Compiled by
the author – 死を思って生きる, atamagaii頭が好い, aYa (綾 or 彩) turaisiawase辛い幸せ, happy-go-lucky Miss Hopper, AniaR,
buonaparte, Phi-Staszek, durak, Грибоедов,
inuinu, now and zen, adream, Zenon Kawafis, nikoniko, namida, Puchatka,
Mokrzyczka, Waremechan, Ona patrzy i się uśmiecha, akinokaze, harugakita,
SmileLick, У меня есть
всё, My Granny – meet My Granny http://i43.tinypic.com/14wag7c.gif.
Everything written by myself is ©
Phi-Staszek.
Posted by
Volte here:
L-R the
most important passages
http://learnlangs.com/Listening-Reading_important_passages.htm
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=21162&PN=1&TPN=1
If you want to learn a language
quickly you’ll need:
The key to L-R is sensory memory,
usually completely overlooked by learners.
Listening-Reading in a teeny-weeny
nutshell:
Complete
gratis legal LR material
Examples of literary texts for zero
beginners.
My last post 2009 08 02 Charlmartell
(= leserables)
mjcdchess (The essence, the soul,
the spirit of L-R:)
My comment about the above passage:
[quote= siomotteikiru
死を思って生きる, atamagaii頭が好い, aYa (綾 or 彩) turaisiawase辛い幸せ, happy-go-lucky Miss Hopper]
Warning:
English is
not my cup of tea at all. But somehow I manage to drink it now and then.
I don’t believe
in learning a little bit every day. I believe in learning a huge bit every
minute.
Plenty of
people can drive a car. L-R is Formula One.
Now you
know what to expect.
Lesson one, find your own way by yourself.
Lesson two,
shooting is a straight line.
(Gun Crazy
Beyond The Law)
Disclaimer:
Of course, it's none of my business how you waste your own time, so let me
waste my own time my own way.
LISTENING-reading:
Beauty is in the ear of the beholder, or, to put it bluntly, LISTEN (L2)
and read (L1). (And use your second favourite organ, that
is what a wise rabbi in
(L1 = mother tongue, L2 = the language you’re learning)
L-R the
most important passages
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=6366&PN=31&TPN=1
If you want to
learn a language quickly you’ll need:
1. a recording performed by good actors or narrators in the language you want
to learn
2. the original text (of the recording)
3. a translation into your own language or a language you understand
4. the text(s) should be long: novels are best
You may wonder: why long texts? Because of the idiolect of the author; it
manifests itself fully in the first ten–twenty pages: it is very important in
learning quickly without cramming.
The key factor in learning a language is EXPOSURE, that is how much NEW text
you will be able to perceive in a unit of time. There is a physical limit here,
you can’t understand any faster than the text reaches your brain. That is why
you ought to SIMULTANEOUSLY read the translation and listen to the original
recording: that provides the fastest exposure.
You should ENJOY the text you're going to listen to.
Texts for beginners should be long - the longer the better, up to fifty hours
(e.g. The Lord of the Ring, Harry Potter, Anna Karenina, War and Peace,
Catch-22).
You might doubt if it is possible. I can assure you it is - you should see
twelve-year-olds listening to Harry Potter.
The translation:
a) interlinear (for beginners)
b) literary, but following the original text as closely as possible
The original text and the literary translation should be placed in parallel
vertical columns side by side.
If the texts are placed side by side, you can check almost instantly whether
you understand or not.
The order ought to be EXACTLY as follows:
What you do:
1. you read the translation
because you only remember well what you understand and what you feel is
"yours" psychologically
2. you listen to the recording and look at the written text at the same time,
because the flow of speech has no boundaries between words and the written text
does, you will be able to separate each word in the speech flow
and you will get used to the speed of talking of native speakers - at first it
seems incredibly fast
3. you look at the translation and listen to the text at the same time, from
the beginning to the end of a story, usually three times is enough to
understand almost everything
This is the most important thing in the method, it is right AT THIS POINT that
proper learning takes place.
If you’re in a position to do it right from the start, you can skip 1. and 2.
4. now you can concentrate on SPEAKING: you repeat after the recording, you do
it as many times as necessary to become fluent
Of course, first you have to know how to pronounce the sounds of the language
you’re learning. How to teach yourself the correct pronunciation is a different
matter, here I will only mention the importance of it.
5. you translate the text from your own language into the language you’re
learning
you can do the translation both orally and in writing, that’s why the written
texts should be placed in vertical columns side by side: you can cover one side
and check using the other one.
And last but not least: conversing is not learning, it is USING a language, you
will NEVER be able to say more than you already know.
© Phi-Staszek
To put it
in a nutshell:
Learning a language is all about EXPOSURE, that is how much NEW text you're
able to understand in a unit of time (a minute multiplied by hours and days).
When you start at the beginner's level your exposure is almost none.
It does NOT matter whether you understand each single word, in the beginning
concentrate on sentences. The more of them you will hear and see at the same
time, the more exposure you will get. Let your brain do the rest.
The layout of the texts to learn is very important.
Sensory memories - visual (iconic) and auditory (echoic)- are very short and
disappear within a second, so you get lost when you have to look for words,
they should CONSTANTLY be within your eyes’ and ears’ reach.
If you want to maximize your EXPOSURE:
Use meaningful texts (not words, short sentences).
Use LONG texts with AUDIO.
By texts I mean TEXTS (a story, a joke, a newspaper article, a poem, a novel),
not individual words or sentences or boring textbooks dialogues about nothing.
Don't try to speak (or write) too soon, it is much better to listen to more
texts instead, listening comprehension should be the most important goal.
I concentrate on the meaning, I do not try to learn a particular language, what
I am interested in is the story, not the language.
And don't do any tests, it is a complete waste of time and a source of
appalling number of mistakes. Tests are good for teachers and publishers, not
for learners.
Sooner or later you will feel you're ready to speak or write, it will come
naturally, and it will be easy.
I’ve NEVER learned how to write English, and I am able to put across almost
anything I want, (making hell of a lot of mistakes, but who cares as long as
the meaning is clear). You may not believe it, but I haven’t written anything
in English for three years, and still I can manage.
ONE thing at a time.
Remember "The Last Samurai": "Too many minds: mind the sword,
mind the people watch. No mind."
PS
As to my English. I'm not a native speaker. I am aware I might sometimes sound
too abrupt or patronizing. If so, please forgive me, it was not my intention.
Be happy, go lucky.
Miss Hopper
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=6366&PN=31&TPN=15
Now let me explain
in more detail why I think the Three Steps are a useful tool in acquiring a
language.
STEP 1
You read the story to make it “yours” psychologically.
I added: you must be passionately in love with the text you’re going to study.
