IT/NL Not knowing where this is going log (Language Learning Log) Language Learning Forum

IT/NL Not knowing where this is going log
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numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6774 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 65 of 112 21 January 2011 at 3:00pm \| IP Logged
	[nl] I've finished my LR experiment with the Jules Verne book. I basically just listened through the whole audio and followed along in the text. Sometimes I would try to actively read the text, anticipating the speaker. But this made me stumble over unknown words and lose pace because the recording is quite fast spoken. Sometimes I would try to read along and out loud, a kind of shadowing. But for the most part I just followed along passively, while listening. I'm not sure if any of these variations has anything more to offer. I should add that this is not "real" LR, because real LR is about following along with a text in L1 while listening in L2. I tried this too, with an English version of the same text, but it didn't work for me at all. The sentence structure in Dutch makes this very painful, because you can never keep a clear picture of what corresponds to what. Many of Jules's sentences are long and flowery, so they can span many lines. You then have to match the English verb at the start with the Dutch verb somewhere at the end, and the many subclauses which don't always come in the same order, and it doesn't work at all. Worse still, the sentences were often split unevenly between the Dutch and the English, so that the piece of Dutch I was expecting to see in English didn't appear until the following sentence somewhere. In any event, I find this kind of reading more demanding and less fun than regular reading. It's more constraining on the one hand, but also leaves me more passive on the other. It's certainly useful to have odd words pronounced for me, but I don't seem to sink into the story equally well when doing this. My next piece of business is to listen through the audiobook by itself and see how well I can follow it. It should be much easier now. But the real test will be to see how well I can follow a different book with a different reader. I have another book lined up for more LR after this, so I plan to repeat the whole thing. After that... I might not feel like doing it anymore, we'll see how much it seems to have helped. Edited by numerodix on 21 January 2011 at 3:01pm 1 person has voted this message useful
numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6774 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 66 of 112 22 January 2011 at 4:16pm \| IP Logged
	[nl] Because the process of learning is so long, I can't help but do some meta thinking about how it seems to work. For example, I've noticed that understanding is not the kind of skill that will atrophy. I've had moments of pause in my Dutch program, sometimes as long as 2 weeks perhaps, and straight after those I've returned to my activity without incurring any penalty. On the other hand, reading fluency seems to somewhat momentum oriented when concerned with challenging text. The book I'm reading now is tougher than the ones before it, and I've noticed that after taking a few days' break from it, I found it tough to resume. But now after 2-3 days it's going better again. There seems to be a certain heuristic at work in this kind of situation where the amount of unknown words is high, that gets established after a bit and allows me to read quite comfortably. Then, if I take a break, it falls away and I'm back to struggling more. But if I pick up something easier to read, I'm not facing the same level of difficulty, and there it doesn't seem to be any momentum at play. 1 person has voted this message useful
numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6774 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 67 of 112 23 January 2011 at 12:01am \| IP Logged
	[it] I notice that I'm not quite comfortable reading certain kinds of things yet. To date I've read literature more than anything, and that has become quite easy. But reading the newspapers feels a bit unpleasant (aside from the unpleasant content about never ending political scandals), I don't know that language as well, the formal language. Right now I still want to keep reading literature, because it's the best reading material I have. But a lot of it is a bit older and I should probably rotate in more contemporary books. To date I've read two books that were written in a legalistic/formal kind of style, and it actually went quite okay. But I do need more practice with this kind of prose, thought it's unfortunate that it's harder to find anything interesting. 1 person has voted this message useful
numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6774 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 68 of 112 25 January 2011 at 2:07pm \| IP Logged
