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Why people have problems with learning la | ||
Tags: Learning Difficulty | Foreign Languages | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Splog Diglot Senior Member Czech Republic anthonylauder.c Joined 5466 days ago 1062 posts - 3263 votes  Speaks: English*, Czech Studies: Mandarin | Message 17 of 32 05 March 2011 at 10:34am | IP Logged | |||||
I agree. However, the target for language learners is rarely to achieve an elite level. Few are aiming to be the world's greatest living speaker of their target language. Most would be overjoyed if they managed to maintain long and useful discussions with natives read newspapers without too much difficulty, understand TV and radio shows, etc. Even with a less popular language, such a Czech, it took me a while to realise that no matter how good I get, there will always be more than 10 Million native speakers whose Czech is better than mine. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| LanguageSponge Triglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5563 days ago 1197 posts - 1487 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Welsh, Russian, Japanese, Slovenian, Greek, Italian | Message 18 of 32 05 March 2011 at 2:58pm | IP Logged | |||||
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For a lot of my friends at school, and some of my relatives who have tried to learn a language before, it's the fact that there's a very obvious end goal with languages - fluency, and that scares them. With most other subjects, you pick a specialty and work really hard at that. You become good enough to use it in your chosen career or whatever you want to do with it and that's that. The other areas of that subject might not interest you or or they might, so if you do, you read up on them out of personal interest and you enjoy it - but you'll never *need* it.
Take a doctor for example. I'm not exactly sure how training to be a doctor works, but I imagine it works something like this - You do your general training, the parts that are absolutely essential in order to do most doctor-type jobs. Then you presumably study a specialty - oncology, paediatrics, immunology, whatever, the point is, you'll know a hell of a lot about that particular field but won't know enough to specialise in the other fields without doing the specialist training. With a language, to be as good as a native speaker, you need to be able to talk about loads of different topics - and that's without even going into technical fields - at some kind of native speed, be able to hear and understand different accents within the language, have an acceptable accent yourself when speaking, respond to questions quickly without too much prior consideration of what you want to say, write coherently (and naturally, which is really difficult sometimes) and so many other things that I can't even write them all down. Once you've got that under your belt, you've then got, as someone else said before me, different accents, perhaps speech impediments, background noise, possible drunkness, speak and understand someone on the telephone, be able to speak the language well while also doing something else at the same time and lots of other variables. All these things, and yet I doubt most people even get this far into thinking about it before giving up. People probably think "wait, I probably can't even use my own language properly, and even if I can it took me about 20 years to get there really and I can't learn half as quickly as I used to be able to, so what chance have I got of doing that with a second language? Jack Edited by LanguageSponge on 05 March 2011 at 3:08pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5808 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 19 of 32 05 March 2011 at 10:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
Let's examine what you said logically. You say some of the class are doing well, and you say this is because they are talented. You also say that some of the class are doing badly, and you say this is because they are untalented. Finally, you say that the teaching method is not bad. If the people who do well are talented, then their success cannot be ascribed to the teaching method -- they would learn regardless of teaching. If the people who do badly are not talented, their failure must be ascribed to the teaching method -- because they are relying on teaching to compensate for their lack of talent. So if talent exists, the teaching method is bad -- you can't have it both ways. A better teaching method would teach the bad students better, without any decrease in performance for the better students (after all, anything that makes it easier to learn makes it easier for everyone to learn). But even if talent doesn't exist, or if talent is only a minor factor, that still holds true: any course that only teaches "good" students is a bad course. When I say I don't believe in talent, what I really mean is that I don't believe talent accounts for the majority of successful learners. I do believe in individual differences, but for the most part I put these down to prior learning, not radically different brain chemistry. When I went into high school, I was shocked to find that I was doing badly in French -- I was always top of the class, but I was actually having difficulties with something for the first time in my life. (There was only 10 of us in my primary class, so while being top of the class meant something to me then, it now seems so trivial!) But in the end, I got back to the top of the class, but because I was learning in a slightly different way from how we were being taught. How so? The teacher gave us verb conjugation