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How to approach analysis and drills | ||
Tags: Drill/exercise | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| crazyleseratte Pentaglot Newbie Germany crazyleseratte.wordpRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3963 days ago 26 posts - 33 votes Speaks: English, German*, Spanish, French, Italian Studies: Dutch, Danish, Mandarin, Japanese, Russian | Message 1 of 6 04 June 2015 at 1:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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Since I watched the workout video, I was fascinated by the methods mentioned there. I
wanted to know more, and I found information on scriptorum und shadowing. I have tried out scriptorum on my own, I have written free essays, I copied down texts and I read a lot for my language learning. I am working with TY, and I have the feeling that my grammar is suffering a bit, so I would like to know more about analysis and grammar drills. How do you approach grammar exercises, explanations and books? How do you work with drills, if the book does not provide them (many of the asian courses come with those already, but what about TY and eastern languages?) I am not refering to any specific language, but would be interested in a general approach, that I can use for all my studies. On the other hand, I am struggling with Korean, which I just started, so any specific advice on that topic might also be appreciated. Thank you 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Speakeasy Senior Member Canada Joined 4053 days ago 507 posts - 1098 votes  Studies: German | Message 2 of 6 05 June 2015 at 12:14am | IP Logged | ||
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Hello Crazyleseratte,
I will limit my reply to the question of drills and dialogues. Stop me if you've heard this one before ... My Experiences I suspect that there is no universally-accepted method for working with "drills" or, in cases where they are not included in the course material, of working with the situational "dialogues" that many publishers offer in their self-study packages in place of large sets of exercise materials. When I started learning German, I began using the FSI German Basic course that, as you are probably aware, incorporates truly massive amounts of sentence pattern/variation/substitution/transposition drills as a means of reinforcing the lessons in language structure. After having worked with the FSI course for a while, and needing a break from this method, I purchased a few conventional commercially-produced self-study courses and was somewhat dismayed by their relatively paltry offerings of exercise materials and, more specifically, of sentence-pattern drills. As I continued to purchase additional materials, I came to the conclusion that most introductory level courses rely on a series of situational dialogues as the key practice material, supported by only a few audio CDs. I would point out that, from my perspective, the Assimil courses, although composed of short dialogues as well, represent an exception and that they function somewhat like a collection of sentence pattern drills, when taken in the aggregate. That is, for me, they have the effect of a "mini FSI" course. In any event, ultimately, by trial-and-error, I developed the following approach for working with dialogues. I seriously doubt that I created an original approach. Rather, I most likely stumbled upon a variant of something that many other people already knew. Here's my approach: Familiarisation With The Lesson Materials While some people like to "jump right in" and start practicing the dialogues immediately, I am more comfortable with "sizing up the situation" beforehand. So, I read all of the lesson notes, grammar references, lists of new vocabulary, and the English translation if there is one, to gain an overall view of what I can expect in the dialogue. Following that, so as to develop a visual map of the dialogue, I read through the text of the dialogue in the target language. Some people prefer to reverse this procedure and they listen to the dialogue first, perhaps several times, followed by the familiarisation that I have described. Doing so has the advantage of having a auditory map with which they can compare the notes, etcetera. I do not accept that there exists a "correct way" of approaching the initial familiarisation phase; rather, I believe that everyone should find the approach that best suits their individual learning style. Working With The Dialogues There must be thousands of variants for working with the recorded dialogues and I admit to changing my approach according to my mood on any particular day. However, initially, I listen to the complete dialogue several times, consulting the transcript for clarification as needed. My objective is to gain an overall "feel" for the sound of the language, its rhythm in the exchange between the speakers and for the cadence of speech. I repeat this step until I can understand the dialogue and "visualize" the text. Then, I begin to practice the individual lines of the dialogue. Working successively through the lines of dialogue, I repeat each one several times. If I encounter difficulties, I concentrate on a short phrase and, having reached a level of comfort, integrate it into the complete sentence or line of dialogue. Also, in an effort to emulate the rhythm in the dialogue, I work from the end of the sentences towards the beginning. For example, suppose that a line of dialogue is composed of four elements, that I will call A, B, C, D. I practice D first until I am