Are Outdated Methods & Boring Materials Making You a Language Learning Masochist?
The Internet has blessed modern language learners with unprecedented access to foreign language tools, materials, and native speakers. Assuming they can get online, even a farmhand in rural Kansas can learn Japanese for free using Skype, YouTube, and Lang-8. But language learning luddites and technophobes scoff at these modern miracles. Like Charleton Heston clutching his proverbial rifle, they desperately cling to tradition for tradition’s sake, criticizing these modern tools—and the modern methods they enable—from their offline hideouts. Communicating via messenger pigeon and smoke signals no doubt. “Technology is for for lazy learners!” they exclaim. “Real language learners,” they insist, use the classroom-based, textbook-driven, rote-memory-laden techniques of old. I call bullshit. Read on to see why.
