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Passive vs. Active Vocabulary | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| eyyamguder Diglot Newbie Turkey Joined 4841 days ago 8 posts - 14 votes Speaks: Turkish*, English Studies: French | Message 1 of 7 20 September 2011 at 7:32pm | IP Logged |
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What is the best method to convert passive vocabulary to an active one for people who are
not in the position to speak language with other people? I think that writing would be very helpful but can shadowing or reading aloud yield better results? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5367 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes  Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 2 of 7 20 September 2011 at 8:33pm | IP Logged |
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Speak the language to yourself!
I gave an example of what you can do here, in post number 157. Self-talk is a great way to use the vocabulary you know and to identify what words you are missing and would need in real life situations. Edited by Arekkusu on 20 September 2011 at 8:34pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| jasoninchina Senior Member China Joined 5217 days ago 221 posts - 306 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin, Italian | Message 3 of 7 21 September 2011 at 7:04am | IP Logged |
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I also self-talk. I often make up random situations and will act out a conversation. What would I say? What would they say? etc.
If you're taking a walk outside and you see a bird fly away, you say: "The bird flew away." You see a leaf fall from the tree: "The leaf fell." etc. Or you can take a picture and describe it or make a story from it. There's really no limit to what you can do with self-talk. You might look a little crazy walking around outside doing this, but that's ok. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| fiziwig Senior Member United States Joined 4851 days ago 297 posts - 618 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 4 of 7 05 October 2011 at 11:19pm | IP Logged |
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I'm trying the idea of writing a daily diary in my target language (Spanish). Throughout the day I review the various things I do and see, and the places I go during the day and try to speak them aloud, then jot them down. So if I went grocery shopping and bought a loaf of bread, a box of oatmeal and a bunch of bananas, I jot that down, in my target language. If it rained, or if a fire truck went past the house, I jot that down. Then, at the end of the day I collect my little scraps of paper and write a more formal diary entry for what I did that day. So far it seems to be helping me express myself a little more fluently.
The second thing I do is to read the news in Spanish on Yahoo and in the comments section below each news story I try to find something interesting to say about the story and post it in the comments section. Edited by fiziwig on 05 October 2011 at 11:21pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| starrye Senior Member United States Joined 5080 days ago 172 posts - 280 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese | Message 5 of 7 06 October 2011 at 4:47pm | IP Logged |
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I don't know about others, but for me personally, shadowing and reading out loud doesn't help much with that. But writing, thinking, daydreaming, and speaking does. When I'm reading or shadowing, I'm just following along orally with a pre-determined script. I think it helps me to practice my pronunciation, but it doesn't help increase my ability to recall passive words and sentence patterns from memory unless it's some type of active output. So I think that part of it is key.
It's not cut any dry though. Sometimes there are words which activate straight away after only hearing them or seeing them once or twice. Then there are others I really have to work hard to coax out...and then STILL forget. Other words buried deeper in my subconscious/passive memory sometimes pop up and activate spontaneously. Those types of deep passive words require me to be actively thinking about a related topic and using closely associated words in order to trigger them. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Homogenik Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4810 days ago 314 posts - 407 votes Speaks: French*, English Studies: Polish, Mandarin | Message 6 of 7 06 October 2011 at 11:19pm | IP Logged |
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I absolutely believe reading or reading with a recording doesn't activate vocabulary like speaking by oneself or
writing out of nothing. I also try to speak out loud by myself, outside or inside (with today's small phones and whatnot, people talk by themselves all the time on the street so don't worry about looking crazy, you'll look addicted to pricey electronic devices instead). Sometimes, I take a magazine and comment on the pictures : what does that person look like, what is she doing, and I describe the objets, their location (the toaster is on the counter, the dog is under the chair, the cat is sleeping on this man's face, etc.). But when I'm at home and I try to read out loud, loud is the key word here, and I always try to put a little personality in it, make it more "dramatic" than it really is. If the sentence is "could you pass the marmalade?", I will say it with exaggeration, such as this : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZkYwItNWsQg 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4814 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 7 of 7 07 October 2011 at 12:03am | IP Logged |
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It could be an idea to record your voice as much as possible, either speaking
spontaneously, or reading from text, or both. For text reading, if you record into something like Audacity, and you have authentic audio of the text, you could for example, have the native language speaker on one track, and your own attempt on another, then when playing back, if you want to hear how close you got it, listen to yours, "rewind", mute out yours, and play the native speaker.....etc. EDIT: Although I have not tried this myself, I think you could possibly use this tecnique for "shadowing". However, as I don't think you can listen and record in Audacity at the same time, you would have to have a duplicate of the native speaker track running from another source to listen to while you recorded. You could probably use it for those sorts of courses where you hear an example or a question and then there are gaps for you to speak. You could also perhaps use it to conduct mock interviews with yourself. Audacity allows you to time shift between different tracks, and the result is automatically mixed, so you could first prepare and record the questions. Then play back, stop at the end of each question, record your answer (goes on a different track), playback the next question, stop, record your answer....etc. You then have to do a bit of editing and time-shifting, and when you are finished, playing back the whole thing should sound like a "spontaneous" :-) interview. Audacity (which is free) is very powerful, and I am sure I have not yet learned its full capabilities. By the way, use the "beta" version (1.3.13 last I looked), rather than the "stable" one. Edited by montmorency on 07 October 2011 at 12:09pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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