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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5326 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes  | Message 41 of 60 16 February 2011 at 3:16am | IP Logged | |||||
I am afraid this proposal will reach the status of jam - just another myth ...
I think one problem with all these slogans like 10 000 hours for becoming an expert, 10 000 of listening if you want to follow an ajatt like procedure and what may be more is that it is too easy to reduce these slogans to something they never meant or even to mix them up completely. The expert principle in a weak form (without exact figures and unjustified oversimplifications) is really a banality, nobody ever doubted it. It is very useful when people have wrong expectations like fluent in 24 hours or similar. The 10 000 hours of listening needed for listening comprehension, spread by Mister AJATT, are just nonsense, or a misunderstanding, certainly not invented with bad intentions, but obviously this cannot always prevent bad consequences. He did this amount of listening (well, probably some less, but the direction will be right), but parrallel to his learning, and he mistakes it as the reason for his final success. One could say, how do you know? but I really know it from my own experience, not in one language, but in several languages. I had learned Spanish, Italian and French with minimal audio resources, not because it is so cool, but just because I could not aff.. no, because I did not find any ... No tv, radio, no podcasts, audiobooks, only my Italian book for beginners came with three cassettes, maybe 2 hours of audio, probably less. So I could read very well, knew grammar and vocabulary, not perfect, of course, but ok, and only years later decided that it was time to get listening abilities. IN the meanwhile resources existed in abundance, and for free, so there was really no excuse not to do it. Spanish was not very difficult, I was pleasantly surprised that after something like 50 hours I could actually follow rather easily. So I attacked Ialian, and there it was really amazing, it made sense quite from the start, maybe after one or two hours! I am sure this is because I had been able to get the correct phonological model of the language with the help of the audio cassettes, and when I read novels my mental model of the language was not so far off that it would not have been possible to correct it in a very short time. French was really more difficult, It looks like I had not managed to read with a good inner voice, well, no surprise, and the correct sound patterns were not connected with the verbs I knew from reading, but could not understand when I started listening. I don't know any exact number here because it took much longer, but let's say that after maybe 200 hours it was ok, but it is still my weakest language in this regard (although I know more words than in Italian, but just to repeat this important point: I had learned them with a wrong or bad pronunciation. I mention this little anecdote before because it may be interesting as a real contrast to some of the claims of today. Splog would probably say that I am not an expert and that this is the reason why I was so relatively fast. I would have to agree with him, but on the other hand I would not tell this story if there were not many people who write about their difficulties with listening, that it is the most difficult part and takes a very long time, and these should know that this is not necessarily true if, and this is the important if, of course, if you know the language. You cannot understand as long as you don't know a sufficient vocabulary, with 1000 words you have a nice feeling when recognizing random words while listening to the radio, but not more. And this is natural, it is not a problem with listening per se. And you cannot understand spoken language as long as you don't know enough about the specifics, to avoid the gr-word, of your language, the rules, the game of your language has to be known and familiar to you, if this is not the case the vocabulary alone won't do the trick either. Heavy dialect speakers or very lazy pronunciation will make it hard for me, there is a lot of room for improvement, I don't want to give a wrong impression, but I understand most of what is said without much effort, and people who are told that they should spend 10 000 hours with senseless, well, quite inefficient background listening may find this interesting. I have often said that people don't have the same natural abilities, so it must be said that it can take you much longer, or you can be faster, but it won't take 10 000 hours. And I don't want to create new myths like Italian in 2 hours or Spanish in 50, I had learned these languages with considerable effort, just without audio. As usually I have probably forgotten most of what I had wanted to say, but maybe later. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 6014 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 42 of 60 16 February 2011 at 11:12am | IP Logged | |||||
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"Mister AJATT" doesn't really spend a lot of time talking about 10000 hours as necessary. He uses it to illustrate the idea that people aren't born with magical talents, but rather that they just practice and practice and practice.
