Why I Fundamentally Disagree with ALG (Dreaming Spanish) – Part 2

What's up, grinders? Welcome back to the channel.

Today, we're going to do part two of why I fundamentally disagree with ALG Dreaming Spanish. Now, if you saw this video, you know it was a long one. It was an hour and 13 minutes in which I reacted to the first four videos, uh, by David Long on his speech about what is ALG, the automatic language growth method. Okay.

Now, I decided to do this because I've had a lot of people in the ALG community, uh, react to my videos or they even just talk on, you know, Reddit and different places saying that I don't understand ALG, etc., etc., and I should have watched his speeches. When in fact, I had watched his speeches before I even started my little challenge. But I decided to do a full react for the community just so I could point out that, you know, I've done it, okay? And I did the first four videos.

Now, I honestly thought that this video would be a dud. No one would care about. But a bunch of you really [ __ ] loved it. I even got subs off of this, which was actually surprising to me. And it's still getting views right now. So, I figure I might as well finish this off because there was a lot of requests that I go to video five and six and just finish off, have the complete series like on my channel. Okay. And then maybe cuz some people suggested I go, uh, basically react to the podcasts that he's done with a few different creators, some of which are like hours long. So, let's begin.

Now, for those who have not seen my previous video, go watch it. Don't watch this video first if you have not seen the previous one. This will make absolutely no sense. You are literally being dropped into the middle of a discussion that's been going on for a while. So, go watch it.

Now, for those who did watch it, let me give you just a quick update on what we were last discussing. He was talking about guessing and how children guess meaning of words that they're hearing, different to how adults do it, and how adults seek precision. More children just let things flow over them.

Now, I do have one gripe. I think I mentioned in my previous video, but I'll mention it anyway right now. Okay. I don't like the term "guess" that they use here because guessing to me is an active process. If I see something and I perform a guess, I'm I'm making a decision, right? Like that's just inherent to the meaning of the word to me. Okay? So, some type of decisions being made about what it is. However, the way that they use "guess" actually means to perform a subconscious, uh, like figuring out of the meaning of something just based on its context. In fact, you should at no point be actively trying to figure something out, trying to think, trying to guess. You should just let it happen. And I think he'll probably stress that again. Let's go.

>> So, our adult desire to do that quickly needs to be put aside. Get comfortable guessing. All right? That's how you understand what's going on. What that means in practice is when the student arrives in our classroom for the first day, they might be a bit lost. But after the first week, their understanding of what's going on rises to an easy 80%. Normally, if they're setting aside the adult tendency, "What's this word mean? What's that word mean? Oh, I heard this yesterday." Put it all behind you. Step out in, let the rain wash over you. Don't worry about each drop. All right?

>> See, this is why I have to stress, okay, that there is no active thinking going on in ALG. You should be just sitting there watching the content or, as it was traditionally done, watching the class, the teacher, okay? And just living in the moment without trying to actively engage, trying to think about stuff. This is why whenever someone comes into my comment section, they say, "Hey, ALG is working great for me." And I'm like, "Okay, what are you doing?" They're like, "Well, I'm just doing what you're doing, but I I guess I look up words every now and then, and you know, I've used flashcards a little bit over here. I did some grammar study." I'm like, "That's not ALG. What you've done is a mass amount of input with some word lookups and some grammar study. It's not ALG. ALG is fundamental to the actual methodology that you do not try to figure stuff out."

So, I need to point that out because it's very black and white in as a methodology. Like literally every other method to learn a language that I can think of, there's no point where they're like, "You're not doing the method because you decided to add something else onto it." Okay? Like Direct Method. If you decide to go do flashcards and study, you know, grammar, even though Direct Method doesn't like specifically use that stuff, they're not like teachers of Direct Method. I was one of them. I've I've got an Espanol channel where I teach Espanol by Direct Method. There's no point where we're going to go, "Well, you're not doing Direct Method anymore." Okay? Because for ALG, the fundamental thinking of the method is it works as long as you don't do those things. Okay. So what is not present is actually important.

>> Let that happen. All you do is sit there and get as much guessing going as you can. Guess about this, guess about that. What happens if you make the wrong guess? It's all right. Further experiences will sort those guesses out.

>> Again, I don't like how "guess" is being used here. Uh, actually his, uh, where he was talking about letting it wash over you, like let the raindrops just hit you type of thing. That's better for what they mean by guessing because some of those raindrops hit you and that's you essentially starting to figure out the context. Well, you're not like tracking every single raindrop.

