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Prior knowledge needed for LR? | ||
Tags: Listening-Reading (L-R) | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| dotdotdot Diglot Newbie United States Joined 5211 days ago 24 posts - 37 votes Speaks: Korean, English* Studies: Italian, Russian | Message 1 of 5 22 December 2010 at 4:38am | IP Logged | ||
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So I'm thinking about experimenting with LR for Russian, but without any knowledge of the language whatsoever besides a few phrasebook phrases. I know about Teango and how he learned Spanish from scratch with this method, but Spanish is a lot closer to English than Russian.
Do you think that it would be possible to learn a language more distanced from English through LR from scratch? Or would it be better to learn some basic grammar and vocabulary before jumping off to native material? 1 person has 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 2 of 5 22 December 2010 at 12:59pm | IP Logged | ||
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Just jump into it and see what happens! :D That's what I did.
The first skill in LR is the ability to follow along with the voice of the actor. It doesn't matter if you don't understand the words (at first). Just knowing intuitively how a Russian sounds when s/he is angry, happy or says something funny is a valuable skill in itself. Btw, if you are new to LR, make sure that you focus on the story and the voice of the actor. When I first started, my focus was on the story and the written text and I think that limited my progress back then. My skills took a quantum leap when I learned how to actually listen actively. And: Make sure that you pick a book that you really like. The single most effective component of LR is the thrill! Knowing these words may be helpful: без, когда, тогда, говорить, сказал. (if you can't decipher the cyrillic yet, you can look up their pronunciations at www.forvo.com)
For me, it was certainly possible for Russian (I did also do some offline reading of parallel texts without audio). But you should definitely learn some basic grammar as you go along. Just so you don't miss that the verb is at the end of the sentence in Japanese, etc. (or as for Russian: that the word endings change according to a case system). :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| carlonove Senior Member United States Joined 5978 days ago 145 posts - 253 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 3 of 5 22 December 2010 at 7:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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If you are going to start LR with a totally new language that's substantially different from languages you know, I would strongly recommend starting out by converting your parallel text into HTML format and using a popup dictionary like globefish or google toolbar (globefish is a firefox add-on which I can't recommend highly enough). If you're clueless on almost every single new word and the language is very irregular and idiomatic (like Russian) it's imperative to be able to get a rough definition for a word or phrase and quickly move on.
Some of the texts on marcodiangelo's site have been aligned in dual column excel/table format, while others have been aligned as a dual column text document. You can easily convert the table-formatted files to html ('save as webpage'), and the formatting will be retained when you open it in internet explorer or firefox. If you convert the text-aligned documents, the alignment will get screwed up. It's not necessarily the end of the world but reduces the benefits of LR. Edited by carlonove on 22 December 2010 at 7:46pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| RedBeard Senior Member United States atariage.com Joined 6094 days ago 126 posts - 182 votes Speaks: Ancient Greek* Studies: French, German | Message 4 of 5 24 December 2010 at 6:32pm | IP Logged | ||
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Speaking of L/R I just found this tip on a different thread.
re: the L/R method -- Lingoleng wrote: For a beginner it is absolutely ok to use his native language, read a page several times until you know what is going on and only then listen to the L2. In my experience taking some time when starting and only afterwards getting faster and reading longer passages pays off. When you know and understand ten pages really well, you have learned nice amounts of grammar and vocabulary, if you don't invest some effort at the beginning the whole process is slower. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5548 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona | Message 5 of 5 04 January 2011 at 11:34am | IP Logged | ||
This all depends on which languages you already know well and feel comfortable with, as well as which approaches to language learning generally work best for you. I think listening and reading is an excellent strategy, of course, and once you've got a handle on the writing system and sounds of a new language, there's no reason you can't use it from the beginning to learn vocabulary and and grammar. I think the main thing to keep in mind is that you can make things so much easier for yourself by using suitable material in progressive stages (I've learned this from experience). Some languages are simply much more transparent to English speakers than others. Languages like Swedish, for example, share a similar alphabet with English, and their semantics and cultural references are not too many miles apart. The key thing for me is that they have plenty of cognates in common and generally follow a similar word order. This really facilitates listening and reading whilst using parallel texts. With languages like these, I've been able to jump straight into easier books like Harry Potter from scratch and make swift progress. With languages like Russian, however, it's a bit more challenging. First of all, you've got the Cyrillic alphabet. Then there's the complicated grammar, flexible word order, and moving stress patterns to keep you busy for a good while longer. When I come across languages like these, I realise I need a good leg up at the start, and try to make study more manageable by using easier material and then progressing to increasingly more advanced texts (i.e. closer to ideal of Krashen's i+1). Here's a suggestion for setting off in Russian: 1. You could start off with a bit of listening and reading using a language course that offers fun short parallel dialogues for beginners accompanied by good quality audio (e.g. Russian Princeton courses). 2. Next perhaps try moving onto something like listening and reading with "The Little Prince" (this is what I'm going to start doing very soon myself). 3. Then it's Harry Potter time (or whatever tickles your fancy), and so on... The key thing here is to find a way of efficiently acquiring enough vocabulary and basic grammar in the early stages to break into successive levels as soon as possible, and all ideally without too much stress and difficulty. Of course it's always tough to begin with when it still looks like unintelligible Martian typeset on the page, but venturing into new exotic linguistic jungles can also be an adventurous and exciting time, especially if you use fun dialogues and interesting stories from the start. Udachi! (good luck) :) Edited by Teango on 04 January 2011 at 11:39am 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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