Language Researcher: "Do not focus so much on language learning." | Dr. Jeff McQuillan

hey guys Lewis here and in today's conversation I actually talked with someone really interesting um a professor and researcher uh Dr Jeff mcquin and so we talked about a bunch of things namely um you know language learning strategies obviously uh research versus popular opinions when it comes to language learning uh and we talked about language acquisition uh is it different when you know it comes to Children versus adults we also talked about the role of comprehens ible input uh we talked a lot about this we talked about finding comprehensible input for language learning and the

challenge of this comprehensible material uh we talked a little bit about intentional learning as well and we talked um at the end a very interesting conversation on the role of AI in language learning and what would be sort of the best possible tool using AI for language learning I really like I really hope that you you will like this conversation um I have included uh all the takeaways if you don't have time to listen to the whole interview I have included uh the takeaways as uh you know uh like a a little summary of all

the takeaways on my website I'll put the link in the description I'm going to be doing this from now on so uh let's go to the interview all right and now we are recording all right so in today's video I have Dr Jeff mcquillin with me for an interview and I'm going to asked Jeff a bunch of questions related to language learning the goal is for everyone listening and myself to learn better more uh efficient strategies for learning languages so Jeff could you just start by introducing yourself uh sure uh well my name is Jeff

mcquillin as you said I live in Los Angeles I've been involved in language teaching um since [Music] 1987 uh when I first taught English in Mexico as a um as a recent college graduate um I uh became a Spanish teacher I taught at the high school level and then I taught at the college level uh I went back and got my uh Masters in PhD uh in the early 1990s I studied under Dr Steven crashing at the University of Southern California uh I went on to become a university professor and I did that mainly training

teachers how to teach students uh in second languages um my research interests um have sort of covered all different areas of language education uh from Reading first language reading reading for little children all the way up to bilingual education and foreign language education and second language education which is what we're going to talk about uh those kind of topics today um I've been I was an academic uh sort of full-time for several years and then uh in the uh early 2000s uh um I uh sort of broke off from Academia I continued to publish and

I publish articles and have done for the last uh 30 years um but now I'm I'm more of a entrepreneur uh I been involved in language education sort of as a profession um as a teaching profession uh I uh started the first language my colleague and I started the first English language teaching podcast back in 2005 before anybody had ever even heard of podcasting uh when we were number one language podcast for several years on iTunes across the world uh and that's sort of been my main focus uh eslpod.com was a website uh and podcast

that we started and now um we don't produce new podcasts but we um have our materials we produced something like U 2,000 episodes uh with English lessons that we then uh we now have sort of repackaged uh into uh our website uh so I'm kind of nowadays I'm I'm part-time academic I'm part-time entrepreneur um and uh I sort of do a little bit of a both of those things uh but my focus has always been on language education and that's and that's where I I uh I focus uh my attention so you mentioned that you've

been publishing for the past uh 30 years so you're also an entrepreneur in in the field so you get to to see both pers perspectives of uh you know the research and you know just normal people like like me so in your opinion what does the current research say about how people learn languages or people how people should learn languages and how does it compare to how average people think they should learn languages well that's a really good um uh question Lise uh there's always there are always popular opinions about um what language learning should

look like and we get those naturally from our own experiences especially in classrooms we we go to high school or grade school high school college we take uh language classes either voluntarily or are required to and our notion of what language acquisition is comes from those experiences naturally uh where else would you get those ideas we also get ideas from commercial programs from things that we see in the library from things that we see on the internet all of these sort of give us uh our our concept of what language learning should be and as

