|
 |
Learning a language by watching TV? | ||
 Language Learning Forum : Music, Movies, TV & Radio |  | |
 Keith Diglot Moderator JapanRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6768 days ago 526 posts - 536 votes  1 sounds Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 41 of 134 11 January 2009 at 10:24am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
I've already burned my grammar books!! --ok, I admit, I didn't have any grammar books for Chinese.
I am using the TV method now. After I reach a good level of understanding (about 60% maybe), then I will start speaking with native speakers. Until then, all I need to do is to watch dramas. And I am serious about acquiring the Chinese language. Chinese shouldn't be harder to learn than a European language if we don't consider the writing system. If you learn the language first, then it will be easier to learn the writing system. I think all native speakers of any language learn to write words that they already know. They don't start by learning to write words that they don't know. Anyway, the TV method is not about learning to write a language. But you could pick up reading by using subtitles. I think MaxB was doing that when he started learning to read Chinese. So my question to all readers of this thread is this: Would you be inclined to use the TV method to learn languages if you saw other people having tremendous success with it? 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6430 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 42 of 134 11 January 2009 at 11:08am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Nope, because watching TV tends to give me a headache and bore and annoy me. It wouldn't be worth it - to me. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5829 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 43 of 134 11 January 2009 at 11:47am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
|
In most cases TV uses a lot of slang and blurred speech which is not suitable for learners. You've got to have a good foundation before TV is any use.
I think my spoken English improved quite a bit after I moved to the UK and started listening to BBC Radio 4 which is known for good pronounciation and advanced vocabulary. Some of the programs are a bit on the dull side though. However, like I said, my English was already pretty decent and this was only to "polish the edges", improve my pronounciation and increase my vocabulary (which it did...) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| SlickAs Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5868 days ago 185 posts - 287 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French, Swedish Studies: Thai, Vietnamese | Message 44 of 134 12 January 2009 at 6:52pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
There isn't even part of you that wants to learn colloquial English? You would rather speak it better formally and sound like the BBC Radio 4 people? I am the opposite of you in that respect. It might be in part because I am Australian, and our culture values informality over formality. For me, it is very important to speak it as well colloquially as formally ... with colloqialism perhaps being a little more important (when it comes to balance ... just a tad more on the colloquial side), since it is the colloquial form that shows intimacy with a culture and people and that you have friends, etc. Let me put it this way: here in Australia I will speak one way while making a business presentation to a crowd (very formally), and quite another way when speaking to my mechanic when dropping my car off for a service (very colloquially, including perhaps some bad grammar). I do that to increase rapport with the mechanic, seem more "working class", get along with him better, and thus have both a richer friendship and know that I might get a bit more attention given to my car than if I spoke to him in a formal stand-offish fashion. Now that is my native language. But I do the same thing in French in Montreal. I speak as well as I can in the office, but if I need to step out onto the factory floor to ensure something is going right, I will take off my tie, put on a smile broaden my "joual" accent, referring to myself as "moé", instead of moi, and them as "toé" instead of toi, maybe drop a bit of a swear word (as a verb), and I believe that serves me well. My French is far from flawless, it can get decidedly broken when I run against concepts that I cant find the words for. But you can still use the accent. Because it shows them that I am not the tall young multi-lingual Australian Anglophone with a masters degree who has breezed into the country to order around the working class idiot Francophones, but rather I hang around in the streets and bars of Montreal (how else did I learn to speak like that), and am one of them ... or at least socialise with people just like them. To be able to to that, to me, is more important than being able to sound like a toff. So in all my languages, I work on the colloquial end. And a good way of doing that is via DVD. And it is DVD because you can take an independent film that is spoken in the colloquial language, rip the audio, trim the pauses, load it into your mp3 player and listen and immitate. In regular conversation with live people (in a bar for example), someone says something and it is gone ... puff ... into thin-air. Not much to immitate there. But with a film, you can listen to the audio what is said over and over. Anyway, that is my 2c on media vs "learning materials" (like Assimil, etc) with "proper accents" and "correct word usage". You miss half the language, and the half you miss is very important to me. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| maya_star17 Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5906 days ago 269 posts - 291 votes Speaks: English*, Russian*, French, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 45 of 134 12 January 2009 at 8:53pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
