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Benchmarking, swimming through treacle | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5238 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 1 of 18 15 April 2015 at 12:49pm | IP Logged | ||
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I wonder how others benchmark themselves when learning a language. I'm interested in knowing how I'm progressing after all the time spent on the Super Challenge, etc. The obvious way of course is to take a test to determine my ability A1,A2, B1, etc... but I find it hard to justify the cost for something which is basically a hobby.
Recently I've begun to do intensive reading every 10 or 20 page of my extensive reading. So once in awhile I'll stop and underline all the words I don't know 100% on a page. For French this looked like this. 384 words on the page, and I didn't know 33 of them. So I know 91.5% of the words on a page. But I was actually amazed at how many I didn't know, since I've actually been reading this book and felt my comprehension was very, very good. Of course some of these words I had a vague idea what they probably meant, but still looked them up. I have this feeling learning any language is like swimming through treacle. It is a slow horrible process, it doesn't taste very nice, and you come out all sticky and nasty and nothing happens for a long time. I've edited my languages again and put them all back to "studies", I don't know if I can "speak" any language other than English. I have seen a lot of people here who say they speak a language, but is their definition of speaks the same as mine? Is 91.5% comprehension sufficient to say you "speak"? So my question is threefold. How do you benchmark your progress in a language? What advice can you give about measuring linguistic abilities in an empirical way (outside of testing)? Is it possible to measure progress on a scale of less than months or years? What are your thoughts? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| basica Senior Member Australia Joined 3538 days ago 157 posts - 269 votes Studies: Serbian | Message 2 of 18 15 April 2015 at 1:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think "speak" like "fluent" can be a highly loaded term in the language learning community and really comes
down to one's personal definition. Personally speaking, I think that one can probably say they speak a language, even if they don't have a high 90s rate of comprehension of text as you require a greater vocabulary to read than to speak with people about day to day things. With that aside, I think your method is quite good. I actually have something similar in mind but will be taking a page of text just giving it a once over and then writing down what I understood if anything. I then plan then after 6 months to come back to the text and reread it and compare what I will understand to what I understand now. I think a similar sort of approach could be taken with listening as well - and as for speaking you could record yourself and compare at how fluently you express yourself on the same topic matter. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4951 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 3 of 18 15 April 2015 at 2:56pm | IP Logged | ||
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You have to analyze the benchmarks around the world (ILR, CEF, etc.) to get an idea of how progress will look like.
When you start a new language from scratch, let's say Kashmiri, I bet your knowledge of this language is absolute zero. So on day 1, you learn how to say Hello!, good-bye!, how are you?, the pronoun "I" and the adjectives "good" and "bad". (example A) By the end of those first few minutes/hours, your progress in Kashmiri has been nothing short of monumental, probably a 500% increase in knowledge from the time you woke up. Two years later... you could have an amazing day and learn 200 words and figure out all these new grammar patterns, and learn a bunch of expressions, studied about geology in this language, and yet your increase in knowledge from the time you woke up was 0.005%. (example B) You feel after all that work that "you are going nowhere". Yet clearly, B was a far far more productive day than A. Day A was a very poor quantitative day, but a MASSIVE qualitative day (the biggest any language learner will ever have in a language journey, day 1 !!), Day B was awful qualitatively (your level barely budged), but amazing quantitatively. But that is the difference between soaring from A0 to a A1-, example A, and "SNAIL-ing" in the middle of the Pacific ocean from low C1 to C1+. So is it possible to measure progress in less than months at anything above B1? I'm not really sure, not without torturing yourself in the process both in the quantification process and in the constant reminding of how slow it can be. So I frankly don't do it. Just like I try not fighting the fact it will get dark later today. I know it's not the answer you wanted, but it is reality I think. Of course once you accept you can't test your progress every day at higher levels, then you can set-up ways to test this progress at a regular and intellectually honest interval. One of the ways I do it is watching a film and then not thinking about it again. Then I watch a sequel (say Back to the Future 1 and then 2, as to eliminate some of the bias of having watched the first film thus having familiarity with the dialogue), and see how I feel my comprehension was compared to last time. You can also do this with book series written by the same author in the same style about the same thing (say a crime series). Read one book and note your comprehension. Months later read another one in the series, then compare. Not very scientific, but then I am not a scientist. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5238 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 4 of 18 15 April 2015 at 3:23pm | IP Logged | ||
It is actually the (an) answer I want. I'm just looking for methods people use to quantify and qualify their progress. Because I want to incorporate this type of advice into what I'm doing. Quantifying reading and writing can be fairly empirical because you can for example post to lang-8 can log the number of corrections and their reduction, if any, over time. Or you can count unknown words like I have done. But given the difficulty of measuring audio comprehension has anyone come up with other ways of doing that? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| garyb Triglot Senior Member ScotlandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5209 days ago 1468 posts - 2413 votes Speaks: English*, Italian, French Studies: Spanish | Message 5 of 18 15 April 2015 at 3:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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Benchmarking speaking ability is difficult because it varies so much and so non-linearly, especially beyond the beginner stage. We've all had experiences where we feel like we're speaking quite fluently about all sorts of subjects one day, then the next day we struggle even with basic things. After that, it's hard to say whether you can claim to "speak" the language. I try to do an objective evaluation and take into account variables like tiredness, and see the glass as half-full ("I'm capable of speaking well, even if not consistently") rather than half-empty ("I can't claim to speak well if I can't do it consistently").
