ALG is not a very time-efficient language learning method... why do anti-ALGers almost all seem to believe in comprehensible input anyway?

[u/Informal-Addendum435]

[u/loqu84]

You guys throw acronyms as if they were general knowledge

[u/DucDeBellune → u/loqu84]

Every few years, someone comes up with a “new method,” slaps a new acronym/label on it for marketing, and voila.

They’re either never grounded in any empirical data, or completely misconstrue empirical data. This one is no exception.

[u/Ecstatic-Island-9778 → u/loqu84]

Automatic Language Growth approach to language development.
If you wanted to google it.

[u/loqu84 → u/Ecstatic-Island-9778]

Thank you very much, I was really curious and now I can get to know more.

[u/New-Bottle-6917 → u/loqu84]

The most important book to understand it is "From the outside in". More of a philosophy book than a proper academic linguistic book but hey you can crush it in one or two sittings. Really strange stuff

[u/UltraMegaUgly]

Because people who can't maintain a regular program of study can always just listen more or read more as opposed to the time wasting, crippling thought process of what now? Commuters can utilize lost time to learn a language. They can't really do their Anki deck and drive. The resource is just so basic it's easy to dive into. All you need is someone speaking spanish (although comprehensible spanish is better).

In the end everyone eventually uses input, they are just front loading it. I believe a single day course every month would really rocket them forward but whatever.

I'm convinced eventually even ALG'ers one day look at some grammar stuff out of curiosity. Let em cook.

[u/stetslustig → u/UltraMegaUgly]

This exactly. I don't particularly strongly believe in "comprehensible input" as any sort of dogmatic silver bullet. But I also spend probably 99% of my language learning time on it, because it's just so straightforward to do. It may not be easy in terms of effort, but it's easy in terms of decision making, and if you're doing it right, the content itself quickly becomes interesting enough that it requires no motivation.

[u/pullthisover]

Simple.

Try learning a language without getting any input— see how far you get.

[u/dojibear → u/pullthisover]

True. But part of ALG is the teacher giving LOTS of input to the students. The input just isn't words in some NL (not the TL). The input is visual.

[u/pullthisover → u/dojibear]

That’s fine but OP’s question is why do people who don’t even agree with ALG also “believe in comprehensible input.”

Comprehensible input is just input that you can understand. Whatever one’s thoughts on ALG or CI-only methods and the most efficient way to learn language, you really can’t learn a language without input. hence why people “believe in it” no matter what their methods are

[u/New-Bottle-6917 → u/dojibear]

Its not just that, ALG's central claim is that any conscious thought, analysis or effort at any point in the learning process, input or output wise permanently damages your ability with the language from that point onwards. Which is the justification for why you should get your listening and speaking to a native level via said input and speak without ever thinking about the language or as the ALG teacher David Long puts it "speaking with zero pre thought" before you even begin to read because you'll import thought and concepts from your native language

[u/TauTheConstant → u/New-Bottle-6917]

Yeah... people act like the unique thing about ALG is that it uses comprehensible input. But that's nonsense. Any language acquisition methodology uses comprehensible input (because how can you possibly learn a language if you never encounter anything in it you can understand?), and that lots of input is a big boost to your language learning is pretty broadly accepted at this point. The thing that sets ALG apart isn't the use of comprehensible input, it's the active rejection of anything else.

[u/JoshHuff1332]

I would like to point out that comprehensible input is more than the narrowed application found in ALG circles. ALG is narrowed application that is only listening at the beginning, no reading, speaking, grammar exercises, etc, until later on. Academics like Krashen and the ones who followed wouldn't have necessarily viewed CI in the same manner.

[u/shadowlucas → u/JoshHuff1332]

Ya ALG is funny to me because Krashen was a big proponent of reading as a means of grammar and vocab acquisition and never made claims that speaking early would 'cause damage'.

[u/ignoremesenpie]

All of my knowledge of ALG is through Evildea and other nay-sayers, so you'll have to excuse the biases that may be present.

I am a proponent of comprehensible input because comprehensible input that is unassociated with any specific program, branding, or dogma doesn't inherently discourage other things that are considered helpful but are rejected by ALG.

