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m.alberto1
Diglot
Senior Member
Australia
youtube.com/user/lan
Joined 5763 days ago
218 posts - 221 votes 
Speaks: Tagalog, English*
Studies: French, Arabic (Written)
| Message 137 of 231 09 July 2009 at 6:25am | IP Logged |
09/07/09
WORDLISTS & FREQUENCY LISTS FOR VOCABULARY MEMORIZATION
Last night, I was doing my wordlists and thinking about how I could improve them. I realised that many words I was learning were really random, and highly unlikely to reappear in the future, such as 'Le Robot de la Commission Scientifique et Technique'?
I then looked into the idea of using frequency lists, and using them for my wordlists, and it just seemed to make much more sense, then merely following the list prescribed by Scola's Insta-Class.
I compiled interesting information and resources regarding frequency lists, wordlists and vocabulary memorization below.
Eafonte wrote:
For those who like to memorize words as a vocabulary acquisition short cut, the best and fastest way IMHO is learning them according to their frequency: the most frequent ones be learned before the less frequent.
This approach is obviously far superior to learnig them from thematic word lists (these are most valuable when you delve into a particular theme, but not when you busy yourself with general vocabulary acquisition), from randomly created word lists, or from alphabetic word lists, like the ones of an ordinary dictionary (the way which is most foolish, doomed to failure and giving-up prone).
In order to learn the words by their frequency you must have a frequency dictionary at you disposal.
Unfortunately, these dictionaries aren't available for every language. Researching the web I've found out these links only:
First of all, two wiki-links comprising many languages (english, German, french, Spanish, swedish, turkish, korean,thai,italian, hungarian, dutch, chinese): http://fr.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionnaire:Listes_de_fr%C3%A 9quence http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Frequency_lists
And anothers:
russian: http://www.learnrussianfree.com/vocabulary.aspx
and http://www.artint.ru/projects/frqlist/frqlist-en.asp
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Iversen wrote:
| Be sure to learn all the most common words, - this to a large degree has to be context based because these words often are irregular and have a lot of idiomatic uses. After that, forget a about frequency and choose the words you want to know from dictionaries. Keyword (in my world): word lists |
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pentatonic wrote:
| And if you want to hit the mother lode of all corpora containing these languages -- Catalan, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Sorbian, Swedish, and Turkish -- with upwards of 3,000,000 example sentences (put those in your alljapaneseallthetime-ripoff-of-antimoon sentence list and you'll know something), and a huge frequency list (German has 1,597,278 entries, although in a raw state), then check out http://corpora.informatik.uni-leipzig.de/ and click on the Download our Corpora browser and databases link. There's even a program there to help you create your own. Download one of the "Plain Text Files" for the language of interest. Inside the zip will be a file called words.txt. |
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1 person has voted this message useful
| m.alberto1
Diglot
Senior Member
Australia
youtube.com/user/lan
Joined 5763 days ago
218 posts - 221 votes
Speaks: Tagalog, English*
Studies: French, Arabic (Written)
| Message 138 of 231 09 July 2009 at 2:29pm | IP Logged |
09/07/09
TAGALOG: 30m
Children comic: "Doraemon (Tagalog Version) Vol. 1" p140-170
Edited by m.alberto1 on 11 July 2009 at 12:51pm
1 person has voted this message useful
| m.alberto1
Diglot
Senior Member
Australia
youtube.com/user/lan
Joined 5763 days ago
218 posts - 221 votes
Speaks: Tagalog, English*
Studies: French, Arabic (Written)
| Message 139 of 231 10 July 2009 at 3:46pm | IP Logged |
10/07/09
NOTES: LISTENING-READING SYSTEM
leosmith wrote:
Here's the listening-reading method in a nutshell:
(each step is with an entire, longish novel)
1. read it in L1
2. listen to the L2 recording and look at the L2 text
3. read the L1 translation while listening to the L2 recording; redo until it is well understood (usually 3 times)
4. while listening to L2, repeat after the recording
5. translate from L1 to L2, orally and manually |
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The following notes are by: siomotteikiru
Reference: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=6366&KW=listening-reading+system
siomotteikiru wrote:
Why crawl if you can walk?
I’ve always been puzzled by the fact that even intelligent people learn languages in a clumsy way.
If you want to learn a language quickly you’ll need:
1. a recording performed by good actors or narrators in the language you want to learn
2. the original text (of the recording)
3. a translation into your own language or a language you understand
4. the text(s) should be long: novels are best
You may wonder: why long texts? Because of the idiolect of the author; it manifests itself fully in the first ten–twenty pages: it is very important in learning quickly without cramming.
