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Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6399 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese
| Message 49 of 489 10 July 2007 at 11:02pm | IP Logged |
An example of something which I believe qualifies, for Japanese, as meeting your method (though it's probably a bit too short), is the book "Breaking into Japanese Literature". It has Japanese on one page, and English on the facing page. http://www.speaking-japanese.com/breaking/index.html has the MP3 recordings of the 7 stories included in the book.
The audiobook thread does not concern parallel texts - perhaps it should. It's just free audiobooks, on the assumption that it's possible to find corresponding texts much more easily than audiobooks. I'm becoming increasingly dubious of this assumption, unfortunately.
I'm currently trying to gather enough materials to give your method a serious try for German; after a lucky start with Kafka, I've had a harder time finding long recordings -and- accompanying texts.
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| FSI Senior Member United States Joined 6319 days ago 550 posts - 590 votes Speaks: English*
| Message 50 of 489 10 July 2007 at 11:22pm | IP Logged |
I'm currently trying a modified version of your method with Around the World in 80 Days to learn French. The book is 8 hours long as read, and the natural French + English translation texts are available at Gutenberg.
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| frenkeld Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6903 days ago 2042 posts - 2719 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German
| Message 51 of 489 10 July 2007 at 11:55pm | IP Logged |
Volte wrote:
I'm currently trying to gather enough materials to give your method a serious try for German |
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You seem to have already studied some German, so you won't really be trying the method in its pristine form, as the first entry into a new language. It seems less controvercial when one is already past the basics.
I found both the language and the needed tools to try out this approach - I placed an order for a 25-hour audiobook of Sienkiewicz's "Quo Vadis" earlier today, and I've never touched Polish before. I would've preferred something more recent and less substantial, but finding all the needed pieces isn't easy. I don't, however, have a week to take off and spend on Polish to the tune of 12 hours a day, so it still won't be the orginal method, but then, it won't be much use to me, and probably to a lot of other people, if it turns out that its effectiveness drops to nought when one is limited to half an hour to one hour a day.
Edited by frenkeld on 11 July 2007 at 12:05am
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| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6399 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese
| Message 52 of 489 11 July 2007 at 1:04am | IP Logged |
frenkeld wrote:
You seem to have already studied some German, so you won't really be trying the method in its pristine form, as the first entry into a new language. It seems less controvercial when one is already past the basics.
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Indeed. I've taken two month-long intensive courses, and can manage some basics in German, but I'm short of conversational. I can read newspaper articles for content, missing some details, but literature is currently far beyond me. If this method lets me read literature meaningfully, I'll be extremely pleased with it, and I'll most likely apply it to several other languages. The first very-close-to-totally-unknown one I'd be tempted to use it for would be Polish.
frenkeld wrote:
I found both the language and the needed tools to try out this approach - I placed an order for a 25-hour audiobook of Sienkiewicz's "Quo Vadis" earlier today, and I've never touched Polish before. I would've preferred something more recent and less substantial, but finding all the needed pieces isn't easy. I don't, however, have a week to take off and spend on Polish to the tune of 12 hours a day, so it still won't be the orginal method, but then, it won't be much use to me, and probably to a lot of other people, if it turns out that its effectiveness drops to nought when one is limited to half an hour to one hour a day.
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Please post about how using that book goes; I'm keeping my eyes open for Polish materials. I second what you say about it being non-trivial to put together all the necessary pieces.
If the method takes 12 hours/day, but delivers some amount of proficiency within a week, it would work extremely well for me. I have a flexible research job this summer, and once it's over, I have an (academic) year without obligations, so I could hopefully do quite a lot with it.
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| Ortho Groupie United Kingdom Joined 6310 days ago 58 posts - 60 votes
| Message 53 of 489 11 July 2007 at 3:08am | IP Logged |
I am currently trying this (I am a new learner in French and have done a bit of Pimsleur and watched some French In Action videos but otherwise know nothing) using "The little Prince". I've made parallel text for each chapter using MSWord when I came to it, and am using the audio that goes with the French version at Logos.
I understand step 1, read the English all the way through, and I understand step 2, listen to the French while listening to the audio, so that you learn to separate the words by sound. I am comfortable with both of these.
What I don't entirely understand is step 3. Should I listen to the audio while looking at the French and the English? (they are in parallel columns, so I can see them both at the same time easily) Or should I listen to the audio while looking only at the English, and ignoring/covering the French side? My brain feels kind of weird when I do this, but it is interesting. The original post seems to imply that I should be listening to the audio while looking only at the English, but I am not sure, so I thought that I would ask because it is unclear for me and it seems important.
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| siomotteikiru Senior Member Zaire Joined 6321 days ago 102 posts - 242 votes
| Message 54 of 489 11 July 2007 at 3:11am | IP Logged |
You all seem to overlook one important factor:
if you don't enjoy (I might say "passionately in love") the texts you're going to "listen-read" to, you won't get much out of it, you're attention will be constantly distracted and you will get bored. And then .... happy-go-lucky Miss Hopper won't be done good and proper.
Edited by siomotteikiru on 11 July 2007 at 3:18am
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| JasonChoi Diglot Senior Member Korea, South Joined 6319 days ago 274 posts - 298 votes Speaks: English*, Korean Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese, Latin
| Message 55 of 489 11 July 2007 at 4:08am | IP Logged |
Ortho wrote:
What I don't entirely understand is step 3. Should I listen to the audio while looking at the French and the English? (they are in parallel columns, so I can see them both at the same time easily) Or should I listen to the audio while looking only at the English, and ignoring/covering the French side? My brain feels kind of weird when I do this, but it is interesting. The original post seems to imply that I should be listening to the audio while looking only at the English, but I am not sure, so I thought that I would ask because it is unclear for me and it seems important. |
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The instructions say to look at the translation while listening to the foreign language, though I see no problem with going back and forth between the bilingual texts, as long as the they are right in front of you.
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| Ortho Groupie United Kingdom Joined 6310 days ago 58 posts - 60 votes
| Message 56 of 489 11 July 2007 at 4:32am | IP Logged |
Hmm. That's what I initially thought as well, though after working with it for a couple of hours this morning I am starting to feel that might actually be important to ignore the French text and just make the connection between the heard French words and the concepts that I already have in English.
While I find myself unable to mentally repeat big sections of the spoken French, I do find that through the text I am having a lot of moments of recognition where I have seen and noticed a word a second time and am developing an explicit idea of what it means, almost as if it were an immersion situation (which I guess it sort of is). I didn't seem to have those moments of recognition yesterday when I was looking at both sets of text: the fact that I was sort of automatically semi-translating every word seemed to stop that from happening, almost as if there wasn't enough empty space for me to recognize things for myself?
Also, when I ignore the French text I am also not being distracted by how the language is written, so I am becoming somewhat convinced that it is necessary at this step to ignore the written French translation to "keep it out of the way", as it were.
However, I do feel that if looking at both languages while listening to the audio is as or more effective as just looking at the English, then it must be much more efficient to look at both. It's just that I suspect that only looking at the English is more effective.
Edited by Ortho on 11 July 2007 at 4:34am
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