How do you know if you understand?

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s_allard
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Re: How do you know if you understand?

Postby s_allard » Mon May 22, 2017 9:55 pm

LeCon wrote:
tarvos wrote:
Some people might say that none of this stuff is really important in real life as long as you have a gist of what is going on. True, but when time comes to use this stuff - if ever that happens, such as in a C-level exam - they key to using it well is to understand how it works.


Il vous reste is a very important construction, but it is symptomatic of a much wider problem and I don't think that this is C-level material at all.

Definitely not. I'm confused as to why s_allard teaches clearly beginner-level students and isn't into the C's himself yet seems to know everything about language learning. It's odd to me.

I love it. I really do. This post from someone with such a wonderful and appropriate name is a great opportunity to talk about the French impersonal verb construction, one of my favourite subjects. Just kidding. For those who are interested in the subject, here is a thesis in French on the subject:
https://is.muni.cz/th/179437/ff_b/Bak.prace.pdf

If anybody thinks that the French impersonal verb construction is only beginner-level stuff, I suggest they read the thesis above before making such outrageous claims.
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Re: How do you know if you understand?

Postby tarvos » Mon May 22, 2017 10:05 pm

It isn't beginner, but it certainly needs to be introduced before the C-levels.

And yes, the Spanish construction is impersonal. But it is different because in Spanish you can drop subject pronouns, so the way the structure ends up being used is different.

Dative constructions have been used in the Romance languages since time immemorial. It's not that strange to see it.

That you can then unleash a grammatical analysis on the subject doesn't really change the situation. You could also provide us with a thesis on the development of the present tense conjugation of French verbs and say that it is quite a complex matter and that there are details that still escape people at higher levels.

Deliberately being extremely obtuse doesn't help, though.
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s_allard
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Re: How do you know if you understand?

Postby s_allard » Mon May 22, 2017 10:39 pm

tarvos wrote:It isn't beginner, but it certainly needs to be introduced before the C-levels.

And yes, the Spanish construction is impersonal. But it is different because in Spanish you can drop subject pronouns, so the way the structure ends up being used is different.

Dative constructions have been used in the Romance languages since time immemorial. It's not that strange to see it.

That you can then unleash a grammatical analysis on the subject doesn't really change the situation. You could also provide us with a thesis on the development of the present tense conjugation of French verbs and say that it is quite a complex matter and that there are details that still escape people at higher levels.

Deliberately being extremely obtuse doesn't help, though.

Emphasis added. I don't want to make this thread into an argument over Spanish or French grammar but the post here goes to the very heart of the subject of the thread: what do learners understand?

tarvos who certainly speaks excellent Spanish understands ""¿Le quedan más sitios para este tarde?" to be an impersonal verb construction similar to my French example "Est-ce qu'il vous reste des places pour ce soir?"

This is patently wrong because the verb "quedan" has as subject "sitios" as evidenced by the plural verb form. There is no subject pronoun such as ellos to be dropped here. Spanish does of course have an impersonal verb construction form such as in llueve, nieva, etc. used in the third person singular form which is one of the defining features of the impersonal verb form.

This is pretty clear but the important point here is that tarvos understands her example to use Spanish impersonal construction similar to the French one when in fact it's not the case. It seems that tarvos has an incomplete understanding of how the impersonal construction works in both languages. Notice that I said "incomplete" not "wrong". This could lead to grief with verbs like resultar in Spanish or venir in French that have impersonal and non-impersonal uses. But what is interesting here is that despite misunderstanding the Spanish impersonal construction, tarvos correctly uses the verb form quedan. Not bad.

Edit: The original quote from tarvos "¿Le quedan más sitios para este tarde?" normally should read "¿Le quedan más sitios para esta tarde?" I have left the original quote as is.
Last edited by s_allard on Mon May 22, 2017 11:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: How do you know if you understand?

Postby tarvos » Mon May 22, 2017 10:55 pm

It's a dative. That's more important than impersonal constructions here
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Re: How do you know if you understand?

