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s_allard
Triglot
Senior Member
Canada
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| Message 65 of 83 27 April 2012 at 4:32am | IP Logged |
Seriously, people, nobody is going to listen to a passage 1000 times in a row. I don't think anybody really meant that. What is true however is that in our native languages we are constantly listening to and using repetitive phrases and constructions. If you watch any television or listen to the radio, let's say for two hours a day, after a year there are probably things that you have heard a thousand times. That's the nature of language. And that's part of the process of learning or consolidating a language.
Edited by s_allard on 27 April 2012 at 4:33am
3 persons have voted this message useful
| slucido
Bilingual Diglot
Senior Member
Spain
https://goo.gl/126Yv
Joined 6675 days ago
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| Message 66 of 83 27 April 2012 at 3:17pm | IP Logged |
s_allard wrote:
| Seriously, people, nobody is going to listen to a passage 1000 times in a row. I don't think anybody really meant that. |
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Some people really mean that and more than that.
"Chorusing" a sentence 100 times a day for ten days or 200 times a day for five days or something in between.
2 persons have voted this message useful
| Splog
Diglot
Senior Member
Czech Republic
anthonylauder.c
Joined 5669 days ago
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| Message 67 of 83 27 April 2012 at 3:46pm | IP Logged |
s_allard wrote:
| Seriously, people, nobody is going to listen to a passage 1000 times in a row. I don't think anybody really meant that. |
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Well, my original question was based on some people saying is exactly what they do. That is, listen to the same short audio clip at least a thousand times over a few days.
Edited by Splog on 27 April 2012 at 3:46pm
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| tommus
Senior Member
CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name
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| Message 68 of 83 27 April 2012 at 4:27pm | IP Logged |
Bonjour Mesdames et Messieurs
I am just now enroute home from a week-long, large conference in Quebec City. First of all; what a wonderful city! And what a friendly city in which to practice your French!
The working language of the conference was English, but all the major speakers said at least a few words in French at the beginning of their presentations. No problem for the francophones of course. But for the anglophones, many of whom probably have been learning French, to some extent, pretty well all their lives, it wasn't so easy. I didn't detect a single anglophone who pronounced "Bonjour Mesdames et Messieurs" very well at all. Mostly, it sounded quite bad. These people have almost certainly heard those four words a thousand times in their lifetimes, spoken by francophones. You hear it everywhere in Ontario and Quebec, and elsewhere in Canada. But they have not mastered it. I have not mastered it.
How can we anglophones master the pronunciation of the rest of the French language if we can't master "Bonjour Mesdames et Messieurs"?
1 person has voted this message useful
| Arekkusu
Hexaglot
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| Message 69 of 83 27 April 2012 at 4:37pm | IP Logged |
Splog wrote:
s_allard wrote:
| Seriously, people, nobody is going to listen to a passage 1000 times in a row. I don't think anybody really meant that. |
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Well, my original question was based on some people saying is exactly what they do. That is, listen to the same short audio clip at least a thousand times over a few days. |
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Some might take this as an indication that the student is hard-working and devoted, but I can only conclude the opposite. We know that the people you mentioned are efficient learners, which is in part why the claim sounds ridiculous in the first place, but if you're going to get something new out of a phrase the 1000th time you listen to it, then you really didn't get very much from each of the preceding 999 times, and that's nothing to be proud of. And if you listened to it several times with no additional results, then that's not exactly a sign of intelligence either.
Edited by Arekkusu on 27 April 2012 at 4:40pm
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| Serpent
Octoglot
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Russian Federation
serpent-849.livejour
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| Message 70 of 83 27 April 2012 at 5:57pm | IP Logged |
tommus wrote:
Bonjour Mesdames et Messieurs
I am just now enroute home from a week-long, large conference in Quebec City. First of all; what a wonderful city! And what a friendly city in which to practice your French!
The working language of the conference was English, but all the major speakers said at least a few words in French at the beginning of their presentations. No problem for the francophones of course. But for the anglophones, many of whom probably have been learning French, to some extent, pretty well all their lives, it wasn't so easy. I didn't detect a single anglophone who pronounced "Bonjour Mesdames et Messieurs" very well at all. Mostly, it sounded quite bad. These people have almost certainly heard those four words a thousand times in their lifetimes, spoken by francophones. You hear it everywhere in Ontario and Quebec, and elsewhere in Canada. But they have not mastered it. I have not mastered it.
How can we anglophones master the pronunciation of the rest of the French language if we can't master "Bonjour Mesdames et Messieurs"?
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They've also heard an accented pronunciation of this many times, pronounced by fellow non-native speakers, especially in class.
IDK about other rules described here, but I agree with the one about authentic materials. Or at least materials recorded by natives. I was quite shocked a couple of months ago, I was waiting at uni and there was a Spanish class on. I had only listened to authentic materials so at first I couldn't even understand their Russian accent!
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| slucido
Bilingual Diglot
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Spain
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| Message 71 of 83 27 April 2012 at 7:13pm | IP Logged |
This "chorusing" technique is something like the prof Olle Kjellin's technique:
Here you have the original article:
http://olle-kjellin.com/SpeechDoctor/ProcLP98.html
Here you have an English teacher who uses Olle Kjellin’s Pronunciation Teaching Method:
http://www.k-way.home.sonic.net/
I asked prof Olle Kjellin in this forum. Is it possible to practice your chorusing method with recordings?
