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Rate of Speech And Clarity DOES Matter

  Tags: Speaking
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
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tarvos
Super Polyglot
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China
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 Message 9 of 40
14 August 2013 at 5:17am | IP Logged 
I speak so fast I can be hard to understand in
any language. Even in Russian I speak quickly
to the extent of confusing natives. I
consciously have to slow down - people find me
hard to understand when I slur so much. The
upside is that at my speed people will take me
for an experienced speaker.
1 person has voted this message useful



Jeffers
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United Kingdom
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 Message 10 of 40
14 August 2013 at 5:35am | IP Logged 
Bao wrote:
It may be due to a persisting headache, but I found it rather difficult to read your original posting. So maybe I may have missed some of it; if I did I want to beg your pardon.

But I'd like to make say one thing, and that is that in order to become more skilled at having meaningful conversations in your target language that satisfy both your conversation partner and you, the one thing you won't be able to avoid is interacting with native speakers. You need to learn to understand interjections, facial expressions, body language. You need to understand the way conversations work, their pace and their content at a given time. Even if your active vocabulary or accent aren't great, as long as you understand the cues your conversation partner gives you, you'll be able to work on your most bothersome shortcomings and so, improve quickly.


I have to agree with Bao, for some reason all the bold sections and all caps gave me a headache. In addition, I think part of the problem native speakers have when they hear a student in their own language is that the body does not match what they are saying. The introduciton French in Action emphasizes that you have to closely observe native body language and facial expression.

A couple points about your post:
Itadakimasu wrote:
Output has been getting a bad rap lately.

Possibly true, but not many HTLAL users buy it anyway.

Itadakimasu wrote:
Usually by people who decided at some point in time that speaking well doesn't matter

This is a straw man argument. I doubt many people would say that speaking doesn't matter to a language learner who wants to learn to speak a language. (Perhaps to someone who just wants to read, but that's another story).

The people I think this post is attacking are those who argue for massive input over output. I am not one of these people, but I think we should get our facts right about those we disagree with, or we just end up going in circles. So here are a couple points I understand about the input over output argument:
  1. They believe that those who begin language learning with massive input develop a better accent than those who just jump in and start speaking it.
  2. They believe in holding back speaking until the learner is ready. This is important; they still believe in learning to speak.


Personally, I agree with Itadakimasu about the importance of learning to speak well. That's what the word "fluent" means, by the way. Some language courses are really good at developing this: e.g. Pimsleur and FSI.

I have been using FSI French a lot in the past couple weeks, and now I wish I had used it from the start. For the dialogue it has a lot of repitition, first phrase by phrase ("dialogue for learning"), and then full sentences ("dialogue for fluency"). Then it has loads of substitution drills, both to learn the words and grammar, and to practice speaking fluidly (with fluency).

I has helped me with some real tongue-twisters. For example, chapter 4 has the sentence, "Voulez-vous que je vous dépose quelque part?" Now a few weeks ago, I would have spoken each word quite separately. But listening to French shows that words are quite compressed in speech, so in this case it is spoken like, "Voulez-vous quejevousdépose quelquepart?" The substitution drill for this phrase runs like this:
      Voulez-vous que je vous dépose quelque part?
      Voulez-vous que je vous dépose au magasin?
      Voulez-vous que je vous dépose chez vous?
      Voulez-vous que je vous dépose à la gare?
      Voulez-vous que je vous dépose à l'hôtel?
      Voulez-vous que je vous dépose au restaurant?
      Voulez-vous que je vous dépose à la pharmacie?
      Voulez-vous que je vous dépose quelque part?      
At the beginning of the exercise, I struggled to say the sentence properly. 30 seconds later, when I was back to the original sentence, I was getting my tongue around it pretty well.

While doing all these drills, I realized those who argue against drills don't fully understand the purpose of drilling. It is not just grammar we are practicing by drills, we are training our mouths to make the sounds properly.
12 persons have voted this message useful



kujichagulia
Senior Member
Japan
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Studies: Japanese, Portuguese

 
 Message 11 of 40
14 August 2013 at 7:30am | IP Logged 
I agree that a balanced approach with input and output is necessary. You need both.

Some people have talked about doing shadowing. For the sake of clarity (my goodness... the use of the word "clarity" in this thread has put that Zedd song in my head... GET OUT!), I want people to clearly clarify what they mean by "shadowing", because there has been confusion here in the forums before. Do you mean repeating along with the audio at the exact same time as the audio, with a script in front of you? Do you mean doing that without a script (blind shadowing)? Do you mean repeating after the audio (chorusing)? Do you mean Prof. Arguelles style, where you walk in a park with some headphones and a textbook, and shadow out loud? Or do you mean something else?

Also, do you shadow all audio you come across? There is a dialog in my Japanese textbook where the people are talking about exploring caves on inhabited islands. I tried shadowing that and I hated it. I prefer shadowing only things I could see myself saying... and there isn't much audio for that.

