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Why don’t you write a perfect course? | ||
Tags: Alexander Arguelles | Textbooks | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Lessons in Polyglottery |  | |
| kaikai Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5745 days ago 27 posts - 28 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: German | Message 41 of 78 04 May 2009 at 4:48am | IP Logged | ||
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I would like a course from which I can go from one language to my next and have the same text. I think the familiarity would make it much easier to take on a second, third, and so forth.
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| phouk Diglot Newbie Germany Joined 6028 days ago 28 posts - 48 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Russian | Message 42 of 78 04 May 2009 at 9:27am | IP Logged | ||
This has been mentioned before, and I see the point, but there are also some serious disadvantages. One of the most noble reasons for learning foreign languages is to learn about foreign cultures, to broaden your horizons. In my opinion, this should happen along the way, and not be pushed to some point in the future after "finishing" learning the language. In that light, I find a course such as Rosetta Stone (at least their older versions, don't know about their current ones) almost perverse, where you look at obviously American people in American settings doing American things (including American touristy things) while learning e.g. Russian, with sentences like "This plane is going to Lima" or with scenes like a bull fight (corrida) (probably hard to find one of these in Moscow). To take food as an example: After finishing such a course, you are qualified to travel to St. Petersburg, go to the next McDonalds, and order there, in Russian - but you wouldn't know the names of any Russian dishes or even the difference between the various kinds of eating places there (ресторан, столовая, буфет). I would not call that language learning - maybe "language learning without the culture, while imposing one set of cultural assumptions on all others". Also, I find it much more motivating to have native texts from the culture for which I'm learning the language at the end of the course. Having a selection of international texts, most of which would necessarily be translations, wouldn't work as well for me. On the other hand, I see the advantage of keeping certain things the same across a family of language courses, such as the structure or the progression of topics. What exactly to keep the same and what to vary, is probably a difficult but important tradeoff. Maybe have the same texts in the beginning dialogues, and differ when you progress to literary excerpts? Maybe offset some of the uniformity by having notes about the target culture(s) in each chapter? Maybe even have something like "targeted variation" in the initial, non-literary chapters, where you have the same topic and general structure for a certain chapter across languages, and you only vary something in the texts where you want to make a point about the difference in cultures? E.g. the topic for chapter X would be "a man asks a woman out for some leisure time activity in the evening", but the exact activity, the setting and the interaction between the man and the woman vary according to the difference in cultures? Comparing and contrasting such texts across languages on this level could be quite interesting for learners as well. For the later chapters with excerpts from native texts or literary works, one could try to find texts that relate to each other in content and setting, but are from the respective cultures. E.g. chapter Y could contain an excerpt about student life - when learning Spanish (Russian, German, ...), taken from a book by a Spanish (Russian, German, ...) author, etc. Maybe there is also a room for a different kind of progression - early chapters are very similar on the language level and allow contrasting vocabulary and grammar, while later chapters allow comparisons on a higher level, regarding the way language is used (e.g. like in the man-woman interaction above) and regarding cultures and cultural assumptions. P.S.: I realize that what I have described would be an immensly difficult task for the course designer/author, but just taking some efforts in that direction and succeeding part-way would make this course so much more interesting IMHO. Edited by phouk on 04 May 2009 at 9:39am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6460 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes  Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 43 of 78 04 May 2009 at 1:17pm | IP Logged | ||
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I am not so sure that having the same texts across languages is desirable - unless those texts are of high literary quality, they would get boring fast. I like the approach taken by JapanesePod101, ChinesePod etc. in their dialogs and texts: they typically make them very enjoyable. This is easy when preparing materials for intermediate or advanced learners, but for absolute beginners it requires finesse. Either that or the dialogs/texts will contain too many new words and too much new grammar. In podcasts you really can't teach much at once, but you do want people to enjoy themselves, so some podcast sites have spent a lot of thought on this.
