|
 |
Experiences activating C1+ "passive" lang | ||
Tags: Advanced Level | Learning Strategy | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5210 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes  Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 9 of 15 05 January 2015 at 10:20am | IP Logged | ||
|
My experience is a bit like that of holly heels: reaching a C1-ish passive level relatively quickly, in a couple of years, but developing decent active skills is turning out to be a far more difficult task especially because I don't get to speak with native speakers as regularly as I'd like. So I don't have much advice to offer, except that lots of listening on its own isn't enough for everyone although I do believe it to be an important part. Of course, even having regular speaking opportunities isn't exactly a magic bullet: plenty people here who live in the country or are married to native speakers etc. still aren't exactly having an easy time with their active skills. Which does give me some comfort, knowing that my problems aren't just caused by things outside of my control.
I think tarvos makes good points. Warming up before sessions always helps me, even if it's just a temporary boost. I've also found that doing self-talk regularly can help. And there's also the psychological aspect for me, I think fear or lack of confidence sometimes holds me back and makes my speaking worse. Sometimes I speak quite fluently when doing self-talk but then when I'm with people I get nervous and make a mess of it. So one important part of my "activation" work is just trying to improve that confidence and conquer the fear. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 10 of 15 05 January 2015 at 4:44pm | IP Logged | ||
|
The situation described here is probably the default situation for most of us. Our passive or receptive
skills are much higher than out active or productive skills because we are not in immersive environments. I need hardly mention that productive skills are much more challenging than receptive skills for pretty obvious reasons that we all know too well. With all the good advice given here, there are only two things I would add. I think that language conversation groups are a great idea. I know that there are limitations, such as speaking only to other learners, but I feel that it is important to get out and exercise your mouth muscles with other people instead of just staying at home complaining about the lack of practice. The second small piece of advice is to learn true conversational language. Simple banter or small talk in any language is usually not very complicated but is not something we tend to concentrate on because we want to be able to talk about lofty subjects with rare words. That's fine but when talking about mundane everyday subjects, a small number of choice phrases and conversation techniques can allow you to have nice conversations without getting bogged down or stuck. You have to become very observant and study how people make conversation and imitate them. And nothing prevents you from moving on to more weighty topics once you are all warmed up. Edited by s_allard on 05 January 2015 at 4:45pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5210 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 11 of 15 05 January 2015 at 5:30pm | IP Logged | ||
Agreed with all of that excellent post, especially:
While my spoken French is far from where I'd like, if it weren't for conversation groups I don't think I'd have ever even reached my current semi-fluent level, at least not unless I had spent a ton of cash on tutoring and/or immersion. Hearing other people's mistakes and imperfect pronunciation isn't ideal, but I still feel that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks and it's a lot better than nothing. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4536 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 12 of 15 05 January 2015 at 10:08pm | IP Logged | ||
|
As I posted a couple of months ago, after 2.5 years of using an input approach to German my receptive knowledge is getting to a reasonably high-level (now approaching C1), but with a much lower productive level.
This isn't surprising as production requires a much finer understanding of grammar than you need for understanding a language. So if you focus your energies on getting your comprehension to a high-level first, then it's not surprising that your production skills lag behind as there are lots of grammar is irrelevant to meaning. What I don't know is whether you can maintain a C1+ level for years, all the time getting lots of high-quality input, and still have poor production skills. 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 13 of 15 05 January 2015 at 10:46pm | IP Logged | ||
It's mostly common among learners of "standard average European", and even they don't tend to have such a huge gap. C1 comprehension and B2 production seems much more common. The Canadian situation is quite unique. Listening isn't enough because those who do it a lot often neglect reading. A balance is hard to achieve and almost everyone neglects one or the other. Neglecting listening just seems more common to me because with a textbooks, parallel texts and maybe some children's books you can learn to read quite comfortably. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| sans-serif Tetraglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4562 days ago 298 posts - 470 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, German, Swedish Studies: Danish | Message 14 of 15 06 January 2015 at 2:02am | IP Logged | ||
For what it's worth, at least my English has proven quite resilient. I've gone longer than a year with minimal writing and speaking on two occasions, and while my production abilities did suffer noticeably, I never truly lost my fluency. I initially had a hard time with a number of mid-to-low frequency words, but a month or two of more active use brought back most of it. Also my accent took a hit, which was more frustrating than I had anticipated. The caveat here is that while it didn't take that long to get back to a comfortable level, adding the final touches was a much longer process---around a year, or possibly even longer than that. Especially detecting and unlearning some bad pronunciation habits took real effort. A more intensive approach would no doubt have speeded up my 'recovery', but I imagine we'd still be looking at several months of re-activation. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5394 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 15 of 15 07 January 2015 at 8:49am | IP Logged | ||
I think this will be possible if you're patient and consider the long term. Will it be possible for you to get to C2 French, C1 Spanish, and B2+ Italian and Portuguese in the next 2-3 years living in the same environment you're in now and trying to keep other aspects of life balanced? That would be awesome to see. More realistically let's look 5, 10, 20, etc. years from now. You'll probably get there by the 5-10 year mark if you keep going and you'll have the rest of your lifetime to keep working at progressing and balancing. I'm far from mastering the balancing act but I find that having consistent activities you do to maintain all languages combined with concentration/deep focus periods in one keeps the fires stoked. To help your goals, it always helps to take a look around you to see if there are local immersion opportunities you may be missing out on or that you can create. There are, of course, conversation groups but I find they can be hit or miss depending on the chemistry and the mix of levels of the group which can make for some stilted conversations (if you have a great group already, great!). Also, getting into the more advanced levels you'll see a HUGE difference between conversing for about 2 hours once a week or so and getting in 4-8 hours of conversation on a regular basis. Without going to live abroad for a while if you can't, see if you can endear yourself to local expat communities (make friends with people you meet in conversation groups, date/marry if you're still single, volunteer with groups focused on members in those language communities), or see if there are places you can work where people speak your TLs, or just spend loads of time with Skype partners. Alternatively, you can get short term immersive practice to level up a bit through language-focused travel: hop down to Latin America for a 2-3 weeks if you can, or over to Europe. Even my last 2 week trip to France was a great speaking boost (it helped that I was staying with friends so had plenty of deep conversation opportunities available to me). Occasional intensive periods like that coupled with less intensive but consistent conversation, such as with groups/language partners should help you make advancements in your active skills. 1 person has voted this message useful |
If you wish to post a reply to this topic you must first login. If you are not already registered you must first register
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
