Julien Gaudfroy - Learn THEN understand (Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies) Language Learning Forum

Julien Gaudfroy - Learn THEN understand
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Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies

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zenmonkey
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Message 33 of 40

08 January 2011 at 1:56am | IP Logged

s_allard wrote:

Again I want to disagree with this idea of opposing learning and understanding. Learning without understanding is parroting or mimicking; I would hardly call that learning.

I'm in agreement with you. I would say that I am not trying to oppose these but that is what I see in the method described as LbU. Not so much parroting or mimicking but an attempt at contrasting two methods of learning as divergent approaches.

Quote:

Immersion is of course a wonderful learning environment; it is not a method.

I think I understand what you are trying to say but I have to disagree on the last part. It can ALSO be a method. Total Immersion, the refusal to think, use or speak your native language is an active method within an environment. It is mentally costly and is one of the reasons I am not doing that -- I am immersed in a German environment but I am avoiding doing Total Immersion here. Because it means to me losing myself to not being able to express myself until I learn the new meanings. That language loss is a dulling of the mind that was very real with French for a year.
If you go and see the site All Japanese All The Time you can see that immersion can be a method.
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Elexi
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Message 34 of 40

08 January 2011 at 7:21pm | IP Logged

Zenmonkey - interesting stuff - would you agree, however, that Total Immersion can only be a method if a) you have some foundation in the language (like you said - you were at A2 and jumped to C2) and b) the immersion is really total - that means not watching French in Action and listening to the audio for a couple of hours a week (or even a day) but not being in an environment with your own language at all.

I say this because I have yet to experience myself or hear stories of profitable experiences from people who have studied on what so often passes as an immersion course - i.e. one is talked at by someone else in a foreign language who point to objects and make gestures for 2-4 hours as a means of teaching. I've tried this when I tried to learn Spanish and came away feeling empty and remembering only the words that were either cognates to English or I could associate in some mnemonic way.

On another point here, perhaps off point - one line of thought in child language acquisition studies is that errors are very important - for example a baby works out plurals at around the 2nd year - i.e. that in English the plural of horse is horses, cat is cats and dog is dogs - s/he then sees a group of men and says 'mans' - adults then correct her/him and say 'men' and so the exceptions to the 's' plural rule are gradually understood and refined by interaction. Most adults do not get this progressive refinement because they are either laughed at or told they are wrong and that's that (and go and seek an answer in a grammar book) - but I assume in an total immersion environment that such mis-understandings of grammatical rules (especially exceptions) are progressively refined by interaction. Was this your experience?
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zenmonkey
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Message 35 of 40

08 January 2011 at 9:58pm | IP Logged

Classes at different language institutes are often done only in the target language. These immersive courses are, for me, reasonably ok - in German a 2x a two week course of 8 hours a day (a month) helped me greatly.

But that is not Total Immersion - TI is a methodic and willing stripping of your L1 language for an extended period of time. You force everything into the new language. I would even leave the room if English was being spoken. For me that was a fantastic moment in my life - a reduction to stupidity and then a rebuilding with clear moments of language epiphany - I could see meaning cascading from the history of words, poetry sang and it just built on and on. Alas, the language loss period is just too costly for me now (it's a very depressive moment) to do it again.

An approach I admire and that should be looked at is AJATT (here)

Without a basis for your target language, semi-Total Immersion can also work - with zero target language I learned English at the age of 10 when we moved to the US. To get us going we also had short classes with a teacher for "basics". But this isn't a methodoligical approach, just the environmental opportunity.

My daughters learned German in about a year with the same environmental process here in Germany (again, not really TI as a method), but we spoke French at home.

But remember, whatever method you use, it takes time, so have fun.

Edited by zenmonkey on 08 January 2011 at 10:26pm
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zecchino1991
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Message 36 of 40

25 February 2011 at 8:01am | IP Logged

Cainntear wrote:

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.

I agree this can be a waste of time if you intentionally try and do it ALL the time,
but I think when am opportunity happens reveal itself, it can be a very beneficial
thing. For example, sometimes I repeatedly hear a word I don't know the meaning of,
which makes me wonder what it means and try to figure it out, kind of like solving a
puzzle. Once I do that and the pronunciation is already embedded in my brain, that's
when I choose learn the meaning. When I do this, I rarely forget either one. And I
disagree that this makes you remember because it's "difficult," I think it's that,
somehow, I feel like not knowing the meaning lets me focus more on the sounds. That is
why it sometimes helps me more to do this than to learn the meaning first. (Also,
difficulty is subjective, I prefer to think of it as a fun challenge. ;) However...

I absolutely agree that this only allows you to remember a very small percentage of the
words you hear. Obviously, listening to things until you understand EVERY single word
from context and never looking anything up is not practical, to say the least. In fact,
it's for this very reason that it actually never even occurred to me to call this a
"method" at all, but rather a convenient (not to mention very effective) little
learning tool that pops up occasionally. And that's all it really can be, in my
experience. Usually what you have to do is learn the meaning simultaneously with the
pronunciation, or preferably just a short while afterwards (of course, that is probably
just my personal preference).

Although to be fair, I think Julien knows all this. I don't think he intended to say
that "learn then understand" should be the only method used. He even said himself that
he tried different methods and when he encountered a flaw in one he tried another one.
So I agree that he knows he tried many methods but seemed to focus disproportionately
on one. I think it's just that he really tried to emphasize this one because he felt it
was the most effective, and I agree with him that when you do learn words this way, you
learn them very well and naturally. BUT...

