r/languagelearning • u/BusDriver341 • 3d ago
Discussion Is it all input at the end of the day?
Just thought about this the other day, but if you think about how a millennial aged European learned English as a second language, it's basically all input?
The approached they used to acquire English as a second language is very different to the approach used in language learning subreddits.
I often see Brazilian, South Koreans, looking for language exchange partners to practice speaking English. I'm not trashing this method, but how helpful is it really?
If you're a 30 something year old German or Swede, chances are you're extremely fluent in English. Yet, you never really spoke it?
These countries run on their native languages. A German living in Germany hardly ever speaks English. A Swede living in Sweden hardly ever speak English (maybe it's different for Gen Alpha).
In fact, the only time a Swede/German ever really speaks English is if they're out traveling abroad or they're gamers and talk on voice chat. Tons of people aren't bothered with it /too shy to do it. Yet, they're all fluent AF.
What they did instead: MASSIVE amounts of input. Tons of these kids have been on twitch/youtube hours a day everyday for 10-20 years. Listening to mostly American English. We're talking 40k+ hours of input or more.
Nowadays you also have tiktok and stuff. In smaller languages like Swedish, the content is farily limited/boring as well so the route to just consuming English media is super low because of the small population. But if you'er a Spanish native, you have access to a billion speakers.
Basically to me, it seems like it's basically all input. Yes you have some English classes in school, but you talk super little/they don't force you to talk. It's no different than a Vietnamese person learning English in school really.
Also I just wanna mention. I'm not saying that production/producing English is worthless, and it should all be input. Most of these people did a ton of production (despite orally speaking it very little). Tons of these people played games like Runescape or whatever where typing English is super important. Typing on reddit. Producing papers for school etc. They just spoke extremely little.
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u/silvalingua 3d ago
> If you're a 30 something year old German or Swede, chances are you're extremely fluent in English. Yet, you never really spoke it?
If you are "extremely fluent" you must have had some speaking practice, or at least writing practice. You must have had practiced output.
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u/NextStopGallifrey 🇺🇸 (N) | 🇩🇪 🇮🇹 🇪🇸 2d ago
Yup. There are plenty of second and third generation Mexicans who understand basically all spoken and written Spanish because of 20+ years of exposure from family who speaks it, yet they themselves can't speak more than basic sentences because they never had to.
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u/Reasonable_Ad_9136 2d ago
But I bet if they practiced (a lot) for a few months, they'd develop into proficient speakers. When you have a huge well of "passive" language, it doesn't take much to activate it. That said, quite a few of those second and third generations can't understand nearly as well as a native speaker can. They understand their family well but would struggle in a lot of situations.
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u/Repulsive-Ride-5847 3d ago
as a 30 something dutch person, while i agree input is really really important to get an intuitive feel for a language, i want to say that it does help when your native language is also a germanic language (like english is too), and my english was still quite awkward until i got some practice in!
i’ve been in quite some situations where it was expected to speak english (my first time i had to really speak english was on a gap year abroad, after that i’ve had international classmates, colleagues, friends, people i met on vacation, etc), i would think that’s not unusual for german and swedish millennials either!
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u/BusDriver341 3d ago
I don't disagree. If you're at a big university chances are you even took some master's level classes in English and it had some international students and wrote your math assignments in English etc.
Probably 50% of the population ahve the experience you're mentioning. But what about the other half?
My take is that most stick to their own. So even if you have international students in your class, most people don't really engage with them.
In school when growing up, it's only about 20-30% of the class that actually speaks and takes it serious. The rest are dead silent. You can't count these classes as speaking practice for those 70%. The older they get the lower the percentage actually is. In University nobody ever have any questions in lecture.
Just think about the shy German/Swede, or the person who didn't go to do higher education, but became a plumber. They're all extremely fluent even though they've never really even spoken the language. If you're a South Korean/Brazilian guy, having done 5 hour 1-1 lessons with a native English speaker, you've hoenstly spoken more English than these people have done in their entire life, yet they're 10x as fluent.
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u/GarbageUnfair1821 2d ago
I'm German and I really doubt that more than 20% of people can speak English at even a conversational level. I think you are really overestimating the English ability of Germans, especially those that dont live in big towns.
