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Vlad’s polyglot podcast

  Tags: Podcast | Polyglot
 Language Learning Forum : Polyglots Post Reply
37 messages over 5 pages: 1 24 5  Next >>
slucido
Bilingual Diglot
Senior Member
Spain
https://goo.gl/126Yv
Joined 6434 days ago

1296 posts - 1781 votes 
4 sounds
Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan*
Studies: English

 
 Message 17 of 37
23 December 2010 at 8:38am | IP Logged 
What techniques do you use, Vlad? I am curious.
1 person has voted this message useful



Vlad
Trilingual Super Polyglot
Senior Member
Czechoslovakia
foreverastudent.com
Joined 6343 days ago

443 posts - 576 votes 
2 sounds
Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French
Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese

 
 Message 18 of 37
23 December 2010 at 12:26pm | IP Logged 
Thank you again for the nice comments.

Slucido,

I don't think I have any technique really. Just lots and lots of time spent on studying
and trying to figure out the logic of the languages. What I think might work for
anything though is just spending really a lot of time listening to suitable audio (with
a good computer dictionary) without looking at the text and then later spend some time
in the country where the language is spoken. But then again there is the question what
is suitable audio.

I think once you can understand what people are saying you can communicate even if you
yourself have to use English most of the time and thus start learning things from
context. You can learn how to understand people on your own before you travel to the
country where you want to go, speaking you will learn there. Except for Mandarin. I
almost lost my mind about 3 times studying it.

For everything else, what I did was that I downloaded audio with a lot of dialogs or
monologues and just pause/rewinded my way through the recording with a dictionary until
I understood what they were saying in that particular recording and then listened to it
over and over on the bus or wherever. For me when I had to manually look up every word
that I could not move on without, I did a greater effort to remember it since looking
it up every time was just annoying. I think I learned a lot of things along the way
like the script for instance (if it was different), or orthography, some grammar and so
on. I think I later kept a log of important words and reviewed them every day.

When it comes to reading, or listening/reading, looking at the text from the beginning
destroyed my pronunciation, because I got influenced by the sounds that the letters
represent in my native language, but a lot of reading after I got the pronunciation
somewhat right was even more helpful than a lot of listening. Except for Mandarin.

Well..not much of a method. I'm sure there are people who learn in a way that is much
more effective, but this is what I did.

Edited by Vlad on 23 December 2010 at 12:29pm

9 persons have voted this message useful



slucido
Bilingual Diglot
Senior Member
Spain
https://goo.gl/126Yv
Joined 6434 days ago

1296 posts - 1781 votes 
4 sounds
Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan*
Studies: English

 
 Message 19 of 37
23 December 2010 at 1:26pm | IP Logged 
Vlad wrote:
Just lots and lots of time spent on studying
and trying to figure out the logic of the languages. What I think might work for
anything though is just spending really a lot of time listening to suitable audio (with
a good computer dictionary) without looking at the text and then later spend some time
in the country where the language is spoken. But then again there is the question what
is suitable audio.

I think once you can understand what people are saying you can communicate even if you
yourself have to use English most of the time and thus start learning things from
context. You can learn how to understand people on your own before you travel to the
country where you want to go, speaking you will learn there. Except for Mandarin. I
almost lost my mind about 3 times studying it.

For everything else, what I did was that I downloaded audio with a lot of dialogs or
monologues and just pause/rewinded my way through the recording with a dictionary until
I understood what they were saying in that particular recording and then listened to it
over and over on the bus or wherever. For me when I had to manually look up every word
that I could not move on without, I did a greater effort to remember it since looking
it up every time was just annoying. I think I learned a lot of things along the way
like the script for instance (if it was different), or orthography, some grammar and so
on. I think I later kept a log of important words and reviewed them every day.

When it comes to reading, or listening/reading, looking at the text from the beginning
destroyed my pronunciation, because I got influenced by the sounds that the letters
represent in my native language, but a lot of reading after I got the pronunciation
somewhat right was even more helpful than a lot of listening. Except for Mandarin.

Well..not much of a method. I'm sure there are people who learn in a way that is much
more effective, but this is what I did.


Thank you for your quick answer. If you are very good learning languages, you are doing something really very well.

I don't understand, how do you look up words that you are listening if you don't read the transcript?

