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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 57 of 65 17 November 2011 at 5:30am | IP Logged | |||||
Sorry, let me clarify. Why are you still doing it after 6 years? In my mind, this is a learning technique. I'm not trying to give you a hard time, I've just never heard of someone doing this after reaching such a high level. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hypersport Senior Member United States Joined 5816 days ago 216 posts - 307 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 58 of 65 17 November 2011 at 6:01am | IP Logged | |||||
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It is a learning technique, but it's also excellent for refinement and maintenance. If I was living in Mexico I'd be speaking non stop, but I'm still here in the U.S.
Reading novels out loud keeps you focused on what you're reading much more than when you read silently and your mind can wander into other thoughts. If you read out loud for 60 to 90 minutes you're getting massive non stop speaking which continues to improve pronunciation if you make the effort and keeps words on the tip of your tongue for when real conversation takes place. Years ago I used to attend a teleclass via conference call and we would take turns reading from different material each week. When I read now I imagine myself with that same group and if I get lazy and read a sentence and don't annunciate everything, then I re-read it. I try and use the time to really practice stringing sentences together the same way I do when I read English. This carries over in a big way when speaking with native speakers. The other benefits are you're vocabulary is always growing and you're command of the grammar gets better and better without even trying because if it's a good novel, you're enjoying the story just like a movie. It's like with Spanish you hear people comment on the subjunctive in the present of the imperfect. Like it's something different, difficult...I'll get to that later. Maybe years later. You start reading books and you see it's no different than any other tense. No less, no more, just another tense. This is what I mean about the grammar, all of it just starts to make sense and feel the same as it does in your own native language. The benefits are too many to consider stopping. 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 59 of 65 17 November 2011 at 3:52pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I've always had difficulty trying to understand what this word vs phrase divide is about. As I said in an earlier post, the issue seems to be that some people believe you should approach speaking by building on component words whereas others, like myself, believe you should drill down from the phrase to the individual words. But the more I think about it, the more I believe the reality of language learning is not as simple.
There are some major implications, however, in these two so-called approaches. The word-based approach emphasizes learning as many words as possible, typically through word lists, in order to reach a high vocabulary count. One will hear statements like, "You need 8,000 headwords to be able to converse." The phrase-based approach places much less emphasis on learning many words and more on learning how to build many phrases with a given number of words. One could hear, "You can converse fluently with a vocabulary of 500 words." Clearly, I'm in the latter category. I should point out right away that I'm saying that your goal should be to have a vocabulary of only 500 words. The thinking behind the phrase-based approach is that the major problem learners have is not lacking words but how to put them together correctly. If that is the case, then let's emphasize precisely that, i.e. assembling the blocks in proper sequence. The big danger here is that because we already have an L1 we will tend to put things together in L2 under the influence of grammatical structures and meanings derived from L1. Just as we make phonetic mistakes by trying to pronounce letters according to how they are pronounced in L1, we will make grammatical mistakes and, more insidiously, mistakes of improper word usage by simply trying to "build up" sentences. By focusing on repeating and varying good model phrases, we are trying to internalize the correct idiomatic forms and avoid making those mistakes. I also stated earlier that meaning was at the phrase level and not at the word level and that the phrase was the basic unit of communication. That was probably a bit of exaggeration, but the fundamental idea is the meaning of words is revealed only in specific contexts. After all that hot air, let's look at some examples. French, like Spanish, uses one word, le temps, for two different objects: le temps (a duration of time) and le temps (the weather). I should also note that to ask for clock time, one uses l'heure, similar to la ora in Spanish. The obvious question, of course, is how does one distinguish between the two meanings of le temps? The only way is context, that is the surrounding words. "Le beau temps" would normally mean "good weather" and "le bon temps" would mean "the good time." The more context we have, the easier it is to differentiate the meanings. The following examples are very clear. Le temps sera beau aujourd'hui (The weather will be great today) Je n'ai pas le temps de vous voir aujourd'hui (I don't have time to see you today) I would say that the real meaning of le temps is triggered by the entire contextual phrase. Le temps by itself doesn't really mean much. But things are more complicated for the English-speaker learning French. "Time" in English has a whole series of other meanings as well. To ask for the time is "demander l'heure". To have a good time would be the verb "s'amuser". And what about, "Is this your first time?" or "Is this a good time to call you?" As can be easily imagined, there is considerable room for misunderstanding and misspeaking by the English-speaker in French. And that is exactly what happens and people end up creating these awkward and awful constructions. It's all about context. If you look up "time" in an English-French dictionary, you will see a long list of equivalents. The only way to master the system, and above all the distinctions, is to learn the words in contrasting patterns. Let's look at an example in Spanish. Suppose you're in a very tense situation and feeling very nervous. In English, you could say, "I'm all nerves" or "I'm very nervous". In Spanish, one could say correctly, "Estoy nervioso". But one could also say, "Estoy de los nervios" or literally "I am of the nerves". This actually would be the better translation of "I'm all nerves". But this construction in Spanish is not something that most English-speakers would arrive at because it is so unlike English. Now, the problem isn't so much understanding this form because we likely already know estar and nervios. The real problem is that we are not inclined to spontaneously construct that form ourselves. But that's not all. When we put all these words together, we have to deal with issues of verb conjugation, gender agreement and word order. And then pronounce all of that correctly. No wonder we make mistakes. These sorts of problems are just a few examples of the pitfalls of speaking a new language. Much of the problem lies in learning how to make distinctions that native users make through context. I believe that the only way to solve this problem is massive input, as hypersport has so aptly demonstrated, and specifically practicing at the phrase level. Edited by s_allard on 17 November 2011 at 3:55pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6485 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 60 of 65 18 November 2011 at 5:34am | IP Logged | |||||
Me too. I like to think my "approach" is neither phrase based or word based. Sure, I learn both of these, and put them in my srs, but they are just items that I feel I need to isolate in order to remember. Is learning grammar, going through a text, conversation, watching movies, reading a book, etc, either phrase or word based? I guess you could try to think of it that way, but why? If a word doesn't stick, why not just make a flashcard? Same thing with a sentence. I don't understand the point of trying to define some sort of basic unit of language. I don't understand the need to discuss the building-up from words, or the drilling down from sentences. I just study the language in a fairly straight-forward way, and put what gives me trouble in a flashcard program. When I hear about word-based or phrase-based approaches, I think of someone using lists of isolated words or phrases to learn a language. And I doubt anyone here is advocating that. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sandman Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5343 days ago 168 posts - 389 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Japanese | Message 61 of 65 05 December 2011 at 7:29am | IP Logged | |||||
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Except for the most simplistic nouns, we don't learn words until we see them in context.
Context * Definition = knowledge of a term or grammatical phrase. There's probably a sweet spot between the two. Even with purely contextual presentations you're focusing at times on a single word or phrase and trying to come up with a "definition" while with single items your are trying to think of their definitions in some sort of wider context. To me the bigger question is whether leaning one way or the other is faster in the long run. Edited by Sandman on 05 December 2011 at 8:12am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| garfield Newbie Germany Joined 6114 days ago 18 posts - 18 votes Speaks: German* | Message 62 of 65 05 December 2011 at 2:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
Really? 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 63 of 65 05 December 2011 at 7:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
Oops, that was a mistake. It should have been, "I should point out right away that I'm not saying that your goal should be to have a vocabulary of only 500 words." 1 person has voted this message useful |
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