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Thoughts on L-R | ||
Tags: Listening-Reading (L-R) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6441 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes  Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 1 of 19 07 March 2008 at 3:45am | IP Logged | ||
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This thread is meant to be a compendium of thoughts I have about L-R, my current definitions, clarifications of what I mean by certain things, etc.
Questions, comments, and suggestions are welcome. I'm still new to L-R; these are my current working definitions. Some parts may well differ from atama-ga-ii's. All new mistakes are mine. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6441 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 2 of 19 07 March 2008 at 4:04am | IP Logged | ||
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Definitions:
So far, this contains definitions of 'know vs recognize' and stages of natural listening. Knowing vs recognition: As my mentioning of recognizing but not knowing words has caused confusion, here's a clarification. I'm classifying knowledge in a few ways. From highest to lowest: Active knowledge. I could use 'rano' (morning) rather easily at this point, albeit not necessarily in the right case for the context. Passive knowledge: I'd instantly know the meaning of this word in any context. Cognates are generally in this category by default. Recognition: At a minimum, given a text and a literary translation into English, I would know which non-particle words correspond to which others, or, conversely, if the translation isn't close, such as with idioms which are different between the language. I specify 'non-particle' as particles tend not to correspond. I can -recognize- almost all the words in "The Master and Margarita" in Polish (and I could not when I started my current experiment, a bit under 4 weeks ago). I passively know a fair percentage, but a significantly lower one; this needs to rise, along with my internalization of the grammar, for me to be able to -consistently- natural listen to a wide range of material. I think most of the words I passively recognize are of middling frequency - ie, ones which don't only occur a couple of times, but also ones which aren't used so frequently as to be essentially untranslatable in isolation. I actively -know- perhaps a few hundred. Words sometimes skip the passive stage; 'dlatego' (because) went from 'recognized but not passively known' to 'actively known' yesterday. Stages of natural listening:
Natural listening is, as I understand it, understanding the meaning of new (not previously heard or read in any language) content, the first time it's heard, at natural speed. There are different levels of it. I hear that atama-ga-ii prepared a list, but I haven't yet read it, as I'm still trying to minimize reading Polish without audio. So, here's my stab at a classification system; I have no idea how far it differs from atama-ga-ii's. It's influenced by my experience with every language I've seriously studied. From easiest to hardest: Understanding simple, factual information with lots of cognates. A 30 second news clip about technology might fall into this category. I've already successfully natural-listened to some such things in Polish; news clips included a weather report and a report on Castro being replaced by his younger brother. Understanding simple speech. In general, I'm not yet at this level in Polish. I can pick out bits quite often, but my understanding is still too fragmentary. I'm not at 80% comprehension here. 4/5 is sometimes enough to discern words, and sometimes not - 99.9% can leave you in the dark in some circumstances. Understanding music. This requires being able to deal with background noise (the music). The actual speech is sometimes unclear, and relatively 'poetic' constructions can be used - word order, grammar, etc can differ from normal to some degree, and phrasing often does. In my opinion, basic -passive- fluency starts somewhere around this point, when almost nothing is being missed in fairly clear songs popular with native speakers. Understanding complicated texts. Reading or listening to 'Literature' (capital-L; works by authors such as Tolstoy and Umberto Eco), with essentially full comprehension, including an idea of at least some of the nuances, references, and jokes. Understanding poetry and relatively 'nonsensical' texts (parts of Alice in Wonderland come to mind, as does "Jabberwocky"). I'm not saying that poetry is nonsense. The key aspect of this category is the use of rather fanciful grammar, odd (or even non-existent, but able to create an impression nonetheless) vocabulary, and terse or missing context clues. The last two categories overlap in difficulty; some poetry is significantly easier than some Literature. For what it may be worth - I can currently get the gist of the chunks of "The Master and Margarita" that I don't have an English translation for (there are two, and are a bit over a page in total), as I've said in my Polish L-R log, but I wouldn't say that I can natural listen them; I miss too much. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6441 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 4 of 19 07 March 2008 at 5:23am | IP Logged | ||
