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Krashen & some failures for Massive Input | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 3881 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 25 of 67 28 October 2014 at 8:54am | IP Logged | |||||
And there is a large chunk of words that adults natives generally have trouble with. My husband recently went to a seminar about job hunting (having been told by the employment agency it would be mostly a way for people with degrees to get job hunting pointers and network with the right people in the industry) which turned out to be an all-day lecture by a professional editor for natives with at least two years of tertiary education. The exercises included how to correctly use the subjunctive and matching nouns with the right gender. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5548 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 26 of 67 28 October 2014 at 10:44am | IP Logged | |||||
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eyðimörk, I think that's a matter of prescriptivism there. When the majority of adult natives has to consciously learn how to use parts of the language in a way that is deemed correct it means that it's used in a narrow set of situations and said native speakers have to learn to ignore the grammar patterns they use in most other situations. What emk and patrickwilken mentioned are features of a language that adult native speakers usually get right most of the time. (I know it isn't as clear-cut and native speakers do make 'mistakes' when the written language has preserved distinctions that are phonologically indistinguishable in the spoken language.)
As Ari said, it's information that is not strictly necessary; I would think it either helps to make sentences easier to parse for native speakers, or it adds an extra layer of redundancy. For me, when I hear a phrase with correct adjective and article declension in German it feels like the forms work together to confirm each other as correct, like the subject agreeing with the conjugated verb does, or the right particle used with a verb. Not having this confirmation alerts me to check if I haven't misunderstood. But because in spoken German virtually all sentences do follow basic word order it's not necessary to have the extra information you can get from article and adjective declension. (Until you have to write correctly.) The only way I know of dealing with this issue is to memorize sentences/short texts using audio recording and the correct written form (learning to hear what is actually said, and recreate it using the written form as a guide) and I don't think input only will fix it, except maybe for a select few. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 3881 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 27 of 67 28 October 2014 at 10:54am | IP Logged | |||||
I see no difference whatsoever between prescriptive grammar learned by natives and prescriptive grammar learned by non-natives. I do realise, however, that, as you say, non-natives make more of these mistakes — ones that natives are unlikely to make. I don't see that as some kind of evidence that there's a grand line dividing natives' inability to use the subjunctive correctly or to figure out the gender of nouns and non-natives' inability to do the same in similar AND dissimilar situations. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5212 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 28 of 67 28 October 2014 at 12:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
Although Bao refers natives having to learn prescriptive grammar, I would frame the argument more in terms of formal written language vs spoken informal language. Formal written language is learned in school like any other subject and is very different from everyday spoken language. French grammar is notoriously full of all sorts of arcane rules that, in my opinion, serve only to make people miserable and distinguish social classes. I'm not surprised that an employment seminar would devote some time to writing properly in French. Something similar would certainly be done in English when looking at writing cover letters for job applications. In fact, one only has to look at the many publications and web sites on writing good English. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4315 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 29 of 67 28 October 2014 at 12:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I want to thank everyone for all your helpful, supportive and interesting suggestions.
For the record, I am very happy with my progress to date: My first major goal when I started learning German was that I would be able to read and enjoyment a complex newspaper without a dictionary, a goal which I have almost met. I always felt that when I could interact with a language at this level then the rest of the language would be quite doable. I had hoped that by the time I reached this point I would also have learnt most of the grammar I needed along the way. I find it surprising that this hasn't been the case, but it's certainly no big deal either. I am now systematically working through a number of grammars and making notes, and doing a daily writing exercise to make active my grammar (basically what I did to learn English in the first place). It's a bit early to say how quick my progress will be, but certainly for something as simple as declensions my progress seems pretty fast. I definitely have it easier learning this grammar now, now that I have a strong intuitive sense of the language, then I would have earlier on. A number of you have stated that I didn't pick-up declensions because they weren't informative to meaning. I don't totally agree with this. I do agree that if the meaning was significantly affected by a grammatical point X I would learn X, however, it doesn't follow that if X is irrelevant for meaning that I didn't learn X in an incidental fashion purely from input. My impression is that incidental learning (i.e., learning of non-meaning-critical grammar) does occur when the grammatical rule is both simple and occurs frequently (i.e., when there is both a strong and often repeated signal). So I have been, for instance, learning the genders/plurals forms of words simply through reading, even though this information is irrelevant for meaning, because the gender/plural forms of nouns occur frequently and are easy to discern. My impression