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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| starrye Senior Member United States Joined 5095 days ago 172 posts - 280 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 177 of 407 25 August 2011 at 8:24pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I just looked in my dictionary, and that's what is used in the example sentence it gives: 私の意見では彼が悪い。
I agree g-bod. I think what helps me to remember is to just try and think of the basic/general connotations behind each particle as a guide, because in many cases there is no translation or the common translations in English are too confusing or too similar, so the nuance is lost. Edited by starrye on 25 August 2011 at 8:24pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Magdalene Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5037 days ago 119 posts - 220 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Mandarin, German, Modern Hebrew, French | Message 178 of 407 25 August 2011 at 10:44pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Another person chiming in to say that the self-talk exercise you've outlined is
extremely helpful. I don't have a conversation partner or a tutor (yet), so I've only done the first four steps of the exercise. Over the past three days I've done the exercise once a day in German for about five minutes at a time, and even that paltry amount has helped me activate some passive vocabulary and find my weak points, vocabulary-wise. It's also helping me prevent some awful gaffes; I forgot how to say "jetzt" today, which would have been a magnificently embarrassing brain fart had I done it in an actual conversation. I've enjoyed the exercise most when I've done it immediately after listening to "Schlaflos in München" podcasts. I respond to what the podcaster has said, trying to copy her intonation and rhythm, and formulate my own opinion, which also activates some of the words she has just used. I imagine my resultant self-talk would be something else entirely if I did this after listening to a news report, and as "news German" isn't what I'm going for, I find an informal, conversational podcast like SiM to be the perfect jumping-off point. Thank you for posting your instructions for the exercise! I'll definitely use this technique in all my studies from now on. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 179 of 407 25 August 2011 at 11:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm glad to hear that! Thanks for writing! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 180 of 407 26 August 2011 at 5:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I’ve expressed the idea that speaking helps improve listening on this forum; perhaps
it’s time I addressed the issue in more detail. This is an open reflection you are all welcome to join. Claim My claim is that speaking increases a person’s ability to understand spoken language and, conversely, that listening alone doesn’t significantly increase one’s speaking skills. Definition of “speaking” First, let me define “speaking”. Speaking comprises two main activities: self-talk and live conversation. Self-talk is the time a person spends practicing oral production without the intervention of another person. Live conversation is when a person engages in a conversation with a native speaker. Speaking shouldn’t be understood as the absence of input; on the contrary, speaking is fueled by input, especially from live interactions with native speakers. Listening is not an effective way to improve oral skills Since speaking requires a very precise and active use of knowledge, and listening only requires passive knowledge, a learner’s listening abilities will always surpass his speaking skills. Consequently, improving one’s speaking skills implies a narrower gap between the two skills. Other than in the improbable event that a learner would have reached such a high level that very little improvement in listening skills were possible, listening practice cannot improve speaking more than listening. If listening were an effective way to improve oral production, exposure would be enough to produce fluent speakers and anyone with high listening skills should also have high speaking skills. That is clearly not the case. Does speaking impact listening skills? If listening has little effect on speaking ability, we are left with only two possible scenarios: either 1) speaking helps listening, or 2) the two skills are unrelated. Let’s look at the implications of both scenarios. If the two skills are unrelated, then speaking would not help improve listening skills, and we'd expect to find people who have high speaking abilities, yet weak listening skills. This would mean that a person could practice speaking on their own for an extended period of time and not notice an increase in their listening skills, or even that their speaking abilities could surpass their listening skills. However, we determined that this is not logically possible. If, on the other hand, speaking helps improve listening skills, then we should find that: -people who study a language while concentrating on speaking, or who are comfortable speakers, shouldn't have listening difficulties; -putting more emphasis on speaking should yield an improvement in listening skills; -people shouldn't generally have problems understanding things they can say (and practicing saying what they have difficulty understanding should lead to better comprehension). In fact, we do find that competent speakers also have good listening skills. While I haven’t done extensive research proving that focusing on speaking yields better listening, my experience teaching pronunciation tells me it does. I’d be interested in hearing others’ experiences. Speaking as a vector of increased awareness Oral production is essentially a series of decision-making processes that help the learner raise his level of awareness to the language. This helps him better notice corroborating and contradicting input. Moreover, producing the language helps the learner better predict what the other speaker is about to say, thus improving the comprehension process. A large part of understanding comes from the ability to anticipate and empathize. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6471 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 181 of 407 26 August 2011 at 11:51am | IP Logged | ||||||||
