visit the AUA Thai blog

In my previous post, I introduced you to a former student of AUA Thai. Actually, I just quoted some text from the blog of someone who seemed pretty successful with the ALG method, as well as encouraged you to read it. It was good to get comments from those of you who did. Thanks.

students of AUA Thai use ALG method

While I have searched for blogs or experiences of students at AUA, I could not find any good ones through my own Google searches. But they do exist! And finally a good one has turned up. It was there all along but still it does not come up in my searches. Shame on Google! Searches always turn up with so many results that have very little to do with what you searched on. Google is not magic. Google doesn't have all the answers, and it certainly doesn't always give you the best results.

Thankfully we do have a nicely documented case of an AUA Thai student who progressed through 1500 hours in the ALG course. His name is Dan. Every month he wrote one post to document his progress and describe his level. If you are interested, you should read it. I'm going to quote some of the most interesting things he wrote. Outside of class he would speak Thai only when he knew how to speak without making up sentences. He started out attending about 5 hours a day (25 hours per week).

He attended from the end of August 2006 until March 2008.

-- Begin Quoted Text --

does credible second language acquisition research exist?

There's a bit of a debate going on over at the YouTube algworld channel page. I was trying to post a reply, but I get a processing error when I try to post, so I'll just put my comment here. Normally I would just give up, but I thought some of you might have a response to what I want to say.

natural language learning

I decided to talk about my preferred learning style for languages. I spent 5 hours on this 17 minute video. I had to edit out all the pauses. In the first part, I mostly talked about ALG and Dr. Brown's background teaching Thai.

This is not a prepared presentation, so there are some parts that I should have expanded on and there are some parts I should have clarified better.  Also, I did not conclude the video properly.  I decided to stop talking when I realized I had used almost 3 GB on my hard drive while recording.

My speech goes rather slowly, so I hope you don't fall asleep. It's probably good for those learning English. I created a playlist for the two parts so the second part could start right after the first and be viewed in the same player.

I hope you enjoy the talk.




Link to the playlist.

anything not attached to an experience is worthless

The title of this post is a quote from From the Outside In, a book written by Dr. Brown. He says:

Understanding without noticing words—that’s the name of the game. Anything not attached to an experience is worthless. But can we really ignore words?

Several paragraphs later:

The answer I found is best explained with these two words: ‘wonder’ and ‘grow’. Words have to grow—gradually. Experience by experience. And the mechanism of growing in each experience is ‘wondering’. The experience is the cheese. But there’s a hole in it. A fledgling word floats by and you wonder: ‘Might that word fill that hole and take its meaning from it?’ Click! Let me expand the two words to five. Experience, hole, word, wonder, and grow. The word grows a new ring of meaning with each experience. Like an onion.

And a few more examples are given and then:

So the big question as we started the NA course was “What do we do about voca-bulary?” And three years later I got the answer. “Nothing!” Don’t teach words at all. Don’t even call attention to them. Just let the students wonder. Just let the words grow.

So, in order to learn words and grow our vocabulary, we need to be paying attention and wondering. That is to say, thousands of hours of TV or audio on in the background, is not the figure you want to go for. While it does add to the amount of time that you do pay attention, it's not the target. Having the TV on in your target language helps, but only the time actually spent paying attention can count towards the number of hours that you have worked toward your goal.

This is why I've stopped recording my Japanese TV hours. Out of the 300+ hours that I put in, I don't know how many of those were hours spent actually paying attention. It shouldn't matter to anybody here anyway because my Japanese methods have not been one single method that could prove anything. I just need to keep the TV on so that I will increase the number of hours actually watching it. When I get back to Chinese, I will keep those hours purely focused on the content so I can wonder and grow.

What happens when you don't learn naturally?

What happens to all those words that you don't wonder and grow? Where does all that vocabulary go when you use an output-based approach to learn a language? Let's look at a couple of examples.

The first example is Tim Ferriss. He says he's reactivating Chinese. I guess "language reactivation" is necessary when you don't really learn a language in 3 months.

I began reactivation of irretrievable German just over a week ago and can already hold a decent conversation. - September 20th, 2007

This volume covers our trip preparation, Pu-erh tea cakes, and basic Mandarin language reactivation. - July 12th, 2009

Learning new languages and reactivating old ones (in this case, Mandarin Chinese). - August 12th, 2009

At 24:50 in his video from Aug. 12, 2009, he pulls out the Living Language Chinese book. As you know, a book for beginners. He thinks only using Chinese to learn Chinese is ridiculous (27:20).


The second example comes from a well-intended fellow trying to learn Czech to fluency in 3 months. He also uses an output approach. (He probably read too much Tim Ferriss material.) His name is Benny Lewis.

After living in Spain for one year and successfully having reached a pretty good level of Spanish, I moved to Germany for 2 months (to practise the German that I had learned in school), then Italy for 3 months.
(...)
To make matters worse I was completely forgetting my Spanish, Italian and German (and in fact, I never did get my German back; that will be another 3-month mission some day!) After all the work I put into speaking these languages, it was depressing that I was back to square one and not even able to piece together basic sentences again!

Why not just translate?

If you translate and then one day stop using the language, you would end up like Tim or Benny. Here's what Dr. Brown said about why you should not use translations:

Because it would then get stacked in the pantry as a memorized unit—instead of glued in the web by wonder to every experience it had ever appeared in. Whenever you wanted to access it for the rest of your life, you would have to go to the pantry. That translation would have killed that word for life. That’s the difference between artificial language (on the shelf) and real (in the web).

What happens when you do learn naturally?

Now let's look at an example of taking a break from natural learning. Another excerpt from Dr. Brown's book:

One day during our second year of operation, a student returned from a three-month break in his native Australia where he hadn’t heard a word of Thai. He said that he had probably forgotten a lot and had better repeat NA 2. I told him that you never forget natural learning. He could take NA 3 and he would find that he was right where he left off. Two days later he came in to see me. “You were wrong, you know. I wasn’t right where I left off. I was way ahead.” I couldn’t explain it. Then a few months later another student reported the same experience. Then another. I was mystified.

