don't ever study English!

Have you every heard of ADSE? It stands for Absolutely Don't Study English and is also known as DESE, Don't Ever Study English. It's a method created by a Korean who then wrote a book for it. I believe the book was originally written in Korean and later Japanese and Chinese versions were published. Since it is a non-study way to learn a language, I am interested in finding out more about it and the man who wrote the book. Unfortunately, my Google searches don't give me much information.

The DESE process is outlined on this page and here I will quote it:

ADSE/DESE -- A Five-Stage Method of Language Acquisition & Language Learning

Stage 1: Select one audio tape suitable for your English level. Listen to it twice a day (one day off a week) until you can hear all the sounds of it. Don't try to translate and understand, comprehension is not important at this point, catching all the sounds is the goal.

Stage 2: Taking dictation of the whole passage sentence by sentence (not phrase by phrase or word by word). Looking up the English Dictionary (e.g. 'Collins COBUILD English Dictionary for Advanced Learners' or 'Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English') for the spelling of words you are not sure. Imitating the pronunciation and intonation, Reading the transcript aloud (recitation), you try to sound as much like the original as possible.

Stage 3: Writing down the definitions and the example sentences of the words you don't understand in Stage 2, you read them aloud. If there are any more words in Dictionary you still do not understand, you look them up and write them down, reading them aloud until you can understand all.

Stage 4: Select one video tape, VCD or DVD (Movie or TV Drama) without any model transcripts. Repeat the above Stages.

Stage 5: Going through an entire issue of an English newspaper printed in USA. (1) Read an article aloud (repeatedly). (2) Without looking, tell someone (or pretend to be telling someone) about what you have read. (3) Do dictionary work as needed. (4) One by One ...

I have a feeling the above quote does not give us the complete process. First of all, it doesn't really say how much nor how long. How long should the audio be for stage one? How long would this stage last?

In stage 2, for the spelling, what are you supposed to do about homonyms? If you don't understand the words yet, it won't be possible to pick the right homonym. It wouldn't even be possible to find the words in the dictionary either since the spelling patterns of English need to be learned before you can look anything up.

My main critique at this point is that every stage besides the first one looks like STUDY to me. Dictation is a lot of work and looking words up in a dictionary is tiring work. I thought this method was supposed to be based on enjoying the language. I would not enjoy all the work that this method prescribes.

I wonder what the results are like. If anybody can point me to any more info regarding this method, I would appreciate it. The only other description of it I found was written here.

Countable

In English, we have countable and uncountable nouns. With countable nouns, we can put a number directly in front of the word to count. Such as, 1 printer, 2 printers, 1 box, 2 boxes, 1 rainbow, 2 rainbows. With uncountable nouns, we need to use a counter. Like 1 glass of beer, 2 glasses of beer, 1 carton of milk, 2 cartons of milk.

There are some countable words in English which have no plural form. Or you could say the plural form is the same as the singular form. For example, deer and sheep. 1 deer, 2 deer, 1 sheep, 2 sheep.

Now of course, you do hear native English speakers who accept and speak using incorrect grammar. So, just because some natives will tell you that it is OK or acceptable, you do not have to start using incorrect grammar. One widely accepted incorrect usage of grammar is when people put an 's' on 'beer.' They'll say, "I drank two beers last night." What they should say is, "I drank two bottles of beer," or two cans of beer, or two mugs of beer. Beer is a liquid. Liquids have neither shape nor size. You must put them into something in order to determine just how much you're talking about. Or you can be more exact and use a unit of measurement for liquids, such as ounces.

Another one is 'content.' Now, there are two words, 'content' and 'contents.' Contrary to some dictionaries, I argue that 'contents' is not the plural form of 'content.' I use the simple reasoning that we do not put a number in front of the word to count. It is uncountable. We do not say, "I have six contents in my purse." It is not a counter. Instead you would say, "I have six items" or "six things in my purse." You can say, "Let me see the contents of your purse," or you can say, "Let me see the content of your purse." There is no difference that I am aware of, however, the one with 's' sounds better to me in that sentence.

There are lots of things which cannot be explained by grammar rules. We call them "exceptions to the rules" in English. One thing which I cannot explain, is when a word uses the singular form or the plural form after the word 'no.' Such as,

• "I have no clue what you are talking about."
  
• "We have no clues in this investigation."
  
• "I had no idea what you were doing."
  
• "I had no ideas for the project."
  
• "I have no idea."
  
• "I haven't a clue."
  
• "I have no good ideas."
  
• "I have no clues."
  
• "I have no excuse for my actions."
  
• "I make no excuses for my actions."
  
• "There is no excuse for this kind of behavior."
  
• "There are no excuses for this kind of behavior."

Vox27.mp3