The key factor in learning a language is EXPOSURE, that is how much NEW text you will be able to perceive in a unit of time. There is a physical limit here, you can’t understand any faster than the text reaches your brain. That is why you ought to SIMULTANEOUSLY read the translation and listen to the original recording: that provides the fastest exposure.
You should ENJOY the text you're going to listen to.
Texts for beginners should be long - the longer the better, up to fifty hours (e.g. The Lord of the Ring, Harry Potter, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Catch-22).
You might doubt if it is possible. I can assure you it is - you should see twelve-year-olds listening to Harry Potter.
The translation:
a) interlinear (for beginners)
b) literary, but following the original text as closely as possible
The original text and the literary translation should be placed in parallel vertical columns side by side.
If the texts are placed side by side, you can check almost instantly whether you understand or not.
The order ought to be EXACTLY as follows:
What you do:
1. you read the translation
because you only remember well what you understand and what you feel is "yours" psychologically
2. you listen to the recording and look at the written text at the same time,
because the flow of speech has no boundaries between words and the written text does, you will be able to separate each word in the speech flow
and you will get used to the speed of talking of native speakers - at first it seems incredibly fast
3. you look at the translation and listen to the text at the same time, from the beginning to the end of a story, usually three times is enough to understand almost everything
This is the most important thing in the method, it is right AT THIS POINT that proper learning takes place.
If you’re in a position to do it right from the start, you can skip 1. and 2.
4. now you can concentrate on SPEAKING: you repeat after the recording, you do it as many times as necessary to become fluent
Of course, first you have to know how to pronounce the sounds of the language you’re learning. How to teach yourself the correct pronunciation is a different matter, here I will only mention the importance of it.
5. you translate the text from your own language into the language you’re learning
you can do the translation both orally and in writing, that’s why the written texts should be placed in vertical columns side by side: you can cover one side and check using the other one.
And last but not least: conversing is not learning, it is USING a language, you will NEVER be able to say more than you already know. |
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siomotteikiru wrote:
To put it in a nutshell:
Learning a language is all about EXPOSURE, that is how much NEW text you're able to understand in a unit of time (a minute multiplied by hours and days).
When you start at the beginner's level your exposure is almost none.
It does NOT matter whether you understand each single word, in the beginning concentrate on sentences. The more of them you will hear and see at the same time, the more exposure you will get. Let your brain do the rest.
The layout of the texts to learn is very important.
Sensory memories - visulal (iconic) and auditory (echoic)- are very short and disappear within a second, so you get lost when you have to look for words, they should CONSTANTLY be within your eyes’ and ears’ reach.
If you want to maximize your EXPOSURE:
Use meaningful texts (not words, short sentences).
Use LONG texts with AUDIO.
By texts I mean TEXTS (a story, a joke, a newspaper article, a poem, a novel), not individual words or sentences or boring textbooks dialogues about nothing.
Don't try to speak (or write) too soon, it is much better to listen to more texts instead, listening comprehention should be the most important goal.
I concentrate on the meaning, I do not try to learn a paticular language, what I am interested in is the story, not the language.
And don't do any tests, it is a complete waste of time and a source of appalling number of mistakes. Tests are good for teachers and publishers, not for learners.
Sooner or later you will feel you're ready to speak or write, it will come naturally, and it will be easy.
I’ve NEVER learned how to write English, and I am able to put across almost anything I want, (making hell of a lot of mistakes, but who cares as long as the meaning is clear). You may not believe it, but I haven’t written anything in English for three years, and still I can manage. |
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siomotteikiru wrote:
Texts:
1. ideal:
(not just any texts) written by educated native speakers for educated native speakers (good writers, scholars, journalists) read aloud by professional actors
2. self-explanotary:
the more you BEFOREHAND know about the text you’re going to study the better.
„Der Prozess” by Franz Kafka or „Lolita” by Nabokov for me, I’ve time and again read and LISTENED to them in many languages, so I almost know them by heart.
3. "extra-linguistic":
you should concentrate on the plot not grammar points or vocabulary
4. „tool kit”:
e-texts in vertical parallel columns, good translation, good audio recording (mp3, wav), pop up dictionary
5. JOY or/and wonder
The first ten to twenty pages (idiolect) might be extremely difficult, but if you don’t give up too soon because you’re scared or frustrated it will become easier and easier, the longer the book the easier it will be to understand.
SPEAKING and WRITING are not difficult at all, provided you have done the right amount of exposure to good quality texts (written + audio).