Finally it happened to me. After I had studied natural Swatow for 8 months, my teacher took a 5-month trip to the States. When she came back I felt like I was on a whole new level.

This is why I am not worried about the break I am having to take from Chinese. I am not worried about language atrophy. I am interested in seeing if I will be understanding better than before. Although I do not experience the language directly, I feel I do experience it through what I see and hear. On TV you can see and hear a lot too.

thinking about rules

The answer to my last post, what else causes damage?, which was given in the first comment by Thomas, is thinking. Here are some more excerpts from Dr. Brown's book:

And, like the ‘speakers’, none of the ‘dictionary flippers’ or ‘note takers’ ever made it. We had been saying “Don’t speak! Don’t speak! Don’t speak!” We now changed this to “Don’t speak! Don’t look up words! Don’t take notes!” But over the years we found an occasional ‘non-speaker’, ‘non-dictionary-flipper’, and ‘non-note-taker’ who still didn’t make it. What else could be causing the damage?

Dr. Brown discovered the answer when he tried to learn Swatow Chinese by his new method.

What an experience! I had hoped not only to find out what it felt like but also to learn fluent Swatow. I got neither. But I got something even more valuable something I couldn’t have gotten in any other way. I found out what else could have been causing damage— what else besides the terrible four: speaking, questions, dictionaries, and notes. I avoided the terrible four faithfully, but I still failed. I had discovered the terrible fifth.

And then Dr. Brown goes on to answer Reineke's question.

You see I’m a lifetime linguist. I can’t listen to anyone speak in any language without noticing all kinds of things. After two days I had noticed that Swatow had five tones: rising, falling, high, low, and mid; and syllables ending in a sudden stop (like p, t, k, or a glottal stop) could carry only two: high and low. Then after two weeks I had noticed that all these tones turned upside down in weak position: rising changed to falling and falling to rising, high changed to low and low to high. And, of course, mid stayed mid. That was wild. How could a linguist not notice something as wild as that? And not only was I a linguist; I was the best. It would have taken other linguists months to work this out, and I got it in two weeks— without even wanting it. In fact, I was trying not to notice things like this—but I couldn’t help myself.

Sometimes, to be sure, a happening was so overpowering that it drowned out the language, and whenever this happened, I learned right. But more often I had time to notice and think, and I learned wrong. So I soon had a headful both of things that worked (overpowering happenings that drowned out the language) and things that didn’t (anything I was free to notice and think about). As an example of each, I’ll tell you how I learned the word for ‘white’ and the word for ‘hundred’.

Then he goes on to tell you about each way in two examples. In one example the learned word pops into his head whenever "one of those stories about beautiful women popped into" his head. In the other example, "The expression wasn’t tied to any special experience, so it couldn’t pop up— I had to think it up."

A few paragraphs later, he goes on to write:

Now look again at the terrible four. “Don’t speak. Don’t ask. Don’t look up words. Don’t take notes.” I wasn’t doing any of those things. A new prohibition was needed. What? It seemed obvious. Don’t think!

But wait. ‘Don’t think’ covers them all—not just the linguist’s meddling. Obviously you’ve got to think about the language for these three: asking questions, looking up words, and taking notes. But what about speaking? After the language has been built, you don’t have to think it up—it pops. But before the language has been built, it can’t pop—if you want it, you have to think it. “Don’t think about the language” covers all of the terrible four.

The terrible fifth then becomes “don’t analyze”, and the terrible five become one: “Don’t think about the language.” But there’s still something different about the fifth. While we could easily see and hear the students speak, ask questions, look up words, and take notes, we couldn’t see them analyze. I had to experience the terrible fifth myself in order to discover it. And not being able to detect it from the outside makes it all the more insidious. It explains why the occasional student who was avoiding speaking, questions, dictionaries, and notes could fail. We now have the answer to the question posed at the end of the preceding section: “What else could be causing the damage?” It’s “Don’t analyze!”

The above quotes are all in Chapter 7 of From the Outside In.

what else causes damage?

More from Dr. J. Marvin Brown's book:

Now, 15 years and thousands of students later, we’ve had hundreds of students who went more than a thousand hours with speaking and dozens who went the same distance without. None of the ‘speakers’ ever got close to my mark while some ‘non-speakers’ eventually passed it. But not all. That is, some ‘non-speakers' passed me and some didn’t. It looked like there was something besides speaking that was causing damage.

Let's look at that paragraph again, shall we?

None of the ‘speakers’ ever got close to my mark while some ‘non-speakers’ eventually passed it.

If we zoom in a little closer we can see:

None of the ‘speakers’ ever got close to my mark...

does speaking cause damage?

Here is an excerpt from Dr. J. Marvin Brown's book, From the Outside In

Did speaking really cause damage, or was I being unrealistic? Hard evidence had to wait three years. In July of 1987 we started the first year-long class of more than a thousand hours, and there were four students eager enough to go the distance: Paul, David. Peter, and Charly. Paul and David never spoke; but, in spite of all our warnings, Peter and Charly did right from day one. They finished the course, they all settled down in Thailand, and they all dropped in to see us over the years. After a few years, Peter and Charly were struggling with broken Thai like all long-time foreigners. But Paul and David had passed me up. Me! The original guinea pig of practice and 40 year resident of Thailand!

more on David Long

Catherine Wentworth posts interviews with successful Thai language learners and her latest post is an interview with David Long, the director of ALG World at AUA.

If you are not aware, David Long is one of the first students to complete the AUA Thai program and reach native-level Thai. I still have yet to see a video of David speaking Thai, but since I don't know the language myself I guess I won't lose any sleep over it.

Although it would be cool if there were a video with David Long speaking Thai with Stu Jay Raj. The two of them would probably make you think that learning Thai should be easy! Of course, if you were to go through the AUA Thai program at ALG World, it would be easy.

