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Is comprehension measurable? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5342 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 169 of 211 24 August 2014 at 3:28am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
It's worth keeping in mind that native kids are exposed to huge quantities of spoken input. To put in perspective, the original Super Challenge involved approximately 2.5 million words of reading. But according to various studies I've seen, native children hear 3 to 13 million words of speech per year (and the kids who are closer to 13 million do measurably better in school). Even if we assume that a lot of that input is either above the child's level, or it arrives before they're ready, they still have a lot more input than most adult learners, even advanced adult learners. And of course, they need to use the language to communicate. And as any parent knows, kids remember. All it takes is one adult who says, Non, vous faites vraiment n'import quoi ! "No, you're just messing around (lit: doing anything)," and all of a sudden, you'll have small children running around shouting, "N'import quoi ! N'import quoi !" What's actually a lot of fun is when the children don't know how to say something. Then they get really creative. :-) 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6407 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 170 of 211 24 August 2014 at 10:51am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
It's not "we" and "they". Many HTLAL'ers aren't native speakers either. And the idiomatic usage is hard to learn prior to actually encountering it. The only thing we can do is having more exposure. Weird wording becomes familiar when you've seen it many times. As for the girl, I meant that she may well have heard the idiomatic usage since it's relatively common. IDK about others but I remember how I used to pick up idiomatic usage before knowing what the expression literally means. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5240 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 171 of 211 24 August 2014 at 2:41pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
This little example is, in my opinion, a perfect case study of the perils of trying to define and calculate comprehension. What exactly does Non, vous faites vraiment n'importe quoi mean? Or, more specifically, what did the adult want to convey, and what did the children understand? Note that I've added the e to import because it is from the verb importer.This was undoubtedly just a small mistake on emk's part, but it is crucial to understanding the whole sentence, as we shall we. Before looking at the words themselves, it is extremely important to remember that this phrase would be said with a particular intonation and tone of voice conveying some degree of annoyance, exasperation or anger. I would argue that the manner in which these words are spoken is probably more important than the actual words themselves. When looking at the actual words, the first problem is to determine how many words are in the sentence. The problem is "n'importe quoi". Is this one word, two words or three words (ne importe quoi)? Is this what linguists call a multi-word unit? What would you look up in the dictionary? In the Le Petit Robert dictionary there is a separate entry for the whole unit but in the following form: N'IMPORTE (QUI, QUEL, QUOI) > 2.IMPORTER This tells us to look under the second entry for the verb IMPORTER. Indeed, there is a whole separate entry for this verb and lots of examples such as qu'importe, peu importe, etc. This is why emk's minor "mistake" may in fact be significant because perhaps he did not see the verb. It would seem then that theoretically Non, vous faites vraiment n'importe quoi is made up of 7 words. But one could argue that it's really 5 words because n'importe quoi is actually perceived as one unit, especially by young children because they do not recognize the verb. What do adult native speakers perceive? It's hard to say. Educated speakers know the verb importer, but I tend to feel that this is more of a set phrase and all one unit. For sake of simplicity, let's say say that the entire phrase contains five words. The first four (non, vous, faites, vraiment) are among the most common words in French. Does that give us 80% comprehension of the phrase if we don't know that n'importe quoi means? Maybe. Or one could argue that the whole phrase doesn't make sense unless you understand everything. What does n'importe quoi mean? The most common translation is "anything". This doesn't really make much sense here. If you break down the expression into three words, the literal translation would be something like "not matters what" This is possibly what educated adults perceive. My own viewpoint is that it is the tone of voice that really what conveys here the sense of exasperation and the actual words are not that important. This, I suspect, is how the children understood the phrase. The adult could have said "Non, vous me faites vraiment suer" to the same effect. But suer "to sweat" and "n'importe quoi" are totally different words. If we look at translation for the meaning, emk's solution is very good. Since tone of voice is paramount here, there are lots of other possible translations. For example, one could say "You're getting on my nerves", "Stop fooling around", "Enough is enough", etc. Edited by s_allard on 24 August 2014 at 2:44pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5342 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 172 of 211 24 August 2014 at 3:46pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Thank you for the correction! I originally wrote n'importe, but it was late at night and I made the mistake of doing a quick-and-dirty check with Google instead of using the Wiktionnaire. Let this be a lesson to me. :-)
My guess is that adults hear this as a compound, where the second part is normally constrained to be a question word (or expression, in the case of quel):
This is tricky to translate into English. "Anything, anybody, anytime" are usually the wrong choice, because they're neutral in English, and the French is often emphatic or derogatory. You can get closer with a translation like "just anything" or "any damn thing", depending on the context. But really you need to rewrite the entire sentence: Non, vous faites vraiment n'importe quoi Literally: "No, you're really doing anything." Better: "No, you're really doing just anything." Meaning: "Stop messing around." How would I count this? Well, personally I'd count it as "transparent", because I've spent five years of my life listening to French speakers talk to children. But if you don't understand n'importe, then you've lost most of the sentence, because n'importe is really a key word here: it serves a semi-grammatical function, it implies a sarcastic tone, and the obvious English translation is generally wrong. In fact, "anything" and "any" are tricky to translate into French. The English word "any" behaves in some pretty complicated ways, and I'd guess that relatively few languages allow it to be translated directly.
