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Moving from B2 to C2

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1e4e6
Octoglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4050 days ago

1013 posts - 1588 votes 
Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian
Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan

 
 Message 105 of 177
22 February 2015 at 12:11am | IP Logged 
About it being looney to try the C2 with no tutour, I am sure that there are some who
prefer to do their own thing and did their own self-study and passed the C2.

I would not hestitate to try the C2 by myself with no help, and if the person who
asked the original question has an interest to do so, s/he should choose that option.
In fact, I would not mind doing the DELE C2, never having lived in a Hispanophone
country. If I taught myself calculus, guitar, piano, bass, football, cricket, chess,
i.e. basically all of my hobbies as well as my many things for academic life, what is
so different about a language or languages? Honestly I think that anyone can teach
themselves, if they really want to do so.

And about money, how is someone in the mid-20s supposed to have so much money to
afford all of these sources, also taking into account the financial status of the
person?

For example, how about someone who needs a C2 certificate for some reason more than
just interest, perhaps a job, or whatever, and is already B2. Add in that this person
is unemployed, 20000€ in debt, lives in a flat, has no family support, and/or is close
to applying for government assistance. Or perhaps the person simply feels
uncomfortable with speaking to a stranger on a regular basis, especially never meeting
in person. To me the only reasonable idea is to do all self-teaching. B2 provides a
good enough platform herefore, to mine eyes at least.

As one of my NT2 (the official Netherlands agency for learning Dutch as a foreign
language) grammar books (which stated that the book is also good for self-study) said
on one page,

Als er in wil is, is er een weg
"If there is a will, there is a way"

Edited by 1e4e6 on 22 February 2015 at 12:19am

6 persons have voted this message useful



s_allard
Triglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 5190 days ago

2704 posts - 5425 votes 
Speaks: French*, English, Spanish
Studies: Polish

 
 Message 106 of 177
22 February 2015 at 1:16am | IP Logged 
I don't know how many times this has to be said: tutors are not for everyone. Hey, think of it as a
suggestion, nothing more. If someone tells me they learned diddly squat with a tutor and that they
passed their C2 exam on their own, I say: kudos, you did it. I'm not wedded to tutors; I don't own a
tutoring service. I fully understand that many people cannot afford the services of a good professional
tutor. It's just that I, and many people, feel that good tutoring is a valuable tool. Nothing more.
How long do we have to keep flogging this dead horse?

I find it so strange that people want to argue against the idea of having someone help you improve
your language skills. If we were talking about tennis, golf, dancing, acting, cooking or pretty much any
sort of skill, we would all - maybe not all - welcome advice from coaches, experts or
people more advanced than us.

I see students rushing to take a masterclass with a passing great musician. Why wouldn't you want to
spend a few minutes getting feedback about your playing from a great master? Now, if you feel you
can get the same results on your own or from reading a book, that's OK because there are plenty of
people who are lining up for the masterclass.

Now, there is the other question of the importance of corrections or what I call corrective feedback. If
someone keeps making the same mistakes over and over again despite correction, there is obviously a
problem. Let's say that in French a student is continuously mixing up devant (in front of)
and avant (before) or the Spanish delante and ante. The solution is to address the issue and work
specifically on this point. As Kato Lomb clearly pointed out, uncorrected mistakes are dangerous. The
reason mistakes keep coming back is that they were not corrected early enough. Fossilization has set
in, and it becomes difficult to get rid of a bad habit.

That's exactly why I think a tutor is so important. This is how you extirpate those bad habits before it's
too late.




Edited by s_allard on 22 February 2015 at 1:49am

3 persons have voted this message useful



luke
Diglot
Senior Member
United States
Joined 6965 days ago

3133 posts - 4351 votes 
Speaks: English*, Spanish
Studies: Esperanto, French

 
 Message 107 of 177
22 February 2015 at 3:15am | IP Logged 
One of the undercurrents here is recognizing what separates the individual at B2 from C2. For each person, the specific shortcomings will be different.

Some people front load their language learning with lots of study and grammar. Others front load it with comprehensible input.   Both strategies could continue to be effective for a given individual. For some though, one may need to change things up in order to shore up the gaps.

How much help one needs in noticing the gaps and filling the gaps is highly individualized.

Some like authority and will bow to it, trusting the authority knows best. Others have difficulty finding a trustworthy "helper". For those, the maxims of "know thyself" and "the buck stops here" are critical.

