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Bull you believed starting out

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emk
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 Message 57 of 94
24 June 2015 at 7:38pm | IP Logged 
Serpent wrote:
patrickwilken wrote:
Unfortunately, I would put this under bull I used to believe. :)

I think for some languages (English might be the exception) the gap between receptive skills (reading/listening) and productive skills (writing/speaking) is too great for expertise in reading/listening to translate automatically into excellence in speaking/writing.

What seems to happen when you read is that the brain extracts meaning, and ignores grammar that is unimportant for meaning (e.g., word gender) so over time you get better and better receptive skills, but productive skills remain far behind.

Of course the gap could close with sufficient practise, but I found even for my native English that my writing greatly improved when I was forced to write a lot at university.

The more exclusively input you go, the more you need three things: language learning experience, an understanding of linguistics and deliberate attention to details. It's definitely not as simple as having fun and learning with zero effort.

Yeah, since we're talking about major changes to people's language learning ideas, I think this was a big part of Khatzumoto's switch from 10,000 sentences to MCDs. With the purely sentence based approach, some people learned to speak Japanese, but others wound up much better at understanding than speaking.

With MCDs, you can choose to hide prepositions, inflections, gender markers, or any other grammatical details. You don't need to be able to explain why you use a given form, you just need to be notice what grammatical form should be used and supply it on demand. It's basically a really lazy way to study grammar and notice details, without having to learn too many explicit rules.
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robarb
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languagenpluson
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 Message 58 of 94
24 June 2015 at 10:38pm | IP Logged 
@ Bao and Juan: Both of you write English excellently. Maybe the "bull we used to believe" is that there is one way
that works and everything else is useless. Evidently, both of your approaches work.

Juan, if you truly only read texts and it was actually the first time you ever tried to listen to a native speaker
talking in English, or the first time you ever tried to speak English, or the first time you ever tried to write English,
I don't think it would go too well. You need some practice for those to come out right.

But I agree that a kind of 95%-reading approach does work. If you use 95% reading to get your understanding to
a very high level, then your first attempt at writing/speaking should be at least passable to start out, and you
won't need much time to catch up. And I think the transfer cost is less from receptive skills to productive than
the other way around. It may not happen automatically, but at least for many people, the cost is pretty low.


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Serpent
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 Message 59 of 94
25 June 2015 at 12:06am | IP Logged 
Agreed, but it's much better to do lots of listening as well, for example with audiobooks.
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daegga
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 Message 60 of 94
25 June 2015 at 1:29pm | IP Logged 
Speaking of listening...

"you need to listen to progressively harder material, slightly above your comfort
zone" (a generalization of the whole i+1 paradigm à la Krashen et al.)

I even experimented with artificially degraded audio 1-2 years ago... :D

My experience is that easy but interesting material works just as well. The
difficulty will fluctuate around the "barely easy" threshold (interesting stuff is
often more difficult, but you can make it easier by cheating, eg. using headphones,
TL subtitles, ...) and the threshold will increase step by step. A natural way of
cycling instead of linear progression.
Of course the occasional intensive study of challenging material can have benefits.
But the whole "if it's easy, it's a waste of time" mantra is bs.

Edited by daegga on 25 June 2015 at 1:30pm

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Serpent
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 Message 61 of 94
25 June 2015 at 8:50pm | IP Logged 
daegga wrote:
I even experimented with artificially degraded audio 1-2 years ago... :D
And how was it?

This thread is turning into "things that can be useful if you don't hate them".
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daegga
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 Message 62 of 94
25 June 2015 at 9:55pm | IP Logged 
here

the last two posts
I don't really remember what the outcome was other than me choosing not to do that
again.

Edited by daegga on 25 June 2015 at 9:55pm

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Serpent
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 Message 63 of 94
25 June 2015 at 10:07pm | IP Logged 
Aww yes now I remember.
To be fair, Silmarillion is difficult to read even in L1, and I'm not sure I'd handle an audiobook either.
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kanewai
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 Message 64 of 94
25 June 2015 at 11:14pm | IP Logged 
I forgot one biggie:

"I should try to speak as fast as the natives"

I don't know why I thought this, but I know I'm not the only one. Especially with
Spanish: students seem to have the idea that it's supposed to be spoken really, really
fast.


3 persons have voted this message useful



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