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On L-R | ||
Tags: Listening-Reading (L-R) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 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 9 of 164 23 March 2009 at 11:01am | IP Logged | |||||
I cannot recognize this. When I'm truly comfortable with a language then I read much faster than anybody can speak. In true speed-reading the incessant internal vocalization also stops (or rather, it is limited to a few scattered keywords that function as resting-and-summary points). But that's of course after the point where L-R would be relevant. I haven't measured the proportion in which listening or reading take the lead in the first stages, but due to my impatience the reading part is probably at pole position. I don't have a clue whether this is relevant for the learning process. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jimmymac Senior Member United Kingdom strange-lands.com/le Joined 6152 days ago 276 posts - 362 votes Studies: Spanish, Mandarin, French | Message 10 of 164 23 March 2009 at 11:33am | IP Logged | |||||
Actually I wasn't saying this occurs when you are truly comfortable with the language. I meant this occurs when you are comfortable with the process. I'm at the stage with Spanish now, which I believe is the stage you are referring to, where I prefer to read books without the audio simply because I get impatient with how slow some narrators can be but I still do enjoy the odd audiobook. At the beginning stages, however, if I relied on the audio at first I would not have a clue what was going on. How could I? My listening comprehension would be non-existent. At this point I have no choice but to read the English slowly in order to keep in line with the audio but as time goes by you can switch your focus to the audio mainly and slowly discard the text. Ultimately you can rely solely on the audio which I believe is the stage referred to as 'natural listening'. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6010 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 11 of 164 23 March 2009 at 1:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
I couldn't disagree more with this. Have you heard the old teaching maxim "do as I say, not as I do"? It's wrong -- do as I do, not as I say. One of the examples I use to demonstrate this is swimming front crawl. "Fingers together, arms describing an S shape in the water," as they used to advise. In order to show "what you demonstrably can do," the coach would hold up his medals and the medals of his top students. An underachiever would be drilled on the technique and berated for not listening to his coach like the top performers do. And then they invented the underwater chase cam and set the cat among the pigeons. What the cameras showed was that the "good" pupils were ignoring the coach and going with what their bodies decided was efficient technique, whereas the "bad" pupils were doing exactly what they were told. My point is that if you tell people what to do, you'd better make sure it's right because there's a lot of conscientious, motivated individuals out there who will do exactly as you say and will succeed or fail 100% based on the accuracy of your advice. In the case of the L-R technique suggested here, the conscientious person will encounter the problems that I described because he will force himself to read at the same pace as the CD. That's not his mistake -- it's whoever told him to do that that is to blame. The people who do well, on the other hand, do so because they don't really listen to anyone and would probably be just as well off if you said nothing. PS. Volte: the term you're looking for (and you'll kick yourself) is conventional medicine. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 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 12 of 164 23 March 2009 at 1:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I speak about what I can see that I can do, - an 'underwater camera' for introspection would be a nice thing to have, but so far I have to rely on ordinary self-observation, which of course can be misleading. But I know that I can write in one language while I'm listening in another, and if the learned neuroscientists then tell me that I only have one language processing channel then my reaction to this is is to compare myself to a microchip that also is limited to doing one thing at a time. But it switches so fast between different lines of operation that the user thinks that the computer is doing a lot of things simultaneously. My thesis is then that I do exactly the same thing in L-R, - but because I'm a 'brain user' and not a neuroscientist it doesn't matter to me whether I'm doing true multitasking or just a good simulation through rapid task switching.