Imagine you’re a biologist and you’ve been crossing frogs with snails and
cloning sheep since you were in cradle – it’s your life, you know hell of a lot
about it, it makes you happy and you can’t imagine your life without it. One
day you discover there’s a wonderful new theory on how sheep can be grown into
lions. Unfortunately it’s in the clitty-titty language, and you don’t know it.
So you decide to learn the wonderful clitty-titty in a day or hang yourself.
Notice two points:
you know almost everything about the subject and you’re in love with it.
The texts in clitty-titty will be self-explanatory and highly enjoyable, you
won’t get tired (on the contrary, you’ll get happier and happier) and you’ll
guess the meaning of at least half of the sentences in clitty-titty.
And now a real life example: La principessa, a teenage girl, is in love with
Harry Potter, she’s been reading the books time and again and knows them by
heart. She decides to become a witch herself: to go to Hoggwart, she must learn
English in a week to prove she’s worthy.
No problem, she has a magic wand: audiobooks of her prince (Harry Potter), but,
unfortunately she has no English texts.
She listens to the books time and again, after a few times she can understand
every single word.
Notice two points:
Harry Potter is her life, and the texts in English are self-explanatory.
I’m sure you remember my own example: Kafka and Nabokov.
You might as well remember I say you can skip Step 1 and 2.
They are not absolutely necessary, though they might be useful.
Step 2
You listen to the text in LSD2 and look at the written text in LSD2.
If you’ve ever tried to listen to native speakers of any language, you must
have noticed that at first you do not know which groups of sounds form words
and that they (speakers, not words) speak as if they were machine guns.
The aim of STEP 2 is to cure these two small drawbacks, and at the same time to
get some exposure to meaning, sounds, rhythm, intonation in the LSD2.
Whether you should go from the beginning to the end depends on two things:
1. how much you understand
2. if you already can recognize the boundaries between words and the speed is
no longer frightening.
If you understand quite a lot (being a free person, you yourself must decide
how much is enough for you), you’d better go to the end.
If you don’t understand anything new after the first ten to twenty pages but
you can follow the written text easily and can spot the boundaries in the flow
of speech, you’d better stop and go to STEP 3. If the speed is still
frightening you go on until it stops being so.
You might as well remember I say you can skip Step 1 and 2.
They are not absolutely necessary, though they might be useful.
STEP 3
The Paradise proper, though it seems Hell at first.
You’re reading LSD1 and listening to LSD2.
IF you’re a fast enough reader you can read much faster than people speak, so
you’re able to know IN ADVANCE the meaning of what you’re going to listen to,
and to be in a position to guess at least some meaning (with a good translation
almost everything) of what you’re listening to.
How difficult the text for “listening-reading” should be depends entirely on
you, you might start with something relatively simple.
Because of the IDIOLECT of the author the first 10 – 20 pages might be a
nightmare for some, but then it’s getting easier and easier, the longer the
text the easier it becomes, but it’s still the same IDIOLECT, variation after
variation on the same theme, more and more celestial music, tengoku no ongaku.
IF you’re not capable of doing it without stopping the tape (audio file,
tempora mutantur, there are no tapes any longer), you might decide to read a
page (or a paragraph) and listen to the passage once or twice and go on.
The aim of STEP 3 is obvious: MEANINGFUL EXPOSURE, INPUT, LISTENING
COMPREHENSION.
And ultimately: NATURAL LISTENING. That means understanding completely new
texts.
I might add here: garbage in, garbage out.
Acquiring ANY SKILL means going through an INCUBATION PERIOD, during which you
get confused time and again at first.
I found out from my own experience and a few hundreds people studying on their
own:
To get to the stage of NATURAL listening you have to do about 20 to 30 hours of
‘listening-reading’ to NEW TEXTS.
You might get down even to 10 hours, it mostly depends on the ‘density’ (= new
words per page) of the texts.
Listening to a short text time and again does not mean new exposure, it is
still the same mechanical repetition. It might have its merits as well: you’re
exposed to sounds, rhythm and intonation, but that’s about it, nothing more.
NOTHING EVER SHOULD BE DONE AT THE EXPENSE OF EXPOSURE until you get to natural
listening to difficult texts.
Some say listening comprehension is passive.
I couldn’t agree less, it is the most difficult skill to acquire. On how you do
it depends a great deal: pronunciation, speaking, and to a large extent reading
and writing.
I might say: God DID know what s/he/they was/were doing when s/he/they told us
to listen first and then learn how to speak, and much later to invent writing.
But we are clever enough to cheat on her/him/them and use writing to acquire
listening skills as well.
When you’ve come to the stage of natural listening you might decide you’d like
to say something to your beloved.
And here there’s one more minor obstacle to overcome: PRONUNCIATION (phonemes,
stress, tones, rhythm, intonation).
It does matter whether you distinguish shit and sheet in English, or proszę and
prosię in Polish, or blé and bleu in French and so on.
It’s not difficult at all: right amount of listening-reading, natural listening
and phonetic listening does the trick.
Speaking is easy: almost everything depends on the above. You might decide to
repeat after the recording, after you’ve reached the stage of natural listening
it should be very easy and done without any effort. It does not matter if you
repeat each word, phrase or sentence.
While repeating after the recording (professional actors in fact) you’d better
not look at the written text, for two reasons:
1. interference of your mother tongue, particularly when LSD1 and LSD2 use the
same alphabet
2. speaking means taking SOUNDS out of your brain, not reading aloud.
I might add here as well: taking part in a conversation means first of all
being able to understand what is being said to you.
GRAMMAR AND VOCABULARY
are in the texts,
why should you bother with lengthy and often wrong explanations?
When LSD1 and LSD2 are not closely related, say English and Japanese or to a
lesser extent Polish and Japanese (Polish is much more complicated
grammatically than English, though from the point of view of a Japanese person,
they are two different dialects of the same language), you might want to read
some basic information about the LSD2.
READING
When you’ve done the right amount of listening-reading with parallel texts, you
don’t have to learn the skill separately.
With languages using a different script, say Japanese for Indo-Europeans (us,
unlucky bastards), ‘listening-reading’ saves a lot of toil, thousands of hours
compared with traditional methods using textbooks and flashcards.
WRITING
on the wall
together we stand, divided we fall
After the right amount of exposure to complicated texts with full and beautiful
DISCOURSE, a little bit of written retranslation from LSD2 to LSD1 should be
enough.
You don’t need to translate whole books, though, only the phrases or sentences
you feel you wouldn’t be able to say or write yourself.
Listening-reading, the same as any language, is in fact a SYSTEM (= a set of
interdependent elements that mean something as a whole, in opposition to each
other in the set, not separately). If you skip or omit one element, the
structure crumbles. You may live in ruins as well, why not, and be brainwashed
by schools, teacher, publishers. If you’d rather use Pimsleur, FSI or (the best
of them all) Assimil, please do.
