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The Schliemann Experiment | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Hakan D Tetraglot Groupie Turkey Joined 5093 days ago 45 posts - 77 votes  Speaks: Turkish*, Icelandic, English, German Studies: Spanish, Greek, Swedish, Hungarian, Mongolian, Modern Hebrew, Russian | Message 33 of 38 09 December 2010 at 7:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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I find this thread worth reviving as I myself often memorize and recite. I think that it's a formidable task for me to recite a whole book with a highly literary language as you're doing and I don't know whether this would help my goals of reaching to an advanced fluency in any given language in the short and medium term.
I don't know whether my method is comparable with Schliemann's method but I'd like to explain how I do that from a perspective of a learner who's taking a language from scratch. 1. First off, I memorize the conversations and exercises that are in the book I'm learning from. I try to recite them walking in the street, drinking coffee, talking to my mom etc. 2. After some point, usually after 7-10 days, when more material comes in I make flashcards for the older ones, especially the ones that are challenging or emphasizing the structures that I'm learning. So that way I don't have to recite and try to remember what the next sentence is but as the flaschards pop-up in random order, I have to think of a suitable sentence (and it HAS to be exactly the same sentence that I've written down). 3. When I get comfortable with remembering the sentences, I reproduce them and their structures. I check whether something is correct on google. If that's giving high rates that means it's a good choice. Otherwise I seek for help from the native speakers. After I finish the language books, or after half-way or two third through them, I start reading children books, first 4-6 y/o then 6-9 y/o and do the aforementioned procedures. Children books consists of full of words like "cheep", "cock-a'doodle-doo", "hee-haw" and stuff that's unnecessary for me if I'm not going for a native fluency but grammatically they're not that easy but not as difficult as a novel and the language gets more complex as the age goes up. Then I move on doing the same with newspaper articles. Especially travelling magazines are very suitable for me. They're very visual and descriptive so I can imagine all those complex sentences in my mind. Finally comes the novels but I've never really recited a whole book. I find Haruki Murakami books to start with rather easy and fun. I just take samples here and there with structures that are awkward for me and again use the same procedures. This way I think I'm not reinventing the wheel in any language and go with the native feeling. At the early stages of my Icelandic studies, before I started with this approach, people usually stared at me very puzzled because the sentences were often grammatically correct, conveying what I wanted to say but nowhere near how a native would word it. Afterwards I used the same method with Greek and German. It seems to work fine with me. I'm not sure how it would work for me to have a translated copy of the book that I'm reading, following it line by line and not using dictionary (or at least very little). I've come up with this approach while I was learning Icelandic as this is a highly idiomatic language. There are so many expressions, proverbs, idioms (and phrasal verbs - if one thinks English is difficult in that matter then he needs to see Icelandic) which are used in daily life that I also need to see their raw forms and usages in the dictionary and see their exact meanings rather than a translated text. Often times etymology and a meaning of a word helps a lot to grasp the meaning of a phrase easily. One other thing, I don't know whether it's eligible as a Schliemann's method, I memorize songs I did it in Greek a lot even after many years these songs can be fixed in your mind and you know what their meanings are. I'm curious to know how your progress is going so far, whether you're still reciting the book and you can implement, reproduce or rearrange the sentences/structures that you've learned already. Good luck and I hope it works for you and we can also say that it's a legitimate method. Perhaps I'm gonna try Alexis Zorbas if you say you were successful :) 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 34 of 38 10 December 2010 at 4:17am | IP Logged | ||
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It's been several weeks since I updated this thread the last time. There is a reason for this silence, but it is not that I have lost my interest in learning Russian, nor that I have abandoned the idea of doing to with the Schliemann method. The reason is that the priorities in my life have changed temporarily, because I'm quitting my current job by the end of this month and I'm going to leave the UK next year. I need a change every few years, a new environment, new challenges. After almost 4 years in my current position I realised that the time has come to move on.
