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Systematic study to reach higher levels | ||
Tags: Advanced Level | Learning Strategy | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4761 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 1 of 52 01 April 2013 at 2:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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Do you think it is "required" or even needed? By this I mean (and excludes complete
immersion): Most of us will agree that to start from A0 in a language, to get to B1 in any good amount of time requires you sit down and simply study, memorize, and internalize grammar. Otherwise it would take way too long to just "absorb" it, if at all. Probably many of us will also agree that to go from B1 to a high B2 will require some systematic study too, polishing writing skills, and practice a lot input and output. But most of us will also agree that it just takes "time" as in "constant exposure", because from A1 to A2 may be just a 1/10 of a mile walk, to B1 a mile-long walk... but B1 to B2 is a 10 mile trek! What about to get from C1 to a high C1, from that to a C2, and then to climb even higher? Is systematic study worth it anymore. At first glance you would think yes since natives do so all the time when they go to school as children and have a subject in their schedule called "FILL IN THE BLANK FOR THEIR NATIVE LANGUAGE" or "Literature". But are they really learning anything new or just going over the same things over and over again, with just some marginal complexity added? Like, even in secondary classes in "Lengua" say in Spanish, most of the stuff covered is grammar that any advanced L2 learner would have learned anyway. And high school "language" learning of their own language is normally as far as most natives will ever go into studying it. So is there really anything "new" there (in any language where the natives just go to school to take a subject in it). The only thing they do is read a lot more in the language, and write essays in it. Thus they are exposed to much larger vocabulary both passive and active, and they become "experts" at their language's patterns in writing (but by no means everyone, many natives have poor writing skills). But in the end, can you systematically study for that? C1 to C2 is probably a 100 mile walk. You can do it, but it takes a huge effort and just a lot of time no matter how you study. And beyond C2, maybe a thousand miles or more... Which means you will be walking for months and months if not a year (sorry if some don't like the walking analogy to the language levels). A lot of people comment on how they just "stop" studying a language systematically after B2 or C1, so there is some precedent to this. So... my question is: Can you go from C1 to C2 just be reading, writing, listening, and talking with no real plan of action? In other words, just randomly reading books, interacting with friends in that language, watching and listening to native audio all the time, and allowing Father Time to do the rest? Or do you still need to do formal study? 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Julie Heptaglot Senior Member PolandRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6715 days ago 1251 posts - 1733 votes 5 sounds Speaks: Polish*, EnglishB2, GermanC2, SpanishB2, Dutch, Swedish, French | Message 2 of 52 01 April 2013 at 3:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think you can go from C1 to C2 just be reading, writing, listening, and talking but you do need to choose the input wisely, even though a real plan of action may not be necessary. Reading random books may do the trick but you risk reading about roughly the same range of topics all the time. Furthermore, it may be difficult to break out of your comfort zone (also in speaking) without some bits of systematic study. Personally, I think that some systematic study, even if not needed, may be of tremendous help - but obviously all depends on your learning style, goals and the time you have.
In my case, 'studying' a language after B2/C1 is mostly about dealing with my weak points, filling some gaps in vocabulary and grammar knowledge, improving my pronunciation etc. depending on what I feel I need to work on. Right now, I've realized I use a relatively small variety of German verbs actively (despite being fully conversational at the C2 level, I hope), so I found a book I'd gotten some 6 years ago, when I was still 'studying' German, and I've started working slowly through this. I'll probably never have 'completed' the book but that's the kind of language support I feel like I need at the moment. I'd need tons of input to learn all of that just by reading or listening, and it would probably be more difficult to activate the words. Sometimes it seems like the better you speak, the more difficult it is to make new words truly active, because you're so used to speak with what you've got :), and I find little bits of 'studying' a good way to work around that. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Expugnator Hexaglot Senior Member Brazil Joined 4978 days ago 3335 posts - 4349 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, Norwegian, French, English, Italian, Papiamento Studies: Mandarin, Georgian, Russian | Message 3 of 52 01 April 2013 at 6:18pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think to go from B2 to C1 you need a lot of reading and listening, but you still need some guided practice, like having native speakers correct your essays. After all, native speakers at a highschool level still have more proficient speakers correct their essays, that is, their teachers, who are more familiarized with the standard language.
