Stephen Krashen: Language Acquisition and Comprehensible Input
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN language learners cite it as the source of the comprehensible input idea and apply it to vocabulary tools and other learning.
What it is
A lecture from the 1980s by linguist Stephen Krashen on how people acquire language. He explains his comprehensible input hypothesis for second-language acquisition.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2020 to 2022.
What Hacker News said
Recommends narwally · 2020-09 · on “Show HN: Vocabulary 90 – vocabulary learning automation”
Anki is fantastic for its flexibility, but for language learning I've found I reach a point of diminishing returns after a certain point. From personal experience, I've been pretty much sold on Stephen Krashen's theory of second language acquisition[1][2], which in practice focuses on comprehensible input. lingq.com is a pretty good way to learn a second language this way. I use it by uploading an ebook in my target language. The app keeps track of the words I've learned, and highlights the words and phrases I'm still learning or haven't encountered. I can click on the word/phrase as I'm reading to see a definition or translation in the sidebar, and then mark the level at which I've learned
Cites dymk · 2022-01 · on “Latin as she is spoke: How classicists tricked themselves (2019)”
It's not a new idea being discussed in language learning circles, and 99% of the recent online discussion about this is based off of this youtube video [1] of Stephen Krashen (a linguist) talking about comprehensible input in the 80s. If I had to guess, most of the recent discussion has started again in the Japanese language learning community, as Japanese is a notoriously difficult language to acquire for anglophones. [1] [this video]
Cites ethanwillis · 2022-06 · on “Launch HN: Mintlify (YC W22) – Maintainable documentation for software teams”
I like the answers in the last part. I literally had an interview today where I quoted a professor of mine from about a decade ago. He was very upset with me about some incorrect types in my javadoc comments and told me "The only thing worse than no documentation is wrong documentation!" :) For your answer on good documentation, that's a good general answer. As you say there are lots of layers to it. Some ideas just from my current viewpoint: - From my forays into foreign language learning I picked up the linguist's Stephen Krashen's research after learning about it from my language exchange partner. One of the main themes of his research is the idea of "Comprehensible Input"(CI). CI is the