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How to Become a Polyglot by D. Spivak | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots |  | |
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6942 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes  Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 41 of 73 23 February 2007 at 10:03am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
I was referring to memorization of vocabulary, not grammar. Also, when speaking of memorizing vocabulary, I wasn't referring to learning to discriminate different meanings of a word or developing a refined feel for its shades of meaning in various contexts, which do have to be acquired for the most part, but just the act of recalling the most basic meaning(s) or a word or idiomatic phrase instead of drawing a blank on it. As an experiment, I've been trying to 'acquire' basic vocabulary in German by reading through several, rather than just one, introductory German textbooks and courses, with the idea of seeing the same words over and over and thereby painlessly 'acquiring' them without any conscious memorization. The conclusion so far is that it has resulted in an unnecessary waste of time - had I been copying new words in a notebook and just looking over the list regularly, like I did in the past when starting out with Spanish, I would have made a lot more progress by now with one textbook than I've made with several. Speaking of later stages of learning, many people in the forum find flashcards very useful and won't hear about just 'acquiring' the basic meanings of all new words. This issue seems outside of "comprehensible input".
Whoever is lucky enough to have someone as experienced as you are as his or her teacher, I am sure will do no less, if they care to learn at all, and a teacher can always tweak the method to fit the individual student. Whether any particular forum memeber new to languages will be quite as successfull with any particular self-study course is another story. There is the general theory and then there is the implementation - one can't always find a well-designed course along these lines. Where one exists and is widely available, people swear by it - French in Action is one example. Otherwise, one may need some old-fashioned help, like a textbook or a grammar.
No doubt about that. The question is only how little learning is too little.
No doubt about that too. However, before one learns to use a grammatical structure in spontaneous speech, one has to learn to understand (intuitively) the construction passively, which is facilitated by having been told of the rule's existence and having looked over a few examples of its use. So, working hard on memorizing a ton of grammar rules is a waste of time, but not having seen them at all can also be rather unproductive, unless one has a top of the line course that is specially designed to ease one into grammar in a natural way - such courses are few and far between, and for many languages may not exist at all.
A good objective criterion here is, when I am writing and come across a dubious construction, whether I can stare at it and, based on intuition alone, decide whether this or that choice feels right or wrong. I know that, for example, with articles, which are absent in my native Russian, I regularly run into situatons when I either can't decide or am left with too many lingering doubts that I don't normally experience with other choices that have to be made. So, it's one area that needs work. There are a few others. What are 'targeted input' and 'facilitated production' in layman's terms? Edited by frenkeld on 26 February 2007 at 7:11am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| FrenchSilkPie Senior Member United States Joined 6616 days ago 125 posts - 130 votes Speaks: English* Studies: French | Message 42 of 73 24 February 2007 at 12:30am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Well, what I have been doing is listen to French in Action, and by watching each episode, I painlessly acquire so many words...some I didn't even knew I knew until I watched it again and discovered I *have* been learning. Maybe it varies person by person. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6942 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 43 of 73 24 February 2007 at 10:01am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Generally, it does vary from person to person. However, I specifically cited "French in Action" as the course that seems to be universally liked and that has stirred very little controversy, unlike, for example, Assimil, which is also excellent, but does not seem to work for quite the same percentage of people, although it does seem to work for many. Perhaps having video cues accounts for the difference. I have French in Action part I DVD's, and I like the videos a lot too, which is precisely the point I was making - 'comprehensible input' is an important general idea whose effectiveness in any given case may depend on the implementation, and with any given implementation will also vary from person to person. Also, one format may not be equally suitable for teaching all the languages. It seems generally true that one eventually acquires a lot of vocabulary through immersion, and for many even just by reading a lot or watching a lot of TV or movies. Anyone who has lived abroad knows it, and anyone who has read a lot, or watched a lot of TV or movies, knows it. At the same time, individual differences (and schedules!) may make the process too slow, so many people prefer to speed things up by writing down vocabulary in some form and reviewing it regularly. Edited by frenkeld on 24 February 2007 at 6:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| LilleOSC Senior Member United States lille.theoffside.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6690 days ago 545 posts - 546 votes 4 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: French, Arabic (Written) | Message 44 of 73 24 February 2007 at 8:51pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
That was an interesting read.Thank you. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Linguamor Decaglot Senior Member United States Joined 6617 days ago 469 posts - 599 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, French, Norwegian, Portuguese, Dutch | Message 45 of 73 25 February 2007 at 1:48am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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FrenchSilkPie, you have quoted frenkeld and attributed the quote to me.
Edited by Linguamor on 25 February 2007 at 1:49am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6702 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 46 of 73 25 February 2007 at 11:27am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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'Comprehensible input' is something we all want to find, but for a beginner there are very few sources outside textbooks and sentences uttered by a teacher. The problem is that if you don't know any words and no grammar even the simplest text will be incomprehensible. With a related language there is a chance that you can guess some of the meaning, but even then you have to invest a lot of trial-and-error and brainpower to guess the rules of the language and get a reasonably big vocabulary. Even for a fairly advanced learner it may take hours of reading or listening before you have met enough cases of a certain phenomenon to learn what it is all about, or even to discover that there is a problem.
For that reason some of us feel that the best strategy is to meet the foreign language armed with as many pre-learned words and as much formal knowledge of the grammar as possible. As Frenkeld mentioned you don't need to know all the different meanings of a word before you meet it in actual utterances; the very fact that it is a known word makes it a lot more likely that you will catch it on the fly, and then you may find that it has been used with a new meaning. Hurrah, that's one piece of aquired learning. If it had been totally unknown chances are that it would just have passed through your head, and you would have learnt nothing. I know that children don't use dictionaries and grammars, but instead they have parents and comrades that put simple words and phrases into their heads (if necessary by force), which take an awful lot of time. I don't have time for that, and even if I did I would not be able to arrange a total immersion with lots of peer pressure situation for years on end for every language I want to learn. I have to follow the line of least resistance and use dictionaries and grammars as an aid to make the scarce real utterances around me comprehensible. Edited by Iversen on 25 February 2007 at 12:05pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6942 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 47 of 73 26 February 2007 at 9:03am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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So, it seems to be the case that different approaches can all be successful, at least superficially. In deciding if they are truly just a matter of personal preference, an important principle, "first, do no harm", comes to mind, and I was never lucky in finding reliable answers to whether a certain technique may seem appealing, but prove harmful to one's full mastery of the language in the long run.
One case in point is pronunciation. Some old books say that if you don't start out with the best possible pronunciation, it will remain a problem area forever. Since I like to start out with textbooks, I tried asking around if the warning was indeed justified and never got a straight answer, which led me to suspect that it may not even be known, which, unfortunately, does not preclude the possibility that it's true. Another would be massive doses of memorization versus 'natural acquisition'. Natural acquisition would seem to be safer from the standpoint of developing proper intuition for the language, rather that turning it into a learned system of words and rules, but it may take longer. But could these "words and rules" be mere cruches that, having allowed us to speed up the learning process, fall away with no after-effects once one starts using the language? I wouldn't be surprised if the answer to this question was not known either, but maybe it is. A related issue is that of using bilingual versus monolingual materials, both dictionaries and textbooks. I used to think that if you are using a bilingual dictionary, you are not thinking in the target language, but later found that some authorities in fact advise against the use of monolingual dictiionaries except at the rather advanced stages. So, how much do we really know? Edited by frenkeld on 26 February 2007 at 9:05am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| LilleOSC Senior Member United States lille.theoffside.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6690 days ago 545 posts - 546 votes 4 sounds Speaks: English* Studies: French, Arabic (Written) | Message 48 of 73 27 February 2007 at 5:41pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
1 person has voted this message useful |
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