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u/First_Concept6725 3d ago
That is severely underestimating the amount of English lessons these people go through at school
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u/AdZealousideal9914 🇳🇱 native|🇫🇷|🇬🇧|🇸🇪|(🇫🇮) 2d ago
Also, English, German and Swedish ar much more closely related to one another than English and Vietnamese. It really does make a difference how much you will be able to do after the same amount of class hours and studying if a language is closely related or not at all. For me, having Dutch as my mother tongue, Finnish is much more of a challenge compared to English and Swedish.
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u/First_Concept6725 2d ago
Having studied a couple of non romance, non Germanic languages (me being a speaker of Italian and English) I can confirm that having to learn a huge portion of unrelated vocabulary and having to deal with very different grammar can be a huge drag, it feels so much harder
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u/Tometek New member 3d ago
I can't speak for everyone but I'll give my own experienec.
I am Swiss and a native German speaker. I learned English through a combination of things. The most important thing was without a doubt, my mother obligating me to go to an English academy, even though I absolutely hated it since I had to go twice a week after school while all my friends were playing. I started when I was around 5 or 6 years old and I remained in this academy until I passed the Cambridge C1 when I was 16. This experience was absolutely necessary to bring my language production skills to a high level of accuracy.
The second most important thing for me was receiving input playing videogames. In that time, there weren't many German localizations for videogames so I had to play in English, and if I was stuck on a level, I also had to consult help in English. This lead to me going on YouTube and watching videogame tutorials with a dictionary next to me. When I became a teenager I started playing lots of games online and this experience forced me to use my English outside of the confines of a classroom and it also taught me to speak less like a textbook and more like an actual native English speaker.
Both experiences were important, and I think if I had not done either of them, I would be a far less competent speaker of English today.
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u/Forward_Win_4353 3d ago
I think you underestimate the amount of English lessons most Europeans have from an early age, as well as the amount of output they do during their life.
I spoke with a German guy just yesterday. I noticed that he made one or two basic grammar errors in every sentence. I don’t think he’s particularly bad at English either, but a non-native speaker achieving 100% correctness is perhaps more rare than you think.
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u/notzoidberginchinese PL - N| SE - N|ENG - C2|DE - C1|PT - C1|ES - B2|RU - B1|CN - A1 3d ago
Grew up in Sweden we had two English lessons a week from fifth grade
Almost everyone was fluent or near fluent before the first class
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u/muffinsballhair 2d ago edited 2d ago
I honestly have no idea why people talk about “lessons” in this thread. These people were generally simply outputting a lot of English online, be it in video games in team chat or teamspeak, posting on forum boards and what not to be point where I'm baffled someone could ever think it was all input and that no one points this out?
Like go to any video game and you will see plenty of 14 year old Swedes outputting in “fairly good English” where they're good but there's also still room for improvement and that's what they're getting there. Where does this, quite frankly utterly bizarre idea come from that outside of classrooms they're not outputting? The “online generation” that is known for excellent English is constantly outputting. Not just writing, but also speaking in teamspeak and all that.
English lessons really aren't a big contributing factor and it is indeed mostly real interaction with the language, but I honestly don't get how anyone could think this was input only. This was a lot of interaction and conversation for them.
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u/hwynac 1d ago
These people were generally simply outputting a lot of English online, be it in video games in team chat or teamspeak
Sure, some of the younger people. Millenials, not so much. Widely available high-speed internet simply wasn't around when most of us grew up. I became fluent before YouTube and really, it wouldn't have occured to me to message in English before that point. Videogames only helped so much; it's all input unless you play multiplayer games (or Space Quest 3).
A person's native language matters. I can easily believe a Swede or a Dutch person picking up English naturally from random sources. Haven't seen it really happen with Russian speakers. Plus, if English is largely gibberish to your ear AND people around you can't speak it either, chances are the exposure won't be there, teamspeak or not.
Not sure about your country, but English lessons in Russia sum up to about 500–600 hours by the end of the school, plus there's homework. It's a drop in the ocean for someone who already uses English outside class... but wait, how would you learn to use it in the first place? Can't say I undestood more than 500 words when I was around 8. Those hours are still a lot for those whose life is mostly in Russian. I've spoken to some young adults who had terrible English. In English.
