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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 |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5365 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 33 of 81 12 September 2011 at 4:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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When people ask me what is the best way to learn a language, I ask two questions. Why do you want to learn the language? Who is paying for it?
So many people come back from their trip to Cuba where they had such a good time with lots of rum and Cuban women and men that they want to learn Spanish. That usually lasts about a month. Or somebody thinks that Russian is cool and wants to learn it to impress family and friends. How long will this motivation last? On the the other hand, there are people who have to pass government language exams to get a job or professional certification. This is serious business. I always question the motivation of people. If you don't have to pay out of your own pocket, I say take a course at one of the better language schools with small classes or private instruction. At the other extreme, if you have no money and lots of time, there are library resources, the Internet, language meetup groups and even language exchange partners, all for free. In between these two extremes, there is no lack of materials and cheaper courses. Which one to choose? Ah, that's the problem and we'll deal with that some other day. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Dr. POW Groupie Canada Joined 4900 days ago 48 posts - 58 votes Studies: German, English* Studies: French | Message 34 of 81 12 September 2011 at 9:50pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Technically, I've been learning French since Grade 4, but it wasn't until near the end
of Grade 10 that I started to study on my own. Up until then, the only things I honestly learned were the VANDERTRAMPS (most people still don't know this), how to conjugate avoir, être, and every other normal -er, -ir, and -re verb, and how "é" sounds. In roughly 10 years, that is all I got out of French, and that's a bit more than a lot of the students in my class last year. During the last month of Grade 10, we were reading a passage, and after the teacher said "If you don't understand anything, feel free to ask!", one student pointed out the word "mon". My teacher asked if anybody knew what it did, and out of a class of roughly 30, me and 6 other students raised our hands. None of the students, except one with French parents, knew what nasal sounds are. Nobody cared if a noun is feminine or masculine. Nobody cared if "y" or "en" went before so-and-so verb. Also, unlike my school, there are no assignments such as "write 3 sentences on your own about your favourite monster, you have the entire class.", "create a fairy tale over the course of a month in a group using grammar I haven't taught you yet, and give a 10 minute presentation in front of the class using pronunciation keys you don't know." or "we'll be watching the movie Titanic in French. Write down 10 words you hear, translate them at home, and hand in the sheet.", or other crap like that. I honestly think that is complete bull. If I'm at a bus stop, am I suddenly going to strike up a conversation on Frankenstein?
For the more "popular" languages, such as Spanish and French, there are almost limitless resources online that will explain what you want and need to know right to you. I have no idea what the case for other languages is, however. Since learning on my own, I have been able to form actual sentences in French. I don't create sentences using grammar I believe is beyond me until I find out how they work, which I eventually do. I know how to pronounce most words properly now. I can tell if a letter is silent, if a vowel is nasal, or if an "e" changes to an "è" in a conjugation. I definitely don't know the pronunciation of every word that does not follow pronunciation rules, but I know a ton more than I knew before, and I doubt that French pronunciation is as bad as it is in English. I find self-study much more efficient than learning on your own. Or at least that's just me. My school sucks. 2 persons have 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 35 of 81 12 September 2011 at 11:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
I did - Esperanto. I'd take Assimil over 50 hours of private tutoring, too, unless the tutor was truly excellent. Most aren't. 3 persons have 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 36 of 81 13 September 2011 at 12:48am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm always amazed by the disdain manifested by a number of people here towards formal language classes, whether these were high schools classes taken years ago or contemporary classes. When people tell me that they learned nothing in the 10 years of French classes, I always wonder if they paid any attention in the classes. I think most language teachers do their best at a difficult task. In Canada, most teenagers outside of Quebec have absolutely no interest in learning French. No wonder then that years later those same people complain about not having learned anything. And then they start to get worried when they realize that knowing a second language (French) well is a valuable asset and that, God forbid, they might even have to pass those dreaded Federal government language tests. All of a sudden they begin to regret all those many hours complaining, "Why do I have to learn French?" And they run to expensive classes and tutors. And the end results are usually not very good
