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Self-teaching methods declared useless | ||
Tags: Rosetta Stone | Self-Study | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| learnvietnamese Diglot Groupie Singapore yourvietnamese.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4884 days ago 98 posts - 132 votes  Speaks: Vietnamese*, EnglishC2 Studies: French, Mandarin | Message 25 of 81 12 September 2011 at 6:27am | IP Logged | |||||
This is a thought-provoking statement, given that the word "ONLY" was purposely emphasized. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4844 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 26 of 81 12 September 2011 at 8:20am | IP Logged | |||||
If you have enough money to pay someone $50 per hour to watch a film with you, then I'm impressed. For the rest of us, we can miss out the odd line or two, and wish we had the money to buy a translator as we reach for our dictionaries. Sorry if that sounds facetious, but it seems like an extreme example to use if you're talking about the advantages of using a private tutor. And I'm sure I am not alone when I say that your first paragraph is actually spot on. Just because a self study course costs a fraction of what a university course costs, does not mean it is worse. Besides the fact that if you take a university course, the majority of your learning will still take place on your own. Cost does not equal effectiveness. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5269 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 27 of 81 12 September 2011 at 10:11am | IP Logged | |||||
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Just out of curiosity, how many of you have learned a language to fluency using self-study only? No formal classes, no immersion?
I have half a wall full of self-study books, and I love them all, but I do not expect them to teach me to speak a language. I expect them to be as s_allard says, a tool, but I have never ever learned a language by self-study books alone. I agree that classes can be equally bad, but generally I believe in a combination of methods, and the only method I have a 100% faith in on its own is total immersion, preferably as a child. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| oldearth Groupie United States Joined 4830 days ago 72 posts - 173 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Esperanto | Message 28 of 81 12 September 2011 at 11:56am | IP Logged | |||||
At the risk of sounding like Steve Kaufmann, I'll say that nobody can teach me a language. I didn't believe that at the beginning, but now I do. It's up to me to learn it myself, through any means necessary. Exposure, flash cards, exposure, frequent dives into reference grammars and dictionaries. Frustration. More exposure. Technically I was a false beginner in Spanish, but the only thing I learned from my terrible (almost English-only) Spanish class 8 years ago was how to conjugate ser/estoy in present indicative, the word for beer, and a few notes about gender. >99% of everything I know now has come from intensive self-study this summer. I wouldn't say I have "learned" Spanish yet, but I'm rapidly closing on B2 level with only dedicated use of self study methods. I guess. By "self study methods" I mainly mean independent study and struggle with the language. I've found the self-study courses I got from the library to be pretty boring (FSI/Platiquemos, Teach Yourself), so I haven't used them much either. After Michel Thomas basic, 30 hrs of Platiquemos, and about ~800 words in Anki, I was ready to junk all the boring learner stuff and start struggling with native materials using a good dictionary and grammar. I mined some key phrases and vocabulary for my Anki deck and quickly moved on. I've found that, personally, I'd rather spend an hour digesting 2 pages of something interesting with 30-40% unknown words than grind through lesson after lesson of contrived stories and dialogs. Neither classes nor self-study courses really works for me in isolation. I can't learn if I'm not attentive to the material, and I can't maintain the requisite attention with boring materials. Those with higher endurance levels probably do get a lot out of infinite pattern drills, but I can't stomach it. If I had a pile of gold to spend on language learning, I'm sure a private tutor would help me improve my spoken fluency. But for now, as somebody with no job and less than $1000 to my name, I'm very pleased with the progress in comprehension I've achieved for about the price of a library card. I think the belief that teachers, tutors, classes, and products have some kind of magical ability to bestow language skills in exchange for money keeps many people in the US from digging in and actually learning. Rosetta Stone et al perpetuate that belief by telling people how fun and easy it is to learn with their products. It's a HUGE business here, but nobody learns. The best analogy I can think of is the spectacular failure of the weight-loss industry to produce any meaningful results. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| amethyst32 Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5584 days ago 118 posts - 198 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, French | Message 29 of 81 12 September 2011 at 12:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Self study and make native/advanced speaking friends to help with the odd question. Personally, I find the pace of progress made in classes is frustratingly slow and unrewarding, especially for people who don't like or want spoon feeding.
