Comment by solarmist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by solarmist | Hacker News Reader

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"Avoid speaking" This is 100% a myth. The Defense Language Institute comprehensively disproved this in the mid-1970's.

I know this because it's discussed on the first day of classes at DLI as for why you need to learn to speak the language not just hear and read it. Because my job title was voice intercept operator.

Pre-1976 the Defense Language Institute did not score or rate students speaking ability because only reading and listening were considered mission critical skills.

Post-1976 it was considered a mission critical skill because it had such a dramatic effect on students final listening and reading abilities during the culminating Defense Language Proficiency Test (DLPT). Subsequently an Oral Proficiency Interview (OPI) was developed and is considered an integral part of the DLPT.

Note: This was all direct, primary research done at the Defense Language Institute with thousands of participants annually, so it was direct cause and effect experiment.

It's hard to find the specific research results summarizing this, but here's one example from that time period. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1975-10458-001

The DLI has a different set of motivations: bring as many analysts to a working level of proficiency within a fixed time period, and has a lot of other things that confound this analysis: it's totally ok for the DLI to wash out some percentage of trainees in each flight, they can pre-screen candidates into whatever language they think is a best fit depending on candidates latent aptitudes, etc.

There is a universe where both pieces of advice can be right; surely you can imagine "don't worry about speaking" advice might be reasonable for someone who is learning casually, has no hard time frame to learn, wants to learn in dribbles and maximally passively, for whom a partial fluency might be a reasonable endpoint, and the greatest risk is burnout from negative reinforcement of failure.

Those are all different claims than the original post was making though.

"Don't speak" is a myth and by not speaking you are hindering your own learning. Dr. Krashen's advice was taken out of context. It was not meant as general advice not to speak.

If you personally don't care and don't wish to speak that's fine, but don't try to promote that as advice on how to get the most out of studying a language.

There's a lot of wishful thinking around language learning. The idea that some part of it will "just happen" naturally is very appealing. The unfortunate reality is that you meed lots of practice at everything: speaking, listening, reading and writing. You won't improve significantly at any one of those skills without many hundreds of hours of practice.

Massive amounts of listening and reading is practice :)

Yes. It will make you better at listening and reading, but not at speaking.

Yes, like speaking will not make you better at comprehension, although comprehension is required to have any meaningful conversation. Speaking needs to be practiced, but input and understanding comes first.

I'm pretty sure the originally poster did not mean to never speak at all. But just not to worry about it for a while.

I don’t see any reason to delay practicing simple phrases like “Hello”, “How are you?”, etc., or practicing the pronunciation of the vocab that you’re learning. It takes years to be able to reliably comprehend naturalistic conversation. You can’t realistically delay speaking until that point.

You definitely can, but whether it's necessary to delay simple things like that, I'm not sure.

It's pretty simple to speak things that you've acquired (of course it'll be slow and awkward at first, but that's natural), I just don't think there's much point in trying to speak things you haven't already acquired.

I interpreted the GGP to mean something like: think about how you learn your first language -- you spend a ton of time listening before trying to speak. Don't focus on speaking so soon. I don't think that is so much "wishful thinking" as an interesting strategy to consider.

I'd do it for spanish, but I can't find star trek with (latam) spanish audio.

I don't think so. Babies are constantly making sounds and trying to speak even when they have a very poor grasp on the language.

I personally learn much more from fumbling around with a language, and letting fluent speakers correct me, than I do from listening to it - though both are helpful. I recently had the opportunity to watch a lot of Spanish TV with a couple native Spanish speakers and I learned a ton from it. Through the commercial breaks I'd be repeating phrases from the show and asking them about it - or telling them my theories about what was going on in the show to see if I was understanding it.

There is little in common between language acquisition in kids and adults. And I have been reading the literature, and you have one research group that says it is the same, another saying it is different. Find me one kid (maybe there is one, but you get the idea) who is growing up in a household in which the local language is spoken and does not sound native when they speak.

>There's a lot of wishful thinking around language learning. The idea that some part of it will "just happen" naturally is very appealing. The unfortunate reality is that you meed lots of practice at everything

Not really. In actual life tons of people have learned to speak a second language naturally without any deliberate practice, books, etc, just by immigrating to another place and picking it up making acquantainces, working (e.g. menial jobs), and so on.

I was surprised to see that suggestion as well: every language course I've ever seen focuses on memorizing a (relatively) natural dialog and reciting it word for word from memory as its primary means of targeting fluency. I don't know about the research OP cites, but I've found that, for me, memorizing the dialogues as the courses suggest have been by far the most helpful way to advance in language acquisition. I will admit, though, that of the foreign languages I do speak, I speak them better than I understand them... so maybe there is something to this.

Not according to the research I've done ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, or my own experiences.

EDIT: As I linked below, here is Krashen on the subject - http://www.sdkrashen.com/content/articles/down_with_forced_s...

Right but as has been pointed out elsewhere, the linked article does not say to avoid speaking. Instead it says to avoid a strong focus on forced speech in a classroom, which likely means the sorts of repetition exercises that many of us remember from adolescence. That is very different from not trying to use the language productively at all.

Right. Making students repeat and memorize sentences that are beyond their current ability is detrimental.

Think of it this way. If I gave you a paragraph in Turkish (or insert language X) to memorize and recite that's very different than giving you some greetings and responses to memorize and recite.

For the first there is no mental model for where the paragraph fits in or how it's constructed. In the second almost everyone has some experience learning greetings in a couple of languages just by exposure to pop culture, so even if you don't understand the specifics of how those phrases work you have some confidence in how to employ them and you'll generally feel somewhat confident in being able to break them down later if you need to because greetings done in short and simple language.

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