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=4261&PN=1&TPN=7#258662
okjhum wrote:
Yes, that's how I do it myself, in the absence of a teacher & chorus or other live interaction. Commuting by car about 45 minutes each way, I spend most of that time listening over and over again on a small number of utterances that I've recorded from any source, even old language courses on cassettes, and burnt on a CD with very short tracks, each the length of one breath group. I set the player on "repeat 1" and have my ears and brain "saturated" with an utterance. Then I'll start saying it in chorus with the CD. Initially with a very large sound that "pushes" my speech apparatus the right way (mirror neurons, I presume). Then with gradually softer and softer CD sound, until I'm saying it by myself. While the quantitative progress is rather slow, the qualitative success is inevitable, unavoidable. What little I can say, I really CAN say.
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Here you have maxb comments about his DIY chorusing method:
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=6281
maxb wrote:
I have looked through my old posts on the chorus method and see that I have left out some important information on why it is a good idea to use it. The idea of the chorus method is in principle to teach adult learners the prosody of a foreign language. Furthermore it is important that the prosody is learnt first. Even before the individual sounds are mastered.
Why? Because, according to research, this is the way small children learn their mother tongue and since the outcome of small childrens language learning is always successful (perfect pronounciation, grammar etc.) it would make sense to copy it. From what I have read, mastery of prosody is absolutely crucial for a childs language development. If the prosody isn't mastered the language will not develop normally. There is even evidence suggesting that the grammar of a language is connected to its prosody and that a mastery of prosody would make learning the grammar easier.
So how does Olle Kjellin suggest you go about learning the prosody?
He believes that the first month of language study should be devoted to pronounciation alone. He suggests selecting an A4-page of practice phrases and learning those perfectly. He believes that if these phrases are mastered to perfection you will have mastered most of what there is to learn when it comes to pronunciation in the language. Furthermore he believes that when you work on a phrase you should learn the prosody of it first. Primarily the rhythm. Skip any sounds that you can't pronounce for now. You can even resort to just humming along with the rhythm and melody of the sentence. Since the rhythm is very important he also suggest that you use material spoken at a natural speed since unnaturally slowed down "language learner speech" disorts the rhythm of the language.
Once you have mastered the prosody of the phrase, you can start working on the individual sounds. When doing that you only need to focus on the syllables that are stressed in the sentence, since he claims that those are the only sounds that are noticed by the native speaker. For instance in Swedish you only need to focus on getting the long vowels right.
Once the sounds and rhythm have been mastered and you are saying the sentence bascially identically to the model you should go repeating for a large number of times to fix the sentence in your auditory memory.
He claims that if you practice like this for about a month you will have an almost native like command of the pronunciation of the language. Which means that you will have acquired a very important skill which the native speakers posses namely the ability to repeat perfectly a word you have only heard once. For instance if you are listening to someone speaking in your native language and you suddenly hear an unknown word, you would be able to repeat that word perfectly, if required to do so. You don't even have to repeat it. I find in Swedish that if I listen to someone speaking and hear a knew word I instantly remember how it is pronounced, I don't even have to say it out loud at the time I hear it to remember it. The chorus method lets you acquire this skill for foreign languages as well.
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Other thread about learning Mandarin:
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=5096&PN=61
OneEye wrote:
To edit the audio for chorusing, I just isolate each sentence on a track, hit the repeat button, and mimic the speaker correct? Is it recommended to do this with every sentence you learn, or just certain key ones (maybe ones that give me difficulty) until I'm comfortable with the sounds of the language?
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Maxb answered:
maxb wrote:
For chorusing I'd say select a small number of sentences (maybe 20-30) and work very intensively on those for maybe a month until you feel that you can say them absolutely perfectly. Then when you learn new sentences keep using the chorusing method, but you will find that having spent so much time on the first batch of sentences the rest of them will come very easily. You will need much fewer repetitions on the new sentences.
Also I recommend that you use FSI or any other source spoken at a natural speed for you source of sentences.
Pimsleur is spoken much too slowly and unnaturally and doesn't let you learn the rhythm of mandarin properly.
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Thread about perfect pronuntiation.
maxb wrote:
http://www.how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.a sp?TID=8232&PN=0&TPN=12
A method I believe in, and which I have used to success is to learn a fairly long audio piece in the language by heart. What I did for mandarin was to take a 6 minute podcast spoken at rather quick pace and split it up into several small chunks. Each chunk maybe 2-5 seconds. Then I practiced 1-2 chunks per day,using the chorus method, for a period of 2 months, until I had the whole podcast memorized. What I have done since is to use a modified version of the "10000 sentences method" where I use audio flashcards. I use a recording of a sentence as the "question" in supermemo and in order to consider myself passed on a flashcard, I not only have to understand the sentence, I also have to be able to chorus the sentence along with the speaker.
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I hope it helps.
Edited by slucido on 27 April 2012 at 7:15pm
4 persons have voted this message useful
| s_allard
Triglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 5430 days ago
2704 posts - 5425 votes
Speaks: French*, English, Spanish
Studies: Polish
| Message 72 of 83 28 April 2012 at 12:40am | IP Logged |
I really think that the chorusing method is excellent. Indeed, I believe that it is something that most of us do spontaneously, albeit in not such a formalized way as outlined above. But we all repeat phrases a certain number of times because we know that repetition is the key to learning success. But from there to say that one has to religiously practice something 1000 times, I find that hard to follow. Why not 500 or 250 or 125 times? Of course, if 1000 works better than 500, I can't object.
1 person has voted this message useful
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