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Better not to watch with subtitles? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| LaughingChimp Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4497 days ago 346 posts - 594 votes  Speaks: Czech* | Message 25 of 64 06 February 2012 at 6:27pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
And as I said, you are wrong about that. Immersion is most useful at the early stages. It may seem you learn nothing at all, but that is a false impression. Other methods seem to be much faster, but that's because they skip prosody and phonology, the most fundamental parts of language. You can't really learn a language properly without them. Many, probably most, people never really learn them later, even if they are otherwise fluent. Not mastering prosody and phonology causes problems with everything else. Words and grammar are hard to remember, your pronunciation is wrong and dificult to automatize and native speakers often sound slurred. Even children struggle with learning language if prosody or phonology acquisition is disrupted. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Warp3 Senior Member United States forum_posts.asp?TID= Joined 5333 days ago 1419 posts - 1766 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish, Korean, Japanese | Message 26 of 64 06 February 2012 at 7:44pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
On the other hand, I watch primarily variety shows and music shows in Korean and have never watched a single historical Korean drama (I have watched some K-dramas, but no historical ones), yet I still know nearly all of those words you listed as well (mostly from variety show sources). Some times those words are used while referencing a historical character or a historical drama, but often they aren't. Terms like king and queen, in particular, are used quite heavily in variety shows. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Balliballi Groupie Korea, SouthRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4490 days ago 70 posts - 115 votes Studies: Korean | Message 27 of 64 06 February 2012 at 7:47pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
LaughingChimp, I don't think that mrwarper is saying don't do immersion at all and skip the prosody and phonology learning part, I think he's saying do the immersion later when you are at an intermediate/advanced level. If you do immersion later, you will still be able to master prosody and phonology, I think. I think it mostly depends on what type of immersion you do. I think you are both right but in different ways. Some forms of immersion are very good for learning the language, other forms are not that helpful especially for the non-advanced learner. With my experience with "immersion", I found that certain forms of immersion were more or less useless to me. For example, my parents spoke Korean to one another but I did not pick up any of the language this way. Watching videos is also a form of immersion that's not highly useful for me when learning Korean (I am a beginner/intermediate stage learner). Doing language exchange or hiring people to speak in Korean to me for an hour at a time were not very productive things either. I think if I were to do immersion by working in an environment where Korean was spoken, or by attending a class in a subject which was taught in Korean, or by living with a Korean family in a homestay situation (a Korean family that did not speak any English), I would learn Korean more quickly (Korean speaking at least, if not reading and writing). I see many instances of people becoming fluent in less than a year after being in those situations, including people who did know a word of Korean when they started. So some forms of immersion seem to work well. The problem with watching videos is that you are not interacting with a Korean native speaker. You are a third-party observer. You are passive, not taking part in the conversation, not required to follow instructions, not expected to do tasks in response (react) to what's said by people in the video and so on. The contents of the video might have little relevance for the listener. For example, I watch historical dramas mostly and what goes on in them has very little connection to my everyday life. The level of language might be too advanced for me (though some people say that's the point of immersion - to throw you in the deep end and expose you to how people speak in real life). So the reasons why immersion by watching non-subtitled videos has not been fruitful for me are: 1) No interaction with the speakers, no feedback, no cues. 2) Contents of video have little relevance to my actual life. 3) Less context than in real life immersion situations. 4) Level of language is too advanced for me as a non-advanced learner. And I can't ask the speaker in the video to dumb down the language for me. I can't tell the speaker that I don't understand what they said or to repeat what they just said. Factors peculiar to learning the Korean language for the English speaker: 1) Different word order in a sentence 2) Three or four commonly used different politeness levels in spoken Korean as opposed to the one level in English (it's almost like having to learn several different languages instead of just the one). For example, I learned "kunilnassumnida" ("there is big trouble") from watching these historical dramas, as this phrase is used a lot in these dramas, but I would sound funny if I used "kunilnassumnida" in all situations where I wanted to say "there is a big problem", as this is the formal form only. So I have to also hear "kunilnasseo", "kunilnassda" and "kunilnasseoyo" lots of times in order to learn these forms as well and use this phrase, "there is a big problem", in any situation properly. (The written form is often different to the spoken forms adding another "speech level". Also there are honorifics and a few minor less commonly used speech levels.) Additionally, when I do listen purposefully to a video for language-learning purposes, a significant amount of time is spent working out which speech level is being used and why. This makes extra work for me. And it's often difficult to work out what the root verb is when the endings change all the time due to different speech levels. 3) Agglutinative nature of Korean 4) Many sounds in Korean are very alien and difficult to pronounce and distinguish for English speakers - Other differences in grammar between English and Korean
But you have picked up many other words than those, I think, Warp3. And your vocabulary might be much better than mine being at a higher stage of learning than me (which I think you are), and those words would be among the words a higher-level student would know. If I just stick with historical dramas, the vocabulary I learn from watching these dramas might be restricted to those kinds of words and they are not very useful to me. Maybe I should watch Youtube videos in Korean that teach you a recipe or other similar type of instructional videos. This sort of exposure to the Korean language is closer to the more useful forms of immersion that I am after. Anyway, I am not too fussed about this as I am concentrating on learning grammar and working on my reading skills right now (speaking and listening are for later). I started this thread because I noticed that my Korean had not improved that much from watching Korean dramas despite watching hundreds of hours of them, and wondered if other people's experiences were the same. Edited by Balliballi on 06 February 2012 at 10:19pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| LaughingChimp Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4497 days ago 346 posts - 594 votes Speaks: Czech* | Message 28 of 64 06 February 2012 at 11:51pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Exactly.
