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How to get to fluency faster | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6038 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 17 of 77 14 July 2008 at 5:24pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Please remember that "natural approaches" have been statistically shown to be less successful than traditional approaches. Furthermore, the whole notion of natural approaches was that the best way to learn languages is the way children did, and psychology and neuroscience have determined that this is not possible -- the brain gradually looses the ability to do it between 5 and puberty. What Krashen and other proponents of natural methods use to support their continued use is the notion that different approaches suit different people -- different people have different learning styles. In the article, Krashen says: "I predict that a traditional class focusing on grammar would not have had this effect." which is opinion and nothing more. His use of the word "predict" here is interesting. When one reads the term "predict", it comes across as scientific -- testable. This is anything but. His "prediction" is about a single person, and regards a purely hypothetical, unrealisable circumstance -- we can now never teach Armando Hebrew through traditional methods. The word he is looking for is the much less scientific-sounding "believe". As an intelligent, linguistically aware man, I can't imagine that Krashen wasn't aware of what he was saying when he wrote this. So it's an opinion, but I'm not saying this opinion -- or yours, even -- is wrong. He may be right. Some people have successfully learned through so-called natural approaches, but there are certainly less of you than there are of others. But a lot of these success stories didn't give traditional methods a serious try. Please don't try to suggest that failing to learn in a high-school full of unruly, bored teenagers is proof that the method was wrong rather than the method. Natural approach classes recently have been full of motivated, mutually supportive learners. There is no science in this argument -- only conjecture However, I hold that to hold with the concept of learning styles is to look at things upside-down and avoid the difficult questions. The observed differences in learning styles are commonly taken to show that different factors help different people learn. What if it's not that? What if these differences in learning are not actually difference in what helps people learn, but what stops people learning? It is commonly posited that learning (and in particular language learning) will take care of themselves, and that there is no such thing as a teacher. I don't hold with this completely, but this view has to have come from some observed phenomenon. Surely that is the teacher as an obstacle -- or perhaps more correctly the teaching style as an obstacle. I feel that teaching on the whole has placed too much emphasis on acentuating the positive in teaching, while the positive is notoriously difficult to identify or pin down when they should have focused on eliminating the negative, which often becomes self-evident when you look for it. At the same time, when we try to study how successful language learners learn, we focus too much on superficial elements -- materials and methods -- and ignore the internal processes that the learner goes through, which are often quite different from the processes explicitly suggested by the method. I suggest that you don't really "learn by listening" but in fact listen then learn using an efficient internal process. I believe that this process is in fact universal, but that by attributing the success of a student to the method -- the superficial activities, we short-change learners. Rather than making the method universally effective, we kid ourselves into thinking that it is optimal for some people, and it's not our fault it's suboptimal for others, when really it's suboptimal for everyone, but some really effective learners succeed in spite of -- not because of -- the material. The more I look at Michel Thomas's work, the more I find that his courses match with the successful parts of my own internal language strategy and the more refine and improve that strategy. But I certainly agree with you on one point: conversation too soon IS disastrous. But "too soon" is defined by your learning path. If you only know the present simple, it's too soon. You end up saying "yesterday, I go to shop" and end up with bad habits. But the more complete the grammar tuition, the shorter this "too soon" period is. It's very easy to learn lexical features (words, phrases) as you go, but grammar is near impossible to guess or presume. That's one of the other good things about Michel Thomas -- he teaches grammar, not words. And not in the traditional way either. His techniques haven't been given the same academic scrutiny as "natural" or "grammar translation" methods, but as I was starting to say a minute ago, Michel has explicitly mapped out a language learning strategy that very closely mirrors the approach my brain took to learning language -- in any situation. I believe that silent periods are best left to the babies and that adults have better skills and abilities at their disposal for learning. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| alfajuj Diglot Senior Member Taiwan Joined 6238 days ago 121 posts - 126 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Taiwanese, French | Message 18 of 77 15 July 2008 at 7:41am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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The natural method or the passive method does work, but it is very very slow. First, you need the environment with lots of speakers of the target language, then you need many years. In the link
http://www.sdkrashen.com/articles/what_does_it_take/all.html The Mexican man in the Hebrew speaking restaurant took 3 years of hearing Hebrew all day long before he could speak well. I am sure that there are faster ways and since the topic of this thread is how to get to fluency faster, there are other, more efficient methods. I prefer using parallel texts plus the audiobook as one method. I start with children's books and build up to novels and other texts. For French, I started with "The Little Prince" and then to "The Stranger" by Camus. While reading I make word lists for vocabulary building. (I don't use a dictionary much, though). I add to this FSI for the step by step training in the structures. Add a grammar book or two and you're on the right track. I also like to learn songs in the target language. Each language is a little different, but for a non-exotic language, the above approach seems to work quite well. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| gogglehead Triglot Senior Member Argentina Joined 6102 days ago 248 posts - 320 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Russian, Italian | Message 19 of 77 15 July 2008 at 2:50pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Yes this is true, it is definitely quicker to engage. And Paul, "mistakes damage" hahah who are you, Tom Cruise? hagha
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| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6577 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 20 of 77 15 July 2008 at 6:45pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I know this was just a typo, but could you please clarify?
