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Writing practice. | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Entoursis Diglot Newbie Australia Joined 3758 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 9 of 11 22 August 2014 at 9:22am | IP Logged |
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Thanks for all your pieces of advice :)
Well yes, it is understandable that one has to check non-familiar words while writing, however (at least in my case) it turns out to be extremely annoying... Do you think it is good idea to simply postpone the "active writing stage" completely and just concentrate on individual word/short phrase learning until I master at least 3000 pieces of vocabulary? Because sometimes that is exactly what I am thinking of doing with all new languages I'll choose to study. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4089 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 10 of 11 22 August 2014 at 10:15am | IP Logged |
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Personally, I started writing Breton after about two weeks of study. In the beginning I only wrote a few very short paragraphs per week: "Today I have yoga class in Guerlesquin. I go to Guerlesquin by bike. I have yoga class every Monday." When my Assimil course introduced a way of expressing the past tense, I started writing things like: "Today I am tired because I did not sleep well. The weather was nice today and I walked my dog between the fields. I saw Yann but I did not talk to him because he was far away."
It won't win you any prose awards, but it gets you practising the grammar you have just learnt and looking up some words that may be a bit more useful for you personally than those present in your course. Does writing very early mean that I sometimes repeat the same grammar mistakes? Yes it does. Does it mean that they are locked in my head forever? No, it does not, at least not if English or French are any indicators. My experience tells me that if you work enough on the language exposure and attentiveness is going to iron out your initial misunderstandings. When I was eight years old I consistently spelled "plats" ("place" in Swedish) with two T's ("platts"). I was very adamant that I was right, because I knew the rule and an A-sound like that cannot be followed by a single T. I was extremely rarely corrected, because teachers then wanted to encourage writing and only corrected the most grave errors. I did eventually get enough exposure to the written word to realise that I had been doing it wrong for years, though, and I was MORTIFIED. I am still a bit embarrassed about it... and wholly unconvinced that errors "stick" unless you let them. NB! I am not advocating trying to write very complex sentences by simply making up your own grammar and expecting everything to fall into place later. But if you make an effort to figure something out, and it turns out later that you misunderstood something, I don't think you've just wasted time or ruined that language for yourself. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Entoursis Diglot Newbie Australia Joined 3758 days ago 5 posts - 5 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2 Studies: French | Message 11 of 11 22 August 2014 at 11:34am | IP Logged |
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I don't know. As for me personally, mistakes never really stick to me. After I started studying other languages after English, I never made repeated serious mistakes because I knew what to expect, where difficulties are hiding, and double-checked every questionable thing. As for repeated mistakes that actually happened, I always could get rid of them immediately. This used to happen generally to English and sometimes to other languages I studied (and even to Russian sometimes). In every case, when I had finally found out that I was doing it wrong, the idea of using it incorrectly every time for my entire life reached such a depth of my brain so I remembered it for the rest of my life instantly and never made mistakes again (and even managed to use it as some sort of mnemonic, like "Some strange word, what does it mean, oh right, that's the one I've been using incorrectly, now I remember"). So when I learn things, I am not really afraid of mistakes. I think of it like this: "Even if I memorize certain word's wrong meaning, it is unlikely to be that significant mistake (e.g. memorizing "antique" as synonym of "old" and using it for people as well as items - it is still understandable), and the very first time I realize that I am doing it wrong is gonna be the last time I am doing it wrong, so no problem at all.
Maybe this is something individual, though. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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