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The Cheating & Consolidating Method | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5390 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 9 of 136 31 July 2014 at 5:40am | IP Logged | ||
We have one of these in my Irish study group. She looks scornfully at anything "dumbed down" for learners and only enjoys "authentic" texts. Sort of by accident the group leader assigned an incredibly difficult poem as reading this past week (written in the mid-18th century). Even the native speaker said there was nothing really to be gained linguistically from it seeing that much of the vocabulary was outdated or had meanings that are vastly different now. It was very discouraging and I was questioning if I wanted to even go since that's not what I'm looking for right now. The only one who voted to keep studying it for the following week was the authentic text enthusiast. There is a certain joy in taking something that's practically indecipherable and finally puzzling out the meaning but that's unrelated to actually learning a language. I'll stick to my cheesy readers and teen dramas for now. 4 persons have 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 10 of 136 31 July 2014 at 6:25am | IP Logged | ||
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Tell her about linguistic enigmas.
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| Arnaud25 Diglot Senior Member France Joined 3841 days ago 129 posts - 235 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Russian | Message 11 of 136 31 July 2014 at 7:06am | IP Logged | ||
Would you be kind enough to give the link to the french transcripts, I can't find them. Btw, if you like absurd old cartoons, you can find the transcripts of the Shadoks here (with a few mistakes, unfortunately). Each episode is very short, generally 2 minutes, you can watch few of them on YouTube Edited by Arnaud25 on 31 July 2014 at 8:27am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5765 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 12 of 136 31 July 2014 at 11:17am | IP Logged | ||
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That's pretty much it.
Personally, I wouldn't have made the visualization linear but put a circle between 'cheating' and 'consolidation' to indicate that you go through many, many cycles using different techniques or in different lexical fields. Because I think that exactly is the issue why some people seem to find it impossible to go from textbooks to ressources where instruction is secondary at best. [That could be media, be it aimed at native speakers, learners or a specific target audience, but also direct interaction with native or proficient speakers.] I think the important point is that for a long time, you'll have to make use of such strategies everytime you're confronted with something new in your target language, but also that knowing how to cheat smartly makes it possible to actually deal with it. Interaction with native speakers: Talking about topics you know well. (Guessing the details from your general knowledge of the topic.) Talking to people you know well. (You usually can read their body language well and they yours, apart from knowing details of each other's knowledge, personal experiences and opionons.) Being part of a group setting. (More time/clues when observing others talk about a topic before somebody might want to talk to you about it. Very helpful when another native speaker doesn't understand what the first native speaker was trying to say and asks for clarification. Usually there's somebody whose speech style and sentence patterns you can copy and modify without feeling like a parrot.) 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 13 of 136 31 July 2014 at 1:12pm | IP Logged | ||
You must click on the link I provided on the previous page for the French site and then click on an individual radionovela you want. Then you scroll down to the pdf's et voilà. For the other languages on the site you'll need to at least know enough to translate the title to find it there and follow the same procedure. Deutsche Welle is ending it's language services to Africa on January 1, 2015 except for English and a dramatically scaled back French service. Get these while you can. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arnaud25 Diglot Senior Member France Joined 3841 days ago 129 posts - 235 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Russian | Message 14 of 136 31 July 2014 at 1:32pm | IP Logged | ||
1 person has 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 15 of 136 31 July 2014 at 2:34pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think that emk has done a great job of explaining a learning process for written French (or any language). My only
question is, like that of iguamon, why the use of the word cheating. I know that emk has addressed this question, but to me this process called cheating is what I would call structured or systematic acquisition or simply acquisition. This so-called cheating is contrasted to learning by brute force, i.e. just listening or reading with the idea of absorbing the language naturally. But the latter has never worked. Following a program or method (e.g. Assimil), using transcripts, flashcards, dictionaries, subtitles, tons of input and repetition are the foundation of any effective learning strategy. I would add graded readers and the explicit study of grammar with a good reference work. All in all, great stuff but I maintain that it is not really cheating. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 16 of 136 31 July 2014 at 2:49pm | IP Logged | ||
That's exactly what I recommend. I have once decribed language learning as a military campaign where you want conquer a town. First you assemple a lot of soldiers and cannons and stuff, and when you have enough of that you smash the walls and start pillaging. With just a few words at your disposal you can't read ordinary texts or listen to TV or radio for fun so your first task is to get to that stage as fast as possible - and 'cheating' with popup dictionaries and bilingual texts is a perfectly legitimate way of getting there fast. Once you can have fun with a language the intensive studies should be supplemented with lots of extensive activities because it is the use of a language that keeps the hard-won vocabulary accessible. And funnily enoughly this will happen even if you don't see the exact same words which you had in Anki or on some kind of list, or you saw them so long ago that you had forgotten them. Skill in accessing your hidden stores is a general ability - it isn't tied to specific words which you have seen recently. And of course the same applies to the activation of language: somewhere you should have a store of words and expressions, but being able to recall them at will is a general ability. 5 persons have voted this message useful |
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