I tell you how to be free and some try to tell me how to be a good slave.
Sorry, not for me, I’d rather die.
ASSAULT = massive exposure in a short period of time
Why?
Hmm, let me think.
The curves of learning and forgetting and overlearning.
Any decent textbook on general psychology begs you to be read.
It might sound
strange but the ASSAULT (massive exposure for hours on end) is a reward for
good life.
Do you love what you’re doing?
Have you ever read books for hours, days or weeks on end with constant joy and
wonder?
Do you get enough sleep?
Seven days
is Hell of a lot of time. Amaterasu (and Jahweh, her younger brother) created
the Universe and everything in it. You certainly can learn a language in a week
if you live ninety seconds a minute.
Never
underestimate the power of a fraction of a second.
If you
still wonder why long texts are so important, I'm sure you haven't read
anything about idiolect, text statistics, discourse analysis or the curves of
learning and forgetting, and overlearning.
IF you don't have parallel texts, do the following:
1. read a page (or a paragraph) in L1
2. listen and look at the text in L2, trying to attach some meaning to it
3. listen and look at the text in L1, trying to attach some meaning to what
you're hearing.
If you don't have the written text in L2, skip step 2, try to do Step 3 from
the beginning to the end, but perhaps more times.
Phases in
acquiring language skills:
PERCEPTION: partial – full
RECOGNITION: partial – full
REPRODUCTION: partial – full
PRODUCTION: partial – full
Vanity’s
French bootcamp
|
vanityx3
wrote:
|
That's exactly what happens in the incubation period. If you go on L-Reading
intensively, full sentences will start to pop-up sooner rather than later. The
brain is finding its way through the maze and building up a coherent system.
PREPARING
Awareness
Knowing what
Knowing how
Setting goals
extra-linguistic
linguistic
Gathering materials
Time (Have you lived a million hours?)
Language skills in your mother tongue
LEARNING (= putting into your head)
“listening-reading”
incubation period
“natural listening”
pronunciation
phonetic listening
reproduction
repeating after the reader
recitation
speaking
reproduction
production
reading
“listening-reading”
reading proper
writing
reproduction
writing proper
USING
COMMUNICATION
CONVERSATION
listening skills
pronunciation
pragmatic skills
vocabulary
grammar
TESTING
good for nothing
it’s for teachers to make you
believe they are necessary and they know better
it’s for publishers to trick you
into buying their books
it’s for school authorities and
politicians to make a living and control you, and tell you what you should do
and fear them
PRONUNCIATION
AWARENESS
inventory of the phonemes of your mother tongue
movements of the lips and tongue to produce the phonemes
inventory of the phonemes of the target language
phonematic listening: minimal pairs, tones
phonetic listening: stress, rhythm, intonation
careful comparison of L1 (=mother tongue) and L2 (= target language)
(Try to) listen to L2 speaker speaking L1
PRODUCTION
Do not try to speak until you've reached the stage of natural listening (= only
after the incubation period of the L-R)
Repeat after the speaker what you only understand (the meaning) and can hear
properly (phonemes, rhythm, etc)
Listen-repeat - if it's correct: listen-repeat, listen-repeat
if it's not correct, do not repeat any more, only
listen
First small chunks (even syllables) here and there while natural listening to
something you enjoy, then the chunks will get longer and longer.
Shadow (= repeat after the speaker(s)) longer sentences and texts.
Recite: choose a few of your favourite pictures (to create a context and
"psychological environment"), put on some pleasant background music,
and imagine why the people (or things) in the pictures use a word, chunk,
sentence, short dialogue you've just shadowed; play all the people (things)
Blind shadowing (without understanding) is a waste of time and effort.
[/quote]
|
Quote:
|
An educated person reads faster than anyone speaks. So we have time to analyze
what we are hearing. You MUST analyze, L-R is not mechanical. If you don't
analyze or are just incapable of doing it, L-R is useless for you. You must
analyze quickly enough without stopping the tape too often. It is a demanding
task. If you are not intelligent enough, you won’t be able to do it, either. To
some extent L-R is similar to simultaneous interpretation. The more difficult
the text, the greater the similarity.
An incubation period is needed to acquire a new skill (listening
comprehension), you must get enough input. Too short a text is useless for L-R.
Handbooks are too short and usually extremely boring.
You only remember what you understand and what is relevant to you. Beginners
need word-for-word translation (plus some grammar explanations, if necessary).
Texts should be self-explanatory, you should know in advance the meaning of
what you are going to hear.
If you do L-R not intensively enough, it will be useless for you. The more
difficult the text you begin with, the more intensive L-R should be. Two hours
a day seems to be the minimum for relatively easy texts.
Parallel texts are extremely useful. The more difficult the text, the more
useful they become. The columns shouldn’t be too wide, not more than eight cm,
you can jump from one column to the other if necessary without stopping the
recording too often. E-texts are more useful, you can use a pop-up dictionary.
For Japanese texts, there should be three columns:
kanji (without furigana) – hiragana transcription with spaces – translation
plus grammar.
或日の暮方の事である。 ある ひ の くれがた の こと で ある。 translation in your language
A good pop-up dictionary is necessary.
Language is
a system, so it's really not possible to say that something is more important
than anything else, pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary, discourse (here: how
the text is organized), listening, reading, speaking, writing.
I like
stories, so I want to understand the story I like as quickly as possible.
I use the
same books I love to learn a new language. Audiobooks, the text in L2 plus
translation, a good reference grammar (and sometimes a dictionary when the
translation is not clear), that's all I need.
I use The
Little Prince, Camus, Kafka, Anna Karenina, The Master and Margarita by
Bulgakov, The Old Man and the Sea, Andersen's fairy tales, Lewis Carroll, A.A.
Milne.
I never get
tired of them. I can start listening and/or reading any of the books and I'm
always in awe: the mystery of the human soul right before your eyes, and you
can constantly smile at it, or - sometimes - cry, but it's happiness,
nonetheless.
And this
AWE-state is the most important factor - the beauty of it is breathtaking, you
never get tired of it, you always want more and you're happy.
I don't
believe there is any optimal environment (except your coffin, that is), it is
your attitude that really matters.
[quote]The
time to be happy is now,
The place
to be happy is here,
The way to
be happy is to make others so.[/quote]
When your
life is your hobby, then everything fits perfectly into the puzzle.
LOVE +
Listening-Reading (INCUBATION period and then natural listening) + pronunciation
= speaking + writing.
Use LONG
novels right from the start. If the languages are different the first three
hours should be translated word for word. If they are similar, it is not
necessary.
