(2) LangFest17: Stephen Krashen Polyglots and the Comprehension Hypothesis 2
if you're reading along and you come to a word you don't know and it's in context you get a little piece of it this all happens subconsciously you don't even know what's happening you get anywhere between five to ten percent of the word each time you see it there's a big amount of variation here but that's about the average this may not seem like much but they calculated if people read enough this is more than enough they looked at what middle-class fifth graders have read about a million words a year just getting five ten percent of the unknown words you'll have vocabulary growth of several thousand words a year which is what we find we have replicated this for second language most contexts are friendly a small percentage will misdirect you but about two thirds are friendly and a few don't make any difference one way or the other so it is a gradual process after while the meaning gets clearer and clearer and you're barely aware that it's happening this is why as we'll see later it's a good idea you know no word not to worry too much about it because you're picking it up you're picking up other things etc so that's point interesting point number one number two I mentioned that in order to more comprehensible input the work people have to pay attention to the input so it has to be interesting I think it has to be more than interesting for optimal language acquisition the input has to be so interesting that you even forget that it's in another language it has to be compelling that's for optimal language acquisition so interesting you're in a state of what Qin SEC muhuali calls flow a great book by the way flow my chin Sigma Holly some of you are nodding I'm not gonna spell chin Sigma Holly but I can spell flow okay anyway he says when you're in a state of flow what you're doing is so fascinating your sense of self diminishes your sense of time diminishes only the activity happens when you're reading a good book when you're watching a good movie Terminator 7 yes okay well I think this applies to us you know what happens is people acquire language and they don't know that it's happening and they don't care that it's happening we've collected a few case histories I want to tell you about one in our published version this is with Christy Lau my former student it's about her son we call him Paul in the articles his real name is Vincent let me tell you about Vincent Christie and her family live in the Bay Area San Francisco she and her husband are from Hong Kong Cantonese and their parents her parents stayed with them for a while so the household was totally Cantonese and their boys grew up comfortably bilingual
in Cantonese and English when Vincent was a little boy mom and dad were working really hard they had occasionally had to hire babysitters babysitter would come over turn on the television Mandarin cartoons I don't have to tell you but I have to tell other audiences civilian audiences right that Mandarin and Cantonese are not the same language okay they're not like dialects of Chinese okay there's a certain shared vocabulary but if you know one it doesn't mean you know the other it's a head start you know like Romanian and French a little B head start but it's certainly no guarantee anyway she'd turn on these cartoons and Vincents started watching them with his Cantonese vocabulary the help of the caretaker cape occasionally explained things and the high quality of children's television are you aware of how good children's television is regular show ever seen regular show you know I still like spongebob what a guy the nicest person the nicest protagonist ever and his friend Patrick Starr the best friend anybody I worry about mr. Krab though you know he's the restaurants called the krabby patty and they make crab burgers and mr. crab is a crab this isn't right okay anyway anyway the children's TV is just absolutely wonderful I watched this stuff on airplanes even when my grandchildren aren't around because it's so good anyway so he watched all these cartoons and gradually started to understand then elementary school he started watching Mandarin TV for kids when he got to high school dad would bring home two movies a week in Mandarin the whole family would watch them in the evening the evening news with grandpa grandma the whole family today Vincent speaks Mandarin when guests come over and their Mandarin speakers no problem they've gone to Taiwan they've gone to Mandarin speaking areas of China he's very comfortable the point is Vincent doesn't care Vincent had no motivation to acquire Mandarin he still doesn't he's not against it he's not for it he doesn't go for this you know Han bond business that we're all Chinese therefore you know like they're doing in Singapore all Chinese speakers have to do Mandarin it's there no it's fine it's okay he was interested in stories acquisition of Mandarin was an accidental byproduct of hearing the stories and watching TV I would like today to announce the end of the usefulness of the concept of motivation we tell kids you know you should really work on your French it's gonna help you someday nine-year-old kid they want to go skateboarding come on this is no tell a good story and they'll be with you get them involved in good books they'll be with you it's the story that counts this we want our goal in all language situations is to find compelling input and we'll see this is what our polyglots understand as well and we certainly Bella the search there was for compelling input all the time so when we go through the case histories we're going to start with an ordinary one I'm gonna make the claim prediction and it's got to be right every time comprehensible input is the major source of language for these people grammar is not such a big deal either there's no attention paid to it all or it's quite peripheral no forced production the ability to speak is the result of acquiring language not the cause correction a little sometimes or none at all very compelling input and many ways of making input comprehensible dictionaries not the only way you will see people have different strategies and they all exhibit patience okay very
