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The Schliemann Experiment | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Andy E Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 7095 days ago 1651 posts - 1939 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 9 of 38 15 September 2010 at 7:23pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I'm currently attempting to learn the Assimil German without Toil and Italian without Toil dialogs by heart rather than using L2 books as source material. Like you, I started off looking for actor's tips but I branched out into looking at rote scripture learning, or memorising poetry. One technique (and it's the one I've adopted together with Anki) involves building the material up bit by bit. From the Assimil point of view, it goes like this: 1. Listen to / look at sentence 1 2. Repeat sentence 1 without looking. 3. Listen to / look at sentence 2. 4. Repeat sentence 2 without looking. 5. Listen to / look at sentences 1-2 6. Repeat sentences 1-2 without looking. 7. Listen to / look at sentence 3. 8. Repeat sentence 3 without looking. 9. Listen to / look at sentences 1-3 10. Repeat sentences 1-3 without looking. and so on until the end of the dialog. A further tip is to provide a hint by reducing the dialog to the initial letters of each word. This aids as an initial prompt in the early stages. I'm then using Anki to provide the review scheduling. The lesson title and hint go in the Question and the lesson title and text go in the Answer. Once the lesson is properly nailed, I plan on removing the hint. It's early days - only about a week - and I've probably spent as much time working out a method as actually doing it, so I'm only on Lesson 4 of both. However, I have high hopes of this helping to internalise the Assimil courses in a more efficient manner. (sorry for highjacking the thread) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| OlafP Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5427 days ago 261 posts - 667 votes Speaks: German*, French, English | Message 10 of 38 15 September 2010 at 11:17pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Wow, so many responses already! I'll write weekly summaries of my progress every weekend, but I'll answer the questions that have been asked right now, otherwise the summary would get too long.
I won't try to fry an egg that hasn't been laid yet. The thought of learning one book by heart is intimidating enough, so I don't think about any others at the moment. The alternatives before I started were any of the shorter books by Dostoevsky, like "White Nights" or "Poor Folk", because he is responsible to half of my motivation to learn Russian. Oh, and the chapter "The Grand Inquisitor" from "The Brothers Karamasov" caused another earthquake, if that's what you're wondering.
Andy E already wrote a good summary of how it works best. I just walked around in the room and spoke the sentences aloud. According to what I found on the web, this is like most actors learn their texts.
Over the last days I tried to figure out how I can handle such a long text, and in the process I discovered one secret of this method: you have to - Read out loud - Write the text down from memory or when listening to the audio - Not look up every word, because you don't have the time, but learn from context. You need a dictionary that contains the words in the order you need, aka "translation". - Repeat often, several times a day, every day. - Try to understand the structures of the language, because this decreases the amount of details you have to learn by heart If I want to be successful then I have to speak, write, read, and listen just to absorb the text. Thus, the need for efficiency forces me to train all four skills. I'll have to study intensely -- and we all know the importance of intensity with language learning. I'll have to use my time well, i.e. I need to get into a state of deep concentration as often as possible. If you reduce the amount of text, all of this falls apart. I cannot lose. Even if I don't succeed in learning the whole text by heart until the end of December, I will have spent a few hundred hours of intensive study time with the language, and this will make a difference. There might be an additional benefit of knowing so much text by heart, but I think I can comment on this only several months or years later when I realise that this knowledge helps me using the language in various situations.
I'm a false beginner. The whole story would be several paragraphs long. As I wrote in the initial post: I know the grammar quite well and may have a vocabulary of 700 words or so. I can handwrite Cyrillic, and that's basically it. It is essential to understand the text, because it takes much longer to learn something that is meaningless to you, hence the translation required. Edited by OlafP on 17 September 2010 at 9:45pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Nudimmud Groupie United States Joined 5184 days ago 87 posts - 161 votes Studies: Greek, Korean | Message 11 of 38 16 September 2010 at 12:12am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
My understanding was that Schiemann's method was more like this: select a book in your target language and then compare it to a translation in your native language (or one you're comfortable in) line by line, rereading until you've absorbed the vocabulary. Then study only the essential aspects of the target language's grammar. Below is an excerpt of his method for learning Greek.
Edited by Nudimmud on 16 September 2010 at 12:26am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| OlafP Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5427 days ago 261 posts - 667 votes Speaks: German*, French, English | Message 12 of 38 16 September 2010 at 12:54am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
A few pages before you would have found this:
What Schliemann's method consists and not consists of should be discussed in any of the threads about his method, not in this log. Edited by OlafP on 16 September 2010 at 9:33pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Spanky Senior Member Canada Joined 5948 days ago 1021 posts - 1714 votes Studies: French | Message 13 of 38 16 September 2010 at 1:31am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Cool experiment - I am sure there are many including myself who will be interested in following along and seeing how this approach turns out. Good luck and best wishes.
For a number of years in my teens, I worked on poultry farms (broilers and layers). Your position on this issue is in accordance with recommended best practices. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Nudimmud Groupie United States Joined 5184 days ago 87 posts - 161 votes Studies: Greek, Korean | Message 14 of 38 16 September 2010 at 1:49am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Hmmmm... I didn't actually read his book, but a book about him and probably about his archaeological expeditions, I can't remember the original any more... And so I only read about his method for learning Greek -- I should probably have checked around before posting to your log. My apologies. In any case I did try to use his 'Greek' method to learn Modern Greek -- without much success... I finally resorted to more traditional approaches. But of course, my failure may well say as much as about my meagre intellectual ability then Schliemann's method. Edited by Nudimmud on 16 September 2010 at 5:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| maydayayday Pentaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5211 days ago 564 posts - 839 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, SpanishB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Persian, Vietnamese Studies: Urdu | Message 15 of 38 16 September 2010 at 12:48pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I'll follow this log with quite some interest as it is similar to a method I used, however I didn't memorise quite enough sentences due to 'going live' in the language after only two weeks.
