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From the Outside In
- GenresNonfiction
155 pages, PDF
Published January 10, 2007
9 people are currently reading
91 people want to read
About the author
J. Marvin Brown
8 books5 followersJames Marvin Brown was an American linguist who studied the evolution of Thai and related languages, supervised the teaching of English and Thai at AUA Language Center, Bangkok, Thailand and developed the Automatic Language Growth approach to language teaching.
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
June 24, 2025
3 stars doesn’t really fit this book, but no other rating could either. That’s because this book is simultaneously two books at the same time.
J. Marvin Brown writes this sporadic autobiography to describe his life’s work, developing his critical hypothesis: automatic language growth (ALG).
70% of the book describes this revolutionary theory, which has entirely flipped the language-learning world on its head and is continuing to make waves among language learners. It describes the life events that led to the theory, the mistakes that kept him from realizing the ideas sooner, the people who contributed to his ideas, and the trial-and-error of ALG’s implementation.
30% of the book describes his obsessive journey to prove that scientists are wrong, by getting an advanced degree in theoretical physics and then trying to explain these concepts of physics to the reader and tie them in to his theory.
I enjoyed immensely 70% of the book. 5 stars.
I did not enjoy the 30% physics lecture (I skipped the 30-page appendix that went into more complex rationales for his physics lecture). 4 stars
Then I took a star off for the author’s pompous attitude, where he *almost word-for-word* brags that he is the best linguist to have ever lived. I get it. It’s biased because it’s an autobiography, but you can read between the lines on his weak attempts at sharing the credit for his genius theory or any display of humility. 3 stars
I think this book is absolutely worth a read for anyone attempting to learn a second language. I definitely enjoyed most of the book. The author’s ideas (and the very concept of ALG) are monumental. But as I was warned prior to reading it… when the physics parts become overwhelming, don’t sweat them much.
J. Marvin Brown writes this sporadic autobiography to describe his life’s work, developing his critical hypothesis: automatic language growth (ALG).
70% of the book describes this revolutionary theory, which has entirely flipped the language-learning world on its head and is continuing to make waves among language learners. It describes the life events that led to the theory, the mistakes that kept him from realizing the ideas sooner, the people who contributed to his ideas, and the trial-and-error of ALG’s implementation.
30% of the book describes his obsessive journey to prove that scientists are wrong, by getting an advanced degree in theoretical physics and then trying to explain these concepts of physics to the reader and tie them in to his theory.
I enjoyed immensely 70% of the book. 5 stars.
I did not enjoy the 30% physics lecture (I skipped the 30-page appendix that went into more complex rationales for his physics lecture). 4 stars
Then I took a star off for the author’s pompous attitude, where he *almost word-for-word* brags that he is the best linguist to have ever lived. I get it. It’s biased because it’s an autobiography, but you can read between the lines on his weak attempts at sharing the credit for his genius theory or any display of humility. 3 stars
I think this book is absolutely worth a read for anyone attempting to learn a second language. I definitely enjoyed most of the book. The author’s ideas (and the very concept of ALG) are monumental. But as I was warned prior to reading it… when the physics parts become overwhelming, don’t sweat them much.
April 4, 2021
This was a very interesting book with lots of insightful and challenging ideas. However, the ideas aren't practical in terms of real life, and I understand why this book isn't a popular tome used by linguists and language teachers. Say I join a Spanish course where I am immersed in the language for 20 hours per week, and the teacher has chosen to use the NA method of teaching. I am exposed to 20 hours of happenings per week. I am hearing thousands of words per day. How am I supposed to simply not think about the language?
I think a big issue with this stems from something that Brown touched on very briefly but mostly just avoided. There is a debate raging in the world of psychology about thinking in images and thinking in words. I can say, without a doubt, that I think in words for at least 80% of my day. Maybe this has been shaped by my exposure to language, maybe it predisposes me to be more naturally inclined towards study of language and linguistics. But either way, I think in language while I go about my daily errands. The only times I think in images are when I'm thinking about a place, or how to get to it. Sometimes I might be able to force myself to think in images, to imagine some food I ate or some kind of tree. But the reason why I've always found cognitive science classes where we talk about representations of objects and how we are able to identify objects, etc, so difficult it because the concept of imagining the object as an image is really tricky.
With that in mind, it feels impossible for me to learn a language without thinking in and about that language! I attribute a great amount of my German learning to thinking in German while I walk the dog or clean the house.
Part of the practicality of real life comes into play with his points about not speaking the target language. Firstly, classes that actually do that don't exist, and if they do, they aren't the kind I've been seeing advertised to me! For sure, I agree that hundreds/thousands of input before really trying to speak the language is probably going to be very beneficial. Watching La Casa de Papel and hundreds of hours of Spanish YouTube has definitely been major for my understanding of the sounds and constructions of Spanish. But at some stage one has to begin speaking. And who gives a damn if your pronunciation isn't 100%? The people I've talked to in Spain don't seem to!
All this to say that, though this book was really interesting from a language learning and a linguistics perspective, there just isn't any practical application for the method in real life. I'll always remember what one of my first year linguistics lecturers told us: that there isn't really a magic age for learning languages, it's just that toddlers don't have full-time jobs, degrees to finish, mouths to feed. Instead, they have massive amounts of time and support that allows them to play with the language. Adults just have to find shortcuts.
