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How Krashen will delay your fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| J-Learner Senior Member Australia Joined 6034 days ago 556 posts - 636 votes  Studies: Yiddish, English* Studies: Dutch | Message 26 of 81 31 July 2009 at 10:39am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Iversen, it seems that languages can be learnt only for passive use to a high level. If you're only interested in developing passive skills then you can't criticise yourself for not being able to produce output. Or, in the case of your decision with languages such as Corsican, you don't need to study the language because enough passive skills come through a proxy language (or languages in your case! - Yes I'm a fan... :D).
This is related to but not the same as input versus output. Surely with only passive knowledge, one has a rather limited ability to produce output. And surely good passive skills can lead to good output once they are activated. I guess the question is: how quickly can these active skills be realised and how? This activation process is what you are doing with your Latin. I hope this is working for you. Now for a language in which one has neither passive nor active skills to a very high degree? My brain tells me that I want to develop them in tandem. I already speak one language and I'm not a baby. So theories don't really play a part in my language acquisition as an adult. Perhaps it is wise for a language learner to give output in the form of structures they are sure of and not attempt to produce things they are totally unsure of. I've seen what happens when I and others try to convey something when they do not have the active skills to do so. I have a limited amount of passive skill in Yiddish due to an amount of input as a child and a teenager. Now I am relearning and learning both together! I was surprised how much I could understand today when reading a bit of it from a book I acquired recently. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6089 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 27 of 81 31 July 2009 at 10:47am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think that any output is good, as long as you have a good coach. There has to be someone (preferably a native) to correct the output. That's why language exchanges are so good for self-study. For my next language I plan to go straight to language exchange with whatever modicum of language skill that i have and not wait until I hit intermediate. The important thing, again, is to have the correction. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6474 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 28 of 81 31 July 2009 at 11:24am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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On Edufire there's one teacher who is really great at helping me activate my Spanish - so far I only had passive understanding based on Italian. Try his class sometime!
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 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6707 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 29 of 81 31 July 2009 at 11:43am | IP Logged | ||||||||
As far as I can see we agree on all these points. But I have a few comments. If you have learnt a passive language to a high level you need to have a steady stream of input to keep the language alive. In the case of Latin it means reading Latin on a daily basis - the only active thing you can do with a totally passive language is memorizing poems and things like that (which I don't do). So no input, no activity. This reduces your chances of keeping the language alive during a dry spell. Learning a language as an active thing simply makes it more robust because you always can think in an active language wherever you are. The activation of passive languages is precisely the thing I described with my Latin as an example. All the grammar and the words I had learnt in the 70s had in fact hibernated, and when I started to relearn my Latin I didn't have to hammer through everything again from scratch, I just needed some repetition rounds, and then I was ready to start thinking and writing in Latin. The only catch was that I wanted to think about things that didn't exist while Latin was still alive, - for instance this forum, my computer, trains, modern townplanning and nuclear physics. So I have been busy modernizing my conception of Latin. But everything I learned about Latin as a passive language have come to good use now where my goal is broader.
I don't agree with the last sentence. The reason that my first period with Latin was so lopsided was that the teaching followed an ancient and venerable method called grammar-translation, i.e. a theory. Now I battle against other theories that dismiss explicit learning of grammar and vocabulary. It's still a battle between theories. But as you write both passive and active skills should be developed in tandem. And this theory is worth defending.
The important thing is to have enough corrections to keep you moving forward, but no so many that you get stuck. Edited by Iversen on 31 July 2009 at 11:57am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| J-Learner Senior Member Australia Joined 6034 days ago 556 posts - 636 votes Studies: Yiddish, English* Studies: Dutch | Message 30 of 81 31 July 2009 at 12:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Perhaps there is something to that, Iversen. In saying that theories don't play a part in my learning, I mean that I haven't really thought about it to the extent where I personally can place my learning methodologies as belonging to one particular theory.
Last year I did a short, 8 week German course which I enjoyed very much. The teacher was not a native speaker and had to learn German himself after being sent to Germany to teach English as a 17 year old. He made us use all 4 skills - listening, speaking, reading, writing. It was neither grammar-translation nor input first output second. He did his best to mix the 4 skills together and I feel that he succeeded in this. I think this is a great way to learn a language for me personally, but this might not be applicable for other people, nor even the most productive way to study language. Now, a teacher might have a theory from which he derives his teaching methodology but when we self-learn, do theories hold them same degree of importance? In my experience of language learning they do not, but perhaps someone like yourself can shed more light on this question. Some people do seem to hold up certain methods and defend them for their efficiency. Writing is indeed a good exercise, I agree. It causes you to think critically about what you want to write in terms of content, tone and structure. These are intertwined aspects of writing that are not always at the same level. Reading can increase one's ability in all 3, it seems. I have seen people say you must learn everything by context, I can't agree. In saying that I do seem to be picking up a lot of Dutch from context, in particular vocabulary. I have also used vocabulary learning methods, some similar to yours, and had success with those too. Just some more of my rantings and ravings....I'm really still an absolute beginner who hasn't really gone anywhere in language learning :D 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6089 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 31 of 81 31 July 2009 at 1:40pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
This is interesting. I give a lot of corrections and I get a lot in return. What would be "so many that you get stuck"? I suppose the learning process could be thwarted if the person is trying to express something that they're not ready to write yet, or they get caught in a habit of direct translation -- which is a real hinderance. Or could you mean getting so many corrections back, that you don't have time to review them all (which would be my problem) (^_^) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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