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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| icing_death Senior Member United States Joined 5860 days ago 296 posts - 302 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 97 of 164 30 March 2009 at 7:45am | IP Logged | |||||
As aYa stated earlier, listening is the hardest skill to learn. Your claim is therefore less believable to me than learning to read in 10 days. Please define what you mean by "understand" here. 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 98 of 164 30 March 2009 at 8:06am | IP Logged | |||||
I could follow the plot; I'd miss some words and details. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| icing_death Senior Member United States Joined 5860 days ago 296 posts - 302 votes Speaks: English* | Message 99 of 164 30 March 2009 at 8:09am | IP Logged | |||||
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Please estimate what percentage of the content you understand.
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6438 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 100 of 164 30 March 2009 at 8:28am | IP Logged | |||||
I've been almost entirely ignoring spoken Polish for quite a few months; my ability to understand spoken Polish has definitely declined sharply, and I expect it would take me a few days to bring it back up to the previous level. But here's an attempt at a few estimates anyhow. Slang: 0% Dialect: no idea, I haven't heard any. Written factual material: varies by subject. I grabbed three random articles from Wikipedia (using 'Losuj stronę'). http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nowotwór_łagodny -- stuff on benign tumors. I understand some words, but don't properly understand it. http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_ścienny_Degi -- some quite specific medical test. My initial understanding was quite low; after looking at a few of the links on the page, I have a rough idea, but wouldn't say I properly understand it. http://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wielowątkowość -- I'd mangle it if I tried to translate it into English, but I get the gist and many of the details. Novels: beyond me; I can pick out words, but not follow the plot. Radio: I started being able to understand 30-second news snippets after a few days of studying Polish; I'd need to check where I'm currently at. TV: I'd need to check. Films: largely beyond me (films are usually harder to understand than random TV shows - more registers of the language, more background noise, more shouting/whispering, more slang, more regionalisms, etc; there are exceptions, of course) Edit: I left songs out of this list; I understand words/phrases from a fair percent of them, but generally wouldn't claim to understand them (understanding singing is significantly harder than speech, early on, and songs tend to use way more poetic language). Edited by Volte on 30 March 2009 at 8:37am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ortho Groupie United Kingdom Joined 6349 days ago 58 posts - 60 votes | Message 101 of 164 30 March 2009 at 1:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't have anything particular against this method and have heavily relied on both audiobooks and parallel texts where available (though perhaps not "The Method"), but none of the above comes anywhere near meeting my personal definition of the word "understand."
Perhaps my definition is too strict, but I feel that if I can't listen to a spoken sentence and then take that sentence apart into every single word that makes it up, I don't understand it. Getting the gist of the content is like 5% of "understanding" it imo. I feel pretty strongly about this, because I have been pushing my way through the waist-deep swamp of the other 95% for a long time now. :-( 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 103 of 164 30 March 2009 at 2:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
Dividing it into every single word is easy for me (for some languages, like German and Polish, even with almost no prior study, because of the way they're pronounced). Understanding a sentence and understanding every word in it don't have a one-to-one relationship, though. With idioms, you can understand every word but have no idea as to the meaning. With sentences like "I think pines, birches, X, aspens, and Y are great kinds of trees!", even if you've never heard the words X and Y before, you'll have a fairly decent idea of what's being said. I routinely read content in languages where I simply do not know anything approaching every word (such as Spanish); if I get what I was looking for out of it (such as a solution to a technical problem), I consider myself to have understood it meaningfully. To make the extreme case: when I'm reading in English, there are often words I don't know - new technical terms, archaic words from novels, etc; sometimes the meaning is entirely clear from the context, and sometimes it isn't. However, I really don't have many qualms about claiming to understand English; any definition by which I don't strikes me as quite useless (understanding particular sentences or texts is another matter, although the vast majority of those are also comprehensible). I've never claimed my Polish is perfect - I keep it at 'beginner' status in my profile, and discuss my shortcomings in it openly. Still, for less than a hundred hours, of scattered study, I'm pleased with it, as I've said. 2 persons have 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 104 of 164 30 March 2009 at 2:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
I'm not saying it to be impressive - I agree that it's not. I'm saying it to report where I got, -despite- getting a critical component (intensity) absolutely wrong. Great? No. Better than I've been with a similar amount of time in any other language with any other method? Yes. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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