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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Vos Diglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5567 days ago 766 posts - 1020 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Polish | Message 57 of 69 13 April 2014 at 1:11pm | IP Logged |
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What I should have said was, many of his books haven't been translated to English, which of course isn't
equivalent to only being available in Polish. I'm guessing a lot more would have been translated to German. Yes, not actively studying it at the moment, as studying 3 languages whilst doing 4 subjects in my final semester of uni just isn't possible, at least at the level which I take as actively studying. Dutch and Spanish I already have a background in which is why I can somewhat manage to do a bit here and there and maintain my level or if lucky somewhat progress a bit, whilst Polish is, with the exception of a brief stint 2 years ago or so, an entirely new and bewildering beast. So once I finish my degree at the end of June, then I think I'll open the books again on Polish shortly thereafter. Can't wait! Don't know how you managed to learn a language (and one so foreign to German and French as Thai) simply through reading and without the use of grammar books. I really like grammar as I like seeing how each new language expresses itself, so going through grammar and course books for me is never a chore, but I have no idea how you could manage to learn a language and be able to actively use it without having its linguistic blueprint well and truly assimilated into your being. But I guess you did get to know it well, however instead of explicitly focusing on the grammar and then moving outwards, you started on the outside (reading, listening) and then made your way inwards. Do you consciously understand Thai's grammar or simply know what feels and sounds right and what doesn't? Either way, your achievements are mighty impressive. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5131 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 58 of 69 13 April 2014 at 9:13pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks :) but I don’t have any special abilities or even talent for languages, and my level in Thai is not so impressive either, there’s somehow a natural limit I can achieve in a language I’m not immersed in in some way or the other (living there, partner etc.). It’s a decent level, I have full access to Thai culture, and I thoroughly enjoy learning more about the language and the culture. I have one thing going for me, though, and that’s my high tolerance for ambiguity - and I use it shamelessly to my advantage!
As to your question, I’ve actually learned Thai mainly through listening; Thai is tonal, therefore I deemed it wise to focus exclusively on listening in the beginning. I didn’t open my mouth for a full 22 months at which point I already had good comprehension. Comprehension is still my strongest skill, but reading, speaking and writing have caught up. I’ve never opened a Thai grammar book. I have two or three lying around (bought only last year), one of them even in Thai, and I intend to read the Thai one at some point. I also don’t translate anything unless someone asks me to do so explicitly; therefore I almost never get to contrast Thai grammar with German or English grammar. Consequently, I couldn’t for the life of me make any general abstract statement about Thai grammar off the top of my head. I fully rely on Sprachgefühl (what feels and sounds right), as I do in German and mostly in English as well. In all those languages I just copy and adapt what I hear and read. The beautiful thing about absorbing grammar that way is that it just feels right as it is. I’m realizing this now with Turkish once more; Turkish is SOV, but it feels completely natural to have the verb in the end because I’ve never seen or heard anything else. I believe the problems with ‘alien’ grammar arise mostly when you go through your other languages (translation) or approach grammar as an algorithm which needs calculating instead of as a pattern which simply needs copying. From what I see in my lang-8 corrections and working with tutors, my grammar is fine. I’ve got my week points, but I see no interference from IE language patterns. Now I have to emphasize that I love grammar. I’m a language buff and I’m fascinated by grammar. I enjoy reading about bizarre grammatical features in other languages I have no intention to learn, and I also enjoy exploring grammar in my stronger languages. I will turn to Thai grammar at some point (maybe even soon) to satisfy my curiosity. However, experience has taught me to avoid explicit grammar instructions during the acquisition phase. But that’s just me, I’m not trying to argue for the ‘right approach to language learning’ here. I hope you’ll find time to return to studying Polish, it’s such a beautiful, soft language, and it has so much to satisfy you’re passion for grammar! I, for instance, love what Polish does to numbers and always get excited when I see a rare form (like czworgiem etc.) in my reading :)) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5131 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 59 of 69 17 April 2014 at 4:45pm | IP Logged |
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As already mentioned, about ten days ago I started to write daily entries in Thai on lang-8. Some of them were good, others not so. It depends a lot on the topic and whether I know relevant phrases. My last entry, written yesterday, was arguably the worst of all, and many errors were pointed out and corrected. This got me thinking whether I really use the corrections I receive effectively. What I usually do is to read through the corrections, "take mental notes", update the text, and then move on. Now it occurred to me that I might be missing out on lots of valuable input from native speakers, and I've been thinking about what to do differently.
