> Classes with other students are just about the least effective way to learn a foreign language.
Well, sure a private tutor is better, but that's a lot more expensive.
Without a teacher of some sort that can provide feedback, I have no idea how I could have learned elementary Mandarin (that is produce and listen to sounds radically different from my native English).
From what I've seen the ability for computers to give feedback on what you are doing wrong is far away from a trained human's.
> The Pimsleur model could take you all the way to fluency,
I've been looking over their website - it seems like it is just audio lessons and no tutor is provided? If that is correct, how would someone learn to correctly pronounce words in say Mandarin using this?
> Without a teacher of some sort that can provide feedback, I have no idea how I could have learned elementary Mandarin
One of the points made in The Language Instinct is that children pick up their languages without using any explicit feedback. That is, people in the child's life who can already speak are liable to ignore errors in the child's speech, and when they do point out errors, the child will essentially always ignore the feedback.
But I wouldn't say children don't get feedback at all. They get a lot of important feedback, such as whether the thing they wanted to happen when they spoke did happen, or whether the person they were talking to appeared to understand them. However, this kind of feedback is generally not the kind provided by a "teacher"; everyone automatically provides it.
Agreed. By "people" above, I should have clarified "adults".
The issue is that it is very difficult for adults to learn new phonemes (individual units of sound that distinguish words from each other) - an adult hearing a novel phoneme tends to map it to one existing in their native language.
Children however aren't handicapped by this problem -- they actually learn the phonemes of their language before they understand the words.
In the Mandarin context, this means it is difficult to learn the ü sound - it just is perceived as something like "u" (resulting in inability to distinguish lü from lu). Tones are another category, where it is just plain hard for adults to distinguish words by tonality. Needless to say, production of the novel sounds is also incredibly hard.
Point being - it's difficult to bridge this gap - and I'd imagine near impossible for most without a teacher. I find Pimsleur's claim of learning a language "effortlessly" with a "near-native accent" - with only the aid of a CD - absurd in this context.
Most teachers don't know enough about phonology to give that kind of explanation. My Mandarin teacher certainly didn't. I can only credit Wikipedia with helping me perfect my pronunciation to the point where I can be mistaken for a native speaker on the phone.
> Children however aren't handicapped by this problem -- they actually learn the phonemes of their language before they understand the words.
This is accurate, but it's worth pointing out that infants are born recognizing every potential phoneme, and what they learn to do is to ignore the differences between sounds that their language considers equivalent. They don't learn to make distinctions they weren't formerly able to make. (This supports the idea that learning foreign sounds is much harder for adults -- I mention it because most people intuitively believe that things happen the other way around.)
Adults do preserve the ability to learn to ignore the difference between two sounds, but that's much less useful than learning a distinction would be. :(
> Tones are another category, where it is just plain hard for adults to distinguish words by tonality.
English features tones pretty heavily, most prominently in the usually-obligatory tonal marking for yes/no questions, but interestingly also in the I-don't-know tonal sequence.
> I find Pimsleur's claim of learning a language "effortlessly" with a "near-native accent" - with only the aid of a CD - absurd in this context.
>That is, people in the child's life who can already speak are liable to ignore errors in the child's speech, and when they do point out errors, the child will essentially always ignore the feedback. //
Interesting, I've some previous and am currently in a situation where I actively correct a child learner, and they respond well to that correction wrt language, less so in behavioural aspects unfortunately ;o)
For clarity, what I do with mispronunciations is break down the word in to phonemes. Yellow is a classic, that a lot of kids struggle with, current child subject has a propensity to say "lellow", though he gets it right more often than not now (age 3) -- I break that down as "yuh-ell-oh" and have him say other words that he can pronounce like "yes" and "yum". So I go "yes, yes, yes, yes, yellow" whilst he listens, then we do it together.
Most early language acquisition is done at home, and for us that has meant away from other parents so I'm not really sure how others do it. I have seen the "aw that's cute" reaction to mispronunciation in the wild, which I guess is a blocker for some.