Cainntear wrote:

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.

^^This. And...

Cainntear wrote:

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.

That's fair, because I agree it's important to look at this from a scientific
standpoint. Especially since it seems to me that even Julien himself doesn't quite know
what made him so successful. However, I think there is one thing everyone agrees on:
whatever he did, it worked. So yes, I wish we could get a better sense of what exactly
he did to learn Chinese so flawlessly, because this knowledge could help a lot of
people.

But because we can't really have that knowledge, I honestly think the best solution is
to discover your own methods until you find some that fulfill your own personal needs.
After all, that's what Julien did...and he clearly found something that worked for him.
Personally, I think his most important "key rule" was hard work and doing what he
thought worked best for himself. :)
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Cainntear
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Message 37 of 40

25 February 2011 at 11:15am | IP Logged

Re: total immersion.
When I've seen people come out of immersive classrooms, the best students seem to be able to translate, the worst don't. It seems that the people who do best do indeed analyse and translate mentally, and this helps them learn. The ones who don't flounder.

I once went into a 1 hour introduction to Finnish (it was a demonstration as part of an English-teaching certificate) and forced myself not to analyse or translate. I was only partially successful, and where I didn't translate, it was really really difficult to recall anything.

In general, whenever I learn a new structure, I have to associate it with the English equivalent to learn it.

I find it very difficult to believe teachers who tell me their students "never translate". How do they know? Have they seen inside their brains?
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polyglHot
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Message 38 of 40

25 February 2011 at 12:28pm | IP Logged

Bakunin wrote:

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.

This is exactly how I learn!

zenmonkey wrote:

s_allard wrote:

Again I want to disagree with this idea of opposing learning and understanding.
Learning without understanding is parroting or mimicking; I would hardly call that
learning.

I'm in agreement with you. I would say that I am not trying to oppose these but that is
what I see in the method described as LbU. Not so much parroting or mimicking but an
attempt at contrasting two methods of learning as divergent approaches.

Quote:

Immersion is of course a wonderful learning environment; it is not a method.

I think I understand what you are trying to say but I have to disagree on the last
part. It can ALSO be a method. Total Immersion, the refusal to think, use or speak your
native language is an active method within an environment. It is mentally costly and is
one of the reasons I am not doing that -- I am immersed in a German environment but I
am avoiding doing Total Immersion here. Because it means to me losing myself to not
being able to express myself until I learn the new meanings. That language loss is a
dulling of the mind that was very real with French for a year.
If you go and see the site All Japanese All The Time you can see that immersion can be
a method.

I stopped using my native language several years ago. I use English however as a second
native language. So maybe it's not total immersion what I'm doing. Now no one is saying
that one should do THAT kind of total immersion. Of course one would need a bi lingual
dictionary at first for instance...

Elexi wrote:

Cainntear wrote:

Re: total immersion.
When I've seen people come out of immersive classrooms, the best students seem to be
able to translate, the worst don't. It seems that the people who do best do indeed
analyse and translate mentally, and this helps them learn. The ones who don't flounder.

I once went into a 1 hour introduction to Finnish (it was a demonstration as part of an
English-teaching certificate) and forced myself not to analyse or translate. I was only
partially successful, and where I didn't translate, it was really really difficult to
recall anything.

In general, whenever I learn a new structure, I have to associate it with the English
equivalent to learn it.

I find it very difficult to believe teachers who tell me their students "never
translate". How do they know? Have they seen inside their brains?

Yes, it's called being a visual spatial thinker. Of course I translate a lot. However I
don't think this is imperative all of the time in all stages, times and places of the
language learning process.

I actually started Spanish from scratch while in Spain many years ago. I arrived in
Spain, the class wasn't translated in to English and certainly not Norwegian, the
textbooks were in Spanish with no English explanations. Now of course I DID use a
dictionary and of course it was a bilingual one.
So not ALL parts of the process are organic, just the immersion class itself as well as
the milieu of the country one finds oneself in. The translation part is what happens at
home after school by the desk I suppose.

I also arrived in Russia as a complete beginner, having only studied the Cyrillic
alphabet and what I could then grasp of grammar and vocabulary. I wouldn't say it was
total immersion at first, but I haven't spoken English in a while, at least not in real
life so that is the sacrifice I suppose. At first I couldn't say anything in neither
Russian nor English, because English wasn't understood so that felt horrible of course.
However we are talking about a few weeks/months, before things loosen up and it's
possible to at least express ones feelings, sadness, joy, telling anecdotes etc.
Basically answering the question "How was your day".
I think it was worth it because with a language like Russian I wouldn't have been able
to do it had I lived with English speaking people while in St. Petersburg for instance.
After 4 months I actually think that I need even more immersion.
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irrationale
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Message 40 of 40

01 March 2011 at 7:35am | IP Logged

Julian wrote:

If I teach you a word and tell you its meaning, say, 'computer', the only thing you’ll remember after a few days is that I taught you a word which meaning was 'computer'. What was the word? Forgot it.

I just have to chime in here. Is he saying that he couldn't remember the Chinese word for "computer" without seeing it a massive number of times? I mean, that word at least is about as easy as it gets..electric brain. We know what a computer is, I didn't need to learn that concept again by massive input. Computer = 电脑. End of story.

I understand this argument for more cultural nuance specific words, but concrete nouns such as these?

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