So, yeah, definitely a tricky issue. But in general, for most plausible counting methodologies, it's not going to make a huge difference when working with longer texts, because it's rare expression, and most comprehension problems are simpler than this. So it's generally not going to change the numbers one way or another when averaging over twenty pages. *EDIT: I believe this word to be missing in the original source. Edited by emk on 24 August 2014 at 5:07pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5240 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 173 of 211 24 August 2014 at 4:19pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Since this thread is not on the subtleties of French grammar, I won't go into details about what I perceive are a number of mistakes here, but there is one detail I don't want to let go by. When we speak of a literal translation, we usually mean some sort of word to word translation based on the primary meanings of the word. Most literal translations are very awkward and serve to illustrate the structure of the source language. In the case at hand the literal translation would be more like this: Non, vous faites vraiment n'importe quoi Literally: "No, you do truly not matters what." Then we can take it from there and improve the translation. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5342 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 174 of 211 24 August 2014 at 5:58pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
If you feel that I've made a mistake, please feel free to PM or correct me. I don't mind. If you go ahead and say there's a "number of mistakes here" but refuse to give details, I'm going to obsessively proofread things for the next 20 minutes. :-) I really do, however, believe that n'importe quoi frequently carries either emphatic or negative connotations in spoken French, as suggested by the following compound phrases from WordReference:
In written French, particular in more formal registers, n'importe is probably more likely to be a direct translation of "anything." But examples like the ones from WordReferenceare why I generally suggest that anglophones exercise caution with n'importe ___—it can mean "any___", but it can't just be tossed in anywhere that "any" appears in English without getting very strange results. Edited by emk on 24 August 2014 at 6:46pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5240 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 175 of 211 24 August 2014 at 11:29pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I agree that n'importe quoi often has a negative connotation, but that wasn't the subject of my post. Neither was
the translation of any into French. Again, without boring everybody with details of French grammar, the question was more about how to understand a block such as n'importe quoi. Can it be broken up into component parts, i.e. three words with the verb importer at the center, or is it a single unit, i.e. one word? This is not a trivial issue. In many languages there are what are usually called idioms, set phrases, collocations or formulaic language that can be interpreted as one unit or as made up of constituent parts. English is notorious for its phrasal verbs but I think all languages have equivalent or similar features. A parent may scream at a child: Get down from the table. Someone else could say: Let's get down and party. Or one could say: Get your head down, they're shooting at us. The classic example I love is: We'll cut the tree down and then cut it up. French doesn't have phrasal verbs as such but is very rich in idioms. In today's Le monde, part of an article is titled « RAMER DANS LE MÊME BATEAU » (Row in the same boat) when describing the difficulties of getting the opposition parties in Syria to agree. In the very same article, when talking about all the behind-the-scenes dealings by France, the author writes: Tous ces calculs ont fait long feu (Literally: All these calculations have made long fire) meaning that all these efforts came to nil. The problem of course when dealing with these units is how to to know when they are to be analyzed as set phrases on in terms of their individual parts. In English for example not all verbs used with prepositions are phrasal verbs. In the case of n'importe quoi the issue is really the presence of the verb importer. Is it really perceived as a verb by speakers? By children no. By adults, especially those who are familiar with the verb importer and its related uses such as Peu importe or Qu'importe with similar negative connotations to n'importe quoi, the answer is not as clear. For the more sophisticated speakers, the verb importer is there and they can play with it. For lesser educated speakers n'importe quoi is probably a unit Edited by s_allard on 24 August 2014 at 11:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5240 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 176 of 211 26 August 2014 at 2:40pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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In a discussion group in French that I belong to we have a young woman whose first language is English. Her
French is very fluent and generally quite correct in terms of grammar and vocabulary. I don't know how she learned French, but judging from the accent, I suspect she learned it as an adult. I would put her speaking ability somewhere in the B2-C1 range. The excellent fluency tends to mask some of the other problems. As I was listening to her yesterday, I asked how myself how one could apply this idea of assessment with percentage to speaking performance in the way that some people do it with reading comprehension. Could I say that her speaking ability is around 90% because there were few noticeable mistakes? The big problem here was not really the presence of grammatical mistakes. The real problem was the non- idiomatic way of saying things. We could basically understand what she was trying to say, but the vocabulary and grammar were not always what native speakers would use. The big problem was the lack of idioms and high- level stylistics. My observation is that this woman never really had her French systematically corrected. She was basically fossilized at a high level and no longer paying much attention to improving her French. This is all observable. I can count the mistakes and notice the sometimes clumsy formulations. I can see for example how the speaker's first language impacts on her French. If necessary, I could record the speaking and work with the person to improve it. With something like comprehension this is not possible, When a person says that they understand a word, a sentence, a paragraph, it's not possible to know how they really understand, especially when compared with what a native speaker would understand. How do we know that a person understands accurately? How does the speaker's first language colour the understanding of the second language? There are, of course, major questions of what is understanding that I won't go into here, but there is, I think, a key that opens a door to seeing how people understand. I believe that oral and written expression gives some insight into how people understand. I'm not saying the active performance mirrors passive performance. Far from it, but I think that many of the mistakes people make stem from the fact that they don't really perceive and understand how the language is used. For example, grammatical gender is a big problem for English-speakers in French and many other languages. But gender is omnipresent in French. You can't hear or read French without seeing it constantly. Why then do English-speaking learners make so many mistakes? The problem isn't that learners don't hear grammatical gender; the problem is that they don't notice it and certainly not how it works. It's there but they don't see it. And this becomes apparent when they have to use it. This same idea can be applied to all areas of grammar and vocabulary. Words are readily recognizable. One can have a good idea of what is being said, but how things are said may not be so easily understood. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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