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L-R summary: July 2008 passive edition | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| Emerald Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom languagedabbler.blog Joined 6237 days ago 316 posts - 340 votes  Speaks: Hindi, Gujarati*, English Studies: Spanish | Message 9 of 55 08 July 2008 at 5:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Volte,
Would you say L-R would be useful at very beginner's level? I have just started studying Italian - and by just, I mean just over a week ago. Are there any particular L-R sources that you would recommend for Italian from your experience? Grazie! Edited by Emerald on 08 July 2008 at 5:02pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6431 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 10 of 55 09 July 2008 at 1:05am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yes, L-R is useful at a beginner's level; as my post said, I had absolutely no background in Polish when I started using L-R for it. Frankly, it's my favorite technique to use as a beginning beginner at this point. Whether one can use it seems to me a matter of personality - you need to be able to deal with uncertainty, not understanding everything at once, and not having a clear way of measuring progress. You can feel progress with it quite quickly, but it's not easy to measure or test, and you cannot output much/anything for dozens of hours. As for L-R materials for Italian - there are a few, though not everything is pre-assembled. Things to look into include "The Little Prince" (the English translation isn't quite as close to the original French as the Italian one is, unfortunately), "Pinocchio" (which has a few excellent audiobooks - a rarity for Italian), and perhaps "I Promessi Sposi". Finding unabridged audiobooks for Italian is the hardest part, I'd say, but it's doable. I realize this is a little vague and doesn't come with download links; I apologize. I haven't done serious Italian L-R. Edited by Volte on 09 July 2008 at 1:05am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Emerald Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom languagedabbler.blog Joined 6237 days ago 316 posts - 340 votes Speaks: Hindi, Gujarati*, English Studies: Spanish | Message 12 of 55 09 July 2008 at 4:50am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks Volte and anteportas. I wouldn't want to say about my own intelligence level - however, I can play computer games (particularly Sims 2) for hours on end, and read good books for days on end.
I was actually doing kind of L-R with Piccolo Donne, but more as a supplement to Pimsleur and MT rather than as a main thing. I will try it bit more seriously now. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Emerald Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom languagedabbler.blog Joined 6237 days ago 316 posts - 340 votes Speaks: Hindi, Gujarati*, English Studies: Spanish | Message 14 of 55 09 July 2008 at 1:13pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I apologize in advance if my questions sound too basic, but I don't know much about the method so would just like to clarify some things. First question is: how essential is it to have parallel text? I understand the importance of it in a text one is not familiar with, but what about with the text you do know? For example, I have an audio and text version of Piccole Donne (Italian version of Little Women). I know this book. I have read it many times in English, and I have seen the movie dozens of times. So far I have only been going through the first chapter of Piccole Donne because I thought going through whole book might be too much. If I use L-R method with this book, is it necessary to have the text in English? Even though I don’t at present understand most of the words, I still get the gist of the story based on few words I do know, and from my memory of story in English. Is the purpose of having text in known language, simply so you would understand the story, or to actually compare sentence by sentence what each word means? second question: why is Assimil only good for short periods of time study, and LR for longer period? P.S: I do understand “getting joy” out of it part. I have an audio only version of Harry Potter 1 in Italian. The first few times I heard the first chapter, I barely understood anything. Then suddenly one time, I understood quite a bit of the story. That simple recognition of being able to tell where the story was at the time was really satisfying, and gave me motivation to carry on with it. Now every time I hear the first chapter, I understand a little more. Edited by Emerald on 09 July 2008 at 1:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6431 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 15 of 55 09 July 2008 at 2:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Don't worry about it.
I'll defer to 'before the door' on this, if s/he has wants to say anything.
I can only speculate. I think the key factors are: - LR is best done with a continuous narrative. Aside from factors like idiolect (the same author tends to use the same words and structures), this is better for holding attention than a series of short things that don't really fit together into a story. - Assimil is highly graded; (in the good courses) it goes from extremely simple to fairly difficult. This leaves you with the alternative of repeating the simplest lessons a lot of times and not getting enough different input, or continuing onto the difficult lessons without much background, and learning more slowly, because there's not enough to latch onto yet, and the point of the lesson isn't one you're ready to absorb. - Assimil is, quite simply, too short. Doing L-R well requires MUCH more than 2 hours of input material, which is the length of most Assimil courses after reducing silence on them. Atamagaii suggested about 20-30 hours, possibly 40, of material (new material, so repeating a tape doesn't count towards this) are necessary. One can use 2 hours to get a 'representative chunk' of the language, and Professor Arguelles' posts explain how to do this, but it's a method rather different from L-R, with different aims and results. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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