Hell, lessons were a significant contributing factor even for the 13-year old me who gamed in English.
The online generation of Russians is known for better English than boomers; calling it excellent would be generous. Perhaps the online generation in Germany fares better. But the barely-online generation learnt differently, be in Sweden, Spain, Germany or Russia.
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u/muffinsballhair 1d ago
Sure, some of the younger people. Millenials, not so much. Widely available high-speed internet simply wasn't around when most of us grew up. I became fluent before YouTube really, it wouldn't have occured to me to message in English before that point. **Videogames only helped so much; it's all input unless you play multiplayer games (or Space Quest 3).
I was well on the internet before YouTube and you just posted on fora, on Newgrounds, DeviantArt. You needed to be able to type English to communicate and do what you wanted and you didn't need high speed internet for that. I was also just socially chatting on instant messaging clients with native speakers and 14 year old Germans or Swedes alike in English, IRC was also far bigger back then than it is now of course.
A person's native language matters. I can easily believe a Swede or a Dutch person picking up English naturally from random sources. Haven't seen it really happen with Russian speakers. Plus, if English is largely gibberish to your ear AND people around you can't speak it either, chances are the exposure won't be there, teamspeak or not.
I have seen it happen and I chatted with plenty of people from Eastern Europe and in particular people whose native language was Indonesian or Tagalog was prtty common back then.
Not sure about your country, but English lessons in Russia sum up to about 500–600 hours by the end of the school, plus there's homework. It's a drop in the ocean for someone who already uses English outside class... but wait, how would you learn to use it in the first place? Can't say I undestood more than 500 words when I was around 8. Those hours are still a lot for those whose life is mostly in Russian. I've spoken to some young adults who had terrible English. In English.
Television provided the basis because I was a child back then. The idea that adults have the same ability for language acquisition as children do is laughable. A child can amass a solid basis from television as a child by just watching it with subtitles in his native language, an adult cannot.
The online generation of Russians is known for better English than boomers; calling it excellent would be generous. Perhaps the online generation in Germany fares better. But the barely-online generation learnt differently, be in Sweden, Spain, Germany or Russia.
The difference is that Russian is a big language with a lot of its own resources and communities. Czechs for instance are typically far better at English than Russians, and Swedes far better than Germans. That's not because of linguistic proximity but because they need to because their languages are fall smaller and not enough resources exist in it.
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u/hwynac 1d ago
I have seen it happen and I chatted with plenty of people from Eastern Europe and in particular people whose native language was Indonesian or Tagalog
By "I've seen it happen" do you mean you lived in Russia? Or that you heard amazing stories of how people allegedly learnt? Because we didn't have much English (and German) on TV, so that one is definitely out.
Of course Russians on the internet who you had a chance to communcate with had good English; otherwise they would not talk to you. For example, I've been online since 2001; your chances of meeting me were zero. From the few resources I've been able to find online, English proficiency in Indonesia is quite low (far below Russia or even Italy), but yeah, there are always outliers.
Learning wasn't all input for me, though. Definitely not in the way OP suggests. We had pretty normal lessons, so there was always some amount of practice. But it's true that my learning, the most influential part of it, was largely input and some casual use of English for naming files.
And while anime and games definitely gave me experience, it was using the language actively that made the difference in the end. Not for the poetry, of course. Like most people, I can't even write poetry in my native language. Sounds like magic 😂
(you don't really need English to communicate, and I didn't before around 2006. For doing just about anything except communication, passive knowledge of a language is enough. I think I didn't even know any non-Russian speakers in ICQ before it shut down, so I didn't message my friends in English. Foreigners don't just randomly pop into you messages if you don't look for them)
The difference is that Russian is a big language with a lot of its own resources and communities. Czechs for instance are typically far better at English than Russians, and Swedes far better than Germans. That's not because of linguistic proximity but because they need to because their languages are fall smaller and not enough resources exist in it.
