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Vocabulary-building with GLOSS | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Eriol Diglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6715 days ago 118 posts - 130 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Portuguese | Message 1 of 2 12 February 2007 at 3:38pm | IP Logged |
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I have been using texts from the GLOSS-site trying to improve my russian vocabulary for a little more than two months now, so I thought it would be a good idea to write a little bit about my experience so far. Hopefully I can get a few tips about how to improve my learning routines and maybe inspire someone else.
First of all, I'm learning Russian for fun and if I don't enjoy a certain learning technique I simply won't force myself to do it. I'm also quite impatient, so I usually don't repeat the same exercise or text an endless number of times until I know it by heart. I would much rather move on to new and more interesting material. At the moment I'm at some kind of intermediate level and the material from GLOSS is pretty much perfect for me. There is lots of authentic material and some of it even touches on subjects that interest me. Because I work with computers all day and don't really want to use them more than necessary in my free time and since I'm not really fond of the GLOSS user-interface either, I have downloaded the things I wanted from the site to put it on paper and CD. More about that in the original GLOSS thread. For me the audio-part is really important. When I learned most of my english vocabulary, more or less unconsciously by just reading lots of books and texts, I got lots of pronounciations wrong and I'm kind of still paying the price for that. I don't want to make the same mistake with Russian. The first batch of texts I worked with was everything with Russian language, proficiency level 2 and lexical competence setting. What I had was simply a paper with russian text and english translation side by side and a CD with the audio. For every text I performed the four different steps below. Steps 2 and 3 were done once while steps 1 and 4 were done several times both before and after the other steps. 1. Just listening to the audio and trying to understand as much as possible. I have done this mostly when I'm driving. Naturally I don't really focus on listening all the time, but I don't see this as a big problem. Sometimes I try to shadow the speaker, primarily for words and sentences that are difficult to pronounce. 2. Reading through the whole text and marking all "unknown" words. I do this really carefully and look at the english translation trying to understand all nuances of the text. The "unknown" words I mark are not just russian words that I have never seen before, but also words that are used in a new context or in an unexpected way, cases where the english translation doesn't make sense to me and words that I recognize but can't remember the exact meaning of. When I began using this technique I fooled myself a bit and marked only words that felt completely new and that I couldn't guess from the translation text, but I soon realised that it's better to mark an extra word than to miss something important. 3. Checking all the marked words in a Russian-Swedish dictionary and writing the translations next to the text. This takes a bit of work with a lot of flipping back and forth in the dictionary since Russian has a large amount of compound words, particips and other pieces of "invented language" that needs some hard thinking for me to understand. Still there are some words that I just can't find and need to leave untranslated. When I have finished this step, the text I'm working with is, if not totally, at least 99% clear to me. 4. Listening to the audio while following the script. I do this to get my brain to really connect the spelling and pronounciation to each other. To do this for more than a few minutes at a time actually takes more concentration than I ever expected. Some of the speakers are rapid-fast and if I lose focus for a second I will miss several rows. Today I counted the total number of words I had marked in the first 24 texts and hopefully learnt in context. The sum was 797 words! If I can retain only half of those I will definitely consider it a success. I have already started working with 20 new lessons, this time moving to level 2+. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| delectric Diglot Senior Member China Joined 7030 days ago 608 posts - 733 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: German | Message 2 of 2 13 February 2007 at 12:46am | IP Logged |
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Nice to hear how you're using the gloss material. I really want to start with the Chinese gloss material soon. It's a shame that there's no function online to slow down the speach or to see the text highlighted as the audio goes over it.
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