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Experiences activating C1+ "passive" lang | ||
Tags: Advanced Level | Learning Strategy | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4668 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 1 of 15 04 January 2015 at 2:10pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I wrote "C1+" just for the purpose of indicating a high level. Obviously one can't take only the passive part of a CEFR test...
Anyway, I'm interested to know if anyone has experiences bringing a language with a very high level of comprehension (say, able to read novels, watch films, and listen to any kind of radio with ease) but very infrequent "active" practice out of "hibernation." How did it go? How long did it take to reach a reasonable level of fluency and ease with speaking the language? Edited by tastyonions on 04 January 2015 at 2:12pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4710 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 2 of 15 04 January 2015 at 2:17pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I've never done that in the sense of having studied a language entirely passively to that
level. The closest I'm getting is activating my Norwegian right now, which is based on a huge passive understanding through Swedish. The thing is, with these kinds of languages, you need to warm up and get used to the context, but then you'll be speaking before you know it. Active recall is a tricky thing, but all you can do is use the language and produce it often, and as long as the variety of contexts is large enough, you will improve fast. After an hour of speaking Norwegian (more likely Svorsk with some Norwegianisms thrown in and using a slightly more Norwegian sentence melody), I was understood easily enough by my interlocutors. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5012 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 3 of 15 04 January 2015 at 6:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I did exactly this with my French approximately a year or two ago. The key was
surprising as it was a "passive" activity-listening. I found out reading, despite all the great thigns it does for you, is not that connected to speaking. But listening is. At the beginning, I could already understand tv series and movies on a C1 or so level but my speaking was totally rusty (a low B2 damaged by several years without any "active" use). After hours and hours of listening, not only the listening itself got near perfect (except for situations like crying people or really weird accents or slang), I was totally elsewhere when I met native speakers and started speaking. Sure, you need to speak to people but heavy doses of listening can make the "activation period" several times shorter, it can make you think in the language right away and put together natural answers quite automatically. Of course, active practice is needed in the end and tarvos is right about the need of various contexts and challenging situations. But I think many people on htlal keep treating active and passive skills as two different worlds, without links. That is just wrong, in my opinion. About the time estimates. Those are quite impossible to give. It mostly depends on the motivation and the previous preparation. The harder your situation is (the more your survival depends on your skills), the faster you'll reach your ceiling, in my opinion (I reached my ceiling, far under the C levels, for Spanish in a week out of necessity). And the better you are prepared, the higher the ceiling is and the smoother is the path. How long did it take me? I think the key period was approximately one year of large amounts of native input, than it took me a few hours of speaking and a few beers. Tarvos, is it difficult to keep apart Norwegian from Swedish for you, given your learning approach? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6600 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 15 04 January 2015 at 7:20pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I'm not sure it's possible to be a true C1 passively and lack active skills completely. The subtleties largely come from knowing several ways to say the same thing and noticing which of them the author chose and why (not necessarily consciously, of course!).
Anyway, it depends a lot on how you got there. Do you speak a related language? (seems so, if you're talking about yourself) In my experience, if you *can* understand almost anything, you just need to actually read books and do listening. (although imo with only a related language, you can only have B2 comprehension easily, not C1) But many will disagree with that and say you need to learn the grammar. I'm yet to see a story of someone who did enough of both reading and listening and needed significant grammar study anyway, though. If you already know the grammar, and reached say B1 before focusing on the comprehension, it seems pretty uncontroversial that you need to practice both listening and speaking. (and obviously in the first scenario you should also actually practice speaking, just maybe less immediately) Again that's just my experience, but I improve rapidly as soon as I have some motivation to speak or write, like while travelling or when I speak to someone online (in writing) and I actually want to talk with them, not just for the sake of practising. Or when I take online courses and there are written tasks, which is a large part of how I recently activated my Spanish. Well, it also helped that a couple of years ago I wrote a lang-8 post about something I'm passionate about, and through the corrections I figured out some differences from Portuguese that I had overlooked. Of course if you want to write a lot on lang-8, this should also help. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4710 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 5 of 15 04 January 2015 at 7:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
It's always good to warm up. Before classes I always peruse my material for a bit and read through it to get myself in the right frame for that language. You'll get into a flow. Listening is one way to do that.
They always spill over, but there's a lot of fear of speaking holding people back for no good reason at all and that's the thing I'm trying to combat. I don't even speak my languages THAT often, I do huge amounts of reading in some of them and most of my communication is written on the internet. The point is you have nothing to fear.
I see them as separate languages in terms of phonology and production, so when I speak Norwegian I consciously have to move to another sound, but grammatically they operate in the same domain. The rest is some lexical items I switch around. Because I don't have enough Norwegian experience, my production is currently 90% Svorsk and 10% actual Norwegian, but with time I can keep them separate. But mixing them doesn't really make a big difference in essence. The languages are so similar that using the Swedish variant with a Norwegian pronunciation is going to sound like Norwegian one way or the other. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| holly heels Groupie United States Joined 3889 days ago 47 posts - 107 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 6 of 15 04 January 2015 at 11:37pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I have reached a level with Mandarin, as a non-native, non-heritage learner, where I can understand virtually all radio, including commentary, call-in quiz shows, etc. with almost no active practice, and that has taken about 1 1/2 years.
But I had to study Mandarin intensively for more than 2 years before I was ready to go all-Mandarin all the time in terms of news and entertainment. So we're talking about 3 1/2 years here. My understanding of Mandarin TV minus subtitles is still inconsistent. Sometimes I can watch soap opera and can finish the actors sentences for them. I have even watched more serious shows, like an angry debate on zoning laws, and I easily understood it. otoh understanding Taiwan news completely is still the Holy Grail for me and I'm not there yet. My lack of active practice is not from a lack of desire but from a lack of speaking partners. I live in a town with only one stop sign which isn't exactly a magnet for Asians. The 2 reliable ones I have found thru the internet have been helpful but one them is actually a native Cantonese speaker. So unfortunately my speaking ability has languished if not suffered from being in the silo for so long. Often I feel as though it is tied up in knots and when I actually get the chance to speak to someone it uncoils too fast and collapses under its own weight. It's amazing that it doesn't happen more often. I try to have one lengthy meaningful conversation a month, more than just "What's your favorite flavor of ice cream?" I have taken to calling a Mandarin spiritual counselor, really more for the practice than the counseling. And fortunately I still haven't said a word of English. We had an abstract conversation about the difference between character and behavior. Not Harvard level, but not too bad. So I believe distance learners really can reach fluency even with some imbalance between the active and passive skills if possible, provided they are disciplined and have a strong foundation, and compensate for it in some other creative way. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4668 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 7 of 15 05 January 2015 at 12:05am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks for all the interesting responses. I wasn't talking about my exact situation, since my comprehension in Spanish, the next strongest language after my French, is probably barely knocking on B2. My predicament is that I want to reach and maintain a very high active level in French and I'm not sure that would be possible while also keeping my other Romance languages active, especially given my time constraints. But if I could learn them passively to a high level and then put in an intense month or two of conversation and writing practice to bring them out of hibernation before going on trips, that sounds pretty enticing. Edited by tastyonions on 05 January 2015 at 12:06am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6600 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 8 of 15 05 January 2015 at 8:40am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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That definitely sounds plausible. But I think your production will also improve by the time your comprehension is C1+. Consider doing SRS/cloze deletion while you're not actively working on your active skills (pun intended;)). Writing should also help a lot.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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