ALG Thai interview with David Long

Antonio Graceffo has uploaded an interview with David Long, the director of ALG (Automatic Language Growth) Thai. It has 5 parts, and since Antonio hadn't created a playlist for it, I created one myself. It's a very good interview. Thanks Antonio!



I hope to some day get a chance to go to AUA and enter this Thai program. I want to experience it for myself. And I don't mean "just experience it." I would complete the program and come out a native Thai speaker.

Here is a link to my playlist: ALG Thai presented by Antonio Graceffo

ALG Thai

ALG World has uploaded a 3-part video from an advanced class. In the title it says 'Famous People' so I guess that is what the class was on.

I believe the students need to complete 200 hours for each level, so that means the students in the class have put in about 800 or more hours of ALG World Thai and understand 60% or more. The students are also allowed to speak Thai and you can hear some of them answering the teacher. Also, I think in the advanced levels there is only one teacher instead of two, which is what I see in this one.

If you don't understand Thai, the third video is the most interesting one.

Here are the links if you need them:
ALG World's channel

• ALG Thai / Level 5 -10 / Famous People / Part 1
• ALG Thai / Level 5 -10 / Famous People / Part 2
• ALG Thai / Level 5 -10 / Famous People / Part 3

the discussion on grammar

People are having a fun debate over in the comment section of Steve's blog. Steve seems to be saying that explicit instruction in grammar is not only unnecessary, but unhelpful as well. The pro-grammar side is saying that without studying grammar, you cannot become fluent in a foreign language.

And then Steve has written a follow-up post. In that post he states,

I learned Mandarin by listening and reading and focusing on phrases, and ignoring grammar explanation. After 8 months I passed the British Foreign Service Exam in Mandarin.

So if it took Steve just 8 months to reach a respectable level of Mandarin his way, I think the TV method will work much faster. With the TV method, I am not spending time looking up words or pronunciation. My time is spent receiving a nearly constant flow of the language into my brain. And it is not my pronunciation that I am hearing. It is the pronunciation of native speakers. Also, I am not getting in the way of my brain's natural abilities by trying to remember what words mean for every sentence. I am not constantly interfering with the natural process. Constant interference will only become a natural habit. A habit of second nature. Avoiding the formation of this habit is one of the main objectives of my approach.

It is interesting, or maybe sad, that none of the people who comment, seem to know about ALG World. One person there wrote:

I am sorry, but the intuitive approach has been disastrous wherever it has been applied. You end up with people who cannot be described as knowing a language, who can parrot a few sentences, but cannot analyze what they do, and will never be able to go beyond a very basic and simplistic understanding.

That statement is completely false. At ALG World, students who complete the necessary time are able to understand the language in exactly the same way as a native. The reason why is because they don't speak from the beginning, they don't take notes, they don't get in the way of the natural acquisition process.

The same person also wrote:

Try mastering Mandarin without being able to understand how grammar and syntax work!

I say to him, I am trying this. I will never study Mandarin grammar.

Why the comprehensibility of input is unimportant... and why it is important

I have stated in an earlier post that I do not believe (just speculation, no data to back it up) that comprehensible input is important in second language acquisition. I am not aware of any evidence to back up the idea that input must be comprehensible in order for it to be useful to the language acquisition process. I think most people are just willing to accept that idea without questioning it. If it makes sense, why question it? Right? Nor have I come across anybody else who disagrees with the necessity for the input to be comprehensible. (I live in a small, small world) So let me be the first, if I may or if I need to, to disagree with the whole "comprehensible" thing.

If anybody is going to actually prove or disprove it, they need to have two experiments going on. One where the learner receives comprehensible input and one where the learner does not, with all else being equal. For the study, I would suggest using the same learner in both experiments. First show me that the learner could not acquire a language through incomprehensible input, and then show the same learner could acquire a different language through comprehensible input. For example, first the learner tries to acquire Japanese, and then Korean. They are both similarly structured languages and would make a good comparison. You could not use the same language for the second experiment as the first because you would prove nothing since the learner received all the exposure to the language in the first experiment, so you must use a different but similar language for the second experiment on the same learner. But you could not use Portuguese and Spanish because they are way too similar with vocabulary coming from the same Latin roots.

Anyway, enough of that. Nobody is going to do their SLA thesis based on my experimental guidelines! So let me tell you what I do think is important about comprehensible input.

The importance of comprehension is that it encourages the learner to pay attention and to continue the process of receiving input. In other words, they don't quit when they are enjoying what they are getting. It can be evidenced from the ALG World classes, that when learners get to level 3 and the comprehension drops, the students get frustrated and drop out. The props and drawings are taken away and learners go into shock.


Quotes from AJ:

At level three things get much worse at AUA. Other students had warned me about the “level 3 shock” but I was still surprised by it....

My rough guess is that the Level 3 input at AUA is only 35-50% comprehensible (to me and most new arrivals). Sometimes the comprehension level is much lower-- and I have no clue what’s going on. Input that is not comprehensible is wasted...

More from AJ:

Through levels 1 and 2 I was laser focused in class. I was not understanding everything...maybe 70-80%... but usually the major points of what was going on....

But when I hit level three my superb concentration and focus vanished. Suddenly I was drifting off in class... daydreaming.... looking at the cute girls in class... thinking about what to do when class was over. I became bored. Not that I didn’t try. I made heroic efforts to keep focused, but could not sustain them. I just reached level 4-- I understand more but am still often confused. My motivation has plummeted. I’m skipping class constantly.

So what happened... what changed? AUA’s classes were never 90%+ comprehensible, but I did OK in the first two levels. Why? Because in levels 1 and 2 the teachers were encouraged to use a wealth of drawings and props and charades and games-- in other words-- aids to comprehension.

At levels 3 and up, the teachers/managers inexplicably decided that comprehension aids were no longer desirable. No more games. No more drawings. No more charades.....

Faced with two stationary talking heads, my understanding plummeted. And, as in the TV experiments, so did my attention. Occasionally I’d get drawn back if I heard something I understood... but quickly tuned out again once confused.