Pay
attention to WHAT and HOW to do the WHAT.
WHO does not matter.
Learning is
a search for the inexplicable.
Of course,
I did not invent writing on the wall. Neither did I invent audiobooks. My
grandmother did.
Parallel
texts were used in the antiquity and multilingual parallel texts were most certainly
used by Komensky (1592-1670).
Ancient
Jews taught their children how to read by using memorized Torah sentences.
They
couldn't use e-texts with pop-up dictionaries and audio. It simply didn’t occur
to them.
As far as I
know nobody used long bilingual novels + audio for self-taught zero beginners.
It doesn't
matter who did what, what really matters here is HOW and how to IMPROVE it.
The most important thing is how to make more parallel texts with matching audio
and how to share them.
aYa on 27 March 2009
The moral sense in mortals is the duty
We have to
pay on mortal sense of beauty.
(V.N.)
I'm not
interested in languages. I only like poetry, novels, movies, and some
philosophy sometimes. I start learning a language when something triggers my
LOVE. I've been lucky, I've loved a lot.
Bread upon
the waters. Eat and let the others die of hunger.
Mummy, was
I downloaded?
No, you
were born, sweetheart.
Daddy says
I was downloaded.
Who
downloaded you?
Daddy did.
He asked OUR MOTHER, THE INTERNET and she searched for me. She said my name
wasn't Public Domain and she had to hunt.
Did she
shoot you?
She did.
With http isohunt dot com.
Books
belong to people who haven’t read them (yet).
1. Everything
you’ve done or haven’t done ever since you were born influences how enjoyable
or miserable, fast or painfully slow, your learning will be.
2.
Publishers are there to sell you their products, however poor they are. They
don’t give a damn whether you learn anything.
3. Schools,
universities, teachers are there to make their living, not to teach you.
4. Start
here and now and keep going. If you don’t know what to do, do anything that
seems sensible and improve on the way. Never consider yourself an expert,
you’re bound to fail.
5. So...
you’d better follow Miss Hopper who likes to be done good and proper.
Learning
someone's language is an act of friendship. (fanatic)
Legere est
omnis scientiae fundamentum.
Latin does
make you clever. It's a wonderful source of malapropisms.
A polyglot:
A guy who tells you he knows twenty-three languages and you believe him.
Why should
it matter how many languages a person claims to speak?
The pope
says he speaks with angels, Mr Ziad Fazah says he speaks in tongues. I wouldn't
question their ability of saying so.
D-Esperanto
My mother
hates potatoes and I love rice.
Your goal
is some sense, my goal is some nonsense. Does it make sense to you?
The trouble
with logic is that it's too logical. Learning a language has a different kind
of logic.
Everybody
who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.
Oscar Wilde
You cannot
be taught. However you may learn in spite of being taught.
Смею
ли я
смеяться?
Ежели мы
будем
смеяться, так
никакого
тогда, значит,
и уважения к
персонам... не
будет... (
А.П.Чехов)
He is Alpha
et Omega. With nothing in between.
'Never
imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that
what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would
have appeared to them to be otherwise.' (Lewis Carroll)
Stupidity
always makes me wonder why gods invented it.
My common
sense is rather uncommon.
They are
sure they’re normal. They are just normalized.
I’d rather
have a dry wit than be dry as dust.
If I took
such trifles as death seriously, I’d have been dead long before I was born.
cudowne nic
bez granic
poezJa
So, OK,
y'know what I mean (I hardly know it myself, actually).
First thing in the morning, I went for a brisk walk to our local pub...lic park
for a pint of fresh air and, y'know, I was deep in thought, pondering whether
the Universe came into being by common applause and such evangelical stuff,
y'know. And as I was walking briskly I noticed a multilingual German friend of
mine some two yards in front of me. Actually, it was difficult not to notice
her as she was beaming all over, all smiles and fresh as a daisy. I've just
finished reading an excellent Italian book by an Italian author, says she, Humberto
Echo, his name is, she says, and the title is, let me see, says she, ah, yeah,
Le nom de la rose. It's an Italian book by an Italian author and it's in
Italian, she says. I should read it, too, as it is an excellent book, she tells
me, and she could lend it to me, a quid an hour, says she, a real bargain. It's
a smooth read and, y'know, I'm sure you'll enjoy yourself immensely. It's a
medieval crime story, there's ghosts in it, and a big library, and some monks
who love their neighbours. I tells her I like stories but I'm definitely
against crime and public libraries. Besides, I'm perfectly monolingual (except
for English, but that does not count, as any city bumpkin knows it
nowadays, at least some of it, 'Russian tanks?, No, thanks' and stuff like
that, y'know).
And then Gertrude Stein, I mean my multilingual German friend, that's her name,
tells me I don't know what I'm missing, learning languages makes you happy in a
jiffy, she knows quite a number of them and that's why she's always fresh first
thing in the morning, she begins with Latin, and then Mandarin, and then
Esperanto... and Italian, too. I should have a try, too, Le nom de la rose is a
good place to start, it's a great Italian book by an Italian author and it's in
Italian, an' there's ghosts in it and she could lend it to me, a quid two
hours, a real bargain, an opportunity of a lifetime, and the most fun way to
learn a language, and it will make me happy in a jiffy.
Happiness... that's what I've been longing for ever since I was thrown into
this world.... She might be right, after all, a quid two hours does not sound
too expensive for happiness.
So, y'know, I began reading an Italian book by an Italian author. I was
surprised how easy a read it was, all letters looked familiar, it was not
difficult at all to figure them out. After some ten or twenty pages I did
notice there were some queer letters, too, funny I didn't see them before, some
ç and ê and â and à, and stuff like that, y'know. Then it occurred
to me I didn't know what the letters stood there for so I asked my multilingual
German friend and she told me they were there to represent some Italian sounds
that were nowhere to be found except in Italian. I've always admired Ms. Stein,
she's so well-read and intelligent and damn sexy. After a while I decided I
wouldn't mind to talk to her in Italian at all, she's got such big eyes, and
she's so well-read and brainy... and she's so sexy I thought...
I went on reading, and was growing happier and happier, she was right, learning
languages (or Italian at least) does make you happy. I was near the end of the
book and it occurred to me I might ask Gertrude, who was sipping happily the
fifth pint of lager, to read the rest for me, there were only a few pages to
go. I listened marvelling how nice and guttural her voice was. After too short
a while she asked me how I liked the Italian sounds and intonation, she thought
Italian was simply amazing and so sexy! You definitely sound sexy, says I, I
like German vowels and consonants and the rhythm always makes me flowing. She
tells me I should stop pulling her leg, she was reading a famous Italian book
in Italian, by a famous Italian author, Humberto Echo, and there's ghosts in it
and some monks in a big library. It would be un-German and not sexy at all for
a German to sound Italian, says I. Besides, I'm not pulling your legs at all...
