> and it's not even clear from research that output (speaking and writing) is useful at all for learning.
Only if your goals don’t include being able to speak or write.
> You can’t be serious advocating “just go read stuff”
True, not “just.” And Chinese is particularly tricky because the ideograms convey little to no phonetic information. Even so, almost any activity I can imagine seems superior to traditional flashcards. Photo flashcards (vs. translation), listening along to highlighted text or closed captions, deciphering street signs or memes, even the written drills you mentioned. (Or better, “write 5 phrases that all start with character X”). Our brains crave meaning, and flashcards offer very little of it.
> even native speakers learn them by repetition
No argument there, most everything is learned by repetition, but I’m interested in context. Native speakers already know the verbal form of most words they’re learning to write, even in Chinese. I’d argue the meaning is stronger.
> life of a toddler is vastly different than an adult
True. The scale of their learning tasks are much bigger than ours. They have to learn that they exist, that their family exists, that they can vocalize, that language is a thing, that they want and need things, and that they can get them by communicating.
> An adult has much less time for that
I think this is a good entry point to the core of the issue for me—-small children don’t “set aside time to learn,” they just learn. You and I do this also, though it’s less novel and flexible and therefore maybe less salient. I think we place too much value on structured or synthetic learning as “real” learning when in fact it’s often extremely inefficient compared to our natural learning tendencies.
There’s a spectrum of structure, starting with what we choose to pay attention to, to an open-ended “study time,” to guided classroom activities, to timed math drills. Flashcards are at the extreme reductivist end of that spectrum. I suspect we like them because they’re easy to understand, uniform, predictable, and convenient to create and use. Creating more effective learning opportunities and supports is substantially harder, but generally worthwhile IMO.
Only if your goals don’t include being able to speak or write.
> You can’t be serious advocating “just go read stuff”
True, not “just.” And Chinese is particularly tricky because the ideograms convey little to no phonetic information. Even so, almost any activity I can imagine seems superior to traditional flashcards. Photo flashcards (vs. translation), listening along to highlighted text or closed captions, deciphering street signs or memes, even the written drills you mentioned. (Or better, “write 5 phrases that all start with character X”). Our brains crave meaning, and flashcards offer very little of it.
> even native speakers learn them by repetition
No argument there, most everything is learned by repetition, but I’m interested in context. Native speakers already know the verbal form of most words they’re learning to write, even in Chinese. I’d argue the meaning is stronger.
> life of a toddler is vastly different than an adult
True. The scale of their learning tasks are much bigger than ours. They have to learn that they exist, that their family exists, that they can vocalize, that language is a thing, that they want and need things, and that they can get them by communicating.
> An adult has much less time for that
I think this is a good entry point to the core of the issue for me—-small children don’t “set aside time to learn,” they just learn. You and I do this also, though it’s less novel and flexible and therefore maybe less salient. I think we place too much value on structured or synthetic learning as “real” learning when in fact it’s often extremely inefficient compared to our natural learning tendencies.
There’s a spectrum of structure, starting with what we choose to pay attention to, to an open-ended “study time,” to guided classroom activities, to timed math drills. Flashcards are at the extreme reductivist end of that spectrum. I suspect we like them because they’re easy to understand, uniform, predictable, and convenient to create and use. Creating more effective learning opportunities and supports is substantially harder, but generally worthwhile IMO.