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Teaching English to Parents | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Satoshi Diglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 5610 days ago 215 posts - 224 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, English Studies: German, Japanese | Message 9 of 18 22 March 2009 at 10:55pm | IP Logged | |||||
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But how can you tell the speed of the recording if it's all garbled junk and groans to your ear?
How can you be absolutely sure that what you are reading is the same passage of text that that background noise is supposed to be reading? Even if you could understand the divisions between the words and thus isolate the words even without understanding them, they are not using the same number of words. No matter how you think of it, that method of yours can only work if you already have a solid ground in the heard language. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5798 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 10 of 18 22 March 2009 at 11:43pm | IP Logged | |||||
...?!?!? First up, most people read novels faster than the speed they speak at, and audio books are generally read out at a slower pace than conversation speed. Secondly, some concepts take different numbers of words to express in different languages. Thirdly, some words are longer in some languages than in others. All in all that makes it very hard to follow along in parallel. On top of all that, according to current neuroscience, there's only one "language channel"[*] in the brain -- the listening channel. When reading, the brain takes visual input and stimulates the auditory listening channel. If you're reading, your brain either A) the brain books out the channel to reading and blocks any incoming speech or B) you loose the track of the book when someone starts talking to you. So it's actually impossible to physically process both channels. You can stop and switch, which I sometimes do with subtitled TV or DVDs (reading the subtitles quickly then listening to most of the spoken stuff, or glancing down at the subtitles as soon as I hear something I don't understand), but I was at a pretty advanced conversational level before I could do this. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5798 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 11 of 18 22 March 2009 at 11:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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tiachopvutru,
Don't get too caught up on vocabulary. Vocabulary is hard to learn in a language you don't know, but easy to learn in a language that you do know. For one thing, there's sounds. If the individual sounds or the patterns of sounds in a given English word are impossible in Vietnamese, it is measurably hard for a monolingual Vietnamese person to memorise that word. Starting with a smaller set of words means that they have less to memorise but will at least be familiarising themselves with the possible sound combinations of English. Once they are familiar with this, then other words will come easier. Plus, the brain is very efficient -- it remembers what it knows is useful and forgets what it thinks isn't. Just memorising words in whatever way doesn't make them meaningful and doesn't prove to the brain that they're useful words. Even if you do manage to cram them in, all you've done is make your head into a dictionary, and you still have to search that dictionary for the word you want. The bigger the dictionary, the longer the search. Having fewer words means they're quicker to look up, so they're easier to use, so you use them more often (rather than giving up and just pointing to the thing you're talking about) and thus show the brain that they're useful words -- at this point you really learn them, and they go from being in your memorised dictionary to being in your spontaneous vocabulary. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tiachopvutru Newbie United States Joined 5515 days ago 9 posts - 9 votes Studies: Vietnamese*, English | Message 12 of 18 23 March 2009 at 4:33am | IP Logged | |||||
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Are you saying that I should teach them a few vocabulary words and then let them build up from there through exposure to the language?
I have no experience in teaching and am not familiar of linguistic, so I'm quite confuse on how to proceed. Preferably, I want them to learn English quickly and not painfully. EDIT: Well, I guess I might learn what to do once I get started... Edited by tiachopvutru on 23 March 2009 at 4:42am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| hypersport Senior Member United States Joined 5668 days ago 216 posts - 307 votes Studies: Spanish | Message 13 of 18 23 March 2009 at 5:03am | IP Logged | |||||
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The entire concept of L-R method as introduced here on this site comes straight from the school that teaches quacks how to give information to patients in need of real care. Pure bull$hit. Makes absolutely no sense and the people that get in line are the same sheep looking for the magic pill, the amazing never seen before secret that will have them master a language in no time, with no real work. Piss.