tables. Most of the class memorised the table, so they could give the answer in any person just as easily. I didn't learn the table, I learned the conjugations individually, but this meant that I could only answer one or two conjugations quickly and stumbled on the others. It was only when I noticed that our exercises practiced the first and third person singular forms more than any others that I realised it wasn't my fault and stopped worrying. I describe this to teachers and some will say "ah, but that's because you're an analytical learner", but that's missing the point: the kids who did what the teacher was asking didn't learn to speak, but I did. It wasn't that the course was right for me and wrong for them, but that the course was wrong for all of us and I was lucky enough to be equipped with the right tools to work it out for myself. While this was my first experience of learning a language, I had always understood that there was a reason for everything, so I tried to learn everything meaningfully, which is of crucial importance in all learning, but particularly in language learning. The other kids had learned that memorising facts and giving the right answer keeps the teacher happy. In my opinion, this is the characteristic of "bright" kids -- looking for meaning -- and it is not synonymous with "intelligence". But the education system embarrasses kids who ask "why", stigmatising kids for not knowing, and actively militates against them becoming "bright". But students shouldn't need to be "bright" when they walk into a language classroom. The path I worked out for myself could have been used as the teaching pathway, and everyone would have learned more, myself included. And that's not to say my learning path was optimal -- there could have been many improvements made. But in order to do that, the teacher would have had to have recognised that she was teaching badly. 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5808 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 20 of 32 05 March 2011 at 10:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
One unique feature about the DLI is that of all the world's language schools, it is said to have the highest number of applications per space available. The DLI rejects more applicants than anyone else. That means the exam doesn't have to be perfect. It can rule out many good candidates and still fill the quota with other remaining good candidates. I did a sample aptitude test someone had posted on the net a few years ago. It was claimed that it didn't test prior knowledge, but rather your ability to learn new things. (I think it was actually an old DLAB paper, but I might be wrong.) All the questions related to features of language. The questions I found easy were ones relating to features in languages I already knew, the ones I found difficult were ones relating to features I had never encountered. I concluded that the test was indeed testing my previous knowledge, and rather than identifying candidates with the ability to be taught new language concepts, it was merely indentifying candidates who didn't need to be taught. As I said, the DLI turns away more applicants than any other language school. This means that they can afford to be picky. Candidates who have already learned stuff are cheaper to train than those who need to learn everything...
With any learning, there is internal activity and external activity. What does Huliganov's brain do internally with the words before he writes them externally on a piece of paper? What is his brain doing while he's writing them? And what does his brain do after he's written them? There's a lot more to his technique than writing and reading, and unfortunately he can't tell us what the rest of it is. He also developed his gold list once he already had certain habit patterns. That's "habit patterns" not "aptitude". 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| kmart Senior Member Australia Joined 5921 days ago 194 posts - 400 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 21 of 32 05 March 2011 at 11:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks RogerK, you expressed me better than I did !
This whole aptitude thing is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, there are people who dismiss one's hard work with "oh, it's easy for you, you have an aptitude for it". On the other hand, I had friends at school who worked much harder than I did, and didn't achieve the same results - in this case, it would be insulting to them to imply that they didn't put enough work into their studies. They simply had less aptitude in those areas, and there were other areas, such as sport and music, where almost everyone had more aptitude than me ! It can't all be about the teaching method, because in every class there are the try-hards who struggle to achieve and the lazy gits who top the class - that would imply that every teaching method is poor and it's only the students who are able to "look for the meaning" who can succeed. In fact couldn't this ability to succeed despite bad teaching, be an aptitude itself? 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6500 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 22 of 32 06 March 2011 at 12:38am | IP Logged | |||||
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It would take forever to comment on everything Cainntear has written in the two long posts above, but there is of course a recurrent pattern in his argumentation., namely that there isn't such a thing as aptitude - it is all a question of previous experiences, which have lead to the adoption of more or less efficient habits - the same mindset that has lead him to deny the existence of learner types.
