|
 |
Immersion Experiment | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Zeitgeist21 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5465 days ago 156 posts - 192 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: German, French | Message 1 of 33 22 June 2010 at 4:31pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
There's always been the debate as to whether pure passive audio immersion in a language can actually achieve solid proficiency in a language (including high level output) so I'd like to do an experiment to find out =)
My aim is to try and listen to an average of an hour of Russian a day, preferably with video but I'm not really very sure where to look. I'm gonna try and keep this up for a year and see if: A) I've developed much listening comprehension B) The extended listening has helped me get a good accent c) If I have any active ability The experiment won't disprove the exposure theory but it could prove that doing it for an hour a day doesn't help :D I know this is much less than the ideal amount of time to spend on such an experiment but I'm moving to Germany soon and German will be my priority =) This isn't a serious language learning attempt just an experiment to satisfy my own curiousity (: I chose Russian mostly because it's a language known for it's great literature, though also because I like the sound of it and because it's completely unrelated to all the languages I know anything about. I have learnt a few Russian words before, but only about 10 in the last three years (not actively trying to learn the language but just asking Russians how to say a couple of things while chatting with them) but I can't remember any of them ^^ I also have listened to 5'nizza quite a lot in the past 6 months who sing some (maybe all?) of their songs in Russian though I think they're from the Ukraine. Though to do this I need YOUR help :D I need to know some websites where I can buy Russian films, or rent them, or ideally download them like you can on iTunes in other languages. Downloading like that would be perfect because then there's no postage yet I still pay. If there are any websites that let you legally stream stuff with adverts then they could be even more useful! I'm pretty sure my family have a few DVDs that have a Russian track so I'm gonna go raid the cupboard ^^ EDIT: Do you reckon this post is in the right subforum? I first put it in the Russian subforum but then thought it fit better here. I'm not sure if this is the best place for it though.... Edited by WillH on 22 June 2010 at 4:33pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| luhmann Senior Member Brazil Joined 5153 days ago 156 posts - 271 votes Speaks: Portuguese* Studies: Mandarin, French, English, Italian, Spanish, Persian, Arabic (classical) | Message 2 of 33 22 June 2010 at 5:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
I think it is quite settled that audio immersion does not work, unless it is done on top of lots of studying. Presumably it works best with video, because you can actually learn some language from the context, but it should take a very long time to crack the surface of the language if not using materials with progressive difficulty.
Anyway, there are a bunch of Russian movies here: http://www.tudou.com/playlist/id/7356781/ (the whole site is in Chinese, but you should be able to get to the films without reading anything) (image quality is poor, sorry, but the audio is good enough.) 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Zeitgeist21 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5465 days ago 156 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, French | Message 3 of 33 22 June 2010 at 7:22pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
Thank you very much!
It's not really established that audio immersion doesn't work, there was an experiment carried out by a man who listened to an old American language for something like an hour a day (without video). Afterwards he could understand only 10 words or so and decided that it wouldn't work. This is often referred to as proof that audio doesn't work but I'd imagine that if he could infer the meaning of 10 words with such little context he could get more. As he'd get a larger and larger vocabulary the words that he'd learn would provide ever more context thus making his rate of progress grow exponentially until he's learnt all the most common words. However these are just my ideas. I'm going to try and improve that through having video giving me context and I'll probably end up doing more than an hour a day, but we'll wait and see =) I'm pretty certain anyone can learn a language to a pretty high level with exposure to media through television but I've no idea how fast. Some people also believe that learning through exposure and having a silent period creates more natural speech with little or no accent and I'm very curious to see what results I get with that. Although I think it's pretty clear that actively learning will get you faster results I've met several people who've achieved native results through mass exposure to English through films so maybe it's worth the lack of efficiency in the long term =) I don't know if I'm right at all but I thought it's worth experimenting with (: And thanks again for the link, it looks pretty awesome! =) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| chirel Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 5130 days ago 125 posts - 159 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: French | Message 4 of 33 22 June 2010 at 9:32pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
I'm very interested in your experiment, make sure you get back to report on how it goes.
