Grammar through massive input (exposure)

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s_allard
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Grammar through massive input (exposure)

Postby s_allard » Sun Oct 09, 2016 3:56 pm

Frankly, instead of constantly wailing and whining about the lack of real-life examples and blaming their teachers for their own failure, if people were to spend more time studying the language, especially the grammar, they would be making quick progress. When I read about going to the supermarket and

...getting to the check-out, saying 'bonjour', hearing the amount to pay and then saying 'bon journée au'voir.' THAT is real life.

I have to laugh because I strongly doubt that the cashier said 'bon journée au'voir.'. It was probably more like 'bonne journée, au r'voir'. THAT is closer to real life. I'm sure no French teacher, as bad as they might have been, ever said 'bon journée'

While I'm at it, this example offers a little segue to another concrete example or 'handwavery' as suggested by someone who has not provided any examples at all.

As we all know, grammatical gender is one of the most difficult features of French syntax to master. And it is one of the foundations of French grammar because its manifestations are so pervasive. Again it would be very useful to build a series of flashcard stacks that address this very problem.

One of the stacks could address this questions of words ending in -ée. It is true that the vast majority of words that end in -ée are feminine, which is why this 'bon journée' mistake sticks out like the proverbial sore thumb. We have words like une année, une soirée, une nuitée, une assiettée, etc. But there also exists a tiny number of words ending in -ée that are masculine for reasons of etymology. These include words like le musée and le mausolée.

So, what is the SRS solution? Obviously you make a stack of sentences that clearly illustrate multiple uses of these words and the attendant gender agreements. And from time to time you go through the deck. And of course you have to actually use the words to learn them.
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Re: Grammar through massive input (exposure)

Postby tarvos » Sun Oct 09, 2016 4:11 pm

To an English speaker, bon and bonne sound the same. I'm pretty sure that's why Marais rendered it as bon.

But it's all right, keep on trollin' trollin' and repeating yourself without actually answering any questions.

You see, you still haven't answered how you are going to use the SRS cards to revise. What methodology you are going to use. But as it happens, it doesn't matter to us, and neither does it to you - because you prefer to not answer questions, and keep trollin' trollin'.
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Re: Grammar through massive input (exposure)

Postby Marais » Sun Oct 09, 2016 4:19 pm

Adrianslont wrote:This could get boring but I'll say it again - absolutely the same thing in my opinion.

I wasn't just talking about years later - please reread. You seem to think that passing a high school algebra test means you "know" algebra. It just means you know that topic. Likewise passing a topic test in high school French that is limited in its scope of vocabulary and grammar means you know that topic, at that level and usually just on paper, not orally. It doesn't mean you can talk to any French person about anything under any conditions. It takes a lot more than a high school course - even with excellent teachers and curriculum to become proficient in a language. And it takes a lot more than a high school course to become a mathematician, historian or scientist. That doesn't mean all of those subjects are taught badly. It just means there is limited time, varying levels of ability and interest.

Probably my last word on this subject - certainly in this thread. In the end it's all about different viewpoints.

We'll have to agree to disagree then.
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Re: Grammar through massive input (exposure)

Postby Marais » Sun Oct 09, 2016 4:36 pm

Cainntear wrote:Simple? Not so much.

First of all, the complexity of possible dialogues is mind-boggling, and in the end you would find yourself spending more time explaining the standard business practices of EDF and SFR than actually using the language -- useful knowledge. That's useful knowledge if you end up managing your own power and internet, but you have no way of knowing in advance which of your students are going to need to know that, and which ones will end up as tenants on an all-bills-included contract.

Besides, until you've actually been in that situation, it doesn't actually mean anything. Situational tasks are overrated.

Ok let me rephrase - it would be very easy to come up with better than is currently taught in 99% of places.

You wouldn't have to go through all of them, just the most common ones. There are for instance in France a handful of little phrases that you will hear all the time in bigger shops. Most of the time you will hear 'do you want to buy/are you interested in/have you heard about our magazine'. All the time you will be greeted and will be wished a bon journée and au revoir. All the time if you put a massive product on the till you will be asked to remove it. You will often be asked if you have the change if it comes to for example €10.04 - you will be asked if you have the .04. You will be asked to go back and bag up your produce if you've forgotten to bag, weigh and label it. These are real life situations and can be prepared for very easily with some relevant lessons. It obviously would never be all-encompassing, but it's a damn sight better than the manufactured nonsense that is pedalled, especially online. These fake, silly conversations that have learners expecting something other than what they will encounter and has them wasting time learning phrases that sound unnatural and that they will never hear.

