Active or Passive Language Skills, YouTube and More…

Good morning.

It's morning here. Today I want to talk about a familiar subject, which is this whole issue of passive learning and active learning. We had a comment on our forum at LingQ. Someone asked if perhaps the active or the passive knowledge of the language is processed in a different part of the brain than the active skills in the language. I don't know, of course. I'm not a neuroscientist, but what I have read and I have read quite a bit on how the brain learns, suggests that a lot of areas of the brain are involved in language learning.

Quite honestly, I don't see how it can be processed in different parts of the brain because, as we learn a language, what initially is indiscriminate noise, eventually, as neuro networks are formed, as I understand it, we are able now to distinguish in what is initially indiscriminate noise where one word ends and a new words begins and, eventually, we can start making meaning out of what was once noise.

Obviously, when we go then to use this then we have to be drawing on those neuro networks. We can't be charging out, it seems to me, to some other part of the brain to start producing the language. I'm not a neuroscientist; although, I always recommend the book by Manfred Spitzer called Learning or The Brain or something like that. I checked at Amazon and it's not available in English. I have the book here in German.

Before getting further into this subject of active and passive, I would like to raise a complaint that I have with YouTube.

I love YouTube. I think it's a tremendous community. It's a tremendous way to improve your language skills. When I do foreign language videos, especially in languages that I'm not very strong in, I often have to do one or two takes before I manage to get through without too many mistakes. Watching yourself speak in another language and listening to your mistakes is a great way to notice where your gaps are. I've often felt that as we go along we should -- and I guess I haven't been doing this, but if I were more serious I would -- make videos of ourselves at different stages in our learning just to see how we progress. So YouTube is great. Here's what annoys me with YouTube.

Every so often a comment below one of my videos says ‘This comment has been removed because there were too many negative votes.

' Why would YouTube do this? I don't mind people disagreeing with me. I don't mind people disagreeing with what other people have to say. I don't mind people calling me an idiot, a gasbag or whatever they sometimes call me, a fool. It doesn't matter. If I find a comment offensive because it contains vulgar language or because it's racist or something I'll just block it for those reasons, but those decisions should be left with me. It shouldn't be up to some automatic process. I don't know what that process is. I don't know how many negative votes, but why? I cannot understand why they would do something like this, it just blows my mind. That's the one thing.

The other thing is I notice sometimes that some comments are withheld or something and then I go to that person's channel at YouTube and the comment is still there.

I suggest this is also something that YouTube does that eliminates some comments. I don't know if other people have had the same problem.

I guess the third in the litany of complaints I have about YouTube is they have made it a little easier for me to reply to comments and I get lots of comments and I would like to reply.

It used to be you'd have to click to answer and then you would be left searching for the comment in amongst this whole list of comments. Now they've got it so you click to reply. You go to that video and the box to reply is below the comment, but the video comes on all the time so then you have to go and shut down the video so you don't hear yourself talking all the time. This is especially the case if I'm sitting in the office and I don't want to disturb other people.

So just some quick comments about things that annoy me at YouTube and I wonder if other people have similar comments.

One last thing that annoys me is the ads and that's why we stopped doing our ads here. We thought we'd put some ads on there to earn a little bit of revenue to pay for coffee in the office, but really it's so annoying. I open another video and I have to listen to three seconds or 15 seconds of an ad so we stopped doing that, but I understand that YouTube has to raise money somewhere for the wonderful service, normally wonderful service that they provide.

Getting back to passive versus active, in some ways it connects with this sort of two schools of thought with regard to language learning.

One says speak from day one and the other says no, you need to build up your knowledge through a lot of input activities. I must say, my own method of language learning is, basically, to focus on input for a period of time that can be two months, six months, 12 months. It doesn't matter. It depends entirely on when I either have an opportunity to speak or need to speak or I want to speak, but I don't feel this compulsion to speak.

Now, the speak from day one people, if we use Benny as an example, he likes to get a phrase book on his way over to some place and kind of leaf through the phrase book and now he's ready to go and he can start speaking.

I don't understand because the language has to come from outside you. You have to begin with passive because you don't have the language in you. When you first go to listen, it's just noise so you have to train the brain to get used to the language. You have to acquire some words and phrases, so why would you limit yourself to what's found in a little phrase book.

First of all, you have no concept about whether those phrases are, in fact, valid.

The phrases don't have any credibility because you haven't heard them in different contexts. They're just a phrase. You're almost reluctant to use it and if you do use it you certainly won't understand what comes back at you. So I've never quite understood that; however, people want to speak from day one.

One of my main positions is to do what you want to do, so if that makes you happy.

