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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| FSI Senior Member United States Joined 6357 days ago 550 posts - 590 votes  Speaks: English* | Message 25 of 28 12 January 2009 at 3:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
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If you don't want this thread to be locked, I'd advise ignoring reineke instead of engaging him in a foreign language and derailing the purpose of the thread. LR topics sadly devolve into arguments frequently here, and things would be much smoother if we just bypassed distractions altogether.
Anyway, I think LR (or any method) works best when we adapt it to our own styles. Right now, I'm using it for Spanish with Don Quixote, and that book is mad long. But hearing so much language and understanding it is marvelous. I'm doing a bit of Japanese as well, but not with LR, but with Michel Thomas' beginner course. Quite impressed with it so far. I want to see how much of Tujiko Noriko's Penguin 2009 I understand once I'm through with the course. Currently, I understand the word "ice cream", but I kind of knew that one going in. :D Edited by FSI on 12 January 2009 at 3:26pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6437 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 26 of 28 04 November 2009 at 7:40pm | IP Logged | |||||
Bizarre. I aligned some Hungarian texts some months ago (most with English, a few with French), and was picking up quite a few words in the process, despite trying to -avoid- doing so. Hungarian has quite a lot of words that ought to be familiar - they're spelled oddly and crammed into a different grammar, but even so. A lot of them are Slavic, even. I continue to prefer doing my comparing while listening, as one of many activities, rather than comparing ahead of time. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6009 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 27 of 28 04 November 2009 at 8:18pm | IP Logged | |||||
As I always say -- the ability to spot the parallels in L-R is acquired over time, and most people who are successful with L-R didn't actually start with it. It's may well be something somewhere else in the learning process that teaches you what you need for L-R. For example, today I skim-read over something in Dutch in my company's Yammer feed (Yammer is like Twitter, but for companies to use internally). I saw the word "meer" and immediately recognised it as "more", despite never having seen it before, because I tied it to the Scots word, which is pronounced exactly the same. I reckon I started to develop the strategy to compare words when I was studying French and Italian simultaneously at High School, but I didn't really develop it because we were discouraged from doing so (my teachers always loved warning us about the danger of false friends) and besides, we didn't get enough examples to show how the changes that occur between languages are fairly systematic and not entirely irregular. Michel Thomas actively encouraged comparison between languages and in the Spanish he demonstrated changes that were 90% systematic. The "strings" of sound changes in German may have been less systematic (and at first I thought they were useless) but they gave you a (vague and fuzzy) feel for how things work and opened up the idea that things that didn't sound all that similar were more or less the same thing. Having been walked through this strategy, I'm now finding I can apply it myself without thinking about it. Welsh and Gaelic are about as far apart linguistically as English and the mainland Germanic languages, and there's the same sort of fuzzy relationship between Welsh words and Gaelic words as between German words and English words. From even just a small bit of study, my brain's starting to get a feel for possible sound changes, and soon I might even be able to guess at probable sound changes. So, as I said, I reckon the ability to do L-R is a result of things previously learnt. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Javi Senior Member Spain Joined 5979 days ago 419 posts - 548 votes Speaks: Spanish* | Message 28 of 28 05 November 2009 at 9:45am | IP Logged | |||||
How do you go about reading words that are new to you, and so you are not certain of their pronunciation? If you come up with the wrong sounds, do you stand corrected when you finally listen to the transcription or sometimes the wrong pronunciation sticks for a while? 1 person has voted this message useful |
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