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Is vocabulary really necessary early on? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4698 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 17 of 30 24 August 2011 at 7:38pm | IP Logged | ||
Leaving aside the list of content, the idea behind this is the idea behind several beginner courses. Michel Thomas only covers about 300 words (in the German beginner course, anyway), but drills basic grammar, especially syntax and use of verbs. His theory is the same, learn the structure first, and you can easily pick up vocabulary on your own as needed. I've found Fast French to be quite good in this respect as well. It seems like it's an "as little as you can get away with" approach, but it is actually well put together. And the total vocabulary is a bit over 400 words. Unlike many similar books, it gives you important conjugations to learn. However, I don't think anyone could complete the course in the advertised 35 minutes a day for six weeks. Unless you don't bother learning most of the vocabulary and conjugations. Saying all that, I am really happy with the book as my intro book (along with a lot of other resources). I like than I'm getting an overview of grammar and a small but useful core of vocabulary first. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| prz_ Tetraglot Senior Member Poland last.fm/user/prz_rul Joined 4648 days ago 890 posts - 1190 votes Speaks: Polish*, English, Bulgarian, Croatian Studies: Slovenian, Macedonian, Persian, Russian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Dutch, Swedish, German, Italian, Armenian, Kurdish | Message 18 of 30 24 August 2011 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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Seems like... the old grammar school is better?
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| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 5800 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 19 of 30 25 August 2011 at 12:47pm | IP Logged | ||
That's a dangerous approach to take. Consider the target sentence "the car is in the garage". Delete the articles and you've got "car is in garage" -- that's understandable. But then some languages don't use "is" in simple sentences. What if the person can't master the rule that says English uses "is"? "car in garage" Would a native speaker of English know that this unambiguously meant "the car is in the garage"? No, it could be an instruction (put the car in the garage) or another thing like "there is a car in the garage". Normally you can make one mistake in a clause and still be understood, but once you add in a second mistake it gets ambiguous -- the third mistake usually renders it unintelligible. Getting the grammar correct at the start saves a lot of bother later -- most of my students are upper-intermediate or advanced, and their English improves most quickly when I focus on teaching them the basics right: things they could have learned properly years ago, but they got into bad habits instead. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 4845 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 20 of 30 25 August 2011 at 1:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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"But then some languages don't use "is" in simple sentences. What if the person can't
master the rule that says English uses "is"?" Can you imagine such a person? We have to learn grammar, of course. But there are simple things like forming questions in English, where one just have to train. And there are things which are difficult to understand. I can say for sure: an average Russian cannot understand the concept of articles quickly. And what to do? To be silent? It took years untill I started understanding what articles are needed for. And I had alresdy known a lot of things in English. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5170 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 21 of 30 25 August 2011 at 1:47pm | IP Logged | ||
No one is claiming that you should halt all further learning if a grammatical point is impossible to understand, but I agree with Cainntear that grammar does deserve special emphasis early on. I also think you are downplaying the effect of bad grammar on communication. The relative importance of any word is negligeable, but grammar is everywhere, all the time, and in most cases, a simple construct can't be replaced by another one. Native speakers sometimes misunderstand eachother because of the way others use words, or the wrong words, but very rarely because of grammar: they expect grammar to be perfect and they have a hard time adjusting to a different grammar. The impact on communication is huge: you can replace words with others but it's difficult to avoid unknown grammar in almost all cases. As for articles, I know a lot of Japanese people and they too struggle with articles. I've yet to met a Japanese person who could use them decently, and the truth is that it's extremely distracting. I've gotten somewhat used to it and yet is still causes lots of misunderstandings. It removes a syllable from sentences that are already difficult to get and I see when they speak to strangers that people get tripped everytime by the lack or misuse of articles. Since it took you years to master articles, two things follow: 1) it's worth getting an early start on because it's hard; 2) if articles had been your number one focus, you might have mastered them earlier. If a single word is missing from your vocab, it's inconsequential. Looking it up takes a second. But if an extremely frequent grammatical concept is difficult, it takes a long time to correct, let alone fix the bad habits that follow. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| RMM Diglot Groupie United States Joined 5016 days ago 91 posts - 215 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Italian, Spanish, Ancient Greek, French, Swedish, Japanese | Message 22 of 30 25 August 2011 at 2:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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I took a lot of language classes in high school and college, and when I came out of those classes my weakest points in the foreign languages I studied were 1) listening comprehension and 2) vocab. We studied a fair amount of vocab to be sure, but not nearly enough in my opinion to have intelligent, fluent conversations on a wide variety of topics or to read moderate to difficult material without very frequently resorting to dictionaries. This meant, for example, that even though I knew the declensions and verb conjugations, tenses, etc. backwards and forwards in Ancient Greek, I didn't know enough vocabulary to read anything without a dictionary (this after six semesters of university-level Greek classes, all of which I got A's in). Consequently, I only rarely read in Ancient Greek anymore because it is such an effort to do so. I really wish that all my language classes (German, Greek, and Spanish) had focused on vocab, esp. in context, far, far more. It's such a time consuming process that any head start on it would have helped me.
For most languages, I find that if I work really hard I can pick up on most of the grammar points within two weeks or so of dedicated study. Naturally after this, one still has to work long and hard to apply the grammar naturally and quickly. However, for me, grammar is by far the easiest and the quickest thing to learn. Vocabulary is the most time consuming and is essentially a never-ending process. To me it makes no sense to postpone the most time consuming task until later, especially since a lot of grammar will often become self-apparent the more familiar you become with a language. I find that if I learn a lot of phrases in a language early on, I quickly start seeing the grammatical patterns within those phrases. To a lesser extent, this is a the case when I use the L-R method or read also. I still like to read up on grammar occasionally just to verify that I'm figuring things out correctly, but I really think that for me at least it's the grammar that comes fairly quickly and naturally, and the vocabulary that must be built up with effort over an extended period of time. Obviously, the latter would come more naturally in an immersion environment, but I've rarely even had other foreign language speakers to talk with, much less been in an immersion environment. I really don't see why grammar, vocab, listening, reading, speaking, writing, etc., aren't all done at the same time. I would think that would--for most people--be the most beneficial and even method. I think in the end, though, it's really a question of how each person learns best, and that's something each person will have to work out for his or herself. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5051 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 23 of 30 25 August 2011 at 3:33pm | IP Logged | ||
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There is basic vocabulary and there is advanced vocabulary. Everyone should know basic vocabulary, but is it necessary to know the word for "shoelace" before you start speaking? I find it very important to know enough vocabulary to be able to describe a word that I need to know in the language and understand the answer. I don't like to speak in circumlocutions but it does help me to learn new vocabulary by staying in the language. You can do this with a living language quite easily. I think the most important tool to have in acquiring new vocabulary in a spoken environment is to know how to ask "how do you say this in whatever language?" My early stage language learning was necessary to get me to the point where I could ask that question in the TL and understand the response. It is a hell of a lot more fun than flashcards or vocabulary lists and the new words stick in my brain much better, especially when I then go on to use them myself.
In reading, context can most often provide the meaning. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| TrentBooks Triglot Groupie United States TrentBooks.com Joined 4643 days ago 43 posts - 98 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Guarani Studies: Biblical Hebrew, Japanese | Message 24 of 30 25 August 2011 at 4:19pm | IP Logged | ||
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My initial premise was that vocabulary come while studying grammar, as well as the notion that having a
solid grasp of grammar actually helps build vocabulary by allowing earlier meaningful conversations with natives. For those of you in the "vocabulary first" camp, how (and when) do you go about learning grammar? It has to come at some point, and my experience tells me it won't come naturally with the same ease that vocabulary will. I'm curious how you address this. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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