comfortable, then I incorporate C, then B, then A and, having gained a level of comfort with the accumulating parts, I begin practicing the line from the beginning as ABCD. I learned this practicing technique several years ago for learning a new piece of music. That is, working initially from the beginning towards the end can build up psychological tension that will cause the musician to anticipate possible errors in playing the final, imperfectly-learned phrases and this yields the self-fulfilling-prophecy of performance errors. In fact, since the musician "anticipates" errors in the as-yet-to-be-mastered final phrase, he can even internalize the tension as part of the learning process, thereby almost guaranteeing that he will make an error at the end of the phrase. The way to avoid this is to proceed backwards from the end towards the beginning; this approach reduces the end-of-line performance errors because the anticipatory tension is reduced. Practicing With Dialogues As Substitutes for Drills Since most commercially-available self-study language courses do not provide much in the way of drills, I use the dialogues as a substitute for drills: I cannot for a moment believe that I am doing anything original, here. Again, there must be thousands of variants for working with the dialogues to produce sets of drills. While other students might wish to invent new sentence patterns from the dialogues, when initially studying a language, I rarely have such a level of confidence. So, I practice the dialogues as they are presented. Here are some of my approaches, depending on my mood: Listening to the recording, and using the Pause feature of my playback device, I repeat each individual line of dialogue 10 times at the very least. Ten times for line one, then ten times for line two, then ten times for line three, etcetera. At this stage, I am often seated, with my eyes closed, and I attempt to visualize the text while concentrating on the proper enunciation of every word. A natural, slow, partial memorization of the dialogue begins to occur. Listening to the recording, and using the Pause feature of my playback device, I repeat the entire dialogue 10 to 20 times. At this stage, I am often seated, but my eyes are open and I try to concentrate on and emulate the rhythm of speech in the dialogues. Listening to the recording, and using the Pause feature of my playback device, I conduct a Role Playing exercise with the dialogues. I assume the role of one of the speakers and respond to the other speaker’s lines. I use the transcription as support. I conduct this role playing a minimum of 5 times and then switch to the other role and play it a minimum of 5 times. I stand up, walk about with my recording device in hand and attempt to “shadow” the recorded lines of dialogue. That is, I attempt to repeat the dialogue simultaneously with the recorded voices. I perform this exercise 10 times at the very least. I find that this walking about, with my eyes open, mimicking the dialogue is mentally very taxing. So, I don’t do it where I might encounter vehicular traffic. Seriously, if you practice this way, do it in a safe place. At this point, I feel that I have made an honest attempt at working with the dialogues and I move on to a new lesson. While some people recommend that the student memorize the dialogues, and while the above approach will yield a familiarity that approaches memorization, the ability to repeat a given dialogue from memory has never been my goal. In my review phase, I often repeat the shadowing phase of a series of dialogues. Since most dialogues are rather short, I run through a series of 15 to 30 dialogues in a few minutes. While many courses include surprisingly good dialogues, I find that the quick sequencing of the Assimil dialogues in this shadowing stage quite beneficial. Everybody Is His Own Guru Anyone can challenge my approach: criticize it, denounce it, tear it apart, call me a fool and an imposter, and offer suggestions for improving my approach; I don't mind at all. DRILL MATERIALS I have already mentioned that, for me, the Assimil dialogues function like a long series of sentence-pattern drills. Additionally, the 1960’s-era FSI Basic courses are a source for drills for many languages. I would add that Glossika offers pure mass-sentence drills for numerous languages at a fairly reasonable price. Edited by Speakeasy on 05 June 2015 at 12:34am 9 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| crazyleseratte Pentaglot Newbie Germany crazyleseratte.wordpRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 3963 days ago 26 posts - 33 votes Speaks: English, German*, Spanish, French, Italian Studies: Dutch, Danish, Mandarin, Japanese, Russian | Message 3 of 6 05 June 2015 at 11:20am | IP Logged | ||
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This sounds reasonable, I have never given much thought to the dialogues, and just
learned the grammar and some of the useful vocabulary, but since I am studying a couple of really difficult languages, I will definitely try this method. It surely reminds me of FSI and Pimsleur, which I find highly effective, so it's worth a shot.... I think it's useful for speaking and understanding especially. Maybe someone else can add to the grammar aspect? Edited by crazyleseratte on 05 June 2015 at 11:22am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5784 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 4 of 6 16 June 2015 at 5:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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Speakeasy, I use a lighter version of your method with Linguaphone materials or
