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Can adult learners achieve native levels? | ||
Tags: Native Fluency | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 169 of 303 14 October 2012 at 3:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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I won't quote all of @Juan's post, but I feel that it also reflects this idea that all classes are useless. There is no doubt that self-teaching or independent learning can be effective. That's why we're here. There is no doubt that many people have had bad experiences with high school classes full of uninterested students and a non-native teacher.
But we're not talking about those kinds of classes. As was said, we're talking about "good, free classes" and I defined what I meant by such a class. Think 4 students, an interested and well-trained native teacher, twice a week and a ton of authentic printed and audio-visual materials. And for free to boot! What more can you want? What do governments and businesses around the world do when they have to train their diplomats, military personnel or executives in foreign languages? How does the US Department of State Foreign Service Institute or the Canadian Foreign Service Institute teach foreign languages? They don't hand out a book and some CD's and tell their students to go home, study and then come back in six months. I can certainly understand that some people prefer to study on their own and feel that they can do just as well as in a class like the one I described. Sure, if I wanted to learn to play the violin, I could buy a book "Playing The Violin for Dummies" and teach myself. But I believe nothing beats having a good teacher. As I said, if anybody hears of a free course like the one I described, please PM me. Edited by s_allard on 14 October 2012 at 4:28pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| okjhum Pentaglot Groupie Sweden olle-kjellin.com Joined 5205 days ago 40 posts - 190 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Japanese, English, German, Russian Studies: Spanish, Polish, Greek | Message 170 of 303 14 October 2012 at 5:49pm | IP Logged | ||
Thanks for asking! IMHO, few things in a language learning situation are better than a good teacher and interaction with a small group of speakers of your target language, when they talk among each other over a game of cards, mahjong, or whatever (where key phrases will be repeated many times), and you are listening with big ears, until you have heard some phrases enough times to dare try them out yourself in the appropriate context. Don't worry if you expect not to understand the answers. Comprehension and understanding will come to you gradually, rather effortlessly, thanks to the overt, transparent context. Probably your interlocutors will repeat or rephrase the answers until you actually do understand, so you will get ample chances of listening and learning in a highly communicative process. Another trick that I used as a foreign student in Tokyo was to attend lectures in subjects that I knew already at levels that I had passed already in my home country. That gave me the terminology and jargon that I needed for my further studies. IMHO, few things in a language learning situation are worse than a bad or insecure teacher. He/she will only waste your time. Then it's better to resort to self study with a recording: Use Audacity (powerful, free program) to record a short piece of news and weather report from some online radio channel of your choice. Or from a commercial language course that you may have purchased already. (But usually they are not good for listening and pronunciation exercises, because they often mix in fancy environment sounds like coffee spoons, street traffic etc.) Chop up the recording into basically one-phrase or one-sentence chunks (each one "breath group" long, suitable for speaking it repetitiously), and save them as separate tracks on your mp3 player or burn a CD. Then set your player to "Repeat 1" and listen to each phrase over and over and over again a zillion times, typically about 10-15 minutes each. This will saturate your auditory system and related brain networks: There are direct neural connections from the primary auditory centers in the temporal lobes to the speech-muscle organizing areas in the frontal lobes, predominantly on your left side, the Broca's area, but actually bilaterally. This fact will soon urge you to mimick and shadow and finally speak in chorus with your recording, until your speech muscles too are saturated with the phrase. Taken together, this will endow you with your own audiomuscular memory and template for how to say it with the very same rhythm and melody as the original, with a native-like monitoring of your speech, and that's how good it ever can be!! :) Altogether, you will only need a 5-10 minutes of recorded material to attain a very good to excellent or even native-like pronunciation. Because the "amount" of pronunciation stuff is so limited, almost as little as the alphabet is, that you will find that all subsequent recordings will stick to the same rules and give you nothing newer than new words, some of which may interest you, but perhaps most of which are uninteresting. So don't try to cram too much into your recording, but keep the amount small enough so you can use and re-use it until you feel like vomiting over it! :-D You will soon notice, that your listening ability will soar, even if you don't understand half of what's being said. But you will catch the words and be able to look them up in a dictionary, without having to ask for them in written form. At that moment, you are on a more or less equal level as the native toddler acquiring his first language. I argue, that this way of doing it is a kind of emulation and adaptation of first-language acquisition to the adult learner's situation as a beginner. It promises good end results! At least this is how it works for me. I base my ideas on about 40 years' experience of language teaching and learning, as well as being a post-doc speech physiologist/phonetician and a MD with obvious interests in the speech, language, audiology and neuroscientific areas. :) Good luck, and keep us posted as to how you progress! Edited by okjhum on 14 October 2012 at 5:55pm 14 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Hiiro Yui Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4718 days ago 111 posts - 126 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese | Message 171 of 303 14 October 2012 at 6:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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okjhum,