3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4345 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 4 of 52 01 April 2013 at 6:32pm | IP Logged | ||
Sure. My wife did this, as did my mother and grandmother, as have countless others. That's what immigrants do. Edited by patrickwilken on 06 April 2013 at 12:56am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5193 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 5 of 52 01 April 2013 at 7:11pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm not generally a fan of systematic approaches when it comes to something as subjective as the study of
language -- what we feel like doing one day will feel like a burden the next, so there has to be allowances for human factors. However, if you are determined to improve, it's probably illogical to pick activities randomly. Out of the 4 main skills, one or two are bound to be weaker than the others, and favouring activities that foster those types of skills would be wise. In this sense, I'd speak of giving your work proper focus. After C1, formal study is not necessary (probably not at B2 either), but again, if you intend to progress at a reasonable pace, you should be critical of where your weaknesses lie and establish short-term plans to remedy these progressively. Frequent re-evaluation should allow you to refocus on the weakest aspects and continue to improve. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Sprachprofi Nonaglot Senior Member Germany learnlangs.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6282 days ago 2608 posts - 4866 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Esperanto, Greek, Mandarin, Latin, Dutch, Italian Studies: Spanish, Arabic (Written), Swahili, Indonesian, Japanese, Modern Hebrew, Portuguese | Message 6 of 52 01 April 2013 at 7:45pm | IP Logged | ||
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I stopped formally studying English after 5 years - that is, I didn't memorize the
vocabulary lists I received, I didn't review the grammar at home and I never did the exercises we received as homework. What I did still do then, and which got me to C2, is: - a lot of reading (random fiction, a handful of classics we had to study for school, quite a bit of news/news analysis/commentary) - a lot of talking with native speakers online (friends), one or two times I also had to hold a presentation in class - a decent amount of writing: ca. 15 essays in class (4 or 6 hours writing time for each), which were corrected, as well as many uncorrected posts in an online forum for political debate So it is possible to reach C2 the same way a native speaker does. I personally doubt the effectiveness of e. g. memorizing C1/C2 vocabulary because each word is so rare that you may never see it again. It's a different matter if vocabulary is a weak point for you and you're still missing some B2 vocabulary. Either way the best way to find out is writing. Writing is the best thing you can do to reach C1 or C2, because it will alert you to your greatest weaknesses: vocabulary, grammar / word usage or expression. There are few people who write well and who really have trouble speaking, and that's the only case where I'd recommend extensive speaking. Talking to native speakers can be a source of idiomatic expressions, which are one of the main stumbling blocks between C1 and C2. Extensive reading can also help with that though, depending on your choice of reading material. Either way you need to read a lot in order to make up the massive amounts of vocabulary that separate C1 and C2 from B2, and to develop native-like ways of expression. In terms of grammar, there isn't anything left to learn really, or there shouldn't be. I'm not sure if there's a way to streamline the process. Certainly if your goal is to pass an official exam, you can just study for the exam, as Benny proved, and then 3 intensive months may be enough to get from B to C1 or better - as evaluated by the exam. But then your language knowledge may wind up being mishappen, e. g. you might be very good at writing essays and not very good at writing e-mails to friends. If you don't study for an exam, I don't think exam prep materials are very good in helping you reach these pinnacles of language study. Rather than wondering about C1/C2 and how to reach it, I recommend thinking about how you really wish to use the language. Imagine that you have reached a level at which your target language is as easy as your native language for you. What would you be doing then? What activities would you be doing in your target language? Would you be talking to people? Reading classic literature or modern magazines? Writing a thesis? Using it at work? Well, guess what, you can do all this regardless of whether you have reached C1/C2. Just start doing it, accept a bit of frustration at first and your language level will quickly rise to the appropriate level. That level may not correspond to the arbitrary constraints of C2. For some people, even B2 may be enough to do everything they ever dreamt of doing in their target language. Moses is very happy even with less than that. Levels don't matter. What matters is that you can fulfill your dreams. 22 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| iguanamon Pentaglot Senior Member Virgin Islands Speaks: Ladino Joined 5074 days ago 2237 posts - 6731 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, Creole (French) | Message 7 of 52 01 April 2013 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | ||
This is, to quote Ari, "awesomeness on toast"! Edited by iguanamon on 01 April 2013 at 8:22pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4519 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 8 of 52 05 April 2013 at 5:07pm | IP Logged | ||
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If you are at B2, you already have such a command that the things you need to fix can be
tackled directly and systematically because those problems will stick out like a sore thumb (e.g. word order problems, bad use of verbal tense/aspect, and so on). You would be able to produce more-or-less correct sentences that you can easily identify the mistakes in because usually only one or two mistakes appear that could possibly render the sentence illegible. It is probably best to do this in writing because if you write a lot, it is obvious where your grammar goes wrong and then it's easy to respond accurately for a native. You can then troubleshoot your language bit by bit until you have removed all the really faulty bits. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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