(Edit: SlickAs's post above on colloquial speech is bang on. I couldn't have put it better myself.) I have a friend who learned Cantonese from scratch just by watching tons and tons of HK dramas. She speaks Teo Chew as a first language, but according to her, the majority of words are different between the two languages. I personally speak neither language and have no idea how closely related they are in terms of grammar/phrasing/expressions/etc. On the other hand, my younger brother learned English from scratch by watching hours of TV a day for at least a year or two. The only language he spoke at the time was Russian, which is quite different from English. I do believe that learning a language from TV alone is possible, but there are several reasons (IMO) why it often doesn't work: -Most people who watch a lot of TV in a language they're learning don't believe that it's possible to learn ONLY from TV, so they'll instinctively supplement their TV with something else. -The basic plot of pretty much anything is often obvious (or at least semi- "guess-able") just by looking at what's going on. If a person finds a foreign show that they enjoy and they can guess the basic plot, they might not make a lot of effort to listen closely/try to make logical connections in sound. -Most people probably just don't do it enough. Most children can speak fluently at the age of 3; by that time they've spent 3 years immersed hardcore in their native language. Many adult learners are unwilling (whether for time or money reasons) to spend an equal amount of time listening to a language in countless contexts to figure it out. Assiml, Michel Thomas, and Assimil give adult learners much faster (and cheaper) access to a language, which leads back to the first point I made. Edited by maya_star17 on 12 January 2009 at 8:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| SlickAs Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5868 days ago 185 posts - 287 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French, Swedish Studies: Thai, Vietnamese | Message 46 of 134 12 January 2009 at 9:22pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Well, I agree with that (that Assimil is much faster and cheaper), but am not sure that I agree that children speak their language fluently by 3 (my neice turned 3 last week, whilest her English is that of a 3 year old, I wouldn't call her fluent, but that illistrates what I mean beautifully). Childrens books like Dr. Zeuss have little stickers on the front that say "for children with 500 word vocabularies". But those 500 words are the most important 500 (like "to be", "to want", etc and all tenses). Here is the deal, for me: Assimil gives you what? 4 hours of recording about? But that 4 hours is the RIGHT words. The RIGHT 2000 words of vocabulary. Every gramatical concept in the language explored. Every important little word is presented over and over. It is extremely complete, and designed to do what it does. TV, or even a rip of colloquial TV or film so you can listen to it again a second time to pick up what you missed (a la Assimil)? No way. It gives you a nice LITTLE slice of the language, with specialised vocabulary depending on the topic of the film (For example if, to learn joual, [after watching the English subtitles] you rip the audio from Quebec film C.R.A.Z.Y. which has great family dialogue in it, you will get about 50 words for "faggot", but not one for "I'm just browsing, thanks" [that might be said to a shop salesman and will be used all the time], since 'masculinity in Quebec' is a theme that the film deals with). The speakers are being relaxed and going about everyday things (rather than the more stilted dialogues in Assimil, etc), and the language is "every-day", but it is just not produced with language learning in mind. Personally, I learn the language from language programmes, the follow on with the formal language from written native materials (like literature), and follow on with colloquial language with media, and by speaking it live to real people. I really do, however, enjoy ripping Audio and editing it down for an mp3 player. Because if it is a film you like where you can listen to it over and over, it is great for learning and repeating while just walking the streets or driving or whatever. It is not boring like "language materials". You dont even really need to concentrate because you have heard it before. And being in that relaxed colloquial language (as is in the film) in your head, feeling as relaxed in it as the main character, when you step into real world conversations later in the day, you feel like you have been speaking the language already today. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6934 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 47 of 134 12 January 2009 at 9:27pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I managed to sit through one Mexican telenovela way back when, and it employed rather prim and proper Spanish. When I tried my hand at Italian for a little while, I watched "L'Avventura" a few times. Many characters were supposed to be from higher social strata, and they seemed to speak fairly clearly a good part of the time. One can probably find similar movies in other languages too, so there may be a range of choices of register in what one watches. Edited by frenkeld on 13 January 2009 at 7:25am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| maya_star17 Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5906 days ago 269 posts - 291 votes Speaks: English*, Russian*, French, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 48 of 134 12 January 2009 at 9:38pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
And I couldn't agree more on your audio from movies > audio from language courses statement. Life is to short to knowingly and willingly torture yourself; if something is boring/unappealing, it needs to go. 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
