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Memorizing lists of "phrases" rather ... | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6485 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 41 of 65 14 November 2011 at 5:33am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
So you're agreeing with s_allard that learning phrases instead of words is a good idea. But s_allard has made it clear that he advocates learning phrases in addition to words. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6485 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 42 of 65 14 November 2011 at 5:36am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
A number would be nice. Or how about a percentage? Or how about just telling us how sentences fit into your language learning plan. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5365 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 43 of 65 14 November 2011 at 4:30pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I really don't see what the fuss is about. Frankly, I don't see what there is to discuss. But let's get one thing clear. When I talk about emphasizing learning phrases, this has nothing to do with trying to learn a language from a phrasebook for travellers or just going down a list of 1,000 selected sentences in the target language. That out of the way, I think the idea of thinking in terms of phrases is nothing new or unusual. It seems to me that this is what most people do spontaneously. As a matter of fact, I have always been interested in how people learn languages spontaneously, as happens all the time when groups enter into contact. There are people who will tell you that the learned a language just by watching soap operas or learning songs in the language. I think it can actually work quite well. In my approach to learning to speak a language, I emphasize learning usable units that one can use immediately. Of course, you have to study grammar and vocabulary. But if you don't want to get discouraged by the staggering amount of stuff you have to assimilate, you must interact with the language in a meaningful way as soon as possible. This is why people who have followed a number of my posts will have noticed that I have always emphasized the fact that the key to speaking proficiency is the mastery of a very small number of forms or structures. For example, I believe that a vocabulary of around 500 words in languages like English, French and Spanish (the ones I'm familiar with) are enough to develop excellent speaking ability. The issue isn't the number of words, it's how to use them properly. In spoken conversational French, four verbs, ètre, avoir, faire and aller make up about 30-40% of all verbs used. In terms of learning strategy, this obviously means that a) look out for these verbs when you are in a conversation and b) these are the four key verbs you have to master. The other key observation is that these key verbs are irregular in form and, above all, used in very many different ways or meanings. What this says is that these verbs, depending on the context or words surrounding them can take on very many different uses. So, to learn that être in French and ser and estar in Spanish mean "to be" is just very tiny tip of the iceberg of how to use these forms properly. Thus, on the one hand, we have to learn how to conjugate the verbs, keeping in mind that two thirds of those conjugation tables are rarely used and that certain forms can actually work for multiple tenses. On the other hand, and this is the real challenge, how do you actually put these forms into meaningful sequences. This is why I believe in working extensively with multiple examples or phrases that "reveal" meaning or usage. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5946 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 44 of 65 14 November 2011 at 5:25pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I can appreciate what you're saying, but my personal view is that learning a phrase as a "unit" before you have some mastery of the component parts is actually quite hard work. Learning phrases as idiomatic interactions of individual items of vocabulary and grammar that you already know is pretty quick. Consider: you can dedicate an hour or two at the start of a beginners' course to "hello, how are you, goodbye", and they still struggle and stumble with it. Michel Thomas introduces "comment ça va?" in the fourth hour of his course, after having taught the basics of questions, the verb "aller" for several persons (present tense) and ça. He introduces "comment" specifically here, but it works the same way as any other question word. (He'd already used qui, pourquoi and à quelle heure. He prompts for "how's it going?" and gets "comment ça va?" from the student, and then casually points out that this is a common phrase. The student this way learns the phrase from first principles, and should understand it effortlessly, and be able to reproduce it very easily. He holds off "je m'appelle" until the eighth hour, because he wants the student to know the reflexive first. Knowing the reflexive, and working with the word for "call", the student is asked how to say "I call myself", which is by now easy to do from first principles, and means something immediately. It's pointed out to the student that this is the normal way of saying your name.
I agree, but we differ on what we mean by "meaningful". While a dialogue along the lines of "hello, my name is Cainntear, what is your name? How do you do? I am fine, too. I must go. Goodbye" is superficially meaningful, I do not believe it qualifies as truly meaningful to the individual. With big chunks like that, there is no real feeling of expression. To me, it's mere protocol, and there is a lack of meaningful choice in what I say. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6638 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 45 of 65 14 November 2011 at 7:31pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
For me the meaning "say" in such examples (see the post on the preceding page) is derived from the main meaning "leave/exit", presumably via a step where the intransitive verb is made transitive, followed by another step where the word "salir (algo)" is applied on things coming out of the mouth of people, ie. words. This is one of the reasons it is worth looking at the components of an expression - you see what actually is said and not just what you could say instead. Even quite aberrant expressions usually have some kind of inbuilt logic, and if you understand that you have got a key to the logic of the language itself. With time the original meaning of a word may wither away and only the derived meaning remains. But in that case the problem is also solved, just in another way. Edited by Iversen on 14 November 2011 at 7:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5365 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 46 of 65 14 November 2011 at 7:54pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I have no doubts that these explanations of the origin of this usage of "salir" are well founded and of some interest. That explains why "salir" was used but not how it is used. When I recorded this example I was interested in the component "le salió con que" with the indirect object pronoun le and the combination of "con que." It was this sequence that I found very interesting and that I wanted to remember. This is something that I would not have said spontaneously. Now it's part of my repertoire. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6485 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 47 of 65 15 November 2011 at 5:34am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I know, so let me remind you. This forum is Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies. Your pages of text essentially say that sentences are good. Given the forum we are in, I don't think it's unreasonable for me to ask you how you use them. Put yourself in the shoes of a self-learner, and give some clear quantitative advice please. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5365 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 48 of 65 15 November 2011 at 8:19am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I'm not trying to be coy. I just don't know what to add to what I have said. What kind of quantitative advice could I give? Should you study 500 phrases of a mean length of 8 words? I have never given it any thought and don't intend to. All I'm saying is learn words in context as much as possible. This is neither new nor revolutionary. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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