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Learning languages only passively | ||
Tags: Passive | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4049 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes  Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 1 of 22 09 September 2014 at 9:55pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hi,
I'm quite curious about this thing: did anyone of you learned a language only passively just to be able to read texts and listen radio/movies? Which methods did you use and how much time requires to get a B1 level? And, of course, with which language. That can change things a lot, also if you already knew languages of the same family. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7158 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 2 of 22 09 September 2014 at 10:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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I can provide my impressions and observations of this exercise for Russian sometime this winter since I've been doing what this thread about for the upcoming Turkic challenge.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5061 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 3 of 22 10 September 2014 at 3:11am | IP Logged | ||
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If your method is primarily input-centered (reading and listening), then you don't have to do anything differently.
Just keep on reading and listening and don't bother trying to speak or write; you'll learn to understand about as fast as you would have. If you like to learn by interacting with people, then learning a language passively might be difficult. You'd probably have to learn to adopt an input-centered learning style for that language. The actual B1 level requires you to be able to speak, but you can get B1-level comprehension with a passive language. If it's closely related to one you know (e.g. Spanish-Portuguese), you could possibly do this in a matter of days to weeks. If its distantly related (e.g. English-Greek) it would probably take most people several months to a year or two. If it's unrelated (e.g. English-Arabic) then expect to take more than a year, unless you have a history of successful fast language learning. Language relatedness is more important for passive learning than for active learning, since you can take full advantage of cognates and mutual intelligibility, and don't have to worry about interference. It's not that common to see Spanish speakers who speak correct Portuguese, but it's very easy for them to get B1 or better passive understanding and vice versa. As for personal experience, I've learned some Latin to about B1-level comprehension (though this kind of thing is always hard to compare with Latin). I've also learned some passive Norwegian, which was trivially easy because I already had Swedish and Danish. I've never tried to speak Norwegian, though I plan to someday. Since I naturally have an input-centered learning style, I didn't do much different when studying these languages versus the ones I speak actively. At least for me though, I find it impossible to learn a language passively without learning it actively at all. Even though I never practice speaking Latin, I'm sure I could stammer through some basic sentences well enough to be understood if I really had to... Edited by robarb on 10 September 2014 at 8:30pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4446 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 4 of 22 10 September 2014 at 9:38am | IP Logged | ||
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In the past I've taken French classes in high school without getting anywhere. The last year I even
managed to read a novel with the rest of the class. On the other hand I wasn't confident enough to ask for directions in the middle of Paris. Back in those days we would just follow the text & reading materials in class. It is rather odd to find students who would go out of their way to read a French newspaper or watch a movie. During the summer we would be enjoying outdoor activities unless we were overseas in a language exchange program. When it comes be active vs. passive learning, if you even put in the extra effort to read a newspaper in a target language, you're doing more than what you're expected in class. Although you may not be engaged in active dialog, but you would have picked up all sorts of new words & phrases when you look up a dictionary. The years when I was taking French, we were taught the future tense by adding the verb "to go" (aller) in front of the main verb like an auxiliary verb without learning the future tense of a verb. For instance: "I will buy a book" you'd say "Je vais acheter un livre" according to the textbook. If you figured out the future tense of the verb "to buy" on you own and came up with the alternative sentence: "J'achèterai un livre", you'd be way ahead of the class. Today I was reading a Chinese newspaper and came across a character 契 (qì) as in 契約 (qìyuē) for a business contract or agreement. When I'm reading an online document, I'd normally cut & paste it into a computer dictionary and get the meaning. Since this was printed on paper, I had to copy it and scribble it in with the finger pad on the iPad. As far as I'm concerned, going to class everyday and relying only on your course material for learning a language is "passive". Reading a newspaper, watching a movie and looking up phrases on your own would be considered "active". Edited by shk00design on 10 September 2014 at 9:40am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5310 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 5 of 22 10 September 2014 at 10:20am | IP Logged | ||