important I'm gonna start out with a non polyglot case just because I think it's a fun case I got a call from a reporter from the Los Angeles Times about ten years ago who said he's was looking at cases of immigrants to the United States who came here young age and they would not only pick up English they would pick up other languages - mostly people who worked in restaurants and he invited me to come with him while they interviewed a young man named Armando who was from Mexico came to the United States in his teens and been in the United States for about ten years limited education in Mexico up to fifth
sixth grade which is normal and was working in an Israeli rest Durrant in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles and the claim was he speaks Hebrew and English well how did he do it I nice chat with Armando the thing about our mondo that you get right away when you're with him he's a really nice guy he's very likeable you all know people like this you're just with them you know kind of like Steve you know just easygoing etc don't worry it's not all gonna be then that way how did he do it he picked up Hebrew he told me by observing listening to co-workers and friends it took 2 or 3 years till he was comfortable with Hebrew even though he was hearing it all the time he never pushed himself he never tried hard to speak Hebrew he had lots of friends he was friendly with the restaurant owners who were Israeli native speakers and spoke Hebrew all the time Moroccan Israelis okay in fact they liked him so much he got into an automobile accident went to a
local hospital the restaurant sent over breakfast lunch and dinner every day he was in the hospital okay the customers he got along with the customers he got along with everybody got along with me it was wonderful he has never learned to read Hebrew has never studied Hebrew never doesn't doesn't know anything about grammar we had a conversation I asked I asked him and a friend of his to have a conversation of what they did yesterday and I kind of you know sat with them occasionally pitched in and I asked him afterwards were you ever thinking about grammar I notice you got the past tense right there so no it just comes out the
way it is I don't know yes he was corrected on vocabulary never grammar I tape recorded the conversation those days we use things called tape recorders ask your parents they'll tell you and I brought it to the same building was the Israeli consulate in downtown Los Angeles and the Israelis tourist office text each other I got two people to come out in the quarter with me and listen to this interview and I say what do you think of this guy I got four evaluations one said that most negative was he's pretty good it's like he's been in Israel two three years and he's getting you know the everyday language really well another person thought he was Ethiopian and spoke Hebrew really well finally someone else thought he was from Morocco and was and lived in Israel for many years the fourth person thought he was a native speaker of Hebrew so we get the range from very good to native speakers this is a nice case and goes right down the
line okay let's move into more exotic domains anthropologists have been telling us we need to look at other cultures other groups when you look at it you find more evidence the indigenous people of the Valles rêveur area versus basin in South America very interesting group this study was done in the 60s by guy named Sorensen and I haven't looked to see what's happened to these people they're still in the situation they were in about 10,000 people 24 languages not all related they had a very peculiar rule you can't marry anyone who speaks your first language they considered foreigners to be incestuous so kids growing up would have to pick up mom's language pick up dad's language and the lingua franca of the local community and as the kids grew up they gradually acquired more and more languages until in their teens they suddenly started speaking of these languages okay this is gonna sound like our mundo once again quote from Sorensen they do not practice speaking a language they do not know well yet instead they passively learn lists of words forms phrases in it familiarize themselves with its pronunciation they may make an occasional attempt to speak the new language in an appropriate situation but it doesn't if it doesn't come easily they will not try to force it it takes from at least one to two years to learn a new language fluently correction another anthropologist it is rare for speak to correct one another and then it's usually only done with embarrassment what do we have here same thing we have no forced speech or very little rarely corrected some conscious learning of the you know the lists of words and pronunciation but not of grammar so this one is consistent the next case threatened to be the counter example they would bring an end to my entire career it was announced by my chief rival at the time I won't mention any names Barry McLaughlin is his name I kept this guy off the street let me tell you I gave him something to do for about 20 years where he wrote article after article saying I was wrong and I would respond then back and forth it was great anyway one of the many things Barry said which is wrong like everything else some people develop high levels of competence without any opportunity for acquiring it
