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Learning languages only passively | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6599 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 9 of 22 10 September 2014 at 4:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm interested in travelling all over Europe and speaking the local language almost everywhere, but as of now that's more of a vague idea. My more immediate interests are watching football, reading, listening to music and audiobooks, and eventually communicating online in writing.
In related languages, you don't even need that "formal study" period, apart from learning the pronunciation. I'm sure that if you devoted a month or two to Catalan native materials, you'd understand them pretty well after that. But then how would you maintain it? That's maybe the real challenge here. Is an Anki session worth it when you could be simply reading? But would reading keep you in your comfort zone? These questions are endless really. I'd also say that some subtleties are noticeable only when you do have active knowledge. I look at the wording and I think: hmm why not X? I'd just say it as X. Sometimes it's just a peculiarity of the language (which is equally fascinating), sometimes the author's unique special wording. Note also that Prof Argüelles also primarily aims to read, but for him active study (including Assimil and shadowing) is extremely important. He also uses graded readers, btw - another key question is how easily you can get comprehensible input. I'm currently reading a children's book in Swedish because anything else is honestly beyond my level. And there are very few parallel texts. How soon you would learn depends on your strategy and the time available. But I was speaking of the related languages - so far it's the Romance and Germanic ones in your case, but I can see you adding the Slavic ones with reasonable effort. In something more "exotic", comprehension is much harder. But speaking can also be much harder. And you'd need more grammar simply to understand, and possibly dealing with more boring texts for learners. IDK, I still feel like we have similar personalities ;) I think that with such goals, what you need to do is to make language learning your lifestyle. No matter whether you settle on 3 or 13 languages, learning shouldn't be something you set aside the time for :) Work and other hobbies should beg your languages to allow you some time off ;) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Via Diva Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation last.fm/user/viadivaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4236 days ago 1109 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German, Italian, French, Swedish, Esperanto, Czech, Greek | Message 10 of 22 10 September 2014 at 4:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I wanted to learn German strictly passively, at the time I only needed to read and understand things, perhaps translate. But soon it was clear that it's hard to find a course which get you through the basics without some active studying. Perhaps if I were more concentrated on remaining passive I'd took a grammar book, filled Anki with words I need and worked my way towards grasping the language.
However, now i aim at active studies too because I have vague (and probably not really possible) plans about German and I find it easier to do passive stuff after I was busy with something active for a while, it wakes up my brain. The very first action in English that later lead me further was just thinking in it (with a lot of mistakes, limited vocabulary and strange topics). I am doing exactly the same thing with German from time to time. However, I'd consider to try vocab+grammar tactics when I'll go to Italian (since folk consider it relatively simply and I am not seeing any scenario of using it actively at the moment). On the other hand, I have already installed an active course on my smartphone, keeping in mind that I got overwhelming results with the same course for German about a year ago. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4624 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 11 of 22 10 September 2014 at 5:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I guess you can be passive native if you hear a heritage language spoken at home but avoid actively using it. Of course, many heritage learners speak very well but there also seems to be those who can understand the language passively but struggle to form coherent sentences independently.
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| 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 12 of 22 10 September 2014 at 8:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
If your goal is to read books and watch movies, then you should read lots of books and watch lots of movies. It's OK if you spend a small proportion of your study time memorizing vocabulary or drilling grammar, but really you need to read more books, watch more movies, and listen to more podcasts. Start off reading books about things you already know about or that you've already read. Then read the kind of books that you want to be able to understand.
I'd say if you want to use passive-only learning as a shortcut, don't bother unless the language has some degree of mutual intelligibility with one you know. So, for example, I recommend learning active French and Spanish. (While related, they're pretty different and mutual intelligibility is pretty low). You wouldn't save much time by doing passive-only, as speaking can help you detect nuances, as a previous poster mentioned. Once you've got those two, Portuguese, Catalan, and Italian have a decent degree of mutual intelligibility. Then you can learn those three passive-only. If you learned them actively, it would take a lot longer because a good deal of the effort would be remembering how to say things correctly even though they're already similar enough for you to understand. No one can give you accurate numbers on how much time you'll save, but as a rule of thumb it's proportionate to the degree of mutual intelligibility the language has to ones you know. You can get a sense of this by seeing how well you understand the language after 1 day of studying (to familiarize with the sound and a few function words). If it's a non-negligible amount then you can probably save time by going passive only. There's really not a strong commitment one way or the other, though. You can keep maintaining passive skill but stop maintaining active skill in a language that you spoke while learning. You can also activate a language you learned passively in a relatively short time by forcing yourself to try to speak it- haltingly at first, but it comes fast if your passive knowledge is good. Edited by robarb on 10 September 2014 at 8:54pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| kanewai Triglot Senior Member United States justpaste.it/kanewai Joined 4891 days ago 1386 posts - 3054 votes Speaks: English*, French, Marshallese Studies: Italian, Spanish | Message 13 of 22 10 September 2014 at 9:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I study mostly passively, though I always start off with a couple months of active
study, and find that I still need periods of active study throughout the year. I'd say it's very possible, however ... I think it will take much much longer than you anticipate. For myself, I started with the similar goals: I wanted to read French & Spanish books, and be able to watch movies without subtitles. I thought that might take a year. I also thought it would be cool to be able to converse, and engage in small talk ... but those were long-term goals. Turns out I had the order of things wrong. Three years on I can: - Read fluently in French, and semi-fluently in Spanish - Engage in a one-on-one conversation in Spanish if they speak slowly - Engage in small-group conversations in French if they speak clearly and there aren't a lot of distractions (like at a bar or a party) - Understand some tv shows in French without subtitles. What I am just on the cusp of being able to do: - Understand podcasts in French - Understand Mexican telenovelas. What I still can't do: - Understand a single effin' thing in French movies - Undertand a single thing in French cop shows (like Engrenage) And this is after three years of pretty much daily exposure to French. So while it is possible to learn passively (and there's a school of thought that says it's the best way to learn, though I don't know if I fully agree with that), you're definitely not going to save any time at all if you skip the speaking part and hope to get right into understanding movies and podcasts. That seems to be the last skill that people learn! 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6599 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 14 of 22 10 September 2014 at 10:26pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I still think that those who consider listening inherently more difficult just don't do it enough. Or care more about understanding face-to-face.