>> For you. You don't have to worry about it. And what we found is those who guess best wind up with the best language in the end, the highest levels of fluency. So essentially, those who avoid doing all that stuff an adult does is the ones who have the best learning at the end or the best understanding and usability of the language. Now, this is not my thoughts. I'm just kind of putting you guys into his head, understanding what he means because like I've been engaged in this [ __ ] for like 900 plus hours at this point. Okay. Uh, not all of you guys have gone down that route.

One other objection some people have from time to time is, as an adult learning through the ALG method, um, I'm not, uh, a child anymore. Just quite frankly, I'm not one years old. So with that in mind, uh, what, what, how do we respond to that? I think it's true that we're not, and that's the problem. If you were, we wouldn't be having this discussion in the first place. We wouldn't be learning how to do it the child's way, would we?

>> Again, this is why people say ALG is the child's way because that's what they keep aiming for.

>> The fact is that adults have a lot of experiences and it's a natural, now tendency to say, "Ah, what does this word mean? And what does that sound mean?" And so, I think it's important that we actually focus instead of trying to remember things, we need to focus ourselves on trying not to use those adult tendencies. Can you do that? If you determine, sure. It's a lot easier to adjust the way you're accustomed to listening than it is to try to remember 20 new words every day for the quiz that's bound to to happen. I mean, let's face it, you learn 20 new words every day. By Friday, you've forgotten what the words on Monday were.

>> I don't agree with that. Um, I've spoken about flashcards plenty of times and how to utilize them, but I'm not going to get into a a discussion over that stuff. I will say one thing though. When you use flashcards and you do forget stuff, you are keenly aware of the fact that you've forgotten stuff because literally a flashcard pops up in your face and says, "Do you remember this?" And you'll be like, "Fuck, no, I don't." Like, you're aware of it, okay? But the fact that you're forgetting stuff is not unique to that method, you know, using flashcards. In fact, it's a major part of even ALG, okay? Because like there are words in Spanish that I've heard potentially hundreds of times at this point and I am still unable to recognize, utilize, possibly even hear them because well, I've just forgotten them. Like I saw them once, they came up or I heard them once, they came up, but you know, I forgot them like 2 seconds later because, you know, for whatever reason, my brain just decided not to remember them. Okay, maybe there was not enough context. Maybe there was enough context, but like still, it was just for whatever reason my brain just didn't like that word in that moment. Maybe for that microsecond, I wasn't focused in on it. You know, that's the difference. You were keenly aware of what you've forgotten when you use flashcards. But when you're using this type of method, uh, you're actually not aware of what you don't know. That's one of the benefits to this type of thing for those who don't like that type of, uh, you know, being reminded of their own failures.

And >> there's a limit. No matter how good you are at that, there's a limit to how far your your ability to remember and recall can take you. What we know though of the brain is there's no limit on what experiences we can collect. Collect more, you gain more. And in language, that couldn't be more true. What are the skills that our teachers use to enable the student to understand? Initially, these were developed almost by accident and all through through on the job training. In the early days in 1984 and '85, many sleepless nights trying to decide what new experience can we provide for the students. The progress from level one all the way through to level 10 varies, but if we

>> Okay, I first watched this series back before I even started Dreaming Spanish. He's talking about 10 levels. If you go look at Dreaming Spanish, we actually only have seven levels. So, we're not going to see a perfect matchup with whatever he's got to say. Or maybe they go beyond this. Okay, we'll see in a second. We group our levels in a in a way that makes sense, uh, for the student. We can group them like this. We have three to four, level one, level two, 3, 4, and 5 through 10. In fact, we can go five through six and seven through 10 if necessary. But by this time, by level five, we're going off into writing classes and other sorts of classes that vary.