. Speaking of expensive classes, Middlebury College in the state of Vermont, USA, runs a very poplar summer intensive language program. Seven intensive weeks of French in 2011 costs about $5,000 USD plus room and board. Many people here at HTLALS probably think that people who take this program must be crazy or have more money than brains. Holy cow, you could buy a book with some CD's for 1/100th of that price and get the same results without moving from your couch. That may be so, but it doesn't prevent dozens of people from signing up every year. What gives? Formal classes are not for everybody. Of course, you can learn a language on your own. But for many people some kind of structure is helpful. And we should keep in mind that there is a science of language teaching and learning with university departments, eminent researchers and all kinds of scientific publications. Sometimes I think we at HTLAL tend to ignore the world of language pedagogy because we like to do things on our own, and we end up continuously reinventing the wheel. The most egregious example of this is these endless attempts to define fluency. For the world of language teaching, most self-study methods are probably viewed as amateurish gadgets of no scientific interest. I can't think of many instances of scientific journals mentioning any self-study methods. I know that some school jurisdictions in Canada use some software, but when I go to language teaching conventions, I never hear about self-study methods. This is not surprising because self-study methods are not meant for the school system. This is unfortunate because I think they complement each other. Edited by s_allard on 13 September 2011 at 12:51am 2 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 37 of 81 13 September 2011 at 1:50am | IP Logged | |||||
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I have two nephews now living in Canada, and they would confirm what you say about the status of French. Their children learn it, but in a fairly cursory way. This is in marked contrast to South Africa, where they mostly grew up (they originally emigrated there from England with their parents). There apparently, Afrikaans is still taken very seriously, and children of "English" origin (and not just Afrikaners) grow up more or less fluent in it. The son of another nephew who is still there appears to be bilingual in English/Afrikaans.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Dr. POW Groupie Canada Joined 4900 days ago 48 posts - 58 votes Studies: German, English* Studies: French | Message 38 of 81 13 September 2011 at 2:12am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm not sure if that was mostly targeted at me, but I'm honest when I say that the
classes I take are not good. Most of my classes are based on being creative with the language, even though a lot of what we need or want in order to be creative hasn't been taught to us yet. We don't learn very much grammar in my class. The pace is extremely slow, because everybody who doesn't care still has to be brought along. I recall that until grade 7, my classes were and endless day-to-day series revolving around learning avoir and être, a vocabulary word or two relating to a certain topic, repeating the alphabet again and again, and learning how to count to ten. Maybe it's the teachers. As far as I know, none of the French teachers at my school are native speakers, and even I can notice a few mistakes coming from them. When I asked my teacher if any of the E's and S' put on the end of declined words were pronounced, I received answers which consisted of "yes", "no", "maybe", and "for this one, yes". She also had this belief that if a student were to find out something on their own, they would remember it forever. Therefore, when we were taught the conditional, we were told that it represents actions that are "unreal" or "figurative". There was no mention of "would + verb" until a few days later.
None of this ever happens in my class. If we can respond using "Il fait beau." to her asking "Comment fait-il?", then we are done. Most students still did not have any idea of what a liaison was, until she said that you cannot pronounce the "s" in "ils" if the verb after it did not start with a vowel, which was near the end of the year. Everybody knew how contractions worked, yeah, but this just made my brain explode. This post and my last post are filled with examples of what I believe is a pretty bad learning experience. Of course, people learn better through certain methods than others. If they didn't offer a flimsy piece of paper at the end of grade 12 stating that you did French over all 4 years of high school, I'd be gone. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| crafedog Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5753 days ago 166 posts - 337 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean, Tok Pisin, French | Message 39 of 81 13 September 2011 at 12:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Though I like to debate and consider the pros and cons of every form of language learning
technique/program there may be, mainly as I feel that many have their own strengths and weaknesses, I'd just like to (quite crudely) say that Rosetta Stone SUCKS. I've tried it with 3 different languages and each time it's been an utter waste of time. 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 40 of 81 13 September 2011 at 1:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't know about the other readers here, but I find it astounding that someone could prefer a book and CD's to working with a private tutor. I would die to have 50 hours of a native tutor to myself. That's six months at two hours a week. Think of what you could do with that. Of course, I would also have all my other materials: textbook, dictionary, self study program, recordings, newspapers, etc. Then I would practice at least two hours a day. For me working one on one with a native speaker beats anything else hands down for one simple reason: feedback. My goal is to speak the language well, and for this I want someone to interact with. How do I know that my pronunciation is right? How do I know that my phrasing is idiomatic and current? How can I have a conversation with a CD? How will a book correct a text that I've written? I learn by doing. To have someone to talk with, who will correct me and answer all my questions is a luxury that most of us do not have. I respect different learning styles and the choices of other persons. If someone finds that a book and a few CD's give better results than 50 hours of private tutoring, all I can say is good for them. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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