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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| floydak Tetraglot Groupie Slovakia Joined 4789 days ago 60 posts - 85 votes  Speaks: Slovak*, English, German, Spanish Studies: French | Message 1 of 13 11 August 2011 at 3:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hi all,
I'm new on this forum. I'm about to learn french, and I would like to have some opinions about my learning technique I want to try. The thing is, that I actually already have learned (more or less succesfull) different languages, and every language I learned- I learnd in a different way. And probably like all of you, I'm still searching for my best method which would maximize efficiency/pain ratio. Last language I've learned was Spanish. I was learning it byt the probably most traditional, painful, but also somehow efficient method. Ergo using regular textbooks, spending lot of hours with grammar and learning vocabulary. I can't say, that this method hadn't worked. But it has some cons which I mention. When I came to spain, I was practically unable to understand a spoken word. I knew a lot of vocabulary, I handled grammar, but I was totaly unused to hear spoken Spanish. So I'm about to try something much more different. I'm going to listen a lot to french speech. I have a textbook with recordings, but I'll try to skip(to the degree most posible) grammar and I'll listen every recording more times (indeed many times) a day. And here I'm heading towards my question. I know there are differencies between children and adults language learning. (However what I read, there's no consensus among linguists about how big these differencies are). So my questions are: Do you thing that an adult can also learn language "naturally" by virtually only listening to it? The thing is, I'll be glad if somebody who actually tried it would answer this question. I will get probably most "no" answers, but one have to have in mind, that young children listen to their native language for more years, every day, and many hours a day, which no adult (or at least very few) can afford. (due to the time or willing limitations). Well, me neither have enough time for trying this on my own. But I'm about to try some modified method. I'll listen to french recordings, but (since I have trancripts) I'll translate it. I'll try not to read while listening (ortography comes next. you can see my English ortography also lacks some qualities:)) anyway, is here anybody who followed some similar pattern while learning language? Listening many times to the same recordings. With the "advantage?" that you understand from the beginning what is talked about. (As I said, I would translate my trancripts in the first place to know, what is talked about") This is quite different approach than merely listening to different podcasts. If I listened to french podcasts now, I wouldn't have a clue what are they talking about. My hypothesis is, that becouse I know what in my recordings is (and exactly when) talked about, this french sentences could easier connect to it's meanings. Alright, quite long post, thanks for any answers. Anyway if somebody needs help with slovak language (I'm not sure if anyone is studying it) I'm prepared to help you. thanks, best regards Peter ps: "If you can't spell it, don't write it." I'm sorry. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jazzboy.bebop Senior Member Norway norwegianthroughnove Joined 5353 days ago 439 posts - 800 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian | Message 2 of 13 11 August 2011 at 4:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If you want to get into reading and listening to a lot of content a very useful program you should check out is Learning With Texts.
Here is a video demonstrating its use. You build up a database of words and expressions from the texts you import and can test yourself on them and chart your progress with some pretty good statistics. Installation might look a bit intimidating but the instructions are very clear and easy to follow and I find the program to be very useful for my own French studies. 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 3 of 13 11 August 2011 at 6:33pm | IP Logged | |||||
This is good but I also think that clearly enounced, slowed down, textbook speech isn't enough on it's own and you should get used to listening to native speech also (from podcasts, TV shows, etc.), sooner rather than later. I'm an advocate of listening to native speech *before* you understand it, because the point is to accustom yourself to the sound of the real language. I believe there is value in this regardless, even if your comprehension level is zero. Good luck! :) Edited by amethyst32 on 11 August 2011 at 6:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| jazzboy.bebop Senior Member Norway norwegianthroughnove Joined 5353 days ago 439 posts - 800 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Norwegian | Message 4 of 13 11 August 2011 at 6:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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A good source of content is LingQ. The content is all free and there is A LOT of it and you can focus on content at different levels. I just import the stuff into Learning With Texts and study it through that instead of using the site's system..
