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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| Cage Diglot aka a.ardaschira, Athena, Michael Thomas Senior Member United States Joined 6630 days ago 382 posts - 393 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Portuguese | Message 17 of 35 05 July 2008 at 8:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Well said TEL! I have to agree pretty much with your entire post..My apologies for apparently mischaracterizing your position. I will probably use MT when I get around to Italian. Edited by Cage on 05 July 2008 at 8:31am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6017 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 18 of 35 05 July 2008 at 10:20am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
TEL has said most of what needs to be said. His point about repetition is bang on. Too often people assume that repetition is the same thing as rote learning, but it doesn't have to be.
What is the most valuable tool humans ever invented? Language. So let's not throw it away -- let's use it. For example, MT uses esperar in the Spanish course. He explains that you don't "wait for someone" in Spanish -- you "await them". Simple. The whole concept wrapped up neatly. Yes, the students still got it wrong and tried to use para, but Michel kept reminding them and it eventually stuck. It's a simple concept and it's so easy to explain -- if you do it in a language that the student understands. And this brings us to the boundary between meaningful and rote learning. One of the most common drills in most systems is single word substitution. "How do you say 'I want a car'?" "I want a house?" "A boat?" ... etc ad nauseum. This can be done almost brainlessly, in a mechanical way. You allow the utterence to become detached from the meaning. Back when they wrote FSI, behaviourist psychology was king and behaviourists thought language was mechanical, but it looks like they were wrong -- it's more complicated than that. With MT, you are very rarely asked to make simple substitutions. Each sentence is different enough from the previous that you have to build up the sentence from its meaning, as opposed to mechanically altering the previous form. The sentences you produce never become detached from their meaning, so this is truly meaningful learning. And this is why it has to be in English: for the language to be meaningful, you need to know what you want to say.
Yes. I wouldn't recommend illiteracy to anyone, but historically it's the norm and there are still many very eloquent speakers in developing countries that have never seen a pen. Language is first and foremost a spoken phenomenon, and the written form is an approximation of that spoken form. The written form can also be read out of order. For example, if you see the sentence "them buy I", your brain has a choice: interpret it in that order, or read it backwards. This means that the importance of word order is drastically downplayed in your mind -- your brain can impose English word order on a foreign sentence. This isn't a transferrable skill, though, as you can't chose what order to listen in. Learning to read a new language is easy, because you already know how to read. Obviously it gets more complicated when you think about think foreign alphabets, left-to-right vs right-to-left vs top-to-bottom, syllabaries and pictograms but there are some common principles. Regardless, if you have a firm grasp of the grammatical structure and sound system of the language, it is quite easy to map that onto the written form with minimal conscious thought. However, if you're stil learning the structure and sound system, you have to think about the written word a lot more. I personally feel that's wasted effort. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| xandreax Diglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5906 days ago 142 posts - 160 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 19 of 35 04 October 2008 at 7:31pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I don't think it's an exaggeration. The native speakers will repeat parts of words that may be more difficult for English-speakers so that (well, probably most people) will understand what sounds they are supposed to make. I've used Pimsleur Brazilian Portuguese. What I love is that, even after the first lesson, I was completely comfortable saying what was in that first lesson, at the same pace as the native speaker. (They will break down words and later say the full sentences at a normal pace.) Some people, of course, recognize, and are able to produce the sounds more easily and with less practice than other people, but still, I don't know of a better course that will help more with pronunciation. Maybe if I had used this for my Spanish studies, I would have felt more confident in my speaking ability earlier on! I think this program may be a good place to start to build up your confidence with pronunciation. For me I feel it is, and after I'm finished I plan on building on what I've learned with other courses.. I will need to learn how to write well and expand my grammar and vocab. Edited by xandreax on 04 October 2008 at 7:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6017 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 20 of 35 05 October 2008 at 6:40am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
I think it's an extreme exaggeration. Repetition is irrelevant -- if you can't hear something, you can't hear it on the first, third, hundredth or millionth time. In our infancy, the brain wires itself up to recognise the phonemes that the people around it use -- this is one of the key distinguishing factors between "native" and "non-native" language. As we grow older, we generalise these phonemes so that they allow us to understand a Tayksas, Noo Yoik, Laaaandaaan or Sko'ish accent as being the same language. All our lives, we're training our brains to ignore difference and to build equivalences. If your brain thinks a dental T and an aveolar T are equivalent (as might happen if you had a French neighbour who spoke to you in English during your childhood), how are you going to "hear" the difference when you start to learn French? You're not, because your brain sees them as equivalent. As far as I'm concerned, concious instruction is the only way to teach pronunciation -- physically training the mouth's muscles to produce the right sound. Anyone who recommends Pimsleur is either an exceptionally lucky person with an unusual talent (if you are, good for you, but don't try to tell the untalented to do what they are incapable of -- I've got perfect pitch but even I can't do it) or simply falling for the hype and misdirection. Put it this way, if your brain can't hear the difference between right and wrong when it starts, then it's pretty easy to make a sound that sounds right to your brain and think that Pimsleur has taught it right. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6445 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 21 of 35 05 October 2008 at 7:12am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
It is an extreme exaggeration: my experiences with using Pimsleur was that it was roughly infinitely better than relying on "this letter in language X is like this letter in this English word" written descriptions, and that it allowed me to be comprehensible. The accent I spoke with after using it was nowhere near native, though - better than what I'd acquire in a typical classroom setting, but that's about all I can say for it.
