#and sorry if this doesn’t make sense I woke up really early today alfjshs. I can’t English rn

[procrastinating-falcon]

Thank you for the recommendation, I’ll definitely look into Stephen Krashen.

And yeah, I agree that studying grammar from the beginning is not the best way to learn. Honestly I’m not sure how they teach Spanish in the USA but I was definitely able to read grammar books in English by the time I was given those books in school. But also I suppose it is much easier to immerse in the English language as a Latin-American than it is to do it in Spanish as someone from the US, so that also made acquiring English way easier.

And also, thinking back on it, with comprehensible input is the way I’ve been learning German with my teacher (and maybe how I learned English in school? But I don’t remember that much) I still think there’s some things you have to memorize, but that can be done through, for example, practicing a dialogue with another student, or some more pedagogical way than sitting down and repeating some list. But I’m not sure if you count that as learning or acquiring.

Sorry, this kinda turned into a ramble on how I learned languages. Hopefully it’s somewhat coherent, but it’s 5 am here and I’m tired so it might not be.

There’s a lot of questions out there about learning a language vs acquiring a language so let me explain it this way

People say they’re learning a language when they’re doing both things. However, when people bring this up they’re generally talking about differences in method/philosophy.

When people are talking about learning a language in this sort of context they’re talking about treating a language like a series of facts you can memorize. Think vocab lists, memorizing grammar charts, crying while using duolingo.

When people talk about acquiring a language they’re treating language like a communication system to be installed in your brain. Like a software rather than a series of facts. But because the human brain is kinda slow it takes like two to ten years of watching sitcom and listening to podcast and embarrassing yourself in front of bartenders for the download to mostly finish.

Children acquire language by watching Dora the explorer and watching mom point at cars and go “that’s a car�� I think but as an adult that’s not usually an option.

I mean it might be but it depends on your particular mom and personal tolerance for watching Dora the explorer