Summary: Nice for beginners and people with bad learning experiences …
Actually, this strikes me as a bit weakly worded. I think the MT courses are the best resource currently available for an English speaker looking to start learning French or Spanish, by a significant margin.
Unfortunately there are no scientific studies comparing the effectiveness of various different ‘teach yourself’ programs and traditional classroom instruction, so I can’t find any direct evidence on that question beyond my own anecdotal experience.
But still, what with that and the much more indirect evidence available, I’d still be very surprised if this wasn’t true.
Unfortunately there are no scientific studies comparing the effectiveness of various different ‘teach yourself’ programs and traditional classroom instruction, so I can’t find any direct evidence on that question beyond my own anecdotal experience.
This is the reason I don’t give a glowing recommendation. Research about long-term language learning is pretty lacking (and difficult to do, obviously), so this is a problem of pretty much any approach. I would agree that MT is the best starting material for these European languages I’ve seen so far.
Yes, but we’re not talking about long-term research here. It wouldn’t be hard at all to get a bunch of volunteers interested in learning a language, and randomly assign them to one of the various different treatments popular in the industry (MT, Pimsleur, Rosetta, traditional classroom instruction, whatever). It would take less than a year, probably.
(Various choices would be up to the experimenter, like whether they wanted to control time so all groups spent, like, an hour a day or whatever, or examine the time students chose to spend themselves as one of the dependent variables, or whatever. Obviously it would be best to do it both ways.)
Obvious, easy, and valuable. Just nobody with the resources has the incentive or the perspective to see that it should be done.
Anyway, I’d expect to see a pretty high failure rate even for the MT courses. Just a significantly lower failure rate than any of the other courses.
Actually, this strikes me as a bit weakly worded. I think the MT courses are the best resource currently available for an English speaker looking to start learning French or Spanish, by a significant margin.
Unfortunately there are no scientific studies comparing the effectiveness of various different ‘teach yourself’ programs and traditional classroom instruction, so I can’t find any direct evidence on that question beyond my own anecdotal experience.
But still, what with that and the much more indirect evidence available, I’d still be very surprised if this wasn’t true.
This is the reason I don’t give a glowing recommendation. Research about long-term language learning is pretty lacking (and difficult to do, obviously), so this is a problem of pretty much any approach. I would agree that MT is the best starting material for these European languages I’ve seen so far.
Yes, but we’re not talking about long-term research here. It wouldn’t be hard at all to get a bunch of volunteers interested in learning a language, and randomly assign them to one of the various different treatments popular in the industry (MT, Pimsleur, Rosetta, traditional classroom instruction, whatever). It would take less than a year, probably.
(Various choices would be up to the experimenter, like whether they wanted to control time so all groups spent, like, an hour a day or whatever, or examine the time students chose to spend themselves as one of the dependent variables, or whatever. Obviously it would be best to do it both ways.)
Obvious, easy, and valuable. Just nobody with the resources has the incentive or the perspective to see that it should be done.
Anyway, I’d expect to see a pretty high failure rate even for the MT courses. Just a significantly lower failure rate than any of the other courses.