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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| JC_Identity Triglot Groupie Sweden thelawofidentity.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4119 days ago 53 posts - 108 votes  Speaks: Swedish, Serbo-Croatian*, English | Message 17 of 46 21 October 2013 at 2:56am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Today time flew by so fast as I was browsing the Internet and reading very interesting content in French.
Today I also felt that I have come to a new level with by reading comprehension of French. I am really sensing the cumulative effect that learning from context has and how I am getting a feeling for the grammar of the language. I have previously been primarily focused on consuming audio content in French but have now begun consuming a lot more written content (with no audio along with the text I read). I mentioned previously that I use browser extensions/add-ons that let me quickly translate words I do not understand as I read French content online. Today however I sat down and coded a small application for myself to the iPhone that lets me do the same thing. I felt that I did not always want to read on the computer. The application lets me specify the URL of the online dictionary that I want to use and then I just have to select a word as I read and press "translate" from a popup menu that appears to get a quick translation of the word. It worked so well that I ended up spending the majority of the day just reading interesting articles in French on my iPhone. Focusing on personally interesting content and treating the target language as a means to this content is truly like cheating. I am fully convinced that the absolute majority of those people that lose motivation quickly in regards to their language learning do so because of boring content or of non-content. I think that keeping it natural is the way to go. If your "language learning activity" is boring, do not blame the language, it is most likely boring due to boring content. You must connect it to your values and interests! So what would you do if you were not studying a language but reading or listening to something boring in your native language? You would stop reading or listening to that garbage and find something else. The Internet is vast and your interests are probably not unique! Edited by JC_Identity on 21 October 2013 at 3:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| JC_Identity Triglot Groupie Sweden thelawofidentity.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4119 days ago 53 posts - 108 votes Speaks: Swedish, Serbo-Croatian*, English | Message 18 of 46 21 October 2013 at 7:13pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I have previously mentioned that I like programming and that I see a lot of similarities between learning a programming language and learning an ordinary language. Learning to program actually helped me shape my present approach for learning French. When I was first learning to program I spent about a year failing to learn to program before I realized what I was doing wrong: I WAS TRYING TO LEARN TO PROGRAM! i.e. mostly focused on learning a programming language and programming as a discipline.
I was piling up programming books and watching video tutorials. It is funny now as I look back at this how I struggled to get through those books and video tutorials so that I could reach a state where I knew how to program. The problem was that I never asked myself what specific reasons and goals I had for learning to program. Sure I had general reasons like: I will be able to do so much when I learn how to program, I will know how computers work and how to talk to them, I will be able to create my own games and software and share them or sell them to a lot of people and I will be able to get a nice job etc. All those general reasons were too abstract to ensure enough motivation to go through the process. In addition non of those reasons were specific enough to give me any hint about where to start and where to go and when I would know that I have gotten there, i.e. when I actually could say that I know how to program. It is easy now to laugh about this but it took about a year of struggle to see the true nature of this issue. Today I see a lot of students of programming as well as students of foreign languages caught in the same trap. They put their focus on the language itself or on the learning for the learning's sake, i.e. they treat the language primarily as an end. I get that it is easy to get motivated to start learning a new language when you watch a video of Luca or Emanuele speaking in so many languages. It is inspiring, personally I get very inspired and I am thankful that today I am able to see those individuals in action. But this inspiration is not enough to take you through the process. What is also needed are VERY SPECIFIC GOALS THAT YOU PERSONALLY CARE ABOUT REACHING. It can be understanding a specific article in your target language or writing an email to a friend in the target language etc. This is one big reason why I think there is such a value in approaching languages primarily as MEANS, because it ensures that you remember the purpose of languages and that without your interests and goals the languages and the learning of them will be empty. Your SPECIFIC goal is what gives meaning to a language and to the learning process of it! I want to end this post by linking to an article and a video where two different well-known programmers describe how they learned to program. The first one is to an article, How do I learn to program, written by David Heinermeier Hansson, who is a well-known programmer working for the company 37signals. He had the exact same experience as me when he learned to program. The other link is to a youtube video, What Most Schools Don't Teach, that promotes learning to program. The most valuable words to me in the video are defiantly Marc Zuckerberg's (just think of it as learning how to learn a foreign language and the words are equally valid): "Learning how to program didn't start off as wanting to learn all of computer science or trying to master this discipline or anything like that, it just started off because I wanted to do this one simple thing, to make something fun to myself and my sisters. And I wrote this little program, then basically added a little bit to it and then when I needed to learn something new, I looked it up either in a book or on the Internet and added a little bit to it." 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| JC_Identity Triglot Groupie Sweden thelawofidentity.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4119 days ago 53 posts - 108 votes Speaks: Swedish, Serbo-Croatian*, English | Message 19 of 46 23 October 2013 at 5:11pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Do you like comic books?
