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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| rolf Senior Member United Kingdom improvingmydutch.blo Joined 6004 days ago 107 posts - 134 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch | Message 65 of 77 18 December 2013 at 6:09am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Hi Patrick, I use a physical book and an e-reader side by side. What's a popup dictionary, is this some kind of app? Sadly I don't possess a smartphone 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| rolf Senior Member United Kingdom improvingmydutch.blo Joined 6004 days ago 107 posts - 134 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch | Message 66 of 77 18 December 2013 at 6:15am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I must confess that I don't understand what this is about. What is blind rule following? And to say "I don't follow any such rules in my own native language, and I have zero desire to do so in another," in my opinion is totally meaningless. How can one speak or write correctly without following rules? With this attitude, learning Dutch is a lost cause. [/QUOTE] Call it an "attitude" if you must, it's simply how I feel. We are all driven in a particular way from birth, with a type of personality that can even be tested and identified. I speak English without using any rules consciously. Or perhaps only on rare occasions. Surely English is not the only language that, when spoken natively, barely requires any conscious thinking about any rules of any sort? I speak it naturally and impulsively. This is the way I want to speak Dutch or any foreign language. Without having to think of word endings and such things. I understand English is highly irregular. Perhaps this means that natives speak it "more naturally" than natives of other languages? Just a random guess which is probably wrong but what you write now makes me wonder... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| pesahson Diglot Senior Member Poland Joined 5725 days ago 448 posts - 840 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: French, Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 67 of 77 18 December 2013 at 8:01am | IP Logged | ||||||||
That's what every language learners aims for. To speak a language effortlessly without thinking too much about it. The thing is it cannot be like that from day one. It is the final goal that you must put effort into to achieve. I suggest you get used to the idea of reading a lot in Dutch. A lot. You don't need grammar drills as much as you need to do plenty of reading in your TL to get to be able to speak it freely. It will be difficult at first but it pays off. Edited by pesahson on 18 December 2013 at 8:03am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4906 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 68 of 77 18 December 2013 at 10:23am | IP Logged | ||||||||
A pop-up dictionary is a feature available on some e-readers. On my kindle (a 2-year old kindle with a keyboard), I have installed the Collins French dictionary. When I put the cursor over a word the dictionary entry appears at the top or bottom of the screen. I can press the enter key to then be taken to that page in the dictionary. The new kindles allow you to highlight a word or phrase and it will look it up on a machine translator for you. It also allows you to put words in some sort of flashcard system. EDIT: as a further idea to get you reading, have you tried comics/BDs? The language can be very colloquial, but obviously the pictures help a lot. Edited by Jeffers on 18 December 2013 at 10:30am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4530 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 69 of 77 18 December 2013 at 10:43am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I actually bought the 1/2 price e-ink Kindle, not the Paperwhite, precisely because it's much easier to look up words with the e-ink version. You are basically running a cursor down the page as you read, and stopping on the words you don't know. I occasionally click-through to the full definition, but mostly just read the short (1-2 line) definition at the bottom/top of the page. My German Collins dictionary cost (I think) 8 Euros, and was probably the best investment I bought for learning German. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5529 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 70 of 77 18 December 2013 at 12:12pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Let's assume, for a moment, that you were a typical English-speaking child. If this was the case, then when you learned to speak English, you received between 3 and 13 million words of input per per year from birth until you started kindergarten. Once in school, you used the language day in and day out to communicate with your peers. By the time you reached 10 years old, you read between 8,000 and 1,000,000 words per year, and continued to do so throughout your school years. If I remove even small pieces of this story, your English would have turned out a lot worse. The kids who only hear 3 million words per year grow up to do poorly in school. The kids who don't interact in English with other children may forget how to speak it. And the kids who only read 8,000 words per year grow up to read at a 2nd or 3rd grade level. And I don't know if you've ever listened