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Moving from B2 to C2 | ||
Tags: Advanced Level | Learning Strategy | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4292 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 105 of 177 22 February 2015 at 12:11am | IP Logged | ||
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About it being looney to try the C2 with no tutour, I am sure that there are some who
prefer to do their own thing and did their own self-study and passed the C2. I would not hestitate to try the C2 by myself with no help, and if the person who asked the original question has an interest to do so, s/he should choose that option. In fact, I would not mind doing the DELE C2, never having lived in a Hispanophone country. If I taught myself calculus, guitar, piano, bass, football, cricket, chess, i.e. basically all of my hobbies as well as my many things for academic life, what is so different about a language or languages? Honestly I think that anyone can teach themselves, if they really want to do so. And about money, how is someone in the mid-20s supposed to have so much money to afford all of these sources, also taking into account the financial status of the person? For example, how about someone who needs a C2 certificate for some reason more than just interest, perhaps a job, or whatever, and is already B2. Add in that this person is unemployed, 20000€ in debt, lives in a flat, has no family support, and/or is close to applying for government assistance. Or perhaps the person simply feels uncomfortable with speaking to a stranger on a regular basis, especially never meeting in person. To me the only reasonable idea is to do all self-teaching. B2 provides a good enough platform herefore, to mine eyes at least. As one of my NT2 (the official Netherlands agency for learning Dutch as a foreign language) grammar books (which stated that the book is also good for self-study) said on one page, Als er in wil is, is er een weg "If there is a will, there is a way" Edited by 1e4e6 on 22 February 2015 at 12:19am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5432 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 106 of 177 22 February 2015 at 1:16am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know how many times this has to be said: tutors are not for everyone. Hey, think of it as a
suggestion, nothing more. If someone tells me they learned diddly squat with a tutor and that they passed their C2 exam on their own, I say: kudos, you did it. I'm not wedded to tutors; I don't own a tutoring service. I fully understand that many people cannot afford the services of a good professional tutor. It's just that I, and many people, feel that good tutoring is a valuable tool. Nothing more. How long do we have to keep flogging this dead horse? I find it so strange that people want to argue against the idea of having someone help you improve your language skills. If we were talking about tennis, golf, dancing, acting, cooking or pretty much any sort of skill, we would all - maybe not all - welcome advice from coaches, experts or people more advanced than us. I see students rushing to take a masterclass with a passing great musician. Why wouldn't you want to spend a few minutes getting feedback about your playing from a great master? Now, if you feel you can get the same results on your own or from reading a book, that's OK because there are plenty of people who are lining up for the masterclass. Now, there is the other question of the importance of corrections or what I call corrective feedback. If someone keeps making the same mistakes over and over again despite correction, there is obviously a problem. Let's say that in French a student is continuously mixing up devant (in front of) and avant (before) or the Spanish delante and ante. The solution is to address the issue and work specifically on this point. As Kato Lomb clearly pointed out, uncorrected mistakes are dangerous. The reason mistakes keep coming back is that they were not corrected early enough. Fossilization has set in, and it becomes difficult to get rid of a bad habit. That's exactly why I think a tutor is so important. This is how you extirpate those bad habits before it's too late. Edited by s_allard on 22 February 2015 at 1:49am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7207 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 107 of 177 22 February 2015 at 3:15am | IP Logged | ||
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One of the undercurrents here is recognizing what separates the individual at B2 from C2. For each person, the specific shortcomings will be different.
Some people front load their language learning with lots of study and grammar. Others front load it with comprehensible input. Both strategies could continue to be effective for a given individual. For some though, one may need to change things up in order to shore up the gaps. How much help one needs in noticing the gaps and filling the gaps is highly individualized. Some like authority and will bow to it, trusting the authority knows best. Others have difficulty finding a trustworthy "helper". For those, the maxims of "know thyself" and "the buck stops here" are critical. Edited by luke on 22 February 2015 at 6:21am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5011 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 108 of 177 22 February 2015 at 4:41am | IP Logged | ||
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Fossilized mistakes are sometimes caused by teachers, not solved by them. I used to
have several such issues concerning areas explained by various teachers in a chaotic or just plainly wrong manner. What I needed was self study, lots of examples, I had to break the wrongly taught pattern and reassemble the pieces. As I said, a correction by a tutor can be part of the process, and sometimes helpful, but on it's own, it is not the most important part. It is not sufficient without the rest of the process, while the rest of the process (basically an explanation from a any kind of reliable source + enough exemples ) can correct the mistake I am making without the mistake being pointed out by someone else. I think the example with "devant" and "derriere" is a stupid one. I cannot actually imagine someone likely to fossilize such a mistake. A realistic example: Several uses of subjonctif. Most teachers (both natives and non natives) are explaining that in a weird way and it is a new concept for natives of many languages, such as Czech. I remember asking about it, I remember others asking about it and the answers, I have old notebooks. And now I can clearly see the way the mistake was created and fossilized. The teachers were the root of the problem. Sure, I asked my tutor a few questions on it and hopefully, I got rid of the last remnants having spent a nice hour with a coffee and my grammarbook. Of those two parts, I think the latter was more important. But it doesn't changed the fact the teachers are so glorified often without reason. Just as not all, by far not all, guitar or tennis teachers are good, many language teachers aren't good and the chances of meeting a bad one and finding out too late are too high. And I find it alarming how hard it is to get useful references when looking for a tutor. But there were areas where I found the advice of my tutor much more important, yet much less of the advice was given. The proper form of writing, the style and fitting into the required genre. Because that is something the preparatory books totally fail to explain and the usual courses are no better. Considering my tutor wasn't going as deep in the corrections of these issues as I had hoped to, I could have learnt quite as much had the resources been sufficient. It is like the audio. Before the internet, cds and so on, you needed a teacher so that you could listen to the language. Now, you need the teacher for proper writing style explanations until better literature on the subject is published. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5432 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 109 of 177 22 February 2015 at 5:27am | IP Logged | ||
