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Listening-Reading system | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies | ( Topic Closed) |  |
| blindsheep Triglot Senior Member Spain Joined 6361 days ago 503 posts - 507 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: German | Message 145 of 489 23 July 2007 at 7:34am | IP Logged | ||
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My thoughts...
"If your post represents the attitude of a majority at this forum then this will be my last post here. Assimil is mentioned regularly here, as are other commercial products and services.The books you buy, the music you listen to, are all commercial, because people like to get paid for their professional activity." Zhuangzi, As others mentioned, the main issue is the affiliation... you could very easily talk about language learning concepts without continual references to your commercial product. To me this seems intuitive and would garner more respect from others on the forum... Why not let people connect your thinking to your program on their own... it doesn't require endless references to it... you can post with the same value without the I think X, Product Y does X the best... check it out! Try I think X, this could be done in a number of ways... using (explain concepts rather than product link here) People can go to your profile if they want more information on LingQ... they can return here and talk about it, talk about its merits and failings... You can stand aside on such posts to remain impartial or they can email you about it... standard ethical conduct for people with vested interests in things... "I have an interest in exchanging views on language learning. I have devoted 5 years to developing a new approach to language learning. I am not supported by government grants nor any other organization. I am driven by my passion for the subject and am interested in what others are doing." Talk in general not constantly self-referencing your product then... as a bonus you'll appear humbler at the same time. It actually quite disvalues your posts because we can reasonably assume in advance you are never going to say, method Z seems better than my product in ways A,B,and C regardless of what information or discoveries to the contrary present themselves... objectivity is clearly threatened if not lost... just like a politician is not going to admit some failing of themselves because they may not get elected if they do, neither are you because people won't then purchase your product... anyways in our present world you have lots of more appropriate places to advertise your products. People have a right to participate in places where people aren't trying to make money off them. "You, apparently, are more interested in standing on your anti-commercial soap box than exploring language learning. To me your anti-commercial bias is just posturing as I assume that you do have an occupation whereby you earn a living." And you're more interested in standing on your commercial soap box than decommercializing your posts... if you intend to leave the forum the moment you can't constantly reference your language learning product, then I guess we know why you where primarily here in the first place. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| furyou_gaijin Senior Member Japan Joined 6387 days ago 540 posts - 631 votes Speaks: Latin* | Message 146 of 489 23 July 2007 at 9:59am | IP Logged | ||
Sad but very true, in my opinion. For all the good ideas contained on TheLinguist website, I was rather turned off by its overly commercial set-up and am unlikely to become a frequent visitor to it, ever. But maybe Americans are more used to this kind of approach than most of us on this side of the Pond... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Zhuangzi Nonaglot Language Program Publisher Senior Member Canada lingq.com Joined 7029 days ago 646 posts - 688 votes Speaks: English*, French, Japanese, Swedish, Mandarin, Cantonese, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Russian | Message 147 of 489 23 July 2007 at 10:03am | IP Logged | ||
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I have reviewed my previous posts on this Forum. I recollect a comment from Administrator welcoming my participation even if I did from time to time reference my own site. It is inevitable that I will talk about the approach to language learning that I am using. I guess where overstepped the line was in actually putting a URL in my last post.
Nevertheless, the distinction is, in my mind , slight. The issue is language learning. In my various comments I have always tried to provide meaningful comment from my experience of learning many languages and continuing to do so. I do not just drop the URL. I find the unwillingness to discuss the ideas and concepts of my approach simply because of one URL reference and the mention of my system, to be tiring and hypocritical. We live in a commercial world, we do not live by barter. I do not expect to harvest members here. I do expect meaningful comments about my approach, questions, comments, anything. Other than Frankgeld, this does not seem to be forthcoming. Whether this is because of the members' allergy to my "commercialism" or an unwillingness to look at other approaches I do not know. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Zhuangzi Nonaglot Language Program Publisher Senior Member Canada lingq.com Joined 7029 days ago 646 posts - 688 votes Speaks: English*, French, Japanese, Swedish, Mandarin, Cantonese, German, Italian, Spanish Studies: Russian | Message 148 of 489 23 July 2007 at 10:11am | IP Logged | ||
This from the UK where the largest circulation newspapers are the Sun, Daily Mail and Mirror, bastion of scurrilous muck-raking journaism---not commercial? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| JasonChoi Diglot Senior Member Korea, South Joined 6360 days ago 274 posts - 298 votes Speaks: English*, Korean Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese, Latin | Message 149 of 489 23 July 2007 at 11:04am | IP Logged | ||
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Steve,
As a language learner, I appreciate your comments here. I hope you will stay. Your comments and insights are fascinating though I may not necessarily agree with everything you say. I hope we can all stick back to the topic which should be about this listening-reading method. By no longer welcoming Steve, we would be cutting ourselves off from potentially useful insights that may prove beneficial especially since he not only speaks a plethora of languages which is why many of us are on this forum to begin with, he has tried a related audiobook method. Let's talk about that instead. :) Edited by JasonChoi on 23 July 2007 at 11:05am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6944 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 150 of 489 23 July 2007 at 11:16am | IP Logged | ||