>> Okay, so they have writing classes at level five plus. Dreaming Spanish, I don't believe actually ever talks about writing. Like if I just go "write." No, it doesn't. But if we go "reading," it talks about reading. So that's interesting because his level five, they start with writing. Again, that's a difference. And the reason I say again, that's a difference is because, uh, in my 900 Dreaming 900 hour Dreaming Spanish update, I actually talk about the fact that the more I do this and the further I get along with the Dreaming Spanish method, the more it diverges from the traditional ALG. And in fact, I'm now at the point of thinking that literally no one is doing ALG because in order to do ALG, you must be in a classroom environment. You must be engaging with teachers. The only way I think you could possibly replicate it is if you did cross talk for like six hours a day, every single day for like a year or two years. Because when we're sitting here and we're just watching media, that's not the same as being in a classroom with teachers who are telling funny stories, like actively engaging with you, playing games with you. And then of there's obviously the difference in writing here. Like that's a big difference. Like you might not think it. You might think, well, what's the difference between, you know, playing games with a teacher and other classmates in a target language as opposed to watching a video of people playing, you know, games? There's a big difference because when you're just watching a video, you you're you're kind of like third-partying this, but once you're actually engaged within it, like imagine if someone picks up this knife and they explain to you that this is sharp in the language. Okay? So, if you're just watching someone do this and like with someone else, you might be like, "Okay, what's what does he mean?" Um, like you might go like, then you might, okay, that's sharp. But like if they're explaining the feeling of the texture difference between let's say this and this, you know, the the the skin of the banana, you you kind of need to feel that to associate those words. You could actually in that moment go, "Well, it's kind of like the English 'sharp.' I guess that's what they're trying to get at there." But like unless you're feeling that, there's a difference. And that's just one one thing that just randomly popped into my head because I have a plate with a banana and a knife on it in front of me.

By level five, students are speaking or almost ready to speak. So levels one, two, and three, they're already arriving at about 65% of their understanding of native Thai out on the road. So So if we're in Thai, that's going to be going out in Thailand and listening to Thai, understanding 65%. If I go to China, I'm learning Chinese this way. I'm I'm understanding about 65% of the words that I'm hearing around me. It's not bad. It takes a year. The second year is developed.

>> So, it takes a year to learn 65% of Thai just understanding it. And that takes us to level five, but they have 10 levels. And Dreaming Spanish has seven levels. Okay. Which obviously would be 3.5. And I'm not going to like Would you understand 65% of Spanish at level three? No. No. I'd say it's probably like level five that you get 65% of Spanish. Maybe level four depending like obviously if you've got any background in Spanish it would be around here. So it's like I know these are all rough numbers and it's very dependent on the person in question, but like the more the more I'm going along the more I'm thinking that I'm just going to start separating these two and calling them two different things. I'm going to have traditional ALG and DSAG and just say that because like they're very they're very very different at the end of the day. It actually took me this long to kind of like, uh, recognize that like just going through my own journey to go, "Okay, I can see how this would be vastly different."

velping other things like the reading and writing and and then developing the speaking ability and actual intercom communication. What skills do the teachers use? Remember that we start out with a lot of looking naturally listening, but we don't know what we're hearing. So our best way to access information is through through the things babies use: look, touch, feel. Feeling emotion is something that our course gives much better than than, uh, uh.

>> He, he literally just mentions feeling right then. Okay. Like what's the odds of that? I like. Yeah.

>> Any other language course I'm aware of. In real life, we we're we're all lives are developed around feeling and emotion. In our program, it's exactly the same.

>> Oh, he means emotional feeling. Okay, that's different. We'll have students come out crying as well as laughing from time to time. Teachers as well. When we think about level one, what does it consist of? Simple daily activities, simple games, uh, uh, different things that that engage the interest of both students and teachers together. Any kind of activity that's easy to see and understand, those are the kinds of things we focus on. What guides the language? The activity? The

>> You see, they're talking about activities, games, very, very different to just watching content. To give you an example, like I've got my series of cross talk videos where I've done with Dreaming, uh, not with Dreams, so sorry, done with Spanish Boost Gaming, where we're literally playing a game together. And by playing a game with him, there is definitely certain things that I've picked up a lot faster because I am playing a game with someone and like it's relevant to that very moment and I'm I'm 100% engaged. Okay. I don't think you can get anywhere near as close, um, just via watching, just content on the TV screen. Like, yeah, it's it's it it feels quite different.

So, what am I trying to say here? Because people always think I'm trying to debunk ALG or I'm trying to like, you know, debunk Dreaming Spanish or something. I'm just giving you guys my honest thoughts, okay? I don't think anyone is actually doing proper ALG. They're doing like this watered-down kind of version of it. I would love to be able to like, if they still did it, go there and actually do it in person at this school just to see how much different it actually is. I suspect it'd be quite different. So people shouldn't be saying that they're doing ALG unless they actually did it in this type of environment. Like, you're more like, you're probably all doing the DS method. Let's just call it the DS method moving forward. I know they say that they teach via ALG, but they're not really.