A well-done Chinese podcast for beginners with zero prior knowledge for example used a telephone conversation with connection problems. The dialog was just a lot of "Hello? Hello?... Anybody there?... Li?... Li, is that you?..." (from either side, they couldn't hear each other) - really simple, but a long dialog and something everybody can relate to. Realistic language usage is important to people, either that or a fictional story that is too crazy to be true, but in a funny way, not like a bad novel with lots of implausible unlikely events. Speaking of which, a storyline will help people study regularly and enjoy themselves. At the very least, there should be recurring characters that people are drawn to identify themselves with. This requirement might be dropped if you do a series of funny dialogs/texts. Since people here can't decide whether to go for situational dialogs or for texts, and the average customer will expect a beginning language course (for modern languages at least) to give him something he can use with friends or in-country, I'd suggest doing both: having a realistic situational dialog, followed by explanations and then a piece of interesting reading (on culture or drawn from literature) featuring the same grammar and some annotated vocabulary to top it off. Recordings should be available for both. Something most courses don't do is to provide recordings illustrating different accents, so that people can get used to regional variations early. This would be most useful for early conversational lessons like "How are you?" - languages are the most divergent there. I would probably not record every single dialog in various local variants, or if so, sell that on a separate CD for those interested in it. There is a difference in opinions as to the amount of vocabulary that should be featured. On the one hand, the more new vocabulary there is in a dialog or text, especially if it's clustered in one area of it, the harder it will be to understand and the more likely your average Joe will give up on the course. On the other hand, some people do like to learn lots of vocabulary, possibly also as a way to pass the time until they are completely comfortable with the lesson's grammar... In my "bite-sized" lessons, I solve this conundrum by providing a small list of mandatory vocabulary, i. e. the words necessary for the main text/dialog, and a long list of 'optional' vocabulary. For example, in your typical self-introduction lesson, words like "I", "to come", "from", "to work" etc. would be mandatory, but even the biggest countries would not be on that list - countries and professions are on the optional vocabulary lists, from which students can pick and choose or learn completely according to his time and interest. Words from the optional vocabulary lists will not be required to know for future lessons or exercises, while I strive to build in the other words in future lessons as much as possible (without compromising the quality of texts/dialogs) as an in-built review. Even though students should be doing review on their own, you can safely assume that the majority won't do it, so by building in review you can even increase your course's rate of success. Anyway it's important to cover all vocabulary and all grammar in your explanations, that is anything that comes up or is implied in either dialog, text or exercises. It sounds easy, but it's the one mistake most of the lesson writers I guide keep making. Especially for a native speaker it's hard to even see that there's a new word, a new part of grammar or an irregularity involved, but it will totally throw off students. As for grammar... Some of the Teach Yourself courses are really bad about this, teaching lots of grammar at once with bad explanations. A good explanation connects the new ideas to something that the student already knows. This could be done by referring to the student's native language, e. g. to explain the concept of cases and the Accusative in particular by making students think about the difference between "he" and "him". Sometimes languages contain a tiny fraction of a concept, or maybe just in one way but not in others, e. g. the Latin Accusativus cum infinito (AcI) can be likened to the way English says "I am happy to see you", but longer AcI phrases require a subclause in English: "I am happy that you are here". It also helps to link new grammar to quotes and phrases people might know, e. g. a lot of people have heard of "Ora et labora", and that gives me the chance to call their attention to the fact that the Latin 2nd person singular imperative is formed by dropping the -re ending of "orare" and "laborare" here. Note: known quotes and related words in the student's native-language can also be a great help in memorizing vocabulary, so you may want to add a column for these in your vocabulary lists. Some courses, such as Synergy Spanish, even go so far as to suggest mnemonics. In the case of exotic languages like Korean, people may not know any such quotes yet, except possibly from Korean pop songs, but you could introduce these quotes as a more memorable illustration of grammar. Common messages from street signs and the like are also great illustrations. Difficult grammar has a way of demotivating average students. Make it look easy using the above mechanisms, but also go slowly on grammar, don't fall into the trap of catering to your dream language student only. Cases for example are a