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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4918 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 601 of 713 27 June 2012 at 1:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
I've gotten some short books with audio from CLE. This is what I've been doing:
I don't count any of the listening for the super challenge. The length of these books means that the 3 reads I do like this counts as 1 book. I'm also considering listening to and repeating the audio for some of the books. (I prefer parroting to shadowing.) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4898 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 602 of 713 27 June 2012 at 10:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
I have a couple thoughts on this: 1. This style of intensive reading seems like an excellent study tool. It's a similar technique to what Assimil uses. It's probably far more effective for learning grammar and vocabulary than simply reading. 2. With this, I really think you are missing something intangible but important by not reading a full book. There's a lot of reasearch right now on explicit versus implicit learning. It's hard to measure the skills you learn from implicit learning (such as you'd get from reading, or watching a film, or being immersed), and there's no consensus on what you actually do learn. For me it's been the subtle things. You learn elements of style, and see how different authors use the language. You get an insight into the mindset and culture behind the language. You learn the language's moods. Reading a full novel or text is intimidating, and like fiziwig wrote, it is not easy the first couple times. It just took me seven weeks to read my first big (380-page) novel. But that's the point of the challenge, right? To push ourselves past this barrier, and reach a point where we can read comfortably. I'm still hoping I reach a point where I can bring a French paperback to the beach, without needing a dictionary. Just to be clear - I'm not criticizing your technique! I think it's a strong one - but I also strongly feel that you are missing something valuable in shying away from longer texts. Seriously. Pick up the Goethe! Edited by kanewai on 27 June 2012 at 10:27pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6606 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 603 of 713 28 June 2012 at 12:47am | IP Logged | |||||
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Oh I'm not shying away from longer texts. But some of the most important books in Portuguese that I want to read are poetry, in fact these books were my original reason for learning the language. Now I'm just going through them for the first time and I feel like I'm missing out too much and that I need to slow down later. I won't be just pondering on the linguistic points, but also on what the author truly meant. And I'd love to do this with almost 200 poems. That's a counter-example to "if you have just 5 books, you can read them 20 times, though after only a few rereads you probably WILL get more books" :))
Though I definitely have more than 5 books in Portuguese, and I'm also going to read LOTR between September and April, on the appropriate dates when things happen:) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| konayuki Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5838 days ago 26 posts - 26 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Korean, French | Message 604 of 713 28 June 2012 at 6:19am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm listening to audio and followed the instructions on the bot page to count the
minutes. I'm listening to 10 minute audio a total of six times, only counting the first two listens (therefore, 20 mins). However the bot listed it as a full movie. How can I change it so that it counts as only 20 minutes of audio and not the 90 minutes it claims I listened to? Thanks! konayuki 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Brun Ugle Diglot Senior Member Norway brunugle.wordpress.c Joined 6629 days ago 1292 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English*, NorwegianC1 Studies: Japanese, Esperanto, Spanish, Finnish | Message 605 of 713 28 June 2012 at 7:57am | IP Logged | |||||
Poetry in any language, including one's native language, requires a good deal of rereading and pondering to fully understand and appreciate the author's intent. If it didn't, why would high school English classes spend the entire class period analyzing and discussing a single poem? Regarding intensive vs extensive reading: Sometimes it can be helpful to read the first chapter fairly intensively to figure out who these people are and what's going on. Then you can read the rest of the novel without looking up anything unless you really get lost. I have tried it occasionally before and found that it can help me to get into the book and to increase my understanding. With Harry Potter, of course, it isn't necessary since I already know what's going on. Right now, I'm trying purely extensive reading with an unfamiliar book and it seems to be going reasonably will. I did read a little about the book before attempting to read it though and that also helps. The other thing I do is that when I get really lost, I reread from the last place I understood. Then I read very carefully and sometimes break the sentences apart in my mind to see how the clauses are put together. If I'm still confused, I break out the dictionary and possibly the grammar book. When I think about it, I suppose that's a little bit of intensive reading stuck in the middle of a lot of extensive reading. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4874 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 606 of 713 02 July 2012 at 10:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Here's an odd observation about the twitterbot database page.
The person in first place has complete 16% of the challenge. The person in second place has completed 5% of the challenge. The person in third place has completed 27% of the challenge. The person in fourth place has completed 37% of the challenge. The person in fifth place has complete 24% of the challenge. ... The person in 11th place has completed 5% of the challenge. The person in 12th place has complete 21% of the challenge. In fact, 4 people have completed a higher percentage of the challenge than the person in first place. Based on percentages the person in first place should be in fifth place and the person in fourth place should be in first place. It all depends on how many languages somebody signed up for. So after everyone has completed their own individual challenges, the person who signed up for the most languages will always be in first place and the people who signed up for only one language will always come in at last place. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6606 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 607 of 713 02 July 2012 at 11:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Nope, it'll always depend on the number of books, movies etc.
Also, I've completed more than 16% of my challenge. I'm actually doing 50 books, 50 movies, 50 pieces of writing in German, but as the option is unavailable I signed up for super duper. (edit: I don't wanna count how much I've actually achieved) If you want to see me lower in the table, just sort by Watched, Read, Written or Conversed :)
Oh and I've completed 46% in my best challenge. edit: oh you just looked at our stats for the first language registered (Italian for me, Spanish for Kerrie and Marikki). These are not the overall stats. And I'm kinda glad that the full stats aren't counted, because it's intimidating to think of those 400 "books" I'm planning to read. Edited by Serpent on 02 July 2012 at 11:21pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5541 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 608 of 713 02 July 2012 at 11:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
I've been reading a lot recently—something like a couple hundred pages a week (which I've been logging elsewhere and which I will report soonish, I promise). I'm finding that more and more "odd looking" idioms and slippery false cognates are becoming much clearer after I've seen, say, 10 examples in context.
You say this like it's a long-term goal, but somehow I suspect you'll be doing it well before the end of beach season. :-) My reading took a big, weird jump about a month ago. The first sign was that Tintin became "clear", thanks to some half-baked grammar study and work at lang-8, and I could finally explain all the verb endings, partitive articles, and whatnot. But it was still slow. A couple of weeks after that, my speed jumped. My current strategy is a bit devious: 1) Really fun bandes dessinées, all of which were originally written in French. (Siegfried and Persepolis are great, though the former is light on words. Immigrants is also worth a look.) 2) Books that I've read repeatedly in English. This allows me to pick up vocabulary much quicker from context. (It's also taught me a lot of depressing things about translations—I'm increasingly convinced that translation steals the charm and character from most books worth reading.) Basically, I'm relying on context (either illustrations or a remembered story) to let me get more with less effort. I'll probably do a few more books this way, and then switch back to original French novels. And my complements to Solfrid—this challenge was an awesome idea. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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