Most native speakers in any language have usually nothing interesting or beautiful to say, because of poor exposure (they do not listen to or read anything really worth it).
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siomotteikiru wrote:
Audiobooks for major languages are easily available, use p2p or Internet shops. Libraries for visually disabled people are a great scource, too.
I've been collecting audiobooks for years, so I have thousands of them in many languages.
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siomotteikiru wrote:
I do not read anything without simultaneously listening to it before I have mastered proper pronunciation (by listening, listening to minimal pairs/ phonemes and then repeating after the recording - "shadowing").
Knowing a language involes four skills:
listening, reading, speaking, writing
and four subsystems:
pronuncitation, vacabulary, grammar and discourse(=how to make texts).
They are all interdependent, and reading without listening is counterproductive.
A Russian friend of mine was doing the following:
To increase input, he listened to the Russian text (synthesized audio) and looked at the target text, he said it worked for him, but his pronunciation was not very good, to put it mildly.
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siomotteikiru wrote:
As to parallel texts.
Good quality literature has very often good translations.
It does not matter if it is 100% exact, words mean something only in a context, and very soon you're able to guess the exact meaning, occasianally you can use a pop up dictionary.
As to making parallel texts: it takes time and effort, but it is more effective and much cheaper than buying textbooks (Assimil, Pimsleur, Rosetta, etc). In one chapter of a novel there are more words, sentences and text than in any language textbook.
You can find some parallel texts online.
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siomotteikiru wrote:
In fact there are two kinds of listening.
1. "listening-reading"
2. "natural listening" to which you get after you have "listened-read" to about 20 to 40 hours of NEW texts. (I’ve checked it with about five hundred Polish learners learning English, German, French, Russian, Italian – studying entirely on their own. And myself learning Japanese. I do not know if it would be the same for English learners. The Polish language is quite complex both phonetically and grammatically, so it is relatively easy for us to learn other languages.)
You shouldn't repeat anything after the recording until you have come to the stage of "natural-listening" (it basically means you are able to understand NEW recorded texts, usually simpler than the ones you have „listened-readâ€, relying only on your "ears", that is not using any written texts, neither the original nor the translation.
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siomotteikiru wrote:
If you work on it 10 to 12 hours a day (I can do it easily), after a week’s time (70 to 80 hours), you’re able not only to understand what is being spoken (if it is not too technical), but you’re in a position to speak as well, enough to be able to engage in small talk at least.
In 70 to 80 hours it’s possible to “listen-read†to 3 to 5 average novels, and that’s quite a lot. The first one will be a little bit difficult, but the rest will be much easier, you’ll be able to “shadow†it (=repeat after the reader) at the same time, and I DO know from my own experience that when you’ve “shadowed†3 to 5 hours, you can speak as well. It does not matter if you repeat every single word, it is the amount that counts. Taking part in a conversation means first of all to understand what is being said to you, and if you do, you can react accordingly.
A great deal depends on the “density†(new words per minute) of the texts you “listen-read†to and “shadowâ€. If it’s too low, it won’t be possible for you to put across your thoughts in a coherent way, simply your vocabulary would be too poor.
Using a language is a skill, you can’t acquire it without practicing it. If you want to learn how to swim it’s no use to analize the chemical composition of water instead of plunging into it. Water for a language learner are TEXTS: spoken and written.
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siomotteikiru wrote:
My idea of parallel texts seems to be different from yours. I thought I made it clear in my first entry:
1. An AUDIO recording by professional actor(s), in mp3 or wav format
2. E-texts in VERTICAL COLUMNS, side by side on one page
3. Texts should be long, up to 50 hours.
Anything else may slightly resemble the idea. A while ago I uploaded a sample of what I mean by parallel texts.
EXPOSURE: {new text (audio+written, see above)} divided by {minute times hours times days}
Hours and days should be counted from the first moment you start learning, sleep and anything else INCLUDED.
The text can be measured in pages or words or minutes (silence and music excluded).
Only if EXPOSURE is known, any meaningful discussion makes sense.
You can get to the stage of “natural listening†just in a week, and to be able to speak using two to three thousand words and simple sentences.
As to the writing and reading it might take a little bit longer, three to five hundred hours of “listening-reading†should be enough. And you most certainly shouldn’t drill kanji using flashcards or Heisig methods. A simple introduction, say the book by Len Walsh, is enough to get an idea what kanji are, the rest is done by “listening-reading.â€
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siomotteikiru wrote:
You all seem to overlook one important factor:
if you don't enjoy (I might say "passionately in love") the texts you're going to "listen-read" to, you won't get much out of it, you're attention will be constantly distracted and you will get bored. And then .... happy-go-lucky Miss Hopper won't be done good and proper.
