As Roddy points out, fourteen years of “instruction” — efforts from the outside to inject skill and knowledge — resulted in almost no change in Roddy’s ability to read, write, or speak Irish.

That’s not to say no one could learn in such a system, just to point out the vital importance of the learner’s goals (or lack of them).

The linguist Geoffrey Pullum made a point about language preservation that’s pertinent here:

…there must be little kids who speak the language with each other because it is their only language or else their favorite. Little kids who would speak it even if they were told not to…

If someone wants to learn a language, then he has to choose to spend time on that language. He’ll make that choice because of what he values, whether the value is a passing grade, or a promotion, or enhanced travel, or the chance to date someone who speaks that language. And he’ll value language instruction to the extent it helps him achieve what he values.

The rest is commentary.

When I learned German in school, the real goal was to teach English grammar — by studying a new language from the outside, we were supposed to learn to take a more anlaytical look at our own language. (of course there were other reasons: to foster international understanding, etc., but giving an analytical view of grammar was probably most important)

When you learned Irish, the motives were (I imagine) different — to “save” the language, preserve the national culture, etc. But then it sounds like they taught the language with emphasis the other way around. I can’t imagine why. Did they re-train ex-Latin-teachers to teach Irish?

The analytical teaching style worked okay at the high school level, especially for the kind of kids who took German in a place where Spanish would be 100 times more useful. But I can see why it wouldn’t work as well for younger kids, and when you’re trying to get through to _all_ the kids, not just the most academic ones.

Look for it under the heading “Using iPods and iTunes for Language Education.”

Warren Ediger

Appreciate all the other points - there are some gems here.

Ken Carroll

I initially started learning Chinese a little less than a year ago. I initially got a private tutor – a very nice and knowledgeable Chinese woman who had taught Mandarin in Guangdong. It lasted only a few months until we totally frustrated each other. She wanted to do immersion – I was drowning. I totally frustrated her when I didn’t get all of my homework done (ref. full time job, home, and family). Meanwhile I found ChinesePod. Its brief dips, dunks, or splashes of immersion from native speakers in high use terminology are short enough to not drown (and lose interest), useful and current enough to use in everyday speech, and flexible to be fit in on a busy schedule. This is definitely the best experience I have had learning a foreign language. It is also more than just the fact that Mandarin doesn’t conjugate verbs, decline nouns, and change the ending on every other word in the sentence to match the gender and number of everything else – I did try another method of learning Chinese first. ChinesePod is useful. It is repetitious without grammar drills. …and it’s just plain fun!

Oh yeah, I almost forgot that ChinesePod also includes written Chinese, too! Many of the spoken courses do not even begin to address this aspect. (…and I won’t start on the lack of utility of the “How to Write Chinese” books that I’ve got in a dusty heap in the corner.)

I would say that this is a bit more than just Language 2.0. It is like going from DOS to Windows; it is a revolutionary change in the basic working mechanisms for the end user, not just a new version of the old approach.