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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| parasitius Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5808 days ago 220 posts - 323 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin Studies: Cantonese, Polish, Spanish, French | Message 41 of 59 17 June 2010 at 6:48am | IP Logged | |||||
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L-R with L2 text/L2 audio doesn't make so much sense to me. (?) Having plowed through a number of books in Chinese without using a dictionary, there are still oodles and oodles of words that I don't know. I don't see how having had the audio to accompany (I can pronounce most of the characters anyway, it is just that I often don't know the words they compose) would have magically made me know the meaning of all these unknown words as doviende seems to suggest happened with German? Can my years of effort really be surpassed by someone diligent enough to L-R L2/L2 until their brain is about to explode for one month? !!
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 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6719 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 42 of 59 17 June 2010 at 4:46pm | IP Logged | |||||
Some of my thoughts on this: From L-R system (2008 03 February): I read a page in one minute (more or less), and I have yet to hear a narrator reading aloud at that speed. So for me, it is more a problem of slowing down my reading (even after just a few minutes of reading I'm several pages ahead of the audio). From L-R Clarifications (2008 23 June): I am sometimes pages ahead of the speaker. Slowing down (to snail pace, I might add) doesn't help as much as I've hoped. Probably something with the language combination, or the text itself. Although I did try L-R last summer with German audio and Swedish translation (and later German original text, of course) (and didn't find it particularly helpful) I had no problems reading and listening at the same time, finding my way if I get lost et.c. I hope I get used to the slow tempo. I still have problems with reading too fast (or listening to slow audio), for languages with Latin script. I haven't tried anything in Russian (but doubt that it would be much different). I haven't yet progressed to Chinese/Chinese for Little Prince, so I really don't know what my impression will be. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5576 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 43 of 59 18 June 2010 at 12:57am | IP Logged | |||||
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I just tried French/French earlier and that was a nice surprise. I guess it's because my 'inner narrator' doesn't yet know how to pronounce French well, so it compliantly waits for the audio. And I actually could follow the story. So I'll probably have to read a single L1 sentence, listen to audio while reading L2, read next L1 sentence until I know enough to just do L2/L2.
Unless you're a savant, reading will be slower in scripts you haven't yet had that much exposure to. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| RedBeard Senior Member United States atariage.com Joined 5912 days ago 126 posts - 182 votes Speaks: Ancient Greek* Studies: French, German | Message 44 of 59 18 June 2010 at 3:59am | IP Logged | |||||
Well said. When I saw this latest round of posts, I though that I must have gotten the idea all wrong. It would, in fact, be quite difficult to figure out a word or phrase in L2-L2. I suppose you could highlight it (to look up later) or pause the tape or something, but this isn't what I thought was supposed to be happening. P.S. Thanks, Jeff, for looking up those old posts, etc. Edited by RedBeard on 18 June 2010 at 4:05am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5796 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 45 of 59 18 June 2010 at 8:40am | IP Logged | |||||
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I've never encountered this reading speed problem, since I've never mixed two languages. Another reason I prefer L2/L2 is because I'm actively learning how all the words should be pronounced. Then later, if I just want to read a book in that language without an audiobook, my "internal monologue" is correct, and I can pronounce words correctly the first time I see them, and also be able to write words down that I've heard (which is valuable for watching TV).
All of the above gains can be made without knowing that much at all about the language (although clearly this is harder with a foreign script, especially nonphonetic ones ;). The other big reason I didn't mix my native language with listening in the L2, was because if it worked, I'd be totally fluent in Japanese by now! Do you know how many hours of anime I've watched with Japanese audio and English subtitles? It's a ridiculous number of hours, and I'm still hopeless at Japanese. I think I just tune out the Japanese audio because I pay more attention to the subtitles. I didn't want the same thing to happen in German and Swedish, so I tried to stick to just L2 audio with L2 text, and it worked well. As a side note, so far all the Harry Potter audiobooks I've seen have been unabridged. This is what makes them so special. I remember hearing that they've been done this way to promote literacy, so I'm glad to say that it worked for me (making me literate in German).
For any language, you need to listen a lot. I spent hours and hours listening to random stuff during my bootstrapping phase (lots of online news, and some audiobooks I downloaded). Next I moved on to the L2/L2 L-R, which gave me thousands of examples of words spoken out loud while I was reading their written form. Just keep doing this for hours and hours :). Once you've listened to a lot of a language, and it's ingrained in your brain, then when you speak you'll be able to tell whether you said it wrong or not (at least to a very good approximation). Hundreds of hours of careful listening will go a long way to giving you a listener-friendly accent. I also had spent some previous time learning about the principles of phonetics, and I have had previous experience learning the sounds of other languages. I compared Swedish sounds to my knowledge of German sounds, to try to tell the difference. Also, the retroflex consonants in Swedish (like in the situations after an "r": "rt", "rd", etc), I recognized the sounds from Punjabi, of which I had previously studied the very basic principles. Learning more about all the possibilities for the sounds will help you learn new languages in the future, but what's really required is just lots and lots of exposure to the language.