Cainntear writes that he couldn't disagree more with me, but his answer doesn't adress the problem as seen from the learners point of view. Contrary to me he sees the problem from the angle of a teacher who tells his pupils to follow an instruction - and they don't (at least those that are successful in dealing with the task at hand don't). I don't see how I could disagree with this, as I have spent all my time in the company of teachers doing things in exactly my own way in total disregard for their sage advice. This also applies to many aspects of L-R, but not to the foundation of the method, namely that you can in fact follow a recording while reading the same thing in transcript or in a literal translation. At the microscopical level we can discuss the length of the task switching intervals, and we can discuss the usefulness of the method in relation to other methods and things like that, but we can't discuss whether I can read a text while listening. I can do that. I do it every single day in my life. Just out of curiosity, do you also deny that a piano player can read and play two note systems at once? Or that some people (including me) can follow a piece of orchestral music in a musical score while listening to the music? In my experience it is exactly the same thing, just in a setting where the linguistical system isn't involved. Edited by Iversen on 23 March 2009 at 5:12pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Dark_Sunshine Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5764 days ago 340 posts - 357 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 13 of 164 23 March 2009 at 2:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm new at all this stuff so I certainly won't claim to be an expert on L-R, or any other learning technique for that matter. But I'm flirting with the method at the moment, and I'm finding it to be a very useful and enjoyable way of picking up new vocabulary in context, and also for improving listening comprehension when I'm following the text in the target language (in my case, French). I've adapted the method slightly though- I'm taking two books (one English & one French), reading the first chapter in English without audio, then immediately listening to the French audio whilst following the French text, and underlining words I don't know as I go along. Next I play the audio a second time, this time attempting to shadow, still looking at the text (but I actually find it difficult to speak as fast as the narrator). I repeat this process with each chapter, and as I progress I increasingly infer the meaning of the previously underlined words. Aside from this, I'm writing a more literal translation in English (with the help of a dictionary), which I eventually plan to L-R with the French audio as described in the traditional method.
One disadvantage is that it is very time consuming, but I think this is offset by the fact that I remember almost one hundred percent of what I have learned, and by the added bonus of improving my listening comprehension, which is a notorious problem with learning French. I will concede that I had a fairly substantial background in the grammar of French before beginning this method, and although I wasn't even close to basic fluency I could easily identify whether the unknown words were verbs, nouns, or adjectives etc. For this reason I'm not at all sure the method could be used to great effect by total beginners (especially where learning a new alphabet/script is involved), but I think it's good for the intermediate levels and up. I also don't think that you can compare advocates of L-R with 'alternative' medicine quacks. The field of so-called 'alternative' health is a multi-billion dollar industry profiting largely from a group of white middle class Westerners with more money than sense. To my knowledge, nobody is making any money from L-R (except maybe sellers of audiobooks) and therefore there is no good reason or financial incentive for anyone to recommend this method if they didn't believe from personal experience that it works (for them at least). Edited by Dark_Sunshine on 23 March 2009 at 2:23pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Goindol Senior Member United States Joined 6073 days ago 165 posts - 203 votes | Message 14 of 164 23 March 2009 at 4:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
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May the osteopaths perish and the allopaths flourish!
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| shapd Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6148 days ago 126 posts - 208 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, Modern Hebrew, French, Russian | Message 15 of 164 23 March 2009 at 5:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Actually the famous originator of the method does explain eventually in the original thread that you do not try to read and listen simultaneously in his/her stage 3 (listening to the audio while reading the translation). You speed read the paragraph just before the audio, which is why the translation should be in your own language, not an intermediate unless you are fluent in that, and you have to be a very fast reader. It also helps that you are supposed to have read the whole book in the translation before you even start L-R, so you know roughly what is coming.
I have tried the technique with Russian, though I do not have the patience to use it as the only technique, and I did know some before I started. I do find I can read just ahead of the audio and then match what I hear to the translation. It helps to do stage 2 first, as originally suggested (listen while reading in the target language). You do learn to segment the speech and read the words, so you can have a mental picture of the written text as you are listening to the translation. I have not done it enough to claim any sort of fluency, partly because it is very tiring to do for anything like the length of time originally suggested, but if I had the staying power I can see that I would get there. My recognition level jumped considerably after 5 or 6 hours, but I am too obsessive about going back to clean up unknown words to follow the technique to the letter. Probably a mistake. But going back to texts I had found too difficult after doing even a small amount of the technique, I have noticed that they are much easier and the stress of words in particular is beginning to sound natural. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Alkeides Senior Member Bhutan Joined 6147 days ago 636 posts - 644 votes | Message 16 of 164 24 March 2009 at 8:29am | IP Logged | |||||
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Also, I think a key component that people overlook regarding L-R for languages which are not closely related is the word-for-word/interlinear text for the beginning which can be subsituted with podcasts or other materials.
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