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VivianJ5’s Language Log | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| VivianJ5 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4260 days ago 81 posts - 133 votes  Speaks: English*, French | Message 9 of 18 18 January 2014 at 6:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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Have spent most of the week creating parallel texts for the Twilight series; getting a bit obsessive about it, actually.
What is surprising me is just how much language I'm realizing I already recognize (can't say I "know" it, since I probably couldn't produce it if I had to), but language I've seen/heard enough that, in context, I understand the meaning. For example, just the task of lining up the paragraphs - to create the side-by-side parallel texts - I'm skimming as I go. When I finally do really begin the reading, the words I truly don't recognize will be much easier to pick out and focus on. And, to break up the boringness of parallel text creating, I browse through one of the many Dutch grammar books I've accumulated, and am again surprised at how much is now clear, through seeing the patterns used in the L2 of the parallel text. I'm starting to understand the reasoning behind some posters (forgive me, didn't note names at the time) who declared that a learner shouldn't really need to use parallel texts for very long, because I'm already seeing some common usages/phrases/vocabulary that I don't need to reference the L1 to understand. It's more of a crutch than anything else, and after a few weeks (months?) of using the crutch, I'm not sure I'll need it anymore. Unless I move to more difficult reading, which is always an option. My observations from 20+ hours of parallel text production... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| VivianJ5 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4260 days ago 81 posts - 133 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 10 of 18 29 January 2014 at 9:15pm | IP Logged | ||
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I haven't posted in a bit, have had a busier few weeks than I was anticipating...
But I have been somewhat productive on the language learning front: finished creating Dutch-English parallel texts from the four Twilight books (I had the ebooks in both languages), and also the first two Harry Potter books, for which I also have the Dutch audio. Have started listening to the radio, for short intervals (hard to focus on out-of-reach spoken language), and restarted Assimil, which is easy enough in the spoken sections even for me. And have also been reviewing one or two pages of grammar (from various books) each night, after I read one or two pages of the parallel text of "Little House in the Big Woods." So it seems that I prefer the multiple approach method: a combination of reading, listening, using a course (Assimil for the moment), and grammar review. Prevents boredom, and I'm starting to recognize some of the patterns that I'm reviewing in the grammar texts, which is a nice reinforcement of everything else. I'm hoping to post more regularly ;-) ... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4701 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 11 of 18 29 January 2014 at 10:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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I love that you're making parallel Twilight books. One thing's for sure, those are a quick, engrossing read. Guilty
pleasure on my part. :-P 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| VivianJ5 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4260 days ago 81 posts - 133 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 12 of 18 30 January 2014 at 8:15am | IP Logged | ||
As an English/ESL teacher (in a former life), Twilight is a definitely a guilty pleasure! Some teenage students of mine told me about the books, and the first time I tried to read them, I was turned off by the amateurish writing and exaggerated prose - and sparkly vampires... But tried again one summer when I was traveling, and bored, and become so obsessed with the story, read all four books in a week. I'm constantly defending the books to friends and family - a good story trumps bad writing any time, in my opinion. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Hekje Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4701 days ago 842 posts - 1330 votes Speaks: English*, Dutch Studies: French, Indonesian | Message 13 of 18 30 January 2014 at 5:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hahaha, I know how you feel! Those books are just so frickin' readable. Now I feel like I have all this Twilight
knowledge stored up in my head that is socially unacceptable for me to share. It's always like: Friend: Yeah, I saw the posters for the new Twilight movie out... with that weird werewolf dude... Me: (mumble) Jacob. Friend: What? Me: Nothing. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| VivianJ5 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4260 days ago 81 posts - 133 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 14 of 18 05 February 2014 at 8:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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So my Dutch learning is going in fits and starts, but I seems to be finding some kind of pattern which is working.
