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Tags: Brushing up a language | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| pab Diglot Newbie Poland Joined 4005 days ago 8 posts - 11 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: French | Message 1 of 6 30 May 2013 at 11:04pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I decided to ask you guys for advice. I’ve been lurking in HTLAL for last few weeks and I’m a bit muddle-headed. I believe I’m a bit of a language geek by nature but years of counter-productive learning patterns and my own health problems took a heavy toll. And now I’m 24 y.o and I’m fluent only in my L1 (Polish) but have an extremely strong willpower to utilize the following months to improve my linguistic skills as effectively as possible.
I’d love to hear from you what approach would you use if you were in my shoes. Chapter one – English. 2 years ago after I had finished high school I discovered Anki. I fell in love with it and begun building my vocabulary. I read tons of articles (the Guardian, blogs, forums etc.) and put a good deal of words into Akni. What it resulted in was... of course improved reading only. For various reasons I had to suspend Anki and now a considerable part of the whole material is either forgotten or belongs to my passive memory [I have a really hard time producing a given word or phrase from my old decks]. Yet my biggest weaknesses are speaking and listening. I was in UK last year and it turned out I was able to use a sophisticated word from time to time but had real troubles with a fluency and freedom of speaking. What's even more sad I struggled to understand natives. It's not very surprising as I can grasp about 30-70% of dialogues in movies or match commentary or interviews. I have to be able to communicate orally as soon as possible. Now it's not only the matter of my ambition [which plays still a big part though] but also demands of my job. It may require a contact with many clients and I have to be able to deal with their problems. I believe that written form of communication isn't by any means a problem. Yet oral communication certainly is. My accent sucks too (it's relevant given what I write below about French). When it comes to grammar, phrasal verbs etc. there is certainly a room for improvement. Basically after high school I just read materials from various sources and gave up everything else. What would be a smart approach in my case? So to sum it up. What approach would you suggest to have the biggest possible improvement in speaking and listening. I tried already www.listen-and-write.com and it may be quite useful. What else? Chapter two - French I decided I had to learn French a few weeks ago. I bought Assimil and decided to use prof. Arguelles’s approach. So I blind-shadow one lesson each day and after 6 lessons I began to read and translate lesson 1. Day 7 = blind shadowing all the lessons and reading&translating lesson 1 and 2. Day 8 = bs all the lessons bar 1 and reading&translating lesson 2 and 3 etc. Do I understand the method correctly? Is it all I should do at the moment? During the passive wave should I do ‘scriptorium’? So far it's been 9 days. My girlfriend said I had better accent speaking French after 9 days than in any of other languages I've tried to learn [English, German, Spanish]. I love it! What's more it turned out that French is a quite an asset in my branch (logistics) so it'd be pretty useful too. So double motivation here Chapter three - Spanish. I had Spanish classes in High School for 3 years. I could even listen to some podcasts (www.notesinspanish.com) and could read easier texts (I believe it was roughly a2/b1). I read a lot and put lots of vocabulary into Anki. Again, it turned out later it was mainly passive knowledge not transferable into real life communication. Then in 2010 I went to Spain and realized I understood almost nothing! I became so despondent that I gave up Spanish at all :( So my Spanish adeventure has its ups and downs and now I’d like it to climb to the top. I really enjoyed learning Spanish. So now I just want to do this smarter. All in all, I haven't been using Spanish since summer 2010. Arguably I forgot a lot of vocabulary and grammar. I've never had almost any skills in speaking and listening. Any ideas friends? Last but not least German. Being a very logical person I'm so cringed I wasn't able to learn German more. So many useless years at school. So many wasted hours. In a nutshell the most advanced issues I managed to learn were a table of past forms and some structures ['weil', 'denn' ...]. Shame. Although the least enjoyable for me [or cramming the tables just discouraged me] German is probably the most important language from my career’s point of view. But basically I’m a beginner. Now, I have a limited time each day (say 90 mins + 60 in bus when I commute) and would like to exploit it wisely. Being able to deal with so many languages you guys are my heroes and I genuinely admire you. I’d love to find what do you think about my position. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4818 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes  Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 2 of 6 31 May 2013 at 6:35am | IP Logged | |||||
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Welcome to the forums.
