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My Thoughts On Sentence Mining and others | ||
Tags: Goals | Learning Technique/Method | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| mpete16 Diglot Groupie Germany Joined 5315 days ago 98 posts - 114 votes  Speaks: Tagalog, English* Studies: German | Message 33 of 66 24 August 2010 at 11:50am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I can't help but agree with you completely. Just out of curiosity, do you use a paper dictionary or an electronic one? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5804 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 34 of 66 24 August 2010 at 2:12pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
It's difficult to stay on-topic if we're not allowed to discuss what the topic is, so I'm afraid I'm about to go completely off-topic...
I think you're confusing two very different things. Superficially, you're talking about "learning by production" vs "learning by reception". However, the effect you're referring to (going by the "building site" example) is not a consequence of this, but rather a conquence of "learning from phrases" vs "learning from rules". If I learn to speak a language by wandering around with a phrase book asking questions, I cannot produce any non-native errors because my entire "script" has been (hopefully) written by a native speaker. But I don't believe the example is as much of a problem as the OP thinks it is. If I learn from rules, I might attempt to say "building place", but that's because I don't know the correct term. If on the other hand I learned from phrases, I might actually still make the mistake... if the term didn't come up in the phrases I'd learnt. On the other hand, if "building site" came up in my phrases, I'd probably get it right, and equally if I'd learned from rules them I would get "building site" right if I just looked it up in a dictionary. The problem does not stem from how you learn, but what you learn -- you simply cannot produce what you haven't learnt. This type of example is commonly used as a criticism of learning from rules, but it's a bogus complaint, that comes from an incorrect understanding of the nature of what a "word" is. The word is not a clear-cut thing that starts and finishes with a space -- that's something we have chosen to impose on language. "Baustelle" is a single word, isn't it? It starts and ends with a space and defines a single concept. But it is composed of two "words" -- bau and stelle (your "building place"). "Building site" may have a space in the middle, but it still denotes a single concept, and it is clearly in this case composed of two words. But it doesn't matter -- this is a vocabulary item, and whether it's a simple word like "milk" or a long phrasal verb like "look up to", you can only use vocabulary correctly if you know it. Edited by Cainntear on 24 August 2010 at 4:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| mpete16 Diglot Groupie Germany Joined 5315 days ago 98 posts - 114 votes Speaks: Tagalog, English* Studies: German | Message 35 of 66 24 August 2010 at 3:17pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
That's true, and I agree with most of what you said, although I do not think I'm confusing two different things. When I say "Sentence Mining", I'm referring to the Antimoon method (that controversial "keep your trap shut unless you know it's correct" method). I apologize for not stating that on my original post. If you simply do not speak if you don't know something, I guess that would prevent you from making mistakes like "Bauplatz" instead of "Baustelle". However, as Benny and a few others on this thread said, it depends on your goals. I'm German, and I want to speak native-like German (yeah, embarassing, I know. A German that can't speak German). I don't think Benny has the intention of becoming a spy for the CIA and being deployed somewhere in Hungary. :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| irishpolyglot Nonaglot Senior Member Ireland fluentin3months Joined 5426 days ago 285 posts - 892 votes Speaks: Irish, English*, French, Esperanto, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Sign Language Studies: Mandarin | Message 36 of 66 24 August 2010 at 4:22pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Right. I'm aiming for MI6, not the CIA ;) If your goal is to speak native-like, details outside of perfect sentences and vast vocabulary make much more of a difference. Work on your accent (getting singing lessons is my favourite way to do this: private music teachers are excellent in helping you improve your accent), and adapt to native pauses, body language, voice, tone etc. These stand out for natives as much more influential in you seeming native-like than perfect grammar/vocab do. They can also be way more fun to work on. Obviously messing up your grammar and using too simple words can raise a few eyebrows, but minor mistakes can slip through unnoticed when every other aspect of you screams "native". I remember while studying for my Spanish C2 I met a Swede with remarkable Spanish - he knew the most obscure words and answered all my questions about tricky grammar. And yet he maintained his personal bubble, dressed too formally, never used slang and had a Swedish robotic way of speaking. Even though his grammar and vocabulary were superior to mine, many Spaniards said that I "spoke better" because I tried to act Spanish. This has happened to me several times in my other languages. The antimoon method of shutting up until you speak perfectly is a horrible way to seem native-like since you will have to avoid all of these social aspects of seeming native, as well as perfecting your pronunciation, tones, musicality etc. It just seems so artificial to me and turns a language into nothing more than an academic subject if you don't plan to use it with people until some very distant date in the future that will likely never appear (reaching perfection is an impossible goal - even natives screw up the language). It's a good way to pass exams or read well perhaps. Edited by irishpolyglot on 24 August 2010 at 4:34pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Lucky Charms Diglot Senior Member Japan lapacifica.net Joined 6742 days ago 752 posts - 1711 votes Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: German, Spanish | Message 37 of 66 24 August 2010 at 5:58pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Sorry, I used the word 'probably' to signal quite clearly that it was a conjecture. I wasn't 'spreading criticism' (what part was critical of anybody?) or potentially damaging anyone's reputation and livelihood so much as offering what I saw as a likely explanation for something doviende brought up, but I'm sorry if my assumption offended anybody. I've read posts from a lot of people who started to hate sentence mining/SRSing because of the approach I described, and I couldn't imagine (and haven't yet heard of) any other reason to think of it as tedious. Am I missing something?? I always thought 'sentence mining' basically meant enjoying media and taking note of unfamiliar words/constructions for later study, which seems almost like common sense for a language learner, and impossible not to enjoy... I suspect part of the problem might be that I've never read Antimoon and am basing my understanding on how it's described on AJATT (so at least I'll give you 'misinformed' ;). Could the people who dislike it please describe how they were sentence-mining and what they found tedious about it?