As Krashen points out, what you're really benefiting from there is that you're being exposed to the language. Your own output, in my opinion, is relatively unimportant. What really matters is what's coming back at you. So you may think that you're actually active, but in fact you're mostly passive because there's very little that you can say. You have to build up that ability to understand, as I've said before.

Now, some people claim that there are very good, that they understand, but they can't speak.

Maybe there are such people. Most people that I have come across who claim to understand but are unable to speak, if I speak to them at a normal rate of speech they don't understand what I'm saying. I have yet to come across a person who understands me very well and who can't speak. These people might exist, but I haven't come across such people. There are people who claim that they can read and write, but can't speak. Fine, I mean there are people who have psychological hang ups about speaking. So they may be able to write very well and that would indicate that they have good active skills in the language and they read and so forth, but they can't speak because they're afraid to sound foolish.

Yeah, would that person have benefited from speaking from day one?

I don't know. In my own case, I think maybe. That might be, but it might also be that it's so frustrating and stressful to speak when you have very few words and don't understand what the other person is saying that for a lot of people that would only inhibit them more. I think a lot of people who have trouble speaking are too obsessed with grammar, too obsessed with getting it right and, therefore, as they're speaking, they're kind of second guessing themselves.

It's a bit like golf.

If you just go up there and swing the club you're probably going to do better on a golf course than if you try to think of where to put your elbow and your knee and your shoulder and all the little details of the golf swing. I have a suspicion that those people who struggle to become active in the language, in fact, are too obsessed with being perfect and with trying to remember all the grammar rules.

By the way, I made some notes here.

When I was a student in Europe I was in Vienna, I think we were in a bar talking with different people. There was a fellow there who was Japanese and who was deaf and dumb and he could write I mean fluently. People would ask him questions in Farsi, French, Russian, you name it, and he would write out the answer and talk to you by writing in these languages. There's an extreme case of someone who can read and write, but can't speak. That's not because he wouldn't have been able to develop those skills, he was, unfortunately, unable able to because he was mute. Sorry, did I say deaf and dumb? He wasn't deaf and dumb. You know what? I don't remember. Maybe we wrote to him and he wrote back; anyway, a remarkable person.

So what is passive input?

Some people think you can just turn the radio on in the background or watch movies that you don't understand. Again, if you like doing that, that's fine. Personally, I've never found that useful. I always want to listen to something where I can get a transcript and work at it as I do at LingQ. That, to me, is the big thing. As I bring these texts in, I save the words and phrases and I review them. So I'm mining this content for words and phrases and increasing my alertness and attentiveness to the language. I find that process, eventually, gets me to where I can start speaking, at first with difficulty and then better and better as I go.

In fact, there's something quite active about the passive nature of input because you are interacting with the language.

You're making meaning out of that language and, of course, I've always found in maintaining my language if I get a call from the local Chinese television station and they want me to appear on some program, I'll listen to my Chinese CDs for a few hours that day and on my way driving to the television station and that refreshes it. So, at least to that extent, I found that a lot of input has helped me.

Like in Romanian, that's the bulk of what I did and there within a month I started speaking.

It depends on when you want to, how comfortable you feel, your needs. I was going to Romania, I had to start speaking earlier and, of course, Romanian had the advantage of having so much vocabulary from Italian. I'm going to make a video here in Spanish this week, so what I did is I went and got a book, a book that I bought the last time I was in Spain. I'm really enjoying it and it helps to reactivate my Spanish.

By the way, I'll close out with saying that Google owns YouTube.

Google has done a lot for language learning. Any time you're in doubt as to whether a phrase is valid or not or how a word is spelled, just Google it and you get the answer right away. You're looking for grammar resources, how to conjugate a verb, Google it. Then you have Google Translate, which is a tremendous resource. For example, if I'm reading this book and I come across a lot of words that I don't know, I simply type them all into Google Translate. When I get a list of 20 or 30 accumulated over 20 or 30 pages, 10 pages, I see the meaning right away and then I copy and paste all of those and import those into LingQ. I go through them again and then I can add example phrases from our library and a whole bunch of stuff like that. It's phenomenal.

Also, one thing I do in Google Translate is I'll say something in English and I'll turn to Google Translate, for example, English to Romanian.

In anticipation say before I have my conversation, I'll just say a whole bunch of stuff in English, up pops the Romanian, I grab the Romanian, I import it into LingQ and I go through it. Granted, that translation is not perfect. It's not going to influence my language, but it's going to give me a lot of words and phrases that I can use in a conversation. There again, Google Translate.

So I criticized YouTube at the beginning, but YouTube/Google has given us a lot of useful tools both for our active and our passive language learning.

Thank you for listening, bye for now.