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Tags: Listening-Reading (L-R) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6440 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 17 of 164 24 March 2009 at 11:06am | IP Logged | |||||
I find it unnecessary - at least, I have found it unnecessary for Polish and Hungarian, despite having no significant previous exposure to them pre-LR (basically none for Polish, and a small amount of Hungarian music for Hungarian). Admittedly, I haven't started L-R'ing Hungarian yet, but I'm making my 4th long parallel text (a partially-automated process, and one which I'm -not- routinely referring to a dictionary in - I've used one maybe a half dozen times, if that), and picking up a ton in the process; it seems more initially approachable/intuitive/whatever than Polish, frankly, despite being non-IE. For Japanese.... dunno, I've done some other study, but haven't tried L-R'ing it. For Chinese, I don't think I'd find it necessary, but I can't say for sure. An interlinear text might well help (I haven't used one), but it's not NECESSARY; after a few dozen hours of L-R, it's very clear what part of the meaning is represented by which words, even if an interlinear text wasn't used. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| icing_death Senior Member United States Joined 5862 days ago 296 posts - 302 votes Speaks: English* | Message 18 of 164 24 March 2009 at 11:17am | IP Logged | |||||
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I read some of the L-R threads. Good grief, that really excited a lot of people. It seems like a good method for improving reading and listening. I would guess people who don't do well with passive methods might find it somewhat ineffective though. It would probably help a little bit with speaking and writing, but there are many better (more focused) methods out there for those skills.
If you're expecting to become an excellent reader in 2 weeks, from scratch, you may be fooling yourself. Even if your L2 is similar to a language you're fluent in, this is a tall order. The handful of people who have reaped success with this method and reported it here don't seem to have made anywhere near the strides as the inventor. But they enjoy it, and it works for them, so that's great. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tricoteuse Pentaglot Senior Member Norway littlang.blogspot.co Joined 6679 days ago 745 posts - 845 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Norwegian, EnglishC1, Russian, French Studies: Ukrainian, Bulgarian | Message 19 of 164 24 March 2009 at 12:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
Do any of those texts happen to be texts that you'd be willing to share and that are in a (for me) comprehensible language? I really want to try L-R:ing, but I never manage to find any material that interests me or suits me. I thought I had finally found something good, a Russian audiobook for which I had the text in Danish to start out with, but the audiobook turned out to have such loud (extremely annoying and painful) background music that I couldn't focus on what the reader said... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| shapd Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6150 days ago 126 posts - 208 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Modern Hebrew, French, Russian | Message 21 of 164 24 March 2009 at 4:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I find the biggest problem with L-R is obtaining suitable materials. Although the original thread made a big deal about learning directly from literature (and Volte has shown this is possible) the supplementary materials he/she gave as references tell a slightly different story. There it is recommended to start with easier material if real literature is too difficult. He/she even specifies a particular set of simplified English readers as starter material.
This then raises the biggest problem. Atamagaii was very scathing about publishers who only want to make money out of inferior products, but unless one decides to take L-R on and produce the kit to make it work - original, formatted translation and recording - starting with simple texts and progressing to higher levels, the method will only be suitable for intermediate stages. This is particularly true of languages far from your native one. The effort of obtaining the components and possibly making interlinear or side by side versions will be too much, especially for minority languages which may not have much audio commercially available. I could not find Hebrew audiobooks in Israel last year even in large bookshops. The best solution for most may well be to use Assimil as a L-R text, though the total amount of exposure would be far less than recommended. That should take a learner to a high enough level to try real literature. By the way, a major objection many have to L-R seems to be the rejection of the possibility of learning passively. I heard just last week from a friend of mine that her father came as a refugee to Scotland during the war at the age of 31 not knowing any English. He kept quietly in the background and said nothing for 9 months and then started to speak English fluently and without an accent. His sister who came over younger and did have formal English lessons always had an accent. My mother also learnt English within two years to a level where she passed school examinations with good marks in everything except English literature and had a barely noticeable accent, though she did both listen to and produce the language. But she did not have formal English lessons for non native speakers. So as aYa said, don't assume something is impossible because you have not done it personally. The reason for doing academic studies of learning is so people do not rely on individual preferences and prejudices. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6440 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 22 of 164 24 March 2009 at 4:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
Weirdly enough, I don't find simplified material, or children's novels, easier at the beginning (with L-R, starting a language far from one I know from scratch - in other situations, it is indeed easier). No matter what I use, the first few hours are ... definitely interesting, but a matter of corresponding paragraphs rather than words; the words and structures only start becoming clear later.
I agree that materials for L-R are problematic. That said, it's a matter of a few dozen hours to get adequate material for some languages; in perhaps 40 hours of work (perhaps a bit more, perhaps a bit less) I've found audiobooks and made parallel texts corresponding to 108 hours of them. This isn't counting any of the premade parallel texts that I have (Franklang is quite good). The language in question is Hungarian, and MEK does make things easier, but this shouldn't be too far out of line for what one can do for English/Polish/Russian/Swedish/Dutch/German/Italian/French/S panish/Portuguese - or with a bit more digging, Finnish/Icelandic/etc; sheetz's posts are a good source for Japanese material, and there's also a lot out there for Mandarin. Admittedly, if you want to learn a Celtic language, Greek, Basque, Hebrew, or any really small language, there simply don't appear to be adequate materials to do L-R, unfortunately. The situation for Asian languages other than Japanese/Mandarin is spottier (I'm not sure if any of them have adequate material), as is the situation for Indic languages, unfortunately. I find Assimil unusable for L-R; I've posted on this before. I haven't yet tried Linguaphone for it, and I can't track down the Polish course Professor Arguelles recommend that I try to L-R, so I don't know if they'd be better. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 24 of 164 25 March 2009 at 12:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The idea of orthodox L-R is to use extremely long texts, but if you can't find that then there are lots of shorter non-literary texts at the GLOSS site, all with audio, transcription and translation, and it has many languages listed.
If you can find an audio version and digital versions of the original book and a translation, then it isn't too hard to make a parallel text. You can use columns or tables in Word or another word processor, and then it is just a matter of doing a lot of cutting and pasting. One trick: different languages don't take up the same amount of space: you can regulate this either by using columns of different width or by changing the font for one of the languages. If you want to have interlaced texts then you can make them yourself, using a spreadsheet and your word processor, but this is much more time consuming. I have described exactly how to do them in this thread. I have made some with base language Danish for several languages (Russian, Icelandic, Dutch) based on some of the tales of H.C.Andersen, and I found these to be very useful. But if you have to do them yourself - and you probably have to - then it takes a lot of time, and I doubt that the gain is worth the extra effort. Edited by Iversen on 25 March 2009 at 12:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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