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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Mikael84 Bilingual Pentaglot Groupie Peru Joined 5235 days ago 76 posts - 116 votes  Speaks: French*, Finnish*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Arabic (classical), German, Russian | Message 41 of 67 27 May 2010 at 9:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Awesome input, S_allard. I agree on almost all points.
I imagine you'd recommend a heavy use of phrase books in order to reach fluency in a target language? Which method do you follow? No grammar manuals at all? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5365 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 42 of 67 28 May 2010 at 1:22am | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks Mlkael84. I haven't seen much material that is based on this strategy. But I have to admit that I haven't looked recently. Most phrase books seem to be touristy-type language guides of an elementary level. I don't use a particular commercial self-study method because I find them too elementary in general. There is so much material out there and on the web that I would be hard put to recommend anything. Let me say that I am a fan of grammar manuals as a way of getting a quick understanding of the system. But, as Iversen pointed out, they generally do a poor job of actually teaching how to use the grammar. For the time being, I use a hodge-podge of materials to generate the exercise materials that I practice with.
The one product that I really like and heartily recommend is something developed by a former professor of mine. It is wall chart system designed around a perpetual calendar. I have the one for learning Spanish in front of me as I write this. I'm nowlooking at a page on the Spanish subjunctive with 41 examples that I can choose from every day. An example I love is: Yo lo digo para que no quepa la menor duda. Vamos a hacer toda la investigaciónn necesaria. I can take this phrase and play with it, as I have outlined above (e.g. replace hacer with llevar a cabo). The web site is www.langcal.com. There are some free recordings on the site. I find the Spanish recordings are taking a long time to appear. Finally, I should add that there is a whole school of academic thinking along these lines. This is not my invention. Most of these ideas have come from other researchers. David Wood, of Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada) has written an excellent article on this subject: Effects of focused instruction of formulaic sequences on fluent expression in second-language narratives: A case study. This article can be found in the Canadian Review of Applied Linguistics, Vol 12, No. 1, 2009. (http://www.aclacaal.org/ReVol_12_1.htm). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Mikael84 Bilingual Pentaglot Groupie Peru Joined 5235 days ago 76 posts - 116 votes Speaks: French*, Finnish*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Arabic (classical), German, Russian | Message 43 of 67 28 May 2010 at 5:59am | IP Logged | |||||
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Those calendars look really cool, too bad they only have them for French, English and Spanish...
You are right, most phrase books are disappointing and their target audience are tourists. May I ask which languages you are studying or have studied with this method, apart from Spanish? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6638 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 44 of 67 28 May 2010 at 9:36am | IP Logged | |||||
When I advocated language guides with similar sentences differing on a few points I didn't also recommend substitution drills, for the simple reason that you can make those yourself - any sentence will do, and there is no reason to let a book dictate a sentence for you. The thing most textbooks and language guides overlook is that you can't learn to manipulate sentences unless you can see a pattern. OK, then give the folks a pattern... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6878 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 45 of 67 28 May 2010 at 9:55am | IP Logged | |||||
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Drills are indeed a pretty dry affair. Berlitz Self-Teacher textbooks are less so. I may have confused matters by mentioning drills right next to them. Evolving patterns are in the text you read, not in the exercises, which aren't many anyway. To what extent those textbooks embody what s_allard has proposed, even if at a lower level, I am not sure.
It is generally hard to turn an idea into something usable, so a concrete example is always a nice thing to have, if it is a relevant example. Edited by frenkeld on 28 May 2010 at 10:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Yukamina Senior Member Canada Joined 6199 days ago 281 posts - 332 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Korean, French | Message 46 of 67 28 May 2010 at 8:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
The site sets off a virus alarm for me. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5365 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 47 of 67 29 May 2010 at 10:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I suspect that most people in this forum are like me in the sense that I either want to speak a foreign language well or not at all. OK, I'm being a bit hard on myself. But it's one thing to impress your friends and family with your language skills; it's a different story when a native speaker comes along.
