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Depth of language grooves

 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
tommus
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 Message 1 of 8
12 December 2010 at 7:55pm | IP Logged 
When an old wagon wheel rolls over a large flat rock on a medieval street, it hardly leaves a mark. But after hundreds of wagons have passed over the rock for years, a groove is worn in the rock. The more wagons and the longer the time, the deeper the groove. Language learning, not surprisingly, is a lot like wearing grooves in rocks. It is a slow process that requires a lot of repetition. Once the grooves are there, they persist for a very long time, but they can be gradually eroded by the passage of time and the influence of other processes.

But what I would like to discuss in this thread is the feeling that a person has when listening to languages that is akin to the depth of the grooves, and potential methods to carve deeper grooves. When I listen to my native language English, it is sharp and clear, with very deep and distinct grooves. French has been my second language for most of my life, but I am not very fluent. When I listen to French, the grooves are much shallower and blurred. It takes much more attention to "lock on" to French and understand it. If French is in the background such as on TV, it is less likely that I will passively monitor what is being said although some words or phrases may pop out. My mind has a definite feeling that my perception of French speech is more blurry and more shallow. Even if I put a French sentence, or even an easy French word, on an audio loop and listen to it 10 or 50 times in a row, the blurriness is still there. The grooves still don't seem as deep as in English, even momentarily.

I am currently not studying or using French as much as my third language. My third language is Dutch which I have studied recently over a much shorter period of time but at a much more intensive level. I think my current level of Dutch is significantly better than my French. I can understand and speak a lot more Dutch than French. But the feeling remains that the French grooves are still much deeper than the Dutch grooves. French speech in the background is much more likely to jump out than Dutch speech. This would suggest that time is a bigger factor in the depth of the grooves than intensity or amount.

I have tried several things to try to deepen the grooves, both in French and in Dutch. It would seem that, in the very short term, the exercise of listening to a single known word 50 or 100 times in a loop would make the grooves feel just as deep as for English. But it does not for me. Doing the loop thing while looking at the word seems to help a bit but not much. Listening to a loop of the same word in English and Dutch doesn't seem to help. Lots of reading and writing seems to help but that is hard to measure. I think passive listening (with the radio or TV running in the background) may be the most effective method of deepening the grooves. It seems that the grooves are being engraved on the subconscious memory. And it seems the perception of the depth of the grooves is largely subconscious (seems like a contradiction).

I'm not sure these thoughts have any real significance. They may be perfectly obvious and not worth stating, and may just be a lot of drivel. But I would be interested in comments from those who feel this fuzziness or shallowness of the grooves. And whether people have noticed the grooves getting deeper as they become more proficient. And if natively-multilingual people have equally deep grooves for two or more languages. Apart from the obvious (intense immersion or plain hard work), has anyone discovered good ways to deepen these grooves?


Edited by tommus on 12 December 2010 at 8:02pm

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microsnout
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 Message 2 of 8
12 December 2010 at 9:12pm | IP Logged 
Like Irishpolyglot I believe that passive listening does little or nothing to deepen the grooves as you put it. However
I find it a great test of how deep they are. With a TV on in the background, I used to understand absolutely nothing
while doing something else. Even eating something while watching made it near impossible to follow the dialog.
Now, I am pleased to find that if a topic of interest comes up while for example typing this entry, I will notice it right
away. I now need to mute the foul TV if I want to get any other work done or it will keep grabbing my attention.

My recent experience with Yabla (french.yabla.com) has led to an interesting discovery. They provide a button to
slow down the speech (preserving pitch) but I now believe you are better off never using it. It would be useful if you
did not have the text and needed to use it to determine what was said but this is not the case. You always have the
text available. There were some videos which were clearly comprehensible except for a short burst of rapid speech
from one person. I just moved on to the next video even though I could not make out that part. After studying
about 150 videos, I started to review earlier ones and found to my surprise that some of these incomprehensible
bursts of speech were now clear and I felt certain I could hear each word.

I like your concept of needing to "lock onto" the stream of speech. When someone says something to me
unexpectedly, I sometimes miss the first few words even though they are well known to me because my brain has
not locked in yet. A similar thing can happen when there is one unknown word and my brain trips over it, no doubt
wondering what it was, and as a result I miss the next 3 or 4 words until I lock in again.

I don't think looping a single word would be useful at all. Even in English this just makes the word start to sound
weird like I have never heard it before. If you had a database of sound clips and could play a sequence of sentences
that all contain the word in different contexts that may be useful.

