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Importance of "studying"

 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
11 messages over 2 pages: 1
Serpent
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 Message 9 of 11
02 July 2015 at 5:42am | IP Logged 
It's more about comprehensible input, I think. You're likely to have a very different experience with Spanish. At least up to that point where you can make yourself understood and get any message across.
Accuracy takes a lot of dedication, especially when you're praised even for the smallest effort, and you're aware that once you blend in you'll no longer be praised.

Edited by Serpent on 02 July 2015 at 5:48am

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holly heels
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 Message 10 of 11
03 July 2015 at 4:18am | IP Logged 
This question always reminds me of those documentaries about anthropologists who seem to speak with native level fluency after living with some obscure tribe in the Amazon with no written language. This probably leads some people to believe that acquiring even a difficult language is almost automatic in an immersive environment. Clearly not true for some people.

But you would really have to put the anthropologist's skill level to the test to see if he has really mastered the all the nuances of the language or not. And a 1-hour TV show with a few fragments of animated conversation with natives is not a rigorous enough test.

Some people just don't have the option of immersion, so they have to simulate an immersive environment the best way they can.

But the good news is, that even without the benefit of immersion, the skill level of a motivated distance learner who studies 3 hours a day for several years (also and including native materials) could potentially surpass that of a person of equal intelligence in an immersive environment who does little or no actual studying.

However, even at C level, the speech of a distance learner would often probably be more stilted and less natural than the speech of a semi-motivated immersion learner, because the distance learner has to rely more on memory and will never have the real time experience of an immersion learner, which there is no substitute for.





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Iversen
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 Message 11 of 11
06 July 2015 at 2:33pm | IP Logged 
Well the distance learner will have other sources. Even if these are oral there is a lot of difference between TV news and the running babble sessions in a family, and you will end up with very different ways of expressing yorself. Personally I wouldn't see it as a failure if I ended up 'speaking like a book' - because I see that kind of rather formal speech as at least as relevant and useful as speaking like a drunk teenager in a bar.


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