The Mother of Stupid Claims

Well, one good thing I can say for Barry Farber (author of How to Learn Any Language Quickly, Easily, Inexpensively, Enjoyably, and on Your Own) is that he shares my skepticism--no, skepticism is too weak a word; my loathing--for one of the stupidest claims made by language schools and langauge instruction methods.

When a new diet appears on the market, the shills always seem to come out and tell you you'll shed 50 pounds in five days, or some similarly outrageous claim. Well, no diet known to humankind procudes that result. But the diet-peddlars go right on making it, not even stopping to think that losing so much weight so quickly isn't even likely to be healthy.

In the world of language learning, the equivalent claim is that Our Stupendous New Method will help you learn a new language just like learning your mother tongue! No language-learning system known to man lives up to this claim--even the ones that are the most audio-oriented--and similarly the notion that this is a good way to learn a language goes completely unexamined.

Why is learning another langauge just like your mother tongue a bad method of language learning? For starters, it takes a decade or more to achieve fluency in your native language. In fact, it takes two years for a child to know even 200 words in his or her mother tongue. Granted, a lot goes on cognitatively in those two years, but I think you grasp my point.

More to the point, adults trying to learn a second language are not children. They don't come into language learning with only a child's knowledge of the world. There's no good reason not to use a grown-up's existing knowledge to aid in second language acquisition. And while old-fashioned, grammar-centered approaches clearly don't work, there's no reason not to use an adult's knowledge of his own language's grammar, either.