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Memorization Strategy for classification | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5757 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes  Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 33 of 38 15 January 2014 at 6:23am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
In English, I use dictionaries frequently because I want to write something, and a word pops up in my mind and claims it is the right one for the job. Most of the time they don't lie. Sometimes they do. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Gemuse Senior Member Germany Joined 4073 days ago 818 posts - 1189 votes Speaks: English Studies: German | Message 34 of 38 15 January 2014 at 8:36am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
There are immigrants who do exactly this. Heck, even the streetsigns may be in a foreign language around where they do business and live. They usually end up not learning English. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4524 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 35 of 38 15 January 2014 at 10:22am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
I too have trouble thinking of "Der Mutter" rather than "Die Mutter", but now that I think of it the problem is not the German language (!), but the fact that I used Anki so long to drill the genders of isolated words. It would have been much better to learn the words largely in context from the beginning using sentences. You need to stop thinking of "Die Mutter" as feminine and "Der Mutter" as masculine or some odd feminine form - they are both as feminine as the other and the context of the text makes that clear. There is some research that suggests that L2 learners have trouble learning gender precisely because the units of language they learn (i.e., words) are too fragmented. Children generally don't learn the gender of words in the same fragmented way, but from phrases in context, which I think is the point Bao and Bakunin are trying to make.
I think there are immigrant bubbles of all sorts all over the place. The Turkish boys at the corner store where I buy beer have complimented me on my German skills, saying their father has never really learnt German after more than 20 years in the country. I eat at Thai restaurant near my house and the people there are surrounded by Thai friends. I went to a benefit organized by a Swedish couple last summer, and realized they too mostly (solely?) hang out with Swedes here in Berlin. English is hard to avoid - I am looking at you HTLAL! - but people nearly always gravitate back to their own language and culture. I suspect the reason that more immigrants are not C2 in their L2, and keep strong accents, is due to an immigrant bubble effect, plus that many do not have the time/inclination/education to read massive amounts in their L2.
I think that's the classic example of implicit learning, which comes from massive exposure. You just don't have any conscious access to the knowledge you possess. Touch typing is the same. I have no conscious idea where the keys are. I just move my fingers and mostly they hit the right key, but sometimes not. My mother, who learnt German as an L2 as a child, did (unsurprisingly) very well in German when she later studied it at school in Australia. When teachers asked her to explain a particular rule she had used to the class she said she always annoyed them by saying that didn't the know the rule; she just thought the sentence sounded right that way. Which is exactly what my native-speaking German wife says when I ask her to explain some grammatical point.
My insight (if you can call it that) was that you only need a much more restricted grammar to access the language, than to speak it. Like in your example from primary school, you don't need to know the rule in English that tells you when you should use an "a" or when you should use an "an", so long you know it's the indefinite article you can read fine. I can certainly recognize and understand the cases when I read, even if I can't necessarily output them accurately. My hope is that a lot of the finer rules (e.g., 'a' vs 'an') will become at least somewhat intuitive after massive exposure. And we shouldn't forget that the grammar books only help us with the basics of speech. There are tons and tons of rules that are not listed, and even if they were you'd never be able to remember or utilize them in real time. Some examples from the Antimoon site: Do you get 'in' a car or 'on' a car? Do you get 'in' a bus or 'on' a 'bus'? Do you say "big red car" or "red big car"? We do an exercise, but make a mistake; make a phone call, but have a conversation; do a job, but take a break; take a step, but make a jump. You can have a bad/terrible headache, but not a strong/heavy headache; you can get great/enormous satisfaction, but not big satisfaction; you can be a heavy smoker, but not a hard/strong smoker etc. The Antimoon site, run by Polish language learners who learnt English largely by input has some really nice examples of the subtle English rules that we are not aware of, plus lots and lots of practical advice for language self-learners. While it's written for English language learners, it's a goldmine for anyone interested in applying an input-style approach to language learning: http://antimoon.com/how/input.htm The Antimoon site plus AJATT were the main models for my own language study when I started out, and why when I stumbled across HTLAL shortly afterwards I immediately signed up for the Super Challenge. There is also a rather nice blog post by a guy who says he learnt Polish by reading Harry Potter (I think he was B1 in Polish when he started): I've studied Polish mostly from reading and listening to books. The first book I ever read in Polish, was Harry Potter. When I first started to read Harry Potter, I had only been learning Polish for about a year at the University. While I did enjoy that class (mostly because of the professor) it was basically all grammar, grammar and more grammar. At the end of that year, I couldn't really speak or understand Polish normally. I started reading the first Harry Potter book in January of 2008. It took me four months to finish it. Honestly, it was extremely difficult and took a lot of commitment. But after finishing that book, I really felt like I spoke Polish. My brain was able to produce and understand Polish automatically! While the first book took me four months, I managed to read all seven Harry Potter books before the end of that year! Each book was bigger and bigger, but I managed to read each one faster and faster. I read (or rather listened to) the last book in only a couple weeks. My learning accelerated exponentially. http://www.linguatrek.com/blog/2010/12/harry-potter-the-book -that-taught-me-polish My hope is that if a native English speaker can learn Polish largely by input, or a Pole English, then German should be relatively straightforward for me. ;) Edited by patrickwilken on 15 January 2014 at 3:24pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5757 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 36 of 38 15 January 2014 at 9:39pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
English was a similar experience for me, though I read LotR as my first book. My other languages I started using massive input from the start, after I'd discovered I could actually remember things I heard when watching videos with subtitles. (I tend to remember the meaning of what I hear or read rather than the words, so that was a revelation.) And my experience is that it takes a long time, that there are bits of the language that do not sort themselves out with more input, and that I also need a lot of social interaction in that language when I want to have anything resembling active skills. Using some formal instruction and some analytical strategies combined with a lot of input makes things a lot faster for me (and less likely to make me feel overwhelmed). As for explaining details of a langugae to a learner - I got better at that after Spanish immersion. I used to start second-guessing myself when I was asked why a sentence was correct, and then I couldn't even say if it was indeed correct, let alone explain the grammar it used. Nowdays I don't allow my mind to immediately switch to rules and explicit knowledge; instead I ask it to give me similar examples. When I have a couple of those, I look at the pattern, and with that I can try explaining. The antimoon example - a good grammar should have those. When I explain such things I would gesticulate or draw images of somebody sitting in a car and standing on top of a car, and then explain that bus comes from omnibus, 'owned by everyone' or 'for everyone', and that the first of those were drawn by horses and were like coaches with a railing and seats on top, and there was a ladder you could climb up. And I would assume that it was cheaper to go 'on' that bus than 'in' it. And I think there are some cities that still motor buses with an open upper deck, though not in my country. And I also like getting such explanations, because I tend to confuse rules and examples in a grammar or textbook without them. Edited by Bao on 15 January 2014 at 10:13pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4613 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 37 of 38 15 January 2014 at 9:41pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Yes, of course you can learn German to C2 level. It sounds as if you are already well on the way and you certainly have excellent learning conditions, living in Germany and being married to a native speaker. How good is your wife's English? You can surely equal whatever she has achieved. I've always believed that adults can reach near-native level given massive amounts of exposure. Lots of people moved country after the war and became totally fluent in a new language, long before electronic learning resources were available. The brute force of cold immersion can re-wire even the least "language oriented" of brains. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||
| FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6856 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 38 of 38 21 January 2014 at 9:35pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||
Imagine a famous person whose name begins with that letter. Imagine a male person for masculine nouns and a female person for feminine nouns. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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