Edited by kujichagulia on 14 August 2013 at 7:32am
1 person has voted this message useful



Itadakimasu
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 Message 12 of 40
14 August 2013 at 8:46am | IP Logged 
kujichagulia wrote:
I agree that a balanced approach with input and output is necessary. You need both.

Some people have talked about doing shadowing. For the sake of clarity (my goodness... the use of the word "clarity" in this thread has put that Zedd song in my head... GET OUT!), I want people to clearly clarify what they mean by "shadowing", because there has been confusion here in the forums before. Do you mean repeating along with the audio at the exact same time as the audio, with a script in front of you? Do you mean doing that without a script (blind shadowing)? Do you mean repeating after the audio (chorusing)? Do you mean Prof. Arguelles style, where you walk in a park with some headphones and a textbook, and shadow out loud? Or do you mean something else?

Also, do you shadow all audio you come across? There is a dialog in my Japanese textbook where the people are talking about exploring caves on inhabited islands. I tried shadowing that and I hated it. I prefer shadowing only things I could see myself saying... and there isn't much audio for that.



I would say all of the above in your first paragraph are shadowing. I usually did the blind shadowing(maybe because I don't see the point in shadowing WHILE reading). Shadowing is much like training for how to play a song by ear in music. Because it's audio based and the activity of speech is audio based, I try to do to copy the sounds without looking unless I need help on a word or the sentence is SUPER long and you can't remember that much at one time. Which was me. In that case the "Chunk shadowing"; listening to 3-4 seconds and pausing and repeating, then 3-4 more seconds and so on..will REALLY HELP you. Even if the material is unrelated to what you want to say, for some reason if you try to learn something you DO want to say it will stick easier, because of shadowing drills. I hope that helped!
2 persons have voted this message useful



Itadakimasu
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 Message 13 of 40
14 August 2013 at 8:56am | IP Logged 
Jeffers wrote:
Bao wrote:
It may be due to a persisting headache, but I found it rather difficult to read your original posting. So maybe I may have missed some of it; if I did I want to beg your pardon.

But I'd like to make say one thing, and that is that in order to become more skilled at having meaningful conversations in your target language that satisfy both your conversation partner and you, the one thing you won't be able to avoid is interacting with native speakers. You need to learn to understand interjections, facial expressions, body language. You need to understand the way conversations work, their pace and their content at a given time. Even if your active vocabulary or accent aren't great, as long as you understand the cues your conversation partner gives you, you'll be able to work on your most bothersome shortcomings and so, improve quickly.


I have to agree with Bao, for some reason all the bold sections and all caps gave me a headache. In addition, I think part of the problem native speakers have when they hear a student in their own language is that the body does not match what they are saying. The introduciton French in Action emphasizes that you have to closely observe native body language and facial expression.

A couple points about your post:
Itadakimasu wrote:
Output has been getting a bad rap lately.

Possibly true, but not many HTLAL users buy it anyway.

Itadakimasu wrote:
Usually by people who decided at some point in time that speaking well doesn't matter

This is a straw man argument. I doubt many people would say that speaking doesn't matter to a language learner who wants to learn to speak a language. (Perhaps to someone who just wants to read, but that's another story).

The people I think this post is attacking are those who argue for massive input over output. I am not one of these people, but I think we should get our facts right about those we disagree with, or we just end up going in circles. So here are a couple points I understand about the input over output argument:
  1. They believe that those who begin language learning with massive input develop a better accent than those who just jump in and start speaking it.
  2. They believe in holding back speaking until the learner is ready. This is important; they still believe in learning to speak.


Personally, I agree with Itadakimasu about the importance of learning to speak well. That's what the word "fluent" means, by the way. Some language courses are really good at developing this: e.g. Pimsleur and FSI.

I have been using FSI French a lot in the past couple weeks, and now I wish I had used it from the start. For the dialogue it has a lot of repitition, first phrase by phrase ("dialogue for learning"), and then full sentences ("dialogue for fluency"). Then it has loads of substitution drills, both to learn the words and grammar, and to practice speaking fluidly (with fluency).

I has helped me with some real tongue-twisters. For example, chapter 4 has the sentence, "Voulez-vous que je vous dépose quelque part?" Now a few weeks ago, I would have spoken each word quite separately. But listening to French shows that words are quite compressed in speech, so in this case it is spoken like, "Voulez-vous quejevousdépose quelquepart?" The substitution drill for this phrase runs like this:
      Voulez-vous que je vous dépose quelque part?
      Voulez-vous que je vous dépose au magasin?
      Voulez-vous que je vous dépose chez vous?
      Voulez-vous que je vous dépose à la gare?
      Voulez-vous que je vous dépose à l'hôtel?
      Voulez-vous que je vous dépose au restaurant?
      Voulez-vous que je vous dépose à la pharmacie?
      Voulez-vous que je vous dépose quelque part?      
At the beginning of the exercise, I struggled to say the sentence properly. 30 seconds later, when I was back to the original sentence, I was getting my tongue around it pretty well.

