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unzum Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom soyouwanttolearnalan Joined 6913 days ago 371 posts - 478 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin
| Message 9 of 24 12 March 2008 at 12:44pm | IP Logged |
DaraghM wrote:
Interesting. Given that implicit and explicit memory seem to be different based on the study of amnesiac patients, I wonder what language learning processes can be used to move the language from procedural to implicit memory. It's all nicely described here,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implicit_memory
Will overlearning achieve this ?
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I think probably just using the language a lot and practising the different skills will bring you to a level where you can use the language without thinking about the rules, how to form the sentence etc. I'm not sure if overlearning is the best way to do it though, because you're just learning the same material over & over, nothing new. Whereas if you did active learning with a lot of practise using the language (speaking, listening, reading, writing etc) you'll be learning new stuff & also helping to move the old stuff from procedural to implicit memory.
slucido wrote:
1-You listen passively and you are paying attention. You try to understand and to follow what it's saying.
2-You listen passively and you are not paying attention. You are not trying to understand. It's DaragahM's work with "vocabulearn" while commuting or listening the radio while doing other things.
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I think these are valid ways of studying, as long as you make sure you have some active study as well. But I think the bulk of the learning in situations like this is from practising stuff you've already learnt actively. Some of it is also probably from things like your brain unconciously working out stuff it's hearing, however, I think it's more helpful as a supplement to your active learning.
And what DaraghM says about listening to Vocabulearn seems to imply that his learning was mostly the first example, listening passively and paying attention to it. Once you have been driving a car for a while a lot of the work is done unconciously, while you concentrate on other things or just switch off. The fact that he could not remember words that he had heard when crossing traffic suggests that when he wasn't concentrating on the tape he couldn't learn stuff.
I think our unconcious brain can learn things, but I'm not sure it's as amazing as we all think it is. When we give it help (i.e. the Vocabulearn tapes having the English word then the Spanish word) we can learn stuff, but we give it barely any clues (i.e. listening to a radio show in a language you know nothing about, or listening to something so quiet that you can't actually hear it), this is when you see really poor results.
If you want to try some real 'subliminal' study, as in the second example, try listening to Vocabulearn while working through some maths problems, paying attention to the maths instead of the tape. You'll probably see poor results in both.
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| unzum Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom soyouwanttolearnalan Joined 6913 days ago 371 posts - 478 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin
| Message 10 of 24 12 March 2008 at 12:46pm | IP Logged |
Just saw your post now. I totally agree with the above bit. Spaced repetition is a really effective method for learning (vocab).
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| slucido Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Spain https://goo.gl/126Yv Joined 6674 days ago 1296 posts - 1781 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan* Studies: English
| Message 11 of 24 12 March 2008 at 3:55pm | IP Logged |
Unzum, I am not exactly sure what you mean about "active study", but if I have learned something in this forum is that unconscious, implicit and subliminal approaches to acquire languages are the best. I mean reading, listening or both in your target language about interesting content of your interest. We can use books, ebooks, audiobooks, podcasts, movies, radio, TV from native resources.
Right now my process of learning English is mostly implicit and unconscious. I am reading this English forum, I am listening the BBC radio and I am trying to write my replay in English to you. Throughout this process I am NOT interested in learning English at all, but about understanding your content and communicating my thoughts to you and others forum members. Which approach do you think it's better to learn English? What I am doing right now or reading and listening boring textbooks and audios actively?
I have given several links to scientific research about the subject and some of them directly or indirectly related to learning languages, including the implicit learning of artificial grammar. If you read them, you will understand my position.
About your specific concern. Many people here use the background sound of radio, TV, even audio courses in their target language without paying specific attention. It seems to me a lot of good anecdotal evidence.
Make it sense? Has it any scientific basis?
Yes, it has a lot of sense.
If you read about the research, you can figure out what this polyglots are doing.
What are they doing?
They are activating the "PRIMING" and "facilitation" effects quoted before. Maybe you don't learn actively the words, it's not about that; but they learn implicitly (subliminally ) a lot about word and sentence passive recognition, pronunciation, enunciation and speech.
What is the consequence ?
They speed up their learning curve, because they can be exposed quicker to native materials. They can learn faster the meanings and the sounds, the recognition of the language and they can be exposed to native material faster and faster. More comprehensible input using native materials and acquisition of the language.
Edited by slucido on 13 March 2008 at 3:51am
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| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6150 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian
| Message 12 of 24 13 March 2008 at 8:04am | IP Logged |
Thanks for all those links. Having read about the effects of overlearning, it's good, but doesn't seem to aid long term retention, which is my goal. Spaced repetition sounds like a far better strategy.
I must argue that my use of Vocabulearn is somewhere between active and passive. I didn't listen to each word explicitly, and I was often thinking about other things, but I did listen to it over 20 times. That means, I may have actively picked up each of the words in different sessions, while it felt like a subconcious process.
I suppose I was hoping for some operant conditioning reflex, where hearing one word would automatically trigger another. I'd love to have my Spanish, or other languages, to the point where I can operate purely in the L2 environment like Slucido. Considering my last three trips to Spain were Ibiza, Barcelona and Valencia, I should probably add Catalan to my hit list.
Are you meant to have long gaps in Spaced Repetition ?
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| pentatonic Senior Member United States Joined 7246 days ago 221 posts - 245 votes
| Message 13 of 24 13 March 2008 at 11:06am | IP Logged |
If our brain functions as a neural network, then it makes sense that everything we do, see, hear, sense by some other method, affects the way our brain works in some way and to some degree. Therefore, natural stimuli, such as living in an immersion environment and being bombarded constantly by a language, would have to be of benefit. Also, when learning explicitly there is implicit learning also going whether we realize it or not. When looking up vocabulary, you are exposed to things like typical sentence patterns, pronunciation patterns, frequent word neighbors, etc.
