[NoahTheDuke]

I love that “hacking language learning” turns out to be “mostly do what babies do”: consume as much content as possible. Babies take it one step further by trying things without embarrassment or any attempt at “getting it right”, only focused on raw communication.

Not to denigrate the efforts of folks who study and practice “the act of language acquisition”, I’ve just been surprised and delighted to watch my now 2 year old daughter learn to speak, which has made me think about how different her experience of “learning a language” is from all of my poor attempts at learning foreign languages.

[jeffreyrogers]

The places that have a track record of actually getting people to speak languages like the Mormons' Missionary Training Center, Defense Foreign Language Institute, or Middlebury all use methods similar to the comprehensive input method and have for a while. The problem for self-learners is that most languages don't have the right materials to do that easily.