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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5533 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 25 of 170 06 October 2014 at 1:30am | IP Logged | ||
That's really impressive. The research I've seen on this subject gives a pretty wide variety of numbers—I've seen claims that typical students catch up to native peers academically within 5–7 years (which I linked above), and within 3 years, and also that some individual students perform at grade-level within a year (there's pretty huge individual variation). Other researchers claim that teachers are frequently fooled by a child's good accent and high conversational proficiency, and tend to overlook academic weaknesses until students wind up struggling. Many of the families that I know personally are actually struggling with the other side of this problem: Keeping a family language alive without a surrounding community that uses it. Even if a language is used extensively within the home, the kids often struggle with it. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| victorhart Bilingual Tetraglot Groupie United States mandarinexperiment.o Joined 3708 days ago 66 posts - 155 votes Speaks: English*, Portuguese*, Spanish, French Studies: Mandarin | Message 26 of 170 06 October 2014 at 3:04am | IP Logged | ||
Luhmann, I agree that learning high frequency vocabulary would be an effective addition to my Mandarin acquisition strategy. I have written a coursebook and developed an entire methodology for Brazilians learning English as beginners, and one of the premises is the use of word corpora to ensure that the highest frequency vocabulary is taught to these first semester students. We have developed a French coursebook and methodology along the same lines. However, there is something very interesting about digesting a large volume of authentic material in a natural way. You won't learn terms that you hear once or twice. Rather, you will assimilate terms that you hear repeated again and again. I tend to only learn a term that I hear repeated dozens or hundreds of times. These terms are, of course, your high frequency vocabulary. So, it's not a question of learning Mandarin or conducting my experiment. Yes, I am probably sacrificing speed of learning for the sake of the enjoyment that my method provides and for the other benefits of conducting such an experiment. But it's not either/or. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| luhmann Senior Member Brazil Joined 5334 days ago 156 posts - 271 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: Mandarin, French, English, Italian, Spanish, Persian, Arabic (classical) | Message 27 of 170 06 October 2014 at 3:16am | IP Logged | ||
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ok, you seem to know what you are doing, but I had to be sure :)
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 28 of 170 06 October 2014 at 8:25am | IP Logged | ||
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You've argued well and obviously have some experience, so I'll take off my "this is
just silly" glasses. :) However, I don't think your argument comparing people who learn using "traditional" methods with people who are immersed holds up very well. That sounds like a false dichotomy to me. I completely agree that immersion and massive amounts of input are keys to getting comfortable in a language, but that doesn't mean that nothing but input is the right way to go. Have you heard about the L/R (Listen/Read) method? It's a method where you read a book in your native language and at the same time listen to the corresponding audiobook in your target language. That's a sensible way of doing massive input learning, though also not possible for a complete beginner not aided by cognates. Anyway, most people who have tried the "TV method" have mostly done hours of passive watching, often inspired by tales of us Swedes and our fantastic English all being due to not dubbing TV shows. If you're taking a somewhat more thought-out method, and you're actively trying to figure things out, you might have more luck, but I'm still convinced that you're wasting a lot of time. Mandarin is many, many times more difficult to learn for a speaker of Standard Western European than is another European language. A factor of 10 is not exaggerated when we talk about ordinary methods, and with this method, I'd put it even higher. If you were doing this with German I'd say go for it, but Mandarin? Anyway, good luck and prove us wrong! 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6910 days ago 4250 posts - 5711 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 29 of 170 06 October 2014 at 4:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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What Ari said.