he just threw that out and that it kept getting repeated all right like fake news okay and the case that was brought up was Heinrich Schliemann if you ever heard of Heinrich Schliemann Heinrich Schliemann was an archaeologist who claimed to have discovered the lost city of Troy one of his biographers wrote a
book called the psychopathology of Heinrich Schliemann so we have to take everything Schliemann said with a grain of salt anyway the guy who wrote about in Jeremy Horn said that Schliemann is one of these people who is counterexample to crashing because he had no language acquisition it was all conscious learning all he said about
Schliemann this is the whole discussion he mastered English in six months by writing having corrected and memorizing essays while working as an office boy he'd write papers have them correct that and memorize them that was it this is all this guy did well I had a week off so what I did I should have said out of way coughs I learned to speak Italian Oh didn't work I went to the library I liked all these books about Heinrich Schliemann including Lehman's autobiography it helps to know other languages written in German alright and you find things that really doubt that this is what happened he did a lot of other stuff number one he studied with the native speaker of English every day for one hour and that included reading out loud we don't know what else they did but there might have been some comprehensible input there he attended to church services in English every Sunday get this he claimed to have memorized Ivanhoe and The Vicar of Wakefield can you imagine if some school person discovers this and this becomes part of the curriculum okay he said all he had to do was to read something three times and he had it he could memorize twenty pages a day he said he devoted every spare moment to language study reading and memorizing on errands and while waiting in line one of the people
who looked at his work said during that time he pumped in about the equivalent of seven years of formal study of language about 1300 hours not all comprehensible input and packed pretty well quality but 1300 hours you're gonna get something out of that also no one gave him a test after six months we don't know how well he spoke English this is just hearsay eventually yes even his critics said he was good at languages but after that time who knows what happened I can't give you firm counter of evidence that you know he had all this comprehensible input but it was a lot more than this one sentence alright Daniel Thomas anyone ever hear of Daniel Tammet he wrote a book called born on a blue day very interesting book extremely interesting very well-written Daniel Tammet by his own description is Asperger suffers from or suffers son of with savant syndrome and he calls it in his own words a necessity for order and routine he has an extraordinary gift
ability with numbers and language to raise money for chair he memorized PI to 22,000 places that's number four in the world I think this is such a waste of time three point 3.14159265 eight nine seven nine three two three eight four six that's 20 if you do that you can get on a website which is good for your career okay anyway we all did that in high school then went crazy with this anyway the world record in PI is 16,000 Daniel Thomas number four heald's the British and European record oh my goodness well spare Li he's claims and I believe him no reason not to that he's good at ten languages but it's clear that he used both learning and acquisition probably in equal amounts here's Lithuanian while he was working in an English teacher in Lithuania he hired a teacher I wrote words down as I learned them to help me visualize and remember them conscious learning and I read children's books acquisition Icelandic he did Icelandic in ten days and then had a conversation in Icelandic on television okay the end of that he read texts Out Louds whose teacher could check his pronunciation conscious learning but quote the large amounts of reading helped me develop an intuitive sense of the languages grammar acquisition he also says when I'm learning a language there number of things I consider essential a good size dictionary but also a variety of texts I prefer to learn words in whole sentences to give me a feeling for how the language works similar with Welsh lots and lots of grammar lots and lots of input from reading and from newspapers
he has a teaching method on his website and it is grammar based but includes some acquisition so are we to conclude from Daniel Hammett that the optimal path is both systems no maybe it only works if you can memorize PI to 22,000 places maybe it only works for people with these special abilities ok I'm going to do two people together here loam Cocteau and Steve Kaufman who are the poly hyperpolyglots I know the best I met loam cutta cutta Kathryn Lum in Budapest gosh 22 years ago I was giving a short course in page a city about an hour by train from Budapest and after I'd been there about a week one of my students said while you're here you really should meet Lum Cocteau she's a national treasure she's the world's greatest polyglot she speaks 17 languages okay and if you wanna meet her you better hurry she's 86 years old okay so I said I would love to meet her so my student called Lum koto and said professor crashing is here from California and Lum Catto said so what and he would love to meet you so I took three trips into Budapest to meet with her magic she really spoke these languages no kidding we spoke English her German is better than mine was better than mine her French was better than mine her Spanish was better than mine every language I knew she knew better and her