	[nl] So my grammar is a bit lacking and I'm well aware of it. At this point it's mostly based on intuition built with Michel Thomas, Assimil and reading. I had planned to do a proper formal grammar study of Dutch, but it hadn't materialized yet. Especially because my biggest problem was listening comprehension, and I wanted to fix that first. Today I picked up a textbook again and started working with it. Quite soon I realized that the exercises were too boring to keep me engaged. As I looked through the whole textbook I came to realize that I don't think I will learn very much from it. Not because it doesn't contain any information, but because my intuitive grasp on Dutch is too high in order to engage with these teaching materials. It feels like re-reading a book where you know the whole story but you just want to go over it again to see if you hadn't missed some important details here and there. Simply put: there isn't enough new content for me to maintain my interest in it. So I've decided to forgo grammar study in Dutch. I think I'm more likely to succeed by keeping on reading and watching tv. It's going to take a long time before I can iron out the last grammar bugs, but then my writing is still faulty in Italian where I did go full steam with grammar. In the end it's a matter of skill. And whether you gain that from focused study or just assimilation and observation is not important. In fact, I think that I needed to study Italian so closely because I had no bite at the language, I had no shortcuts to give me access to it. It was "all new". Dutch is not, and never has been. I begin to wonder that maybe if it hadn't been for my lack of listening comprehension I might have assimilated a whole lot of it passively already. 1 person has voted this message useful
Oasis88 Senior Member Australia Joined 5696 days ago 160 posts - 187 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Italian	Message 69 of 112 26 January 2011 at 11:20pm \| IP Logged
	I like the way you think mate. You seem to be very honest and informed about what needs to be done next. This attitude is what I'm trying to adopt... just start the language and then make refinements and modifications as you go. Setting yourself a rigid plan can be demoralising when you jump ship, yet a fluid and informed strategy is not only more effective, but can only be put together once you actually getting stuck into the language since this is the only time when you find out where your strengths and weaknesses lay. 1 person has voted this message useful
numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6774 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 70 of 112 27 January 2011 at 1:28am \| IP Logged
	Well you have to improvise to keep finding activities that are both motivating and that help you learn. Thankfully there is a big enough supply of resources and ideas to draw upon, so I don't often get stuck in a situation where "I have to do this or I won't get anywhere". 1 person has voted this message useful
numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6774 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 71 of 112 28 January 2011 at 12:28pm \| IP Logged
	[it] Sometimes I love my brain. > El Real Madrid ha ganado los dos últimos partidos, Mallorca y Sevilla, con dos goles de Benzema, que vienen a reforzar su autoestima y la creencia en el club que tienen a un buen delantero. Il Real Madrid ha vinto le ultime due partite, con la Mallora e la Sevilla, con due gol di Benzema, che è venuto a rafforzare l'autostima (have to rephrase here) e la fede nel club che ci tiene a un buon attacante. > Sin embargo, las últimas semanas no han sido buenas para el atacante francés, que se ha visto en medio del fuego cruzado entre la insistentes peticiones de Mourinho por fichar a un nuevo '9'. Sin dall'inizio, le ultime settimane non sono state buone per il attacante francese, chi si ha trovato nel mezzo del fuoco incrociato intorno alle insistenze di Mourinho per acquistare un nuovo numero nove. Did I mention that I have never studied Spanish, not even for 5 minutes? 1 person has voted this message useful
numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6774 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 72 of 112 02 February 2011 at 12:00pm \| IP Logged
	I recall someone suggested a vocabulary estimation technique at one point: take a dictionary, pick a letter with few words (eg. U) and count the number of words you know/don't know. This can then be used as a sampling to estimate the known/unknown ratio in the dictionary as a whole. I was remembering that today as I glanced at my bookshelf and saw three dictionaries. Collins pocket: francese (ita-fra bidirectional), 35,000 entries Van Dale: Pocket-woordenboek: Nederlands als tweede taal, 14,000 entries kosmos mini woordenboek: Noors\|Nederlands (bidirectional), 10,000 entries ita: 53/79 letter U => 67% of 35,000 {intermediate/fluent} fra: 26/39 letter U => 66% of 35,000 {beginner} ned: 65/113 letter J => 57% of 14,000 {beginner/intermediate} nor: 59/62 letter J => 95% of 10,000 {native} As you can see from the results, it's a pretty flawed methodology. The French sample is by far the lowest quality, with the fewest words in the sample, thus least representative of the dictionary as a whole. But there are other problems. For one, I don't judge words the same way in every language. In French the meaningful criterion at my low level of knowledge is "would I be able to infer this word in context?". There is also the compounding factor that too many French words look like their Italian lookalikes, whether or not they really mean the same thing. I can map the French onto Italian, but that doesn't tell me whether I know the meaning, because I may never have seen the French word before. Thus Italian seems clearly to help understand French, but just as much makes it harder to measure that understanding. With Dutch, this is far less of a problem. Dutch words look far less like Norwegian, thus reducing the risk of "false positives". But the sampling here suffers from the use of a beginner's dictionary which lists the same word twice when they want to distinguish between grammatical categories of the word (one entry as a noun, one as a verb), so the known/unknown judgment is a different one to me. I did not attempt to compensate for this. Finally, in Norwegian I ask "do I understand this word on its own?", a far stricter criterion than all the others. Edited by numerodix on 02 February 2011 at 12:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful

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numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6774 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 65 of 112 21 January 2011 at 3:00pm \| IP Logged
	[nl] I've finished my LR experiment with the Jules Verne book. I basically just listened through the whole audio and followed along in the text. Sometimes I would try to actively read the text, anticipating the speaker. But this made me stumble over unknown words and lose pace because the recording is quite fast spoken. Sometimes I would try to read along and out loud, a kind of shadowing. But for the most part I just followed along passively, while listening. I'm not sure if any of these variations has anything more to offer. I should add that this is not "real" LR, because real LR is about following along with a text in L1 while listening in L2. I tried this too, with an English version of the same text, but it didn't work for me at all. The sentence structure in Dutch makes this very painful, because you can never keep a clear picture of what corresponds to what. Many of Jules's sentences are long and flowery, so they can span many lines. You then have to match the English verb at the start with the Dutch verb somewhere at the end, and the many subclauses which don't always come in the same order, and it doesn't work at all. Worse still, the sentences were often split unevenly between the Dutch and the English, so that the piece of Dutch I was expecting to see in English didn't appear until the following sentence somewhere. In any event, I find this kind of reading more demanding and less fun than regular reading. It's more constraining on the one hand, but also leaves me more passive on the other. It's certainly useful to have odd words pronounced for me, but I don't seem to sink into the story equally well when doing this. My next piece of business is to listen through the audiobook by itself and see how well I can follow it. It should be much easier now. But the real test will be to see how well I can follow a different book with a different reader. I have another book lined up for more LR after this, so I plan to repeat the whole thing. After that... I might not feel like doing it anymore, we'll see how much it seems to have helped. Edited by numerodix on 21 January 2011 at 3:01pm 1 person has voted this message useful
numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6774 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 66 of 112 22 January 2011 at 4:16pm \| IP Logged
	[nl] Because the process of learning is so long, I can't help but do some meta thinking about how it seems to work. For example, I've noticed that understanding is not the kind of skill that will atrophy. I've had moments of pause in my Dutch program, sometimes as long as 2 weeks perhaps, and straight after those I've returned to my activity without incurring any penalty. On the other hand, reading fluency seems to somewhat momentum oriented when concerned with challenging text. The book I'm reading now is tougher than the ones before it, and I've noticed that after taking a few days' break from it, I found it tough to resume. But now after 2-3 days it's going better again. There seems to be a certain heuristic at work in this kind of situation where the amount of unknown words is high, that gets established after a bit and allows me to read quite comfortably. Then, if I take a break, it falls away and I'm back to struggling more. But if I pick up something easier to read, I'm not facing the same level of difficulty, and there it doesn't seem to be any momentum at play. 1 person has voted this message useful
numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6774 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 67 of 112 23 January 2011 at 12:01am \| IP Logged
	[it] I notice that I'm not quite comfortable reading certain kinds of things yet. To date I've read literature more than anything, and that has become quite easy. But reading the newspapers feels a bit unpleasant (aside from the unpleasant content about never ending political scandals), I don't know that language as well, the formal language. Right now I still want to keep reading literature, because it's the best reading material I have. But a lot of it is a bit older and I should probably rotate in more contemporary books. To date I've read two books that were written in a legalistic/formal kind of style, and it actually went quite okay. But I do need more practice with this kind of prose, thought it's unfortunate that it's harder to find anything interesting. 1 person has voted this message useful
numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6774 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 68 of 112 25 January 2011 at 2:07pm \| IP Logged
	[nl] So my grammar is a bit lacking and I'm well aware of it. At this point it's mostly based on intuition built with Michel Thomas, Assimil and reading. I had planned to do a proper formal grammar study of Dutch, but it hadn't materialized yet. Especially because my biggest problem was listening comprehension, and I wanted to fix that first. Today I picked up a textbook again and started working with it. Quite soon I realized that the exercises were too boring to keep me engaged. As I looked through the whole textbook I came to realize that I don't think I will learn very much from it. Not because it doesn't contain any information, but because my intuitive grasp on Dutch is too high in order to engage with these teaching materials. It feels like re-reading a book where you know the whole story but you just want to go over it again to see if you hadn't missed some important details here and there. Simply put: there isn't enough new content for me to maintain my interest in it. So I've decided to forgo grammar study in Dutch. I think I'm more likely to succeed by keeping on reading and watching tv. It's going to take a long time before I can iron out the last grammar bugs, but then my writing is still faulty in Italian where I did go full steam with grammar. In the end it's a matter of skill. And whether you gain that from focused study or just assimilation and observation is not important. In fact, I think that I needed to study Italian so closely because I had no bite at the language, I had no shortcuts to give me access to it. It was "all new". Dutch is not, and never has been. I begin to wonder that maybe if it hadn't been for my lack of listening comprehension I might have assimilated a whole lot of it passively already. 1 person has voted this message useful
