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Memorizing lists of "phrases" rather ... | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5365 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 17 of 65 03 November 2011 at 1:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
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As always, it was quite interesting to read Iversen's latest post on this issue. I wonder if we can contrast a top-down approach (my position) and a bottom-up approach (Iversen's) to mastering idiomatic word usage. The top-down approach emphasizes learning entire phrases or chunks that contextualize usage. The bottom-up approach by contrast emphasizes learning the component words individually and then building up larger phrases. I'm not sure that this characterization is totally accurate, but I think it conveys the general idea that Iversen and I are trying to reach the same goal but from different starting points.
But first of all, what is the problem that we are trying to solve? We all have observed when listening to foreigners in our native language that generally speaking they make two kinds of mistakes. At a more elementary level, they make mistakes of form: wrong word endings, wrong grammar, improper pronunciation, etc. On the other hand, all the formal aspects may be right, but the choice of words is wrong. As native speakers, we usually understand what the person means, it's just that we wouldn't say it that way. This is what collocations are all about. Certain combinations of words feel right and others feel wrong. The usual cause of this problem is over-generalization or transfer from the native language to the target language. So, for example, I learn that room in French is chambre, I will initially tend to use chambre in French every time I try to render the equivalent of room in English (or whatever native language). The problem is that the distribution of chambre in French is not identical to that of room in English. French uses salle and pièce to complement chambre. Our goal here as learners of French is how to accurately learn when (or where) to use each word. The problem is not so much a difference in intrinsic meaning--the words mean essentially the same thing--, it's really a question of what contexts require a specific word. (Let me point our that this is where dialectical differences can enter into account.) So, a salle de bain is a bathroom, salle à manger is a dining room, but chambre or chambre à coucher is a bedroom. In my own dialect of French, I've never heard chambre à dormir or salle à dormir. But in Quebec we do have chambre de bain. A living room is salon, vivoir or living (in France). For an entire house or apartment, we would use pièce for all the rooms, as in une maison de 6 pièces, of which only two may be actual bedrooms. Thus un appartement de deux chambres means a two-bedroom apartment even though it certainly has other rooms. Things get more complicated when you look other kinds of rooms like classrooms, darkrooms, cold-storage rooms, showrooms, rooms in office buildings, etc. How do we as language learners go about learning these fine distinctions? Should you study the individual meaning(s) of each word and try to derive some general rule. For example, chambre is nearly always a bedroom and pièce is a generic term for a closed space. This would be the bottom-up approach. I'm not really against this. If it produces good results, by all means use it. The problem I see is that this approach is precisely what leads to over-generalization and those imperceptible mistakes that are impossible to correct by oneself. For example, in Spanish until only very recently I was using felicitaciones and felicidades interchangeably until a native speaker corrected me. My own approach is to say that it is best to expose oneself to a wide variety of examples in context. Context here means a phrase or sentence. Correction by a native speaker is also very important. Even though it may be just an individual situation, this correction is one step in the right direction and prevents the repetition and fossilization of the mistake. Many uses are so idiosyncratic that it is not possible to derive general rules. Why is a darkroom a chambre noire and the chamber of commerce la chambre de commerce? And why is the green room in theatres le foyer des artistes? Edited by s_allard on 03 November 2011 at 5:22pm 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 18 of 65 03 November 2011 at 3:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Idiomatic uses of words and expressions are essentially unpredictable because the clash between the usages of single, but influentual individuals, random developments among ordinary citizens, external influences and intrinsic linguistic logic all have contributed to making the whole ting a mess.
