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How to avoid the intermediate plateau. | ||
Tags: Intermediate | Learning Strategy | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6706 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 9 of 15 30 August 2014 at 12:26pm | IP Logged | ||
OK, then learn 500 new words - then the effect becomes perceptible. I'm more worried about thing like oral understanding and pronunciation which are harder to quantify. But one good old trick is to return to texts or recordings which you had trouble with one month ago. Would similar stuff (but of course not exactly the same materials which you have studied) be OK with you now? Then you have progressed. Taking a wider perspective as Cavesa suggests is also a good idea. Sometimes it pays to focus on the scope of what you have done and can do instead of focusing on things you haven't done yet and can't do. Have you been through most corners of the grammar (without being too rigid about understanding it all or being able to construct textbook examples)? Have you read/spelled your way through a nice big range of different kinds of texts? Have you tried to think in the new language? Can you explain your level in the language in the language? And last but not least: have you found reliable and sufficient resources which can keep you occupied for months ahead, or are you stuck with one textbook and three videos on Youtube? Edited by Iversen on 30 August 2014 at 12:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7208 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 10 of 15 30 August 2014 at 1:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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Anthony Lauder did a video on learning a language in
minutes instead of years. He's done a lot of great videos. In one of them he talks about spending 50% of your time on the big long course that should lead you to fluency, and spending the other 50% on doing fun things, which could be other courses, reading comics, watching videos, etc. I applied a technique like this with Spanish and it was effective. My big long course was FSI Basic Spanish. I'm doing something similar in French. FSI Basic French being the long course. This approach helps you know you are making progress, while you are still aware you aren't done yet. It also gives plenty of time to fill in the gaps with other techniques, material, approaches, etc during the long march. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4447 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 11 of 15 30 August 2014 at 1:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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As a native-speaker in any language, I don't think you can avoid using a dictionary entirely. There are
always rarely used words you would only come across "once in a blue moon". If you watch a typical primary school Spelling Bee contest in the US, there are dozens of words that you don't know as a native- speaker in English. These may include a term for a specific part of a flower or a body part that came from Greek or Latin. According to the polyglot Stuart Jay Raj, in the beginning of your learning you should be no more than 20s from the dictionary (book or electronic copy). In the beginning, you have to look up words & phrases more frequently. Once you get to a certain level, you don't need to lookup most of the common words. Listening is the key to learning any language. When watching TV programs or movies, if you are used to reading subtitles, you don't always make the connection between the subtitles and the actual pronunciation of words & phrases in a dialog. For Cantonese speakers who watch Mandarin films, even with subtitles in Chinese characters, they don't automatically associate a specific sound in Mandarin with a specific character. Since both languages use the same set of Chinese characters, a Cantonese speaker would think of the pronunciation of words & phrases in the Cantonese way even when the actors on screen are speaking Mandarin. The main problem is when you get into a conversation. You don't have a choice to look up words / phrases because this would annoy the other person you are talking to. If you happen to be lucky the other person also speaks your language or know enough words, he/she can fill in that word/phrase with the ones from your language and then switch back. Once a young student from Shanghai, China came to our place for a visit. She said that she was studying "Déyǔ". The Chinese language uses a lot of condensed expressions. "Dé" is the short-form for "Déguó" (Germany) and "yǔ" is for language. You put the 2 together you get the German language. Someone in the group looked a bit puzzled with the word: "Déyǔ". Another speaker said in Mandarin: "她学习 German" (she's learning German by substituting the Chinese word "Déyǔ" with the English equivalent and the sentence became clear. Edited by shk00design on 30 August 2014 at 1:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Luso Hexaglot Senior Member Portugal Joined 6064 days ago 819 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, French, EnglishC2, GermanB1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Sanskrit, Arabic (classical) | Message 12 of 15 30 August 2014 at 4:14pm | IP Logged | ||
