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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| victorhart Bilingual Tetraglot Groupie United States mandarinexperiment.o Joined 3710 days ago 66 posts - 155 votes  Speaks: English*, Portuguese*, Spanish, French Studies: Mandarin | Message 65 of 170 21 October 2014 at 9:23pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Haha, that's funny. Fortunately I already knew that, so I will be able to continue for another 6 years. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5433 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 66 of 170 21 October 2014 at 9:59pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
While I guess any publicity is better than no publicity at all, and I acknowledge the recognition, I have to say that I did not say that you only need 250 words to speak a language, and certainly not Mandarin, of which I know nothing. But I don't want to get into that debate which has nothing to do with this thread. But since the question was asked, my objection has nothing to do with the number of words. My fundamental objection is about the effectiveness of looking exclusively at videos one does not understand at all. If, on the other hand, as been highly recommended by most people here, watching videos combined with some other strategies and tools, including language-teaching videos meant for children, then we will certainly have good results. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| shk00design Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 4447 days ago 747 posts - 1123 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin Studies: French | Message 67 of 170 22 October 2014 at 8:13am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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In my opinion you need to start with learning some very basic words & phrases first whether you are using
flashcards, computer programs like Pimsleur, Rosetta Stone, etc. Watching video is a good idea but without some basic vocabulary & grammar your comprehension would be so limited that you wouldn't be able to pick up anything. Next you have to find TV programs & films with subtitles. There are lots of Chinese programs from Singapore with both English subtitles & Chinese captions. Watching a movie with Chinese captions you run into the problem of recognizing characters. You have to spend at least 3-6 months before you can pick up enough characters. And you need to decide whether you want to learn Traditional or Simplified characters. If you rely on English translations for a movie, you are going to get the meaning of what was said by the actors but not necessarily the grammar rules or all the words & phrases because there are differences between even close languages like English & German. After that you can get into the 4-character proverbs. The Chinese would add proverbs in conversations that you would find a few in a TV program or movie. In the past 8 months that I was watching Chinese drama series (those with up to 20 episodes) and TV talk shows, I compiled over 100 different 4-character proverbs including 莫名其妙 mòmíngqímiào (something that is unclear), 無師自通 wúshīzìtōng (self- taught). You can spend another few months with Chinese proverbs alone. And the language use a lot of short-forms such as: 奧運會 instead of 奧林匹克運動會 for the Olympic Games, 民運 instead of 民主運動 for democracy movement. You need time to catch different words & phrases that are shortened. How many different words & phrases can you pick up in 1 day? You can't expect your brain to be a sponge and get everything you hear on TV in 1 day. You need to repeat a phrase enough times to get it into your head. If it is an uncommon phrase, you may hear it just once and never use it again. You find different word usage between Mainland Chinese & Taiwanese Mandarin such as: Taxi：出租車 － 計程車 Astronaut：航天員 － 太空人 Bicycle：自行車 － 腳踏車 Washroom：洗手間 － 盥洗室 Finally you can never pick up a language 100%. There are always new words & phrases that you would pick up from newspapers, magazines, TV or radio. Yesterday I picked up a computer term: 翻牆 referring to getting around the Internet to access web-sites that are blocked by the government. Sometime ago, I went to a summer language exchange program in Taiwan with a friend from the US. We were both assigned to an advanced level Mandarin class and passed. We would write letters back and forth for many years before switching to E-mail in Chinese. My friend always claimed that his conversation skills tend to be weak compared to his writing skills. He recently enrolled in a university level Mandarin class while studying German. I haven't been in class for a while but kept up listening to Chinese programs on radio and can read the newspaper reasonably well (about 95%) except for several words & phrases in each article that I have to look up. The bottom-line to learning and maintaining a language is exposure. You need to set aside time every day or every week that you can watch a radio or TV program or a movie or read a newspaper. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4536 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 68 of 170 22 October 2014 at 12:41pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
It does point out how limiting your experiment is in some ways though. I have basically been native input all the way for the last two-and-a-half years in German. So I am certainly not immediately antagonistic to your general approach, but I think personally I would have had a lot of trouble working out the German number system just from input as it's often hard to know what a spoken/written number refers to in the real world (e.g., "the serial killer had five victims" - what does five mean in this context? "I was 28 when I first visited the USA" What does 28 mean in this context? "Their third dog was called Fido" etc). I think there are lots of these "little" things (if you can call counting little) that are much quicker to learn in a "dirty" non-input fashion, that take nothing away from the value of learning predominantly by input from native materials. Also as others have pointed out over the years (EMK had a nice post about this over a year ago) video input is a very poor analogy to the way children learn languages. And if learning solely via video is an unnatural act - you are after all one of the few people ever in the history of the planet to attempt to learn Chinese this way - then it's not really clear to me what the purpose of the experiment is. Perhaps you can learn the language this way. Perhaps not. But it's not a "natural" way to learn, and so it's seems to me to be just another technique - and most likely a rather inefficient one. Edited by patrickwilken on 22 October 2014 at 1:13pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5311 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 69 of 170 22 October 2014 at 2:00pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I'm pleased victorhart is willing to do this experiment, because I don't think anyone else would. I'd just like to remind victorhart not to complicate the experiment by using non-video-watching activities like SRS or memorisation or Qiao Hu whatever that is, if possible. If you learn with both video & SRS, and do succeed in the end, I will contribute your success to SRS and not to video [reason below]. Then your experiment becomes wasted. [reason for above] Person A: 1. Sees an image of a dog in a textbook, captioned "狗", and realises that 狗 means dog. 2. SRSs it. 3. Learns and succeeds. victorhart: 1. Happens to see an image of a dog in a video, subtitled "狗", and realises that 狗 means dog. 2. SRSs it. 3. Learns and succeeds. Step 1 seems insignificant compared to step 2. * * * I think video-watching is just like L-R: subtitles in L1, images also a form of L1, voice in L2. Has anyone experimented learning via L-R alone? How long did it take? Maybe we can compare which method works faster. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| YnEoS Senior Member United States Joined 4257 days ago 472 posts - 893 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian, Cantonese, Japanese, French, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Mandarin, Italian, Spanish | Message 70 of 170 22 October 2014 at 4:01pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
If he's allowed to review content I don't see why SRS would be out of bounds. SRS is just a scheduler for the content you see. It seems his experiment already includes re-watching and re-studying videos. So the same effect of SRS could be achieved by writing in your calendar "July 7th, watch Episode 6 time code 13:25-13:27, once without subtitles, once with subtitles". Only with SRS you can spend your time getting exposure to the language instead of writing in your calendar. Though I think this brings up some interesting questions that patrickwilken was also raising, which is what is this experiment actually testing and where exactly are the lines drawn? Like translations seem fine sometimes and some kind of review/study of video content is okay, but any combination that would make learning more efficient is out of bounds? If you're main goal is simply to avoid building strong ties between a mandarin word and it's English translation, why not greatly increase your speed using something like Gabriel Wyrner's method, and start by learning 625 concrete words with google image search + forvo and never put your eyes on the English meaning? Or is that not fun and too much like studying?
Video + Subtitles is actually quite a different process than Listening-Reading. With subtitled video the content is synced up for you and the subtitles can pass by without you paying any attention to them. With Listen-Reading you have to keep the text and audio synced up yourself, so if you're not constantly matching what you're reading with what you're hearing, you're not in sync and you're not Listening-Reading. This is why I think Listening-Reading ends up being much more efficient, it requires more concentration to do, in addition to there being a lot more content and repetition.) 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5311 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 71 of 170 22 October 2014 at 4:40pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I was more referring to the SRS that emk described - SRSing snippets of videos. I felt that drilling snippets was against the idea of immersion-via-videos, because it's unnatural. But that's just by MY definition of the experiement, not by Victor's. Like you, I don't fully grasp what exactly the experiment is trying to prove. I'll go read Victor's blog now. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| victorhart Bilingual Tetraglot Groupie United States mandarinexperiment.o Joined 3710 days ago 66 posts - 155 votes Speaks: English*, Portuguese*, Spanish, French Studies: Mandarin | Message 72 of 170 22 October 2014 at 5:19pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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smallwhite and YnEoS,
I really appreciate your thoughts and to be perfectly honest I'm not always sure of the boundaries on what types of activities or compromises--in addition to just sitting passively in front of streaming video in Mandarin without subtitles and paying attention--are coherent with my experimental methodology. It is useful to get outside opinions. For instance: - It seems obvious that watching the same movie or even clips over and over is perfectly acceptable. - I am not yet familiar with SRS, but it seems that if I can use the technology just to make reviewing these clips more efficient, without even including subtitles, it would be perfectly acceptable. It's kind of like being able to skip tracks on a DVD player rather than have to rewind a tape in a VCR. I'm not doing anything other than watching video, but I am reviewing clips more efficiently. - It seems that jotting down a word a day (my own phonetic transcription) on a list and the exact source where I heard it is OK in that it is really just a way of focusing my attention and facilitating review of specific video clips. If I start reviewing the list in isolation to try to memorize words, then it seems that it would be a violation. But if I use it just to help me find that part of the video where the term is used and review it, it does not alter the experiment fundamentally. What do you think? - It seems clear that watching videos with English subtitles is a real compromise and does alter the experiment somewhat. I am doing so basically because I enjoy the movies much more that way, but I do occasionally remove or cover the subtitles, and plan to do that more and more. - Qiao Hu is just a show in Mandarin for toddlers that is readily available on YouTube. It seems obvious that watching it is an inherent part of my methodology as proposed from the outset. - I have made little Qiao Hu study guides. It was a suggestion of a moderator from another forum, to have something to share with others. Making the guides does not help my learning except in that it helps me focus on what I'm watching. All I do is make note, in English, of terms I think or know that I understood (and provide a little summary of the plot). So although you could say it's sort of a violation of my experiment, I think it will not significantly affect the results. Regarding what I'm setting out to do with my experiment, I don't want to be repetitive with what I've already posted. I want to test the value of watching authentic videos in an utterly foreign language even for beginners. For some people, the idea that watching authentic videos is beneficial for a total beginner may seem obvious; to others, it may be ridiculous; yet others might find it intriguing and revolutionary. By doing this exclusively (while acknowledging the main compromise of sometimes using English subtitles with movies, but not with Qiao Hu or other sources), I believe the evidence provided by my experience will be much more compelling than if I did it as part of a more balanced approach to learning Mandarin (which would probably be more effective). In addition, I personally want to learn Mandarin, but am in no hurry and have very limited time to commit to it, so this seemed like a fun, easy way to make some progress. It is proving to be just that. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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