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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
 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 17 of 20 14 September 2012 at 10:42am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Excellent plan. You can do this first, and afterwards you will probably know enough also to get the meaning. Trying frantically to understand something in a weak language will mean that you skip most of the details you should learn. Personally I have not changed my methods much the last year or so. The exception is that I have come to the conclusion that the best thing I can do with a wordlist based on a handwritten copy of a text is to go back to the original text and see whether I know understand each and every word in it AND that I also understand its grammatical structure. I do this within a day or so after I did the wordlist while I still remember the selection of words I had on the list and the memory hooks I invented to remember them, and therefore it functions as a repetition round. I may still do a repetition round, but then it will be in the more lax form I normally would do the second or third repetition, i.e. I write the foreign words but just think their translations, unless it is one of the few words whose meaning I still haven't learned properly - and then it goes into my next wordlist. An important corollary to this change in my habits is that I keep my text copies and my wordlists together until I have done the control reading as described, and maybe even after this. Edited by Iversen on 14 September 2012 at 10:43am 2 persons have 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 18 of 20 14 September 2012 at 4:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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 19 of 20 17 September 2012 at 1:50pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks for your comments @Iversen.
Memory hooks - are you hinting at mnemonics here? I didn't think you were into mnemonics really. That thing about going to the original text is good I think (although I often forget where, or can't find it. I don't worry too much though, as I think that with enough extensive reading & listening, I should encounter it again). (Thanks also @Serpent!v :-) ). Edited by montmorency on 18 September 2012 at 3:30pm 2 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 20 of 20 17 September 2012 at 11:56pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Your memory is better than mine. I haven't had time to do my phonetic copying for some time (roughly since somewhere in July) - I did it a lot with Irish, using the abair.ie speech synthethizer, and I also used the Acapela box and in some cases genuine recordings. However the noise from my neighbour led me to cut down on those listening exercises which demanded concentration, and I also ran into a period where I had less free moments at my job. And then phonetic copying somehow slipped out of my daily activities. However it is a technique which I have tried out with good results and now that you have reminded me I know that I should should get active in that field again. It is so far the best way I have found to learn exactly what the natives say. For those who wonder what Serpent and I are referring to: it occurred to me earlier this year that I have learnt most of my words and most of my grammar by working with short snippets of text, first copying them and then doing wordlists, and then I would use extensive activities to train passive and active fluency. But within the realm of pronunciation I hadn't worked with details since the 70s where my teachers forced me to do it - I just listened extensively, which of course is a relevant thing to do, but certainly not enough. Then I thought about the problem and came up with the idea that I could listen attentively to short snippets of speech and write down as precisely as possible what the speakers said. Because I haven't bothered to learn IPA and because I find my own homebrewed notation systems sufficiently suggestive I decided to stay with those, but the notation isn't a cardinal point - the important thing is the attentive and detailoriented listening. Another important point is to forget about the ususal phonemic analysis and instead write down the sounds as you hear them - though with the caveat that you need to to know which words the speakers actually intend to say - otherwise you can't use the things you notice in practice later. Ideally you should listen to more than one rendering of the same sentences, but that's not always possible. However when you do it then it becomes clear that different speakers have quite different pronunciation habits, which are lost when you do the usual reductionistic phonemic analysis.
I don't try to play memory artist, but when I have spoken and written about wordlists I have always stressed that you can and should use any available trick in the book to help you memorize the words and expressions you try to learn: imagery, associations based on sound or spelling, etymology and derivational patterns.And in several places (including my videos about wordlists) I have used the expression 'memory hook' about those useful associations which can help you to drag a word or expression back from oblivion. Unlike memory wizardry there isn't much in language learning which demands you to remember things in a certain order - even morphological tables should eventually be learnt as a bunch of isolated items, because you haven't got time to run through irrelevant items when you need a specific form. So the techniques of the memory artists are only partially relevant for language learners, and I haven't memorized the complicated system which the memory wizards use to learn packs of cards and things like that in a short time. But associative techniques in general are certainly relevant. Edited by Iversen on 18 September 2012 at 12:16am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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