Take high school language instruction for example. Often, it’s heavily grammar focused because people think that’s the way you should learn a language. Still, an avarage student is not able to string together a correct sentence after four(!) years of language study. Weird then that methods that don’t focus on grammar or just waaaay less, achieve better results.

The method DOES matter!

‘Keep the goal in mind; as long as you’re learning and not hating the process, you’re doing something right.’

So true. I wasted a lot of time researching to find the ‘perfect’ language learning method. Realising that it doesn’t exist was disappointing but freeing at the same time.

I also like Geoff’s comment about how some people seem to think how you learn a language is more important than whether or not you end up learning it.

I also find it humorous when someone says that they learned languages by doing X, and then someone else says that X simply won’t work… even though the first person can clearly speak a number of languages. Iversen at the HTLAL forums is a very good example of this. He swears by using word lists to learn masses of vocabulary, right at the start of learning a language. Many people look on this practice as a bad idea. And yet Iversen is one of the most accomplished language learners in the forum.

Unfortunately, ‘best’ is different for everybody and nobody seems to notice this. For me, that means tons of vocab up front and then reinforcement with actual media. For others, that means tons of actual media with some dictionary lookups as they need them.

I fully plan to switch to the ‘tons of media’ method once I have enough vocab, while others insist on it from the start.

Another problem is the perceived fluency from different methods. If you want to sound like a dictionary, learn from one. If you want to sound like a person, learn from one.

For me, I’m fine with sounding like a dictionary until I can actually have a real conversation, then I’ll start working on sound like a person.