So what makes comprehensible input important is the fact that you stay focused on the input and don't feel like giving up! That's why it is good to have. But is it really necessary? I say that for what is going on inside your head, it is not necessary.

Here's why.

First of all, for the most part, that which is done to create comprehensibility is not the language itself. Drawings, gestures, props, and everything else is a visual aid to comprehension, not a language aid. The communication can be made comprehensible, but still the actual language used is not yet learned. So comprehension does not equal acquisition. Comprehension can be quick, but acquisition takes time.

Second, Dr. Brown said that students should not think about the language. So if we are not thinking about the language but yet we can still acquire the language, then acquisition must happen regardless of the comprehension.

Basically, comprehension is something you do, but language acquisition is not something you do, rather it is something that happens to you. How does it happen to you? Through lots of input that you let into your head.

A language is not a randomly used set of words. All languages are used in patterned ways. These patterns are studied by linguists and then classified into grammar rules. Then, teachers teach these grammar rules to native students and to language learners. The rules help keep people using the same set of patterns in the language.

Through massive amounts of input, our brains will organize the patterns of the new language and create firm paths for us to access our new language. We can't do this consciously. By studying the language, learning the grammar, memorizing words, and so on, we create a habit of thinking about the language and we try to reproduce the language before we have enough exposure to it.

1,500 hours of study may create a person who is very skilled at reproducing the language. But 1,500 hours of natural language acquisition produces a person who thinks like a native in the language. 1500 hours of thinking vs. 1500 hours of not thinking.

The "thinking vs. not thinking" is the important difference in the speed of further and further acquisition. Thinking is a habit! How hard it is to break reinforced habits! The reason ALG World doesn't allow you to speak during the first 800 hours is because they don't want you to develop the habit of thinking. If you know only 500 words of Thai, and you go around practicing it, you're going to find yourself in situations where you need words that you don't know. Or you'll know some words that you think are correct and you'll think of a way to string together what you mean with them. The point is that you're creating a habit of thinking about how to say what you feel. You also end up saying things that you don't know if it is the natural way to say it or not. People will not correct you. You'll develop a habit. You'll be understood but you won't be correct. Maybe somebody will finally correct you and then you'll have to stop and think and remember what you were taught so you can fix your bad habit. I believe that's called a language monitor! You'll have to monitor yourself to make sure you don't slip up. ...And so you slip into the downward spiral of mediocrity.

OK, I think I've gone further than what I wanted to say. So let me summarize what the most important thing in this post was. That is, our brain can do all the work of acquiring the language. Given enough volume and variety of input, the brain organizes the language and makes the connections which in turn creates the ability to comprehend the language.

Can we expect this to happen with just 100 or 400 hours of input? Definitely not with only 100 hours. And you certainly cannot finish at the half-way point and come to a valid conclusion.

I do recommend that you be interested in the input. Listening to only audio input that you don't understand would probably not be interesting which, in turn, would make you drift off into thinking about something else, which may or may not affect the effectiveness of the language that you are trying to let into your head. So, if you're not into it, you'll most likely not keep up with it. You'll forget to watch or listen to whatever it is that you were using.

So by all means, find something interesting and if you think that makes it comprehensible for you, that's fine. When I can figure out what is going on in a TV drama story, I find it interesting even though I admit that I am not actually comprehending 99 percent of it. What I do understand about the plot of the story is mostly from my imagination backed up by how I saw the characters interact. I can see that the girl's parents don't approve of her boyfriend and I imagine that somewhere in that dialogue they are telling her she can't see him anymore. I don't know that for a fact but I can stay interested in the story and keep watching and keep listening to the incomprehensible language.

I think I've just come up with a new term. Interesting Input!

Armando

I have read the story of Armando before and just now came across it again. The article was written by Stephen Krashen and is about how Armando acquired Hebrew. It's not very long, so I urge you to read it if you haven't read it before.

Armando became a near-native speaker of Hebrew without classes, books, or studying. He was simply employed in a family-owned restaurant where the owners were Hebrew speakers. Armando said (quote from the article),

...it was two or three years until he was comfortable in conversation even though he heard Hebrew all day on the job. He said that he never forced or pushed himself with Hebrew, that his approach was relaxed.

In a job, you may hear Hebrew all day long, but it wouldn't be as much as in a class at ALG World. In a restaurant, when it gets busy (assuming his restaurant had busy times) people may be shouting orders but they won't be having conversations. When a restaurant is slow, the workers are talking and conversing a lot. So each day and each hour would vary. That is why it may have taken him longer than an ALG World class. But at least he didn't give up like many students do.

Armando told me that he had never learned to read Hebrew, never studied Hebrew grammar, had no idea of what the rules of Hebrew grammar were, and certainly did not think about grammar when speaking. He said that he received about five corrections a day, but none of these were aimed at grammar; it was all vocabulary.

So we see he never studied the grammar. He never spent time reading either. His acquisition was all through the ear.

It's very interesting to see how the judges came to different conclusions about the speaker they heard (Armando.) While 2 of the 4 said that he was not a native speaker, 1 of them explicitly stated that he thought Armando was a native speaker. I don't know what that says about Armando, but it says a lot about the people who judge you.

Krashen also states the following in the article:

Of course, Hebrew was not comprehensible for him right away. His great accomplishment was due to patience, being willing to acquire slowly and gradually with a long silent period (or period of reduced output). With a "natural approach" language class Armando would have had comprehensible input right away and would moved through the beginning stages more quickly, and real conversational Hebrew would have been comprehensible earlier.

I note that "Hebrew was not comprehensible for him right away." This, to me, clearly means that comprehension became the result of the input.

It also interesting that Krashen changed the name of the input hypothesis to the comprehension hypothesis. I have not looked at everything Krashen has written. I mean, I have not read the vast majority of his works. So I do not know for sure, but I suspect that he has never done a study on incomprehensible input. I think it is just being taken as a given that incomprehensible input is of no value. For most people, that makes sense.