Look, I can speak for me. I started learning Spanish 3 years ago, and I'm considered fluent by many and can speak with any native speaker about most any subject, even if I have to go the long way around as my vocabulary obviously lacks in different areas. There wasn't any magic involved, just lots of hard work, and I'm not done yet. I did Rosetta Stone 1 and 2 and then went to LSLC and did Level 1 through its entirety more than 30 times. Then I did Level 2 in its entirety more than 20 times. I mocked and spoke over the speakers from the beginning. Then I found out here that there's a chick word for that called shadowing. Who knew? I've been doing it from the beginning. During this time I switched my tv to a Spanish package and quit watching American TV. I started reading childrens books out loud and progressed to novels from Grisham, Sparks, Koontz, etc. I talked with all kinds of people online, in the city, at work, in the gym, restaurants, the soccer field, stores, everywhere. Made friends with many and continue to stay in touch on the phone. I started listening to podcasts during my workday. I had a go at FSI and realized what I had been missing there and am in the process of doing that course now, and yeah, I still speak it everyday with natives and get all my news in Spanish TV. Music too and Spanish radio in the car. I live in America, but I have almost completely immersed myself in Spanish for the sake of becoming fluent in the least time possible. Yeah, I'm venting a bit, but it simply amazes me at how many people say thay want to learn a language, and so few actually put into practice that which will make it happen. You see these guys post what they're GOING to do as they lay out there master plan before they've even started. This course, that course, some shadowing here and there, some L-R too of course as it seems to be legit, hell it gets discussed enough, must be, then some native materials. Unbelievable. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6226 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 14 of 18 23 March 2009 at 9:13am | IP Logged | |||||
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To avoid derailing this thread, I've posted replies to Cainntear and Hypersport elsewhere. I request that further discussion of L-R go to that thread.
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| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5553 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 15 of 18 23 March 2009 at 4:13pm | IP Logged | |||||
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tiachopvutru, the inattentiveness of your father sounds like a typical part of grief. The inattentiveness will pass. My grandma picked up Italian when she was in her sixties, after having lost three close family members, so it certainly isn't undoable.
Do some of your family friends of your parent's generation speak English? If so, can you ask them how they started out? It sounds a bit as if both of them lost their motivation because learning English seems to be very difficult to them, they don't need to and they probably feel shy about not being able to express themselves like they can in their first language. I'm not a teacher, but if I were in a similar situation, I'd probably teach them phrases they can use immediately first, like the words for buying a pen, and then take each of them into a shop with no Vietnamese speaker and let them try out their new-learnt phrases - simple positive experiences that motivate. (I think one of the main problems with immigrants here who don't pick up the language is that they don't need to because they have their social network of people who know their language, and that they feel it's too hard to manage to learn the new language and culture and to act independently in everyday situations.) And then follow up things with the more thorough-looking beginner courses from the local library; give them exposure through movies, nag them to try to use English for easier sentences at home, invent games (I could imagine some game with my mum in which both of us try to find the English/Spanish words for as many items in view as possible - we're children at heart), cook together with the mother using a recipe in English once she shows a bit of confidence in herself - just the thing that you as a person can do. After all, you know them well, you know their quirks, you know where their confidence lies and what they don't feel confident about, and I'm sure you can use this knowledge to ease their way. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5798 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 16 of 18 23 March 2009 at 6:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
Not quite, I'm saying that teaching language is more than just teaching words. If you only use a few words you can demonstrate how to manipulate them in various ways. As most words are manipulated in the same way by applying the same rules, you can learn the rules with a small number of words and then easily use them with any other word. I you can say I start, you start, we start, they start, he starts, she starts and it starts; all those people started, will start and won't start; would start, could start and might start, is or are; and you can say all those things about (for example) remember, then you can without much effort do the same with paint, surf, ski; discover, disappear, discuss; etc. That's loads. But if you learn I want, I need, I start, I have, I paint, I buy, I know, I feel, etc... there's nothing you can extend from in there. Teach grammar -- words will take care of themselves as things progress.
Most good teachers learn as they go. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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