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1000 hour silent phase - Khmer | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Mooby Senior Member Scotland Joined 6106 days ago 707 posts - 1220 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Polish | Message 17 of 30 28 May 2015 at 10:45am | IP Logged |
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Your focus on listening made me recall something Amorey Gethin wrote (in 'The Art. and Science of Learning Languages' co-written with Erik Gunnemark). On Page 141:
" I have got into a very bad habit of having to turn all the sounds I hear in a foreign language into a picture of their written form in my mind's eye. I have to see the words before I can understand them. This is obviously a great disadvantage for me, as it puts an extra step between the sounds and my understanding of them - and that of course also takes more time. That in turn means that it is difficult for me to understand a foreign language spoken quickly unless I am very familiar with it and have a large passive vocabulary in it. Unfortunately I think that it is almost impossible for me to break this habit now. It should probably be regarded as a warning against making reading the basis of one's learning a foreign language if it is important to become fluent in understanding the spoken language quickly. We have suggested earlier that reading is probably the quickest way of gaining a broad mastery of a foreign language, and we do believe that that is indeed true for most people these days. But you should be aware of the possible dangers. ---- The majority of humans who have existed have probably been illiterate, and so cannot have 'seen' any words they heard ". In our native language, we don't have this dependency on visualising speech/sound - we just speak, we just listen (even if we are avid readers). Can we have it all in a foreign language? Can we comprehend all forms and produce all forms unbiased, unhindered and unfiltered? To avoid Gethin's problem I know I need to listen (and speak) more, but in the absence of easy opportunities I focus on reading or listening in a non-interactive way. Your approach is giving me food for thought Bakunin, as always! 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5131 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 18 of 30 28 May 2015 at 3:55pm | IP Logged |
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Thanks, Mooby, for sharing this, and I think there is some truth to it. Your comment made me reflect on my pronunciation in Thai, and I realized that I sometimes visualize the spelling of a word before finding the right tone (Thai tones are encoded in the writing system) or whether a plosive is voiced or unvoiced. This tends to happen for words I’ve rarely or never used before and have only encountered in writing. I think this is direct confirmation for the observation you quote. Fortunately, the vast majority of Thai words seem to be stored as an auditory unit, if that makes sense, and are accessible as such.
Regarding the questions you raise: I don’t know, but I want the full package! I’m not in a rush, my time horizon for a language is in the range of a decade or 10’000 hours. Arbitrary numbers, but that’s the order of magnitude. So, with my current approach to Khmer, I just invest a tenth of that up-front into listening comprehension with the hope of getting a really good grasp on the sound system, prosody, intonation patterns and basic grammar before actually producing any language myself. I don’t expect to emerge from these 1000 hours with decent speaking skills, not at all - the mouth needs to be trained as well. But I do hope to have a near-native ‘mental model’ of how the language is supposed to sound so that I can self-correct over time. Children who start speaking never do so with a foreign accent, and I hope I won’t do either. It seemed to have worked quite well with Thai, so I’m confident. But time will tell. And even if these 1000 hours are a complete waste of time, I’ve only increased total time spent by 10%, or delayed everything by one year. No big deal. Thai and Khmer are not inflected. There is a lot of grammar, of course, but not in the form of endings. I know, however, that Greg Thomson (Growing Participator Approach) developed his oral approach to language learning on Uzbek which is of the agglutinative type. The basic exercise he suggests to work on grammar in a listening-speaking-setting is the so-called ‘information gap exercise’. Focusing on one grammar point at a time, the language used in these exercises is stripped of additional context so that the grammatical feature (maybe a case ending, a verb form or gender) is the only carrier of the corresponding information. The information gap here is that either the tutor or the learner lacks information the other has and needs to find out (or communicate) by processing (or producing) the grammatical feature which is being worked on. For instance, if relative position (above, under, in front of etc.) is encoded in endings, then the tutor could arrange a set of toys in a certain way, and the learner needs to do the same behind a wall. The tutor strips down his language so that only the endings carry the relevant meaning. This forces the learner to process this grammatical feature. (Such an exercise needs to be preceded by extensive comprehension activities, and should be followed up by production activities, reversing the roles of who describes and who listens.) But I’m digressing. Thanks, Mooby, for your interesting comment! 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5131 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 19 of 30 30 May 2015 at 9:42am | IP Logged |
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Yesterday, I got audio from all 5 tutors I'm working with! In total, about 2 hours and 15 minutes. And another hour or so in my inbox this morning. If recordings continue to come in at this rate, I'll be a very happy Khmer student :) I just love new stuff!
