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Stories of unusually rapid progress? | ||
Tags: Success Story | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4450 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes  Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 9 of 19 24 December 2014 at 6:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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Takes an incredible amount of effort to learn a language. If you know another language that is similar this makes
learning easier like between German & Dutch, Norwegian & Swedish. Just watching a TV program in Spanish straight for 2 days? Some common greetings like Adios, Buenos Dias would stick in your head but not the rest unless you have subtitles to do the cross-reference. Most people would pick up common words because they are repeated half-dozen times. Like in a Japanese TV show I can pick out common words like Domo like the Chinese Duo for "more", Hai for "yes", Ahso for "is that so?" but the rest of the show would be totally relying on subtitles. What about details about a language? Would someone who watches a Chinese show for 10 hours be able to pick out the difference between Bóbo & Jiùjiu both translated as "uncle" in English. That person has to know the Chinese distinguish between relatives from the father and the mother side of the family and even older and younger members and have different terms for them. Like you say Gēge for an older brother and Dìdi for a younger one. In English a brother is a brother regardless of age. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6915 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 10 of 19 24 December 2014 at 6:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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Sometimes a burst can do a lot. I think it's fully possible to reach A2 in 30-35 hours - especially if it's being done in a short time. Imagine studying for just 35 hours, but only for five minutes at a time. What can be expected of that? Flip cards in Anki? Listen to a short dialogue a couple of times? For most of the languages I've studied, I've felt that I've progressed fastest when I've studied in bursts. Edited by jeff_lindqvist on 25 December 2014 at 11:27pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5268 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 11 of 19 24 December 2014 at 7:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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One aspect that gets overlooked n HTLAL, or perhaps not mentioned as much as it should be, is how having learned one second language to a high level helps so much with learning the second one. It helps more with a related language. Portuguese was much easier to learn because I already had learned Spanish to a high level. I was able to read and figure things out right off the bat.
Sometimes, I think raw beginners see how much fun we're having with our language lists and want to do the same. The difference is that experienced learners have an advantage that they just don't. Having learned at least one second language to a high level helps with so many aspects- how languages work, pattern recognition, what needs special attention, how you learn best, when you need to switch things up. This is a huge advantage that raw beginners don't possess and it's a very underrated advantage. When I decided to learn Haitian Creole is when I really saw the breakthrough. I advanced into intermediate quite quickly (B1 equivalent). I started reading straight away. I was speaking quite quickly. It felt amazing. I had major advantages from having learned Spanish and Portuguese and also including my native English and familiarity with Caribbean English which has some similar structures. If there were dubbed series in HC available or a telenovela, I could have moved even faster. Could I do the same thing with a non-transparent language like Mandarin, Georgian or Arabic? Yes and no. Yes, my experience advantage would help, but only so much. No, I wouldn't be able to read straight away and cognate help would be minimal. With these languages you have to re-invent a large part of the wheel as you go, from what I've seen in others' experience. Emk's subs2srs Spanish undertaking has been a joy to see. I always assumed he'd repeat his successful French formula and start off with Assimil. Nothing wrong with that, I just don't think he would've advanced as far as he has if he had just used Assimil and Anki without the native material. He made the native material comprehensible with subs2srs. Now he's created, in essence, his own personal Assimil. When he feels he's ready to tidy up what he's learned, whether he uses Assimil or another method, it will go quicker and faster. 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6603 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 12 of 19 24 December 2014 at 9:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't think this gets overlooked though? In 2007 I even learned some Esperanto because of what Prof Argüelles said about language learning getting easier after four languages. In fact, sometimes this effect is even overrated, like when someone wants to learn one language but asks whether doing an "easy" one first is better, as if this will make the harder language's difficulties disappear. I've seen this plenty of times over the years.