For example, while I didn't study grammar religiously, reading up on it after gaining some native input that happened to be comprehensible to me, was incredibly helpful, even if it was only at an awareness level rather than a mechanical understanding level. Think less "according to the grammar guide, it's supposed to work in so-and-so way" and more "I've read about this before, and so I've caught it used in real contexts without letting it go in one was and out the other." This lax but focused attitude made me receptive to the flexibility in which natives speak without it shattering my whole world view whenever they don't confirm to the grammar guides to the letter.

[u/Informal-Addendum435 → u/ignoremesenpie]

Do you think doing lots of tests and (grammar) flashcards with instant feedback each for the same number of hours you've spent inputting comprehensible input would actually have let you master the grammar of the language to a higher level than the comprehensible input has?

[u/Ecstatic-Island-9778 → u/Informal-Addendum435]

Why would it, I don't see the connection between one thing or the other.
May you explain?

[u/ignoremesenpie → u/Informal-Addendum435]

No. I have no connection to whatever information the cards hold, so I would need to first fight through the mental hurdle of brute-forcing information first. Then I would need to fight the urge to not kill myself subjecting myself to that kind of routine.

Compare that to comprehensible input plus supplementary learning. I neither have to put myself through mental stress or mortal danger. Lol

[u/dojibear → u/ignoremesenpie]

I only heard about CI/Krashen after taking language classes (with a teacher) in several languages. The CI ideas matched what I found in all the classes:

-- no rote memorization of single words (no flashcards/Anki)
-- testing is not a method of teaching
-- "understanding TL sentences" is the goal, starting day 1

[u/Ecstatic-Island-9778 → u/dojibear]

Oh no...
Testing is one if not the strongest teaching method.
Flashcards are not single words only and there is nothing wrong with learning single words btw many have done so.

Nothing of the above is against understanding TL since day one at all.

How old are you?

[u/shadowlucas]

Inefficient and doesnt work at all are two different things. I think its followed because it doesn't require doing things that a lot of people dont like (grammar drills, flashcards, etc.)

[u/Ecstatic-Island-9778]

Can you ever learn a learn a language without being exposed to it in any way at all?
And are you willing to spend1000+ hours consuming INCOMPREHENSIBLE INPUT?

[u/dojibear → u/Ecstatic-Island-9778]

Why would anyone use things they do not understand (INCOMPREHENSIBLE INPUT)?

[u/Ecstatic-Island-9778 → u/dojibear]

No idea but he [OP] did ask, "why do anti-ALGers almost all seem to believe in comprehensible input anyway?"

[u/youdontknowkanji]

because the problem with ALG is that it's very restricting and uses very romanticised version of "comprehensible input". they don't want you to do anything in fear of killing your gains, they want you to go the baby route of slowly adding things, that you don't need to do textbooks or whatever, that it's a passive process and all you need to do is play some audio on your drive to work and 5 years in you will have perfect accent...

this doesn't really work. some grammar study, some anki, some dictionary use is mandatory if you want to make good pace. (also it's covered in marketing schemes so you get those nice step by step videos that get harder and harder.)

this is not to say that input itself is bad or anything, or that grammar should be priorities (imo). personally i think that something along side 80% input + dictionary and maybe 20% SRS + some grammar is more or less optimal if you are going for the input before output strategy. this is of course, assuming 3h+ of study per day.

i feel like people forget that comprehensible input can technically (unless you are linguistic term semantics purist) be reading + dictionary look ups, which should be more or less equivalent to what you do in the textbooks (it's literally how reading sections are designed in them). in fact, this is how a bunch of people got good at japanese relatively fast (like the jlpt n1 full marks in 9 months guy on r/learnjapanese). it's what i did personally and passed N1 1200h in, and read a bunch of media in jp since.

[u/NextStopGallifrey → u/youdontknowkanji]

Nine months to fluent Japanese sounds insane.