I think you're suggesting in your question that's not necessarily what the research tells us uh is the best way to acquire a new language um people tend to have a a idea about language learning that focuses a lot on for example studying a lot of grammar conscious a lot of conscious learning involved in grammar vocabulary or whatever the area is think thinking that um if they can just you know study things uh they'll be able to then become fluent in the language whereas the research over the past 50 60 years or so has shown us

that in fact most of our language competency most of our fluency comes not from this sort of conscious study but rather from an unconscious process what we call acquisition um we we in the field sometimes distinguish between these two of knowledge there's learning which is our conscious knowledge that's the knowledge we get when we study say a grammar rule from a textbook and then there's a much more important kind of knowledge which is our unconscious or implicit or subconscious if you will knowledge and that's the knowledge that we use most of the time that's the

knowledge we use without even thinking about it uh that's the knowledge that you get when you're a little baby and your mother and father or your caretakers speak to you well that's that's language not something that you're studying out of a book that's language that you're unconsciously or subconsciously acquiring and it's that unconscious or subconscious language it's that kind of knowledge that we're most interested in because that's the one that's the most useful so what we try to do as language researchers is is to the best we can by doing interviews like this and by

publishing is to to uh sort of nudge people push people in this direction that what you really want to focus on is not so much language learning not your conscious knowledge not your ability to to fill out a test and and score correctly on a grammar quiz but rather we want to push people towards getting their unconscious their acquisition of language uh at a more fluent level and those are two different processes and therefore there are two different sort of approaches to getting there so uh Is this different if you're if you're a child for

example I I think most people uh would agree that yes okay you you acquire the language you don't necessarily learn it you don't have to learn it you just you know listen to it from your parents and from school and then you acquire it but is it different for adults because my understanding is that well you know when I went to school and I had to learn English and I had to learn Spanish Spanish was a quite dismal failure but um I had to I had to study these languages and uh I think that even

when you're not in school I know that the the Foreign Service Institute for example there is you know a lot of deliberate study going on is this really necessary step or can you just acquire languages just like a child well there are two good questions there the first is is language acquisition fundamentally different for a child than it is for an adult and I think as uh one of the previous people that you interviewed Dr Bill Van Patton correctly points out the underlying process for language acquisition is the same for all human beings at whatever

age it doesn't matter if you're uh a child or an adult if you're a man or a woman if you have blonde hair blue hair or like me no hair uh all of us acquire languages the same way so the basic language acquisition device if you will that our brain we think is hardwired uh with that works the same way for everyone now that doesn't mean that the results are going to be the same for a child and for an adult not because our brain is different necessarily although there's some disagreement about certain features of

language which may be acquired easier such as pronunciation when you're a child versus an adult um I don't want to get into the the nitpicky details about that but the basic idea is that language acquisition is the same a children will often and typically will achieve higher levels of fluency in a second language say than adults that's not because of a biological reason necessarily that's primarily due to a couple of reasons one as Bill Van Patton pointed out in the previous in your previous interview children have hours and hours and hours and hours of exposure

to that language they are given huge amounts of time to acquire a language whereas adults s usually have much far fewer hours of exposure in any given language so the difference is in just the the amount of language exposure is huge also we have very low expectations for children right if a if a child can say a few words in in in in in a language a young parent is is absolutely thrilled right the first seven to 9 to 12 perhaps even 14 months a child doesn't say anything but that's not because a child is

an acquiring language the child is acquiring language during that entire period but we don't expect the child to start speaking where as adults we walk into a foreign language classroom or a French classroom or a Spanish classroom we expect ourselves to be speaking by the end of the first class right we have these unrealistic expectations of ourselves so there are psychological reasons but there are also simple simply reasons of time uh children tend to do better largely because of time not because there's any sort of underlying difference now um the other part of your question

um uh I've I've not forgotten what was I talked about um so the example was school or the the Foreign Service Institute where there's a lot of deliberate learning going on is this useful at all got right I'm sorry yes typically when adults try to acquire a second language they start with the learning part rather than the acquisition part typically uh classrooms are set up and textbooks are set up to to try to teach you consciously certain features of the language whether that be your vocabulary or syntax or morphology or whatever it happens to be