On the other hand, what happens with Mandarin? I have found several successful polyglots who have had a lot of problems with it.


1 person has voted this message useful



Vlad
Trilingual Super Polyglot
Senior Member
Czechoslovakia
foreverastudent.com
Joined 6343 days ago

443 posts - 576 votes 
2 sounds
Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French
Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese

 
 Message 20 of 37
23 December 2010 at 1:43pm | IP Logged 
slucido wrote:
I don't understand, how do you look up words that you are listening if
you don't read the transcript?

On the other hand, what happens with Mandarin? I have found several successful
polyglots who have had a lot of problems with it.


Slucido, I tried to figure out what words in the recording were based on their sound
only and looked for their meaning in the dictionary. I just listen to the recording and
try to guess the spelling until I come across something that seems as the most probable
meaning of the sound I just heard. I think this can only work with languages well
related to the languages you already speak at an advanced level, because if you have to
look up absolutely every word and know nothing about the language, it will take you
forever. I really did learn Russian this way and my native language is quite far from
Russian in the Slavonic language family.

Mandarin is just too far from everything. There are no links in vocabulary or sentence
structure or the logic of the language so you cannot rely on shortcuts and guesses and
have to do everything the difficult way. The only thing that could make it easier would
be to design some sort of a supercourse, where someone would come up with the right
audio to listen to, which would go from simple to difficult, would combine all the most
common syllable/tone combinations and about 3000-5000 of the most common sentence
structures and vocabulary and would not be boring :)



Edited by Vlad on 23 December 2010 at 1:50pm

3 persons have voted this message useful



slucido
Bilingual Diglot
Senior Member
Spain
https://goo.gl/126Yv
Joined 6434 days ago

1296 posts - 1781 votes 
4 sounds
Speaks: Spanish*, Catalan*
Studies: English

 
 Message 21 of 37
23 December 2010 at 4:35pm | IP Logged 
Vlad wrote:


Slucido, I tried to figure out what words in the recording were based on their sound
only and looked for their meaning in the dictionary. I just listen to the recording and
try to guess the spelling until I come across something that seems as the most probable
meaning of the sound I just heard.



Very good.

This reminds me a technique I read somewhere. Watch a short video several times trying to understand as much as possible, using the dictionary or whatever you need and when it seems impossible to understand more, turn on the subtitles.

It seems that the problem with Mandarin is that we, western people, don't have scaffoldings.



1 person has voted this message useful



noriyuki_nomura
Bilingual Octoglot
Senior Member
Switzerland
Joined 5099 days ago

304 posts - 465 votes 
Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Japanese, FrenchC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, SpanishB2, DutchB1
Studies: TurkishA1, Korean

 
 Message 22 of 37
23 December 2010 at 8:23pm | IP Logged 
Oh my, I just listened to your recordings, you speak all the languages so fluently and well! I think you are being really humble, but you speak Mandarin really so fluently! :) I am really impressed by how well you managed the tones of Mandarin! :)

ps: I like your Taiwanese accented Mandarin, it sounds so beautiful!


3 persons have voted this message useful



Vlad
Trilingual Super Polyglot
Senior Member
Czechoslovakia
foreverastudent.com
Joined 6343 days ago

443 posts - 576 votes 
2 sounds
Speaks: Czech*, Slovak*, Hungarian*, Mandarin, EnglishC2, GermanC2, ItalianC1, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Serbian, French
Studies: Persian, Taiwanese, Romanian, Portuguese

 
 Message 23 of 37
24 December 2010 at 5:59am | IP Logged 
noriyuki_nomura,

thank you for the nice comment.

You know, native Chinese speakers are known to be very very forgiving and tolerant to
foreigners studying Mandarin and they have been telling me that I speak very good Chinese
back when could only say "Nihao" :) It still is a nice encouragement. Thank you.

Edited by Vlad on 24 December 2010 at 6:04am

1 person has voted this message useful



Chung
Diglot
Senior Member
Joined 6915 days ago

4228 posts - 8259 votes 
20 sounds
Speaks: English*, French
Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish

 
 Message 24 of 37
25 December 2010 at 5:34am | IP Logged 
To rewelacyjna praca, Włodek. Len tak ďalej!


2 persons have voted this message useful



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