This made me think that a lot of our discussion on fluency has neglected two aspects. phonology and accuracy of usage. I suspect that the reason we neglect phonology is partly for technical reasons. It's difficult to discuss in writing a subject that is primarily oral. We do talk somewhat about accent, but, accent, technically speaking, is just one component. I believe intonation is often what gives the entire phrase it's distinctive sound image. I don't want to get more technical; however sound is very important for oral fluency because it is often used to convey the tone of the conversation. We can communicate sarcasm, irony, questioning, surprise, anger, orders, etc, through our pronunciation. Accuracy of usage is a rather clumsy term to describe the fact that our grammar may be right but the choice of words is incorrect. For me there are two exciting moments when I'm learning a foreign language. The first is when I understand a whole spoken passage. I didn't have to think about it; I just got it. The other moment is the reverse phenomenon: I say something that is dead on in the conversation. Nobody has to strain to figure out what I'm trying to say. No one is politely tolerating my mangled speech. The conversation just continues on. The passage just rolled off my tongue effortlessly. Well, effortlessly may not be the right word. How much time and effort went into getting to the point where I can say things correctly and intelligently! How do we get there? So far we have insisted on developing fluency through learning formulaic expressions or lexical "chunks" until we are comfortable with the many of grammatical patterns of the language. Then we can pump up the vocabulary to expand our range of understanding and expression. The problem that I'm sure we're all familiar with is that our speech tends to be awkward, unidiomatic and unsophisticated. The problem is that we may know a lot of words and lots of grammar but we don't how to use them at the right moment. Let's look a small case study. In English, French and Spanish the most frequent verb with the same core meaning is: to be, être and ser / estar. Right away, we notice that Spanish has two verbs for one verb in French and English. So, we know that one immediate complication will be when to use the respective Spanish verbs. We'll come back to that later. We have three situations: 1. The usage in the target language tracks the usage of our native verb: For example: I am Canadian Je suis canadien Soy canadiense We can thus say that it's relatively easy to learn the foreign usage. The complication with Spanish is that there are times when one will use ser and others where estar is required. And there may be situations where one can use either or maybe there are regional and dialectical differences. I won't weary everyone with an explanation of the distinction, which can be readily found on the web. Suffice it to say that one can say, "Estoy aquí" (I'm here) but "No soy de aquì" (I'm not from here). "Soy aburrido" is "I'm boring" and "Estoy aburrido" "I'm bored". 2. Usages of the L1 verb are translated by different forms in the L2 or L3 languages. I am twenty years old J'ai vingt ans Tengo veinte años Here the typical mistake would be to transfer usage from L1 to L2 and L3 with something like "*je suis vingt ans". Not good. The other classic example is, "je suis fini" instead of "j'ai fini" for "I'm finished". But those are relatively simple examples. Things can get more complicated. English uses "to be" to form what is often called the continuous present form, as in "I am going" or "She is sleeping". Spanish has something similar, as in "Está lloviendo" (It's raining). French does not have this form. So, of course, French speakers will have problems with this and will say in English something like, "I am going to the office five days a week". This continuous present form of "go" is the basis for the construction of the future tense, as in "I'm going to / gonna leave" instead of "I will leave". French and Spanish have the same structure with "Je vais partir" and "Voy a partir". This explains why both French and Spanish speakers will readily say in English, "I go to leave tomorrow". 3. The verbs in L2 and L3 have different usages from L1. In French, être is an important auxiliary verb for approximately 16 verbs such as aller and venir as in: "Je suis allé" and "Je suis venu" for the formation of compound tenses. It is also used with all so-called reflexive verbs, e.g. "Je me suis levé" (I got up). Spanish uses the same auxiliary for all verbs: "He ido" (I went), "He venido" (I came) and "Me he levantado" (I got up). In passing. Spanish makes a distinction between the pretirite "murió" (He died) and "ha muerto" (He has died) that spoken French no longer makes. There is a major complication. For certain verbs, the same compound form can mean the action or the condition or state. For example, "il est mort" can mean "He died" or "He is dead". This distinction is evident in the following questions Il est mort quand? (When did he die?) Il est mort depuis quand? (How long has he been dead?) Note how English uses "has been" to render the idea of time past. There are many other examples where the L2 and L3 verbs must be translated by different verbs in L1. "Estar con ganas de" in English would be "to feel like". Situations 2 and 3 are obviously the source of our problems. Most mistakes stem from learners transferring usage from L1 to L2 or L3. That's why we sound strange or awkward to native speakers. To make things even worse, there is the added complication of idioms. "I'm sick of" or "I'm fed up with" don't have much to do with either illness or food. All of this is the bread and butter of translators. For us language learners the problem is how to acquire a mastery of these forms and make them roll of our tongue effortlessly. Voilà le problème. There is no one strategy. There are all sorts of techniques that are abundantly discussed in this forum. Dictionaries and grammar books are obviously essential here in addition to our preferred method. As others including Iversen have mentioned, grammar books tend to do a poor job of providing really effective exercises. I'll be first to admit that I rarely do those fill-in-the-blanks exercises that one sees at the end of every chapter of most grammar books. I start off with the best of intentions and then I get bored. I think the key element is lots of real examples that illustrate the pattern. What you don't what to do is get bogged down in the rules. You have to learn the rules, but above all you have to repeat those examples to the point where the rules become second-nature. So, in the end, I basically make up my own exercises along the lines I outlined in previous posts. This combined with massive input usually does the trick. Edited by s_allard on 30 May 2010 at 1:15am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6638 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 48 of 67 30 May 2010 at 12:13am | IP Logged | |||||
I do the same thing, though I tend not to think of it as exercises. One important trick when you study grammar is to relate the explanations to something tangible. Therefore I make morphological tables, but don't try to learn them from the sheet - I keep them within sight when I read genuiine texts. And it is the same thing with syntax, except that my preferred method here is to make collections of phrases that illustrate a certain point. However the real memorization of the rules in both cases happen in an interplay between reading rules in a book (or several..) and checking out how they manifest themselves in practice. However this emphasis on input leaves open the question about activation. Input alone doesn't make you an active user of your target language. If you want to have an immediate effect then you will of course need to produce some output, but I have more and more come to the conclusion that you shouldn't try to make long impeccable sentences from the beginning. It is much better to focus on short snippets, which in due time can be combined to complete sentences. Earlier in this discussion I stated that I prefer remembering verbal constructions in an 'anonymized' form ("to do sth to sby), while S_allard apparently preferred readymade 'lifelike' model phrases. But we seem to agree that chunks are the way to go for the beginner, rather than the construction of long end elegant sentences. Basically anything that demands that you solve riddles is worthless and harmful, - the time would be better spent on doing variations on simple themes. And you don't need a book to tell you that - just pick a phrase and start manipulating it. Edited by Iversen on 30 May 2010 at 4:46pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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