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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| JC_Identity Triglot Groupie Sweden thelawofidentity.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4119 days ago 53 posts - 108 votes  Speaks: Swedish, Serbo-Croatian*, English | Message 33 of 46 13 December 2013 at 3:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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The following is a post that I just posted in the thread that I started called "Language - primarily an END or a MEANS?":
There is that guy again! and he keeps asking the same question! Luckily this time he has Luca to answer him! and could he possibly have done it any better than this?!! Okay, I should explain what I am talking about. Today I was watching the following video on youtube, (which in my mind is the BEST VIDEO ON LANGUAGE LEARNING, so if you care to, I would strongly recommend that you watch it): Luca Lampariello: Burning Questions from Add1Challengers It is another video from the add1Challenge. In the video several language learning students are asking Luca questions about the language learning process. This thread actually started partly because I watched another add1Challenge but that time the languages learning students were asking Benny Lewis questions. In both videos the same question keeps being repeated (and I recently noted that it is the same guy asking it), namely: "I don't know what to learn", as if there is an out-of-context end to language learning. Luca's answer is so good and complete, so you should really check out the video. What Luca's answer boils down to is that you should be focused on personally interesting content and not on the language, and then the words will come to you instead. This stresses the importance of context. He further says: "IT IS NOT ABOUT DELIBERATE LEARNING, IT IS MORE ABOUT INDIRECT LEARNING", as in the language not being the end but you treating it as primarily a means to the content that you like. "Passion and interest drive language learning". Luca also brings up another perspective on this, namely the difference between studying and learning which I also mentioned in my initial post. So I would really recommend you watch the video. One last thing I liked about the video is one great psychological lesson that Luca shares about having a long-term goal but not focusing on it, but rather being focused on what is immediately ahead, and making sure to take those small steps and above all enjoying the process. Having a focus on the end while in the process in my experience always turns out badly, performance-wise and enjoyment-wise. This video made me want to revive this thread, because as Brian in the video acknowledges at one point, all the questions that he gets seem to reveal the fact that too many people are focusing on the wrong thing. That first guy is not alone. The majority of the questions seem to be derived from the same flawed premise, namely that of treating languages primarily as ends. (P.S. I want to make it clear that I am not after that guy personally, but he keeps on exemplifying the greatest issue within the language learning community, in my mind, and I am actually a bit thankful towards him for his honest will to understand and the fact that he is so explicit about it) Wow I just realized I had forgotten the best quote from the video, so I had to edit the post and add it here: Luca: "I learn it indirectly, I have never learned one word by heart, never ever! Never tried to learn a word by heart. You just do things indirectly and you get the results!" Edited by JC_Identity on 13 December 2013 at 4:00pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| JC_Identity Triglot Groupie Sweden thelawofidentity.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4119 days ago 53 posts - 108 votes Speaks: Swedish, Serbo-Croatian*, English | Message 34 of 46 15 December 2013 at 12:23pm | IP Logged | ||
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I just watched this video on Youtube.
