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Must I Memorize A Billion Phrases? | ||
Tags: Idiom | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| nadia Triglot Groupie Russian Federation Joined 5516 days ago 50 posts - 98 votes  Speaks: Russian*, English, French Studies: Hindi | Message 9 of 43 25 January 2010 at 3:06pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I absolutely agree. How do we learn our native languages? We hear and then read words, phrases and patterns mlns of times -- they are repeated by people who surround you, by tv, etc. Roughly the same natural approach works with learning a foreign language but it's slightly different. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 10 of 43 25 January 2010 at 8:08pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yes but once you reach that stage, you shouldn't need to memorise the phrase in its entirety -- your brain should be able to understand the new phrase as a particular combination of or exception to the generalised patterns. If you memorise it as a set phrase, you don't get the flexibility to use it in different tenses, or make it passive or hypothetical.
No, despite a superficial similarity, this is completely different. An adult in an immersive class will learn to parrot long phrases that have an abstract communicative function (eg "What is your name?") without understanding how the phrase is constructed. * A toddler will not parrot phrases. A toddler does not have any concept of these abstract communicative functions, because the toddler has no language, and the concepts emerge from language. A toddler will only say things that he or she thinks he knows how to construct -- the child builds up a bank or words and theories on the rules and will produce sentences based on these theories. ("me want biscuit".) Child language development is a fascinating subject and a massively complicated process, full of false starts, incorrect assumptions and things sorting themselves out over several years. Children induce these rules from what they hear, and the assumption of natural methods (which has also been taken into bilingual teaching) is that the adult does too. We can, and we often do, but clearly a lot of people never manage to break apart the given phrases and become fixated on the language as initially presented. The child's learning process consists of two separate processes running concurrently: 1: Identification of rules 2: Learning the language by putting the rules into practice. The child needs to work the rules out for himself as we have no way of telling him them. An adult can be told the rules and can get straight to work on stage 2. * Although this is not restricted to immersive classes. My high-school French was not immersive, but I was taught to ask "Comment t'appelles tu?" before I'd learned any other "comment" question, before I'd been taught to conjugate regular -er verbs and certainly before I'd learnt to handle the reflexive pronoun. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| nadia Triglot Groupie Russian Federation Joined 5516 days ago 50 posts - 98 votes Speaks: Russian*, English, French Studies: Hindi | Message 11 of 43 27 January 2010 at 4:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Oh but no one says you shouldn't learn the "theory" behind a language, its grammar and the way sentences are formed and so on. That's kinda obvious. But just knowing that, for example, English is an analytical language and that there are phrasal verbs isn't going to take you far. You've gotta read-read-read and get used to these structures and internalise them. Just knowing that Russian is synthetic and that words are declined and there are 6 cases and 3 declensions and bla-bla-bla won't make you fluent in Russian, either. I place absolutely no trust in immersion courses. In fact, I don't believe in teaching foreign languages at all. I don't believe in parroting or audio approaches either -- I personally have always had to see the word written before I could remember it. By immersion I meant constant exposure to the language and input. Edited by nadia on 28 January 2010 at 5:13am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| TheBiscuit Tetraglot Senior Member Mexico Joined 5925 days ago 532 posts - 619 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Italian Studies: German, Croatian | Message 12 of 43 27 January 2010 at 6:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Not at all, it's quite the opposite in my opinion. The more you understand generally, the more you understand from context. You hear idioms but they won't throw you as they are doing now because you'll get the meaning from the context or the situation. I've never sat down and learnt millions of idioms in Spanish but I understand them from context. The ones I like eventually filter into my speaking. This even works with hardcore slang and Spanish that's not Mexican. I'd say just work on your listening in general. You'll get to the point where you can understand almost anything from context alone. It seems like an infinite number of possibilities but what you find is very little variation from person to person in terms of conversations on a daily basis. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5671 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 13 of 43 27 January 2010 at 7:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Just for fun I read a short newspaper article before replying, to see how much of it was idiomatic. It was less than half a page long, but there were a great many idioms that you would not understand without having seen them before and then memorised them by heart. Here are just a few of them: "The man on the street ..." "Ill-gotten gains ..." (this one is interesting, since "gotten" is often assumed to exist only in American English) "Things are looking up ..." "To be completely straight with you ..." "... those predictions were over the top ..." There are thousands of such idioms - and they are used in all but the simplest texts. This is one reason why the leap from intermediate to advanced is such a challenge. I have never come across a way to get around picking them up over time. It is a very long process. If you do have a shortcut I would be overjoyed. I cannot see how, though, you are supposed to understand something like "for all intents and purposes" just from unravelling "generalised patterns". 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5840 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 14 of 43 27 January 2010 at 7:54pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Same here. That's why audio only courses are not ideal for me. I wish they were because they can be used during commute and travel town, whereas sitting down with books take more planning.
