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Reducing Self-Study Method Abandonment | ||
Tags: Burn-out | Self-Study | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 73 of 139 30 August 2013 at 11:59am | IP Logged | |||||
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For what it's worth, a new book, Think In Any Language, by an up and coming polyglot and language learning guru, Gabriel Wyner, will be published in early 2014. I have no idea how it will compare to Farber's book.
I should add that on Wyner's website there are the usual talking head videos of him speaking in various languages. The French is notable because of some egregious mistakes that made me cringe. It's also worth noting that while extolling the virtues of learning on your own, Wyner mentions that he attended that $10,000 Middlebury College language program not once but thrice. That will certainly give a boost to a language learning career. Plus living in Vienna at the heart of multilingual Europe. Not too shabby indeed. Edited by s_allard on 30 August 2013 at 12:01pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 74 of 139 30 August 2013 at 2:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Lest I incur the wrath of the HTLAL police and inquisitor(s), I'll return to the OP. Part of the explanation of the high rate of abandonment of self-study methods is to be found in the nature of the self-study market.
Unlike the majority of language learners who learn their languages in schools, self-study learners are language hobbyists who often have no compelling reason to learn the language beyond personal interest. Anybody who buys a book with two CDs and really believes the blurb on the package that says you will speak like a native in a few months is either very naive or delusional. No wonder they run for the hills after a few lessons. The serious language learners, of which there are many here at HTLAL, often don't finish these books or methods because, I think, they don't need to. They've learned enough and are ready to move on to other resources. In passing, it would be interesting to read why @Arekkusu did not finish the Assimil challenge. I myself have a few Assimil methods that I've never finished because I never started. The one that did pique my interest a bit was the Advanced Italian but, as happens so often, I was turned off by the subjects of the dialogs and the voices. Plus the linearity and the monotony of the whole process made the whole thing seem boring. I felt that it was the sort of program that one could follow if confined to a cabin for six months. Now compare that to a multimedia-rich environment with ever-changing content. I'll skip the details because I'll be accused of repeating myself, but I think everyone gets the idea. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5380 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 75 of 139 30 August 2013 at 3:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't think this is true at all. As I've been asking this question outside of the forum as well, most of the people I know who have started a self-study method in the past are not language hobbyists. However, the vast majority used a method for what was at least a third language, their second language having been learned either through high school or because they moved to another country. I don't question that the self-study route is probably not the most common for people who suddenly need to learn a language for work, for instance. It should, however, be popular among people who need to learn for personal reasons, such as a new partner or family member speaking the language.
I quit because Assimil annoyed me to no end. I still managed to make it to lesson 80-something in the active wave, though. I found the lack of proper explanations really frustrating -- "just take it in and you'll figure it out later on your own, somehow, passively" is not a proper teaching method, and not something I want to replicate. The recordings were ok, although I only listened to a few. In parallel, I was reading a French-Romanian-German version of L'étranger (Camus), I was enjoying a very short magazine made for learners of Romanian, I was listening to online podcasts (Skeptici în România) and I would read online articles on electronics from www.go4it.ro -- which I now almost completely understand. Maybe I should thank Assimil for that anyway? Somehow, I'm not sure. Currently, I'm working with an equally frustrating book on Estonian by a company called Cornelsen. The book gives short grammatical explanations (which are mostly ok), presents lots of dialogues with no translation (frustrating and sometimes hard to understand), long lists of irregular nouns in various cases (baffling, to put it mildly) and an inordinate amount of exercises which are actually meant to be the main learning tool (I don't usually do exercises, but this is an essential part of the lesson). Edited by Arekkusu on 30 August 2013 at 3:25pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5261 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 76 of 139 30 August 2013 at 5:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
I think s_allard and I are fairly close to being on the same page here. All of the methods that Farber suggests in his book are almost all online now. Where I think the rub between us lies is in the expectations for a textbook. Some seem to think that it should be a "one-stop shop" with everything you need to take you to B-2. Myself and others are thinking more along the lines of a textbook being there to solve problems that come up elsewhere in your learning. Some are saying that the lessons need to be shorter and more fun. My way of thinking, inspired by Farber is to get my fun elsewhere and use my textbook/grammar to solve problems instead of being my primary focus. So, I don't expect it to be fun or hold my hand. Almost all textbooks/courses, by their very nature, are incomplete. No matter how good they are, they can't substitute for the real world and can only go so far in simulating real-life situations. In my opinion, a course should be structured in such a way as to provide building blocks, a foundation upon which the language can be built by the learners themselves. The Assimil Experiment was interesting. A bunch of people were very excited about it when kanewai announced it. They soon started to peel off until, at the end, there were only a handful who completed it as structured. Of course, the sample of experienced learners here on htlal is different than, and not representative of, the general public sample. Still, many of the participants found the experiment too restricting, didn't like the inadequacy of grammar explanations with Assimil, and/or didn't want to do or didn't like the "active wave". I always say that a course should be just one of several tools in your tool box- not the main tool or the only tool. That's where I see the disconnect- some would really like the course not to be just a tool but the whole box. I shall try to answer Arekkusu's question in a way that supports my advocacy of a multi-track method. The textbook should state openly that if you buy it and only use the book, you will not be proficient, not in three months, six months, or a year. The introduction should be honest and forthright in detailing what else must be done in order to learn the language fully