Postby Iversen » Mon May 22, 2017 11:23 pm

French and Spanish both use a descendant of the Latin word "restare". To be frank I was not too sure whether Latin always used it in the singular or in the number that corresponded to the number of the subject, so I decided to have a look at some authentic examples. Since Latin wasn't on the list of Languages eligible for advanced search in Google I used the search phrase "hic resta(n)t" (plus some excluded words to cut down on the number of hits in irrelevant languages). The result was that Latin uses accord with the number of the subject, i.e. the Spanish solution. The logic continuation of my inquiry would then be to check some texts in Old French to see whether the change to an understanding of the construction as inherently impersonal (and therefore always in the singular), but it is not easy to find searchable long texts in Ancien French online - and in the few things I found (like "Perceval, or the Story of the Grail")I didn't find an answer to my question. So until further information emerges the most logical scenerio is be that the use of an obligatory dummy subject "il" lured somebody in France into thinking that the French verb "rester" by nature was meant to be impersonal and singular.

And then the obvious question would be: at what point did some native French person reinterpret the syntax of "rester", thereby demonstrating a lack of understanding of the meaning the word had had until then?
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Re: How do you know if you understand?

Postby reineke » Mon May 22, 2017 11:40 pm

s_allard wrote:
tarvos wrote:It isn't beginner, but it certainly needs to be introduced before the C-levels.

And yes, the Spanish construction is impersonal. But it is different because in Spanish you can drop subject pronouns, so the way the structure ends up being used is different.

Dative constructions have been used in the Romance languages since time immemorial. It's not that strange to see it.

That you can then unleash a grammatical analysis on the subject doesn't really change the situation. You could also provide us with a thesis on the development of the present tense conjugation of French verbs and say that it is quite a complex matter and that there are details that still escape people at higher levels.

Deliberately being extremely obtuse doesn't help, though.

Emphasis added. I don't want to make this thread into an argument over Spanish or French grammar but the post here goes to the very heart of the subject of the thread: what do learners understand?

tarvos who certainly speaks excellent Spanish understands ""¿Le quedan más sitios para este tarde?" to be an impersonal verb construction similar to my French example "Est-ce qu'il vous reste des places pour ce soir?"

This is patently wrong because the verb "quedan" has as subject "sitios" as evidenced by the plural verb form. There is no subject pronoun such as ellos to be dropped here. Spanish does of course have an impersonal verb construction form such as in llueve, nieva, etc. used in the third person singular form which is one of the defining features of the impersonal verb form.

This is pretty clear but the important point here is that tarvos understands her example to use Spanish impersonal construction similar to the French one when in fact it's not the case. It seems that tarvos has an incomplete understanding of how the impersonal construction works in both languages. Notice that I said "incomplete" not "wrong". This could lead to grief with verbs like resultar in Spanish or venir in French that have impersonal and non-impersonal uses. But what is interesting here is that despite misunderstanding the Spanish impersonal construction, tarvos correctly uses the verb form quedan. Not bad.


Something tells me you translated that sentence from French.
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Re: How do you know if you understand?

Postby tastyonions » Tue May 23, 2017 1:15 am

No simple answer, really. In practice, it generally comes down to, "The words don't strike me as unknown and the grammar doesn't strike me as unknown." Basically nothing looks puzzling at all. Of course there are always plenty of cases where this subjective sense doesn't match up with the actual level of understanding, in which case you can end up looking silly when displaying your interpretation to others.
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Re: How do you know if you understand?

Postby coldrainwater » Tue May 23, 2017 7:29 am

My science background always taught that a decent metric for understanding a topic is to be able to teach it effectively to a professionally competent audience. My training in accounting would tell me to trust with verification and to anchor my understanding to something rock solid. My IT background would tell me to seek breadth and depth of knowledge and, as a rule of thumb, to go one level of abstraction deeper than you expect to need (this has shown itself tremendously useful for me in my professional career). After going that one level deeper, a return to fundamentals is often helpful as is thinking about what surrounds and extends your target of understanding.
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Re: How do you know if you understand?

Postby zenmonkey » Tue May 23, 2017 7:30 am

reineke wrote:
s_allard wrote:
tarvos wrote:It isn't beginner, but it certainly needs to be introduced before the C-levels.