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siomotteikiru wrote:
A piece of advice once more:
Don't make interlinear texts yourself if you do not know both languages, it is a waste of time and effort.
Make parallel vertical texts or just use printed books.
Read a page or a paragraph (in your mother tongue), do STEP 2 AND 3 one to three times and go on. Do it from the beginning to the end of the novel. Then start again from the beginning, it will be much easier. The third time should be quite easy.
The longer the novel the better.
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siomotteikiru wrote:
Grasshoppers, don't jump here and there, otherwise you'll get lost in a pool of tears, like poor Alice.
A word of caution:
If you read in L2 before you have mastered the proper pronunciation, you might end up never mastering it properly.
You should not read anything in L2 before you have reached the stage of "natural listening".
Nor should you repeat anything after the recording before you have reached that stage and done some amount of phonetic listening: phonemes, minimal pairs, intonation.
Nothing should be done at the expense of EXPOSURE:
NEW, NEW, NEW TEXTS divided by (minute times hours times days).
If you still wonder why long texts are so important, I'm sure you haven't read anything about idiolect, text statistics, discourse analysis or the curves of learning and forgetting, and overlearning.
IF you don't have parallel texts, do the following:
1. read a page (or a paragraph) in L1
2. listen and look at the text in L2, trying to attach some meaning to it
3. listen and look at the text in L1, trying to attach some meaning to what you're hearing.
If you don't have the written text in L2, skip step 2, try to do Step 3 from the beginning to the end, but perhaps more times.
If you want to benefit fully from the "l-r"-ing, you must have exposure to 20-30 hours of NEW, NEW, NEW texts, at least.
When you've done 40-60 hours of listening-reading, you probably won't have to learn how to speak, long sentences will pop up from your head themselves.
But all of the above must be done in one go, stopping only for eating and sleeping.
Of course, working with recorded novels, even in a far from perfect way, is MUCH BETTER THAN USING TEXTBOOKS, or only reading without listening.
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siomotteikiru wrote:
You might have noticed I said: IF you want to learn a language quickly.... blah, blah, blah...
It means, among other things, it’s a condition and that I consider you a free human being, I am a strong believer in individual freedom of thought and action. I’m most certainly not a pope who tells his sheep what’s good for them unconditionally.
Now let me explain in more detail why I think the Three Steps are a useful tool in acquiring a language.
STEP 1
You read the story to make it “yours†psychologically.
I added: you must be passionately in love with the text you’re going to study.
Imagine you’re a biologist and you’ve been crossing frogs with snails and cloning sheep since you were in cradle – it’s your life, you know hell of a lot about it, it makes you happy and you can’t imagine your life without it. One day you discover there’s a wonderful new theory on how sheep can be grown into lions. Unfortunately it’s in the clitty-titty language, and you don’t know it. So you decide to learn the wonderful clitty-titty in a day or hang yourself.
Notice two points:
you know almost everything about the subject and you’re in love with it.
The texts in clitty-titty will be self-explanatory and highly enjoyble, you won’t get tired (on the contrary, you’ll get happier and happier) and you’ll guess the meaning of at least half of the sentences in clitty-titty.
And now a real life example: La principessa, a teenage girl, is in love with Harry Potter, she’s been reading the books time and again and knows them by heart. She decides to become a witch herself: to go to Hoggwart, she must learn English in a week to prove she’s worthy.
No problem, she has a magic wand: audiobooks of her prince (Harry Potter), but, unfortunately she has no English texts.
She listens to the books time and again, after a few times she can understand every single word.
Notice two points:
Harry Potter is her life, and the texts in English are self-explanatory.
I’m sure you remember my own example: Kafka and Nabokov.
You might as well remember I say you can skip Step 1 and 2.
They are not absolutely necessary, though they might be useful.
Step 2
You listen to the text in LSD2 and look at the written text in LSD2.
If you’ve ever tried to listen to native speakers of any language, you must have noticed that at first you do not know which groups of sounds form words and that they (speakers, not words) speak as if they were machine guns.
The aim of STEP 2 is to cure these two small drawbacks, and at the same time to get some exposure to meaning, sounds, rythm, intonation in the LSD2.
Whether you should go from the beginning to the end depends on two things:
1. how much you understand
2. if you already can recognize the boundries between words and the speed is no longer frighting.
If you understand quite a lot (being a free person, you yourself must decide how much is enough for you), you’d better go to the end.
If you don’t understand anything new after the first ten to twenty pages but you can follow the written text easily and can spot the boundries in the flow of speech, you’d better stop and go to STEP 3. If the speed is still frightening you go on until it stops being so.