listened to 4- and 5-year-olds with a language learner's ear, but quite a few of them butcher grammar, stutter and produce word salad when they get excited, and they get by happily with fairly tiny vocabularies. So if you want to get the same results you got with English, you better be prepared to pay the price: fully immerse yourself in Dutch, use it to communicate with your friends and coworkers, and be prepared to spend years learning to speak like an intelligent adult. And even then, you'll run into problems: You don't hear phonemes as well as a toddler does, which will cause major problems with certain languages (French's gender system, for example, relies heavily on phonemes that most adult English-speakers can barely distinguish). And unaided adult brains may refuse to pick up certain grammar points entirely: there are people who have spoken French every day for 40 years who still say *mon voiture, which is just awful. Now, there are ways to lean a lot more like a child than most people do. Khatzumoto, for example, asks people to sell or give away all their English language media, to listen to their new language around the clock, and to spend a huge amount of time on "fill in a syllable" flash cards. I refuse to ever memorize much grammar; I just pay lots of attention when I'm reading and I occasionally read a page or two of a grammar book. But that's misleading, because when I do read French grammar, I understand it at glance, thanks to my massive prior exposure to French and my training in computer science. But one way or another, you're going to have to pay a price. Most kids do not learn languages easily or cheaply, and they'll usually resist learning any language they can possibly get out of learning. Seriously, ask parents in bilingual households in monolingual countries. Language learning at any age requires extreme stimuli, at least if you want to get beyond basic playground stuff. If you want to avoid grammar study completely, it's probably still possible to reach a very good level of Dutch, but when you see what would be required, you might find the occasional grammar book awfully tempting. Edited by emk on 18 December 2013 at 12:12pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4530 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 71 of 77 18 December 2013 at 1:43pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
At least for reading that seems actually pretty easy to achieve if you have a daily reading habit: 1/2 SuperChallenge per year = 5000 pages = 250 words per page x 5000 = 1.25 million words which is 100 pages per week for a year (including a 2 week holiday). or about 14 pages of a novel per day. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5006 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 72 of 77 18 December 2013 at 7:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
As pesahson said, that is the dream of every learner. However, you don't speak English perfectly without ever having learnt the rules. Yes, you didn't learn many of them in a descriptive manner. You had a lot of people to correct you, to practice with, to take as a good example. You have surely read a lot. And you surely learnt some grammar at school in a rather descriptive manner as well. So you know the rules, even though you probably can't recite the definitions usually and you don't need to remember the rules in order to use them. And now you dream of speaking good Dutch without thinking about the rules. That is surely possible, if you give yourself a similar background, if you create it. Without it, you have no hope. It doesn't matter much which methods you are going to prefer but you just cannot avoid the rules completely. People who move to another country may learn a lot of the rules just by immersion and do just fine. Others don't and they speak horribly until the day of their death because they have settled for much less. There are people who have avoided soaking in the rules of their native language. Sure, they are fluent and native but everyone can see they are just stupid, uneducated ignorant individuals and noone intelligent (at least average) is ever going to speak to such people willingly. Avoid the rules if you can but people worth talking to will switch to English asap. Really, the general population in the Netherlands tends to be very good at English, they are not waiting for your ear-destroying broken Dutch to save them and grant them the priviledge of speaking with you. If you want people who are grateful for any word you can say, look elsewhere. The two bases of learning grammar are these: 1.The immersion path. Learning from examples, practicing on real pieces (or rather hoardes) of the language in whichever form. 2.The classical path. Learning from tables and exercises. The best tends to be any combination of these two, depending on you. Some people go with 100% one and 0% of the other, others 50/50, 80/20, or whatever and they all can succeed at learning the grammar and speaking correctly. I'd like to point out the use of word "correctly" and not "fluently" since being correct is what the grammar is mostly about, in my opinion. But you cannot expect to avoid both paths and still succeed. That's like trying to go from Europe to America without using either a plane or a ship. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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