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Where are the advanced speakers? | ||
Tags: Advanced Level | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5532 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 17 of 37 18 December 2012 at 7:21pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
To make Ilya Frank-style books, the alignment wouldn't need to be perfect. I was specifically thinking of algorithms like the following: * A program for aligning sentences in bilingual corpora * Fast and Accurate Sentence Alignment of Bilingual Corpora This is mostly just dynamic programming based on sentence lengths and other available data. There may be some good reasons to start with the 1991 paper and try to fill in any missing pieces without actually reading the more recent papers. And if there are a few alignment errors here and there, the reader will probably be able to manage. Tools like this could be pretty handy for advanced students: You could even hide the L1 text unless the reader wants more detail on something, and you could easily export interesting sentences to Anki. It could be sort of a cross between LingQ/LWT, Listening/Reading and Ilya Frank-style books. Unfortunately, automatically aligning audio with text is considerably harder. Subs2srs is the only really practical tool right now, unless you want to manually align with something like TranscriberAG. Anyway, I'd actually love an intensive French course targeted at my particular needs, and various FSI researchers have claimed that the right kind of course can help students immensely between ILR 3 (roughly C1, I think) and near-native levels. But even finding a good private Skype tutor can be tricky—I've spoken to several who seem pretty lost with students who've already reached B1. They have a nice little curriculum for beginners and don't do very well outside of it. I think an ideal solution would be lots of native materials, immersion and very intensive instruction with lots of personal attention. But we all make do with what we can find and afford. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Kyle Corrie Senior Member United States Joined 4829 days ago 175 posts - 464 votes | Message 18 of 37 18 December 2012 at 9:07pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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emk (or anyone interested in creating their own bilingual/parallel texts),
You may want to look into an opensource program called 'hunalign'. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 19 of 37 18 December 2012 at 9:28pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
As for Ilya Frank method, the real strength of it are the translations, which tend to be done by L2 speakers of the language specifically for learning purposes. The text indicates some basic forms and often some of the pronunciation (e.g. stress for Ukrainian, transcriptions of 2-3 words per paragraph in English). Also, I meant that while we don't have that many graded readers available, Ilya Frank-style books are as easy to find as just beginner level materials. Although they can be used from the beginning, this seems a little too adventurous for many; de facto it's mostly popular with people who are A2 or so. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5766 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 20 of 37 18 December 2012 at 10:28pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Reagrding this forum: I have only one target language in which I believe I make few enough mistakes to make meaningful contributions in, and that one is English.
Speaking in more general terms, most of the material for advanced learners I've seen in book stores in the country where the language is spoken. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| bela_lugosi Hexaglot Senior Member Finland Joined 6454 days ago 272 posts - 376 votes Speaks: English, Finnish*, Italian, Spanish, German, Swedish Studies: Russian, Estonian, Sámi, Latin | Message 21 of 37 19 December 2012 at 1:28am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
This might be a silly question but seriously, don't they have a foreign language section in American bookshops? o_0 You've got to be kidding me... I never thought the situation over there would be THAT bad. It is a pity that most people on this message board don't write anything in the non-English discussions. I assume that the majority here knows at least one foreign language, so what's the problem then? I don't want HTLAL to turn into an English-only discussion board where people talk about learning languages but never bother using any of them apart from the oh-so-mighty English. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 22 of 37 19 December 2012 at 2:36am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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If the physical bookstores can't be bothered to sell foreign books then you have to buy them from internet bookstores (and not necessarily the one with a name that begins with an 'A'). But personally I get most of the things I read in my minor languages for free from the internet.
Concerning bilingual editions and Ilya Frank's setup: I use a lot of bilingual texts, which I produce mainly with the help of Google Translate - I have explained elsewhere why this isn't so dangerous as some might think. In the beginning I used a trick: if you insert a Google translation into MSWord 'as text' then you get alternating sentences in your target language and your base language. Which is very close to Ilya Frank's setup. But I have totally dropped this method: it is much easier to make tables with two columns and put each version in its own column. Then you can align the paragraphs fairly precisely simply by manipulating the width of the columns, and you can finetune the aligment by changing the font size of selected paragraphs. However I don't quite understand why someone who claims to be fluent in a language should want bilingual texts at all. I rarely use bilingual texts in languages which I can read fairly well, but they essential in languages which you can't read without looking things up - a glance at even a bad translation may help you to get on without loosing time on look-ups. But even a translation disturbs your reading, so a some point you have to cut the umbilical cord. Edited by Iversen on 19 December 2012 at 3:01am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5766 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 23 of 37 19 December 2012 at 2:53am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
For the lulz. ... (should go to bed.) I think it's about tolerance of ambiguity. Some people would rather have a L1 text to refer to for the few occasions when they aren't sure if their interpretation was the correct one. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 24 of 37 19 December 2012 at 2:59am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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When I trust my own hunches more then those of Google translate AND only have qualms about a few words on each page then it is time to stop using translations. But there is a greyzone where I still use them for my intensive studies, but not for extensive reading (i.e. reading for pleasure and/or content). Edited by Iversen on 19 December 2012 at 3:00am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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