English was really really excellent she grew up in Budapest monolingual Hungarian she got her languages start after she finished her PhD in chemistry from the University of page where where I was she started out by doing French then added English she was teaching French going one lesson ahead of her students etc she basically did it on the
job as a professional interpreter and translator and went after language after language her core method she called the core novel she would get a book written in the other language and read it thoroughly until she knew the whole thing pretty well I told her what we were doing reading lots and lots of easy
stuff she says oh I wish I could have done that absolutely but this is all that was available she said that she did Russian during the Nazi occupation of Budapest when it was forbidden by law to speak Russian on the streets you're under penalty of death her she and her husband moved into an apartment that had been abandoned by a Russian family and they left behind stacks and stacks of romance novels she said this is where my Russian came from now that's a contrast with Steve who has also a late starter did not grow up with lots of languages here in Montreal in the English side I had a similar experience I grew up in Chicago and I took French in high school and we were never told that French was spoken in Canada it's like it did not I found out years later no kidding okay anyway I did take French by the way and my experience was kind of like yours only a little worse I was given a passing grade after two years of French by a very kind teacher who didn't want to spoil my record under the condition that I never study French again and that his reputation wouldn't be ruined of games all grammar grammar grammar of course anyway I've been dodging palisade Fabio my deaconship Alphonse they come in bashes manioc Savion we okay anyway Steve had a different experience in some languages if you read his book you'll see that he lived in France for three years he worked in Japan for several years has traveled a great deal has worked in these languages done business lumber industry diplomatic service etc they have similar comments though about immersion about living in another country people say you want to learn the language go to the country you want to learn to speak Spanish go to Mexico no bad idea if you don't know any of the language you won't understand anything okay I'll tell you my experiences with Mandarin I got invited to go to Taiwan first in the year 2000 to give a lecture one of my former students invited me and then after I gave that I got other invitations etc and I've gone to Thai I went to Taiwan at least once a year for the next 10 years and going back again a couple of months and thanks to my student her husband their kids I really know a lot of people by the way I'm master of the MRT I know all the stops how to get off at cetera after I would say the equivalent of 3 months of being in Taiwan if you pile it all together the only thing I could say and understand in Mandarin was was she one being shilling that was it I like ice cream she's not a bad thing to know I then took a class in 2007 using a method based on stories comprehensible int but my teacher was Linda Lee and we're still friends still working together sort of the first 10 minutes no first 5 minutes the first minute I got more comprehensible input in that class then I did all that time in Taiwan because none of it was comprehensible obviously okay so the beginner belongs in a language class or as Steve is recommended and as long kata recommends set it up yourself do it at home Steve recommends doing that even if you're in the country and especially if you're not in the country and they give similar reasons because l'm kata when you're abroad especially as a tourist it's difficult to make the acquaintance of someone patient intelligent and available enough to help you practice your skills etc you can achieve the same results really better at home and Steve Calvin says create your own language world a world of meaningful language for listening and reading so that's number one that the same view of immersion the so going to the country is fabulous for intermediates when you can start to understand it but not for beginners both talked about the importance of compelling input in my terms Coffman says we can only learn to use a language from interesting and meaningful content we should allow students to choose subjects familiar of interest to them he says when taking a Mandarin class what she did in Hong Kong the best times were when we had lunch and we all got to talk the teachers and we talked about our lives experiences etc lomé kata talks about the same thing getting in a
state of flow from reading and does it very eloquently when you read a character's fate becomes the readers fate genuine readers sail with Robinson Caruso throw themselves under the train with anna karenina died of tuberculosis with the lady of the Kamiya's afterward luckily they come back to life she says she made sure she got compelling input whenever she bought books she bought two one of them would be more comprehensible and interesting don't take any risks etc both put skill building in its place grammar study Steve writes occasionally I consult grammar books sometimes explanations help at other times it didn't I would usually remember grammar rules or explanations only for short periods of time and then forget them thank you for saying this in public Steve that has helped so many of us okay oh gosh I can't remember there's something wrong with me in the end it was only through enough exposure to language that my grammar improved Steve wrote I deliberately ignored explanation of the theory of Chinese grammar because the theoretical explanations sometimes made no sense to me me too PhD and grammar sometimes I have no idea what they're talking about I knew with enough exposure they'd start to seem natural lo Mikoto what lets you avoid mistakes does not memorize laws of grammar but the right form seen heard she says said but a question mark to such an extent it becomes second nature Steve again do not spend your time in a vain attempt to master the language from grammar rules and wordless you will not enjoy this tedious form of study and it will not work oh um cat though is a very nice quote
