Natural Approach?

About a month ago, Tower of Confusion had a nice write-up on the Natural Approach and, for want of a better word, some Less Natural Approaches. At issue: Does a natural approach truly require "learning like a child"? The answer:

I believe that, as adults, we are smarter than kids, and we should be able to acquire languages more efficiently than them.

I think this is about right. Children have a lot of time on their hands with which to learn language - and lots else - in context. Adults have less time, but they have a lot more knowledge about the contexts they're learning about. As a result, most direct methods or natural approaches for adults teach things in sequences to take advantage of the fact that adults already know what sentences are and the types of things they express, etc.

There's a second question in here, and that's the introduction of artificial tools. I think there can definitely be an over-reliance on things like flashcards, grammar books, etc. On the other hand, if they work for you, it would be silly to eschew them. I think the key thing to keep in mind is that learning gets its start with comprehensible input. If you base your learning on the fact you've learned grammar rules or memorized a certain number of words, you're probably going to be disappointed when you first try to use your language for real. If, on the other hand, you're using artificial tools in order to make content comprehensible faster - eg, learning to recognize by endings which words are verbs or, for that matter, learning to recognize the 150 most common words in a language - that should be fine. Just so your consolidation of learning consists in meeting with content in a slightly less artificial form, there's nothing wrong with loading the dice in your favor as far as working with that content.