As for "fast learning" experiences, I guess learning pretty much all Finnish grammar in a year and reaching basic fluency in less than two years kinda counts? These were also my two final years of school/lyceum. I also made some fast progress with Polish in preparation for my trip in May 2012, mostly with LR, parallel texts (Ilya Frank's method) and tongue twisters. This was my first serious effort with a Slavic language, although in 2007 (aka when taking my Finnish to basic fluency) I had read an Ilya Frank book in Ukrainian, and I also consider Belarusian a heritage language, though I've had very little natural exposure. Anyway, I did a two-week Tadoku in the second half of March, I LR'ed a lot in April and early May, and in the second week of May I went to Poland and I understood basically everything I needed. I spoke in a mixture of Russian and Polish, and I regularly got replies at a fast/native speed. In late May or early June, I remember reading the HP3 chapter about dementors on a really hot day, and having enough emotional connection with the words (and comprehension, obviously) to get a strong cooling effect. Let me just add that since then I've not had a strong motivation to improve in a short time. Well, maybe Italian in November 2013, but I had been plodding steadily for 4.5 years and I had been hoping for a more immersive experience in Malta. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4105 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 13 of 19 24 December 2014 at 9:43pm | IP Logged | ||
Don't feel bad. Unless you're on a very tight schedule, there's really no point in being the fastest, or second or third fastest, learner of a language. To me, it's far more important to make good use of time than to be the fastest in number of days or weeks. There's a local language school here where students graduate every semester with a level of Breton that allows them to work or even teach in the language after only one year. It's very impressive. Me, I've studied Breton for a year and I can only have basic conversations and write (albeit in all the available tenses) about topics of interest to me. The difference is that I've studied a little bit every week and they've had 5-8 hours of instruction and immersion every day, plus homework. As impressive as I find their progress, I'm pretty happy with mine. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5562 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 14 of 19 24 December 2014 at 11:46pm | IP Logged | ||
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I made swift progress in both Swedish and Spanish in a few little experiments back in the summer of 2010, having never studied either of these languages before and starting as a complete beginner.
Dreams of Valhalla, study-and-click - I boosted my vocabulary reading level from 31% to 95% in just 55 hours over a period of 19 days (using Stieg Larsson's "Män som hatar kvinnor" for testing), reaching 91% by the end of the first week. I did this by systematically listening to and reading "Harry Potter och de vises sten" using a method I developed and not so imaginatively labelled "study-and-click". I managed to somehow fit this in whilst relocating back to England from Germany, knee-deep in removals and paperwork, and hopscotching between my hotel room and cleaning up the flat. I studied 2-3 hours a day on average, but this is perhaps a misleading statistic, as some days this number was as high as 6 hours, and others as low as 0 hours. Fighting Windmills: Spanish experiment 1 - As a precursor to "Dreams of Valhalla", I spent 2 weeks listening to and reading Spanish ("El Principito" and “Harry Potter y la piedra filosofal”). My project started off as an overambitious listening-reading experiment, but always keen to play and innovate, it quickly evolved into the methodology I used above for learning Swedish. My vocabulary reading level rose from 75% to 92% in 11 days (using Carlos Ruiz Zafón's "La Sombra Del Viento" for testing), and stayed consistently within the 90-95% range thereafter. With a more feverish mindset, my hours of study and immersion ranged from an hour all the way up to 17 hours in one day (13 of which were study!), so that by the end of the experiment, I'd put in 91 hours of study and 116 hours of Spanish in total including immersion (averaging 6-7 hours of study a day, and 8-9 hours of Spanish a day including immersion). El Mariachi: Spanish experiment 2 - I followed this directly with a much more lighthearted 2 week project to try and activate what I'd learned passively in "Fighting Windmills", after which I employed a Spanish tutor in Germany for several long one-to-one sessions, and then jetted off with my wife to Barcelona for a week to get some real-life immersion (during the World Cup no less!). Much to my delight, I found that I could understand almost everything my tutor said during our sessions without much difficulty (you can find more info on this if you like from around the middle of my TAC log for 2010: TAC 2010, Team K, Teango). Getting what I wanted to say across proved to be a lot more challenging than listening, however, as so many words were on the tip of my tongue but not quite ready to jump into action. All the same, after our first 2-hour session, my tutor rated my speaking and writing levels as falling somewhere in the B1 to low B2 range, and was genuinely taken aback when I told him I'd only been studying Spanish for 4 weeks. This was my first ever attempt at conversation in Spanish as well, so I was really pleased with the overall result. Edited by Teango on 25 December 2014 at 12:00am 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5436 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 15 of 19 25 December 2014 at 4:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't have a story of astonishing progress to tell but I am now working on Polish and I see very rapid