You might as well remember I say you can skip Step 1 and 2.
They are not absolutely necessary, though they might be useful.
STEP 3
The Paradise proper, though it seems Hell at first.
You’re reading LSD1 and listening to LSD2.
IF you’re a fast enough reader you can read much faster than people speak, so you’re able to know IN ADVANCE the meaning of what you’re going to listen to, and to be in a position to guess at least some meaning (with a good translation almost everything) of what you’re listening to.
How difficult the text for “listening-reading†should be depends entirely on you, you might start with something relatively simple.
Because of the IDIOLECT of the author the first 10 – 20 pages might be a nightmare for some, but then it’s getting easier and easier, the longer the text the easier it becomes, but it’s still the same IDIOLECT, variation after variation on the same theme, more and more celestial music, tengoku no ongaku.
IF you’re not capable of doing it without stopping the tape (audio file, tempora mutantur, there are no tapes any longer), you might decide to read a page (or a paragraph) and listen to the passage once or twice and go on.
The aim of STEP 3 is obvious: MEANINGFUL EXPOSURE, INPUT, LISTENING COMPREHENSION.
And ultimately: NATURAL LISTENING. That means understanding completely new texts.
I might add here: garbage in, garbage out.
Acquiring ANY SKILL means going through an INCUBATION PERIOD, during which you get confused time and again at first.
I found out from my own experience and a few hundreds people studying on their own:
To get to the stage of NATURAL listening you have to do about 20 to 30 hours of ‘listening-reading’ to NEW TEXTS.
You might get down even to 10 hours, it mostly depends on the ‘density’ (= new words per page) of the texts.
Listening to a short text time and again does not mean new exposure, it is still the same mechanical repetition. It might have its merits as well: you’re exposed to sounds, rythm and intonation, but that’s about it, nothing more.
NOTHING EVER SHOULD BE DONE AT THE EXPENSE OF EXPOSURE until you get to natural listening to difficult texts.
Some say listening comperhension is passive.
I couldn’t agree less, it is the most difficult skill to acquire. On how you do it depends a great deal: pronunciation, speaking, and to a large extent reading and writing.
I might say: God DID know what s/he/they was/were doing when s/he/they told us to listen first and then learn how to speak, and much later to invent writing.
But we are clever enough to cheat on her/him/them and use writing to acquire listening skills as well.
When you’ve come to the stage of natural listening you might decide you’d like to say something to your beloved.
And here there’s one more minor obstacle to overcome: PRONUNCIATION (phonemes, stress, tones, rythm, intonation).
It does matter whether you distinguish sh*t and sheet in English, or proszę and prosię in Polish, or blé and bleu in French and so on.
It’s not difficult at all: right amount of listening-reading, natural listening and phonetic listening does the trick.
Speaking is easy: almost everything depends on the above. You might decide to repeat after the recording, after you’ve reached the stage of natural listening it should be very easy and done without any effort. It does not matter if you repeat each word, phrase or sentence.
While repeating after the recording (professional actors in fact) you’d better not look at the written text, for two reasons:
1. interference of your mother tongue, particularly when LSD1 and LSD2 use the same alphabet
2. speaking means taking SOUNDS out of your brain, not reading aloud.
I might add here as well: taking part in a conversation means first of all being able to understand what is being said to you.
GRAMMAR AND VOCABULARY
are in the texts,
why should you bother with lenthy and often wrong explanations?
When LSD1 and LSD2 are not closely related, say English and Japanese or to a lesser extent Polish and Japanese (Polish is much more complicated grammatically than English, though from the point of view of a Japanese person, they are two different dialacts of the same language), you might want to read some basic information about the LSD2.
READING
When you’ve done the right amount of listening-reading with parallel texts, you don’t have to learn the skill separately.
With languages using a different script, say Japanese for Indo-Europeans (us, unlucky bastards), ‘listening-reading’ saves a lot of toil, thousands of hours compared with traditional methods using textbooks and flashcards.
WRITING
on the wall
together we stand, divided we fall
After the right amount of exposure to complicated texts with full and beautiful DISCOURSE, a little bit of written retranslation from LSD2 to LSD1 should be enough.
You don’t need to translate whole books, though, only the phrases or sentences you feel you wouldn’t be able to say or write yourself.
Listening-reading, the same as any language, is in fact a SYSTEM (= a set of interdependent elements that mean something as a whole, in opposition to each other in the set, not seperately). If you skip or omit one element, the structure crumbles. You may live in ruins as well, why not, and be brainwashed by schools, teacher, publishers. If you’d rather use Pimsleur, FSI or (the best of them all) Assimil, please do.