Ya, that's actually pretty much it. I was exposing myself to any and all content in Swedish, and keeping some words and phrases to look up. Sometimes I would switch between what's been called "intensive reading" and "extensive reading". Intensive was where I'd pick one page and try to understand every single word on the page, and I'd listen to it over again several times and try to understand all of it just from listening to it (after I'd looked up all the unknown words). Extensive, was where I did no lookups (or less than 1 lookup per several pages on average), but just tried to get absorbed in the story and keep on going. Pure reading for pleasure as much as possible, not worrying about any of the (many) words I didn't know. I really think both Intensive and Extensive strategies are very valuable. Intensive is like a continuation of the bootstrap period, which can give you a firm push toward higher vocabulary, but Extensive is really necessary in order to absorb the grammar, the phonetics, and to get many more words from context (or at least get many more "experiences" with those words, so that if you eventually feel the need to look some of them up, then they'll stick better because they're somewhat familiar already). I think the two most important things are: 1) do as much as you can in a single sitting or in a single day (because 2 hours in the same day is more than twice as much benefit as just 1 hour) and 2) Keep going! You need to read several hundred thousand words of a language before you're going to be awesome at reading. Don't stop after you've only read 5000 words and think "wow I still suck!", because that's obvious. If you read 1 million words of a language, even starting from nothing, then there's no possible way you can fail. You WILL be good at it after 1 million words, no matter what other strategies you employ. I like using Anki for flashcards, since it gives me a bit more "focused" exposure to the words that I didn't previously know. I always add words as an example sentence, because a single word usually means many different things in many different contexts. With one sentence, you're just learning one of those contexts, but that's what you need to do. But you don't *need* to do flashcards. Just getting continued exposure through reading is enough. Stick to whatever is fun. If flashcards aren't interesting to you, then do something else instead. There's no way to read 1 million words of content if you hate the material, and you can't watch hundreds of hours of TV if you don't like the shows. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6513 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 46 of 59 18 June 2010 at 9:40am | IP Logged | |||||
I have read the instructions for doing LR quite differently - you should be doing one thing at a time, and in the case of LR we are talking hours, not minutes. However I do see the point in Bao's interpretation. If you don't understand a word of the target language then it won't do much good to listen to L2 while reading L2 except if the purpose specifically is to learn something about to pronunciation. Listening to single sounds to make them just right presupposes that you know what to listen for, i.e. which letters go with which sound(s) - or in the case of languages with a bad ortography: how specific words are pronounced. And you will probably have to listen to the same short sequences several times to catch the details. In the other hand: listening for intonation (or 'melody') doesn't require you to have a transcript, because intonation is not indicated systematically in writing, apart from punctuation. Which leaves the use of a translation (L1) while listening to the audio source (L2). As far as I can see this is the real breakthrough involved in the LR method - that it serves a purpose to listen to a foreign language while reading a translation in your native one (or another one you can read fast). For the sake of parallellity the translation should be fairly literal, but absolute parallellity can't be achieved except with hyperliteral translations - and you can't expect to find those anywhere. So basically the advantage is that you know what is said, i.e. the real purpose of this exercise is to make the audio comprehensible at a time where you still don't know the essentials. I tried it out with Farsi when the method was published, and I found that is was indeed possible to follow the speaker. However for lack of suitable nonliterary texts and other personal preferences I haven't spent much time on this technique since then, - but I'm fairly sure that it works. The question is how to combine it with studies of vocabulary and grammar, but that's another matter. With a somewhat understandable language the situation is different: now the use of a transkript with the audio is relevant because the transkript makes it easier to find head and tails in the endless stream of words. And eventually exercise nr. one (and everything else you do) should lead to that result. But for shorter texts in a language that isn't totally incomprehensible there must be a time where it makes sense first to listen to a section with a translation, then listening to it once again with a transkript while you still remember the meaning. Which essentially is what Bao proposed, but in with larger units. Edited by Iversen on 19 June 2010 at 1:59am 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6719 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 47 of 59 18 June 2010 at 2:01pm | IP Logged | |||||
I read a lot faster in all of my Latin/Cyrillic languages, faster than I've heard anybody speak (except for auctioneers...), so even if I'd do some L2/L2 L-R in say Russian/German/French, I'm pretty sure that I'd be pages ahead after just a couple of minutes.
Strong point, and something I experienced with Chinese. OK, I've never done L-R for intense sessions of several hours in one go, but so far, I have the same feeling as you when I listen to something in Chinese and read in Swedish/English at the same time. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5576 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 48 of 59 18 June 2010 at 3:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Iversen, I am aware of that, and I think I did mention that I don't have to call what I'm doing 'the original L-R'
I also think I remember atamagaii gave the advice to try out what works best for oneself. As you mentioned, the main problem is that in most cases there is no translation available that serves the purpose; and I not have a helpful native speaker at hand to translate a whole novel into a format that I could use for L-R. This problem might not exist between closely related members of one language family, but even between languages like English and French which share a lot of vocabulary and, in comparision to what's out there also a lot of grammatical features and idioms, you often have to keep a whole sentence or two in mind and match that with what you hear because more often than not the order of main clause and relative clauses is inverted between both versions. In fiction, that is. I have a somewhat weak working memory and lack especially when it comes to sounds (I usually cope using my factual knowledge about a given topic), so I can't trust my brain to just make the connections without me paying too much attention to it. I also have the awful weakness that to (passively) remember a lexical item, I either need a visual representation + an auditory representation and less than 10 repetitions I am aware of, or an auditory representation and probably around 100 repetitions. More if the phonetics of the words are difficult for me. I do, however, not remember words I don't have any auditory mental ... image of. So one of the first steps for me is to make the connection between spoken and written language. That's why for me it works best to alternate between intensive work with short units - sentences, paragraphs - and extensive listening once I'm too tired to keep the intensive work up. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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