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At what level do you say you speak (2) ? | ||
Tags: CEFR Language Levels | Speaking | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 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 81 of 118 01 April 2013 at 7:47pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4534 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 82 of 118 01 April 2013 at 7:58pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think the original quote is more like "reach for the stars, and at least you won't end up digging in the mud". Edited by patrickwilken on 01 April 2013 at 7:58pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4534 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 83 of 118 01 April 2013 at 8:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I am sort of curious, how could you be at B1 and think you knew everything? Was it because you were in a sort of sheltered class where you weren't exposed directly to the real language? I am at B1 in German, and my limitations are transparent to me every time I try to interact with the language via books, TV, and conversations.
This reminds me a lot of the chapter in Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, where he discussed the now famous study of music students in a Berlin music academy. The students were divided into three groups: future soloists; the solid, but not brilliant; and the future (!) teachers. What was found was that the only thing separating these groups was the relative amounts of practice they had performed. There was no evidence of innate talent at all. That is, that some people just got better with the same amount work faster than others. As this result has been replicated in quite different fields (chess; competitive sports etc). I wouldn't be surprised if something similar was true for language learning. I am sure there are people who have personalities that are better suited for learning languages, and others who have more efficient techniques for learning, but I wouldn't be surprised if in the end that 'talent' is not that important, but hours of immersion is, which I find immensely empowering. Edited by patrickwilken on 01 April 2013 at 8:21pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| casamata Senior Member Joined 4263 days ago 237 posts - 377 votes Studies: Portuguese | Message 84 of 118 01 April 2013 at 8:49pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
No, when I was at B1, B2, I was speaking Spanish all the time in college but hadn’t been abroad yet. And for the first few months abroad I thought that I knew a lot just because my grammar was extremely good. But I didn’t realize that my word choice was not as amazing as I had originally thought nor was my vocabulary adequate. I had a lot of native contact at university but the issue is that natives will accommodate you and decrease their “level” so that communication is fine. But at more advanced levels they obviously will up the anty and it’s harder to understand. In many sports where physical ability is much more important than skill, that doesn’t apply. Maybe for tennis but even in tennis the very best players are all 6’1”. Why? It’s probably the best mix between power and speed. Del Potro is kind of an exception at 6’6” but all the rest are 6’1” or 6’2”. In track, absolutely not. It is 99% physical ability and about 1% skill. You need crazy natural talent to become a good sprinter but to be a good distance runner a lot of people can adapt and do ok. I don't train hard anymore but am much faster than my friend that has busted his butt for years. Of course, the same happens with me compared to much-faster runners! Sorry for talking about running; I'm using it to show how talent does matter in many subjects and since I prefer talking about things that I know about, I used that analogy. I wouldn’t agree with chess or piano; there are little like 6 year olds that are professional-class in both with fairly little practice. In comparison, I have played a LOT of piano in my life but was never nearly as good as those people. I remember my sister would never practice and she would run circles around me in piano. "That is, that some people just got better with the same amount work faster than others." Isn't that the definition of talent? If I spend an hour a week doing math/chemistry/chess/whatever and somebody else spends 3 hours/week and we reach the same proficiency, aren't I more talented? In Spanish there would be loads of people that couldn't get the intricacies of the subjunctive (adverbial clauses or even the basic constructions!) but I did easily. Conversely, I couldn't trill my r's no matter how hard I tried and some classmates did it on their first try. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| casamata Senior Member Joined 4263 days ago 237 posts - 377 votes Studies: Portuguese | Message 85 of 118 01 April 2013 at 9:02pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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There was no evidence of innate talent at all. That is, that some people just got better with the same amount work faster than others. [/QUOTE]
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/20/opinion/sunday/sorry-striv ers-talent-matters.html?_r=0 I just read this after reading your post. Don't get me wrong, I believe that people can achieve a lot even with average talent, but in some fields it is just statistically extremely improbable. Maybe this idea that we are all equally pre-disposed for everything has to do with the current phenomenom that everybody deserves a ribbon for participating, that we should all get a medal regardless of how well we performed. "But this isn’t quite the story that science tells. Research has shown that intellectual ability matters for success in many fields — and not just up to a point. " "Scores on the SAT correlate so highly with I.Q. that the psychologist Howard Gardner described it as a “thinly disguised” intelligence test.) The remarkable finding of their study is that, compared with the participants who were “only” in the 99.1 percentile for intellectual ability at age 12, those who were in the 99.9 percentile — the profoundly gifted — were between three and five times more likely to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work. A high level of intellectual ability gives you an enormous real-world advantage. " At the very least, in sports our physiology determines what sports we can be very good at. A 5'9" 135 pound ethiopian with tons of type 1 fibers will never be an olympic sprinter just as Usain Bolt would fail miserable in a 5K. (The world record holder for the woman's 100 meter actually DID try to be a long-distance runner olympian and reached a high school level of performance after training. The late runner Flo-jo) A jockey that is 5'0", 85 pounds will never play in the NBA just as a 6'8", 280 pound man will never be a good jockey. There are merit-based professions but those PhD's in Math and science are extremely brainy. My comparitively feeble brain bows down to them, which is why I study something that is more hard work than talent. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4534 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 86 of 118 01 April 2013 at 9:03pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I think you are seriously overestimating the ability of six year olds in either chess or piano, but I am happy to see the evidence. I would be sort of surprised that a six year old could reach the keys properly to play to be honest... With regard to your relative piano abilities compared to your sister it's hard for me to me to judge the evidence. Perhaps your practice was simply not that effective relative to hers. Perhaps you are underestimating how much work she did. Do you really believe all these peer reviewed published studies are false? Can you provide me with counter studies? If all these results are seriously in doubt, I would expect a lot of counter studies to show this. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| casamata Senior Member Joined 4263 days ago 237 posts - 377 votes Studies: Portuguese | Message 87 of 118 01 April 2013 at 9:56pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Dude, these were little 6, 7 year olds that played at major auditoriums in Europe. They were professionals. I'm not talking about some little 6 year old cousin that plays a basic song. These kids were legit, world-class. My sister never practiced. Literally. I seriously would practice twice as much but sucked compared to her. I was better at her than some things and she was better than me at others. And by "better", I mean that we had different proficiency levels even with the same time spent at the task. If you really believe that we are all the same, how do you explain the fact that there are people that don't even spend much time doing an activity and within a year are better than those that spend many times more time and effort doing it? Heck, I spent many, many hours playing and practicing basketball but due to my limited height (under 1.8m) and quickness, I couldn't even make a middle school team! I LOVED it. But with running I was always one of the best with no training. How would you explain that? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7206 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 88 of 118 01 April 2013 at 9:56pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
For a variety of similarly talented people, depending on the field, it may be that the most important thing is hours of practice. But that's not always the case. Unless you are not way above or below average in some area, you must have experienced talent making a difference. Have you really never found yourself to be head and shoulders above or below someone else and it didn't have anything to do with practice time? There are many possible explanations: 1) Researchers of average (which is already high) ability don't want to believe that there are some who will blow them away without effort. 2) Some fields have more of a talent component than others. 3) Some people have a talent for the work that is study, practice, and discipline. Are you unaware of any scientific studies that purport things you know to be preposterous? Think of those sponsored by large companies or special interest groups. A study doesn't necessarily mean anything. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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