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| Calro2 Triglot Newbie Canada Joined 6675 days ago 26 posts - 32 votes Speaks: English*, Portuguese, French | Message 5 of 13 11 August 2011 at 9:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
I understand your frustration and your desire to find the most efficient method possible. I have used several different methods to learn French and it's hard to accurately know how useful some of them were. Here are some things that I discovered in my learning journey: #1. In contrast to many people, I do not believe in "overlearning". It probably works really well for some people, but I found it boring. I mention this because you said you will listen to the same recordings many times. Personally, I got a lot more out of getting lots of exposure to the language in different contexts (listening to lots of different recordings). There is so much to learn that I found it counterproductive to focus so narrowly on individual recordings, and I feel doing so slowed down my progress. I do go through some recordings more than once, but it's a maximum of 2 or 3 times and for different objectives. #2. I found there is nothing detrimental about reading a transcript while listening to the audio. You can use a combination of listening only and reading while listening to catch what you missed before if you want to first test your comprehension. I think we feel that it's some kind of personal failure to use texts at all, but I've found it only helped my listening comprehension. I don't believe you have to force yourself to ignore the transcripts - not only do they not harm your listening abilities, but they can also save you a lot of time and frustration. #3. Listening a lot/reading/watching TV programs (mostly news-related and documentaries) helped me learn grammar better than trying to focus intensively on learning it in isolation. The rules just never really sank in for me. I found it easier to understand and absorb grammatical rules in French after I developed an intuitive feel for how things should be said from lots of exposure to native speech. #4. I don't think my French accent would have been as good as it is now if I hadn't listened to so much audio, specifically natural speed native speech, not modified for French learners. I've been mistaken several times for a Parisian by people from France and people are always shocked when I say I've never lived in France or any other francophone country. I have to credit the copious amount of listening I did. #4. Listening helps, but I should have practiced speaking more to develop more confidence and activate the large amount of grammar and vocabulary I had been exposed to. I think it is good to place more emphasis on listening, but I think it is possible to delay speaking for too long, at least for those of us not learning in the country where the language is spoken. I can hold conversations in French, but there was always some hesitation on my part. I naively thought, based on some of what I read on this forum, that some miraculous breakthrough in speaking would come the longer I listened, but doing oral summaries with myself about different topics has given me far more confidence in speaking. There are other techniques that I think have helped me tremendously, but I don't know if they'd be useful to a beginner in a language. Maybe some things work better at a more advanced stage. As for learning only through listening, I can't say I've done that exclusively. I was lucky enough to have access to French in Action, which I think is the best language program in the world :). I only used the videos, though. While good, I found the audio lessons too tedious to get through. Have you considered using a course as well? I don't see anything wrong with using a well-structured course like French in Action or Assimil (which are both pretty painless) in conjunction with lots of reading and listening to authentic materials aimed at native speakers. When I start on Spanish, I intend to use a combination of audiomagazines, radio and Assimil Spanish for my foundation. I hope this helps a bit. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5946 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 6 of 13 11 August 2011 at 11:10pm | IP Logged | |||||
Having learnt Scottish Gaelic, I started watching Irish TV. I can now understand almost as much Irish as Gaelic, because Irish and Gaelic are very similar languages. However... I can only reply in Gaelic, and Irish people don't normally understand me. If I want to speak to them, I'm going to have to learn the rules and practise speaking. The same goes for reading. I can understand a lot in most written Romance languages, but I'd have to actively learn to write in them.
There are some curiosities in French that a transcript will help you with -- French has a lot of elided vowels, and you really need to read about "liaison", because extra sounds sometimes appear seemingly from nowhere. There's logic to it, but it's not very efficient to try to work out that logic for yourself. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Akalabeth Groupie Canada Joined 5454 days ago 83 posts - 112 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese | Message 7 of 13 13 August 2011 at 2:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't think children can learn a language by just listening either. They try to speak in the language, parents correct their grammar, eventually things sink in. When they start speaking neither their vocab or grammar are perfect (in general anyway).
Verb conjugation is one of the things that you will need to practice to be able to write/speak correctly (at least it is with me). My experience is you will only learn the minimum required to do what you practice doing. If you know tu means you and parle? means speak you're going to read tu parle, tu parles, and tu parlent as all being interchangeable if you don't actually practice. When I started studying Japanese I tried to do all input and recite the appropriate grammar rule whenever I reached a conjugated verb, and after doing that for a few months I tried to recite the rule without seeing the conjugated form to begin with. It worked rather poorly. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| floydak Tetraglot Groupie Slovakia Joined 4789 days ago 60 posts - 85 votes Speaks: Slovak*, English, German, Spanish Studies: French | Message 8 of 13 17 August 2011 at 5:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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thanks to all for your responses.
I would add some thoughts after one week. Many of you consider textbooks wrong/boring/inefficient/old method. I might be old fashioned (despite being only 24) but I think you can achieve good level of language using textbooks. Of course under the condition that you use it well. Another thing is, that you need a really good textbook. For me, a good textbook is one with many recordings recorded by native speakers. I've read lot of stuff about L-R method in here and honestly I'm very sceptical about achiving fluency after several days/weeks. You can't fool your brain. My opinion. Everything has to be done gradually and this is big pros of textbooks. I find it more efficient if I start with easy texts. I read them and listen. Frequently. But the biggest advantage against L-R method is, that I learn some grammar from textbook (only minumum amount) needed to understand. Then I'am able ALONE to translate this text and this is in my eyes the crucial part. Becouse what you are able to do alone, you remember best! I've learned Spanish this way, and I'll learn french also. However I will pay much more attention on listening than I did in Spanish case. So if someone hesitate or don't know how to begin, I recommend to get a good textbook with following structure: Text and Mp3 file of written text vocabulary (contains only words used in text) grammar (contains only grammar needed for this text) I would listen to the recording. Then read the text. Translate the text in my head and then listen to the recording while reading the text. And this I would repear several times. and then the same over and over again with texts more demanding in grammar and vocabulary. When you finish the book, of course you won't be native speaker. But first then I would more start with reading and listening to different podcasts and/or books/newspapers. First when I handle good grammar and vocabulary basics. Reading and listetning to different sourcies would be much less frustrating as if you had started L-R with Dostojevsky or whatever... There exist many books with this structure in my native language, so I think there must exist tons of books in English as well. There exist this "no pain no gain" idiom and I don't believe in magical techniques offered on various internet sites which claim to learn language effortless. When you are motivated, you would make this effort with a big smile on your face:) well and one more time, sorry for my spelling:) Spanish and German spelling is so much easier.. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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