When in Rome, do as the French do, after all.
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=19242&PN=1&TPN=1
Hello,
first of all excuse my poor English, I hardly ever use it, so I'm sure
there will be plenty of mistakes.
I will be retiring next month and I will be having plenty of spare time and I
thought I might take up a hobby or two to just kill the time.
When I was young, in my teens and twenties, almost every night I had the same
dream. I heard the voice of my younger sister, she was saying something like,
'Kyootansurukokorogaarimasuka.' I heard the voice clearly, it was very
pleasant, but I didn't understand a thing, it was in some funny language, if it
was a human language at all.
The dream kept recurring for some years and then it stopped. It reappeared a
few months ago, but this time, she says, 'Ironnajibunninarutoomosiroikara'. It
sounds as if it is the same language, but I still don't understand a thing. In
the dream, I'm always trying to ask her what she means, but she only smiles and
whispers softly, 'Mezameyo, mezameyo', and I wake up without knowing.
My question is:
Is it a human language?
If it is, I'd like to learn it.
L-R works
perfectly for anyone reasonably literate. If you're a good learner, I mean a
good learner in general, not a learner of languages, you should have no trouble
with it.
It's very
easy for closely related languages.
It's
relatively easy for intermediate learners (= 2 to 3K words and some basic
grammar) of any languages.
It's rather
difficult, but not impossible, for unrelated languages.
A rule of
thumb:
if you
enjoy Mumble Thomas, Rosetta Stoned, Pimpsleur, it won't work for you.
if you
enjoy Assimil, it might work for you.
if you
enjoy good literature, it will work for you.
One more
thing.
I've never
wanted any followers, money, You-Tube fame, perfect academy, etc. I only share
what works for me and some other crazy people.
If you were
Mr. Martian Machine and only saw crawling soldiers on a battle field, you'd
scientifically prove human beings can't walk, let alone love one another.
siomotteikiru 死を思って生きる, atamagaii頭が好い, aYa (綾 or 彩) turaisiawase辛い幸せ, happy-go-lucky Miss Hopper
siomotteikiru,
atamagaii
Listening-Reading
system. The thread which kicked it all off.
http://www.how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=6366&PN=3&TPN=1
!Listening-Reading
thread – siomotteikiru’s (and atamagaii) posts:
http://rapidshare.com/files/152957462/_Listening-Reading_thread_some_more.rar.html
Volte
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=21098&PN=1
List of
resource lists
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=19563&PN=1&TPN=1
MarcoDiAngelo
The Best
Method Ever
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=13501&PN=7
Parallel
texts project
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=19917&PN=1
http://www.bilingual-texts.com/library/
(it’s dead)
Japanese:
sheetz
http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=804
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=6241&PN=1
nandemoii:
http://www.japanesepod101.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5218
I had a
dream
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=19242&PN=1&TPN=1
http://video.qip.ru/video/view/?id=u150947577c3
http://video.qip.ru/video/view/?id=u2179131e13e
http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?pid=125567#p125567
M. Medialis
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=18499&PN=2
Splog:
http://www.youtube.com/user/FluentCzech#p/u/4/C3y8v0Ftk0Q
http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Listening-Reading_Method
Luke
Learning
French Fast
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=6764&PN=4
kealist
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=9414&PN=2
http://lr.learnlangs.com/lrwiki/Complete_gratis_legal_LR_material
Examples of
literary texts for zero beginners.
To
download:
http://rapidshare.com/files/401382015/ai.7z
It's one 7z
file, 3.34 MB. It's packed. To unzip it use 7zip or WinRar.
The file
contains:
L1 Polish,
L2 French
Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry
Saint-Exupery
- FP Le petit prince 3 kolumny.pdf
Word-for-word
translation with grammar and pronunciation notes.
L1 Polish,
L2 German
Grimm -
Rotkaeppchen (t_um interlin.doc
Word-for-word
translation with grammar notes.
L1 Polish,
L2 English
Carroll -
A-Pd-gr Alice in Wonderland kody
komorki.pdf
Word-for-word
translation with grammar and pronunciation notes.
L1 French,
Spanish, L2 Spanish, French
No
word-for-word translation necessary.
Antoine de
Saint-Exupéry
Saint-Exupery
- FH Le petit prince.pdf
The texts
were posted here a long time ago.
Of course,
you should have more texts to do L-R.
All the
books should first be read (and enjoyed) in normal literary translation.
If you're
interested in L-R, (even if you don't know the languages) have a closer look at
the texts to see how they should be prepared.
Bye,
[IMG]http://i42.tinypic.com/2j5dtt5.jpg[/IMG]
http://i42.tinypic.com/2j5dtt5.jpg
There are
two new elements in L-R
- the crucial ones:
- using long novels (parallel texts and audio)
right from the start, even for zero beginners.
- using self-explanatory texts: I mean:
Knowing in
advance the meaning of what you're going to listen to and the text being psychologically yours and relevant.
Examples:
The Bible
for a Jehovah's witness or a book you've read many times since you were a
child.
Each
element of L-R separately does not seem so significant. If you put them
together as a whole system, they become extremely effective, the most important
ones being:
- massive exposure in a short period of time
- self explanatory texts
- parallel e-novels with good quality audio
- Step 3 (read L1, listen L2)
- learning how to pronounce properly
Learning
any language in any way is not for everybody, almost everyone fails miserably.
Language is
a system of interrelated subsystems, grammar is one of them.
I will try
to explain why I need grammar right from the beginning.
When I
start learning a new language, there are two things I concentrate on - and I
find them very important:
1. listening comprehension
2. pronunciation
To do both 1. and 2. properly I need
some kind of logic behind them:
I must know
what kind of sounds there are, how they differ from the ones I already know,
what phonetic features I must pay attention to while listening, etc.
If I don't
know that pitch accent is important, or that Japanese spoken words are divided
into morae (or moras, if you prefer), or that there are whispered vowels there,
then I am bound to fail to notice them myself and substitute them by something
completely different.
I must know
what grammar features there are, how they differ from the ones I already know.
I must know
that nouns have no gender or plural forms, that there are no articles, that the
sounds -mas- carry the meaning of some kind of a polite form, that -u is the
present/future tense, and that -ta is the past tense, that tenses are not only
a characteristic of verbs but some adjectives as well.
I'd rather
know straight away that おはようございます o-hayou gozaimasu is in fact お早う御座います and that they are forms of 早い hayai and 御座る gozaru, and that there's no 'good' or 'morning' in it – and that is simply
means: it is early...
I'd rather
know straight away that どうぞうよろしくお願いいたします douzo yorosiku o-negai
itasimasu are in
fact forms of 宜しい yorosii and 願う negau and 致す itasu, and
that 宜しい is a honorific form of 良い yoi/ii and 致す いたす itasu a humble form of する suru – and that it means something like
this:I humbly ask you to be kind to me.
I'd rather
know straight away that です desu is a form of であるde aru and
that である is made of で and the verb ある that is irregular and its negative
form is ない/無いnai and that
ない is an i-adjective
and no longer a verb.
I must
understand straight away that じゃない ja nai is
not something mysterious at all, that じゃ is in fact a phonetic contraction of で + は (pronounced わ wa) and that は here is in fact a topic marker and
that the same phonetic contraction is to be found in 死んではいけない sindeha ikenai,
死んじゃいけない sinja ikenai.
Etc, etc.
Then I
don't have to treat every single expression as something completely unrelated
to other expressions/words/forms, and be puzzled all the time by something that
it is not puzzling at all but only made so by bunglers or (not so) learned
morons who write/sell language handbooks.
And that
saves me HELL of a lot of time later while dealing with authentic materials for
native speakers right from the beginning. I prefer
books I already love and know well.
It now
should be obvious why I need a good reference grammar with good audio by native
speakers.
By the way,
grammars don't have to use artificial sentences - there are grammars that only
use authentic natural sentences. Of course, if you don't like Miss Grammar, it
is your business, not mine.
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=9433&PN=4&TPN=6
Super
Polyglot
Senior
Member
Joined
21/10/2007
(651 days
ago)
Posts: 321
Speaks:
French, English, German, Luxembourgish*, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Italian,
Russian, Dutch, Latin, Ancient Greek
Studies:
Hungarian, Japanese, Polish
02
August 2009 at 7:05pm | IP Logged
Before
leaving, deactivating myself so as not to go on clashing with a certain oh so
knowlegeable member {he means Cainntear}, I want to name the one most helpful
for me: "Siomotteikiru". Her L-R thread! I can't do L-R the way she
does, but it helped me to see where I was going wrong.
Word-lists
are all very nice, but I can't learn words the way Iversen does, in a vacuum, I
get totally frustrated and bored after a day or two. And I'd only know those
words on the page, not in real life. I know, I've been there.
I have to
make sure I really know what a text is about, to make it memorable, if I want
to learn from it, properly. Parallel texts I'd read the wrong way round before,
making it a slow and painful experience.
I have to
use a lot more audio than before, to get to "natural" listening and
"natural" understanding/knowledge. Thanks for making me try and find
a way to get over my unwillingness to listen to audio-books. I just needed to
realise how marvellous that is, using an mp3 player! 2 ear-plugs!! Just sitting
listening didn't work, my mind would wander. And I hated using a walkman, that
one ear-plug thingy made me feel weird. Both ears plugged in make all the
difference. Well, it wasn't really Siomotteikiru who told me to use mp3
players, but she pointed the way, without her I don't think I'd ever have
tried.
It's the
whole way my going about language learning has changed because of her. I find I
appreciate literature much more if I listen to it, rather than read it. Even in
foreign languages I don't know so well, like Polish (I just loved listening to
Mikołajek [Le Petit Nicolas]). As a result I also appreciate reading more than
I did, Russian for instance, a lot of listening to texts has allowed me to
become a better, faster, more appreciative reader.
Yes,
Siomotteikiru it is, I changed my approach a fair bit because of him/her and am
also much more consistent than I've ever been. Unless I was obliged to (school,
living in
Dixi.
Iversen
Super Polyglot
Moderator
Denmark
berejst.dk
Joined 1417 days ago
3927 posts
- 854
votes
Speaks: Danish*,
French,
English,
German,
Italian,
Spanish,
Portuguese,
Dutch,
Swedish,
Romanian,
Catalan
Studies: Afrikaans,
Greek,
Latin,
Icelandic,
Norwegian,
Esperanto,
Russian,
Gaelic
(Irish), Lowland
Scots
[QUOTE=Iversen]
Congratulations,
siomotteikuru, it is not often that I have to think a post over for several
days before I have considered all its implications.
My first thought was: this looks like the way I have used the http://gloss.lingnet.org/searchResources.aspx -
GLOSS-lessons , - there you have the original text, a translation plus an aural
version all in one, though with shorter, non-literary texts.
My next thought was: at which point in my own learning process would your
method be most effective. I came to the result that I would want to know the
basics of the language - some morphology, a minimal vocabulary plus knowledge
about the phonematics of the language - before I started listening/reading. One
reason for this is that it is timeconsuming and difficult to find your way
round a written text unless you already have some training in reading that
language, - this is especially true if you lose your place in the text and had
to find it quickly again. With texts in another alphabet than your native one
this is even more important.
So I would think that your method gives the best results from somewhere round
the level of a good beginner or intermediate fluency up to basic fluency.
Then there is the question of using large (and generally difficult) texts. If
you are to benefit from your reading of the translation I suppose you have to
subdivide it into short sections of maybe a paragraph or two up to half a page
at a time, - in your own words: "You only remember well what you
understand and what you feel is "yours" psychologically ". I
would lose that feeling for the first page of Anna Karenina if I had to read
the whole book first. When you are advanced enough to skip the initial reading
of the translation this of course doesn't apply any longer, and you can survive
longer sections in one go.
As you mention it is important to use texts that are interesting because of
their content. For me that would not necessarily be literary texts,- there are
a great number of books about science in reasonably good translations.
Unfortunately you won't get any actor to read aloud a book about nuclear
physics or zoology, - the availability of audiobooks is the main advantage I see
in using the usual heap of literary masterworks.
The quality of the translations is also all-important. They have to be as
literal as possible, otherwise they will just be one more source of confusion.
Ideally they should be so literal that they don't even conform to the rules of
the language they are written in (however I see that siomotteikuru have another
opinion on that). But such translations are in practice impossible to find, and
you may have to accept translations that are more concerned with being good
literature in their own right than telling you exactly what is in the original.
I use one listening technique that is diametrally opposite to
listening-reading, namely listening 'like a bloodhound follows a trail'. The
main idea here is that you should listen without trying to translate or even
understand, just follow (and subdividing) the stream of sounds and if you know
enough words and grammar the meaning will pop up in your head just like when
you listen to a language that you know well - you just need a better source and
more concentration. However this can only done with success at a rather
advanced stage, so listening with an exact transcript in your hand is by a wide
margin the best alternative until then. You need to find aural sources with
exact transcripts, but the use of audiobooks is of course the logical solution
to that problem. No problem there, - the problem is to find usable translations
into a language you know well.
