Item — HN Reader

I am rather conflicted by this site, while it is aimed at ESLs and was created by ESLs those who created it seem to have an inflated view of their English skills and lack understanding of the poetics of the language which make it so versatile. Perhaps they are being pragmatic but I think they take it to the extreme and are not actually teaching how to learn English effectively but only teaching how to mimic English effectively. But does it matter? You can't really learn a language until you live in the culture that speaks the language, book smarts must yield to street smarts at some point if you really want to learn a language and its nuances. I really don't know, part of me thinks it does not matter, it is mostly about getting over that first hump so you can get into the culture that speaks the language and really start learning, but the other part of me notices the increasing trend of ESLs correcting EFLs without even considering that they might not understand.

I guess it is all part of being a native speaker of a widely spread language and the evolution of language. I am curious to see where it takes us.

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An alternative approach of language learning I've tried has been studying with an audio tape series called Pimsleur Spanish, where the producers take the opposite approach to teaching: they provide minimal grammar explanations, but try to teach grammar implicitly. For example, instead of explicitly stating a rule for whether to include the equivalent of "an" when saying "I have an appointment," the program provides a couple examples (e.g. something like "Tengo cita con el profesor" and then "Tengo una cita" to imply that you skip the "una" when you say that you have a specific appointment with someone that you already scheduled).

I've also tried Michel Thomas's Spanish audio approach that takes a rules-based approach, by explicitly teaching word order and grammatical concepts largely with English, in a way that explains "rules" comparably to the submitted article. I found the course helpful, but I believe that there definitely too many edge cases in language learning for an explicit approach to reasonably cover all the nuances of language learning.

You've made a great point that it's often easier and more useful to learn about the nuances of language learning through implicitly picking up patterns of speech through conversation and immersion (I also think lots of reading can be helpful), versus memorizing lots of rules and their exceptions.

I thought the author made an interesting illustration, though, of how there is a lot of nuance with natural-sounding expression that might be missed from formal instruction. Immersion can be a great approach to solve this problem—even if a student can't move to a location where it's the majority language, experiencing a great deal of content for native speakers can help one implicitly pick up on natural-sounding patterns of communication.

Back in the 80s/90s when I was in public education they largely relied on our natural language skills and I can not remember ever learning about things like conjugation or infinitives, we just learned tense, it was prescription grammar with all the fancy words removed and we only got the basics like adjectives and nouns. Then come high school when we took our required second language, we learned that language from a rather rigorous and descriptive standpoint, as a result I probably learned more about English than the German I was studying and have since almost completely forgotten thanks to lack of use. In retrospect it was quite effective and a big part of the reason I have issues with antimoon, when I was learning German they exploited those natural language skills which were reinforced in my grade school and jr high years, antimoon is neglecting this and just saying "memorize all this arbitrary stuff." But as I said, I am not sure if that even matters.

>I thought the author made an interesting illustration, though, of how there is a lot of nuance with natural-sounding expression that might be missed from formal instruction.

This is where I thought they failed, random selection from their offerings "What size is it? BUT NOT What weight is it?" Weight in that example may not be "proper" but is highly figurative and this example ignores that, to bear the weight of the world on your shoulders does not mean to heft 5.972×10^24 kg and this is a false equivalence between size and weight. In the authors native Polish this may be more sensible but it will not work for all ESLs. Not the best example but I picked at random, most of his examples fall into this trap. "What weight is it" can absolutely be used effectively and properly but weight and size have no real correlation because English also has density, "What weight is it" is considerably more dense than "What size is it" but both could be completely nonsensical in context.

But again, does it even matter? I think the figurative language of the Romantics and Modernists is on the way out, Realism and Naturalism is coming back and they are going to be considerably more blunt/direct than they ever were. The younger generations seem to have no care for the old style figurative language, even their sarcasm and irony is more blunt and they seem far more interested in reading genre fiction. The next big thing in literature is going to have to balance the simplicity and directness of genre with the weight of the Modernists and I think it is going to happen. Lately we have hearing a great deal about the supposed affirmative action/reverse sexism/racisim aka wokeness of the publishing industry but I think this is mostly that women and minorities have the most interest in proving themselves by the old standards and that implied majority is just going through the motions at this point. The new movement is always pioneered by the minority and currently the literary and social minorities are aligning, it is not just the avant garde this time.

I am amazed at how much usage has changed within my 42 years which demonstrates one of my biggest issues with anitmoon, he made usage out to be a rule, usage and definition are the most fluid things in language. I doubt any of this matters for all the reasons I have given, but I find it very interesting.