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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5435 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes  Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 65 of 122 23 December 2010 at 6:00am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Like Diglot, I don't see what the fuss is about. Time and emotion--the latter being some form of personal engagement--are major success factors in language learning. I'll drink to that. If we disregard the sideshow over "there is" and "there are" featuring the usual inimitable prose of a central character, I really have a hard time finding anything to debate.
Is a successful learning outcome a linear function of time? Certainly not. Emotion is a notoriously difficult concept to measure. So, I think we're stuck with agreeing that, all things being equal, the more time and emotional commitment one puts into learning a language the better the outcome. It seems like a truism to me. Who can be against that? The key issue here is "all things being equal". There are many other success factors that are probably just as important as the two mentioned. There may even be an unknown factor such as a mysterious talent or knack for languages. Frankly, I think we would do better to study the methods of successful learners. Of course, it has been done to some extent. And then there is a horde of polyglots on YouTube and the blogosphère--not to mention all the commercial products-- who will be only to glad to part you from your money in exchange for some magic formula that will make you fluent (sic) like a native in a jiffy. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| slucido Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Spain https://goo.gl/126Yv Joined 6680 days ago 1296 posts - 1781 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan* Studies: English | Message 66 of 122 23 December 2010 at 1:09pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Yes we are stuck, but it's not because I am pointing out the obvious. It's because I think our focus is wrong when we give advice to other people or to ourselves. I think the obvious repetition-emotional binomial is very important for the average people, but it can be very good for successful language learners. When I ask for advice or I read books or forums, the answer is always the same: a lot of input and output. Some polyglots are more output centered and others more input centered, but it always boils down to the same few ideas: working and interacting with the real language as much as possible. The specific techniques seem something secondary. Thinking about that, I wonder how can I find the BEST method FOR ME (or for YOU). If I know that I have to spend a lot of time with input and output, what do I have left? I think what I have left aren't specific techniques,but something different: EMOTIONS. So, the BEST methods are the ones that work with MY EMOTIONS and not the specific techniques themselves. This is tricky, but very important if we want to find really new and groundbreaking techniques . I am not trying to give anwers or solutions, I am trying to elicit NEW ideas from you. Edited by slucido on 23 December 2010 at 4:25pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6016 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 67 of 122 23 December 2010 at 7:21pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Exactly. We may disagree (quite vociferously) on the specifics, but we wouldn't argue so much if we didn't believe there was a greater truth lurking somewhere beneath!
Repetition is totally obvious and completely unavoidable in language learning. The question is what to repeat, when, how often, in what order, etc etc etc. There are a lot of variables that have a measurable effect on the effectiveness of study. Yes, the more study we do, the better, but that is not something that can be productively discussed, it's sina qua non.
Really? You obviously haven't spent much time here, because there's a lot of discussion of the use of things like SRS and vocabulary lists, and I'm assuming that you don't include decontextualised language in the term "the real language". I'm not a fan of vocabulary lists, and I think they act as a good demonstration of why indiscriminate repetition is not a good strategy. In high-school French, we were given themed word lists. We memorised them. I found that in the end I had learnt the list, not the words in it. In order to get the word I was looking for, I'd either have to run through the entire list mentally until I found it, or I would have to find another point to start off from. The worst thing is, I loved raspberry jam as a kid, but I wasn't as keen on strawberry jam. The same goes for yoghurts. (It was the little squishy strawberries that I didn't like.) Over the course of my childhood, I spent almost a year in France, so I knew the difference between "framboise" and "fraise". Except that once I'd learnt this list, it actually interfered with my ability to recall one or the other. Instead, I started thinking of the list. On the list, "fraise" came right before "framboise", and because I repeated them so often together, they got tied together in my brain. Repetition can do harm as well as good.
People are very similar in emotional terms, and most techniques do fail to connect with emotions. (I don't know anyone who connects with a substitution drill saying that there's a key, a cat, a book, a cup (etc) on the table.) But talking in terms of emotion gets us into very vague territory. I think a more important word is "meaningful". Some teachers mistake "there's a book on the table" as being a meaningful sentence, because it is full of things that have their own meaning in the dictionary sense, equivalent to signification in French or significación in Spanish. But meaningful is used in education as a contrast to rote learning, and dictionary definitions are learned by rote. Meaningful learning is more about meaning in the sense of vouloir dire/querer decir -- it has to say something that I can connect to on a personal level. This will naturally have an emotional response. However, you can get an emotional response out of an activity without actually having an authentic meaningful connection to the language. Have you ever heard of The Typing of the Dead? It's a great game and it's immense fun. I'm pretty sure I would enjoy it in any language, whether I know it or not, up until the end of level 2 (as the boss on level 2 asks you questions rather than getting you to copy what appears on the screen). So playing the game would reward me emotionally, but I would have no meaningful link to the actual language used, and I doubt I would learn much from it. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6016 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 68 of 122 23 December 2010 at 7:23pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Please do continue -- I love a good bit of amateur psychoanalysis. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6016 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 69 of 122 23 December 2010 at 7:38pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
It was the BNC. As I recall it, I used "three" as my test (I was using a rather simple web interface and couldn't get a PoS tag for numbers in general). The pattern was quite interesting. In the spoken corpus, "there 's three" (92) just wins out over "there are three" (91). "There is three" (1) is admittedly very rare. "There 're three" never occurs, but a search of "there are" gives 4527 vs "there 're" at only 87. So at the very least, "there's" is the appropriate contracted form. However, one of the things that got me to look this up in the first place was noticing that some people do have a tendency to say "There is ... there are" in real life, and I thought that this pattern appeared in the corpus as well, but I can't replicate it now, so I may have made that up. Unless I used a different corpus, but that doesn't sound like me. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| slucido Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Spain https://goo.gl/126Yv Joined 6680 days ago 1296 posts - 1781 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan* Studies: English | Message 70 of 122 23 December 2010 at 7:56pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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I have used emotions in a successful way. Arguing in foreign languages. Watching horror movies in foreign languages. I fall in love when I was sixteen years and this emotional situation skyrocketed my French. Do you know the girls's language? Guess.