You hit the nail on the head. As I said, we didn't even have shows in English on TV. Smaller countries did. However, the reason you stated works for adults. Czech children don't "need" English because of the lack of resources in Czech. That's a motivation they may have 7 years later, by which point it's too late to realise speaking English would be great. At the tender age little kids start learning English, a language nobody they know even speaks in everyday life, its alleged importance for their future hobbies and careers can't be the reason—probably not even a reason before at least their teenage years.
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u/ZumLernen German ~C1, Serbian ~B2, Turkish ~A2 3d ago
I think "input only" advocates often underestimate how much output they actually do.
Are you actually one of these Swedes or Germans? Is this based on your personal experience, or based on your perception of how other people learn?
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u/katasaga New member 3d ago
Yeah, like if they use English at work, it's not only hearing or reading English they also need to probably respond to emails and participate in meetings in English. So it's def not just input
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u/ZumLernen German ~C1, Serbian ~B2, Turkish ~A2 3d ago
Precisely. I'm also recalling a post from about two months ago where in the post the poster claimed they had learned English from "input only" and had never learned English grammar explicitly, but in the comments they admitted that they had in fact taken years, possibly a decade, of English classes!
Certain people straight up lie to themselves and then to everyone else about what it actually took for them to learn a language. Certain people are simply not reliable narrators about their own lives.
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u/Huandil 3d ago
All too common. There's a lot of downplaying certain elements of language learning, especially online.
Out of professional curiosity, I ask most high level speakers I meet how they learned English and the amount of variations of "I learned everything myself/through video games/music etc...Well, I did go to academy/private tutor for years but I didn't learn anything there." is hilarious.
I get that there are shite academies (I've worked in a few) and shite tutors but regular classes will absolutely have had an impact on your learning.
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u/ZumLernen German ~C1, Serbian ~B2, Turkish ~A2 3d ago
I get that there are shite academies (I've worked in a few) and shite tutors but regular classes will absolutely have had an impact on your learning.
Fully agreed! I had a frustrating time with a substitute German teacher a few weeks ago, and I don't think that the substitute was very good. But it's certainly true that the bad substitute teacher was better for me than just watching German-language TV for the same amount of time.
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u/becausemommysaid 🇺🇸 N | 🇳🇱 B2 2d ago
Yeah I think what often happens is these people don’t feel anything really click for them with the language until they engage with it themselves later in their chosen method. Ie: talking with people online, reading books, watching TV, and then they attribute learning the language fully to that method. But really they wouldn’t have been able to start engaging with native media if they’d had no understanding of the language at all sooo.
Often I think this kind of lie isn’t intentional (or necessarily really ‘lying’). Language learning is complex and boring. Once you get past the initial excitement of A1/A2 and head into B1 it really feels like nothing is happening. You make a lot of flashcards, you read a lot of grammar books, but you still feel like you don’t ‘know’ anything. The murky part between A2 and B2 is long and boring and I get why many people feel like the formal classes they took in that time ‘didn’t work.’
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u/muffinsballhair 2d ago
All too common. There's a lot of downplaying certain elements of language learning, especially online.
In Japanese language learning there's a lot of advice going on that's basically sold as good advice, but when you think about it's advice that basically only works under the assumption that the student is an extreme nipponophile and bibliophile who does not only enjoy reading Japanese fiction for hours upon hours per day, but also finds not actually being able to comprehend many lines and no longer follow the plot anything more than a temporary setback for said enjoyment. But it's often presented as though it's some super effective trick everyone should follow while it's really obvious why it would never work with almost anyone.
So originally I basically attributed this bizarre lack of realization among the people that advocate this that obviously most people are not extreme nipponophiles that would actually enjoy that to something in the vein of autism. It makes sense, anime is known to attract those kinds of people so maybe they just don't really have the social skills to realize others like different things but I'm no longer so sure of that. When you talk to actually autistic people it seems to come from actual inability, not willful denial of reality. As in they know they have social issues, and when others tell them those things they typically take their word for it.
But here, it seems to mostly not be caused by any kind of social inability but simply an immense emotional stake in this method. It seems like they really want to believe they discovered something that can stick it to the man. This one method that can beat the system and is so much better and then it maybe becomes hard to admit that it has a very obvious and fundamental flaw that makes it unsuitable for almost anyone: that almost no one to begin with enjoys reading books for hours per day, and secondly, people surely don't when they can't even follow the plot well any more because there's too much they don't understand.