I think a big issue with this stems from something that Brown touched on very briefly but mostly just avoided. There is a debate raging in the world of psychology about thinking in images and thinking in words. I can say, without a doubt, that I think in words for at least 80% of my day. Maybe this has been shaped by my exposure to language, maybe it predisposes me to be more naturally inclined towards study of language and linguistics. But either way, I think in language while I go about my daily errands. The only times I think in images are when I'm thinking about a place, or how to get to it. Sometimes I might be able to force myself to think in images, to imagine some food I ate or some kind of tree. But the reason why I've always found cognitive science classes where we talk about representations of objects and how we are able to identify objects, etc, so difficult it because the concept of imagining the object as an image is really tricky.
With that in mind, it feels impossible for me to learn a language without thinking in and about that language! I attribute a great amount of my German learning to thinking in German while I walk the dog or clean the house.
Part of the practicality of real life comes into play with his points about not speaking the target language. Firstly, classes that actually do that don't exist, and if they do, they aren't the kind I've been seeing advertised to me! For sure, I agree that hundreds/thousands of input before really trying to speak the language is probably going to be very beneficial. Watching La Casa de Papel and hundreds of hours of Spanish YouTube has definitely been major for my understanding of the sounds and constructions of Spanish. But at some stage one has to begin speaking. And who gives a damn if your pronunciation isn't 100%? The people I've talked to in Spain don't seem to!
All this to say that, though this book was really interesting from a language learning and a linguistics perspective, there just isn't any practical application for the method in real life. I'll always remember what one of my first year linguistics lecturers told us: that there isn't really a magic age for learning languages, it's just that toddlers don't have full-time jobs, degrees to finish, mouths to feed. Instead, they have massive amounts of time and support that allows them to play with the language. Adults just have to find shortcuts.
August 14, 2025
Really interesting theories on language learning from a man who just had a lot of interesting thoughts. Was amazing to get so much deep insight from a man so utterly obsessed with the optimization of language learning and spent his lifetime dedicated to such an endeavor. This book not only provided radical new insight into the ways that languages could be learning, but it also seems he provided the foundation on which other theories have built, namely those espoused by refold and mattvsjapan. Resultantly, due to this work's direct and indirect impact, my views on language learning have been fundamentally overhauled from my 7th grade self's extreme of viewing grammar as the key to efficiently unlocking the tools to piece together anything in language, to now viewing massive amounts of audial input as the base foundation for learning a language.
Despite the revolutionary nature of the content of this book, I still have some gripes with the it. Mainly he got a little too excited about some little tangents that I feel like distracted too much from the main story that he was trying to convey, like when he went down physics rabbit holes. In terms of the theory, I'm still not sure whether to be a die hard 100% believer in all his claims of greatness, because it seems like there's lots of anecdotes that, while having success, also still face limitations in ability. It seems like adult language learners are subject to the crutch of being habituated to the patterns of their mother tongue, but this language learning method seems to be the best one to break you out of those patterns. If I had to put all my chips on one language learning method that could get you the closest to fluency, I'd say the author's proposed method is it.
That said I still feel some doubts floating around in my mind, but they feel all technically explainable by the method. For example, learners with this technique can still suffer with poor accent, though it's been shown that speakers who don't identify with a certain culture also won't develop their accent. Perhaps this just goes to show that even though this method gives you the best shot, there are still countless factors at play putting adult learners at a disadvantage: higher cognitive ability = likely to overthink, fear being wrong, used to expressing logical concepts in a certain way that doesn't translate; established cultural identity = unlikely to fully lean in, will have desire to translate their own cultural ideas over (for example wanting to say "how are you?" to people when in some cultures that isn't really asked).
All in all, one of these next languages I wanna go all in on this method and see where I end up!
Despite the revolutionary nature of the content of this book, I still have some gripes with the it. Mainly he got a little too excited about some little tangents that I feel like distracted too much from the main story that he was trying to convey, like when he went down physics rabbit holes. In terms of the theory, I'm still not sure whether to be a die hard 100% believer in all his claims of greatness, because it seems like there's lots of anecdotes that, while having success, also still face limitations in ability. It seems like adult language learners are subject to the crutch of being habituated to the patterns of their mother tongue, but this language learning method seems to be the best one to break you out of those patterns. If I had to put all my chips on one language learning method that could get you the closest to fluency, I'd say the author's proposed method is it.
That said I still feel some doubts floating around in my mind, but they feel all technically explainable by the method. For example, learners with this technique can still suffer with poor accent, though it's been shown that speakers who don't identify with a certain culture also won't develop their accent. Perhaps this just goes to show that even though this method gives you the best shot, there are still countless factors at play putting adult learners at a disadvantage: higher cognitive ability = likely to overthink, fear being wrong, used to expressing logical concepts in a certain way that doesn't translate; established cultural identity = unlikely to fully lean in, will have desire to translate their own cultural ideas over (for example wanting to say "how are you?" to people when in some cultures that isn't really asked).
All in all, one of these next languages I wanna go all in on this method and see where I end up!
February 14, 2022
Read while I was in Korea and I gave a presentation about it. The book offers some great insights about language learning, liking comparing learning a new language to weaving a web from happenings and experience, and mental image flash. I really like these ideas and the way the author utters them but it seems hard for me to come up with effective learning methods based on the ideas besides watching English TV series and reading extensively.
August 24, 2025
Interesting explanation of the listening approach to language acquisition. Dreaming Spanish got me started on this path. After reading Brown's book, I continue to consider myself intrigued but not entirely convinced.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews