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How Do You Use Native Material? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| haziz Bilingual Triglot Newbie United States Joined 3865 days ago 28 posts - 37 votes Speaks: Arabic (Written), Arabic (Egyptian)*, English* Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 2 04 January 2016 at 2:49pm | IP Logged |
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As I try to progress beyond learning materials and onto "native" material, I find myself uncertain of how to
use them! Most of the "native" material is really in simplified form, either aimed at children or consisting of graded readers with a lot of hand-holding. Some are in the form of podcasts with transcripts in both English and Spanish such as Radio Ambulante. Even then I find many of them above my level. Some of the material, I have imported into Lingq, so I effectively have a running dictionary (something which I sometimes find distracting), but a lot of it is in good old paper form and I am reading directly. While reading this material, I do usually understand most of what is being said, or at least get the gist of the material. I do often however encounter entire paragraphs where I do not "get" what is being said. I also can often recognize the stem or infinitive of a verb but often can not state what tense or mood it is in. I can often guess since it is sometimes clear if the text is discussing past events and I can sometimes guess if the subjunctive is being used, however I find it more interesting to just keep going and try to read the material as if I am reading English, with my main interest being in enjoying the material rather than agonizing over the sentence structure or the grammar. I suspect that there is no "right" way to use native material, however I would like to poll the members of this forum. Do you stop and look up every incomprehensible word? Do you dissect each verb for it's tense and then recite it's conjugation in that tense? Do you just read the material for your enjoyment, the same way you would in your mother tongue? How do you use "native" materials? Edited by haziz on 04 January 2016 at 2:52pm 2 persons have 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 2 of 2 04 January 2016 at 5:46pm | IP Logged |
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I would first and foremost distinguish between extensive and intensive activities. When I do intenstive activities then I want in principle to understand every single word, expression and construction in the source, and in practice that means that I have to work with short texts or short sound examples plus dictionaries, translations and grammatical tools (including 'green sheet's with concise overviews written by myself). That's where I get my words and my grammatical facts.
If I know enough words and grammatical facts I can understand texts and speech samples on the fly - at least if I accept that I don't have to catch everything. The important thing with such extensive activities is not to learn new words o constructions, but to train my use of the things I already know - or in other words: to work on developing fluency at the expense of completeness and perfection. OK, I may pick up a word or expression here and there, but if I have to think about each and every unknown elements then I loose the momentum and the whole idea with the exercise is lost. If I have problems finding sufficiently easy materials for extensive activities then it may help first to work intensively through some of the material I want to use extensively - that will often give enough of the special vocabulary in a given source to make the use of the whole lot comprehensible. Otherwise that specific source must wait until I can handle it. One special trick here is to 'listen like a blood hound', i.e. listening only for words and word boundaries, but without any attempt to guess the meaning of anything - including the general meaning (imagin a bloodhound following a trail without caring about the surroundings). Unless you can hear the words and separate them in your mind while listening then it has little sense to start guessing about their meaning so it is worth trying out this special technique if you only catch a few words or endings here and there. Edited by Iversen on 04 January 2016 at 5:51pm 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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