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Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5671 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin
| Message 33 of 57 10 November 2010 at 8:56pm | IP Logged |
Recently, I added another video, this time trying to tackle the eternal question "What is
Fluency?"
I made this video in response to recent controversy over a certain polyglot who has
appeared with claims of fluency in a large number of languages. Those claims have lead to
rather heated debates in the forums here, and across various youtube channels.
My video aims to pinpoint what various people mean by fluency, and how claims of fluency
can lead to disputes.
So, What is Fluency?
1 person has voted this message useful
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5671 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin
| Message 34 of 57 13 November 2010 at 7:56am | IP Logged |
I have put a new video on youtube discussing Active vs Passive
Vocabulary
1 person has voted this message useful
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5671 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin
| Message 35 of 57 09 January 2011 at 9:25pm | IP Logged |
Goodness, I had a nice experience today. A woman approached me in the supermarket and
said: "Excuse me ... but ... are you Anthony? I am one of your biggest fans!"
Well, every man loves to hear things like that (particularly from a woman!).
She was from India and had moved to the Czech republic, and explained that my videos
had helped her with learning the Czech language. Such positive feedback is always very
encouraging, and it put a smile on my face.
This was actually the second time I have been approached by viewers. The first time, I
was sitting in a cafe with Richard Simcott, and a young group of Americans approached
me asking if I am "FluentCzech". They explained that they were in Prague for a two
week classical music festival and watched my videos before arriving.
I seem to remember Richard joking at the time that I had probably paid them to approach
me. I had not, but is a good strategy for the future.
Edited by Splog on 09 January 2011 at 9:45pm
2 persons have voted this message useful
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Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 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 36 of 57 11 January 2011 at 11:33pm | IP Logged |
I just listened to a couple of your videos, including the one about Literal translation - not for the first time, but for the first time in a long time. And it would something of an understatement to say that I agreed with your basic tenet, namely that it is foolish to learn idiomatic expressions as entities which you have to learn in their entirety without asking questions. The fact is that almost any expression has an inner logic, and if you know the component words you can mostly see how the ensemble came to get its derived meaning - and then you stand a good chance of remembering it.
In your video you show Ilya Franks method (L2 word, L1 word, L2 word, L1 word...) and turn it around: L1 word, L2 word, L1 word, L2 word... Smart! But you have to know the foreign expressions well before you can choose those L1 words you need. So where do you get the 'pattern' for an expression from?
As far as I can see you actually have to use literal translation in two phases. In phase 1 you take foreign texts and translate them literally, i.e. word for word, but with hints about derived meanings. And somehow you carry some of the discoveries you do in this phase over to phase 2, which is the active phase where the 'inverted Frank' is used: you don't think 'hello', but 'good' + 'day', and then you know how to express the thought in fluent Czech: "dobrý den". When you have internalized the logic behind this expression you can drop "good" + "day" because you have learnt "dobrý den" - hopefully not only faster, but also in a more congenial and 'deeper' way than if you just had memorized the whole expression and learnt that it was used instead of "hello".
Learning a language is not just memorizing a lot of expressions, but also modelling your own thoughts on the logic expressed in that language.
Edited by Iversen on 11 January 2011 at 11:41pm
2 persons have voted this message useful
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5671 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin
| Message 37 of 57 12 January 2011 at 12:19am | IP Logged |
Iversen wrote:
I just listened to a couple of your videos, including the one about
Literal translation - not for the
first time, but for the first time in a long time. And it would something of an
understatement to say that I agreed with your basic tenet, namely that it is foolish to
learn idiomatic expressions as entities which you have to learn in their entirety
without asking questions. The fact is that almost any expression has an inner logic,
and if you know the component words you can mostly see how the ensemble came to get its
derived meaning - and then you stand a good chance of remembering it.
In your video you show Ilya Franks method (L2 word, L1 word, L2 word, L1 word...) and
turn it around: L1 word, L2 word, L1 word, L2 word... Smart! But you have to know the
foreign expressions well before you can choose those L1 words you need. So where do you
get the 'pattern' for an expression from?
As far as I can see you actually have to use literal translation in two phases. In
phase 1 you take foreign texts and translate them literally, i.e. word for word, but
with hints about derived meanings. And somehow you carry some of the discoveries you do
in this phase over to phase 2, which is the active phase where the 'inverted Frank' is
used: you don't think 'hello', but 'good' + 'day', and then you know how to express the
thought in fluent Czech: "dobrý den". When you have internalized the logic behind this
expression you can drop "good" + "day" because you have learnt "dobrý den" - hopefully
not only faster, but also in a more congenial and 'deeper' way than if you just had
memorized the whole expression and learnt that it was used instead of "hello".
Learning a language is not just memorizing a lot of expressions, but also modelling
your own thoughts on the logic expressed in that language. |
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Iversen, you have really expressed what I am talking about very well.
1 person has voted this message useful
| RogerK Triglot Groupie Austria Joined 5077 days ago 92 posts - 181 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian Studies: Portuguese
| Message 38 of 57 16 January 2011 at 10:53am | IP Logged |
Splog wrote:
Goodness, I had a nice experience today. A woman approached me in the supermarket and
said: "Excuse me ... but ... are you Anthony? I am one of your biggest fans!"
Well, every man loves to hear things like that (particularly from a woman!).
She was from India and had moved to the Czech republic, and explained that my videos
had helped her with learning the Czech language. Such positive feedback is always very
encouraging, and it put a smile on my face.
This was actually the second time I have been approached by viewers. The first time, I
was sitting in a cafe with Richard Simcott, and a young group of Americans approached
me asking if I am "FluentCzech". They explained that they were in Prague for a two
week classical music festival and watched my videos before arriving.
I seem to remember Richard joking at the time that I had probably paid them to approach
me. I had not, but is a good strategy for the future. |
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Nice experience! I like your videos too. 'How to become a polyglot in minutes' was very good. If you love doing anything the time will fly by which makes it easy to spend years practicing and become exceedingly good at any task.
Using children's encyclopaedias to practice reading and improve your vocabulary on a broad basis is such good idea I'm keen to buy a couple.
Edited by RogerK on 16 January 2011 at 11:08am
1 person has voted this message useful
| YourHowToDo Newbie Ireland youtube.com/user/You Joined 5063 days ago 3 posts - 2 votes
| Message 39 of 57 19 January 2011 at 11:34am | IP Logged |
'How to become a polyglot in minutes' was very enjoyable for me too :)
1 person has voted this message useful
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budonoseito Pro Member United States budobeyondtechnRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5807 days ago 261 posts - 344 votes Studies: French, Japanese Personal Language Map
| Message 40 of 57 19 January 2011 at 3:55pm | IP Logged |
I went through your spiral videos the other night. Very applicable to me as a computer
guy. I like the read-write-listen-speak. I am going to give the writing some more time to
force comprehension.
1 person has voted this message useful
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