The Language School That Teaches Adults like Babies

Summary

The video delves into J. Marvin Brown's revolutionary approach to language learning, challenging traditional methods by emulating infant language acquisition. By providing thousands of hours of comprehensible input without focused grammar or vocabulary study, Brown demonstrated that adults could achieve fluency similarly to infants. His experiments led to the development of the Automatic Language Growth (ALG) methodology, which capitalized on natural language acquisition processes rather than forced learning. Despite initial skepticism and challenges, Brown's work greatly impacted language teaching approaches, emphasizing that conscious language analysis could hinder natural learning.

Highlights

• J. Marvin Brown experimented with teaching adults languages like infants, with great success. 🚀
• His method, ALG, prioritized natural input and discouraged conscious language analysis. 🎯
• Students who followed his method reached remarkable Thai proficiency, some exceeding Brown's own skills! 🏆
• Brown realized that conscious language processing could hinder natural learning processes. ⚠️
• The legacy of his work highlights adults' potential for language learning akin to kids, minus traditional methods. 🌍

Key Takeaways

• J. Marvin Brown revolutionized language learning by mimicking infant acquisition methods. 🤔
• Brown's method, ALG, focused on natural, comprehensible input over forced grammar and vocabulary study. 📚
• Despite criticism, Brown's students achieved high levels of fluency, challenging traditional learning techniques. 🌟
• The method illustrates that the conscious analysis of language can interfere with natural language acquisition. 🧠
• Brown's work suggests adults retain the ability to learn languages like infants if uninhibited by analytical skills. 👶

Overview

J. Marvin Brown's innovative approach turned language learning on its head by mimicking the way babies naturally pick up languages. His journey, starting in the 1980s, was sparked by his dissatisfaction with traditional language teaching methods that overemphasized grammar and vocabulary drills, which often produced students who struggled to communicate naturally.

Brown introduced the Automatic Language Growth (ALG) program, a bold hypothesis that adults could achieve high levels of fluency through abundant exposure to comprehensible input alone. His method proved successful, especially for those who avoided early speech and resisted the urge to analyze language analytically, allowing their subconscious to take the reins.

The video celebrates Brown as a pioneer who showed that the key to language fluency lies more in exposure and less in rote memorization or forced usage. His surprising findings highlight an inherent ability in adults to learn like children if they set aside analytical skills, suggesting a future where language acquisition is more playful and natural.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction of J Marvin Brown's Experiment The chapter discusses an experiment by J Marvin Brown conducted in the 1980s that investigated teaching adults a new language in the same way infants learn languages, without formal grammar or vocabulary instruction, just through comprehensible input. The results significantly influenced thoughts on language learning.
• 01:00 - 02:31: Early Life and Learning Experiences James Marvin Brown was born in 1925 in Salt Lake City, Utah. He had a lifelong fascination with languages, which led him to study seven different languages at University, alongside general Linguistics studies. He studied six of these languages using traditional language teaching methods.
• 02:31 - 07:00: Brown's Experiment with the Army Method The chapter titled 'Brown's Experiment with the Army Method' describes the traditional grammar translation method used for teaching languages focusing on memorization of grammar and vocabulary with exercises in translation between the target language and the native language. The method emphasizes reading and writing over speaking and listening, resulting in limited real-world communication skills. Brown is said to have learned the first six languages at university using this outdated approach.
• 07:00 - 17:00: Transition to Natural Approach The chapter titled 'Transition to Natural Approach' discusses the introduction of the Army method, also known as the audiolingual method, for language learning. This method was developed by linguists hired by the US government to enhance communication abilities among soldiers in foreign languages, with a particular focus on speaking and listening rather than reading and writing. It represents a shift from traditional language teaching methods.
• 17:00 - 24:30: Creating a Comprehensible Input Classroom The chapter discusses the transition from traditional language learning methods, which emphasized exercises and drills, to a newer method known as the 'Army method.' This approach was suggested to Brown by his Thai teacher, who was one of the original creators. The key advice was, in addition to practicing vocabulary and grammar, to prioritize pronunciation to improve language skills.