It's almost as if all these courses are written in English and then translated as word-for-word as possible into the TL.

You will find all sorts of sites with nonsense small talk that the cashier in any country will never engage in. Yet a complete absence of what you will actually be asked if you go and do a full shop somewhere.
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Re: Grammar through massive input (exposure)

Postby s_allard » Sun Oct 09, 2016 5:07 pm

tarvos wrote:To an English speaker, bon and bonne sound the same. I'm pretty sure that's why Marais rendered it as bon.

...

I'll skip the other usual nastiness and get straight to the point here. This observation is very interesting because it goes to the heart of the issue. bon and bonne do not sound the same, objectively speaking. An English-speaker has the same ears as everybody else and isn't hearing the same sound. The problem is the English-speaker doesn't make a meaningful distinction between the two sounds. Similarly, mon and ma don't sound the same to an English speaker but that same speaker will say *ma père and *mon mère because they don't distinguish between the use of the two sounds.

Marais, like all English-speaking learners of French, has two problems with grammatical gender. First off, he's never internalized the link between gender of the noun and the morphology of all the dependent words such as determiners, adjectives and relative pronouns. So, he should have learned the word as la journée or even better la grande journée to really understand what gender agreement entails.

The second problem Marais has is that despite hearing 'bonne journée' he renders it as a 'bon journée' because he never mastered the bon/bonne writing convention and probably thought that bon was the proper way to write the sound of bonne.

All of this is very elementary French that was certainly covered way back in high school but never assimilated due either to bad teaching or lack of studying, take your pick.

But it's not too late to learn. And I'm pretty sure that after today Marais will never make that mistake again. And as I previously suggested, a deck of cards on the subject will do the trick. And to those who seem confused as to how to use these grammar stacks, I say do what one does with any deck, just open them when you have a free moment. What could be more complicated than that?

P.S. I see that a in subsequent post, that egregious bon journée mistake was repeated. I guess I was mistaken about people learning from their mistakes.
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Re: Grammar through massive input (exposure)

Postby Cavesa » Sun Oct 09, 2016 5:30 pm

s_allard wrote:Please, how much more of this off-topic discussion do we have to put up with. We well know that some people here think: "Since I can't speak language X fluently after years of high school all language teaching is crap and worthless, end of story". And there are other people - I am one of them - who think that language instruction, like any form of instruction, produces variable results depending on different factors as previously discussed.

To come back to SRSing grammar rules, I want to take another concrete example of the utilization of flashcards or a flashcard application in Spanish. Let's say that an exercise reveals that I'm having a problem using relative pronouns in Spanish, i.e. donde, cuyo, en el que, en la que, lo cual, etc. It seems that I don't really understand when or how to use each form correctly.

The solution is pretty simple. I build a stack of example sentences that illustrate very clearly the different uses or rules, especially the more complicated or difficult situations. Again, we're not talking about huge decks; it's just a question of focussing on problem areas.


This is hilarious. Yes, I am all for getting back on topic, so how about you stopped repeating things and assuming people think things they obviously didn't write, perhaps actually reading the posts before replying would help ;-) ,and redirecting the thread all the time? You are actually doing your "cause" more harm than good by illustrating well some of the common troubles of today's langauge teaching.
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Yet, you raise a valid question. Whether to use SRS for just small bits of the grammar, or larger chunks. That is something that would certainly be worth testing. However, just like with vocabulary, I don't think any SRS is needed for small amounts of data.

Just like it is easy to learn 100 words without any such tool, and much harder to learn a 1000 or 10000, I can't see how much easier is learning tiny stacks of examples with SRS than without.

Anyone has actually tried?

And I think we haven't been discussing much another aspect of using srs, which is very important for the whole "efficiency" question. The way to find and choose the examples. I can see two ways of approaching this:

1.You study a grammar point and than look for examples in various sources. This is quite time consuming. You get exposed to lots of examples but waste the majority of the time googling, leafing through grammarbooks, and so on. I actually know one type of source that would be ideal for such a task: A translation based exercise book, 6000 (or 8000, depending on the language) already chosen examples with translations. But still, you might need some personalisation.

