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Language Learning Orthodoxy You Ignore | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Darklight1216 Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4885 days ago 411 posts - 639 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: German | Message 9 of 116 28 November 2014 at 10:47am | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't bother with flashcards either. They bore me and learning a language that I don't
actually need isn't worth making myself miserable. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| epictetus Groupie Canada Joined 3667 days ago 54 posts - 87 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 10 of 116 28 November 2014 at 10:48am | IP Logged | |||||
That's part of a larger realisation I've had over the past few years. The internet is really good at answering certain types of questions and absolutely terrible at others. Rather than asking "will this work?", it's better to just do something (if it hasn't been done as you imagine it) and then report back to the group. Unless you know well the people who offer advice (and them, you), it's mostly just another idea yet to be personally tested. I tried to like Anki. I wanted it to solve my problems. But I couldn't continue to justify it the day I finished my 5000th word. I'm a little surprised to read the comment about not wanting to talk to native speakers in their country... why else would you go on a language learning trip?! Surely you can do at home what you'd do in the hotel room? I can't imagine how a xenophobic language learner could exist. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| chiara-sai Triglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 3493 days ago 54 posts - 146 votes Speaks: Italian*, EnglishC2, French Studies: German, Japanese | Message 11 of 116 28 November 2014 at 11:20am | IP Logged | |||||
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The best way to learn the pronunciation is to imitate native speakers
If I tried this my accent would be at best terrible, at worst unintelligible. Phonetics saved me! But really, I’m not sure what the orthodoxy is, there seem to be many different ones depending on whom you ask. For example, a lot of people here are saying that the orthodox view is that flashcards are brilliant, but I think outside of the Internet people don’t even know what flashcards are; for instance, I have studied French in elementary school, English in high school and Mandarin at university (the first two in Italy, the latter in the UK) and in none of these instances flashcards were even mentioned, never mind recommended, and I’m sure the approach of school teachers is as orthodox as you can get. Indeed now I feel the need to go against the orthodoxy of this thread and say that I love flashcards, they’re very helpful to me and I even enjoy doing them! 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 3832 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 12 of 116 28 November 2014 at 11:55am | IP Logged | |||||
- Flashcards and SRS are a great way to learn vocabulary. I find them useful to learn to distinguish words that seem to be all equal, thing that happens often with languages with very little relation with one's mother tongue. Especially with Memrise. But then you need to see the words in action, in real word phrases, to see how they are really used. Remembering the Kanji (RTK) is a great way to learn Chinese characters. I found indeed that I was skipping all the stories because I find them absurd and far from being mine. I would prefer a method that really explain the radicals, how they are used to construct new words and so on. And if you know such resources please let me know :) 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ogrim Heptaglot Senior Member France Joined 4424 days ago 991 posts - 1896 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, English, Spanish, French, Romansh, German, Italian Studies: Russian, Catalan, Latin, Greek, Romanian | Message 13 of 116 28 November 2014 at 1:48pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Speak from day one.
Not sure if that is considered "orthodoxy" around this place, but it is certainly something you hear from many, not only the Irish polyglot. Whether you wait three months or a year, I belive a "silent period" getting the basics in place is necessary in order to say anything meaningful, at least that's how it works for me. 9 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tristano Tetraglot Senior Member Netherlands Joined 3832 days ago 905 posts - 1262 votes Speaks: Italian*, Spanish, French, English Studies: Dutch | Message 14 of 116 28 November 2014 at 1:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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"Speak from day one" fits a very specific personality.
I like to study alone, I like reading, I like to understand. I'm a social introvert and I'm eventually proud of it. All the people like me prefer the "silent period", not because we're afraid to speak, but just because we are listeners more than talkers. And since we like to listen, we like to understand more deeply. 8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| eyðimörk Triglot Senior Member France goo.gl/aT4FY7 Joined 3884 days ago 490 posts - 1158 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French Studies: Breton, Italian | Message 15 of 116 28 November 2014 at 2:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Start with children's media.
No thanks. To say that I hate children's media would be an exaggeration, but only a slight one. The Hobbit or Harry Potter is where by tolerance level is set — I find them slightly too childish in English, but decent enough for a weaker language. I did once manage to listen through several children's audio books in Breton for the novelty of understanding almost every word of material that was new to me, but I had already spent a lot of time with other materials by then. Start with graded readers. Maybe I've had bad luck with graded readers, but in my experience they are as bad as children's books... at least the ones that are written as beginner's versions of classics. I had several of those in French as a child and I hated them. The language was flat and uninteresting, and the focus on hitting all the important points of the story made the stories rather uninteresting as well. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5551 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 16 of 116 28 November 2014 at 2:49pm | IP Logged | |||||
Worse. The graded readers I've tried were written to fit specific textbooks published by the same company, and they assumed a lot of obscure words to be known, but then explained words that should be transparent to native German speakers with a halfway decent sized English vocabulary. Really good at making me feel stupid and inadequate. I'd rather fight my way through a book written for native speakers and know that it's the level I will have to reach when I want to function like a native speaker, than to let a dumbed down book tell me that what I know is not what I am expected to know. (Annotated unabridged texts are slightly less patronizing, but I have the same problem with them.) 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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