Chunking: the secret to fluency?

CC subtitles available in multiple languages.

Discover the benefits of language chunks in today's video. Learn what they are, how to use them, and what teachers often get wrong about chunking!

Sources:

⏲️ TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 Intro
0:14 What are language chunks?
1:17 How do we learn language chunks?
2:46 The problem with teaching chunks
4:26 My experience with Turkish

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[Thelinguist]

❓Have you heard of or tried chunking before? Share your experience in the comments!

[Tamaplus]

I think the most valuable method in learning a language is by immersion and reading, focusing mainly on vocabulary . It works for me. Thank you, I look up to you in my multilingual journey.

[gabriellawrence]

That's why memorizing song lyrics, poems and quotes is a good way to acquire vocabulary. I find it difficult to remember verbs outside of an exemple sentence, who else finds verbs to be the hardest type of word to remember?.

[peterwright]

One of the first things I noticed when I started using Lingq sentence mode was groups of words together that had a slightly different meaning than the individual words, i.e. chunks. So I started making links for the chunks. It’s a great feature.

[tonyaltass]

Language learning should be similiar to learning any other subject.
Start off small with the basics and then gradually build upon what has been learnt.
The issue with languages is the subject is enormous. Myself being a native speaker of English of more than 50 years i can still learn more about the English language. There is no end point.

[granthamwizard]

After watching this last night I realise how important this chunking method is. As I do it myself. The only way to truly learn is immersion and exposure through these digestible pieces. Good video, LingoSteve.

[johnalmberg]

I’m also a big Krashen fan and input has got me through DELF B1 in French, but I’ve gotten tired of not really having a grip on verb conjugations and have recently been using Anki to memorize all the conjugations that I feel I need. I’m tackling one verb at a time, but learning present, simple future, conditional, subjunctive, simple past, imparfait, and imperative, as well as the past and present participles. I really felt like it was time to learn these conjugations for the most common verbs and it’s already helping my reading and oral production. I live in France and being able to produce the right verb changes the way French natives look at me. It’s great. What prompted this comment was your remark about the massive input required to learn a lot of chunks. I came to the same conclusion about verb conjugations. Yes, eventually I might read enough French to acquire enough conjugations to become fluent, (I currently read about a million words of French a year (thank you LingQ for that data) but just sitting down and memorizing a bunch will get me there quicker, I hope! It only takes a few minutes a day, but it’s a long term project. I figure it will take about 6 months to cover the most important irregulars, and the most important conjugation patterns. Hopefully after that, I will be able to make intelligent guesses about the other 10, 000 verbs! Whatever’s fun, right?

[FranG]

This makes a lot of sense. If you pay attention to English speakers, especially those with a small or limited vocabulary, it's easier to decipher the chunks than with a well-spoken person with a sophisticated vocabulary.

[jtee]

I started learning Polish by mastering its complex grammar and memorizing a couple thousand words in a few months. I could barely understand a thing until I was immersed for a couple years in "chunk phrases" living with a Polish spouse. I guess what I'm saying is that chunking unlocked the language treasure chest that I'd already filled with the grammar and vocabulary.

Also, I've spent years studying colloquial Arabic part-time and reached intermediate stage using mostly Krashen's acquisition methods. I can speak pretty well BUT my listening needs improvement. So in a reversal of the normal learning pattern I'm enlisting grammar late in the game to improve my listening since Arabic is based on root words that are altered slightly to form new but related meanings. Identifying the roots helps identify the meaning, even in conversation.

[ancientromewithamy]

Good points here. I've been working on Arabic for about 6 months now, and I'm certain I've learned more from watching the news and documentaries than I have from all the textbooks so far, though I do refer to those for grammar and vocab. And learning new alphabets is an additional hurdle, of course.

I also used daily planners to memorize days of the week, month names, and numbers, I just write those below the English day names every month until it starts to stick. But in general, listening to things has helped me progress faster in understanding things than just going through grammar books and only watching videos teaching Arabic, partly because of (as Krashen says) I can pick out content I'm interested in, and I get more words in different contexts and chunks when it's people speaking naturally and at length.

[atrumluminarium]

I had no idea Lingq had the option to save entire phrases. Thanks for the info Steve :D

[Oler-yxxj]

I actually haven't heard of chunking before, interesting to know

[tahall]

It would have been nice to have some concrete examples of ‘chunks’.