Yes, I know. And I'm trying to explain that it's better to do it early.
No, you won't. What do you expect to get from delaying it? I understand you want to speak NOW, but it just doesn't work that way. You can't learn phonology later, because you need to know it before you start learning vocabulary and grammar. Otherwise you will have to improvise with your native phonology, which is probably not suited very well for your TL. It causes all sorts of problems like "I know it's 'tal', but is it with the weak, strong, or apirated T?". If you have to learn it as t, the other t, and yet another t, you will have trouble remembering which one is there. But if you know the TL phonology, you can memorize the word directly with /t/, /tː/ or /tʰ/ and avoid such problems. If you skip phonology, you will learn much slower, not faster.
That's a good thing. Early immersion has to be passive. If you are forced to react, that's wrong, because it also forces you to remember words before you learn phonology, which defeats the purpose of early immersion. The content does not matter too much either, as your goal is to learn the sounds. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Balliballi Groupie Korea, SouthRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4490 days ago 70 posts - 115 votes Studies: Korean | Message 29 of 64 07 February 2012 at 12:26am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
I worried about that in another post, where I said that when I read, I do subconsciously vocalize the words in my head, and my pronunciation and intonation are all probably wrong, and if I do this a lot, I might develop bad habits in speaking. (Though I did do a little pronunciation work before I studied grammar intensively by shadowing some CDs, and also I learned some pronunciation rules.)
I think you just answered my question, LaughingChimp. So the ideal thing for me would be a grammar book that teaches you grammar with only a few words of Korean used over and over again in the example sentences. And you can learn how to pronounce those few words well so the problem of having bad phonology is avoided or minimized. Unfortunately, the grammar book I am studying uses a wide range of vocabulary in the example sentences, I think deliberately (to train you to look up the dictionary, and introduce you to commonly used expressions as well). It's very annoying because I want to concentrate on learning grammar and don't want to learn vocabulary at the same time. Half the time I spend studying the grammar book I am looking up words. (I want to learn vocabulary separately and do shadowing at the same time later on, as I wrote in a language log here.) If I learned to speak Korean only through watching videos, I think it would take me twenty years to make any sort of headway, realistically. (I might have excellent pronunciation though ...) I hope to overcome the problems of poor pronunciation by doing heaps of shadowing later on, so I am not really skipping phonology. I know that's not really immersion, but I like comprehensible input. And to make it comprehensible I have to learn grammar and vocabulary this way (studying from books - any other way takes too long and isn't practical for me). I really don't do well in situations where there is a lot of stuff that's way over my head like in the videos. So for me, as I see it, shadowing is a superior method of learning to speak than video immersion. And later, I will do immersion activities such as conversing with Koreans, which will also help improve my phonology. I am not in a hurry to learn speaking but I am in a hurry to learn reading, and that requires knowing grammar and vocabulary. (For me, learning a language isn't just about speaking it fluently and without an accent, but also about reading and writing the language, and I have a short time frame to accomplish all these things.) I thought video immersion would help me with those things but it doesn't help a lot. I read mrwarper's comment again and he says,
He doesn't say don't use it, but don't use it alone, especially in the early stages. Edited by Balliballi on 07 February 2012 at 1:14am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5096 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes | Message 30 of 64 07 February 2012 at 1:06am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Who are you talking about? Romulus and Remus, Kaspar Hauser, Tarzan? In the latter case I think it is correct to state that his apish could have been a lot better, indeed. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5024 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 31 of 64 07 February 2012 at 2:23am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
Wow, thanks for your kind words, leosmith :) I'd really like to see what else comes up about this -- I wanted to start refraining myself a bit about it to avoid making others not to develop and expose their own ideas. I think playing with subtitles is a very rich territory with many unexplored possibilities.
