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Same audio 1000 times? | ||
Tags: Listening | Pronunciation | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 17 of 83 19 March 2012 at 4:29am | IP Logged | |||||
First of all I don't want to sound like a shill for that particular product. The fundamental question that is raised here is really how much exposure to recordings do you need for the process to be effective. Do you listen to a two minute sample 1000 times or do you listen to 1000 samples twice each? I'm exaggerating a bit, of course. I think that a basic rule of thumb is that we should have as many varied samples as possible covering a range of speaking situations. So, you would want examples of various kinds of media language, academic language, everyday conversations, etc. Much of this stuff is pretty easy to come by today with the Internet. What I find really rare even today is raw, unrehearsed, spoken conversational language. Well, not exactly. You can find a lot on Youtube. But you have so much work to do in terms of transcription. I would never suggest that a 4 minute sample of real spoken French would encapsulate all there is to learn in French. But that sample can encapsulate a certain type or class of interaction. And a lot of the phenomena that we see in this example are typical in the sense that we see it in many if not all forms of unscripted speech. Let me give some specific examples. If you listen to a lot of radio, television and movie speech, you know that those voices are all trained to deliver their lines in a professional manner. If you listen to a lot of CBC radio, you really get used to CBC style of speaking. Even movie dialogues that seem very realistic do not really come close to how people really speak. Now, when ordinary people are interviewed, you do get more of a glimpse of how the language is really spoken. And I should add that textbooks and grammar books are light years away from representing real speech. What we all know and live with in our own languages is the fact that real speech tends to be a hodgepodge of properly formed sentences and all kinds of things. For example, in the sample in question, the commentary points out places where the speakers switches direction in midstream. He starts out trying to say one thing and ends up saying something else. Or he makes a mistakes and corrects himself. Or uses all kinds of seemingly meaningless words as conversation markers to keep things going. This is the real thing, not something sanitized for teaching purposes. In that sense, it's not at all different from what you would hear in English if you were to record 4 minutes of college students interacting spontaneously. Do you have to listen to an hour of the same two college students talking to get a feel for how that kind of language is used? I don't think so. But I do think one should listen to number of different samples to get a broad view of how English or any language is spoken. So, I would prefer 10 samples of 4 minutes each rather than one sample 40 minutes long. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 18 of 83 19 March 2012 at 5:36am | IP Logged | |||||
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After having written my last post, I got to thinking about this issue of the size of sample recordings and an experience I had came to mind. I've been following a Spanish (from Spain) soap opera and my understanding of that genre of scripted Spanish has improved immensely. What I did notice, and I actually wrote a post about this some time back, was that the language is highly repetitive and for, example, only a small numbers of verbs are actually in use. So, although I'm still learning some new words even now, after the first couple of episodes I could really follow the series without any problem.
One thing that did make a major difference was finding a Youtube video with a small part of an episode subtitled. It was amazing because it made me realize that there were things that I really never understood because I had never really figured out the words, This included the theme song. Although I have seen over 200 episodes to date, I truly believe that just one episode with a complete transcript and a good dictionary would give me something like 90% of everything I need to follow the entire series. Of course I would have to listen to it a few times to make sure I understand everything well. Edited by s_allard on 19 March 2012 at 5:37am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 19 of 83 19 March 2012 at 12:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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As Arekkusu has pointed out so well, listening to audio many times in the target language is no guarantee of native-like pronunciation. Obviously, there is a place for repetition when combined with an active component.
I'll take the example of the actor Meryl Streep who recently won an Academy award for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in the film The Iron Lady. All the British observers, who know a thing or two about proper accents, marveled at Streep's perfect accent. Did she get this by listening to a recording of Madame Thatcher a 1000 times? I strongly doubt this. While I'm sure she listened to recordings extensively, I suspect that the first thing she did was hire a good dialect coach who used a variety of recordings of Thatcher. If you want perfect or good pronunciation, you have to get personalized attention. And I'm sure Streep's dialect coach did not come cheap. But look at the results. On the other hand, someone like Michel Thomas, the language teacher to the stars, obviously didn't believe in dialect coaches and kept that strong Polish accent until he died. Edit: Here is a link to a post on how dialect coaches work in films: http://trilbyjeeves.com/2011/02/22/dialect-coaching-for-acto rs-the-importance-of-preparation/ Edited by s_allard on 19 March 2012 at 12:31pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5869 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 20 of 83 19 March 2012 at 1:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm sure a similar thing happens when reading a series of novels by the same author. I have read about eight Dutch-language novels by the same author. Certainly I have learned most of the words he tends to use. Each new book introduces new vocabulary. Throughout each book, I get better and better, and the last chapter is by far the easiest. This is quite normal of course. It is what you would expect. But it is interesting to note that when you switch to a similar type of novel by a different author, you are back into some unfamiliar territory until you master his/her set of words and way of writing. Eventually, these noticeable differences will fade away as overall proficiency increases. I guess that take-away message from your post would be to take the first episode of a TV series or the first chapter of a book, and review and learn it very well. Learn every word. Study the sentences and expressions in detail. Then you can probably breeze through the rest of the book or series. If you are not much interested in reading so many books or watching so many episodes, probably it would be very productive and effective to simply study the first chapter (or even just the first page) in great detail. Then switch to a new author or series. Maybe a bit boring but possibly very effective. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 21 of 83 19 March 2012 at 2:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
I really wouldn't suggest reading only the first page of a book, but we agree on the general idea. You want to combine the widest range or variety of material with enough depth in each genre or area. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5384 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 22 of 83 19 March 2012 at 2:31pm | IP Logged | |||||
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So, Splog, what's your take on all this?
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5672 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 23 of 83 19 March 2012 at 5:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
My take on this is ... nobody who has replied has done anything like 1000+ reps on each clip, and pretty much everybody is guessing that it seems excessive. I belong to that same group, which is unfortunate, since I was hoping at least one person would be waving the flag for the approach. I thought about this today, as I was out walking for two hours today and listening to an audiobook in French. I really enjoyed the book, which kept me focused, plus I heard thousands of different sentences which gave me broad exposure. If, however, I had stuck to just the first two minutes of the book, repeatedly for the whole two hours, I would still have only manged 60 of the 1000 reps. There would still be a whole 31 hours of repeated listening to do for that two minute clip. At that rate, it would take me several years to finish the book. No matter how effective the technique may be, I don't think I have the mental endurance to do it. Perhaps there is something to the technique, but I would need considerable proof of its effectiveness, and (just as importantly) a guarantee that the 2 minute clip I was listening to was not just some random clip, but rather one created by super-geniuses to ensure that not a single second of the clip is irrelevant. Maybe, though, I am just lazy. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5384 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 24 of 83 19 March 2012 at 6:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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What do you hope will happen after you've listened to that clip 1000 times?
Surely, if you've considered such an extreme endeavour, you must have some utopian view of what could happen. You seem to imply that some kind of switch could go on as you near a thousand repetitions. There is only so much information you can get from a clip. It seems perfectly conceivable that the totally of the available information it might contain, no matter how geniusly conceived, could be entirely absorbed in, say, 5 hours (just to give a generous time frame). What miraculous result could warrant giving it another 25+ hours? Edited by Arekkusu on 19 March 2012 at 6:59pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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