Good questions. I'm not entirely sure yet. The general idea I have is to wait until I can easily understand -simple- texts which I haven't previously heard. This is how I interpret what atama-ga-ii said (although I could definitely be wrong on this point), and it's what seems most natural to me. I intend to do a bit more phonetic work first as well. Some Polish consonant clusters which I didn't study during the phonetics step are still giving me trouble. Specifically, I find words which contain them tend not to stick in my memory. Szcz is the worst in this regard; I find it hard to get used to. As for understanding what I'm reading - I largely do. But this is because the text is quite familiar at this point. Picking out a few unusual words, or recognizing what I heard 20 minutes ago is -far- easier than natural listening, at least for me. When I do things like seek backwards a few minutes in the audio, and just listen to it, I can associate it with the meaning, usually by the time I've heard a few words, and pretty much always within a paragraph or so. I consider this to be mainly a matter of memory, rather than understanding, though some of the latter, or at least recognition, is required; I doubt I'd be able to do this with an entirely unfamiliar language right away. Similarly, if the audio for a chapter starts a minute before I start looking at the page, I understand what's being said to a fairly decent degree (but rewind and start again while looking at the page anyhow). Edit: other numbers I'm keeping in mind, albeit as secondary metrics, are 60-80 hours, and 20-40 hours of new material. I'm still significantly short on both; I'm at about 40 hours and under 20, if you discard my previous Polish experiment (which only added "Animal Farm" as new material). Given the -extremely limited- amount I picked up during that experiment, and that it was a fair while ago, I think that that is, unfortunately, closer to accurate than counting it towards this total. Edited by Volte on 07 March 2008 at 7:59am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Alkeides Senior Member Bhutan Joined 6150 days ago 636 posts - 644 votes | Message 5 of 19 07 March 2008 at 11:00am | IP Logged | ||
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Maybe you should classify understanding audio and texts separately? Personally speaking, while I can read Japanese literature (both "popular" and those somewhat more "formal", like a translation into Modern Japanese of Genji Monogatari), sometimes I can't understand songs immediately, especially with slurred singing.
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6441 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 6 of 19 07 March 2008 at 1:38pm | IP Logged | ||
I agree with your general point, and I did bring that into the classification, to some degree. Music is the only one which -has- to have an auditory component. For the others, if it does, I assume clear speech. The less clear the speech is, the harder something is to understand, all else being equal. Given that it's possible for English to be spoken (or sung) so unclearly that I cannot understand it, and that I'm rather skeptical of the use (for me) of criteria in other languages which call for abilities beyond what I currently have in English, and given that I'm trying to make a rough classification to gauge ability with material which is often professionally recorded, I think that clear speech is a fair assumption. This scale doesn't take the difficulty of understanding people in loud discos into account, or heavy dialects; that's way beyond its scope. It's just an ad-hoc tool I've made up to give myself some kind of metric to work with. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6441 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 7 of 19 11 March 2008 at 6:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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I wrote this several days ago, before attempting to do L-R with faster audio. It's a bit of a brain-dump, and somewhat unpolished.
