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Most ridiculous ways to "learn" a language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4098 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 41 of 61 17 June 2014 at 9:38am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Study a language for one hour per week for 38 weeks, follow up with two hours per week for 114 weeks. Stop for 10 weeks in the middle of each 38 week period (total: 4 pauses). Never ever get any kind of exposure to your target language outside of these scheduled hours. Never get personal guidance. Only study with people who lack motivation. Let most of what you hear in your TL be heavily accented by someone who isn't a native or even native-like. Have a tutor whose understanding of language-learning reality is so tenuous that you're made to get a pen-pal in your TL around 30 hours into repeating introductions ice cream flavours. Spend your life wondering why you're not kind of fluent after these 260 highly inefficient hours spread over 4 years.
Also known as how my generation of Swedes were taught their third language, if they didn't keep studying it at the "gymnasium" (grades 10-12). Though I guess there are much worse ways of learning languages. Students of this method will walk away with at least some basic phrases, and the very studious will have a good base for doing some proper learning, and your mileage may vary slightly depending on your teacher (my husband and I went to the same school ages 13-15, but his teacher spoke German in the classroom and provided some interesting native materials; my French teachers never spoke French to us and we worked almost exclusively with the tape and textbook).
Yes! How I hate the "If you absolutely loathe children's books, read them in your TL anyway because you're a learner and learners must read children's books and love them." attitude. 7 persons have 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 42 of 61 17 June 2014 at 12:12pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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And don't get me started on the idea that you are supposed either to understand everything, or to look up every word you don't know. Only you can decide whether a book is too difficult or not. Edited by Serpent on 17 June 2014 at 12:15pm 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 43 of 61 17 June 2014 at 2:27pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Yeah I tried that. It wasn't very effective. :( 3 persons have 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 44 of 61 17 June 2014 at 9:23pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
"The Swedish Method" has such a nice ring to it. Is this approach a total waste of time? I was actually thinking about doing something similar with my tertiary languages (the ones I could probably study once a week, or on the weekends, but not daily). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5531 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 45 of 61 17 June 2014 at 9:40pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
There are two major obstacles: you're probably going to forget a lot between lessons, and few people have the right kind of motivation to study something for one hour per week for several years. But if you can fix the forgetting, and fix the motivation, it actually works surprisingly well. For first hand experience, see my guest post on the Beeminder blog, which talks about how I use Anki to very slowly learn Egyptian. The key phrase here is "very slowly": at 1 hour per week, it will take almost 5 years to put in 250 hours. Here on HTLAL, we can make even the weird ideas work sometimes. :-) Edited by emk on 17 June 2014 at 10:20pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4098 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 46 of 61 17 June 2014 at 10:16pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
For self-study it probably isn't half-bad. Cons: more time to forget. Pros: consistency and progress despite time constraints. As a classroom method, though, it's "not something to hang in the Christmas tree", as we say in Sweden. That hour or two per week is split into 30-40 minute periods, of which lots of time just disappears trying to get started and handing out worksheets, and the rest of the time is divided into activities such as waiting for the tape to rewind and listening to unmotivated disinterested children/teenagers reading sentences in your TL aloud. 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 47 of 61 17 June 2014 at 10:29pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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The key problem is the lack of exposure outside the class and the slow teaching of grammar. That's more or less how English is often taught in Russia, too.
Especially the grammar is a major problem because classes tend to focus on accuracy and on small details, as these are easy to teach and test. Passive skills are generally ignored and you won't be learning the "advanced" grammar that you could easily understand until it's time to learn to produce it (same goes for the vocab). Basically, I'd say it's only useful to help you keep going and not quit the language (and even in this regard classes can be demotivating as well). 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Lugubert Heptaglot Senior Member Sweden Joined 6866 days ago 186 posts - 235 votes Speaks: Swedish*, Danish, Norwegian, EnglishC2, German, Dutch, French Studies: Mandarin, Hindi | Message 48 of 61 19 June 2014 at 11:17pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
The Swedish Method worked for me then and there. I got a solid if mostly theoretical foundation in English and German. My German didn't really take off until I visited Germany in my 20's and realised that even indigenous Germans weren't getting the death sentence for for example using the wrong case or gender for a noun. For current ridiculous methods, I think I'm addicted to the diffusion method. It's a bit like Tanya B's "Sleep with TL dictionary under your pillow." So I'm buying lots and lots of for example Chinese readers, dictionaries and grammars etc., and probably hope that the sheer volume will make the contents transfer to and get absorbed into my brain. Not overwhelmingly successful so far... 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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