But not to me. That's like saying that incomprehensible language just bounces off of you and has no effect. This simply cannot be true. I will write about why I disagree in another post.

50 words

This article states:

By 24 months, children will usually have a vocabulary of around 50 words and have begun combining those words in two or three word sentences.

At 36 months, the child has a vocabulary of 300 to 1,000 words!

How does the child learn all these words? Does a child look them up in the dictionary? Do the little toddlers ask for a translation? "Now, what would that be in baby talk?" Or perhaps they do a Google search?

They just look, listen, and guess. Can adults learn the same way or do we need a dictionary and must try to memorize lists of words? ALG World has already proven that adults can learn the same way. We don't need translations. We don't need explanations of how the language works. We don't need to think about the language. We just need the exposure to the language. An hour a week is not going to be enough. You're going to have to give it a try, but do not tell me that you tried for 200 hours. That's not enough. With a language close to your own, it should not take as long as a completely different language.

Too bad there are not that many people in the world who are willing to try this. We need more testimonials from those who learned a language without studying. I guess if this type of language acquisition became the norm, a lot of publishers would lose sales.

what can we do?

If you've been reading my blog, you can tell that I've become convinced that the ALG method (automatic language growth) is the best way to acquire a language. It is the only method that gets you to native proficiency in 2 to 3 years. And there are many reasons why and how it works, which I won't go into in this post.

So what can we do if we cannot go to Thailand or if ALG World does not offer the language that we want to learn? The way I see it, there are 2 choices. The first is to go with the other methods of learning a language where you use dictionaries and look up everything you don't understand. In the end, you'll have to be satisfied with whatever ceiling you reach.

The second choice is to try to create our own Automatic Language Growth. The way I'm going to do this is to use online TV. In fact, I began about a week ago. I don't remember exactly which day it was. I'm not going to document how many hours I've watched or any statistics like that. I know it's much easier to watch 10 hours of TV than to listen to an hour of limited content.

As you might be aware, I have been trying to learn Chinese. From now on, in accordance with ALG principles, I'm no longer going to try. I'm simply going to bathe in the language and let the language into my brain. If there was ever anyone who was good at not trying, that would be me!

As I have already learned a little bit of the language, I hear many of the words that I have learned. I am experiencing first-hand the crippling effect of my learning. Whenever I hear something familiar, the meaning just won't come. I have to associate it with the English and then I understand the meaning. There is some kind of barrier. But I know I can get over this, because these already-learned words are so frequent and common that I eventually won't feel the need to translate them.

When I watched the first day, the language was very much like a blur. I tried to hear every word, but I could only hear 2 or 3 words in a sentence. I think the words that I could catch triggered something that made me not able to catch the other parts of the sentences. After a few days, I noticed that I could hear much more and it was much clearer. It was a big difference. Although I still don't know most of the language, it comes through more clearly now.

All of the Chinese TV shows and movies have subtitles in Chinese. With the help of seeing the word, I was able to figure out the meaning of a new word last night. When I saw it at first, I couldn't figure out what it meant. The word was 姐夫. I knew each character but was not able to understand what the word meant. After figuring out the relationship of the people in the drama and then finally seeing this word used in a context of only two people, I could finally figure out who 姐夫 was and of course what the word is. I don't think this is the intended way to acquire the language, but anyway, this is the first word I learned or figured out from watching TV.

There's another effect of watching many hours of TV in a foreign language. There's something happening inside my head because of all that input that is pouring in. There are times when I am not watching or thinking about the language at all, and I hear or feel something in the back of my head. Bits of phrases, or a word from the language is playing or repeating in my head. It's not me trying to do anything. But I hear this echo. I guess it is similar to a song you just can't get out of your head. But in this case, it's only partial language. My only guess is that my brain is processing the language. It's doing something in the background.

I believe the amount and variation of the language input is the most important thing to consider in regards to your exposure to the language. Without enough variation, your brain may not be able to work out the meaning. But with lots of variation, it all begins to make sense. Plus, I think you need to be overwhelmed by the language. Massive amounts of language input will really get your brain working. While Krashen states that it needs to be comprehensible, I do not. I believe that comprehension of the language is the by-product of the input. I will get more into this idea in another post. And finally, I believe that you shouldn't try or make any effort. Just relax and let the language flow in.

learn a language by watching TV

Can you learn a language by just watching TV? A member of the how-to-learn-any-language forum, user-named reineke, learned Italian by watching TV. His native language is Croatian. I would like to paste some of his posts from that thread where he revealed this information. The thread started with a question about learning a language by only listening. Reineke's was the first reply and soon after, the discussion turned to the ALG method (automatic language growth). That thread began in April 2007, so I'm not sure if Dr. Brown's book was available online at that time. I think it really is necessary to read the book in order to understand the method. From the thread we can see that forum members did not have a full grasp of the ALG method and the reasoning behind it.

While I'm not sure what Dr. Brown would have said about using TV as your input to learning a language, I am thinking it is possible and these comments from reineke back up that idea.

I did that for Italian as a kid. I liked watching cartoons so it wasn't really a "method". I took forced breaks during winter or whenever the weather was bad. One day someone asked me what the heck am I staring at something I don't understand, and I told them the gist of the plot. I frankly do not know when I started understanding, as I was too much into the stories. It was a massive amount of tv time but it's still the language I know the best, I'm near-native, kinda like a native speaker that's been away for very long and needs some refreshing, if you know what I mean. That's mostly due to my laziness though heh.