As I mentioned in my "Study Log", I plan to take a break from the forum until the end of the year to spend more time on actual language-learning, but since I got tangentially involved in this debate, I feel compelled to weigh in on this topic one last time before commencing my hiatus in earnest. I haven't seen all the posts by Don Casteel of Platiquemos, but I do remember having an impression that he mostly came here to deal with Platiquemos issues, and not to discuss generic language-learning issues. He even dealt with specific orders on a couple of occasions through the forum. I guess you could say he was "invited" by the complaints made by the buyers, but it wasn't PM he used to deal with those complaints. Mr. Heinle joined recently to answer some questions about Pimsleur, which is an expensive commercial product. I could site a few more examples, but the above should suffice. I guess one could conduct an experiment in learning a language with nothing but free web resources, but most of us do use quite a few commercial products, and you have to pay money for them on both sides of the Atlantic. I can, like everyone else, be put off by too much "commercialism", but being the sophisticated consumers that we all are, at the end of the day most of us just look at whether we get enough value for the money. Some do make their purchasing decisions based on their feelings about some products being "too commercial" - it's a matter of personal choice. I did briefly consider whether Steve's initial post in this thread fit well with the subject of the thread, and I will say I wasn't quite sure, but it did have something about audiobooks, and, prodded by my questions in that direction, he did, as he had promised, try the "listening-reading" method and reported back, and I find his hybrid technique an interesting idea. The fact that he combined the LR approach with his product is hardly a big deal - used in this particular fashion, you can think of LingQ as simply an efficient tool for looking up new words in the text and creating electronic flashcards and wordlists from them. This capability can be reproduced with a flashcard program and an electronic dictionary, or paper and pencil, if you prefer, so the technique itself, that of combining the LR technique with the old-fashioned text analysis with a dictionary, is an idea that doesn't have to be tied to any particular product. The right product can, however, speed things up, so it's worth knowing the choices that are out there. Edited by frenkeld on 23 July 2007 at 5:49pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| PuYi Bilingual Tetraglot Newbie Australia Joined 6790 days ago 13 posts - 15 votes Speaks: English, Mandarin*, Cantonese*, Korean | Message 151 of 489 24 July 2007 at 1:46am | IP Logged | ||
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We are all smart people here (I hope). And no one is going to rip our money off without our consent. What is the fuss about??!?!
Steve has to feed his family, and Siomotteikiru has an ego to feed. Those are not relevant, because both are PASSIONATE about language learning and are EXCELLENT resources... I know for sure Steve (Zhuangzi) is passionate about his work because I've read his biography in his book, there is no other man as passionate as he is. HE SPEAKS FROM EXPERIENCE. Siomontteikiru may be a bit blunt, but he has provided an excellent thread for us. It has NOTHING to do with commercialism.. please read Steve's post again without your "sensitivity"... you'll find that he's genuine. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| siomotteikiru Senior Member Zaire Joined 6362 days ago 102 posts - 242 votes | Message 152 of 489 24 July 2007 at 4:08am | IP Logged | ||
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Let me be stubborn once more.
Listening-reading is a system, and that’s its only advantage. Not its particular components, not even STAGE 3, or ALE as it was renamed by a guy who has his family to feed (I hope they are not hungry like some poor bastards in Darfur or Palestine). Listening-reading gives you 1. freedom from all sorts of crooks: schools, teachers, textbook publishers etc 2. joy (I’ll always remember Krashen: “"The best methods are therefore those that supply 'comprehensible input' in low anxiety situations, containing messages that students really want to hear. These methods do not force early production in the second language, but allow students to produce when they are 'ready', recognizing that improvement comes from supplying communicative and comprehensible input, and not from forcing and correcting production." Stephen Krashen I particularly like the “low anxiety situations”. What about “joy and love” instead? 3. beauty: Good literature might not be as good as Assimil or Pimsleur, but it has its merits, too. 4. saves you tremendous amount of toil, time and money (you can throw away dictionaries, flashcards, tests etc) As to its components: they all have been used separately at one time or another. Some kind of listening-reading was done in ancient Israel, long before Jesus was born. Children (as young as two years old) were taught to read by their own parents in the following way: they learned by heart some verses from Tora, their parents baked (made cookies!!!) the passages and the children recited looking at the baked text. And after that they could eat the cookies. In modern times “listening-reading” proper (reading in your mother tongue and listening to a foreign language) was used by some passionate adventurous people, I know of at least two. I invented (or discovered) it myself when I was a little girl (back in the sixties): I noticed that if I had first read a story in Polish and then listened to it on the radio in Russian – and they used to read a lot of good literature then, not only communist crap), I was able to understand almost every single word. I started learning languages on my own when I was eight. In the eighties and nineties I was some kind of coordinator of home schooled children and teenagers – they were free, brave and clever enough not to go to school – and it was then that I thought the whole matter over and wrote some notes (“book”) on it, for the children to use as a guide. I made plenty of parallel novels for them too. Languages for me have never been important in themselves, what I really like are stories (told, written and shown) and poetry. I do not give a damn if I forget a language: if I have nothing more to read in it, I abandon it as soon as possible. You can incorporate SOME elements into your own learning, but to exploit it to the maximum it is much better to use it as a whole. As to my “own ego to feed”: it is strong enough on its own and does not really need any external support. I’d rather say I enjoy teasing people to make them think. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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