2.You combine the SRS with your regular input. Basically, you sacrifice a part of the immersion experience (an important part of building that sense for what is correct and what is not, from my experience) and time to take good examples to SRS them. This sounds good, but I am not sure whether the time investment would actually be worth it, as simply going through more input in the same time might work too. And that is actually the base of Emk's srsing method, which looks great.

I am more and more convinced that the Emk's method might be what you are looking for. Hasn't he even created a tool to make anki decks much faster?
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Re: Grammar through massive input (exposure)

Postby s_allard » Sun Oct 09, 2016 5:56 pm

Marais wrote:
Cainntear wrote:Simple? Not so much.

First of all, the complexity of possible dialogues is mind-boggling, and in the end you would find yourself spending more time explaining the standard business practices of EDF and SFR than actually using the language -- useful knowledge. That's useful knowledge if you end up managing your own power and internet, but you have no way of knowing in advance which of your students are going to need to know that, and which ones will end up as tenants on an all-bills-included contract.

Besides, until you've actually been in that situation, it doesn't actually mean anything. Situational tasks are overrated.

Ok let me rephrase - it would be very easy to come up with better than is currently taught in 99% of places.

You wouldn't have to go through all of them, just the most common ones. There are for instance in France a handful of little phrases that you will hear all the time in bigger shops. Most of the time you will hear 'do you want to buy/are you interested in/have you heard about our magazine'. All the time you will be greeted and will be wished a bon (sic) journée and au revoir. All the time if you put a massive product on the till you will be asked to remove it. You will often be asked if you have the change if it comes to for example €10.04 - you will be asked if you have the .04. You will be asked to go back and bag up your produce if you've forgotten to bag, weigh and label it. These are real life situations and can be prepared for very easily with some relevant lessons. It obviously would never be all-encompassing, but it's a damn sight better than the manufactured nonsense that is pedalled, especially online. These fake, silly conversations that have learners expecting something other than what they will encounter and has them wasting time learning phrases that sound unnatural and that they will never hear.

It's almost as if all these courses are written in English and then translated as word-for-word as possible into the TL.

You will find all sorts of sites with nonsense small talk that the cashier in any country will never engage in. Yet a complete absence of what you will actually be asked if you go and do a full shop somewhere.

(Emphasis added)
In the absence of any specific examples from courses or online sites that this poster is so vehemently complaining about, I decided to look at one the oldest French courses freely available on the Internet, the venerable FSI French course from 1960, and see how the so-called real-life situations mentioned here are dealt with.

Not surprisingly, the FSI doesn't have a chapter devoted to shopping in our ultra-modern supermarkets. It doesn't include terms like 'organically grown chia' or 'sun-dried tomatoes'. There's no mention of online grocery shopping, fidelity cards, debit cards, contactless payment, and so forth.

Some of the situations and content of this course will strike us as quaint today, after all it's 56 years old. But the grammar and the basic vocabulary are perfectly relevant. Other than some of the vocabulary the French spoken by the supermarket employees today is fundamentally no different from what was spoken 56 years ago. What is so special or real-life about 'do you want to buy/are you interested in/have you heard about our magazine' that an FSI student couldn't handle? Ditto for 'You will be asked to go back and bag up your produce if you've forgotten to bag, weigh and label it.' All of these phrases can be easily handled by a user of FSI.

I should highlight that no where in FSI does one see bon journée.

The real problem here is that the poster is a beginner in French, at least according to the language profile and has not yet mastered the basics. Without the basics everything seems complicated. So stop complaining and hit the books.
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Re: Grammar through massive input (exposure)

Postby tarvos » Sun Oct 09, 2016 7:12 pm

s_allard wrote:
tarvos wrote:To an English speaker, bon and bonne sound the same. I'm pretty sure that's why Marais rendered it as bon.

...

I'll skip the other usual nastiness and get straight to the point here. This observation is very interesting because it goes to the heart of the issue. bon and bonne do not sound the same, objectively speaking. An English-speaker has the same ears as everybody else and isn't hearing the same sound. The problem is the English-speaker doesn't make a meaningful distinction between the two sounds. Similarly, mon and ma don't sound the same to an English speaker but that same speaker will say *ma père and *mon mère because they don't distinguish between the use of the two sounds.


