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"Myths" of foreign language learning | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5428 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 49 of 72 09 May 2010 at 11:48pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
The distinction between "gap in knowledge" and "error" may exist from the perspective of the user, but the end result is the same from the point of view of the listener. I agree that the distinction los otros/los demás is not a big deal and hardly qualifies as an egregious error. We all have made and make much bigger mistakes in learning a language. Keeping in mind that the central focus here is what is the most efficient learning or acquisition strategy, it would seem to me that the approach recommended here by Cainntear is to overgeneralize in order to maximize contact with the language and then refine (correct) as one's knowledge of the language increases. Isn't this the essential teaching of the communicative or natural approach of language teaching? Lots of authentic language input, get the student talking as much as possible, little correction, and worry about the grammatical details later instead of getting bogged down in complicated rules from the beginning. I agree with much of this approach. It's best to have people make mistakes but talking rather than being too terrified about making mistakes to speak. Actually, this is the precise reason why I am a great fan of learning in context. Why present complex, arcane rules with many exceptions when lots of correct input will get the same results? If I understand Cainntear's position, the learner does not make errors but merely demonstrate gaps of knowledge that will be filled later. This, in my opinion, applies well to the lexicon. As our vocabulary expands, we are able to refine our usage and make more subtle distinctions. So, a beginner may say "ne laissez pas le feu sortir" but after a certain period will no longer make the mistake of overgeneralizing "sortir" and will have acquired the new word "s'éteindre" and will henceforth say "ne laissez pas le feu s'éteindre". This process seems to be the one all learners follow to some extent. I agree with it. I'm not sure that the same process applies to grammar. Let's assume for example that all French words ending in -e are feminine and that with time, we will learn those words that are exceptions and correct our syntax appropriately. This would be the approach if one were to learn lists of words with no context and just the minimum gender information. Could it work? To some extent, probably. At the same time, since most language learning, especially in the communicative approach, is basically learning in context, one inevitably picks up the right syntax information inevitably. For example, in Spanish verb forms, given the series ver/veo, leer/leo, comer/como, one could overgeneralize and use poder/podo. So one uses podo until the day you realize that the right form is puedo because poder is an irregular verb. I'm sure some people do use this form of reasoning with more obscure verb forms. My questioning is basically why make these kinds of mistakes in the first place? Why not learn the right forms from the beginning by learning in context? Why learn something and then have to unlearn it later? Why risk fossilizing certain mistakes or bad habits that are never corrected later? When I hear certain people who have been speaking French for over 20 years say "il a parti" instead of "il est parti", I realize that it is because their initial overgeneralization was never corrected. Since they are understood perfectly, they don't realize that they are making a mistake. Things that are regular and predictable don't have to be learned in context because they can be generated by a simple rule. But when you are dealing with irregularities and lack of predictably, learning in context, in my opinion, is the way to go. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6701 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 50 of 72 10 May 2010 at 12:15am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
My questioning - and apparently that of Cainntear too - is basically: why make these kinds of mistakes in the first place? Why not learn the right forms from the beginning by looking into a grammar, which will teach you about irregular verbs and other pitfalls in a much more concentrated and effective way than any amount of learning in context? Then you can use your limited reading and listening time for purposes for which there aren't any shortcuts, like idiomatics and style. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6009 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 51 of 72 10 May 2010 at 3:07pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Iversen's pretty much right about where I'm coming from.
I think using the term "user" distorts my point somewhat -- if you substitute the word "learner", it becomes clearer, because a learner has a long-term investment in the process, with long-term goals. If we focus on the superficial, we can ignore the underlying structure that will guarantee success later on. As an extreme case, if you look at school classes, they have children parroting fixed phrases until they can say them very well. When these are tested, the children have the superficial appearance of speaking the language, but go beyond the fixed scripts of the classroom and it becomes clear that most of them are missing the underlying structure required to produce original, spontaneous language. So the school kid can say "Comment t'appelle-tu?" but doesn't necessarily understand either subject-verb inversion in questions, the concept of object pronouns preceding the verb or the idea of a reflexive verb. The listener gets the benefit of the question, but the benefits to the learner are minimal.
