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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 17 of 55 09 July 2008 at 4:16pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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anteportas,
thank you. I see what you mean by long post :P I have saved the link, so I will go through it at leisure. 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 18 of 55 09 July 2008 at 4:17pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Volte,
Thank you for your explanations, and for opening up the topic which though obviously discussed before, might have been missed by fairly new people like me. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Zorndyke Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 6950 days ago 374 posts - 382 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: Czech | Message 19 of 55 09 July 2008 at 8:38pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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I intend to try the listening-reading method in the future for Russian, but there are still important questions that puzzle me. I apologize in advance for these stupid questions and it's likely they have already been answered somewhere, since they seem very obvious to me, but after all that has been written on L-R it's almost impossible to find answers for these (that's the needle in the haystack...):
1. When one starts to learn a language with L-R the target language seems to be nothing but a floating stream of foreign sounds. Reading the English text, how can I know what part of the text the speaker is currently reading? That means how can I better match the English text with the Russian audio? Often it would be difficult to find the sentence/clause the Russian speaker is reading in the English text. Only when the speaker starts reading a new paragraph or there are names or non-Russian phrases I would be able to locate the exact place that is currently being read out. Mostly I wouldn't know where the speaker is in a range of about 1-2 sentences. I cannot imagine it is possible to learn a language with L-R without knowing where you are in the text. 2. I hardly think that someone can help me with this, but I feel I can only concentrate on either the text or the audio. Listening to the audio means not reading and understanding the text properly and the other way round. 3. Even if I imagine I can cope with problems 1 and 2, I still have the feeling that I am missing something very important about this method. If I understand correctly the first step of the L-R method is reading the text in a language that you already know while simultaneously hear the audio in your target language. And then after 10-20 pages you simply begin to understand occasional phrases until after several dozens of hours you start to get the gist of the Russian text/audio? To me this sounds like "Oh, of course you can jump down that canyon, you only have to flap your arms and after 10-20 meters you will begin to fly!" That seems very unrealistic to me. You listen to a stream of words in a language that you do not know at all and then you are expected to learn and understand it somehow only by "concentrating on the meaning", whatever that means when you do not understand a word in a totally new language? I'm afraid I don't know how to phrase this question better. Is this correct or am I missing something? What exactly am I supposed to do while listening to the Russian audio and reading the English text? Edited by Zorndyke on 09 July 2008 at 8:49pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6542 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 20 of 55 09 July 2008 at 11:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Huh? I thought it worked for you. 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 21 of 55 10 July 2008 at 4:02am | IP Logged | ||||||||
The language doesn't seem like "a floating stream of foreign sounds" to me. A few things help significantly at the beginning: 0) Cognates - not only names are similar between the two languages. Any pair of large languages have some loan words in common at this point, all the more when you're dealing with a translated text, which you always are in L-R. 1) Intonation. With a good professional speaker, there will be a pause between each clause, and a longer one between each sentence. This helps a lot when pauses and cognates are still all you have to go on. 2) Pick simple material at first. Something with short sentences is best. Sentences are usually in the same order in literary translations; clauses within a sentence often aren't. 3) Being in a range of 1-2 sentences is often close enough, at the start; as you learn more, you can more consistently stay closer. It definitely feels weird to follow along with an entirely unfamiliar language at first, but it works. Iversen wrote about doing it with Persian.
A few people have written about this problem; I don't know of a solution. The best I can suggest is to try, and see if it becomes more natural. If not, maybe this method isn't for you.
You're missing a few things. 0) You don't tend to understand whole phrases within 20 pages. That would be.... nice. L-R is incredibly powerful, but it's not magic pixie dust; the results are insanely fast, but not that fast. 1) What happens is that first, you can associate sentences/clauses, with a fair amount of uncertainty. The uncertainty gradually decreases. Eventually, you can associate words and figure out how things are structured, etc. 2) During this process, words, phrases, and structures gradually become more and more familiar, through repeated exposure in different contexts. To use your analogy of flying in a canyon: with appropriate tools, why not? I enjoy paragliding, but I certainly can't do it bare-armed. Similarly, I can't start understanding a substantial amount of a language not closely related to one I already have a base in within some dozens of hours unless I have tools to make it more comprehensible; L-R is one such tool. The weirdest stage of L-R is early in 'natural listening', or approaching it, where you can understand your target language (through a fog of lack of nuance and with some gaps), but not analyze it, and frequently can't say which word means what. The second-weirdest stage is following along and associating the unfamiliar language with meaning during the first few hours. 2 persons have 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 22 of 55 10 July 2008 at 4:04am | IP Logged | ||||||||
C'mon, leosmith, that's not befitting of you. Furthermore, I'd like to ask you to refrain from low jabs at atamagaii in my logs. S/he's my friend, and if you must do them, I'd prefer you do them elsewhere. And lastly: I think s/he is intelligent, but eh. 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 23 of 55 10 July 2008 at 4:54am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Volte,
I read through quite a bit of original post about L-R and it was illuminating. I see that one of the most common question was the one raised above by Zorndyke. My question is what if you know the material? If you are going to read a book in target language that you already know in English, would it still help to do the first step of listening in target language and reading English? Or would it be more beneficial to move on to listening in target language and reading in target language? 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 24 of 55 10 July 2008 at 4:59am | IP Logged | ||||||||
I shall defer again to 'before the door', as I haven't L-R'd with any books I knew intimately beforehand, although I make sure to read them at least once before starting L-R. I would expect it to depend on how well you know the book, and the familiarity of the language. That said, if you're still at the point where you have reason to do L-R, I'd expect that using the English would make more sense, or alternating, as the user FSI does; that said, parallel texts are better by the time this becomes an issue. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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