When thinking of artificially introducing stimuli to induce implicit learning, several questions come to mind: What are the limits? Would photoreading a dictionary every day help? By computerizing it, you could go through the whole dictionary in just a few minutes. Would doubling the speed of an audio like vocabulearn make it more effective? Would it make it twice as effective? How far can you push these speedups before the text becomes a blur and the sound becomes a useless buzz?
Also, you have to ask if the view is worth the climb? Priming has been shown to benefit to some degree, but to what degree, and is this benefit worth the effort and time involved?
What is a good way to test all this and find out for sure?
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| kewms Senior Member United States Joined 6186 days ago 160 posts - 159 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese
| Message 14 of 24 13 March 2008 at 11:23am | IP Logged |
slucido wrote:
Right now my process of learning English is mostly implicit and unconscious. I am reading this English forum, I am listening the BBC radio and I am trying to write my replay in English to you. Throughout this process I am NOT interested in learning English at all, but about understanding your content and communicating my thoughts to you and others forum members.
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Learning a language by using it may be implicit, but it certainly is not subliminal. Writing a response in English in particular is an extremely active use of the language.
In my own experience, I've found that having Japanese radio on in the background helps me get used to the sounds of the language, but not much else. To actually learn anything, I need to focus.
Katherine
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| slucido Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Spain https://goo.gl/126Yv Joined 6674 days ago 1296 posts - 1781 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan* Studies: English
| Message 15 of 24 13 March 2008 at 5:56pm | IP Logged |
DaraghM wrote:
Thanks for all those links. Having read about the effects of overlearning, it's good, but doesn't seem to aid long term retention, which is my goal. Spaced repetition sounds like a far better strategy.
I must argue that my use of Vocabulearn is somewhere between active and passive. I didn't listen to each word explicitly, and I was often thinking about other things, but I did listen to it over 20 times. That means, I may have actively picked up each of the words in different sessions, while it felt like a subconcious process.
I suppose I was hoping for some operant conditioning reflex, where hearing one word would automatically trigger another. I'd love to have my Spanish, or other languages, to the point where I can operate purely in the L2 environment like Slucido. Considering my last three trips to Spain were Ibiza, Barcelona and Valencia, I should probably add Catalan to my hit list.
Are you meant to have long gaps in Spaced Repetition ? |
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If you are using learning language materials in a non-laboratory context, it is difficult to create pure conditions. It's sure you were using different levels of awareness in regarding your materials.
If you travel to Catalunya and Balearic islands, basic knowledge of CatalĂ can be useful for you.
pentatonic wrote:
When thinking of artificially introducing stimuli to induce implicit learning, several questions come to mind: What are the limits? Would photoreading a dictionary every day help? By computerizing it, you could go through the whole dictionary in just a few minutes. Would doubling the speed of an audio like vocabulearn make it more effective? Would it make it twice as effective? How far can you push these speedups before the text becomes a blur and the sound becomes a useless buzz?
Also, you have to ask if the view is worth the climb? Priming has been shown to benefit to some degree, but to what degree, and is this benefit worth the effort and time involved?
What is a good way to test all this and find out for sure? |
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Nothing is absolutely sure. You always need to experiment by yourself. Aspirin is a well-known and useful drug, but it is very dangerous for a few people, for example: people with AAS allergy or gastro-duodenal ulcer.
Regarding the effort and time involved, the good news are that this processes are almost effortless.
kewms wrote:
slucido wrote:
Right now my process of learning English is mostly implicit and unconscious. I am reading this English forum, I am listening the BBC radio and I am trying to write my replay in English to you. Throughout this process I am NOT interested in learning English at all, but about understanding your content and communicating my thoughts to you and others forum members.
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Learning a language by using it may be implicit, but it certainly is not subliminal. Writing a response in English in particular is an extremely active use of the language.
In my own experience, I've found that having Japanese radio on in the background helps me get used to the sounds of the language, but not much else. To actually learn anything, I need to focus.
Katherine
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Implicit= Subliminal= unconscious.
The problem is the added meanings people associate to "subliminal" and "unconscious"
Language production (speech and writing) is largely unconscious. At least when you are writing on the go.
Nobody is saying that you don't need to focus. This isn't the discussion. Never was. The question is about where do you focus your focus.
Other useful links:
Priming (psychology):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priming_%28psychology%29
Conclusions of the Research on Nonconscious Information Processing
(A quick "non-technical" summary)
http://www.personal.utulsa.edu/~pawel-lewicki/simple.html
If you have interest about this topic, I recommend the Pawel Lewicki's site. It has a lot of references.
Edited by slucido on 13 March 2008 at 6:00pm
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| kewms Senior Member United States Joined 6186 days ago 160 posts - 159 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese
| Message 16 of 24 13 March 2008 at 6:12pm | IP Logged |
slucido wrote:
Implicit= Subliminal= unconscious.
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Not according to my dictionary they're not. If you are working with nonstandard definitions of these terms please enlighten us.
Quote:
Language production (speech and writing) is largely unconscious. At least when you are writing on the go. |
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Hardly. The physical act of speaking or writing may be unconscious, but composing sentences and selecting words involves a great deal of conscious effort. Now granted, because I'm a writer I may choose my words more carefully than some people. But I'm also a native speaker, so my use of English is probably less effort-ful than that of most learners.
Katherine
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