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Listening before speaking | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| axe02 Triglot Groupie Joined 7223 days ago 71 posts - 73 votes  Speaks: English*, Portuguese, French | Message 41 of 83 28 February 2006 at 10:08am | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks! That'd be great.
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| duffdude Groupie United Kingdom Joined 7195 days ago 75 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 42 of 83 28 February 2006 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This is quite an exciting prospect!
I spend a lot of time around my girlfriends family who all speak Cantonese, and I can understand what they are talking about a lot of the time, but i'm too scared to speak. Another reason is I'm not quite sure they know I understand a thing, so I'm a bit embarassed about it if you know what I mean. Anyhow, There I was thinking I was wasting my opportunity to learn Cantonese by not trying to speak it, when it turns out I'm (If this in fact works..) actually going about it the best way possible!! Just wondering, does anyone have any thoughts on using this approach on more than one language at the same time? I wonder if it would result in more mental "overload" than studying two languages at the same time using conventional methods. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Farley Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 7094 days ago 681 posts - 739 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, GermanB1, French Studies: Spanish | Message 43 of 83 28 February 2006 at 10:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
Somewhere on the forum, I think in one of the Assimil topics I described how I learned German through a massive amount of listening. I took an immersion course in Germany, skipped all the homework in favor to watching videos and (somehow) mastered basic conversational German in a period of 2-3 months. So yes it works. I’m doing something similar with French in Action to learn French at the moment. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| fanatic Octoglot Senior Member Australia speedmathematics.com Joined 7148 days ago 1152 posts - 1818 votes Speaks: English*, German, French, Afrikaans, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Dutch Studies: Swedish, Norwegian, Polish, Modern Hebrew, Malay, Mandarin, Esperanto | Message 44 of 83 28 February 2006 at 11:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I spoke yesterday with the man who learnt Brazilian Portuguese in Brazil who didn't speak for the first six months on the job. He told me he just gave one word answers where he could or got someone to translate from English. He was taking lessons but not saying a word in the language. That reminds me of learning French at high school; we didn't say anything in French, we just learnt about the language.
He told me he was in a situation where someone translated what someone else had told him into English one day and he told her, don't bother, I understood it, and then replied in Portuguese, to everone's amazement. From then on he spoke fluent Portuguese. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6945 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 45 of 83 01 March 2006 at 10:20am | IP Logged | |||||
The lessons sound a bit suspicious. :) Was there no active component at all to his lessons? It would be interesting to know how exactly he was studying the language.
This is just the point that has been in the back of my mind while reading this thread, that in some sense traditional language learning was in large measure passive. Of course, they made you translate stuff from your native language, and you probably had to get up in front of the class and say something in French once in a while, but an individual studying on his own with school-inspired methods and materials of those days could well end up with a mostly passive approach without giving it much thought. Anyone working with a grammar-translation style textbook and a lot of reading materials, while also listening to the radio - a rather old-fashioned approach - is pretty much doing passive learning. And if the learner has the personality that he sees no reason to make a fool of himself until he feels reasonably ready to talk, or simply has no opportunities to do so, it closes the loop altogether. It sounds as if a course like Assimil makes the process more efficient by having the audio, the reading, and the grammar parts fully coordinated, making the job easier and also making sure there is enough audio - with reading and grammar/textbook study it is easy to forget to listen enough to the radio. And the listening is graded, of course. Generally, there must have been good reasons for introducing the more active approaches, like Pimsleur or FSI - I wonder if the step back in the process was giving up on the passive part in favor of an entirely active approach. Could it be that the passive wave of Assimil (or "French in Action" videos for French) followed by an FSI or even a Pimsleur course offers the best of both worlds? Edited by frenkeld on 02 March 2006 at 9:58am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| flatlandllama Diglot Newbie United States Joined 7091 days ago 35 posts - 44 votes Speaks: English*, Vietnamese Studies: Khmer | Message 46 of 83 01 March 2006 at 11:01am | IP Logged | |||||
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ye but i think what the problem with highschool foreign language is that people learn about it in English so there is never a chance to get exposure of any sort...I think when I was taking private class in Vietnamese I had more listening time in Vietnamese in one week if not one day than I did in German all 3 years of my highschool class. Does anyone know how this approach addresses pronunciation? Do you listen until youve got everything down good and then once you start talking you self correct until youre fluent and can pronounce very well? Just curious because if I can get a similar result to actively working on pronunciation with a teacher then that would be good.
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| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6945 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 47 of 83 01 March 2006 at 11:13am | IP Logged | |||||
Unless reading is consciously treated as a tool for learning to think in a language, it can become a mere translation exercise. Reading and listening seem most effective when made into immersive experiences, which the traditional classroom format was ill-suited for. Still, one could learn grammar and vocabulary at school, and the traditional approach to teaching them was not necessarily all that bad, but there was not enough practice, passive or otherwise, to drive them home. Edited by frenkeld on 01 March 2006 at 3:41pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Farley Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 7094 days ago 681 posts - 739 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, GermanB1, French Studies: Spanish | Message 48 of 83 01 March 2006 at 1:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
I’m inclined to think so. In the absence of native speakers Pimsleur or FSI would be an excellent conversation simulator. In the case of “French in Action” each video lesson has an accompanying CD with 60-80 minutes of audio lessons. If you watch each video 4-6 times the audio lessons fall into place after 1-2 reviews. That is much easier that watching the video once and repeating the CD 4-6 times.
Hindsight is 20-20, looking back on my old grammar translation classes I would have to agree. My German professor from college was honest about his approach – he introduced German. He taught all the grammatical rules and enough phrases for survival situations – very much old school. If you wanted to actual speak German he gave you the address to the Goethe Institute and told you to go Germany. It worked for me; looking back I see his point. Too bad he did not use audio for listening, if so his method would have been even better. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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