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Reading in a FL: Build vocabulary first | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| KimG Diglot Groupie Norway Joined 4911 days ago 88 posts - 104 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Portuguese, Swahili | Message 9 of 31 20 December 2011 at 7:40pm | IP Logged | ||
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It's what I have done to get better at both English and Portuguese. For some reason it seem to work, when some of my self study book's don't tell me enough for me to really "get" it. For some reason, as example, we got in scandinavian some rules for sentences, who in portuguese uses conjunctions, where English I think don't, my self study kits didn't explain anything about this, I sat and read, suddenly I just realized it, looked up the grammar rules, and discovered I suddenly understood what "conjunctivo" was, how it connected to the futuro do preterito (conditionalis), and so on.
English sort of was my worst subject. But I did not give up after school, and read a lot, in start, i read some fantasy books of my favorite writers ,who was not translated to Norwegian. After sitting and using my Oxford advanced learner's dictionary until it literally got worn out, I now got an good enough vocabulary, I can cope with almost anything fluently. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Magdalene Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4970 days ago 119 posts - 220 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Mandarin, German, Modern Hebrew, French | Message 10 of 31 20 December 2011 at 8:14pm | IP Logged | ||
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Stating the obvious here: as a technique, reading to build your vocabulary has wildly
different learning curves for different languages. I improve and maintain my German and Spanish primarily through reading, which is possible because of my longer time learning these languages; their (relative!) lexical and grammatical transparency to English; and their similar cultural contexts and shared histories with the English-speaking world. Even as a beginning learner I could pick up a book and, after some hemming and hawing, roughly figure out what it was about, or at least puzzle out some chapter titles or something. Mandarin is totally different. When I look at a text written in Chinese characters, I have to identify those characters (their meaning and pronunciation); figure out if any of those characters combine to form words or set phrases; and then mentally translate the whole sentence. It's really hard to do any of those things as a beginner. Though it gets easier and easier, each character learned is a battle won in the earliest stages of learning Chinese, so knowing 500 characters (the amount I'd learned when I dove into native materials for the first time) seems a real accomplishment...until you realize that you need to know over six times that many to be functionally literate. But knowing that many characters in isolation isn't near enough: even if I know all the characters in 一 言为定, how am I to know it's an idiom meaning "it's settled" or "it's a deal"? How am I to know that 挪威 (Nuówēi) is the phonetic transcription of "Norway"? How am I to know that the traditional characters 認識 are the simplified 认识 I'm used to? The answer is, of course, practice; the ability to distinguish word boundaries comes with familiarity with the language. But that practice takes a lot of time and effort that may be better spent working on other skills in the language, which is why a lot of advice about learning Mandarin says to work on speaking now, learn to read later. So yeah, I agree with earlier posters about reading as a good way to improve one's vocabulary, but the extent to which you'll be able to use this as an efficient and sustainable beginner/intermediate learning technique depends on, among other factors, a language's script and its transparency (both linguistically and culturally) to the language(s) you already speak. 3 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 11 of 31 20 December 2011 at 10:19pm | IP Logged | ||
When a language is closely related to yours, reading a lot can help you improve your vocabulary quickly, but only if you know cognate languages or if you have enough experience to quickly see though new grammatical constructs. This may happen to be Steve’s favoured method, but not everyone does this. For languages like Japanese, a lot of people spend a lot of time learning vocabulary with SRS, but again, not everyone does this. Instead of opting for a vocabulary intensive acquisition, you can choose to favour production. Instead of going for a very large passive vocabulary, you could concentrate on building a smaller, but active vocabulary. I don’t think there is a specific moment when one mysteriously becomes ready to speak – I speak when I start and I focus on producing the structures and the vocab being introduced by whichever lesson plan I use. Presumably, this approach may require more self-confidence, but it's also potentially much more satisfying. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| datsunking1 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5519 days ago 1014 posts - 1533 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: German, Russian, Dutch, French | Message 12 of 31 20 December 2011 at 10:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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I can read harry potter in Spanish, yet my speaking comprehension is TERRIBLE beyond tv shows, news, etc. The colloquial spoken language (I'm in college) makes me feel like I know NO Spanish whatsoever.
I try to learn 10 words a day :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5945 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 13 of 31 21 December 2011 at 9:45am | IP Logged | ||
The simple answer is: by developing coping strategies. Unfortunately, "coping strategies" are often wildly different from "learning the language". Languages evolve to be understood, so they evolve with a lot of redundancy built in. This means that you can understand a heck of a lot without actually understanding everything. Most current teaching philosophies stress "exposure" as the key element, but exposure gives no motivation to learn things like prepositions correctly. Find someone who claims to have learned your language by exposure and read or listen to them. You'll find that they tend to make a lot of fundamental errors -- this is because they never needed to understand the finer points of grammar in order to understand their books, films etc. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6484 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 14 of 31 21 December 2011 at 1:31pm | IP Logged | ||
I can't agree with this. Even if it's true that most current teaching philosophies stress "exposure" as the key element, I doubt if most current teaching philosophies are as lax on grammar as you say. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Tamise Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom jllrr.wordpress.com/ Joined 5177 days ago 115 posts - 161 votes Speaks: English*, German, Dutch Studies: French, Japanese, Spanish | Message 15 of 31 21 December 2011 at 7:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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One of my favourite things to read in a new target language is Agatha Christie novels - I'm pretty familiar with them, they're fairly easy reads, and they exist in a lot of languages. Of course some of the language may be a bit outdated, but it's a good way to get exposure. For Japanese, I got manga that was related to anime I had watched subbed, so I already knew the story. Most of these have furigana which means you can at least read and understand some words even without knowing the kanji. I think for Chinese it'll be a while before I can read anything beyond textbooks and easy readers though!
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| JiriT Triglot Groupie Czech Republic Joined 4731 days ago 60 posts - 95 votes Speaks: Czech*, English, German | Message 16 of 31 22 December 2011 at 11:44pm | IP Logged | ||
Do not believe Steve Kaufmann. You can find a lot of contradictions in what he says. He overemphasises listening and says that in this way you can learn the language. It does not work. Listening is good and language teachers or textbook now recommend listening to language material spoken by native speakers. But only listening is not enough. First, I would recommend you to learn the basic grammar. Find a good textbook where grammar is explained in a simple way. And the book also contains some vocabulary and idioms of the language. The vocabulary could be something between 800 - 1500 words. You should buy the audio (CD, MP3) which every good textbook now has. Learn the grammar, the vocabulary of the textbook and read several times the lesson articles (simultaneously with listening to the audio). Then add listening to the articles on you MP3 player. This is what Steve K. recommends too. In fact, the internet courses (including those on Steve K. www pages) are a textbook (artificial conversations, sometimes with grammar). It is not an authentic language material but it was primarily invented as a textbook. But I prefer a book, it has some advantages (internet contains a lot of various stuff and you can be easily distracted). After mastering the textbook you can start reading and listening to the real (non textbook) material. You could try to do it after doing half of the textbook, but it may be too difficult for you now. I do not recommend you to read books, especially those one hundred years old, as Steve K. does. You could start reading radio news, if there is a transcription. Then you have both the text and the audio. The problem is, the news vocabulary does not cover everything. You can complement it with something different, according to you preferences. With audio or just texts. You can learn a lot of words in this way. You know the words in one direction, but you need to know more words passively. Some of the words you will know actively anyway. And you should learn the vocabulary from the textbook in both directions. For active knowledge you need some speaking practice with native speakers. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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