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Julien Gaudfroy - Learn THEN understand | ||
Tags: Learning Strategy | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5122 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes  Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 17 of 40 05 January 2011 at 10:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Cainntar, I doubt that Mondria's 'infer the meaning of a word from a sentence context and test retention after
two weeks' has anything to do with what Julien did. The setup suffers from (1) too little exposure, (2) an experimental time frame which is way too short, and (3) testing the wrong thing. If you test for the ability to translate L2-L1, then explicit learning is certainly more effective. Julien's goal, however, wasn't being able to translate L2-L1, his goal was to understand and speak native-level Mandarin. That's quite different. I don't know what to make of your and Iversen's other argument that Julien may have achieved the same using flashcards and other sinister contraptions. This may well be. But for the time being, I prefer to trust Julien's own assessment of why he was successful. Arekkusu, I imagine that the learn then understand thing works as follows: You start noticing a word, but don't understand it, you notice it again and again and start to have a vague feeling for the context, you keep noticing it and develop a more refined sense for context, pronunciation and maybe already usage, you keep noticing it and have suddenly a first guess at it's meaning, you keep noticing it and keep refining (or changing, or adding to) your guess, you keep noticing it and become more and more certain of your guess(es), and then, at some point, you are so certain that you 'understand' the word in the usual sense. I suppose that the neuronal result will look very different to the neuronal result of an Anki drill. Edited by Bakunin on 05 January 2011 at 10:09pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Andrew C Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom naturalarabic.com Joined 5182 days ago 205 posts - 350 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written) | Message 18 of 40 05 January 2011 at 10:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
I don't believe we make guesses when learning languages. We make logical deductions which we refine and refine. If we made true guesses learning languages, we would end up in a real mess. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6695 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 19 of 40 06 January 2011 at 12:05am | IP Logged | |||||
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I do think that we make guesses, but I also know that many of those guesses are wrong. But even guesswork is founded on deductions from observations, which just don't take you all the way to a logical conclusion - and then you make wild guesses to fill out the empty space. Some people are very good at making good guesses from scanty evidence, others are less good at this.
The problem with a language like Chinese is that you don't have the usual amount of loanwords and similarities to hang your hat on. So at least in the beginning you don't have much evidence to make deductions from. However if I have understood Julien's method then he FIRST notices that there seems to be a word or expression that pops up again and again, and THEN he gets interested in finding out what it means and this pushes him to look it up or ask someone or whatever. And with time he gets more and more data to work on, which makes both his deductions and his guesses better. This is not the same thing as learning everything from pure incomprehensible input in the target language - but of course still far from the strategy where you learn words and expressions batchwise in the expectation that you will find them in the real world too. Edited by Iversen on 06 January 2011 at 12:13am 2 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 20 of 40 06 January 2011 at 12:06am | IP Logged | |||||
We make educated guesses, often using nothing more than instinct. Language is not a logical system. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5290 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 21 of 40 06 January 2011 at 12:49am | IP Logged | |||||
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People like Julien are an inspiration for us mere mortals, there is no doubt about this. But I miss an important quotation:
Julien Gaudfroy wrote: "... Indeed I think I have that luck, to be gifted. But it does not replace the hard work, the only difference is that I get to small results a lot quicker than most people which is a huge boost in confidence. And confidence is what has kept me studying that much. Still, among all those people who say that it is because I’m gifted I don’t know of one person who has studied as hard as I did during the first 4 years. I was basically 24/7, and tried all possible ways in order to know Chinese as well as my mother language. ..." Don't forget the bold passages when discussing the superiority of his method. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Andrew C Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom naturalarabic.com Joined 5182 days ago 205 posts - 350 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written) | Message 22 of 40 06 January 2011 at 1:03am | IP Logged | |||||
I'm aware languages are not logical, but I think our learning of them is. I don't think we make blind guesses - we make "educated guesses" as you say - for me this means some type of logical deduction - perhaps even fuzzy logic. I came to this conclusion while teaching an EFL lesson actually designed to teach students to guess words from context. The context was a guy was standing outside a car having broken into it and he had a screwdriver in his hand. The question was "Can you guess what a screwdriver is?" A pointless question. There is no way anyone could guess. Or if they did guess correctly, they would have no idea if their guess was correct, so that would be pointless too. EDIT: I don't mean all our language learning is logic based. Obviously sometimes we learn from seeing things or explanations and other ways. I just don't think we every truly guess. Edited by Andrew C on 06 January 2011 at 1:39am 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 23 of 40 06 January 2011 at 2:22am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think we are barking up the wrong tree. I don't Julien really meant that you just listen to any input and then with time spontaneously work out the underlying system. What I think he meant--if I should be so bold to say so--is that you don't have to understand everything in detail to be able to learn how to use a language. As lingoleng's quote from Julien pointed out, Julien probably used various strategies in an intensive manner. What was not said, but certainly understood, is that listening to realistic input with some guidance can do wonders for training the ear and for developing a feel of how the language is used in context. Later on, one can peel away the layers of grammatical and semantic subtlety.
My observation is that this approach of extensive imitation and memorization is typical of most if not all good language learners. We've heard stories of people who memorize entire dialogs of movies or television programs. If the material is chosen properly, I think this produces excellent results because the learner is acquiring a real sense of how the language is used. Logic and meaning are important to some extent, of course, but what is truly important is usage in the sense of the role of the utterance in the chain of communication. This evening I went to a language meetup here in Montreal and met a Mexican Spanish-speaker. I promptly asked her some questions about some dialogs that I had heard in a Mexican film. There were a couple of expressions that bothered me because although I had a general sense of their meaning in the context, I didn't really understand their full usage. What I mean by that is that I couldn't really generalize and use these expressions in other contexts because I wasn't sure of how to use them. All the dictionaries I consulted were useless. But in a few minutes this person cleared up everything by explaining to me how to use these expressions in various formulations and various contexts. I came home and watched the film again with a whole new appreciation of the language. I don't think that watching these dialogs a hundred more times without the explanation would have changed anything. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5122 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 24 of 40 07 January 2011 at 8:04am | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks for your answers so far. I conclude from this that there is considerable skepticism as to whether his 'key
principle' is really key. Some of you have voiced the opinion that this particular approach (learn then understand) is inefficient and irrelevant to his success, and that he's rather a gifted person with a very high level of dedication and focus who could have, and probably has, used any other learning technique. Furthermore, there has been disagreement as to whether guessing and wondering is possible at all, and if so, useful or efficient. Some of you have provided anecdotal evidence that 'learn then understand' has resulted in solid long-term retention, but this has also been challenged as perceptually biased and scientifically refuted. Unfortunately, nobody has been able to contribute extensive personal experience with such an approach (learn then understand), which leaves me wondering whether your skepticism is just opinion and/or lack of imagination. Anyway, I'm happy to leave it at that for the time being :) Thanks again. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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