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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Dvergr Newbie United States Joined 6178 days ago 32 posts - 33 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch | Message 9 of 69 06 March 2008 at 5:15pm | IP Logged |
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This is the single
most exciting thing about language learning I've ever read... Edited by Dvergr on 08 March 2008 at 5:41pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6945 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes  Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 10 of 69 06 March 2008 at 6:31pm | IP Logged |
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I was influenced by more than one forum member, and being in acute semi-retirement from the forum myself, I don't want to generate multiple posts here, so I'll violate leosmith's guidelines for this thread and mention several people in one go.
(1) The first person, reineke, is not one of the forum bigwigs, but it was only our discussions, backed up by the interesting data he dug up on various languages, that had finalized in my mind which languages I would actually want to learn, roughly in what order, and why. This is extremely important, so he goes as number one on my list - at the end of the day, I could figure out on my own how to learn languages, but not necessarily which ones to learn. (2) Vocabulary acquisition being the most important phase of language-learning for me, given my orientation towards reading, ProfArguelle's posts on vocabulary acquistion through glossaried simplified readers, dual-page format bilingual editions, and alternating chapters and/or whole works between the translation and the orginal have opened up my eyes to a dicitionary-free alternative to growing one's vocabulary. (3) ProfArguelle and fanatic for brining Assimil courses to our attention. (4) fanatic, Linguamor, and siomotteikiru/atamagai for Krashen and comprehensible input in various incarnations, as well as the idea of language study versus language aquisition. (5) Zhuangzi for his emphasis on hardcore vocabulary learning techniques and his rigourously anti-grammatical stance - I found it interesting to be forced to examine yet again the role of grammar study in language acquisition. (6) Iversen - for lots of things, among them the distinction between extensive and intensive reading. (7) administrator - not to suck up to the guy or anything, but he did create this site in the first place. More to the point, his emphasis on audiocourses was new to me at the time. Also, I like his own list of languages. (8) Hencke - for his contagious perfectionism. There may be more, but this is what occurs to me at the moment (Barry Farber anyone?). Was the above worth the time sunk into the forum? Only future will tell. So far the forum has been more of a general inspiration than a decisive influence on my learning techniques, but I do feel like I have a lot more options to choose from than before. Edited by frenkeld on 08 March 2008 at 11:02am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7158 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 11 of 69 06 March 2008 at 6:46pm | IP Logged |
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For me, Vlad has been the most helpful member as I've consulted with him many times about matters in Slovak. (In general, I've enjoyed the exchange of ideas and feedback with others (e.g. Julie, Seth) when discussing Eastern European languages.)
As regards to methods, no one stands out decisively, but I do make honourable mention of fanatic who has shown that Assimil can be a useful tool. At the least his experience has softened my criticism of Assimil (I had been very disappointed with Assimil Hungarian) and I am now a little more receptive to considering Assimil for future language study (if only for the audio content to get extra practice in hearing and using the language). 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Marc Frisch Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6667 days ago 1001 posts - 1169 votes Speaks: German*, French, English, Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish, Italian Studies: Persian, Tamil | Message 12 of 69 07 March 2008 at 5:25am | IP Logged |
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daristani's posts are always extremely helpful and I'm very grateful for the invaluable advice he has offered on my favourite two target languages (Turkish and Persian), which is even more precious considering that there are very few experts on those languages here.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6705 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 13 of 69 07 March 2008 at 11:38am | IP Logged |
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Right now I'm too busy to spend much time here, but the forum has definitely meant a lot to me. In fact I found it by accident while I was looking for something about Romanian (due to an upcoming holiday in the summer of 2006), and the first person that I would single out must be ProfArguelles, - at the time absent from the forum, but known from his old postings under the name of Ardashir. His methods didn't mean very much to me, but the large number of languages he knew and his general scope of knowledge made me feel thoroughly ashamed that I had let most of my own languages slip away during a 25 year long period of utterly negligence, while others were busy accumulating whole families of languages.
So I decided to take on the task of relearning all the languages I had known before 1982. My methods were in the beginning quite conservative - working my way through an old Teach yourself Romanian, doing the drills and so on. It was quite by accident that I was led to give wordlists the central role they now have in my language learning: I read some discussions on this forum about the number of words needed to be fluent (with long-time absent Malcolm as one of the chief protagonists) and I decided to count the number of Romanian words I knew. I noticed that the numbers rose more with each count than my activities in between could possibly account for, so I concluded that working directly with a dictionary - in conjunction with work on textbook and later genuine texts - was a splendid tool to revive half forgotten languages. When I had revived most of my old languages I turned to Greek, but found that my methods simply didn't work in this case, due to the fact that I didn't have a stock of forgotten words to draw on and that I didn't know a related language that could be an alternative source. So I had to refine my use of wordlists, and I had to analyze how genuine texts should be used in the absence of sufficiently easy and plentiful 'comprehensible texts'. In this phase it was important to have discussions with people who were flatly against the use of wordlists and grammars and other old-fashioned black-school tools. These discussions (and reading stuff about different learning styles) certainly helped me to refine my own ideas and methods, but they didn't really teach me new tricks. Then Siomotteikiru passed by and shattered my univers by showing that there was an alternative both to silly dialogs in the classroom and fruitless searches for sufficiently easy texts, namely listening to recordings in a foreign language while following a bilingual translation. I think this must be the best way for a beginner to hear a lot of foreign talk and getting the 'buzz' in your head that is the forerunner for structured, effortless thinking in the foreign language. I have never spent those long hours listening to novels that Siomotteikiru recommended, partly because I get bored listening to anything and literature in particular, but even in smaller doses the method is valuable... as a supplement to wordlists, intensive reading and as much ordinary extensive reading as you can manage to do. I have had many other usefuls tips from the forum, including concrete links to audio and video sources on the internet. Having access to foreign language TV from all over the world is a blessing that ought to make it easier to learn languages now than it has ever been in the past, where you had problems even getting written texts. But these things have more been of a practical nature, they haven't had theoretical repercussions on my ideas about how to learn languages. So the most important factor that makes me stick around here probably is the contagious effect it has to 'meet' people who as me are genuinely interested in learning languages. My apologies to Leosmith for referring to more than one name. My apologies to Leosmith and everybody else for writing so long posts. Edited by Iversen on 07 March 2008 at 11:53am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| solidsnake Diglot Senior Member China Joined 7043 days ago 469 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 14 of 69 07 March 2008 at 12:15pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks for the props Seth.
My vote goes to Glossika. He no longer participates here-- as seems to be the trend of the most influential members, but the content of his posts and the PM's we shared are a goldmine of insight and knowledge. Thanks Mike! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Vlad Trilingual Super Polyglot Senior Member Czechoslovakia foreverastudent.com Joined 6586 days ago 443 posts - 576 votes 2 sounds Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese | Message 15 of 69 08 March 2008 at 4:09am | IP Logged |
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Without trying to return the favor, for me Chung has been the most valuable member because of his vast knowledge of Eastern European (and not only) languages, high quality posts and for taking the time to write the elaborate and precise language profiles.
It is unfair to mention only one or just a few members, because I might forget someone, but.. Iversen, Ardashir, Zhuangzi and others for taking the time to write posts that would take me ages to find myself if I had to look for them in books. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Dvergr Newbie United States Joined 6178 days ago 32 posts - 33 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch | Message 16 of 69 08 March 2008 at 2:30pm | IP Logged |
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My second vote is for Volte because of her thread
here and because of her many thorough postings about her experiences using the L-R method. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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