--------- Here are some musings I've been having on L-R, and language learning in general. They may be entirely wrong; they are ideas, largely untested. I think I should try L-R with the audio artificially speeded up. Why? Because I currently have too much time to analyze. ... Isn't analysis good? In this case, I'm not so sure. It -does- help me get specific things into my head, but at what cost? There's an enormous amount of language which is pure convention and feel. I'm finding that I'm strongest on particular easily-analyzed points, and weakest on ones which defy clear logic, such as sentences which have a lot of short words serving fixed conventional roles that aren't particularly logical (to be fair, this is a weakness I seem to always have early in language study). Why I doubt analysis: - atama-ga-ii mentions 12 year olds who love Harry Potter successfully using L-R; the large focus on love of the topic (and, I suspect, by proxy, attention paid to -content-, rather than form) seems to be critical. (This was supported by re-reading the L-R thread, which I did a day after writing this.) - analysis is so limited. During my first attempt at Polish, I asked about 'jest' vs 'to jest', and one reply noted that a recent conference had debated the question without firm conclusions. - I've read so many statements about people who tend to jump in and not analyze doing better at language than those who want to pick apart every detail, that I find myself wondering if there's something to it... I wonder if my analytic background is actually hurting my L-R attempt - or, to look at it from the opposite side, how much L-R is helping by forcing me to go at a speed where I can't analyze everything to death. This isn't a call for no analysis. One thing I've found myself repeatedly wishing for is a -minimal- grammar quick reference sheet, and some sentences (perhaps 300, to take a number from atama-ga-ii, during the debate on how many sentences it took to get an idea of the grammar of a language) which demonstrated major points, and to use both. Rather, it's a question of how far 'intuition' can go - and how big of a role it optimally plays in language learning. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6441 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 8 of 19 11 March 2008 at 6:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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This is another unpolished post I've been sitting on for a few days. I wrote it in two sittings, and ended up forgetting part of what I meant to write.
----- How to bootstrap vocabulary acquisition seems to be an aspect of language learning which attracts very different approaches. I found it interesting to contrast various methods and steps to L-R. A couple of things jumped out instantly. First, in L-R, there doesn't really seem to be a 'holophrastic' phase (understanding one word at a time) - and to the extent there is, it's not at the beginning. I suppose there could be, and it might even be a good thing (atama-ga-ii did write about starting with literal, word-for-word translations), but it's possible to do without. Starting from literary translations, I originally only understood (some) cognates, and corresponded phrases without knowing how the phrases were formed or what the individual phrases they were composed of meant. The closest thing to a holophrastic phase that I went through was after I could generally figure out word correspondences. At that point, very short and simple phrases, usually dialog, were where I gained the most active knowledge (ie, given an English word, I'd be able to translate it to Polish, or given the Polish word, define it in English, albeit without nuances), and to the limited extent that I thought in Polish, it was largely - but not entirely - in the form of single words. At this point, I've returned to studying phrases, to solidify my knowledge of how they fit together and express meaning. The above-mentioned URL says that this only happens after a few hundred words of vocabulary have been learned, which matches the estimate I made earlier today. My estimate may be somewhat low, as I know some relatively unusual words, such as immortality, which probably contribute very little at this stage. Another thing: L-R is, by the far, the most painless way to gain basic vocabulary that I've found. I really dislike studying isolated word lists at the start, whether from a dictionary, a text book, or any other source. Assimil is painfully slow for this particular purpose. L-R doesn't lead to instant active use, but it leads to recognition -extremely- quickly, and use seems to snowball, starting quickly but building rapidly. I haven't used many non-L-R resources to gain vocabulary; I've read (not studied or memorized) word lists in grammars, and a couple of tiny web pages on common Polish phrases. Greater familiarity with a language makes words in it easier to remember, and I've definitely seen this effect; I end up actively learning a few words whenever I see a word list, with rather minimal effort. It feels more like learning vocabulary in a language I'm in at least an intermediate level in. Another thing which was quite striking was what was written about morphological variation (ie, helpful, helpless, unhelpful). L-R makes morphological variation become relatively straightforward fairly quickly (for instance, I'm quite comfortable with bez-, and fairly comfortable with nie- and -ny). I wouldn't call myself even lower-intermediate, much less advanced, but the way L-R encourages dealing with morphology strikes me as leading to 'advanced' ability in this particular area from a very early beginner level. I'd say that 40 hours of L-R has helped me with Polish morphology and word families more than 4 years of studying Italian in a classroom helped me with the corresponding concepts in Italian; these types of morphological variation were a major gap in my knowledge until I started extensive reading in Italian. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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