All in all I would say that your method is attractive and probably effective,
and I'm going to think seriously about what I can use from it.
Iversen on 04 July 2007 [/QUOTE]
I had done
a little mock-LR before with a friend, with l'Étranger in French and Chinese,
one of us holding one version. It wasn't bad, and I respect an awful lot
It turns out this is an excellent method for
learning chess as well. Although not really a language, application of this
method has increased my chess strength in the short time I have been doing it.
using this method
with chess you do not memorize anything. You simply go over the master games
using a data base. You do not need to take lots of time on each move just watch
the game as it progresses and soon you get more and more familiar with
excellent chess and how it is played. You pick up structures tactics and
everything.
its exactly like a language. I am not sure this is proper content for a
language thread but learning chess this way is like learning chess
"language"
M. Medialis
Diglot
Groupie
Sweden
Joined 974 days ago
94 posts
- 1
votes
Speaks: Swedish*,
English
Studies: Russian,
French, Japanese
Message 34 of 40
28 February
2010 at 2:19pm | IP Logged
Thanks
again AniaR! Yes, I'm definitely serious about L-R. L-R is more than a language
learning method for me, it has become a lifestyle. I never read literature
before, and now I'm discovering so much - while learning new languages at the
same time.
|
M.
Medialis wrote:
|
Senior
Member
Ireland
adrean83.wordpress.c
Joined 882 days ago
139 posts
- 18
votes
Studies: French
Logged on
Message 2 of 2
05 June
2010 at 7:18pm | IP Logged Thanks for reposting
these passages Volte.
It was really a strike of lighting when I first read about the
listening-reading method. I went through every post of the 50+ page topic. It
was so obvious and clear yet no one had pointed it out. Often the most simple
things are the most effective as the method proves. I think its important to
point out too that the L-R method is not only an excellent tool to learn
languages but also a chance to get a real education in litterature. I myself am
learning French and names like Stendhal, Zola, Verne, Maupassant, Proust,
Flaubert, Hugo, Voltaire etc. meant nothing to me before. There is nothing more
I like to do then to share this method with other language learners and witness
their excitement to hear of something so simple but so practical and
interesting.
his site:
http://languagefixation.wordpress.com/
[quote=doviende]
The other
big reason I didn't mix my native language with listening in the L2, was
because if it worked, I'd be totally fluent in Japanese by now! Do you know how
many hours of anime I've watched with Japanese audio and English
subtitles? It's a ridiculous number of hours, and I'm still hopeless at
Japanese. I think I just tune out the Japanese audio because I pay more
attention to the subtitles.[/quote]
Watching
movies is NOT L-R.
L-R is
LISTENING-reading, that means you must pay attention to what you’re hearing,
analyzing it to derive the meaning (and JOY) out of it.
If you’re
unable (or not willing, or don’t care, or refuse, or pay attention to something
else – jumping pix or big eyes or short skirts) to LISTEN to what you’re
hearing, you can spend two lifetimes on watching anime, it won’t miraculously
make you understand haiku or pick up chicks in Japanese.
L-R is not
mechanical – it’s not something that comes in through one ear and goes out
through the other, missing your brain on the way. It requires conscious effort.
You can
call a monkey Willy-Nilly Shake Speare, but that does not mean that it will
produce a single sonnet, not to mention Hamlet, the Prince of L-R.
The written
text (both in L1 and L2, preferably in parallel vertical columns with matching
chunks) is there only as an additional tool to help you with your LISTENING.
The faster you read, the more time you have to analyze what you’re GOING TO
listen to. It goes without saying that you must remember (and be in love with)
what you’ve just read.
You CANNOT
read subtitles in advance, they appear on the screen at the same time as the characters
are speaking, you have no time to pay attention to what you’re (mis)hearing,
you concentrate on what is going on in the movie. Quite often, subtitles in L2
have very little in common with what is actually being said in L1. What’s more,
exposure (new words/sentences per minute) is very poor.
By the way,
L-R (reading in L1 with an occasional glance at L2 and LISTENING in L2) works
MUCH, MUCH, MUCH better than just reading and listening in L2. I know, I’ve
done both, girls and boys and both.
The best
way is, of course, YOUR OWN way. But it takes thinking, and people somehow
usually think that they think.
It’s always
worth remembering:
There are
no rule(r)s.
siomotteikiru 死を思って生きる, atamagaii頭が好い, aYa (綾 or 彩) turaisiawase辛い幸せ, happy-go-lucky Miss Hopper
The entire
concept of L-R method as introduced here on this site comes straight from the
school that teaches quacks how to give information to patients in need of real
care. Pure bull$hit. Makes absolutely no sense and the people that get in line
are the same sheep looking for the magic pill, the amazing never seen before
secret that will have them master a language in no time, with no real work.
Piss.
|
AndreasMina
wrote:
|
If you can play the violin it might.
I have
spoken to my mom on the phone. generally and in an unbiased way I tried to
describe Siomotteikiru and his behavior, just out of sheer curiosity to see
what she had to say about him. I also read about 15-20 of Siomotteikiru's posts
to her. It was over the phone and I was translating directly from English into
Slovak, so please bare in mind that it is difficult and somewhat inaccurate to
psychiatrically examine people over such a distance in such a way, but this is
what she told me:
He is most probably a male, under 30 years old and mentally ill.. so not
psychopathic as I said, but mentally ill. She diagnosed an initial stage of
Schizophrenia. She said that:
- in this case of the illness the thoughts loose their healthy structure and
are driven from reality and that a mentally healthy person which is listening
does not always understand what is said and is confused :-) that he/she doesn't
understand what the mentally ill person is talking about. If the thoughts are
sometimes substituted with coherent ones, it is even more confusing.
- that to non-professionals the thoughts seem very coherent and had she not
seen 500+ such cases before, she would also think that these were the thoughts
of a very strange, but a not mentally ill person.
typical signs:
- free associations - fast switching of concepts, sentences that change topics
within the same sentence. sentences in one paragraph, that have no connection
between eachother(a healthy person does them too, but not as frequently)
- cannot revise himself (behave), even after he's been repeatedly asked to do
so
- the speech seems to have sense, but when you examine it more closely you
discover that it really doesn't.. which is caused by the mentioned frequent free
associations, and other elements.
she also said that he must've been a very intelligent person before the illness
and that the illness is quite recent. she also suggest seeing a specialist very
soon.
Again.. to diagnose someone over the phone by reading his posts and by me
trying to describe that person is very inaccurate, but she said it is very
probable. She said he reminds her of a patient she has right now too.
When I asked how it was possible that he speaks such perfect English and
Russian, she said that he has learned the languages before the illness
occurred. She also said that in Schizophrenia, the gender sometimes tends to
fluctuate within the patient, but in later stages.