major stumbling block. The average English speaker will need a lot of time just to absorb the idea, never mind the different types of cases and their specific endings. Teach Yourself Czech doesn't do much in that way, and even as a veteran of Latin I got bogged down trying to remember, envision and correctly apply Czech cases at the pace they envisioned, to the point that I stopped using that book. It would make sense to explain the idea of cases in general first, then cover one case, cover another in the next lesson, and so on. However, we again have a conflict of interests, because some students will have encountered cases before and a sizable group of them will want to memorize all endings at once through recitation. For this purpose, I would suggest still going through the cases one by one in the lessons, to accomodate first-time students, but referring other students to a complete table of declensions at the back of the book. Similarly for conjugations and anything you can make a table of. Tables are quite daunting to memorize for a first-time student. Also let me say that grammar can be taught more than once, and it often even makes sense to give the student a basic understanding of a concept first and delve into irregularities or special usage cases in a much later lesson. Just compare what a textbook says about a particular tense and what a reference grammar says about a particular tense - if they are anything even remotely similar, you got a bad textbook. To prevent the student from getting demotivated in a self-study course, you may even include a brief explanation or example of why it is necessary to learn this part of grammar. Most marketing people will tell you to use people's wishes or fears for that, e. g. "You will make a good impression on your boss" or "You don't want to get lost in Tokyo". Or you could draw from literature for this, e. g. use a short poem to illustrate the advantages of being able to place the subject at the end of a phrase. Exercises make or break most language courses. You can't have too many of them; if they are too easy for somebody, he can always skip some, but a challenged students can't create more. Exercises should be in order of difficulty. For example, after I explain a grammatical concept, I might give the student a first task of identifying such forms in the lesson's dialog/text. Then maybe a straight task of creating such forms (like a conjugation exercise, but it's more enjoyable if you can invent a real-world context where this would be useful). Then, an exercise that requires distinguishing between tricky parts, e. g. between similar tenses, regular vs. irregular formation, and so on. The most difficult but possibly also the most beneficial exercise is to have students identify and correct mistakes. All of these exercises can be made harder or easier depending on the mode of answer: true/false is the easiest obviously, followed by multiple-choice, followed by many-choice (e. g. a fill-in-the-blank exercise with words listed at the top or a matching exercise), followed by entering part of the word (e. g. just the ending), followed by entering a complete word, followed by entering more than one word of a sentence, followed by creating almost the complete sentence (e. g. based on hints like "who / be / woman / across / street?"), followed by free production, followed by translation into the target language (yes this is harder than free production!). Free production exercises are often the most enjoyable, if you give a real-world situation and ask students to cope with it. If you prefer translation exercises, you can still use sentences whose usefulness is apparent. Lastly, let me say that preparing beginning students for either literature or real-life situations is a false alternative. There is no reason you have to choose just one, at a beginner level at least. Whether you're teaching them to get by in-country or you're preparing them to read literature, you should still look to teach the most frequent words and the most frequent grammar first, avoiding outdated words for now in favour of ones that will come up all the time. So what harm does it do to introduce these words and this grammar with sentences that the student may be able to use in real life, rather than concocted examples? It's only later that paths have to diverge. -- I realized this is a huge post, but I've tried to make it easier to navigate with highlighting. (Highlighting can improve your course, too.) As part of my work with Myngle.com, I now routinely guide teachers preparing lesson materials, and this is a condensed version of what they typically need to hear. A lot of these points are general pointers for lesson writers, and currently-available textbooks follow them to a greater or lesser degree. One thing no textbook (that I am aware of) does right now though is to use grammar examples that are useful, likely to come up, or memorable, such as words from sayings, essential phrases of literature, songs, ads, street signs... any few words that you are likely to have heard in this form before are good, or also if you're likely to come across this phrasing frequently in the future. Hanging grammar points on such examples is the best way of ensuring they will be remembered. Edited by Sprachprofi on 04 May 2009 at 1:42pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| JonB Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6255 days ago 209 posts - 220 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Italian, Dutch, Greek | Message 44 of 78 04 May 2009 at 5:45pm | IP Logged | ||