• 24:30 - 34:10: Outcomes and Observations The chapter 'Outcomes and Observations' discusses the dedication required to learn the Thai language effectively. It narrates the story of an individual who decided to first master the Thai pronunciation using a phonograph, a method that involved repetitive listening and practicing with Thai expressions pronounced by native speakers. The chapter suggests immersive learning as a method to eventually achieve fluency, highlighting a plan to live in Thailand for a year after mastering basic pronunciation to become proficient.
• 34:10 - 42:00: Refining the Method and Discoveries The chapter discusses an individual's method for mastering the pronunciation of Thai over the course of a year. The person mimicked sentences from recordings repeatedly until achieving near-native pronunciation. Despite this success in pronunciation, the individual still lacked a comprehensive understanding of the language. To further his learning, he lived in Thailand, realizing that while pronunciation was strong, there were still challenges due to limited language skills in other areas.
• 42:00 - 51:00: Brown's Conclusions on Language Acquisition The chapter discusses Brown's personal challenges in acquiring the Thai language. Despite being able to construct grammatically correct sentences, Brown struggled with comprehension and real-time communication. This inability to understand and respond effectively rendered him unable to engage with native speakers, thus affecting his social interactions and immersion into the local environment. Consequently, Brown resorted to staying indoors, dedicating his time to reading Thai literature, studying newspapers, and repeatedly listening to recorded Thai conversations.
• 51:00 - 53:00: Brown's Legacy and Autobiography The chapter titled 'Brown's Legacy and Autobiography' discusses Brown's experiences with immersing himself in the Thai language and culture. Initially, he undertook self-study in Thailand for a year, which helped him pick up the language progressively. Over the years, Brown alternated between living in Thailand, engaging in Thai linguistics research in the field, and teaching Thai courses at universities in America. His ongoing interactions and experiences in Thailand improved his proficiency in the language significantly.

The Language School That Teaches Adults like Babies Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 what if you took an adult and tried to teach them an entire language completely from scratch in The Identical way that infants learn languages so we're talking we're just going to sit them down and you're going to give them comprehensible input in the language for thousands of hours without teaching them any grammar any vocab or anything about the pronunciation of the language what would happen J Marvin Brown actually ran this experiment on a pretty large scale in the 1980s and the results that he found through running this experiment single-handedly changed the way that I think about language learning and a pretty sign ific way so this is the
• 00:30 - 01:00 story of J Marvin Brown and how he ended up running probably the most crazy language learning experiment of all time so James Marvin Brown was born in 1925 in Salt Lake City Utah and he was always fascinated by languages so when he went to University he studied seven different languages in addition to just studying Linguistics in general and for six of the seven languages he studied it in the way that languages had traditionally been taught up until that point and this was the method called the
• 01:00 - 01:30 grammar translation method so this is uh in this method of teaching languages basically you just sit down you memorize lots of grammar and vocabulary and then you just translate on paper back and forth between your target language and the native language so it pretty much has no emphasis on speaking or listening it's all just reading and writing and as you can imagine people who use this method generally didn't actually get very good at communicating in the language that they were studying so Brown studied the first six languages that he learned at University using this kind of old method that wasn't really
• 01:30 - 02:00 effective at all but then for the seventh language which was Tai he used this brand new method that had just dropped at the time called the Army method so this Army method which was also known as the audiolingual method had come about through the US government hiring linguists to come up with a brand new way of teaching languages that would actually help soldiers get up to speed in communication ability in in foreign languages so that then they could send these soldiers to the field and they would actually be able to communicate and things like that instead of focusing on reading and writing it had a strong emphasis on speaking and listening and
• 02:00 - 02:30 it was really all about exercises and drills and just trying to grind out practicing the language in order to build communication ability so Brown's Thai teacher at University was one of the original creators of this new Army method and she was like yo you should use this new method and you'll get really good at Tai and he's like okay cool sounds good what should I do and what the teacher told him to do is in addition to doing all these drills and exercises to you know learn the vocabulary and grammar of Tai he should really focus on pronunciation as his number one priority and and just grind
