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The Cheating & Consolidating Method | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4827 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 113 of 136 16 August 2014 at 10:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I want to belatedly thank emk, and also s_allard for their very full and interesting
responses to my (admittedly throwaway) question/remark about wanting a neat French way to express "cheating" (in the sense that emk originally meant it). Very interesting. I'm also grateful to s_allard for confirming that when we Brits use the expression "aide-mémoire", we are using it in more or less the same way as French native speakers, which is probably not the case for a lot of French expressions we (probably mis)-use. A more slangy British expression would be "crib sheet" (rather than "cheat-sheet". "crib notes" is a related expression. "To crib" basically means to copy, but in a sneaky kind of way). I also want to take my hat off to emk for the great example of comprehending a page of French text, in such detail. I haven't actively studied French for about 15 years, but it was still very interesting, as a general example of reading comprehension, and also reminded me of quite a few French words I used to know better, and exposed me to a lot of words I never got to! Edited by montmorency on 16 August 2014 at 10:11pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5531 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 114 of 136 17 August 2014 at 2:00am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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montmorency: I'm glad you enjoyed the thread!
Anyway, I was thinking it might be interesting to try another demonstration in a language where I'm a lot weaker. And then I stumbled over the perfect text in an awesome used book store for $7: Virent Ova! Viret Perna!! (Green Eggs and Ham in Latin). For those folks at HTLAL who aren't English speakers, this is a translation Dr. Suess's classic children's book, which has been selling zillions of copies a year for longer than I've been alive. I read it many times when I was young, and I've read to my kids so many times that I can recite big chunks of the English text from memory. 
Here's the first scene in Latin:
Going into this, I have several advantages that help me "cheat": 1. I studied Latin for either 3 or 4 years in high school, and 6 months intensively at college. At my best, I could laboriously decipher simplified native texts, but I never really consolidated anything. Nearly all of this knowledge is forgotten, but a few vague fragments remain. 2. The book has copious illustrations. 3. I know the English text extremely well. 4. I speak both English and French, both of which will give me a huge number of cognates. First pass: Reading & guessing Here, red means "opaque" and blue means "decipherable (I hope)." Other words are marked as purple, which indicates "sort of decipherable", or more accurately, "a wild-ass guess."
OK, this decipherment is a mess, and it's going to be hard to consolidate much when I'm mostly guessing. Second pass: Using the dictionary at the end of the book Fortunately, we have one more tool at our disposal: a short English/Latin dictionary at the back of the text. This requires us to decipher things manually, so it's going to be less efficient than a hyper-literal interlinear translation like linguists and Assimil use, but we do what we can. Using the dictionary:
OK, that wasn't too bad, though the Latin verse is definitely not a literal translation. It's nice having a 3-page dictionary at the back of the book, though! As for grammar, I can already guess what -atus means from context, though -ari is going to be problem. I'm obviously running into an "expensive decipherment" problem here: I can make the text mostly decipherable, but the process isn't especially efficient. There's a couple ways I could tackle this: 1. I could use a text with a better interlinear translation, perhaps from an Assimil course or something similar. 2. I could try to milk every last drop out of the deciphered text, perhaps by making cloze cards in Anki or by rereading several times. 3. If all else fails, I could suck it up and translate as best I can. What about Latin grammar? One obvious problem here is Latin grammar. Latin is a highly inflected language, with five declensions, four conjugations, multiple subcategories of each, and a big pile of irregular forms. I can think of several strategies for dealing with this: 1. Make Iversen-style "green sheets" with all the regular endings, and keep them at hand. Or just buy a commercial version. 2. Ignore any formal understanding of the grammar, and just train myself to reproduce it. Khatzumoto is very fond of this approach, and he uses cards that look a lot like this:
I'd love to try learning grammar this way at some point, just focusing on filling in the blanks with building a conscious theory. And the only reason to fill in the blanks at all would be to force myself to notice the details. I don't know how it would work, but it would certainly be fun to try. Thoughts As you can see, I don't know enough Latin yet to learn easily from extensive reading. But if I cheat a lot, I can definitely have fun with native texts, which suggests that iguanamon's favorite multi-track approach might be a good choice: Combine a course like Assimil with smaller amounts of native material. This example also shows that "cheating" is hard in the beginning: the available resources are often less than ideal, the language may just be too strange, and so on. Native children brute-force their way through this stage with pantomime, repetition and massive input. One of the reasons that I like Assimil so much is that their courses provide a great substitute for this step, because they both simplify the target language and provide everything needed to make it decipherable. 5 persons have 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 115 of 136 17 August 2014 at 11:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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As a matter of interest, in Welsh, "paratoi" is "to prepare", so I immediately guessed
"paratus" would be "prepared", which is more or less the same as "ready". And the Welsh for "ready" is "parod" (usually mutating to "barod" in practice), which is of course not far from "parat-". I know there is a small but significant portion of Welsh vocabulary that is related to Latin or French (or both). I'm not exactly sure how it came about. I don't think the Romans ever really took control of Wales. Latin influence could have come from early Christian monks and French influence could have come from Norman soldiers or nobility. 1 person has 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 116 of 136 18 August 2014 at 7:51am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Maybe it depends on what you count as a word. Due to German morphology, words like Donauschifffahrtspolizeiverordnung easily become more than one word in English (or French). This is the reason why the word count of German texts is usually a bit lower. But I'm only sure about French, I never counted English words for comparison purposes. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| MRoss Newbie Australia Joined 6177 days ago 15 posts - 21 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, German, Spanish | Message 117 of 136 21 August 2014 at 7:26am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I agree...with everyone ha!
