How can the natural approach to language acquisition work for L2?

Question

So, I was seeing a video today where the narrator brought this approach as the best for L2 acquisition. I believe it can be useful, that's how we all learned our L1 after all, but I wonder how it can work and if it works if we are involved with L2.

The issues I'm concerned with are mainly two: 1) comprehension, 2) speed.

1) Comprehension

We really did learn our L1 by mostly associating images to the words but I feel we can't base our acquisition on this. In a natural language acquisition approach, we are always misunderstanding things and in the end actually understanding very little. For example, I had a "natural" japanese lesson and the teacher played a couple videos and after commented on them, telling us what he believed we could have got from the dialogues. Most things he said I didn't get at all. As kids it was okay if we didn't understand much of what others said, but as adults neither can we or the people we talk to tolerate that.

2) Speed

It generally takes at least over 5 years for us to acquire our L1 to communicate our thoughts sufficiently well for day to day life. At 5 we weren't masters of the language though, as we probably didn't know how to create many words, how to organize words in a coherent way, which words to use and so on. Past that age we needed a couple more years to get to hone our skills, resulting in over 10 years of "natural" language studying. The average L2 acquisitioner can't work with 10 years, as most of us need to learn a language for something that requires the knowledge as soon as possible.

I hope you enlighten me about these issues in particular as some people claim to have turned into 10 lang. + polyglots with this approach despite of what I said.

Answer 1

Well as someone who's tampered with 'natural' language acquisition approaches here are some conclusions I personally made:

1. Like Steven Krashen said, comprehensible input is key. If you listen to a language and understand nothing, you'll learn nothing. For immersion-based approaches to work you need a foundation of basic vocabulary, which will allow you to expand your knowledge based on what you already know.

2. We have an advantage over children because we have cultural knowledge (also known as cultural capital), which we've acquired over the years and can easily translate into other languages. For extremely foreign languages however, we need to learn about the cultural context of vocabulary and the culture of the nation they're found in to truly acquire them.

   One of the reasons it takes children so long to learn a language is because they need to learn about the world around them, learn objects, abstract concepts, theories, mathematics, shapes etc. We have that knowledge already and can simply translate that, saving us 10+ years of learning.

3. You get good and natural at what you do a lot, as long as it's input-based. If you listen to a lot of songs, you'll get good at writing songs. If you read a lot of books, you'll be able to reproduce writing naturally. If you listen to a lot of conversations, you'll be able to produce natural sounding language. Just think of those Spanish footballers when they give speeches after a match: they speak like the English players because they've watched thousands of post-match interviews!

This isn't an answer to your question but just a few insights I had. I hope these help.