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Harm in using native materials early? | ||
Tags: Native Materials | Time to learn | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5212 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 25 of 29 26 October 2011 at 12:47am | IP Logged | ||
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If you exercise too much, or the wrong way, you can get an injure that prevents you from getting anywhere in a sport. Many people think something similar can happen with languages, like hard-wiring bad pronunciation / grammar habits that you can't revert -something I don't believe-, etc. so that would not be such a 'bad' question.
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| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4895 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 26 of 29 26 October 2011 at 12:52am | IP Logged | ||
I doubt you could strain or injure your brain in the same way as you could a muscle. However, as people have pointed out from the first page, if using difficult native materials lead to frustration, then it can stop you from learning. If, on the other hand, using them leads to you enjoying a difficult challenge, then they are good. Simple. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| abcedef Tetraglot Newbie Sweden Joined 5615 days ago 14 posts - 18 votes Speaks: Swedish*, FrenchC2, English, German Studies: Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 27 of 29 16 November 2011 at 2:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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The level of difficulty doesn't come with the material that you use, but with the way
you decide to use it. You have been giving a number of examples of how material with presumed "high difficulty level", can be used in basic training; like news broadcasts or 17th century books. As someone said, one could easily make an easy exercise just by guessing the content of a broadcast or why not just translate the headings on each chapter in your 17th century book. The difficulty truly comes with how you decide to use your material. Before, I often found it hard to find learning material on my level. They were either too difficult or too basic. I changed the way I treated the material i I had, and was able to make it as difficult or easy as I liked. However, this does not always work, but it may enable us to use easy-to-find native material even at basic level. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| jed Newbie United States Joined 4802 days ago 12 posts - 33 votes Speaks: English* | Message 28 of 29 17 November 2011 at 6:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, here is my two cents worth (actually more like three or four cents).
It is always fun and motivating to start dipping into native materials as soon as possible; it just isn't always a very efficient way to make progress. How quickly you make progress depends on a lot of things. If you are trying to learn a language similar to your native language or similar to a language that you have already learned, then you can start using native materials almost immediately. For example, if you know Portuguese or French, you should be able to start reading and listening to simple/short native Spanish materials almost immediately and get quite a bit out of them. On the other hand, if you only know Germanic or Romance languages, native materials in Korean, Chinese, Turkish or Arabic might not be very useful for quite some time. It also depends on how many languages you have learned previously; each time you learn one you get better at recognizing and decoding patterns of language that are different from those of your native language. But like other posters have said, there are always ways to use native materials, especially with French, which has so many resources. If you go to the websites for rfi.fr or france24.com, you can read short news articles about topics you already know something about, and then listen to 10-minute broadcasts. These are handy because many of the same stories are repeated for several days, helping you build up new vocab/language while hearing/reading slightly different versions of the content each day. Sites like yabla and fluentfrench also have native French materials that have been jimmied about to make them more accessible to learners. For someone determined to start off with some literature, here are some ideas. The Stranger, The Little Prince and Simenon's Maigret books are all much shorter and easier than Madame Bovary. Books for children and fairy tales can be useful(and it is often not hard to find a reasonably-priced recorded version), especially if you are already familiar with the stories, but they are full of very kid-oriented language that you might not encounter anywhere else. Doverpublications.com has a number of dual readers of classic French literature. As for Madame Bovary, I would buy an English version, read 2-3 pages in English and then read the corresponding passages in French - it's a lot more fun and efficient than spending lots of time in the dictionary. You don't want to spend so much time in the dictionary that you lose track of the storyline and character development - that seems to defeat the whole purpose of using native materials. My own preference? While my whole purpose in learning a language is to move to native materials/interactions as quickly as possible, I find that I can make that move much sooner and much more successfully if I spend a certain amount of time devoting all my energy to Assimil, FSI (which both put me to sleep, but are nonetheless very useful) or some other fairly thorough foundation course first. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| FuroraCeltica Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 6851 days ago 1187 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, French | Message 29 of 29 18 November 2011 at 12:56am | IP Logged | ||
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I'd say after the first 50 hours of study, you should introduce native materials. I regarded the exercise books and courses as "training" for the use of real life materials, which I called a "live fire exercise". If you introduce them too early, it will demotivate you.
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