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DIY Corpus for learning a language | ||
Tags: Learning Technique/Method | French | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| cazgram Senior Member United States Joined 5649 days ago 34 posts - 45 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 1 of 18 23 December 2010 at 11:13pm | IP Logged | ||
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A while back I took a course in Educational Linguistics and for my final project, I created a corpus (large collection of real-world text) of 19th century literature and attempted to show how you could use it in a classroom setting to teach a language. The course was mostly graduate students for language teaching and the concept was well received.
Fast forward to today. I've personally been on a quest to learn French for the past few years, with very little success. My problem, as best as I can figure, is that the courses I've tried, such as FSI/FIA, remind me too much of school. I'm currently finishing a math degree at a local U, and the last thing I want to do is crack open another textbook when I finish studying. So...I've been trying to come up with a way that more closely resembles how I'd spend my free time regardless of language learning. I like the L/R method because it appeals to the way I think I learn languages, from a more global approach. And I like to read. The problem for me is that L/R is too overwhelming, and a it's a little dull to never really know what's going on. That's why, maybe somewhat contradictorily, I also like Iverson's method of wordlists and reaching a critical mass of vocab. I like memorizing things, but not without some bearing or compass. So I looked in to frequency lists, and I found one that used news sources...not exactly where I want to go yet. Hmmm...what to do? I have Harry Potter à l'ecole des sorciers and le Petite Prince on audiobook as well as paperback. After a little internet digging, I've also got a txt files of those as well as a few other HP books. I opened up a concordancer (I used AntConc), added those txt files, sorted by word frequency, and voilà! My very own, customized frequency list. AntConc also has a feature where you can click on the word of interest and sentences containing that word will pop up. Instant sample sentence! But more usefully, sample sentences that I'll need to learn to be able to read these books. Has anyone already tried this approach (a search of corpus and concordancer didn't reveal too much) and if so, how did it work? I think it might be effective to take the first three words before and after the target word from each sample sentence and input that in to Anki. Or maybe just use wordlists...still not sure. I'm not crazy about Anki. It also might still be useful to do a sort of L/R on the weekends, and see how moving my way down the frequency list improves the L/R experience over time. Anyway. Let me know if you have experience in this, and your opinions about using a DIY corpus. I have another two weeks before school starts back up, so I'm going to spend it playing around with this idea. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| 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 2 of 18 23 December 2010 at 11:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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I suppose you would like a corpus so you can identify the most common words and maximize your learning. Right?
Find a French-language TV show or movie with subtitles. There's your corpus. Watch a few and inevitably, all the most common words in the language will turn up. And they'll turn up more often than less common words. You will no doubt notice the difference between what's frequent and not, and you'll also be enjoying yourself watching entertaining videos containing real language in a real sociolinguistic setting. Nevermind corpuses. Expose yourself to real language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5290 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 3 of 18 24 December 2010 at 12:20am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't know if I understand what you are looking for, but something like this Frequency Dictionary French is never a bad idea. And for HP there is not too big a set of magic vocabulary you'll learn anyway, either by looking the words up, or not, as you like it. Edited by lingoleng on 24 December 2010 at 12:22am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| cazgram Senior Member United States Joined 5649 days ago 34 posts - 45 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 4 of 18 24 December 2010 at 4:36am | IP Logged | ||
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@Arekkusu
Thanks for replying. I agree that watching more movies and being exposed to the language is good, and is probably the best "corpus" approach. I just have a hard time of letting go of active studying, and this was a shot at trying to find a middle ground between the two. Whenever I sit in front of a movie to absorb the language, I find myself either: (a)getting bored if it's a dialogue-dependent movie and I don't know what's going on, or (b)for more action-based movies, just letting myself be entertained. Maybe I just need more patience and consistency. @lingoleng Thanks for the link. I thought there should be something like this out there, but I hadn't run across it. This is good, but what I was hoping to do was make the frequency very specific to the material I wanted to tackle, ie Harry Potter/lower level reading, and most corp(i)? are based off relatively different things...like newspapers. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| cazgram Senior Member United States Joined 5649 days ago 34 posts - 45 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 5 of 18 24 December 2010 at 4:37am | IP Logged | ||
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I'll probably end up moving most of my thoughts to a language log, since most of my thoughts from here on out seem misplaced in the "Learning Method" category.
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| carlonove Senior Member United States Joined 5978 days ago 145 posts - 253 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 6 of 18 24 December 2010 at 6:27am | IP Logged | ||
Thanks for mentioning this program; I never knew this type of software existed at the freeware level and was so easy to use. Edited by carlonove on 24 December 2010 at 8:58am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5290 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 7 of 18 24 December 2010 at 2:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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Of course you can do whatever you are interested in. But I want to point out something that rarely gets mentioned when talking about Anki, vocabulary lists or maybe concordance software for analyzing corpora. The giant advantage of a precompiled list of words, made by an expert (a teacher, linguist, whatever) who invests a lot of time and knowledge into compiling his lists is: He can do it better than a beginner. By using his work you save a lot of time and may actually have learned the 2000 most important words, when another person is still searching for the best method.
Searching for Anki word lists I usually have to find out that the only lists of good quality are copies - maybe legal, maybe not - of professional books. Regarding LR: Don't you use texts in both languages? 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. All this is highly debatable, of course, do whatever you are interested in, but using a precompiled frequency list is a shortcut in my opinion, and as you say you have been trying to learn French for several years, why not give it a try? Learn the first 500, then the first 1000, then the first 2000 words, step by step, side by side to reading and listening HP, and things get easier and easier. Edited by lingoleng on 24 December 2010 at 2:09pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6003 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 8 of 18 24 December 2010 at 3:01pm | IP Logged | ||
Seconded, and this goes for grammar too. Why spend hours and hours trying to find the rules and possibly making a mistake when some very clever people have already what the rules are for you? Don't get me wrong, I'm a great fan of corpus study, but this is simply an example of reinventing the wheel. The reason a lot of people don't like FIA is that it teaches bits and pieces. You know fragments of precomposed language, but you don't know how it works (FIA has "je m'appelle" and suchlike in lesson 1, doesn't it?) -- you have no model of the individual building blocks of the sentence. A lot of grammar-heavy stuff (and I think FSI is sometimes guilty of this) tends to consider certain lists of items as elementary. The classic example is "the present tense of <verb>". In French, there are six different forms of the present tense, although they are all related, and trying to learn six things at once is difficult. Something which a lot of courses do (the FSI drills are also sometimes guilty of this) is to focus too much on varying the words, not the grammar. Saying the same structure 10 times is easy, so if you're having to recall 10 different words (I like oranges, I like cake, etc), you're not thinking about the structure, because the difficult bit is recalling the words. I actually find that not only do I stop thinking about the meaning of the structure, I actually start to resent the structure -- parroting the phrase distracts me from recalling the vocabulary, which is what my brain identifies as being the task goal. This is one of the reasons I like the Michel Thomas course (first hour free online). He uses a limited vocabulary -- just enough words too show the grammatical feature properly, not so many that it becomes an exercise in recalling words. He covers a remarkable amount of grammar in a very short space of time. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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