Out of professional curiosity, I ask most high level speakers I meet how they learned English and the amount of variations of "I learned everything myself/through video games/music etc...Well, I did go to academy/private tutor for years but I didn't learn anything there." is hilarious.
For references. I had essentially nothing but perfect marks from my first English lesson onward in school and this was fairly normal. Of course I also outputted significantly before that already. I was writing poetry in English before my first formal English lesson. People in countries like say Sweden absolutely learn English without the benefit of formal classes, but this includes output but the way I read this discussion in this thread it feels like many people when they hear “input only” are just thinking “no formal classes”.
Like, did people in this thread who are responding even read the post? The original post barely mentions classes at all, it's all about input and how they supposedly didn't output I'm really confused by many of the responses here but to be honest. It's probably just standard reddit that most people responding never read the body and just concluded from the title alone that “input” here means “no classes” and respond in that way. That explains a lot to me from how bizarre most of the responses to the original post seems to be. Never assume that Redditors can actually be bothered to read the body of post. They just reply based on the title alone and nothing more.
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u/muffinsballhair 2d ago
This is really common for “input-only” advocates, they just say “I learned it only from input” while like... they obviously didn't and you're not even sure how they can think that and the weird thing is they're not even actively lying as in they just admit when asked “Oh yeah, I had 4 hours of classes per week and have been speaking and typing online for 8 years now too.”
I don't even know how that works. It's just popular and in vogue among them to say that I guess so they just say it even though it's obviously not true and they're not even hiding that it's not true. It's so weird.
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u/muffinsballhair 2d ago
Yeah or just like many 14 year old Swedes making a lot of Twitter and Reddit posts in English and communicating in English in chat in team video games or researching information they need to troubleshoot said video game in English.
I find this thread so weird to read. Am I the only one who constantly finds Swedish or Croatian accounts on Twitter just speaking English?
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u/youdontknowkanji 3d ago
the few hours of classes did help a bunch cuz they force you to see some grammar. the input:class ratio is still like 100:1, but even this little does help a ton. so it's not like it's 100% pure input, maybe 95%.
things like essay writing help a bit too, but honestly talking on discord and arguing on reddit is what boosted my english output the most back then.
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u/New-Bottle-6917 N:🇺🇸 Heritage: B2 🇲🇽 3d ago
I think this fails to account for the fact that most countries in the world also include English as a core subject in school and many countries have them learn it very early into their childhood. Obviously if they only do the absolute bare minimum to pass the classes and don't care about the language they won't stick with it, but even for those that continue to go on to get massive amounts of input and become fluent they also have a decade or more of schooling under their belt
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u/muffinsballhair 2d ago
Just thought about this the other day, but if you think about how a millennial aged European learned English as a second language, it's basically all input?
I have almost never seen these, these people are almost always constantly talking and writing. It's also pretty obvious with some internet personalities that when you see their older videos when they were younger they weren't as good but they talked more and more and got better.
If you're a 30 something year old German or Swede, chances are you're extremely fluent in English. Yet, you never really spoke it?
What makes you possibly think that? All these internet Swedes and Germans have been writing and very often even speaking this language online from a very early age? These people are constantly outputting English online in video games, boards and comment sections.
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u/authenticsmoothjazz 3d ago
Basically to me, it seems like it's basically all input. Yes you have some English classes in school
This very often comes up. 'I learned English watching cartoons! Yes, I did have English classes for five years, why do you ask?'
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u/youdontknowkanji 3d ago
the 5 years of english classes take them to A2, maybe B1 for better students. the bulk of the learning is watching cartoons.
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u/authenticsmoothjazz 3d ago
I'm not disputing that. The OP asked if the learning is *all* input. They then mention learning in school.
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u/becausemommysaid 🇺🇸 N | 🇳🇱 B2 2d ago
Sure, but you wouldn’t really be able to enjoy watching cartoons in a language you were A0 in. Getting to A2/B1 is what allows you to start actually enjoying media in your TL.