I thought my main learning tools would be parallel texts (Dutch-English), with some listening to audiobooks (the ones I have parallel texts for, if possible), and some television. Well, the listening has been a bust so far: unless I have the subtitles right there (or the text of the audiobooks), I miss 75% of what is being said. I know this is normal, but it is very hard to focus if you can't even figure out what words are being said, never mind actually knowing what the words mean. I can be patient about the meaning, but I at least want to know what word(s) are being spoken, and television series are just too mumbled for me at this point in time. The news programs are a bit better, since they are enunciating better, and that fits what I remember from learning French: I could get news programs, and teachers in front of the classroom, so much better than casual conversation or television series. So, for now, will be focussing on news programs and audiobooks with the text right there. Parallel texts are another quandary: I keep coming across certain phrases and turns of phrase repeatedly, which, when translated, seem to mean something different every time. So I've gone back to my course books, because I'm finding, with every chapter I can review (even if I don't do the "productive" activities, like speaking or rewriting the example sentences), I learn more about the idiosyncrasies that every language has, and which sometimes are more quickly learned by being made explicit. For example, the "je" ending on words, which makes them either familiar or diminutive, depending on the context. Or the use of the word "mee" in a phrase, which can mean so many different things, which are not immediately clear from the story. I've been going back to Michel Thomas, and also Assimil and the Routledge Colloquial Dutch course; the latter two are very good for the mini-explanations they give about Dutch language peculiarities. Every time I stop to review a lesson or two, I find things which are pretty much immediately useful in my novel reading and listening. Two steps forward, one step back; I'll get there eventually! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| VivianJ5 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4260 days ago 81 posts - 133 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 15 of 18 09 February 2014 at 11:57am | IP Logged | ||
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Going back and reviewing the Michel Thomas Foundation course has been a huge help. The teacher's voice is
incredibly clear, and soothing almost, and I can hear the accent I'd like to imitate so much better than on TV or on the radio. Yes, it's artificial and abnormally slow and enunciated, but, in my mind, you have to understand "perfect" speech before you can get around to understanding "normal" speech, with its mumbles, abbreviations, and imperfections. I'll never forget when I was learning French: I would get so frustrated hearing people say "T'as pas ..." when the written was "Tu n'as pas...". It took a long time of enunciating the full set of words to understand why that was a "normal" spoken French construction, and to understand it, and others like it. Which brings me to another language learning point: knowing what kind of learner you are is so important, particularly for languages, but I'm sure it must carry over to other subjects. I'm sure I've mentioned this before (middle age brain freeze here!), but one anecdote will illustrate the point. Back in 1995 (early days of the internet, and I didn't yet have a computer), I was doing an TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) certificate program in Paris. One day we came to class, and there was a new teacher in the front of the room, who told us we would be spending an hour learning a new language, to experience what it was like to be a learner again - since most of us already spoke decent French, and it might have been awhile since we were "new" language learners. The teacher proceeded to spend the next hour speaking to us in Dutch, which none of us had encountered previously. She spoke to us in Dutch, expecting us to repeat after her, and then ask each other questions. Well, I realized pretty quickly that her method wasn't working well for me: I was freezing up while trying desperately to make sense of her nonsensical speech. This lasted for a good 30 minutes, until she finally turned on the overhead projector, and showed us the written language we had been trying to understand and speak. All of a sudden, it all became clear, and I was able to finish the class with flying colors, because I could SEE (and spell) the words that I couldn't make sense of by just hearing. This episode really clarified for me the need to understand your own learning style, and to adapt any learning method you might encounter to fit your own needs. Some people are Visual learners (like me), some are Aural, some need to move - I think it's called Kinesthetic learners, and so on. (This also greatly influenced the way I taught, but that's a story for another day.) In my case, when using the Michel Thomas course, for example, I have to take this purely aural course (no written support materials, when used as intended), and adapt it to my visual style. So while I'm listening to the questions and answers of the listening materials, I'm sitting at my computer doing a "dictee," as the French say: I'm typing everything I hear, or typing what I think the student response will be, and then check based on the spoken answer. This helps in two ways: it helps to focus my mind on the listening (if I have nothing to LOOK at, my mind wanders), and also help to reinforce what I'm hearing, by seeing the words on the screen. I do the same thing when listening to the Assimil course: while the audio is playing, I'm following along with the book. Eventually I might drop the book, and just type what I hear, but it's all the same principle: I'm using my own learning style to adapt the course for my own needs. So while I know the listening component of learning a language is important, I find it pretty useless for me in the beginning stages if I don't have some visual support (like a book, or subtitles in a TV show or film). This has helped clarify what I need to do when learning a language, to have the most effective materials. Edited by VivianJ5 on 09 February 2014 at 11:58am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| VivianJ5 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4260 days ago 81 posts - 133 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 16 of 18 23 February 2014 at 9:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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Been negligent with this log, but have a excuse - whether it's good or not depends on your point of view, I suppose.
Have been having long discussions with my husband, regarding his job and the situation at his company, and it's looking very likely that we will be leaving the Netherlands sometime in the next year to move back to the U.S. This has, obviously, put a bit of a damper on my enthusiasm for learning Dutch at this point. Of course, it makes sense, that only a couple of months after finally getting serious about learning the language where I'm living, I would find out I'm leaving. I could continue with my Dutch studies, but it's feeling a little pointless at this stage, especially since I could really use some refresher time with my French, and would love to re-activate the Italian I studied for so many years when I was younger, and the Spanish I barely touched on 30 years ago... So many languages, so little time! I still find Dutch a fascinating language, well worth learning in theory, but considering how often I'd use it in the future, and the probability of speaking it after we move away...well, I'm feeling less motivated for Dutch, and more motivated for French and Italian. To be continued... Edited by VivianJ5 on 23 February 2014 at 9:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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