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Strategy: Learn 600 words a week. | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| Linguamor Decaglot Senior Member United States Joined 6563 days ago 469 posts - 599 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, French, Norwegian, Portuguese, Dutch | Message 97 of 167 11 October 2007 at 2:05pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Now you are arguing like a politician again, instead of like an academic. Why would you think that researchers are unaware of new technologies and have not investigated their effectiveness for language learning? Just because you are unaware of research doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. The following journals are specifically dedicated to technology and language learning. # CALICO Journal (Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium) # Teaching English with Technology (IATEFL Poland) # CALL-EJ On-line (Online Journal) # Computer Assisted Language Learning: An International Journal (Taylor and Francis) # CALL Review: the SIG Journal (The IATEFL Special Interest Group's Newsletter) # IALLT Journal (International Association for Language Learning Technology) # JALTCALL Journal (Japan Association of Language Teaching - Computer-Assisted Language Learning Special Interest Group) # ON-CALL (Australia) Archives only - now incorporated into CALL-EJ: http://www.cltr.uq.edu.au/oncall/home.html # Language Learning and Technology (Online Journal) # ReCALL (European Association for Computer Assisted Language Learning) Edited by Linguamor on 11 October 2007 at 2:25pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Linguamor Decaglot Senior Member United States Joined 6563 days ago 469 posts - 599 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, French, Norwegian, Portuguese, Dutch | Message 98 of 167 11 October 2007 at 4:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
My question to some native English speaking professional translators. "I have been given the following "sentence" as an example of how a speaker with zero knowledge of a language can use word for word translation and still be able to get a clear understanding of what the "sentence" means. "Boeing. has. taken. of. delay. in. manufacture. of. sound. plane. of. line. of. news. generation." I would like to know how native English speakers would interpret the meaning of this "sentence"." Here are the responses I have received so far. "Hi Michelle: so would I....I think someone's been pulling your leg..." "Agree with David." "Poorly." "Completely incomprehensible gobbledy-gook!" "Absolutely horrible. It refers somehow to the delivery delay of US planemaker Boeing's new 787 Dreamliner aircraft (the new generation) announced yesterday. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7038294.stm But the series of words here per se would not be understood as anything meaningful." "Agree with the above comments. If anything, the example illustrates the opposite of the claim." 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| apparition Octoglot Senior Member United States Joined 6595 days ago 600 posts - 667 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), French, Arabic (Iraqi), Portuguese, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Pashto | Message 99 of 167 11 October 2007 at 11:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I don't think it's very clear, either. :-(
I might think "Boeing delayed some sort of new plane." Which I guess gets most of it. But I'd be pretty frustrated with only that amount of meaning, when that's only parsing about half of the words in the sentence. I'd feel I was missing something. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6648 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 100 of 167 12 October 2007 at 4:01am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Linguamor, now you are pulling Xtremelingo's leg! The sentence was produced to illustrate what a person who didn't know a certain language could understand solely by translating word for word - which must be seen as a worst case scenario. If you have to use that method until you know the language, then the experiment clearly shows that this is better than nothing - it is nonsense to say that it hasn't any meaning. And it is totally harmless, because if you can understand the original sentence then you obviously won't be doing this kind of 'half-translations'.