pronunciation and so forth is it necessary no it's not necessary to have a conscious knowledge of the language in order to acquire it in fact we think these systems are different and they don't even interact with each other in any direct way again there's some controversy about that but uh uh for the most part uh these are we we tend to think of these systems as developing separately implicitly and explicitly now is it it's not necessary although most adults because their their experiences with language learning have been so steeped in this tradition of studying things

consciously that most adults would be somewhat unsatisfied if they didn't feel like they were actually learning consciously certain things so as a teacher you might be in fact uh teaching certain conscious uh you teaching them rules about certain things because that that feels like language learning but your real agenda should be getting them more and more acquisition uh it's not necessary to go through conscious learning but most adults will insist upon it because it's simply part of what their own uh experience of language learning has been it would be wonderful however if our our education

system and if if if language learning material uh started introducing this new paradigm this new approach which would be to say hey it's not necessary to understand to to memorize these rules what you really need to do is to be able to understand language get what we call comprehensible input understandable language because that's going to be the key to to improving your fluency improving your acquisition and so yeah talking about comprehensible input assuming that one to say okay I don't I subscribe to what Jeff mcquillin says and I don't really necessarily need to do any

learning how would one go about doing this comprehensible input thing let me just say for the benefit of your audience that uh on my own website which is I have a couple of websites but the website that I have that that I that I use for my research if you will uh is uh backseat linguist dcom and you hopefully we can put that in your your show notes um and on my website I I have a couple of videos uh one of which is called fundamentals of second language acquisition which was a basically a lecture

I gave a group of um young uh es English as a foreign language teachers uh and on in that video it's it runs about an hour I kind of go through in more detail these these uh theoretical if you will aspects of what language acquisition is so I encourage those of you who are watching who are really interested in these uh topics to maybe take a look at that video but going back one of the one of the things we talk about in the video which is why I'm I'm referencing it here is this notion

of what is comprehensible input and how do you get it so it's it's a really core question that you're asking comprehensible input just to to give a brief definition is language that you can understand now that may seem a pretty obvious kind of concept right well of course language is understand but in fact if you're a beginner or an Intermediate Language acquirer there's a lot of language that you will encounter that you will not understand right if I'm trying to learn say Chinese and I turn on the television uh and I'm watching a Chinese language

broadcast well that's going to be almost 100% incomprehensible input right it's going to be basically noise I'm not going to be able to understand anything we think that that kind of input is not useful at all in language acis in other words noise incomprehensible language is not going to help you improve your language I could sit there and watch that Chinese language television program for hours and hours and hours and yeah I might pick up a little phrase here a little word there maybe maybe one of the people on screen holds up a coffee cup

and says cup and then you know I might pick up that one word but for the most part that's going to be a completely frustrating and useless experience in terms of my language acquisition what we instead want to get is language that we can mostly understand we may not understand it 100% but we can mostly understand what the person or or the uh is saying or what the book is that we're reading is saying that's the language that has potential to help us increase our language acquisition when we can get input when we can get

language and input is just another name for reading and listening right when we can read and listen to things that we understand we're going to start acquiring the language that's embedded in that input and that means the syntax the vocabulary the morphology the uh uh the semantics all the different aspects of language that are are are part of being a fluent speaker and a fluent listener in a language all of those are embedded if you will in the language we're listening and our brain only needs to hear that and see that in a way that

it can understand to be able to acquire it we don't have to do anything special all we have to do is find language that we can understand I say understand I I often say mostly understand because it's not necessary to understand 100% but if you can understand most of what is being directed at you in terms of input your brain will start acquiring it you don't have to do anything you just have to sit there enjoy it and understand it uh and and that's what comprehensible input is now how do we get comprehensible input well

that's um there used to be a a show on American television something like The $64,000 Question it was a quiz show of some sort back in the 1950s and some we sometimes use that as an expression That's The $64,000 Question okay how do you actually get comprehensible input well it depends on the where you are in your language acquisition Journey if you are a very beginner and you know no you don't know anything say of Chinese or of Japanese right right how are you going to get comprehensible input the only way you're going to get

