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Learning a language for 6 weeks | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6580 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 73 of 195 10 April 2007 at 1:25am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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My perspective on the issues at hand:
1) The testing. I think the test is very important, not because of any competition between people, but because of the competition between methods. That's what this is supposed to be, right? We're trying to discern which method is the most effective. To do that it's very important to have an impartial testing method. If you have a testing method that's based on reading and writing alone, you're likely to get the conclusion that Pimsleur sucks, and so on. The only really fair method might have to be the learner's own feelings about the progress. This might be unfair in the details, but if enough people participate, this should even out. It's not a great test, but I can't think of any other that's reasonably fair (and reasonably practical). So I suggest a longer forum post after the six weeks are done, describing how well you think the method worked, and then a single thread with short answers to predetermined questions ("Approximately how many words did you learn?" "Do you feel your pronounciation is good?" etc.), where the first post is sort of a summary of the different methods and the opinions of the learners, updated regularly (does Sprachprofi want to take this responsibility?). Maybe this post would just contain leaners' grades on the methods, in a few different categories, like "Pimsleur: Pronounciation 4/5, Word count 1.8/5," etc. How's that? And this way, it's up to the individual learners how they want to test their progress. If someone has access to a native speaker, they can use them to evaluate the method's effectiveness in conversation. Someone else might want to read Wikipedia articles, etc. With enough time, the methods ought to be pretty fairly judged overall. Which brings me to 2) The starting date. It's fun to have lots of people start at the same time, but this is a thing that anyone can do whenever they wish, right? I'm sort of comparing it to the 24 hour RPG challenge. You can do it whenever you want, and post the results, but once in a while some people will decide to do it at the same time. 3) The 30-minute limit. This is also pretty important, to make it easier to compare methods. Possibly there could be a number of "time classes", like 30, 45, 60 and unlimited, but the more of these, the lesser the number of participants in each class. However, they could give interesting results, like "Pimsleur is a good use of your time if you only have 30 mins, but if you can spend an hour, you're better off with Assimil." 4) A limit on the number of words you learn. I say no way. A method that can teach you many words in a short amount of time is better, no? Unless it neglects grammar, pronounciation, etc. But this will become evident in the final review, no? EDIT: typo Edited by Ari on 10 April 2007 at 2:01am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| sergiu Diglot Senior Member Romania freewebs.com/invata_ Joined 6437 days ago 105 posts - 108 votes Speaks: Romanian*, English Studies: German | Message 74 of 195 10 April 2007 at 2:06am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Iiee thanks for the list of Turkish resources ,it's been more than helpful.I never knew that FSI is available for Turkish,I will use this alone ,and for more practice, the videos on Youtube to get me familiarized with their pronunciation .As for the German-Turkish-English dictionary you can say that I did struck gold!
As for the words limit I still think it's a good idea,in my experience, if you try to learn too many words at once(i.e.rushing things,looking for shortcuts) you will forget most of them ,that's why you must balance the amount of time to the amount of words being learned. We can't forget about grammar ,just like you said. Then there is the review issue ,you would need extra time for it ,aside from the 30 minutes.You can't just go on learning new things while you forget the old ones,right? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6580 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 75 of 195 10 April 2007 at 2:20am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
If you spend review time outside of the 30 minutes, you're not following the rules. Revision must be included in those 30 minutes, right? And if you learn lots of words and then forget about them, you won't have a good word count. The important thing is how many words you know at the end of the period, not how many you're known in total during the period. If the method makes you learn new things and forget about the old ones, it'll show up in the testing. Same thing if it focuses only on words and not on grammar. I mean, let's say there's a method that will teach you 20 words every session, and make sure you remember them. This method would be great, but with your word limit, it'd be held back, and we might never find out. Setting limits on what the methods can do during these 30 minutes is giving them an uneven playing field. We need to be fair to the methods if we want to judge their effectiveness. The whole point is to determine which methods are effective. If we start thinking "let's say you can't do this, because it's not effectve", what's the point of the experiment? What are we testing? I say let's try out all those things that we all think aren't effective and let the results speak for themselves. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Frisco Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6854 days ago 380 posts - 398 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Italian, Turkish, Mandarin | Message 76 of 195 10 April 2007 at 4:18am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Ari, I don't think this was proposed to test what methods are the most effective. If it were, the methodology fails from the beginning. There's absolutely no control and no guarantee that everyone does what they're "supposed" to do. I wouldn't advise you look it at so strictly because even if it were executed with all these time limits enforced, the results will still be relatively meaningless in determining a "superior" method.
I think this should be kept simple and meaningful to the individual participants. 6 weeks to see how well you learn a new language. That's it. Forget required study times, forget competition, forget the tests, just concentrate on learning as much as you can however you can in 6 weeks (and beyond, but the 6 week mark will just be the time to reflect and report your progress). We are not going to come up with a sound, scientific experiment right now, so we shouldn't bother with all these rules. All they're going to do is suck out the fun and motivation from the main idea. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| sergiu Diglot Senior Member Romania freewebs.com/invata_ Joined 6437 days ago 105 posts - 108 votes Speaks: Romanian*, English Studies: German | Message 77 of 195 10 April 2007 at 4:19am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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We'll have to just wait and see if such powerful method does exist and learn from it.
Anyway, I'm very anxious to see the results myself.I already posted too many times in this thread so this is my last one :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6907 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 78 of 195 10 April 2007 at 4:29am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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OK, I flipped cards for about 30 minutes yesterday, but before that I had a look at the various web sites in order to know which words/sentences I should copy.
Even if everybody should stick to the time limit, could you really prevent people with particularly good memory to go through what they have learned, albeit mentally? I mean, I can practice guitar for 30 minutes and "play" the tune(s) in my head for the rest of the day. Is that cheating? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6580 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 79 of 195 10 April 2007 at 6:29am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I rest my case :) Of course, it's Sprachprofi's idea, I'm just trying to interpret his thoughts.
I agree that it will be quite unscentific, and you certainly won't get a "superior" method out of it. What you will get out, however, are some hints on the strengths and weaknesses of different methods. We might find that Assimil gives people good listening comprehension, while Pimsleur gives better pronounciation, and flashcards give great vocab. This could probably be very helpful for individual learners. As for people "cheating"; from what I've seen of this forum, I'm quite content with simply trusting them.
As for the main idea, see quote from Sprachprofi above. I can only speak for myself, but "learn a language and say how it's going after six weeks" doesn't give me much fun or motivation, and isn't very different from what people are doing at the moment. Imposing limits like half an hour a day is more motivating for me. Partly because it's a different way to study and changes in study habits are often motivational. And I would suddenly have to think about how I'm going to most effectively use my time, something that can have great advantages to have considered when I do my "main" language study. It would also be a nice way to test ideas and study methods. I can say "I have an idea. What about only cramming a lot of vocab before even looking at the grammar?" Then I could make a "6WC test" of the method and post my results. This would provide a good basis for discussions about study methods. I could report back that "this method made grammar more easy to study, since you had a sound base vocab to construct your own example sentences with. However, it was difficult to keep up the motivation when only studying the words." Then others could suggest changes to your method, try out their own versions, etc. Or we might find that different methods work differently when applied to different languages. I'll have to state once more (mostly to remind myself) that it's Sprachprofi's idea and I'm not trying to hijack it. I'm just brainstorming about the possibilities. This is what it would look like if I organized it, but I don't. I'll try to shut up now :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6548 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 80 of 195 10 April 2007 at 9:15am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I usually like to start out with listening/speaking. If I take a written test, it probably won't show the progress I've made. That's why I like the interview idea.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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