simpletailor [he/him]

Thank you!

Can you direct me to more information? I’d like to know more.

If you haven’t already, start by communicating that you need more and different kinds of emotional support from your partner. They deserve a chance to develop this skill. If they’re not able or willing to meet your needs, you’re not a good fit. I learned this the hard way. But you deserve someone who can meet your emotional support needs.

As far as the other non-romantic relationships go, you don’t have to cut people off, but you should find other, more empathetic people to lean on. I have very close friends that I know will be there for me when I need emotional support. I also have other good friends who aren’t as good at it, and we get along just fine and bond over shared interests.

You are right insofar as rote memorization not being an ideal way to become a fluent language user, but “language acquisition model” is not a theoretical framework. Language Acquisition is a sub-field of linguistics.

“Comprehensible input” is an untestable hypothesis from the 1970s by a researcher named Krashen. Immersion methods are perfectly fine ways to acquire language–both grammar and vocabulary–but a massive benefit to already having a first language means that you can leverage your existing linguistic schemata (e.g., mappings for abstract concepts onto words, grammatical categories, etc.) to jumpstart your second language competencies.

With structured instruction and ample opportunities to practice speaking conversationally, a classroom learner can achieve the same level of conversational fluency as someone who learned the language immersively.

Further, a purely conversational course would not lead directly to improvement in the domains of reading and writing. There are some synergies, but these are separate skills that need to be targeted by specific pedagogic interventions. This is why children learning their first language still need to go to school to learn how to read, of course. And a major benefit of learning to read is then reading to learn.

The primary issue here is classroom time. Language instructors need to focus on a million different things. Here’s a no comprehensive list off the top of my head: the domains of reading, writing, speaking, and listening; compositional modality (e.g. presentational speech, colloquial speech, presentational writing, genre-specific conventions for persuasiveness/humor/storytelling/etc.); general vocabulary and grammar; specific vocabulary and grammar (e.g. for home/academic/professional/etc domains); social norms (again by domain); cultural literacy (again by domain); etc.

And then divide the instructor’s time by the number of students.

A learner needs to integrate within a speech community and continue practicing these skills within the appropriate contexts, or they atrophy. The foreign language context (i.e., the target language is not commonly spoken in daily life near the learner) is terrible at this, because it means that the learner does not have easy access to others with whom to practice and from whom to learn.

Tldr; use your other languages to help you speed up the baseline memorization and pattern recognition skills that are fundamental to contextual application, find a community, and do language with them.

My bona fides are a PhD in the subject and a decade of language teaching in US public schools and universities

Language acquisition research on a “critical period” for language learning is inconclusive. Neuroplasticity may make it easier for a child to acquire/differentiate specific linguistic information (e.g. sounds that exist in one but not both of the languages) but being socialized into a second language discourse community /also/ means that they’re getting far more time practicing the language.

That stood out to me too. If I’m thinking of the same Star Trek context you are, it was a character in Discovery whom we’re not supposed to like because

LLMs are okay if you already know the answer, because they don’t have a basis for truth or a bias for source; they prioritize frequency of co-occurrence of words in the training data. They can produce very convincing and completely made-up text, or propagate “common wisdom” that isn’t actually correct.

Using ChatGPT is pretty much the same as trusting one of the random AI-generated blogs poisoning the search results–which other people in this thread are complaining about the uselessness of.