Lists with idiomatic expressions or (good) dictionaries can give you some, but not nearly enough information - and it will come in a form which make learners fall asleep. Corrections can be used to control your language production, but unless they lead to rules they won't help you much. Ultimately the only way to learn idiomatics is to get as much input as possible AND be very attentive to anything in that input which you wouldn't have expected. And there we have the schisma: I firmly believe that this analysis is conducted most efficiently when you know as many building blocks as possible, whereas s_allard is a firm believer in a top-down approach where you take the expressions at face value and learn them as complete entities rather than as combinations of smaller elements. I suppose both methods work, though not equally well for everybody. Luckily a single person can use both methods at different times and see what works best, and then time will show whether he/she will drift in one or the other direction. I agree that overgeneralizations from your own language can lead to errors (and so can overgeneralizations based on absolutely justified expectations based on the meanings of the elements, even without the 'help' of any other language). So you have to learn to avoid the rare or very specialized word combinations and instead use those that more or less by accident have become the common ones. And having learnt a number of guaranteed correct combinations by heart will of course help you. My point is that knowing the building blocks will help you to memorize those guaranteed correct expressions in the first place. Edited by Iversen on 07 November 2011 at 11:05am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6485 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 19 of 65 04 November 2011 at 12:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
What strange definition have you invented now? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5946 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 20 of 65 04 November 2011 at 1:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
We can cope with situations we've never seen before, right? Because we've generalised from situations we have encountered that are similar but not identical. This is called generalisation. Generalisation is at the heart of pretty much every theory of learning. "Learning by induction" wants us to generalise from zero. Learning from rules attempts to give a predigested "general" form to start with. This is entirely uncontroversial, so I'm not sure what your problem is.... 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6485 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 21 of 65 04 November 2011 at 3:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Just as long as you don't prohibit me from using "learning" in my posts, I have no problem.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5946 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 22 of 65 04 November 2011 at 7:00pm | IP Logged | |||||
That's not always true. The problem is overgeneralisation, and yes, this is quite often from the native language, but there's plenty of times I've heard people make mistakes that you can't possibly come from their native languages -- instances where a direct translation would be correct, but they don't do it. Quite often you'll find that people simply overgeneralise from what they've learnt of the language already -- they try to say everything with the little of the language that they know. I've seen this from both sides -- I used to come up with bizarre complicated constructions in Spanish, then someone would tell me the proper way to say it, and I would go "oh, that's just like in English!" And I've corrected other people's English only to have them say "oh, that's just like Spanish!" So not all overgeneralisations are overgeneralisations from the native language. But even when they are caused by native language interference, does monolingual teaching eliminate it? Not in my experience. I'm currently studying Gaelic full time, and a couple of the students on the lower-level course keep saying "moran" (= a lot) as though it meant the same as the English word "more". Why? Because the first syllable is pronounced just like "more". They do this despite being exposed to correct usage on a daily basis. I pointed the mistake out to one of them yesterday, and I'll be keeping my ear open to see if that's enough for him to fix his error.... Now as for "chambre", it's not just a room, it's a private room, a personal room. This isn't a hard-and-fast rule (salle de bain vs chambre de bain), but it's the biggest single step that anyone can make in generalising. I agree that most dictionaries are too vague, preferring to offer potential translations rather than giving an explanation, but that's the dictionary's fault -- it's not a problem that's intrinsic to bilingual teaching. Edited by Cainntear on 04 November 2011 at 7:05pm 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 23 of 65 04 November 2011 at 8:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
The issue isn't the choice between monolingual or bilingual teaching. Indeed, I don't know how this question even entered into the debate. It's really more about what is a good or the best strategy for acquiring subtle distinctions of word usage in the target language. One approach, suggested in the quotation here, is to search for some intrinsic rule at the word level and then apply it or "generalise" at a higher level. I don't see anything wrong with this if it works for the user. My own approach is to rather observe and imitate as many examples of the different usages in question and learn to match the usage to the extralinguistic context. So, for example, I learn that in Spanish you answer the telephone with Sí, dígame and I don't concern myself with analyzing the grammar of the response. All I need to know is that this little phrase is what I should use when the phone rings. If we return to the original example, i.e. how to learn the distinctions between chambre, salle and pièce, I believe that to say that chambre is a private room is really not saying much because a) it doesn't explain certain usages of chambre that have nothing to do with "private room" (for example, une chambre froide 'a cold storage room') and b) it doesn't show the distinction from salle and pièce. And that is the fundamental problem. When to use chambre and when to use the others because they are not totally interchangeable. How do you learn these distinctions? I propose observing lots of examples of each usage and then generalizing or extrapolating to those novel situations where one has to choose. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| RogueMD Senior Member United States Joined 4955 days ago 72 posts - 82 votes Speaks: English* | Message 24 of 65 05 November 2011 at 4:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thank you all for your considered responses as they serve to show me that at least what I was considering was
worthy of consideration and not to discounted outright! My personal observations in my native language (English) was that many of my "daily" conversations had much repetition of phrases that came out almost without thought. These simple phrases, though, were not the same when translated to another language (in my case, Hungarian or Chinese). So, memorize the phrase in L2 knowing that it was not a word for word translation; but rather, the intent of the message. By memorizing these phrases as a whole (rather then the component words separately) one gains a lesson in grammar for free! Hopefully, what I just explained makes sense (I am now just off a 48 hour day with 2 hours sleep!). Thanks again. Michael <---- off to sleep 1 person has voted this message useful |
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