Comprehensible Language Input
I’ve enjoyed studying languages and I’m intrigued and somewhat convinced that our most institutional language learning is not well-designed.
Many philosophies for language learning take some form of the idea that you should learn foreign languages much like to you learned your first language.
It is perhaps a gross simplification but it does seem like that is at the heart of many approaches.
One approach in this vein is called comprehensible input. The idea is that you should learn through input and that you should attempt to have most of the input being understandable. Like when the parent plays with their baby, “look at the ball. Look at the blue ball. Where is the ball?” With enough cycles of this, the baby learns to recognize “ball” and “blue”.
I suspect that it is not sufficient to just watch YouTube videos to learn language but there are hundreds of hours of English language learning videos following this philosophy. I’ll update this page with some channels that seem promising.