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Reading is perfect, but inefficient | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Kami_77 Diglot Newbie Italy Joined 4094 days ago 11 posts - 13 votes Speaks: Italian*, English Studies: Japanese | Message 1 of 56 09 September 2013 at 10:36am | IP Logged | ||
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I think that extensive reading is one of the best way to learn a language, but as I
state in the title, it is extremely inefficient. If you have reached an intermediate level, you will come across words or patterns that you do not know quite often while reading, but if you are already an advanced learner you will know most of the things you read and this is a 'waste of time' if you are reading for the sake of learning. It would be nice if books designed to contain every important words existed. For example a book containing the 5000 most frequent words in English, then a book containing the other 10000 most frequent words and a third one with the last set of 10000 words. We would have 25000 most common words in total linked together through a coherent story. The same could be said for listening. Anyway, how do you deal with this problem if you study mostly by reading? Edited by Kami_77 on 16 September 2013 at 11:40pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4532 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes  Studies: German | Message 2 of 56 09 September 2013 at 10:50am | IP Logged | ||
I am mostly doing extensive reading to learn German, and don't find it a particularly inefficient method. I am at B2 for reading. It's easy enough to find text's that are either much harder or too easy to read. Two quick points: 1. I don't think it's a waste of time reading words you already 'know'. I personally have to see words and phrases in lots of different contexts for the words to become a natural part of my vocabulary. I don't think when you learn a language you just learn a particular word, and then move on. You are constantly being exposed to different nuances of a word as you read which is essential if you want to become truly fluent. 2. I am not sure frequency lists really help you much beyond the first couple of thousand words. Frequency distributions occur in a highly multidimensional space. So what is 'low frequency' in one context, becomes high frequency in another. I like reading within one genre or even one author for a while where a lot of relatively 'low frequency' words suddenly become high frequency, and then moving on to another author/genre as I become comfortable with that vocabulary. Edited by patrickwilken on 09 September 2013 at 11:12am 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6438 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 3 of 56 09 September 2013 at 11:05am | IP Logged | ||
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You've described graded readers, more or less. There are also specialized books; I once saw a crime story that was designed to teach people SAT vocabulary.
Beyond books that aim to solve exactly that problem, there's a lot to be said for breadth: seeing the same word in different contexts helps you learn its nuances. Read 'difficult' literature by a wide range of authors, and don't consider it inefficient. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 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 4 of 56 09 September 2013 at 11:07am | IP Logged | ||
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Reading is very efficient, but it also pays to use particular grammatical and
PHONOLOGICAL structures in context. For example, today I studied French and even though my phonemes in French are good it is the prosody, intonation and speed at which I speak which marks me as foreign (and the little gender errors). It pays to revise these things, go back to them, and remark upon what you do wrong. For example I need to speak more slowly to render the emphasis on the correct positions in a French sentence and open my mouth more widely. Rounding the vowels. These are things you need a tutor for if you want to do them correctly. Similarly, for structures of longer texts, longer discourses, and so on, using a tutor to pay attention to these mistakes is crucial. However, I agree that just doing exercises or studying grammar books in this sense is inefficient. The most useful exercises for me, in French (mind you a language I already speak fairly well), and in which I am a B2-ish overall (perhaps higher in reading comprehension), are those where you force yourself to pay attention to details in a language so that you don't say them "generally correct" but that you are precise. This is where study helps. But to understand or to enjoy texts you don't need much more than B1 or B2, except for particular vocab in certain areas. I understand all instructions if they are given in French and would have no trouble doing them correctly. But to speak really good French you need to work on the minute details. However, reading/listening are very useful exercises and also serve as a way of exposing yourself to the language, getting a feel for how things are said, which structures are common, and so on. You cannot have one without the other. Personally, I hate being tutored in the beginning because that's when I just need to absorb absorb absorb info. This I can do on my own. Tutoring to me is only useful if I have basics in a language that I can already apply. It is useful if I understand the instructions of the other person without hesitation. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5559 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 5 of 56 09 September 2013 at 12:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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All methods of learning vocabulary beyond the first few thousand are innfficient,
because you simply don't encounter these words very often, even in native materials. We've done word analysese on here before, and if I remember correctly, a typical a book contains about 15,000, of which about 5000 appear only once, and another 5000 only 2 or 3 times, and the remaining more and more frequently. If you're at the low intermediate stage, you will be overwhelmed with unknown words, that don't get repeated as often as you would think. Books for children or youths presumably have smaller vocabularies, as do newspapers, but they all have there own "specific" vocabularies that would need to be learnt. Edited by schoenewaelder on 09 September 2013 at 12:45pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4532 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 6 of 56 09 September 2013 at 1:11pm | IP Logged | ||
But it's important to remember what is low frequency in one book might be mid-to-high frequency in another. So if you want to learn the low frequency words like saddle, cactus etc you can read Westerns, and if you want learn low frequency words like encryption, spy etc read thrillers. The same sorts of variations also occur, but perhaps to a lesser extent, for verbs, adjectives and adverbs. What frequency analyzes like the one above often gloss over, is that frequency distributions are inherently highly multi-dimensional. If they were uni-dimensional - implying that the probability of encountering a word would be the same in all media - then it might make sense to learn words in the (absolute) frequency in which they occurred, and worry that when you read that low frequency words are always going to be relatively rarely encountered, but that is not the case. As the space is multi-dimensional the frequency varies along each dimension - dimension roughly equaling genre - you interact with. Edited by patrickwilken on 09 September 2013 at 1:24pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4706 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 7 of 56 09 September 2013 at 1:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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Words? How do you measure words?
Do you mean morphemes? If we are talking German, do you count articles as different words? Compound words? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4532 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 8 of 56 09 September 2013 at 1:56pm | IP Logged | ||
I am not sure if you are referring to my post or someone else's, but if you are, I am not sure I get the relevance of the question to my post. Does it really matter how you count words? I assume that any way you count words there will be a frequency distribution (following a power law?) that varies by genre, such that what are low frequency words in one book, will appear with higher frequency in another. My point was in response to statements I often hear, like "for low frequency words you may only see them three times in a book. so it's really hard to learn them by extensive reading.", which ignores the fact that frequency distributions vary widely across books. Edited by patrickwilken on 09 September 2013 at 2:03pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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