For English, I recommend extensive listening. Get a tv series or two and enjoy it in original. At first perhaps with English subtitles but later without them. This will do miracles to your listening comprehension and secondarily, it will affect your speaking as you'll spend time immersed in the language and learn to think in it. If you watch tv in Polish, just cut it out and put the time into English. And as a bonus, you'll probably enjoy it more as translations and dubbing usually mutilate the films and tv shows. This approach worked for me in three languages so far and it worked for my boyfriend's English and for other members of the forum as well. For French. Use the Assimil the way you like, even though usually people blindly translate after 50 lessons. Listen a lot. For both French and Spanish, you might benefit from a more traditional course as well. Or a grammar book but both options depend only on you. If you're content with Assimil and your progress, there is no reason to change it. You might get a Spanish assimil as well. German. Hmm. Learning four languages actively at once is a lot of work. How fast do you need to progress in German? Perhaps for start, to do something totally different from school activities, you might like the courses at Deutsche Welle website. They are among the best free resources out there and focus on listening a lot. Good luck. The most important thing: Do things you enjoy, have fun. It's the only way to ensure you'll keep learning without burning out. :-) 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| pab Diglot Newbie Poland Joined 4005 days ago 8 posts - 11 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: French | Message 3 of 6 01 June 2013 at 2:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
I watched several movies and a few episodes of my favourite TV show with subtitles. I could understand the whole plot and most of the dialogues. Yet I wasn't satisfied as I couldn't enjoy more complicated punchlines, word-plays and some details. Moreover I had to look at the subtitles as I was missing too much when I focused on the listening only. And after a few episodes I became discouraged and gave it up. Now I decided I won't give up so easily. Roughly 20 minutes every single day will be set aside for listening English. And I'm going to evaluate myself no sooner than in three months.
That's my biggest concern. I'm afraid that it's probably more than I can chew. But it's a double-edged sword I mean as time goes by I'll forget last remains of my Spanish/German. As regards deadlines I don't have any. But I'd love to be at B1/B2 in 2 years. As far as French is concerned there is an additional hitch. It's very likely that I will be offered a year (or half year) at the French university. I'd love to utilize this time as effectively as possible in terms of my language knowledge. But I read lots of posts here and many people say it's better to be at B1 at least in order to have the biggest gains. So I'd like to progess quickly. Edited by pab on 01 June 2013 at 7:17pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| pesahson Diglot Senior Member Poland Joined 5537 days ago 448 posts - 840 votes Speaks: Polish*, English Studies: French, Portuguese, Norwegian | Message 4 of 6 04 June 2013 at 7:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hi Pab, welcome to the forum!
First things first. You don’t have that much time to study, so I’d say start just one new language now. In six months I think you could start another one. It’s better to go slowly then burn out. Your English seems pretty good so you can just keep doing what you’re doing. If you want a book I can recommend English Grammar in Use. It tackles specific problems. I remember going through it finding out about mistakes I’ve made or finding answers to questions that troubled me, even though I thought my English was already pretty good. If you want to understand English better, you just have to listen to it a lot. There’s no way around it. Do you watch more American od UK TV? As you know there are many regional accents in the UK which might be a problem but it’s just a matter of time. I’ve been watching English TV almost exclusively for the past couple of years and I can understand even the thicker British accents. I think speaking will come naturally. It would be great if you could talk to someone in English or just practice self-talk to get into the habit of speaking. Assimil is a great choice. You should stick to it and finish the book while doing a lot of additional listening so that in the future you don’t have that problem as you do with English. For ideas how to use Assimil you might want to check this THREAD I know how you feel about abandoned languages but there’s only so much we can do within the time we have. I personally think that if you haven’t used a language for a couple of years, it really won’t make a difference whether you wait another year to start again. Don’t beat yourself up over that. You don’t need to know all those 3 language right now. You have time. Do you know the Polyglot Project Podcast? It's a series of interviews with guys like Luca Lampariello, Alex Rawlings, Richard Simcott and others. I recommend listening to them to learn about their techniques and also their mental approach. (I especially recommend the ones with Luca and Richard). Edited by pesahson on 04 June 2013 at 7:14pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Crush Tetraglot Senior Member ChinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5674 days ago 1622 posts - 2299 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Mandarin, Esperanto Studies: Basque | Message 5 of 6 05 June 2013 at 6:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Your written English seems really good, if you have trouble speaking i think it's really just from lack of practice. If you spend a good week or so speaking i'm pretty sure you'll find that all that passive vocabulary quickly unlocks itself. You seem to have a pretty good vocabulary, too, so it's a little surprising that your listening comprehension isn't as good. Maybe you just need to get used to the speed people speak at or perhaps to their accents? I'd say watching TV or movies that interest you, with subtitles if you need them, would probably help a lot. Another option would be to listen to audiobooks as the speakers tend to speak much more clearly. I don't think it's the content (vocabulary, grammar) that's messing you up, maybe you just need to get used to the sounds.
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| outcast Bilingual Heptaglot Senior Member China Joined 4758 days ago 869 posts - 1364 votes Speaks: Spanish*, English*, German, Italian, French, Portuguese, Mandarin Studies: Korean | Message 6 of 6 07 June 2013 at 4:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have to (third?) what others have said here: your English as written above could
easily pass for a native. I had to scan the entire OP to find any awkward phrase. And your use of low-frequency, college-educated vocab like "despondent", "transferable", is something many natives do not manage. I'm just curious, how is your written English so good (a solid C1 at least, and I would dare to say towards the upper range of dare I say nearing C2), but your speaking skills are, from what you described, so far behind (in comparison to your writing). I know that 90% of language learners can write/read better than speak (me too, working on correcting that now), but I would think that if you are really really advanced in one area, that will tend to "drag" the others a bit, since you need a certain amount of "insight" or experience to write English so well, that it should at least unconsciously seep through into your spoken. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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