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One Week Challenge | ||
Tags: Time to learn | Beginner | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| zhanglong Senior Member United States Joined 4930 days ago 322 posts - 427 votes  Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese | Message 1 of 70 16 December 2011 at 12:50pm | IP Logged | ||
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To all the lovers of language:
Hello, all! Barring any savant-like abilities, here is the mind-exercise. You are given a challenge to "learn" a language to the intermediate level - (B2) The final exam is to speak to a native speaker for half an hour about regular, daily topics about your life. No discussion of history, politics, philosophy, religion or other abstract topics. Two people in a coffee shop, shooting the breeze, making small talk. The challenge: do it in 7 days. As a someone who is a student of languages, or perhaps as a language professional, how would you embark on this project? Be creative in your replies. It's easy to say "it can't be done!" but how can you fool the native speaker that you are at B2 level in one week's time? Below my initial suggestions: 1) Given the short time frame, I would ignore most, if not all, writing in the language. The examination is an oral test, so reading and writing should only be done as supplementary exercises to improve one's listening comprehension and speaking ability. 2) Find a copy of Pimsleur for the target language if it exists. Listen to three lessons a day, morning, afternoon, and evening. At the end of the week, you will have completed 21 lessons. If you feel expecially ambitious, do four or five Pimsleur lessons a day. Any more than five and you won't be able to absorb it all. The lessons themselves contain a lot of review within them, so they are good for listening and speaking practice. 3) If no Pimsleur exists, find a good elementary textbook with MP3 or sound files included. Rip the sound files onto a computer / mp3 player / iphone, and listen repeatedly. Repeat the material after the tape; if a transcript is available, say it at the same time as the audio. Memorize the script and attempt to recite it without any prompts. 4) Find a native speaker and demonstrate what you have learned. Try to speak to them each day for at least ten minutes, or try to speak to them for twice the time as the exam: 60 minutes. 5) Find native broadcasts of the news in the target language. Try to find examples of international news stories so that you can be familiar with the details to check your comprehension. Limiting yourself to 30 lessons of Pimsleur, and one good textbook, may give you the listening practice, limited vocabulary, and small grammar you may need for the speaking exam. Listening to many podcasts may be great, but they sometimes have too much L1 and not enough L2. A five minute exercise can quickly become a half hour ordeal as the podcast hosts joke their way through the lesson. Other similar scenarios: * Your government has recently received information that it must translate quickly. You have no previous experience with the language, but are brought in to decipher unencoded text or audio and provide a basic translation to your superiors. * You work for law enforcement and are needed to listen to some audio gleaned from recorded conversations. Your agency is attempting to organize an operation based upon what intelligence you can gather from the recordings. * You are working for a group that needs to gather as much information as it can in as short a time as possible. You are to meet with a native speaker who is willing to give you this information, but cannot speak your language. What would YOU do? 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 2 of 70 16 December 2011 at 1:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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I certainly wouldn't go with Pimsleur -- it's too slow and limiting.
I don't think you could "self-teach" in that time frame either -- you would need an expert teacher to lead you through it as fast as possible, someone like Michel Thomas, when he was alive (but hopefully with a better temperament and accent!) You can get a lot out of extracting the audio from a comprehensive course and building up your own repeating listening materials using the rather excellent Gradint. However, it can be a very slow process extracting the individual snippets using something like Audacity, so you could end up spending several days of your week simply cutting and prepping. I did a Welsh course last year and was heading for a fail, so I started doing this and scraped through my exams. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 3 of 70 16 December 2011 at 1:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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I would take on the challenge, if I had an entire week to devote to that task only. But it depends what
language we are talking about -- I won't reach B2 in Mongolian, but Portuguese would be a different story. I wouldn't waste any time listening to recorded lessons or writing, however, I would possibly use a written method because certain things need to be worked out intellectually and seeing them explained on paper is sometimes useful. I would also want someone available at all times to talk to me in the language and correct me. But I would still need time to study on my own through it all. And if the goal is to trick the listener into thinking I'm B2, I would try to control the conversation as much as possible. To a certain degree, I might even prepare that conversation in my mind throughout the week and focus on expressing things that might be useful during that exchange. Edited by Arekkusu on 16 December 2011 at 2:23pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 4 of 70 16 December 2011 at 2:09pm | IP Logged | ||
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Learn a language to B2 level in 7 days is, in my mind, impossible. To be able to carry on a scripted conversation of sorts, maybe.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5382 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 5 of 70 16 December 2011 at 2:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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You know French and Spanish -- if you could clock in 100 hours of study with a full time Portuguese
assistant, you'd likely reach B1. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5600 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 6 of 70 16 December 2011 at 2:43pm | IP Logged | ||
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The only chance is to babble on during this half an hour so much that the other has no chance to say things you won't understand.
4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6471 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 7 of 70 16 December 2011 at 3:56pm | IP Logged | ||
Never mind 100, how'bout 30, given that prior knowledge. I'd love to have a full time assistant and give it a try ;-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4910 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 8 of 70 16 December 2011 at 7:01pm | IP Logged | ||
I agree, 20-30 lessons of Pimsleur wouldn't do, and it would take most of your time. Unless you are going to ask the person on a date at a restaurant on St Michel Boulevard, and you expect to get turned down. Michel Thomas was taught to the students on the recording in a single weekend. If I had to learn as much as possible in a week, I would start by listening through MT 2-3 times, and then plan/script most of my conversation, memorizing the sentences I was planning to use. If the other person goes off topic, I would just pretend to ignore his change of topic, and say something like "yeah but..." before launching back into one of my scripted sentences. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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