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New techniques learnt this year? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6151 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 1 of 20 12 September 2012 at 3:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm just wondering what new techniques people have learnt, or discovered, this year ? They can be either self discovered, read about, or hopefully from this forum itself.
My biggest discovery this year was learning vocabulary through monolingual encyclopedia's and dictionaries. For Spanish I've been using 'El Pequeno Larousse Ilustrado 2011'. For French I'm using the 'Vocabulaire Expliqué du Français' series. I'm still waiting for a copy of Le Petit Robert to arrive. I find it much easier to anchor vocabulary if the word is defined withing the language itself. I assume this is because it's easier to remember a description rather than a word in a separate language. E.g. Taking an easy A2 level example, the Spanish word for garland is guirnalda. I could learn this via lists or flashcards, but I find it much easier to remember a description like, "Guirnalda - Adorno a modo de corona abierta, de flores y ramas. Motivo decorativo formado por hojas, flores y frutos unidos por cintas suspendidas por sus extremos." I don't remember the description word for word, but the general sense and purpose of the text. Edited by DaraghM on 12 September 2012 at 4:02pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| vermillon Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4678 days ago 602 posts - 1042 votes Speaks: French*, EnglishC2, Mandarin Studies: Japanese, German | Message 2 of 20 12 September 2012 at 4:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Well, if you find it easier, good for you. But these words are clearly similar and remembering similar words is easier than learn a definition for most people. It's also easier to say that "perro" means "dog" rather than describe what a dog is.
Especially, it means you have to re-learn the whole world through Spanish, like a kid. You have an adult brain, and therefore you could use its more advanced faculties. I'm not saying it doesn't work, but for most people this is generally a bad advice. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5130 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 3 of 20 12 September 2012 at 4:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
How did you come to the conclusion that this word is an A2 level word? R. == 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6151 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 4 of 20 12 September 2012 at 4:32pm | IP Logged | |||||
Rather coincidentally, I've just found a recent post by montmorency, where he describes a polyglot using a similar technique. Gabriel Wyner goes a bit further and tries to minimise the amount of English learnt to a complete minimum. He uses Anki but keeps it entirely in the target language. Edited by DaraghM on 12 September 2012 at 4:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6151 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 5 of 20 12 September 2012 at 4:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
It turns up in the ELE publication, Uso Interactivo del Vocabulario A1-B1 in the chapter Las Fiestas (Capítulo 9). As that tends to be an A2 topic, I assumed the word was at that level. As a slight aside, you can take a look inside at Chapter 17 here. Edited by DaraghM on 12 September 2012 at 4:43pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4828 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 6 of 20 12 September 2012 at 5:16pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I was search old posts (some very old) in this forum for references to flashcards, and
came across a (very old) posting about "retention cards", which are basically a version of flashcards, but with the difference that you have L1 and L2 on the same side of the card. I found this quite interesting. The L2 word is in very large letters in the centre, and the L1 word is in one corner in small letters. I didn't get the impression that anyone had taken this up very enthusiastically, so maybe it isn't that great an idea, but I have played with it a little. (an experiment still in progress ... :-) ). I added a comment to the thread where I'd found it, and I think someone then added that it was based on some theoretical work, which I'm afraid I didn't pursue, as it didn't appeal to me. I did google to see what people had said about retention cards and about the only thing I found was some rather poor videos on YouTube pushing cards made by one particular company, which had their logo in large letters on the front of the card! I wouldn't use cards made by someone else anyway, but I certainly wouldn't use those! Very distracting. With my own experiments, on the reverse side, I simply reverse L1 and L2, i.e. have the L1 words in large letters in the centre, and the L2 word in small letters in a corner. (for learning it in the other direction). Probably no better (or maybe not as good) as conventional flashcards, but anyway, I think they are possibly doing something slightly different. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| stifa Triglot Senior Member Norway lang-8.com/448715 Joined 4873 days ago 629 posts - 813 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, EnglishC2, German Studies: Japanese, Spanish | Message 7 of 20 12 September 2012 at 7:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I only used English in the first 1100 Anki cards in Japanese, and have currently made