Some people apparently think things like "Only the Japanese can really learn to read Japanese, and I can't because I just don't have the talent for it", which is BS. Some people also apparently think that if they spend a couple hours here and there, then they should expect to be awesome already, and they get disappointed when they're not awesome yet, and then start thinking that first idea again, that they just don't have the talent. Basically, I think if you want to get to a really good level of a language where you can have a conversation in a noisy bar, and understand most of what you read, then you should plan to spend several hundred hours on it. How many months it will take will depend on how many hours you spend. Actively trying to understand things and figure out the words will be more effective than just having background noise on while you're not paying attention. Once you know those things, that's about all you need in order to plan it long-term. Get started now, and reassess after a couple hundred hours. 13 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Vir Newbie France Joined 5160 days ago 1 posts - 3 votes Speaks: English* | Message 43 of 60 18 February 2011 at 11:42am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think the 10,000 hour idea has been taken completely out of context, probably by some "journalist" as someone has already suggested! But the journalist did not invent the idea and it isn't just a random figure pulled out of the air. Empirical work has been done on excellence in a number of fields. But...these studies have been done over a wide range of disciplines: music performance, chess, sports. They haven't necessarily applied these ideas to foreign-language learning acquisition. And K. Anders Ericsson makes it very clear what he means by "expert" in his book (as editor) 'The Road to Excellence' and I quote: "The HIGHEST levels of performance and achievement in sports, games, arts, and sciences...". The 10,000 hour "rule" came from a study of violinists and pianists - there isn't just one level of expert: "At age 20, the two best groups of violinists had spent over 10,000 hours on deliberate practice. The group of expert violinists with an intermediate level expert performance had practiced on the average about 8,000 hours, and the least accomplished group of expert violinists only about 5,000 hours. For comparison, the group of amateur pianists averaged only about 2,000 hours of accumulated deliberate practice at that age." Now, all of these violinists would be professionals at various levels from soloist to chamber musician to orchestra - they're "experts" but not all at the same level. What would you consider the language-learning equivalents? Sorry this post is a bit long - but without defining terms, 10,000 hours or the 10-year rule is meaningless. One of the bottom lines seems to be that the amount of deliberate (i.e. concentrated) practice is "monotonically related to the attained level of performance". I'd suggest the book if you really want to understand where these ideas are coming from. Otherwise concentrated work for as long as it takes seems to be the answer! Ciao Vir Edited by Vir on 18 February 2011 at 1:05pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| anothername Triglot Groupie Brazil Joined 5089 days ago 96 posts - 195 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Spanish, English | Message 44 of 60 18 February 2011 at 2:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't find it amusing how deceptive some "scientific studies" are nowadays, specially in the psychology field. What I do find amusing is the amount of very intelligent people who believes in those claims, instead of realizing how much marketing/business is involved in some "academic" projects that surprisingly become best-sellers on your favorite library.
Of course the amount of practice is crucial on developing "excellence" at any field. What is questionable is this arbitrary number of hours (10.000), the definition of excellence, and especially the quality of practice required. I'm pretty sure that 10.000 hours of piano or violin practice following bad instructions will produce no good player, let alone language learning. Also, some people can deal with more accelerated information input, others would need/prefer a very paced learning. What means, one hour is not a precise unity of learning. If the X person learns 20 important things in an hour, the Y person learns 30, and so on. There are so many variables. It's not like cooking pasta in 8 minutes. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| zhanglong Senior Member United States Joined 4957 days ago 322 posts - 427 votes Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 45 of 60 24 February 2012 at 1:49am | IP Logged | |||||
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This thread is over a year old, but some of the posters here seem not to have read the paper on which its assumptions are based.
It's from an article called The Making of an Expert, and based upon the research of K. Anders Ericsson, among others. The article can be found in the archives of the Harvard Business Review. While you may disagree with the 10,000 hours figure, the point the article makes is a valid one. Practice *doesn't* make perfect. Perfect practice does. The authors use the term "deliberate practice" to describe practicing what you're not good at. Rather than endlessly practicing what you already know how to do, to reach a higher level, you must always be willing to do things that are *uncomfortable*. In other words, you must put in a lot of time doing what you can't yet do, not just reinforce the things you already can. So you need a long time, and you also need good teachers or authentic models, to be able to be an "expert" in a particular language, but the point is well-made that "expertise" is ill-defined. The authors address this in their article. Malcolm Gladwell may well be a "pop-culture" academic, but he is not the originator of the 10,000 hour rule. Rather than color your opinion of the theory based upon your opinion of Gladwell or of the perhaps flawed AJATT method, read K. Anders Ericsson's original article and see for yourself what you can adapt for your own development. Now to the original poster's question. Are 10,000 hours enough of listening practice necessary to be fluent in a particular language? Hmm. According to the paper, 10,000 hours are necessary for world-class performance. Being able to converse with the local grocer is not the same as reciting poetry or engaging in debates on national television. To be able to speak to native speakers and understand what they say is a far cry from being in a courtroom or legislative body arguing the merits of abstract legal, social, or philosophical ideas. I would say if you just want to be able to speak about things in daily life, to let's say an intermediate level, you would need approximately 1,000 hours of listening practice. The initial set of hours, let's say the first hundred hours are needed to become familiar with and get a good foundation of the phonology of the language. This is highly dependent upon which language is your first language and what is the language you are trying to learn. The rest of the time would be spend learning how to speak and recognize vocabulary, and sentences from authentic contexts. Try to get 100 hours of deliberate practice and see how you do when you chat with native speakers. 10,000 hours seems excessive; the real number should be nearer to 25% of that total. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| atama warui Triglot Senior Member Japan Joined 4729 days ago 594 posts - 985 votes Speaks: German*, English, Japanese | Message 46 of 60 24 February 2012 at 6:46am | IP Logged | |||||
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IMHO, the... no, any idea that involves <x amount of time> is flawed.