How to learn any language in six months: Chris Lonsdale at TEDxL I would rank it close to the one with Luca that I posted in the last post. What a concise way to put everything you need to know about how to approach language learning efficiently! Chris Lonsdale himself claims to have learned Chinese in 6 months to a fluent level. Like me he likens a language to a tool. He says further that "we master tools by USING tools. We learn tools fastest when they are relevant". His five principles of rapid language acquisition are as follows: 1. Focus on language content that is relevant to you (who would have guessed) 2. Use your new language as a TOOL to communicate from day 1 3. When you first UNDERSTAND the MESSAGE you will unconsciously ACQUIRE the language. 4. Physiological training (as in for example improving your ability to hear certain sounds) 5. Psychophysiological state matter (be tolerant of ambiguity) NOW, WATCH THE VIDEO! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| JC_Identity Triglot Groupie Sweden thelawofidentity.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4119 days ago 53 posts - 108 votes Speaks: Swedish, Serbo-Croatian*, English | Message 35 of 46 26 December 2013 at 9:37pm | IP Logged | ||
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The last few days I have been thinking a lot about listening and reading. I have improved my reading comprehension of French a lot
thanks to the LAMP app. It is incredible how fast and effortless it has become. Now I have also noticed an unconscious expectation creep up inside me when it comes to consuming audio material in French. I have been thinking that my improvement in my reading comprehension should have spilled over more to my listening comprehension than it has. And the more I think about it, the more it is clear to me that there is no great reason for why it should have. In fact I am much more interested in being able to speak in French when I travel there and to consume French audio content than I am in reading French. The last couple of weeks though I have been experimenting with the LAMP app which for me is probably the best way to improve one's reading comprehension, if you like watching videos that is. Now my use of LAMP has been nothing but complete pleasure. So there is no regret here, and I will continue using LAMP but I have realized that you do not improve your listening comprehension much by only reading. To improve your listening comprehension, you have to listen, which might be obvious to some. I thought that it spills over more than it does. And as I see it there are two basic aspects to the listening. First you need to be able to discern the individual words from the flow of speech and then you need to understand the meaning of these words (and some feeling for grammar) in order to be able to integrate it back into one (whole) message. I see the discerning as having to do with the HOW and the understanding of one unit of sound i.e a word as having to do with the WHAT. When you just focus on reading you get to know the "what" but it is hard to get the "how" this way even if you know pronunciation rules. There is so much more to this "how" then just knowing how to pronounce the word in isolation. This became obvious to me when I before used to experiment on Spanish which should be a very phonetic language. The entire context with the flow of the entire sentence as well as its speed affects how the word sounds naturally in speech. I have a hard time seeing how you can get to learn this just by reading. I think that listening comprehension is absolutely the most important skill to learn as long as you care to someday speak and understand the spoken language, and that is, to speak it without any accent. Now I have at least learned two languages by learning how to listen and speak first before learning to read. The first is my native language Serbo-Croatian and the other is Swedish. Now I remember very little about how I learned the first but I can recall an interesting experience with the second, Swedish. I recall how I being six years old and coming to Sweden just after about a month or two had gotten the rhythm of the Swedish language down. I seem to have naturally focused on the HOW aspect of listening comprehension when it came to Swedish. I remember this because I tried at one time to speak to a Swedish woman in Serbo-Croatian while using the Swedish rhythm. Perhaps I thought that she would understand me this way. This memory actually reminds me of Susanna Zaraysky's Language is Music. She seems to go about learning languages this way too. I have also realized that many people including myself at sometimes make mistakes in regard to listening. It is too easy to do it passively even if you do something like LR:ing. I am here convinced that this passive listening does not do much if anything. When you listen you have to consciously analyze the sound the you are hearing, by first making sure to discern the individual bits and then of course making sure to understand those bits. This is why if you do LR, the texts, both L1 and L2, are just there to be a point of reference where you can check the answer for feedback on how well you are able to discern and understand what you are hearing. It is your conscious effort to discern and apply meaning to what you hear that makes you improve. Edited by JC_Identity on 26 December 2013 at 9:38pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5530 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 36 of 46 27 December 2013 at 3:28pm | IP Logged | ||
I strongly suspect you will see spillover, but it takes a while. There are several problems which block the spillover at first. Since you're a programmer, I'm going to get a little mathematical here. Please forgive me. :-) Problem 1: Symbol-to-sound mapping. Assume we have a string of French letters L, and its phonetic realization P(L). In French, P is basically one-way function: you can go from L to P(L), but not from P(L) back to L, except via brute-force memorization. (In France, going from P(L) back to L is an pass-time called la dictée. They hold competitions on TV.) Your problem is that you've been training yourself to recognize L by reading, but you're hearing P(L), and you can't completely invert the function yet. Problem 2: Speed. When you're reading, you're decoding L relatively slowly, and you can take time to think if you need it. This allows you to stop and re-read, and to bring your puzzle-solving skills to bear. But P(L) comes too fast, and you don't have time to decipher more than a fraction. There's a couple of different ways to crack this problem. Here's what I did: Solution 1A: Keep chipping away at P(L) with lots of listening. Fortunately, P^{-1}(P(L)) is only partially opaque, especially if I have enough context. So I watched lots and lots of French TV series, and I would puzzle out lots of little pieces of P^{-1} as I watched. TV series are useful, because they eliminate several complicating factors: (a) I hear the same voices from episode to episode, (b) the underlying vocabulary is typically a small subset of the language, and (c) the visual images and story line give me very strong context for figuring out pieces of P^{-1}. Plus, TV is a pleasant and laid-back form of studying, and I can do it even when my brain is fried. Solution 2A: Build a fast, robust statistical model of L. The better I could characterize the probability of any text L, the easier time I had puzzling out P^{-1}, because my brain could predict L, calculate P(L), and compare it to what I just heard. This allowed efficient hypothesis testing, which seems to occur at both subconscious and fully-conscious levels. And of course, the best way to improve my model of L was to read a lot. And to keep reading until I could understand French text faster than most people talk. So as far as I can tell, lots of TV series and books will eventually cause your reading comprehension to spill over into listening comprehension. Of course, there are quite a few other ways to tackle this problem. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| VivianJ5 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4260 days ago 81 posts - 133 votes Speaks: English*, French | Message 37 of 46 01 January 2014 at 4:51pm | IP Logged | ||
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J.C., I was looking at your Capish app on iTunes, and was very intrigued; seems like exactly what I was looking for.