Simply untrue, in my experience. I've written multiple times about how I've learned to differentiate sounds by repeatedly listening to words which contrast only in the sound in question. If the sound clips are half a second each and there are two sounds, you can rack up over 3000 repetitions in an hour. I've never found a pair of sounds I can't differentiate after doing this - but I haven't tackled Korean tense consonants yet. Best of all, this type of phonetic work can be in the background, while browsing the web, writing, etc (passive phonetic work is the only part of language learning that I consider this to be true of); doing it in the foreground would probably be painfully boring. The only situation I've found where I have trouble with this is with Italian. I can differentiate the sounds in isolation, but I'm too used to considering the open and closed vowels equivalent (they vary regionally, and aren't reflected in writing) to maintain the distinction afterwards. A decade of explicitly lumping together 2 sounds in the target language is hard to overcome. I don't have this problem with other languages, though. Even with Italian, my perception of the language and its sounds is gradually changing - it's just much harder and slower going than languages where I haven't acquired so many bad habits and externally-reinforced mistaken ideas.
The beautiful thing about the human brain is that neuroplasticity exists throughout the lifetime of each human. I may never perceive languages other than English exactly how I perceive English, but learning to distinguish phonemes seems to be well within my grasp even as an adult.
My experience contradicts this as well. Conscious instruction can be useful; I use it for sounds that give me trouble, and have done some explicit and conscientious study of phonetics. However, I've found that I'm now able to reproduce quite a lot of sounds I've never consciously studied, to the point of being mistaken for a native speaker of Serbian (while I only knew one word of it, which I've now forgotten, which had a rather odd trilled r in it unlike anything I've ever had reason to produce elsewhere). I have no natural talent for mimicry; it's actually something I was exceptionally bad at during my first two decades - to the extent that I occasionally had people in my childhood home town doubt I was a native English speaker (it was my only language), and I only picked up 'th' correctly after extensive teasing from other children. I'd tend to say that lots of careful listening > conscious instruction alone > any other way of learning sounds that I know of.
We agree again. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6017 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 22 of 35 06 October 2008 at 7:56am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Hang on, what you are talking about is conscious instruction -- direct comparison of minimal pairs etc -- which is different from what Pimsleur does. And probably better. I'm dubious about the general reusability of this technique (it's common in Spain, they tell me, but I've met very few Spaniards who can pronounce the difference between "ship" and "sheep"), but it's got more chance of working that just listening to language.
I...I...I... I cannot emphasise this enough, but the effectiveness of a learning technique cannot be judged by the success of a minority, but the success or failure of a majority... and minimal pair listening hasn't worked all that well so far. The question is whether this is because it is inherently flawed or just badly executed, but that's a very deep question.
Sorry, I'm lost now. How can you be doing minimal pair work when you've not got a direct comparison?
Yet the problem exists, is very real, and you have experienced it. I suspect you have never tried to learn Hindi. Try hearing the difference between t, th, T and TH. You are what is called an effective learner, you have learnt how to cope with some of the difficulties of learning. Anything you find hard is ten times harder for people who weren't lucky enough to stumble upon the strategies you employ.
It's possible, I've done it too (with a certain few phonemes), but I contest that it cannot be done passively. You (appear to) have admitted that you do conscious study. I do conscious study. The most successful language learners I know are the most geeky ones, because they think about the subtleties and work out the stuff that no-one has taught them and then teach themselves. It's an inefficient way of handling it -- we should be making those subtleties part of explicit teaching.
