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The Cheating & Consolidating Method | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4888 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 105 of 136 08 August 2014 at 8:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
Thanks for the notes! And here's the funny thing about languages: I've seen "trou" a thousand times. I've probably used it in a sentence. And yet yesterday I stumbled: it's hole. Or pit? No, spring. Or well. Wait, spring. It's like forgetting someone's name who you know perfectly well. When I was going back and adding color tags I was shocked: I missed this???? But I was aiming to see what was automatic, so I kept it red / opaque. Other things I missed seem so obvious now, a day later. With "hautes dans le ciel" I kept thinking "hautes" must be a thing in the sky, and couldn't figure out what that thing was. Edited by kanewai on 08 August 2014 at 8:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5235 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 106 of 136 08 August 2014 at 8:44pm | IP Logged | |||||
I am so glad I'm not the only one who does this! 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 107 of 136 09 August 2014 at 12:36am | IP Logged | |||||
I'm taking a Coursera class about learning how to learn and this graphic reminded me on emk's method:
Basically, it's easier for the brain to use the existing neural connections than to create new ones. (I think someone said this is why Cristina temporarily forgot Spanish when she learned Italian) I've also heard of that in the context of coping with anxiety - the more times you've had a thought or a whole vicious circle of thoughts, the easier it is to think of it again, sometimes jumping to unreasonable conclusions that you no longer question. So while forming new pathways is important, you also need to consolidate and "walk these paths repeatedly", until they are as automatic as getting home from the nearest bus stop or store. The picture shows a new connection, one that has already been practiced a bit, and a mature one. Edited by Serpent on 09 August 2014 at 12:43am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4532 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 108 of 136 16 August 2014 at 5:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
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OK. Out of curiosity I tried to translate the same passage as EMK, but using the German translation, before I looked at his translation.
Interestingly the 347 French words become only 283 in German - not sure if this means that some parts were left out or if really German is nearly 20% more compact!
I was a little surprised by the results. First, I was surprised by how few words I didn't know so depending how you count I would have a pretty high comprehension rate. However, there were quite a few rough patches, which are not obvious when you simply count words. First, the whole second sentence "Falls das Werk..." threw me, as I wasn't expecting to have a sentence about someone's works, right after the sentence about the person themselves. Because I wasn't expecting it was really hard for me to parse in a way that I felt confident with the translation. So while I would count most of the words as known, you could perhaps say that I didn't understand much of the sentence at all, which would have a big impact on my overall comprehension score. "Lauf der Durance" was fairly opaque for me. "Lauf" is obviously something like "walk" but I didn't get that Durance was a river. Once I got that then "meandering" or something like it is obvious, but without that insight the expression is unintelligible. "der ganzen Breite" I had trouble with, simply because I couldn't get my idea around how he could walk the entire breadth of the region in three days. "belebten" I also had trouble with because I couldn't imagine how the village looked like a living village with people, when the houses were chewed up and tower of the church collapsed. What this underlines for me, is (perhaps obvious point) that simply knowing words (or grammar) is not enough. You need to have a sense of the general context/action of what is going on, to hang the words off. As soon as I started making wrong assumptions about the text then I couldn't understand parts of what was going on. I think it's often assumed that: Vocab and Grammar = Comprehension But I think this can work in reverse: Comprehension = Vocab and Grammar I've had this impression multiple times when I come back to a book I have struggled partway through in German and then given up. On the new reading I suddenly feel like I understand so much more than previously. I am sure this comes not simply from having better vocab/grammar, but from having a better internal model of how the words/grammar should hang together to tell the story gained from my previous reading. This is particularly obvious for books I have started and then given up, because my much improved German suddenly drops away as soon as I reach a section I haven't read before. Edited by patrickwilken on 16 August 2014 at 7:53pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sterogyl Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4366 days ago 152 posts - 263 votes Studies: German*, French, EnglishC2 Studies: Japanese, Norwegian | Message 109 of 136 16 August 2014 at 6:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
German needs fewer words than French (and English), yes. 2 persons have 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 110 of 136 16 August 2014 at 6:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
To me this is a great example on how you know you're actually making progress over time. When the initial struggle is great, if one can carry on, a subsequent trip will be easier. That's what I've found. Edited by luke on 16 August 2014 at 6:44pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4532 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 111 of 136 16 August 2014 at 6:42pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yeah. But without wanting to sound negative, part of this progress seems to be illusory - in the sense that the comprehension boost is probably simply because I know the layout of the story better. I am pretty sure the same thing would happen if I had read the story previously in English or even if I had only read a short summary of the story's plot. I often don't understand what it being said because I make wrong assumptions about what I expect to see/read. Actually, to use EMK's "cheating" terminology: Although I don't generally do this, I think it can be a good and useful trick to convert text to comprehensible input by pre-reading a summary in your L1. Or for instance by reading the text as a graphic novel. Edited by patrickwilken on 16 August 2014 at 7:34pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4827 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 112 of 136 16 August 2014 at 8:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't know about French, but I would respectfully question that statement for German and English. It had always been my impression that German overall needed slightly more words, and this is what I've found when preparing my own parallel texts, although I haven't done that many. I had a quick look at volume 2 of the Penguin German-English Parallel Text reader, which contains several short stories, it varies with the story, but I'd say that the German generally takes at least as many words as the English, and in some cases more. The last story is interesting: "Der Zimmerer" by Thomas Bernhard. It is laid out as one single long paragraph. The last pair of pages has the text made up of the same number of lines, with exactly one word on each of the two last lines! So, a dead heat in that case. :-) Of course, for "literary" translations, you are somewhat at the whim of the individual translator. Edited by montmorency on 16 August 2014 at 9:10pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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