>> Needs to know. Absolutely not. The teacher goes into the classroom with an activity that a person without any hearing ability at all could look at and follow. Right? It might be an experience like, "What did you do this morning?" and showing, "Oh, first thing I woke up, and then I got my toothbrush and I brushed my teeth."

>> That you can obviously do via videos, and that is basically Direct Method. For those who want to know what that is, I've got a series on another channel where I teach Espanol via Direct Method.

>> Or I got my comb and I comb my hair. Without any hearing ability, a person could see and follow and grasp what's going on. That's what we want in level one. By level two, understanding has come up a bit, nearly to 20%. So when a student reaches into level two, their ability to hear has come up a bit. Two out of 10 words in normal Thai conversation. They're ready to speak. No. But let's face it, in real life, a baby is born into a household of maybe all adults. At least a household where everyone else in the house is older than he or she.

>> I don't know if this is true, but the way he's talking implies that just from day one, they're talking native speed. Maybe that assumption is wrong, but that's very different again to how Dreaming Spanish does it. That they they are more Direct Method and their first beginner video series, like their super beginner, beginner. They they in some ways are Direct Method, although they don't actually teach the language. They just talk really slow and give lots of visual indications. I don't know if they do this for, you know, in the traditional ALG, if they actually slowed down their speech. I'm assuming they did, but he keeps talking about, you know, adults and how adults talk.

>> How important are levels, uh, in real life? Maybe not at all. It's interesting that you can watch a young child and a grandmother sit and be engaged in one another all day long without either of them being bored. How is that possible? It's possible because of the connection and what we do in our

>> Okay, if that's the case, a grandma will simplify her speech for a child just instinctively. We all do that. We look at the baby and we go, "Aren't you so cute? Aren't you so cute?" Yes, you are. I just want to eat your face.

>> Our ALG program is try to form as strong a connection as possible between the teacher and the student. When those connections happen in a broad enough, uh, environment, you're going to learn the language without even trying. That's our goal for you. When we think about the skills of the teacher, what are they then? The ability to communicate non-verbally in a way that you understand and stay engaged. This brings us to in one way, it's an innovation of the ALG program. This brings us to the whole concept of ALG cross talk. ALG cross talk is taken from a concept that, uh, Dr. Brown, uh, came up with many years ago. This is what I'm actually kind of curious about, cross talk, and how they describe it.

>> And in in outside of ALG, um, frame of reference, cross talk is a situation, I think well known around the world, where where you have two people, two different native languages, but they're listening fluency is high. They're able to listen to, let's say, I'm American and someone here's Japanese, I understand Japanese and the Japanese person understands English. So I just speak in English and this other person speaks in Japanese. And that level of cross talk is quite common in our higher levels of ALG. For example, level 5 through 10. I highly recommend that sort of dialogue. And what that does is give you real life engagement and and input in an area that will only help to build your language speaking ability. But what we've done is taking cross talk to much higher, if in our context, lower levels, if you will. We're going from a place where students understand what they're hearing in a foreign language. For example, I'm English understanding Japanese, all the way down to level one where I don't understand what's being said.

