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Bull you believed starting out | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4453 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes  Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 25 of 94 22 June 2015 at 1:57pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't think I started out with any big dogmas one way or another as far as methodology, though one of the false things I believed early on was that in order to reach high proficiency in a language I would have to be "fanatic" about exposure to it rather than doing a more reasonable amount regularly. This sometimes led to discouragement since I ended up listening to a lot of things I really didn't understand much at all and fatiguing my brain with a flood of language just to get lots of "exposure" in. Edited by tastyonions on 22 June 2015 at 1:58pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5554 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 26 of 94 22 June 2015 at 3:13pm | IP Logged | ||
I would think we need one on "Bull you still believe" though. 13 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5747 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 27 of 94 22 June 2015 at 4:58pm | IP Logged | ||
Prof Arguelles said that he also uses shadowing to maintain a language. When actively focusing on other languages, he maintains the non-active ones by shadowing audio books. I suppose that could be considered an occasional activity though that would also place shadowing outside of beginner's strategies. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| robarb Nonaglot Senior Member United States languagenpluson Joined 4847 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 28 of 94 23 June 2015 at 2:36am | IP Logged | ||
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I used to believe that L2->L1 dictionary lookups were really bad because they train you to mentally translate.
I used to believe that
I still think that the quoted strategy is the best way to learn the core structures of the language and how to read, and it's my primary learning activity. But now I recognize that there's a place for listening, speaking and writing if you want to be good at more than just reading. And that some (crazy) people are actually extraverted enough that they benefit from having constant interaction with native speakers all the time instead of reading, and that other (not nearly as crazy) people get a lot of mileage out of memorizing and/or systematic grammar study. It turns out that, once you're motivated and persistent, your methodological ideology doesn't predict success that strongly. The fallacy of "classroom methods don't work" comes largely from comparing unmotivated learners to autodidacts who are strongly self-selected for motivation and generally have positive outcomes by any method. 10 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tangleweeds Groupie United States Joined 3363 days ago 70 posts - 105 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Irish, French | Message 29 of 94 23 June 2015 at 4:29am | IP Logged | ||
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I started out believing that if I worked hard to pronounce things accurately, I'd naturally
pick up what they meant along the way. I hate when my brain gets stuck repeating a phrase that I can't remember the meaning of. Especially when I'm someplace I can't look it up! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| chaotic_thought Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 3330 days ago 129 posts - 274 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Dutch, French | Message 30 of 94 23 June 2015 at 11:23am | IP Logged | ||
This isn't the reason translating dictionaries are bad tools for learning. It's because they typically don't provide context and almost always leave more questions than they answer. Here is a typical example for trying to find out what 'yumi' means in Japanese by using a translation dictionary: yumi -> bow With this entry, I can quickly discover that the Japanese word yumi means 'bow'. All right! But wait a minute... what does 'bow' mean? Without context, words very rarely have anything approaching a clear meaning. And for a learner you really should demand a clear meaning. 'Bow' can mean lots of things, like it could be a section of ship, a gesture used in greeting, a sort of ribbon you tie on the front of your suit, a colorful band that forms in the sky after the rain has cleared and the sun is shining, etc etc... The proper way to solve this is to give appropriate context to allow the reader to understand you. Nonetheless translating dictionary authors, when faced with this problem, will invariably either not provide the context or they will provide a 'fake context' instead (which is even worse IMO): yumi -> bow (and arrow) This particular example is from the EDICT Japanese-English dictionary. Why does adding "and arrow" in parentheses constitute a 'fake context'? Well, at least it tell us what 'bow' is not. We can know that 'bow' is not a gesture used for greeting, not the forward part of a ship, and not a ribbon that you tie on your suit. But it still doesn't say anything about what 'bow' actually is. Furthermore, by adding the extra words "and arrow" this 'fake context' is tossing in some subtle confusion to the definition where it does not belong. For example, is the word yumi only applicable when we have the bow together with the arrows? What if I've forgotten my arrows or have none left? How do I refer to the bow itself? These are questions that the translation dictionary can never hope to answer. The only reason anyone is able to understand this 'definition' in the first place is because they are coming to this dictionary already knowing what yumi actually means. Now let's see what a random kokugo-jisho (standard dictionary) says about the word: yumi -> buki no isshu (a type of weapon) ... Here we can see already from the first three words that the explanation is moving in the right direction. You can stop reading if you want or you can continue reading the definition to see it further explained that yumi is a device often made of wood or bamboo and that it utilizes elastic force to hurl arrows toward a target. In other words, the definition actually tells you what it means enough that you can draw a picture of it. It will also teach you other words simulatenously that are related to yumi, like dan-ryoku (弾力), arrow (矢), etc. And it leaves no questions of what the word that you're actually looking up means. That is why I don't use translation dictionaries for learning what words mean. Not because they "train me to mentally translate" or something like that. Edited by chaotic_thought on 23 June 2015 at 11:30am 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6491 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 31 of 94 23 June 2015 at 12:39pm | IP Logged | ||
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I don't think I brought along much bull when I restarted my language learning in 2006, but I definitely was taught some bull during my school- and university years. Luckily I was also taught so many sensible and useful things that I eventually came out knowing slightly more than I knew when I started school as a 6 year old goggle-eyed kid.
