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Just read and not understand? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Gorgoll2 Senior Member Brazil veritassword.blogspo Joined 4945 days ago 159 posts - 192 votes  Speaks: Portuguese* | Message 17 of 62 18 March 2011 at 12:23am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I´m suffering this problem. I´m able to read English well, but my understanding is quite
weak. I´ve Asperger, therefore, I don´t get hear well sounds. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5229 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 18 of 62 18 March 2011 at 1:48am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Since this idea of reading or listening to incomprehensible input seems to pop up regularly here, I'm really curious to see if there are people who seriously believe that someone, let's say a beginner, should slog through an incomprehensible book in the target language and hope to glean something by the end. Honestly, I think this is masochism. It's like those who advocate listening extensively to incomprehensible audio. Why do this when it is so much more effective to actively engage in reading with the help of a grammar book and a dictionary?
Frankly, I don't see the point of trying to guess the meaning of something when you can look it up in a dictionary. I recognize that when reading in the target language we might have to gloss over certain things so that we can keep moving along. But that's not the same as hovering over some words trying to guess what they mean. I think we have to strike a balance between laboriously studying a text and just enjoying a general overview and the sound or the look of words. What I have always noticed is that the more work I spend actually studying the language the more I understand what I read and hear later. I'm sure most of us have experienced that "aha" moments when we read or hear some rather idiomatic expression and fully understand it. And that's because we've seen it seen it somewhere before in a grammar book or a dictionary. Then suddenly we hear it used for real. Now the next step is to use that construction ourselves. That's the real challenge and is probably the ultimate joy. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Darklight1216 Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4899 days ago 411 posts - 639 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German | Message 19 of 62 18 March 2011 at 3:26am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
That might, might work if you are, for instance, English speaker who studied Spanish several years ago, forgot it and rely heavily on cognates. However, I've looked at (reading isn't anything to close to what happened) Russian words to see if I could absorb something... no dice, unless it was transliterated and usually not even then. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| LLF Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5379 days ago 66 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English* | Message 20 of 62 18 March 2011 at 3:13pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I'm certain that you couldn't. I've experimented with the "learn by context" method in both Spanish and Russian. IMHO, it's a waste of time since, as you point out, context rarely allows a unique meaning for each word. Even on those occasions where you can guess a word from context, that is all you have: a guess. And I always feel the need to be certain. I now rely solely on the brute force approach: look up every unknown word in the dictionary, maybe waiting until the end of the paragraph to allow the full context to become clear. It's slow, but in the long run, far more effective. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| PonyGirl Groupie United States Joined 4818 days ago 54 posts - 70 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German | Message 22 of 62 18 March 2011 at 3:51pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Maybe I am just a "fly by the seat of my pants" person, but I don't really care if I know the exact difference in my TL between "complex" and "difficult." For a relative beginner, there is all the time in the world to learn that. Right now I am far more interested in getting a broad and useful selection of vocabulary. Once that is established, I can discover the finer points of "advanced" vs "difficult." As many of you have said, I think that reading/listening is great if you are accompanying it with something more instructive. A grammar book is very instructive, but can only take you so far. Eventually you have to discover the widely diversified ways that it can be used in the language. Likewise, a novel will give you this diversity, but cannot be nearly as instructive. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5180 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 23 of 62 18 March 2011 at 4:40pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
I entirely and utterly agree with josht and Cainntear's advice: even the most "decorated" polyglots frequently have claims that virtually always turn out to be ponderable when you realize what they actually did. Steve may claim he doesn't know much about Japanese grammar, but he lived there for many years and has been speaking it for around 40 years, so of course he knows how to use particles. Benny may claim to have almost passed C2 examination within 3 months of living in Germany, but -- he's not hiding this fact, mind you -- he also spent 5 years studying German in high school. It's quite possible that it's the little things people forget they did, forget to mention or perhaps don't even notice that make the most difference. The deliberate methods vary, but the automatic internal mechanisms are probably the real key to success. 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| koba Heptaglot Senior Member AustriaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5667 days ago 118 posts - 201 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Hungarian, French | Message 24 of 62 18 March 2011 at 6:44pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
How did you learn your first language? You learned it intuitively listening to it from your parents and people around you, that is, just listening, listening and listening. That's basicaly how methods like Assimil work, although there's still some grammar explaination every 7 lessons. I can relate to how Lingosteve's learned Japanese. My first foreign language was English, and I started studying it on my own, doing an immersion (that is, watching movies, doing a lot of reading, etc), and that was all very intensively done, pretty much everyday I would have contact with the language much more than I would have with my native language, back then I had a lot of spare time to do it. From my experience, I can tell you that I have neither used grammar nor language books, until I was in a very high level and could speak it, in the word's general meaning, "fluently". Of course I still would make a lot of mistakes (as I still do), but I was speaking the language with a flow of a native and making very few mistakes. I could absorb a lot of different structures, grammar, expressions, etc, and that was all through listening and reading. Therefore, I would say that if you already know a good deal of vocabulary and you can dedicate yourself to listening to a language as much as possible, that's the method you should go for. Not only you will acquire a good ear to the sounds of the language, but you will also acquire a feeling of how natives actually speak it, that's something no one can teach you, you have to be exposed to it long enough to learn it. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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