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Why you shouldn’t use the forum too much | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| FashionPolyglot Newbie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3941 days ago 39 posts - 73 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Portuguese | Message 1 of 28 03 March 2014 at 12:53am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Before I became a member of HTLAL forum, I was a member of a movie forum. Movies was the first thing I was
interested in, and to this day, I can still name many movie titles and actors. I spent countless hours browsing & making forum posts that did not make a single impact in my life. Now, I barely go on this forum, and I only browse & make forum posts that I know I will learn from. I learned from my past forum experience to "Not waste your hours on the forums, and actually GO OUT THERE AND DO IT"! I want to send this message across because some of you don't realize the value of time. Sure it's not bad making a few posts, browsing once in a while, posting your language learning experience in your log, or simply being engaged in a forum topic. But it comes to the point where it gets to be too much, and you only realize when it's late in the day, that you accomplished too little on your language goals. My advice to you: - Spend only 1 hour of your day in the forum, preferably twice a day. 30 minutes in the morning, and 30 minutes at night. This is so you can reply to responses you may have received. - Don't update your language log everyday. I know this sounds like silly advice, but the time you wasted getting people engaged in your language diary, can be used for improving your language skills. - When you do update your language log, don't include every detail. Say only what is important. That's less time you have to spend typing words on your computer. Which is good because then people won't have to make long responses to you. - You don't have to participate in every active topic. Only engage the topics that interest you the most, topics you can learn from or topics that impact you personally. - Don't be stubborn. If another forum member gives you advice, it is to your benefit. Apply that knowledge to your language experience & life in general. - You don't have to reply to every single response you received. It's best to move on to actually learning the language. You can reply back the next day. I hope you like what I had to say. As always, good luck to your language learning journey! :) 17 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 4142 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 2 of 28 03 March 2014 at 1:39am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Errrr…thanks for the advice? This is a very odd post.
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 DavidStyles Octoglot Pro Member United Kingdom Joined 3939 days ago 82 posts - 179 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Latin, French, Portuguese, Norwegian Studies: Mandarin, Russian, Swedish, Danish, Serbian, Arabic (Egyptian) Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 28 03 March 2014 at 2:02am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I, for one, appreciate the effort people put into helping others here.
Perhaps relevant also is the educational value of reading (and writing, if not native) here. Also the notion of multitasking is surely not to be underestimated. On a side-note, I'm not convinced by "If another forum member gives you advice, it is to your benefit." - it may well also be that they're talking rubbish (it happens! caveat lector) or that their advice is good for some, but for some circumstantial reason not good for you. Better than accepting everything at face value is to read everything with a degree of critical open-mindedness (this is not an oxymoron - I'm referring to holding the position of bearing in mind that something could be correct or incorrect and you might not know which yet). 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6595 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 4 of 28 03 March 2014 at 2:08am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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LOL no way. How can I survive without knowing how emk's Ancient Egyptian is going? or Jeff's Irish? or anyone's Finnish/Portuguese/Croatian? or Chung's anything?.. or what happened to that nice beginner who wanted to know this and that, and what did Cavesa tell him?
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| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4845 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 5 of 28 03 March 2014 at 3:37am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I think this is a topic that needs to be pointed out to some people. I don't agree with all of the advice FashionPolyglot mentioned (especially about the advice here, and you can't put an arbitrary number on the amount of time someone should spend at HTLAL - it's different for everybody), but the basic premise is that you should limit the amount of time you spend on the forum if it takes away from the time you need to spend learning a language.
I, for one, probably spent too much "language time" on HTLAL - language time being the time I budget for studying my languages. Now, I've had legitimate reasons to be at HTLAL. I've had several questions about language learning, and there's no better place to go. I don't think that is time wasted. But I spent a lot of time reading about techniques and ways to learn a language, instead of learning a language. Now, if I have completed my scheduled study time, I don't see the problem of coming to HTLAL or limiting my time. But if I am here at HTLAL and I haven't finished my scheduled tasks, then I need to finish those before coming here, unless I need help with a problem. Edited by kujichagulia on 03 March 2014 at 3:38am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
 Jiwon Triglot Moderator Korea, South Joined 6434 days ago 1417 posts - 1500 votes Speaks: EnglishC2, Korean*, GermanC1 Studies: Hindi, Spanish Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 28 03 March 2014 at 5:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I think it's just a matter of personal preference.
