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Shadowing a novel | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7207 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 33 of 46 16 October 2014 at 2:44am | IP Logged | |||||
I definitely prefer doing larger chunks, like a whole book and repeating it, rather than taking a small chunk and perfecting it before moving on. For me, one gets the feeling of accomplishment of having gotten through the entire set of material, even if it is only partially understood. Repeated visits bring comprehension up a notch each time. As far as shadowing, I may only do a few lines or paragraphs in the context of a long listen. I often do just phrases. This helps me concentrate on the material and at for those bits I shadow, I know what I'm saying. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sterogyl Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4369 days ago 152 posts - 263 votes Studies: German*, French, EnglishC2 Studies: Japanese, Norwegian | Message 34 of 46 16 October 2014 at 3:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
For psychological reasons... It gives me a feeling of accomplishment when I work my way through an entire novel or something like this. I've already made Anki flashcards out of complete literary works and I like it. It's also a certain means of measuring my progress. But frankly speaking, shadowing a whole novel is very daunting. If I proceed the way I have described above, it'll take more than a year to shadow the book I'm presently working at. That's just TOO much. Maybe I'll just do it as proposed by Retinend. Or I'll skip the project and use single chapters only. I've tried shadowing many times, rejecting it after a couple of days because it was all too strenuous. I always shadowed a bit on and off, but not regularly and rigorously enough to get any results. This time around I want to challenge myself again. I think it's worth it! Well, maybe it isn't, but I'll never know if I don't give it a shot. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6584 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 35 of 46 16 October 2014 at 6:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
I've shadowed a few short stories. It gives you a sense of accomplishment and completion and the audio of one is just about 20 minutes or so. I divide it into 2-3-minute chunks, work through it, adding all new words as Anki cards, and then shadow it a few times. Then I add the chunk to my "studied" playlist, or my "shadow library", as I call it, which contains other stuff I've worked through (like Assimil lessons). I listen to the playlist on shuffle every day, and often shadow a few clips from it, at random. As the playlist builds, so does my vocabulary and fluidity. The repetition of these clips over longer periods of time makes me very familiar with them. Overlearning is a good thing when it comes to language learning, and this really helps anchor the vocabulary I learn through them, since I can often recall a phrase or two for many of these words (and I have the context I found them in on the back of the Anki card, too). But yeah, short stories. With French I've worked through a few by Montpassant, with Mandarin I'm working through some Sherlock Holmes (though it's actually The Baskerville Hound, so that's not a short story). And with Portuguese it's Assimil lessons. I'll be adding some audio clips from films and TV series, too, to get more natural and colloquial language, as well as get some stuff for Cantonese, since there's no such thing as an audiobook in Cantonese. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sterogyl Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4369 days ago 152 posts - 263 votes Studies: German*, French, EnglishC2 Studies: Japanese, Norwegian | Message 36 of 46 16 October 2014 at 8:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Short stories are good, too. The reason why I think I would like to use novels is that I don't have to look for new short stories all the time. LOL. So you also divide your audio files into small chunks. I think this is a good way to really internalize the content.
By the way, there are audiobooks in Cantonese. I once googled in order to find an audiobook of 我的前半生 (the biography of the last emperor of China) and lo and behold, I found nothing but a (free) Cantonese version (to my dismay, of course, for I was hoping to find the audiobook in Mandarin)! I don't know if it still exists, though. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6584 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 37 of 46 16 October 2014 at 8:39pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, there are a bunch of Maupassant stories on litteratureaudio.com, and several Spanish stories on Albalearning, if I remember correctly. So for some languages it's not a big problem.
That's encouraging news! I've been searching for Cantonese audiobooks and only found a few religious ones (usually audio-only, not written works read aloud). The problem, even if I do find one, is of course that it's going to be Mandarin read in Cantonese pronunciation, rather than actual Cantonese, but that could be good to work on, too. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6599 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 38 of 46 16 October 2014 at 10:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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As for the shadowing library, do you still do this in several of your languages or is it just a phase? Edited by Serpent on 16 October 2014 at 10:03pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4310 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 39 of 46 17 October 2014 at 9:38am | IP Logged | |||||
I admit I have not shadowed a whole novel. This is important... I suppose that I want to advise that shadowing literature is a good idea. A full novel would probably work, but it's better to start with a small scale experiment. For me this was "Die Verwandlung," which is only abut 60 pages long. I predict that I spent about 100 hours shadowing the edit: novella, Siddhartha, (itunes gives me this information) and 200 hours writing it in the scriptorium, including my own system of glossing the text for grammatical features. The novella has about 200 pages in most editions.
Bearing in mind that I've not shadowed a full novel....yeeees... I would go through it, and accept that at the start you will be doing very poorly. But it's not a waste of time because whatever you gather (maybe just scattered bits of vocabulary) will serve as a context for the next time you listen, and you get better each time. For Siddhartha, I ended up - in total - shadowing early chapters about 30 times, later chapters less, for reasons I mentioned. If you space these out, then 30 of each is more than enough to gain a feel for the musicality of the recording. Twinned with a deep understanding of the grammar that you obtain from writing the words and analyzing them, your recognition of the language should be very high, and your recall should be decent. Better than mine, I'm sure, because I accrued these 30 repetitions very intensely, and from my experiences with Spanish, I know that spacing them out would have been better. Approaching it whole is a natural way of spacing out the repetitions. Edited by Retinend on 18 October 2014 at 3:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6584 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 40 of 46 17 October 2014 at 10:04am | IP Logged | |||||
I used to do it for Mandarin and then that library got lost in an iTunes migration. I wish I still had that, and as I've recently restarted with a new library, I plan on keeping it. At the moment I have one such library for each language, and one "collection" library that automatically adds any track in any of the other ones. I think I will eventually create one more that only contains the latest additions, so I can work on them a bit more, creating a bit of a faux SRS. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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