But would really like a laptop (Mac) version, you mentioned somewhere (?) that you were working on it. Any idea when (if?) that might be available? I would be very willing to pay for a laptop app, since I travel often, and don't take my laptop AND iPad with me, just the Macbook Air, so iPad-only apps are of limited use to me. One of the reasons I like Anki, even if I don't use it as often as I'd like. I'm enjoying your posts, please, continue! Happy New Year. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| JC_Identity Triglot Groupie Sweden thelawofidentity.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4119 days ago 53 posts - 108 votes Speaks: Swedish, Serbo-Croatian*, English | Message 38 of 46 13 March 2014 at 4:44pm | IP Logged | ||
Thank you for the kind words! I am actually planning to soon take down the Capish app because I am not satisfied over the iOS 7 upgrade which Apple has made, since it is not yet completely stable. It has broken some parts of the functionality and given rise to some bugs. I will perhaps deploy it again later on when Apple takes care of these problems. I am not currently working on the mac version, but have created a couple of various iPhone apps for myself which are not published. I have noted that I use the iPhone more than the iPad and have it with me all of the time, so I agree with you about the iPad. I cannot really promise you when and if I create a Mac version, but if I do, I will for sure write about it here on my log. Again thanks, I appreciate your kind words. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| JC_Identity Triglot Groupie Sweden thelawofidentity.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4119 days ago 53 posts - 108 votes Speaks: Swedish, Serbo-Croatian*, English | Message 39 of 46 13 March 2014 at 6:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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I just removed French from my profile over languages that I study.
No, I have not thrown in the towel yet nor stopped learning French. In fact I have learned more French now than ever before. I am doing it because I want to stay true to myself and my convictions. From my experience the quest to "learn language X" or to "study language X" has always made me focus on the wrong thing and has led to frustration every time I get caught up into framing what I do with French as "learning it" or "studying it". This can happen when you wake up and think that you have to study your target language for a while or do something to take you closer to that end-goal of being completely fluent in the language. Now this to me puts the focus on the wrong thing. As we all know, it is very hard to define what it means to be fluent in a language. Of course you have to know enough vocabulary and have automatised the grammar etc. but it is hard to draw a clear line about all this. Will you call yourself fluent if you cannot speak on a certain topic like politics? what if you lack vocabulary to speak on this topic in your own native language, are you not fluent? These are hard questions and I think that you have to possess a basic general knowledge of a language to be fluent in it, but my point here is that languages are only any good if used and why care about learning that political or other vocabulary if you are not interested in the subject. There will always be more to learn. Furthermore I hold that we shall not go about learning languages, we shall let them come to us and incorporate and integrate them into our unique lifestyles. There is no set number of words or grammar point out there that you have to know to be labelled fluent! So WHY SHOOT FOR SOMETHING YOU CANNOT HIT? Even if you employ self-discipline and struggle to go through boring content in order to learn THE language. How fun will you have trying to maintain later on something that you couldn't care less about? Instead focus on what you want and what already interests you and especially on what you already are doing. Build from there. The key is not to change for the language but to bring the language to who you are. So if you weren't studying grammar, word lists, reading fiction, or watching tv-series prior to your language learning quest, don't bother once you begin! Instead embrace the interests that you already have and the activities that you already are engaging in and bring your target language into these. So if you have always been interested in cooking and frequently read on the subject, start using your target language to continue doing so. Today, this is possible for the majority of languages thanks to the Internet and all the other tools that we have access to. Moreover this is why I also say that languages are only tools and should be treated as such to avoid frustration and enable us to experience that joy that we all want. So I actually think it can be very bad to have long term goals such as "I want to learn language x" or "I want to be a fluent speaker of language x". Don't bother setting goals around the language but rather use the language to reach specific language-unrelated goals. So to return to and answer why I removed French from my study list, I did so because I am no longer studying it or trying to learn it, I am using it or rather living it and maybe someday people will label me as a speaker of French, but who cares as long as I can use it for my interests and enjoy doing so. So without wanting to sound too much like Bruce Lee I would say that language learning and use should be about honestly expressing yourself. Different languages are different ways of doing so. This is the natural way to languages, efficiency and enjoyment guaranteed (since you will want to spend the time). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| JC_Identity Triglot Groupie Sweden thelawofidentity.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4119 days ago 53 posts - 108 votes Speaks: Swedish, Serbo-Croatian*, English | Message 40 of 46 14 March 2014 at 3:25pm | IP Logged | ||
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So now when I am no longer studying French or "learning it" what do I do?
As I have said, I am using it. Now some people might think that I am here only playing with words, but I can assure you that how you frame your language endeavour has a profound psychological effect. I am embracing who I am and my interests and bringing French to my life. For example two areas that I am interested in are business and philosophy. So I use French to consume interesting content on these topics as I would with all my other languages, whether it be reading articles on the internet or listening to podcasts etc. I am not forcing it. I am continuing my life as I would without French. I should here bring up some subtle details to explain what I mean. So for example normally (in languages that I know to a higher degree) there are situations where I start reading an article but find it boring half way through and I quit reading it. Now I as I am using French I do the same, I do not continue reading the article just because I want to learn French, if it is boring it is boring - I abandon it. My main focus is the content that the language opens up to me, not the language itself. Of course every language is beautiful in it is own way and I like to be able to think express myself in a different styles but truly a language is a tool for thinking and communicating. Another implication of my approach is that I do not plan or schedule language learning sessions. I do what I would do normally, I am being myself. Only now I am bringing French into my life more and more where I see fit. What I have found is that I am right now spending more time on French than ever before, when I used to force it, and schedule and plan language learning activities. Now as I am totally focused on my interests and the content I can spend hours using French without realising how quickly time passes by. Another example that I can bring up here is that when I started learning French I saw a great benefit in a method that is similar to what you here on the forum call LR. It is perhaps the most efficient method there is to ensure large amounts of comprehensive input in a short time frame. So what I did was to build myself an app that set me up to use such a method with ease. And so I went and found fiction books that I could use along with this method. The only thing I forgot was that normally I almost never read fiction and I dislike the majority of fiction out there. But there I was, I had found the most efficient method to learn any language (as if there is an absolute definite end-goal to language learning) and I began reading fiction for the sake of learning the language not the other way around. So my "most efficient method" gave me frustrations and it turned out that the "most efficient method" in fact was not efficient at all since I did not want to spend the time but had to force myself through discipline. Now I spend more time than ever before on French and I do not need any discipline, because I have inverted the relationship between me and the language. Now the language is the servant and tool, as it is supposed to be. I no longer read fiction because of a language learning activity, I might read it if I find it interesting because of the content and if I get bored after a page I quit and do not continue reading it for the sake of the language. Yet another implication is that I do not review what I have read or use any spaced-repetition methodology. If I am to be truly honest with myself I find it very boring to reread some content that I already read some days ago. I also do not learn French because I want to be a polyglot or because I want to reach that undefinable absolute level of fluency where everyone thinks that I am fluent. I guess I care to little about those things, instead, I just use French and enjoy French, now, as opposed to deferring it until I reach that imaginary level of someday. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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