• 02:30 - 03:00 out the ability to pronounce Thai correctly for a year and then after that go to Thailand just live immersed in in the people and language of Thailand for a year and that should be enough to learn the language so he was like okay cool makes sense to me and he got to work grinding so he started learning Thai in 1953 so he was actually practicing Thai pronunciation using a phonograph so he had one record of different Thai Expressions getting pronounced by native speakers and he would sit with this giant phonograph and just rewind it over over and over to
• 03:00 - 03:30 hear you know one sentence getting spoken in thae and then he'd mimic it and try to sound as close to the recording interwine and listen to it again he'd imitate it again and he basically just did this over and over every day for a whole year until he got to the point where he could basically perfectly pronounce Tai and sound almost as good as a native speaker even though he still didn't have a great grasp of any other aspect of the language so he did that for a whole year and then he actually went and lived in Thailand now what he found when he arrived in Thailand was that although he did have good pronunciation and he could you know
• 03:30 - 04:00 say a sentence that he prepared and people would think he was totally fluent he basically couldn't understand anything anyone was saying and it took him way too long to kind of form sentences in his head through you know thinking about the grammar and and things like that so he couldn't really communicate with Tha people or make friends or really immerse himself out in the in the wild and so we ended up kind of just staying at home in his room and reading lots of Thai novels and studying Thai newspapers and listening to Thai conversations he had recorded on a tape recorder over and over again yeah I just thing this is kind of funny cuz
• 04:00 - 04:30 basically that's exactly what happened to me when I went to Japan in high school so it definitely can relate here but anyway after he kind of grinded out self-study in Thailand for a year he finally started to pick up enough of the language that he could get a little more immersed and he spent the next bunch of years kind of going back and forth between a living in Thailand and doing kind of tha research on Thai Linguistics out in the field and then being in universities back in America and kind of teaching Thai classes and things like that and as he spent more years living in Thailand and interacting with Thai people his tie did get better and better until he eventually reached a pretty
• 04:30 - 05:00 Kick-Ass level of tha ability and you can imagine at the time the number of foreigners living in Thailand was already very very small and he was one of the only ones that could actually speak fully fluent Thai with almost perfect pronunciation at a very high level so he kind of talks about you know getting treated like a king for being this super rare specimen of being a foreigner with amazing tie in 1962 at the age of 37 years old brown finally finishes his dissertation on tha Linguistics graduates from Cornell University with a PhD and moves to
• 05:00 - 05:30 Thailand permanently when he arrives in Thailand he gets a job at the AUA Language Center which stands for the American University alumni Language Center and this was basically the most prestigious Language School in Thailand at the time so it taught English to Thai people and it also taught the Thai language to foreigners living in Thailand and because he had all these different accolades to his name right he had a PhD in Tha Linguistics from one of the most prestigious universities when it came to istics in the whole world and
• 05:30 - 06:00 he was probably the best Foreigner in the Thai language when he went to AA the people there basically gave him full control over the whole curriculum so he could do whatever he want when it came to teaching the students and brown was very passionate about making the best curriculum possible and actually getting all of his students to become fluent in their target languages right cuz he had done some language teaching back in American universities cuz he was kind of forced to as a PhD student but back then it was all about just making sure the kids passed tests and got good grades
• 06:00 - 06:30 and no one really cared if they actually were mastering their target languages or not and he thought that that was a bunch of bow and he was sick of all that so he really wanted to actually get results for his students and the way that he thought about it was he used the Army method to learn Tai and now he was completely Kick-Ass at Tai so the Army method was the obvious way to go so we completely changed the whole curriculum for both teaching Tai and teaching English and he built it around this Army method style of having tons of drills and exercises and this kind of drill
• 06:30 - 07:00 sergeant style of practicing the language now the weird thing was although the students that were attending the classes would get better and better at performing these drills that didn't really seem to carry over to actual language ability so they'd be in class and they'd be able to do these grammar drills and and produced the target language with perfect grammar they do these pronunciation exercises and have very natural pronunciation but then when they'd go to Just spontaneously speak the language of the native speaker they'd still break all the most common grammar rules and would still have a really thick foreign accent but Brown did not give up easily he knew
• 07:00 - 07:30 that the Army method worked for him and so he was determined to find a way to make it work for his students so for 18 years straight he wrote and rewrote and rewrote the entire curriculum of his classes trying to find a way to get the Army method to work for his students he really wanted to produce fluent speakers of the language but no matter what he did it just didn't seem to work his students never really reached a significantly high level in their target languages now alongside this these this
