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Language Learning With No Internet | ||
Tags: Internet | Learning Technique/Method | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| diplomaticus Newbie United States Joined 3967 days ago 23 posts - 31 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 1 of 18 15 July 2015 at 5:30am | IP Logged |
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I see interesting conversation about how the internet can help change learning and
all. What would you do if you had limited access when starting off? Presumably at more advanced levels, one would just read materials or watch movies at their level, etc... Say you were going to have limited or no access to the internet for 2 months when starting off in a language. What resource would you want to start off with? Mainly I am curious since I see lots of advice that seems sound to me about not waiting too long to start using native materials or conversing with people and all. Consider this a throwback question to a time before the internet, though you can stock up on materials until you venture off to be alone (so you could buy your pimsleur or assimil or whatever ahead of time and just have the audio on a laptop.) 2-4 hours of study time a day. How would you fill those hours knowing you can't hop online (so let's cross off phone apps like duolingo and all as well). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5322 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes  Speaks: German*, English | Message 2 of 18 15 July 2015 at 9:09am | IP Logged |
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If I had to spend 2 months without Internet Access and only intermittent access to electricity, the obvious choice would be an eInk reader loaded to the brim with interesting books and dictionaries for the target language(s).
If access to electricity won't be a problem, a cheap Android tablet with ePub/Kindle/PDF books reading apps and offline dictionary apps will do. My personal favorite is the Kindle, because it comes with excellent free monolingual and bilingual dictionaries for the major Western European and Asian languages and it's easy to generate popup dictionaries for rarer languages from tab-delimited text files. I'd also bring an MP3 player or a smartphone with an MP3 app and audio material for the language(s). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4641 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 3 of 18 15 July 2015 at 11:18am | IP Logged |
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I learnt most of my languages before internet existed, and there were, no e-books, no mp3, no Skype, no Anki, or any of these tools people take for granted today.
So how did I learn languages back in the pre-internet age? Of course, my resources were limited, but that doesn't mean they didn't exist. English, French and German I learnt at school, but in addition I could also visit my local library and find books, magazines and newspapers in these three languages. When I started learning Spanish, I did so with a correspondence course. That meant that I had a course book, cassette tapes as audio support and a work book. I would do the written exercises (writing by hand), send them by post and maybe a week later I would get them back corrected with the tutor's comments. A bit later on I attended a weekly evening class, which was my first face-to-face interaction with a Spanish person. When I started university, my access to language learning material got better, because I could use the library of the Romance language department as well as the general library. Here I could find books and other reading material in all the languages which interested me. And there were even VHS tapes with movies I could watch. Still, the approach was basically always the same: a beginner's course, a dictionary and an exercise book. So, to answer the question how I would start learning a new language today with no internet access, the answer is that I still do so, in the same way as I did back then. I buy a decent course book with audio support (Assimil, Teach Yourself, Colloquial etc depending on the language), a good bilingual dictionary and in most cases a comprehensive grammar book. I have a notebook for doing vocabulary lists and another one for doing written exercises. Even today with all the technology available, at a beginner level I find internet of less use than when I get to a higher level where I can start to enjoy reading native material, listening to radio/podcasts or watching movies. I don't claim that my old-fashioned way of learning is more efficient than using modern technology, but I've found that it is perfectly possible to learn a language to a decent level using traditional, "pre-technology" methods like the one I've always applied. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4523 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic | Message 4 of 18 15 July 2015 at 11:28am | IP Logged |
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The most important use of the internet is material collection for me. That goes both for
courses and for native material. But you can get to the same stuff offline, it's just more cumbersome and more expensive. If you can pile up beforehand, then I don't really see any restriction, at least for a beginner. Get something like Assimil+Pimsleur or some random coursebook (Teach Yourself, Colloquial, whatever) + Anki. Maybe add parallel texts. Graded readers would be nice to have if available. This will keep me occupied for a while. 2 months is no time. Edited by daegga on 15 July 2015 at 11:30am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 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 5 of 18 15 July 2015 at 12:46pm | IP Logged |
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During my study years in the 70s we had limited acess to a language lab, but no computers and no internet. But we had good libraries at the university where you could read books or scientifics magazines, and just beside the university buildings we had one of the two main libraries in Denmark (the other one is in Copenhagen). So for written sources we didn't feel that we had problems getting resources.