>> So, you can see they talk about doing cross talk from like literally the beginning. Okay? And I've been called out by a lot of people early on in my Dreaming Spanish series saying I should be doing more cross talk. And I understand why they say that, you know, due to what he's saying here. And also, it's probably true. Like the further I've gone along following this method, the more cross talk you should be doing. But in a lot of ways, I also think Dreaming Spanish, they really like if they are actually promoting the ALG method or utilizing it, they don't talk about cross talk anywhere near enough. Okay? And let me give you an example. If I go to level one, let's see what they say about cross talk. "Cross talk is the most efficient activity that you can do if you can't find speakers of the language." So, you can see they talk about cross talk, okay? And they do mention it in every single level and say that it's like the most efficient thing. But have a look at this. This is what what I don't understand. You can track your hours. So if you view your hours, they got hours watching TV, hours for podcast audio, hours for talking with friends. Where's hours for cross talk? Now, you might be thinking, "Oh, that should go under watching TV." No, it's very different. Okay, but talking with friends, is that like, is that meant to be cross talk? Because I would assume talking with friends is actually, you know, talking in the language. So shouldn't that be, you know, for cross talk? So it's like they don't track that. Although they do mention it in each of the levels about, you know, its importance, which is probably something that I missed out on. I should have done probably a lot more cross talk early on, but also they say it's the most essential thing and they give you the hours that you should be spending at each level. Okay, like 50 hours. What they say, uh, "You are still best served with cross talk or classes or videos." So, it's like, cross talk or classes or videos, uh, where the teachers speak in a very comprehensible way. So how much of that should be cross talk? Like, I would actually, if I was trying to design this around the ALG methodology methodology as much as possible, I would go back and say 50% of your time should be should be cross talk, okay, to make the best progress. Now, I know why they don't do that, and it's because if you came in as a new person, you're looking at this and you're going, "Okay, I can watch 50 hours of content on this website, or I have to pay 50 hours worth of teachers." Brah, I'm not doing your method. It's so much easier to just sell people on watching content as it is opposed to getting them into classes, paying for those, or even finding free classes. So, it's like they sell it in the text, but not in the makeup of the website. And I think that actually impacted on me early on. Like I saw the series before I started, but, you know, you watch a whole series and whatnot, and then you go try something, and when you're trying it, you know, you forget aspects of it, what they stress and what they don't stress. And like here, they're not stressing as much as like the rest of the videos. Like this is just one video out of like six or whatever. So I feel like Dreaming Spanish should at least add an option to track your cross talk to show that it is important.

>> How does cross talk work? These are the skills the teachers use. I go into a to a first level Japanese class. How much Japanese do I know? 0%. How do the teachers communicate with me? Not certainly not by speaking Japanese. So, whatever they're saying in Japanese is washing over me, but I can't understand the words. How do I understand what's going on? I look, they're offering enough body language, pictures, props.

>> Oh, man. That just blew my ears out.

>> There's about 10 tools we've identified that are valuable in communicating that have nothing to do with what's being said. So, as they're speaking, they're also showing me. In level one, it's all visual. If 80% of my understanding comes from what I'm seeing, 0% comes from what I'm hearing on the first day. Is that actually cross talk though? That just sounds like Direct Method. If he's calling that cross talk, then that means basically everything that they're doing is cross talk. Because in my mind, cross talk is when I actually engage with you in conversation using English, but you respond in my target language, which is Spanish, or in his case, you know, would be Thai. But here he's just talking about how they communicate ideas, which is just teaching to me, not necessarily cross talk, but maybe the the student in their classes would always just be, you know, talking back. It's hard to say. They don't clarify.

>> If 80% of my understanding comes from what I'm seeing, 0% comes from what I'm hearing on the first day. At the end of level one, maybe about 200 hours. Now I'm understanding nearly 20%, maybe 17, 18% of the whole language overall. That means that my understanding has developed, but still I'm relying almost entirely on what I see.

>> That kind of matches up with the Dreaming Spanish. Like the first two levels, almost three levels, it's all just visual cues that keep things moving forward. Probably around level four, maybe like mid midway level three, that you can actually start like removing visual cues and understanding what's going on. But like one to two, it's just all visual cues.

>> That need for visual input is the key to native language growth. And at the early at the early stages, we compare

>> He just said key to native language growth. That is a specific selection of words. He's implying that you're going to grow this as a native language, not be high level in the language, you know, like a a a master, you know, secondary speaker of the language, literally a native language. It's quite a claim.

>> A first day student to a newborn baby, if you will, or maybe a one-year-old child. So we think about

>> He might have just meant that in the context of that's what a child does. That's their native language growth. That and my assumptions might have jumped there where I'm like, "Oh, they call their method the automatic language growth and therefore they're talk like I don't know." I don't know if that cuz like they do sell in a lot of different places that if you follow this to a tea, you will walk away with a native sounding accent. So it's it's kind of fishy.

>> Those skills that the teachers use. What are we doing with cross talk? We provide the student with the skills to communicate in the same way our first level teachers do. Imagine that you're here in, uh, uh, you're you're you're in China, for example. You don't know.