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| OlafP Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5427 days ago 261 posts - 667 votes Speaks: German*, French, English | Message 16 of 38 18 September 2010 at 10:37pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Week 1
This week I tried to layout a scheme that would allow me to reach my goal. As mentioned in the previous post, I'll have to use all four skill to absorb the text. I can have my mp3 player with me all the time, but I don't want to depend on the printed text and a translation. So the first thing I should do is to improve my listening skills. Since January I always listened to Swedish recordings during my lunch break, but I'll have to drop this now and use all the time at my disposal for Russian. So I started to do some L-R. I never used this technique before, and it was tough in the beginning. I couldn't keep it up for longer than 10 to 15 minutes without a break. But after a few of these short sessions it did become easier, and now, having gone through 3/4 of the book (about 7h) I'm already noticing the effect of it. It is quite amazing -- I can follow the recording of earlier chapters without the text or translation after having gone through them only once. I'll keep up the L-R'ing for a few days as long as I see (rather hear) such improvements. I'm trying to learn a language here, not to perform a circus trick. If I can get a good grasp of the whole text but fail to learn anything by heart, this will serve me better than, say, knowing 30% by heart without ever having read the remaining 70%. So I will not learn one chapter after another, but go for the whole book and absorb as much of the language as possible. Some things will stick in my mind anyway and then I will decide later where I need to invest more energy, repeat more often, use different techniques. This process of going through the whole book at the beginning also serves me to weed out anything I refuse to learn by heart. There are a few chapters that are so bad that it defies description. I will exclude the chapters "Of War and Warriors" and "Of Old and Young Women". The latter is just stupid and bad taste and the former can explain why Nietzsche got his name abused by mass murderers. I won't defend him on this -- he brought this mess onto himself needlessly. Yes, the chapter must be understood metaphorically, but I'll stick to my judgement that this is awful writing. Nietzsche was an admirer of Heinrich Heine, and as such he should have remembered the words: "I am the deed to your words." In addition to that, Nietzsche always stresses the "quiet truths that creep only into the finest ears", and then he makes a hell of a noise himself often enough. Nobody bought his books when they were released the first time, so he apparently thought he has to scream louder to be heard. These two chapters sum up to only 8.5min of the recording time, so it doesn't make a big difference anyway. There still are 10h 16min left. This was a necessary rant. -- Quote of the week Den Einsiedlern werde ich mein Lied singen und den Zweisiedlern; und wer noch Ohren hat für Unerhörtes, dem will ich sein Herz schwer machen mit meinem Glücke. A wonderful sentence and three serious problems for translators. 1. Einsiedler / Zweisiedler A pun. "Einsiedler", lit. "one-settler", is German for "hermit", and it allows for a derivation of "two-settlers". 2. Unerhörtes Thomas Common translated this word as "the unheard", which would be "Ungehörtes". The Swedish and the Russian translations below don't get any closer, either. "Unerhörtes" means in fact something audacious, like the French inouï. The Verb "erhören" means to answer a prayer or someone's courting, so "unerhört" also carries the connotation of unanswered prayers or rejected courtship. 3. wer ..., dem ... "dem" is the dative form of the demonstrative pronoun "der", the short version of "demjenigen" ("derjenige"). It refers back to the subject of the previous clause "wer" (who, whoever). There is no way build a similar construction in English or Swedish. Thus, these translations all sound a bit weird at this point. The French à celui-là is spot on, but I doubt a native French speaker would create such a clause as in the Goldschmidt translation deliberately. The best horse in the stable is Russian here. The demonstrative pronoun тот can be twisted to all genders, numbers, and cases. Here it works with the masculine dative form тому. Common (1909): To the lone-dwellers will I sing my song, and to the twain-dwellers; and unto him who hath still ears for the unheard, will I make the heart heavy with my happiness. Hollingdale (1961): I shall sing my song to the lone hermit and to the hermits in pairs; and I will make the heart of him who still has ears for unheard-of things heavy with my happiness. Parkes (2005): To the solitaries shall I sing my song and to the dualitairies; and whoever yet has ears for the unheard-of, his heart will I make heavy with my happiness. Goldschmidt (1983): Je chanterai ma chanson à l'ermite et à ceux qui se sont retirés à deux dans la solitude; et celui qui a encore des oreilles pour entendre des choses inouïes, à celui-là je remplirai le cœur du poids de mon bonheur. Bianquis (1969): C'est aux solitaires que je dirai mon chant; à ceux qui se sont retirés seuls ou à deux dans la solitude; et quiconque a encore des oreilles pour entendre de l'inouï, j'accablerai son cœur de tout le poids de mon bonheur. Gandillac (1971): Aux solitaires je chanterai mon chant, et aux solitaires à deux; et qui encore a des oreilles pour entendre, de mon heur veux que soit lourd son cœur. Teratologen (2009): Jag ska sjunga min sång för ensittarna och tvåsittarna; och den som ännu har öron för det som aldrig förut hörts, hans hjärta vill jag göra tungt med min lycka. Antonov (19??): Одиноким буду я петь свою песню и тем, кто одиночествует вдвоем; и у кого есть еще уши, чтобы слышать неслыханное, тому хочу я обременить его сердце счастьем своим. Edited by OlafP on 04 October 2010 at 10:54pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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