Oasis88 Senior Member Australia Joined 5696 days ago 160 posts - 187 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Italian	Message 69 of 112 26 January 2011 at 11:20pm \| IP Logged
	I like the way you think mate. You seem to be very honest and informed about what needs to be done next. This attitude is what I'm trying to adopt... just start the language and then make refinements and modifications as you go. Setting yourself a rigid plan can be demoralising when you jump ship, yet a fluid and informed strategy is not only more effective, but can only be put together once you actually getting stuck into the language since this is the only time when you find out where your strengths and weaknesses lay. 1 person has voted this message useful
numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6774 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 70 of 112 27 January 2011 at 1:28am \| IP Logged
	Well you have to improvise to keep finding activities that are both motivating and that help you learn. Thankfully there is a big enough supply of resources and ideas to draw upon, so I don't often get stuck in a situation where "I have to do this or I won't get anywhere". 1 person has voted this message useful
numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6774 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 71 of 112 28 January 2011 at 12:28pm \| IP Logged
	[it] Sometimes I love my brain. > El Real Madrid ha ganado los dos últimos partidos, Mallorca y Sevilla, con dos goles de Benzema, que vienen a reforzar su autoestima y la creencia en el club que tienen a un buen delantero. Il Real Madrid ha vinto le ultime due partite, con la Mallora e la Sevilla, con due gol di Benzema, che è venuto a rafforzare l'autostima (have to rephrase here) e la fede nel club che ci tiene a un buon attacante. > Sin embargo, las últimas semanas no han sido buenas para el atacante francés, que se ha visto en medio del fuego cruzado entre la insistentes peticiones de Mourinho por fichar a un nuevo '9'. Sin dall'inizio, le ultime settimane non sono state buone per il attacante francese, chi si ha trovato nel mezzo del fuoco incrociato intorno alle insistenze di Mourinho per acquistare un nuovo numero nove. Did I mention that I have never studied Spanish, not even for 5 minutes? 1 person has voted this message useful
numerodix Trilingual Hexaglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 6774 days ago 856 posts - 1226 votes Speaks: English^C2, Norwegian, Polish*, Italian, Dutch, French Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin	Message 72 of 112 02 February 2011 at 12:00pm \| IP Logged
	I recall someone suggested a vocabulary estimation technique at one point: take a dictionary, pick a letter with few words (eg. U) and count the number of words you know/don't know. This can then be used as a sampling to estimate the known/unknown ratio in the dictionary as a whole. I was remembering that today as I glanced at my bookshelf and saw three dictionaries. Collins pocket: francese (ita-fra bidirectional), 35,000 entries Van Dale: Pocket-woordenboek: Nederlands als tweede taal, 14,000 entries kosmos mini woordenboek: Noors\|Nederlands (bidirectional), 10,000 entries ita: 53/79 letter U => 67% of 35,000 {intermediate/fluent} fra: 26/39 letter U => 66% of 35,000 {beginner} ned: 65/113 letter J => 57% of 14,000 {beginner/intermediate} nor: 59/62 letter J => 95% of 10,000 {native} As you can see from the results, it's a pretty flawed methodology. The French sample is by far the lowest quality, with the fewest words in the sample, thus least representative of the dictionary as a whole. But there are other problems. For one, I don't judge words the same way in every language. In French the meaningful criterion at my low level of knowledge is "would I be able to infer this word in context?". There is also the compounding factor that too many French words look like their Italian lookalikes, whether or not they really mean the same thing. I can map the French onto Italian, but that doesn't tell me whether I know the meaning, because I may never have seen the French word before. Thus Italian seems clearly to help understand French, but just as much makes it harder to measure that understanding. With Dutch, this is far less of a problem. Dutch words look far less like Norwegian, thus reducing the risk of "false positives". But the sampling here suffers from the use of a beginner's dictionary which lists the same word twice when they want to distinguish between grammatical categories of the word (one entry as a noun, one as a verb), so the known/unknown judgment is a different one to me. I did not attempt to compensate for this. Finally, in Norwegian I ask "do I understand this word on its own?", a far stricter criterion than all the others. Edited by numerodix on 02 February 2011 at 12:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful