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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| L Newbie United States Joined 6179 days ago 13 posts - 13 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 1 of 48 29 May 2007 at 9:53pm | IP Logged | |||||
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This websites owner discusses many great ways to study a language, yet people don't usually discuss how they study. So how do you personally study? Does anyone here have a unique way that they practice their languages? How long do you study and how often?
1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6484 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes  Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 48 30 May 2007 at 2:27am | IP Logged | |||||
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You can't mean that! A large proportion of the posts describes flash cards, wordlists, the sentence method, comprehensible input, immersion techniques, shadowing, standard systems such as Pimsleur and Thomas and FSI or the internet, the tribulations of common class room teaching plus loads of threads about other questions about how to study - including the question of time spent on different language learning acitivites. A whole subforum describes different commercial or free systems, another is filled with personal study logs. If I chose to give you links to these discussions, I would have to reference half the site.
Edited by Iversen on 30 May 2007 at 2:31am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Keith Diglot Moderator JapanRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 6558 days ago 526 posts - 536 votes 1 sounds Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Mandarin Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 48 30 May 2007 at 4:29am | IP Logged | |||||
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Studying? Who wants to study when we can just read posts and theories and ideas on this forum all day long?
I am working on Mandarin by repeatedly, and I mean repeatedly (don't make me repeat that) listening to the dialogues from Assimil Chinese with Ease. I've got a study log about it. I'd like to listen for 165 minutes a day, but I'll settle for 90 minutes. It's hard to get uninterrupted time for it. I am trying to overlearn the material and use this as my foundation to build upon. I refrain from speaking and just listen. If you're interested in my method, visit my study log. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| MarcoDiAngelo Tetraglot Senior Member Yugoslavia Joined 6228 days ago 208 posts - 345 votes Speaks: Serbian*, English, Spanish, Russian Studies: Thai, Polish | Message 4 of 48 30 May 2007 at 4:55am | IP Logged | |||||
That's so true :) Edited by MarcoDiAngelo on 30 May 2007 at 4:55am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| cameroncrc Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 6298 days ago 195 posts - 185 votes 2 sounds Speaks: English*, Japanese Studies: Ukrainian | Message 5 of 48 31 May 2007 at 12:22pm | IP Logged | |||||
of course! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| wetnose Groupie United States Joined 6759 days ago 90 posts - 98 votes Studies: Mandarin, English* Studies: Japanese | Message 6 of 48 31 May 2007 at 6:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
In fact, I was thinking that perhaps we should dedicate a section of the forum to collected 'classic posts'. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Kleberson Diglot Senior Member Great Britain Joined 6199 days ago 166 posts - 168 votes Speaks: English*, Portuguese Studies: Italian, Russian, Arabic (Written), Mandarin | Message 7 of 48 07 June 2007 at 4:33am | IP Logged | |||||
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Now that I have moved into "self-study" without the use of courses that take all the guessing work out for me, such as Michel Thomas etc. I have become really stuck. I am learning vocabulary from "mastering vocabulary" but often stumble upon a sentence that usually misses a word from the Italian sentence in the English translation. What do I do in this situation? Should I just look the missing word up in a dictionary and add it to the English translation? I haven't been doing this yet, because I'm not sure if it is correct to do that?
I'm a new language learner and I started in the middle of April. So how do all you veteran learners solve this issue? Assuming it happens to you when you are learning vocabulary from a vocabulary book. I spend roughly half an hour learning one translation due to this ongoing problem!!! It's a real headache. Thanks. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Volte Tetraglot Senior Member Switzerland Joined 6220 days ago 4474 posts - 6726 votes Speaks: English*, Esperanto, German, Italian Studies: French, Finnish, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 8 of 48 07 June 2007 at 5:19am | IP Logged | |||||
I don't use books which just teach isolated vocabulary; the only person I can think of who has an approach anything like that is Iversen, who describes his approach here. However, I think the problem is a little more fundamental - it sounds like you're trying to approach Italian as a set of vocabulary to be memorized. I've never heard of anyone successfully learning a language that way. Grammar is also important, and even more than that, the concept of 'how people say things'. "The Art and Science of Learning Languages" has the most elegant and concise description of this that I've seen: it basically points out that every language is a mapping of reality, rather than another language. I'd strongly recommend reading it; it contained a lot of insights that I've arrived at painfully over a few years on my own. Just adding 'missing words' to the English translation helps you figure out what individual words mean (not perfectly, since words don't correspond 100% between languages, but partly), but not necessarily what the phrase means; just as there are different ways to say things in English ("a cat is in the room" - "there is a cat in the room" - "in the room, a feline exists", etc), there are different ways to say things in Italian - and many of them don't translate word-for-word into correct, or even comprehensible, English. Pay attention to how the Italian phrases are formed; if you want, try to analyze them; but don't get hung up on it. What's really important to be able to communicate in a language, and understand it, are probably two things: vocabulary, and a decent idea of how people put their thoughts together to express something (grammar and idiom). You can do a surprisingly large amount with a few hundred words and a basic idea of grammar (you can't read well, or hold meaningful conversations, but you can communicate at a basic level if the words/phrases are well-chosen). Acquiring vocabulary is really important (the best language teacher I've ever had claimed it was the most important thing) - but it's not enough. I'd recommend that you get some somewhat more structured material for independent learners. For Italian, I quite like Assimil; apparently the FSI course isn't so great, but I haven't seen it. Getting a good textbook or grammar reference would be a good supplement too; I used "oggi in italia" in highschool without liking it much, but now that I look back to it for some places where my grammar is weak, I've learned to appreciate it. I personally wasted a few years (about 3) trying to learn languages on my own without any course materials (other than a few lessons of Pimsleur, 2 German intensive courses, and a few textbooks that I didn't really use) - just dictionaries, bilingual texts, and native texts and radio stations. I ended up with a decent passive grasp of French and Italian, along with some use of Italian, and smatterings of an ability to read Romance and Germanic languages to various degrees, and to be fairly good at picking out key bits of meaning from texts even in largely unfamiliar languages given either cognates (words that sound similar to ones I know) or if the important information was numerical or technical and written with a numeric system I could read. Since finding this forum, I've been using Assimil with a combination of languages, ranging from the most familiar (Italian) to entirely new (Persian), and well - it's definitely an extremely easier and more efficient way to learn. Their are two key elements: bilingual texts (with the explicit reminder to pay attention not only to what is said, but -how- - word for word translations make no sense, usually), and audio that matches the transcript of the language you're trying to learn. Having both is much, much more effective than using them in isolation. I don't care much, at this point, for the traditional textbook approach, but I'm planning to experiment more with it. Your mileage and learning style may vary. Edited by Volte on 07 June 2007 at 5:24am 1 person has voted this message useful |
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