In one passage he writes: When I say I don't believe in talent, what I really mean is that I don't believe talent accounts for the majority of successful learners.I do believe in individual differences, but for the most part I put these down to prior learning, not radically different brain chemistry. It is true that nobody has been able to demonstrate a radically different brain chemistry for good language language learners when compared to those who fail miserably, and the jury is still out on more subtle differences. But there is definitely a difference between speaking five languages to perfection and speaking just one, and it is hard enough to demonstrate how the brains of those who know five is different from the brains of those who just know one - at least if you expect to find one simple set of differences. So I'm not surprised that it is difficult to pinpoint the differences that lead to the obvious differences in skills. I just wait for science to sort those things out. In the meantime I recognize as a simple fact that there are vast differences both in the level different persons have achieved and the amount of toil and labor it has cost them to get there. The reluctance to ascribe at least some of these differences to 'aptitude' could be that aptitude is seen as innate and immutable in the same way as intelligence (according to the classical model). But for me there is not just one kind of aptitude, but several things 'you can be good at' - which of course leads us back to the discussion about learning styles. Personally I don't think my memory is particularly good - well, sometimes I can remember weird details, but never in a well-ordered or dependable fashion. And for this I have compensated by finding efficient memorization techniques - or at least methods that are efficient for me, with the innate AND acquired characteristics I have got. On the other hand I'm above average in my ability to stay focused on things like grammar studies and working with wordlists for hours, and probably also in analyzing the way different study methods affect me (using the same aptitude I think I have in analyzing grammar in an independent way, instead of just learning the rules by heart). I have never had to train those abilities, and nobody have forced me to change myself in that direction - not even in elementary school. So why should I accept that those things are acquired habits? I acknowledge that they could be the result of some simple throw of the dices in my infancy, but even then I would say that by the age I entered school they formed a distinct set of aptitudes, and I don't really care about the proportion of them that was due to different factors 6 or 7 years before. And given that this profile of skills or aptitudes has been constant for at least fifty years, why should I believe that methods that would make bad learners better necessarily would make me a better learner too? Actually any intervention by a teacher who didn't believe in individual differences, but nevertheless had the goal of making less capable student more capable, would in all likelihood destroy the blend of skills and exploitation of skills that made me reasonably good language learner. And any theory that without any proof states that there isn't anything like aptitudes (or learning styles) could potentially give such a teacher carte blanche to do his destructive work. He might even spoil Cainntear's own attempts to learn grammar in a meaningful way, if it turned out that meaningful grammar studies didn't function for those who hated grammar. Therefore it is absolutely not trivial which 'zero hypothesis' we choose in the absence of real proof. Edited by Iversen on 06 March 2011 at 12:48am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Darya0Khoshki Triglot Groupie United States Joined 4865 days ago 71 posts - 91 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written), Arabic (Iraqi) Studies: Persian | Message 23 of 32 06 March 2011 at 1:48am | IP Logged | |||||
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Wow, I feel like language "talent" encompasses so many different areas.
For example, some people *seem* to be naturally better at immitating sounds than others and can pick this up quickly without any special training - people who are musicians, singers, or are good at making weird phonemes and pronouncing languages. Some people *seem* to be able to understand grammatical patterns and apply them without too much effort or practice. And then there's memory. I remember a kid in one of my classes who had horrible proununciation but he could remember every single word he learned and had a better vocabulary than anyone else in the class. So people can be good at different aspects of a language. But I think there is a fine line between talent and passion. I've been told that I'm "good" at languages, whatever that means, but that's the product of consistantly making at least 1/2 hr of contact with each language every day over a period of years, and I chaulk it more up to the passion (or motivation) that drove me to put so much time into it than any natural ability. Perhaps "talent" comes in because people who experience some immediate success in a field are more likely to be drawn to it enough to want to work hard, but if the people who didn't experience immediate success at something stood it out long enough to put in the time, they'd eventually get to the same place. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5178 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 24 of 32 06 March 2011 at 4:05am | IP Logged | |||||
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I must have had close to 20 languages teachers over the years and very few of them – if
any – have not told me that I was more gifted for languages than any other student they’d had before. I’ve considered the possibility that I’ve somehow incorporated as a natural process a successful learning regimen that others haven’t. While this might explain why I tend to gain fluency rapidly, it doesn’t account for why I can grasp a complex grammatical construction and right away start using it naturally while others are still struggling to make sense of it. Though it is undeniable that some people are talented for language acquisition, it’s also undeniable that virtually anyone can learn a second language. I’ve met mentally challenged individuals who actually learned a second language to fluency! It’s fair to say that anyone reading this forum can also do it. If we can all do it, then how come so many fail? Because they give up. Why do they give up? Because they fail to make their learning meaningful in their lives. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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