OK, I can accept that, but I would argue that this is because you have internalised good habits from your conscious study. Your brain is now capable of retreading the different paths. So I would argue that you would not now be able to do it subconsciously if you hadn't first done it consciously. My dad, a teacher, refused to teach "study skills" classes -- he argued that the only way to learn them is by doing them and taught his Chemistry classes so as to try to teach people to make the links that he found so easy to make, rather than assuming that everyone would make the same links as him.
Which reinforces my belief that it is a learned habit -- if you hadn't studied consciously you'd never have learned it. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6445 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 23 of 35 06 October 2008 at 8:51am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Ah - we were defining 'conscious' differently. I was thinking that what you meant by 'conscious' to be active phonetic instruction ("do this with your tongue, that with your lips..."). What I was talking about requires conscious acquisition of material - but, as I find it best to learn to differentiate minimal pairs in the background as I do something else, I don't consider the actual learning stage conscious. I'd find it useless to do it by listening just a couple of times (worse, with instructional material and so forth thrown in too). I can differentiate most sounds immediately, but the ones I can't take more repetitions for me to learn than I think most people using minimal pairs give them. Anyhow - as my previous post shows, I was talking about repetition being vital - and that changing the number of repetitions changes whether or not I can clearly perceive a difference in phonemes; conscious vs unconscious is another issue.
I've never met anyone else who's used minimal pairs the way I do, hence I'm the only data point I have. I'd be glad to hear the experiences of anyone else who tries. I'm not going to conduct a formal study - though if someone else does, I'd love to see the conclusions. If you know some traditional minimal pairs 'ship or sheep'-style material for a language I am not phonetically familiar with, I'd be willing to use it and see if it works for me; if it doesn't, that would further suggest that there is a difference between the methods for at least some learners, despite sharing some ideas. If it does, it would cast some doubt on my variation being more effective. Obviously, it wouldn't be conclusive either way - but it would be a first, tiny step in finding out whether the problem is in the execution. I agree entirely that it would be better to have more data. However, as I don't, I provide what I've found through direct experimentation, in the hopes that it can be helpful to someone else. Other learners are free to ignore it or try it; odds are good that even if it doesn't work for everybody, I'm not the only one it would work for.
Given ship.wav and sheep.wav, for instance (if I were trying to distinguish the vowels in ship and sheep), I do something like while true; do mplayer ship.wav sheep.wav; done - that is, I set up my system to play one sound in the minimal pair right after the other, until I tell it to stop. So, I'd hear ship.wav, sheep.wav, ship.wav, sheep.wav, ship.wav.... I then listen (with headphones) while doing something else with my attention, such as posting on this forum. I'm not sure if I've answered your question, since I'm confused about what you found confusing/why you thought I didn't have a direct comparison; if I haven't, please ask again.
That's actually an example I've had in mind for the last several months. I haven't found minimal pair material for it; if you have a link to some, I'd be grateful - and I'd report on how it went.
I've found this forum a huge help, in that it gave me background information and strategies to jump off from; I think I learned about minimal pairs here. Hence, my desire to share what I learn with other people, in the hopes that some of it can be of help as well.
I openly admitted that I do conscious study. I consider my 'thousands of repetitions in the background' technique to not be conscious study, although choosing to acquire the material to do it is, but that's a minor semantic point. I'm perfectly happy to call it "mountain-gazing-at-lion-study"; the label doesn't matter.
In the general case (that I would not be better at mimicking sounds if I had not consciously made that a priority, done a lot of listening, done explicit phonetic study, etc), I agree with you. In the specific case (a trilled Serbian r), I disagree: I'd never encountered the sound before as far as I can remember, much less consciously studied it.
Quite likely; we have no particular disagreement on that point. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| DaraghM Diglot Senior Member Ireland Joined 6157 days ago 1947 posts - 2923 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: French, Russian, Hungarian | Message 24 of 35 06 October 2008 at 10:28am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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If I'm correct, an example of minimal pairs in a traditional course, is Unit 1 Tape 2 of FSI Hungarian. The sections "Practice 1B" and "Practice 2B" contrast the vowel sounds in various Hungarian words.
E.g. ide - üde ige - üget izen - üzen, and so on. [EDIT] - I've found this feature of the course, to place it way above any other Hungarian course I've used. I wish more courses would use this technique. Edited by DaraghM on 06 October 2008 at 10:31am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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