Exactly. It wasn't that hard to understand, was it? I'm not so sure about the 'think' part, however... see below :)
The way I was referring to it, there aren't actually "types of immersion", but rather "degrees"* only. Whatever the type of stuff you do, you do it partly in your TL, partly in your NL. Using TL alone is universally known as "total immersion" and I used "immersion" for short. My mistake. Until you reach some level in your TL, you really want to rely on your NL for lots of tasks. The one problem with this is that learners tend to cling to it for too long, though, but now you've just been warned. *For example, if your parents spoke Korean to each other but they spoke English to you, that was far from "total immersion" -- and probably why you didn't pick up Korean as a child: you'd have little real need for Korean at home, and none in the outside, so you'd naturally drift towards English monolingualism. Going the immersion route is completely unrelated to prosody and phonology, though. As an adult, unless you explicitly study them, you'll need to play by ear, and there's no need to risk to spend years limping along missing (sometimes) critical stuff. The reason is, it takes very little (just a few days in the worst case) to study even in its finer details, and it helps a lot with everything else. Note, however, you'll probably really master p&p only after a long time and lots of practice anyway, so my advice is: get to know everything that is to know about them in the beginning, and let them sink in while you study and practice everything else in the language. It's preferable to refer to them for review, even if quite often, rather than to discover things you've been missing for years.
Excellent self-analysis. I'd say 4 is the most important, though that is largely impressionistic, and I'd like to remark that you can pause and repeat as much as you like. This can only help your comprehension of any given segment until boredom overwhelms you. Think of it as an artificial way to dumb your materials down.
I think 4 and 2 must be the most difficult for you, in that order. 4 has an easy solution (in principle): study Korean phonology now; 2 may take some very long time to get used to, which is normal for English speakers.
The problem can be avoided altogether by studying phonology formally. It doesn't take long, and otherwise you'll still be playing by ear, which may or may not work out well. At the very least those 'few words' should cover all minimal pairs prone to confusion by English speakers.
Unless your book is very bad (it happens) and it really has too much vocabulary, you may want to change your aim just a little bit. Without grammar you can say little, without vocabulary you can say nothing. You need some vocabulary to apply that grammar. That's how I dropped Japanese grammar in the first place (bad book, too little vocabulary). Edit: fixed a TL/NL and a few other typos. Edited by mrwarper on 07 February 2012 at 4:22am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5024 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 32 of 64 07 February 2012 at 2:27am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
ChimpO, please cut me some slack, will you? First you call me dishonest, then I don't agree with you, and automatically I'm wrong? If there weren't words for that already, I might invent a few right now. Nuff' said, I think. Sorry for posting two messages, but I wanted to keep some thing separate.
Wrong :) They seem to be faster because they are. Just in case, please note that I said immersion alone (i.e. NO presence of your NL). In such an environment, at level zero you have to guess from any non-linguistic cues only, which is necessarily slower than using your own language to explain things or requesting/finding out information. This difference in efficiency is usually not reverted until learners achieve a reasonable level in the TL. I concur, though, that skipping proper study of prosody and phonology (a defect of ALL programs and methods I've seen so far) is a bad thing, no matter how strange this may seem coming from someone that apparently oppose so strongly to the teaching of grammar. I'm not really sure how you would study prosody in any depth without knowing grammar first, but let's leave that aside.
Not mastering any single aspect may cause problems with everything else. Any efficient language program should approach every aspect of the language from the beginning. You can learn a language neglecting p&p (as those myriads of horridly accented speakers show), but that implies you'll be limping along unnecessarily and it may take ages to fix problems that can get deeply seated meanwhile. I went over this in the thread "pronunciation mistakes that irritate you".
Next time you may try to explain things before fringing name calling :)
Well, doing immersion and studying prosody and phonology are entirely independent concepts and I hope we are clear on this by now. That said, unless you are a genius, it'll probably take you a rather long time to truly master TL prosody and phonology, but it takes a very short time to know all there is to know about them. That's why it only makes sense to study them first. If you're not aware of the existence of some things, you'll probably keep missing them for a very long time, or even never get to hear them, let alone incorporate them into your speech. If you study them before hand, you'll be ready to pick them up when they show up even if you may fail at first. You'll improve eventually. In my experience, skipping p&p you'll be just a bit slower, but not much, but OTOH you'll be unnecessarily 'limping' as I mentioned above. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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