comprehensible input in a language that you don't understand at all is by what we sometimes refer to as extr linguistic cues that is things outside of the language what am I talking about here I'm talking about gestures I'm talking about images I'm talking about photographs I'm talking about uh intonation of the voice there are things outside of the language itself that will help you understand language one of the most popular uh or a popular language uh teaching method back in the 1960s and 70s was something called total physical response I'm not sure if you're familiar

with this um Lis uh Total Physical response the entire method was based on the student watching the actions of the teacher the teacher would uh would stand up and would say in French or in the language of Spanish stand up and the kids would see stand up oh they they began to realize that that's what those words meant just like when you're uh perhaps uh reading to A little child and you have the picture book in front of the child and you're pointing at the at the elephant and you're pointing at the at the giraffe

the child begins to associate those things that that he or she is hearing with the image on the page that's how you make input comprehensible to a beginner you do it visually or you do it kinesthetically if you will by by gestures uh all of these things are ways of making the language comprehensible now eventually you're going to be able to understand language just by the language you have already you're going to be able to apply what you know to what you don't know that's really the definition of all education right you're taking things that

you know already and you're using those things you're leveraging those things if you will to figure out what you don't know so as you start moving up in your language quisition fluency you're going to be able to just listen to someone and use what you understand of them what they're saying to figure out what you don't understand what you're what they're saying so I may understand 90% of what you say and I use that 90% to try to figure out what the other 10% is that's what that's what that's the the mechanism if you will

of how we get comprehensible input we take what we know and we apply it to what we don't know so if I'm if I'm an Intermediate Language acquirer I may be able to start reading books that are written say for third or fourth graders in native language but they're simple enough for me to understand uh they also contain things I don't understand and I'm able to use what I understand to understand figure out what I don't understand so comprehensible input is a matter of I sometimes like to think of it as a matter of leveraging

what you know to figure out what you don't know and at the be very beginning level of course you don't know anything so that's why you need more and more visual uh or or what we call extra linguistic information in order to try to figure out what the language that's being spoken or the language that you're that you're reading so I don't know if that answers your question but I'm trying to give you sort of General parameters of what getting comprehensible input would look like yes and I I think you're touching on a on a

very important issue because is as a language learner myself I found that you know at a higher level of proficiency like for example you know with my English I can pretty much consume anything that I I find on the internet or anywhere and benefit from it if I meet an unknown word I'm usually able to guess it from the context and and so on but uh I always found it very hard at lower levels of proficiency beginner level lower intermediate even even intermediate uh get getting material that is comprehensible and interesting at the same time

this is a real Challenge and so I have it's a huge challenge oh yeah it's it's one of the biggest challenges in my opinion when learning a language yeah I want to talk more about artificial intelligence and language learning because I I'd have to admit that up to about 6 months ago I just thought that this whole chat GPT thing was uh was you know the hype train just uh some other uh you know Trend in in the language learning world but actually when I I really started taking a look at it seriously I I

realized you know you can generate comprehensible input at the right level but also and I think this is a huge problem because if you're learning you know one of the major languages there is comprehensible comprehensible input out there but yes it you have to look for it and also it's not always interesting to you right depending on what you're interested in and um I think I don't think that necessarily the input being interesting is a requirement for you to benefit from it but just because you need to spend so many hours reading and listening to

you know the language to become fluent I think it is important for it to be to be interesting otherwise you're you're just going to get bored so hypothetically let's say that you know I'm I'm a software developer um and I'd like to develop I mean to use my programming skills to you know use Ai and develop I don't know graded readers or maybe graded listeners and use this technology to create something that would really benefit language Learners what what would you make if you were me oh that's a great question um before I answer that

