This is a common misconception. It probably does not match your and others' experience simply because it is conventional wisdom, and most people are taught to do this. But just because most people do something a certain way does not make it the most efficient way.
There are a number of reasons why you would want to focus on input early on. For starters, with very little exposure to a language, you have very little idea of what it is supposed to sound like. Not just pronunciation but word choice, grammar, and phrasing as well. So when outputting early you will make your best effort attempts, which are almost certainly going to be incorrect. Odds are these poor "best effort" attempts will stick as muscle memory and continue to be bad habits well into fluency, if you make it that far. I'm sure you've encountered many foreign speakers in English that are very fluent but have poor pronunciation or use incorrect grammar.
I've never heard that "producing" a language is more efficient to learning it than "consuming" it. How can you learn anything by producing it without having "consumed" it first? That's not learning, that's inventing, and you don't want to be in the business of inventing language unless you're William Shakespeare. If you're interested in learning more about this idea, check out Stephen Krashen's Input Hypothesis [0]. In particular this quote from the Wikipedia article is salient:
> Talking (output) is not practicing.
Krashen stresses yet again that speaking in the target language does not result in language acquisition. Although speaking can indirectly assist in language acquisition, the ability to speak is not the cause of language learning or acquisition. Instead, comprehensible output is the effect of language acquisition.
I think more importantly, most people find the _communication_ part exciting. Listening to 1000h of $LANG language podcasts is dramatically less enjoyable than the sense of cultural connection you get from conversation.
That's all muddied by AI/programmed learning (how much connection do you get from Duolingo?) now but I think the kernel is still true. People largely learn languages to talk, not to listen, it's no wonder things are structured that way and good luck trying to sell people otherwise.
Not if it is a movie or a tv series. Best (enjoyable) way would always be to watch something you like in a language you want to learn with subtitles for a longer term. Things like binge watching won't work though because the brain gets tired and tunes out.
IMO subtitles are not that effective as you brain just stays in read-mode and you don't actually process any of the spoken language. When most languages grammar are not 1:1, so hearing "house red is mine" but reading "my house is red" isn't helpful - more true with real sentences that tend to have more than 4 words in them. Language listening skills require a fair amount of attention and focus.
Though I do think there is value in watching tv series or movies you've already seen in another language _without_ subs. You're able to focus more on the dialog and pair it against your knowledge of the story structure without getting distracted. You can't only do that however, which I don't think you're suggesting. You need to have studied the language to know what words you can pick out/know/dont know.
The brain doesn't engage in the same process when presented with translated subtitles, to such an extent that you're better off watching a familiar show with no subtitles. However it can be helpful to have same-language closed captioning to improve distinction of word boundaries, accents, etc. Netflix has been great in recent years for this, in my case watching German-language shows.
Yeah yeah, and the input hypothesis has it’s own critics about what exactly “comprehensible input” even is.
…but let’s face it: either extreme (only input, only output) is clearly stupid.
Predictive models require a feedback loop; if you don’t have any means of correcting the predictions of good output, you’ll never refine your model.
This is true of AI models, and it’s true of humans. It can’t not be true.
The point is that you can only learn meaningfully from annotated inputs, like tv, or like talking to people. The input just has to be at the right level.
...
Should people start with listening instead of talking to people? Probably not. Probably they should do both. Why not do both? It's crazy to suggest you should only one or the other.
Probably, the feedback loop in deep immersion of a language, where you have it around you all the time, in a country where that is the native language is the best possible way to encounter lots of examples at lots of different levels to learn from. Probably, you get better input from speaking, because it means people talk to you at a level similar to what you're already at.
Is it about actually speaking? No.
…but it’s patently ridiculous to suggest you could go to another country and just sit silent and listen for three months.
This is pretty interesting tech, and frankly, amazing that it works at well.
Is it perfect? No. Is it another useful tool? It certainly is.
Comprehensible input has a pretty straight forward definition. It's language before or just after the end of understanding. Maybe 80-90 percent known words so you can get the context of what's being said.
If you can't grab hold of context of what's being said you won't really pick much up.
That's why total immersion isn't effective for beginners.
Clearly the common way is more efficient than the original suggestion, given that people achieve useful fluency in a language much quicker than spending 40 hours a week for 7 years listening to it, and only then starting to consider speaking in it.
I can only assume that the OP misspoke when they said 15,000 hours. In reality, when and what you output is dependent on your “input fluency”, as opposed to some arbitrary number of hours. In other words fluency is not an on/off switch. You will develop pockets of fluency as you acquire the language, and those pockets become suitable for output.
Sure. But if their point is not "consume a gigantic amount of stuff passively before you consider speaking", I'm not sure what the difference to the conventional way is, given that "immerse yourself in the language, consume lots of native media, ..." is extremely common and widely recognized advice.
Ok, Krashen is interesting, and maybe talking more often is good for learning languages only because it gets you to receive correct and comprehensible input from the language
I'm unconvinced to be honest, as pretty much everything else that human learn is made better by practice, but I'm not a linguist.
I still think that proposing to start learning a language by spending 15000 hours (or 1500, or 150) listening to it, instead of trying to practice early on is a very inefficient way to learn a language, compared to pretty much anything
There are a number of reasons why you would want to focus on input early on. For starters, with very little exposure to a language, you have very little idea of what it is supposed to sound like. Not just pronunciation but word choice, grammar, and phrasing as well. So when outputting early you will make your best effort attempts, which are almost certainly going to be incorrect. Odds are these poor "best effort" attempts will stick as muscle memory and continue to be bad habits well into fluency, if you make it that far. I'm sure you've encountered many foreign speakers in English that are very fluent but have poor pronunciation or use incorrect grammar.
I've never heard that "producing" a language is more efficient to learning it than "consuming" it. How can you learn anything by producing it without having "consumed" it first? That's not learning, that's inventing, and you don't want to be in the business of inventing language unless you're William Shakespeare. If you're interested in learning more about this idea, check out Stephen Krashen's Input Hypothesis [0]. In particular this quote from the Wikipedia article is salient:
> Talking (output) is not practicing. Krashen stresses yet again that speaking in the target language does not result in language acquisition. Although speaking can indirectly assist in language acquisition, the ability to speak is not the cause of language learning or acquisition. Instead, comprehensible output is the effect of language acquisition.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Input_hypothesis#Input_hypothe...