On Learning a Language by Watching Videos

Advantages, Challenges and Solutions to effectively acquire a language with youtube videos.

Acquiring a language by watching videos in the target language is a rather potent method, meshing well with the good old Comprehensible Input (CI) theory.

Advantages

You may want to give target lang videos a try because...

• ...it meshes with "the science": Call it i+1, call it meaning-making, call it TBLT. A lot of the theory seems to support the idea of watching native speakers talk on YouTube.
• ...it's fun. As opposed to, say, grammar drills.
• ...it's extendable, with a low barrier of effort. Lower than making flashcards, for example. Beware Trivial Inconveniences.

Challenges

Finding content is challenging. Well, if you're learning Spanish, there's literally learningspanish. I'm learning Egyptian Arabic — much tougher (YouTube doesn't even acknowledge it as a separate language).

And you want content that's interesting. Harder again to find if you are only a beginning learner. And if you want natural, interesting content, this excludes two favorite suggestions of the internet.

• Animations for young kids: These are not interesting. Also, a lot of them tend to be insane, with the lead animator being on LSD and the producer in love with 18th century pedagogy.
• Language learning videos: Someone telling you the top 50 phrases in language X is not CI. First, it's not natural language. Second, these videos tend to do most or all of the no-nos that you want to avoid for such content: Subtitles, translations, decontextualized speech.

There are some interesting proposals out there, such as to just watch anything in the beginning, since you're not going to get anything anyways (source). But is that the way, is that active enough, is the cognitive load high enough? Easy to just zone out and watch the frames go by.

Solutions

A lot of people are thinking about this right now. The /r/dreamingspanish subreddit is a great source. Tools like filmot and lingq help. I'm building my own prototype right now, based on the idea of practicing the relevant vocab just before watching a video.

Looking forward to a much more effective video learning method in the future.