Hi Whizzes!
Once upon a time, I signed up for a Russian class my freshman year of college (one of those where there is an excrescence of ivy 🌿, cough, cough). Why? Because I’d felt a connection with Russia ever since opening one of my father’s huge photo books in his library in Lima. When I saw photographs of Russian architecture (the pretty muscovite kind that makes you feel like you’re in a fairy tale 🧙🏽♀️, NOT the brutalist stuff), I felt profound nostalgia. I felt I’d been Russian in a past life, perhaps.
The first class left me ok. There were THREE professors, all of them affable, and they passed around stuffed animals 🐸 and fruits 🍎, naming them in Russian. We happily repeated after them.
Ok. What could go wrong? You’ve got not one but three nice humans, and a bunch of stuffed…stuff. We’d all come ready, having bought all the required materials, which involved a book for children and a textbook (it would be a long, arduous decade before I found out that alone—having to buy a textbook, that is—should have sent me clicking on the DROP THIS CLASS button faster than I could jump off a gorge 💦—and I did jump off a lot of gorges back in college, so I should know).
Semester one did not go so well. I did not know what the professors wanted of us. I don’t remember much of the class, except for being made to give output (writing and talking), somehow, and also the professors giving grammatical explanations that I did not understand ❗️❌ 🚫, asking us if we understood, and all of us nodding “yes” emphatically, even though we didn’t. I can tell you I nodded “yes” because I knew that saying “no” would only get me more complex grammatical explanations…an endless loop of…nothing. The only saving grace was that it couldn’t get any worse. Riiiiight.
But then, on a wuthering 🌬, grey and cold autumn day of Semester 2, Professor Number One told us to open the children’s book, titled Что я видел (kinda sounds like Shto Ya Vidyel)—What I Saw, a travel book written by a man named Boris Zhitkov in 1988, for Russian children. How can I explain the further downfall into the nadir of my brief Russian existence 𓀒? I already comprehended nothing, could only say a few phrases in Russian (still the only ones I can say), and now there was this musty, huge, incomprehensible story with grammatical explanations and annotations that we were supposed to start reading. It was too complex. It was not compelling. It was not written for language acquisition. It was torture. What I thought would be a 4-year long journey into Russian fluency became a 1 year journey into being able to say 5 phrases, because I did not sign up for Russian the following year, nor the following, nor the following. 🔚
Ok, not the best story I’ve ever written, but there you have it. Hey, it was not supposed to leave you with warm and fuzzy feelings anyway.
So...there is a debate in the World Language World about something called Authentic Materials. Some people believe that only materials written for native speakers are authentic. I believe this belief is nothing short of pure ******** (insert favorite curse word…no, not cuss word…CURSE word). 🤬
Not only do they believe this, but, unfortunately, they follow through with it in the learning environment, using short stories, articles, novels, and movies written FOR NATIVE SPEAKERS🉐 ㊙️ ㊗️ 🈴 🈵, while teaching beginners. I also see this happening in several of the language scam (intentional or unintentional) apps and products that (for some strange algorithmical reason) are marketed to me through Facebook and the like. Like what? Like…
”Learn Spanish by reading Jane Eyre in Spanish…The translation is right below!!!”
Have you read Jane Eyre in English? Riiiight. And even if you have…hey, the Spanish/French/ETC translations to most famous works in English exist. How come you haven’t bought them and are reading them in tandem with the English? Because something instinctively tells you that it AIN’T GONNA WORK. Too complex. There’s a term for that, and it’s called INPUT FLOOD. When a learner feels like they are drowning in too many new words 🌊, shut-down occurs.
The other part of that particular scam that galls me is that, on top of being something that will, guaranteed, NOT help humans acquire languages, it also feeds off the public domain, using works that can be published by anybody because the authors have been dead for over seventy years. Essentially, they put no work in…but hey…I’m the crazy one here 🤦🏽♀️, somehow expecting that scammers will put mega effort into the product they are scamming people with.
So, let’s get this straight. Who should be reading materials written for native speakers? You got it, native speakers, and, without a shadow of a doubt, people who are non-native but have reached a degree of native-like fluency. I’ve got the above scenario with Portuguese and French—NOT RUSSIAN. 😤
One of the main reasons I founded Input Wand is because even the Novice Low books available out there, in my opinion, are too complex. They have too many Unique Words. As a facilitator, I have seen the turning point between total, rapt attention from learners, to shut-down 🫠, simply because I introduced them to one word too many in a lesson.
Let me put it this way. Learners can get incomprehensible input anywhere, at any time, anyhow they like. In a learning setting, learners should be receiving 100% Comprehensible Input. Language Acquisition is a by-product of receiving comprehensible linguistic input in the target language⚡️.
It takes around 15,000 hours of receiving comprehensible input in their native tongue for a human to develop the basic mental representation of said tongue, and the communicative ability of a 7-year old. In case the number didn’t hit home, I said FIFTEEN THOUSAND HOURS 🗯. I also said SEVEN-YEAR OLD 👁🗨. What’s my point? Time is of the essence ⌛️ ⏳. To waste even one minute of learning time with incomprehensible input is doing a huge disservice to learners.
Constanza Ontaneda.
your own personal Language Acquisition Witch 😉
My question for you is:
❤️🔥 What is one of your Language Acquisition Horror Stories from the Crypt?
