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L-R success or not story | ||
Tags: Success Story | Listening-Reading (L-R) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| RMM Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5162 days ago 91 posts - 215 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Italian, Spanish, Ancient Greek, French, Swedish, Japanese | Message 25 of 29 19 September 2011 at 2:50am | IP Logged | ||
Some people believe that you really need to do hours every day to see any benefit with this method. I prefer to think of the method as being at its core: get an L2 audio book, L2 and L1 texts and find some productive way of combining them. I have looked through just about every L-R related thread on this message board and I do not believe that I’ve have found a single person yet who has done the method exactly as originally prescribed. How could an average human being possibly sit there for ten hours a day doing this stuff? Consequently, I’ve thrown all time constraints out the window and just do whatever I feel like doing. This has prevented me from burning out. I’ve never been able to get myself to do more than four hours in a single day; yet I’ve still benefited a lot from the method. It is true that I find I benefit more if I L-R for 4 hours a day rather than 1 hour for 4 days; however, for me at any rate, the difference between the two has not been particularly drastic, and I still find myself moving forward in the language even if I only L-R for an hour (or even less) per day. I think this may be the key to using it as a long-term learning strategy. I’ve been doing L-R as my primary language learning method for the past (almost) 4 months now and frankly I have never stuck with a single method or program for this long in the past ever, unless I was forced to within the context of a foreign language class. So for me, L-R has led to the opposite of burn out: I’ve finally found a method I find fun enough to stick with. I’ve got to admit I don’t find it all that “easy” either. But I love to read, and I really feel like I’m killing two birds with one stone with this method—and I think that’s great. It really was a bit of a challenge at first. However, the more I get used to doing it, the easier it has been to continue doing it. Overall, my enjoyment of the reading material makes up for any of the “hardships” of the method. (You really do have to enjoy what you are reading for this method to work well, imo!) Although I agree that it is good to use as “an intermediate-stage listening comprehension tool,” I actually found that the method worked best for me with the only language that I started L-R’ing from scratch (Swedish). So many basic words were repeated over and over and over again within a small number of pages, I found that my Swedish vocabulary grew by leaps and bounds in very short periods of time. However, when I L-R’ed my best foreign language (German), my listening comprehension and reading speeds improved, but vocab acquisition was very slow going, undoubtedly because I already knew the words that were repeated frequently and was now trying to memorize words that might only appear once every 100 pages or so. Consequently, I’ve recently started writing down in a notebook a lot of the words that I don’t know while L-R’ing German and looking them up later. I don’t think that this is necessary for languages where my vocabulary is more basic. At any rate, both my Swedish and German (and Spanish and Italian) improved but I definitely saw less rapid progress with languages where I was already at an intermediate level. At any rate, the original poster may care to read my account of my Listening-Reading experiences in regard to German. Overall, I was very pleased with the results and have every intention of continuing with the method: http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?T ID=29160&PN=1&TPN=3#331734 Edited by RMM on 19 September 2011 at 2:55am 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| birthdaysuit Groupie United Kingdom Joined 4752 days ago 48 posts - 101 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Spanish, Swedish | Message 26 of 29 21 September 2011 at 2:24am | IP Logged | ||
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If you're looking for audiobooks in German (and many other languages, I assume) check
youtube. I typed in Deutsche Hörbuch and loads of audiobook videos came up. My first choice was "Tote Mädchen lügen nicht", which is "13 Reasons Why" by Jay Asher, a young adult novel that I hadn't previously heard of but became very interested in reading. Then I went to google and wrote the name of the book in English, typed in "free ebook", and found a link. To the person who says his funds are limited: you can find almost everything you need online without spending any money. Just search wisely. I have just started using this L-R method and am already noticing the improvements in my German vocabulary. I also use many different methods throughout the day so as not to get bored. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4763 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 27 of 29 21 September 2011 at 4:33pm | IP Logged | ||
The YouTube idea seems like a good one, which I would not have thought of doing. I've just had a bad experience however by following your google search suggestion! Looking for that particular book, I think it was the second link down I clicked on which hung my Firefox session (all tabs, not just that one). I could then not restart Firefox and had to reboot. Tried again after reboot with exactly the same result. My exact search was: "13 reasons why" free ebook Just done it again, and the 2nd link down is findebookee.com and I think I remember that being the one which hung, so I'm not risking it again. So be careful folks. Admittedly, I did upgrade my Firefox to the latest 6.0.2 yesterday, and it could be something to do with that, and not the site, that is the problem, but it seems a bit odd. Even though my Firefox was hung, I could still "ping" well-known websites, and another computer on the same home network had no problems. EDIT: Apologies. I may have done that site an injustice. I had the same problem just now, and I hadn't gone near it. Maybe it's a Firefox problem, or a problem with my computer. I attempted to "restart [Firefox] without add-ons", but (as expected), it didn't come up. I managed to bring up an old installation of Opera that I had lying around, and that's working ok, apparently. Maybe it's time for me to try out this Chrome that the kids are all talking about. Edited by montmorency on 21 September 2011 at 6:30pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6374 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 28 of 29 21 September 2011 at 9:18pm | IP Logged | ||
The site works perfectly for me under Firefox. I'm using Linux and the noscript extension. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Matheus Senior Member Brazil Joined 5016 days ago 208 posts - 312 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: English, French | Message 29 of 29 05 October 2011 at 4:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think this method can help, but it depends on what you are looking for.
I think it might be very useful for languages with irregular spelling - that you don't know how to pronounce, like English. I'm using it to learn to read French, and it seems to be working. My technique is simple, I listen to an audio book while reading the .pdf file, it's better than using text-to-speech programs given that you are listening to the real native speaker pronunciation, not to a robot. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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