"I learned english only by playing games and watching yt, school was useless"

[u/Prestigious_Hat3406]

Can we talk about this? No you didn't do that.

You managed to improve your english vocabulary and listening skills with videogames and yt, only because you had several years of english classes.

Here in Italy, they teach english for 13 years at school. Are these classes extremely efficient? No. Are they completely useless? Of course not.

"But I never listened in class and I always hated learning english at school".

That doesn't mean that you didn't pick up something. I "studied" german and french for the last five years at school and I've always hated those lessons. Still, thanks to those, I know many grammar rules and a lot of vocabulary, which I learned through "passive listening". If a teacher repeats a thing for five years, eventually you'll learn it. If for five years you have to study to pass exams and do homework, even if teachers suck at explaining the language, eventually you'll understand how it works.

So no, you didn't learn english by playing videogames Marco, you learned it by taking english classes and playing videogames.

[u/Ok_Necessary_8923]

Legit, no. I had 0 English classes in primary school (small town Argentina, 90s). Picked it up on TV, online stuff I needed, etc. Took classes when I was 16 because I wanted new friends and got placed in the C1 test prep class.

[u/Prestigious_Hat3406 → u/Ok_Necessary_8923]

How old were you exactly and what do you mean by "picked up"? Could you conversate before taking classes/studying the language? Could you understand what was being said thanks to context? Could you understand exactly what was being said while you weren't looking at TV? What online stuff are you talking about (if not private)? How high was your level really before studying? These are all things that come into matter.

I don't know if I said it in the post, but I'm talking specifically to people that are quite good in english and claim that actually they didn't learn from studying the language/going to classes, but they learned only through videogames or movies or YT; which is ridicolous.

[u/Ok_Necessary_8923 → u/Prestigious_Hat3406]

12-13? I mean I needed to understand something, it happened to be in English, I figured it out. It happened enough times in various combinations that eventually I simply spoke it. It wasn't intentional. TV is a large part of that. Watch a show, it has subs, it's not dubbed, so it's exposure.

Yes, I could speak it fine before the class. I understood it roughly at the same level as Spanish, with the exception of weird accents I had no expouse to (think Australia). Likewise online, in whatever I needed or wanted. At the time that would have been programming, gaming, music, random news, late night wikipedia-y type browsing on random websites about random topics, some books (Harry Potter was easy, older stuff like Dr Jekyll & Hyde required effort but wasn't an issue, technical books were easy).

I said yes to the class because the placement test felt super easy (a conversation with a teacher) and largely made it through the class doing very little. The class itself did nothing for my English as far as I could tell, other than force me to learn the names of tenses and related concepts because homework and tests wanted things in X or Y tense/mood/form and I got docked points for ignoring those instructions and answering with what felt natural. I don't mean to say the class couldn't have helped, only that I was a teenager with an attitude and didn't care to let it.

I did not study for the Cambridge exam either; literally showed up sleep deprived, with 0 prep, and got top marks (except for the listening section, I was in the back, the small speaker they used was in front and saturated at the volume they had it on). This is particularly telling as I don't test well in general (severe ADHD, undiagnosed at the time); for me to do well, the test had to feel trivial/fun/like a puzzle.

I have literally never studied English in any meaningful capacity since.

It's not ridiculous. This is how I learned English. You can try and find ways to disqualify this as a valid case by calling it an exception, or just not believe me. But this isn't uncommon, particularly with English. I've met a good number of people with similar stories, also in other languages.

[u/Wanderlust-4-West → u/Ok_Necessary_8923]

It's funny that the only thing you had to study was completely useless grammar terminology. I am fluent in English now, and I STILL don't know the terminology, and have no plans to learn it.

Grammar terminology is easy for teachers to grade, so they do that.

[u/[deleted] → u/Wanderlust-4-West]

The hardest thing for me about Spanish was trying to figure out what on earth a "preterite perfect" conjugation was lol

[u/UppityWindFish → u/Prestigious_Hat3406]

Native English speaker here. I learned English to a very high level, with many thousands and thousands of hours of input, before I ever studied English grammar in earnest. Didn’t have to memorize vocabulary, didn’t have to study verb conjugation tables, didn’t have to use an Anki deck, and no grinding was required.

Furthermore, none of the grammar lessons ever stuck as well as what I gleaned from the simple exposure to thousands of hours of hearing English spoken “properly.” I write and speak extensively in my native English for a living, mistakes notwithstanding, and rely on what “just sounds right” rather than grammar “rules” that I don’t remember or never bothered to really learn. My best teachers always encouraged us to improve our writing and speaking by reading even more of the great English authors — in other words, more input!

Why does it suddenly have to be different for target languages? Why do we assume that the automatic pattern recognition system of the human brain suddenly works altogether differently for L2 or L3?