is that this doesn't work for declinations, because even though they occur very frequently, the rules which govern their use are too complex to learn in an incidental fashion. That's not to say that the rules governing declinations are SO complex. They aren't. The main point of my original post was simply to point out (and perhaps serve as warning) that even pretty simple grammatical rules, such as those that govern declensions, won't be picked up incidentally from reading/listening. However, even relatively infrequent complex rules can be learned quickly from grammar books in the right context. One I learnt yesterday, which I am pretty sure I will never use, states that 'in very formal written style and in older texts monosyllabic masculine and neuter nouns in the dative singular optionally take an -e ending'. What I find funny about this rule is that although I doubt I have seen it much, if at all, in books, or ever heard it used in films, I have seen it repeatedly over the years when walking pass the Reichstag (German parliment), which has the following inscription on large letters on the front: Dem Deutschen Volke - To the German People. But despite this my brain never once picked-up what the 'e' in Volk was doing, but reading this once in a grammar book was enough to burn the rule into my brain. Edited by patrickwilken on 28 October 2014 at 1:26pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5212 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 30 of 67 28 October 2014 at 1:05pm | IP Logged | |||||
The fundamental hypothesis of massive input is that with time and exposure to the target language, the learner will spontaneously internalize all the necessary linguistic rules to produce correct output. I call this reverse engineering the language. Although the OP speaks of failure of massive input in terms of producing good output, I would prefer to use the term limitation rather than failure. In my opinion Iversen has nailed this fundamental limitation: this reverse engineering can take a very long time. I would add that it is fraught with the risk of imperfect results. It is true that children learn languages naturally by massive input. But we sometimes forget that right from the beginning children get massive correction of output in addition to massive input and massive interaction with other children. All three phenomena go hand in hand. And in many countries, children enter some kind of structured learning environment by the age of 5 or 6. For most adult learners, especially those outside the country of the language, the massive input comes from recordings, videos and books. Good constructive error correction is often hard to come by, and there is little interaction with native speakers. It's not surprising that despite massive input in these conditions most adult learners do not achieve high- proficiency speaking. On the other hand, living with a native speaker, in the country to boot, will undoubtedly lead to better results. Most of us here at HTLAL would die to have these learning conditions. What to do then? The more input the better, of course. But here I totally agree with Iversen and Cavesa: explicit grammar training is important to speed up the process of building a correct internal model of the language. A good professional tutor would make a huge difference. It's hard to correct oneself. A job working with native speakers would be great. Taking a class alongside native students would obviously be challenging but very rewarding. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4315 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 31 of 67 28 October 2014 at 1:17pm | IP Logged | |||||
I guess I can't help but approach as a cognitive psychologist, whose background is studying processing limits in cognition. What I think I have observed trying to learn declinations via massive input for over two years, is that I would simply not learn this grammar rule via input, not that I was learning it very slowly. I think is an important distinction as it really emphasizes input (massive or otherwise) on its own will never be enough in principle to learn a language properly. Or at least a language with a sufficiently complex grammar.
This is of course not true as you state a bit later. I very much doubt (now based on my own experiences) that children would learn these sorts of grammar rules if they didn't get feedback (which is of course what you say later, but which contradicts your initial statement). I only jump on this because I think people say this way too often, and it was to offer evidence directly counter to this sort of viewpoint that I made my original post. Edited by patrickwilken on 28 October 2014 at 1:25pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Jeffers Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4691 days ago 2151 posts - 3960 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Hindi, Ancient Greek, French, Sanskrit, German | Message 32 of 67 28 October 2014 at 1:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
I have done a lot of reading in French, but so far it has mainly been either readers designed for learners, comics, or books for children/young adults. As a result, I have not really been exposed to the past historic (or passé simple). Now I'm reading a novel aimed at adults, and from the start I was coming across odd forms I didn't recognize, like "il fut" and "il fit". I had a guess that I was dealing with a literary tense, so I grabbed my BBC Talk French Grammar, scanned through the declension tables. I figured out that they were past historic forms, so I turned to the pages on past historic and read about how it is formed and how it is used. As I've continued to read that novel, I've kept my grammar handy, and looked up that page several times when I've forgotten which form I was seeing (être or avoir?), or when I came across new forms. I'm not sharp enough to pick this up with one reading, but by continuing to read and using my grammar as needed, I'm becoming more familiar with the common forms of the past historic and how they are used. My point is that for me, lots of reading is good, but I need to use occasional supplements to learn. Usually I do internet searches for odd forms or strange sentences, but a grammar book is also handy, especially when it comes to an entire tense like the past historic. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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