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Learn to read Thai in 16 hours? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes  Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 9 of 14 04 December 2010 at 12:39pm | IP Logged |
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Classic self-made internet guru behaviour.
1) Develop amorphous "enemy" to attack with vague undefined references. "Thai the Thai way", the "widely accepted" approach, "phonetic". 2) Attribute end-point failure to speak fluently and/or accurately to these buzzwords, rather than the quality of teaching. (Notice how once he finally starts talking the problem isn't romanisation at all (or to use his term, "learning phonetically") but the fact that the romanisation is relied on for too long. This isn't the way he sells it on the surface. This is all backed up with a selection of the worst examples of teaching language you can find, used as a broad attack on the whole methodology 3) When someone comes along who knows you're misrepresenting what's already there, or that you're abusing standard terminology, you simply attack them as being brainwashed by orthodox methods. This line makes your opinions impervious to all attack from anyone with half a clue, and the internet guru preys on the uninformed and easily led. 4) If you want the easily led to believe in your authority, you're going to need to quote "research", but not explicitly. You'll say a vague statement and mention Krashen, and say something more specific and mention your own research, which isn't usually anything accepted as academic research. Talking about "publishing" helps a lot, but if you're a "self-proclaimed expert", this doesn't mean getting it in a journal, it means uploading it to your website. And language teachers rarely engage in reliable double-blind studies anyway -- the teacher is all too often the researcher, so there's very little control of variables. 5) Someone will challenge your research with a larger body of research. See point 3. 6) And if all else fails, put on those puppy dog eyes and say "why are you being so mean to me? I'm only trying to help people. All you people ever do is criticise, at least I'm actually doing something." Oh wait, I've not just described self-made internet guru behaviour, I've also described the behaviour of practically all language methodology "experts" in history. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6012 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 10 of 14 04 December 2010 at 1:06pm | IP Logged |
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Now, looking at his argument.
Speaking is not a linguistic skill? Well... umm..... really....? I know my views on this are a bit extreme, but... what? I've always said that speaking is the core language skill -- I've always felt that understanding language is about the brain asking itself "what would have made me say that?" As I say, it's an extreme position and it's pretty theoretical... and (I admit) not really particularly scientific. It's kind of more philosophical. (My reason for believing this: Have you ever had someone say something to you and then believed that you said it yourself? If you can believe that you have said something that you heard, then saying and hearing must go through the same processes. Have you ever finished someone else's sentence? Then your brain must be going through some kind of active process, creating language. Have you ever spoken to an elderly lady whose lip trembles when you're speaking to her and who always says the last word of your sentences? This condition (I don't know what it's called) is an extreme example, but I believe demonstrates a clear link between comprehension and production.) But I cannot accept that speaking is nothing more than reading + muscle movements. That's a very behaviourist philosophy, and as Noam Chomsky said in response to behaviourist language theories, there's far too much creativity and innovation in language to be explained by habit or simply copying what we hear (or read). The other problem I have with giving reading pride of place is that reading is a non-linear activity. When you're reading (so they tell me) your eye flicks backwards and forwards on the page, and you don't know you're doing it. I was told this years ago, but I've never been able to notice myself doing it, but then according to what I was told, the people they studied also swore that their eyes kept going in a straight line. If your eyes skip backwards and forwards over native-language text, then they'll do the same in foreign language text. Why do the eyes do this? No writing system is a complete unambiguous reflection of spoken language. The word "orange" is pronounced slightly different in the phrases "an orange car" and "I ate an orange", and these differences give up syntactical information. When reading, we need to reconstruct that syntactical information from context, so we need to read ahead. This is where the danger comes in. If the eye reads non-linearly in order to seek out syntactical information, what happens when reading in a language with an unfamiliar syntax? The results are unpredictable. This is why I support extensive reading, but only once the student is very comfortable with the basics of syntax. (I've met many "advanced" learners of various languages who can read complicated texts but still get their nouns and adjectives the wrong way round.) Even setting aside my neurological theories about the importance of speaking, I can still justify speaking as the core skill in language teaching, because it is the only way to genuinely see what the student is doing. You will never know if a student is processing written words out of their natural order, but you will immediately know if the student is speaking out of order. Speaking is the the skill that relies most on an accurate internal model of language and rewards the student most for having that model. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| M. Medialis Diglot TAC 2010 Winner Senior Member Sweden Joined 6358 days ago 397 posts - 508 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: Russian, Japanese, French | Message 11 of 14 04 December 2010 at 2:41pm | IP Logged |
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I'm not even a self-proclaimed expert, but I just want to give my brief personal opinions:
My interpretation: * He is a strong believer of "input before output". This theme is the basis for most of the things he writes. * When talking about writing, he probably refers to the act of producing your own texts. My guess is that Prof. Arguelles' Scriptorium exercise would not count as 'writing' in his argumentation. My own view: Writing is immensely helpful when learning languages. But when I write, I personally prefer to copy other peoples' works before I try to come up with something on my own. * When he talks about speaking, he seems to be decoupling 'the act of moving the muscles of the mouth' from 'constructing thoughts in the brain'. I can't remember having come across this separation before, and I don't think it's very helpful. I'd rather split up 'the act of moving muscles' into separate skills such as native-like pronunciation and prosody etc. And let the word 'speaking' denote every skill that is needed for producing audible output. BTW, about being able to read and pronounce Thai correctly in 16 hours.. I don't know about Thai, but from my experience from Russian and even the Japanese kana, you're likely to be surprised when you hear the real native pronunciation of a word you've only seen written (in the beginner stage, that is..). Many of his ideas make sense, but they are occluced behind his unconventional wording. Quite ironic when you think about it - that passionate language learners have a hard time communicating with each other in their native language! ;) Just my thoughts, please be kind to me.. ;D Edited by M. Medialis on 04 December 2010 at 2:41pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6551 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 12 of 14 08 December 2010 at 1:10am | IP Logged |
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(This nit-picking is getting a little tedious.)
