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From the grammar book to your mouth | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5335 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 1 of 58 12 February 2012 at 5:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I am having a Russian grammer marathon this week end. Someone said that to understand Russian grammar, you just need to grab a grammar book, and just study your brains out. The problem is that that is not really working for me. I can do the grammar excercises, I am not stupid. I read the rule, answer the questions in the book, and mostly get the answers right. The problem is that this does not translate into me being able to use these structures correctly, because that is not the way my brain is wired. I need to hear the structures used repeatedly in real speech, in order to get it.
Once when I started a Russian course, the teacher put me through a test, and was amazed at how much grammar I knew. Or so she thought. When I knew how to say coffe with milk and tea without sugar correctly , she assumed that I knew the underlying grammatical structure, which of course I didn't. I just knew how to say tea with milk and tea without sugar, because I had heard it so many times, probably in Pimsleur. Precisely since I know this, I have been trying to listen to Pimsleur, Michel Thomas and everything else I have acces to in the way of audio, but it takes enormous amounts of time "to learn like a child does" when you are no longer a child. Does any of you have any good ways of getting the grammar out from the grammar book and into your mouth, preferably via your brain? 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ellsworth Senior Member United States Joined 4958 days ago 345 posts - 528 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Swedish, Finnish, Icelandic, Irish | Message 2 of 58 12 February 2012 at 6:30pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Well what I have been doing with Russian is making a list of nouns and verbs that can be
used together in various different tenses, cases and moods, memorizing that list including all their forms, then just making up and speaking aloud tons of sentences with those words until it begins to become natural. Then I make another list and so on. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6583 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 3 of 58 12 February 2012 at 7:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
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A classic technique is to pick a grammar pattern, study how to do it in the grammar book, then go through your day trying to find ways of using it. So if you're working on the past tense, you say things in your head like "I was in the bathroom just now", "Shakespeare wrote this play", "I hope you enjoyed your food, Mr. Snuffles!" and so on. If you want to get to speaking quickly, I suspect this is the way to do it. I haven't really used the technique much myself, as I haven't been in a situation where I need to speak the language but aren't familiar with the grammar, but I suspect it's good, and I know it works with vocabulary.
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| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5767 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 4 of 58 12 February 2012 at 8:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Tell me the rules, I'll form correct sentences. And not learn how to do it later.
I help myself by this: If available, I listen to grammar explanations and ignore the instructions to use the learnt actively, but try to pick up how it works so I understand it when it's used. The next time I recognize that grammar point in a context that I want to be able to say, I memorize the sentence. I then try to remember the explanation, or when it's a new grammar point I try to figure it out on my own and afterwards I look up the explanation in my books (it's very important for me to use my own brain to make sense of things). Once I feel relatively sure about that one sentences, I learn new ones (or start to pick them up) and I 'turn them around' in my mind until they're aligned with the first sentence and I can 'see' the pattern as clearly as possible (this means turning around word order if necessary, trying to find rhymes, replacing words from one phrase with another until the sentence patterns starts to 'make sense' to me). When I feel like the sentence pattern has settled in my brain, I try using it in conversation. -> think about the grammar point actively whenever I encounter it -> create a good memory item for one example and use it as the basis for the following generalization -> do not allow myself to 'practice' using my short term memory and immediate feedback as that only teaches me to rely on my short term memory and other people's feedback -> play around and allow for a set of possible rules and conclusions to be formed without anybody else confusing me -> once that's done, try in out and get as much feedback as possible: learn how to use it. Edited by Bao on 12 February 2012 at 10:48pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5227 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 5 of 58 13 February 2012 at 5:20am | IP Logged | |||||
Isn't this a bit like going to the doctor to tell him what you have, and what he should prescribe you? ;) OK, jokes aside, I think if you're so sure what the root of the problem is (provided you're also right) you should try to do exactly what you said: Let's say you just read a rule off a grammar book; it will surely come with a few examples, right? Isn't that "real" language? Play those in your head a few times. If that's not enough for them to stick (usually works for me) try speaking aloud. If that's still not enough because you feel saying stuff yourself is kind of cheating, get one of those little fellow learners you brought to this world to say it for you. If it won't stick yet because they're not natives, write those things down and get one of our native friends to use them for real for you. Also, natives will be able to check alternate uses you can try to make up on your own. If that still doesn't work, maybe what you need is something else, or we may dwell into this a bit further. I'm sorry I can't tell you how *I* do it, it just happens. I think it may be because I hate reviewing so much I just get myself to read it for real and not get my head up until it's "in" or don't read it until I'm really ready to learn. I'm human, so I need to review, but if feel I'm reviewing too much it becomes kind of a mental self-kicking that has worked wonders so far.
