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Memorizing lists of "phrases" rather ... | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5416 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 25 of 65 07 November 2011 at 6:42pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I couldn't have put it better myself. These observations sum up what I think are the fundamental facts about learning to speak a foreign language for everyday situations: 1. Much of the interaction is repetitive with a relatively simple and limited vocabulary 2. The phrase or sentence is the fundamental unit of communication, not the word. 3. By learning words at the phrase level you kill two birds with one stone: learn the component words and how they are used in linguistic context, i.e. the grammar. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Al-Irelandi Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5521 days ago 111 posts - 177 votes Speaks: English* | Message 26 of 65 10 November 2011 at 2:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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That language is acquired in chunks is the theory of the connectionist model of language
acquisition. I am not aware of the evidences/arguments for and against it are though. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6536 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 27 of 65 12 November 2011 at 10:51am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Perhaps. But many of us have learned that isolated word study in addition to "normal" study yields much better results than just more normal study. So I would advise people to try both and judge for themselves. In my experience, isolated sentence study isn't an efficient replacement for isolated word study. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5416 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 28 of 65 12 November 2011 at 6:03pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm not sure what the issue is. People should do whatever works for them. What exactly is isolated word study? Of course, one has to study words. If you see a word you don't understand, you look it up in the dictionary. If it's a verb, you study the conjugation. But the real problem is not the word, but how to use it. How do you surround it with other words? And that's the real challenge. This is where learning phrases plays a role as part of an overall strategy. We all know that speaking a language is not just simply learning lists of words. It is above all learning how to put those words into correct sequences. How you get there is the problem that we are trying to solve. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| RogueMD Senior Member United States Joined 5006 days ago 72 posts - 82 votes Speaks: English* | Message 29 of 65 12 November 2011 at 6:29pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yes... this was what I was getting at. I have just now looked at "The 10,000 sentence method" ( I believe popularized by a Japanese learner. This I will look at more deeply. Another person that seems to advocate a somewhat similar "idea" is the fellow at "Roadrunner language" (or something like that... I'm not at a "convenient" computer to look it up!). I enjoy EVERYONE'S input... a big Thanks for your time! Michael 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5997 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 30 of 65 12 November 2011 at 8:38pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
But not all.
That's an overstatement. Language is a multi-layered process, and each level adds meaning. "Cat" means something. "Has the cat got your tongue" isn't really about cats, but we don't see it as an independent "vocabulary item" -- it's something built on top of the fundamental individual means of words. Meaning comes at at least three levels: vocabulary, syntax and idiom. Starting at the idiom level makes it extremely hard to generalise the rules of syntax, because you are viewing a very very restricted range of usage. Learning syntax in the general case, with a minimum of idiom, gives you generalised knowledge that can later be specialised in idioms with little or no effort.
Sorry, I disagree. You're not learning how they're used "in linguistic context", but "in a specific linguistic context". If you start with phrases, you're not going to be exposing yourself to a wide enough variety of uses to learn the generalised meaning. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5416 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 31 of 65 13 November 2011 at 12:46am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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How many times do I have to say it: do whatever works for you. I don't think that it's a question of learning individual words versus learning phrases. What I and others have been arguing is simply that if you want to produce correct sequences of words, i.e. phrases, then at some point one has to learn phrases. Does that mean learning 10,000 phrases willy-nilly? Does that mean not studying individual words? Of course not.
My position is that for me certain things are best learned in context because I get the big picture that I can always deconstruct later. I don't know what is so complicated about this. Just the other day I heard on a Spanish soap opera the following phrase on the telephone: ¿Me puedes poner con Pilar? que quiero hablar con ella. (May I speak to Pilar? I want to speak to her.) This was a perfectly generalizable example of a kind of redundant phrasing that Spanish uses and particularly the use of the verb poner. I would not have been able, for the moment, to build this kind of construction just by studying the words individually that I already know. But in one fell swoop I learned a way of asking to speak to someone on the telephone. In fact, I have since used this construction a few times with great results. But, if this approach doesn't work for you, please, do yourself a favour and don't use it. Edited by s_allard on 13 November 2011 at 12:47am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6536 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 32 of 65 13 November 2011 at 8:29am | IP Logged | ||||||||
The op is asking us if we think it's a good idea to study sentences instead of (not in addition to) words. You posted something in support of this, so I disagreed with you. Then you posted the opposite, so I assume you didn't read the op's post thoroughly. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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