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An experiment: 100 days of _Cien años_ | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4766 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes  Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 1 of 55 29 July 2013 at 5:18am | IP Logged |
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I am a 60 year old, part time learner of Spanish. I'm doing this because I think it might be fun, and it should help me learn some Spanish. 100 days is the length of a Assimil course, and it makes a nice title :)
A survey of several Spanish books written for native speakers shows that I can immediately understand about 85-90% of words in a "typical" novel, which is written for adult native speakers of Spanish. This is not enough to read the novel for pleasure. I obviously need to learn more words. A look at the research shows when a learner knows: 1) 80% of the words, there is very little general comprehension, 2) 90% of the words, some comprehension for some users begins, 3) 95% of the words, a "significant" amount of comprehension happens (50%?), 4) 98% of the words, complete comprehension (the final 2% of unknown words do not interfere with comprehension). Krashen's input hypothesis states the rather obvious generalization that one acquires a language through exposure to "comprehensible input." at the level of i+1. In other words you need exposure to language that contains things you don't already know in a context where you understand what it means. It is a "no-brainer" that this is necessary for language acquisition, but it may not be optimal. There is other research that shows that without a "focus on form" and output, learners' output may "fossilize" at about the B1 level. To use reading novels for comprehensible input, I need to use some techniques to support my comprehension. I want to read something with some complexity to it; so I'm going to use some of the techniques I learned for doing Assimil and from reading this forum. _Cien años de soledad_ by Gabriel García Márquez is a famous novel by a Nobel prize winning author. A rough check shows that I know about 85% of the words in this novel, so it is well over my head. It can be challenging even for native speakers. Whatever my level of comprehension, at the very least it is a bunch of vocabulary I can learn :) I have only an hour a day to work on Spanish, and I'm going to spend a half hour doing something like Listening-Reading and a half hour doing something like the passive wave of Assimil. Each day, I will record my "comprehension" rate by figuring out what percentage of words I know out of a random section of the book. If I am learning Spanish vocabulary needed for reading this book, I should see an increase in the percentage of words I know. If I don't see an increase, any one of several things may be happening: 1) The techniques I'm using may be in effective. 2) I may be forgetting words as fast as I learn them. 3) There may be such a variety of words in the book that I don't show much improvement even though I am using effective techniques. I'll explain exactly what I'm doing tomorrow with my results for the first day tomorrow. :) edited to correct bad English Edited by sfuqua on 29 July 2013 at 5:51am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Universum Diglot Newbie AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4144 days ago 9 posts - 25 votes Speaks: English*, GermanB2 Studies: French | Message 2 of 55 29 July 2013 at 5:31am | IP Logged |
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An interesting project, good luck with it. I'm doing the same with French, but taking a
more direct path of learning the vocab explicitly first, to get to the 98% level, before hitting the book. I'll be looking forward to seeing the results of your approach. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4766 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 3 of 55 29 July 2013 at 5:47am | IP Logged |
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I have an aversion to word lists, not because they don't work, or because I hate them, but because organizing them takes time away from interacting with the language. I know people learn from making anki cards and the like, but only have an hour a day, and I'd like to spend the time in Colombia with Gabo, at least in my head.
I've done some L-R reading before, but have been disappointed with the results. The words seem to be "half learned" and they fade quickly. I think I had unreasonable expectations. I never did do the multiple hours of L-R a day that the original method involved, so I guess the problem with vocabulary was to be expected. I also think I was unreasonable about what it takes to learn a word from context. Research shows (I'm being lazy about citations; I can look them up if you're interested) that one needs to see a word in between 6 to 20 contexts before the word can become a part of the learner's creative production. So word learning from reading is an incremental process; until you've seen the word a lot, you "kind of know the word." You would recognize that you had seen it before, but you might not know exactly what it means, and you certainly couldn't use it in production. L-R would get you started learning a whole lot of words, but it would take quite a bit of time before this could be expected to affect production. I bet word lists could speed up this rather slow process; that was certainly my experience when I was learning other languages where I used word lists. :) Edited by sfuqua on 29 July 2013 at 7:55am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4766 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 55 29 July 2013 at 6:02am | IP Logged |
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I called L-R slow, what I meant was that you could expect it to take quite a bit of time to get a particular word into productive use, but it would be fast in that you could have many, many words in the process of moving toward production in parallel.
I wonder if this was what was going on in my earlier language learning where I felt I had a "sudden breakthrough" in the language. I had had many words, or other language features, building up until I finally got the "magic" amount of exposure. If many words and/or other language features happened to reach the finish line at the same time, it would give me the illusion that I had done something special at that time that had led to a breakthrough. :) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Universum Diglot Newbie AustraliaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4144 days ago 9 posts - 25 votes Speaks: English*, GermanB2 Studies: French | Message 5 of 55 29 July 2013 at 6:17am | IP Logged |
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I've had similar experiences with L-R in the past. Even having done 24 hours over the
space of one glorious weekend, I found it incredible at the time, but it didn't last. I don't have the time to manually create word lists or flashcards either, so I have my computer create them for me automatically. The joys of computer programming. Your "6 to 20 contexts" stats seem to correspond pretty well with experience - wordlists help in getting a leg up, but nothing beats seeing it in the wild. Best of luck with it all. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| mike245 Triglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6973 days ago 303 posts - 408 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Cantonese Studies: French, German, Mandarin, Khmer | Message 6 of 55 29 July 2013 at 7:04am | IP Logged |
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Good luck! This sounds like a lot of fun. Cien años de soledad is one of my favorite
books of all time. So are you planning to give yourself 100 days to finish the book? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5263 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 7 of 55 29 July 2013 at 2:17pm | IP Logged |
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My hardback edition of Cien años de soledad has a monolingual glossary of arcane vocabulary related to the flora and fauna of Colombia, the civil war and the political machinations. Don't be too worried if you don't get all that vocabulary, unless you're planning on retiring to Colombia. Gabo has done more for Colombian tourism than the tourism board. Enjoy getting lost in Macondo! Edited by iguanamon on 29 July 2013 at 6:22pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| sfuqua Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4766 days ago 581 posts - 977 votes Speaks: English*, Hawaiian, Tagalog Studies: Spanish | Message 8 of 55 30 July 2013 at 7:32am | IP Logged |
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Day one 85% comprehension; I'm just beginning so there is no improvement yet :)
I made an audiobook of the novel using IVONA reader with their Miguel voice, an "American Spanish" voice, anyway a male voice that speaks with seseo. The voice speaks at about a 160 words per minute, the standard rate for an audiobook on Audible. I divided the audiobook into 100 files. Each of the files is about 8 minutes long. Today I listened to the first file four times today. The first three times I followed along with the English translation; the fourth time I followed along with the Spanish. At this point, I had a pretty complete understanding of the Spanish while I followed along reading it. Next I went to page one and covered it using the same way that was described in the Assimil Spanish without Toil I was studying recently. For each sentence I would: 1) read the sentence silently. 2) go through each word, slilently saying the English meaning. If the word is a verb, I note the tense; if it is a pronoun, I note the referent. 3) Read the sentence out loud. At the end of the page: 1) Read the whole page aloud, several times if I stumble while reading it. My impression the first day is that the Listening and reading worked more or less as designed, and that the "Assimil lesson" reading aloud part was slow and laborious. I want to spend some of the time speaking, and I want to spend some of the time focusing on the meanings of individual words and the grammar, but I may adjust this part of the lesson. Tomorrow I plan to review page one and cover page two the slow, reading aloud way. If I'm not happy with it, maybe I'll do something else; shadowing or something. So far this is fun, which is the main reason for doing it. :) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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