can I just touch on this issue of interesting and comprehensible because that's a really interesting point I I haven't talked normally when we talk when I talk about this I talk about comprehensible and interesting and I didn't really hit on the interesting part when I talked about comprehensible input previously um first of all you're absolutely correct if it's not interesting you're not going to continue with it you may benefit from it still but it's it's it's a matter of uh of being able to sustain it it's like a diet that that's that's good for you

but if it's so hard that you can't stay on your diet well then really it's not a very good diet right um uh and that's true for a lot of activities that if you're if you're in if you're doing exercises and you hate them well you're not going to probably do them for more than a couple of weeks and therefore H you you lose that consistency and consistency is really important in language acquisition getting that five 10 minutes even if it's 5 10 minutes a day that's going to make a difference cumulatively over time right

it's a matter of time we talked about that when we talked about children versus adults so you want to get as much time time as you can exposed being exposed to the language in a comprehensible way um Steph Steve crash and I had a little exchange on email a few months ago we talked about this issue because for people like Steve or people uh uh like like myself or or like you and probably like many of the people who are watch your videos we we sort of love this whole language acquisition thing right we we're

excited to learn a new language it's something that interests up maybe we're interested in language per se Beyond just the communicative uh uh possibilities of it um for People Like Us comprehensible input is often enough especially at the early stages for example when I was starting in on French and Italian if I could understand it I would be happy that was enough for me but there reached a point after about a c two or three months of say reading French reading this that was comprehensible input but it wasn't interesting it was kind of but you

know it was enough because I was excited because I could understand it right that was the sufficient high for me that was enough to give me that little dopamine hit okay but there came a point in my French and my Italian when comprehensible just wasn't enough it had to be interesting otherwise I was like I I just this is too boring I don't want to do that and one of the first things I did therefore when chat PT came online I was one of the first people I mean I went I got on there right

away as soon as the general general public could use it the very first prompt I put in was tell me a story in simple French of a tell me a mystery story in simple French based on a Agatha Christie novel um uh using no French using no more than the first 10,000 most commonly used words in French boom and it spit something out now it wasn't fascinating and chat GPT and the llm models are not really great still at producing fascinating fiction but but it was more interesting than other stuff I read or I would

say I'm a big non-fiction reader as I think you are too so I would say something like I'm reading I was reading something on the history of ancient Egypt tell me the history uh give me a brief overview of the Pharaohs of the Old Kingdom in Egypt there it was in simple French okay so so it immediately spit out stuff for me to to to to read the interesting part is really important and uh that's something that you can now do with something like you know chat GPT or one of the other llms okay getting

back to your question then what would what would you do as a programmer well Paul nation made a very good point in his interview and your interview with him um it's a point that I've made to people before as well which is we live in a world unfortunately in which there are two two circles there's one Circle over here that represents all of the programmers okay uh the people who have technical knowledge of new of of tech of of these new advances and then we have another Circle over here of people who know something about

language acquisition and unfortunately these two circles don't intersect okay this were a ven diagram right there's two circles and there's no intersection we have almost nobody working in the language acquisition field who also has the technical capability to do things like create a dualingo or uh you know a Rosetta Stone and so forth and unfortunately the result of that is is that everything that comes out in it doesn't matter what the new technology is it's the same old crap that used to be that you could find back in the 1950s pardon my French as we

say right uh it's the same old junk that you could have found back in the Foreign Service Institute exams from you know uh courses from from 1955 that's the real issue that we Face here the people my my sister used to work for 3M not for 3M I'm sorry my sister used to work for IBM uh and they had a they had a saying in her division a fool with a tool is still a fool just because you have a tool like AI if you don't know how to use it you're still a fool if

you if you don't know what language acquisition Theory tells us uh and and language acquisition uh uh uh methodology tells us is a good thing well then you're not going to be able to produce anything better than what we used to have you're just going to put it in a different format and I'm afraid that's exactly what will happen if you go to chat GPT right now and you type in I want to learn Spanish teach me give me some beginning Spanish lessons you know what it's going to give you my guess is here are

some grammar rules here are some words to memorize right it's going to give you the same junk what what we want you know someone like you to do is to jump in and say okay let's create a course where everything is comprehensible from the very beginning uh let as an entrepreneur I can tell you that the money to be made in the language learning Market here's a little here's a little secret for everything but English all of the money is at the bottom the language learning Market internationally is well I won't say internationally in the