I usually don't reply to this series of teacher-bashing posts and constant harping because I have long since given up trying to make sense of this stream-of-consciousness writing. But I will make an exception because this is really too much. I don't want to waste precious time with this but I do object to my example being called stupid. Well, maybe it's not my example after all because I wasn't talking about "devant" and "derrière". Where does this "derrière" come from? It's not in my post. This is so weird. I think there is a serious problem of French reading comprehension here. Quick, a tutor for written French is needed here. Those who read my post properly will note that I was actually talking about the confusion of "devant" and "avant". A similar problem that often occurs with the Spanish "delante" and "ante". The source of the confusion for English-speakers learning French is, obviously, the phonetic similarities of both forms. It should be pointed out that even native-speakers of French sometimes confuse these words. Here is an article from the Office québécois de la langue française on these two words: Avant et devant As the article points out, the distinction between the two terms can sometimes be a bit difficult to make because of subtle distinctions of time and space. It is easy to get these forms mixed up and unless corrected quickly, the mistake becomes fossilized. This is exactly why Kato Lomb called uncorrected mistakes perilous. Once you start confusing devant and avant, it is very difficult to separate them later. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| 1e4e6 Octoglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4292 days ago 1013 posts - 1588 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan | Message 110 of 177 22 February 2015 at 6:04am | IP Logged | ||
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I am a bit confused. "delante" and "ante" being compared to "devant" and "avant",
because "después [de]" and "antes [de]" in some of those cases are correct choices. I quote the exemples from the link: Exemples : - Nous nous reverrons sans doute avant ton anniversaire. - Le restaurant où je dois la rejoindre est situé juste avant l'église sur la rue du Pont. - La sécurité de ses enfants passe avant la sienne. - Pour Ariane, la famille passe avant la réussite professionnelle. In Spanish, the first one, using "ante" is incorrect: Volveremos/Regresaremos sin duda ante tu cumpleaños should be Volveremos/Regresaremos sin duda antes de tu cumpleaños For the second example, the Spanish using "delante" also does not sound right to me. It should be "frente/enfrente de" for "facing": El restaurante donde/en el cual/en el que tengo que encontrarla se encuentra/se ubica/está justo frente/enfrente de la iglesia en la Calle de la Puente/Rue du Pont "ante" is usually a very figurative and formal preposition, like how sometimes a priest might say in a church or sometihng: Que a nosotros la misericordia nos la déis cuando nos encontremos ante el Señor, a Vuestra Merced te suplicamos. or in a legal setting "before" the judge: Encontrándome ante Vuestra Señoría, Señor Juez, le ruego le perdone a mi cliente, por la impunidad que había hecho el día de los hechos ocurridos. The fourth example of that list, must be completely reformulated in Spanish to me, to sound idiomtically correct. I would translate that French one to Spanish as such: A Ariane le importa más la familia que el exito profesional. Just to add one more, the first example of the last list in the link: Le devant de sa maison est recouvert de briques. A simple "delante" would just sound wrong to me. It needs something else: La parte delantera de su casa está cubierta de ladrillos A bit better might be: Unos ladrillos cubren la parte de enfrente de su casa. These are rather formulaic things that I have seen in many of my grammar books, from intermediate to advanced. The last time that I have had any sort of Spanish or French formal education (never had a tutour), was in 2007. They never taught me any of these things, I did this by self-study, with a heavy grammar approach. I am not sure how this is impossible for a B2 aspiring to C2, or in the process of having left B2 and is in limbo between C2 (perhaps somewhere in C1 range) to figure this out, or at least have already learnt this. I have gone through more than 20 grammar books by myself after the B2 level, and these things come quite naturally and quickly now, I am not sure how a bit of self study can not but help with these prepositions if it is the argument that a tutour or some class is needed to figure out what exactly wherefore these prepositions are used. Edited by 1e4e6 on 22 February 2015 at 6:25am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5432 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 111 of 177 22 February 2015 at 6:32am | IP Logged | ||
With all due respect, there is some confusion here. The point discussed in my post has nothing to do with the translation of devant and avant into Spanish. We're talking about people mixing up devant and avant when speaking French. Much the same way some people mix up delante and ante in Spanish. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6584 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 112 of 177 22 February 2015 at 9:31am | IP Logged | ||
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An interesting thing about fossilized mistakes is that the first time I read about the concept, it was in the context of ALG and the "natural method" which advocates a silent period. They blamed the fossilized mistakes on early speaking. If you start speaking before you have a good enough grasp on the language, you'll make more mistakes that are morre likely to fossilize. I think this makes sense. Of course, delaying speaking is no guarantee that no mistakes are ever made. Maybe it can be useful in the later stages to get some feedback from a tutor and then set to work on the weak points oneself. Maybe the reason corrections have not been shown to be helpful in classroom studies is just because it's not the corrections, as s_allard indicates, but the focused training. Simply being corrected every time you make a mistake does nothing. But taking that weak point and sitting down with a cup of coffee and a grammar book, as Cavesa suggests, might just do it.
There are other ways of getting the feedback, for people who canno afford a tutor. Joining a writer's community online, for example. And a lot of stuff can be gained from just googling expressions one wants to use in writing, or using websites like linguee.com. 8 persons have voted this message useful |
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