While doing all these drills, I realized those who argue against drills don't fully understand the purpose of drilling. It is not just grammar we are practicing by drills, we are training our mouths to make the sounds properly.




Yes! I was just going to mention the FSI courses for being amazing at teaching people output from the jump and really getting you off that beginner island, where you are scared or unable to speak. And the best thing about it is most of them are FREE on the website and you can listen all day long to them.

Honerable mentions go to


SpeedLearningLanguages(a new better version of FSI)


Rocket Languages(99$ for a great program)


And Living Language



All of these are audio based sources which are great to use. Michel Thomas as well.




The straw man is a shame that people pull. Usually I get, "But Itadakimasu, output is something that will come naturally over time you DON'T have to do it".


And I usually say that yes I know it will come over time. However, what's stopping anyone from becoming better at it right now. There are plenty of natives who have crazy accents and only get by, by being at such a high level of the language that other people can understand them. Second language learners don't have that luxury, unlike some crazy deepwoods countryman of that native country, he may be hardly understandable, but he has all of the intonations, idioms, culture knowledge, and vocal patterns of more or less everyone else in the country. All 4 of which new learners do not have. Learning how to speak clearly from the jump is essential to avoid miscommunications and make more friends. Not even mentioning how impressed people are if you can roll your tongue properly on words, or are able to speak at a consistent pace.


1 person has voted this message useful





jeff_lindqvist
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 Message 14 of 40
14 August 2013 at 10:49am | IP Logged 
Itadakimasu wrote:
I would say all of the above in your first paragraph are shadowing. I usually did the blind shadowing(maybe because I don't see the point in shadowing WHILE reading).


Neither do I. It really isn't that difficult to shadow "blindly". Of course you don't get everything right, just as you wouldn't get every single note right when learning a tune by ear the first time you hear it.

The only time I've shadowed with a script is when I followed Arguelles' exact methods, with the Assimil courses. Useful for grammar, reading and anything else, but what gives you the best "flow" is to blind shadow (in my opinion).

Edited by jeff_lindqvist on 14 August 2013 at 6:03pm
2 persons have voted this message useful



Cavesa
Triglot
Senior Member
Czech Republic
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Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1
Studies: Spanish, German, Italian

 
 Message 15 of 40
14 August 2013 at 2:18pm | IP Logged 
Automatisation is surely good for some parts of the language but there is a point at which you cannot automatize everything you are likely to say and I think it comes more often sooner than later.

I think there are several separate troubles making people speak slowly, with gaps and far under their potential:

1.Bad comprehension.
They learnt their phrases well, they shadowed, repeated, drilled them into their brain. But it takes them ages to decypher what did the native say and whether they can use their patterns to answer. This is one of the reasons why I believe tons of input are helpful for active skills as well. Conversation is a dialogue and you won't get far without understanding. The native won't follow your textbook conversation, not even in the basic situations like shopping.

2. Not being able to think in the language.
Again, this is an obvious lack of practice. Both input and output are helpful here from my experience. People need to do things that stretch their abilities and don't leave time for translation. Listening to a tv show is a good start. Chatting in real time in a pc game is great. Speaking is the Holy Grail. Without thinking in the language, even basic sentences will take them ages to put together.

3.Bad grammar.
Doesn't matter how you learn grammar. But without it, you will end up as many people from "communicative" language courses who can parrot their phrases but get stuck anytime they need to create their own sentence no matter how simple. Conjugations and declinations are a common trouble for these people because they never learnt them properly. On the other hand, there is the opposite extreme as well. People so fixed on using correct grammar and vocabulary that they just cannot get past a point they find tricky.

4.Lack of confidence
A very simple reason.

5.Not knowing native-like ways to get more time to think.
We all know them in our native languages. We use them when we need an extra second to think about what we want to order, what to answer to the teacher, how to explain something, what is the boss talking about from the thousand possible options and so on. I think hribecek put somewhere a list of these pieces of "language glue" and it was really good. Without these useful tools, our conversation partner has no way to tell that we are deciding between chicken and pork and not trying to remember how to ask for them.

4 persons have voted this message useful



lingoleng
Senior Member
Germany
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605 posts - 1290 votes 

 
 Message 16 of 40
14 August 2013 at 2:59pm | IP Logged 
Itadakimasu wrote:
In that case the "Chunk shadowing"; listening to 3-4 seconds and pausing and repeating, then 3-4 more seconds and so on ... I hope that helped!

"Pause and repeat" is different from "shadowing".


3 persons have voted this message useful



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