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The LW method | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5356 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 1 of 9 25 August 2014 at 11:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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or: Attentive focused extensive semi-intensive listening and noting
A method for actively maintaining focus on audio material for longer periods and improving understanding, for persons with a good passive vocabulary (98% word recognition) who tend to be inattentive, easily distracted and fail to automatically absorb the language simply by listening to native materials, like all the other members of this forum seem to be able to do (may be adaptable to individual circumstances) While listening, simply note down on a notepad every "interesting" verb in every sentence. Sometimes it may not be possible to keep up. Don't worry, this is "extensive" listening. Just let it go. For me "interesting" means any verb I hear, that I am conscious I don't come across very often, or I realise that I wasn't really aware of its use in a specific way. To be honest, for me this is practically every verb apart from a handful of very common ones such as: to be, to have, to eat, sleep, run etc. I also note down "to be" or "to have" if they are used with adjectives or in constructions with which I am unfamiliar. The real aim is maintaining focus on the audio, the writing down is just the technique, so you only need to note as little or as much as necessary to keep focussed on the audio. I don't want to get anyone's hopes up too high, because I suspect there are not that many other learners exactly like me (I even suspect that I may have some form of ADD), and I only discovered it a couple of weeks ago, so I don't know what the real longer term benefits are. It also has not improved my understanding of things like films or natural spoken dialogue, or real life, but I am at the moment hopeful that I have found the key to progressing from the plateau I have been on for about the last six years. The experience for me, listening to clearly spoken material, has been like a small miracle. After just a few sentences, it is like a switch goes on, and I can think about the verb, the meaning, the grammar, the whole sentence, and follow the subject under discussion. It's as if everything is somehow stored in the verb. I do not make any attempt to learn the new usages, I simply reflect on them, wonder if I have heard it before, and note it down. In general, there are relatively few words that are completely unknown to me, but it is the details of their specific usage that is often completely unfamiliar, as are the cases, associated prepositions, etc. It has also surprised just how bad I am at "verbs". I always knew I was pretty weak, but I have been shocked to realise, that practically every verb I come across, I find its usage is slightly unexpected or I would not have been able to actively use it myself. I suspect the reason is, that as long as you understand all the nouns in a sentence, you can almost ignore the verbs. In fact, many verbs can almost be rewritten as "do" , perhaps plus an adjective (e.g. "commit a crime" = "do a crime") and my lazy brain, given the choice, prefers to just ignore the finer grammatical aspects. In the past I have tried to listen out for other grammatical features, e.g. conjunctions, prepositions or particles, and usually found myself drifting off quickly. But it might be worth trying variations: if your understanding of a text is lower, then maybe listening for the nouns will be a helpful strategy Edited by schoenewaelder on 25 August 2014 at 11:58pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| sctroyenne Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5187 days ago 739 posts - 1312 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Spanish, Irish | Message 2 of 9 26 August 2014 at 2:20am | IP Logged | ||
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For a while I was keeping some scratch paper nearby and just jotting down any interesting
word or expression that struck my fancy. It does wonders for maintaining your attention span and, thus, keeping you focused on listening comprehension. Jotting down verbs sounds like a great variant - focus on how they're used (which mode for instance), which preposition gets used, possible collocations, etc. I think, actually, you can give yourself any "assignment" to watch out for specific features of the language during listening and you should receive the same benefit (verbs being especially useful given their fundamental role in language). 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| cpnlsn88 Triglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 4833 days ago 63 posts - 112 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Spanish, Esperanto, Latin | Message 3 of 9 28 August 2014 at 10:22pm | IP Logged | ||
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I think this is very interesting as an approach with lots of side benefits. I like the
fact it is based on 'noticing' in a semi structured way. I think it works in two ways this can work; firstly by selective 'noticing' you maintain focus on the input so a lot more goes in; secondly you can vastly improve your verbs which, potentially, can give very significant gains in fluency in speech because (I can't prove this) there is a kind of impoverishment of speech whereby learners have a reduced set of verbs. This is just a hunch but would be good to give this a try. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Elenia Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom lilyonlife.blog Joined 3652 days ago 239 posts - 327 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Swedish, Esperanto | Message 4 of 9 29 August 2014 at 2:01am | IP Logged | ||