Not at all. I'm saying you can start with the general grammatical details, prevent errors, and correct those that you can't prevent. Advocates of the natural approach say that this is wrong because you can't do it perfectly. I say you can't do it perfectly, but you can do it well enough to be worth it. You can give a solid base in the grammar without going too deep into vocabulary items.
Because of that little word "lots". Once you have the rule, the exceptions can only be learned by exposure, but why should every learner have to reinvent the wheel and discover the rules slowly and tortuously by themselves?
No, the two exist, although it's a question of shades of grey. The learner who learns from context often genuinely misinterprets the data.
Poor example -- there really is no need to overgeneralise "sortir" to that extent. If we learn it as "exit", it's possible to underuse it, but not overuse it.
This is not grammar -- this is vocabulary. Grammatical gender is an attribute of a word and words tend to fall into sets demonstrating similar morphology. Having a "fuzzy rule" gives you an organising structure for your "first guess", and that guess can be proven or disproven by the evidence. But once you've got the grammatical structures and all the "buckets" to put the words into, this is easy.
And this is where we come back to fuzzy rules. "Poder" is a slightly irregular verb, but it is not irregular in the present tense. The diphthongisation of stressed O to UE (and of E to IE) is a feature of Spanish phonology and occurs in words of all classes. For example, French port, porte = puerto, puerta. Of course, the verb "portar" doesn't do this (porto, porta, portas etc), and it's arguable that this makes portar an irregular verb, even though it looks regular to the foreign learner. This is the perfect example of the "fuzzy rule", as Michel Thomas used one for this in his course. MT described this phenomenon as the O or E "breaking under stress". When he encountered one that didn't break under stress, (comprender, IIRC) he said that the consonants on either side of the vowel "supported" the vowel, that they "held it up", so it didn't break. At no point did he give a list of consonants that support the vowel or a list of consonants that don't -- this clearly wouldn't have worked, as the example puerto, puerta vs porto, porta shows. Any explicit rule to say when this diphthongisation occurs would be complex, arcane and really riddled with exceptions, so Thomas doesn't try to give a complete rule. He creates a distinction between two classes and gives the basic reason for the distinction with examples. With that structure in place, the student is left to get a feel for when it happens and when it doesn't through examples, but is encouraged to continue to generalise to a rule, rather than learn each one as an individual isolated case. I got pretty good at guessing at first sight which verbs would be "radical stem-changing verbs" and which wouldn't, but I couldn't describe the rule I use. I also get the feeling that the rule, if fully described, would go beyond the boundaries of the syllable in question and be very complex indeed. But there's a rule in there somewhere that my brain has figured out. Would it have done so independently? Maybe, but it's not guaranteed. The fuzzy rule starts you on the right path and gives you a solid headstart.
Well first up, as I say above, you've misinterpreted my position. Secondly, this is another example where a fuzzy rule can be applied. If you teach that both forms of the perfect exist, and that some verbs take one, the others the other, then the student will be able to sort them into the appropriate category as they go. Useful, but you don't need to stop there. You can teach that être is used for intransitive and reflexive as "doing it to yourself" or "only the doer is affected" or whatever. Then you've just got to make them understand that predicative constructions don't count as doing it to anybody, not even yourself. No fancy words, no clever formulas, just "who's doing it" and "who's affected by it". There are certain gaps in knowledge that can be left unadressed, but others that are important to get right. être et avoir is a lot more important than los demás and los otros. The law of diminishing returns applies to explicit teaching, and for me, exposure only comes in once explicit teaching ceases to be efficient, but efficiency does not rely on exactness, and after all, exposure is inexact. It is therefore inconsistent and illogical to dismiss a rule as worthless because of its inexactness while simultaneously championing learning from exposure. Edit: but I suppose what you and me are arguing about is exactly where we draw the line on diminishing returns. Edited by Cainntear on 10 May 2010 at 3:10pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5451 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 52 of 72 10 May 2010 at 6:16pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
There are so many verbs with -o- that don't diphthongise that you'll have a hard time convincing me that portar is irregular: cortar, llorar, abortar, coger, montar, romper, lograr, responder and possibly thousands of others. (This doesn't necessarily make the stem changing verbs irregular though.)
