[T-992] The input hypothesis sounds too good to be true (yet here's why I trust it is)

Like donkeys and elephants in US politics, the self-directed language-learning Internet is split into two parties.

On one side of the aisle sits the crowd of Stephen Krashen and his acolytes who swear allegiance to the input hypothesis. They believe that language acquisition takes care of itself, as long as you get enough exposure. Members of this party are like elephants who sit around, chilling and chewing, trusting that their big ears will inevitably pick up the new language they want to learn.

On the other side of the aisle sit the day-one speakers whose elder statesman must be Benny Lewis, the Irish polyglot. This party believes that languages are not as much learned as they are earned through speaking out, making mistakes, and correcting those mistakes. Members of this party are more like energetic donkeys who don’t mind carrying an uncomfortable burden and looking like fools for a while to acquire fluency.

I myself am a card-carrying member of the Krashen party.

I’m not saying that speaking early doesn’t have its merits. I believe that, with a little practice, you can become a deft communicator, even if your vocabulary is as slim as a tourist phrasebook.

The best example of this is my friend Lalit whom I got to know when I spent a month in Sri Lanka in 2006. Of the local crowd I hung out with, Lalit’s command of English was the weakest, yet he was the most outspoken. The attitude and swagger carried him far.

Most people are not like Lalit, though. For most people, the idea of speaking in a language you don’t know well is as appealing as walking into your high school classroom naked. Just thinking about it makes you want to wipe the sweat off your palms.

The Input hypothesis is in that regard more comforting. More convenient to trust. It keeps you safe and secure in your comfort bubble, allowing you to stretch it from the inside, as Khatz (the famous Kenyan who learned enough Japanese in 18 months to move there and get a job at Sony) once wrote somewhere. Therefore the input hypothesis is more seductive.

And so it arouses a suspicion that it might be too good to be true.

One day you might ask yourself if you perhaps believe in input only because it’s more convenient for you not to risk speaking wrongly and making a fool out of yourself?

This seed of suspicion can grow into doubt: maybe you’re wasting time by not attempting to speak your target language?

I used to worry about that. But this was before I had my language learning satori moment. I can now put forth an extraordinary claim.

I was once fluent in Japanese

If only for a short moment. But it was enough to convince me forever that Krashen is right.

This happened in the fall of 2016, during a car ride through a Tokyo boulevard lined with Ginko trees with brilliant golden yellow leaves.

I was in the passenger seat chatting with the driver, an owner of a small electronics parts store in Akihabara who was doing business with the Serbian company I used to work for at the time.

Our meeting was arranged through an email exchange a few days before my wife and I, freshly married, arrived for a 10-day holiday to Japan. At no point in our email conversation did I give off any impression that I had any kind of Japanese ability whatsoever.

You can see where this is going…

When we met in front of the Isetan department store in Shinjuku I initiated the exchange of greetings in Japanse, thinking of it as nothing more than a small courtesy.

But then, to my utter dismay, the guy just kept talking almost exclusively in Japanese.

He said he was relieved I knew Japanese. He said it like it was the most natural thing, like there was a fifty-fifty chance this random guy from Serbia would speak it.

Of course I was anything but relieved. I discreetly wiped my palms against my coat.

It was only the beginning of a long evening of stilted conversation

He spoke in simplified, gentle Japanese, peppered with broken English, with heavy help from the dictionary on his phone. I responded in simple English with a dash of broken Japanese.

When he took us to lunch the conversation flowed more easily because he could keep the dictionary on the table right beside his bowl of tempura while I kept a glass of beer next to mine.

But the dynamic changed when we got in his car to go to a shopping mall in Odaiba. He could no longer check the dictionary app all the time. So we switched the conversation to Japanese. He’d make an intentionally simple remark. I would then (this all happening in my head) parse his utterance to find parts I understood, translate them, construct an answer, then rehearse it a few times before finally saying it out loud. It was exhausting. It felt like I was calculating chess moves.

Or rather, it felt as if I was trying to smuggle bits of conversation across the language barrier that stood between us like the Berlin wall. Each thought had to go through a narrow checkpoint where hostile but incompetent grammar Nazis took their own sweet time to meticulously search and scrutinize the thought before raising the ramp.

(I’m mixing my metaphors by having the Berlin Wall and Nazis in the same analogy but what the heck.)

At the shopping mall in Odaiba I got some relief because we sort of separated while each of us did our own shopping. I am a fan of stationery so I got some emotional relief caressing the fine Japanese stationery products, the fancy notebooks and index cards and such.

Eventually I had to emerge from my hiding place in the stationery aisle and resume the evening.

In the car on the way back from Odaiba the awkward conversation resumed, each red light stop extending to eternity.

But then, near our drop-off point, suddenly and randomly:

My flash of fluency struck

He asked me something and I instantly shot back a coherent reply.

I blurted out my answer without hesitating, without translating his words first, without constructing, double-checking and rehearsing my answer, without thinking at all.

I even used a few words I hadn’t until then.

It was like a single spark flew across an air-gap to jump-start a dormant Japanese language engine, allowing me to crash through the ramps of our language barrier, unchecked.

This is what speaking Japanese feels like! I thought. It feels like nothing.

The fluency engine stalled as suddenly as it turned on. I couldn’t do it again. But nevertheless, it was one of the most memorable moments of the trip. Half of me was glowing with self-satisfaction. The other half was puzzled.

I must admit that at first, I thought that the solution to this puzzle pointed toward increasing output as a means to improve my Japanese.

I even bought $70 worth of italki credits when I got back home

I was that close to switching sides.

It’s easy to see how I got this impression – a single evening of being forced to speak Japanese improved my abilities more than years of half-hearted acquisition efforts.

But I wasn’t seeing the big picture. I took me awhile to realize that the reality was the opposite:

I took only one evening to activate all the (admittedly meager) language abilities I acquired mostly passively.

One. Evening.

Henceforth, it was clear.

That’s why I won’t be too concerned with output in this 1000 day experiment. Instead I’ll do stuff like:

Plans for today:

Obstacles