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Making a language course your own | ||
Tags: Language Program | Learning Strategy | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Belle700 Senior Member United States Joined 5698 days ago 128 posts - 143 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French | Message 1 of 4 11 August 2011 at 3:47am | IP Logged |
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When you are following a language course on your own, when do you (or do you at all), go "off-roading" and deviate from the course, altering what the course instructs you to do? Basically, do you go through the course "cover to cover" straight through, or do you move about the course where you feel like going?
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| The Stephen Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5054 days ago 65 posts - 77 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Czech, Hungarian | Message 2 of 4 11 August 2011 at 7:47am | IP Logged |
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Good question. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, especially with how I go through Assimil, which is notoriously open-ended. And I've settled on a little theory about it:
The overall method used is dependent on both the learner and the language. Assimil and the like offer one patented 'method' that they would love you to believe works for everybody in learning any language, but I believe this is impossible. Not only are people different when it comes to learning, languages will differ in difficulty depending on their proximity to the language(s) the learner already knows. So basically I believe that deviation from the predefined method of a brand is, in many cases, if not most cases, essential. I base that on my own personal experience: When I did Assimil German, I had a horribly irregular schedule. Some days I could blaze through three or four lessons, and other times I could have a spell of two or three days where I didn't study at all. And, ultimately, I still got a lot out of it. I was able to pretty easily manage a 300-level German class at my university, despite that being my first-ever formal class. Additionally, my instructor, a native speaker, was pushing me for awhile to take on a 400-level class based on how I spoke it. But German is relatively close to English in the grand scheme of things. Now, I'm going through Assimil Hungarian. I'm more experienced and have decided for now to keep strictly on the "Assimil" path of one lesson a day, even knowing that Hungarian, not being an Indo-European language, is not in the least similar to English (except maybe for a lack of noun genders and use, albeit a radically different use, of the Latin alphabet). The result is right now I have a bit of a dilemma: part of me wants to trust the program that helped me so much in German even though I don't feel very comfortable with the content I've seen, and part of me (a bigger part) wants to adapt to that discomfort and rework something in my routine. I just don't think it's working like it's supposed to. Sorry for such a long post. To summarize, I did well with deviating from a method when learning a Germanic language, but am not doing so well with a non-Indo-European language when actually sticking to it. So yeah, I say experiment! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 3 of 4 11 August 2011 at 2:07pm | IP Logged |
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Great idea in principle, not so easy in practice.
Most language courses say in the introduction that you don't need to do them in order, that you can dip into any bit you fancy, but it doesn't really work that way, because the grammar and vocabulary builds on itself and gets reused, so if you skip a chapter as you're more interested in the past than the future (for example), you're suddenly confused by lots of words you don't know. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Akalabeth Groupie Canada Joined 5521 days ago 83 posts - 112 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Japanese | Message 4 of 4 13 August 2011 at 6:43am | IP Logged |
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For Japanese I've found the best thing that's worked for me is to not really study the courses at all. I skimmed through a few to find what kind of notable simple features the language (for Japanese it was verb conjugation and counters) and make a ton of flashcards to cover the basic uses (e.g. conjugate this verb into past tense, conjugate this verb into the potential form, what is the reading for this number and this counter...). Treating it like an academic exercise (learning about the language without learning the language) before diving in can be very helpful for me. Now I'm going through a grammar dictionary and making flash cards to test myself on all the complex stuff.
The more complex grammar takes a lot of effort to make good flashcards for, which can be frustrating. On the other hand, if you spend fifteen minutes trying to think of the best way to phrase a question you'll probably remember the answer very easily. Just the fact that you're asking a question can give away the answer: "What types of verbs can't be used with the construction te-form + ageru" gives a mental reminder that there is an exception that you might not remember when you're actually speaking/writing. So I have to make trick questions like: Combine hataraku + ageru to say 'do work for someone' (which would be ungrammatical if you did). Time consuming, but very memorable once it's done. Edited by Akalabeth on 13 August 2011 at 6:44am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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