• 07:30 - 08:00 18 years of of just banging his head against the wall trying to to find something that works for his students his tie was getting better and better and better and by the late 1960s he had what apparently many people described as a legendary level of thae ability where people regularly confused him as a native speaker on the phone and he was getting called to give talks in tie to Native Thai speaker language teachers and these native speakers would often say that his tie was even better than theirs
• 08:00 - 08:30 so again the Army method seemed to work for him he had achieved this you know near native level of tie ability yet for whatever reason it didn't work for his students So eventually he kind of got burnt out and he decided to learn a new language from scratch cuz he realized that although he still really believed in the power of the army method he had never used the Army method alone to master a language to fluency from scratch right cuz for the Thai language he used the Army method but then he actually lived in Thailand and he learned a lot through immersion so in
• 08:30 - 09:00 1983 at the age of 58 Brown decided to go back to America and start studying Japanese in order to prove once and for all that you can use the Army method to go from zero to fluent in a language so he went back to his hometown in Utah started going to the local University there and he took Japanese classes and grinded his ass off practicing for hours every single day and he didn't get very good at Japanese but despite this because he had so much experience teaching languages and because he was at
• 09:00 - 09:30 least performing very well in the Japanese classes you know getting good grades and things like this he started to become a kind of teaching assistant to the Japanese classes that were taught there where he would design the curriculum and work with a native speaker to teach people Japanese and after his first term where he designed all of these exercises and drills to help people you know really Master the content uh the student appraisals came in so you know how at University you take classes and then at the end the school asks you to kind of fill out feedback on what you liked about the
• 09:30 - 10:00 class and what you thought of the teacher and stuff so they can improve the curriculum so he taught his first Japanese class at this University and then he got the student appraisals and he was expecting them to be really good cuz he thought that he had taught a kick-ass class but it turned out that all the students completely hated him and hated his class and to Brown this was a huge shock and it was kind of the straw that broke the camels back and he really just felt like giving up on everything right he had this dream of helping students reach fluency in a language and it just felt felt like after literally Decades of bang his head
• 10:00 - 10:30 against the wall nothing worked and he really just hit rock bottom so he writes in his autobiography that he literally cried himself to sleep that night that he got back the student appraisals now the very next day after Brown cried himself to sleep he went to visit his friend and colleague Adrien Palmer and Adrien hands him a book which had just been released at the time and this book was the natural approach by Steven crashion and Terry ter
• 10:30 - 11:00 now the interesting thing was this was not Brown's first exposure to crashion Brown had actually read one of crash's earlier books a few years prior but he didn't really take it seriously and kind of just wrote the whole thing off because you know to him he already knew how to learn a language right it was the Army method but now after finally hitting rock bottom and truly giving up he was finally ready to consider entirely new possibilities so he read Steven crash's book with a open mind and to him it was a sudden conversion we have two very different ways of going
• 11:00 - 11:30 about the job of getting better in another language you can acquire language you can learn language and they're very different acquisition I've described as a subconscious process very different from acquisition is what we call learning that's what most of us did in school learning is knowing about language conscious knowledge of language the important role is with acquisition acquisition gives us fluency and accuracy I think we all acquire
• 11:30 - 12:00 language in exactly the same way the way we acquire language is amazingly simple we acquire language when we understand messages when people speak to us in another language and we understand what they say language acquisition will take place in fact language acquisition takes place necessarily it's unavoidable you can't help it given
• 12:00 - 12:30 messages people understand what we call comprehensible input the language acquisition device goes to work it happens subconsciously automatically and inevitably Brown had this huge Epiphany that the main reason he had got so Godly at Tai was not because he' used the Army method but because he had got insane amounts of comprehensible input you see brown had this habit for over a decade
• 12:30 - 13:00 where pretty much every single night he'd go to these thae pubs where you could basically pay to have hot tie girls just hang out with you and he would go there literally every single night and listen to hot thae girls just talk to each other in tie for multiple hours every single night for over a decade so at the time he didn't think of this as you know getting input or learning the language or anything like that to him it was just a stupid way of blowing steam but he realized that it was just that blowing steam that actually probably contributed more than