[u/youdontknowkanji → u/NextStopGallifrey]

if you are interested they did a podcast with the guy: https://youtu.be/Vv234kZdBgs?si=5xn7qG3TNfcQfQ5M

[u/New-Bottle-6917]

The problem with ALG is not really a matter of efficiency or whether input is necessary to learn a language. ALG's primary claim to fame is that consciously thinking about the language or utilizing conscious effort when understanding or using the language leads to permanent irreversible damage.

If you think about what you heard, struggled to remember a word while speaking and forced yourself to remember, read some words you've never heard before, simply pondered why a word or phrase is used in one situation and not another one. Boom you've permanently damaged your ability with the language and no amount of input can save it.

It's a rather ridiculous methodology and is home to claims like English speaking students learning Thai to a native like level within 2.2k hours of input exposure, or like how Malaysian students learned faster despite not having related languages with cognates purely due to cultural similarities or how people could achieve a native like level in languages like Spanish in around 1k hours of input which services like Dreaming Spanish thoroughly disprove

[u/muffinsballhair → u/New-Bottle-6917]

leads to permanent irreversible damage.

This “permanent irreversible damage” thing in general is such a bizarre meme. Everything is reversible including ingrained mistakes in one's native language. Dōgen thought “for all intends and purposes” was actually “for all intensive purposes” until he was a teenager. He had been mishearing it all his life as a native speaker and someone pointed it out to him and he corrected it then, it's that easy.

You can correct about anything, I had many mistaken ideas about languages I learn, some of which someone just told me out of the blue, in some cases it sort of “started to dawn on me” more and more that I had a mistaken idea and then I asked to confirm and it turned out I was wrong.

Honestly, if anything it's the input-only people that have the wrong ideas the most often and yes they can correct it too but if you do input only then you don't interact and battle test your ideas so it takes far longer for you to realize that it's wrong, especially when you do narrow-input. This is really common with Japanese because many people really only read one type of fiction religiously and consequently get a very wrong impression of the nuance and semantics of various words. It's really common in my experience that they assign gendered interpretation and mysticism to words when it simply isn't there because they only consume material that has the same rigid gender patterns or the same supernatural elements over and over again.

It's a rather ridiculous methodology and is home to claims like English speaking students learning Thai to a native like level within 2.2k hours of input exposure, or like how Malaysian students learned faster despite not having related languages with cognates purely due to cultural similarities or how people could achieve a native like level in languages like Spanish in around 1k hours of input which services like Dreaming Spanish thoroughly disprove

The thing is that Thai is actually uniquely suited for this method because it's a high-salience language that mostly lacks low-salience things such as articles, grammatical gender, cases and just in general inflexion. People who do input only mostly have trouble getting a good feel for low-salience parts of languages that mostly communicate redundant information that aren't necessary to fully understand and parse to understand the message of a prose.

[u/NextStopGallifrey → u/New-Bottle-6917]

Even if Dreaming were accurate in their assessment of 1000-1500 hours for "fluency", FSI says something like a total of 600-700 hours for Spanish or French with more structured study, IIRC. DS is literally 2-3x as long.

I view Dreaming as more of an "appetizer" before getting to the main course of real study.

[u/unsafeideas → u/NextStopGallifrey]

FSI has massive failure rates while students are highly motivated and specifically self selected bunch for more likely to succees then average.

And they study a lot on top of the course. Their numbers are not, for example, my numbers.

[u/New-Bottle-6917 → u/NextStopGallifrey]

Tbf the FSI typically expects a similar amount of hours to be done outside of class. So even then the estimate is closer to 1400 hours, regardless there seems to be very little evidence of DS users reliably passing B2 DELE or higher by 1500 hours let alone 1k as estimated by Brown

[u/Fabian_B_CH]

Because where are you going to get the language from if not from input?

[u/Lizard_Li]

Can someone tell me what ALG is?

[u/LeScorer → u/Lizard_Li]

A well respected linguist of the Thai language founded a language school in Thailand which uses a method he created (Automatic Language Growth). Students learn through aural comprehensible input, and absolutely nothing else. No grammar study, no vocab drills, no speaking, no reading.