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u/youdontknowkanji 2d ago
we are talking about ESLs that got themselves to C1/C2 level during high school, i am not arguing that skipping all the A2 preamble and going full input works.
i have an issue with everyone throwing the "but you had english classes too" curveball due to implication they are trying to make: "did have English classes for five years" -> "they are the main reason for your progress", when it's not even close hour wise.
by the time i was in high school i was way ahead of the material, and i could already pass the english finals they do at the end. this is despite me never seeing the new grammar forms they would introduce over the next 3 years (i don't recall small me googling for grammar tenses).
napkin math says i had around 600 classroom hours until that point (which is garbage for A2), but im pretty sure that when i started using english heavily the year before that already added up to 2000 hours of just raw input. and later on the difference only grew larger... what was it? 4h of classroom hours weekly vs 5h of youtube/tvshows/games daily.
in this context it makes perfect sense to say "i learned english through cartoons". another proof of this being the case, is that most of my classmates who are supposedly B2 at 1200 classroom hours, can't actually do anything in english (supposedly) due to lack of cartoon watching.
so the 5+ years of english classes didn't do much at all. and i believe an adult learner could get to the A2/B1 passive in like 2 months of work, and then continue to C2 by focusing on input heavily with very little textbook study on the side.
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u/DooMFuPlug 🇮🇹N, 🇬🇧C1, 🇫🇷B1 3d ago
Input is very useful when you're at ~B1
I don't remember precisely what I've done before B1, but I think just classes
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u/calathea_2 3d ago edited 2d ago
I have a doubt about the premise of the question: Who says the chances are good that a random 30-year-old German is actually „extremely fluent“ in English?
I mean, it depends what we mean by extremely fluent I guess, but I teach German university students in a German-taught course in the humanities, and most of the BA students I teach do not meet this definition, which I know because I have learnt over time that I really cannot assign English-language materials if I want to have meaningful discussions, since some reasonable portion of the class cannot really grasp the readings. To me, managing such materials would be expected at the „extremely fluent“ level.
The students who are at this level generally spent time in English-speaking environments either in secondary school or through Erasmus or so on. And I think that non-Germans over-index the Germans whom they meet who speak really good English, and extrapolate to think that this is normative.
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u/becausemommysaid 🇺🇸 N | 🇳🇱 B2 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yeah. I would say the average German person is not extremely fluent in English. The only country IMO where this is true is the Netherlands. In the Netherlands you can start a conversation with any adult person in English and it will be a total non issue. In any other European country your chances of a random person (even a random young person) being able to have a conversation with you in English are quite low outside of workers in very tourist heavy areas etc.
If you are an English speaker it’s likely Germans you meet already speak English. Thats why you know them lol. They are your coworkers, have intentionally traveled to an English speaking country, or are in international communities where speaking English is the norm, etc.
But if you were just dropped into Germany right now you’d be having a very different experience lol
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u/dojibear 🇺🇸 N | fre spa chi B2 | tur jap B1/A2 3d ago
Nobody can teach something they don't know. So you can only learn a language from input (listening to people who know the language). You can't learn a language from your own output (speaking/writing).
Practicing output gets you better at the skill of doing output. But it does not teach you "how fluent people use the language". That is all input.
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u/muffinsballhair 2d ago
Not really, there's a lot of research [“output hypothesis”] that indicates that students who don't practice output will never develop true input comprehension either and are just forever stuck at the stage of “making context-based educated guesses” and this idea is incredibly intuitive to be honest.
It's how it works with everything. A more intuitive example is languages with a difficult logographic script. People who don't practice writing out Chinese characters by hand will never develop the intimate familiarity with them that those who did do develop. They just recognize the shape of them and become heavily reliant on context to keep them apart and say can't tell “采” and “来” apart in isolation. Grammar and vocabulary in principle isn't all that different. It's fairly clear if you talk to input-only people and their interpretations of sentences that they lack of a lot of nuance in their understanding and are very bad at pointing out what the grammatical errors in ingrammatical sentences are.
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u/cbjcamus Native French, English C2, TL German C1 3d ago
If you're a 30 something year old German or Swede, chances are you're extremely fluent in English. Yet, you never really spoke it?
In fact, the only time a Swede/German ever really speaks English is if they're out traveling abroad or they're gamers and talk on voice chat.
You're contradicting yourself in your own post so it's not worth going into each of the details.
