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Long Sweep Technique for TY & Colloquial | ||
Tags: Colloquial (program) | Teach Yourself | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6149 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 1 of 4 09 June 2010 at 11:54am | IP Logged |
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Having recently decided to study Danish, I purchased both the Teach Yourself Danish and Colloquial Danish courses. Both these course take a similar approach, and have two audio CD's, which is normal for their series.
In previous language learning attempts using these courses, I use to go through each unit, completing every exercise, before moving on. I would only listen to the audio relevant to that unit, and would repeat each dialogue a number of times. This meant a unit would take a number of days to complete, and it was hard to listen to the same stretch of audio over and over again. If a grammar point was mentioned in the unit, but not tested in the exercises, I soon forgot it. If the audio was difficult to match with the text, I sometimes gave up all together. E.g. Colloquial Latvian. My new approach is much simpler. Instead of stalling on a unit, plough ahead, skipping the exercises, and read through the next unit. When listening to the audio, listen to the whole CD, and not just the unit in question. Try and cover as many units together as possible in a session. During the next session, sweep through the same long stretch again, but maybe start at a different point. It takes me about 40 minutes to properly cover a unit. If you want, in the second or third sweep, pick a good exercise and complete it. Don't get bogged down in silly exercises like rearranging sentences, puzzles or crosswords. Translation exercises can be a useful test. As I'm doing this with Danish, certain common words like og (and), med (with), and men (but), I hear often, and in different contexts. If a word is hard to decipher in a dialogue, I'll probably hear it again in a later dialogue. Sometimes the audio contains exercises and pronunciation practice. I'll do them as I hear them. I arrived at this method based on my experiences with L-R, which is probably the most efficient way to learn a language, if you've already got the basics, or a good grammar book. Edited by DaraghM on 09 June 2010 at 11:58am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| rlf1810 Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6338 days ago 122 posts - 173 votes Speaks: English*, German, Slovak | Message 2 of 4 09 June 2010 at 3:21pm | IP Logged |
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Interesting approach to the series. I agree with skipping the 'silly exercises'. TY exercises don't exactly have that FSI efficiency. I think the ridiculous amount of English used on the TY cd's is what keeps me from using them though. But, I'll give this a try in the future.
-Robert 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Petitanne Triglot Newbie United Kingdom Joined 5322 days ago 19 posts - 29 votes Speaks: French*, English, GermanC1 Studies: Spanish, Latin, Arabic (Written), Hindi | Message 3 of 4 09 June 2010 at 4:23pm | IP Logged |
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I think it's an interesting approach indeed to keep the motivation up. I will try to follow your method and see if I can get better results.
Cheers. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| anamsc Triglot Senior Member Andorra Joined 6201 days ago 296 posts - 382 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Catalan Studies: Arabic (Levantine), Arabic (Written), French | Message 4 of 4 09 June 2010 at 8:23pm | IP Logged |
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I did something similar with TY Catalan. I would listen to the dialog for the unit about 5 times, listen to the vocab about 3 times, read the unit, and move on to the next one. Normally I didn't listen to the whole CD at once like you, but I would listen to everything up to the relevant unit and then the next unit. It took me about two weeks to go through it at this rate (I wasn't really spending alot of time on Catalan at the time). After that, I went through the whole book a second time with the intention of being more thorough, and it all came very easily to me.
I don't know how well this would work for a harder language, though. It worked for Catalan because I knew Spanish and it was similar, but I feel like you might get discouraged for a language like Korean or something. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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