Personally, I am constantly changing the way I learn Japanese because if I don’t their will always be blind spots, areas where I can’t see any improvement.

A lot of literature since the late 70′s points to the role of the learner in learning, meaning that teaching (and hence methodology) takes a back seat to learning styles. “What’s your learning style?” is a much more important question to ask than “what’s your method?”.

I would be like saying there is no best method to build a house or an automobile. I believe it is human nature to try to constantly improve. Products like the ipod or the Toyota hybrid are a result of this.

Saying there is no best method and it is simple a matter of time spent, would be like saying if Chrysler just spent more time designing cars, they’d be just as good as Toyota. I imagine the method is different between the two which will always yield different quality results.

Other than those, I treat the commercial products as another way to learn languages.

And Cisa, I agree with you. There is no point of spending time discussing which method is the best.

On the other hand, myself not coming from an Anglo-Saxon environment, I cannot really understand why it is so important to discuss whether Rosetta Stone or FSI are better. Where I live these resources are rarely known and are hardly available, or if so, for much more money, than in ,say, UK. But I don´t want to wine or something, please, don´t misunderstand. I just say, that in my environment it is normal to enroll for a course, find a teacher to learn a language, self-study is not as usual, since there are not many self-study type textbooks. On the other hand, partly this is something positive, since those people wishing to learn a language on their own just simply buy a ´simple´ textbook and get down to business.

I also find all these methods a little suspicious (no, no accusation!!), since they promise you something you may not get. Also, I don´t like the ´study-in-your-car-while-going-from-pennsylvania-to-california´ approach. Parroting methods like Pimsleur may be good if you want to study just some phrases or as an additional exercise to your real studies. If you learn a language, you gotta learn grammar to be able to build sentences, and you gotta learn the vocab as well to be able to build those sentences from something.

However, there are some little tricks that work differently for everybody. E.g. using flashcards to memorise words, putting post-its on the fridge, but these are not complete methods.

All in all, I would say, that these courses may be a good resource, may provide a good coursebook, a good audio, but discussing which method is better is time-consuming and meaningless.

His other hypothesis on total native material does sound a bit extreme to me. I would imagine that a learner completely new to the language would need some learner’s materials. But again, he is arguing that the total native approach will be ruled out by those beginners who are not motivated by it.

what the original poster argued was not only that “there is no best method”. His view was much more radical: “all methods are the same, as long as you spend time with them”. He aknowledges time as the only relevant factor (along with input and output) and for him the method counts only if it makes you spend more time on that language.

In many forumists’ opinion, this is simply not true. Time is important, but how you study is important as well. If you are completely new to a language, you can spend 12 hours every day only watching DVDs on that language, but you won’t learn it as well as you would if you used other methods as well. This is an extreme example to an extreme hypothesis by the original poster.

To return to that relationship, it is true that you need time. But is time alone enough? You need consideration, understanding, etc. etc. You need a “method”. No arguing that what works between you and her doesn’t work for another couple, but you can’t infer from this that just spending time together is a guarantee of a happy life.

By ‘methods’, I mean techniques and executions, as compared to ‘approaches’.

The one thing that seems to be a common denominator is time. Whatever your golden method is, you can’t avoid doing it for an hour or two every day if you want to get good at your target language.