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Using children’s material | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| AriD2385 Groupie United States Joined 4785 days ago 44 posts - 60 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 1 of 46 18 August 2011 at 7:47am | IP Logged | ||
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Has anyone used or considered using children's books and programming to learn a language? I'm not thinking of
materials geared toward teaching kids a second language, but rather materials designed to teach native speaking children that language. Say, starting with a 3rd grade grammar book in the foreign language and working your way up through the grades till you reach high school or college level. This would require a basic understanding of the language first, but it would seem that if followed it would pretty much get you there--at least in ensuring that there aren't any holes in your knowledge. If the grammar, vocab, and literature books were supplemented with movies, newscasts, and music in the foreign language, it would seem that you'd be solid. But I suppose this would take longer. You could probably do multiple grades per year, but still it'd take a while. Other than time, can anyone point out pitfalls to this method? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| jean-luc Senior Member France Joined 4895 days ago 100 posts - 150 votes Speaks: French* Studies: German | Message 2 of 46 18 August 2011 at 9:23am | IP Logged | ||
Yep, the problem is availability and interest of the materials. And I don't think that using exclusively children's books (without any other method) is really efficient. Edited by jean-luc on 18 August 2011 at 9:35am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 newyorkeric Diglot Moderator Singapore Joined 6314 days ago 1598 posts - 2174 votes Speaks: English*, Italian Studies: Mandarin, Malay Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 46 18 August 2011 at 10:15am | IP Logged | ||
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There will be a lot of vocabulary in children's books that isn't very useful for the beginner. You'll learn elephant and tricycle before coffee or job, for example.
I also don't think children's shows are useful at all for beginners. Shows aimed up at 4 or 5 year olds and older are just as hard to understand as adult shows and go any younger and you will be watching Barney and Sesame Street, which wouldn't be time efficient or interesting for that matter. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| oldearth Groupie United States Joined 4830 days ago 72 posts - 173 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Esperanto | Message 4 of 46 18 August 2011 at 12:58pm | IP Logged | ||
I'd say it depends on your goals for the language. If you're aiming high, as I am, then you're going to need to know those low frequency nouns eventually. I don't think it's a waste of time to read children's books at the library as long as it's not baby/toddler stuff and you enjoy it. It wasn't my primary method of study by any means, but I found taking notes while going through several elementary school books with pictures helped me quickly pick up a lot of vocabulary words that are showing up in Harry Potter (which I'm reading now). I don't know much about children's television, but I watched several Disney movies early on. I was already so familiar with them from my own childhood that they could be used as comprehensible input. If you have some childhood favorites, see if they've been dubbed. I think it was Splog who shared the idea to study illustrated encyclopedias for native children. If you can find a good one for your target language, that would probably be a better resource than the average picture book. On the other hand, if your goals are to order coffee at a foreign cafe... then, yeah, kid's books probably aren't your best bet. Edited by oldearth on 18 August 2011 at 1:11pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| AriD2385 Groupie United States Joined 4785 days ago 44 posts - 60 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 5 of 46 18 August 2011 at 3:53pm | IP Logged | ||
I actually found what you're saying to be true. I was watching Sesame Street in French and it was a Cookie Monster segment. Well, of course his voice tone is so strange and the speech pattern so irregular that I honestly had difficulty figuring out what he was saying--moreso than with a program geared toward adults, such as "French in Action." As a listening comprehension exercise, children's programming didn't help. But I should probably look into the Disney movies (I'm positive they're all available in French and Spanish) as well as young adult lit. I watched a lot of Disney and read a lot of books when I was younger. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5701 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 6 of 46 18 August 2011 at 6:29pm | IP Logged | ||
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Such questions come up every once in a while. (Look here.)
Children's books are not made to teach children their own languages. Grammar books for students are more or less style guides, they teach you that you should not use a certain dialect feature in writing, but they don't teach you how the grammar behind dialect and standard version actually works. Children learn that through interaction with and observation of their own community. It might work if one has the time to spend a decade in immersion living with a host family ... In general, I find that material aimed at children is has relatively boring content, language that is made unnecessarily difficult - erm, funny and interesting - and on top of that it is full with references to the daily life of a child of my target language culture, usually with a twist to make it more interesting. Or, difficult to understand for an older foreigner. If you want to use native material, try magazines. Not the ones with gossip, but for specific hobbies (yours, hopefully) and/or with many interviews. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7091 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 7 of 46 18 August 2011 at 6:37pm | IP Logged | ||
I do have a couple of anthologies of non-Polish literature for Polish students - one is for students of 2nd grade and thus a bit "dumbed-down", the other is for those in 9th. The second one is more overt as a textbook since it comes with reading comprehension questions after every short story or excerpt but this isn't as great as it sounds when you're learning on your own since the book's authors assumed that the user would be in a classroom with a teacher who would check the answers or lead a discussions (in Polish) about the stories' themes or characters. In general, their usefulness is limited to being extra reading material for me, but considering that I got them in the bookstore's bargain bin, I'm not complaining (instead of paying 30 zlotys, I paid less than 15 even though 30 zlotys is still cheap for me) I tend to agree with the others here that a foreigner learning subjects in ways that are taught to native speakers isn't all that good especially when that foreigner is very much at the beginning stages of learning the teaching language. The most usefulness that I can find for such books is as a supplement so that I can see some low-frequency vocabulary or technical jargon in a foreign language, or in the case of those Polish books, I get idiomatic translations to Polish of some non-Polish literature. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| VityaCo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 7016 days ago 79 posts - 86 votes 1 sounds Speaks: Russian*, Ukrainian*, English Studies: Spanish, Japanese, French | Message 8 of 46 19 August 2011 at 9:20am | IP Logged | ||
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That is how I started to speak English.
I had learnt some grammar and I could write and read, but I could not participate in a naturally flowing conversation as it was too fast for me. I went to a public library and checked out a detective story based on a cartoon and it made a trick. Edited by VityaCo on 19 August 2011 at 9:29am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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