And yes, the Spanish construction is impersonal. But it is different because in Spanish you can drop subject pronouns, so the way the structure ends up being used is different.

Dative constructions have been used in the Romance languages since time immemorial. It's not that strange to see it.

That you can then unleash a grammatical analysis on the subject doesn't really change the situation. You could also provide us with a thesis on the development of the present tense conjugation of French verbs and say that it is quite a complex matter and that there are details that still escape people at higher levels.

Deliberately being extremely obtuse doesn't help, though.

Emphasis added. I don't want to make this thread into an argument over Spanish or French grammar but the post here goes to the very heart of the subject of the thread: what do learners understand?

tarvos who certainly speaks excellent Spanish understands ""¿Le quedan más sitios para este tarde?" to be an impersonal verb construction similar to my French example "Est-ce qu'il vous reste des places pour ce soir?"

This is patently wrong because the verb "quedan" has as subject "sitios" as evidenced by the plural verb form. There is no subject pronoun such as ellos to be dropped here. Spanish does of course have an impersonal verb construction form such as in llueve, nieva, etc. used in the third person singular form which is one of the defining features of the impersonal verb form.

This is pretty clear but the important point here is that tarvos understands her example to use Spanish impersonal construction similar to the French one when in fact it's not the case. It seems that tarvos has an incomplete understanding of how the impersonal construction works in both languages. Notice that I said "incomplete" not "wrong". This could lead to grief with verbs like resultar in Spanish or venir in French that have impersonal and non-impersonal uses. But what is interesting here is that despite misunderstanding the Spanish impersonal construction, tarvos correctly uses the verb form quedan. Not bad.


Something tells me you translated that sentence from French.


I'd prefer "Le quedan más boletos para esta tarde" would be an improvement but the point being discussed seems relevant between the two language. I'd probably use 'lugar' / 'boletos' for this to say 'quedan lugares' or 'quedan boletos': But like 'place' in French you can have 'queda lugar'. You'll notice that the constructs for 'place' (fr) and 'lugar' (sp) can actually be singular or plural depending if noun is being used as an uncountable or countable noun. (I'm moving away from the impersonal construct).

In French you can have both:

'Est-ce qu'il vous reste des places pour ce soir?' - tickets for a concert

'Est-ce qu'il vous reste de la place pour ce soir?' space/area for a party or packing or a restaurant... here space in used as an uncountable.

In terms of 'meaning' and 'understanding' ... well, either works in the real world and understanding would not be lost.

Spanish has 'hay lugar' ... you guys want to discuss if that is the proper impersonal or not?
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Re: How do you know if you understand?

Postby SophiaMerlin_II » Tue May 23, 2017 11:53 am

s_allard wrote:In the course of thinking about intensive vs extensive reading, it occurred to me that that we rarely talk about what it means to really understand things we read. Three recent incidents brought this to my attention. First, when discussing a sentence with my tutor, I realized that I had never really mastered a particular grammatical concept and therefore I had understood the very opposite of the true meaning of the sentence in question. This meant of course that I had been misunderstanding similar sentences incorrectly all these years.

A second incident involved the use of the verb valer that I'm quite familiar with. Despite all my research in various dictionaries and the internet I just couldn't seem to understand the particular sentence. Even after discussing it with two tutors, the usage still seems foggy. I just don't see how I could it.

Thirdly, just last night, I tried to use the verb desharcerse in a sentence, only to learn that I was again saying the opposite of what I intended because I had misunderstood the use of this verb when I had read it and even looked it up in the dictionary.

In a similar vein, I recently came up with a perfectly constructed sentence but the wrong verb that resembled the French verb I was surely translating from in my head. Luckily my interlocutor corrected me.

All this makes me think that it is not always sure that we fully understand what we think we understand. How to be sure?


There is an unfortunately simple answer: you usually can't be sure.

Although I am surprised that for years you didn't notice a sentence having the opposite meaning you thought it did. Nothing seemed off? The only kind of clue you are likely to get from yourself is a "???" type of feeling when you transition from that sentence to the next one. That's tiny moment of hesitation or doubt is all you are going to get.

For many years I was a math tutor, and thinking you know something when you have at least part of it wrong is very common.
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