How to do Assimil every day (Language Programs, Books & Tapes) Language Learning Forum

How to do Assimil every day
Tags: Hindi \| Assimil
Share with: Delicious Digg reddit Facebook StumbleUpon
Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes

42 messages over 6 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 Next >>

slucido
Bilingual Diglot
Senior Member
Spain
https://goo.gl/126Yv
Joined 6681 days ago
1296 posts - 1781 votes

4 sounds
Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan*
Studies: English

Message 25 of 42

25 November 2008 at 11:03am | IP Logged

namida wrote:

slucido wrote:

Therefore, there isn't a best method....

Every body knows there is, ask Cainntear - Michel Thomas.

I am very sorry. I am wrong. Michael Thomas is the best method.

1 person has voted this message useful

josht
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6452 days ago
635 posts - 857 votes

Speaks: English*, German
Studies: French, Spanish, Russian, Dutch

Message 26 of 42

25 November 2008 at 11:10am | IP Logged

I must say, it seems a few of you get into this same, tired argument at least once a week. It's old. There will always be people who cling to their "way" as the best; let them do so. Arguing with them obviously isn't working. It takes two to argue, you know.
1 person has voted this message useful

slucido
Bilingual Diglot
Senior Member
Spain
https://goo.gl/126Yv
Joined 6681 days ago
1296 posts - 1781 votes

4 sounds
Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan*
Studies: English

Message 27 of 42

25 November 2008 at 11:30am | IP Logged

Volte wrote:

... against my better judgment, I'm jumping back into this thread.

I understand you. I am a temptation.

Volte wrote:

Sluicido: the level of your English clearly disproves your hypothesis.

It's very kind of you. Thank you very much. I admire you too.

Volte wrote:

There.... now that that's out of the way:
Just because everything that works shares certain features does not mean that those features are either necessary or sufficient. Examples:

- Every system of mathematics which humans have invented has been invented on Earth. Does this mean that systems of mathematics couldn't be invented elsewhere - for instance, by humans on the ISS? No. Just because something is found in all examples does not make it necessary.

- All plants need nutrients to grow; they can't grow successfully without them. That doesn't make nutrients sufficient (without light the results will generally not be good). Just because something is found in all examples does not mean it is sufficient.
-- This does not mean that any combination of nutrients are equally good; some are deficient and lead to a plant growing more poorly, for instance. Just because something is necessary, does not mean that any form of it is equally good.

Please stop it with the logical fallacies. Repeating yourself doesn't make what you say true or correct; it does make it boring.

Talking about fallacies, your fallacy is known as "false analogy" and you have another fallacy a prefer to forget....

Volte wrote:

Back to language learning:
- Not all input is equally effective. I've tried dozens/hundreds of hours of internet radio in languages (and sometimes language families) I knew nothing of, dozens of hours of Assimil, dozens of hours of L-R, dozens of hours of reading parallel texts without audio, etc. The results varied from "I know Thai sentences often end with 'krup'" after hundreds of hours of native radio input, to being able to read non-fiction for the gist in Polish (dozens of hours of L-R). This isn't purely a matter of language distance; my German results were nearly as dismal as my Thai ones, and German is closer to English than Polish is.

It changes according to the language, your goal, your attitude and you need output as well.

Volte wrote:

- Not all output is equally effective. For instance, with Scriptorium and similar techniques, I find myself noticing where I make errors and correcting them (and my mental model of the language); with corrections a week later (or never) to something I wrote freely, I learn much less. Krashen's language learning magazine has some fascinating claims (backed by studies) about forced output (and correction to output) being within statistical significance of no output, when groups of students were chosen to do one or the other (the students had to read in English, and then not write about what they'd read, write about it in their native language, or write about it in English).

Here you can find a lot of testimonies and speculation. Nothing with scientific evidence.

Volte wrote:

- People don't learn effectively when they're bored to tears; any method that does this is not going to be effective to people that have this result. Do we have to debate this one?
-- Additionally: different things bring joy/boredom to different people.
--- Given the above, the difficulty of testing and measuring language learning, the limitations of affordable studies, and that the people who have the most liberty to experiment are individual learners who also don't have the resources to do studies, is it surprising that people have differing thoughts as to the merit of various methods (and, for that matter, principles)? My language learning principles certainly aren't identical if I'm aiming to be able to do survival tourist small talk in a week vs reading wikipedia; why should more uniformity be expected when there is more than one person involved, and more divergent aims?

