Learning a Zombie Language

Response to Listening to Thai in Bangkok: Automatic Language Growth, a new approach to absorbing a hard language.
http://www.asiantribune.com/index.php?q=node/7910
Flexible attendance schedule, learning from experts, dirty jokes... what more could a person want from a language-learning program. These are some of the elements of the Automatic Language Growth program created by linguist Dr. J. Marvin Brown.
The ALG program is based on the way children (are observed to) learn language, through listening and observing.
When an adult approaches a language through a traditional language class, they start by struggling with pronunciation and memorizing vocabulary, moving on to conjugation charts, copying lines of grammar, and translations. This is altogether the opposite of a baby's approach; babies will develop their language skills before they physically can speak. This yields a period of the time where the child-brain is an observer to the language process.
The ALG program tries to replicate this observer status by not allowing beginning students to speak in Thai. This also ensures that students only hear proper Thai, and don't form bad language habits by listening to their struggling classmates.
But no one will get much out of just hearing Thai spouted at them for hours a day, unless it is particularly memorable. That is where the dirty humor and politically incorrect jokes come in. Teachers use jokes as a way to make the words they are teaching stick. The idea is that over time, through hearing a word correctly used in many different contexts, that word will become part of the listeners vocabulary.
The theory behind the ALG program requires rejection of the "critical period hypothesis" of language learning. This theory states that children learn language differently than adults. There is an ideal period of language development in children, and that after this time, learning a new language is much harder. In the ALG program, adults attempt to learn language through the same techniques used by children.
Even with the "critical period hypothesis rejected, I do not think this is the most effective system for learning a language. The ALG program is only half of immersion, being placed in a situation where one must learn the language around them. It completely lacks the speaking component.
The theory also overlooks that even after children have their time of observers in a language, it takes many years as a participant, through trial and inevitable error, to gain the nuances of speech. Children do not immediately start speaking in full and proper language when they begin to speak, they try one set of sounds after another to build their speaking vocabulary from their listening vocabulary. Even after years of listening, many children still lack proper pronunciation.
The ALG program does in many ways resemble the ulpan programs established in Israel to teach Hebrew to new immigrants. Hebrew, an un-dead language, became the national language of Israel, but lacked modern speakers. Since there was no common language between the floods of people coming to the fledgling state, the classes had to be taught in a way that was without needing a common first languange. The basis of the ulpan is learning Hebrew through Hebrew.
In this process, language is taught through context and the expressiveness of the teachers, much like in the ALG program, but the fundamental difference is these classes also try to get the students speaking as soon as possible. In ulpan, students learn basic exchanges of greetings and words to begin speaking their new language within hours of starting the class. This allows students to begin their trial and error process earlier, and forces them to get comfortable with the awkwardness of speaking a new tongue much faster. (I worry that the transition from listening and learning to speaking may not be as smooth in the ALG program.)
Also, there is no translation. Ulpan is a full immersion process. Hebrew only. So if students want to communicate, in the same way kids are forced to learn a new language, the adults must learn their new language. The pace of an ulpan is such that students go from no background to fluent in eight months or less.
I think this is a better more complete system of quickly learning a language than the ALG system, which relatively seems to have about the same logic as Harold Hill's Think System.