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When to start R-L? | ||
Tags: Listening-Reading (L-R) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4888 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 1 of 7 10 August 2013 at 1:36pm | IP Logged |
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I recently started L-R with Candide for French (an excellent first choice, btw), and
now I'm wondering how to apply it to other languages. I've read a lot of the posts, and the answer might be buried in there, but hell if I can find it. I know people have started it quite early in their studies, but I don't know how early, or how it went. I'm not about to start a new language now, but there are a few (Russian, German, maybe Japanese, Latin, or Arabic, and let me just add Russian again, 'cause that's like the holy grail of lit-lovers) that I'd like to be able to read the classics in, some day. And I always thought I'd follow the same progression I followed for other languages: an audio course, a text book, Assimil, then TL books. In other words: I am still many many years away from reading Nabakov, Tolstoi, or Dostoevsky in their native language! But people seem to imply that you can start R-L right at the beginning. Has this actually worked for anyone? Edited by kanewai on 10 August 2013 at 1:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6596 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 3 of 7 10 August 2013 at 5:17pm | IP Logged |
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See the posts by Volte.
It has certainly worked for me, at least with related languages. As a beginner in an unrelated language I'm not sure it would be any better than a textbook for me - the rec is to use an interlinear translation of a children's story, and this sounds boring for sure. But with Polish and the Romance languages I can safely say that it has worked. I have a pretty good comprehension and I even learn to say more and more things myself as I continue reading in these languages. From your languages, German and Russian should be no problem. For Arabic you'd need parallel texts that mark the vowels (although probably not for long), for Latin there are more podcasts than audiobooks, and the pronunciation varies depending on the speaker's native language. For Japanese it's possible, but I think you'll be more comfortable with your usual methods at first. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4888 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 4 of 7 10 August 2013 at 8:28pm | IP Logged |
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aYa's posts are challenging to decipher, to put it mildly. He seems to imply that he
used L-R to learn Japanese (!), but I can't imagine it working for 'exotic' languages before you've reached an A2 / B1 level. But I can't find a simple answer in any of aYa's writings: how much Japanese or Russian did he know before he started, and how much did he learn? Edited by kanewai on 10 August 2013 at 8:38pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| nonneb Pentaglot Groupie SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4750 days ago 80 posts - 173 votes Speaks: English*, Ancient Greek, Latin, German, Spanish Studies: Mandarin, Hungarian, French | Message 6 of 7 11 August 2013 at 1:02am | IP Logged |
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Plenty of people like starting L-R from the beginning, but I could only get it to work for related languages or languages I already knew some of. I had great experiences LRing with Spanish, French, and German, (only French from a very low level) but I feel like I wasted a lot of time trying to do it with Hungarian.
I had already done the first three lessons of FSI Hungarian and glanced through a brief grammar. I waited 'til I had a three day weekend, as advised, and spent 24 hours LRing Harry Potter 1 over the three day period. Over the next week, I clocked another 3-5 hours per day (I was very meticulous about keeping records of what I was doing because I was excited to see how effective LR would be from the beginning). I stopped after the week because I felt absolutely no improvement. There were too few similar words and the word order was far too distant for me to get anything out of it. I've read since then that if the languages are very distant and you don't know any of it, you should spend the first few hours translating word-for-word from the L2, which is something I did not do and could have helped. I'm not trying to say you can't use it from the beginning of somewhat opaque languages, but I struggled with it and you might want to try something different than what I did (I followed the advice given in the forum posts here, both the original thread and other things by Volte except where noted). 1 person has 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 7 of 7 13 August 2013 at 12:49pm | IP Logged |
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I haven't found it that much harder to use L-R for unrelated languages: I suppose the initial steps are a bit harder, and it takes longer to see the same amount of progress, but a few hours of Chinese had me recognizing the same sorts of milestones that I'd hit for Russian early on. Lack of cognates is definitely annoying at first; I've found word-order to be a quite minor issue.
Using L-R right at the beginning with a script you don't know for a language not closely related to any you know, with a normal 2-column parallel text, requires a few hours of being quite lost, relying on things like names and even the length of sound files vs the amount of text. There are tools to make this easier, like interlinear texts and/or a third column with a transcription in the latin alphabet (romaji, pinyin, etc); I haven't found them necessary, but they certainly make the first hours more comfortable. I personally enjoy puzzling through this initial step with a literary parallel text and audiobook without more tools, but Aya describes it as hell; with better tools, it's more fun. Either way, this stage only lasts a few hours, at least for me. Using L-R as an absolute beginner strikes me as a matter of taste and preference, even for the most unrelated language pairs. Is it doable? Yes. Is it enjoyable? It depends on you and your materials, and I can't answer that for you. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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