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Experimental Branch - now Eng. grammar | ||
Tags: Learning Technique/Method | Grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 3896 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes  Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 1 of 33 22 February 2014 at 6:50pm | IP Logged |
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Hi all!
After some month, good successes (remarkable improvements in my spoken English and French) and some flop (Dutch), experimentation and a lot of reading, I found myself in the last two days thinking hardly about language learning. I compared this beautiful activity with other activities I approached during my whole life, I eventually used concepts from mathematics and software engineering to make a model about language learning. I try to explain using the less words possible. Experience 1: playing piano. One person listens the Arabesque of Debussy and decides the he wants to learn how to play it. Truth #1: this song isn't impossible to play. Many people can do it. Truth #2: if he never plaid piano before, it is impossible to play it. When studying piano, a student studies a great number of exercises, technique, music reading, repertoire and so on, increasing during time the difficulty in order to achieve many milestones like agility, hands indipendence, reading, expressivity etc. Isolating only one aspect doesn't allow to know the whole piano playing but when studying an aspect also others are involved. At a certain point the student will be able to approach naturally the Arabesque of Debussy or pieces even a lot more difficult. Experience 2: running. I don't have to convince you that if you never run you cannot running the marathon :) But running is also part of the basics of almost all sports training. Experience 3: writing software: it is more or less like piano learning. Experience 4: singing. Same that piano learning. I can continue endlessly. Everytime I need to learn how to do something, I never had a specific target and studied how to do only that. I always had to learn the foundations with specific exercises that aim to train complex aspect in isolation. In language learning, this usually doesn't happen. There are several valid reasons for this, most of all because usually the need is to learn a specific language directly. What I want to do, instead, is to train my language learning process. Polyglots learn really quickly languages because their learning process is trained after having studying lots of languages. So, first point is to isolate specific aspects of language learning. From my readings and my brief experience they are: 1) learning grammar 2) acquiring vocabulary 3) memorizing idioms 4) learning the phonology 5) learning the writing system When learning grammar you are also acquiring some vocabulary, same when memorizing idioms; when learning the writing system, usually but with exceptions (like Chinese languages, for example) you're also learning the phonology. For what concerns me, the most difficult activities are learning grammar, writing system and phonology, while acquiring vocabulary and idioms is just a mechanical work of memorization. Also, there is an important general order in learning a language that is writing system first, then grammar. Therefore, this is the concept: I will train my learning process with challenges of increasing difficulty. I will do research in order to being able to classify the difficulties of grammars, writing systems etc. and I will work on them for pre- established amount of time that I like to call "iterations". I will log also the time spent on them. Edited by tristano on 28 February 2014 at 12:22am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 3896 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 2 of 33 22 February 2014 at 6:52pm | IP Logged |
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This post is reserved for iteration summaries.
1) Toki Pona + Devanagari + English grammar (from February 22 to March 22) Useful material: Toki Pona: tokipona.net bknight0.myweb.uga.edu tokipwnage.webs.com Edited by tristano on 28 February 2014 at 12:22am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 3896 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 3 of 33 22 February 2014 at 7:00pm | IP Logged |
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I will start study in each iteration a grammar and a writing system.
For the first iteration that ends on March 22, I decided to study Toki Pona, a minimalistic constructed language to express feelings. Since the language is so minimal, studying the grammar doesn't take 6 week so I will try to learn the whole language. About the writing system, I will announce it after some research today or tomorrow :) Edited by tristano on 26 February 2014 at 11:56pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6446 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 4 of 33 22 February 2014 at 9:18pm | IP Logged |
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Yay toki pona! toki pona li toki pona :)
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| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 3896 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 5 of 33 23 February 2014 at 1:44am | IP Logged |
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:)))
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| albysky Triglot Senior Member Italy lang-8.com/1108796Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4237 days ago 287 posts - 393 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, German | Message 6 of 33 23 February 2014 at 12:31pm | IP Logged |
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From what i can understand it seems you want to get a sort linguistic knowledge , which can be an
interesting thing and to some degree can also help you learn languages . Nevertheless ,if you want to improve your language learning skilks , in my opinion the best way is simply to learn languages . Learning a language is above all a subconcious process , being aware of certain patterns can certainley help , but one thing is being aware of certain structures and patterns another thing is to be able to use them and recognize them while listening and reading . To give you an example you can know that russian has six cases , verbal aspects etc etc , concepts that are not so difficult to understand theoratically, but they recquire lots of time to have a decent command of . here is where the subconscious process comes into play . Maybe you could find interesting to check krashen's comprehensible input theory. To conclude ,i think that your plan can be very interesting from a linguistic perspective , go for it if it is what you are intersted in , but overall i do no think it will necessarily enhance your learning skill, which again , as far as i can understand, involves mainly the subconcious . Edited by albysky on 23 February 2014 at 1:37pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7054 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 7 of 33 23 February 2014 at 1:12pm | IP Logged |
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I think you learn more by doing and experience than by meta-learning. I think of meta-learning as helpful
when it is on top of practical experience. If you have been in the work world for some time, you will realize there are those who know what they are doing and how to do it, and some who wouldn't be able to do it if they had to, but are in a position to give orders. I would liken the second individual to the meta-learner. Even if you've never worked before, you may have observed this by watching politicians. I'm with albysky though. A lot of language learning is below the radar. Learning grammar and the IPA may help. It that pleases you, go for it! Edited by luke on 23 February 2014 at 1:28pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 3896 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 8 of 33 23 February 2014 at 6:21pm | IP Logged |
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Hi @albysky and @luke,
thank you for your inputs. I agree with you when you say that the language themselves are learned more by day to day experience. Indeed, a golden rule that I gave myself is to not experimenting with my target languages. The meta-learning I'm planning serves to refine my abilities and boost my confidence on specific aspects without encountering failures on target languages and acquiring transversal linguistic competences that can help me along the way (if not give myself the chance to work with a lot of different languages for the love of the new toy). For what concerns my target languages, I will learn them by experience. But since I'm a software engineer, something that pleases myself a lot is to understand how things work under the hood, divide in small pieces and reassemble them, indeed I don't recommend to do this to other people. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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