United States the language learning Market is a pyramid okay everybody goes through Spanish one and two and almost nobody makes it to the top which means all of the language learning materials most of them are going to be found at this lower level if they exist at all if you could create a a course that was comprehensible from the very beginning using a ton of image generation which unfortunately chat GPT is not great at yet okay and if you've used chat GP or one of the other LMS you know what I'm talking about right you

tell it to you know you produce an image with a um with a man on an elephant and it'll produce an image with a man standing next to an elephant you say no put the man on top of the elephant and you'll produce another image with a man behind the elephant no put the bloody guy on top of the so it's very frustrating I I I do this all the time I produce a weekly uh um ESL uh newsletter for people who subscribe to our uh our services and who follow us um I'm you I

use a lot of images so I'm using chat GPT every day to produce images uh that relate to the content of whatever the lesson is that I have in my email um and it's a constant frustration uh but that's exactly what we would want we would want a course that is fully visual but has lots of comprehensible input that tells simple interesting stories they don't even have to be great stories but as long as they're mostly comprehensible and relatively interesting that would be a huge benefit um are you familiar with Rosetta Stone they're not as

popular now as J lingo but you know you know what they do right they have four four pictures duol lingual kind of stole their formatting in a way didn't they um they basically took a bunch of pictures and then it's it's they're constantly quizzing you which I find really annoying um you don't get better you don't get better by being quizzed necessarily you get better by getting good comprehensible input don't give me the bloody quiz just give me the comprehensible input Rosetta Stone was on to something but they didn't know what they had they instead

what they what they should have done is they should have taken photos and created a simple story and then created another simple story that built on the vocabulary the first story and then the third story that built on the vocabulary the first two stories right you could easily start covering those first you know 500 1,000 word families you use that as your sort of guiding principle and you but mostly the most important principle is you're writing interesting stories and you're making them comprehensive by the extra linguistic cues now of course as you move up into

the intermediate levels where you don't need as much visual right um again the pattern is already there go to a library or go go to a bookstore if there are still bookstores in the world I think there are go to a bookstore uh and look at the children's section and notice that the that the that the first books that you introduce to kids are are just picture books they're nothing but pictures and the parents are expected to go through and you know talk about the pictures and then the next level there are just a few

words on the bottom of the page and then the next level there's sentences at the bottom of the page and then at the next level you get up to the point where there's a one page of text and one page of image and then finally you get up to the level where there are no images because you have enough language to make sense of the language that you don't understand that that leverage principle that we talked about earlier in the interview um so my general recommendation and by the way I've been making this recommendation since

like 1998 okay I've been I used to go out and give talks to language teachers uh throughout the United States I probably talked to you know five 10,000 different teachers over a period of two or three years in the in the late 90s early 2000s uh and and I would end my talks every day talking precisely about this hey teachers if you really want to make a contribution to language acquisition here's what you need to do and I would explain it to them and everybody would nod and go oh yeah yeah that's a great idea

but nothing happens so so so I'm giving you the my best stuff here L I'm saying here's what here's what would really make a difference um the technology is already there and as you say it doesn't necessarily have to be reading you could just have listening or you could have uh you know both right you could have which I think would be ideal right you can read along as well as listen imagine having hundreds not just a couple we need hundreds and hundreds of interesting stories in beginning Japanese that you can listen to and follow

along with just like a kid would uh or just like you would on you know captions on the TV that you can follow along with and and and just enjoy listening and reading to those stories without having to do anything else if you could do that that would be a huge contribution to uh language acquisition at at the at the you know practical level I've been thinking about something similar in the past uh uh few weeks uh not necessarily with images but but my I've always liked uh graded readers but in languages other than English

there are some but then they're just not enough I mean it's just uh you can read all of them and you still need to read more if you want to be flu so yeah I think with AI could generate you know tons of reading material and personally I've been thinking about not necessarily fiction because I'm not really sure how good chat gbt is at generating fiction but non-fictions for example a series of books in Easy Japanese about I don't know life in Japan and uh you know how to live in Japan and stuff like that

with yeah images but so in terms of the images would you say that it it would need to be like uh a bunch of images or does it need to just be you know a few images two images per page or something that is not too frequent yeah I've experimented um with this idea myself um uh and fortunately I'm not a very good artist um but I don't think it needs to be complicated I don't think you need like a DC Comics uh Marvel Comics level kind of or Manga uh comic kind of um detail

in fact in some ways that's a disadvantage at the beginning level because it's distracting so if you're going to talk about um I kicked the ball you just want a person the kicking action and a ball if you have a table and a chair and a forest behind you or whatever that's just going to distract you uh as a as a person looking at that I'm thinking oh are they talking about the forest are they talking about the ball are they talking about the chair you want to keep it at the beginning level anyway very

I in my this is my instinct okay my instinct is it's not based on any sort of research but just based on sort of my Common Sense approach to would be keep it simple visually it only has to be the visual only has to be complicated enough to make the input that the person is listening to comprehensible that's it okay it just has to determine if we will the text you don't want to um you don't want to clutter it up with a lot of other stuff um it just has to be enough to make

it comprehensible yeah um in terms of the graded reader idea of course um I agree with you uh it it would there's there's lots room uh for development chat GPT doesn't do very well at fiction right now um it it can what I found in my experiments with it early on was that it was okay at doing what we would call pasti which is sort of um here's here's what I did I would give it a story that I knew was not in copyright protection in the United States so before 1920 I don't know four

five six whatever it is um so early say early Agatha Christi stories detective fiction which which I'm interested I kind of like fiction the detective fiction um and I would say uh use that story and just um simplify it make it easier or I would say um put it in a modern context uh and uh make this character male and this character Fe I I would I would sort of change up the details of it then it can do okay and then it can produce start producing dialogue which of course um is very useful because

you you also want to get that conversational language in there not just you know not just the descriptive l oh okay right so assuming that um in an Ideal World I were to generate these uh these books let's say for example you know graded reader of about uh let's say 300 pages of pure just language how many of these would someone need to to read and let's assume that um I also generate the audio for it using you know uh AI then uh someone would just read and listen to this all the time for many

hours a day how many of these graded readers would someone need to consume to really reach a let's say you know at least conversationally fluent level in in a language and I'm assuming here that uh it really depends on the language as well but uh in general it it does and and I I'm afraid I have to give the same answer that that that bill Van Patton gave which is that that it's it's really an impossible question to answer because we don't really know what we all we know really is what people have been able

to do in the past based on X number of hours in what was probably pretty lousy instructional um uh settings uh you know that I think the Foreign Service Institute or or one the Defense Language Institute or one of the US government um organizations came up with this chart of how many hours you would need maybe you're even familiar with this um and I forget it was and of course um it does make a difference uh whether you're you're a French speaker learning Spanish and you're a French speaker learning Japanese right two different things because

obviously Spanish is much more comprehensible to you by the way the reason it's easier to to acquire um is is is really because it's more comprehensible the language the the vocabulary is is more cognate um the grammatical structures are more cognate uh but but but the most important thing is it's more comprehensive so when I'm picking up French and Italian it's much easier for me than if I were to pick up uh you know even German although obviously the English helps with the German uh so um that's why I'm uh like Bill I'm I'm gonna