At the bottom of my heart I'm a lonesome wanderer, someone who despises all the bourgeois values of career, material possessions, security (or rather the illusion thereof), simple answers, simple entertainment, fashionable lifestyle. Ironically, it was exactly the book used with the experiment of this thread which once made me fully aware of this, and now it reminded me that I once set out "to become who I am", i.e.: nobody's master and nobody's slave. Recently I've been too much of a slave. This week I've had a few days off, and the plan was to continue with the Schliemann experiment. The simple fact is that once the decision for a serious change in your life is made, you realise what is important and what is just a hobby. Learning Russian is a hobby right now, so it gets to the end of the priority queue. I just cannot concentrate on it until other things are sorted out. That looks like a sane reaction and shouldn't really surprise anyone. It also means that I should give a summary of what I've learned from this project. I've roughly covered 25% of the book, i.e. 2.5h of recording time of the audio book. I cannot recite all of this freely. Often I need the book to help me out, and there are some sections that I don't have a good grasp of. An interesting effect is that I can speak along with the recording quite well, but as soon as I stop the audio, my memory tends to leave me. I can hear the recording in my mind for the sections that I know well, so I'm sure that the stress of all the words in these sections is correct. This experience is the same that I had with the fairy tales during childhood, what I described in an earlier post. So I still have this capability of absorbing a text by listening to a recording, but it is a lot less efficient than when I was 4 years old. What I would not do again is to try to learn a certain amount of text in a given period of time. Looking at the amount of text I wanted to cover and comparing it to what I really achieved makes the experiment look like an epic fail. I cannot imagine how Schliemann could have learned pages after pages by reading through them only a few times. This already sounds unreal when you know a language well, but when you have to learn new vocabulary at the same time then the claim sounds ridiculous. I stopped caring about the amount of text. My listening comprehension has improved quite dramatically, and I can read news in Russian on the web and get at least an idea of what it is about without using a dictionary. When reading arbitrary texts on the web I sometimes encounter words that look somehow familiar and yet I don't know their meaning. When I look them up in a dictionary I usually remember immediately the passage(s) where I learned them. Maybe it is because of the rich morphology of Russian words that they are hard to recognise in an unknown context, maybe this is a general problem with learning words in sentences instead of in a more isolated way. Schliemann did not mention that he used any kind of grammar books to support his learning. You might get quite far without a grammar in some languages, but with Russian there is no hope that you can learn the language to a good standard just from a prose text, unless you already know another Slavic language. Schliemann could have learned Russian without a grammar to a point where he could make himself understood, but in order to learn it well you need to get an explanation of what aspects are and how verbs of motion work. These concepts are just too alien for someone who knows only Germanic and Romance languages. Things are a bit different with respect to vocabulary. I showed in the first post of this thread what you can reasonably expect to learn from one book. Schliemann didn't make any bold claims about his vocabulary. He only wrote that his method allowed the learner to express himself on a subject that he is familiar with. That doesn't sound like what you would call advanced fluency, so his assertion seems to be realistic. The Schliemann method gives you the opportunity to learn a language using the text you like most. This seems to be the best benefit. You don't depend on any course to learn a language, but this comes at a price: it is hard. There is no simple start, but you can get the weirdest constructions right from the first sentence. At this point you might not have any chance to understand all the bits and pieces, so you must accept things as they are and hope they will start falling into place later. This looks like the most important things I've learned. I don't think the Schliemann method is much better than others, but it seems to be the right one for me. I will continue using it with Russian as soon as other things are sorted out, and I might come back to this thread then. If anyone is in doubt about whether this works or not: give it a try. It surely is not so bad that you will waste your time. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Romanist Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5274 days ago 261 posts - 366 votes Studies: Italian | Message 35 of 38 10 December 2010 at 1:02pm | IP Logged | ||
OlafP, do you think that some of the hardness you have encountered could be due to your choice of text? Of course, I know that "Also Sprach Zarathustra" is considered a great classic. But to me it almost seems like madness to choose something as complex and sophisticated as this for Schliemann-method learning! Didn't Schliemann himself describe using a fairly 'lowbrow' work of fiction when he was learning Russian? 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 36 of 38 10 December 2010 at 3:12pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't think that the text is too difficult. There are many participles and gerunds in the Russian translation, which is typical for a literary style, but I was prepared for that. A 'lowbrow' text can be hard to read as well when it contains a large number of idiomatic twists and colloquial speech.
