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Could someone help me with Scriptorium? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| crafedog Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5810 days ago 166 posts - 337 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean, Tok Pisin, French | Message 1 of 7 27 February 2011 at 8:42pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hello everyone
I've used the Shadowing technique a few times in the past and I really enjoyed it/found it to be of great use however I've never tried the scriptorium technique the professor demonstrated a while ago. I might try it tomorrow but I have to admit I was a little bit confused by the video. I've searched for details on this site/others but I haven't found much written about it apart from some people mentioning that they've used/are using it. The professor seemed to say go for about 15 minutes or so which sounds reasonable as you can focus intently on the sentences. I know others try longer. I also read that keeping a book of your work is beneficial. I'm a little confused about one or two other things: 1. Where should I get the sentences from? (I'm going to try this for int+ Spanish) Literature or something like Assimil? I think literature seemed to be the better candidate for int+ from what I read. 2. What kind of length should the sentence be? They seemed fairly brief in his videos but I think I saw him mention that you can try much longer when you get the technique right. 3. Do you look at the sentence when you write it out or is all of it from memory? 4. How much of the sentence should I understand before writing it? (both vocab and grammar structure) 5. Have you used this technique? How do you feel it helped? What did it help the most? What was difficult? I might try this (to begin) with Assimil. I'm going through the 2nd phase. I'll listen to a recording of the lesson, speak a sentence aloud, write out the sentence I heard without looking at the book while speaking it aloud, check it against the book's version, speak it again. How does this sound? Later I'll move onto regular books. Thanks for any help in advance and sorry for all of the questions. Edited by crafedog on 27 February 2011 at 8:59pm 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 2 of 7 27 February 2011 at 10:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have found out that copying text passages in your target languages by hand is more efficient as a learning method than you might think. However I don't systematically read the sentences aloud like Professor Arguelles, and another difference is that I always reserve a right margen of 3-4 cm for new words, which I look up sometimes before writing a sentence, sometimes in the middle of it and sometimes after. Besides I typically work at least an hour or so with each text - a quarter of an hour is not enough to carry me into the intended 'groove' (or whatever you choose to call it).
So my technique isn't the same thing as Professor Arguelles' scriptorium method, but the aim is the same: to slow things down so that you notice the details and don't just skip over the problems. I may not have as organized a way of working as the professor, but it works for me. Edited by Iversen on 28 February 2011 at 1:04am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5758 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 3 of 7 27 February 2011 at 11:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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I probably don't do it as the professor says, because I had my own habits long before I had internet ...
I read the sentence aloud to see if I can understand and pronounce it. Then I read the first couple of words aloud and write them in my note-book. At this point, I try to be ambitious and, let's say, if I have an average of four words that my working memory can hold to write them down, I will read six or seven words aloud with the intention of writing all of them down without looking at the text. While writing, I will repeat what I had just read aloud word for word. Once I've finished or if I am too unsure about the spelling ot about what comes next, I will look back at the text, check for mistakes and then read and write the next part. Once I've finished the sentence I'll read it again to double-check. When copying texts that are not in German or English, the reading aloud comes naturally because it is easier that way. I feel exhausted after doing this for 15-20 minutes. And I don't think it makes sense to copy texts one can't read. 1 person has 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 4 of 7 28 February 2011 at 1:10am | IP Logged | ||
When I started out learning languages like Greek and Bahasa I couldn't understand what I wrote. But then I looked tons of words up and checked the endings and fabricated hyperliteral translations which I wrote between the lines in the original language. Sometimes I even copied the original lines once again after the translation. Luckily this is over now in both cases - I don't need to do those translations. But I still do my copying sessions, and then I just write down the unknown or otherwise puzzling words in the margen for later use in a wordlist. Using this technique - with or without a translation - forces me to consider everything in the text. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5758 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 5 of 7 28 February 2011 at 1:59am | IP Logged | ||
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Yes, I should have elaborated on that. I didn't because it's difficult to explain what exactly I mean.
What I did mean was that I need to know the pronunciation in one way or another (accompanying audio, relatively phonetic script, dictionary - whatever applies), and that the level of the text should be so that I understand most of it from normal reading, and understand it well when working with it intensively. But I usually do this kind of exercise with texts I have worked with more intensively before, for consolidation, to minimize errors and especially to speed up automatization. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 6349 days ago 397 posts - 508 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French | Message 6 of 7 01 March 2011 at 11:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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Alright, I just answer from my personal experiences. I can't say what works for others, just what I've done.
1. Where should I get the sentences from? (I'm going to try this for int+ Spanish) Literature or something like Assimil? I think literature seemed to be the better candidate for int+ from what I read. I personally use any native material that I find interesting enough. Could be any part of a novel or a short story that I like; or speeches from Dmitrij Medvedev's video blog; a J-pop song.. anything! :) 2. What kind of length should the sentence be? They seemed fairly brief in his videos but I think I saw him mention that you can try much longer when you get the technique right. I never pick 'sentences'. I pick complete texts (or lyrics), and just copy it out by hand (using Prof. Arguelles' technique). 3. Do you look at the sentence when you write it out or is all of it from memory? Absolutely. Otherwise, I would risk misspelling something. 4. How much of the sentence should I understand before writing it? (both vocab and grammar structure) If I don't understand anything at all, Scriptorium becomes so exhausting that I can't go on for more than a couple of minutes. But once I pass a certain level, I can sometimes go on for several hours. I wouldn't want to give a hard rule on this one. Just try to do it on a text, and if it's too hard, pick another one etc. It may be a good idea to listen to it (or even better, LR it) earlier in the day. This makes the Scriptorium so much smoother for me. Before, I usually LRed a page of a book in the morning, did Scriptorium of it in the evening, and listened to it normally the day after. I loved it. 5. Have you used this technique? How do you feel it helped? What did it help the most? What was difficult? I'd say that it's the most powerful technique I've tried for doing intensive studies (at least for me). It's especially helpful to boost your ability to read foreign scripts (Japanese and Russian cyrillic in my case). But I think it helps in almost every area of language learning. By the way. I always use an audio player which allows me to 'bookmark' the audio. When I press the letter 'b' on the keyboard, a time bookmark is set, and when I press 'n', the player instantly goes to the position of the last bookmark. By doing this, I can play a certain sentence or word (or even a single phoneme) over and over until I get it right. Sometimes, my brain simply refuses to catch all the sounds in fast speech, and this little trick remedies that. Note that my goal is to be able to repeat the word in the same speed, pitch and rhythm as the original speaker. -In this aspect, my Scriptorium sessions may be slightly more focused on native-like speech production than Prof. Arguelles'. Edited by M. Medialis on 01 March 2011 at 11:24pm 10 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| crafedog Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5810 days ago 166 posts - 337 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Korean, Tok Pisin, French | Message 7 of 7 04 March 2011 at 9:44pm | IP Logged | ||
Thanks for all the great information there and thanks for answering my questions so thoroughly. It sounds quite similar to the way that I'd been using the 10k sentences method but focusing on literature rather than media. After I get through Assimil/get my other bilingual books in the post, I should give this a try. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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