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The Secret of Improvement | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| slucido Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Spain https://goo.gl/126Yv Joined 6609 days ago 1296 posts - 1781 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan* Studies: English | Message 17 of 27 27 December 2011 at 8:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
I understand your problem and I know it is hard. I think the problem is that we usually have too many fears, but we don't realize that there is nothing to fear. There is nothing to fear because everything is already lost. I mean that I think about my own death and people who I have known and they have died. It might seem radical and depressing for someone, but this gives me peace of mind. This kind of thinking calms me down and everything seems small and without importance. It's nothing new. It is the "meditatio mortis". The point is that nothing is really that important to feel bad, guilty, shameful or whatever. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5700 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 18 of 27 28 December 2011 at 1:27am | IP Logged | |||||
That would still ask for a more or less healthy way of evaluating social situations; something I'm working on but can't yet call my own. But my main concern is not talking to random people - I do that when I have a chance to even though its often stressful - but developing relationships that, as a side effect, may give me some language practice. slucido, when I chose to stay alive I also chose to view life as the most important value for myself. I know it isn't infinite, but after emerging from a rather nihilistic phase, I now overcompensate and the mere idea of wasting what little time and opportunity I have fills me with dread. I'm still thinking very hard about what the stages of 'conscious competence/associative phase' and 'unconscious competence/autonomous phase' mean in regards to speaking and communication in speech. And I'm thinking about how I can understand certain words, can pronounce them correctly when reading them, can use them in writing but still they are not part of my active oral vocabulary. Sometimes what trips me up is the actual pronunciation, for example what kind of change in the overall prosody of a sentence a word elicits, and sometimes I lack a feeling for register - 'elicit', for example is a word I wouldn't remember during the course of a normal conversation because I'm not sure it's a word you actually do use in a normal conversation. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6484 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 19 of 27 28 December 2011 at 3:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
I've tried this, and it definitely didn't work with an SRS. But I do believe stepping out of one's comfort zone is critical to language learning, especially when one begins to converse. Developing a thick skin might be more useful to someone than a powerful new technique. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5315 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 20 of 27 28 December 2011 at 3:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
Right. The metronome of language learning might just be confidance and an increased tolerance for mistakes or apparent failure. There are those who are afraid to speak with native speakers or who claim they aren't "ready" yet, and there are those who just do it anyway. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Homogenik Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4758 days ago 314 posts - 407 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Polish, Mandarin | Message 21 of 27 28 December 2011 at 5:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
Use it anyway, even if it doesn't exist. It doesn't matter in the long run because eventually you will learn the right word. Vocabulary you learn as you go along, I don't think it's particularly helpful to put so much effort on this aspect of language learning. It's more useful, in my opinion, to form phrases with the few words you actually know. Elicit is a very specific word and even though precise vocabulary is better, more refined, etc., it's fine to take the detour or more words. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5700 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 22 of 27 29 December 2011 at 2:11am | IP Logged | |||||
Oh, I would. But the curious thing is that I often don't remember such words I have an incomplete Sprachgefühl of when I could use them in speaking. Now, the information I lack would best be gained from a proficent speaker's feedback. (Yay.)
I wonder how it comes that when discussing such topics, we inevitably end up using platitudes to refer to complex strategies. For example, when you take the idea of 'stepping of out one's comfort zone' - I as an individual with my very own version of social anxiety would define my 'comfort zone' as social interaction with close friends and relatives, as well as formulaic interaction of which I know what to expect. Anything going above that causes me distress. But because I already feel that a situation is stressful, adding a new level of difficulty doesn't make much of a difference to me. So I tend to be the person out of a group who asks a stranger for directions or switches to a different language first - because I'm already far out of my comfort zone. The problem with acting like that is that it's very exhausting so I can't keep it up for very long. At the same time, being in a permanent state of stress impairs my learning and adaptation to the situation. So the necessary course of action for me is to gradually expand my 'comfort zone' and to avoid forcing myself into situations that exhaust me so much that I fall back to my 'safe' zone for comfort. Meaning, in fact I have to reduce the amount of time I spend on activities that look like 'stepping out of my comfort zone' and instead increase the times I repeat and vary activities that I seem to have mastered already. In a way, you could view that as consciously avoiding to let skills become routine until you're finally satisfied with them. (The easiest way I know to turn a skill into a routine is to do it while focusing one's concentration on a new skill at the same time.) Concerning the idea of 'developing a thick skin', I don't know if I want to be more amused or annoyed. First of all, I perceive the idiom itself to have a connotation of straying from the average. It is a way of describing people who seem to be unaffected by frustation as well as other people trying to influence them. Doesn't that mean that there is a perceived normative within a group that tells its members when one members strays from it? And still, being descriptive the idiom doesn't say anything about why a person seems to be unaffected by a situation that the average person would be affected by. It doesn't even say whether the person actually feels unaffected by it. It doesn't say if the situation doesn't hold any value to them so they couldn't care less. It doesn't say if they have natually low affect intensity. It doesnt't say if they have a strong sense of self-worth that isn't easily influenced by negative affect. It doesn't say if they simply don't perceive another person's attempts to influence them. It doesn't say if they have a high sense of self-efficacy or internal locus of control, that allows them to believe it's just a matter of trying again. And I'm sure there are many more possibilities. Now, I personally don't hold with ideals that not all or at least most people have the same opportunity of reaching. I won't ever attain low affect intensity even if I wanted to. I do, however, have a chance to change the way I evaluate situations, how I let my sense of self-worth be affected by my mood, how I evaluate other people's attempts to change my behaviour and how I deal with my sense of self-efficacy. (Both self-worth and self-efficacy can be changed too - over time.) By the way, I think I reached my conlusion regarding the language plateau. It is: Stop doing more of the 'same', or doing more of the 'different'. Instead, find more activities that are similar in content, but different in approach. (And concentrate on one topic at a time.) Rinse and repeat. :D 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6484 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 23 of 27 29 December 2011 at 5:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
Interesting idea. Can you give an example? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5700 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 24 of 27 02 January 2012 at 9:09pm | IP Logged | |||||
This is rather difficult, as you might have gathered from how long it has taken me to write a reply. One main issue is that I'm not particularly clear about how I myself have learnt most of the language tidbits that I know, or even just what I know and what I don't know/understand and can't use. One of the problems I seem to have with spoken English is stress in words and especially word clusters. I learnt most of my English vocabulary from reading, and I learnt most of what I know about English pronunciation by assimilation. I rarely have trouble understanding words I hear for the first time when I learnt them from a written source. After hearing a word a couple of times I usually can remember and reproduce the sounds it consists of, but I don't always remember its stress pattern or the way it's stressed in a clause. That's most obvious by words that I don't know the origin of, and by words that are written the same for different word classes, and for loanwords that follow a different stress pattern in the other language. The activities I thought of so far are: -Use a text with audio. Mark stressed (reduced) syllables in the transcript and then listen to the audio to check for mistakes -Read or listen to a text and pay special attention to words that are very similar across word classes -Read a text aloud and mark down all words I've had trouble with -Once I've identified a number of words, make a list of 10-20 words with a common topic, then try and use them in a conversation. -Read about English phonology, stress and word formation. It may sound ridiculous that I learn about Spanish and Japanese using English as a source language, and yet I have very little explicit knowledge covering those topics for English. No idea if that'll actually help; I have yet to try out. And I also have to figure out what I want to tackle first in my other languages. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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