible.
The way we do at Ling where you have the audio, you can break it down into sentence
by sentence with timestamped audio.
You can look words up gradually.
It becomes more comprehensible, perhaps more important at some
point, and especially the level that these, uh, Japanese students are at.
It should be compelling.
It should be something that you are interested in and that can change, of
course, but if you stay with something that you are very interested in, which
is relevant to you, enjoyable to you, uh, as your interests change or move,
then you'll move to some other area.
But in, in each case, you will be able to work with related vocabulary.
Okay.
Coming across similar vocabulary in different contexts.
All of the good things that Justin Sung talks about in some of his other
videos, relevance and interleaving and so forth, but it has to be based on
some sense of what you're interested in.
And it's not just a matter of jotting down some words and then,
as he says, practicing them.
Well, how do you practice them or how do you learn them?
There has to be a methodology and that methodology is input.
Compelling.
Input, and I think that's sort of the underlying piece that's
missing in Justin Sung's video.
Now, very often people make critical videos.
People can make critical videos about me, uh, or leave critical comments.
And sometimes they say, I don't mean to be critical.
Well, I mean to be critical, uh, and I think it's important to be critical.
I think we have to judge things honestly, based on our best knowledge
of the subject and our prejudices.
And we say, this is what I think.
So you have just heard what I think are Justin Sung's
video about language learning.
And I would like to leave you with two videos that I did about comprehensible
input and compelling input.
Thank you for listening.
Bye for now.