I think it's awsome if someone has been able to learn ten words from audio exposure only, I can't figure out how that could happen. But with video or other context that is of course possible, every baby does that. They have to figure out the concept of language from the context, and they can (usually) do it! So why wouldn't an adult with determination and a better understanding of the world be able to do just that? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5831 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 5 of 33 22 June 2010 at 10:57pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
Except that they normally still talk about being actively immersed in the language. EG. Total Physical Response -- the teacher tells the students to do stuff (open the window, put the red box on your head etc) and then the student does it (this requires a lot of explicit coaching by the teacher, such as pointing at the window and saying "this is a window. window. this is a window" and opening it and saying "open", then closing it and saying "close"). The students are allowed to start giving their own commands as soon as they're ready.
Just films? Are you sure they didn't have classes in school? And what age were they when they started watching these films? Because...
Whether it's the same as what babies do is questionable (basically, it's generally thought that a child learns to speak because it wants to say stuff, and watching TV doesn't make you want to say stuff... unless it's a football match and your team's losing), but leaving that aside, there's good reasons not to expect an adult to be able to learn the same as a child. 1) The human brain undergoes radical and rapid growth during infancy. Massive amounts of neural connections are made, tested, and either kept or cut away depending on if they prove useful. The infant brain has an unbelievably great capacity for learning. The adult brain, while still quite incredible, is far more restricted. It has long been held that a man born blind will never learn to see if cured as an adult. This may be an exagerration or there may be interventions that can cause the brain to start learning again, but certainly to date surgical interventions in eye and ear disorders post-infancy have not given the recipients the full use of these faculties. 2) The syntax of adult-learned languages does not go into the same part of the brain as that of infant-learned languages. It appears that we evolved the ability to learn language as children, presumably when the human population was small and relatively uniform. Some time later, we started meeting people with different languages, and rather than adjusting our existing capacity for learning so that it didn't close off at puberty, we seem to have evolved a secondary mechanism for learning languages. OK, it could be just a copy of the infant mechanism, but it seems unlikely because: 3) There are multiple brain areas involved in language comprehension and production. The syntax areas are a small part. Crucially, all languages share one area that deals with semantics. It is trivially demonstrable that our knowledge of semantics is transferred as adults: if an English speaker studies, by immersion, a language with the full range of good morning, good afternoon, good evening, good night, they will spot it and learn it almost immediately because he already knows the semantics and all he needs to learn is the syntax. Learning a language with only good morning, good afternoon and good night will be more difficult, because the semantic boundaries are different. And for a "morning, afternoon, night" speaker to learn these in a "morning, afternoon, evening, night" language will be even harder, because suddenly there's an extra semantic category to deal with. This also can lead to frustrations that a child wouldn't experience. With all that semantic knowledge, we're used to being able to say all sorts of stuff, and then we find ourselves hopelessly limited. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Zeitgeist21 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5465 days ago 156 posts - 192 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, French | Message 6 of 33 23 June 2010 at 1:57am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
Maybe I'm completely wrong in my ideas, that's why I'm experimenting :P
And as far as the frustration goes, isn't that pretty subjective? If you just chill and don't care that you can't express yourself as well as in your first language then it doesn't need to be frustrating. I've learnt what it's like not to be able to express myself through immersion in German :D 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| ANK47 Triglot Senior Member United States thearabicstudent.blo Joined 6917 days ago 188 posts - 259 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (classical) | Message 7 of 33 23 June 2010 at 3:29am | IP Logged | ||||||||
|
I think getting a lot of audio input is what helped a lot with my Arabic pronunciation. Maybe I just like to think that it helps, but I try to have as much foreign language audio/video playing throughout the day. I rarely listen to English music anymore. It's all Arabic. And I have Arabic TV shows playing a lot of the time when I'm sitting on the computer. I don't know if it helps, but it can't hurt and it's not much work at all.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||
| TerryW Senior Member United States Joined 6177 days ago 370 posts - 783 votes Speaks: English* | Message 8 of 33 23 June 2010 at 9:32am | IP Logged | ||||||||
Yes there have been debates on this, and some have claimed that they have done it and learned well. I just find it hard to believe. Many people complain here that they are at an intermediate level, but just cannot understand the spoken language by native speakers as seen in films, TV, etc. even after many hours of viewing. So, if they know the basic grammar and the high-frequency vocabulary but still can't understand, I can't imagine that a total beginner will be able to understand much, even after 1 hour/day (or more) for a year. I'd love to know your experiment results. Please give us updates on your progress monthly or something, but I'm pretty sure "Gibberish in = gibberish out," and you'll understand little to none. You may be interested in reading the following 3-year-old thread (my first post on the forum) : Total Immersion is a Crock! Edited by TerryW on 23 June 2010 at 9:34am 2 persons have voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
