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Advice about learning declensions? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| William Camden Hexaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6273 days ago 1936 posts - 2333 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Spanish, Russian, Turkish, French | Message 9 of 16 11 October 2007 at 7:47am | IP Logged | ||
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I didn't memorise formal tables with German declensions, I just spoke and read the language, and, over time, it just sank in. Pretty much the same thing has happened with Russian.
There was a point with German where I wondered if I would ever master which nouns were masculine, feminine and neuter, and even wondered how Germans do. But the fact is they do and eventually, so do foreign learners. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| FSI Senior Member United States Joined 6360 days ago 550 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English* | Message 10 of 16 11 October 2007 at 7:58am | IP Logged | ||
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My advise would be to simply continue to absorb the language - via reading, via listening - and the patterns will become natural. You won't even have to think about them; they'll just be there. It's a gradual process, but it works very well for advanced learners (natives) and not-so-advanced learners (non-natives).
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| rggg Heptaglot Senior Member Mexico Joined 6326 days ago 373 posts - 426 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English, French, Italian, Portuguese, Indonesian, Malay Studies: Romanian, Catalan, Greek, German, Swedish | Message 11 of 16 11 October 2007 at 8:43am | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you guys!!!
I didn't expect more posts to this thread, thank you for all your advices. It's true, as time goes by, mental patterns are starting to show in my mind when I think about what article and what ending I should use, it's still a slow and mechanical process but it's getting better and better. Thank you all. Edited by rggg on 15 October 2007 at 4:40pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Linguamor Decaglot Senior Member United States Joined 6619 days ago 469 posts - 599 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, French, Norwegian, Portuguese, Dutch | Message 12 of 16 11 October 2007 at 10:53am | IP Logged | ||
Spot on again. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| pinksnowsuit Diglot Newbie United States Joined 4579 days ago 3 posts - 4 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: French, Russian, Greek | Message 13 of 16 18 May 2012 at 9:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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Thank you to all of you. I am going to to try a combination of all the above. I'm a new member and I'm really appreciating all the advice and camaraderie
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| freakyaye Senior Member Australia Joined 4839 days ago 107 posts - 152 votes | Message 14 of 16 20 May 2012 at 2:10am | IP Logged | ||
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@ hencky and @ Andy: can you give an example?
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| Al-Irelandi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5536 days ago 111 posts - 177 votes Speaks: English* | Message 15 of 16 20 May 2012 at 3:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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A brief discussion on the approaches to learning grammatical endings.
SLA research from an input processing paradigm has shown that forcing learners to notice and depend on such inflections for meaning is more efficient for acquisition than just having learners be exposed to plenty of comprehensible input (as argued by Krashen) or more 'traditional' approaches (as outlined in Paulston (1972)) involving grammar charts/paradigms followed by mechanical drills/exercises. For an inflection or declension to be acquired a form-meaning connection needs to be made in the mind, as in the connection between the past-tense and the English '-ed' ending. For second language learners this process can be problematic. VanPatten (1996, 2002, 2004) argues that learners may depend on other information in what they hear or read that causes them not to notice or attend to such endings or inflections during language comprehension and as a result leads to them not being acquired. As a result learners cannot rely on such inflections to gain meaning and have less chance of using them correctly in speaking and writing. For instance, if there are two items in a sentence which encode the same information then priority will be given to one over the other. This is due to humans preferring to attend to lexical items over grammatical items for comprehension, hence if a temporal adverb (e.g. 'yesterday', 'last week', 'ayer', etc) contains the same meaning as some grammatical ending/declension/inflection (e.g. Eng. -ed) then the adverb will be processed for meaning as opposed to that ending. It follows that there exists difficulty for endings to be attended to for meaning and as a result may not be successfully acquired. To remedy this VanPatten has mentioned using input that forces learners to depend on the endings or forms for extracting meaning and as a result facilitates their acquisition. Despite their use, materials based on such research and pedagogy may not be readilly available. In sum, all three approaches for learning declensions which have been mentioned have restrictions. Using grammar charts and transformational drills (1) have more to do with manipulating output as opposed to getting the input into the learner's head, akin to playing around with a car's exhaust fumes (output) to get it to run better as opposed to thinking about providing it a better source of fuel for intake (input). The mere exposure to comprehensible input (2) still is not sufficient in getting learners to attend to certain language forms (morphological inflections in your case). Despite plenty of opportunities for reading and listening, elements of the language fail to be noticed and processed in the input. In the case of structure input (3) then you need someone to structure the input for you, i.e. instructional materials based on the pedagogy which is not readily available. Besides the discussion on declensions, a copious amount of exposure to the language you want to learn is essential, but as mentioned some input is better quality than others and makes such declensions more salient and easier to be processed and acquired. Edited by Al-Irelandi on 20 May 2012 at 3:59pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| dbag Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5023 days ago 605 posts - 1046 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 16 of 16 24 May 2012 at 6:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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There's an FSI Greek course available. If it's anything at all like the Spanish courses
then I'm sure it'll really drill the grammar into your head. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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