Vlad on 30 November 2007
My comment:
'Is Mr.
Dobson a crazy old woman?'
'No! She's
a crazy young man!'
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=24387&PN=2&TPN=2
Rediscovering
LR
And at last I can use my newly attained freedom to dive into all my LR
materials. -Discovering the stories of Kenji Miyazawa and O. Henry (among many
others). LR could as well be an abbreviation of "Literature Reading"
or "Love to Read": Good native actors, a good translation and the thrill
of a great story => language learning euphoria!
A new favourite is Miyazawa's story "The Acorns and the Wildcat",
together with the fantastic dramatization at fantajikan: Pure happiness:
Fantajikan - The Acorns and the
Wildcat
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=24602&PN=1&TPN=4
A good
story with quality materials and well-aligned parallel text makes studying a
sheer joy! :)
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=26852&PN=1&TPN=4
As I like
the LR-idea and use it with good success, while many new contributors are not
aware of it any longer, I want to give a link to a collection of texts,
compiled by Volte, a kind of overview of the original
discussion:
http://learnlangs.com/Listening-Reading_important_passages.htm
Just some short comments:
If you can't understand the method as it is described in these not necessarily
systematic passages, you won't be very successful using LR either.
Some people always want "t h e" method, LR is o n e method. Methods
are not religions, but tools.
You must be a good and quick reader, a text you use for LR should not be the
first book you ever read in your life ...
What have
you learned about language learning?
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=29512&PN=1&TPN=4
The only
time I really got a methodological surprise was when I tried listening to a
podcast while reading a translation (as suggested by Siomotteikiru as part of
the Listening/Reading method). Unfortunately the method demands a spoken text,
a transcript and a literal translation and getting those together is a
problem - especially for non-fictional texts. So in practice I work on
bilingual texts until I can understand speech without the help of transcripts
and translations. But still, it was a surprise that it was possible to follow
speech in Iranian without ever having tried to learn the language.
Brun_Ugle flies again (TAC 2012 team い)
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=30326&PN=1&TPN=2
Message 14 of 51
20 December 2011 at 10:04pm | IP Logged
These past few days, I’ve been doing a lot of
Listening-Reading with the Japanese translation of Harry Potter. It’s an
amazing technique. I can’t believe the improvements I’ve been making in this
short time! It took me a while to get the hang of it, but now it’s great.
This is my way of doing it (a slight variation on the original): I’ve already
read Harry Potter many, many times, especially the first books because I reread
them before each new release. So I know the book very well. This is important.
It’s also important that it is a book you like well enough to read it again and
again. So, that’s the first step (knowing the book in your own language) down.
The next step is reading in the foreign language (Japanese) while listening to
the audiobook in the same language. And the third step is to read the book in a
language you know well (English) while listening in the foreign language
(Japanese). It takes a little practice read in one language and listen in
another, but it gets easier. I find it nice to alternate back and forth between
these two steps, although that isn’t how the original poster of the technique
recommended. I haven’t gotten to the shadowing part. The audio is very fast and
I am not a fast talker usually in any language and certainly not in Japanese.
I’ve also found it best to go through the whole book each time. I was doing one
chapter at a time, but not anymore. I think meeting the same word in different
contexts helps me learn it. And in a whole book, most words are bound to be
repeated several times.
Anyway, this seems to have given my Japanese a turbo-boost. The improvement in
listening comprehension is amazing. I still have a long way to go, but it has
allowed me to take a great leap forward in a very short time.
I have some hypotheses about why this is so. One thing I’ve noticed, and which
seems counterintuitive, is that (up to a point) the faster he speaks, the
easier it is to understand. I started thinking about why this might be so, and
came up with the following. One thing is that he speaks faster and faster as
the story gets more exciting. It is natural to assume that the most exciting
parts are often also very concrete and easy to visualize. That means that I
probably have a stronger image of these scenes in my mind and it is thus easier
to attach the Japanese to the image. However, I think there is more to it than
that. I think the speed itself is also somewhat important.
I am a visual thinker. When I hear words, they create images for me – not just
pictures, but also sensation and such. So when I read or listen to a story, I
am there inside the story. However, this doesn’t work as well in a foreign
language when there are a lot of words I don’t understand. The words I know
well work as they would in English – they come into my head, become images
and the words themselves disappear, leaving room for new words to come in. The
problem is with words I “almost” know. These are words that I’ve seen before,
perhaps studied, but don’t know well enough for that instantaneous translation
into images. Before, when I would listen to something, my mind would latch on
to these words trying to remember what they mean. Of course, then I would miss
the next three of four words, maybe more. These could be words I might have
understood had I heard them. This latching on to words lowers my listening
comprehension. When he speaks fast, it seems my mind doesn’t get the time to
latch on and try to figure out the words. By letting the words go, I actually
understand more!
I think another clue to why listening-reading works is that even if you only
understand one word in four, the images are already in your head (from having
read the story before), so those words easily call up that image. Since the
image is already there, the “almost known” words often become clear because the
context of the image is enough to remind you of their meaning. Gradually other,
formerly completely unknown words also become clear because you hear them
several times and over time naturally fit them into the image. Like a half-done
puzzle – the missing pieces are easy to fit in.
This guy discovered L-R himself:
Are transcripts while listening useful?
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=30479&PN=1&TPN=2
I got a Spanish audio book of Peter Pan from Amazon, but I
was having trouble following some of the passages. I just couldn't make out some
of the words because they were spoken too fast and run too close together. I
couldn't find a transcript in Spanish, but I did find the whole book,
in English, on Gutenberg.
Surprisingly, listening to the Spanish while skimming the English text
helped me a lot to understand those difficult passages. That way I wasn't
getting word for word what the Spoken Spanish was saying, but I was getting
enough of a hint from the English to figure out for myself what the
Spanish audio was saying.
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=9433&PN=4&TPN=2
Then Siomotteikiru passed by and shattered my univers by showing that there was an alternative both to silly dialogs in the classroom and fruitless searches for sufficiently easy texts, namely listening to recordings in a foreign language while following a bilingual translation. I think this must be the best way for a beginner to hear a lot of foreign talk and getting the 'buzz' in your head that is the forerunner for structured, effortless thinking in the foreign language. I have never spent those long hours listening to novels that Siomotteikiru recommended, partly because I get bored listening to anything and literature in particular, but even in smaller doses the method is valuable... as a supplement to wordlists, intensive reading and as much ordinary extensive reading as you can manage to do.
http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=9433&PN=4&TPN=2
This is the single
most exciting thing about language learning I've ever read...
My second vote is for Volte because of her thread
here
and because of her many thorough postings about her experiences using the L-R
method.