pursuing books no wait that's not the one Oh many excellent philologists who with impressive confidence in the most abstract realms of a foreign language needed interpreter to buy a streetcar ticket or order lunch let me read to you from a letter published in the London Times in nineteen fifty something okay a long time ago ah August 29th 2002 man writes him when my wife Oh level French fail happily bargains in French market stall holders I 1953 a level French pass only stand by muttering no tomatoes are feminine you should be using the subjunctive I was even able when paying the bill at a small hotel to say
beautifully and accurately in French had we not been awoken at 3:00 a.m. by the dust cart it would have not been necessary for us to have raided the minibar for a bottle of water unfortunately I had to reply I had to reply I had to rely on my wife to understand the reply sorry it's still gonna cost you 50 francs so not the route correction here alone cat that confuses me a little I would wish I could still chat with her oh gosh one of my great honors the two greatest honors I've had in my life this is the big one the second one was having lunch with Stanley the inventor of spider-man whoa look you've watched the Marvel movies there's always a cameo Stanley what a guy anyway it's another lecture anyway the other is of course being with lone cat oh and being asked to write something at her at a celebration of her life her the under her hundredth birthday correction what about being correct that lone cat though says correction can make you sick to your stomach she recalled one situation as an interpreter now she had a PhD in chemistry and in this instant she made a mistake a slip of the tongue instead of saying inorganic she said uh no organic she said my chief rival heartily corrected me I was lost for the rest of the day now if this happens too long
CatDog what about nine-year-old kids and classes on the other hand she says uncorrected mistakes are very perilous you keep repeating the wrong formula they take root in the mind and we accept them as authentic I don't think so I think if you get more comprehensible input they gradually go away do you have to know every word when you read I wrote a paper last year worked on a gift presentation called regression to skill building how all of us forget the theory of comprehensible input and we go back when I'm reading in French German Spanish etcetera I don't look up words I just keep going no problem if I can't read the book that's too hard I'll read something else and vocabulary still grows reading in Mandarin I still want to look up every word I fight the impulse okay because the texts are harder for me Steve says you can expect to forget whatever you look up in a dictionary pretty quickly I heard Steve give a lecture recess he looks up a word by the time he gets back to the text he's forgotten it oh isn't that a relief all right lone cat though you don't need to know every word you don't need to look up every newer don't get obsessed with words don't know build comprehension on what you already know do not automatically reach for the dictionary if you encounter a word or two you don't recognize if the in creche expression is important it will come back if not there's no reason to worry about it this leads to the issue of perfection which all of us wrestle with we're gonna hear from Steve from Lum Cotto and finally Laurence Olivier Steve I became fluent in French by giving up the traditional approach of trying to perfect my grammar perfection didn't matter anymore only communicating did I no longer dislike language learning I read what I liked even if I didn't understand at all I spoke with people who interested me don't try to achieve perfection which is vanity it will hinder your progress seek to enjoy yourself your improvement will be constant though uneven this next quote from Steve is a big one and stunned me when I read it and I realize how I've been suffering by not understanding this other people don't care if we're perfect here it is you will often feel you're struggling when in fact you're communicating quite successfully the key to successful communication is to try to relax enjoy the experience focus on the meaning you're trying to communicate not how well you're doing do not think your grammar and pronunciation are being judged your listeners want to understand you pretty heavy huh clunk at them if you feel you must speak like a native you will be inhibited language is the only thing worth knowing even poorly isn't that wonderful propagation of half-truths is not an advancement of science but hindrance the language learning however it would be a pity to fall silent because he or she doesn't know with certainty whether a form will hit home or not one of the few things that was good about the last Star Trek show Enterprise which I thought was horrible it was like written by sixth grade who were not quite you know normal there's this one episode where the lieutenant in charge of translation the communication officer the translators not yet been built the universal translator and this enemy vessel are threatening vessels is after them and she's trying to figure out how to respond and she's got all these charts and verbs and she's