Farley Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 7083 days ago 681 posts - 739 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, GermanB1, French Studies: Spanish
| Message 9 of 27 10 August 2007 at 9:39am | IP Logged |
furyou_gaijin wrote:
- excellent patterns for constructing new sentences through substitution;
- etc.
It is suprising how many topics can be covered by carefully remixing a sufficiently diverse set of very short dialogues.
|
|
|
I agree. What I have found of particular interest is that learning a number of very short dialogs is its own variation drill.
2 persons have voted this message useful
|
furyou_gaijin Senior Member Japan Joined 6377 days ago 540 posts - 631 votes Speaks: Latin*
| Message 10 of 27 10 August 2007 at 10:09am | IP Logged |
winters wrote:
So, poetry, prose excerpts, even folk art, all of that can pass, but dialogues from language learning textbooks - no. |
|
|
I wasn't specifically referring to language textbooks but rather dialogues from situations close to real life: recently developed podcasts are a great source of those. Movies are another great source.
1 person has voted this message useful
|
leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6541 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog
| Message 11 of 27 10 August 2007 at 1:03pm | IP Logged |
Agreed. I get some great stuff from soap operas (TV dramas). But short podcasts, like chinese pod, are even more specific, and really focus on high frequency, useful phrases, so I think I'll listen to them more often. Thanks for the tips!
1 person has voted this message useful
|
CaitO'Ceallaigh Triglot Senior Member United States katiekelly.wordpress Joined 6848 days ago 795 posts - 829 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Russian Studies: Czech, German
| Message 12 of 27 10 August 2007 at 7:21pm | IP Logged |
maxb wrote:
audiolang wrote:
We all have our speaking styles ,that's why we don't have to imitate other people.
|
|
|
But you get your speaking style from imitating someone. We have all gotten our native accents by imitating someone (most likely our parents). |
|
|
I remember reading an article somewhere about how kids learn languages, and discovered that generally kids don't learn their accent from their parents. Most of the time, they pick up their mannerisms from other kids, subconscious peer pressure and all that. This makes sense to me, as I grew up with quite a few kids whose parents were from the UK and Australia, but their kids spoke just like I did. Or I spoke just like they did. :)
The memorizing of a monologue or short text intrigues me. I've seen a video of that first fellow in Canada, and was amazed. But what I can't connect is how the memorization of this six minute piece of text and audio could translate to speaking an entire language with a native sounding accent.
I'm guessing it's because once you've mastered those six minutes, you've affectively trained your mouth muscles to move in that way?
1 person has voted this message useful
|
Hencke Tetraglot Moderator Spain Joined 6885 days ago 2340 posts - 2444 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Finnish, EnglishC2, Spanish Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map
| Message 13 of 27 13 August 2007 at 11:25am | IP Logged |
winters wrote:
... but I absolutely refuse to memorise, and as such to carry inside of myself, something of absolutely no emotional or artistic value for me - and the dialogues you mention are precisely that. |
|
|
I find that once a native dialogue starts to stick, just reproducing it and marvelling at the native-sounding result coming out of your mouth, is quite a powerful emotional and artistic experience all in itself ;o).
1 person has voted this message useful
|
Journeyer Triglot Senior Member United States tristan85.blogspot.c Joined 6859 days ago 946 posts - 1110 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, German Studies: Sign Language
| Message 14 of 27 13 August 2007 at 7:18pm | IP Logged |
For me I listened to a lot of German music, and that helped. I wouldn't say I memorized it to the point where I could sing it at the drop of a hat, but I could sing along with it, imitating their voices and so forth.
Memorizing texts is something I haven't really put much effort into, although I will likely do it with other languages I study.
1 person has voted this message useful
|
Earle Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6306 days ago 276 posts - 276 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Norwegian, Spanish
| Message 15 of 27 13 August 2007 at 10:14pm | IP Logged |
Yeah, I learned a lot of German folk songs. I know more than most Germans, at least the younger ones...
1 person has voted this message useful
|
dmg Diglot Senior Member Canada dgryski.blogspot.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 7002 days ago 555 posts - 605 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Dutch, Esperanto
| Message 16 of 27 13 August 2007 at 11:09pm | IP Logged |
Personally, I'd much rather memorize a dull dialog with high didactic value (i.e., containing lots of useful sentence fragments and themed vocabulary, such as those provided by Assimil or Living Language) than a dramatic monologue or poem that won't help me in everyday conversation. Hell, my francophone friends already laugh at me when I use constructs they consider too European (I live in Quebec), so I can't imagine their reaction if I started spouting Molière.
1 person has voted this message useful
|