As your experience illustrates this works well but it’s not necessary. Breaking down words into phonemes is not something people from illiterate cultures do normally. It’s not excessively difficult to teach by any means but it’s also not something that comes naturally as you’ve no doubt seen when teaching children how to sound out words when learning to read. Teaching consonant vowel consonant words (cat, rat, rag, bag, tag, tug, bug etc.) if you sound out a word phoneme by phoneme they’ll often get one wrong when they put it together, usually the vowel.
In the environment of evolutionary adaptedness language acquisition would not primarily occur in a nuclear family, children would spend a lot of time around not just their immediate family but also with other nursing mothers and children close in age and as they get older with children close on age more generally. They pick up pronunciation from the environment and all the other elements of a language too. This is why children will reject a language spoken only by one person in their environment starting around age three[1] and how you get distinct school/social class accents, like international school English or public school English in the U.K.
This guy spoke only Klingon to his son for the first three years of his life. The same rejection occurs with natural languages if only one person speaks it to a child so if you want your child to grow up bilingual they better hear your language from other people too.
>> Classes with other students are just about the least effective way to learn a foreign language.
> Well, sure a private tutor is better, but that's a lot more expensive.
In my experience, a private tutor really is not any more expensive than an classroom environment when you factor in the reduced number of hours needed. I have been taking language lessons online with 1-on-1 tutors (via Skype) through italki. You can easily find good native speakers with teaching qualifications for under $15 / hour. I find that I get more out of a dedicated hour with a tutor than half-day course in a classroom.
My brother and sister get individual Japanese lessons from a UCSC professor for 60 minutes a week. They apparently progress faster than the actual Japanese class. (I believe a normal UCSC class has 3-4 hours / week of classroom time.)
> I've been looking over their website - it seems like it is just audio lessons and no tutor is provided? If that is correct, how would someone learn to correctly pronounce words in say Mandarin using this?
Audio lessons vary widely in how they're designed. In the context of Pimsleur, it's an interactive back-and-forth.
Tape: "Tell her your flight is tomorrow."
[30 second pause. I say "你的航班是明天。"]
Tape: "你的航班是明天。"
[30 second pause. I correct "你的航班是明天," based on the feedback]
Tape: "你的航班是明天。"
[30 second pause. I repeat again]
And then the tape goes on.
That is feedback. It's prescriped, but it's incredibly effective. After I say something, I hear it pronounced back at me by a native speaker. That's 90% of the feedback a tutor or teacher would give you, only it's there for everything you say.
I found my pronunciation after a couple of months of Pimsleur to be dramatically better than people who've been in classes for a year or two. Indeed, when I tried stepping into a class, I left, since my pronunciation got worse.
That, combined with spaced repetition (which Pimsleur uses), combined with a half-dozen other research-based techniques, makes it ultra-effective.
> After I say something, I hear it pronounced back at me by a native speaker.
I imagine that being sufficient is going to vary a lot by individual learning styles and ability to mimic. I'm guessing you are rather good at mimicking sounds/music/etc.
> That's 90% of the feedback a tutor or teacher would give you, only it's there for everything you say.
I'm not so great at mimicking, so without someone telling me I'm actually pronouncing the words wrong, I'm just going to converge on an incorrect pronunciation. I cannot self-assess the accuracy; I need a tutor to point out that what I mistakenly believe is correct is not correct -- that is provide feedback to me. (I've tried similar exercises to what you describe and it just results in incorrect convergence)
This is especially an issue with Chinese where my native English brain naturally ignores tonality. Since the information is being stripped away, it's borderline impossible to self-ascertain whether my tones match or not.
Well, sure a private tutor is better, but that's a lot more expensive.
Without a teacher of some sort that can provide feedback, I have no idea how I could have learned elementary Mandarin (that is produce and listen to sounds radically different from my native English).
From what I've seen the ability for computers to give feedback on what you are doing wrong is far away from a trained human's.
> The Pimsleur model could take you all the way to fluency,
I've been looking over their website - it seems like it is just audio lessons and no tutor is provided? If that is correct, how would someone learn to correctly pronounce words in say Mandarin using this?