The CEFR scale's very wide and distinct levels are a blessing and a curse. It's relatively easy to estimate your own level (even taking ups and downs into account) because the descriptions are so different from each other, but it's a bit demotivating to think that, despite significant progress, my French has been "B2" for the last few years and could well remain so for the next few. I even hesitate to say that it was a "low B2" back then and a "high B2" now, since it's hard to tell how long the road really is. CEFR aside, I find it difficult to describe my ability using anything more than fairly meaningless terms like "quite good" or "relatively fluent on a good day". Regarding "studies" versus "speaks" on this site, many people seem to agree that the "basic fluency" described for "speaks" is more or less B2 (or an equivalent description from those who don't like using CEFR), and that's what I go by. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 4101 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 6 of 18 15 April 2015 at 4:02pm | IP Logged | ||
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Might I ask what the point is?
Measuring your progress from time to time is a good thing, sure, because otherwise you might become blind to your advances and feel like you're just treading water. But what is the purpose of doing so rigorously with scientific method unless you're doing a scientific experiment? Does it help you somehow? Because I mostly see it as a way to spend a lot of time, take the joy out of pleasant activities, and something to worry about and obsess about the way some people obsess about calories. Personally, my benchmarks are entirely subjective and very easy to work with: "Am I happy with how well I'm doing this?" I see my progress because I make myself reflect on how my experience regularly, and because I break down my learning into small enough tasks that I can see the progress (e.g. if I'm not 100% happy with my ability to talk about everything and anything, I might break that down into how I'm not pleased with my ability to respond to people's feelings and how I am not pleased with my ability to use "give me a second to think about this" words, and then I'll work on those two things instead of giving myself the unbearable task of getting out of an extended "I'm not good enough at conversing! I suck!" rut) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5264 days ago 2241 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 7 of 18 15 April 2015 at 4:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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I agree with outcast's well written post. I don't measure quantitatively or count words. Comprehension, that's something I know when I see it and hear it.
When I was learning Portuguese with a tutor, we worked with a novela without subtitles in TL or any language available. She asked me to write a synopsis of what went on, blow by blow, and to note unknown words by giving a time stamp. When I first started doing it, it was difficult, very difficult, brain-meltingly difficult. Soon after about 20 episodes or so, I was spending less and less time on unknown words. My listening comprehension had improved as I got used to speech patterns and accent. Writing the synopsis and then telling the story made me better at speech and composition. It worked well for me. Though I used a tutor for this exercise, it could be done on one's own by using an accurate transcript as the answer key. Get a pen and paper and take notes write the TL in whatever personal shorthand works for you and test your comprehension against the transcript. The only counting I would do would be to see, roughly, what percentage I got right. Another approach is to find a review or synopsis of the episode/film. Watch/listen to the film/episode and check your comprehension against the review or synopsis. This would be easier to do with a dubbed series or film where the review or synopsis can be read in English as well. I don't believe I can put a numerical figure on it, per-se. Obviously people can and do, but I believe there are so many variables and unquantifiable aspects that any resultant statistics would be inherently flawed. I do believe that broad categories of comprehension can be determined, i.e.: "I understood the gist"; "I understood most but I missed some important bits"; "I understood almost everything". This is what I do when I'm learning. I am currently watching "Toma lá dá cá", a Brazilian comedy series, and am about halfway through it. There are no subtitles available and I haven't felt the need to search for a synopsis. I understand almost everything. I use the series to refine and polish colloquial speech and incorporate interesting turns of phrase. I have no trouble with comprehension in Spanish or Portuguese and often can't remember what language I have read or heard something when I relate it later to my friends in English. Haitian Creole is more basic and requires more of my attention. I have no trouble with basic conversation and reading/listening to the news, but films are more difficult. It takes time, and the films available from Haiti are not very good quality. They just don't hold my interest very well. The same goes for the scant, non-translated, literature I can find. I used the forum definition of basic fluency here and decided by my own, and my friend's, evaluation that it was appropriate. If Ladino were listed here as a language, I would probably add it to basic fluency as well, though I will never master it to the same level as my other languages. EDIT: Of course, one can be formally tested in many languages. Given that I have no need for that and cannot justify the expense involved (travel and time being the biggest costs), it is up to me and those of us who also (for whatever reason) are not formally tested to self-evaluate and take TL-speaker interactions, when appropriate, into account. Of course, people will tell you that your speech is great, but when they do not struggle to understand you, when they don't switch to English, when the conversation is natural and not strained for both parties, that's a pretty good sign. Edited by iguanamon on 15 April 2015 at 8:30pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| rdearman Senior Member United Kingdom rdearman.orgRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5238 days ago 881 posts - 1812 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian, French, Mandarin | Message 8 of 18 15 April 2015 at 5:45pm | IP Logged | ||
I'm happy with the subjective, but it is subjective and for me changes daily depending on what mood I'm in. So I wondered if anyone had some objective methods I can use which don't depend on my mood, whim, or colour of the moon tonight. :) I'm not obsessive about this, but the reason I asked the question is because, other than going out and taking a test which thousands of others have taken and comparing my score against theirs, I really don't know anyway to benchmark myself. Benchmarking is a common practice and sensible exercise to establish baselines, define best practices, identify improvement opportunities. Benchmarking is used by companies and individuals and it helps to: Gain an independent perspective about how well you perform compared to others Identify specific areas of opportunity Validate assumptions Prioritize improvement opportunities Set performance expectations Monitor performance and manage change So while I realise everyone is an individual and learns at their own paced, based on their motivations, opportunities, etc, I personally like the idea of having some kind of "score card" which I can measure myself against, not daily, but perhaps month on month, or semi-annually. This makes me really interested in how others on this forum might try to estimate their progress, and what techniques or clever methods you are all using, but I don't know about! :) 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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