It does seem like some languages are more tricky than others in this respect though, for example French and Danish. 2 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 15 of 22 10 September 2014 at 11:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hi guys, thanks for the many answers.
Let's summarise a bit. 1) active/passive learning definition: apparently really confusing. 2) pros of this way of learning a language: much time saved studying related languages; more difficult with isolated and distant languages. Seems to be very convenient to learn to understand romance, Germanic and slavic languages since they are very well represented. 3) for certain people is much more difficult 4) reading/listening and reading books seem to be the preferred way to learn a language in this fashion. 5) maintaining the language over time is to be taken in serious consideration, and the only way to assure it is to insert it in your life. I have some comment to these points. 1) I was referring to active/passive skill, not to the process to obtain it. 2) ja, I agree on that. 3) I'm not sure why. 4) personally, I think that that is more useful in a second moment, but this is what I'm observing now. I cannot understand some input properly if I don't have a base vocabulary and grammar. To me studying the language with the passive wave of Assimil and studying grammar every day for 100 days brings one farer than doing srs and trying to read for three months. Also, I find it more enjoyable. Finished to do Assimil and with the base grammar one can start to read and watch stuff, maybe starting with not too difficult resources, and starting to really learning from it. 5) that is also my goal. Some user's specific comment: @Iversen: it seems from your story that the continuum of the languages involved assures, if the "strategic languages" are kept trained, than the understanding of the related doesn't vanish or it vanishes less quickly (french and Spanish for example are a good deal in the romance family). @Serpent: I also have the feeling that we have similar personalities, for some post of yours I read :) In my case, if I decide to dedicate myself to a project like that, the Slavic family would be the ideal, because 1) I'm not studying related languages that I need to use actively, while I'm doing this with French, Spanish and Dutch 2) is full of major languages 3) the culture is also very fascinating - in this extent, I think that studying also the culture can lead to a better understanding, reinforcing the context. 4) they look to me less different to romance languages than Germanic languages are. 5) I can probably use Romanian as a bridge, than going with Polish that seems to have a fair amount of Latin cognates. Romanian is a language that I would really like to learn, so no problem ;) 6) I think there is a continuum of languages that are not Slavic but are influenced by Slavic languages. 7) I have also the impression that the mutual intelligibility is higher in this family than in romance and Germanic. In this period, other than the study with books and classes, I'm using English every day for countless things, speaking in French with some colleagues, reading a French book, watching tv series dubbed in french, watching news in French sometimes, having skype conversations in Dutch, reading Dutch books, watching a Dutch tv serie. I just started Spanish, but I was able to read and listen Spanish even before, it will be just relaxing do it afterwards (learning to speak it is a different story). Overall, I'm using less Italian then foreign languages. @Kanewai: personally, with French and even more with Spanish (never studied and my understanding is already better than with French) this goal was almost for free. I never tried with Portuguese but I don't expect it to be much different. But my mother tongue is English, and mine is Italian. I expect you to be able to do the same with Dutch and German much quicker than me. Then, there are other considerations. 1) people is different. I can play one song with the piano, if not too difficult, directly the first time I listen to it. I play since I'm 7. I'm a software engineer, meaning that every day I have to deal with input that I don't completely know and produce expected results. I studied very bad French in middle school, I forgot it completely, did a placement test 18 years afterwards and put into A2.2 course, because I was able to reverse engineer the input contained in the questions and use Italian as a benchmark, understood the questions at the interview and answered with something that sounded something like French but was actually a modified version of Italian :) Then passed the exams of A2.2 and B1.1 without studying the grammar nor doing homework almost at all. I'm not a genius. It's just my whole life that I do this all the time: observe something, compare it with something else that i know, see the differences, attempting to reproduce something approximately similar. I'm well trained, that's it. I'm not a good pianist, my accent sucks in every languages and I'm not a rockstar developer (there are very few of them, and they can do in one hour what normal developers do in one week and very good developers in 2 days). 2) not only you might have a different learning style, but according to this, you also implement totally different strategies. To me speaking is the most difficult thing to do; I actually do more writing than anything else. Some people is fluent speaking but cannot write. It depends. Once in my university I had to deal with an assignment that was seemingly impossible. I did only that for one entire week different hours a day and in the end the result was flawless. In the end training counts more than anything else. 3) perspectives are also different. Since I'm more trained in dealing with confusing and partially unknown input, I probably need a lower degree of comprehension. Maybe you understand much more than me, but you have a different consciousness about that. A friend of mine is more fluent than me in English, but he told me that he cannot see a movie in a language that is not Italian, because he wants to understand every single word and he gets really pissed off when he misses something. Even in Italian, he stops and rewatches scenes many times if he thinks he didn't understand completely! Seemingly, people that are C2 can think that they know a little the language, and people that knows how to say hello with a terrible accent can be convinced to know the language. Of course this is extreme and I'm not telling you that it's your case. I simply don't know, but the message is still valid: to someone having a partial comprehension is enough, for someone else is not. 3 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 16 of 22 10 September 2014 at 11:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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woah it seems that I really like to enumerate.
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