Ming argues that teaching single words is easier than phrases, and children pick up phrases through repetition and interest, not because they're natural gestalt learners. He pushes back on the idea that gestalt language processing stages must happen in order.
My personal opinion, also professional opinion, is that what's the point of teaching another phrase when you can just teach a word? What's the difference? I don't see the difference. In fact, a phrase might be even harder than teaching the word. And if we say that children learn in phrases and they prefer it that way, I don't see how that's actually legit, because a word is much shorter than a phrase. So if you tell me that a child can learn a phrase better than a word, that's just saying if you learn a foreign language, you're trying to learn like a phrase rather than just a word. It doesn't make sense. And most of the time, why children pick up those phrases is because of, number one, it's interesting to hear it. And number two, it's been repeated many times in the correct context. And so these rules are also the same with learning any word out there. And most of the time in the gestalt learning processing theory thing, and it's a theory, is that the stages generally cannot be skipped or should not be skipped.