Yes, this falls in line with the point I was trying to make earlier (EDIT: and now that I take a second look at the original post, it's the exact same point the OP was making, too :). I see these different methods as being compatible with certain goals just as much as they are compatible with certain learners. I guess my preferences (as an introverted perfectionist) would lean more toward an input-based method generally, but if my goal for a certain language was spoken communication as quickly as possible, I'd be willing to tweak that. It's hard to pick one method and say it's the one that's going to suit me for all situations. Edited by Lucky Charms on 24 August 2010 at 6:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| feanarosurion Senior Member Canada Joined 5074 days ago 217 posts - 316 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Finnish, Norwegian | Message 38 of 66 24 August 2010 at 9:40pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
It's a paper dictionary, so inputting the sentences into SRS takes a little work. But it's pretty much the greatest thing that's happened to my language learning process. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5804 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 39 of 66 24 August 2010 at 11:14pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
If you're interested in sentences, it's presumably because you're interested in "learning in context", but if you continually repeat the same set of sentences, you're actually only learning the word or phrase in one context. OK, so theoretically you should be mining enough other sentences to balance it out, but you have no guarantee of statistical representativeness. Worse, most people will find it difficult to distinguish between knowing and half-knowing, so are likely to stop mining certain material before they have enough. But what I find particularly tedious is repeating the same sentences. Overexposure to the same material lets my brain start to get lazy. The adult brain's good at learning vocabulary and bad at learning grammar (we learn new words all the time -- eg blog and w00t! -- but the grammar of a language barely changes in a single person's lifetime) so if you expose yourself to the same phrase over and over again, sometimes the easiest way for the brain to deal with it is to start thinking of it as a large vocabulary item . Just as we don't process "building site" as two independent words or "look up to" as three independent words, the brain will happily process a group of three of four unfamiliar foreign words as a single item. So with all that, sentence mining + SRS fails for me because either I know it or I don't. Repeating something I know is valueless, repeating something I don't leads to me filing it in my brain in the wrong way. PS. Antimoon doesn't use the term sentence mining. The only time it occurs on the site is a link to AJATT. I'm not sure what the OP is referring to.... 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6343 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 40 of 66 25 August 2010 at 1:48am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Good question. I'm going to focus on reading here, since you mentioned flashcards. In a perfect world, I'd learn everything in context. a) All my languages would have a wide variety of graduated reading material, and I would never have to learn anything out of context. and/or b) I would have the mental capabilities of some people I've heard of that never use flashcards, lists, etc, but learn languages much faster and better than I do. For me, even though neither a) or b) exists, learning in context is still a goal I shoot for because it makes sense. My goal is to read, not to do flashcards. And no matter how many flashcards I do, I'll still need to spend hundreds of hours reading to become proficient. So I minimize the amount of time I spend on flashcards. I wish I could avoid them completely, but I've learned that for me the most efficient way is to stick new vocabulary words in an SRS for a few months, then delete them. In other words, I learn to read by reading, and use flashcards to learn vocabulary only when necessary, and with a single word rather than a whole sentence. That's my philosophy, but now let me mention some other things that I don't like about "sentence mining". At one time, 10,000 sentence dude said he was spending 3hrs per day doing flashcards. That would drive me crazy. I believe flashcards should never exceed 25% or your study time. When I exceeded 25% flashcards in the past, I got very bored with them, and didn't have enough time to do all the things I wanted to do with my languages. With Japanese, it can be hard to memorize a word when it's buried in a sentence. You can spit out the whole sentence, but not recognize the word when you see it in a different context. Many people who have been using sentence mining as their primary study method are finally finding this out, and switching to single words. This of course is cured by doing a lot of reading. Therefore it's much more efficient to just learn to read by reading in the first place and use flashcards for words than to learn to read with sentence flashcards. There were some other good points made on this thread, so rather than repeat them I'm moving onto something a little more intangible. It all started with a little thing called Heisig. People learning RTK1 learned that they could reap massive benefits by doing this huge out of context "crusade" of 200-300 hours. I'm not knocking Heisig - it's a great technique for learning how to write the kanji given an English keyword. But the people liked this kind of crusade so much that they started looking around for other crusades. They forgot that RTK was just supposed to give them something to anchor their kanji to, and that they were supposed to go onto normal, in context language learning to make it work. So they went onto the RTK2 crusade, the KO2001 crusade, the Core2000 crusade, and the biggest crusade of all - the 10,000 sentence crusade. Many of these people have lost contact with what it is they are trying to accomplish. Rather than transitioning to actually using the language, they transition to another crusade. When asked what their exit strategies are, they say things like "I'll start to read when I'm dang well ready", and "I plan on using flashcards for the rest of my life - what the heck are you talking about?" IMO, the longer they put off actually using the language, the less likely they are to actually use it. And paradoxically, I agree with Benny the Irish Polyglot when he says the more you delay speech, the less likely you are to become good at conversation. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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