A couple of years ago I saw an hour-long YouTube documentary made by a Spanish teacher in the US about his one-year quest to get to conversational fluency in Arabic without direct study.
I thoroughly enjoyed it, and used some of the ideas in it to help get my start learning Korean.
But one thing from that video that I was extremely skeptical of was TPRS (Teaching Proficiency Through Reading and Storytelling). I watched some demos online and it just seemed... incredibly boring. I couldn't wrap my head around it.
Then I had an opportunity to try a TRPS lesson in a language I have never studied (and don't have any immediate plans to study). My mind was blown. I was 100% engaged the whole time. My brain felt like it was in some sort of hyper-focused overdrive. I woke up the next morning with phrases from the lesson rattling around in my head. It usually takes a lot of exposure before I start hearing that din in the head. This was less than an hour.
When I see people write in my native language, their problem is almost never vocabulary. It's things like prepositions. Word order. Getting the nouns and verbs to agree in terms of tense, gender, and number. More word order. More gender.
Don't get me wrong, vocabulary is crucial. It's hard to read an interesting book without vocabulary. But vocabulary doesn't seem to trip language learners up the way grammar does.
What I think TPRS gets right is the concept of micro-fluency with a sheltered vocabulary for the very first stage of learning a new language. It seems like it almost doesn't matter at first what the early vocabulary is, if you're getting an intuitive sense of all the basic bits and pieces of grammar.
This in turn means that early lessons or content can use whatever vocabulary is going to be easiest to make comprehensible, even if those things aren't necessarily things you'd generally encounter in day-to-day life.
So, yeah. I was wrong :) TPRS is pretty cool, and if you have the chance, you should totally try a lesson in a language you know nothing about, just for the sake of experience.
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via Learn Online English Speaking
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