Here's a cross post from my blog with the title 'Babbling': The 1000 hour long silent period is not completely silent. If I have the desire to try out a word or phrase I’ve just heard, I do that. More often than not I hear a discrepancy between my pronunciation and what I’ve just heard. I think, this is quite normal - the right vowel quality, the right consonant sounds, the right flow of a phrase, that’s something that needs to be physically learned and practiced. It’s not something that comes for free with lots of listening. What comes with lots of listening (with lots of silent listening in the beginning I should say) is a good mental model of the sound inventory, prosody, intonation etc. After enough exposure to the language, I will be able to ’hear’ Khmer in my mind. Then I will have the ability to self-correct, to get my own speech to match this mental model. For this to work, the mental model needs to be solid. I don’t think this mental model can be built up in 50 or 100 hours, it needs substantially more time. That’s why I’m looking at about 1000 hours. This is also the order of magnitude of language input a baby gets before it starts babbling and speaking their first words. Back to babbling. Actually, I’m not babbling in the sense a baby babbles, I’m almost always trying out full words or phrases; I just thought ‘babbling’ is a nice title. Sometimes, I’ll do a short loop, three, four, five times. Sometimes I’ll say a word without being prompted. I dream a lot in Khmer, and when I do, there are lots of phrases swirling around in my head. Here in Siem Reap, I say the occasional word to street vendors and other people I meet. If I had to put a number on it, then I’d say I experiment with speech about 1 minute for every 100 or 200 minutes I listen (not including dreaming). Don’t hold me to the exact numbers, but that should be the order of magnitude. I assume this ratio will increase over time. Right now, I’m noticing that I’m getting a much better grasp on certain vowels and diphthongs. No sound in a given language is precisely defined, they are more like an equivalence class of acceptable sounds (to use a mathematical term), or like a category of similar sounds. If this is not clear, take any word of your language and get 10 different people to say it 10 times. Focus on a certain sound, maybe a vowel - the vowel quality will be slightly different each time and in each person. The entirety of acceptable variations is the equivalence class, the category, of this sound. Needless to say that these equivalence classes are different from language to language. To give an example, sounds which seem to be in one and the same equivalence class in Khmer can fall sometimes into the o-class in German, other times into the u-class. In the beginning, this confused me, but now I’m beginning to hear all of those variations as one Khmer sound. The corresponding Khmer equivalence class is taking shape. (I’m more than 250 hours into the silent phase. That this is happening only now - and there’s more to come - is another indication that the silent phase should be long… really long.) I think, babbling and trying out sounds and words is a natural and important part of the silent phase. There's no need to suppress it, but there's also no need to encourage it or turn it into deliberate practice. The real transition to speaking will begin when I'm ready for it, and this is still quite some time into the future. Disclaimer for HTLAL: Please consider that this was written as a blog post; I’m not on a mission, this is what seems to work for me and what I currently think makes sense within the constraints of my approach and language learning philosophy. Edited by Bakunin on 31 May 2015 at 4:06am 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5131 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 20 of 30 05 June 2015 at 3:00pm | IP Logged |
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I’m leaving Siem Reap on Sunday, so here’s a quick update slash summary. This was my first trip to Cambodia, and I stayed about ten days in Siem Reap and four in Surin (Thailand). Siem Reap has all the traveler needs, but the overland trip to Surin and even the situation in town made it obvious that Cambodia is very poor and even more corrupt than Thailand. The people I’ve met were very nice, though, and I’ve been really enjoying my stay.
My main objective was to find more tutors, which I did. On the internet, I read that a certain coffee shop is frequented by Khmer teachers and their students, and I just walked up to the counter and asked for a contact. That worked out very well and got me two tutors. I found a third one by just asking someone I’d met whether he would be interested to do this kind of work. Because I’ve been around for quite some time, we were able to practice and set everything up nicely, and I’ve been receiving lots of new recordings over the past few days. It’s great to get lots of new input, I really like the variety I have now. I probably need to be careful to not overdo it; I’ve already noticed that listening to three hours of new stuff is much more exhausting than listening to one hour of new stuff repeated three times. But it’s also much more fun. I bought a few books, not really wordless picture books but still useable, I guess. I also found a nice book with drawings depicting Cambodian culture and daily life; this might be quite useful to get some exposure to vocabulary specific to the local culture (and there’s lots!). I’ve met a good number of people who knew some basic Thai. Many Cambodians have worked in Thailand, or want to work there. It was interesting to see that Cambodians struggle as much with tones as most Westerners do who want to pick up a bit of the language. The taxi driver who drove me from the border into Siem Reap on the way back from Surin, however, spoke very good Thai, and we had a nice long conversation as we sped through the flat nothingness north of Siem Reap. Attitudes towards Thailand are much more positive than Thai attitudes towards Cambodia as far as I can tell; attitudes towards Vietnam are a different story. In Surin, I’ve been to two villages and heard some more Northern Khmer. This time, I didn’t even try to find a tutor for Northern Khmer, it didn’t work at all last time, and I’ve got more than enough for standard Khmer. It’s anyway my impression that the difference is not that large, apart from the mixture with Thai, so it makes a lot of sense to learn Khmer first and look into Northern Khmer later. Ah, I forgot something - Angkor Wat. I rented a bike and left my hotel at 4:30 to be at 5 at the gate and then enjoy the sunrise over the main temple complex. The timing worked out well, but at 5 in the morning there were already hundreds and hundreds of tourists all over the place, jostling for the ideal spot to take pictures; mostly Asian, but also scores of Westerns. A nightmare. I was back in town before 6. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5131 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 21 of 30 08 June 2015 at 9:42am | IP Logged |
