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Revolutionary approach to learning langua

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slucido
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Spain
https://goo.gl/126Yv
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 Message 41 of 129
31 January 2009 at 4:36am | IP Logged 
Raчraч Ŋuɲa wrote:

I agree, that listening-only is not the ONLY thing he is saying, and is required for language learning, but rather what I disagree with him is that he is saying that listening-only will be beneficial even if one has no idea of what is being heard. This is actually what is making his research "revolutionary" and "ground-breaking" and being used by slucido for his subliminal/subconscious learning thing. Without that, it is hardly "revolutionary" and "ground-breaking".


This isn't revolutionary and ground breaking. These are journalistic comments. Journalists need hype to sell.

The benefits from listening a language, even if you don't understand or you don't pay attention, are known a lot of years ago. Now we have increased scientific evidence. In fact I gave you a lot of scientific papers.



Raчraч Ŋuɲa wrote:

But another research compared reading only, reading-while-listening, and listening only for their rate of vocabulary acquisition and decay, yet concluded that listening only acquire vocabularies the least, for the reasons explained below. I think the value of listening is only for correct vocalization of learned words.


That's hilarious. In Spanish we say: "Estás mezclando churras con merinas".

If your goal is learning vocabulary or words, the best method is the keyword technique. If you use this technique in a distributed practice way, you have the most powerful method. No doubt about it.

I repeat my point with other sentences :

If you hear your target language like a background sound, throughout the day, without paying attention, this will speed up your learning process when you study the target language consciously (Assimil, LR method or whatever).

Another example. Imagine you want to learn German the next year, because you don't have time now. If you hear native German audio 1 hours every day like a background sound, without paying active attention, when you start conscious learning, you will go faster.

We knew this a lot of years ago, but now we have more and more evidence about it and how it works.




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chelovek
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 Message 42 of 129
31 January 2009 at 3:58pm | IP Logged 
Raчraч Ŋuɲa wrote:


But another research compared reading only, reading-while-listening, and listening only for their rate of vocabulary acquisition and decay, yet concluded that listening only acquire vocabularies the least, for the reasons explained below. I think the value of listening is only for correct vocalization of learned words.



That's an interesting study, but it's not really related to the article posted. The Australian study is about whether listening in general makes it easier to subsequently acquire words. The study you've cited is about which method you should use when you are actually in the process of learning new words. In other words, they were asking if you'll learn "[foreign word]" more easily if you listen to it, read it, or listen to it and read it. The newer study, however, asked whether listening to the language in general would make a given learning method even more efficient.

----

By the way, slucido, thanks for all the interesting links.

Edited by chelovek on 31 January 2009 at 4:00pm

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TheBiscuit
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 Message 43 of 129
01 February 2009 at 3:10pm | IP Logged 
Well, I'm always up for growing some new neural tissue. I think I'll put the professor's research to the test with a random language and see how it goes. Anyone else?
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slucido
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 Message 44 of 129
01 February 2009 at 3:14pm | IP Logged 
chelovek wrote:


By the way, slucido, thanks for all the interesting links.


Thank you. I hope these links are useful but maybe they are too many links.

Funnily enough Khatzumoto has just written a article about listening incomprehensible input and the article quoted here. He is not a scientific, but I know he has several followers in this forum and has some interesting points.

http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/why-you-should-kee p-listening-even-if-you-dont-understand

Quote:


One of the more apparently “controversial” pieces of advice I’ve offered is to simply immerse in audio - keep listening whether or not you understand L2 (the target language). It’ll all just start to make sense. No doubt I am not the first person to have suggested this. At best I simply pushed the idea to its logical extreme…



Quote:


A lot of the theoretical background for the language learning advice on AJATT comes from the work of the dashingly handsome Dr. Stephen Krashen, particularly his Input Hypothesis. One piece of advice that people seem to have locked onto with great fervor is that input needs to be “comprehensible” and “i+1″ (where i = your current level of full comprehension); they viciously defend this idea to the point of branding the “keep listening to L2 whether or not you understand” advice invalid “because Krashen says that…”.




Quote:


The reason I used and recommend the “listening all the time” technique in the first place was partly to remove any and all excuses involving the words “you’ve just got to live in the country”, and partly because I strongly felt that the universally high level of proficiency we see in native speakers of a language is entirely due to their environment and behavior. It follows that if I were to replicate conditions of environment and behavior, then surely I could expect to replicate the results…that was my thinking. I felt that native speakers enjoyed what I like to call an “incubation period” (perhaps “gestation” period would be more accurate), where they simply passively listened to their language for obscene amounts of time, and that this period was essential to their prodigious linguistic awesomeness.

Anyway, finally, academia got my memo (”Where the heck were you, academia! That one was right to you!”), and the cognitive science people are now getting with the program (they’re all: “We were with the program the whole time! We ARE the program!”), and starting to explain what goes on in the lives of every native speaker of every language; taking our hunches and giving them some level of experimental rigor. Enter Dr. Paul “All Russian All The Time” Sulzberger from Victoria University of Wellington in Brand Spanking New Zealand, who was interested in:
...





