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Must I Memorize A Billion Phrases? | ||
Tags: Idiom | Vocabulary learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| IronFist Senior Member United States Joined 6439 days ago 663 posts - 941 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean | Message 17 of 43 28 January 2010 at 12:35am | IP Logged | ||
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On a related note, I know a guy who said that learning Vietnamese to native-like fluency is next to impossible for someone who wasn't born and raised there because he said daily conversation consists of literally hundreds of idioms that don't make any sense literally translated, but that everyone knows the meaning of, and would take forever for a foreign language learner to memorize all of them.
I don't know the first thing about Vietnamese so I can neither confirm nor deny that this is the case. Edited by IronFist on 28 January 2010 at 12:36am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| cathrynm Senior Member United States junglevision.co Joined 6127 days ago 910 posts - 1232 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Finnish | Message 18 of 43 28 January 2010 at 2:08am | IP Logged | ||
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>literally hundreds of idioms
Hundreds of idioms doesn't seem like a problem to me. With flash cards and massive repetition, hundreds of anything can be memorized. I think brute force techniques maybe start to get painful above a few thousand, and maybe breakdown when you get past about 5000-1000 or so bits of information. But, hundreds? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5432 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 19 of 43 28 January 2010 at 7:11am | IP Logged | ||
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I really find it quite interesting that while many entries in this thread emphasize the necessity of massive amounts of exposure to a language, this discussion takes place in a forum where generally the accent is on speaking many languages. If learning just a second language requires so much effort, what about those people who claim to speak three, four or more languages?
I don't intend to reopen a theme that, I'm sure, has been debated many times here. But if I can throw in my two cents, I believe that a key stratedy in learning a new language is not so much learning massive vocabulary but more the many usages of the core vocabulary. We all know that simple conversation calls upon a relatively small vocabulary and a limited grammar. With the right accent, one could pass for being very fluent in the foreign language. But woe unto you if the conversation takes a more technical turn. For example, today I went to the bank and spoke in Spanish to the teller. I have no problems with the usual transactions. But today I had to explain why a chcck made out to me should not be put on "hold" for 5 days. Needless to say, I felt quite inadequate in Spanish. I somehow mumbled my way through, but it was quite humbling. My grammar wasn't the problem. I just didn't know how to say the right things in Spanish. Now, the vocabulary of a newspaper is much greater than that of ordinary conversation. So we often have to consult the dictionary to make our way through a newspaper. This is a great way to acquire vocabulary. That said, I am of the opinion that it is nearly impossible or very rare, to master multiple languages in great depth. Mind you, it is no mean achievement to be able to carry on a conversation in many languages, and I salute the many polyglots that contribute here. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 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 20 of 43 28 January 2010 at 9:53am | IP Logged | ||
Good point. But it is all a question about time (and about patience). Working with a lot of languages means that there is less time for each one, and this also means that it is worth exploring methods to make the things you do pick up stick in your brain. And comprehension and context are important for that. OK, now that may sound as an invitation to immersion and the 'natural' method and no translation and all that stuff. But I have drawn the opposite conclusion. Apart from some special tasks like understanding the basic sound system of a language by listening intently, the first problem for a language learner is to find material that is just above your abilities AND interesting in its own right. The second problem is to start using the things you learn. Anything that can transform otherwise inaccessible texts (written or spoken) into something you can almost understand is OK, and this includes wordlists (or Anki etc.), grammar studies and bilingual texts. The point is that you don't do these things in order to get building blocks for immediate language production: you do them because a large vocabulary and knowledge of morphology and syntactical patterns gives you access to a lot of material that you otherwise couldn't digest, and once you are 'inside the castle' you start looting the place for all the small idiosyncratic ways of expressing yourself that the natives have amassed,and which are so difficult to guess just from dictionaries and grammars and textbooks. I don't see it as totally catastrophic that you pass through a phase where your own utterances are less than idiomatic. Their purpose is not to deliver finished nobelprize winning stuff, but to establish a work shop or laboratory for learning the language, where you can try out the things you snatch from the overfilled storehouses of the natives. The more you plunder these store houses, the more idiomatic your own utterances will eventually become. In due time. With patience. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| victor-osorio Diglot Groupie Venezuela Joined 5434 days ago 73 posts - 129 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English Studies: Italian | Message 21 of 43 28 January 2010 at 10:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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I agree with those who say you have to memorize phrases at some point, but not att the
beginning. For me: - At the beginning of the learning process, you must know the grammar and put it on practise, like most textbooks pretend. After learning the grammar and being able of doing your own phrases you must read. Read, read, read a lot. But try to stick to the context. It doesn't matter if you don't understand every single word, if you can understand the general meaning of each paragraph, it's perfect. Just keep reading like this. - Then comes the intermediate part: here you have to get deeper in the estructure, vocabulary and knowledge of idioms. By this time, you would already be capable of produce a lot of idioms without haven't made any effort to memorize them. But it's time to make really conscious about the little things that make a difference. Here you can say you speak a little X language, now you have to work your way up until you can say I speak that language. You have unconsciously learn to understand but now you have to consciously learn what's correct and what's not to correct yourself. It's like you're a manufacturer of speech and your subconscious is your employee. He makes the speech. But you have to be trained to check if your unconscious is making the right work, if the product is going out fine. So they'll be things you have to consciously memorize if you don't want your employee to deliver a bad product to your clients (the ones who are listening to you). 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| sonsenfrancais Groupie United Kingdom sonsenfrancais. Joined 5981 days ago 75 posts - 85 votes Speaks: FrenchC2 | Message 22 of 43 28 January 2010 at 10:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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We make this mistake of thinking that learning a vocabulary of words is the language. No, sadly it's all the little everyday phrases we have to acquire - much harder.
Take saying 'Where am I' in the language you're learning, French. 'Où suis-je ?'. But a French person might say 'On est où là ?' Divide learning a language into two parts. One is formal. Grammar, vocabulary. The other is how the people of that country actually speak. My advice, if you're serious about French - get French television. Or go and live there for 25 years 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| fsc Senior Member United States Joined 6331 days ago 100 posts - 117 votes Studies: French | Message 23 of 43 29 January 2010 at 1:58pm | IP Logged | ||
The posting that get me are the ones where they say they have become fluent in a new language in a matter of weeks or a few months. A year ago I thought I was making good progress in my listening and understanding. By this I mean I was able to recognize more and more words and short phrases. At that time I wondered how much better I would be a full year later. Well now it is a full year later and I think my listening is even worse. So much is just jibberish, unless it is a phrase or sentence I have memorized. Those seem to come few and far between. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| fsc Senior Member United States Joined 6331 days ago 100 posts - 117 votes Studies: French | Message 24 of 43 29 January 2010 at 2:10pm | IP Logged | ||
How does your brain know it is useful if you are just learning a new language? As a beginner, can you learn one word of French and then go have a conversation and see if it is used often in normal context? Of course not. You only know one word so you can't have a conversation. I don't think you necessarily learn things through use. I think you retain them through use. I think a person is going to have to memorize some things and then retain what they use and lose what they don't. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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