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Harry Potter Parallel Text LR Method | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5773 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 25 of 40 10 July 2010 at 7:27am | IP Logged | ||
I've done something similar, so I can explain mine. When I read 5 Harry Potter books in German, I did not use the English version of the texts. I had some small previous knowledge of German, but when I started reading the German text with German audio, I didn't really understand too much. I kept on listening and reading, and my understanding steadily progressed. I did not read the books beforehand in English, although this probably would have helped. I knew the characters and the general storyline because I had seen the movie in English before. As I was reading I would pick one or two words per page to highlight, and then later when I was done reading, I would go back and look those words up in a dictionary. It was important to preserve the "flow" of reading, so I tried not to highlight too many words, and I tried to choose words that I had already seen a few times so as not to pick the rare words that I didn't really need. I didn't understand too much in book 1, but I followed the general plot. By book 3 I understood quite a bit, and after book 4 I had full comprehension of all the plot details. For book 6, I had no problems listening to only the German audio without reading anything, and I understood every sentence entirely, although there's still plenty of individual vocab that I could learn. I'm going to do this same thing again in Swedish, but with some small changes. I'm going to read books that I've read before in English or German, so that I know the plot in more detail already (which is more in line with the original L-R proposal). If you want to do L2 audio and L2 text, then it's much better if you know the plot of the story in great detail, because you'll be able to learn more by connecting any similar words to what you already know. Obviously the best is line-by-line parallel texts, but I have no access to anything like this. The reason I chose not to read the books in English first was that I just didn't want to spend the time doing it, and I thought I might get bored of it if I read everything twice. It seems that part of the common L-R practice, however, is to read each book multiple times, so if you feel motivated then go try that. I feel that the core parts of this for me were 1) to get tons and tons of German into my head, 2) to get German audio at the same time as German text so that I would learn how to correctly pronounce any word, and 3) To learn the skill of continuing to read in a flowing manner despite not understanding every individual word. This was all very valuable for helping me read other books for which I had no audio...I could pronounce it correctly myself, and I could smoothly skip over a lot of words that I didn't know, in order to preserve a sense of continuity in the story. I'd like to hear from more people who listen to L2 while reading L1, since I have no experience with that. Does it work well? 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| digitlhand Triglot Groupie United States ryanslrblog.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6008 days ago 77 posts - 108 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Swedish Studies: German, Arabic (Written), Japanese, Greek, French | Message 26 of 40 10 July 2010 at 7:42am | IP Logged | ||
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Updated my blog. Will post youtube video as soon as it's done encoding
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| digitlhand Triglot Groupie United States ryanslrblog.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6008 days ago 77 posts - 108 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Swedish Studies: German, Arabic (Written), Japanese, Greek, French | Message 27 of 40 10 July 2010 at 8:13am | IP Logged | ||
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Torgam, I've posted my video on YouTube:
German and Swedish L-R Summary Edited by digitlhand on 10 July 2010 at 8:14am 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Torgam Triglot Newbie Germany Joined 5069 days ago 6 posts - 11 votes Speaks: German*, English, French Studies: Spanish, Dutch | Message 28 of 40 10 July 2010 at 10:05am | IP Logged | ||
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@digitlhand
Thank you, everything is clear now! @doviende I am quite surprised that your method worked so well considering that you basically had to learn just from seeing the text without having any support in the form of a text written in a language you already spoke well. To me, that seemed to have been the deciding feature of the L-R approach. All the better. :-) I am also quite amazed by the speed of your language acquisition. There certainly must be diminishing returns involved as I have done 100 hours of L-R (traditional style, with bilingual books, reading the English translation, listening to the French) in a relatively short time (3 weeks) and while I experienced a considerable improvement of my French skills (I was on a level where I could read a newspaper with considerable dictionary support before I started), it is nothing compared to the progress you have made. Chapeau! :-) Could you quickly calculate how many hours, all in all, you have spent listening? Edited by Torgam on 10 July 2010 at 10:08am 2 persons have 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 29 of 40 10 July 2010 at 11:45am | IP Logged | ||
It's about comprehensible input. He knew the general plotline, and German is quite similar to English (it has significant differences, but they are closely related). Parallel texts make it easier/faster and you pick up more of the words, in my experience, but working without them is possible. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5773 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 30 of 40 10 July 2010 at 12:03pm | IP Logged | ||
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Ya, the more you know the plot and the characters, the better. The closer the language is to your own, the better. If you have both of these factors in your favour, then I suggest you do some quick vocab work to learn some of the most frequent verbs and adjectives, and then you can jump straight into reading L2 while listening to L2.
