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Listening-Reading system | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| FSI Senior Member United States Joined 6359 days ago 550 posts - 590 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 105 of 489 16 July 2007 at 11:15am | IP Logged | |||||
This is another point at which I have diverged from the method described on page 1. I simply can't spend 8 to 10 hours per day in constant meditation with this, or with any other method. For me, it would take the fun out of this. And I want this to be fun. If not, I would stick with FSI. For me, 3 hours a day was too much - I tried it with Verne, and it left me almost too burnt out to do my 1.5h with Dickens later in the day. I wrote a much longer post about this just above this post, so I won't go on in this one, except to say that, for this method to work for me, one of the first things I decided to do away with was the several-hour-a-day committment, in favor of styles more conducive to the way I learn. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6447 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 106 of 489 16 July 2007 at 11:36am | IP Logged | |||||
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Hi FSI I think you missed this so I will try to ask again. Simotteikiru clearly stated you're supposed to do an intensive course for 50-60 hours and that was it. After that you could chill out. The best course/method is the one that works the best for you. I believe it's rather that the best way not to forget a language is to do a little each day. The initial course is another matter. US servicemen often do intensive courses well above the 50 hour limit.
What was your previous knowledge of French? Italian? How many hours did you roughly spend on it? How long did you study Spanish? You say you were not able to tell the French tenses apart. Major ones? You have swept the book some 3 times. How many hours did you spend on Verne? I'd like to differentiate between finding out that reading and listening to audiobooks is good for you (something we kinda knew) vs. this particular method - reading/following translations intensively for a short period of time. This method was supposed to create amazing results after some 50-60 hours for absolute beginners. I understand you had a bit of an advantage as you were not an absolute beginner in French and you had been learning Spanish for a year and you've been stabbing at Italian. You have to do some 4 more sweeps so it's early to tell. You're taking long breaks and doing too many other things at the same time and from what I read here you're not really supposed to do that. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| FSI Senior Member United States Joined 6359 days ago 550 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English* | Message 107 of 489 16 July 2007 at 11:42am | IP Logged | |||||
Hi reineke! I'll go through these one by one. 1. Previous knowledge of French came from completing the Michel Thomas courses last year, as well as the Learn in your Car courses this Spring. Both were repeated several times (I like sweeping through courses to pick them clean). Besides that, I've done no formal study, though I've spent lots of time listening to French music (my main motivation for learning the language), and lots of time listening to Radio France Internationale. But in terms of actual courses, just the two above. I started FSI French this year, but I haven't completed it once. I made it up to halfway through unit 4, but...that program is impossibly dull - it makes FSI Spanish seem interesting in comparison, which, in itself is no small feat. This said, I could certainly tell the tenses apart in *speech*, and at my peak, felt relatively comfortable expressing myself orally in the language, as long as the sentences were simple ones, and I wasn't required to use the subjunctive beyond "Il faut + infinitive". That and listening to the language have always been my greatest strengths. But in terms of reading? Beyond news articles, which are usually transparent enough to get the gist of anything, I stayed away from literary material because although I could easily maneuver through "I speak/I was speaking/I will speak/I could speak" *orally*, I couldn't tell them apart on *paper*, since I never studied the language on paper. Simply put, I couldn't spell, and I didn't know any of the verb endings visually - any of them. This has unequivocally changed with the use of this method. With Italian, the story is similar: Michel Thomas - though only the beginner course - and Learn in your car, which I swept through 10 times last year. After this, again, I could express myself simply in the language, though not as well as in French. However, I made no attempt at reading in the language, and found far harder to understand aurally than French or Spanish. After the MT and LIYC courses last year, I left the language alone. Spanish is my strongest of the three by far. After completing FSI 2 - 4 several times, the language simply makes sense. Like with French, I listen to a lot of music in the language, and would be more than happy to give artist recommendations. That, plus radio, and film, takes care of aural comprehension. My main weaknesses in the language are primarily in matters of vocabulary. Vis-a-vis reading time for Verne, see the post slightly behind this one. I've spent approximately 25 hours on Verne now (24 hours from the last 3 sweeps, 1 hour from today). About the amazing results? I have no idea what they'll bring, or where I'll be at the end of 7 sweeps of each book. But for me, what's happening already is already something of worth. My best advice is to tune the method on page 1 to your own modifications, and see where you end up! Finally, about diverging from the page 1 style? Certainly. See my two previous posts for more on that. I 'm not trying to replicate siomotteikiru's methods or results, but to take that method, make it suit mine, and see what I get out of it. As stated before, there were parts I didn't quite agree with, and there were other parts I wished to explore that weren't in the original method - so I made my own! If I had not, perhaps I would not have attempted anything like this at all. But however I can make it fit me more, I've got to try it, and see where it takes me. Good luck! 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6447 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 108 of 489 16 July 2007 at 11:49am | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks, the only problem I see is that what you're doing is no longer the original method. Were the Verne sweeps done in large chunks? Hopefully Volte will have a more measurable progress report.
