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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| Javi Senior Member Spain Joined 5984 days ago 419 posts - 548 votes  Speaks: Spanish* | Message 17 of 30 08 December 2008 at 8:37am | IP Logged | |||||
Well, that's why I said I do the filling in the gap and reading aloud, and furrykef complained that even in this case you are producing the words just out of the context, and you couldn't do it without that help. So, I wonder: Is reading aloud producing? Is thinking in your target language producing? Is writing producing? Is filling in the gap producing? Without a context, have words got any meaning at all? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| slucido Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Spain https://goo.gl/126Yv Joined 6678 days ago 1296 posts - 1781 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan* Studies: English | Message 18 of 30 08 December 2008 at 9:28am | IP Logged | |||||
I add: Is struggling in recognizing and understanding sentences in your target language, production? Is it useless? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6014 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 19 of 30 08 December 2008 at 9:52am | IP Logged | |||||
Ah, I think I see where you're coming from, and we're into quite complex territory. * Is reading aloud producing? Maybe... if you're fully understanding and following the sentence. However, you can read aloud without really following what's going on (particularly in orthographically regular languages such as Spanish). In fact, in some cases it's easier and quicker to read out without understanding. The human brain always looks for the easy way out. I find it too much effort to force my brain to understand when it doesn't need to. * Is thinking in your target language producing? Define "thinking in your target language"... Well, if you're constructing sentences in your head, that's probably production, but again there's the point where the brain glosses over it without due care and attention. So again, it's an effort to force yourself to do it properly. I do it sometimes, but it's now got to the stage where I find it difficult to choose a language if I keep my mouth shut/ * Is writing producing? There's some disagreement over this. Some people reckon writing gives you too much thinking time, so it's not really proper production. * Is filling in the gap producing? No. Well, that's my opinion at least. A sentence starts at the beginning, goes through the middle and ends at the end. A gap-fill corrupts this ordering. You read every single bit of the sentence except for something in the middle. In fact, you can do gap-fills without "reading" the sentence at all. You can decode and deconstruct the sentence as a technical puzzle, you're not engaged in the meaning or the natural flow of the sentence. In fact, there's a danger of disociating yourself from the language. * Without a context, have words got any meaning at all? No, we don't. Fair point. But I don't see Kef denying this -- Kef's still talking about producing contextually meaningful sentences. You both agree that words exist in context and gain meaning from them. But his claim is that in receiving (reading and/or listening) if the context makes the meaning of the word obvious, you don't have to consciously "read" it; but in production, even where context makes something obvious, you still have to say it. I monitor myself occassionally when I do exercises and tests, and I can see that I rarely read a whole question -- I know how to pick out the important bits and use only them (like with my sentence matching example). The single language task that I cannot cheat in is spoken production, and even then only if there's a substantial difference between subsequent prompts. If I had a sequence of "I used to have a car", "I used to have a dog", "I used to have a cat" I would just echo "I used to have" like a parrot and I would only really be thinking about the "a car" "a dog" "a cat" bit. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6014 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 20 of 30 08 December 2008 at 9:57am | IP Logged | |||||
Recognising and understanding is usually classed as reception, not production. And I'd say it's completely useless, because if you're having difficulty then you can't be listening as you normally would, so you training yourself to read in an unnatural way. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6014 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 21 of 30 08 December 2008 at 11:06am | IP Logged | |||||
That was a horrible experience. Brainwashing, I think they call it. A "course" that distracts you with petty linguistic exercises while attempting to indoctrinate you to their way of thinking. Really, I mean it's a 50 year old discipline, it has been largely abandoned by academia as bunk, and yet it's presented as if it's the most natural thing in the world. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| slucido Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Spain https://goo.gl/126Yv Joined 6678 days ago 1296 posts - 1781 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan* Studies: English | Message 22 of 30 08 December 2008 at 12:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
Where do your "academia" live?...outside science? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| furrykef Senior Member United States furrykef.com/ Joined 6475 days ago 681 posts - 862 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, Latin, Italian | Message 23 of 30 10 December 2008 at 6:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
Nope. Read my post again, more carefully this time: it explains in great detail how it does not use your memory. For it to use your memory, your brain must make the assocation "comprar = buy" (or "buy = comprar"). If you can give the correct answer ("buy") without actually knowing the word "comprar", then you are not drawing upon that association, and therefore not reinforcing it.
Actually, I think being able to emphasize production is a strong reason not to go monolingual. Perhaps people who argue for going monolingual haven't taken that into account. :) - Kef 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Javi Senior Member Spain Joined 5984 days ago 419 posts - 548 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 24 of 30 11 December 2008 at 4:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
Of course they have, or at least I have. I gave up bilingual sentences because: 1) It forces you to use dual material which most likely will be material specifically designed for language learning. Doing that beyond a beginner level is dead boring for many people, actually a lot of people using SRS don't like language courses. Alternatively you can 2) work with real native stuff and do the translations yourself. That way you will spend a lot of time thinking of the best way to say something in your native language, a time that would be much better spent working on you target language. 3) Either way you'll run into a big problem of consistency in your translated stuff, that is, the sentences in your native language. That plus the loads of nearly untranslatable things all languages have, will make impossible to recover the original sentence after a double translation. If you actually make it, it's because you are not translating, you are using the L1 sentence as a reminder of the L2 sentence that is in your head. That is not production at all, and anyway, I really doubt it works when you have 4000 sentences. 4) It forces you to work with short sentences, other way the earlier problems will increase exponentially. 5) Translating is harder than just reading or filling in the gap, so you are more likely to procrastinate on a task that should be done every day. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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