Edited by luke on 22 February 2015 at 6:21am

2 persons have voted this message useful



Cavesa
Triglot
Senior Member
Czech Republic
Joined 4769 days ago

3277 posts - 6779 votes 
Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1
Studies: Spanish, German, Italian

 
 Message 108 of 177
22 February 2015 at 4:41am | IP Logged 
Fossilized mistakes are sometimes caused by teachers, not solved by them. I used to
have several such issues concerning areas explained by various teachers in a chaotic
or just plainly wrong manner. What I needed was self study, lots of examples, I had to
break the wrongly taught pattern and reassemble the pieces.

As I said, a correction by a tutor can be part of the process, and sometimes helpful,
but on it's own, it is not the most important part. It is not sufficient without the
rest of the process, while the rest of the process (basically an explanation from a
any kind of reliable source + enough exemples ) can correct the mistake I am making
without the mistake being pointed out by someone else.

I think the example with "devant" and "derriere" is a stupid one. I cannot actually
imagine someone likely to fossilize such a mistake. A realistic example: Several uses
of subjonctif. Most teachers (both natives and non natives) are explaining that in a
weird way and it is a new concept for natives of many languages, such as Czech. I
remember asking about it, I remember others asking about it and the answers, I have
old notebooks. And now I can clearly see the way the mistake was created and
fossilized. The teachers were the root of the problem. Sure, I asked my tutor a few
questions on it and hopefully, I got rid of the last remnants having spent a nice hour
with a coffee and my grammarbook. Of those two parts, I think the latter was more
important.

But it doesn't changed the fact the teachers are so glorified often without reason.
Just as not all, by far not all, guitar or tennis teachers are good, many language
teachers aren't good and the chances of meeting a bad one and finding out too late are
too high. And I find it alarming how hard it is to get useful references when looking
for a tutor.

But there were areas where I found the advice of my tutor much more important, yet
much less of the advice was given. The proper form of writing, the style and fitting
into the required genre. Because that is something the preparatory books totally fail
to explain and the usual courses are no better. Considering my tutor wasn't going as
deep in the corrections of these issues as I had hoped to, I could have learnt quite
as much had the resources been sufficient. It is like the audio. Before the internet,
cds and so on, you needed a teacher so that you could listen to the language. Now, you
need the teacher for proper writing style explanations until better literature on the
subject is published.
3 persons have voted this message useful



s_allard
Triglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 5190 days ago

2704 posts - 5425 votes 
Speaks: French*, English, Spanish
Studies: Polish

 
 Message 109 of 177
22 February 2015 at 5:27am | IP Logged 
Cavesa wrote:
..

I think the example with "devant" and "derriere" is a stupid one. I cannot actually
imagine someone likely to fossilize such a mistake. A realistic example: Several uses
of subjonctif. Most teachers (both natives and non natives) are explaining that in a
weird way and it is a new concept for natives of many languages, such as Czech. I
remember asking about it, I remember others asking about it and the answers, I have
old notebooks. And now I can clearly see the way the mistake was created and
fossilized. The teachers were the root of the problem. Sure, I asked my tutor a few
questions on it and hopefully, I got rid of the last remnants having spent a nice hour
with a coffee and my grammarbook. Of those two parts, I think the latter was more
important.

....

I usually don't reply to this series of teacher-bashing posts and constant harping because I have long
since given up trying to make sense of this stream-of-consciousness writing. But I will make an
exception because this is really too much. I don't want to waste precious time with this but I do object
to my example being called stupid. Well, maybe it's not my example after all because I wasn't talking
about "devant" and "derrière". Where does this "derrière" come from? It's not in my post. This is so
weird. I think there is a serious problem of French reading comprehension here. Quick, a tutor for
written French is needed here.

Those who read my post properly will note that I was actually talking about the confusion of "devant"
and "avant". A similar problem that often occurs with the Spanish "delante" and "ante".

The source of the confusion for English-speakers learning French is, obviously, the phonetic
similarities of both forms. It should be pointed out that even native-speakers of French sometimes
confuse these words. Here is an article from the Office québécois de la langue française on these two
words:

Avant et devant

As the article points out, the distinction between the two terms can sometimes be a bit difficult to
make because of subtle distinctions of time and space. It is easy to get these forms mixed up and
unless corrected quickly, the mistake becomes fossilized. This is exactly why Kato Lomb called
uncorrected mistakes perilous. Once you start confusing devant and avant, it is very difficult to
separate them later.