It is difficult to make any general assessment of the modern 'Teach Yourself' series, because there are some considerable variations in quality between the various titles. For example, 'Teach Yorself Arabic' seems to be a very good introductory course, but 'Teach Yourself Finnish' looks (in my opinion) like a glorified phrase book! As a rule, the earlier generation of Teach Yourself had a more effective approach and better overall contents. (This is something which Prof. Arguelles talks about in his Youtube review of the TY series.) Of course, the older TYs didn't have any audio content - which is an obvious drawback. Sometimes you may get people trying to tell you that a given language has radically changed since the time when the earlier books were written. But if you actually look at the books, it becomes clear that any uses of outdated language are few and far between, and are more than compensated for by the overall superiority of the earlier series. I agree very much with the thesis which Prof. Arguelles advances in his Youtube reviews. Since the late 1960s there has undoubtedly been a trend towards the simplification and dumbing down of language courses in the Anglo-US sphere. (Interestingly, this process is not mirrored in other countries. As you mention, the French Assimil series arguably improved somewhat during the period 1960-1985!) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| evandempsey Diglot Newbie Ireland Joined 5674 days ago 27 posts - 53 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Italian, Russian | Message 45 of 78 04 May 2009 at 8:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hello Professor,
I agree with pretty much all the criticisms that have been offered above. I will not waste your time by reiterating them. There are, however, several points that I feel should be emphasized: All language courses teach some version of the prestige pronunciation of the language, the pronunciation of academics, newsreaders, politicians, etc. This is all well and good. The clarity of these accents is an excellent model for the student, but in many languages the spoken language of native speakers in their daily lives is filled with phonetic contractions which do not exist in the intentionally clear speech of newsreaders, etc. This phenomenon is very pronounced in French. I have rarely seen any explicit instruction for understanding this type of speech, and yet it is this type of speech which the learner will encounter the minute he leaves the safety of his language course. The one course that I have seen that does this is SmartFrench. I have not bought this course, as I had already overcome this problem when I found out about it, and indeed it seems lacking in other respects. But in this aspect of language instruction it excels. I base my judgment on the demonstrations on the course's website. I would also like to mention two courses that I consider to be of an extremely high quality. They are both still available, but the main problem with them is that they lack audio. The first is the cours de langue et de civilisation françaises by G. Mauger. This two- volume set is not only a language course, but also a course in the French culture. The cultural notes included are extremely interesting. I found the few photos included to be very beautiful. Even in grainy black and white reproduction they inspired me to continue my studies. Like you, I oppose the dumbing down of modern courses by the inclusion of too many pointless illustrations and useless busy-work exercises, but I think that the addition of some judiciously chosen images can be extremely effective. The second course I want to mention is The New Penguin Russian Course by Nicolas J. Brown. I think it would be an immense coup for Penguin if they released audio for this course. Both of these courses have their faults, but on the whole they are much better than more recent offerings. The striking thing for me is the seriousness and academic rigour of the approach. The writers make it clear from the beginning that one is embarking on a serious study of the language. The courses also offer readings drawn from literature. The last text in the Russian course is a short story by Chekhov. The person who makes it through any course to the point where he can read Chekhov has conquered a significant portion of the language, enough to continue learning through engagement with literature and other native materials. Mauger's French course offers readings taken from Maupassant and other illustrious French authors. I do not want to imply that these courses are perfect - they are not - but they get some things extremely right, and I think any new language course aimed at the serious student would do well to take the successes of these courses into account. I apologise for the length of my message and I hope you find my comments useful. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| !LH@N Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6811 days ago 487 posts - 531 votes Speaks: German, Turkish*, English Studies: Serbo-Croatian, Spanish | Message 46 of 78 05 May 2009 at 1:04am | IP Logged | ||
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Without reading all the (I must confess, probably very very informative) posts, I would like to throw in my 50 cents, too.
