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Trying to be too clever | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| osoymar Tetraglot Pro Member United States Joined 4524 days ago 190 posts - 344 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Portuguese, Japanese Studies: Spanish, French Personal Language Map | Message 9 of 74 23 October 2013 at 9:01pm | IP Logged | ||
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I find this a very interesting topic, the only problem is that all of my thoughts on
the matter are partial tangents and I'm not sure which to go with. I think I'll just spit a couple out here, feel free to pick up or discard whatever you please. 1. Yes, in the most basic sense trying to incorporate newly learned vocabulary or grammar will probably slow down your fluency. Whether this is good or bad really comes down to whether you are *practicing* the language or *using* it. For example, if I'm skyping with someone mainly for the purpose of practicing there language, of course I'll try to stretch myself. If I'm in a job interview and I want to prove that I'm conversant in the language, I would restrict myself to what I know really well and try to steer the conversation in that direction. Of course, most real life situations would be somewhere in the middle. 2. What I first thought of when I saw "trying to be too clever" was the learner (myself included!) who learns words in an ascending scale of difficulty, paying no attention to context or register, and throws them into his conversation willy-nilly. This comes across as very stilted, and if you have materials that can guide you as to which words are more suitable for conversation, so much the better. If not, you'll have to rely on language partners or tutors. 3. Of course, the more unusual the word, the fewer contexts in which it is appropriate to use, and therefore the more difficult it may become to activate! I'm not sure what the solution is here, other than trying to cultivate language partners with a particular interest in whatever field the vocabulary pertains to. Given how hard it is to find language tandems of any kind, that may be a real challenge! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| hribecek Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5137 days ago 1243 posts - 1458 votes Speaks: English*, Czech, Spanish Studies: Italian, Polish, Slovak, Hungarian, Toki Pona, Russian | Message 10 of 74 23 October 2013 at 9:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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This post is very relevant to my case in Czech.
I always want to know every word and to speak as perfectly/natively as possible. My main problem with this is that mistakes are always painful for me and affect my fluency and so perhaps I should dumb down my Czech to make less mistakes and therefore speak more fluently. I know mistakes are good and I should see them that way but I can't help but feel bad every time I make one. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tanya b Senior Member United States Joined 4566 days ago 159 posts - 518 votes Speaks: Russian | Message 11 of 74 23 October 2013 at 11:38pm | IP Logged | ||
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I'm not an intellectual and sometimes I resent when my fellow native English speakers who are, try to put on airs or show off how clever or brilliant they are by using words that only a highly-educated person would use.
Now I plead guilty to doing the same thing, often acquiring useless vocab that I will never use, to be on the safe side, just in case the conversation suddenly turns to the mating habits of ladybugs or 12th-century Hungarian folk dances--I want to be ready and at least appear to have a high IQ. For me, the essence of fluency is being clever when you have to be. End of story. On the subject of being too clever, I remember I was watching a couple of American intellectuals on TV discussing the work of some obscure German movie director I had never heard of. They were both trying to outdo each other with their intellect and wit, and I thought to myself--if you're so smart, why don't you learn German and try having this conversation and see how well you do. I'm afraid that becoming multilingual has made me into a hater, a hypocrite and something of an intellectal snob. Lord have mercy. Edited by tanya b on 24 October 2013 at 12:07am 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| cpnlsn88 Triglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 4825 days ago 63 posts - 112 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Spanish, Esperanto, Latin | Message 12 of 74 24 October 2013 at 12:12am | IP Logged | ||
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I blame fluency, the requirement to debate for 3 hours on the mating habits of Japanese ladybugs. Yes, there's something to be said for the pedestrian and mundane.
Someone once said to me 'I've just sat in an economics lecture in French and understood everything but now I don't know how to buy a stamp'. I have a similar problem in German - I can talk about political and philosophical and religious themes but struggle with the everyday and mundane. At the end of the day I don't think it matters. If you learn a language you never quite get there and will know a lot of failure and frustration and you are always getting better as you make progress, however slow it is and however winding the path is. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4797 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 13 of 74 24 October 2013 at 2:21pm | IP Logged | ||
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Well, this comes down to the well known trouble of finding material for the spoken
language. I find good books and tv shows of the "lower" genres to be the best choice. If all the input you get is about academic topics than it is understandable your active skills will be disbalanced as well. It is very common. And these are the main reasons, in my opinion: 1.Advanced or even intermediate courses (both books and classes) prefer the topics that suit the exams and the modern, "conversational", multi-culti eco curriculum. These days, many teachers and schools feel the pressure to provide students with much more than "just skills". So they are trying to get into the culture and interesting topics. But they do it their way which is aimed at intelectual and academic topics and sources. I dare guess 95% of people in classes can speak for several minutes about the wildlife protection or discrimination of anyone but cannot shop in classical smaller shops, follow a recipe or ask for advice concerning broken heating. 2.The libraries focused on foreign languages often share a similar obsession. They want to educate the readers and give them the best of the foreign culture, not some popculture crap. So the intelectual and educational value of the content is more to them than the language learning value. Even when it comes to dvds, they tend to have many more high quality movies than just thrillers, comedies and tvseries. And there are other and similar disbalances. Such as some libraries thinking a language lover=a humanities person with no interest in sciences. And a few more. 3.Many of us tend to have a similar approach at times. We all want to get to the content we enjoy. And there are many people who enjoy mostly documentaries and intelectual things and find the mainstream and intelectually easier things to be a waste of time. 4.Many people think "I will learn all about the conversational language by the conversation when I get an opportunity." Well, this may be true if you are moving to the country or are in exceptionally good situation (your new friends are monolingual for exemple). But often the easiest (for all sides) and most logical outcome of this are people switching to English as they find you uncomfortable to speak with in their language. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5348 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 14 of 74 24 October 2013 at 4:20pm | IP Logged | ||
I believe that is a common failing of economists, irrespective of language issues. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5218 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 15 of 74 24 October 2013 at 4:41pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think that the OP's point is well taken. Many times when we try to speak in a sophisticated manner and on
complex subjects things fall apart because we are out of our depth. The main problem, in my opinion, is not that are "trying to be too clever;" the problem is that we haven't really mastered the basics. There is a myth that talking in a sophisticated manner means using a rarefied vocabulary. To talk about any technical topic, you need a technical vocabulary. But you can talk in a highly sophisticated manner with very mundane words by combining them in sophisticated ways. The key to this is being able to make fine distinctions and nuances with ordinary words. Today I listened to a discussion between Malcolm Galdwell and Stephen Fry on the Guardian newspaper website. No big fancy words here but lots of examples of how to use ordinary language in different ways. I believe that instead of trying to learn as many words as possible, it's more important to learn the many ways of using fewer words. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4616 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 16 of 74 24 October 2013 at 8:14pm | IP Logged | ||
I agree, but you are still going to have to be ready to recognise a lot of words, or be really advanced in recognising meanings by context, which normally requires a fairly large passive vocabulary. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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