I tell you how to be free and some try to tell me how to be a good slave.
Sorry, not for me, I’d rather die.
ASSAULT
= massive exposure in a short period of time
Why?
Hmm, let me think.
The curves of learning and forgetting and overlearning.
Any decent textbook on general psychology begs you to be read.
But you say there are no parallel text with audio. You’re wrong, there are aplenty.
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siomotteikiru wrote:
By the way, I've asked a couple more questions about the method on the forum (on how to effectively use -parallel- texts, stopping vs not stopping the audio, spending large amounts of time per day but also doing other mental work, and about whether it's better to repeat a -long- text once or twice, or go for entirely new material, and on what 'phonetic listening' is).
My answer:
xxx
JOY and EXPOSURE
If you stop or not depends entirely on you, experiment and see what happens.
If you feel like doing something else, do it.
Phases in acquiring language skills:
PERCEPTION: partial – full
RECOGNITION: partial – full
REPRODUCTION: partial – full
PRODUCTION: your own, based on what you’ve learned, in “artificial†envirenment
COMMUNICATION: using your language skills in real life situations
If you understand a lot while “listening-reading†(it doesn’t matter if ony for a while), say 50% to 70%, it would be much better to go to new texts (if you have any).
If you understand not so much, it’s better to do it more times. But if you feel you don’t like it any more, do new texts. That’s why, among other reasons, you should have plenty of materials to learn. Learning a language means exposure to sounds, words, sentences (grammar), discourse (= rules of making texts). You don’t need to understand everything in one particular text, you’re sure to come across the same sounds, phrases, grammar and discourse rules in new texts, they will recur time and again, the longer the text, the more often you’ll hear and see them, sooner or later you’ll remember them and be able to use them without any cramming.
JOY should be your ultimate guide.
As to phonetic listening:
It means exposure to phonemes (=sounds differentiating the meaning of words in a given language), stress, rythm, tones, intonation patterns, and careful comparison with similar phonomena in your mother tongue.
It is the only area in language learning where some sound previous knowledge would be extremely useful.
You should do it using both special recordings and the texts you’re “listening-reading†to.
Don’t believe anybody (including yourself), they might cheat, experiment and see what really works.
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siomotteikiru wrote:
When you’ve come to the stage of „natural listening†to fairly difficult novels, “listening-reading†is no longer necessary.
“Listening-reading†is for LEARNING a language, not using it.
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siomotteikiru wrote:
PREPARING
Awareness
Knowing what
Knowing how
Setting goals
extra-linguistic
linguistic
Gathering materials
Time (Have you lived a million hours?)
Language skills in your mother tongue
LEARNING (= putting into your head)
“listening-readingâ€
incubation period
“natural listeningâ€
pronunciation
phonetic listening
reproduction
repeating after the reader
recitation
speaking
reproduction
production
reading
“listening-r eading â€
reading proper
writing
reproduction
writing proper
USING
COMMUNICATION
CONVERSATION
listening skills
pronunciation
pragmatic skills
vocabulary
grammar
TESTING
good for nothing
it’s for teachers to make you believe they are necessary and they know better
it’s for publishers to trick you into buying their books
it’s for school authorities and politicians to make a living and control you, and tell you what you should do and fear them
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siomotteikiru wrote:
Vertical side by side texts are much easier to use. You can check the meaning or the spelling instantly without stopping the audio. Echoic and iconic memories are very short (less than one second), so you get lost when you use printed books.
Once you've prepared a bilingul parallel text, it is easy to make multiligual ones, you just copy one side and paste it to another version.
You can translate easily using vertical texts, you just cover one side.
You can see what is missing and wonder why it is so.
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siomotteikiru wrote:
Listening-Reading in a teeny weeny nutshell:
LOVE + Listening-Reading (INCUBATION period and then natural listening) + pronunciation = speaking + writing.
Use LONG novels right from the start. If the languages are different the first three hours should be translated word for word. If they are similar, it is not necessary.
There's nothing miraculous about it.
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siomotteikiru wrote:
PRONUNCIATION
AWARENESS
inventory of the phonemes of your mother tongue
movements of the lips and tongue to produce the phonemes
inventory of the phonemes of the target language
phonematic listening: minimal pairs, tones
phonetic listening: stress, rythm, intonation
careful comparison of L1 (=mother tongue) and L2 (= target language)
(Try to) listen to L2 speaker speaking L1
PRODUCTION
Do not try to speak until you've reached the stage of natural listening (= only after the incubation period of the L-R)
Repeat after the speaker what you only understand (the meaning) and can hear properly (phonemes, rythm, etc)
Listen-repeat - if it's correct: listen-repeat, listen-repeat
if it's not correct, do not repeat any more, only listen
First small chunks (even syllables) here and there while natural listening to something you enjoy, then the chunks will get longer and longer.