There are two levels of language that we have to distinguish here. The first is the purely linguistic one. This is about morphology, sentence structures and the choice of vocabulary. You should expect to get more exposure to these aspects in the classics, but they are explained well in grammar books. What you won't find in the grammars are irregular speech and colloquialisms, but they don't occur in 'highbrow' literature that often. Sure, I know Steinbeck and Dickens, and it is obvious that something like "The Grapes of Wrath" or "Great Expectations" would be a very bad choice for a beginner in a language. But if you know the book beforehand, you know what you're getting into. The other level is the symbolic one. This is where the classics are strongest. In a good novel things don't only stand for what they are, but they a metaphors. Nietzsche's Zarathustra is one of the most metaphoric books you can find. Entertainment literature is about the plot, whereas in good literature the plot is nearly irrelevant. Zarathustra doesn't even have a plot worth mentioning. It is somewhere between fiction and non-fiction, like its language is somewhere between poetry and prose. This is harder to understand than entertainment literature, because the reader must recognise the metaphors -- it requires an active reception, not a merely passive one, where you follow a few persons through a plot. This has nothing to do with grammatical forms, length of the phrases and the like, and therefore it doesn't interfere with language learning. I wrote something similar a few months ago in the French forum. If the classics are harder to read then because they require an active reader, but this is exactly the same in every language. You need to be able to read between the lines, but if you can't do that in your native language, you won't be able to do it in a foreign language. If however you are familiar with seeing things metaphorically, then this works right away in a new language, as soon as you understand the literal meaning. How can anyone understand in one language that the sharks in Hemingway's "The Old Man and the Sea" are not just fish, but then miss that point in a different language? Edited by OlafP on 10 December 2010 at 4:18pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hakan D Tetraglot Groupie Turkey Joined 5093 days ago 45 posts - 77 votes Speaks: Turkish*, Icelandic, English, German Studies: Spanish, Greek, Swedish, Hungarian, Mongolian, Modern Hebrew, Russian | Message 37 of 38 10 December 2010 at 10:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hello again OlafP,
I'd like to ask you some questions regarding this approach. I don't know whether you get to speak in Russian often in your daily life but, 1) After you started memorizing the text did you notice any change with the fluency of your Russian disregarding the new words or structures that you've learned from your readings? 2) Did you have times where you felt like "yeah, this sentence (or part of it) exactly fits here so I'm going to use it"? 3) Were you able to recreate phrases within your dialogues coming from the memorized texts? I'd be very glad if you could answer. 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 38 of 38 11 December 2010 at 2:08am | IP Logged | ||
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Currently I don't have any opportunities to speak freely, unless I talk to myself. My motivation for learning Russian is to be able to read literature in the original version and to listen to audio books. Practicing active skills seems to be crucial for progress, so I'll do my bit, but I'll limit that to writing. As a result, I cannot answer your questions. I can, however, outline the impact of learning text by heart on my writing.
In many cases I remember words in the contexts they occured the first time in the text. This helps a lot with the government of verbs (i.e. which cases they require). I rarely remember full sentences that I can use straight away. This might be because the language of the Russian translation often is not neutral, but uses inversions of nouns and possessive pronouns. I would guess that you can use you more phrases "out of the box" when learning a text that contains more dialogue. Schliemann mentioned that with Ancient Greek he could come up with sample sentences from the classics when someone doubted the correctness of his Greek. I'm not sure I could do the same with Russian sentences, but I can definitely do this with single words. If someone were to ask me where a particular word occurs, I can tell immediately, and I can even say where the word is printed, like 2nd word on the 5th line from the bottom, lefthand side. I don't know the page numbers and I cannot pinpoint the exact location if the word is far in the middle of a page. It works reliably only with the first occurrence of any word. I may be able to give more than one example, but this is difficult. With verbs, adjectives, and nouns a different ending doesn't make a different word to me, but a (different) prefix does. Participles and gerunds always are separate words when it comes to remembering their location in the text. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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