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How long does it REALLY take to learn ___? | ||
Tags: Time to learn | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6378 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes  Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 9 of 15 02 November 2014 at 8:58am | IP Logged | |||||
That's interesting. I'd classify it differently. Maybe: 25 minutes of intense focus and analysis: 10 XP 2 hours of lazy reading: 5 XP 5 minute conversation: 0.5 XP Daily study doesn't yield a multiplier effect, but longer breaks and the a restart gives you a +1 Armor of Protection. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cabaire Senior Member Germany Joined 5395 days ago 725 posts - 1352 votes | Message 10 of 15 02 November 2014 at 11:50am | IP Logged | |||||
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Well, Serpent, the larval stage of a frog is a nuijapää, literally a cudgelhead, because they are a big head with a tail.
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| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6378 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 11 of 15 02 November 2014 at 12:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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It's a British word, yes? I've always known them as "tadpoles" in English.
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| victorhart Bilingual Tetraglot Groupie United States mandarinexperiment.o Joined 3503 days ago 66 posts - 155 votes Speaks: English*, Portuguese*, Spanish, French Studies: Mandarin | Message 12 of 15 02 November 2014 at 1:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
The relevance is precisely for the purpose of comparison. The fact is that I am learning and I have made progress. I'm pretty confident that my first hypothesis will be proved correct--I will sooner or later understand Mandarin. I'm sure some will say that's only possible because I've watched shows for toddlers and used English subtitles with movies in many cases, but that's just fine with me. What could fairly be said (though for me, it's still much too early to tell) is that I'm learning far more slowly than I would, say, if I were doing an FSI course, or using subs2srs, Anki cards with characters, and/or a Pimsleur course. So to answer my 2nd hypothesis, related to comparative efficiency, having such parameters is highly relevant. For anyone involved with language instruction and curriculum development (as I am), or planning whether and how to tackle a foreign language personally, having these parameters is also quite useful, as long as they are understood for what they are-- highly contingent and very broad approximations. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5226 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 13 of 15 03 November 2014 at 9:36am | IP Logged | |||||
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It's rather amusing that one of the threads next to this one as I write this post is on learning to
understand a TV series in 30 days. How to understand a TV series in 30 days The technique used requires some pretty serious work with computer software to put subtitles and video clips in Anki. One can see how it works because the fundamental idea is to use the subtitles in two languages as bridges to be able to break the language down into fundamental units that one can analyze into units of meaning and then intuitively build a passive model of the language. I can do something similar without doing all that serious computer work if I take a language that is close to my native language. So let's say that I want to understand Brazilian Portuguese and I have good knowledge of Spanish plus my native French. The little that I have seen of Brazilian TV with subtitles leads me to believe that if I were to work with a few hours of recordings and pay close attention, I think I would end up enough knowledge to be able to follow some soap operas. This works because of the similarities between French, Spanish and Portuguese. Just the fact of having the sounds divided up into words is a huge advantage because I can immediately see the resemblances When things are dissimilar, I pay special attention to the images and I try to guess or deduce the meaning. In passing, if I were seriously interested in learning to understand Brazilian Portuguese quickly on my own, I would get a simple guide to Portuguese grammar just to have an idea of what to look out for. Trying to learn a language by watching films with completely opaque audio and without the benefits of subtitles in at least one language that one understands is extremely inefficient because there is no way to make any connection between meaning and sound beyond some very elementary units for greetings and interactions such as hello, goodbye and thank you. I encourage readers to try this with some Youtube videos in a language that you don't understand and without subtitles. Take a short clip and watch it 20 times and see if you understand it better at the end. Or watch ten clips in that language and see what you understand at the end. Basically there will be no difference between the beginning and the end, and for a simple reason. It's all a stream of meaningless sounds. If you have subtitles, that's right away a huge plus, especially if the subtitles are in two languages, because you have something to work with. But to just watch videos with totally incomprehensible audio is, in my opinion, a complete waste of time from a language learning perspective. If I look at how much Mandarin has been learned so far in 170 hours, this doesn't seem to be going anywhere. On the other hand, it can be a very enjoyable experience for other reasons, especially in the company of one's daughter, but that's a different story. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4503 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 14 of 15 03 November 2014 at 9:40am | IP Logged | |||||
Indeed, we call them tadpoles (at least in Canada and the US you do). 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| geoffw Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 4484 days ago 1134 posts - 1865 votes Speaks: English*, German, Yiddish Studies: Modern Hebrew, French, Dutch, Italian, Russian | Message 15 of 15 03 November 2014 at 11:29pm | IP Logged | |||||
Here is how I learned the word pollywog as a kid (in the US). 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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