> “I was taught like xyz, and I’m successful now and so that was definitely the right approach”.
For what it's worth, the same reasoning can be heard in other fields. I work in foreign-language education, and debates about the best way to learn another language—memorize vocabulary and grammatical rules? move to a country where the language is spoken? watch a lot of movies in the language?—often reduce to competing personal success stories.
Teachers who have taught a foreign language using a particular method often come to believe that their method is the best, even though they are usually unable to measure the actual long-term outcomes for their students. It may be just too discouraging to be uncertain about the effectiveness of what one does to make a living, so teachers become advocates for whatever approach they happen to use.
Foreign languages come with an enormous amount of experience. Whether that experience comes from watching a lot of foreign language media or living there or something else entirely probably doesn't matter. You need to build intuition and that seems to only come with experience. Teaching in this sense tends to provide subpar results, because no teacher can spend enough time to get students the experience required to become close to fluent. (I also suspect that it's not just the amount of experience total, but that there's some kind of minimum "experience density" based on time. Eg an hour a week for 20 years might not be enough, but 2 hours every day for 1.5 years might be. But this is just a hunch.)
At least that's my personal experience. We studied English for 11 years in school, some studied it later in university too. Every single person my age that was good at it used English outside of the classroom - mostly on the internet. They had enough experience that even without knowing the grammar rules they got the right answers "because it felt right".
I think this applies to learning anything else that requires to recognize patterns works in the same way: programming, mathematics, listening to a different language, reading handwriting, fighting difficult bosses in video games etc. You can theoretically understand all the pieces, but still be incapable of utilizing them for a satisfactory result.
This is a great analogy. It boils down to having a reason to put in the time to become proficient. A lot of people learn to code by the book without ever finding a puzzle they passionately want to solve through code. With language, you need a reason to practice. Only a breadth of experience can fill the gaps that allow you to intuit meaning in the real world, as opposed to a classroom. In a foreign country, the reason amounts to simply living there. I remember years of knowing simple BASIC and Perl when I was about 10-13 years old and having no ideas what to make with them. I could compile a Mac program with windows and menus and didn't know what to make, other than screen savers. Hypercard was what harnessed my creativity in narrative to my curiosity about code. A similar thing might happen to anyone who wants to code who loves music or writing or art. Code, like language, is for many people only important as a means to an end. It's a tool to communicate. So the measure of success in learning such a tool isn't necessarily whether you make a career at being a translator. It's at whether you can effectively use the tool to do the things you want and need to accomplish outside the specific domain of communication itself.
I've struggled with exactly this lately. I used to write and record and play in bands. It sounds awful but at some point I lost hope of being commercially successful at it. The fantasy of rock stardom was what drove me to spend thousands of hours writing and playing. But I still love music. I rearranged my goals during the pandemic, bought a pedal steel guitar and started teaching myself something completely different. Now I can see myself getting onstage in a year or two and backing up a band I like, just for the joy of playing. Just having that long term goal in the back of my mind has let me lose myself in hours and hours of practice. In the code arena, I often have a "Show HN" in the back of my mind, even if I rarely or never show anything.
Hi there. I write software for learning foreign languages, at a foreign language instruction company. If you have time and inclination to discuss things, please check out my profile.
For what it's worth, the same reasoning can be heard in other fields. I work in foreign-language education, and debates about the best way to learn another language—memorize vocabulary and grammatical rules? move to a country where the language is spoken? watch a lot of movies in the language?—often reduce to competing personal success stories.
Teachers who have taught a foreign language using a particular method often come to believe that their method is the best, even though they are usually unable to measure the actual long-term outcomes for their students. It may be just too discouraging to be uncertain about the effectiveness of what one does to make a living, so teachers become advocates for whatever approach they happen to use.