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Difficulties with shadowing | ||
Tags: Shadowing | Alexander Arguelles | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Lessons in Polyglottery |  | |
| Asiafeverr Diglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6130 days ago 346 posts - 431 votes  1 sounds Speaks: French*, English Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, German | Message 1 of 19 15 October 2007 at 1:41pm | IP Logged |
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I just finished editing Assimil Japanese. Today, I put all the edited lessons on my iPod and walked outside for a while. It was extremely challenging!
I tried to listen to the tape while concentrating on every sound but I could not do it for more than 30 consecutive seconds. I understand almost no Japanese so to me, every lessons sounded like random foreign sounds nicely put together. Whenever I would try to listen carefully and try to remember the lesson, I would think about something else less than 30 seconds later! I listened to a lesson while walking and then thought about random events of my life in the middle of the tape, my concentration would just not go on the tape. Do I need to stay concentrated on the lessons during the whole 2 hours or can I simply listen them passively? It is very hard for me to listen to these "sounds" and actually concentrate on them and try to remember them, especially when walking. I walked in many streets and most of them were quite quiet. There were cars but not a lot so they didn't really disturbed me. The only thing that was really challenging was, like I said, to concentrate on each sounds produced by my mp3 player when I have no idea of what they mean, and that for 2 hours in a row! I stopped around lesson 30 because it was getting too hard to stay focused. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance! 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| quendidil Diglot Senior Member Singapore Joined 6100 days ago 126 posts - 142 votes Speaks: Mandarin, English* Studies: Japanese | Message 2 of 19 17 October 2007 at 9:45am | IP Logged |
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I do experience this problem somewhat as well. As I stroll around my housing estate with my PSP and headphones, listening to the mp3 recordings of "Breaking into Japanese Literature", I find that although I can understand large portions of the stories, some parts are still incomprehensible and my mind will wander. I guess listening to them over and over again, until you are able to shadow the recordings is the solution?
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| Asiafeverr Diglot Senior Member Hong Kong Joined 6130 days ago 346 posts - 431 votes 1 sounds Speaks: French*, English Studies: Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese, German | Message 3 of 19 17 October 2007 at 12:11pm | IP Logged |
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But I understand about 5% of the recordings! I am a beginner. The professor's technique is to listen to them over and over until you can shadow them but my mind just won't do it. Today I listened to the same lesson over 20 times but I was thinking about other things most of the time and I don't remember anything except for the first 3 words. Listening to them without really concentrating doesn't work either because at some point I don't even hear the lessons anymore because I think about something else instead.
The professor recommends listening before understanding but it is very difficult for me :( Am I supposed to read the lessons? I think this would help a lot. When doing something such as Pimsleur or the "recommended" way to do Assimil, it is much easier to concentrate on the text and I remember much better. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 jeff_lindqvist Diglot Moderator SwedenRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6697 days ago 4250 posts - 5710 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English Studies: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Mandarin, Esperanto, Irish, French Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 19 17 October 2007 at 1:04pm | IP Logged |
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In the thread "Ideal Systematic Approach to Korean", one of the suggestions was to "blind shadow" the audio, which to me seems as if you're not supposed to read the lessons. I don't think that blind shadowing at this stage is a way to reinforce what you've read (simply because you haven't read anything yet) but rather get you accustomed to the rhythm and the sounds of the language itself.
Something like learning a melody by playing by ear or with the help of written music. Of course you can keep shadowing the audio when you're familiar with the text. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7044 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes | Message 5 of 19 21 October 2007 at 5:43pm | IP Logged |
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Mr. "Asiafever," you are to be commended for your enthusiasm in attempting to blind shadow two straight hours of Japanese, but I do hope you have not attempted this again! At very best you are wasting at least 90 minutes of precious study time, and it is much more likely that you are actually impeding your own progress and setting up a terrible psychological precedent for future learning.
If you can devote two hours a day to the study of Japanese, you should make decent progress. If you can begin your studies by an intensive and exclusive period of phonetic training, you will be much better off. So, you may indeed shadow two hours of Japanese each day for the next few weeks, but I would recommend that you do so in eight different fifteen minute installments. I would also strongly recommend that you not listen to the recordings for the entire program, but rather that you initially listen to only the first fifteen minutes (i.e., so that you do the same thing eight times a day), and that you then add other fifteen minute segments in successive alteration as you make progress. Passive listening with a wandering mind is terribly harmful if you do not understand what you are listening to. For shadowing to be of any value, it must be intense and concentrated, a genuine and actual exercise. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6385 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 6 of 19 27 October 2007 at 10:45am | IP Logged |
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ProfArguelles,
I've recently tried to "shadow" some songs in Portuguese and Spanish, languages I don't speak at all yet. I like these songs a lot, so I was able to keep concentrated, but I had another problem: I seem to hear some familiar words, but since my knowledge of these languages=zero, the words I "understand" are from other languages, and I'm pretty sure they (or at least some of them) wouldn't even sound similar to the words I know if I spoke the language. I've already experienced this a few times and the worst thing is that it's really hard to get rid of such associations later on. Is there a way to avoid it or should I stick to what has worked for me: starting to shadow only when I can understand (most of) what I'm saying? Best regards, Marina Evdokimova 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| ProfArguelles Moderator United States foreignlanguageexper Joined 7044 days ago 609 posts - 2102 votes | Message 7 of 19 28 October 2007 at 6:15pm | IP Logged |
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Ms. Evdokimova, I do not believe the situation you are describing is problematic. I take it you are planning to learn Spanish and Portuguese at some point, and, looking at the languages you know already, I believe you will find that vocabulary acquisition will be a relatively easy part of the task. Knowing English as well as you obviously do, and with at least a base in Latin and Esperanto, you already know a huge number of Spanish and Portuguese words. I assume that it is these words, carried and colored by the spirit of the songs that you are singing, that you are recognizing. If this is so, this is in fact good and normal, for the procedure for shadowing languages that are related to those you already know is somewhat different from the procedure for utterly exotic ones. With exotic tongues you can, must, and should focus first and foremost on the phonetic aspect in isolation precisely because you can do so, not knowing anything of what you are saying. With related languages, however, you may find that you come to understand a surprising amount of what is going on in the early lessons merely by shadowing them repeatedly, understanding a bit more each time. You may form some false associations, but there is no need to let these become fixed convictions that cannot be corrected when you encounter what they really mean. Indeed, that very experience of being corrected can carry with it an insight that actually makes it easier to remember the material learned. There is no need to blind shadow these kinds of languages for any length of time, and indeed the desire to find out exactly what you have been saying gives nice impetus to your initial explorations of languages.
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| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6385 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 8 of 19 29 October 2007 at 3:26am | IP Logged |
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I forgot to mention that many words I "recognized" are actually from Finnish, and that my vocabulary in Latin and Esperanto is quite small.
And yes, I'm planning to learn Spanish and Portuguese, the latter hopefully already next year. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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