I forgot to mention that this is also exactly how I learned German. I bought my first satellite dish in 1990 and German channels were the most numerous. I spent a frightful amount of time on it. I did finish three years of elementary school German on my own and I stopped there (lazy bum). My German is lacking. I can understand just about everything (written and spoken) unless it's too technical but I'm at the point where I need to do a lot of reading (like I did for English and Italian) and grammar study or I won't progress any further. Compared to Italian, when I try to pronounce things I'm obviously foreign. I can fake it real well but I trip easily. I was relatively young when I started but not young enough. My advice is, yes it's possible but after "only" 800 hours you might be a little disappointed with your results. It might be different though if you try learning a related language. Another thing to think about is that you need massive amounts of material. And when I say massive I'm not kidding. You need several tv channels, access to a few thousand dvd's and many interesting radio channels. Boring material will cut you in the bud. No one has the spine to take 1000's of hours of boring material with this type of method. That's also one of the problems I'm currently facing with languages that are seemingly rather rich in multimedia material, namely Russian and Portuguese.

I just reread your post. I don't understand the part about not "focusing too hard" or "trying to figure things out". If you mean conscious effort, I don't think it's a problem with interesting material as it will draw you in. I did even as a kid occasionally peek in the dictionary though. I also sometimes pronounced things aloud for the heck of it. Doppio maglio perforante! Hahahaha. I think it's a silly rule.


So this can be compared to a sort of a spoken sentence method. A movie can have less than a half hour's worth of conversation (unless you're into real touchy feely stuff and even then there's a lot of "significant" silence). What is more important, perhaps, is the number of hours you'll be listening with little to no comprehension. We're talking going cold turkey here, listening to a language until you start understanding things and once you start collecting bonus points for "understood listening" you can do the math to see how long it will take you to finish. Right? Well, I did a lot of that with and without previous knowledge and I can tell you that previous formal training accelerated my comprehension. I still needed to do a large number of hours of listening, but having some sort of a grammatical skeleton on which to slap some flesh did help tremendously.

I do not believe in witchdoctor talk that you should only follow their method and nothing else.


The "critique" explains their method somewhat. A lot of the input comes directly from the teacher and is tailored to student's knowledge. It progressively gets harder, perhaps too fast (and therefore the critique). A second teacher helps by interacting with the first one. I am sure they use movies etc but it seems that their teachers are the main source of spoken language. How early they start with movies I don't know but all their content has method behind it. My "method" from the input perspective was very natural (and slow). The upside was that I was never bored. I basically just stared at all sorts of content meant for children and adults that I wanted to see. I was exclusively interested in the content and not in the process itself. I was in no hurry to ace the test. I believe it took a long while to say hey, I understand this and after that first Eureka my progress went incredibly fast. Way too fast perhaps and this leads me to believe that the hours spent listening to incomprehensible gibberish were paying a golden dividend. Some of the input I received over and over again may have rubbed off and bits may have been sleeping and waiting for the right key to unlock parts of the "system". I think way too much attention is being paid nowadays on trying to develop speaking skills from the very start. Everyone wants to be able to speak ASAP (even when they have no pressing need) and the schools are trying to oblige. Shorter courses for busy people who need to travel and hopefully make themselves understood in foreign lands are a completely different ball game.


I believe 1600-800 implies 50% comprehension on average. The first number depends on the shortcuts devised by the teachers (gestures, pictures etc.), on the course material and on your own individual progress. Mine was probably 4000-800. The second number depends on the difficulty of the language and is nothing else than an ideal number of hours of comprehensible input needed to reach a certain level of competence. Good pronunciation was a natural outcome of the process but not the main goal in itself. In any case the first number is always significantly higher than the second one. If I got something wrong someone please correct me.

If I'm using Pimsleur and there's a silence, I don't see why I can't open my yap and pronounce things as my voice is not directly interfering with the input.



Ahh that's interesting. But children do not keep their yaps shut that long. They do make attempts at words and sentences and usually they suck real bad in the beginning. They're natural at it though and that was my point. They don't force themselves either to speak or to keep their pieholes shut all the time. I've heard a couple of theories disputing the "critical period" and even that it's been refuted altogether (from an old psychology teacher). I haven't researched it but I'd certainly like to believe it.

It's interesting how you find having to keep quiet a burden. I've always found being forced to repeat after the teacher and having fake practice conversations a real pain. This theory suits me.

Now, what about the languages where we were forced to speak for a long time? Are our brains "polluted" forever? What about long periods without much input and no attempts at speaking? Would a renewed effort at 800 hrs of comprehensible input and no talk work effectively? Would previous imperfect efforts at speaking be overwritten or refreshed together with other knowledge? :)



The last bit is most relevant, I think, as they bothered to find out who studied language actively and who had poor knowledge of it. The desired result for us, language geeks er enthusiasts is to see the same parts of the brain fire up as those of a native speaker. This seems to be the case with the people who had good knowledge of the language. I doubt they all followed the same method. They did mention one caveat though: all subjects spoke two related languages. The most important sentence:

"attained proficiency is more important than age of acquisition"


The listening approach requires a lot of listening. You cannot really "try it" to see if it works, you have to finish it. I wouldn't use children as the only guideline for language learning. The problems with bilingual children are complex. Often kids will refuse to speak in the "inferior" language as it makes no sense talking to daddy in Polish when he perfectly well understands English. Such children are overwhelmingly more exposed to English (TV, mom, school, friends) than the other language (dad). Often they're embarrassed to speak in the language. I am not sure that the chorus method is the only method to guarantee a native accent. I am not sure that any method "guarantees" a native accent for adult learners. If you keep at it long enough and under favorable circumstances it might. So could the listening method or a combination thereof. What are the disadvantages of the chorus method? I see one of practicality.

from the outside in

There are some documents worth reading over at ALG World. Among them, I highly recommend Dr. J. Marvin Brown's book, From the Outside In. By reading this book, you will understand the background and proof of Automatic Language Growth. You see, a lot of people who are aware of ALG do not realize that this is a proven method. To everybody, including myself, who have just heard about AUA Thai in the last two years, it seems that this is a new approach, but in reality, AUA has been teaching Thai this way for over 20 years now! So it's not just theory. It has been tested, verified, and implemented. When they say that speaking is not necessary and will hurt your ability to acquire the language, they know what they are talking about!