progress. I attribute this to a number a factors that we see in the inspiring stories above: 1. The receptive skills are much easier to acquire than the productive skills. For example, we make faster progress with listening than with speaking. 2. As seasoned language learners we know how to learn a language quickly by focusing on the core elements. When traveling in the Ukraine a few years ago I found that I could start getting by after a week living with local friends. I had figured then what I have formalized today: spoken everyday language is extremely repetitive and uses a very tiny portion of the overall resources of the language. We can approach any language in terms of universal functional features. How does the verb system work? How does the tense system work? How do you ask questions? How to do you give orders or instructions? How do you talk about people and things with pronouns? How do you indicate plurality? Is there a gender system? How do cardinal and ordinal numbers work? Similarly, one can identify the core communicative functions of the language that one often sees in learning methods. Greetings are very important and can be learned or identified in a matter of minutes. Identifying oneself. Making basic enquiries. Ordering things in a restaurant or a store. Etc. I found that the most effective way of learning was to accompany a Ukrainian friend doing everyday activities. With a little notebook and some keen ears, I observed how the language worked, and, best of all, actually tried things, with my friend as back-up just in case I got into trouble. When we would meet friends, I just basically stood by and tried to not look too stupid but I soon realized that they were doing exactly the same sort of thing that I would do in my own language. After a while I could sort of follow the conversation. In an immersive environment, this is all so much easier and definitely more fun than sitting in front of a computer screen. Edited by s_allard on 25 December 2014 at 8:41pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6709 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 16 of 19 31 December 2014 at 9:31am | IP Logged | ||
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I normally don't even try to learn to speak any language fast, but I had to do it once when I booked a trip to the lusophone island nation Cape Verde with just one month to go to learn some Portuguese. I did manage to be able to have short conversations, but it took about a half year more before I dared have a monolingual travel experience (in Mozambique). My previous experience with Portuguese was an all-romance reading course in the 70s (so I had a grammar and a bilingual dictionary), and while I studied the language I workd pretty hard. For instance I listened to almost everything on "TV Ciência". And most importantly: I knew a fair bit of Spanish beforehand.
Learning a language without a closely related support language takes much longer - especially if I haven't found a congenial and easily accessible TV channel or internet archive to listen to. I still don't trust my Russian or Greek enough to use them with a short notice because I didn't have such standard audio resources available. OK, there are things on the internet which look interesting, but the initial step is the hardest, and here having an evermumblin' TV channel at my disposal beats everything else. Especially if it has subtitles. Writing is much easier because I have time to think and maybe even to look things up. The usefulness of related languages also explain that I basically can read things like Frisian or Old English or Old Saxon without ever having studied those languages formally. There will of course be words I don't know, but I will be able to get the meaning of most sentences simply through the word stock I already have learned the hard way in related languages (or later stages of the same languages). S_allard mentions having friends who speak your target language available. I do recognize that this provides for speaking opportunities, but my own road to speaking skills go through the passive skills, thinking (at first in fragments, later in true sentences) and writing. And that road takes longer than jumping right into speaking the language, but when I eventually arrive there I'll typically be able to read just about anything I can find in it, save a few arcane or regional words. Edited by Iversen on 31 December 2014 at 9:42am 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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