Television and radio did exist back then, but we had far fewer channels, and finding opportunities to listen on the air was definitely a problem - and we knew that we had a problem! I travelled a lot in Europe during those years, so in that way I got some acquaintance with my languages in their spoken form, but apart from that our main source were conversations and classes at the university. We took it as the way things were, but it was easy to see that the situation was problematic. The internet appeared before my second language learning period (from 2006 or so onwards), so this time I have much easier access to genuine sources in foreign languages, bilingual texts (although mostly with machine made translations) and the marvellous thing called Google. I have no idea about the way the language students of today integrate those resources into their study program, but they would definitely have made me more efficient if I could have had them during the years where I could spend all my time learning languages. Plus maybe my wordlist layout, which I didn't invent before 2007. And how would I deal with a two months long leave from the internet? OK, two months is a long time, but when I'm travelling I normally have very limited access to the internet, and I spend much of this short time on this forum - so I'm effectively internetless. Unfortunately I'm also far from my collection of dictioanries and grammars and old printouts, but I always carry a few micro dictionaries and some printouts around with me, and if I'm travelling in a country whose language I'm studying I spend a lot of time reading things and listening and - not least - trying to continually think in the local language. In other words I can do some kinds of intensive study, but the main focus in such a period will be on getting more fluent. If the internet AND television went down while I were at home I could survive on my collection of written materials, but I wouldn't have much opportunity to hear my languages, and my store of bilingual texts would sooner or later run out. For me the activity commonly known as speaking wouldn't be severely affected - I hardly ever speak anything but Danish (or once in a blue moon English or German) to other human beings at home so there wouldn't be much to loose from a blackout. And if HTLAL disappeared because its DNS weren't renewed? Hard blow, but I would probably continue working on my local copy of the homepage which I thought about some months ago, but still haven't published on the internet. The idea that everything you do with a computer should be published on the internet or in some cloud hasn't quite reached this remnant from long gone days. Edited by Iversen on 15 July 2015 at 1:08pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5230 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 6 of 18 15 July 2015 at 4:28pm | IP Logged |
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Before I really realized how much the Internet could be used to supplement language learning, I just read grammars and dictionaries. I still think that would suffice. For common languages, one can find native materials at libraries and bookstores (offline bookstores are tougher to find nowadays, but I'd manage).
What's lost? Access to the Online Oxford Dictionaries, which allows one to download native pronunciations, which I use to make flashcards. I could still use Anki without the Internet, though I couldn't find native pronunciations from Oxford and Forvo. But if left without Anki, I could make physical flashcards and simulate an Anki type system. It would be tough not having Amazon to use to shop for native materials. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7158 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 7 of 18 15 July 2015 at 7:09pm | IP Logged |
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Ogrim and Iversen cover my answer. If I couldn't get started with classes (as I did with French, German and Latin), then I'd relive my youth scouring libraries for whatever I could get my hands on.
I still remember the looks of puzzlement from my father when he saw my borrowed copies of Hippocrene's Tatar-English and Azeri-English dictionaries in my room, and I remember fondly the summer evenings teaching myself Hungarian for real with Jerry Payne's "Colloquial Hungarian" and often rewinding the cassette to rehear a passage or dialogue. All the while I was dreaming of the time when I could at last go to the library's language lab and book a session to use FSI Hungarian Basic Course since it wasn't in circulation. 3 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 8 of 18 15 July 2015 at 11:53pm | IP Logged |
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I just had a day without internet because my modem connection broke. Now that I have
it back I can say that what I did was just listen to some Assimil tapes, radio shortwave broadcasts from Norway and the Netherlands for some native materials. I do not have a TV set, so I guess that my house in this respect is more like before the 1920s than before internet. It was not so difficult. I never use e-books, no Kindle, or Nook or whatever. ALl of my learning materials are physical coursebooks with paper. If I needed another course or grammar book, I could just go to the bookstore. No internet needed at all, regardless of which era I live. My grandmother learnt French in the 1930s and 1940s as part of the school programme. No audio at all, so it was just physical books. My mother learnt Spanish in secondary school in the 1970s. It would not be very different, except that it would be records or cassettes with a cassette player than internet. If not want to write, there is also a typewriter in case you want a keyboard. She also gave me a book from the mid 1980s that was for tourists who wanted to travel to the USSR and the Eastern Bloc. It has a language guide for all of major languages there, in additionn to Russian, like Czech, Romanian, Croatian, Lithuanian, etc. No audio, but just text. It has nothing to be with age--I was born in the late 1980s and never use e-books or anything like most people my age (or even those older). I used a 1950s-style ribbon- ink typewriter where you have to realign the column manually, for my classes up until 2004. I also have a record player a few metres away from me, and a bookshelf for my language books, with span in publication from the 1950s to present. I have a physical radio that I can tune with short wave to get foreign language stations if needed. I should add that as a child I had no internet until 2001, not because we had problems installing it, but we never had a need for it. Up unti 2001 also, I had a 1985 Intel computer where the only thing that I did was play minesweeper. I think that those who have serious problems without internet just have not learned how to adapt without it. I do a lot of other things that others do not do, like I have not driven a car that has been fabricaded after 1986. My father also gave me a slide rule years ago, although most people do not use that. I am in my mid-20s and if I can adapt better than some 40 year olds without internet, that seems quite odd to me. Edited by 1e4e6 on 16 July 2015 at 12:00am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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