152 Japanese-only cards. If the word is an animal or something very concrete, then I would rather use an image. It might mean that you have to learn many similar words used to describe the words along with many "dictionary words": words that are very helpful when using a monolingual dictionary. I do this because something that might be a common word in one language might have an "obscure" translation in another language. For instance, the English word "pinnacle" which has a range of meanings, translates to the Norwegian word "tind" which has one the literal meaning of pinnacle: A tall, sharp and craggy rock or mountain. It is also a rather rare word, which I have never really encountered before I looked up "pinnacle". Considering the fact that two rather similar languages have words which can not be translated, it might be obvious that two vastly different languages like English and Japanese have cases like the one mentioned above. Edited by stifa on 12 September 2012 at 7:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| 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 8 of 20 12 September 2012 at 11:25pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This has been an important year for me as a language learner, as I came back here with more experience last autumn after a long break. My ideas about language learning have changed and I've discovered new resources... techniques, not so much, but I'll still ramble here :o)
I've recently realized just how much of an aural learner I am. There's one game I like on Pottermore (degnoming the garden), and after getting good at it I realized I was playing it by ear! Due to this preference, I of course risk being biased, so I always make sure to state clearly that it's just my opinion. Nevertheless, I'm convinced that a vast majority of learners don't do enough listening, especially anyone who has problems with it. Also, inspired by doviende's posts who said he was progressing rapidly by LR'ing HP in German, with the audio AND text in L2, I started doing this in Danish. Previously I considered this mostly a technique for those whose listening lags behind their reading (including myself when I was learning Finnish - I was going by the more conventional methods for visual learners, and I was like a fish out of water). Now I can see its usefulness for related languages with a peculiar pronunciation. Danish is often called the Scandinavian equivalent of Continental Portuguese or French, heh. I'm really enjoying it and I'm making progress. I feel quite proud of overcoming this obstacle in Danish without resorting to the more drastic measures like going through a textbook and reading boring texts intensively... (which wouldn't help my listening anyway, heh) I'm also happy with how my Polish studies went. Working towards a native-like pronunciation when I could barely come up with a sentence of my own was an interesting experience. I did a lot of listening (classic LR), I tried out foreign tongue-twisters for the first time (not sure they're useful for all languages, but they're definitely useful for Polish)... and I did shadowing. Not a lot of it, it's documented in the consistency thread. A total of 18 days. And most of it was what I call LR-shadowing - doing LR and understanding it well enough that you want to shadow/repeat some individual words/phrases. I didn't even realize this was a part of LR method, heh. I now do this in Danish and I think one day I'll even be able to speak it :o) Another important thing is what I call receptive listening. Even though (or maybe because?) I'm an aural learner, I'm not always sensitive to the phonetics and intonation. I'm a woman and I believe in the power of cycle - and my best moments for this sort of listening are when I'm on my period, perhaps because I don't have enough energy for some of the more demanding activities. I'm passive but not lazy. Oh and I mentioned resources in the beginning. It's nothing new, really, as I admire these resources and recommend them in every thread. These are lyricstraining, GLOSS and Destinos. Last but not least, I've recently developed a method/habit for quickly creating cloze deletion cards - nothing fancy, just: 1. type or paste the original sentence and make a simple card with it, copy the question field before adding 2. switch to custom layout, paste the sentence into question AND answer 3. double-click the word, CTRL+X, put ___ into the gap 4. CTRL+V into the custom field 5. if you want to make more cards: CTRL+A in the answer field (which now contains the unaltered sentence), CTRL+C, go back to step 2 sounds complicated but I do this automatically now :D EDIT: And I just remembered that I discovered the autoscroll feature in Adobe Reader, and I also realized in this thread that I simply need some sort of an automatic way for converting enjoyable texts to exercises. Will probably start threads about this soon. edit2: started one: Making your own exercises? Edited by Serpent on 13 September 2012 at 12:52am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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