However you have submitted this sentence to trained translators who also happen to be native speakers of English, maybe even without a reference to the context in which it was used. And of course they say that it is gobbledy-gook, because it clearly is. But for a novice in a certain language that kind of gobbledy-gook might be enough to guess the meaning of the original sentence, - which is the first step to learn something about the idiomatic use of the language in that sentence. With the speed this thread is degenerating (and of course I'm part of it myself, - my apologies) we risk that it will end up as one more closed thread... Edited by Iversen on 12 October 2007 at 7:22am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| xtremelingo Trilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 6232 days ago 398 posts - 515 votes Speaks: English*, Hindi*, Punjabi* Studies: German, French, Arabic (Written) | Message 101 of 167 12 October 2007 at 4:12am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Linguamor,
I know they are not aware of some technologies, because we are in the process of developing unique/innovative educational technologies that have not been released to the market yet. No release = No Access = No Research by linguists. You can argue all this want, but as a linguist you don't know what is going on in the laboratories of engineers and computer scientists as well as an engineer or a computer scientist does. What if I told you, we are in the process of teaching blind persons how to see using sound > visual triangulization by using methods of sonar as understood in the physiology of bats? Don't underestimate the research efforts by 'non-linguistic experts' and inventors that have fluency in developing new systems (particularly software) that will allow linguists like yourself to easily test new ideas. We have in the past significantly contributed to the field of linguistics. Unfortunately, your narrowminded view in research does not understand the various connections between different (even unrelated) fields of study. Internet Language-exchange is a very good one for example. Many of engineers (including myself) that are pioneers in the technology of VoIP, when we first designed this technology, we considered many possible uses, and the possibility of language-learning far before the linguists even woke up and thought about this. If you would like to see one of my theses (150+ pages) that I had completed in 2004, this will confirm this for you (I can send you a link via PM). We thought about language-exchange via the Internet well before some linguists like yourself woke up and smell the coffee about any of those possibilities. As some linguists were ignorant of these new technologies then, we also have new state-of-the-art language technology being developed now, that many are oblivious too. I am not legally allowed to discuss some of them in detail on a public forum, as we are in the process of acquiring patents. However, we can take this discussion via Private where I feel more comfortable discussing some of the "top-secret" methods, because I still do trust you will respect my privacy. I hesitated to go this far, but to give myself some credibility, that I do treat my research in a very scientific manner. My research has been published in the library of the University -- Edwin studies at (he may not know this). Perhaps he can pick you up a copy to confirm this. Provided my name can be kept anonymous, I don't trust some freaks that may exist on this forum that may look me up for the sole purposes of contacting me for malicious purposes. You have a hard time seeing how the art of research is a cross-discipline field of work.
I question the way you presented this arguement to them. If you proposed this idea in a negative way initially (which is what I believe), I can expect you to invoke a certain negative response. As we've been on the opposite ends of the table for a while, I am pretty sure this method was not presented in a favourable light -- playing devil's advocate would have probably got you more honest responses. Why? Because I can equally provide you references if not more that will dispute all of the above claims.
As we can see, Apparition has accurately conveyed a pretty decent meaning from this. The goal isn't to extract the meaning perfectly. The goal is to extract a meaning. The rest of the context, practice and eventual familiarization with grammar through extended reading and study will eventually confirm and perfect this meaning over time. But to say that you can not get any meaning whatsoever out of this is nonsense on your part. Even if a beginner were to make an accurate hypothesis as to what the combinations of words suggested in sequence may imply -- they have derived a meaning from it. Accuracy is something that will be developed over practice and experience. The goal is to get beginners reading content sooner. Edited by xtremelingo on 12 October 2007 at 6:18am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6217 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 102 of 167 12 October 2007 at 6:11am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I am visiting Turkey next week and I have decided to experiment with learning 600 words a week (c.86 per day) in the time before I go, perhaps continuing while there. My conversational Turkish is pretty fluent but I could do with knowing more vocabulary (a rough estimate I made on another thread, using a "dictionary test", suggested I knew about 4,000 Turkish words). Edited by William Camden on 12 October 2007 at 6:12am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| edwin Triglot Senior Member Canada towerofconfusi&Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6409 days ago 160 posts - 183 votes 9 sounds Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French, Spanish, Portuguese | Message 103 of 167 12 October 2007 at 10:31am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I heard my name being mentioned... Xtremelingo, I am not studying in any university now. As for my past universities, which one were you referring to? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| edwin Triglot Senior Member Canada towerofconfusi&Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6409 days ago 160 posts - 183 votes 9 sounds Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French, Spanish, Portuguese | Message 104 of 167 12 October 2007 at 10:53am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Being inspired by the method posted in this thread, I am going to purpose yet another vocabulary building method. You are going to learn 700 words per week!
1) Pick 100 words randomly from a dictionary of your target language 2) Bake 100 cookies and engrave one word onto one cookie. Do this for all cookies. 3) Pick up 1 cookie at a time, read out the word on it, then eat it 4) Eat all 100 cookies 5) Do it everyday I believe by eating the word literally, you are going to memorize it forever. As you can see, the set-up time is huge, but that's irrelevant. It is only a one-time thing (per day). The actual time you spend is when you are eating the cookies. If you eat 5 cookies per minute, it will only take you 20 minutes each day. I actually did some research and published a paper for my master thesis many years ago. But unfortunately, it is not related to this method. In fact, it is totally unrelated to language learning. If you find other research which potentially undermine this method, I can tell you (without reading those research) that they are totally unreliable. Don't trust them! Trust me! Yes, trust me! No need to argue with me now. Try it out first before you comment on my method. In fact, I won't be replying to anyone who has not tried my method. Please don't forgot to report to me your progress everyday. 6 persons have voted this message useful |
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