If you do, as I do, I think that you have a great way to learn a language as a by-product just by consuming comics you find interesting. If looking at it from a language learning perspective, comic books are even better than ordinary books when it comes to offering a rich context, there are also the pictures. But of course not all comic books are written with "proper" language. However if you have been reading my log, you know that am not the least concerned about this because for me the language is primarily a mean and tool. I am not going after the vague pursuit of a language as an end in itself whatever that implies. My primary concern is the consumption of, to me, interesting content. Now for me, in French, there are a lot of great classics in terms of comic books that I would want to read. The only issue right now for me is that consuming French comics (that is electronic ones) is still a bit slow for me. Slow when it comes to ensuring comprehensible input. It takes a bit too long to look up the meaning of something that I do not understand myself. There are essentially three ways to ensure comprehensible input when reading a comic book as I see it: - You search an online dictionary manually by typing the word or words that you do not understand - You have the same comic book in a language you understand, which you can refer to, next to the one in the target language. - You have a great OCR tools which enables you to click or mark a word and get direct translation through an online dictionary . I am looking into all these three ways of ensuring comprehensible input as I want to build a tool for myself for reading comic books. The ideal would be to enable the third alternative since it would be the fastest but I do not think that there is a good enough OCR tool for this unfortunately, and it would be hard to get it to function on comic books since the font can be irregular. The solution might be to go for the first two. I will see what I will do, need to think about it a bit more. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 20 of 46 23 October 2013 at 6:59pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Yup. Comic books and TV series provide amazingly helpful context, thanks to the images and the plot. The French actually publish relatively few American-style "comic books", but they produce an enormous quantity of amazing graphic novels, which are longer and less episodic. For a great visual image of just how many bandes dessinées are available in French, check out my photos of Librairie Planète BD in Montreal. When I walked along those shelves, at least 75% of those books were of the quality that you'd expect from a really solid run of an American comic book. Not even the native speakers who work in a BD store manage to keep up with all the good titles being published.
I actually think this is a big virtue of comics. French is a fairly diglossic language, and there are some important differences between the spoken and written registers. It's hard to get enough exposure to the spoken register early on, before you're able to understand television. And most novels contain a relatively small amount of dialog. But bandes dessinées consist almost exclusively of spoken French, much it quite natural. They're a marvelous stepping stone towards watching television series, which I consider to be an amazing language learning tool.
Let me suggest one more approach: Just plow through. While I'm an enormous fan of pop-up dictionaries and SRS systems, they're not actually necessary. If you consume enough content, most words will eventually be encountered in a "perfect" context, one which makes the definition clear. And further reading will reinforce the word naturally, provided the reading volume is high enough that you see the word regularly. This breaks down a bit when your vocabulary reaches 10,000 or 15,000 words, because the unknown words become quite rare, and there are always words which refuse to stick. Pop-up dictionaries and SRS are great tools for when huge volumes of extensive reading just aren't enough.
I've been experimenting with another approach, which is capturing interesting text snippets efficiently when reading, and looking up definitions later. You can see the pre-release version of my program in my log. It has various tools for bulk import of captured text, which is then chopped into cards and presented in a "workspace" with a choice of several dictionaries. When I have some spare time, I sit down and look up definitions on a hundred cards or so. It's pleasant work, well suited to a laptop. I do my reading and my Anki reviews on mobile devices, but I like using a big screen and real keyboard for dictionary work. This paradigm would work quite well for comics if you could capture a panel or two of a comic while reading, and then look stuff up later. OCR wouldn't need to be perfect, because you could always just edit the OCRed word. If anybody's interested in building an image-capture tool, I'm going to be providing a REST API for my tool and releasing the source code into the public domain using the unlicense. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5007 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 21 of 46 23 October 2013 at 7:57pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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The only con of BDs and comic books is the price/amount of content ratio, unless you have
a well stocked library at hand. I have got such a library in my city, at least when it comes to French :-) Using the context that is provided to you, that is, in my opinion, even better than looking up everything in a dictionary. However, it is the classical question whethet it is better to use input intensively or extensively :-) (and the answer is obviously: whichever you prefer). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| JC_Identity Triglot Groupie Sweden thelawofidentity.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4119 days ago 53 posts - 108 votes Speaks: Swedish, Serbo-Croatian*, English | Message 22 of 46 24 October 2013 at 10:06am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
What a treasure! I have definitely been looking into BD:s and they seem to be a sea of pleasurable reading.
Wow I like this advice, thank you! It is easy to get too attached to technology sometimes. It reminds me a lot about what Kato Lomb advocated as well. I think your approach and your program seems really interesting. I can see value in that it helps you keep up the flow while consuming the content rather than having too many interruptions. I will let you know if I decide and manage to code a satisfactory OCR for comics. I am not too motivated yet. But I will definitely try to implement your advice more and try to plow through some BD:s. Thanks for sharing emk! Edited by JC_Identity on 24 October 2013 at 10:10am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| JC_Identity Triglot Groupie Sweden thelawofidentity.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4119 days ago 53 posts - 108 votes Speaks: Swedish, Serbo-Croatian*, English | Message 23 of 46 04 November 2013 at 4:43am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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This post is going to be on how I learn words in French, the value of mnemonics, Daniel Tammet, and
perhaps a revolutionary idea for retention of words. First of all I see all of a person's knowledge as a whole, like a large net. I am convinced that learning happens when a person's is able to integrate a new piece of knowledge into this whole or net. The more and stronger connections one is able to make the better. This is why I am opposed to rote memorization. I see rote memorization as the most primitive form of memorizing, which is not based on an understanding of the nature of knowledge. It is not concerned with making connections with the interconnected whole that is already there. Rather than connecting the new piece of knowledge which essentially is the method of understanding one is trying to memorize by storing an isolated piece. This is why one quickly forgets what one is trying to memorize by rote memorization. Also if one manages to retain this piece of knowledge stored this way, i.e. not being connected to other relevant facts, this piece of knowledge is not recalled within the proper context which it should properly flow naturally from when the right opportunity triggers the context of knowledge. Put in other terms: it was not connected when stored so it will not come connected when recalled. I have noticed that every time I tend to learn a new word in French from just having read it once, i.e. get it to stick immediately, is when the written or spoken form of the word reminds me of something I already know. For example I remember when reading the word "tapis" (carpet) in French and looking it up, it was immediately imprinted in my memory since in Bosnian the word for carpet is almost the same and has to have the same root: "tepih". Another was the word "prevenir" (warn/forewarn) in French which was easy to remember since I already knew the word "venir" (come/arrive). I just saw it logically in my mind as one forewarns before arriving. Now these are rather obvious ones. But there were also less obvious ones, one being "poids" (weight) which in its written form reminded me of the Bosnian word "pod" (floor), but here the meaning was not the same, but I instantly thought when I first looked it up that weight is what falls to the floor, "pod". This connection helped me to have the French word "poids" stick. The case is always the same for me when I get words to stick immediately, I always make a connection to something I already know. Now the connection needs to be meaningful. To properly memorize a word you have to connect the form of the word (written/spoken) with the meaning of the word. However this connection need not be direct. It is often hard to make a direct connection if the written letter combination or the spoken form does not remind you of something that you already know. This is where I tend think up simple mnemonics for myself. However I do not do it every time and for every word but rather only when I feel like it and when I think the word is important. Also I tend to do it when I know that I have looked up a word before and it seems important. It does not take me more than a couple of seconds to do this and when it does take longer I usually stop myself and move on instead. One example the other day was how I learned the word "embêtant" (annoying/irritating) which kept coming up. I divided it up as "Em" (short for Emily) "be" (ask in Swedish) "tant" (lady in Swedish). I saw in my mind how I said to Emily to ask a lady something and how the lady thought that Emily was annoying. Now it is not perfect but yet it made it stick in my mind. I really think that mnemonics could be a great tool and the more I see the power of this tool the more it gets me thinking about the case of Daniel Tammet, the supposed savant who learns languages really fast. The only thing that I see him being better at than average language learners is that he is better at memorizing, but I do not think it is a matter of genetics but of technique. To be honest I do not think the guy has a special brain and is any different from normal people. It is about how he uses his brain. He mentions in his book and in interviews that he sees connections between words and that a single word for him represent a color and feeling etc. This tells me that he has automatized a system that helps him make more and richer connections with what he is learning. Now why could not normal people do the same thing? I know they can and it has been done when it comes to memorizing numbers with the so called peg system and all its derivatives. This system helps you see number as more than just numbers, it allows you to translate numbers into concepts from which you can build images and thus remember long number sequences easily. Now the more I think about it the more I ask myself why could we not make a system for letters or letter combinations or even better for the IPA. Such a system would no doubt allow people to make instantaneous mnemonics or rather see any kind of letter or sound combination as potentially meaningful. This is just an interesting thought I had which might be worth investigating some day. I am getting more and more convinced however that this could be revolutionary for our retention. Another interesting thing Daniel mentions in his book is that he also always makes sure to learn words from context. He never studies word lists but learns words from reading them in sentences. So to end this post I would say: Knowledge is acquired by making meaningful connections. So you will remember best what you make meaningful to you. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Ezy Ryder Diglot Senior Member Poland youtube.com/user/Kat Joined 4347 days ago 284 posts - 387 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: Mandarin, Japanese | Message 24 of 46 04 November 2013 at 1:18pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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As for the mnemonics part, there has been recently a related thread, "How to never forget a
Japanese word again", and I remember reading a post at someone's blog, where the author has developed a system of associating persons and places to Chinese words based on initials, tones, etc... However those languages have a particular property which doesn't occur in certain other languages. I.e. they use a relatively small number of syllables; and in case of Mandarin Chinese, many words consist of only 3 or fewer of them, each being a morpheme (if I understand it correctly). When it comes to certain other languages, they may use way more syllables, so associating something to each, would be a big task in itself. As for mnemonics for IPA - the advantage would be that one would remember how to pronounce each word correctly, not relying only on the orthography, of which the level of straightforwardness varies across languages; and it probably would be possible to do something like, a place for the place of articulation, person for the manner, and perhaps an object for additional properties (such as stress, aspiration, palatalization, etc...), but in many languages words consist of multiple sounds. Thus one word's mnemonic requiring as many images as it has sounds, could make such system difficult/inefficient. The only other option I see, is making a mnemonic only for a unique part of the word. But if You'd manage to come up with a better solution, I'd be interested in reading about it. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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