Edited by slucido on 01 February 2009 at 3:15pm

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parasitius
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 Message 45 of 129
01 February 2009 at 9:58pm | IP Logged 
What a heaping pile of shit this thread is... I can't for the life of my understand why so many people think it is possible to debate the guy's "claim" (his thesis) on the basis of some wild guesses based on an article which was probably created on the basis of only 2 or 3 sentences of "plain summarized facts" about the thesis.

We're talking we have about 1 sentence of information about the guy's claim here people, there isn't much to debate unless one of you can get a hold of the thesis itself and give us some nice quotes.

Now, if anyone is up for the task, would anyone be daring enough to email Paul, tell him how interested we are in his work, and ask for a few more specifics if possible (possibly showing him this thread)? paul.edgar@xtra.co.nz is what I got from the Google cache of this page:

http://72.14.235.132/search?q=cache:is-U0di00mkJ:www.victori a.ac.nz/lals/research/phdma-students.aspx+Paul+Sulzberger+la nguage&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=9&gl=sg&client=firefox-a

Here is some extra info:

Second Language Learning (PhD research).

This research considers the hypothesis that the acquisition of vocabulary in a second language is (inter alia) dependent on the acquisition of a knowledge of the phonotactic structure of the second language. The observation that children acquire considerable knowledge of the phonotactic structure of their native language before they begin to speak, coupled with the finding that phonological memory in both children and adults is correlated with native language "wordlikeness", suggests that implicit knowledge of the phonotactic structure of the native language is implicated in vocabulary development - in particular the ability to rapidly acquire ("fast-mapping") the form of novel, native (but typically not foreign) words. This thesis considers the argument that the lack of such experientially-derived, implicit phonotactic knowledge can explain many of the difficulties experienced by second language learners in the acquisition of vocabulary in the early stages. Email Paul.

QUITE A BIT MORE NUANCED THAN THE NEWS STORY, HUH?

Notice the words "the early stages"? Not a single one of you big mouths took this into account in your pillars of salt, and it makes all of your ridiculous comments about "learning a whole language just from listening" completely irrelevant strawman rubbish.

Edited by parasitius on 01 February 2009 at 10:03pm

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Raчraч Ŋuɲa
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 Message 46 of 129
02 February 2009 at 3:08am | IP Logged 
chelovek wrote:

I can't believe you wrote all of that crap.^


parasitius wrote:

What a heaping pile of shit this thread is......Not a single one of you big mouths took this into account in your pillars of salt, and it makes all of your ridiculous comments about "learning a whole language just from listening" completely irrelevant strawman rubbish.


I never thought that I will get involved in a pissing match in this forum. This is not really very conducive to clear thinking, very distracting, with 2 members here intolerant of dissenting opinions, urinating at people they think have "crap" or "shit" ideas.

Not for a person who didn't grow up in such an environment....makes me ponder why they're both from the US... I'm gonna stay away for a while to grow a thicker skin, but I will be back. My time tonight will be better spent studying Castellano.

And while I'm gone, why not be daring enough yourself, parasitius? I'ts your idea anyway. Adios.
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parasitius
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 Message 47 of 129
02 February 2009 at 3:21am | IP Logged 
Raчraч Ŋuɲa wrote:

I never thought that I will get involved in a pissing match in this forum. This is not really very conducive to clear thinking, very distracting, with 2 members here intolerant of dissenting opinions, urinating at people they think have "crap" or "shit" ideas.

And while I'm gone, why not be daring enough yourself, parasitius? I'ts your idea anyway. Adios.


I didn't mean to imply anyone's ideas are rubbish intrinsically. But, the CONTEXT of this discussion is debating the ideas presented by a certain researcher. If someone wrote a long post about how they think it is impossible to learn a language from scratch with "just listening", then they are attacking a position the researcher never claimed and thereby simultaneously confusing everyone else and reducing the quality of a thread overall because they are not contributing anything constructive to debating whether what the researcher ACTUALLY SAID is valid and reasonable or not.

Because we have such limited information on his thesis, in my opinion the only constructive posts might be (1) reference to similar research you know of (2) anecdotes of tangentially similar phenomena you've experienced. We don't have enough info to be saying this is a new "learning gimmick" and the other outrageous statements I've seen. So anything irresponsibly jumping to conclusions on this guy's work ruined this thread imho.

Yeah I should email him, but I'm shy. I'm debating it...
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shapd
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 Message 48 of 129
02 February 2009 at 4:59am | IP Logged 
If you Google Paul Sulzberger you will find a link to a Radio New Zealand interview where he discusses his research. It will probably only be available for a few days.

As far as I understand, what he did was to analyse Russian words according to their similarity to English phonetic patterns and then see which ones test subjects could remember. Those like English were remembered and those with eg consonant clusters were not. He assumes that is because English speakers have no internal representation of these sounds and therefore need to hear them hundreds of times to be able to process them. (I am sure there was a study some time ago showing that Japanese learners of English could be taught to recognise the difference between "l" and "r" if they heard them intensively enough, which supports his theory).

He recommends listening to radio, watching films etc before you can understand them, just so you will remember the vocabulary more easily when you come to learn it formally. He does NOT say that all that is needed is random exposure. Even babies need context.

He intends to do more research to see how to apply these findings to real world language learning.

So could we cut the abuse and recognise that he may have a valid and useful finding, though limited.


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