• 13:00 - 13:30 anything to him having such a high level of natural tie ability so Brown was now a 100% crashing convert in fact he was almost more crashing than crashion himself he wanted to take crash's core theories on how people acquire languages and he wanted to put them into a classroom setting where they would really be tested to their limits and applied in their 100% full Glory so the next term at this University that he was at at Utah he started a natural approach Thai class where he taught people the
• 13:30 - 14:00 Thai language 100% through comprehensible input now at the beginning the classes didn't go well at all because when you try to do this type of class where you're only teaching purely through comprehensible input you're immediately faced with this extremely difficult issue of how do you generate input that is both comprehensible and engaging to people that literally don't understand a single word of the language right so he was trying lots of different things he said he was staying up all night trying to brainstorm different ideas of activities
• 14:00 - 14:30 he could fill the class with and he was doing things like trying to give the students commands or orders and then have them follow the orders some stuff kind of worked most things didn't work but one day he had a huge breakthrough when he brought his wife to class so remember he was in America at this point teaching people the Thai language and he was doing all the speaking himself right cuz he didn't there were he was the only one that spoke Tha so he started to get worried that his students might be thinking that they weren't getting real tie because the only tie they're hearing
• 14:30 - 15:00 is from a foreigner so one day he brought his thae wife into class cuz he had married a thae woman in Thailand many years before and he did this just so that you know he could show the students him and his wife speaking with each other and then the students would realize that his tie sounds exactly like hers and this was just kind of a way of flexing to his students that his tie was basically native level but what he realized was when it was him and his wife and now you had two speakers of the language and they were engaging with each other that made it way easier to create this engaging comprehensible
• 15:00 - 15:30 input and it opened up way more possibilities so this ended up being a huge breakthrough right even crash in himself most of the the way that he came up with how to create comprehensible input basically had to do with somebody standing at one teacher standing at the front of the class and just talking into a void basically but what brown realized was most language use happens for communication right in order to communicate you need two people going back and forth and so when he had two different people they could interact with each other they could have fights with each other they could help each other out they could uh act out whole
• 15:30 - 16:00 scenarios using different props and things like this and this really opened up a whole world of possibility when it came to creating this comprehensible and engaging input even for people that were complete beginners in the language so Brown ended up running this natural approach tie class for a few terms at this University in America and overall it went really well you know like I was saying it was still pretty bumpy and there were a lot of rough edges but overall the students actually really en enjoyed the class and they seemed to be getting better and better at
• 16:00 - 16:30 understanding Tai even though all they were doing was getting comprehensible input so Brown ended up accepting an offer to move back to Thailand and go back to teaching at AUA the school which he had taught at for 18 years previously but this time he was only going to develop this class that teaches 100% through comprehensible input and this class ended up going on to be called ALG or automatic language growth so like I was saying before Brown had gotone from one extreme ex to the opposite extreme
• 16:30 - 17:00 and he was now a hardcore believer in crashing theories which said that we don't acquire language through speaking the language we only acquire the language through getting input and anytime that we're speaking the language we're simply using what we've already Acquired and we're not learning anything new if you want to improve your English it will not help you to speak English to yourself as you drive to work in the morning in your car the ability to speak a language is a result of getting language acquisition uh not its cause so Brown now had this hypothesis that if
• 17:00 - 17:30 crashing was correct once someone had a sufficient critical mass of input in their target language they should start being able to naturally speak spontaneously speech should just emerge as crashion said and so he really wanted to put this hypothesis to the test so he made a rule in his ALG classes that students were not allowed to speak until they've had 500 hours of classroom input now unfortunately most students didn't follow this Rule and they just spoke
• 17:30 - 18:00 right from the beginning anyway it's kind of understandable why this is because most people who are learning a foreign language as an adult speaking is kind of what it's all about right it's kind of the goal we all have in mind we all are really excited to speak we want to go and talk to native speakers and we have this very deep rooted idea that the only way to get good at speaking is through speaking so it was very hard to convince students that it was actually in their best interest to wait um plus you know they were living in Thailand this whole school is in Thailand so it was probably pretty impractical to try to completely avoid speaking anyway so