1.)When I started learning Spanish, I started out with Spanish-Kit. I think it was doing a good job introducing Grammar and vocabulary, and I liked the translation exercises, though I missed dialogues. 2.)I love Michel Thomas and the overall design of the courses. But major drawbacks for me are the fact that Mr.Thomas sometimes has a horrible pronunciation and that the scope of the courses are somehow limited. 3.)"Spanish for Reading" was very very useful. I personally love reading based courses a lot, because I think it is more important to obtain passive skills. What I found negative were the silly exercises. I think those fill in the gap, which word matches which word, etc. exercises to be highly useless. I prefer no exercises or translation exercise (always from the native into the target language). I would like to get "French for Reading", but it is just too expensive. 4.)I tried to use FSI several times, but I found it to be too boring. Plus, I couldn't see any major progress. A big drawback of FSI and many other language courses is that they do not explain the way they are supposed to be used in a detailed and thorough fashion! 5.)Pimsleur is always fun at the beginning, but I think it gets too boring (it is like an FSI only audio course) 6.)I am in love with Ronelle Alexander's two books about Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian ("BCS: A Textbook" and "BCS: A Grammar"). I love the way it is designed, vocabulary at the beginning, a dialogue, and then grammar points. Sometimes the grammar points are explained in a complicated or weird way. I cannot stress this enough, I think a good language learning course should include some heavy (in the sense of a lot, not in the sense of very hard!) reading passages! A drawback of this course are the exercises, which I find very very useless (fill in the gaps etc.) Another drawback is, that it doesn't come with audio. You can buy a CD-Pack with all the dialogues on it, but it costs about 30 bucks (the last time I checked)! And considering the fact that both books together cost about 60 bucks, it is a little expensive! I think that is another point, which a lot of courses lack: a good price. I, for example, can't afford to spend 30$/€ on a Pack of CDs after getting two books for about 60$/€ first! Regards, Ilhan Akcay 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Rout Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5702 days ago 326 posts - 417 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish Studies: Hindi | Message 47 of 78 05 May 2009 at 1:32am | IP Logged | ||
That is a big drawback of FSI. The Barron's (the only version I own) gives instructions but they're for a classroom environment. People have to figure out ways to use it productively for self learning which don't always work out. I find it extremely useful and not all that boring if you can get past this. I personally never found anything wrong or boring about pimsleur except that it shows you only a very limited scope of the language and stops short. The system is based on four main ideas: anticipation, graduated interval recall, core vocabulary, and organic learning and forces you to produce the language on your own. It does its job but it must be supplemented, just like Assimil, just like FSI, just like most courses. That is the obstacle: creating a course substantive enough to need little or no supplementation from other courses. That is the perfect course. Another note on accents. I think the course should use different speakers but they should be distinct enough to recognize the differences amongst them and speakers should be gradually introduced. In the Assimil I own (2nd Ed. German) the male voices are so similar it's sometimes confusing because it sounds like he's talking to himself! The same speakers should be kept until you've heard every aspect of that speaker phonetically; until you KNOW that speaker and can pick him out of a crowd, THEN switch to a different speaker. That's the only way to make a distinction. You can consciously make a choice, "No, I don't like that accent. Hey where did my friend go?" Professor, you once said that if you made a course it would be much like Assimil. My concerns with that course are: I prefer to know the characters very well with a story and clear distinct audio. Longer excerpts from literature and a bit more culture learning. Better exercises, more like those found in the old TYS books by J. Adams. Bad translations and maybe further explanation of grammar notes but not to the extent of having it in a separate book like Linguaphone. I think if you made a course like this with maybe more lessons it would be very nice. What is the outline you're thinking of? Edited by Rout on 05 May 2009 at 1:39am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kaikai Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5745 days ago 27 posts - 28 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: German | Message 48 of 78 05 May 2009 at 1:53am | IP Logged | ||
I agree Rout. This is one reason why I am enjoying GLOSS. Multiple distinct speakers/accents is increasing my listening comprehension. Edited by kaikai on 05 May 2009 at 1:58am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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