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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| fredomirek Tetraglot Senior Member Poland Joined 6905 days ago 265 posts - 264 votes  Speaks: Polish*, EnglishC1, Italian, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Japanese | Message 2 of 15 14 February 2008 at 2:14pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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I think that books originally written in the target language are best because it's simply the most natural language used in them and some culture information as well usually.
For Latin American Spanish I may suggest Cien años de soledad by Gabriel García Márquez (from Colombia). The book is long, audiobook is available in the Internet and it's so famous that there are certainly many translations into different languages. However, it uses quite difficult language sometimes (for me at least). 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| biki2 Diglot Groupie United States vatoweb.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 7021 days ago 57 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Arabic (Written), Catalan, Arabic (Egyptian) | Message 3 of 15 14 February 2008 at 3:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Is the audiobook you've used read by a text-to-speech engine or a real person? The version I've heard is TTS and it's hard to listen to for any prolonged period. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6438 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 4 of 15 14 February 2008 at 3:12pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
There are a couple of important factors. One is that you want the Spanish to be well-written, not an over-literal translation from English. If Spanish was the original language, the more literal the translation is into English, the better (within reason - it should still be comprehensible English to you).
A good translation, in this context, is one that's fairly close to the original, and also reasonably decent sounding in the language it's been translated to. To give an idea using just English, say the original sentence was "He walked outside, squinting into the bright morning sky". A good translation, translated back into English, would be quite similar. A bad one might become "He glared at the sunny air as he went outside". Or, a bad one might be the foreign equivalent of "He outside walked, squinting at bright morning sky" -- just as one can write English incorrectly, other languages can be written incorrectly too. (Be careful - what's correct English, translated word-for-word, is rarely correct in any other language, and vice versa).
Either is ok, as are books written in 3rd languages.
"The Little Prince" is great in Spanish; I don't know if there are Latin American accented recordings of it. The English translation that I've seen is a little so/so (it was originally in French), but usable. "Dejados Atras" is tolerable; it's a translation from English to Spanish, and quite literal. I can't say how good the Spanish is. I don't remember if it's Latin American or Spanish Spanish (not that they're particularly different - it's comparable to British vs American English). I Listen-Read it last month, when I visited the States, so it's back to the library by now, and biographical information on the narrator seems hard to find. It's not a particularly well-written book (it's a page turner - comparable to Stephan King's or Dan Brown's work - not high literature), but it's fairly readable. Whether or not you find it useful probably depends on whether you can stomach a book of its sort which tries to treat the evangelical Christian version of the rapture as fact and occasionally wanders into a few pages of biblical prophecy in a row; I managed, and I'm not of that particular faith. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6438 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 6 of 15 16 February 2008 at 4:44am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
What I'm currently doing is to read a chapter at a time; I load all of the sound files into my software to play them, which is set up to automatically continue to the next one, and then read the chapter in the parallel text along with it. I then continue to the next chapter. I -don't- pick up as many details as when I'm reading a parallel text without audio, at my own speed (an example of how I do with that is here, with transliterated Chinese). However, for the same amount of time, I get exposed to much more of the language, I don't overgeneralize based on too little input, and generally, I find L-R more enjoyable, productive, and last but not least, sustainable (I can't intensively compare parallel texts for hours on end). I generally go straight through, pausing and/or rewinding primarily when there are external interruptions. I'm still experimenting with steps, and this is heavily patterned after atama-ga-ii's advice. Still, at the risk of being the blind leading the blind: Prerequisite: pronunciation. I didn't do this first for Spanish, and found that to be ok, as the sounds weren't that exotic for the most part, but I did do it eventually. Make sure you can hear all the contrasts. Just as in English, if you can't distinguish 'shit' from 'sheet', or 'bitch' from 'beach', awkward situations can result. As a learner of Spanish, you want to make sure you don't mix up ano and año -- (anus and year); at least one member of this site has previously done so: when asked how old s/he was, s/he claimed to have 19 anuses, rather than years. Perfection doesn't have to be the goal, but you _need_ to be able to distinguish all of the contrasting sounds for different words. I apologize for the crude examples, but I think that they serve to underscore the importance. Secondarily, it's good to have an idea of how the sounds differ from English; the Spanish b/v isn't the same as either of the English letters. A basic study of phonetics is not strictly mandatory, but I've found it very useful. For more far-flung languages, phonetically, like Polish, I've found it much less frustrating to study pronunciation first. I've made 2 L-R attempts at Polish (I'm currently doing the second); during the first, not being able to properly distinguish some of the sounds caused a lot of unnecessary frustration. First step: know your text; read it in English. The more familiar you are with the text in advance, the more you can concentrate on language rather than plot as you study. This step is optional, but helpful. Second step: read a small amount of the text in Spanish, while listening to Spanish audio. I'd recommend -not- skipping this step. I originally thought it was only useful for finding word boundaries, and skipped it for Polish, as I could do so immediately. However, it's also vital for getting the correspondence between spelling and sound into your head (Spanish is fairly easy for an English speaker, in this regard, fortunately), and even more than that, being able to -quickly- find where in a paragraph the text that matches what the speaker is saying is. Third step: The absolute key part of this step is to have the audio in the target language, and listen to it, as well as a text in a language you know. Parallel texts are far preferable to non-parallel ones. During my earliest experiments with L-R, I'd just read along in English, and this does help: I found myself thinking in reasonably coherent German for an hour after having done about 3 hours of L-R with it. What I now find more effective, -if- I can do it without breaking my concentration, is to read a sentence, clause, or paragraph (depending on the complexity, speed of the speaker, etc) in English, and then follow along -at exactly the same time- as the audio in the text in the target language. I find more correspondences this way (a lot of words are either written or pronounced similarly to English, but not both), and everything sticks better for me. If this is too difficult (it was for me the first time I tried L-R'ing 'The Master and Margarita' in Polish, after having read the book once in English, and skipping pronunciation and step 2, above), I find it extremely distracting, and it's better to just read the English at as close to the same time as the audio as possible (exactly the same time is impossible, as word orders differ, etc). The -important- thing is to do what feels most effective to you; if something is boring, or too difficult and frustrating, adjust the difficulty up or down accordingly. Finally, what atama-ga-ii has said about love is important: the more you genuinely enjoy your material and the language, the better. It's the difference between hours of fun and joy, and a painful slog. Later steps: I've butterflied between languages, partly due to a lack of L-R materials. Hence, I'm yet to get to this stage via L-R, though I'm committed to do so with my current experiment. I have no advice to give on this stage, yet. Feel free to ask more questions, or for clarifications.
