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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6985 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 9 of 90 06 April 2007 at 3:37pm | IP Logged | |||||
Do you think one could equate 'hours of understood listening' with 'comprehensible input'? As for the hours, the French figure of 720 matches the FSI classroom hours to get to ILR level 2/3. The Thai figure is longer than the FSI class time (scroll towards the bottom of the page). Do you understand their estimates as saying that one hour of listening at 50% comprehension = 30 minutes worth of the "goal listening time"? I guess it's time to get listening. Edited by luke on 06 April 2007 at 4:24pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Farley Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 6872 days ago 681 posts - 739 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, GermanB1, French Studies: Spanish | Message 10 of 90 06 April 2007 at 4:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
Yes I think you could. They based many of their studies on Krashen’s ideas of input.
Yes that is what they were getting at. You could watch a 2 hour movie, maybe there is only 1 hour of conversation, you might only understand 30 minutes, and may you only pay attention to 15 of those minutes. EDIT: Here is a review of AGL's course. You will have a scroll down find the article: Critique of AUA's Automatic Language Growth Program Edited by Farley on 06 April 2007 at 4:13pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6227 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 11 of 90 06 April 2007 at 7:11pm | IP Logged | |||||
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So this can be compared to a sort of a spoken sentence method. A movie can have less than a half hour's worth of conversation (unless you're into real touchy feely stuff and even then there's a lot of "significant" silence). What is more important, perhaps, is the number of hours you'll be listening with little to no comprehension. We're talking going cold turkey here, listening to a language until you start understanding things and once you start collecting bonus points for "understood listening" you can do the math to see how long it will take you to finish. Right? Well, I did a lot of that with and without previous knowledge and I can tell you that previous formal training accelerated my comprehension. I still needed to do a large number of hours of listening, but having some sort of a grammatical skeleton on which to slap some flesh did help tremendously.
I do not believe in witchdoctor talk that you should only follow their method and nothing else. Edited by reineke on 07 April 2007 at 1:12am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| leosmith Senior Member United States Joined 6330 days ago 2365 posts - 3804 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Tagalog | Message 12 of 90 06 April 2007 at 11:24pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Comprehensible input is input you can comprehend. I think if one doesn't know anything, and watches a typical movie, at the end, one probably won't comprehend much more than in the beginning. I'm not saying that this is what AGL does, but this is what I've seen people post. Maybe AGL has designed graded comprehensible videos. Who knows. But I still wonder if holding one's tongue for so long is smart.
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| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6227 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 13 of 90 07 April 2007 at 1:10am | IP Logged | |||||
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The "critique" explains their method somewhat. A lot of the input comes directly from the teacher and is tailored to student's knowledge. It progressively gets harder, perhaps too fast (and therefore the critique). A second teacher helps by interacting with the first one. I am sure they use movies etc but it seems that their teachers are the main source of spoken language. How early they start with movies I don't know but all their content has method behind it. My "method" from the input perspective was very natural (and slow). The upside was that I was never bored. I basically just stared at all sorts of content meant for children and adults that I wanted to see. I was exclusively interested in the content and not in the process itself. I was in no hurry to ace the test. I believe it took a long while to say hey, I understand this and after that first Eureka my progress went incredibly fast. Way too fast perhaps and this leads me to believe that the hours spent listening to incomprehensible gibberish were paying a golden dividend. Some of the input I received over and over again may have rubbed off and bits may have been sleeping and waiting for the right key to unlock parts of the "system". I think way too much attention is being paid nowadays on trying to develop speaking skills from the very start. Everyone wants to be able to speak ASAP (even when they have no pressing need) and the schools are trying to oblige. Shorter courses for busy people who need to travel and hopefully make themselves understood in foreign lands are a completely different ball game. Edited by reineke on 07 April 2007 at 1:47am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6362 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 14 of 90 07 April 2007 at 1:50am | IP Logged | |||||
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I read about the ALG approach a good while ago, and I've used some of their thoughts to guide my Mandarin learning. Unfortunately, I had spoken a bit before I first encountered the method. I have a few comments.
I don't see any reason why using dictionaries, grammar studies, etc., would do anything but increase the comprehensibility of the input. I advocate doing normal study, with a bit more focus on getting input, and simply not speaking at all, for example doing Pimsleur or FSI, but thinking the answers instead of speaking them out loud. Your job is to get as much comprehensible input as possible, and you can't expect the input to get comprehensible by itself. So you've got to use the tools at your disposal to make it so. That includes sentence analysis, flashcards, repeating the input, and what have you. To the self-learner who wishes to follow the ALG approach, I'd say the Rosetta Stone is about as close as you get, though it will hardly provide you with enough material for 800 hours. Finally, I don't think I'm going to wait for 800 hours of comprehensible input (1500 hours of input altogether?). A good accent is nice, but it's not that important to me. So when I've had a good number of hours (no amount specified), I plan to start chorusing. This in combination with the silent period will hopefully get me a "good enough" accent. I've got more languages than Mandarin to learn, so I can't afford to go for perfection. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| reineke Senior Member United States https://learnalangua Joined 6227 days ago 851 posts - 1008 votes Studies: German | Message 15 of 90 07 April 2007 at 2:17am | IP Logged | |||||
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I believe 1600-800 implies 50% comprehension on average. The first number depends on the shortcuts devised by the teachers (gestures, pictures etc.), on the course material and on your own individual progress. Mine was probably 4000-800. The second number depends on the difficulty of the language and is nothing else than an ideal number of hours of comprehensible input needed to reach a certain level of competence. Good pronunciation was a natural outcome of the process but not the main goal in itself. In any case the first number is always significantly higher than the second one. If I got something wrong someone please correct me.
If I'm using Pimsleur and there's a silence, I don't see why I can't open my yap and pronounce things as my voice is not directly interfering with the input. Edited by reineke on 07 April 2007 at 2:31am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6362 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 16 of 90 07 April 2007 at 3:51am | IP Logged | |||||
That's the whole point. Don't open your yap. The theory goes something like this:
This means that there's no such thing as a "critical period". The difference between how children learn a language and how adults learn, is that children keep their yaps shut for three years. If adults do the same, they get the same results, as the ALG classes demonstrate. Problem is, for an adult, keeping the yap shut is dreadfully boring and frustrating. And naturally, the input has to be comprehensible, or your brain won't know which sound goes with which word. 3 persons have voted this message useful |
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