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Language Learning Orthodoxy You Ignore | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 57 of 116 03 December 2014 at 3:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think you can't do without either input or output. Reading is simply the best way to
accrue good vocabulary, but it simply won't teach you to pronounce something properly. Reading the car manual doesn't mean you can fix it. Practice makes perfect. So you need output and a good tutor/corrector who pays attention to your personal mistakes. In this sort of thing it's never either/or and that's what bothers me about this discussion. I would say you need both a good tutor and lots of native input. The reason you need the tutor (personal tutor, I personally don't like group classes because they're not customizable) is because there are many mistakes you will not be aware of, and even through input you won't find them. They are also a model for how people speak. Often it's even better to have had various tutors (genders, people) so that you get a feeling for the differences in spoken register. I don't like homework of the variety "here's the text do the questions". That's way too common in classes. I get that people do that to beginners because they want them to study the rules perfectly, but perfection is such a long way away especially at the beginning. The tutor is there to point things out to you you didn't know about. That's their job. Even the most self- critical among us do not notice everything, and we all make stupid mistakes. I am self-critical enough to notice about half of my mistakes and I have done extensive writing in various languages besides my native one and English (I have experience writing complex material in both), and even I still miss a ton of mistakes in them. You simply have another view as the writer, and that's why we have editors. My tutors function more as editors than as teachers at my level in certain languages. The advantages this has also carry over to other languages - I could probably come up with a reasonably good text in Greek, reasonably coherent, but with a lot of mistakes concerning articles/prepositions and a bunch of vocabulary holes (which I solve by means of a dictionary). The reason is because I already have a certain style that carries over from my better languages. You can even carry this over to creative writing (for example I write poetry in Russian occasionally, and the problem with that is mostly stylistic issues and vocabulary! Some people who read it commented that "despite the fact you lack a whole lot of the required register, the actual writing is easy to you". This is because writing is something you can practice! Output is a good thing here. The native input is especially necessary at the intermediate and higher levels because this is where your vocabulary starts to show big gaps. Collocations are important but to understand them you simply need to read a lot because a lot of them will occur in writing. I've also found that Arguelles' advice is very pertinent: find books at your level. I don't even mean graded readers, simply stuff that you can read without too much effort. If you need to look up more than 5~10 words on a page, it's too difficult. 98% is the golden number in my view. (I agree with Arguelles that it shouldn't be much lower, not because of the drop in understanding, but because the small drop in understanding means it will be very annoying to continue reading when you miss so many details). An example: I recently read two novels in Russian, one being the Master and Margarita (hard) and A Foreign Woman by Dovlatov (easy). They're both good writers, but the latter was much easier to read and despite the fact M&M is much more intellectual and layered, reading the second book was much easier and enjoyable for me. And I liked M&M! Arguelles then focuses on literature and polyliteracy, and this is where I deviate from him - I think you simply need to read what is pertinent to you and increase the complexity gradually. For example I have written things about literature before - on Master and Margarita of all things (!) which I read in Russian, which is about at the level of a high school student in his final year of foreign language studies when he has to read proper literature in the original. But that's one topic and I actually connected it to Bulgakov's criticism of the Soviet attitudes toward religion and atheism (in the Netherlands, atheism is common, but religion was never banned or looked down upon in the same way as during Soviet times). You can do this for loads of topics: permafrost, gardening, F1 racing - pick good topics, especially ones you're reasonably knowledgeable about but could do with some deepening of the vocabulary of, and you're set. With regards to two more things: speed is something that people shouldn't value in and of itself. Speaking faster doesn't make you better - it just means you slur more. I slur enough as it is, I do not need a speed increase in my speech levels. I can handle high-speed conversations in my better languages. What you need is clarity, precision and ELEGANCE. At a high level tutors are inescapable for the reason that they will be able to tell you the exact way you can phrase something. Or should. In Russian, I already use a wide variety of expressions correctly (this always leads to good fun when people ask "how do you know that") but equally often it happens that stylistically I can't always pull them off. At this level your grammar should be a point of proofreading (and you'll always miss stuff). This is not about speed, it's about clarity. If you're presenting orally, it's better to err on the side of caution and speak more slowly. Good orators do not speak very quickly. They speak slowly, narrate clearly, do not slur, enunciate every syllable and weigh their words well so that every word hits the jackpot. Speaking too fast usually implies nerves. Make sure to write clearly, and if you are speaking, doubly clearly. About the attitude - I'm sorry, but our skills do not exist to impress