anything which doesn't come with a translation (for Assimil and other materials that come with a translation, I nowadays use a combination of shadowing and back-and-forth- translation). Step 1: listen to dialogue and look up whatever is needed to ensure I understand 100%. Step 2: using "pause" button play dialogue pausing after each sentence to repeat twice. Repeat. Step 4: shadow dialogue twice. Step 5: repeat above the following day. Step 6 shadow dialogue twice on days 3, 4, 5 and 6. Repeat any sentences I found difficult to shadow. Your method seems like a more intense version. I especially like the role play idea and the closing your eyes to visualise, I need to try and incorporate these ideas. One question: how do you repeat each sentence 10 times without some loss of pronunciation accuracy after the first few repetitions? Edited by Random review on 16 June 2015 at 5:36pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Speakeasy Senior Member Canada Joined 4053 days ago 507 posts - 1098 votes Studies: German | Message 5 of 6 17 June 2015 at 2:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hello Random review,
I like your approach and I would suggest that others use it before attempting my version. I am ferociously dyslexic and I find that the mind-numbingly intensive drilling of new materials helps me overcome my inherent learning difficulties. As to the number of repetitions versus pronunciation accuracy, I cannot guarantee any results. In fact, I have spoken only French for the past 28 years and I still make pronunciation errors! Nonetheless, generally speaking, I practice slowly and increase the cadence by small increments. If I'm having difficulty with a particular word, I break it down into syllables and use the same approach as I would for a practiciing phrase: Step 1 Practice the syllables. syllable D syllable C syllables C-D syllable B syllables B-C-D syllable A word A-B-C-D Step 2 Incorporate the word into the phrase and practice the phrase until any hesitation disappears. Christopher Parkening On Practicing: The classical guitarist, Christopher Parkening, recommends that students practice a new piece of music until they can perform it seven times, from beginning to end, without error. This seems easy until you've tried it: repetition 1 perfect, repetition 2 perfect, ... repetition 7 perfect. If you can perform the piece seven times without error in a practice session, you can be confident that either your audience will not notice any actual errors that slip in or that you will be able to recover from the errors without braking your rythme. If you make an error at any point in the practice series, begin again and restart the count: repetition 1 perfect, repetition 2 perfect, ... repetition 7, oops, error! Restart: repetition 1 perfect, ectetera. Peforming a piece seven times without error takes a lot of practice! This routine could be applied to the practicing of dialogues. A perfect performance would include not only the ability to repeat the dialogue, but also the ability to match the recorded voices in pronunciation, stress, intonation and cadence ... seven times sequentially, without any errors whatsoever. Quite seriously, I cannot recommend that anyone adopt my approach, I was merely describing my own particular method for working with dialogues. I practiced the complete Glossika Mass Sentences for German with similar intensity and I am quite confident that my pronunciation is atrocious! Edited by Speakeasy on 17 June 2015 at 6:11pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| OlafP Triglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5436 days ago 261 posts - 667 votes Speaks: German*, French, English | Message 6 of 6 20 June 2015 at 5:31pm | IP Logged | ||
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Different languages cause different problems, so in the early stages I wouldn't try to make it independent of the language. Grammar drills should not be necessary for languages that don't have a lot of grammar, like Danish/Norwegian/Swedish. As for language specific drills, you depend on thorough exercises from books, because obviously your need for such drills is inversely proportional to your ability to create them yourself. Unfortunately, we live in hedonistic times where instant gratification and superficial knowledge seem to be all that matters. I would not blame the publishers for this, since they can only stay in business when they offer something that is selling.
My recommendation for languages with a rich morphology is to buy everything from the 1950's to the 1970's that you can find on the second hand market. Often the price of the book will be lower than the shipping costs, so this sounds bolder than it actually is. The Cortina Russian book has a large number of easy drills, and the many difficult exercises in "Latin: An Intensive Course" by Moreland/Fleischer will probably derail everyone right from the first chapter who has gone through a current course. You have to find such gems for each language separately. With enough proficiency in a language the best way to get any further seems to be what Benjamin Franklin allegedly did to improve his command over his native language. A few years ago someone posted a link to a blog in this forum where Franklin's method was described. The link is dead now, but I was cautious enough to save the text on my harddisk. I don't know whether this is the original text from the blog or whether I rephrased it on my own, but here it is anyway:
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