I started Russian with Pimsleur alone, just for fun, but it drove me up the wall. At first I wasn't sure of what I was hearing and I missed quite a lot of soft consonants and the like, just because I didn't know exactly what to listen for. I checked with my friends, and I learned the alphabet and tried to write things down -- my friends informed me that I had developed a good ear but that wasn't enough to get the spelling right. I more or less worked around that, Pimsleur has little vocabulary, but then I hit the final wall. If you have learned languages before, it is just too damn slow. It feels like walking in the dark with a candle because you didn't bring a torchlight -- unlike total newbies you're very likely to have a zillion question but there's nobody around to answer them. I have tons of good Russian books in text and audio (read by good actors) if that's of any use for you. I'd say it doesn't get more real without bugging real speakers, but it may be hard to locate concrete examples of grammar uses... Edited by mrwarper on 13 February 2012 at 5:25am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tanya b Senior Member United States Joined 4779 days ago 159 posts - 518 votes Speaks: Russian | Message 6 of 58 13 February 2012 at 6:58am | IP Logged | |||||
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I recommend Living Language Ultimate Russian, which very methodically explains the cases--Accusative, Dative, Prepositional, Instrumental, and Genitive. Thanks to that book, Russian cases have never been an obstacle for me. It also introduces the learner very gently to the relation between case and gender. I only studied one page per day, and never attempted anything as ambitious as a grammar marathon. I prefer the building-blocks-learning pyramid approach, with lots of tedious review. The book even allows the learner to describe the Russian case system entirely in Russian, including examples.
My weakness has always been Russian verbs, so I recommend Katzner's English-Russian Dictionary which does a decent job of explaining verb declensions. Also "501 Russian Verbs" is a good resource. Happy Marathoning and Zhelayu Vam Udachi! Edited by tanya b on 13 February 2012 at 7:02am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| hrhenry Octoglot Senior Member United States languagehopper.blogs Joined 5131 days ago 1871 posts - 3642 votes Speaks: English*, SpanishC2, ItalianC2, Norwegian, Catalan, Galician, Turkish, Portuguese Studies: Polish, Indonesian, Ojibwe | Message 7 of 58 13 February 2012 at 7:49am | IP Logged | |||||
Sort of related, but how are you finding the MT course? I ask because I went through it with Polish. In the advanced course, they thoroughly covered cases. By the time the advanced course came out though, I'd already studied cases elsewhere, and it caused me no end of grief. I had a hard time remembering when to use what declension. So when I finally got the advanced course with its cases, it seemed like a godsend. Granted, by then I already had the knowledge, but with the MT course, it made it seem so effortless. And I found I could construct what I needed to with what was taught in the advanced course. It just made sense. I would imagine the Russian course is similar in how it covers difficult grammar points. I would just keep going with MT. I'm guessing any problems you're encountering right now will eventually be addressed in the course. R. == R. == 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5335 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 8 of 58 13 February 2012 at 9:32am | IP Logged | |||||
I am sure it will, but I sort of went the wrong way with Michel Thomas, so I am still waiting for the good parts. The thing is, that by the time I had heard about Michel Thomas, I figured my level would be such that I would be able to manage the vocabulary course. That I did, but I then realized that since I had not done the two previous courses, I lacked the grammatical framework. I have therefore gone through the foundation course (which came close to pure agony)and have now started on the advanced course. I am quite happy with it, and I am counting on the combination of that, Pimsleur, Sosiedi (which is actaully very good at drilling in grammar) Assimil and my grammar marathon to make some of the grammar penetrate my thick skull. After this weekend I feel that even though I am probably not able to spontaneously say all the nouns in their correct cases, at least I recognize them, and understand why the ending is what it is. I am hoping that this would be a first step towards actually mastering them. However I have no clue when it comes to adjective endings and their cases, but I guess that will be a task for next week. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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