Would you say you have native-like pronunciation/accent in Japanese? I could use some advice because, as I said, even if I mimic over and over, I can't be sure I'm hitting the right frequencies/melodies. I think I end up sounding off, but I don't know how to fix it. Here's my best attempt. Technically I didn't shadow for this video and I spoke slowly to make sure my pronunciation was good, but please let me know what you think. How are people without "the ears" supposed to improve? The guy in this video sounds really good, but at the same time, something sounds "familiar" about his voice. Like, I could imagine what he sounds like when he speaks English, whereas with actual Japanese guys there's some different quality to their voice, but I can't put my finger on it. Am I imagining things? Am I noticing a difference in voice, or accent? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 172 of 303 14 October 2012 at 7:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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I want to heartily endorse @okhjum's recommendations. They would certainly be part of a good course. The debate also reminds me of the absolutely worse course in Spanish conversation that I ever took. We were just two students in a C2 class. All we did for two hours was read out aloud articles from a newspaper and then try to comment them under the guidance of the teacher. Nothing like what @okhjum is recommending. A total waste of time. I could hardly believe my eyes and dropped out after three weeks.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| okjhum Pentaglot Groupie Sweden olle-kjellin.com Joined 5205 days ago 40 posts - 190 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Japanese, English, German, Russian Studies: Spanish, Polish, Greek | Message 173 of 303 14 October 2012 at 8:36pm | IP Logged | ||
Hi, Hiiro-kun! That's really, really good! You sound almost like a Japanese news reader. You are not speaking too slowly, if news were the context (and it fits the content and style of the text). Your Japanese prosody is really good, and you are hereby strongly requested, no, ordered, to stop considering yourself to be "without the ears"! :) One detail that might be improved even more, is your long consonants, as in "jikken". They were not really too short, but on the verge of being too short. Natural speech favours larger margins, so just make them a wee bit longer. Apart from that, your moraic performance is astounding. It's quite "near-native", as far as I can judge. Hopefully, we have some Japanese member, who could also judge it (without adding the usual flatteries, as we westerners can!). Cheers! /Olle Edited by okjhum on 14 October 2012 at 8:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| okjhum Pentaglot Groupie Sweden olle-kjellin.com Joined 5205 days ago 40 posts - 190 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Japanese, English, German, Russian Studies: Spanish, Polish, Greek | Message 174 of 303 14 October 2012 at 8:52pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hiiro-kun, the other link resulted in an error. But a very important trick for sounding genuinely Japanese, is to change your pitch of voice from low to high between the first and second mora, and then fall from high to low after the accented mora, if any (could be the first syllable, in which case you must fall from hi to lo in that position). You did that very well. If not, it would sound very foreign-accented. This is in stark contrast with my first Japanese book, "Teach yourself Japanese", which bluntly stated that Japanese has no special accent. As I was not a phonetician at that time, I believed the crap. And then I had to spend several years "repairing" my faulty accent!! :(
Eventually, it seems as if my pronunciation was accepted as "near-native". I asked a Japanese phonetician friend of mine to point out what I should improve, but he couldn't. He said it sounded like some Japanese dialect that he didn't know so much about! :-D And when I answered the phone at the lab, I sometimes even had to defend my position and persuade the person at the other end that I indeed didn't understand everything he said to me! Those moments made me very happy! :) /Olle 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| 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 175 of 303 14 October 2012 at 9:55pm | IP Logged | ||
As for why the government organizes classes - mostly for conversational practice and for controlling that they do complete the book. And because everyone is different and the material would have to be chosen for everyone personally. And most learners wouldn't even know what they need, especially if it's their first foreign language. But if you just give them money they'll spend half of it on Rosetta Stone and shiny "fluent in 10 days" stuff. Whereas with a good teacher you'll hopefully get somewhere even if you're using a shitty coursebook. Organizing 10 newbies' independent learning would take as much time as teaching them the basics. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 176 of 303 15 October 2012 at 1:40am | IP Logged | ||
How much of this improvement should transfer over to natural speech? You mention rhythm and melody, but did you mean to say that this will also have an impact on pronunciation? The setting that is presented here is quite simple to replicate. Perhaps we could start another thread where people post a recording of themselves, then proceed with the exercise and then repost to show the level of improvement. Edited by Arekkusu on 15 October 2012 at 5:21am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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