#cause i figure okay i'll make SOME progress in 1500-2000 hours

[rigelmejo]

@earlgrey--tea you asked who learned French just by watching TV shows and I'm thrilled you asked.

Here is the paper Peter Llewellyn Foley published: Picking up a second language from television: an autoethnographic L2 simulation of L1 French learning. Looking over the paper again now, he did 1500 hours of audio-visual French material for native speakers. He read toward the end of that period for some hundreds of hours, and he talked to people in French similarly toward the end of that period for some hundreds of hours. I read the whole thing, and I recommend anyone else who's curious reads the whole thing. Because my takeaways may not be the same as another person's. The paper includes what he did, how he studied, how he tracked his study, what study materials worked best (he found children's cartoons with a lot of visuals of what is being talked about were the easiest to learn from in the first few hundred hours - and adult television where they talk about things not directly visually shown as some of the hardest stuff that he used once he had more understanding of the language).

His paper shows at least 1 person could learn French by watching shows (with children's cartoons being best at the beginning stage until you learn more words), and trying to figure out what each thing means as you hear it. He did a lot of puzzling out the sounds he heard, using context and guessing what was being talked about (for curiosity's sake he did the opposite of what ALG Automatic Language Growth articles tend to suggest people do). He did not do any reading later sometime after 1000 hours, and it's fascinating how different he imagined French spelling was based on his guesses from the sound, compared to how it is actually spelled. He did use some graded readers for learners once he was reading.

He did not look any word translations up when watching all those shows. He personally makes the guess that if he HAD looked up words, if he HAD used French subtitles, and if he had focused entirely on children's shows at first, his progress might have taken less time. But his experiment did not do that, so it's only a guess, and actual success of people who've looked up words should be referenced instead for how successful or not it is (people like r/Refold learners look up words while watching shows), and he did not use any video materials made for language learners but my personal thinking is that Comprehensible Input type lessons at the beginning stage may have worked even better than children's cartoons.

To me, his level of understanding and ability to do things lines up fairly well with Dreaming Spanish's roadmap estimated hours to do X things. That makes sense to me as Peter basically studied with stuff made for native speakers, which eventually became more comprehensible. And Dreaming Spanish is designed to be fully comprehensible to a learner, until they can comprehend stuff for native speakers. I imagine Peter had a harder time initially, but as an English speaker learning French, with all the cognates, maybe he didn't have to learn as much to cross the threshold into comprehending children's shows as someone learning a language with no cognates.

I wrote my in depth thoughts about his paper here but it's mostly just rambling.