The idea is that if you use anything other than aural input, you will create connections with your native language, therefore leading to bad grammar and a poor accent etc. These connections supposedly cannot be broken and are permanently 'fossilised'.

After students have reached a certain level of comprehension, they may speak and learn to read.

Dreaming Spanish is based of this principle. Its founder used the method to learn Thai.

[u/sapgetshappy → u/LeScorer]

Well, this goes against everything I was taught and have experienced as a language teacher…

[u/LeScorer → u/sapgetshappy]

It is controversial and doesn't have much support from academic literature to my knowledge.

[u/Lizard_Li → u/LeScorer]

Thanks for explanation! I’ve never heard of this but essentially he is advocating for us (as adults) to learn like babies? Interesting idea…

[u/NextStopGallifrey → u/Lizard_Li]

Yes. Please don't.

Some more knowledgeable than I have analyzed the Thai spoken by these people and it's not good. It's way better than I can speak, obviously, but it's nowhere near the claimed "native" levels.

[u/muffinsballhair → u/Lizard_Li]

No. Babies do not learn like this.

Babies start speaking in broken grammar well before their understanding is perfected.

I have no idea why some people here seem to think that babies learn by input-only. They learn by dialog and babies that do learn by input only due to being heritage speakers who don't speak the language back and only hear it tend to develop a rather poor command of it.

[u/New-Bottle-6917 → u/LeScorer]

You forgot the most key aspect of it that conscious thinking about the language causes irreversible damage and that those who were most successful on his opinion were those who engaged in zero thinking. Likewise Marvin Brown never formally tested the methodology in an academic setting, moreover the school no longer teaches via ALG

[u/Patient_Kangaroo614 → u/New-Bottle-6917]

I tried something vaguely similar to increase my spoken French and it worked somewhat. I would speak with a French speaker for an hour and I wouldn’t prepare for the session at all. It prevented me from relying on memorized scripted lines and made me much more spontaneous and natural in speaking. But I also studied a lot of grammar the old-fashioned way.

[u/unsafeideas]

Cause comprehensible input is a.) necessary no matter which method you are using b.) works on its own if you like it.

You have to do it. You may do other things too. Those other things may help too.

[u/Fun-Sample336]

ALG is not a very time-efficient language learning method...

There isn't really evidence for and against ALG being "not a very time-efficient language learning method", so your premise is already flawed to begin with. A way to investigate this question would be to look at other comprehensible input methods like Graded Reading and Extensive Listening and how efficient they are.

why do anti-ALGers almost all seem to believe in comprehensible input anyway?

Because it works, which is undeniable at this point. Their problem seems to be entirely that all other methods might be replaced by comprehensible input, including language courses. Prior to ALG the idea to base language learning completely on comprehensible input and deliver it with video-on-demand didn't really seem to exist. So, much of the ado around ALG is due to it being regarded as a rival. This is also fueled by ALG actively discouraging the use of other methods, which many regard as an affront.

[u/dojibear]

ALG is a TL teaching method that only uses TL (no other language). How does the teacher communicate meaning to the students? They do it by visual means. ALG works well as internet videos. The teacher puts a book on the table, while saying "I put a book on the table". The teacher puts on a hat, while saying "I put on a hat". The teacher uses photos, cartoon drawings, and other visual methods. So a student can't choose to use ALG. The teacher has to teach using it.

How is time efficiency measured? What "method" is more efficent than ALG? I used an ALG course on the internet to go from A0 to A2 in spoken Japanese. I don't know how "efficient" is was, but I know I did not have to memorize grammar rules, memorize vocab, memorize sentences, or drill anything. And it worked.

I don't know any "anti-ALGers", but I like CI at more advanced levels. Part of CI is knowing what each word means, and most people do that by using NL translation. A TL word might have multiple NL translations, but if you see the TL sentence you can figure out which "meaning" is being used.

CI isn't an exact method. It is the general idea that testing, quizzing, grammar rules, and vocab aren't really language learning. Language learning is understanding TL sentences. All the others are things that might be useful to some students in specific situations.

[u/NextStopGallifrey → u/dojibear]

Which ALG course did you use for Japanese?