>> By the way, I want to stress one other thing. They were doing six hours of class where you were literally just sitting there with teachers engaging with them, playing games, whatnot. But you're doing this in Thailand. Okay? So you would then finish in class and then you would go out on the street and you're literally hearing Thai all around you. You're living. You're not just getting the hours in class, you're getting the hours outside of class. So the the class hours might be what you could deem as active input, and then outside you're getting a ton of passive input as well. That's why I I think a lot of people don't line up with the Dreaming Spanish roadmap at 1,500 hours because one, it's not active. Like it's you're active as in you're watching, but you're not actively engaging with teachers, which really helps cement a lot of things. So like it's not 100% cross talk. And two, you're not then like once you take off the headphones, just surrounded by the language anyway, you know what I mean? So you're not getting that massive amount of passive input as well. And three, they're doing six hours per stint. I think they mentioned that in a previous video or there was somewhere where they mention, okay, cuz like it's a whole it's a whole day of classes. Okay, so you're massively drowning yourself in the language. You're massively engaged in the language, and then you're surrounded with the language when you're knocked off. You're living the language.

Know any Chinese? All around you are Chinese people. We see those people as perspective teachers. But how do you talk to them? Do they understand English? Probably not. If so, not very easy to talk anyway. And the amount of time and effort it takes to sit down and have a three or four sentence conversation that would normally take the space of maybe 10 seconds or 20 seconds. In fact, might take 10 or 20 minutes. Because here's what happens. I say something in broken Chinese to the Chinese person. They listen and they try to figure out what I'm saying and they try to figure out their answer and then they think about that happens quite rapidly, by the way. Then they think about how to say it in English. So they're translating their Chinese answer into their broken English, which then comes back to me so I can understand it. And that whole process takes so much time and is so tiresome that in fact, I'm practicing broken broken Chinese, which does not help my listener. He's practicing broken broken English, which doesn't help him either or or help me either. And in fact, practicing without enough input as a basis doesn't help either of us. So we have a very tiresome conversation that lasts about 5 minutes and each one goes his own way. What do we want to see happen? Exactly?

>> That just sounds like, you know, people who have not progressed far enough in their language. Like my wife is a non-native English speaker. We can speak for hours. She doesn't get tired. It doesn't bother her. Like this language she knows flawlessly at this point. Like she has an accent and there may be a word here and there where every now and then she might go, "Hey, what's that mean?" But that's the extent of it. So that's the difference between a speaker who has spent an insane amount of time with the language speaking it, working with it, using it every day, and the person you're describing is probably like an a low intermediate level speaker of the language.

>> The opposite. I'm already fluent in English. He's already fluent in Chinese. If we can add in all the visual techniques that our level one teachers use for he and myself, we both can have a very engaging, relatively high level of conversation and find out about each other. We can begin to share things that before we wouldn't have even imagined after a year's worth of language study. Is that possible?

>> I think that's some assumptions on their part. It really depends on the person and like how how much they desire to learn this language. I think it would be the same with ALG. Like I've found myself struggle with the DS variant of ALG. Let's just call it DSA DS method. Okay. I've struggled with it at times because it can be boring, you know, and I would just prefer to go study grammar realistically. And plus, I I love [ __ ] learning about grammar and [ __ ]. So like this type of like active engagement and like, could you imagine if you're a person who doesn't like, you know, going out and meeting people? This would be hell. You're just stuck in a classroom environment where you have to engage with everyone for like 6 hours every day. Like that' just be hell for them. So that's another thing people need to take into account. By the way, I'm not saying that would be me. I'd actually probably really enjoy this. I think the classroom environment, one, act of engaging with the teachers and stuff. That would be so much fun. Um, it's just the sitting in front of a TV screen watching content over and over. Those first 100 hours, they were hard, man. Like I literally got a video where like, what was the title of the video? I can't remember. Let me go find it here. So, I was 450 hours. I'm seriously struggling. This part around here where you're just watching slow, boring content, like a lot of boring content, it was difficult for me to stay engaged at times, okay, to get through this. But I think if I was in a classroom with like a bunch of other people, we're like playing games because like the stuff that got me through it was Spanish Boost Gaming and watching his gaming channels and stuff. So could you imagine if we're just like playing games, you know, trying to use the language or at least trying to understand it with the teacher and stuff? I think that would be so much more fun. So much more fun. And therefore, I probably would have progressed further and faster.

>> Yes, we do that regularly. What we want to see happen is enough of those relationships develop so that let's say I'm in China, I develop a relationship with, uh, uh, five different Chinese people. What happens? They might be in the same language program as me or or nearby, or they might be friends at work. We're able to engage in discussions visually using the same techniques, experiencing experiences together.