When I think of Cheating as it is used here, I think more of Life Hacks. And what us old school types would call a Shortcut. I understand Why the word was used and can comprehend the conveyed message fine. But what using that word does is, it slows down the speed at which you read the text because we are not used to its use in this manner. The message is still clear though. Years ago I did six months of German at uni. It was dry, dull, boring and a grind. The text held no interest, assignments were drab, the syllabus was not conducive for learning. I stopped. (This was pre internet days) What I've done with my current efforts in Dutch is, developed my own system using L2 with audio and translating myself to creat my vocabulary list. Grammar started a couple months in. It's working for me because, the L2 text is something I enjoy. I tried news but I don't read news in L1, so L2 is equally unappealing. But having the L2 text as something I enjoy, I'm happy to devote time and it's never tedious. Now my question is...with the shortcut pic vs the grind pic...shortcut lists dictionary while grind mentions translating. What's thd difference? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5531 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 118 of 136 21 August 2014 at 12:39pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Please keep in mind that the "grind" pic was intended to satirize a certain sort of language class, and as such, it was a bit of a joke. But there was an idea behind the joke, and let's see if I can explain it a little better: A certain sort of language class. "We want to supplement our course with lightly edited native texts. Each text must be fully translated, on paper, with all the tricky parts sorted out. If you don't understand it completely, it doesn't count. Total exposure this year will be approximately 100 pages of text. Oh, and here's a list of 20 words to memorize this week." An alternative approach. "As Krashen claimed, you acquire language by understanding messages. There may be more to it than Krashen claimed, but that's the heart of it. If the meaning and the words are simultaneously present in your brain, your brain will eventually work out the patterns. And since understanding messages is key to the learning process, your goal is to understand as much raw input as possible. It doesn't matter how you produce that understanding—any artificial aid or trick you can dream up is fair play. And you never need to understand 100% of anything. Take what's you can get easily from your input, and move on. Given a choice between understanding 100% of one page, and 90% of ten pages, choose the latter often, and the former only occasionally." The underlying argument here is that the adult brain can still learn languages via osmosis, but that osmosis requires two things: partial comprehension and sheer volume. Many traditional courses encourage students to work way too hard to produce that comprehension, and they provide nowhere near enough volume to burn that knowledge into the language centers of the brain as automatic and reflexive knowledge. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5531 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 119 of 136 21 August 2014 at 1:44pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
Here's another example of "cheating", from another thread:
Some things to notice: 1. I'm using the English translation to help cheat. This is a huge aid—it saves me tons of dictionary time, and it helps me puzzle out the Egyptian. 2. When I get hopelessly stuck, I just summarize the offending passage as "Let's give a bunch of stuff to Imhotep; he's cool," and move on. I'm better off consolidating the 4 out of 5 lines that I can decipher, and leaving the opaque lines for another day. I know people who would insist that this text be translated down to the last verb tense and obscure idiom, or else it "doesn't count." But that approach says, "Decipherment should be expensive and complete. Consolidation? What's that?" But it's the consolidation that will someday allow me to glance at the text and understand it like I understand English or French. 3 persons have 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 120 of 136 21 August 2014 at 3:17pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
An evening class of which I was a member last academic year spent the first 2 terms (October to Easter, basically) over a relatively short book by Friedrich Dürrenmatt. And this was the most advanced class on offer. That's not all we did, and it had its good points, and a very nice native speaking teacher, but the slow pace of that book (and a similar experience the previous year) was rather frustrating. Meantime, I had obtained a translation of the book (and its prequel), and eventually made myself a parallel text version of them both, which I shared with a few members of the class whom I thought would appreciate it. To be honest, the most productive part of the exercise for me was actually making the parallel texts. You learn a lot from that! Edited by montmorency on 21 August 2014 at 3:22pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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