Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "Professor Shows How To Learn Languages | Dr. Barry Lee Reynolds" video.

@alexisdemoulin5514 Yep, Krashen, in interviews, is pretty clear about the fact that his method isn't 100% input, you do have 10-20% intentional study of vocab and grammar related to the language. It's not like you just expose yourself to the language and suddenly become capable of speaking. Any method that doesn't require some delbierate study/practice and output isn't a realistic approach. It may get there eventually, but part of why output is important is that it helps to evaluate whether you're leaning actual language or not. And unless your whole purpose in learning the language is just to enjoy reading, listening and watching whatever media they've crated, output is likely to be something that people need.
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@loistalagrand Kanji is harder to learn that Chinese Hanzi is. The actual characters are the same difficulty as they only really vary (as far as traditional characters to kanji) in terms of stroke order with the added difficulty of having a lot of readings. Chinese characters, even the simplified set, rarely has more than 1 reading, and I'd be hard pressed to come up with any that can be read in more than 3 ways. If you haven't already done so, I'd look into Outlier Linguistics as they have probably the best methods for working with Hanzi, and I think Kanji as well, in terms of how to break the characters down into components that can be used to more efficiently work with them.
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@rauschma The issue with Kanji is that unlike Chinese Traditional characters that mostly just have one way of reading, Kanji tends to have a lot of ways of reading them as it was not intended to be used for Japanese. It's sort of like Korean prior to the development of the Hangul character set.
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Realistically, you're not going to want to do just one or the other. A bunch of the vocab really has to come from exposure to content that you can understand and enjoy. Now, whether the deliberate study needs to be flashcards or not, that's a different matter. But, there's no reason to have massive decks of cards as the main point to deliberate study of vocab is to get a word into your head so you can recognize and/or use it to speed things up. Mnemonics, SRS flashcards or even just repeating it technically all work, although mnemonics and flashcards are the way to go for deliberate study of vocab, and probably both for any word that warrants deliberate study.
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@fransmith3255 That's horribly inefficient and a waste of time. Normally, the vocab for the flashcards comes from a mixture of what you need for conversation, is in the books you're reading or the movies you're watching. Then it gets put into flashcards along with the entire rest of the sentences, or at least the rest of the clause. If you're not deliberately spending some time studying vocab, it's just going to slow the process and create situations where you don't have an entry point at all to a given context as you don't have the words. It's one of the issues with being an intermediate, there can be a significant amount of work that goes from being able to do basic tasks of daily living in the foreign language and being able to have friends without the language being a struggle every time you hang out. You're not normally going to bother memorizing random words as most languages have 15-20k or so of vocabulary words that adults have. And some languages have hundreds of thousands of words in the dictionary, on top of whatever slang is going on.
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@fransmith3255 I think there's nuance to what you're doing that I didn't get from your posts. The choice of grammar and vocab needs to come from the things you're wanting to do with it, so you can get the input.
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Exactly, Ultimately, what makes the language permanent tends to be repeated exposure and use of it; any of the vocab that sticks while reading or watching videos is more or less just a bonus. Learning ab it of grammar and vocab intentionally helps bridge the gap. It's not like studying it is going to make it yours to command forever, but even just having one use of a word memorized gives you a hook to hang any additional meanings on.
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@squaretriangle9208 It's mostly because older techniques involved too much grammar and most language books provide more grammar than a learner can use at the expense of vocab and actually exposure and use of the language. Having some knowledge and awareness of the grammatical structures of a language can help a lot in terms of making more of the inputs something you can use.
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TBH, most experts push some combination of deliberate study of grammar and vocab along with inputs. What varies is how much of which and how calibrated the input needs to be. But, anybody claiming that it's 100% study or 100% input is probably a charlatan that is best avoided. The correct answer is probably between 20% and 80% of study versus input. And methods like mnemonics can cut down on the intentional study a bit.
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