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 Language Learning Forum : Language Programs, Books & Tapes |  | |
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6991 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes  Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 225 of 245 30 March 2012 at 11:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
It depends on your level and what you are looking for from a translation. For me, as support for an audiobook of which I have incomplete comprehension, it is very helpful. E.G., if I'm good with most prepositions and the filler words that permeate the language, but I don't know some specific words, it improves comprehensible input. Google translate is far from perfect, but I find it to be a helpful tool. In the example above for stories by The Brothers Grimm, it is great for words like specific types of trees, flowers, and especially words that were perhaps common at the time the stories were written, but that are rarer in modern adult literature. So, I don't use Google translate like a dictionary per se, but rather as comprehension support for audio and ebooks. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Gatsby42 Groupie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4427 days ago 55 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 226 of 245 31 March 2012 at 6:08pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Carlo- I'm not sure how you'd define "new" to the language. I'm around an A1 level,
which makes most of what I've tried to read for L-R totally incomprehensible. I thought that was the point of L-R, to help you learn material too advanced for you traditionally. Either way, thanks for the links. I'll be sure to use them. Luke- Alright. I was just thrown off when you were talking about Google Translate like you could start an audiobook and have GT literally translate entire chapters word for word. It sounded crazy since most good translations are done in a caring and meticulous fashion over the years by someone who has advanced fluency in both languages. Either way, thanks again for the links and advice. Thanks to you, I stumbled upon some Oscar Wilde works that I plan on pouring through. Don't really have any familiarity with them, but they seem to be mercifully simple. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| carlonove Senior Member United States Joined 5772 days ago 145 posts - 253 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 227 of 245 01 April 2012 at 7:27pm | IP Logged | |||||
I tend to use LR-related techniques only when I've reached an intermediate level of a language, as I find it too frustrating as a beginner (more or less the "totally incomprehensible" stage you described). Because of the relative closeness of Spanish of English, this may not pose as much of a problem for you. You may not be able to do "pure" LR with Spoken Wiki articles since there is no corresponding translation, but if you read the article with the assistance of Franker and then copy/paste the "frankated" text into a document file, you've got a custom-glossed version of the article that should help you make more sense of the recorded version. If you're unfamiliar with Franker you should take a look here: Franker Browser Extension 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6383 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 228 of 245 01 April 2012 at 9:14pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Hm, Italian and Spanish are about equally close to English. It's just that in the US you get a lot of exposure to Spanish.
Afaiu, a requirement of doing LR (with L1 text and L2 audio) is that a sentence in the target language is no longer a string of incomprehensible noise for you: ideally, you should be able to tell where one word ends and the other starts, even if you don't know the meaning. Though for me LR is also a good way to get to this stage. Edited by Serpent on 01 April 2012 at 9:15pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| carlonove Senior Member United States Joined 5772 days ago 145 posts - 253 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 229 of 245 01 April 2012 at 10:02pm | IP Logged | |||||
I agree that Italian and Spanish are relatively equal in difficulty to English, but I wasn't referring to Italian in my comment. I've LR'd with languages outside the romance family, and consistently found that it's too frustrating when you have little or no grasp of the grammar. I was in fact much more successful with Italian, which I studied in school for several years. If I recall correctly Siomotteikiru did do some "traditional" grammar study prior to his LR marathons, although I don't know where it's mentioned in the massive original thread. Also, nobody's been able to replicate his level of success, or as far as I know even been able to maintain the same intensive study schedule he describes, so people should realistically not expect to reach the basic reading and listening fluency he mentions in such short a period of time. And if someone could reach that kind of basic fluency so quickly, I suspect they could do it with methods other than LR as well. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Gatsby42 Groupie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4427 days ago 55 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 230 of 245 02 April 2012 at 10:48am | IP Logged | |||||
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Thanks again for the links and advice Carlo.
As for debate about L-R, I'm still willing to try it. I never really bought into the idea that attaining fluency would ever be the kind of easy task I could do in an entire year. Spanish is weird. It's close to English in grammar, but very alien in other ways. With me, the trouble in L-R isn't so much that I can't understand anything, but more that it's hard to keep up. If you stop to actually think for a second you risk getting three sentences behind and losing an entire paragraph before you find your place. I'm gonna keep up with it and see what happens. I figure that if I can't start making sense out of the current short story I'm L-Ring within another three to four goes, I just may find something else to pour my energy into. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6225 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 231 of 245 03 April 2012 at 4:36pm | IP Logged | |||||
Of course one can attain 'fluency' (as it tends to be defined on this forum) in a year: people routinely do so, if they're studying fairly intensively. Whether it's people at the DLI, missionaries, or European students on exchange programs, this is not a rarity. One doesn't hit this level in a year by spending 15 minutes a day or an hour a week on a language, of course.
It's a short story. That's not how LR works: you need a longer text. Repeating the same short one at your level isn't very effective. There was a thread a few years ago where the lingq guy tried repeating a short story 72 times or so, with dismal results... it's just not enough material. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Gatsby42 Groupie United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4427 days ago 55 posts - 72 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Spanish | Message 232 of 245 03 April 2012 at 9:51pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Well, then I'm at a loss really. The only text I've been able to find so far that matches
it's audiobook is Harry Potter and I heard bad things about the translation and it's reliability as a text for learning. Guess I'll just have to suck it up and hope the comments about it's translation were exaggerated. Edited by Gatsby42 on 03 April 2012 at 9:51pm 1 person has voted this message useful |
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