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Just how exactly do you learn Gaelic? | ||
Tags: Gaelic (Scottish) | Learning Strategy | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 25 of 35 23 October 2011 at 6:16pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
OK, so I overstated my case a bit (did I mention that I was drunk when I wrote this?) Certainly, language has a good degree of error-tolerance -- we've evolved to understand speech that is slightly different from our own personal idiolect and to understand speech that is slightly distorted by weather, background noise etc. So we can reword my statement slightly: If I can say something I can understand it or something sufficiently similar. If I can't say it or something sufficiently similar, then I can't understand it.
I would certainly agree that as native speakers our active vocabulary (and grammar) is smaller than our passive one. And as an advanced learner, my passive knowledge of Spanish is better than my active, but even by the time I reach an intermediate stage, I do find that the stuff I've never actively mastered is just very fuzzy, and I don't personally feel that I fully understand the words at that stage.
I'll admit it again, I exaggerated pretty wildly there. Really my statement was a reaction to various pub conversations with foreigners. For example, I was speaking to someone on Wednesday night who said something along the lines of: I can to make myself understood, but I have problem to understand. I think to do more listening practice. I understood him perfectly, but I told him I thought his problem was speaking. The problem (as far as I could see) was that he had an inaccurate internal model of the language. At best, it would take ages to build up that internal model just from listening; at worst, his flawed production would prevent him from developing that model. A while ago I wrote a few blog posts on the idea of the 4 skills, and why I believed it was wrong. But I definitely overstated things here. There is a place for "listening practice", it's just a far more restricted idea of listening practice than most people believe. The usual sort of "listening for information" is pretty pointless, because it doesn't teach you to understand, it simply teaches you to cope with having limited understanding. For me, listening practice should be a matter of tying input to a well-developed internal model, so a good form of practice would be listening to something that you would understand 100% in the written form, and that is build of language elements you have active command of. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5785 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 26 of 35 24 October 2011 at 1:34am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Well I don't think it was overstated at all. I started years ago as convinced as anyone
in the need for listening practice, but I now never use any kind of dedicated listening practice, my personal experience is one of being let down by it, and as I said I find this whole philosophy of breaking things down into skills and sub-skills to be practiced completely wrong-headed. Am I the only one has had the experience of correctly manipulating all the exercises in every book I can get my hands on and then finding that I'm not equipped to navigate the real world? This was most noticeable for me with grammar, but it applies to the so- called "skills" as well. For me people don't learn that way. How to improve your ability to understand the spoken language? To be sure one way is to practice understanding meaningful input, but that is not pure listening practice IMO as it involves improving your whole model of the language (to borrow Cainntear's term)- how do gestures and (sentence-level) intonation relate to different meanings, how to people say the same thing in different ways to achieve different results, how does pronunciation change under stress, and indeed different forms of stress, gaining knowledge of new vocab and grammar structures, better understanding common contexts in the L2 culture, liason and elision in rapid speech, and so on, and so forh. How else to explain that improving your pronunciation (or grammar, or vocab, or anything else for that matter) improves your ability to understand? Is that not a classic case of being able to produce what you understand? As for the large passive vocabulary of natives, well many of the words in my passive vocabulary I *can* produce if necessary, and those that are truly passive in the sense that I couldn't produce them I clearly don't understand that well, I only understand them as pointers or hints to understanding the meaning of a whole sentence, rather than understanding exactly what meaning they are conveying. Has anybody ever had the experience of trying to explain one of these words? My youngest sister (studying at a good university and therefore expose t a lot of new "high-end" vocabulary) asks me these all the time! It's a nightmare! "Er, well, it kind of means, er, sort of, I mean you could use it say in...no wait, you can't, it's more that...oh look, the SENTENCE you are referring to means X, but the actual word I only understand in quite a vague way." EDIT: I have a feeling that people are going to tell me that modern listening practice includes much of this. 1) Much of it doesn't (and the Welsh course Cainntear refers to seems to be a case in point). 2) When they do they do it in a modular fashion (e.g. "this excercise is going to practice intonation in yes/no questions etc") but that's more a pronunciation excercise, though it may help with listening, and it'd take forever to cover every permutation in this modular fashion. And the model that is practised is invariably a simplified version of the real world. 3) To the extent that it is successful it does so by improving your model of the language via comprehensible input, but you can get far higher levels (orders of magnitude higher!) through L-R, watching TV series/films or reading books at an appropriate level (or that you already know well from L1), etc. 4) Listening practice also practises strategies e.g. listening for keywords, this sounds valuable but again is a pale version of the practice you get in actual conversation, teaching an inflexible version of a small subset of the many flexible strategies we all use. Interaction with natives is the only really efficient way to improve your skills in this way (as I know to my cost). Edited by Random review on 24 October 2011 at 1:59am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Chris Heptaglot Senior Member Japan Joined 7123 days ago 287 posts - 452 votes Speaks: English*, Russian, Indonesian, French, Malay, Japanese, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Korean, Mongolian | Message 27 of 35 24 October 2011 at 5:50pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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[QUOTE=Random review] Am I the only one has had the experience of correctly manipulating all the exercises in