>> This is kind of important. You do want to find people that you actually like to talk to, uh, with your target language cuz like when I started doing gaming videos and my gaming series with Spanish Boost Gaming, I just I'm having so much [ __ ] fun, bro. It's so much fun. Like th that hour or hour and a half that we just play games together just goes like that. Like I don't even realize that. Like when when we finish maths, you'll literally see us be like, "Oh, oh wow, it's been an hour. Okay, well, I guess I'll see you next week." You know, like it's just it's very different.

>> Is the foundation of of relationships communicating visually like the mother communicates with the baby, and I develop his English skills all the while he's developing my Chinese skills. Does that work? That's the foundational basis of ALG. As we provide that to our students in in Thailand learning Thai, what happens initially? Students are afraid. "Oh, if I'm if I'm interacting in my own native language, then I'm not listening to Thai." What we found is this. The engagement of the student increases. Let's face it, if I'm sitting here listening to Thai being used,

>> You know what's actually interesting? If we have a look at the series, the first four videos, I disagreed a lot with him because like he was telling me the reasons behind how they believe things work and I was like, "No, that does not seem like even based on my own experiences, uh, that does not seem to fit reality." And it like I don't even think the science backs it up. However, this these last two videos, okay, where he's talking about basically the engagement side of things, I'm like agreeing. Like this video is not really a disagree in any way. Like, have I disagreed with him up to this point in these last two videos? Like, the last two videos were reviewed. No. What I'm trying to say is that, uh, this is probably going to be a poorly titled video cuz it's like the second one in the disagree series.

>> I can tune out just like when I'm watching the TV. Sometimes I might doze off or think about some other things and come back 10 minutes later. Ah, it doesn't really matter. But if I'm engaged in a conversation, it's very difficult to doze off. I'm I'm engaged. I'm right there. I've got to follow everything. And when a person gets engaged, that quality of interaction is very important. And so with cross talk, we bringing a whole new interaction level to our ALG program. Not only that, but it's enabling students to develop, uh, the language outside of the classroom in a whole new way. Often times, people have have, uh, come and said, "Yeah, I have a a Thai friend." or perhaps a partner and we have difficulty talking. The English isn't so good and my Thai isn't so good.

>> I'm having really radical thoughts right now. I feel like at some point I need to learn another language just via pure cross talk or at least like 80% cross talk. I redo this experiment and do a comparison between this and the DS ALG method because I feel like there would be a very big difference. I don't have that time. Or do I? May maybe when I'm a bigger YouTuber and I make money, I can do it. But like I I want to do that. I feel like that would be very, very different.

>> What do I do? We always recommend cross talk. By the way, I'm not saying that I agree with their assumptions about why these things are working the way they are. I already spoke about that in my previous video. I just feel like the quality of the interactions would make a big difference on the method.

>> Never been able to effectively pass those tools on to the student until recently. And now what we have are cross talk workshops. People might come and visit, uh, Bangkok for two months. They want to be able to get around. What works for them? Survival Thai? Nah. 10 words. Does that help? Not much. But the ability to communicate with confidence takes them anywhere in Bangkok or anywhere else in the world. I was talking to a student recently who said he went to Vietnam and used cross talk effectively. Another student went to Cambodia and was able to use cross talk to create, um, whole documentaries, uh, uh, with the with the local Khmer people. I find that I find that the more we use cross talk as a means, the more engaged people are in their communication interaction, and we're coming to exciting, uh, new frontier with ALG Cross Talk.

>> Okay, so we've seen the series and you've you've heard my thoughts. I think my big takeaway from this is basically that I'm going to stop referring to Dreaming Spanish as ALG and I'm just going to call it the DS method because the way he describes it, having rewatched the series now after I've got to like 900 hours because I've watched this before I even started the series. Okay. And my own experiences at this point make me think that the meth the two methods that are being utilized here, the DS method and the ALG method, are actually quite different. And if I am to be fair to the ALG community, then this probably needs to be done via just almost pure cross talk. However, I also want to state to the ALG community that none of you guys are doing ALG. None of you, unless you went to this school or you're doing just pure cross talk, you're not actually doing ALG. That's pretty much my takeaway from this. Anyway, I hope you guys have enjoyed this video. Let me know your thoughts down below. If there's anything else you want me to react to, let me know. And make sure you sub to the channel. See you all in the next video. My cat is at the door. He's scratching. He's howling. He wants food. And if he doesn't get fed, you will.