Here are the things you must not do while acquiring a new language as stated in the book:

1. Don't Speak!
2. Don't Ask!
3. Don't Look Up Words!
4. Don't Take Notes!
5. Don't Think!

All of this means, don't analyze the language. We all do this naturally as adults to some degree, and if you look at the worst language learners, you will see this over analyzing. I have worked with ESL students as a teacher or conversation partner, so I have run into these people who analyze and think about the language more than anyone else, and let me tell you, they drive me nuts! They will start thinking about the language and trying to figure out how to construct a sentence and totally ignore their teacher. It's like, hey I'm going to tell you how to say it. Would you just stop thinking and start listening! But, of course, it's the system's fault. Everybody is expected to speak and everybody expects the quiet person is not getting anywhere.

A little background on Dr. Brown will show you that he had been there and done that. He had been through the FSI drilling and "practicing until it becomes automatic" type of learning. In fact, he learned Chinese through the Navy in the 1940's and was the guinea pig for the Army Method in the 50's. He is the one who proved that their methods "worked." And in 1980, he again set out to prove that practice makes perfect:

I was excited as I walked into the Japanese class that fall quarter of 1980. I had never been less than number one in a language class—and that was without trying. This time I was going to knock myself out. Getting an “A” wouldn’t be enough. Being the best in the class wouldn’t be enough. I was going to be the best the world had ever seen. You wouldn’t believe the extremes I went to.

I practiced until I could deliver it with perfect pronunciation and without a single hesitation. Then I practiced up to double speed without a hesitation.

I did this sort of thing with daily drills and quarterly speeches for three years. It didn’t work. And I could see that it never would. Not a single sentence was ever triggered by a thought. And this had been one of my requirements for success. I had set out to prove the success of practice. I proved, instead, its failure.

So, as you can see, Dr. Brown went from a motto of practice, practice, practice to a motto of don't practice! Another thing to point out is that Dr. Brown had created Thai language programs in the traditional way. He had many years of experience in revising the program and trying to improve it the traditional way. He had left AUA and when he came back is when he started the ALG way. With the old methods of teaching Thai, in 30 years he never had a single student pass his own abilities in Thai. And he wrote that after 10 years with the ALG method, he saw students passing him up all the time.

First, we need an understanding of how advanced Dr. Brown was in Thai. He studied Thai for 4 years and was immersed in Thailand for 40 years.

Now what was my own language preparation? I had studied Thai for 2 years at Cal at 3 hours a week and 2 years at Cornell at 6 hours a week. ... So when I arrived in Thailand I had been through almost 500 hours of classroom study by the Army Method. I could make near-perfect sounds once I had assembled a sentence for delivery, but I couldn’t even begin to ‘carry on a conversation’.

Where was the guinea pig after 32 years? I told you that by 1960 I thought I had arrived. Well I kept getting better and better through the 60’s ... People described my Thai as ‘legendary’ and I tended to believe them. When I gave lectures to Thai schools, the teachers would later tell me that my Thai was better than theirs. Now I knew full well how damning this comment can be, but I still lapped it up. More convincing were things like this. I phoned to speak to an American friend, and the servant who answered the phone later told him that a Thai man had called -- and swore by it. “Are you sure it wasn’t a foreigner with perfect Thai?” (he had been expecting me to call). “No. It was a Thai. I’m 100% certain.” I could see through this too, but I was succumbing to something I said earlier: ‘Short term satisfaction tends to blind us to long term goals.’

Now, the point that I am making here is that when your language skill is that much advanced and you recognize that someone else is even bettter, then that "better" person must be really, really good!

But what were the long-term goals of the guinea pig? I had set out to prove that the Army method could produce perfect speakers. Then, I thought I had proved the method right. Now, I can see that I had proved it wrong. The difference is hiding in the word ‘speak’. Then, I was thinking of ‘delivery’ (how the speaking comes out). Since my delivery was near perfect, I had proved it right. Now, I’m thinking of ‘production’ (how I get from thought to sentence). Since my production of Thai is very different from my production of English, I must have proved it wrong. Let me put it this way. When I speak Thai, I think in Thai. When I speak English, I think only in thought--I pay no attention to English.

A mif is a mental image flash. There is an article on it by David Long at the ALG World archive page. For now, I just needed to tell you what 'mif' stands for so when you read the next quote, you won't be wondering so much.

I found long ago that whenever I was in a Thai-speaking group together with other foreigners, I could easily tell whether they were better or worse than me. When I could see what they were trying to say, I would be flashing my own internal speaking (mifs), and I could easily see how my mifs compared to theirs. Was I faster or slower than them? Better or worse? Of course anyone could do the same thing for their own range. We’ve all got such a meter.

So, how long does it take for a successful student of the ALG method to pass up Dr. Brown at speaking Thai?

Our first success story came in 1988 when our course had grown to a full year. He was the first ‘student’ to pass me up. It took him about 5 years (one year of class plus 4 years of partial immersion). The most recent success story that I noticed was in 2001--after our course had reached new heights. It took her 2½ years (1½ years of class plus 1 year of partial immersion). And this is the current state of the art: 2½ years.

Remember now, I’m talking about a level above me. Her 2½ years had overtaken my 40! Notice also that my ‘bell test’ could only come at some time after a student had finished our course; that is, after a certain amount of immersion. It just so happened that the two people mentioned above worked in our department after their course and we were thus able to observe their immersion.

So, the proof is there. The concept has been proven. To sum it up, I'll state it this way. Not thinking about the language while acquiring it is far superior to drilling, practicing, and learning the language.

ALG Crosstalk

Crosstalk is where two languages are used to communicate. Each person uses his own native language so that only perfect model language is heard. Non-verbal methods are utilized to facilitate communication as well. This Crosstalk method allows for longer discussions because each person can fully participate. If one person had to use a second language that they were limited in, then that person wouldn't be able to say as much and the conversation might be over sooner.

Crosstalk was further developed by AUA to allow it to be used in lower level classes. They also recommend students to use Crosstalk outside of the class. In Part 6, David Long explains crosstalk. And there is a video of crosstalk in action for you to see what it is like and how well it works.