One thing definitely not useful for deepening grooves is talking with other language students of about the same
level.
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tommus
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 Message 3 of 8
12 December 2010 at 9:51pm | IP Logged 
microsnout wrote:
I don't think looping a single word would be useful at all

I wasn't thinking of this looping as a learning method but simply as a way of experimenting with the grooves. It seemed to show that although my mind knew exactly what the word was and how it sounded, and repeated that 50 times in a very short time, it did nothing to deepen the grooves. So the grooves have more to do with well-developed connections and worn paths among brain cells developed over extended periods of time.

microsnout wrote:
If you had a database of sound clips and could play a sequence of sentences that all contain the word in different contexts that may be useful.

I expect you're right. If you put a word in a sentence, its pronunciation often gets affected by the words and sounds before and after that word. So you probably have to hear that word in multiple settings, especially for high-speed conversations.

microsnout wrote:
One thing definitely not useful for deepening grooves is talking with other language students of about the same level.

It seems that it ultimately comes down to (in reading and listening) massive amounts of interesting comprehensible material, with non-boring repetition (variety). It would seem that if some large language-teaching companies would provide massive amounts of graduated (slowly increasing in difficulty) interesting material with parallel audio/text, all in the target language, the language learners would beat a path to their doors.

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microsnout
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 Message 4 of 8
12 December 2010 at 10:48pm | IP Logged 
With deep enough "grooves" I think you will begin to hear words that aren't even there if the
context suggests that they should be. In some recordings of fast speech that I have studied,
I know that not all the words from the transcript are really spoken. Native speakers seem to
use this ability of the brain to fill in the missing words as a means to speak even faster.
For example, I have seldom heard a double 'nous' in realistic French audio like
"Nous nous retrouvons". A French woman I spoke with claimed she always says it but the audio
file in Audacity doesn't lie, the second one is not there! If the brain just fills in these words
for you, it would explain why conversation in a noisy bar is so much easier in your native language.

Edited by microsnout on 12 December 2010 at 10:49pm

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Marikki
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 Message 5 of 8
13 December 2010 at 5:23pm | IP Logged 
I think that to me reading is a good way of measuring how deep the grooves are. Reading literature (mostly novels) is my main method of learnig languages. It has been wonderful to experience how the manner of reading will little by little change from reading mechanically, sentence by sentence, to seeing and understanding whole blocks of text at once.

For example, when I begun reading my first Spanish novel it was downright amusing how slowly my brains decoded and combined words into meaningful sentences even though I would have understood the meaning of every separate word and every grammatical aspect in a text.

It has also been interesting to notice what happened in the beginning stage, when I sometimes got too tired of reading slowly and rested my brain a little by reading one whole page very fast just as I normally do, without trying to “see” individual words and without trying to understand anything. Well, what happened is that I somehow “heard” (yes, it almost felt like hearing) the grammatical layer and sentence structures so that I understood some things that I wouldn’t have understood immediately had I been reading more slowly, just one sentence at a time. Almost like there would already have been some fragmentary grooves you cannot notice unless you travel very fast.



Edited by Marikki on 13 December 2010 at 5:26pm

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Arekkusu
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 Message 6 of 8
13 December 2010 at 5:54pm | IP Logged 
Interesting. I don't see language like grooves made in stone over time, but more like tracks in the mud: they're easy to make but they disappear if you don't maintain them.
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Marikki
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 Message 7 of 8
13 December 2010 at 6:31pm | IP Logged 
Arekkusu wrote:
Interesting. I don't see language like grooves made in stone over time, but more like tracks in the mud: they're easy to make but they disappear if you don't maintain them.


I know that after twenty years not using any German my German grooves are still there although filled with mud. It would be a relatively easy job to clean the mud away.

Well, could be that my grooves aren’t carved in stone but something more elastic like slowly rottening wood.    

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tommus
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 Message 8 of 8
13 December 2010 at 8:52pm | IP Logged 
Arekkusu wrote:
Interesting. I don't see language like grooves made in stone over time, but more like tracks in the mud: they're easy to make but they disappear if you don't maintain them.

That is not how it worked for me in French. The grooves were difficult to make. They slowly got deeper up to about age 26 when I reached what the Canadian government called a functional level. Since then, (another 35 years) without active study and with infrequent use, I think the grooves are just as deep, and not very muddy.

Please take it as a compliment that it must be nice to have a muddy mind. Mine is much more stone-like.





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