One idea I've been toying around with today is to keep an error journal. I have powerful tools at my disposal: my corpus of familiar texts with more than 0.5 million words, and Google. These tools could help me bring the corrections to life, or investigate particular aspects in more detail. Here's what I did today (please note that the journal is highly experimental at this stage): 
The picture is small but should be readable. Basically, I used my corpus and Google to confirm usage patterns and find more examples. In the first correction, as a follow-up I also investigated the use of a particular particle after a certain phrase and concluded that it’s very common (something I wasn’t aware of). If I go ahead with this idea, I will just add to this file. There is no need to review, print, search etc. on a regular basis, but it's good to have it all in one place so that I *can* review, print, search etc. in case I want to. The benefit lies mostly in actually doing the research, looking at the examples, selecting them, copying them (maybe by hand as well) etc., I would hope. I'd also expect this exercise to have a tangible positive impact on oral production. It seems to take a lot of time to write an error journal, it took me about 50 minutes to write the two pages, covering only the first two sentences of my lang-8 entry. Another idea, which can be combined with the first one, is to write the text again, trying to consider the corrections received. I think I will give the error journal plus rewriting a try for a few weeks. Of course, this means that I will write fewer texts and spend more time on working with the corrections. If any of you have experience or views on what to do with corrections of written texts, please let me know. I'm pretty much groping in the dark at this point. 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 60 of 69 18 April 2014 at 12:04am | IP Logged |
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BTW, have you seen this technique? I believe the materials where it's from are the same as those mentioned here - I really recommend you to have a look, even if you don't do much/any LR or if you think your Polish isn't good enough yet.
I'm now scriptorium'ing a tiny "corpus" of *awesome* sentences, to mix and match them like this and use them for learning things that come in lists. (btw any other ideas/suggestions?) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5131 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 61 of 69 26 April 2014 at 7:57pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks, Serpent, scriptorum, shadowing etc. are all tools in my toolbox! For Thai. For Polish, I’m content with reading adventure stories for boys at a crazy rate. I’m also subscribed to a few Polish podcasts (mostly politics and current events). At this point in time I don’t intend to work on active skills since I’m working on my spoken and written Thai and simply don’t have the capacity to do two languages at the same time.
Polish: I’m still reading the Three Investigators, but there are only a handful of books of this series left. The stack of books I bought a few months ago has been ‘read down’ amazingly fast. I’m standing at 200k words this month so far and might end up at a bit under 250k, a healthy correction down from 300k per month during the first quarter. A good long term average goal would be 1-1.5 mio words per year which is about 80-125k words per month. But since I still enjoy going fast, there’s no need to scale back right now. Thai rocks, for a change. It was a bit on the back burner for some time (well, if one hour plus per day qualifies as being on the back burner) but has now made a fulminant comeback. I’ve had quite a few 30 minute tutoring sessions (no actual tutoring going on, just chatting) with two different tutors through italki. In addition to that, I’ve taken to writing a lot on lang-8, averaging 4 entries per week over the past 4 weeks or so. Nobody has reacted to my idea of keeping an error journal (or learner’s journal) as described two posts above and in a separate thread, but I find it very useful and will continue to do it. I finally seem to have found a constructive approach to working with my errors, and I’ve already noticed how this helps me to improve little by little. I think the key here is to complement whatever is proposed as a correction with many more examples from blogs and websites (using Google or my own corpus). This helps me to assess how popular that particular phrase is and gives me more context to really understand how it is used. I also add the best of those additional examples as cloze deletion cards to Anki to reinforce certain points and keep useful phrases fresh. I’m under no illusion that I will never repeat the same mistakes again, but I’m sure that keeping the error journal will help me to improve faster. After the discussion with Vos, I’ve dug out that Thai grammar I mentioned to him. It’s all in Thai, written for Thai linguistics students. I started reading it on the train to work and really enjoy it. It’s interesting to see how Thai works when looked at from a linguistics perspective. One thing I learned right at the beginning was that there are no adjectives in Thai, only verbs, which makes perfect sense considering how the language works. At the moment the author is plowing through all kinds of noun phrase complement constructions. I have yet to see a construction that is new to me, but it’s nice to somehow structure the implicit knowledge I’ve acquired over time. I’ll for sure raid the linguistics shelf of university bookshops when I’m in Thailand next month. Thanks, Vos :) Edited by Bakunin on 26 April 2014 at 7:59pm 1 person has 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 62 of 69 26 April 2014 at 9:33pm | IP Logged |
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(I wasn't speaking of shadowing and scriptorium but of "playing with the vocabulary" as siomotteikiru described.)
Oh wow sounds so cool about the Thai grammar for linguists! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5131 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 63 of 69 03 May 2014 at 7:53pm | IP Logged |
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Just a quick update since I’ve just updated my Turkish log and need to get on with other things… Polish is chugging along nicely; I’ve finished the Three Investigators and will now start with Harry Potter. I’ve never read or watched Harry Potter and am curious what the hype was all about. Thai continues to be my focus language with lots of lang-8 entries and tutoring sessions. I’ve also started reading various forums at the expense of HTLAL. There’s really no reason why I shouldn’t spend downtime on Pantip or some other Thai forum instead of on HTLAL…
Working with my learner’s log is very useful, I think it helps me to improve my writing little by little. It’s also a good repository of stuff I learn about the language, comments people make, explanations I get or find on the web. On lang-8, I often try to chat a bit with the people who correct my entries, for instance by asking them for further explanations or additional examples, or just by reacting to their comments. Any writing practice is welcome :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Mooby Senior Member Scotland Joined 6106 days ago 707 posts - 1220 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Polish | Message 64 of 69 03 May 2014 at 9:06pm | IP Logged |
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Well done on the massive amount of Polish reading!
I think your choice of material is a good way to maintain 'the flow'. I still read too much advanced stuff, so I might buy a Lemony Snicket book in Polish soon. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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