snobs on the internet. That's a very crude formulation and I am aware of it but this is how it is. I am not talking to people to be consistently judged on whether I pronounced every soft r correctly. That's not the issue. "Foreigners make such terrible mistakes" is a sign that you are being very chauvinistic and unhelpful towards people who are making a conscious effort to adapt to you. It's a very selfish response to someone who is showing good intentions. Maybe in the case of English many learn it for the financial benefits, but by and large that is a minimal part of people learning foreign languages. If someone told me to my face right now that "I make such terrible mistakes in Romanian/Russian/Lao" I would probably punch them and walk away. I don't want to make an effort to be subsequently spat on because I "didn't cross my dots correctly", so to speak. Tutors should be strict on mistakes (the best tutors are crazy good with red pens) but they should not be impolite. There's a difference between being strict (a necessary quality in a tutor) and indecent (repulsive). Of course, you also get the opposite "за русский язык тебе пятерка!" but you just say thanks and move on in that case. Often I like Eastern European tutors because they are generally very attentive to this kind of detail in writing (Romanians and Russians jump to mind. The French and Germans are good at this too). Edited by tarvos on 03 December 2014 at 3:56pm 9 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 58 of 116 03 December 2014 at 4:40pm | IP Logged | ||
(By speed, I meant the speed of acquisition, not the ability to speak fast.)
Yeah, the language also needs time to grow in your mind. 3k pages in three years are different from 3k pages in one year. I'm not saying one is better than the other, but they're different. Read too little and there won't be enough consistency. Read too much/too fast and you'll get more enjoyment than actual improvement. 4 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 59 of 116 03 December 2014 at 7:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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For some strange reason a few people have taken umbrage to the idea of my calling certain mistakes
made by learners terrible. It's not as if I go around telling people I don't know that they speak terrible French. I'm invariably polite and let things go by that I would never let my students say. Let me give a specific example of what I call a terrible or particularly egregious mistake made by an English-speaking friend of mine while speaking French to a large francophone audience. Talking about a musician who plays many instruments, he said: "Il joue plusieurs instruments comme le trombone et l'organe." I don't think he noticed the ripple of laughter in the audience. In my mind, mixing up l'organe and l'orgue is a terrible mistake. And one that this person will keep on making unless he is corrected. I should point out that there is another mistake in the sentence, albeit a relatively minor one, that I would not consider terrible. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 60 of 116 03 December 2014 at 7:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's at most a funny mistake and could happen to everyone. Of course people will laugh,
but is that a sin? Absolutely not. It would be if a mistranslation caused a war. That's not what this is and that's why we put special guidelines on translation work. 5 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 61 of 116 03 December 2014 at 8:06pm | IP Logged | ||
Slips of the tongue involving words like organ, organism, orgasm and orgy seem to happen in any language where they are similar. At least he had the most innocent combination possible (whether he knew the correct term or not). But as I said, just because he speaks with confidence and fluency, you can't conclude that he thinks he says everything correctly. He would find public speaking hard if he worried about making mistakes. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5227 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 62 of 116 03 December 2014 at 8:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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Gentlemen, you can't fight here--this is the war room!
At the very least, I think we can all agree that people who make linguistic mistakes should be drawn and quartered. Edited by ScottScheule on 03 December 2014 at 9:15pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4888 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 63 of 116 03 December 2014 at 9:35pm | IP Logged | ||
This is where the drills from FSI really helped. They burned a lot of patterns into my brain so that certain patterns just felt natural. I have the same issues you have with just reading - for me the big issues were gender, pronouns, and prepositions. I can recognize them all easily enough, but needed the drills to internalize how to use them. 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 64 of 116 04 December 2014 at 3:06am | IP Logged | ||
This is a very important observation. Not everybody sees mistakes in the same light. Obviously, we are not talking about going to war over mistranslations here, but we are discussing just how important certain mistakes are. One could say that mixing up organe and orgue is not such a big deal. Everybody makes mistakes, and if we get a good laugh out of them, there is no problem. Therefore there is no point in pointing out the mistake to this person. My own position is that when I attempt to speak a target language, I aim to say what a native speaker would say. Native speakers of French will make certain mistakes, but none would mix up organe and orgue. People laugh at this mistake because it is ridiculous. I don't want to appear ridiculous when speaking my target language. If I make a major mistake, please, somebody, tell me. I would be mortified but at least I won't make the same mistake again. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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