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Julien Gaudfroy - Learn THEN understand | ||
Tags: Learning Strategy | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5422 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 9 of 40 05 January 2011 at 12:06pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I'm not sure it's an either / or situation. How can you oppose learning before understanding to learning after understanding? I would call learning before understanding imitating not learning.
Also, I think we can debate what understanding in this context means. Here we are looking at the spoken language where there is a certain formulaic component, and part of the the so-called meaning is to be found outside the words themselves and more in the immediate social interaction. Meaning here means more usage. For this reason, I totally agree that one could and even should memorize entire conversational units before being able to analyze and understand the grammar or all the vocabulary. This approach is certainly conducive to achieving fluency (in the technical sense) rapidly. In other words, you don't have to understand everything that you are saying as long as what you are saying makes sense. That said, I believe that at some point it is necessary to deliberately study shades of meaning or usage. I have found for example that as my knowledge of a target language progresses, I find myself revisiting very common words or grammatical constructions because there are usages or subtleties that I was never aware of. Just yesterday I heard someone using "Please do" in a context that I had never heard before in English. Always the linguist, I remember remarking to myself that it would be very hard to define what "do" meant here. And actually, the "word" meaning was not important. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5858 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 10 of 40 05 January 2011 at 2:38pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Normally I would expect to hear "Please do" as the answer to a question such as: "If you don't mind, I'd like to borrow your book?", where an unabridged answer could be "Please do it." It expresses the sentiment of "I'd be pleased if you borrowed my book". The "do" also has a slightly different tone, such as "Go ahead". Was that the context you observed? A similar but less likely answer might be just "Please", with the same meaning as "Please do". Both have the "I'd be pleased ..." connotation which is somewhat the opposite meaning of 'please' in "Please pass the pepper." 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5422 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 11 of 40 05 January 2011 at 4:14pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
It was basically the sense of "Go ahead". I had said something like "Excuse me" and the person replied "Please do". Of course, I didn't have a problem understanding the answer as such. I was really more interested in the meaning of "do" in the context of our discussion of learning without understanding. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5858 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 12 of 40 05 January 2011 at 4:49pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Dutch also has an interesting variation of the use of please (alstublieft) that was a bit, for me, 'learn before understand'. When you order something in a restaurant for example, you might say: "Een koffie alstublieft" And when the waiter/waitress brings your coffee, he/she says: "Alstublieft" in the sense of "there you are", perhaps having connotation of "I am pleased to serve you your coffee". So I learned this usage, but I still don't fully understand it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6901 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 13 of 40 05 January 2011 at 5:22pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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From time to time I've learned/"absorbed" riffs/melodies/tunes/solos by playing along immediately without necessarily having heard the music before. Some people never do that - instead they're doing exactly the opposite. They listen to the music hundreds of times until they feel they're ready to try it out on the instrument. Although I've never been in a "hurry" to jam with people, this listening (=understanding) approach could be regarded a "waste of time" (as Julien calls it) - especially if one wants to get functional in music (or language) in this life.
Use the tools you have. Now. You can always sharpen the tools later. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6003 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 14 of 40 05 January 2011 at 8:58pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Iversen did already touch on that subject:
He can't say he would have learned better one way or another and neither can any of us. We cannot learn the same language twice, and different languages are so different that we can't really compare the last with the next. And with each new language it gets easier, so I'm always dubious of advice of the type "I wish I'd known this when I first started" -- would it have been so effective if you hadn't learned all that other stuff first?
Being convincing is often just a sign of charisma, and being charismatic doesn't make you right. Sometimes it's a matter of good debating skills, and good debating skills don't make you right. Let's walk it through. He says: A) If I tell you a word, you won't remember it. D) If I see a word lots of times without looking it up, and then look it up, I'll remember it. Why did I mark those claims A and D? Because there's a considerable gap between them - there's a lot of middle ground that isn't directly covered by either. It is self-evident that the more you encounter a word you will learn it. Now Julien no doubt consciously tried to learn lots of words, but only actually learned a small number of them. He knows that he only learned a few out of a lot of words. Now he's assuming that the failure to learn was down to the method of learning, but maybe it's just down to lack of use. On the other hand, he has a set of words that he learnt by exposure, but has no recollection of all the words he failed to learn by exposure. He was never aware of them. So his viewpoint is biased. I could have come to the same conclusion as him through my own experience, but I come from a mostly scientific educational background and understand the problems with the bias in the observation. Now, if we want to look at raw figures, the best thing I can point you at is Jan-Arjen Mondria's Myths about vocabulary acquisition. Mondria's fifth myth: Words whose meanings have been inferred with the aid of the context are retained better. That is, during the inferencing process the learner is actively processing the word and its meaning, more than when the meaning is given to him. Mondria found that it doesn't matter what goes on before knowing the meaning, it's only once the meaning is known that the learning really begins. Time before is wasted, and only stretches out the time to learn properly. Plenty of people will strenuously deny this because they can vividly remember going through the process of seeing it lots. It may be counterintuitive, but remembering is a bad thing. If you can remember how you learned something, then it was difficult. When learning's easy, you don't notice it happening.
More of a problem is when people confuse "meaning" and "definition". Then people focus on what the dictionary says, and not what the collection of words on the page means. (Damn, I'd made a resolution to stay away from this site for a bit and learn more stuff. Right. Back to lurk mode.) 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5373 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 15 of 40 05 January 2011 at 9:53pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
How the hell do you remember or learn a word whose meaning is completely unknown to you? If you succeed, at best, you've remembered sounds, but there is no way you'll build an entire vocabulary on that basis. There is evidently a progression from not knowing the meaning at all and not remembering it, to remembering it and having a pretty good idea of the meaning, at the very least. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5373 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 16 of 40 05 January 2011 at 10:01pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Making guesses is a powerful learning mechanism. If you take a new word or a new grammatical structure and you twist it and bend it to see where its limits lie, you make guesses which, when they are proved correct or incorrect, make the acquisition process extremely personal and the information is easier to retain. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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