If one is about to do massive input learning, it can never be wrong to have an idea of what is going on. The native language helps you understand the target language. In fact, I've done L-R with varying results: 1. several long books in Spanish - good results 2. a short book in Chinese - bad results I was familiar with all stories beforehand, but the lack of cognates in Chinese simply made the process so darn difficult/different. OK, body language and other visual cues can give you an idea of what's going on in a TV series, but that's still less than having access to the actual story in a language you already understand. Good luck! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5431 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 30 of 170 07 October 2014 at 1:53pm | IP Logged | ||
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After initially dismissing this idea as another half-baked concoction that we see from time to time here at HTLAL,
I've change my thinking somewhat. My question is : Why would a high-achieving, experienced, expert language learner try something that everybody around here thinks is doomed to failure? What does he know that we don't? I take as given that there is no need or desire to learn Mandarin quickly for any practical purposes. This is basically an enjoyable fun experiment to see how much language can be absorbed passively. The reason most people here believe this will not work is that the material is nearly totally incomprehensible and therefore there is no way for the learner to even start building any kind of model of the language. Although people may not like to formally study grammar, the plain fact of the matter is that if you want to speak or comprehend a language you have to have some kind of grammar of the language in your head. How it gets there is another matter. I take note that there is some use of English subtitles and a program meant for teaching Mandarin to young children. But, if I understand correctly, the thrust of this approach is to simply watch movies in Mandarin and "absorb" the language naturally, much the way children do. Sitting on a couch watching a DVD is not exactly the same learning situation as that of a young child growing up in a home continuously surrounded by spontaneous language teachers. What I will admit is that the visual element does add an element of understanding that certainly can help with deciphering some of the meaning. That is exactly why I have always believed that when one wants to look at the comprehension of movies one has to take into account the picture. If we take something as simple as learning to count from one to ten in Mandarin, how many weeks of watching at 30 minutes a day are required for this? And how does one know for sure that the results are correct? One alternative method of learning would be to simply call up a Youtube video on counting in Mandarin. You could learn to count or at least understanding counting in less than 10 minutes. All that said, I think that the language learning aspect of this experiment is largely secondary. The real goal here is to have a good time and blog about it.That's OK too. Edited by s_allard on 07 October 2014 at 1:55pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 5060 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 31 of 170 07 October 2014 at 6:32pm | IP Logged | ||
Kuhl, Tsao and Liu have actually done a study showing that infants with exposure to Mandarin only through TV fail to learn aspects of the language that infants who had the same amount of exposure to a Mandarin speaker learned. That's not to say children learn nothing from video (and indeed Kuhl's lab shows some effects of passive exposure), but I should not even have to say that watching a bunch of videos has almost nothing to do with first- language acquisition other than that it doesn't involve explicit study of grammar. People like to say they are learning like children, but they almost never are. How many people here try learning language by listening to simplified input all day long, using a silent period followed by a period where they don't speak but explore the language's sounds, followed by a one-word stage, followed by simple word combinations, followed by sentences? All the while interacting with native speakers every day, but not trying to have adult conversations? Ha! That would be a cool experiment, but too hard to implement. So yeah, try it, have fun. People have failed many times to acquire a language passively, but the OP seems to have stacked the cards in his favor (other than choosing a hard language). But it is not any more "natural" than extensive reading, Lingq, Assimil, SRS, or basically anything out there people are using. All are technologies, many are more based on learning theory than passive video absorption, and none (of the major ones) are at all like first language acquisition*. *Well, 100% immersion is kind of similar to what young children do when they learn a second language, like when they enter school in a new language. But this method is in some ways a polar opposite of the video method! 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| syrichw Diglot Newbie Taiwan syricfreising.blogsp Joined 4268 days ago 6 posts - 10 votes Speaks: Mandarin*, English | Message 32 of 170 09 October 2014 at 10:23am | IP Logged | ||
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This is the first time I saw this thread and I am actually doing the same experiment now. I learned German for four years, acquired basic fluency but got entirely tired in learning grammar and memorizing vocabulary. So I decided to do something different. I started to watch Korean drama without any Chinese subtitles from late June and acquired my first word in Korean after a week. I haven't used any dictionary, textbooks or audio course as reference. I have done almost two hours a day, mostly in metro and I have already watched 12 TV series (16-20 episodes each). I have spent more or less 200 hours on it. My friend (who is a polyglot good at South East Asian languages) suggested me to watch anime instead, so I might switch to Doraemon after I finish watching 13th series.
I could say my progress is slow since I could hardly speak anything except the most common phrases in Korean. But there are a bunch of familiar sounds in my head and I could imitate intonation of the language pretty well. I have lots of friends studying Korean taking the traditional method. They are able to read in Korean but could hardly speak anything. Therefore I decided to take the adverse path by training myself to become an illiterate speaker in Korean and learn how to read/write later. Please keep going and I will happy to see your results! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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