not be able to answer your question with a real answer um you know I would say uh you know you can kind of look at how well people do in in a traditional classroom after you know uh two semesters of a language um I don't know I know the I I know in the EU you guys have a um this ranking system uh with you know a12 and yeah don't claim to understand it I don't really know what those things are um we don't use them here but um we use something called the actal levels

okay the American Council of teaching foreign languages um and I think they they say that after a year or two of of Spanish you should be at sort of ACTA level you know two which is sort of low intermediate you know the things are all very imprecise um I would say you know it it's going to depend on a lot of things if you were getting pure comprehensible input however for I don't know 500 hours um so I don't know let's say you did it you know uh well if you did it 10 hours a

day theoretically you could in 50 days um you could probably be sort of at a lower intermediate level or upper Beginner level I I would imagine but that's but but again that's just sort of there's so many variables involved uh uh L said I it would be very difficult to sort of put a figure on it um I do think um that two things are true one um if you got a lot of pure comprehensible input it would you would go much faster than you would in a traditional program much faster okay two most people's

expectations are higher than the reality okay so so so even though you would go much faster a lot of people still think that well all if if I just studied another 20 hours I could be up here no it doesn't work that way the brain has its own its own timetable right uh and it's going to take time for the brain to acquire things here's something to think about the third person singular s in English I go he go she goes right you add an S to the end for third person singular that's an extremely

easy grammatical Construction we can teach that on day one of an ESL class there are people who have lived in the United States there you know for decades who when they're in conversation will still miss the third person singular s they'll still say he go to the store instead of he goes to the store that's because the language acquisition device has its own agenda and just because you get lots and lots of input doesn't mean you're necessarily going to acquire everything however I still would say you know in the optimistic side of things um if

you had good pure comprehensible input um you could make significant progress in say 500 to a th000 hours I mean I I'm I'm pretty sure even if it were in a language say going from French to Japanese the problem is that such a rare case the reason we don't really know is because we almost have we have almost no inst instances when somebody has been exposed to that level of quality input for a given amount of time that's the problem once you create this course Lise however then we can start researching this properly get on

it yeah but in terms of the format of this hypothetical course would it be because you're saying course so it would be as a not really a textbook but just a book or would it be an online resource what do you think I mean the formatting you know how you actually Market it and and package it um uh that that would depend you'd have to experiment with that it wouldn't be you know if if I were to do something like that it would almost certainly be a course uh that I would you know uh have

it as as as an online thing they maybe put it in an app it depends what the final product looked like and how how it would actually go by the way um 10% that's my cut okay please yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah he said no I tell we're record don't cut this out don't edit this out yeah definitely I mean this is this is something I've been thinking about doing anyway so good for you good for you yeah and also just for myself honestly uh get a lot of reading material and listening material in Japanese

and stuff like that yeah yeah absolutely okay Jeff well this uh this has been great I want to be respectful of your time and um do you have any uh last uh words in terms of where people can find you and find your material yeah U well for those of you and I suspect most of people who are interested watching the video are already either fluent English speakers or like yourself amazingly a good second language uh uh speakers um uh back seat linguist b a c k s c a t l i n GUI s

t.com uh is where you can find some of my research um I post there you know sort of whenever I do something which is sometimes four months can go by or six months can go by for it's it's really aimed at at my my fellow researchers and people like yourself who are interested in language um education issues um and there's all sorts of stuff on there including links to videos um uh my website my professional website uh I my colleague uh have a website called eslpod.com uh which uh is for people who are sort of

intermediate to Advanced language uh acquirers who are looking for written and audio materials that's where you can find um sort of my take on the Intermediate Language uh teaching World um and I want to thank you for the interview it's it's been it's been a blast uh maybe we can come back and do it again talk about some of these uh topics that we maybe didn't get time to today yeah definitely thank you Jeff all right thanks