saying well let's see I don't know what the past tense of this is and how do I do and the cap says just say something they're gonna destroy us and they're gonna go destroy earth just yeah but I can't worry about the subject-verb agreement I don't know if this is correct just do it she doesn't and of course saved there it is we can save the universe by not being perfectionist Laurence Olivier in a wonderful book it's called the ultimate seduction I highly recommend it it's from a quote by Picasso work is the ultimate seduction discussion with Laurence Olivier don't waste your time striving for perfection nobody will notice when you achieve it striving for perfection is the greatest stopper there is if you do you'll be afraid you can't achieve it and if you achieve it you'll be afraid you can't achieve it again it's your excuse to yourself for not doing anything instead try for excellence doing your best don't let your high standards trip you up great therapy for me okay final our next final thing is there a gift for languages I I took advantage of my relationship with Lancome when I met the linguists in Hungary I was invited to the University to talk to the languages department that said her and I told him in casual conversation have you know I've been hanging out with Lancome you know I get around man and the usual everybody said oh she's got a different brain she's just different none of them had ever met her or studied her all these people involve a language pedagogy etc I asked her about that she said not at all she just knows how to do it and there's another factor the duration and intensity of activities and language is what is crucial not a mystic gift for languages a gift for language is not a matter of intellect of character self-confidence and openness Steve I think comes closer in fact the successful foreign language speakers take for granted that they'll have to communicate in another language and don't think it's unusual it's natural they accept the fact that they were born with the ability to acquire another language and that's what you guys have those who's the most have you succeeded well also I think you have to know how to do it Steve also had the benefit of something I think is increasingly important the concept of language parent I wrote a short article on this on language parents it was suggested by a buddy of mine in New Zealand who said that when he went to China did martial arts he made friends with another kung-fu student and who's a native speaker Chinese and this guy spoke a little slower was interested in what he said didn't correct his errors and they became buddies it is the transition when you get to the environment it's good to find people like this Steve tells us his language friend was the Japanese commercial officer Nick kisaki expressed himself in a careful painstaking way that helps so much and was long-winded that's great my language friend in Austria I was a music student in 1962 before your mother was born in Vienna I went to study piano and I didn't do very well on piano I had this real problem with my teacher but I did great in German that kind of changed things anyway my landlady my house fell foul Novak love to sit and gossip and she was I thought she was very old like probably 60 okay and she always repeated the same stories which were wonderful for me and I really enjoyed having tea with her two three days a week she was my language pear she also got me into great literature those you know German Karl my Winnie - junk pure total junk it was wonderful I recommend junk lots of easy stuff
that's so much fun you feel guilty reading it when I was in Ottawa University of Auto I made friends with a member of the French department who never spoke English to anybody and we used to get together in the weekends and take our kids rollerskating across the river and Hall he was my language parent in French my language parent in Spanish has disappeared I don't know what to do as you can tell I work out at Gold's Gym in Venice California where Arnold trained okay and I don't look big because it's my day off and one of the people working there sweeping the floor there are mostly a Mexican Americans and Mexicans who do the work there and I talked to them you know and I met this lady named Emma Emma was just wonderful to chitchat with I started just chatting with her about a year ago and you know we spoke Spanish turns out she doesn't speak English and I found the topic of mutual interest our children and my grandchildren we just went on and on it was really great and she said you know thanks for talking to me nobody does insider' got there last week she's going I have to track her down she was wonderful a language parent is that bridge that can help you and I think many of you are thinking of who your language parent was last page I thought we'd stay till around 9:30 no that's fun so let me come to some conclusions with all this if they're all so well and done this is on the table on the bottom and this is a partial summary of what I've said we have all these people who did different things some got corrected some didn't slimmin got corrected l'm Kato's sometimes got correct some of them studied some grammar Ashley Minh studied a lot Daniel Tammet a lot some didn't two of them for sure did not speak until they were ready the rest of them we don't know what they all had in common comprehensible in but that's yet that has to be it now again I'm going to conclude by saying when you write your case history and I hope you do I'm going to be in trouble if it doesn't come out but that's how it goes science is a dangerous game so far over the last forty years it's been okay but I'm waiting to see the rest of it so please help me out on this thank you very much to a big picture you [Music]