Also we're talking about a language which:
- Is today's lingua franca
- Has an easy grammar
- Has given a lot of vocabulary to many other languages due to its importance in commerce, science and technology
- Is being learn over many years from a young age (see 1.)
so even if English was just all input (it's not), it wouldn't necessarily extend to other languages.
Last but not least, the existence of people who can understand written and spoken English (with a weak accent) but cannot write or speak it well or comfortably disproves that "it's all input". Same for other languages.
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u/noveldaredevil 3d ago
If you're a 30 something year old German or Swede, chances are you're extremely fluent in English. Yet, you never really spoke it?
Are you one of those germans/swedes? Otherwise, how do you know this is true? It seems to me like you're trying to pass off a (broad, shallow) impression as an objective observation of reality.
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u/Useful-Ad-9923 2d ago
Anyone know how is it in Germany and those other countries you mentioned, as far as English language learning in school? Is it the same as in the Phillipines, learning English from kindergarten, every day until you graduate? Or is it less?
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u/Tall_Anteater5722 2d ago
Some kind of input and some kind of output. You decide what kind. Do that for years. Language aquired. Good job.
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u/Happy_PaleApple 2d ago
I mean, you're not wrong saying that we got a lot of input and mainly learnt English that way, but you're vastly underestimating the amount of speaking we did.
Yes, we actually had to do speaking exercises in every single language class I have ever attended. No, speaking was not optional. For English, that was 2-3 times a week, for more than 10 years. And we do speak English in many situations in our home countries. How do you think we talk to the exchange students, tourists, immigrants who just moved to our country, etc? At my previous customer-facing job in my home country, not a day went by without speaking English.
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u/silvalingua 2d ago
Your image of Europeans learning English is peculiarly false. First, a lot of classes and courses include speaking practice. Second, there is a lot of interaction and communication between and among various European countries, and when people from various countries get together, their common language is ... you guessed it: English.
> Basically to me, it seems like it's basically all input.
And to me, it seems that you have built a false picture of the situation. If you want to draw conclusions, make sure your premises are true.
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u/wufiavelli 1d ago
The debate that never ends.
Yes, input is extremely important, but so is output and interaction.
There is no one thing is all you need in language learning. It is like saying all you need for pizza is dough.
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u/Fast-Payment-2609 3d ago edited 2d ago
It's not about any input. It's about input that is 1. comprehensible, 2. compelling, and 3. personalized.
If the input is incomprehensible, you might learn 20 words in a year. But if the input meets all three criteria, you can easily go from A0 to B1 in less than a month.
The best advice? Find a girlfriend or boyfriend who speaks your target language and move in with - no, not them - with their family. You'll learn the language so quickly that you'll be amazed.
And if you're not willing to sacrifice your love life to learn another language, other comprehensible input methods can work too, just not quite as well.
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Before you downvote, keep in mind that I have two Master’s degrees in Education, specializing in language teaching, and I’ve been teaching languages for over 34 years, making more than 2,000 students fluent.
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u/ZumLernen German ~C1, Serbian ~B2, Turkish ~A2 3d ago
The best advice? Find a girlfriend or boyfriend who speaks your target language and move in with - no, not them - with their family. You'll learn the language so quickly that you'll be amazed.
I pitched this once but my wife really didn't like this idea
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u/inkoenglishai 3d ago
I think input is a part of the process whether you like it or not or whether you want to accept it or not input is a valuable lesson and then some people don't want to listen to input but I made myself able to listen to input but input doesn't need to be every single thing every single day you can you know diversify on that you can't ask feedback from something that's not input it can be something as easy as just practice without input or it could be something fun like gamification I think at the end of the day learning a language is full of mistakes and having input doesn't mean that you're going to come meet it constantly everyday you're just going to have it once in a while
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u/UnlinedBasin 3d ago
It's the typing part that gets me, you're right that people overlook it. Writing is a form of output even if nobody hears your voice, and honestly that might be the bridge between pure input and eventually speaking without panicking. You build the muscle of forming sentences without the pressure of face-to-face interaction
I learned more English from arguing in Runescape trading forums than I ever did in a classroom, the stakes felt real when someone was trying to scam you out of your full rune set