Comments on: Why Language Classes Don’t Work: How to Cut Classes and Double Your Learning Rate (Plus: Madrid Update)

By: Zachary

Zachary — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:25:09 +0000

I speak fluent French and fluent English, with a bit of Swedish thrown in and progressing through my second year of classroom-based intensive Mandarin at a prominent American university. What you say about the need to make as many mistakes as possible — even when you know a correct way of articulating something — could not be more true. I do worse in classes, but ultimately learn better, because I try to incorporate new words and grammatical structures when speaking with my professor.

As an aside, your Chinese sounds like that of someone who lived in Wuhan when they were young and then moved to Beijing. Crystal clear, although the only accurate descriptor that comes to mind is ‘not heavy’.

Chinese midterm in twenty minutes. ??????????????, ???????…

By: Farid

Farid — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 18:04:38 +0000

As a language trainer for quite a long time, I can verify some of the ideas introduced in this post.

By: Letty

Letty — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 21:32:21 +0000

Hi Tim,

Great post. I perfectly agree with you when you say that things go well after practicing rather than after learning them. I studied for about three years Spanish in college and I thought I “knew” it. But I was far from the truth. When I traveled to Spain I discovered that it was absolutely impossible for me to know Spanish, because I had only learnt it and skipped an important part – PRACTICE.

Now, I practice Spanish every day with my virtual Spanish friends on http://www.fluentfuture.com, an exchange language website for people passionate about foreign language. And, just by seeing how helpful this is, I realized that learning and practice must go hand in hand in order to come to master a foreign language and effectively use it.

By: Jared

Jared — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:28:59 +0000

theres a typo! “diffucult” is in the 5th paragraph down from the “In conclusion—the learner is the problem (what?) ” headline.

By: avery bean

avery bean — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 03:19:06 +0000

Your method sounds vaguely Socratic. interesting. The rub I’m finding here is the positive that anyone can rapidly acquire language proficiency. However, the situation of devoting 4+ hours daily for one month, etc, is the challenge to most anyone. It would be interesting to see how these kinds of ideas of accelerated learning can be applied to those without the luxury of time–though it’s probably antithetical to the aims of your practices. What I like about this, it allows one to move rapidly though the skut-work of basics, and jump into the more context-interesting areas of language within the context of exchanging ideas–where the real learning begins.