I see your point, but my experience tells me otherwise. Language schools have to target the average student, not people like us (if you allow me the plural). We shouldn't forget that we few, we happy few at HTLAL are a minority. If you give the typical student the workload many people here find normal, you'll lose him in no time. Speaking of myself, I'm aware that sometimes I'm bit of a nuisance to classmates (I manage to control myself by now). Teachers are always receptive to the odd one (me again) that compares their language to four others all the time, but they have to focus on the just-so-committed others. As a rule, I'm also in favour of these manuals' structure: each unit introduces you to a feature of the language (and the people). They give you chunks of vocabulary in a playful manner and the texts are used to highlight grammatical features. As for the nomenclature, schools have to abide by a code. If they think their "clients" need 7 years in average to complete the course, then they must name the levels accordingly. In my experience, this is not carved in stone: once, I met a classmate enrolling in a class two levels above mine. I asked how had they allowed it, and he went: "Oh, I talked to K. (a teacher) and he said that I could do it, given my recent results. Talk to him, and I'm sure they'll allow it too." In the end, I didn't do it, because I was being perfectionist, but it was a possibility. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7208 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 13 of 15 30 August 2014 at 9:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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Part of the trick to avoiding a plateau is to have something that will carry you through it. Something that will keep you going and add to your language toolkit.
Learning the 5000 words in a Routledge Frequency Dictionary. They cover at least eleven different languages. Adding five or ten words from the dictionary per day over the course of a eighteen to thirty-six months, when supplemented with intensive and extensive listening/reading will carry you a long way through the intermediate hump. Edited by luke on 30 August 2014 at 9:44pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Lorren Senior Member United States brookelorren.com/blo Joined 4254 days ago 286 posts - 324 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Danish, Irish Studies: Russian | Message 14 of 15 30 August 2014 at 10:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've gotten to the point in Spanish where I know that "I can do it."
I'm reading books in Spanish (that I know in English) without help from a dictionary. I started listening to Notes in Spanish Advanced, and while I don't understand everything yet, I have a good idea of what they're discussing. I can certainly see myself going into books that I'm familiar with due to watching the movie, and then into books that I'm interested in but have not read the book in English or watched the movie. I know that I could interest myself in native podcasts, although I won't understand everything at first. I finished all five levels of Rosetta Stone almost a year ago. At that point, I was not at the "I can do it" stage that I am now. I started off by reading a magazine in Spanish and writing every word that I didn't know and putting it into a flashcard program. I could only do a paragraph at a time at first. I can read an entire article now. There is a huge gap, but it can be resolved. I'm sure that other people have other methods, but this is what I have been doing. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6706 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 15 of 15 30 August 2014 at 10:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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I do see the point in learning the most common words or word forms in a language and check with a frequency list that you know them. But there is a catch: if you count headwords then 500 should be enough, with word forms it depends on the language, but let's say 1000 items. And what about the rest? Well, these words are so rare that each new text (read corpus) basically will present you with a new set of word(form)s, and the overlap will be fairly limited - especially when you take into consideration that the overlap includes the most common word(form)s. Been there, done that: I made some statistics earlier this year based on two samples, each with around 37.000 English wordforms from my multiconfused log thread. And after much heavyhanded cleansing I was left with slightly less than 4000 headwords from each sample - and the overlap was slightly less than 2000 headwords.
I suppose you can calculate the expected overlap for two samples of a given size in a language where the word frequencies are known - but I left mathematics quite a long time ago so I'll leave that calculation to others. But if the result is as I found, namely that the overlap between samples is unimportant, then it doesn't help you much to learn the 5000 most common word(form)s - you can just as well learn the words which characterize the kind of topics you like to read about, or which your favorite authors prefer. Just remember to add the most relevant connector phrases, which are as important as learning the most common words - one more thing to be learnt from the excellent videos of mr. Lauder. Edited by Iversen on 30 August 2014 at 11:01pm 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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