That's not what the OP meant. OP is asking how to learn only the passive/input skills reading and listening, and not the active/output skills writing and speaking. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 4049 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 6 of 22 10 September 2014 at 12:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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Yes indeed :)
Sorry for the confusion: the study activity is considered "active", in contrapposition to the "passive" learning intended as just listen the language without studying it at all demanding to learn it without do anything: this is just useless, as for example Benny Lewis pointed out. But that was not the point I wanted to discuss :) My point is: I need to speak a very limited amount of languages: when I do know English, French, Spanish, German and maybe Mandarin plus the language of the country where I live, I don't really need to learn many others. But I'm interested in understanding virtually every language, to understand people talking, media and culture. In the first group I need to reach good level of proficiency, in the second it's enough to understand. While for the first group the goal can take several years, I'm wondering about the second. Said that understanding can be strictly contextual; B1 was just an indicator to say: "I will not understand poetry or a discussion about tbe decadence of the *buzzword* in a theoretic *buzzword* of the *many buzzwords". That's fine. I cannot do it in English and to many extents also in Italian that is my mother tongue. As I told you before, learning to write and speak takes really a lot of time, because the correctness required is much higher than just comprehension. Therefore I'm asking if - someone of you is studying languages just to read books and watch movies - how do you reach this goal, so methods and techniques (for example I noticed that my understanding benefits much more from learning grammar than doing flashcards, but probably just doing assimil I would reach the same result with much less strain if I'm not interested in writing and speaking) - how much time do you need to be able to use native resources for a normal audience (not children books, not specialized texts). - if it turns out that to learn one language actively I need 1 year, and passively 10 months, then it's not worthy to do it only passively. But if I need two years to learn actively and one month to learn passively, I can theoretically understand 24 languages in the time I need to learn how to write and speak one :D ok, these number are totally random and meaningless, it's just to say :) It would be nice to read some of your experiences, both positive and negative :) Edited by tristano on 10 September 2014 at 12:53pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 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 7 of 22 10 September 2014 at 1:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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You are active if you write, speak or think in a language, making up your own sentences on the way. This has nothing to do with the kind of materials you use or your circumstances - you can be passive even though you work 10 hours a day on your language learning. You just have to abstain from thinking your own thoughts.
I learnt to understand Low German by watching TV (using my knowledge of German to its utmost), and because of TV, books and travels I also understood Norwegian and Swedish long before I tried to activate them - although in this case I may have produced some mixed Danish-Swedish utterances along the way during travels. And finally I can read Ancient French and Ancient Occitan, and I have even had courses in them where we learned the grammar of the languages and read of lot of texts - but I have not tried to learn to speak or write them. So yes, you can learn languages as passive languages, but I have not seen it function unless I already knew some related language which could function as a crutch. And the further away that crutch was, the more difficult it was to retain my passive skills. So once I stopped studying French and my Latin courses were over I soon forgot even to read Latin. But my Old French is still fairly reliable because I use Modern French quite alot. And as long as I keep my Icelandic alive I can also read Old Norse - although I pronounce it as Modern Icelandic in my head. Edited by Iversen on 10 September 2014 at 1:34pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5310 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 8 of 22 10 September 2014 at 2:18pm | IP Logged | ||
I think, how much time you can save by eliminating output-study depends on how good you are at output. I break down language-learning into 5 parts: (1) grammar, (2) vocabulary, (3) reading, (4) listening, (5) output (speaking+writing), and I learn roughly in that order. So, if you want to eliminate output, you're more or less just eliminating the last step. Eg. not doing the exercises of each chapter, or not writing a book report after reading a book. Now if you're good at output, such that it only takes up 5% of your study time instead of 20% (1 divided by 5), then not studying output only saves you 5%. Whereas if you're shy or quiet, or your L2 is hard to pronounce, such that studying output would've taken up 50% of your study time, then you can save 50% by not studying output. That percentage changes, though. It used to take me ~9 months to be able to understand slow and clear radio. Then I started RE-listening to things as advised by fellow HTLALers, and now it only takes me ~3 months. And then... how fast you can learn to read probably simply depends on how fast you can cram 8000 words. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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