Language learning can seem like an impossible task. There are hundreds of apps, tools, recommendations, methods. There are even, apparently, dozens of "the best method.
" How are you supposed to find time to learn when figuring all of this out is a full-time job? Or what do you do if you just don't want to do all that work? That sounds hard.
Isn't there a way you can learn where you just don't do anything? Well, actually, there is. It's what I affectionately call "the easiest possible language learning method.
" There are many different names for it: Automatic Language Growth, Comprehensible Input, The Natural Approach, etc. It's so easy, I can explain it in one sentence. "Watch videos that are easy enough that you understand basically everything until you're fluent.
" That's it. Literally just watching videos and understanding the language. Now, I'll spend the rest of this video explaining why and how.
First, why this works. Essentially, us humans are hardwired to pick up languages. It's sort of our thing.
100% of the entire world acquires their first language without being sure how to do it. That's a pretty promising number. And the reason why this method of "doing nothing" works is that we don't really lose that ability to acquire language without explicit instruction.
That isn't to say we can learn exactly like kids, because being an adult does get in our way a little. As a baby, we are totally blank slates that were just trying to learn how to interact with the world and to think thoughts. And so we had tons and tons of incentive to acquire our native languages.
We also had no responsibilities and worries, and that helped a lot. As an adult, we don't have as much internal need, but we do still have those mechanisms. We just need to give our brains enough material to work with.
[Spanish audio] I'll link some studies and papers down in the description if you want to do more reading on the academic side of things. But a lot of this was known back in the 80s. A great example is from a study about drilling grammar.
It was found that learners don't acquire languages one thing at a time. We don't learn past tense and then present tense and then future tense, regardless of our native language. Instead, we learn a little bit of this, a little bit of that, some this, add a little bit, whatever it is.
And that doesn't change whether you're learning in a classroom by doing drills or just by going out on your own. And so why waste time trying to explicitly study or learn things if it doesn't really change much? For many people, the reason to explicitly learn has a lot to do more with comfort and understanding.
They want to know what's happening and why something is like that, sooner rather than later. And so they study it. It's also faster in the short term since you can technically speak on Day 1 by reading off a piece of paper.
However, students who just absorb the language like a sponge quickly outpace the study years. People that go through the Draming Spanish "program," which is really just a whole bunch of videos, find that they can start speaking after about a 1000 hours of watching. And after about 1500 hours total, that also includes other YouTube and TV shows in Spanish, they start to sound really natural and fluid without studying grammar, pronunciation, or anything.
There's actually a bit of a community of people who make updates on their Spanish acquisition. So I'll put some links down to those stories in the description. That 1500 hours number holds true for other languages closely related to English.
But for a native English speaker to do that with a very distant language, it would take closer to 3000 or 3500 hours of watching and enjoying the language. Those numbers might sound huge. "3000 hours?
What? Are you crazy? " But if you think about it, it's not really that much.
Someone that's dedicated can do a thousand hours in a year. A normal person can do 500. And two to six years honestly sounds pretty good for achieving high level, natural sounding fluency, in a language.
And some people do it even faster. There are stories of people getting obsessed, or doing it for work, and reaching fluency in less than a year. There are two main problems with this style of learning, however.
One, it can be hard to stomach. And two, there isn't enough content for most languages. When I say that it can be hard to stomach, I mean that it's difficult to spend a lot of your free time just sitting there and focusing on a language that you don't yet speak.
It can be frustrating not understanding, and annoying that you don't really "know" any words. There's a lot of reasons people get frustrated and quit or don't even start. There are ways around that, but this video is truly about the simplest language learning method.
Just sit there. If you want to get a taste of what it's like, Jan Telakoman made a series of videos to show people what it's like to acquire a language in this way. The trick is that he did it with a fake language that only has 120 words.
And so you can mimic the process of acquiring a real language in just over 10 hours over the course of a month. If you're at all interested in this style of learning, try it out, and you'll experience firsthand what it's like. I'll put the link in the description, but you can also search it.
It's called "o pilin e toki pona. " And the second problem is that there isn't enough content out there for pretty much all the languages. Spanish and Thai are the two that definitely have enough content.
Korean and Japanese are both getting there. And some people have also had good success with French, Russian, Norwegian, and sometimes Mandarin. But that's not a very long list.
But as more people learn about the effectiveness of this style, I'm sure more and more people will make content for their native languages. And one day, you'll be able to do this with any language out there. Well, I hope you enjoyed this video and learned a little something new.
And for those of you interested in trying this out, go for it. You won't regret the decision. And let me know down in the comments.
Are you learning like this or do you plan to try? Are there any languages that I should have included on my list? Thank you so much for watching and have a great rest of your day.
I'll see you in the next video. And until then, happy immersing. Hey, as you know, there's a lot of language learning advice out there, which can make it kind of overwhelming and difficult to actually get going on your own learning.
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