I've found (my interpretation of) Dr. Arguelles' shadowing technique to be extremely useful. I'm currently not doing it, as I'm trying to focus on Polish, and only Polish, and only via L-R (plus pronunciation study and referring to grammars, as atama-ga-ii advocates), but it's the single best technique I'm aware of for making speaking in a language become more automatic, and it's rather good for improving pronunciation (my German accent went from horrendous to good enough to routinely get compliments after a week of shadowing - and I'd already had a fair amount of exposure, taken a month long intensive course, etc, beforehand; likewise, I got a decent accent in Persian, as confirmed by multiple native speakers, after perhaps a couple of weeks of shadowing, with no previous significant exposure). Dr. Arguelles' scriptorium technique is also very useful; I've found it to be great for pointing out where my mental model of a language is wrong, and allowing me to work on correcting it. I've watched movies in English with foreign subtitles, and vice versa, as well as movies in languages with subtitles in the same language as the speech. If you like movies, it's ok (and you should check out the dvd movie method threads on this site). I personally get a headache if I watch too many movies, and don't enjoy very many of them, but people vary. There are tradeoffs: books have richer narrative description, and more words in the same amount of time. Movies let you learn more from non-linguistic cues. And, something that can cut in either direction: books tend to be narrated very clearly, in a consistent way, usually in a fairly high register, with next to no background noise; movies are more likely to have dialect, whispers, people talking over explosions, etc. Edited by Volte on 16 February 2008 at 4:48am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6438 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 8 of 15 16 February 2008 at 3:36pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||
The small segment parts don't seem at all like her method to me, but you should ask her, and report back here - PM me for her email address.
Assimil is all-L2, so the editing is just to remove gaps. I'm not convinced about the shadowing L2 while looking at L1 then L2 either. Also, shadowing in the Professor Arguelles sense, as I understand it, is repeating at the -same- time, rather than after; otherwise, you can't pick out small pronunciation errors. Furthermore, he dislikes the Assimil notes; in the newest editions, there are far too many, many of which are obvious. Aside from that, it looks ok; but it would be better to ask him (ask under 'Lessons in Polyglottery'; he doesn't appear to reply to posts elsewhere).
I'd read more than a clause for step 2; I'd probably recommend doing at least 5 minutes. I did a bit over 20 for Polish, and found that to be more than sufficient - but I'd had some previous L-R experience with Polish, and on the same book at that, so I don't know how representative that is. The point is familiarity: can you identify word boundaries? Look away, listen, and -quickly- find your place halfway through a paragraph? Other than that, I recommend not neglecting pronunciation. Also, looking at grammars -after- having spent a while Listening-Reading is very useful; it helps give you more of an idea of what to expect. What I do with grammars is skim them, look at things like verb conjugations (not trying to memorize them), getting an idea of any major patterns, how nouns and verbs change, the meaning of any prepositions that I keep seeing but have trouble with, etc. Also: both atama-ga-ii and Professor Arguelles are much, much more experienced than I am; I strongly recommend asking them directly. QUESTIONS:
Here is his description of his scriptorium technique.
Not quite, though you're getting there; I also can't speak authoritatively for other people.
I'd expect it to be a waste of time, but I may be wrong. Listening in multiple foreign languages is something atama-ga-ii advocates; ask her.
Yes, it's less effective. See 4 posts on the subject, all by atama-ga-ii under her previous username (search for 'idiolect'): http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=6366&PN=0&TPN=1 http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=6366&PN=0&TPN=8 http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=6366&PN=0&TPN=11 http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=6366&PN=0&TPN=15.
The advantage of Assimil is that it introduces grammar and vocabulary in a relatively logical way. Starting with simpler material (Assimil, or word-for-word translations for L-R) is helpful. Professor Arguelles also recommends shadowing audiobooks, to improve and maintain languages.
Shadowing is good for improving speech. Atama-ga-ii's method is good for increasing comprehension. I strongly suspect atama-ga-ii's technique is good for conversation; I found myself able to write short posts in Spanish after about 10 hours of Listening-Reading (don't expect the same - I already spoke Italian, which is extremely similar, and 10 hours is really a lower bound). 1 person has voted this message useful |
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