Shadow (= repeat after the speaker(s)) longer sentences and texts.
Recite: choose a few of your favourite pictures (to create a context and "psychological environment"), put on some pleasent background music, and imagine why the people (or things) in the pictures use a word, chunk, sentence, short dialogue you've just shadowed; play all the people (things)
Blind shadowing (without understanding) is a waste of time and effort.
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siomotteikiru wrote:
Is good pronunciation important at all?
It affects your listening skills, your speaking skills, your spelling and your reading. It affects your motivation and psychological well-being. It's ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL.
Is good pronunciation difficult to achieve?
NO. If you get down to it properly.
1. Do not speak, do not write, (and do not read without listening) until you've reached the stage of natural listening
2. practise some phonetic listening
3. repeat after the acto(r) only when you fully understand what is being said and you hear the sounds, tones, rythm etc properly
4. avoid NEGATIVE exposure: non-native speakers and fellow students (garbage in, garbage out)
5. do not "charge" at difficult sounds, words etc, do not try to repeat them at all costs, concentrate on what is positive: easy and pleasant.
6. do not blind-shadow (see 5.)
It usually takes about 30 to 40 hours of active phonetic study to be able to repeat absolutely correctly simple phrases and short sentences.
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siomotteikiru wrote:
What makes L-R different is:
1. using long novels right from the start in the fully bilingual format, with bilingual texts in vertical columns side by side on ONE page and as e-texts, recorded by professional actors
2. Step 3 (= listening to the target language while reading in a language you understand. Beauty is in the ear of the beholder.
3. Using self-explanatory texts (= knowing the content beforehand, both the meaning and emotionally)
4. speaking and writing only after the incubation period,that is after getting to the stage of natural listening.
5. the Assault (= massive exposure in a relatively short time)
6. taking into account all the sub-systems: pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and discourse (= how to produce texts), discourse in textbooks is artificial and often wrong).
7. And that's true, it IS the cheapest way of learning a language, both in terms of money and time. And I might add: the fastest and most enjoyable (for literature lovers). And how many true literature lovers are there? We few, we happy few. Be happy, go lucky.
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Edited by m.alberto1 on 10 July 2009 at 4:40pm
1 person has voted this message useful
| m.alberto1
Diglot
Senior Member
Australia
youtube.com/user/lan
Joined 5763 days ago
218 posts - 221 votes
Speaks: Tagalog, English*
Studies: French, Arabic (Written)
| Message 140 of 231 11 July 2009 at 12:46pm | IP Logged |
11/07/09
FRENCH: 1hr
*Wordlists: Words 111-130
*Listening-Reading (Incubation Period): 0-9m19
LEPRINCE DE BEAUMONT, Jeanne Marie - La Belle et la Bête
L1 = teaching language (English)
L2 = target language (French)
1) Read paragraph in L1;
2) Listen to the paragraph in L2 while reading it in L2 (then use gtranslate popup dictionary for unknown vocabulary);
3) Listen to the paragraph in L2 while reading it in L1;
TAGALOG: 1hr
Wordlists: Words 81-100
Children comic: "Doraemon (Tagalog Version) Vol. 1" p171-190
ARABIC: 30m
Alif Baa with DVDs: Unit One p24-27
Edited by m.alberto1 on 12 July 2009 at 11:25am
1 person has voted this message useful
| m.alberto1
Diglot
Senior Member
Australia
youtube.com/user/lan
Joined 5763 days ago
218 posts - 221 votes
Speaks: Tagalog, English*
Studies: French, Arabic (Written)
| Message 141 of 231 12 July 2009 at 7:59am | IP Logged |
12/07/09
I've been doing the wordlists for some time now, and getting a feel of how effective it is. I was reading more about vocabulary acquisition on this forum, and found FSI's comments to be interesting
FSI wrote:
I basically read for plot and enjoyment, and not with the analytical eye. Once I'm done reading it, I read the translated version of it, and then go back to the target language version for another read. I'm not consciously trying to figure out each sentence, but rather to make sure I'm following the story. However, I do find lightbulbs constantly going on when I understand words, recognize cognates, or just "get" how different things fit into each sentence. I find I pick things up the fastest if I'm simply reading for the story instead of trying to force myself to learn each word.