The crux isn't that part. The crux is the fact that we may have the same ears but we do not perceive all sounds equally. Instead we have a variance of sounds that to our native ears are allophones, but to other people sound distinct. Which sounds we perceive as allophones of a certain letter depend on our upbringing as a child. Nasalization of vowels is a salient process in French, but completely non-existent in English. That's why English people pronounce bon and bonne the same, because they really DO NOT HEAR the difference at all. Their ears don't have anything to do with it. Learning to pronounce bon and bonne is a matter of learning to drop the 'n' (English people would add the n) while retaining the nasal quality inherent in nasal vowels.

Mon and ma do sound different because the basic vowels are different and are distinguished by English people - people would pronounce mon with the n, though, usually. Or they would completely drop the n but also lose the nasal quality. That's what is causing the accent.

People are hearing the same sound - their ears aren't trained to hear the difference. You have to train people to pronounce the sounds differently and once they can pronounce them comfortably and reliably, they will start hearing and noticing this difference. The fact that these sounds are different practically does not mean that our brains perceive them as such. That's what causes accent.

Marais, like all English-speaking learners of French, has two problems with grammatical gender. First off, he's never internalized the link between gender of the noun and the morphology of all the dependent words such as determiners, adjectives and relative pronouns. So, he should have learned the word as la journée or even better la grande journée to really understand what gender agreement entails.


I'm pretty sure people understand what gender agreement means even if they don't use it correctly. I probably misuse the gender of certain rarer words in French, even though I am perfectly aware that there is a difference between bon and bonne and I even hear the difference clearly.

The second problem Marais has is that despite hearing 'bonne journée' he renders it as a 'bon journée' because he never mastered the bon/bonne writing convention and probably thought that bon was the proper way to write the sound of bonne.


It's not a writing convention. They are two different words pronounced in two different ways with two different underlying morphological forms. A writing convention is choosing to write the sound "f" as "ph". This isn't; it is a completely regular French reflection of gender morphology at work.

All of this is very elementary French that was certainly covered way back in high school but never assimilated due either to bad teaching or lack of studying, take your pick.


If Marais studied French in high school, that is.
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Re: Grammar through massive input (exposure)

Postby s_allard » Sun Oct 09, 2016 8:56 pm

tarvos wrote:
s_allard wrote:
tarvos wrote:To an English speaker, bon and bonne sound the same. I'm pretty sure that's why Marais rendered it as bon.

...

I'll skip the other usual nastiness and get straight to the point here. This observation is very interesting because it goes to the heart of the issue. bon and bonne do not sound the same, objectively speaking. An English-speaker has the same ears as everybody else and isn't hearing the same sound. The problem is the English-speaker doesn't make a meaningful distinction between the two sounds. Similarly, mon and ma don't sound the same to an English speaker but that same speaker will say *ma père and *mon mère because they don't distinguish between the use of the two sounds.


The crux isn't that part. The crux is the fact that we may have the same ears but we do not perceive all sounds equally. Instead we have a variance of sounds that to our native ears are allophones, but to other people sound distinct. Which sounds we perceive as allophones of a certain letter depend on our upbringing as a child. Nasalization of vowels is a salient process in French, but completely non-existent in English. That's why English people pronounce bon and bonne the same, because they really DO NOT HEAR the difference at all. Their ears don't have anything to do with it. Learning to pronounce bon and bonne is a matter of learning to drop the 'n' (English people would add the n) while retaining the nasal quality inherent in nasal vowels.

Mon and ma do sound different because the basic vowels are different and are distinguished by English people - people would pronounce mon with the n, though, usually. Or they would completely drop the n but also lose the nasal quality. That's what is causing the accent.

People are hearing the same sound - their ears aren't trained to hear the difference. You have to train people to pronounce the sounds differently and once they can pronounce them comfortably and reliably, they will start hearing and noticing this difference. The fact that these sounds are different practically does not mean that our brains perceive them as such. That's what causes accent.

The problem here is failure to see the difference between hearing and distinguishing (phonemically). bon and bonne are two different sounds. English-speaking ears are no different from French-speaking ears. They do hear the difference. But, and here we agree, the significance of the difference is not the same in both languages. This is exactly what I meant by:

The problem is the English-speaker doesn't make a meaningful distinction between the two sounds.

