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Length of audio in LR method? | ||
Tags: Listening-Reading (L-R) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| kaptengröt Tetraglot Groupie Sweden Joined 4343 days ago 92 posts - 163 votes  Speaks: English*, Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic Studies: Japanese | Message 1 of 8 13 January 2013 at 5:51am | IP Logged | |||||
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With the LR method it is said to be ideal to have around 50 hours of audio when you are a beginner. I was just wondering if, hypothetically, a recording of the same book (unabridged of course) in the target language takes say, one third of the time as it does for all other languages. Or the opposite and it takes much longer.
If I had a language that took a third of the time compared to most other languages, would it be okay to do shorter audio then? Like 30 hours instead of 50 being the minimum ideal, or if it takes longer then 70 hours instead of 50 for example. What I mean is, if there are large differences like that should you compensate for them, or ignore it and still say 50 hours is best? Edited by kaptengröt on 13 January 2013 at 5:55am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| grunts67 Diglot Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5307 days ago 215 posts - 252 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Spanish, Russian | Message 2 of 8 13 January 2013 at 7:31am | IP Logged | |||||
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You are not doing pastry. It's not a exact science. Therefore, you can't say that for a normal language you will do 50 hours of L-R and reach a particular level.
Those number are really approximation and I have seen form 40 to 80 hours of new materials. You can logically thing than a difficult language that is differ more than a other one will take more time but it's still depend of a lot of factors. Just do it till you hit that 'natural listening' stage. After that, reevaluated what you want to achieve. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6914 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 8 13 January 2013 at 12:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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The main point is to make sure to expose yourself to a lot of content, and it's just assumed that ~50 hours of audiobooks (or more) will give you a lot of grammatical material and sentences structures. More will do no harm.
(Bear in mind that the amount isn't set in stone. Siomotteikiru supposedly (said he/she) got decent skills in German after four 10-hour rounds of Kafka.) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kaptengröt Tetraglot Groupie Sweden Joined 4343 days ago 92 posts - 163 votes Speaks: English*, Swedish, Faroese, Icelandic Studies: Japanese | Message 4 of 8 13 January 2013 at 2:19pm | IP Logged | |||||
Well, unless I am misunderstanding you, that isn't really what I meant - this is hypothetical and has nothing to do with my learning, I'm not talking about getting to a certain stage or saying I have any problems. I was just curious because I realized the a recording of Harry Potter in one language was three hours longer than in another, and what that said about density between languages (these were even both Germanic languages so I imagine it could be wildly different between very unrelated languages). I take "50 hours" to mean "this amount of audio shows you that your book is long enough for a beginner", and long enough meaning you should be exposed to a good amount of new material, yet also enough different contexts for some of that same material, and whatnot. (A little difficult to describe my thinking but hopefully you get the idea.) I was thinking, if the "density" is different between languages and one is, say, a lot more "dense" than another (I don't know what to call it other than dense) then that could affect how much time should be recommended. As a poor example (maybe I am not thinking clearly and this sounds entirely wrong to you guys), take some of these Germanic languages, they have a LOT of reused words that are simply put into compounds, instead of having more unique words. If I say "dictionary", a unique word in English, actually I would need to say "wordbook" in say, Swedish, which is simply two very common words put together. Affixes are also be included in "small, reused parts that make up meanings" and can be much more common than in English (mainly thinking of Icelandic here and not Swedish). If we are ignoring languages like literary Icelandic which tries not to have loanwords, we can also include loanwords/"friends" like "synonymordbok" (thesaurus - synonym wordbook). So you see how a language like that has a lot less vocabulary to learn (compared to English) and the same words will show up much more often. Which is one form of density. Let's pretend Swedish has half as many words as English, in the language as a whole, both rare and common etc. For simplicity's sake, let's say Swedish is also twice as easy as English grammar-wise. Then let's pretend Swedish is spoken twice as fast as English too. So there you have a language that would theoretically get you to the same amount of language proficiency, four times faster than English. Is it then reasonable to think more along the lines of "a good-length audio for Swedish CAN BE one-fourth of the original suggested length?". Of course the above example is made up. But you have to wonder, if you were to look at an audiobook and in English it were five hours but in (insert-language) it were ten, if you shouldn't mentally double the recommended listening time per book for that language. And I am not talking about book length to go "I don't want to read long books!!" or anything like that either, like I said this is just theoretical to satisfy my curiosity.
Yes, I also think part of the total time needed must also hinge on how good your skills of understanding by context are, and how fast you obtain new words and grammar. I think, probably, someone learning another language for the first time might take longer because those skills are not as well developed (even if they are unconsciously-trained skills). Edited by kaptengröt on 13 January 2013 at 2:33pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| grunts67 Diglot Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5307 days ago 215 posts - 252 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Spanish, Russian | Message 5 of 8 13 January 2013 at 5:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I see. I misunderstood your post. I apologize. This is a interesting question. I guess it also depend the average spoken speed of a particular language and if the audio is faster or slow or equal at that average speed. I have no clue honestly. Edited by grunts67 on 13 January 2013 at 5:35pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6914 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 8 13 January 2013 at 6:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Oops, I too read your post like grunts67. Anyway it's an interesting question, and I think it applies to books as well. Some languages are more "dense". Wasn't there a discussion a while ago about books being shorter in some languages (without being heavily edited)? (Possibly in regards to the Harry Potter series)
Of course it's rather pointless (at least very time-consuming) to count how many syllables we read (or hear), but what's considered "a book" (or "a sentence" or even "a word") in language A and B can vary a lot. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6444 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 7 of 8 07 February 2013 at 3:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
The dominant factors, as far as I can tell, don't include the speed of the language. Speed of the individual reader varies far more than speed differences between languages. Similar speakers won't often vary by 1/3rd across languages; particularly slow or fast ones can vary by more than that within one language. The amount of audio you need varies, but depends more on factors like how transparent the language is to you - a 4th Romance or or 5th Germanic language is going to be a lot easier than your first non-Indo-European one, and require less material to get to the same level. And this holds regardless of how fast or slow a particular speaker or language tends to speak/be spoken. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6708 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 8 of 8 08 February 2013 at 10:05am | IP Logged | |||||
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I am fairly sure that it would take a native speaker of for instance English or Swedish less time to learn Dutch through LR than it would take to learn Greek or Urdu or Korean. And maybe it would be a good idea not just to rely on LR with unrelated languages, but that's another discussion. Now assume that you have different versions of the audio material. Will a source which speaks extremely fast bring down the total time for the experience? I doubt it, because the limiting factor is not the ability of the speaker to speak as fast as a fish auctioneer, but your ability to catch words and integrate them into some kind of mental map. And with a rushed source or a source with bad sound quality I would actually expect that the whole process took longer. I have read that Danish typically is spoken 'faster' than Swedish, but that's because we drop half of our words. Will that make it easier to learn Danish than Swedish? I doubt it.
These are however just theoretical considerations. I am not sure I even have read about others than Siomotteikiru who could take 'LR course' of 50 or 80 hours in a row without going berserk or falling asleep. Actually few test reports here at HTLAL have specified how many hours the experiment really took. In my case it would be less than one hour, because I had problems finding appropriate non-fictional materials. But that short time gave me the impression that reading along in a translation while listening to a recording did give me the kind of mental 'buzz' which is so useful, but hard to get from more parsimoneous listening. Edited by Iversen on 08 February 2013 at 10:12am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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