I think this video demo showing people communicating but speaking only their own native language illustrates the fact that you CAN continue to think in your own language even though you are engaged in a conversation where another language is being used. And that is why I said in a previous post that just listening to conversations in Japanese is not going to help me to start thinking in Japanese. It is totally not necessary to think in the language you are hearing to understand what you are hearing, and yet you are not translating either. They are just two separate skills.

While crosstalk is a good way to get input in your target language before you are ready to speak it, it will not turn you into a speaker of your target language. Nor will you learn to think in the target language. But with it, you can show the other person or people that you do understand what they are saying. I've had many experiences where I was spoken to in Japanese and since I thought it was pointless to speak English, I couldn't respond very well in Japanese and so of course the other person doubted how well I could understand them. That was a 4 or 5 years ago, so today I can respond quite well.

Normally, if you respond to someone in English they won't be able to understand you and even if they do, they will think you don't understand Japanese. 99 percent of people are not going to speak to you in their language if you are approaching them with English, so I think you have to set it up first. I think that crosstalk might work best in your own country. If you are in the US, for example, you might find a speaker of the language and ask them to speak to you in their language and let you respond in English. But you should tell them not to translate anything for you. Translating is really the lazy way out. What you want is for them to explain things to you in their language. When someone explains something, they use the most basic words and concepts in their language. Hearing those explanations is really good practice for you.

I was speaking with an acquaintance of mine in Japanese on Skype a couple of weeks ago and at the end she ask that next time I speak English and she will just speak Japanese. At first I laughed, but actually I have thought of that before so I was quite open to it. If she ever comes back online on Skype, we'll see how it goes. We'll see if she really sticks to speaking Japanese while I am speaking English or if she tries to practice speaking English.

the ALG method

At ALG World, the basis for Speaking, Reading, and Writing starts with a foundation of understanding. But how do you gain understanding? By listening, looking, and guessing. Listening is how you develop your ear. With a well developed ear, you will be able to know whether your own pronunciation is correct or not. You will be able to self-correct. Some people believe that children can pick up pronunciation better than adults. I, however, notice that they don't do it any better. In fact, some 6-year olds still have trouble with certain sounds. It is not uncommon either. In English, "th" is difficult to pronounce as well as "r" sounds. Japanese also has sounds that some children will take longer to get right. So, the simple fact is, that children do not just produce the sounds of their native language correctly right off the bat. They take time and every child is different. Adults just need to learn to do more listening. At ALG World, students are not expected to start speaking until after 700 hours of class. They won't be allowed to speak Thai in the first 3 levels. So, at least 600 hours of listening!

David Long says that visual information is important to learning. I guess it would be like if you heard somebody say, "トイレに行きます" and every time they said that you saw them go into the bathroom (or toilet-room), you would make a connection with the sound to the action that you saw. Probably the first couple of times you would not be able to remember the words that were said as they would just whiz right by you. But soon you would start to recognize the words and after you heard them you would start to expect that action. As you get used to the sounds of the language the words would start to stick in your short recall memory. And later when you suddenly need to go, those words or that phrase would just pop into your mind. When you hear something and see something, that is an experience. Experiences create stronger bonds to the language than other methods.

The third key to learning was guessing. David Long says it is important to guess and then move on. Trying to hone in on the exact meaning will slow down your progress. If you were taking Thai at ALG World, you might be sitting there thinking in English because you haven't got any Thai yet. But if you try to connect every Thai word to something in English, you're going to be missing out on everything else going on. By using your ability to guess, you are learning intuitively. Adults want to be exact and have the "right" answer. But in reality, we don't need to be right to learn a foreign language. If someone said to you, "Do you want !#$%&?" and then handed you a banana, you would guess that the word you didn't know means "banana." So you would spend some time thinking that word meant "banana," so what? Then one day they say the same thing to you, but this time they hand you an apple. You might go into shock for a half a minute, but you would just readjust your understanding of that word. Do you dare make the mistake of thinking that the word means "fruit?" Or will you be more open-minded? Who knows what they'll hand you next time? Maybe a potato. But in the end, you'll get the correct understanding through all of your experiences.

Another thing said by David Long is that you learn through collecting experiences. The more experiences you collect the more you'll learn. Just a few minutes ago, I let a man from the Co-op in. We have an intercom that he rang from downstairs, and because the speaker is not clear enough for me, I couldn't understand where he was from or why he wanted to greet me and give me a present, but I let him come up anyway because I knew I could collect another experience for my Japanese learning. ALG World is the only place in the world where you can start out at zero and be given enough experiences to learn another language. You could spend 6 hours or 12 hours (if you skip lunch) a day experiencing the Thai language. Unfortunately, unless you are a kid being put into a school system, you cannot just go out into the real world and get that kind of experience.

If you come to Japan, as soon as you display a lack of understanding, communication will be shut off unless the other person can muster up some English. If you came to learn Japanese, then English is not what you want to hear. People are not interested in trying to help you learn their language when it is one of the most difficult languages on the planet. They've already tried learning yours and failed. They spent 6 years studying English, so they do not expect you to pick up Japanese in a million years. They are older than you too. That means they are wiser than you. You are just naive.

Just two days ago, I was complemented for being fluent in Japanese after only 5 and a half years in Japan. Well, opinions differ, but it's not polite to argue and luckily the remark was not said directly to me. People judge quickly and have low expectations, but I have high standards. Now I am at a level where I can go out there and collect my experiences myself. I'm not lost. I can follow just about anything in general. But still I don't have any friends. That is what I need to pile up the experiences and to keep learning.

So, the whole ALG method is really about collecting experiences. It's not about translating, looking words up, memorizing rules, or testing. Just experiencing. We learn through our experiences by Listening, Looking, and Guessing.

By the way, if you want more information on the school that has the ALG Thai program, you'll need to click on Programs at the ALG World home page and then click on AUA Thai Program.