|
 |
Billingual people | ||
Tags: Diglossia | ||
Share with:
| ||
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| kinoko Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6435 days ago 103 posts - 109 votes  Speaks: Italian*, English, Japanese, Spanish Studies: German | Message 25 of 69 30 March 2007 at 12:11am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
|
Ok just tell me how on earth you are going to understand anything of Korean or Chinese if you don't read and study the language together with listening to natives. That's not comprehensible input. "learning like a child" and comprehensible input are VERY different things. Children do not really understand what it's spoken to them. In languages like Korean or Japanese (expecially for completely unrelated European ones) if you just listen, even paying attention, you may well not even be able to distinguish the sounds you hear and recreate the word. In your brain, let alone in your oral production and sentence building.
What is "comprehensible input" for you and how do you relate it with the concept of "learnin like a child"? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Linguamor Decaglot Senior Member United States Joined 6417 days ago 469 posts - 599 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, French, Norwegian, Portuguese, Dutch | Message 26 of 69 30 March 2007 at 1:14am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
No study aids, grammar or textbooks, or dictionaries. No grammar explanations. I was not trying to learn Norwegian. This took place before I attended university. It was while at university that I encountered the concept of comprehensible input.
The human brain is designed to learn language from comprehensible input. The nature of language also makes it necessary to learn language this way. The lexico-grammatical system of any language is far too large and complex to be consciously learned.
I would agree that your example involves comprehensible input. The incidental details are important to me because they largely determine the specific elements of language one is exposed to, and the amount of comprehensible input one is exposed to. I don't try to force everything within the comprehensible input framework. I find rather that the concept of comprehensible input accounts for the observations that are made when language learning is examined, and predicts results that are then observed. This is exactly what any theory of language learning is required to do.
Could you be more specific? Edited by Linguamor on 30 March 2007 at 2:40am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Linguamor Decaglot Senior Member United States Joined 6417 days ago 469 posts - 599 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, French, Norwegian, Portuguese, Dutch | Message 27 of 69 30 March 2007 at 2:17am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
I could recruit a native speaker of Korean or Chinese and instruct him or her on how to speak to me in Korean or Japanese in a way that I could understand. As my ability to understand Korean or Chinese increased, and I began to be able to speak, I could begin to converse with other native speakers, and thus learn more from comprehensible input. This article explains exactly how it can be done. http://www.languageimpact.com/articles/gt/leaveme.htm
Children learn language by understanding the speech that is directed at them, and then later from understanding speech they hear around them. Comprehensible input is speech and/or writing that is understood. Edited by Linguamor on 30 March 2007 at 2:37am 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Linguamor Decaglot Senior Member United States Joined 6417 days ago 469 posts - 599 votes Speaks: English*, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Danish, French, Norwegian, Portuguese, Dutch | Message 28 of 69 30 March 2007 at 2:35am | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
You can acquire language from comprehensible input without being immersed in the target language or living where the target language is spoken. To acquire language from comprehensible input you need exposure to language that you can understand. The best possible way to go about it is to have one or more people speak to you in the language in a way that makes it possible for you to understand what they are saying. As they speak to you, your abiliy to understand more and more language increases, and your ability to speak the language emerges. That is the ideal situation. The problem is what to do when the situation is not ideal. The answer is to expose yourself to ample amounts of language (written and spoken) that you can understand, while gradually increasing the difficulty level. This means that you need to find material that contains language that you can understand, but which also contains some grammar and vocabulary that you have not previously been able to understand, and material that contains grammar and vocabulary that you can understand, but not yet produce. Any written or spoken material with these characteristics can be used. Now what do you do with these materials? You read and/or listen to them, focusing on understanding them. When you are understanding language, you are giving your brain the opportunity it needs to acquire the language. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6742 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 29 of 69 30 March 2007 at 12:02pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
This is potentially important information. Unless you took a long break after High School before going to the University, you would have been in your late teens at the time. While this is very much on the tail end of the "critical period", it is still, based on my unsystematic observations, an early enough age to offer considerable advantage for this type of immersive language acquistion compared even to people coming from abroad after college.