Yeah, you've got it! A LOT of people posting here simply don't seem to have considered this. There are so many comments about "speaking" a language after 1-2 years. Sure, you can probably manage basic situations, write simple messages and have conversations with people. But you could never understand a serious debate, workin that language etc. In order to do that you must know all these thousands of expressions. If you really want to know a language you have to read hundreds of books, watch the news in that language and read non-fiction. I am definitely there with English, and have been for years. But I am beginning to doubt whether I've taken water over my head with Russian. Just the basics of the language are darn hard; what will the more advanced bits be like? Perhaps I should have stuck with German or French after all. In Russian everything is new and different... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 15 of 43 27 January 2010 at 8:40pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
You've certainly got to internalise the structures, and you can't internalise the structures without having identified them. I believe (as [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ausubel says) that learning does not occur in discovery of new knowledge, but in using new knowledge. Simply being told the rules does not teach you the rules; simply reading the rules is not learning the rules; and similarly, simply working the rules out for yourself is neither teaching nor learning. So no, being told there are 6 declensions in Russian teaches me nothing. Being told how to form the declensions, and being given adequate opportunity to practise forming the declensions (in a meaningful manner) does.
At least one of those was more general than you think: Things are looking up There's lots of phrases with "things are" -- "...going well", "...aren't quite what they seem to be" etc. "Things are" also "...looking bad", "..looking better", "...looking dismal". And finally, while "up" isn't used all that often for general positivity, "down" is very common in various negative contexts. Memorising "things are looking up" as a single set phrase ignores the wide degree of variation. "To be completely straight with you" isn't a real fixed phrase, because you can drop the completely, you can change the tense, you can change the person, and you can be "honest", "open" etc. And more to the point you really lose little in terms of expressiveness by not being able to say it, because you can just "be honest" instead. I have no shortcuts, but generally you can only learn things through use, something useful will get repeated use in your normal context. If you have to memorise something it's usually because you aren't learning it naturally, and I don't think it's worth the effort to force your brain into storing something it doesn't really see the use for. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| katilica Bilingual Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5473 days ago 70 posts - 109 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish* Studies: French, Catalan | Message 16 of 43 28 January 2010 at 12:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I agree with you. Sure he/she has to learn a lot more phrases and get a better hang of the language's structure but there comes a time when he/she will have to be familiar enough with the language to understand new phrases thrown at him/her. I was never schooled in Spanish (only until age 7) and I manage to understand idioms and new words based on their context. I attend a church where everyone is Guatemalan and I quickly learned what their odd words meant. For example, I instantly grasped that a 'chumpa' was a jacket and that a 'pacha' was a baby bottle and so on and so on based on the context. We do it in our own language all the time even if the word is some weird slang that we would never, with our knowledge of rules, guess what it means. Yet, we get a hang of new slang almost right away when we hear it. Of course, there are some people that can never really understand a word that's slang or a word that comes from another country without having it fully explained to them since they can't quite grasp the meaning right away. If you keep studying, there will come a time when you can pick up new phrases right away using your advanced knowledge of the language but of course, there will still be some words that you will have to go and seek out their meaning but we do this in our own language as well so don't fret about it. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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