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Viewpoint: You can damage Language by writing and speaking | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4667 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes  Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 41 of 46 27 July 2014 at 4:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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Languages are not museum vases so they cannot be
damaged. 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 42 of 46 28 July 2014 at 12:50pm | IP Logged | ||
From Evita's log (hope it's okay to quote ^_^)
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 43 of 46 28 July 2014 at 1:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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Nobody wants to make mistakes or form bad habits when learning a foreign language, or anything for that
matter. The problem is that for all learners it is often difficult to detect when one is making a mistake. It's not as simple as saying, like Evita, "Since I have no one to correct my mistakes, I simply don't make them and get lots of input instead." The idea behind this sort of thinking is don't say or write a thing unless you have heard it from a good source. Not a bad idea, and this is what a lot of us do with writing. Plus when writing we can revise our output before hitting that Post Reply button. Even with that I for one make plenty of mistakes that I only see later. But this does not work well in spontaneous speech. We don't have a Preview button for speaking. We have to remember that the big problem for everybody when speaking a second language is the presence of the first language lurking under the surface. Most, if not all, our mistakes come from the interaction of the two languages. This is very apparent in accent. Most of us will have an accent for the rest of our lives. The rest of the language is easier to master, but there often remains areas where certain mistakes have become crystallized that one is totally unaware of. This is where working with a professional tutor is absolutely essential. People think they speak perfectly until they start working with a good tutor. All of a sudden, all sorts of little details have to be corrected. Things that you've been saying improperly for years are brought to light. But more importantly, a good tutor shows you how to say things in a natural and fluent manner. So, instead of being frightened to death of making a mistake, invest in a good tutor 2 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 44 of 46 28 July 2014 at 5:10pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm inclined to agree with the original article that pronunciation is more of an exception:
People sometimes say that the process of learning a language has to involve a lot of mistakes, because they think learning a language is like learning to play golf. But this is a bad analogy. In languages, it is easy to “follow good examples”. In golf, it is difficult. If you see a few example sentences with a word, it is not difficult to produce a correct sentence with that word. On the other hand, you could watch professional golfers all day long, and still be unable to strike the ball correctly. The only hard-to-imitate element in languages is pronunciation. Also, I doubt we have all that many people who are delusional enough to think they speak perfectly when they don't. Remember that many HTLAL'ers either enjoy learning grammar, or get a lot of input (or both). Besides, not getting corrections orally doesn't mean not getting them in writing, either explicitly or in the form of exercises, googling etc. And nearly error-free writing is fairly easy to transfer into good speaking (at least if you can think in the language and write correctly without double-checking). That's what I've done in Finnish, mostly by using shadowing. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5429 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 45 of 46 29 July 2014 at 1:24am | IP Logged | ||
If learning a language were as simple as looking at a few example sentences of a word and then producing correct sentences of that word. This is must be the understatement of the year. How do people attempt to learn languages? They look at good examples all the time. All the methods, whether self-learning or classroom are full of good examples. So, why do people still make mistakes? They make mistakes when they go beyond repeating the good examples because they have not mastered all the grammatical and lexical intricacies in order to speak correctly. As I have said repeatedly, as language learners we all emulate good examples that we hear and read. But when it comes to actually speaking spontaneously and interacting with native speakers, there is a relatively long process before we can produce error-free output. I have never heard of anyone studying a language passively and then start speaking it perfectly with native speakers. I believe that this is impossible. Edited by s_allard on 29 July 2014 at 1:59am 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 46 of 46 29 July 2014 at 4:58am | IP Logged | ||
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Problems mostly happen when people generalize based on the usage in their native language or try to use words based on what they see in the dictionary, often without any example sentences.
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