You're probably right that any rule fully describing this would be very complex. It would probably involve phonological changes between Vulgar Latin and Old Spanish, be riddled with exceptions and be beyond any practical application. Is it possible to find a rule that explains why renovar is a radical changing verb and innovar is not? I'm also pretty good at guessing which verbs are radical changing and which are not. I'm not sure if it's only guesswork or if there really is a rule in there somewhere. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 LauraM Pro Member United States Joined 5350 days ago 77 posts - 97 votes Studies: German Personal Language Map | Message 53 of 72 10 May 2010 at 6:29pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Do you all suppose "learning styles" come into play here? As in, what may work for one learner may not be at all
effective for the other? That it isn't always necessarily about one single right way or a wrong way no mater who the student? I have enjoyed this dialogue thus far and appreciate all the insight! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6009 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 54 of 72 10 May 2010 at 7:26pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
There are so many verbs with -o- that don't diphthongise that you'll have a hard time convincing me that portar is irregular: cortar, llorar, abortar, coger, montar, romper, lograr, responder and possibly thousands of others. (This doesn't necessarily make the stem changing verbs irregular though.)[/quote] I did say "arguably"... Either "portar" is phonologically irregular or "puerto" and "puerta" are. I'm not going to argue one way or the other, and I'm happy to consider it a "boundary case" where things can go either way. But you appear to have missed my point -- the diphthongisation is a result of the interaction of the vowel with the phonemes before and after it. As the examples you give have different letters before and after the vowel, they are not counterexample to the notion that -PÓL- is most naturally pronounced -PUÉL-.
Double letters are almost unheard of in Spanish, so innovar is a very unusual word. If I understand it right, what it means is that the N is pronounced as part of the prefix. I believe that this means that the stressed syllable loses it's N, so is merely ÓV and not NÓV. The change of NÓV to NUÉV can be seen in neuvo (and most -novar forms) as well as in the number nueve (compare with noventa, where the lack of stress allows the phoneme to be realised as an O sound). But what I was trying to get at was that just because the pattern is mind-bogglingly complex doesn't mean it's not worth looking at. We have a choice between just leaving it and hoping for the best or starting with a rough idea of what's going on and then accepting that at some point we stop and just hope for the best. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Andy E Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7101 days ago 1651 posts - 1939 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 55 of 72 10 May 2010 at 8:44pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
At the present moment in time, this particular post of mine is fairly useless but I'm absolutely certain I have come across a website somewhere that had such a rule - I'm also pretty certain I posted about it here in the past and I know I saved the text off somewhere - I just need to find one or the other or preferably both. Andy. Edited by Andy E on 10 May 2010 at 8:44pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| tractor Tetraglot Senior Member Norway Joined 5451 days ago 1349 posts - 2292 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, Catalan Studies: French, German, Latin | Message 56 of 72 10 May 2010 at 9:26pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Yup, I did notice.
What about monopolio? The diphthongisation of stressed O and E was one of a series of phonological changes that happened during the transition from Vulgar Latin to early Romance. As far as I remember (from when I read about the history of the Spanish language), it only happened to those words whose O or E had been short vowels in Classical Latin. This means that it may not be possible to find a rule based on the phonology of Modern Spanish alone.
I would guess that the division between syllables is either in|novar or i|novar, not in|ovar.
Yes, there has been a change from nóv to nuév, but nóv is not impossible in Spanish: nova, novio.
I think we more or less agree on this one, at least in principle. I do believe that it's worth pointing out to the learner that there's some kind of regularity in o > ue, e > ie. And any learner of Spanish with a background from other Romance languages can probably benefit from knowing about patterns like terra > tierra and ferro > hierro. But I also do believe that one can reach a point where the rules are so complex that they are more confusing than helpful. Edited by tractor on 10 May 2010 at 9:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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