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Spontaneous learning of lang sim. to L1? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6597 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes  4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 9 of 10 31 August 2012 at 3:28pm | IP Logged |
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It's not just about the vocabulary. Plenty of learners don't do enough listening, and then they're unable to recognize familiar words/process the spoken language fast enough. You don't need just vocabulary, you need to actually listen. And to read as well.
Similar words are a waste of effort because you can learn them by hearing them a few times, while at the same time improving your passive understanding of the spoken language. I'd say there are very few (formal) learners for whom listening is not one of the last priorities, after reading, speaking and maybe even writing. But if there's more balance in your learning, all of these are easier if you do more listening! Especially speaking. As for myself, I would say that having a good pronunciation is a high priority, but having good conversational skills from the beginning isn't. It only becomes a priority if I have specific plans to go to the country of my L2. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 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 10 of 10 02 September 2012 at 8:36pm | IP Logged |
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You can become become quite good at understanding a related language, both in its written and its spoken form - I have to search hard for TV programs, books or newspapers which I don't understand in Swedish and Norwegian, and I learned to understand Low German by watching Talk op Platt. The hard part is to convert these passive skills into active skills - and I have heard some quite gruesome attempts to speak other Nordic languages by people who thought it was enough to listen and read a lot and avoid a few lexical pitfalls.
To my mind you need to learn them from scratch as if they were new and exotic, but you will be able to pass much faster through each stages because you can draw on your passive knowledge. This also applies to dialects. You need to dissect the sounds and the grammar of your target language/dialect to find out exactly where the differences are. Maybe you can do this without knowing the correct nomenclature (just as I use my own homemade phonetic transcription systems instead of the official IPA), and maybe you are such genius at this kind of analysis that you can do it on a subconscious level, but for dummies like me this exercise means that I have to convert my observations into conscious and systematized knowledge, and I use grammars and dictionaries to help me do that. Even for languages which I can understand on a passive level. Learning a related language is easier than learning something very different, but it still takes some effort to do it properly. Edited by Iversen on 03 September 2012 at 12:05am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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