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It's not ridiculous at all. I learned English in exactly that way: Massive input. I learned nothing back in elementary and middle school - they tried to drill grammar, in the form of "I am, you are, he/she/it is, we are, you are, they are". Didn't work.
But I got interested in microcomputers in the mid seventies, when I was a teenager, and most of the material available was in English, so I subscribed to Personal Computer World after finding issue 1 in a local shop. Drank it all up, slowly at first, then faster, and later on I just continued - not in order to learn English, I just wanted to read what I wanted to read. And there were of course movies etc. I didn't get past technical English until much much later, when I started to read English books because that was what was available when travelling. I got all my English vocabulary and grammar from that. English is admittedly a bit special in that it's easy to immerse even if you don't live in an English-speaking country. There's no problem finding comprehensible input (a term I hadn't heard until recently, but looking back that's what I was doing).
I can manage in more languages, to a survival level, using exactly the same method. And I've worked for many years trying to learn Japanese, by more traditional methods (I couldn't just start reading.. I thought) - and I got almost nowhere. Yes, I can describe basic grammar, but I can't (or couldn't) understand Japanese outside of greetings, and I couldn't speak to save my life. But some months ago I switched to what we're discussing: Acquire the language by comprehensible input. Fortunately there are now people around who prepare material for you, and that's what I'm using. Suddenly I'm finally getting somewhere. It works. The fog is lifting. As to "And children also get constantly corrected when making mistakes" - no, that's not really true. That's a myth. If you look, you'll see that children's mistakes are only corrected if it's serious. For the rest, except for a small amount of corrections, children simply gradually correct themselves. And they don't need teachers to work with them to learn the language. Children are fully fluent when they enter school, what they learn is more vocabulary (something which continues for the rest of their lives, of course), expressions etc. But that's not teachers teaching them said expressions. They simply come across them as part of everything else they do. "people who constantly talk to the child at levels they understand"
Again, that's not how children learn the majority of speech. What they do is to constantly (but in a relaxed, passive way) listen to adults and other older people talking between themselves. They're surrounded by input. And that's how they acquire their language. An adult actually has an advantage most children don't have: A great ability to read. If they can read, and understand a lot of interesting topics, adults have access to massive input which is not typically accessible (at least to that level) by children. |
So many times I've said "Your mommy is a she, not a he". Or "She said". Similarly correcting words like "I did fall" to "I fell".
I accept that teachers probably wouldn't be that picky, and most of the other English-speaking / bilingual children let things slide so long as he's understandable.
(I don't want to be "strict", but I have a social circle here who ask for corrections so it's an easy habit for me.)