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Where are the advanced speakers? | ||
Tags: Advanced Level | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5379 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 9 of 37 18 December 2012 at 3:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Not only are there few learners who make it to that level, but they increasing use native material, so it has to be a really small market few are willing to venture into. 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 10 of 37 18 December 2012 at 4:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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s_allard mentioned grammars in the languages they describe, written for and by native speakers. And yes, that can be a problem. I have two Greek grammars. One is written by a Greek author, and although it is in French everything is seen from the point of view of a native speaker. So I only use the other one, which is a Routledge grammar written in English. Some day I may get so far that I can profit from the 'Greek' one, but I don't feel the need right now. In other languages I do use 'native' grammars, such as "Le Bon Usage" in French when I deal with rare and precious constructions, but while I learned the language in the 70s I preferred material written for learners, not books written for elitist connaisseurs. It is not necessarily the language a book is written in that can be problematic - it is the choice and the prioritization of the topics which can be skewed.
As for learning materials for advanced learners I don't see the need for ordinary textbooks or graded readers. Grammars, dictionaries, collections of idiomatic expressions and articles about specific linguistic topics will remain useful, but advanced learners can pick and choose everything that is available in their chosen languages and about their favorite subjects - they don't need somebody to select and chew the fodder for them first. One last comment: when the multilingual/non-English subfora were introduced I saw it as a great leap forward. But it soon became clear that the discussions there had a tendency to die out fast, and then the eternal silence was only broken by some forlorn voice in the wilderness who once in a while asked why nobody wrote there. The discussions in these subfora who survive are those that have a specific theme, which is relevant for a fairly large number of HTLAL members. I actually started my own multilingual and multiconfused log thread because I became tired of waiting for something to happen in the other subfora. Edited by Iversen on 18 December 2012 at 4:30pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 11 of 37 18 December 2012 at 4:27pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Elsewhere, most people who self-teach a language already speak at least some English, so they have a more realistic idea of what they should do, and I'm sure the success rate is higher. And of course Esperanto learners f..k up the stats in a good way:) (Also, in Russia the various Ilya Frank method books are quite easy to find) Edited by Serpent on 18 December 2012 at 5:47pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| justonelanguage Diglot Groupie United States Joined 4460 days ago 98 posts - 128 votes Speaks: English, Spanish | Message 12 of 37 18 December 2012 at 4:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yes, once people reach a certain level, I think they just talk with natives as much as they can or work in the language. They also read in the language, whether online, magazines, or books. Since you study Spanish and it's the foreign language that I know, here are some things that you can buy to "immerse" yourself better. The Real Academica Española (RAE) has some dense works that I would only recommend for like PhD people that REALLY like the minutiae of grammar. I LOVE grammar but it's too much for me; I have a small grammar book from the RAE that I never use since it's too boring and complex. You could chat with natives on italki.com or livemocha, I believe, if you can't find face-to-face chats. For reading material, you could check out Gabrial García Márquez for classics or Carlos Fuentes if that's your drift. Careful about Marquez's "Cien años de soledad"; it is so hard to read that there is a 20 pages glossary for NATIVE speakers explaining vocabulary. I would recommend getting an edition with a geneological tree explaining all the marriages, unions, and children. Since there are like six generations, it gets kind of confusing. Other works I recommend are, "Nada" by Carmen Laforet, "El embrujo de Shanghai" by Juan Marsé, "La Familia de Pascual Duarte" by Camilo Cela...Good luck! http://www.amazon.com/Diccionario-Practico-Estudiante-Studen t-Dictionary/dp/8403097468/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1355845010 &sr=8-1&keywords=diccionario+practico+del+estudiante http://www.amazon.com/gramatica-Lengua-Espanola-Manual-Spani sh/dp/8467032812/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1355845145&s r=1-1&keywords=nueva+gramatica+de+la+lengua+espanola Edited by justonelanguage on 18 December 2012 at 7:18pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4686 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 13 of 37 18 December 2012 at 5:07pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Not quite 10 years ago there was a Borders bookstore I used to frequent that had, in addition to the instructional materials, a section of the store for foreign-language books. It carried a modest selection of books in Spanish, French, German, Russian, and a very surprising amount in Polish, possibly among other languages. They also carried, inter alia, Le Monde and Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung. Borders' archrivals, Barnes and Noble, sometimes have an even bigger foreign-language section, but it is entitled, invariably, "Libros en Español." Borders is no longer in business. Coincidence? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| lichtrausch Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5958 days ago 525 posts - 1072 votes Speaks: English*, German, Japanese Studies: Korean, Mandarin | Message 14 of 37 18 December 2012 at 5:35pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I miss Borders. It was much healthier for the bookstore market to have some competition. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 15 of 37 18 December 2012 at 6:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Well, except for learning English, I think a lot of the big monolingual countries are pretty bad at reaching any kind of conversational fluency in a second language. Continental Europe does OK, certainly.
You know, it would be possible to build a tool which took two ebooks, and automatically turned them into an Ilya Frank-style book with alternating paragraphs and links to online dictionaries. It would take a little bit of work, but it would definitely be possible. And there's no reason why it couldn't export interesting sentences for use with Anki. If we want advanced materials, we can always make them. :-) 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5128 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 16 of 37 18 December 2012 at 6:27pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Having worked with my share of CAT tools over the years, I would think this would take more than a little bit of work. Sentences often don't work out to a 1-to-1 ratio between languages, and manual alignment usually needs to be done. But the manual exercise of aligning two texts is a good exercise in and of itself. R. == 1 person has voted this message useful |
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