Perhaps if you looked at it as education rather than nitpicking, it would seem more useful. (And what you are saying isn't particularly useful to people wanting to learn Thai.) I disagree. This discussion would be useful to learners of just about any language. Researching, opening one’s mind, and spending a great deal of time at the sites I mentioned would do a language learner a lot of good. (It seems obvious to me (but not to people like you, or the developers of some very large and expensive language learning programs) that it's much more effective for beginner and intermediate learners, for instance, to focus on the colloquial, everyday usage of a language) I have never stated my opinion about whether it makes sense to focus on colloquial in the beginning. I merely stated Pimsleur was overly formal in some people’s opinion, but not obsolete. But since you claim you know my opinion, I might as well express it. My answer is that sometimes it makes sense. For example, to start out with informal verb forms in Japanese is more logical to me. Other times it doesn’t make sense. I think with most languages it’s better to start out with a mixture, and briefly explain politeness levels early on. I wish Pimsleur did this, but it doesn’t, and that’s not a big deal to either one of us, right, since we both use it. (even if it is `wrong') I’m once again not sure what you mean by this, but I’d never advocate teaching beginners stuff that’s truly wrong. (and to not bother with writing at all) As I explained before, I think this is a mistake, but suit yourself. (I don't see it as a basic skill.) Whether you see it as one or not, it is. (You also keep nit-picking about Romanization.) Not at all. I just disagree with your argument that Romanization is to blame for all the problems you mention. If a student insists on making English sounds when reading Thai Romanization, why blame the Romanization? I have met very few westerners at a high enough level in Thai for me to judge their accents. The advanced people I have met all have had good accents. And I don’t know anyone who avoided Romanization completely from the beginning. Take another language if you want – Mandarin. Most beginners start out with pretty bad accents. But most people at higher levels sound pretty good. This isn’t because the advanced people avoided pinyin in the beginning. Starting out with Romanization in Thai is not a mistake. This allows one to learn more of the language while they are easing into the complex alphabet. It can be avoided, but if I had to do it all over again, I would do what I did before – work through Becker’s first book, which uses Romanization while teaching the language basics along with the alphabet. By the time one finishes that book, one will have all the tools to be begin reading at a basic level, and lots of vocabulary and grammar to help the rules stick. The second book discards Romanization. A convincing argument can be made for avoiding Romanization from the beginning, but calling Romanization a huge mistake is a huge exaggeration, IMO. (I'm not really sure what it is you don't understand) I’ve made it very clear what I don’t understand. I’ve noticed that you don’t want to elaborate. I was actually impressed by the level of the passage. Harder than I thought it would be. 15 minutes is pretty long, but I suppose it’s to be expected. However, this is not nearly as difficult as most native material. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 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 13 of 14 08 December 2010 at 5:14pm | IP Logged |
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What a weird thread! It is amazing that anybody can take a person seriously who claims that you can learn to read Thai in 16 hours. The rest of his absurd claims are refuted quite effectively by leosmith, but there is one tiny point which is debatable. I haven't dealt with Thai yet, but even though its alphabet may be more complicated than the Greek or Cyrillic ones I do think that it is worth learning and using the alphabet of any language from the beginning. A romanization is only relevant if it represents a fairly precise rendering of the phonemes of the language, and then only as a supplement to reading stuff written in the original alphabet of the language.
The only exception would for me be languages like Mandarin (and other kinds of Chinese) or Japansese, where you could spend years learning ideogrammes without learning anything else about the language. Edited by Iversen on 08 December 2010 at 5:14pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6551 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 14 of 14 10 December 2010 at 1:44am | IP Logged |
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I agree with you that it is a debatable point. I have a friend who is nearing advanced fluency in Thai who agrees
with you. But I still believe it's more efficient for the average beginner to use transliteration while getting up to speed on the alphabet. It takes about 100 hrs of study to get where one would with cyrillic in 10. I don't know about you, but after 10 hours of cyrillic, I still felt pretty shaky. I wouldn't want to jump into a language program with lower reading skill than that. I have debated this issue twice before, but have had a really hard time convincing people who have never studied Thai. It may be a difficult alphabet, but it's just an alphabet, they say. If one can learn the kana and quickly delve into Japanese, one can do the same with Thai. So I'm willing to bring up the points again, but only if people are interested. I noticed, for example, nobody wanted to hear the reasons why it's impossible to be able to read the newspaper, even without understanding, merely by learning the rules and practicing for a few hours. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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