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Bull you believed starting out | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5015 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 81 of 94 29 June 2015 at 12:49pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
What I wrote is "bull I believed starting out", which is what the thread is about, and I just quoted you there because I saw an interesting connection between what we said -- the idea that "methods", or ways to connect language pieces together, eventually become one more language piece (or a piece of the language + learner combo, anyway) quite often, rather than being as universal as people usually think. Kind of having pieces and a frame, and [not] counting the frame as a piece, if you let me use such a crude analogy.
The link was probably wrong because I was restlessly surfing the internet in the middle of an extremely hot night (+30°C at 5AM), and that's the kind of thing you can just expect, but I think I can reconstruct my train of thought: Correcting natives is just as possible and 'right' (or wrong!) in itself as correcting a learner is, because being 'right' about language use has nothing to do with where you were born. However, I thought (before you replied, I added 'seems to me' up there) you were hinting at the idea that using language that is 'educated', 'old fashioned', 'written register', etc. is somehow always 'right', if not merely better than the alternatives -- and that's as wrong as avoiding it 'not to sound bookish / posh / whatever' -- both of them widespread beliefs we'd do better without, btw., i.e more 'bull' I concurred with at some point. Edited by mrwarper on 29 June 2015 at 12:52pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4097 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 82 of 94 29 June 2015 at 6:39pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
I didn't say anything like that and it's not what I think, for the record! What a naivete to be accused of. The observation was about how English people will accept something being a bit out of place, register wise (I won't speculate why at this moment, though I have my ideas) and Spanish people tend to correct misplaced registers. I admit this could be a very personal experience, although I was adding to the observation of Bao, a German.
I'm sorry but the analogy doesn't help. I don't see the connection to what I was saying, and I am trying. If it was not clear I apologise. I wanted to say that it's a good idea to think in chunks rather than words. Chunks like "as soon as possible" "schnellst moeglich" "cuanto antes" which can never be deduced purely from their constituent words, only learned. I say: don't learn the words - learn the chunks. Is this advice to be called a "method"? I'm just paraphrasing Luca Lampariello, with the word "chunk" coming from psychologist George Miller originally. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| mrwarper Diglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member Spain forum_posts.asp?TID=Registered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5015 days ago 1493 posts - 2500 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishC2 Studies: German, Russian, Japanese | Message 83 of 94 29 June 2015 at 8:21pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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We all misinterpret others sometimes, maybe I misread Bao, you, or both, apologies about that.
As for linking what you said about language chunks and my comment on methods, I am too tired and I can think of no way to make myself any more clear right now -- I don't think it's really important to establish an unarguable connection anyway, so sorry, but I'll leave it at that :( 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5017 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 84 of 94 29 June 2015 at 8:34pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
This is strange, because I'm pretty sure I was the one who talked about the stars coming out being an element in itself--in the very post to which you are replying. So you are agreeing with me, and aligning me against myself. A tad surreal. If you have such powerful allies, I'm hesitant to disagree with you! That being said, as one can see, I agree one does have to learn chunks of words together, but at the same time, I claim (of course this is my experience only, take it as such) that it's easier to learn the chunk if you know the constituents of the chunk first. So in my view, it would be best first to learn: 1. The present tense of "haber" = "hay." 2. The term for star: "estrella." 3. How to pluralize words like estrella: "Add -s." And then: 4. The phrase "hay estrellas." This as opposed to simply trying to memorize "hay estrellas" first before learning "hay" and "estrella" or how to make Spanish plurals. I'll admit that sometimes single words have a meaning that is difficult if not impossible to isolate. In some phrases "get" is one of these. And I gave a similar example in my original post: the "dint" in "by dint of." That being said, most words do have a meaning that is easily isolated. "Estrella" is easily isolated. And when a word is easily isolated like that, then it is best (in my view) to learn the vocabulary item first. Edited by ScottScheule on 29 June 2015 at 8:36pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| smallwhite Pentaglot Senior Member Australia Joined 5097 days ago 537 posts - 1045 votes Speaks: Cantonese*, English, Mandarin, French, Spanish | Message 85 of 94 30 June 2015 at 12:08am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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I couldn't think of even 1 bull I believed starting out, yet people are able to come up with 11 pages of it. I guess I was lucky because no one told me anything about language learning back then; I just figured things out by myself.
Jesus. If for just this one aspect of life, you once believed in so much bull, imagine how much bull you have believed in or are believing in, about all aspects of life. 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 4848 days ago 361 posts - 921 votes Speaks: Portuguese, English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, French Studies: Mandarin, Danish, Russian, Norwegian, Cantonese, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Greek, Latin, Nepali, Modern Hebrew | Message 86 of 94 30 June 2015 at 3:16am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Well, even if 95% of your nontrivial beliefs are correct, you still have plenty of bull ones!
And if you believe that all your beliefs are correct, you are guaranteed to have at least one bull belief. 7 persons have voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| Retinend Triglot Senior Member SpainRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4097 days ago 283 posts - 557 votes Speaks: English*, German, Spanish Studies: Arabic (Written), French | Message 87 of 94 30 June 2015 at 8:12am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
My goodness, really? That's pretty dumb of me. I read all the posts (8 pages more by the time I returned to it) very quickly then replied to three of them, so I suppose that I presumed "you" were different people since the ideas seem to clash a little, no? The rest of your post illustrates an important caveat, which is that at the very outset I admit you're mostly learning words and their transformations, and it's folly to try to memorize the whole chunk because you'll end up misremembering sounds and saying something like "hoy estrillas" by mistake. But I think one ought to graduate to chunks as soon as possible. Would you agree that eventually the "word-up" approach becomes subsumed into chunk-learning? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||
| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5017 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 88 of 94 30 June 2015 at 3:49pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||
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Well, I've tried to explain why I don't think the ideas clash. I said that chunks have to be learned, and then I discussed when they should be learned (i.e., after learning individual vocabulary items). No clash there.
"Hoy estrillas" is a very good illustration of the precise problem that I try to avoid by learning the constitutent words first, so we agree there. If I try to learn the chunk first, then that's a mistake I'm very likely to make. But if I learn "hay" and "estrella" by themselves, then I'm quite unlikely to make that mistake. As to whether the word-up approach becomes subsumed into chunk-learning, yes, that's my design. Learn individual words first, and then the chunks that are made out of them (with exceptions we've discussed--fossilized expressions, and words with very mercurial meanings, like "get" in English, or "echar" in Spanish.) As to how soon to graduate to chunks, that depends. Realistically, if one has a set amount of time to devote to learning vocabulary, then they must make a choice between learning a new individual word or a new chunk. What's the most expedient choice? It depends on usage. A particularly useful chunk like "the stars are out" probably should be learned before an obscure single term, like "orpiment." By the same token, one should probably learn "knife" before they learn "wish in one hand, shit in the other..." Likewise, it could make sense to learn basic greetings and pleasantries before learning intermediate vocabulary items. But the usual result of my method is, as you say, initially learning mainly individual words, with a few chunks, and then, as time goes on, fewer and fewer individual words and more and more chunks. In my Spanish now, for example, I've learned most of the necessary individual words I need in any general conversation, so most of my time is currently spent learning chunks. Then you get to chunks of chunks, e.g: "se lo lleva todo por delante" includes the "sub-chunk" "por delante" which I've already learned. Edited by ScottScheule on 01 July 2015 at 5:34pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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