Among the things I was taught was that languages ought to be taught by the natural method, using only the target languge. So I got 2½ years of French in the 'Gymnasium' (lycée, high school) where one of the most gifted teachers I ever have experienced tried to teach a class at the mathematical-physical line French. After 2½ years he realized that this was a mistake, and the same teacher taucht most of us all the French we needed to pass the exam through grammar-translation and other 'old-fshioned' methods. Later on in the university we were urged to use monolingual rather than bilingual dictionaries, but luckily we disobeyed and just bought both kinds. A monolingual dictionary is essentially a lousy lexicon. OK, maybe it has contains some useful morphological and a few examples, but generally the explanations contain too little exact information of the topics at hand - like telling us that a "yumi" is some kind of weapon. OK, so is a bazooka or a club. Actually I get more information if the book tells me that a yumi is (or can be) the same thing as a 'bow' in English - and maybe a few things more. But of course there are bad bilingual dictionaries too, like those that tell me that it is a bow without telling me which of the meanings of this word are relevant or not. My stance on monolingual dictionaries is that they hardly ever are better or more informative than a bilingual dictionary of the same size. And if I really wanted to know what a "bumi" conceivably might be I would have to be fairly advanced to understand the phrase "buki no isshu". More bull: conversation classes are good for you. Well, maybe if you like to discuss literature, but when I studied French in the mid 70s I had trouble with "mundtlig sprogfærdighed" (oral profiency) in spite of following a lot of those conversation classes. After two failed attempts I simply dropped all French classes and went on interrail in France, and when I came back just before the exam a smart teacher had arranged a French-and-only-French weekend for his students in a chalet - and my note jumped from 5 at the 13-scale to 8, which was above the average. OK, speaking will always be my weakest skill, but if I hadn't dropped the conversation classes I would never have gone on to get my exam,with the top note 13 twice in grammatical subjects. Potential bull no. 4: after this I might have concluded that you just have to get some immersion and then you can learn any local language in a flash. But luckily I didn't succomb to that fallacy. I did improve my Spanish by travelling in the 90s and 00s, but only because I already knew the basics. I also travelled in Asia and in the Slavic parts of Eastern Europe, and I never picked up any of the languages they speak there. Edited by Iversen on 23 June 2015 at 7:51pm 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tastyonions Triglot Senior Member United States goo.gl/UIdChYRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4453 days ago 1044 posts - 1823 votes Speaks: English*, French, Spanish Studies: Italian | Message 32 of 94 23 June 2015 at 12:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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Monolingual dictionaries tend to stink for certain types of lookups, especially some concrete nouns. Let's consult the RAE for the Spanish word "un cenzontle":
"Pájaro americano de plumaje pardo y con las extremidades de las alas y de la cola, el pecho y el vientre blancos. Su canto es muy variado y melodioso." "American bird of brownish-gray plumage with the extremities of its wings and tail and chest and stomach (colored) white. Its song is quite varied and melodic." Ok, that kind of narrows things down, but just telling me "mockingbird" would have been a lot simpler and left me with less uncertainty. Of course, we do have Google Images these days to clear things up for us. Edited by tastyonions on 23 June 2015 at 12:52pm 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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