Why? Because if I understand a word, that's cool, but it doesn't help me understand how to use it. But if I understand a sentence, then I understand (more or less) every word in that sentence, and more importantly, how they fit together. I get a three-dimensional picture of the word implicitly, rather than a one-dimensional explicit perspective of the word. So when I see that word again in a different context, I'm more likely to understand it (implicitly, if not explicitly). Eventually, I'll be more likely to use it correctly in a sentence, because I'll already have a built in catalog of examples of how it's used in sentences.
So I'm a fan of context; we don't speak in words, we speak in sentences. If I keep looking at the big picture - following the storyline - and understand the sentences that make up the story, the words that comprise them fall into place over time. It comes down to whether one favors a wide/implicit or narrow/explicit approach. I prefer picking up things by repeated exposure in waves (implicitly) rather than learning things one by one (explicitly). |
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1 person has voted this message useful
| m.alberto1
Diglot
Senior Member
Australia
youtube.com/user/lan
Joined 5763 days ago
218 posts - 221 votes
Speaks: Tagalog, English*
Studies: French, Arabic (Written)
| Message 142 of 231 12 July 2009 at 11:27am | IP Logged |
12/07/09
FRENCH: 30m
*Listening-Reading (Incubation Period): 9m19-14m
LEPRINCE DE BEAUMONT, Jeanne Marie - La Belle et la Bête
L1 = teaching language (English)
L2 = target language (French)
1) Read paragraph in L1;
2) Listen to the paragraph in L2 while reading it in L2 (then highlight unknown vocabulary and use gtranslate popup dictionary);
3) Listen to the paragraph in L2 while reading it in L1;
TAGALOG: 1hr
Children comic: "Doraemon (Tagalog Version) Vol. 2" p1-65
Edited by m.alberto1 on 13 July 2009 at 5:45pm
1 person has voted this message useful
| m.alberto1
Diglot
Senior Member
Australia
youtube.com/user/lan
Joined 5763 days ago
218 posts - 221 votes
Speaks: Tagalog, English*
Studies: French, Arabic (Written)
| Message 143 of 231 13 July 2009 at 6:12am | IP Logged |
13/07/09
OBSERVATIONS:
INSPIRING LITERARY WORKS IN TAGALOG
I was having a browse of some harder Filipino/Tagalog works of literature, and found this quote on Project Gutenberg by Rosauro Almario in "Ang Mananayaw:"
At makikibaka kamí laban sa masasamâng hilig, mga ugali't paniwalà, magíng tungkól sa polítika, magíng sa relihión at gayón sa karaniwang pamumúhay; yamang ang mga bagay na itó'y siyáng mga haliging dapat kásaligan ng alín mang bayan: tatlóng lakás na siyáng bumúbuó ng káluluwá ng alín mang lahì.
At first glance, I didn't fully understand it. However, after I thought about it a bit more and looked up some unknown vocabulary, I understand this paragraph to mean:
"And we are able to struggle against the evil passions, the behaviours and ideas, which can be about politics, even religion and thus about average life as well; since these aspects are the columns that must be the foundation of any place: three strengths which make whole the soul of any race."
I thought about the essence of this work, and the ideas behind just this one paragraph and was amazed at it. It's quite deep. I haven't encountered anything like it before in Tagalog! I especially like how these ideas can be written in Tagalog/Filipino, and I can understand it - It really gives it such weight and meaning and gives me such awe for the tagalog - and even more motivation to begin reading such works as this purely in tagalog.
1 person has voted this message useful
| m.alberto1
Diglot
Senior Member
Australia
youtube.com/user/lan
Joined 5763 days ago
218 posts - 221 votes
Speaks: Tagalog, English*
Studies: French, Arabic (Written)
| Message 144 of 231 13 July 2009 at 5:47pm | IP Logged |
13/07/09
FRENCH: 30m
*Listening-Reading (Incubation Period): 14m-17m30
LEPRINCE DE BEAUMONT, Jeanne Marie - La Belle et la Bête
L1 = teaching language (English)
L2 = target language (French)
1) Read paragraph in L1;
2) Listen to the paragraph in L2 while reading it in L2 (then highlight unknown vocabulary and use gtranslate popup dictionary);
3) Listen to the paragraph in L2 while reading it in L1;
TAGALOG: 30m
Children comic: "Doraemon (Tagalog Version) Vol. 2" p65-98
ARABIC: 30m
Alif Baa with DVDs: Unit One p28-30
Edited by m.alberto1 on 13 July 2009 at 6:11pm
1 person has voted this message useful
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