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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| 1qaz2wsx Diglot Groupie Greece Joined 5365 days ago 98 posts - 124 votes  Speaks: Greek*, EnglishC1 Studies: Russian, Albanian | Message 1 of 11 19 December 2010 at 3:43pm | IP Logged |
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I wonder,is it possible to start learning a completely new language by reading an entire foreign book using a dictionary when you come across a word many times, without knowing a single word at the beggining?What will your level of vocabulary and understanding be by the end of the book?Has anyone done this? Edited by 1qaz2wsx on 19 December 2010 at 5:37pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| tomsawyer Senior Member Aruba Joined 5279 days ago 103 posts - 141 votes Speaks: English* Studies: GermanB1, French, Russian | Message 2 of 11 19 December 2010 at 6:42pm | IP Logged |
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You could certainly start learning with such a method, but I doubt (in my opinion) that it would be a very efficient method. You'd have verb conjugations that you wouldn't be able to find in a dictionary, the author's writing style could be vastly different from normal use of the language, and there'd be many idioms that would be completely lost on you.
Still, perhaps you could try it and let us know? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| BartoG Diglot Senior Member United States confession Joined 5439 days ago 292 posts - 818 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Italian, Spanish, Latin, Uzbek | Message 3 of 11 19 December 2010 at 10:21pm | IP Logged |
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One of the forum members, doviende, does a lot with learning by reading. A recent post on his personal blog, LanguageFixation, has some good ideas for getting started with this, along with some information about Kato Lomb, a polyglot who purportedly learned by reading. The post is here:
http://languagefixation.wordpress.com/2010/12/02/how-can-i-l earn-a-language-quickly-from-novels/ (remove spaces from url) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5254 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 4 of 11 20 December 2010 at 1:13am | IP Logged |
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Why not try a multi-track attack? Make reading the most important part of your arsenal but supplement it with listening to an audio version of the same book, some grammar and vocabulary as well.
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| nimchimpsky Diglot Groupie Netherlands Joined 5603 days ago 73 posts - 108 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English | Message 5 of 11 20 December 2010 at 10:41am | IP Logged |
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It is too time-consuming and inefficient.
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 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 6 of 11 20 December 2010 at 3:49pm | IP Logged |
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I actually worked my way through a Greek guide to Rhodes with a dictionary, writing out the whole thing by hand, but I also studied a grammar, made wordlists etc. at the same time. I suspect that working your way through a book in the manner described could give you passive reading skills, but not much else. Therefore the method has to be used in conjunction with other activities.
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| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5373 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 7 of 11 20 December 2010 at 5:44pm | IP Logged |
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Language acquisition is like a ladder: each step can only be reached when you are standing on the previous one.
Because books don't start out simple, growing gradually complex, you will hit complex sentences right from the start. I suppose that once you've reached a higher level, perhaps even intermediate, you could take a book that uses general every day language as a sort of guide of the things you need to understand or work you way through, but I doubt it would be very productive. There is also an important distinction to make between exposure in a language that's familiar to you and one that isn't. In some languages, exposure to new words that are only a little bit different from the ones you already know will suffice to teach you the words, but in other languages that are completely unfamiliar, new words will appear as meaningless strings of sounds or letters. Still, I wish someone would write a (relatively short) book that would contain, with a certain chronological progression in difficulty, all the most common grammatical structures and necessary words for fluency. Edited by Arekkusu on 20 December 2010 at 6:03pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ANK47 Triglot Senior Member United States thearabicstudent.blo Joined 7089 days ago 188 posts - 259 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (classical) | Message 8 of 11 21 December 2010 at 7:56am | IP Logged |
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Use books as part of language learning, but audio is much more important. You'd be putting yourself at a disadvantage if you focused just on reading books. I know a lot of people who focused on reading too much when learning a language and didn't expose themselves to much audio. The approached the language like something to be analyzed and memorized. They were very frustrated when they had a very hard time understanding the spoken language. If you're going to either do reading or listening, then go with listening. Your brain is made to learn languages from audio input.
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