Sure, I'll take a look. Thanks!
It takes a lot of hard work for children too. They just have no other choice, and usually some adults going way out of their way to help as much as they can.
> beginner book/audio recommendations if you want
Please! Anything with an easy level but appropriate subject matter for young kids?
I studied French in high school and would like to start reading some French kids books to my 3.5 year old, but I haven’t made the effort to find any yet.
That being said it's still a slower way to learn because the language in anime is quite removed from a typical real conversation you will get in to.
I believe Krashen's theory is easy to misunderstand. If you only take a brief look at it you may think it's over simplified. The theory isn't just input in the sense that you've at least got the language going in you're ears. The "comprehensible" part means that you are comprehending via the language, using context to fill in the blanks. I don't think you learn from outputting language, but outputting is essential for producing the ideal comprehensible input. For example, BTBurke's third point is to ask questions to a native speaker. Note that here, the native speaker is doing the speaking, and BTBurke is learning when listening, not when asking the questions. But asking questions to a native speaker like this and refusing to give up and go back to your native language engages the human brain in a way that simply watching some videos doesn't, and provides important context. Krashen calls this compelling input. In BTBurke's first point, they say production is essential, but I think Krashen would say this so-called production (talking to native speakers) is really just using production to get ideal comprehensible input from native speakers when you listen to them speak back to you. As for the 5 minute minute presentation. I would say that this 5 minute presentation is mostly just testing one's current ability, but the preceding the presentation there would be hours of looking up (and inputting) sentences that you wish to say rather than learning randomly, and that's where most of the real learning occurs.
I apologise for the "It's both right and wrong at the same time" kind of answer. In summary I believe BTBurke is a fantastic language learner, but if you look closely at what they are doing, you'll see they are providing themselves with plenty of comprehensible input, and the production/output as actually a more minor part that facilitates this input.
Language is not a one way street. Being able to manipulate another person's actions and words through speech is as much a part of language understanding as being in a position to have others manipulate your actions and words.
Part of knowing a language therefore is being able to speak and write it. In order to learn how to speak and write it, you are not going to get away without speaking and writing it.
And even if Krashen's hypothesis that input is ultimately the whole story were true (which by definition it isn't), production would still play a critical role in memorization. Every time you struggle to find a word and eventually conjure it, it gets reinforced.
So no, I don't think we ever have that same level of growth and rapid learning.
If you bootstrapped those people with a month or two of 1:1 lessons with a native speaker and then started them watching anime aimed at young kids with no subtitles, slowly moving them up to more complex examples, still without subtitles, they would end up learning to understand Japanese passably well after enough hours of it.
If you just dump them “countless hours” of complicated Japanese which they can ignore while reading English subtitles, then they’re going to end up learning a few words and phrases but not really becoming fluent.
If they started with poor English reading skill it’s not a completely useless way to practice that though. (Reading books would be better, but reading anime subtitles is better than nothing.)