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Vlad’s polyglot podcast | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| slucido Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Spain https://goo.gl/126Yv Joined 6674 days ago 1296 posts - 1781 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan* Studies: English | Message 17 of 37 23 December 2010 at 8:38am | IP Logged | ||
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What techniques do you use, Vlad? I am curious.
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| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6583 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 18 of 37 23 December 2010 at 12:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you again for the nice comments.
Slucido, I don't think I have any technique really. Just lots and lots of time spent on studying and trying to figure out the logic of the languages. What I think might work for anything though is just spending really a lot of time listening to suitable audio (with a good computer dictionary) without looking at the text and then later spend some time in the country where the language is spoken. But then again there is the question what is suitable audio. I think once you can understand what people are saying you can communicate even if you yourself have to use English most of the time and thus start learning things from context. You can learn how to understand people on your own before you travel to the country where you want to go, speaking you will learn there. Except for Mandarin. I almost lost my mind about 3 times studying it. For everything else, what I did was that I downloaded audio with a lot of dialogs or monologues and just pause/rewinded my way through the recording with a dictionary until I understood what they were saying in that particular recording and then listened to it over and over on the bus or wherever. For me when I had to manually look up every word that I could not move on without, I did a greater effort to remember it since looking it up every time was just annoying. I think I learned a lot of things along the way like the script for instance (if it was different), or orthography, some grammar and so on. I think I later kept a log of important words and reviewed them every day. When it comes to reading, or listening/reading, looking at the text from the beginning destroyed my pronunciation, because I got influenced by the sounds that the letters represent in my native language, but a lot of reading after I got the pronunciation somewhat right was even more helpful than a lot of listening. Except for Mandarin. Well..not much of a method. I'm sure there are people who learn in a way that is much more effective, but this is what I did. Edited by Vlad on 23 December 2010 at 12:29pm 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| slucido Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Spain https://goo.gl/126Yv Joined 6674 days ago 1296 posts - 1781 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan* Studies: English | Message 19 of 37 23 December 2010 at 1:26pm | IP Logged | ||
Thank you for your quick answer. If you are very good learning languages, you are doing something really very well. I don't understand, how do you look up words that you are listening if you don't read the transcript? On the other hand, what happens with Mandarin? I have found several successful polyglots who have had a lot of problems with it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6583 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 20 of 37 23 December 2010 at 1:43pm | IP Logged | ||
Slucido, I tried to figure out what words in the recording were based on their sound only and looked for their meaning in the dictionary. I just listen to the recording and try to guess the spelling until I come across something that seems as the most probable meaning of the sound I just heard. I think this can only work with languages well related to the languages you already speak at an advanced level, because if you have to look up absolutely every word and know nothing about the language, it will take you forever. I really did learn Russian this way and my native language is quite far from Russian in the Slavonic language family. Mandarin is just too far from everything. There are no links in vocabulary or sentence structure or the logic of the language so you cannot rely on shortcuts and guesses and have to do everything the difficult way. The only thing that could make it easier would be to design some sort of a supercourse, where someone would come up with the right audio to listen to, which would go from simple to difficult, would combine all the most common syllable/tone combinations and about 3000-5000 of the most common sentence structures and vocabulary and would not be boring :) Edited by Vlad on 23 December 2010 at 1:50pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| slucido Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Spain https://goo.gl/126Yv Joined 6674 days ago 1296 posts - 1781 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan* Studies: English | Message 21 of 37 23 December 2010 at 4:35pm | IP Logged | ||
Very good. This reminds me a technique I read somewhere. Watch a short video several times trying to understand as much as possible, using the dictionary or whatever you need and when it seems impossible to understand more, turn on the subtitles. It seems that the problem with Mandarin is that we, western people, don't have scaffoldings. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| noriyuki_nomura Bilingual Octoglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 5339 days ago 304 posts - 465 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Japanese, FrenchC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, SpanishB2, DutchB1 Studies: TurkishA1, Korean | Message 22 of 37 23 December 2010 at 8:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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Oh my, I just listened to your recordings, you speak all the languages so fluently and well! I think you are being really humble, but you speak Mandarin really so fluently! :) I am really impressed by how well you managed the tones of Mandarin! :)
ps: I like your Taiwanese accented Mandarin, it sounds so beautiful! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6583 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 23 of 37 24 December 2010 at 5:59am | IP Logged | ||
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noriyuki_nomura,
thank you for the nice comment. You know, native Chinese speakers are known to be very very forgiving and tolerant to foreigners studying Mandarin and they have been telling me that I speak very good Chinese back when could only say "Nihao" :) It still is a nice encouragement. Thank you. Edited by Vlad on 24 December 2010 at 6:04am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7155 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 24 of 37 25 December 2010 at 5:34am | IP Logged | ||
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To rewelacyjna praca, Włodek. Len tak ďalej!
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