|
 |
Multiple Beginner Courses | ||
Tags: Beginner | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Astrophel Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 5544 days ago 157 posts - 345 votes  Speaks: English*, Latin, German, Spanish Studies: Russian, Cantonese, Polish, Sanskrit, Cherokee | Message 1 of 7 17 April 2013 at 9:34pm | IP Logged | ||
|
A lot has been said on this forum about not doing multiple beginner courses that cover the same material, (Colloquial, Pimsleur, FSI, Teach Yourself...) but I've found with Russian at least it can actually be a good thing; if you need more practice but you're still at a beginner level where using native materials is difficult, going through more than one beginner course and doing all the exercises just gives you more practice of a specific point, rather than having to repeat the same Pimsleur lesson over and over or re-answer a lot of grammar exercises you probably remember the answers to.
I think what people mean, and what SHOULD be avoided, is repeating the basic stuff after you've already mastered it. That's a waste of time, even if there's a few vocabulary words you don't yet know or something (if they're common enough to be concerned about, you'll pick them up in native materials pretty soon anyway.) But if, from the start, you combine multiple courses and work through them at the same time, this is actually really effective. Somehow seeing the same point in multiple contexts gives you that spike of "Oh, I know this!" that encourages you, before you dive into the extra practice you need, and you get to approach the same subject from different angles so it really sticks. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6721 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 7 17 April 2013 at 10:48pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I've always liked to approach a language with many resources (as long as I have access to them). While the first lessons are usually similar ("My name is...", "At the restaurant", "What's the time?" etc.), no course has the exact same vocabulary, the exact same grammar explanations and so on.
Many years ago, some people I chatted with always told me that I should finish one course before going on to the next one. Some people are obsessed with perfecting each lesson, studying it till they know it by heart. With the right courses, the right method(s) and the right approach, I'm sure that someone using two-three sources (or more) can reach a higher lever faster than someone who's just using one. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4821 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 3 of 7 17 April 2013 at 11:10pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I agree. I always need more exercises than just those in one course. And I get bored when
using only one for too long. I think two or three at the same time are great. More are dangerous as one could spread themselves too thin. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5344 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 7 17 April 2013 at 11:59pm | IP Logged | ||
This is an excellent point. I know that I occasionally warn first-time language learners to be careful about dividing their time between too many courses. In part, this advice is based on a survey that Benny Lewis ran a while back, which concluded that novice language learners who focused on a single course were more likely to actually succeed. Trying lots and lots of courses didn't appear to help, perhaps because it was a form of wanderlust or procrastination. Or maybe there's no direct cause-and-effect relationship at all. My advice is also based on my personal experience that a single intro-level Assimil course was enough to start reading real French books (with real pleasure but so-so comprehension). Obviously, the results are going to be different for a language like Russian or Chinese. So my personal advice to novices is to try a couple of courses, and if something really "clicks", to use that as the backbone of their studies, and to maybe keep some other courses around as a supplement. My advice is in no way aimed at experienced language learners. (After all, at this point, I suspect I could learn quite a bit of Spanish using nothing more than an online dictionary, a $5 grammar and some bilingually-subtitled DVDs. I would not recommend this method to somebody who has never learned a language before.) As with all such advice, everybody's brain and needs are different, and I try not to be dogmatic about methods, because people here at HTLAL successfully learn in so many different ways, and some of them learn so fast it terrifies me. :-) 5 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 7 18 April 2013 at 4:28pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I think one reason why novice learners may find using more than one method/book overwhelming is that they believe they need to know both perfectly. My view is that it's more efficient to see how two different books deal with the same beginner material from different angles than it would be to read the same book twice. The idea that you get twice the exercises is also valid (although I almost never do them, personally).
I find using more than one book to be more interesting, but I probably naturally gravitate towards using and finishing (though not always) a single one after a while, and that's also part of the idea: finding the method that you have more affinity with and which keeps you motivated. 3 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 6 of 7 19 April 2013 at 6:52pm | IP Logged | ||
|
I'll tell what I do, even though it doesn't seem so effective:
When I have time, I take two courses at once, one of them focuses more on grammar and the other on dialogues. For example, I'd take Assimil Chinese and Routledge Basic Chinese: a grammar and workbook (that was not exactly what happened, but you see my point). It takes you much less time to understand grammar than to learn sentences, vocabulary and appropriate endings, if that's the case. So, what happens to me as a beginner is that I often get bored with the grammar when I still have the vocabulary to retain. That's what is happening with Chinese, for which I repeated two courses (Assimil and Méthode 90) and did several other beginner's textbooks. My usual approach, though, is taking several language textbooks, but one after another. When it gets too repetitive I just skip the chapters. Like, I usually only do the exercises for the first course, while regarding audio, the more, the merrier. This might have slowed me down considerably for Chinese and Georgian, but worked for French and Norwegian which are closer languages to my native Brazilian Portuguese. In the case of Georgian, I've run out of textbooks but I'm still at a beginner's level, so I'll have to use native materials even if at this stage it's painful to use them, since I have to look up every other word. One reason I use several books is because I don't overlearn lessons. I just pass through them once and I'm usually eager to finish a textbook, sometimes too obsessed, I admit. But with Norwegian I was aware enough not to use one grammar book that was nearly the same as another. There's always the possibility of adding the sentences of your course to Anki, so you can retain them and keep working on them. 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 7 of 7 19 April 2013 at 7:14pm | IP Logged | ||
I think this raises an interesting question about the function of beginner courses. What seems to work me is use beginner courses as a necessary evil to get to a sufficiently high level (B1?) to start accessing lots of native level materials (books, films etc) at which point your language learning really takes off. So what would be useful for me in a beginner course is lots of useful vocabulary and a general overview of the grammar so I can bootstrap myself up to around B1. Doing lots of different courses is useful if it gets me faster to an intermediate level, but not if it wastes my time learning lots of explicit grammar rules or doing lots of different exercises to actively speak/write. Edited by patrickwilken on 19 April 2013 at 7:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
If you wish to post a reply to this topic you must first login. If you are not already registered you must first register
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