I basically followed a lot of advice from AJATT. I picked out interesting sentences, used an SRS, and then just exposed myself to as much native content as I could. I also watched German TV without subtitles (although sometimes German subtitles, but never English). So over about 5 months, I watched ~200 hours of TV, and read about one million words in German (5 harry potter books, one by Tad Williams, The Hobbit in German, and something else I think). Before I did all that, I actually tested it out by "reading" 50 pages of a German book without doing any dictionary lookups...I just held it, moved my eyes over all the words, and tried to get whatever I could out of it. I had read it 10 years earlier in English, so I remembered little bits of plot, but basically understood almost nothing (despite having knowledge of common German words already). BUT...when I went back to page 1 after reading those 50 pages, it was actually much easier already! With no dictionary lookups. So, I knew the concept was plausible, and I started working hard on Harry Potter as described. So, for people starting from scratch, learning a language similar to their own, I suggest a short period of learning as much vocab as you can using whatever method you like, and then jumping right in. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Torgam Triglot Newbie Germany Joined 5069 days ago 6 posts - 11 votes Speaks: German*, English, French Studies: Spanish, Dutch | Message 31 of 40 10 July 2010 at 1:00pm | IP Logged | ||
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Interesting. So would you suggest that it actually makes generally more sense (after you have the basics) to read L2 while listening to L2 instead of reading L1 while listening to L2?
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| doviende Diglot Senior Member Canada languagefixatio Joined 5773 days ago 533 posts - 1245 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Hindi, Swedish, Portuguese | Message 32 of 40 10 July 2010 at 1:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well it seems to me that it's a huge advantage to be reading the L2 while listening to the L2, because it teaches you the proper pronunciation of all the words, and you learn where the word boundaries are because you're reading the exact transcription.
Personally, I really like to learn the written form of the language, and I want to know how a new word is spelled when I learn it. Also, if you later want to read a book that has no audiobook format, then if you've learned the proper pronunciations you'll be able to read these other books and have a good "voice" in your head. I tested this myself when I started Swedish, because I had no prior Swedish experience at all. I "bootstrapped" myself as a beginner by casually looking through a grammar book, reading about Swedish phonetics, and then using flashcards to learn about 200 of the most common words. After that, I did a combination of L-R (L2 audio / L2 text) and some "intensive reading" where I would pick a whole page and look up every unknown word on it so that I could understand everything. For every 2 hours of L-R, I probably did 30 mins of Intensive reading (at least at the start). After I understood more, then I moved to doing mostly L-R. While I was reading, I would highlight one word every second page or so, and then later I'd put that sentence into my SRS. I read several books in Swedish this way (Harry Potter 1&2, The Hobbit), and made a lot of progress. There are some easy audiobooks where I have excellent comprehension, but others are still a bit difficult. When I later bought a book of 1000 common Swedish words, I found it almost useless because I already knew almost all of the words. I'm resuming my Swedish studies this week, and my method will be basically purely L2 L-R with some SRS sentences. I'm pretty confident about this, but I guess it depends on how tolerant you are of not understanding much at the start. You have to be willing to listen to a lot of hours of audio without getting much, and you need to be somewhat self-motivated about teaching yourself some basic vocabulary in whatever way is good for you (like perhaps Iverson's wordlists might work for a lot of people). The combination of basic vocabulary + basic grammar familiarity + a related language (English and German are close to Swedish) created a situation of somewhat-understandable input for me, so then it was just a matter of time dedicated to the task after that. That early "bootstrapping" phase was mostly just 1 intensive week of study, and that was enough to get started on L-R in L2 (for me, anyway. Your mileage may vary). As Khatsumoto from AJATT likes to say, Knowledge does not come before Exposure...Knowledge is a *result* of Exposure. Just start putting in the time :) 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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