Everyone knows that learning a language is an uphill battle until you reach a point from where you basically learn effortlessly. This critical mass, the peak, is what you need to reach. The peak is some degree of sense of grammatical structure, to understand what words do in a sentence, and of course some amount of the words themselves. There are actually scientific researches for a number of languages, analyzing what kind of grammar is in use how often, in what kind of situation, how to express oneself in alternative ways, and so on. There are also frequency lists that determine which words to learn in which order, to achieve the highest amount of understood words in the least amount of time. If you mastered the grammatical structures used in most situations, and the words you'll encounter to a certain degree, your brain begins to do magic by itself, enabling you to understand words you don't know, by deriving the meaning from context. For this to work, there must already be a visible picture, to which only a part is missing, so the brain can do what it always does - fix the image to get the picture, fill in the blanks. It doesn't sound like fun to sit down and concentrate on internalizing grammatical rules. Children don't have to, so why would we? Because children have to focus on learning for years, 24/7, because they depend on getting a grip or they won't understand and be understood. Learning with rules and associations already there means faster progress, and it's been proven over and over again by now that adults can pick up a new language way faster than children learn their L1. Forget Rosetta Stone. It sounds like endless torture to sit down and learn vocabulary. Words come and go, one ear in and the other ear out. What you confidently used a month ago escaped you, despite having used it quite a lot. Words sound so much like other words, how could you possibly internalize them to the point you can remember the meaning instantly when you hear them, or remember the words themselves when you need them to express an idea? Yes, this sounds like a PITA, and it is, unless you actually enjoy learning them. Forget about "listening often enough (to totally incomprehensible input)". Either way, the words and grammar structures are necessary, and the road might be long, but every step takes you forward. With identical learning material, in an identical environment, the very same person might be able to reach the identical level of Language B in 80% of the time it took him for Language A, factoring in learning experience and Language B being closer to his mother tongue. What does this say about time? Right. Nothing. I guess Einstein was right when he said "Zeit ist relativ". 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| DreamCH Tetraglot Newbie Switzerland Joined 4692 days ago 18 posts - 25 votes Speaks: German, Swiss-German*, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 47 of 60 24 February 2012 at 11:03pm | IP Logged | |||||
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@doviende: which books have you found in Dutch? that`s a lot of audio stuff :-)
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| Asiafeverr Diglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6370 days ago 346 posts - 431 votes 1 sounds Speaks: French*, English Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, German | Message 48 of 60 26 February 2012 at 1:18am | IP Logged | |||||
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I know the original question was about the difference between condensed and spread out input but it seems there has been a lot of discussion about the
validity of the 10,000 hours rule. Many people here are bashing Malcolm's book because different techniques get different results with different languages and using one figure to cover every possible scenario will obviously not be very accurate. I think many of you are putting too much emphasis on the figure and forgetting the main messages: to become exceptional at something you have to put in a lot of hours, and these hours have to be dedicated to the right type of work. While getting a lot of input might be easy, there are much more efficient ways to learn a language. Another bestseller on the subject of exceptional performance suggests that what is really important in achieving a high level at anything is deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is designed to improve one's performance: it has goals, it is mentally demanding and difficult, it is constantly repeated and constant feedback on your result should be available. Studies found that one of the main difference between good chess players and grandmasters is that the grandmasters spent a lot of time studying the game, reviewing games from better players and trying to predict their moves while good players spent that time playing chess. In language learning terms, deliberate practice is not simply listening to content but looking for content slightly above your level, actively learning its vocabulary and structure, constantly creating new sentences and content, and getting as much feedback as possible. Although listening to a lot of content might be easy and effective to some extent, it seems to me that challenging active learning would give you a much better return on the time you invest in a language. Edited by Asiafeverr on 26 February 2012 at 1:21am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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