every book I can get my hands on and then finding that I'm not equipped to navigate the real world? QUOTE] No! Not at all! I did a degree in Russian and French, and during my stay in Russia in the third year of my degree, I became aware that, although I could discess all sorts of things in Russian, to an intermediate+ level with good grammar etc. I was actually lacking in many basic formulae and idioms for conducting basic transactions on the street. Oh, sure, I could get what I wanted, but I had to start learning the 'phrase book' stuff when I got there, in spite of knowing some pretty advanced grammar. Having said that, a caveat awaits...don't think, for one minute that not doing the exercises is a good idea. There comes a point where it all fits together and if you've neglected your grammar drills, that pillar will cave, leaving you with a pick n' mix of phrase book, pidgin TL and lots of otherwise unnecessary awkward hand-gestures. Early stages of courses at school, cover all that shopping 'stuff' and asking the way, but we tend to forget it. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| dbag Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5024 days ago 605 posts - 1046 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 28 of 35 24 October 2011 at 7:40pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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@ Random review. I think you have chosen a very narrow range of activities to refer to as listening practice. When I think of listening practice , I think of activities such as LR, watching TV series, films etc. I have never really thought of these activities as something seperate to listening practice.
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| Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5785 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German | Message 29 of 35 24 October 2011 at 8:10pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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@ dbag, I get your point, but these things are so much more than just listening practice
(as found in course books). If the things you say are what you mean by listening practice, then I don't think we have any disagreement, they are all valuable. I thought we were discussing dedicated listening practice in language courses, maybe I got the wrong end of the stick. At any rate, regarding those (and I'll look out an example) I'm sticking to my guns. Edited by Random review on 24 October 2011 at 8:16pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6013 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 30 of 35 24 October 2011 at 11:51pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Not true. Drills in general are a very inefficient way to learn grammar. This is because: A) They define the task too explicitly. The learner is at most once prompted to recall the grammatical structures under test (instead only having to recall vocabulary). In the worst case scenario, they won't have to recall it at all, because it's right there in the task description. As the process of speaking involves recall under pressure, I think it's obvious why this is a problem. B) They are rarely integrated. Typically drills pick a single tense, mood, aspect and voice and stick to it. So we end up saying "X didn't do Y" for various values of X and Y, then "A will do B" for various values for A and B as another task. But we rarely see "A didn't do B so I'll have to do Y" in drills.
I'll give you that, but these types of "listening practice" are just too time- and resource-heavy to be part of a class of any programmed instruction. Trying to substitute a few 5 minute close listenings is never going to work. The "listening practice" in the SaySomethingInWelsh course is woeful. It's just a series of disjoint sentences (although sometimes if you're lucky there's a question and then an answer). It's along the lines of: The young dog is not tired, but the old cat is tired. Do you start singing often? No, I don't start singing often. I buy bread. He walks to the pub. She shuts the door. etc There's no motivation to try to understand, and even if you do, it's very hard indeed to focus on disjoint utterances of this form. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Chris Heptaglot Senior Member Japan Joined 7123 days ago 287 posts - 452 votes Speaks: English*, Russian, Indonesian, French, Malay, Japanese, Spanish Studies: Dutch, Korean, Mongolian | Message 31 of 35 25 October 2011 at 3:13am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I have to disagree with you here, Cainntear. Grammar-translation has worked very well for me. Learn the rules, apply them and see where you went wrong. They give you the feedback you need to consolidate the learnings.
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| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6153 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 32 of 35 25 October 2011 at 11:52am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I think the most important element to learning a language is conversation practice. Producing language via methods such as Michel Thomas has to be complemented by listening to the native language. I can produce a sentence using this method while still failing to understand a native speaker saying the exact same sentence. This is because of prosody. These methods can teach language production, and some aspects of the pronunciation, but it’s very hard to learn prosody without immersing yourself in extended listening.
Regarding Portuguese, I can understand a lot more than I can say. If I hear directions such as ‘à direita’ or 'à esquerda', I know they’ll correspond to the Spanish 'a la derecha' or 'a la izquierda', but I couldn’t produce the original Portuguese word. Back on topic, I found a very thorough way to learn Irish (Gaeilge) was to attend a Gaeltacht. This consisted of a four week course in an all Irish speaking area of the country. As Irish is taught in schools the courses begin at quite an advanced level. I think they might run similar courses for Gaelic on the Isle of Lewis. Edited by DaraghM on 25 October 2011 at 12:18pm 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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