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I have wanted to do something like this for Swedish and German with some interesting
lectures, but I feel that my understanding is way to low. However, noting things down really can help with listening comprehension as well. At the start of my year abroad in France, I was having difficulty catching most of the words I heard in lectures, and missing pretty much all of the important bits. By the end of the year, I was getting pretty much everything down and understanding it. I also found that I was having better luck noting down words I didn't know correctly. Although this isn't the same as your method, taking notes really helped transform what I heard from a block of semi-comprehensible sound to something that I could actually understand and learn from. Note-taking also helped me internalise certain words and phrases that were very useful to me, but which I would probably have great difficulty using if I just sat down and tried to study them from a list or a book. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| kujichagulia Senior Member Japan Joined 4643 days ago 1031 posts - 1571 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, Portuguese | Message 5 of 9 29 August 2014 at 8:17am | IP Logged | ||
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This is something I've wanted to do for years, but I've never been in the right situation to do it. To do this regularly, I need to be sitting down at a table or a desk, free of distraction, so I can concentrate on what I hear and write them down. I can't think of a time or place where/when I can work in such ideal circumstances, so I've put it off.
Learning new words from this method seems painstaking; if you made a spelling mistake when writing the word, or you misheard it, it can take you ages to find it in a dictionary. But this method seems to improve your listening greatly, and helps you to parse all the sounds from that "block of semi-comprehensible sound", as Elenia eloquently put it. And if you use native material, you can learn to do that at native speed. That is a big benefit. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5356 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 6 of 9 29 August 2014 at 4:22pm | IP Logged | ||
It sounds very similar to me, other than you were presumably noting key words rather than verbs. In some way, my choice of verbs was arbitrary, I think anything that forces you to focus on the sentence is probably good, but verbs do seem to open up the rest of the grammar of the sentence for me. The funny thing I find, is that you would think the writing down would detract from the brain processing time, but I can almost feel the audio being decoded and analysed in some other part of my brain while writing it down. I shall take it as confirmation that the technique helps a least one other person. I shall be trying it with a weaker language when I get round to it, but I guess it won't be the same. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5356 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 7 of 9 29 August 2014 at 4:37pm | IP Logged | ||
You must be insanely busy or something, or possibly lacking in furniture. I have been using the technique primarily for listening comprehension, not for learning new vocabulary, other than looking up the odd word. But I can imagine, if you are at the stage where you can follow the gist of a story, it could be useful to try to note down things, even phonetically, without worrying about meaning. Accumulating vocabulary is always a long and tiring process, and words get repeated surprisingly infrequently in native materials - apart from a handful, which get repeated surprisingly often, and if certain sounds begin to sound familiar, then that would be a word worth looking up. But for me it is primarily extensive listening, without pausing to look stuff up. But maybe it is the LR method you should be trying, or parallel texts. I have never got round to it myself, because I haven't managed to assemble any interesting materials. Edited by schoenewaelder on 29 August 2014 at 4:39pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Elenia Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom lilyonlife.blog Joined 3652 days ago 239 posts - 327 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Swedish, Esperanto | Message 8 of 9 29 August 2014 at 7:55pm | IP Logged | ||
Not quite the same - French lectures seem to be almost entirely composed of key words! I estimate that I'd be scribbling down something like 500-600 words during a focused half hour. While that's all very well and good for class note taking, your method is definitely better suited to language learners because it lets you pick a weak point and work on it, which focuses the mind much more then when you're trying to take down every single element that contains meaning. I also agree with you about the importance of verbs. You can understand all the nouns in a sentence but without verbs you'd be hard pressed to understand what's going on. As you pointed out in your first post, having a wide variety of verbs under your belt also improves your output. I'll try your method out with Swedish and report back. It's definitely a weak language for me, so I'm not expecting to make gains in the same areas as I would with a strong language, but I've no doubt that it will help me improve. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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