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The Schliemann Experiment | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| OlafP Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5437 days ago 261 posts - 667 votes  Speaks: German*, French, English | Message 1 of 38 11 September 2010 at 5:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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It is time for man to fix his goal.
It is time for man to plant the germ of his highest hope. Still is his soil rich enough for it. But that soil will one day be poor and exhausted, and no lofty tree will any longer be able to grow thereon. Alas! There cometh the time when man will no longer launch the arrow of his longing beyond man -- and the string of his bow will have unlearned to whizz! I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: ye have still chaos in you. Alas! There cometh the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There cometh the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself. The Method There are some discussions here and there in the forum on Heinrich Schliemann's method of language learning, which basically consists of learning books by heart. As far as I've seen there are no reports in the forum by anyone who tried this method. I am crazy enough to have a go at it. The goal is of course to master a language. Just learning a text by heart probably won't do the trick. Schliemann actually did a few more things: he continuously wrote essays on various topics of interest and recited the texts he had learned to a listener who didn't necessarily understand a single word of it. My listener will be a microphone. I am going to record the text in order to check my pronunciation. I will start writing essays in my target language at some point and may post them in this thread if I feel like it. The Book I would not be able to do this with an arbitrary book. Most books thrown on the market are junk and not worth reading at all, let alone learning by heart. There are a few books that entered my life like an earthquake: unexpectedly and leaving no stone upon another. Friedrich Nietzsche's "Thus spoke Zarathustra" is one of them, and there are a few more reasons why I think this is the ideal choice: - I've read the original version so often that I know whole chapters by heart, even though I haven't touched it for 13 years. - I have a quality audio recording of the complete book (10h 24min) in my target language. It is much easier for me to learn a text by listening to a recording than by reading it. This also allows me to do a lot of shadowing to get the pronunciation right. - It is fascinating to see how people try to translate something that cannot be translated in the proper sense because of a large number of puns and allusions in the source. Yet this book is so rich and deep that it remains worth reading when all these features are lost. Some translators try to preserve the tone, which comes from Nietzsche imitating the language of Martin Luther's Bible translation. I must say that I like translations more if they avoid this and use just the plain target language. An example would be Goldschmidt's French version. A few days ago I received the Swedish translation by Nikanor Teratologen, released only in 2009, which seems to be very straightforward as well. - The book has a rhythm and therefore more structure than usual prose texts. This aspect is preserved in most translations. The text is a Dionysian chant and often imitates the form of musical compositions. The quote above from chapter 5 of the prologue demonstrates how certain expressions are repeated the same way a composer would employ themes or motives to give the piece a form. The Language I'm going to try the Schliemann method with Russian. One of the challenges of Russian is that the stress can move from one syllable to another in unpredictable ways when a verb is conjugated or when a noun is declined. Since stress is not marked in texts for native readers, the best way to get a grip on this is to listen to the spoken language a lot. The audiobook read by Irina Erisanova is of a very high quality and a joy to listen to. At the moment I'm not in a position where I can read any texts beyond beginners' lessons without a dictionary or even express myself in Russian. I have a good understanding of most parts of the grammar, but my knowledge of vocabulary is very weak. I'm far below 1000 words, maybe even below 700. This raises the question what I can expect from this experiment. The Scope How much of a language can be learned from one book? Fortunately, there are some electronic versions available, so I could analyse the text. - Breadth of the vocabulary In order to get an idea of the amount of vocabulary in the book, I counted the unique words in the English translation by Thomas Common on gutenberg.org. English is the ideal choice, because it neither has a case system nor a complex conjugation of verbs. I replaced all punctuation by spaces, converted the whole text to lowercase, then replaced all spaces by line breaks, sorted the result alphabetically and removed duplicate lines. All of this can be done in one go with a chain of the Unix commands sed, sort, and uniq. I diverted the output into a file to check the quality of the list before getting the lines counted. This file with one word per line in alphabetic order had a length of 7926 lines. So I would say the vocabulary is in the range of 5k to 6k words. - Coverage of inflected forms Then I made the same measurement with the Russian translation from lib.ru. Because of the moving stress in Russian words you would want to have as many inflected forms as possible in the text, so if the size of the final file is big, this would actually be a good sign. And indeed the result turned out be 14252 unique words. Browsing through the list I saw many sections that looked similar to this: сильная сильнее сильней сильнейшего сильнейшее сильнейшему сильнейший сильно сильного сильное сильной сильном сильному сильны сильные сильный сильным сильными сильных The Target There should be a deadline to prevent me from slacking off in the middle of the process. Schliemann wrote that you can memorise a book in a few months. This week I tested it with Goldschmidt's French version to get an idea. I could learn one page per day, which took me 45min, and then I recalled the text from memory several times a day. At this rate it would take me exactly one year to learn the whole book. The audiobook will make things easier, my poor Russian vocabulary will make things harder. Anyway: The target to learn the whole book by heart in Russian will be 31 December 2010. At this time I should be able reproduce the Russian version from memory when opening the book in another language at any arbitrary page. I intend to update this thread once a week. Thus I have fixed my goal. May my soil be rich enough. edit: typos Edited by OlafP on 12 September 2010 at 5:20am 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sennin Senior Member Bulgaria Joined 6036 days ago 1457 posts - 1759 votes 5 sounds | Message 3 of 38 11 September 2010 at 6:19pm | IP Logged | ||
Decide for yourself, but I really think this is not a good idea. Go ahead with reading and memorizing books - that's cool. Just don't recite your essays, unless you want to end up reinforcing mispronunciations. p.s. Care to share which books you intend to use? Apart from Thus spoke Zarathustra. Edited by Sennin on 11 September 2010 at 6:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6449 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 4 of 38 11 September 2010 at 7:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've always wanted to try this, but it likely won't happen. I am very interested in this experiment. It's great that you'll be working with an audiobook. I'd try to find a dual language version of the book. Edited by reineke on 17 October 2010 at 6:03am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| GrandMan Newbie United States Joined 5281 days ago 5 posts - 6 votes Speaks: English* | Message 5 of 38 15 September 2010 at 4:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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Sounds good!
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5322 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 6 of 38 15 September 2010 at 6:53pm | IP Logged | ||
Did you use a special memorization technique or did you simply re-read the page as many times as you needed to remember it? I'm also interested in this method and looked at several web sites with tips for actors on how to best memorize a script, but most actors still just seem to learn their scripts by heart. BTW, since both you and Schliemann are Germans, I'm a bit disappointed that you didn't call your blog "Das Schliemann-Experiment". :-) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5383 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 7 of 38 15 September 2010 at 7:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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I just realized something: what if we created a more condensed version of this method? What if we established a given number of static sentences that covered the vast majority of the commonly used structures and grammatical processes in a language, and which a person could use and modify by substituting nouns, adjectives and verbs as needed?
Maybe one could created a much more condensed version of this method that could hold within 10-20 pages? Even better, what if we could write a story specifically with that purpose in mind? 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5383 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 8 of 38 15 September 2010 at 7:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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Kudos for the courageous endeavour, by the way!
How long exactly have you been studying Russian for, as you begin the experiment? Any idea of what is considered to be the ideal time to start this? I'd assume you'd need a strong basis. Not understanding what you've learned by heart would seem to be a waste of time. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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