Sure, a more "efficient" way of utilizing the forum would be to access it only when one has questions about languages, or wants to gather extra information about their target languages. Much time spent typing answers to threads like this one could be seens as "dead" time which could have been better spent doing actual language learning. However, just like any community, this forum also needs some regular contributors to make it organic, something more than just a collection of people. Thanks to our regular visitors, this place has its own sense of place, making it very unique from all the other forums out there. And what makes people keep coming back to it is the feeling that there will be some people, probably those they already know from reading much of their posts, that have posted replies to their queries when they log in again. If it only consisted of people visiting only sporadically to quench their personal curiosities, much character and "feel" of this place would be lost. It would be like a home without parents (or children if you are a parent). Edited by Jiwon on 03 March 2014 at 5:57am 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5764 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 7 of 28 03 March 2014 at 8:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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... why? I hoped I'd see some well-laid out commentary about what happens when you spend so much time on a forum that it turns out to be too much for you. Even how to figure out that it's too much. You might realize that a large number of participants on here are not native speakers of English and at least for me, using this forum is part of my daily 'English' routine. Edited by Bao on 03 March 2014 at 9:16am 10 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 8 of 28 03 March 2014 at 11:46am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
FashionPolyglot, HTLAL is for learning languages, and for helping other people learn languages. So far, you've used it for everything except that. In Hello Everyone & 15 Languages Intro, you explained that you wanted to learn 15 languages, and that you felt Iversen and Arguelles were doing it wrong:
This discussion lasted for 6 pages, and everybody's advice was unanimous: If you want to achieve your goals, we're happy to help you, but you need to start studying. Since then, you've started a thread about why you want to learn Portuguese:
This is a perfectly reasonable thread by itself (though one we're had a 100 times), but it's part of a larger pattern of talking about learning a language, without actually learning one. You've just started another top-level thread titled Do you hate your native tongue?. This is actually a rather interesting question; lots of heritage learners feel like this, and we haven't discussed this subject much before. And now in this thread, you're lecturing everybody on how to use HTLAL:
During your "15 languages" thread, lots of people suggested that you stop talking about being a polyglot, and actually start studying Portuguese. We hinted (not so subtly) that it was time to start a log, and to start actually studying. But your log still contains a single, solitary post:
Do you see the pattern? You're spending all your time on HTLAL talking about learning, and on lecturing other people on how to learn. Let me blunt: This is a trap. You will never become a polyglot this way. You will never even master basic conversational Brazilian Portuguese. If you want to use HTLAL to learn Brazilian Portuguese, we'll be delighted to help you out, to provide advice, to answer questions, and to provide moral support when things get hard. But if you're going to HTLAL as a distraction from the actual work of learning a language, then HTLAL is only going to sabotage your goals. So, in the spirit of this thread, some advice: 1. Please see How to Start Learning a Language. Pick a course, or some sort of self-study approach, if you haven't already. Note that many of these courses are available through public libraries. Do not spend more than a day deciding how you want to begin. 2. When you receive your course, open the book to lesson 1 and get started. (Or if you decide that you're of an AJATT type, set up your immersion environment and your SRS software, and start making MCDs from bilingual materials. Of if you want to "speak from day 1", set up an iTalki account and schedule your first lesson. Whatever you choose, figure out step 1 and do it.) 3. When you've done that, post in your log and tell us how it went. I promise: if you use this community for learning a language, we will support you. But right now, participating in HTLAL is not getting you any closer to your goal of being a polyglot, because you're using it to talk about languages, and not to study languages. The more time you spend talking about being a polyglot someday, the more likely you are to undermine your chances of reaching that goal:
Please do not fall into this trap. Right now, your participation in HTLAL is getting you no closer to your goals. 35 persons have voted this message useful |
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