I am saying that the best method is the method you don't give up, If you don't give up method X, you will spend a lot of TIME with this method X, even without being aware. As long as this method X have input and ouput, you will succeed. If you don't give up with this method, it means you are maintaining this behavior because it's reinforcing for you. And this method is reinforcing in the behaviorist sense of the term.

Why does method X is reinforcing for a certain person A?

We don't know, but you can find psychological, cultural, biographical and biological factors. In fact, it doesn't matter. Results is whats matter.

For example, I don't like studying languages by itself. Average methods are very boring for me, but I have a lot of interest for specific contents. I can read or listen a lot of hours if something it's interesting for me. If the content is very interesting for me, it means it's reinforcing and I maintain this behavior a lot of time. If I attach this content, with a target language, I spend a lot of time with this language without being aware. Here I am working with two basic principles:

1-Operant conditioning:

2-Classical conditioning.

Very powerful.

People here don't need linguistics, they need behavior analysts.

Edited by slucido on 25 November 2008 at 11:41am
1 person has voted this message useful

tricoteuse
Pentaglot
Senior Member
Norway
littlang.blogspot.co
Joined 6684 days ago
745 posts - 845 votes

Speaks: Swedish*, Norwegian, English^C1, Russian, French
Studies: Ukrainian, Bulgarian

Message 29 of 42

25 November 2008 at 12:33pm | IP Logged

I just have to add a small comment...

Slucido, please -please please- stop repeating yourself. You seem to find extreme pleasure in writing those same, incoherent words over and over again (filling pages with it, which is in fact quite impressive seen as at least I find no content!) and gracelessly hijack threads where someone just happens to mention the word "method" (perhaps we could ban it to avoid this problem?).

(As a side note, Go Volte!)

And an on-topic comment: thanks for the advice here, people! I have the exact same problem with structured courses, I just go "naaah" after 10 or 15 lessons. I'm soon going to start with Le Hongrois sans peine though, so applying most of the advice given here may actually get me somewhere ;)
1 person has voted this message useful

reineke
Senior Member
United States
https://learnalangua
Joined 6453 days ago
851 posts - 1008 votes

Studies: German

Message 30 of 42

25 November 2008 at 12:44pm | IP Logged

slucido wrote:

namida wrote:

slucido wrote:

Therefore, there isn't a best method....

Every body knows there is, ask Cainntear - Michel Thomas.

I am very sorry. I am wrong. Michael Thomas is the best method.

Please post all the pearls about the best method here: slucido and the best method there is
1 person has voted this message useful

slucido
Bilingual Diglot
Senior Member
Spain
https://goo.gl/126Yv
Joined 6681 days ago
1296 posts - 1781 votes

4 sounds
Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan*
Studies: English

Message 31 of 42

25 November 2008 at 1:36pm | IP Logged

namida wrote:

slucido wrote:

People here don't need linguistics, they need behavior analysts.

People here need their own brains. It seems to be the rarest thing under the sun.

Well, I think it's easier to deal with behaviors than brains.

1 person has voted this message useful

Siberiano
Tetraglot
Senior Member
Russian Federation
one-giant-leap.Registered users can see my Skype Name
Joined 6499 days ago
465 posts - 696 votes

Speaks: Russian*, English, Italian^C1, Spanish
Studies: Portuguese, Serbian

Message 32 of 42

25 November 2008 at 1:44pm | IP Logged

Slucido, I think, you have discovered something that works for you, which could be a small epiphany for you, and then you wanted to share the idea and your enthusiasm with others. To be standing up for your ideas that long and much, you have to posess a strong evidence - for example, if you kicked ass in English, many would think you're a god, and would agree with your ideas, saying "I can't do the same, I'm lazy". This is not the case, and the rest is your POV, which is very disputable.

Respecting your enthusiasm and efforts, I suggest you to write an essay. Rather than forum squabbles, this will be of more use and not a timewaste. Publish it in a webpage, and leave. You'll be content of making a complete thing, you will be able to give it somebody, and years later rereading it will be a pleasure, whether you'll have changed your mind or not.

1 person has voted this message useful

This discussion contains 42 messages over 6 pages: << Prev 1 2 3 4 5 6 Next >>

Printable version

You cannot post new topics in this forum - You cannot reply to topics in this forum - You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum - You cannot create polls in this forum - You cannot vote in polls in this forum

This page was generated in 0.3613 seconds.