I am thinking about drilling. How can I make more emotional my drilling? How can I make more emotional Pismleur drilling? I don't know, but I do know that if I want to repeat a sentence 2,000 times in a foreign language I prefer a sentence about some trait I want to get or something emotional. For example: Repeat 2,000 the following sentence in your target (s) language(s) chorusing with the audio: "I am a language learning genius" or "I love language X (target language)" Or something that you strongly desire or you find desirable. The trick is that you know the meaning and you like the meaning or the meaning elicit strongly emotions. Edited by slucido on 23 December 2010 at 7:59pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| simonov Senior Member Portugal Joined 5594 days ago 222 posts - 438 votes Speaks: English | Message 71 of 122 23 December 2010 at 8:20pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Good. I wasn't even going to bother to reply to your ridiculous post, but as you ask for people's opinions and thrive on arguments, here goes:
You should try and read what people write before criticising. I wrote, quite clearly: "The Queen and I" starting with a capital T. In which case the "The Queen and I" would mean "we". We were not considering anything but subject case. So where does your accusative come from?
Nice one, turn defense into attack, or shall I say arrogance. Especially when we're in agreement as far as "It's me" is concerned. If you call that hypercorrection, then you've just shot yourself in the foot.
Not quite, just google it and you'll see that it isn't dead yet, not even remotely. Of course, as usual, all those people, grammars, dictionaries still using it are totally wrong. I do however use the Oxford dictionary and accept what it says. But I would still consider "To WHO?" weird as it would sound like the answer should be "To he". That is my personal, subjective opinion of course.
Who ever mentioned using "whom" as subject of a sentence. And, since you usually so object to Latinate, why do you use Latin case names instead of English "subject, object (direct or indirect), possessive".
It's all in the eye of the beholder. Why should "whom" look anymore incongruous when the preposition comes at the end of the sentence? It has nothing to do with "look" but with "sound". I say: "Whom did you see?" because I'm used to saying that, "who" in this case just sounds off to me. That's my good right, and if you check on the internet you'll see that a hell of a lot of other people do the same thing. But I've noticed that I am in fact using "Who" (without the M) at the start of sentences ending in a preposition. And never start 'complete' sentences with a preposition. "Oh, so you went to the flicks? Who did you go with?" Which latter question I would shorten to either "With whom?" or "Who with? indiscriminately, a spur of the moment decision. Anything wrong with that? 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| slucido Bilingual Diglot Senior Member Spain https://goo.gl/126Yv Joined 6680 days ago 1296 posts - 1781 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan* Studies: English | Message 72 of 122 23 December 2010 at 9:36pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Love is another powerful emotion. Some sentences for drilling in different languages can be found here:
http://www.links2love.com/love_quotes_languages.htm http://claritaslux.com/love-phrases.html Movements creates sensations that fake somehow emotion. http://effortlessenglishclub.com/vocabulary-and-movement The key to deep, powerful, long term vocabulary learning is movement. When we combine strong physical movements with understandable new vocabulary, we create deep connections in our brains and bodies. These connections are long-term. They last! (...) I taught a number of new words using strong actions. The students shouted the new words with me, while simultaneously using the strong actions I showed them. By the end of the lesson, they knew those words well. In this video you can find an explanation: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZWvzRaEqfw&feature=related Active Experiencing is a useful technique used by Actors. Here you have an interview where Toni Noice (cognitive researcher, Indiana State University) explains how it can be used with everything, including language learning. Acting Like an Actor to Improve Your Memory http://www.manythings.org/voa/wm/wm336.html RS: "I want to bring our audience into this. Now what suggestions or what, perhaps, what exercises -- what exercises would you suggest that you use that our students of English as a foreign language might find useful?" TONY NOICE: "Oh, I think just the very basic application of always saying, 'What is the purpose of this sentence?' Obviously it applies directly to drama or comedy. But in addition to that it applies to almost anything, because we've done these studies with boring prose material, computer instructions and so forth, and we still find it benefits memory if, instead of trying to just remember the computer instructions, you picture yourself giving this information to a person, a good friend who vitally needs it. And you really try to get through to this person in your imagination. "And so I would say using your imagination to not just remember the information but really live the material, try to make it as active as you possibly can by, in your own mind, communicating whatever you're trying to remember to another person." Here you can find a scientific paper about the subject. What Studies of Actors and Acting CanTell Us About Memory and Cognitive Functioning Helga Noice1 and Tony Noice2 1Elmhurst College, 2Indiana State University http://www.psychologicalscience.org/pdf/cd/actors_memory.pdf ABSTRACT—The art of acting has been defined as the ability to live truthfully under imaginary circumstances. Our many years of researching theatrical expertise have produced findings relevant to text comprehension, learning theory, cognitive aging, and expert memory. In this article, we first discuss how large amounts of dialogue, learned in a very short period, can be reproduced in real time with complete spontaneity. We then turn to abstracting the essence of acting and applying it to diverse undertakings, from discovering optimal learning strategies to promoting healthy cognitive aging. Finally, we address the implications of acting expertise on current theories of embodied cognition. Edited by slucido on 23 December 2010 at 10:02pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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