I noted in Lesson #51 I wrote il n’a pas des amies when it should be d’amies. I am pretty sure I did not realize at the time that that was wrong although elsewhere around the same time I used the negative partitive correctly. Slips like that occur when you have not entirely acquired the language, certainly the case with me and French.
It has been a long, long time since I started blogging these lessons and I have many, many to do but I’m enjoying it. I get up early when it’s dark and instead of reading I get to work on this.
One of my motivations is to combine it with a new student I have who is doing great, too. I hope to show that this sort of teaching does lead to acquisition. My granddaughter was certainly comprehending far more than the second year French student in high school and when she stopped coming she did not yet have quite one year’s worth of hours of instruction in.
The essence of the teaching is that the learner must first ingest as input a large amount of L2 so the brain lays down the patterns. Only then will the learner have anything to draw on. “Learned,” in the sense of consciously learned material like verb forms, rules of subordination, adverb placement, order of pronouns, etc. simply are unavailable without careful cogitation, available only under ideal conditions of carefully crafted writing. Even then, few students are ever able to do that.
My purpose in stating that is to assure the reader of my blog that input comes before output, period. Anyone who insists on output from the beginning simply is gumming up the work of the natural process, the Language Acquisition Device. Note there is no objective proof that this is true or that it works, only the results from this kind of teaching.