actionrat

What kind of learning experience did you go through for each language?

What do you think about pushes for traditionalism in a tribe? I live in Arizona, and I've heard speakers lament that kids have lost the old ways (spirituality, customs, language), but restoring them would solve a lot of problems that Native American youth have. Do you think that approach holds promise? Do you find that young people want that traditionalism?

Thanks for doing this AMA.

I know this won't get answered, but who were the linguists and language acquisition (and hopefully second language acquisition) experts you talked to? Because there are some pretty well agreed on answers for "what order to teach stuff" out there: from the 1980s onwards there have been multiple studies that have revealed developmental sequences for the acquisition of grammar in a second language, and corpus linguistics (another big-data enterprise) has revealed a great deal about which words are used more frequently and provide greatest "coverage" of texts in a particular language. A good deal of research has also been done regarding input, output, and interaction, and general recommendations supported by empirical research are out there for how to teach languages.

Perhaps you were asking the wrong questions? Adjectives or adverbs first is the wrong question; a more appropriate one would be which adjectives and which adverbs. Especially for second language learners who already have some metalinguistic awareness (they can quite easily differentiate between the two)- it's not like you're gonna blow someone's mind when you teach them how words like "quickly" work in English. But knowing which adjectives or adverbs to teach can make language learning more efficient and productive- learners will more rapidly be able to comprehend the language they encounter as well as have more frequently needed words at their disposal to begin interacting and negotiating meaning in the second language.

I think your project certainly has its uses and strengths as a supplementary resource for language learning, but I'm a bit put off by your "Language teachers HATE him" vibe given off in this post.