With that disclaimer: I don’t believe most people, especially after adolescence, learn a new language they way they learned their first. And thank God. Immersion may be an excellent method, but in childhood it’s characterized by an enormous amount of enforced listening (because we don’t know enough to reply), followed by a length period of trial-and-error.

Certainly there’s some level at which most students do need certain things — basic sentence structure, use of common verbs, present / past / future / imperfect / conditional (maybe in that order, at least in terms of when they’re introduced?)…

Harless has been a big influence on how I think about learning problems (in a workplace sense), and so I hear him asking, “Learn a language for what?� As in, do you want to travel in Chinese-speaking places? Do you want to pick up a Chinese date? Do you want to read Confucius? Li Bai? The Little Red Book? Do you want to get a job with Praxis, or with Lenovo, or with Hutchison Whampoa?

You’ll still need to know how to put words together, but your date or your employer may not care that you know 月下�酌. On the other hand, if they do care, they’d perhaps be interested to find over three dozen translations of Drinking Alone with the Moon.

This is a discussion we’ve been having at the office — how much of any language learner’s needs, regardless of their goal, is the same? I tend to think that every language student through at least the intermediate levels need basically the same things, and only as you reach higher do specialized needs create specialized requirements. I have been told by many people much smarter than me that this is horribly misguided, though, so perhaps I’m mistaken :)