2 persons have voted this message useful



1e4e6
Octoglot
Senior Member
United Kingdom
Joined 4050 days ago

1013 posts - 1588 votes 
Speaks: English*, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Norwegian, Dutch, Swedish, Italian
Studies: German, Danish, Russian, Catalan

 
 Message 110 of 177
22 February 2015 at 6:04am | IP Logged 
I am a bit confused. "delante" and "ante" being compared to "devant" and "avant",
because "después [de]" and "antes [de]" in some of those cases are correct choices. I
quote the exemples from the link:

Exemples :

- Nous nous reverrons sans doute avant ton anniversaire.
- Le restaurant où je dois la rejoindre est situé juste avant l'église sur la rue du
Pont.
- La sécurité de ses enfants passe avant la sienne.
- Pour Ariane, la famille passe avant la réussite professionnelle.


In Spanish, the first one, using "ante" is incorrect:

Volveremos/Regresaremos sin duda ante tu cumpleaños should be

Volveremos/Regresaremos sin duda antes de tu cumpleaños

For the second example, the Spanish using "delante" also does not sound right to me.
It should be "frente/enfrente de" for "facing":

El restaurante donde/en el cual/en el que tengo que encontrarla se encuentra/se
ubica/está justo frente/enfrente de la iglesia en la Calle de la
Puente/Rue du Pont


"ante" is usually a very figurative and formal preposition, like how sometimes a
priest might say in a church or sometihng:

Que a nosotros la misericordia nos la déis cuando nos encontremos ante el Señor, a
Vuestra Merced te suplicamos.


or in a legal setting "before" the judge:

Encontrándome ante Vuestra Señoría, Señor Juez, le ruego le perdone a mi cliente,
por la impunidad que había hecho el día de los hechos ocurridos.


The fourth example of that list, must be completely reformulated in Spanish to me, to
sound idiomtically correct. I would translate that French one to Spanish as such:

A Ariane le importa más la familia que el exito profesional.

Just to add one more, the first example of the last list in the link:

Le devant de sa maison est recouvert de briques.

A simple "delante" would just sound wrong to me. It needs something else:

La parte delantera de su casa está cubierta de ladrillos

A bit better might be:

Unos ladrillos cubren la parte de enfrente de su casa.

These are rather formulaic things that I have seen in many of my grammar books, from
intermediate to advanced. The last time that I have had any sort of Spanish or French
formal education (never had a tutour), was in 2007. They never taught me any of these
things, I did this by self-study, with a heavy grammar approach.

I am not sure how this is impossible for a B2 aspiring to C2, or in the process of
having left B2 and is in limbo between C2 (perhaps somewhere in C1 range) to figure
this out, or at least have already learnt this. I have gone through more than 20
grammar books by myself after the B2 level, and these things come quite naturally and
quickly now, I am not sure how a bit of self study can not but help with these
prepositions if it is the argument that a tutour or some class is needed to figure out
what exactly wherefore these prepositions are used.

Edited by 1e4e6 on 22 February 2015 at 6:25am

3 persons have voted this message useful



s_allard
Triglot
Senior Member
Canada
Joined 5190 days ago

2704 posts - 5425 votes 
Speaks: French*, English, Spanish
Studies: Polish

 
 Message 111 of 177
22 February 2015 at 6:32am | IP Logged 
1e4e6 wrote:
I am a bit confused. "delante" and "ante" being compared to "devant" and "avant",
because "después [de]" and "antes [de]" in some of those cases are correct choices..


With all due respect, there is some confusion here. The point discussed in my post has nothing to do
with the translation of devant and avant into Spanish. We're talking about people mixing up devant and
avant when speaking French. Much the same way some people mix up delante and ante in Spanish.
2 persons have voted this message useful



Ari
Heptaglot
Senior Member
Norway
Joined 6342 days ago

2314 posts - 5695 votes 
Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese
Studies: Czech, Latin, German

 
 Message 112 of 177
22 February 2015 at 9:31am | IP Logged 
An interesting thing about fossilized mistakes is that the first time I read about the concept, it was in the context of ALG and the "natural method" which advocates a silent period. They blamed the fossilized mistakes on early speaking. If you start speaking before you have a good enough grasp on the language, you'll make more mistakes that are morre likely to fossilize. I think this makes sense. Of course, delaying speaking is no guarantee that no mistakes are ever made. Maybe it can be useful in the later stages to get some feedback from a tutor and then set to work on the weak points oneself. Maybe the reason corrections have not been shown to be helpful in classroom studies is just because it's not the corrections, as s_allard indicates, but the focused training. Simply being corrected every time you make a mistake does nothing. But taking that weak point and sitting down with a cup of coffee and a grammar book, as Cavesa suggests, might just do it.

There are other ways of getting the feedback, for people who canno afford a tutor. Joining a writer's community online, for example. And a lot of stuff can be gained from just googling expressions one wants to use in writing, or using websites like linguee.com.


8 persons have voted this message useful



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