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| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5365 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 30 of 81 12 September 2011 at 2:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
Here is the complete quote of what the author said: "3- Self-teaching methods Pros: Cost. Convenience. Fun to use. Cons: You will not learn French. No feedback. No grammar. No real person. Who has not seen a box of Rosetta Stone for sale in a mall? While self-instruction methods can be a great complement to a formal instruction, I strongly believe none of them can teach you French by itself. Why? No feedback. How will you know you pronounce the words correctly? The voice graph? Talk of a scam! They pick up your voice modulation, not your pronunciation... Worse, these methods often lack any solid grammatical structure, and you cannot master French without it. Other languages? Maybe. But not French. And everything is being "fed" to you: you'll never come up with a subject of conversation: that is not how real life works! So, again, let me reinforce my message: they make great complements of lessons: you’ll learn new vocabulary, they will reinforce things you’ve learned, they are fun to use. But they are not efficient on their own. Of course, whatever you get, audio is a must." I have put the relevant passage in bold. The author did not say that self-study methods are useless. But let's get back to the real issue. Some time back I started a thread How many people really teach themselves?. One of the most common observations in the posts was how many self teaching materials remain unused after the first few lessons or chapters. I am willing to state that 75% --a guess--of the people who buy one of these products expecting to "learn to speak like a native effortlessly" promptly give up when they quickly realize that learning a language is not effortless. I said in a previous post that in my opinion all language learning is basically self study, even with classes and private instruction. It's a lot of work and you need to use all the tools and resources that you can get. As another poster has pointed out, we probably all have a wall or shelf full of stuff on our target languages. If I look at my Spanish shelf, I can count three dictionaries, at least ten books on grammar, a couple of books on vocabulary, a few software packages, some CD's and all kinds of materials in Spanish. And that doesn't include the Internet resources that I use. I do not believe that you can buy a package, be it Fluenz, Assimil, Rosetta Stone or Learn Spanish Like Crazy, among many, and after three months expect to speak fluently at a B1 level. Is it possible? Maybe, but highly improbable. To say that any one of these packages, in this case Assimil, is the equivalent of 50 hours of private instruction is preposterous. I have nothing against Assimil, but in all seriousness I don't see how it comes anywhere close to replacing a live person with whom I can actually speak the language. I may be alone in this, but I believe that the best way to learn to speak a language is to actually speak it and be corrected immediately. I find that things become etched in my memory when I hear them coming out of my mouth. Now combining a self study product with some private instruction or coaching can be a winning combination. As for paying somebody $50 an hour to watch a movie with me, I certainly wouldn't do it often, but I could see it as useful. Actually, what I do is make an audio recording of the passage I didn't understand and play it back to my teacher. But the real point here is that I have someone who can answer all my questions. At this very moment, while waiting to meet my language buddy, I'm stuck on a certain passage of a Spanish soap opera that I'm following. I've listened to the passage at least 25 times to no avail. Sure, I could just as well say "To hell with it, it's not a big deal." But I really want to understand what was said. When my teacher asks me, "How was your day yesterday?", I have to build a narrative using the past tenses and all kinds of vocabulary that my teacher helps me find and use in an idiomatic way, saying "You could say that, but it would be more natural to say this." Or what about reading together a restaurant menu I brought back from a trip? Or maybe spending 20 minutes just correcting my pronunciation? Or correcting a presentation that I have to do in Spanish in front of a group? Or explaining the differences between European Spanish and Mexican usage of a certain word? Can a book, a bunch of CD's or a software package do this? Edited by s_allard on 12 September 2011 at 4:30pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| petteri Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4867 days ago 117 posts - 208 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: German, Spanish | Message 31 of 81 12 September 2011 at 4:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
I have an impression that learning in class environment does not really support good pronunciation. Many teachers are not native speakers of the language and other learners often have really bad pronunciation. The problem is that in class environment learners get used to hearing awful language and copy it. Listen and repeat using good material could provide even better results. But privates from natives can be much more effective.
True. Private instruction and immersion can be very effective, especially if learner already knows basics of the language. But it is hard to speak the language without any listening comprehension and knowledge of basics. Private lessons are expensive way to parrot. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5316 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 32 of 81 12 September 2011 at 4:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Whether you learned something from a book or from a class is irrelevant -- in both cases, you chose to make knowledge available and you made the effort to learn it.
In a way, all learning is self-learning because you can't be forced to learn. At the same time, since learning can't occur in a vacuum, no learning is self-learning. I used to take pride in saying "I learned X on my own", but you can't actually learn anything in a vacuum -- someone taught you something, you read it or heard it somewhere, or else you figured it out on your own from some sort of input, but the sources of information are so varied and we are so dependent on input sources that even if you learned without any actual person teaching you anything and any author explicitly pointing something out, you will still have been dependent on some source of input. Classrooms don't work for me. They take too long, they bore me and I feel like I'm wasting my time. However, that's both a calculation and a personal preference: classrooms can still be a valuable source of information, I simply consider that I can learn more efficiently from other sources instead. But one source alone is not enough. Classrooms alone can't make you fluent, and neither can self-learning methods. 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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