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The Cheating & Consolidating Method | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 81 of 136 05 August 2014 at 4:14am | IP Logged | |||||
I don't want to doubt this poster's memory but how many people here at HTLAL believe that a person could write a review of a book they "read" without a dictionary and written in a language they didn't know? There's a missing link somewhere. This is impossible. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 82 of 136 05 August 2014 at 4:41am | IP Logged | |||||
I think I've got the difference between not cheating and hard-core cheating. 1. Not cheating does not mean reading the Ancient Greet without any help, as I originally thought. It means a) reading with a guide book in English that provides translation and b) using a grammar book (Clyde Pharr's Homeric Greek - A Book for Beginners) with a series of exercises aimed at helping the student better understand the original Greek. 2. Cheating means just skipping through the exercises of the grammar book and reading the original Greek with the help of the guide book and additional translations. This is more fun than slogging through the exercises. I'll be the first to admit that this kind of cheating is not such a big deal. Who has not skipped some exercises in a grammar book? I doubt that anyone has ever written out every single exercise in Assimil. If this sort of thing is cheating, then I'm guilty as any and I've been cheating all along. Edited by s_allard on 05 August 2014 at 4:49am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5765 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 83 of 136 05 August 2014 at 9:27am | IP Logged | |||||
Read: "clever enough to know when it'll give the desired effect" 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7204 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 84 of 136 05 August 2014 at 11:39am | IP Logged | |||||
My question was, "does your wife know?" 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 85 of 136 05 August 2014 at 2:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Since I plan to attend the 2014 Pojyglot Conference in Novi Sad, Serbia, later this year, I figured I'd spend a few
days in Romania, a country whose culture has always intrigued me. So, I thought I should learn some rudiments of the language which is related to French. For next to nothing I picked up an old audio-cassette edition of Assimil's Le roumain sans peine. We have two Romanian families living in our building. I even have some recordings of songs in Romanian. With all that and the vast resources of the Internet, I think that I could get some basics of the language to help make my trip enjoyable. But wait a minute. With all this talk about cheating as a way to make language learning faster and more effective, I was intrigued by the following advice on how to cheat from someone in a similar situation:
If I can find an old saga in Romanian, maybe I'll give this a go. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 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 86 of 136 05 August 2014 at 5:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think s_allard is keen on preserving the difference between "legitimate" learning and "cheating", which still exists in class and haunts many learners long afterwards, while most others here are trying to destroy it.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5765 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 87 of 136 05 August 2014 at 6:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think others are talking about what we in German call a 'wall in the head', eine Mauer im Kopf, a thought habit which keeps people from doing something because they don't realize that the physical barrier that initially kept them from doing it isn't there anymore.
kanewai mentioning that his method would lead him to fail a college class is one of these walls. I've had teachers who told us it was totally legitimate to read guides before tackling the full text, especially if the text was difficult for us. (I would think that is something you do in preparation for class, though.) Just as I had teachers who insisted that their teaching was 'better' than any guide could possibly be. Uh-huh. I understand the point about 'cheating' being a word with a negative connotation for activities which should get a positive connotation, but when I think about my own experience - maybe I could learn better with transcripts and bilingual texts, but when I try to use them I get anxious and feel like I am cheating. (It gets even worse when there's an omission or a mistake in the supplemental material, and I think 'who am I to think this is a mistake with my low level of the language etc') 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 88 of 136 05 August 2014 at 7:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
The old saga was chosen on purpose. It's supposed to be random and difficult. They are among the most impenetrable texts. But my point was that if you take small puzzle pieces, in the end you can read sagas. I don't think I would necessarily use it as the first piece of the puzzle, but for many people this is the reason (i.e. I want to read Tolstoy/Proust/insert classical author here in the original). If you want fun old stories about the inhabitants of Transylvania, there are some funny legends, though. I used to take a bilingual reader to school to teach the children. The children at the orphanage loved it. But if you want something modern yet difficult, I suggest Caragiale :) I remember my teacher made me read him 4 months into studying Romanian. Edited by tarvos on 05 August 2014 at 7:08pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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