explaining the multi-track method, why and how it works. Such honesty would be incredibly refreshing. For example, I have used the Pimsleur method before and found it useful for what it does well- help with pronunciation and generating automaticity (simulating conversation) in speech. I never believed that it would teach me the language and I always say that it should be used as a supplement. If I could change Pimsleur, I would change it to eliminate English as soon as possible, more quickly than it does. Get rid of the pick-up artist talk and the business travel related stuff. (The whole time I was in Brazil, I went to no meetings, had nothing dry cleaned and wrote no reports- I went to Brazil to get away from all that!) I would also have the advertising blurb say: "This course serves as a good complement to whatever beginner's textbook you are using. It won't stand on its own but if you use it along with a textbook, a grammar, listening and speaking, it will help you in your quest to learn the TL." I'd also make it all mp3 and lower the price by a third. Ideally, the textbook I would like to see would have a complementary website with exercises and links, tutorials on Anki and making parallel texts, an explanation of the many ways to utilize LR, podcasts and a bilingual and monolingual online dictionary link. If there would be another textbook by the same publisher for teaching English, there should be a website for the publishing company's learners of both the TL and English to gather and practice writing and speaking together, along the lines of lang8, and iTalki. Lenguajero, a now defunct website for Spanish/English learners, combined both. I imagine a course for English-speakers who want to learn Spanish and Spanish-speakers who want to learn English using indivdually designed courses for their respective TL's with similarly structured textbooks. Their learning links would be different but they could get together and practice with each other on a linked site both in writing, text chatting and voice chat. The updated Farber book should also serve as a guide for those who can figure out things on their own and don't need as much hand holding. All this stuff is what gets recommended everyday here. People pick and choose what suits their needs and many members are successful, whether they're using podcasts, anki, listening/reading, language exchanges, telenovela episodes, films, dubbed Buffy the Vampire Slayer dvd's or some combination thereof. We htlal'ers know what works for us and more importantly what won't work. We talk about it all the time. We write logs and threads about it. That knowledge could be condensed and shared with a much wider world. It would benefit a lot of people who would never think of posting on an internet language-learning forum. This will serve until the Star Trek holodeck is built and then language learning will be on a whole new level- really interactive and personal. I'll sit at a table of an outdoor café on the banks of the Seine and learn French from my own personal holographic tutor of the oo la la variety while sipping good wine and nibbling on some wonderful cheese. Of course, by that time we probably won't need to learn languages. Let's hope we'll still want to anyway. P.S. If you do write a beginner's course for Quebec French, please try to include a chapter on internet language/vocabulary- "lol speak" (messaging and text messaging), how to surf the web in French, email, twitter, google images, online dictionaries and grammars, how best to do a language exchange- online and in-person, etc. Edited by iguanamon on 31 August 2013 at 1:08am 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 77 of 139 30 August 2013 at 9:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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@iguanamon has said in exquisite fashion (con meridiana claridad) what I didn't dare write because of the lurking gendarmes. I totally agree with the contents of the post. I would just add that I think the notion of textbook will become obsolete because it will take the form of a pool of didactic resources to be used in any which way the user desires. Edited by s_allard on 30 August 2013 at 9:07pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 78 of 139 31 August 2013 at 3:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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After that inspirational and scintillating post by @iguanamon I got to thinking that, when you think about it, we here
at HTLAL already have one foot, if not both feet, in what I called the future of online language learning. Just think about how we use dictionaries today. Like most people here, I have a number of dictionaries, including a big, fat Oxford Spanish dictionary. It's excellent and is always present on my night table. But I find myself using it less and less because there are so many advantages to using the online resources. I won't describe these advantages in detail because all readers are fully aware of them. It's so easy to check spelling or usage and even pronunciation with a couple clicks. And if the letters seem to get smaller with passing years, you can just magnify the characters on the screen. The future is now. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5008 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 79 of 139 31 August 2013 at 5:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Lurking gendarms? :-D
I think a lot of what iguanamnon says makes sense. That is why I would like the most if the textbooks focused on their primary function: the core of the studies, the path of what you should learn to get to a certain level. Of course you'll always need more than that, that is why I'd love so much to see the links and ideas added to the textbook chapters as I said. Both to native things you should be able to handle at that point and to further info, exercises, only verb book (medulin just put in another thread an awesome link for a Spanish one. And I had thought I already googled quite all there is!) I find it strange that even publishers publishing more parts of what you can use don't make links for further study material. Such a huge publisher makes a series or two of regular textbooks with a workbook, grammar workbook, perhaps a vocabulary one, verb trainer, phrasebook and so on. But they don't even point people to that (like "for more exercises on the matter, open our grammar workbook on page 53"). They expect the teachers to do this which is bad both for self learners and for people who are in classes and realize the need for further practice. It is bad for the publishers as well because the teacher will only copy the one page for everyone (and fortunately there is one of the few merciful points in the copyright allowing teachers to do that). If they were more clever, they could make most students buy not only the textbook but further practice material as well. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 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 80 of 139 31 August 2013 at 8:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I guess they don't want to promote anything for free? :( And in printed books the links to, say, the most popular hotel sites or whatever can get outdated easily.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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