It's an interesting concept, but I don't see the practical application - how does thinking about it this way help us learn languages any better than the other way?
This sounds like old style teaching. Punish the mistakes. I can't speak for everyone, but I prefer reward the accomplishments.
I'm happy for you. But are you so sure that your method will work better for everyone? For example, those users of Pimsleur and FSI? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| FrenchSilkPie Senior Member United States Joined 6644 days ago 125 posts - 130 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 21 of 77 15 July 2008 at 10:55pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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In my own opinion, I believe listening before speaking, the Natural Method, is the best method to gain near native fluency, including accent, word usage, verbs, and remembering vocabulary.
But I must agree with the others in that it will take you longer than artificial learning methods, and it is not always feasible. If you are learning a language like Icelandic, its going to be pretty difficult to find materials to do so. It all comes down to this: artificial or natural knowledge? Do you have the time and patience to wait and listen for a couple of years? Do you have the resources? I do not think it is a method for everyone. If given the choice between having a silent period or memorizing endless verb and vocab lists, I would choose the natural method. In the end, yes, it will most likely take you longer. Yes, it is harder to see process. Yes, there may not be many scientists/linguists who agree with the method. For myself, I would like to model my language learning after the best learners of all: children, who, if placed in the right enviroments, can acquire the language with an excellent, near native ability within a few years. As teens/adults, we can even speed up the process with the aid of our native language. I would never recommend anyone use translation, or most of the methods I see today because it is all artificial knowledge. I would prefer to have natural language skills. Again, I suppose it is up to the learner. Spend your years struggling with listening to attain near-native fluency, or study verb lists and vocab sheets to get an artificial knowledge? Of course, some people flourish with constant studying and learning vs. acquiring. And again, it is not always possible. Whatever you choose, good luck! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Javi Senior Member Spain Joined 6008 days ago 419 posts - 548 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 22 of 77 16 July 2008 at 4:31am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I wonder if anyone here has gained fluency through that listening approach. I'm curious about because that's basically what I've been doing for the last two years or so, but I don't feel like I can get fluent that way. I suppose I'm going through an unusually long silent period, but it's fine, I'm learning English for fun, just to read content on the Internet and understand films, radio, etc. So, as soon as I finished with Assimil-I I switched to real material.
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| Sunja Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6112 days ago 2020 posts - 2295 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 23 of 77 16 July 2008 at 5:39am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Hey, Javi. Good job with the English there! It looks like you're learning my language and I your's.
I haven't tried Assimil. I was prepared to get it but it's a bit pricey. Now I'm discovering that I'm doing just fine without it. I have plenty of (painstaking) methods for vocabulary that (I suppose) language-learners have used before the dawn of Assimil, Michel Thomas, FSI. It's old-fasioned, but I doodle pictures of the word (if it's a noun) and hang it above my bed, so that I see it when I wake up or before I go to sleep. One method I have, more modern but perhaps just as quirky; I write words I hear out on paper and check them not with a dictionary, but by typing the word with a verb or connecting word in a search. Google gives me the word again in a context -- in a Blog or something. I've learned this works best if the word appears in a personalized context. I learned one of my first 100 words, "casi" this way, and got something rather vulgar: some Spanish speaker was trying to learn how to say "I almost sh--" in Mandarin. Needless to say I was able to deduce what "casi" meant and learned some other, more unimportant words as well (lol)! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6730 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 24 of 77 16 July 2008 at 5:29pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
As an ardent supporter of word lists, grammatical tables and other formal methods it may seem contradictory to sugegst that I may have attained at least something appoaching basic fluency in Swedish just by listening to Swedish television and travelling in the country since the sixties. But this is a special case: I'm Danish, I have had endless exposure to the language and the only reason that I didn't apply my usual techniques is that they seemed pointless. Why make word lists when I know practically all the Swedish words that I meet? However I still don't trust my Swedish enough to use it with Swedes (except when they simply don't understand spoken Danish), and the reason is that I still make silly mistakes, which I blame on the fact that I never did a proper study of the language. So in a way even my dubious Swedish illustrates that the pure listening method isn't enough. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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