I have no issue with the need to acquire, as opposed to learn, a lot of the language for anything remotely resembling fluency - it's a given. Whether "acquisition" just involves comprehensible input, or whether there are some additional general mechanisms involved, I have no choice but to leave to the researchers in the field, who may or may not be in broad agreement on this at the moment. It's actually not important, because when I was talking about comprehensible input not being "the end-all of language learning", I was referring merely to the practical aspects of language study by an adult.
These "details" are the crux of the matter and the reason I got into this discussion. Precisely because you believe that comprehensible input is the main language acquisition mechanism, saying that you study languages by a "comprehensible input method" is pretty close to saying nothing at all. As is advising someone asking how to learn a language that he or she just needs to make sure to have enough comprehensible input. For there is no other way. Whether I am watching TV, working through an Assimil course, talking to a teacher, or painstakingly translating a novel word for word, I am getting comprehensible input. When I am brushing up on grammar, I do this to make input more comprehensible in the near future. When Iversen is memorizing word lists from a dictionary, he is preparing himself to make subsequent input more comprehensible. Only a method specially designed to preclude any hope of learning a language would not involve a lot of comprehensible input. So, the devil is not in the comprehensible input idea, but in the details, for these details are all that distinguishes various language study methods. People new to languages do need to be reminded that language learning must involve a lot of practice and not just study, and that our minds have a way of figuring out and internalizing a lot of things through practice, but that's about it.
It may well be an important or even the sole mechanism of language acquistion, but that's beside the point. The issue is what type of comprehensible input, what activities help make the input comprehensible, and how answers to these two two questions may vary among individuals.
The answer is in everything I've said up to this point. A number of people have been encouraging you to share the details of how you study languages, but I found it hard at times to find these details in your posts because the discussion was dominated by the comprehensible input idea. In sharing the details you allow us to try to figure out which of your actual practices may be worth emulating, for just saying "comprehensible input" is too general to be informative. Edited by frenkeld on 30 March 2007 at 12:45pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| kinoko Tetraglot Senior Member Japan Joined 6435 days ago 103 posts - 109 votes Speaks: Italian*, English, Japanese, Spanish Studies: German | Message 30 of 69 30 March 2007 at 12:15pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
|
I could recruit a native speaker of Korean or Chinese and instruct him or her on how to speak to me in Korean or Japanese in a way that I could understand. As my ability to understand Korean or Chinese increased, and I began to be able to speak, I could begin to converse with other native speakers, and thus learn more from comprehensible input.
Thats brilliant Linguamor, basically your "learn like a child method" would come down to hiring a native teacher to teach you privately from morning to night, living with you and devoting her existence to teaching you the language in progressive steps and in a way to be always comprehensible for you. I have never heard anything like that about language learning. Obviously you're making up things without even knowing what you're talking about... 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| solidsnake Diglot Senior Member China Joined 6840 days ago 469 posts - 488 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin | Message 31 of 69 30 March 2007 at 12:26pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
Wow, that sounds like my last 5 relationships! ;P 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||||||||||||||
| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6742 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German | Message 32 of 69 30 March 2007 at 12:36pm | IP Logged | ||||||||||||||||||||
Actually, two or three tutoring hours a week would still be consistent with the original quote. The "learn like a child" aspect of it would be in (a) not using a dictionary, (b) not studying grammar, (c) not using one's native language, (d) immersion outside the tuturing hours. The method doesn't really seem all that radical, and as for cost, I've known people who liked to get into a new language by working with a tutor two or three hours a week. It's not within everyone's means, but one doesn't have to be Bill Gates to afford it either. Edited by frenkeld on 30 March 2007 at 1:28pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
|  | 
Printable version
|
| Copyright 2024 FX Micheloud - All rights reserved No part of this website may be copied by any means without my written authorization. |