In other words, English-speakers do hear two sounds; they hear the difference but this difference is not significant. When English-speakers hear 'bonjour' are they hearing 'bonnejour'? No, they hear bonjour like everybody else. In fact, they will usually reproduce it perfectly immediately. Problems arise when they attempt to read the written word bonjour.

Problems of pronunciation are not due to not being able to hear different sounds, they stem from not being trained to articulate the sounds properly and to the interference of the native language. This is a different problem. English speakers have enormous difficulty with roue and rue, not because they don't hear the difference. They initially can't articulate the u sound. Similarly, French-speakers have a problem with th in English. The certainly hear it but it takes time to learn how to articulate it.

In Marais' case the problem wasn't not hearing the difference between bon and bonne; it was using the spelling bon to render the sound of bonne.

Marais, like all English-speaking learners of French, has two problems with grammatical gender. First off, he's never internalized the link between gender of the noun and the morphology of all the dependent words such as determiners, adjectives and relative pronouns. So, he should have learned the word as la journée or even better la grande journée to really understand what gender agreement entails.


I'm pretty sure people understand what gender agreement means even if they don't use it correctly. I probably misuse the gender of certain rarer words in French, even though I am perfectly aware that there is a difference between bon and bonne and I even hear the difference clearly.


I did not say that people don't understand what gender agreement means. Here is what I said: (Marais) never internalized the link between gender of the noun and the morphology of all the dependent words.... Why do people make gender mistakes despite understanding gender agreement perfectly and hearing clearly the difference between bon and bonne? For example why would someone say: *J'ai acheté une belle bidule hier instead of J'ai acheté un beau bidule hier? It's simply because that person has not internalized the link between le and bidule. Instead, this person probably overgeneralized the fact that most words in French ending in -ule are feminine.

The second problem Marais has is that despite hearing 'bonne journée' he renders it as a 'bon journée' because he never mastered the bon/bonne writing convention and probably thought that bon was the proper way to write the sound of bonne.


It's not a writing convention. They are two different words pronounced in two different ways with two different underlying morphological forms. A writing convention is choosing to write the sound "f" as "ph". This isn't; it is a completely regular French reflection of gender morphology at work.

I guess we don't have the same definition of a writing convention. I learned that writing conventions include things like spelling, capitalization, abbreviations, punctuation, etc. But I won't quibble. Let's call it a spelling convention. The fact remains that Marais heard bonne journée and wrote bon journée. Why would he write bon when he heard bonne? Obviously, he thought that this was the proper way to write or spell bonne.
All of this is very elementary French that was certainly covered way back in high school but never assimilated due either to bad teaching or lack of studying, take your pick.


If Marais studied French in high school, that is.

I agree totally. I was let astray by that mad rant about how the teaching of French in schools was rubbish
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Re: Grammar through massive input (exposure)

Postby tarvos » Sun Oct 09, 2016 9:18 pm

I'll leave the rest for a second, but I want to argue with this:

In other words, English-speakers do hear two sounds; they hear the difference but this difference is not significant. When English-speakers hear 'bonjour' are they hearing 'bonnejour'? No, they hear bonjour like everybody else. In fact, they will usually reproduce it perfectly immediately. Problems arise when they attempt to read the written word bonjour.


Not necessarily. I find that people find hearing the difference quite difficult. Some people do not hear it at all - this is a problem I encountered with Spanish speakers who could never distinguish between s and sh, even when I told them how to mechanically produce the sound in the mouth. So they may well have the sound register as bonnejour, I don't exclude it at all.

Problems of pronunciation are not due to not being able to hear different sounds, they stem from not being trained to articulate the sounds properly and to the interference of the native language. This is a different problem. English speakers have enormous difficulty with roue and rue, not because they don't hear the difference. They initially can't articulate the u sound. Similarly, French-speakers have a problem with th in English. The certainly hear it but it takes time to learn how to articulate it.


The thing is not that you don't hear the difference. The difference is clear to you and me. What happens is that the brain doesn't register it as another sound and thus it sounds the same. Until I was 22, I couldn't hear the difference between a tapped alveolar r and a uvular r at all. Only when I could pronounce the tapped r did I hear the tapped r. It works in reverse.

In Marais' case the problem wasn't not hearing the difference between bon and bonne; it was using the spelling bon to render the sound of bonne.


And that is where I beg to differ, because to English ears, bon and bonne sound exactly the same.
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