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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5564 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes  Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 49 of 62 20 March 2011 at 2:48am | IP Logged | |||||
Please remember that children's books are not automatically easy for adults learning a second language. The vocabulary used is often high frequency for an infant, but rather on the lower end on what is deemed important by the author of a text book. Even between European cultures that happily copy from each other, there are many references a preschooler will understand and a learner will have trouble understanding. The topics are quite removed from the everyday experience of an adult. Most of the stories I've read to children were about things the children knew from their daily life, but with a twist that made them interesting to the children. They are also made for being read repeatedly. An infant will talk about the elements in a story it recognizes, and try to make sense of it, and when children reach school age, their stories become more complex and abstract and their talking about it slowly becomes an inner monologue rather than something said out loud. Unless you're keen on re-enacting that process you might want to choose other material for your tests. In a way, one could say you can't get the gist of stories for infants because there is nothing in them for you to be recognizable as "the gist". I know some people who reported having similar problems to you, and I think they couldn't read because they got so hung up on details they didn't understand that they couldn't shift back their attention to the larger picture. It could also be that even though you know the words and grammar, your mental representation of them is still formulaic. When I want to read in a new language, I try to find texts that contain no or little new information other than the information relevant to the language, that are written in a style that should be easy to understand for contemporary speakers of the language, that have a consistent style used between them (magazines or a serialization by one author) and that are about a topic that interests me. Then I try reading them. If I can't understand enough, I try something else that might be easier to understand. If I don't find anything I actually can read, I choose the text that seems most promising or motivates me most and tackle it sentence by sentence, looking up unknown words and grammar points and translating it to some degree. (It depends on how difficult/important I find it, sometimes I just puzzle the meaning together in my mind, sometimes I do a very literal translation.) I repeat that until the text is finished (or I'm too lazy to continue), then re-read the text I using my notes as a memory aid. And then I re-read it the next day or the day after, until I feel like I can read it reasonably well. This might seem the exact opposite of what you're trying to do, but it actually isn't because either the problem is your choice of reading material, or the way you are working with it. If it's the first, you'll find something you can read. If it's the second, I guess the main problem is that you're trying to treat the text like an English text. If you get hung up on details/things you don't know, working with a text intensively will make you understand those details, and when you re-read the text you will still know many of them and will be able to perceive those you've forgotten as less important. If you're relying too much on formulaic knowledge, working with new, but similar texts every day will help you to learn how to manipulate the words and grammar like a language. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Rennon Newbie Finland Joined 4801 days ago 8 posts - 8 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish, Finnish | Message 50 of 62 20 March 2011 at 7:48am | IP Logged | |||||
It isn't so much the grammar or whatever in children's books (however, I do get confused occasionally with certain structures) it's the vocabulary. Words almost never seem to stick in my head, and in Finnish children's books (as my wife has pointed out) the vocabulary is so unused in normal conversation with variations of verbs you'd never see in a newspaper or hear in colloquial speech that I'm just constantly looking in a dictionary for every second word (and many of them I never find and have to ask my wife because that's how non-standard they are). That being said, I think my problem lies nonetheless in vocabulary acquisition, my current method is to just look up in the dictionary words I don't know, though for many many words, no matter how many times I do this, I'll constantly forget them anyway. It gets very frustrating but I just keep trying because even though I don't understand 99.9% of what my wife and her family are saying to each other, I want to be able to talk with them in Finnish, not English. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5564 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 51 of 62 20 March 2011 at 9:31am | IP Logged | |||||
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... you do realize that you need to review the words you learnt? Especially when you're a beginner it takes a lot of repetition to be able to remember a word. With time and exposure it becomes easier to remember new words.
I think that it doesn't matter that much how you get your reviews (flash cards, word lists, notes from conversations, memorizing sentences or text, reading/listening/watching the same content until you know it by heart - things like that), but you'll have to do a lot of them until your command of the language is good enough that you will be able to remember new words just from mentally repeating them when you think of the situation you learnt them in. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Andrew C Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom naturalarabic.com Joined 4988 days ago 205 posts - 350 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written) | Message 52 of 62 20 March 2011 at 10:47am | IP Logged | |||||
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I'm sorry if this is obvious, but if you aim is to speak Finnish with your wife and her family, you should be learning conversation vocabulary, not children's book vocabulary. If your wife will help, you could record one of her conversations with her family and then translate it. Then practice it with your wife. Or if that's too difficult you could get basic Finnish dialogues WITH AUDIO (very important) from somewhere (Assimil?) and learn those. Languages have vast vocabularies, so you have to focus on what you need rather than trying to learn everything.
3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Rennon Newbie Finland Joined 4801 days ago 8 posts - 8 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish, Finnish | Message 54 of 62 20 March 2011 at 5:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
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[removed - double post] Edited by Rennon on 20 March 2011 at 5:07pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Rennon Newbie Finland Joined 4801 days ago 8 posts - 8 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Swedish, Finnish | Message 55 of 62 20 March 2011 at 5:06pm | IP Logged | |||||
I do speak Finnish with my wife half the time, but it's quite difficult with her family as they live far away and we only see them every few months, and as speak very good English, with only 24 hours in a day it can get quite tedious to keep interrupting conversation ever 5 seconds with "anteeksi" and "ole hyvä ja voitko sä toistaa hitaampi?" when we just want to have flowing conversations with the little time we have. It is no excuse however, since I need to speak this language as I now live here and want so much to be a part of this country. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| rad Newbie United States Joined 5412 days ago 18 posts - 23 votes Speaks: French | Message 56 of 62 21 March 2011 at 3:35pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Perhaps the videos on YouTube by FluentCzech would be helpful. His situation is similar to yours, Rennon, and he put together a variety of methods that works for him.
And perhaps you are expecting fluent conversations on whatever topic comes up in too short a learning time. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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