We discussed this and what I've seen contradicts this statement. In Chinese, I can talk fluently without stopping for five minutes at a time, but if someone is talking to me, even on the same topic, I have to interrupt and ask for them to repeat themselves or translate something within the first minute. I know this from numerous chats with my language partners where e. g. I talk about what I did yesterday and then they do, or I give my opinion on a current issue and then they do... In my Arabic class yesterday (my first class even though I already covered 7 chapters of Teach Yourself), I made nearly the same experience: I was comfortable making sentences about myself, but I had a lot of trouble as soon as the teacher said something. It's not just me; I was at an intensive summer language course in Beijing in 2004 and some of the beginners and almost everyone of the intermediate class had the same problem, plus I've also anecdotally heard from polyglots who are tackling other non- European languages. I believe passive skills are undervalued because they are so easy to acquire in European languages - it took me just 20 hours to become comfortable reading Spanish novels. That is why students of European languages never seem to be worse at understanding than at speaking. However, I have reason to believe that it is an entirely different ballgame for students of non-European languages. Edited by Sprachprofi on 26 August 2011 at 12:54pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5557 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 182 of 407 26 August 2011 at 12:51pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think I've come full circle on this conclusion too. Initially I focused on speaking German in school and found listening came easily as a happy by-product. Then I became obsessed with language learning methods later in life, and fell for the allure of silent periods in fear of non-native production and pronunciation. My listening skills seemed to advance much more slowly than before, and at the time I put it down to age and being out of practice. Now I've finally returned to my initial instincts of focusing on speaking from the very beginning, as long as there's some way to check and adjust my hypotheses, and feel much happier with my overall progress. Every time I learn to say a new word correctly in conversation, it leads to me being able to hear it more clearly in future. However, I might be unusual here in that my speaking and writing skills have always tended to be streets ahead of my listening and reading (perhaps because those are the aspects I enjoy the most).
Although I can see where you're coming from here, I wouldn't say that listening doesn't help a lot once you've reached a certain level. For example, I've found that listening to lots of music and a handful of audio books during commutes has greatly facilitated my pronunciation and grammar in more than one language. Often when I try to say something in conversation, I can clearly recall how that phrase was said by a narrator, and these memories help guide me like the whisper of an invisible advisor in my ear. Edited by Teango on 26 August 2011 at 1:02pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| starrye Senior Member United States Joined 5095 days ago 172 posts - 280 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 183 of 407 26 August 2011 at 2:07pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Well, looking back on my own Japanese study so far, which has been very input heavy, I can attest to the fact that extensive listening and input has NOT automatically resulted in fluent speaking-- I still have to work on that skill and practice, same as anyone else would.
As my experience with Japanese grows, I'm finding that each skill is vitally important and reinforces the other.During my year of non active study, I did a lot of passive listening, and some reading here and there. What has resulted is that I often hear the voices of specific native speakers whom I've listened to a lot, in my head. I have a strong aural memory of the way that things should be said, and strong intuitive feeling. But, that alone isn't the same thing as physically producing language. I still have to practice that. I have indeed noticed there is a relationship between reading and listening, and am noticing that there is also a relationship between speaking and writing. My listening is beyond my speaking right now, so I have no way to tell if speaking improves listening. But I'm willing to believe it does, because it makes sense. I don't know if I would have gotten where I am with my listening quicker had I spoken more right from the start, but that seems logical. Probably would have been quicker overall if I were focusing on both input and output equally. I don't think I buy this idea that one is more important than the other, or that there is a shortcut into other skills just by extreme focus on another. I don't know if it's possible to focus on just speaking alone, because even speaking with natives still involves listening. Unless you are only self-talking, you can't logically have a conversation if you don't listen to your conversation partners when they reply. I can imagine that someone who only focuses on speaking might have weakness with people who speak more quickly than they are used to, or with people who use vocabulary they are not familiar with (unless perhaps you live in the country and have the opportunity to interact with a wide variety of different types of people). People often say that Japanese men are hard to understand because they slur and mumble a lot, or young girls are difficult because they often speak so quickly. Plus in language with different registers depending on who the speakers/listeners are, gender differences, and politeness levels, you need to be able to understand things you aren't likely to say very often yourself. I often hear that foreign men end up sounding too feminine in Japanese, because they so often have exclusively female language partners. Well media gives you easy access to a wide variety of different types of voices, accents, and speaking styles...and access to a wide variety of different people talking about different topics. So that is one example of how lots of listening can help improve your speaking too. But even if it happened that someone had focused on speaking, and now has trouble listening...I don't see why that skill can't be trained up after. I mean, it's not as if they are forever doomed (at least I don't believe so)! They simply would need to do more listening practice. Edited by starrye on 26 August 2011 at 3:42pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 184 of 407 26 August 2011 at 4:15pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
And I appreciate your input.
I agree that with similar speaking skills in a cognate language vs. a non-European language, you will understand less of the latter, but that doesn't alter the fact that you still understand more if you speak better. The claim is not that if you can speak well, you will understand everything. It's that you'll understand more. I realize it's a difficult statement to refute because a person couldn't be in both states at once, but I'm sure you'll agree with the logic. Do you think you would understand as much Mandarin as you do now if you didn't speak as well as you do, or do you think it would be the same? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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