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Si-Tau The Temple Cat
I’ve worked with children’s books from Thailand before (on animals, fruits, school, eggs, travel), but those books weren’t really story books, more collections of related situations. Yesterday, however, I started my first real storybook from the region (again, from Thailand): Si-Tau the temple cat. It’s not a wordless picture story, every double page has text on the left and a picture on the right. The pictures, however, mostly tell the story, and there are only two or three facts which I need to explain to my tutor to make the pictures self-explanatory. Not every picture book is like this, most books with text I’ve looked at recently rely more on the text than the pictures, and that doesn’t work for me at this point. The story is about an old lady and her cat. Both are devout Buddhists and give alms to the monks every morning. The temple boy who helps the monks on alms round doesn’t like the cat. The old lady dies and the cat moves to the temple. The temple boy tries to chase her away but isn’t successful. Then one night there’s a fire in his hut, the cat saves his life, giving her own. He repents and enters novicehood. In the end all is good, and we learn that the cat will be reborn as something better. The great thing about stories like this is that they expose me to a completely different set of vocabulary than Western stories. The first few recordings were full of special words related to the monk, what he does, what he wears, what this alms round is etc. As in Thai, there seems to be a special register for monks, and fortunately for me there’s a lot of overlap (these words are mostly derived from Pali anyway). Then there’s the environment: the type of house, the water tank in which rain water is collected, banana plants, types of baskets etc.; as well as other culturally specific things like ways to sit and kneel, gestures of respect etc. All of that is very useful to know and can’t be found in Western stories. I guess the point I want to make here is that it’s important to work with material which is specific to the culture of the language we’re learning. This even holds true for an Englishman learning French - think of food, household items, festivals -, but is much more important when the target culture is fundamentally different as in my case. Language learning is as much learning about the other culture as it is learning the words and structure of the language. It’s not enough to be able to say stuff, it’s equally important to know what to say in what situation, to understand implicit references, to understand the belief system of the people, to understand their stories, their history and points of view. If you want to see some pictures, head over to my blog. Edited by Bakunin on 11 June 2015 at 8:07am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6598 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 22 of 30 08 June 2015 at 3:34pm | IP Logged |
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Well, but one doesn't exclude the other. Polyglots generally have 2-4 strongest languages whose cultures they are deeply involved with. And related languages can actually give you context for enjoying the culture. My enjoyment of Portuguese wouldn't be the same without Latin, Spanish, Italian, Catalan, even Indonesian.
As for the book, so is the text in Thai? And you have to explain some things to your Khmer tutors? 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5131 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 23 of 30 11 June 2015 at 8:12am | IP Logged |
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@Serpent: I've removed that paragraph; it's not a very helpful distinction to make. Yes, the text of Si-Tau the Temple Cat is in Thai but the pictures basically tell the story. There are only two pieces of information I found worth adding to the pictures (that the cat actually dies, and that the temple boy enters novicehood). The book could as well have been from Cambodia, Buddhist culture is more or less the same in both countries.
1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Bakunin Diglot Senior Member Switzerland outerkhmer.blogspot. Joined 5131 days ago 531 posts - 1126 votes Speaks: German*, Thai Studies: Khmer | Message 24 of 30 14 June 2015 at 8:43am | IP Logged |
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Yesterday, I’ve reached the 300 hour mark. My Khmer comprehension is growing steadily, and I’m starting to connect little bits and pieces here and there. I’m busy feeding the iceberg with all kinds of new words, and I can feel it getting larger and heavier. But I’m under no illusion that the road ahead is still very, very long.
Compared to the last 100 hour period, I’ve started working with three new tutors which I found in Siem Reap - my first trip to Cambodia. I’m mostly working on different stories with everyone, but I’ve started giving the same story (with some delay) to a second person to get a different perspective and review specific vocabulary. I’m also working on ‘Action English Pictures’-strips with everybody, with the intent to get all pictures recorded by all tutors. I prefer stories, but the vocabulary in Action English Pictures is really important to know and will be a good base for almost anything. I’ve started noticing a few things related to grammar (function words, morphology, register) which are clearly different from Thai, but it’s too early to be sure of any of these. I’m also trying myself more and more at sounding out words and phrases, and I suppose this will further increase as I go through the beginner phase. I’ve abandoned the idea to learn Northern Khmer for now and will focus entirely on standard Khmer until I have a certain competence in the language. This decision is entirely driven by my inability to find suitable tutors for Northern Khmer, and I further rationalize it by the fact that the two varieties seem to be close (save for the influence of Thai). I will see what can be done about Northern Khmer later. Last time, I was unhappy about the high review ratio, i.e., the ratio between hours listened and hours recorded, but this time I’m happy to report progress. The overall ratio was at 5.6 and is now down to 4.5. Over the past 100 hour period, I’ve received almost one hour of new recordings every day. For the next 100 hour period, I don’t have any specific plans; I’ll just continue what I’ve been doing so far. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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