• 18:00 - 18:30 unfortunately most of the students did just start speaking the language from the beginning but there were some students who followed the rules and actually completely waited to speak the language so basically what happened was brown hired more and more teachers and he trained these teachers and they over time they got better and better at coming up with ways to make engaging comprehensible input they experimented with different things they discovered more and more techniques that work really well they just kind of got really Adept at it the classes always consisted of two native thae speakers standing at the front of the classroom and
• 18:30 - 19:00 interacting with each other and directly interacting with all of the students that were sitting in the classroom and listening but a key component was that when the students did have to speak something back they would never speak Thai they would just speak back in English or respond back with hand gestures or face gestures and things like this cuz again Brown had forbid people from speaking early and he didn't want people to be forcing early output now the students would go to these classes for 5 hours a day for 5 days a week and so obviously they were racking
• 19:00 - 19:30 up these hours of input very quickly and it was kind of a full-time commitment from the students but what ended up happening was that the comprehension ability of the students right from the beginning grew very rapidly they got better and better at understanding Tai but the real question for brown was would speech eventually emerg naturally right like of course they were the people that were that ignored his instructions and were forcing early output from the beginning but for those people that actually followed the instructions and they didn't output for the first 500 Plus hours would eventually they just open their mouth and T would start coming out and the
• 19:30 - 20:00 answer was yes hey guys sorry to interrupt the story but I have to give a quick plug for my online community called immersion Dojo so at immersion Dojo every week we do a live Workshop where I hear from you answer any questions you have help you work through any sticking points in your language learning and also talk about a lot of my new ideas and recommendations regarding language learning so in these last couple years I've learned a lot more about language learning that I didn't used to know a lot of which has been informed by ALG and J Marvin Brown's thinking so I have a whole new series of recommendations regarding what the best
• 20:00 - 20:30 way to learn a new language is I'm eventually going to turn those all into nicely edited videos that you can watch for free on my channel but that's going to take a while so for now I kind of have a quick and dirty version on the immersion dojo for all the community members and right now we have a really cool Community going where we have really passionate language Learners sharing resources and trying out these new techniques and getting really exciting results so if that sounds interesting to you definitely check it out would love to have you it's $1 a month and without further Ado let's get back to the story once the first cohort of Al students reached around 500 hours
• 20:30 - 21:00 of classroom comprehensible input at first it was the southeast Asians that kind of spontaneously started speaking the language at first one and then a little bit later another student and then a little later another student and after a certain amount of time a significant portion of the students that had waited to Output started Naturally Speaking Tai now they weren't perfect right off the bat although they had very very clear pronunciation and the mistakes that they were making were not the typical mistakes that that foreign speakers of Thai normally make they kind
• 21:00 - 21:30 of resembled more the the mistakes that infants make when they first start speaking Thai as their native language and what happened was as those students continued to get even more input and continue to practice speaking the language their output would get more and more accurate and they would make less and less mistakes over time even without Ever Getting explicitly corrected on the mistakes that they were making so at first it was the southeast Asians who started Naturally Speaking after around 500 hours and then once that original cohort reached around 900 hours of comprehensiv input then some of the westerners and Japanese speakers started
• 21:30 - 22:00 to join in as well so unsurprisingly people whose native language was farther away from Tai needed more hours of input to get to that same point but eventually even the westerners whose native language was extremely far removed from Tai they also started organically speaking once they had 900 hours of classroom comprehensible input now like I said a second ago the way that the ALG classes were structured was that you had 5 hours a day of classroom comprehens ible input for 5 days a week and the
• 22:00 - 22:30 entire ALG program ended up being 18 months long so over the course of 18 months you would end up getting a total of 1,800 hours of classroom input and what would happen was for the Western students I'll just talk about westerners and kind of leave out the the southeast Asians just to kind of simplify the conversation but what happen on average for the westerners who actually followed the instructions and didn't force speaking early was that after around 900 hours they would start spontaneously speaking but that was only halfway through the program so they'd continue