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| FSI Senior Member United States Joined 6359 days ago 550 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English* | Message 109 of 489 16 July 2007 at 11:57am | IP Logged | |||||
I mostly read a chapter or two at a time. Each chapter is between 8 and 17 minutes long, though the majority of them are approximately 14 minutes in length. At a certain point, when I find myself checking the time on my media player and longing for the end of the chapter, I know it's time to take a break. And yup, I'll admit this is no longer the original method - not at all. I'm quite interested in reading of other people's progress with the overall l-r style, however - whether they used the page 1 technique, modified it into their own, or come to the table with an entirely different technique from another source. Hopefully more people who try this - however they try it - will report back! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| HTale Bilingual Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6378 days ago 164 posts - 167 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written)* Studies: French | Message 110 of 489 16 July 2007 at 12:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
Please keep us posted! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6909 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 111 of 489 16 July 2007 at 12:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
But is it really that important to the entire volume in L1 before listening-reading L2? Even if I haven't tried this (yet) I have about the same feelings as Iversen regarding "getting lost" after one page, no matter how interesting the story may be. With that in mind, I definitely see FSI's point of taking one chapter at a time (or even less), but then it's "only" a few hours per day, and not eight hours (or whatever the original method suggests). Anyway, I will try this as soon as the audiobooks I'm after are returned to the library. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6439 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 112 of 489 16 July 2007 at 12:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
I haven't found 'getting lost' to be a problem at all. With both German and Polish, the latter of which I'd -never- previously studied (nor any Slavic language), I got confused as to where I was in the English by more than two sentences only a handful of times. Proper nouns are great for realigning oneself - and, especially after the first perhaps half hour or hour, it just isn't that hard to keep aligned if one is -only- reading the L1. Reading the L1 and glancing at the L2, I get lost a lot more - still not that often, but it breaks flow and the correspondence of L1 text and L2 audio for me, and annoys me. I'm hoping for suggestions on how to reduce or eliminate this effect. The book I used was "Animal Farm". I jumped right into listen-reading (step 3) with it, as I'd previously read it (albeit years ago), and dividing Polish into words mentally came very quickly. I found, back in 2004, that I could divide Japanese into words after perhaps 3 (certainly not more than 6) hours of listening to online radio stations, and Polish has the same kind of staccato clarity as Japanese and German, so this worked well; I was dividing Polish words I listened, -without- looking at the L2 (due to a software glitch - I was having to use Abiword, which was behaving extremely buggily, until I fixed a problem with OpenOffice), within perhaps 30 minutes. My progress report so far is a little sad, as I've only put in ~5.5 hours, yesterday and the day before, listening-reading Polish, and the ~1.5 hours yesterday were looking primarily at the Polish, which I found rather unsatisfying, and which I -think- siomotteikiru just warned against. Despite this, I'd say that my Polish is better than my Persian at this point (except for small talk, since I don't know how to say things like "hi" or "how are you" - but in terms of passive understanding of connectives, grammar, vocabulary, etc). Words stick much better for me with this method than they did with Assimil Persian, and I don't find myself mixing up connectives. I'm working on adjusting my schedule and gathering materials; I'd be -very happy-, given a sufficient idea of what methods to use as a baseline, and enough materials, to do 10+ hours a day of Polish for a week and report on the results, but for these past 3 days, I've been falling far short of that. I've spent several hours today reading "The Master and Margarita" in English to prepare for listening-reading it. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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