Sin_Nombre Newbie United States Joined 4922 days ago 19 posts - 22 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French
| Message 1 of 41 14 April 2011 at 11:39pm | IP Logged |
Recently, I had a short conversation with the popular Italian polyglot Luca, who speaks (if memory serves) about 8-9 languages with good accent. According to him, it is better to translate Assimil from L2 -> L1 and then from L1 -> L2, which would negate the need for Passive and Active waves. I was wondering what the opinion of this strategy was on the board. He refer to this as full circle, and has written rather extensively about this strategy elsewhere. Your thoughts?
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irrationale Tetraglot Senior Member China Joined 5837 days ago 669 posts - 1023 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Tagalog Studies: Ancient Greek, Japanese
| Message 2 of 41 15 April 2011 at 12:22am | IP Logged |
You mean to start translating between L1 and L2 from the beginning?
This is how I learn languages now. I just translate a lot (thousands) of sentences with audio back and forth between L1 and L2, all in Anki, starting from simple and moving on. They come from various sources, I haven't used Assimil to do it yet, but I could. It works fantastically for me, but I'm sure not for everyone. I basically ignore the grammar.
Is this what you are referring to?
Edited by irrationale on 15 April 2011 at 12:24am
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Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5168 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian
| Message 3 of 41 15 April 2011 at 2:49am | IP Logged |
Let's say you take a sentence from L2. If you understand what it means, and you can close
the book and say the sentence from memory, with relative ease, as if you were using it in
real life, what exactly would be the advantage of translating it into L1 and then back
into L2? It seems to me that all this can be done orally without needing to translate it
back and forth.
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Sin_Nombre Newbie United States Joined 4922 days ago 19 posts - 22 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, French
| Message 4 of 41 15 April 2011 at 3:39am | IP Logged |
I believe it works more like this:
http://womenlearnthai.com/index.php/part-one-an-easy-way-to- learn-foreign-languages/
http://womenlearnthai.com/index.php/an-easy-way-to-learn-for eign-languages-part-two/
Though I'm still not entirely sure about the idea.
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IansDad Newbie United States Joined 5501 days ago 28 posts - 41 votes Studies: French, English
| Message 5 of 41 15 April 2011 at 3:49am | IP Logged |
I've been wondering about this method too.
Not waiting 50 days (lesson 50) until you start trying to recall the language you are learning seems smart. Why wait???
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AndrewW Newbie United States Joined 4794 days ago 29 posts - 60 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish
| Message 6 of 41 15 April 2011 at 5:56am | IP Logged |
If you posted a thread asking, "How do you use Assimil?", I'd bet you would get pages of different methods. That's
part of the brilliance of the series. And let's be honest - with their instructions, you almost have to make up some
of it as you go!
The fifty days is arbitrary to some degree, and I don't think there is anything wrong with adjusting the "method" to
fit what you want it to be. I think most would recommend that, actually. But, quicker isn't better! Part of the idea
behind the active vs. passive wave is that by the time you begin the active phase, you've had significant exposure to
the language and you see all the previous material in that context. Grammar that you didn't recognize before has
been reinforced over several episodes, and those notes mean more than they did before.
If you're doing lesson 1 on day one, and then on day five you're doing lesson 5 + active wave of lesson 1, you're
absolutely not accomplishing the same thing.
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Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5798 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh
| Message 7 of 41 15 April 2011 at 2:32pm | IP Logged |
L2->L1 is a passive way of working.
I'm not keen on passive stuff anyway, for one simple reason: understanding does not require 100% accuracy. Production does.
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IansDad Newbie United States Joined 5501 days ago 28 posts - 41 votes Studies: French, English
| Message 8 of 41 15 April 2011 at 3:59pm | IP Logged |
Here is an interesting Wikipedia entry (look at the pdfs in the Reference section).
It would seem that the "testing effect" (active phase) is very important.
"In his 1932 book Psychology of Study, Prof. C. A. Mace said "On the matter of sheer repetitive drill there is another principle of the highest importance: Active repetition is very much more effective than passive repetition. ... there are two ways of introducing further repetitions. We may re-read this list: this is passive repetition. We may recall it to mind without reference to the text before forgetting has begun: this is active repetition. It has been found that when acts of reading and acts of recall alternate, ie when every reading is followed by an attempt to recall the items, the efficiency of learning and retention is enormously enhanced."[3]"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testing_effect
http://psych.wustl.edu/memory/Roddy%20article%20PDF%27s/Roed iger%20&%20Karpicke%20%282006%29%20Review.pdf
Edited by IansDad on 15 April 2011 at 4:03pm
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