• 22:30 - 23:00 to get 5 hours a day 5 days a week of this comprehensible input and they'd start speaking more and more and the quality of their output along with their comprehension would continue to grow more and more and once they' hit that 18 month Mark or 1,800 hours of comprehensible input they would be full-blown fluent in tie so Brown did it he proved crash in's hypothesis that it's possible to become fluent in a foreign language even as an adult even if you're only learning 100 % through comprehensible input but that's not even
• 23:00 - 23:30 the most impressive thing the most impressive thing is what happened to the students after they would graduate from the ALG program so Brown started having students that would go to the ALG program for a year a year and a half reach Basin fluency and Thai and then they'd go on and just live their lives in Tha and in just a few years the students would go on to actually be better at the Thai language than brown was himself and remember Brown had a so-called legendary level of TI ability so Brown mentions one student in particular named David long who went to
• 23:30 - 24:00 ALG for just one year of full-time classes and then after that went to just live his life in Thailand for about 4 years and he was a big fan of the program so he'd often come by to just check in with brown and kind of report how his life was going and after around one full year of ALG classes followed by four years of just living his life casually in Thailand without doing anything in particular to actively improve his thae ability David long ended up being better at Tai than brown was and this was under Brown's own
• 24:00 - 24:30 admission so Brown's ALG program was able to produce near native level tie speakers purely through comprehensible input without having to go through any grind work uh any memorization any practice or anything like this people would just show up to the classes the classes apparently were actually really fun CU you're just watching native speakers basically do skits and interact with you and then you just go live your life in Thailand and pick things up through natural immersion like native speakers do and then you end up with a near native level of ability so if this
• 24:30 - 25:00 story is true then in my opinion it's the most profound thing that has ever happened in the world of second language acquisition but the thing is the story doesn't end there in fact it's what I'm about to talk about next that had the biggest influence on my own ideas related to language acquisition so although ALG was able to produce some near native level speakers of Thai purely through comprehensible input this was only a relatively small minority of the ALG students most of the ALG students never went on to get very good at tie so of course Brown got to work
• 25:00 - 25:30 trying to analyze what's the difference between the students that get these incredible results and the students that get relatively crummy results well the first thing that he noticed that was really obvious was the students that spoke early and broke his rule about waiting to speak pretty much never went on to sound that good so like I said before no matter how hard Brown tried he was never very successful at getting the majority of students to wait before they started speaking the language most students would just start forcing output right from day one and all of these
• 25:30 - 26:00 students that did this forced early output never went on to be near native level and tie even if they completed the entire ALG program and then lived in Thailand for many years after that they would go on to always speak the language with a kind of typical foreign accent and broken grammar it was only the people that waited to speak until speech emerged naturally that went on to reach a near native level in tie so the first conclusion that brown came to was that forcing early output somehow causes perent damage to the language acquisition process but it quickly
• 26:00 - 26:30 became clear that this wasn't the only Factor at play because although all of the students that forced early output never went on to speak very good taii within the pool of students that did wait to do early output some of them would go on to reach a near native level and others would go on to speak relatively broken tie so there was clearly more factors at play that brown had to isolate and what he eventually was able to realize was that students who would do things like ask questions about the language and about what things mean look words up in the dictionary or
• 26:30 - 27:00 take notes about the different words or grammar that they were trying to learn would generally never go on to get very good at the language so at this point Brown had coined what he called the terrible for forced early output looking words up in the dictionary taking notes and asking questions about the language people who did any of these four activities would generally never go on to reach a near native like level of ability in the language but even so there were still some people who didn't do any of the Terrible four would on the surface look like they were perfectly
• 27:00 - 27:30 doing the ALG method yet would still go on to speak relatively poor level tie and wouldn't reach that native like level so there was some mystery X Factor that Brown still wasn't able to isolate and it wasn't until Brown tried to use the ALG method himself to learn a new language that it became clear what this final X Factor was brown wanted to learn a language through the ALG method himself to gain firsthand experience cuz he knew that that would allow him to design even better classes and it just so happened that some of the ALG teachers were native speakers of the