[siasea_lang]

I find learning languages in chunks really useful. It helps you really speak the language and not translate it in your head . Great video 😊

[shamu]

God dammit, I spent 6 hours yesterday writing something like an article to post in a japanese community and one the idea that I had was something close to that. And after finishing that, I discovered the existence of that concept of chunking in this video.

But in addition to that (or before that), I wanted to argue that learning "common words", as in frequency list from newspapers, are the most inefficient way to learn. First, because, at exception of the most common ones, they will not be the same for everyone. Everyday's life vocabulary are really frequent, yes, but I don't live in an english country and I already forgot half of them simply because I still don't use those words. And I'm not exposed to them too. I learn, or perhaps relearn, the word "curtain" the other day because I learn the word カーテン (curtain but in Japanese). So yeah, there is that. And secondly, because of that idea of chunks. Which I may be extending to "very specific vocabulary" or group of word that often appear together which may not be at the same level (for example all the words for may appear more often with the verb eat than with other verb). I'm not sure of the exact limit of the concept of chunk with this video alone. Need to check that later.

But anyway, I did no "try" chunking but I certainly did learn chunks simply by immersing myself on very very specific subject. Like for an internship during my master degree where I read about 400 research paper about some mathematical models for a specific problem in biology. It was a very specific subject and even an advance one too but because it had the same vocabulary and the same "chunk" that often appear in slightly different context, it gave huge boost both in confidence and capability to read English. And after that I nerver studied English actively again. I just immersed myself. Or not even immersed, just consume content in english.
And right now, I'm at a similar stage in Japanese but with japanese youtuber (mainly about gaming). And one experience was really meaningful in that regard. I watch multiple stream of the same game which was very very repetitive and I got a lot of "chunk" from that because each time, it was the exact same context with similar vocabulary, expression but with slight variation/reaction. The thing that surprised me the most how I learned and memorized the variation of one chunk which was なにもない ("there is nothing"). And all its variant, なんもない, なんもね, なんもないな, ない, ね, ないな along with all the variante in tone/emotion.

Also, I don't if there a name for that phenomenon but it's crazy how we can jump from one chunk to another and how it can "aggregate" into bigger chunk when immersed in a same specific and delimited environnement. I'm probably not really talking about chunk anymore (still not sure about the definition, it seems like both a general and specific concept) but oh well. I'm not versed enough in linguistic to put more of my though into word but anyway, it feels great to be at this stage where I'm starting to learn and memorize new word or grammar simply by immersing myself. Well no, I need to correct myself. To learn and memorize "chunks".

Anyway thanks for the video! Happy to have learn about this concept even I may stretched it a bit to adapt it to my own personal experience and though.

[mervyncawley]

Great advice for us language learners out here

[draugami]

Thank you for your insight. I would like some examples that you found by"chunking."

[spinnettdesigns]

I thank you for your video.
I want to have fun and I may not be at lightening speed right now but I do diversity of reading and listening "...all the while, enjoying my language learning..." I totally resonate with your opinions.

[piotrwachowski]

I respect you, Mr. Steve. I'm from Poland. I really like your channel and your methods of learning foreign languages. I learned two languages ​​communicatively without any courses. I had English and Russian at school. I know English quite well. I also know Russian quite well. I also know a little Latin. I learned Spanish communicatively for half a year, studying about an hour a day. I'm currently learning Greek. My next goal is Persian, because I'm interested in this country and I plan to visit it as a tourist. I always start my adventure with any language by learning the indeclinable parts of speech (in Polish, which is my native language), these are adverb, preposition, conjunction, exclamation mark and particle. This is my language learning base (I'm talking about European languages, I don't know how it is elsewhere. Then there's learning (usually memorizing) 20-30 most frequently used verbs in different conjugations, then the most frequently occurring nouns, finally adjectives and adverbs. Knowing this, I start to put together whole sentences from all these parts of speech. And it's worth reading a lot, even if we don't understand most of the text, these words and sentences are fixed in our head. And after reading, a good method is also to write these sentences by hand (no keyboard or computer required, just a piece of paper and a pen). I start with simple sentences like: This is a horse. The horse is nice, big, strong and fast. The horse likes to eat grass and corn. The horse is brown. I really like this horse. This is a template that you can substitute for any other animal. Once we master this, we can build complex sentences.

[wesleyoverton]

Why will LingQ no longer input videos from youtube even though they have subtitles? Please fix