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Best way to master correct conjugation? | ||
Tags: Morphology | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Rout Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5522 days ago 326 posts - 417 votes  Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish Studies: Hindi | Message 17 of 41 18 November 2012 at 1:14am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Well, I'm not a translator, but I am a fluent speaker. :)
You should obviously do both. Grammar translation methods are a much more structured way of learning the basics. I could probably learn how to put a car back together if left to my own devices, but it would be a hell of a lot easier with the owner's manual. Perhaps a better analogy would be: completing a grammar-translation manual is like someone showing you exactly how to put together a 1979 Honda CRCC, piece by piece; with this knowledge I now have a much better intuition for putting together Toyotas, Chevrolets, Nissans, etc. (i.e. my own paragraphs). Translation-manuals are like training wheels; they have to come off eventually, but in the end, your unskinned knees will thank you. I'm sorry for all the analogies. :P
So am I. I just like efficiency. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| vonPeterhof Tetraglot Senior Member Russian FederationRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4582 days ago 715 posts - 1527 votes Speaks: Russian*, EnglishC2, Japanese, German Studies: Kazakh, Korean, Norwegian, Turkish | Message 18 of 41 18 November 2012 at 8:52am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Hint: think of other meanings of the word "accusative". Edited by vonPeterhof on 18 November 2012 at 8:53am 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6407 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 19 of 41 18 November 2012 at 9:05am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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You're fluent because you've had the tools that people didn't have for centuries. Including the very basic ones like recordings of any sort of audio content.
Plenty of people learn the basics, using various means. It's going past this that truly matters. Learning the grammar from input is far easier than putting a car back together. Especially when you have some knowledge of linguistics.
I like efficiency too. It's more efficient to get some passive skills first, because this way you'll also get some active skills along the way. Of course it doesn't have to be as extreme as my preference for not learning to speak before my listening is at the level where I can understand almost any reply I will get. And guess what: when it's time to start, I find I can say a lot more than I expected. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6407 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 20 of 41 18 November 2012 at 9:09am | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Yeah it stopped bothering me ages ago that the accusative case has such a name. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Rout Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5522 days ago 326 posts - 417 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Spanish Studies: Hindi | Message 21 of 41 18 November 2012 at 3:43pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
Agreed, but you're (deliberately?) missing the point. By the way, any knowledge I have about English grammar or linguistics is a direct results of comparing German and English analytically. Just another benefit.
Which I was able to jump right into since I understood most of it without having to look up every other word. I was activating everything I already knew. I'm guessing in centuries past this would have been done by visiting the country itself. It was exhilarating.
Exactly, which is why you should get it out of the way as soon as possible so you can jump into the native material with a good understanding. This is what I mean by efficiency.
To each his own. I learn from learning, you learn from listening, some learn from speaking, etc. I like to develop all of my skills in line with another, since I find them all important (depending on the language). I also try to develop my pronunciation from the start so I don't get stuck in any bad habits; that way when I'm doing copious amounts of reading I have the correct voices buzzing around in my head. I continue to develop it indefinitely. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5576 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 22 of 41 18 November 2012 at 4:41pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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Rout, the main reason I stopped doing translation drills is that I tend to pick up odd bits of language everywhere and so generally end up forming TL sentences that are usually just as correct as the intended translation, but use different expressions, register etc.
And I can't check on my own whether those sentences are ok, so it undermines the positive effect of drilling (did it, did it right, remember the correct version/did it, did it wrong, redo, remember the correct version). That even happens when I try to repeat a sentence right after hearing; I tend to replace words with synonyms and very high/low politeness level with more neutral politeness without intending to. With cued memorization, staying in register is made easier because I use an entire text, not sample sentences. And the cues provide enough information for me choose the sentence pattern and vocabulary used in the lesson, and not anything else that might or might not fit as well, and that I usually don't have a chance to have checked immediately. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6513 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 23 of 41 18 November 2012 at 6:05pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
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I have used several of the techniques mentioned in this thread, plus a few more (see my Guide). For me it is esential to have a clear structure and a broad bird's eye perspective on the whole grammar of a language while I'm learning it, but while essential they function as the background for detailed of studies of short passages, where I learn the workings of a language by seeing its function so to say through a microscope. And extensive reading and listening serve to corroborate the things I have learned while working with details - I don't learn much grammar there, though maybe some idioms (especially if I add an element of intensive study by jotting them down somewhere).
Bao wrote: "I currently use a method I read about on htlal - I copy the text by hand, reading it aloud. Then I write down the first letter of every word as a cue and repeat the text sentence by sentence until I can read all of it aloud, using my cheat sheet only. The next day I write down the entire text using the cheat sheet.". This is an interesting idea, but so far I can only say that I copy a lot from genuine texts found in magazines or on the internet, but rarely read aloud and sofar I haven't ever tried to recall a whole text - though the 'first letter method' could make this more realistic. Instead I cull new words and reuse them in wordlists, and I check the sentences against the rules in my grammar - and there the bird's eye perspective is necessary, because I can't expect only to find interesting things from one chapter in my grammar in a genuine text. I need to know where to find things, and for that I need to be able to cathegorize them. In my guide I mention my most efficient method to learn morphology: study several grammars and decide for yourself how that material can be presented in tables in the most efficient and memorable way, leaving aside rare irregularities and making separate sheets for common ones. If a language has different endings in adjectives and nouns then the table should include the articles, the endings of the adjectives AND the endings of the nouns on one single page. And then I write the result down in several colors on thick green sheets which I easily can spot among all the white pages. The idea is not to memorize the tables by root, but to keep those green sheets within sight whenever I read or write so that I can look a form up or confirm a guess with one glance at one sheet. When you have done that often enough you have learned those forms. I read grammars cursorily at a very early stage to know 'what there is to learn', but later I read them to systematize the things I have picked up during other activites and put them into nice boxes with a label on. That helps me to memorize the rules. But this is only a meaningful activity when you already have seen or heard most of the phenomena you read about or hear - it is too inefficient to try to remember rules which don't refer to something you already have met on the loose out there in the wilderness. Each rule in the grammar has so to say to ring a bell in your brain. Any random page will contain examples of the most common phenomena and that's all the background you need to do morphological green sheets. With rare syntactical phenomena you may have to search for examples, maybe even in thick old grammars - but if the search does't turn up lots of examples it could be worth asking yourself whether something ao rare really is worth spending valuable time on. Postpone it. The drills in most textbooks are in my opinion a waste of time. It would be better to spend the space on graded examples - ten slightly different examples of a certain construction would teach you more about the use of it than one example ever can. The worrying thing seems to be that the authors of textbooks have a tendency to see their task as writing puzzles, but being political correct children of these troubled times they then get bad feelings and try to win back the attention of their most lazy readers by presenting these puzzles as easy multichoice or combinatorial games. However at the end of the day they are still writing puzzles ... maybe because they can't mimick the more natural process where you take some expression in your target language and then twist and turn it freely, adding new elements and building it into larger structures. Edited by Iversen on 18 November 2012 at 7:29pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6407 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 24 of 41 18 November 2012 at 6:44pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||
But as I said, Finnish is a highly regular language. In most other languages, this isn't worth it, especially not at the price I paid. For me that's the pain of the (un)skinned knees :D Re: reading and pronouncing things in your head, yeah, that's important. But listening is enough for that, there's no need to say anything aloud before you are ready. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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