Difficulties with shadowing (Lessons in Polyglottery) Language Learning Forum

Difficulties with shadowing
Tags: Shadowing \| Alexander Arguelles
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Language Learning Forum : Lessons in Polyglottery

19 messages over 3 pages: 1 2 3

Serpent
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Speaks: Russian*, English, Finnish^C1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese
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Message 17 of 19

05 November 2007 at 6:53am | IP Logged

ProfArguelles wrote:

Ms. Evdokimova, this is indeed a much more interesting problem if your perception of these two Iberian sisters is colored by your previous acquaintance of this Uralic Northerner. I do not think it is dangerous, however, and, if sustained, you could indeed even turn it to your eventual advantage by creating an utterly idiosyncratic and therefore usefully memorable chain of associations. If it bothers you, on the other hand, you have two options: 1) stop singing Spanish and Portuguese songs, or – preferably – 2) start learning Spanish and Portuguese.

I didn't even know there's anything unusual about it. Mother said she had also had experienced something like that back in the Soviet Union times, when it was quite hard to find some foreign songs and next to impossible to find their lyrics, and since English (or more precisely, listening comprehension - she can read and speak quite well) was taught quite inefficiently then, she often "heard" Russian words in those songs.
Do you think I will have this problem if I start learning Portuguese (and later other languages) through "blind shadowing"? Of course the only way to know it for sure is to try doing so, but I'm afraid I won't manage to add one more language now.
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ProfArguelles
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Message 18 of 19

11 November 2007 at 5:19pm | IP Logged

Ms. Evdokimova, I suggest that you attempt to perceive this “problem” from a different perspective. Your linguistically interested ear is just impatient to find meaning where it does not have understanding. Thus, it makes associations of its own from its normal frame of reference and awareness (i.e., the Russian language). I think this is a sign of what I call “language consciousness,” the kind of mental make-up that probably induces you to tune in to foreign conversations that you might happen to overhear, as perhaps while taking public transportation. Most people in such circumstances tune out languages they do not understand, no longer recognizing the words or sentences as such, and relegating the sounds to the general category of background noise.

As for how to go about adding Portuguese and other languages as soon as possible, let me return to the evolving and increasingly interesting thread on time management.

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Andy_Liu
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Message 19 of 19

03 February 2008 at 9:02am | IP Logged

ProfArguelles wrote:

If you can devote two hours a day to the study of Japanese, you should make decent progress. If you can begin your studies by an intensive and exclusive period of phonetic training, you will be much better off. So, you may indeed shadow two hours of Japanese each day for the next few weeks, but I would recommend that you do so in eight different fifteen minute installments. I would also strongly recommend that you not listen to the recordings for the entire program, but rather that you initially listen to only the first fifteen minutes (i.e., so that you do the same thing eight times a day), and that you then add other fifteen minute segments in successive alteration as you make progress.

Professor,

I had wanted to post earlier, but because of time constraints, I have not been able to draw good conclusions of my acquaintance with French until lately. I started dabbling since late December with French using New French with ease only. Since French is Romance and I knew little about everything Romance, I started by using the course as it was intended, but later I tried to blind shadow instead. I have briefly shadowed while pacing and, for most of the time, traveling. For that purpose, I have also reduced the spaces of all the audios to just one second at maximum and packed them together as seven large chunks, 13-15 minutes each.

Here come the problems. I have only read the meanings of the first 30 lessons or so rather briefly, and naturally I have not figured out all the meanings of the English translations yet. Since I am still blind-shadowing, I cannot yet associate sounds with a lot of meanings. (I may have started reading prematurely, did I?) Somehow it has been tempting to read the English translations (the teaching language), especially when I think I cannot make any more progress with the same chunk - I often find a few chunks in a lesson that are "too" fast to follow.

My mind has stored a few small chunks of, especially, the first lessons as sound memory with meanings, but still, from the lesson 25 or so, I cannot exactly “shadow” in the way we understand it to be – my subconscious might know where a particular syllable should be in one of the lessons, but in real terms I miss almost 3 out of 5 syllables in later lessons. I am now around lesson 45 (the third chunk). Also, when and how do I know if I am familiar enough with the pronunciation and intonation of a language? Through conscious study in the past and with knowledge of other languages, I have identified all French phonemes, but still have minor problems with the nasal vowels – sometimes the narrative speech seems to be somewhat “slurred” and nasal vowels of “less” stressed syllables (or they may simply be unstressed) and in words like “gentil” (“un” sounds rather obvious, on the contrary) sound not very clear.

I have so far shadowed in this way for only several hours. Definitely, I need more practice, and my case might be very different from Japanese because of my background.

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