• 27:30 - 28:00 suot dialect of Chinese so Brown threw together a suot Chinese ALG class for him and the other teachers so that they could all get some direct experience learning a language through ALG Brown continued this suot ALG class for 1 to 2 hours a day for 8 years straight so we ended up going on to get literally thousands of hours of sual input but despite this he never became fluent in the language and the reason for this he realized was because while getting input
• 28:00 - 28:30 he was thinking about the language too much you see brown was a trained linguist and according to him he was one of the best linguists alive and so we couldn't help himself but compulsively analyze every little aspect about the language without even really trying to he was consciously analyzing the tones and the grammar structures and making comparisons between the other languages that he knew to try to deduce with different morphemes and different words would mean and he basically was doing a lot of conscious study you could almost say on the language just by listening so even though on the surface he was just
• 28:30 - 29:00 sitting there and listening and he wasn't doing early output or taking notes or looking words up he was basically doing the equivalent of that all in his head just by analyzing the language now he writes in his autobiography that of course there were moments where the interactions between the the two native speakers were so engaging that he would forget to analyze it he just get caught up in the moment and when that happened he would truly acquire different words in the language and he talks about how there were certain words there he acquired them naturally just through input without consciously thinking about them and for
• 29:00 - 29:30 those words he could use them pretty naturally if he ever tried to speak the language it's like those words would just pop into his head whereas for all the other words and different aspects of the language which he consciously learned through analyzing the language he could only use them through consciously thinking them up so we kind of found that the aspects of the language that were acquired unconsciously he could use naturally and felt very natural to him but for the aspects that he consciously learned through analyzing the language through thinking he had to think to use those aspects of the language and they never really went on to feel very natural and
• 29:30 - 30:00 this experience led him to add on to the terrible four and turn it into the terrible 5 there was no forced early output no taking notes no looking words up no asking questions about the language and no analyzing the language and what he realized was that you could simplify this terrible five down into a terrible one which is no thinking about the language that's the common denominator between all five of these factors when if you're trying to use your conscious mind to contrive the language or consciously understand the language that is a completely different process
• 30:00 - 30:30 than the unconscious process of naturally acquiring the language and that first process actually interferes with the second process so the more that you consciously contrive and consciously analyze the language that has permanent negative effects on how much you'll be able to acquire that language through unconscious acquisition Brown eventually ran ALG for 11 years before retiring in 1995 and passing down the ALG program to his star student David long who continu new run ALG at AUA in Thailand to this day
• 30:30 - 31:00 Brown's ultimate conclusion which he came to after spending 11 years teaching thousands of students through comprehensible input and producing dozens of speakers who were able to speak Thai at a near native level was that even as adults we never lose the ability to acquire languages in the exact same way that infants do instead we actually gain the ability to engage in a completely different process which is using our conscious Minds to analyze and think about language but but this conscious process actually gets in the
• 31:00 - 31:30 way of the natural acquisition process so if we're only able to kind of get out of our own ways and not engage this conscious process no matter how old we get we always have access to that same kind of magic that infants use to become native level at whatever language they're exposed to but what about Brown's own tie although Brown did learn a lot through immersion over the years he also did a lot of this conscious study in the language which he later came to the conclusion causes permanent damage but in spite of this he apparently had legendary tie and would often get confused for a native speaker
• 31:30 - 32:00 well according to Brown his own tie was a kind of hybrid he did rely on a conscious monitor when he spoke Tha and that made the act of speaking Tha feel very different than speaking English he has this quote that always really resonated with me because honestly I feel the same is true about my own Japanese when I speak Thai I think in Thai when I speak English I think only in thought I pay no attention to English Brown passed away in 2002 at the age of 77 shortly before completing an
• 32:00 - 32:30 autobiography titled from the outside in after his passing his close family and friends published this autobiography for free online and that's what the majority of this video has been based on I highly recommend reading the entire autobiography yourself because Brown left us with so many insights which I wasn't able to include in this video