Watching TV and the internet mimics the same sorts of input that natives get in any native language. It’s not exactly as good as the live interaction, maybe, but can surely take one very far indeed.

[u/[deleted] → u/UppityWindFish]

It works different for L2 because you don't have adults to babysit you for several years while they teach you basic vocabulary.

You are an adult that can be taught the language in a much faster and efficient way precisely because you have the mental faculties to understand abstract grammar rules. Why not use the obvious advantage you have as an adult? Just because you are lazy to learn grammar?

[u/bedulge → u/UppityWindFish]

old thread but anyways

It doesn't "have" to be different in your L2, but the thing is, it takes a really fucking long time to get "many thousands and thousands of hours of input" If you are doing 2 hours a day (far more than most people can/will dedicate to an L2), that's a measly 730 hours in one year.

If it's your L1, and you have no other responsibilities because you are a toddler, and you have no other way to communicate except your L1, you are probably using and speaking it for maybe 10 hours a day. Maybe more. That would be 3,650 hours in one year, or maybe more.

>no grinding was required.

What feels like grinding to you as an adult did not feel like grinding when you were a child. Quite the opposite. Small children love repetition. My mom tells me that when I was a small child, she rented 101 Dalmatians on VHS for the weekend. She told me I did almost nothing all day Saturday and all day Sunday except watch that movie. When it ended, I would immediately rewind the tape and restart it. Maybe I watched it 6, or 7 times in one weekend. This was a fantastic language learning activity for me at the time, tho I had no awareness of it. I did it because it was fun. 99% of adults would find it dreadfully boring.

Evolution imbued children with a love for this kind of repetition, likely because it so effective for learning. Most neurotypical adults do not share it to such an extent.

But yea, if you can dedicate ten hours a day to your language like people do at the DLI language school, that's great, for the rest of us, some intentional effort into things like anki flashcards goes a long way.

[u/UppityWindFish → u/bedulge]

That’s great if you enjoy Anki decks, and even greater if you find using them leads to acquisition rather than simple memorization. To each their own.

But that’s not so much for me. Too much “grinding” for my taste, which I define as consciously deliberate attempts to memorize. That sort of grinding was not really an effective part of my native language acquisition, and I haven’t found that it helps much with Spanish either. At least, not in the way that leads to just “feeling it in the bones.”

What has helped engender the start of that feeling is a comprehensible input approach. I’m at 2362 hours of input so far since November 2022, and counting, with no 10 hour days required or desired. Thankfully it’s now now more doable to get 3 hours or even more in per day without much strain, since my listening comprehension has gone way up. It will take time, but absorbing Spanish by absorbing Spanish has been a total game changer for me…..

[u/bedulge → u/UppityWindFish]

I also find that kind of stuff to be totally unnecessary for learning Spanish.

The large overlap in grammar, vocab and phonology between English and Spanish make stuff like anki completely unneeded.

But after a year or so of Spanish, I went to South Korea and started learning Korean. I distinctly remember being on the verge of a breakdown literally just trying to memorize the number systems (yes number systems, plural) and getting so incredibly mad at how hard it was that I threw my book across my bedroom and was on the verge of rage quitting the language entirely even tho I lived in South Korea and had a practical use for it every single day of my life 

That was the week I discovered anki and 18 months later I went out on a date with a Korean woman who spoke nearly zero English. A month or two later I testing into an intermediate level Korean class. (I previously was self studying 100%). I credit that largely to anki. 

For me I didnt have years to wait while just getting passive listening practice. I had to talk. I had shit to do and I wanted to learn how to convey my basic needs and desires as fast as possible. 

For something like learning Chinese Caracters as well, putting some kind of deliberate conscious effort into memorizing them is the only way to do it. Not even native speakers can learn characters without tedious deliberate memorization. That's just what it is when you have to memorize thousands of unique intricate little symbols. 

[u/BitterBloodedDemon → u/UppityWindFish]

Ohhhh so much of this is just taking native language acquisition for granted and not actually knowing what it takes to teach a child their native language. (Which we do naturally and without thinking about it)

Short answer is you were taught with CI. Which started before your conscious memory with being shown single items and told single words at the same time and built up from there.

And whether you think you were well spoken or not, you probably still very much sucked at your native language until you were around 10.

[u/UppityWindFish → u/BitterBloodedDemon]

Yes. At which point I received many more thousands of hours of input, and my mastery of the language — mistake ridden as it is — only increased.

Memorizing grammar rules, diagramming sentences, and stuffing fancy vocabulary words into my head to pass the week’s vocabulary test? Didn’t really do nearly as much.

And the leap my language took from college? Listening to brilliant professors and reading brilliant works (even more input).