Reineke's SLA Notebook

[DaveBee]

And that's one reason why I expose myself to the spoken language. Well, there's that and the fact that my earliest memories of hearing a foreign language are linked to pretty images and sounds and not to words and concepts like "French," "Italian," "grammar" or "studying". I like to have fun with language and through language.

Do you have a program you follow?

eg. Begin with educational children's programmes (Sesame Street), or programmes on topics you know well, or perhaps dubbed programmes you have already seen in another language?

[reineke]

---

[DaveBee]

Do you have a program you follow?

eg. Begin with educational children's programmes (Sesame Street), or programmes on topics you know well, or perhaps dubbed programmes you have already seen in another language?

Yeah, about that.. I suppose there are some unwritten rules that I do follow.

Even if I often neglect them, I am committed to my languages and I use them for my pleasure and entertainment. The most important rule that I can think of at the moment is:

1. Don't bore yourself

I can nod along to that. It's just that in your case, where you start with nothing, no language course to prime your vocabulary, I wondered if there was a method that started you with A is Apple, and progressed in a graded path.

-----------

In one of your earlier postings I web-searched a name, and ended up with a research project (possibly just a grant farming project!) called EUROM4 > EUROM5. Which appears to be a project/experiment to learn all the Romance languages at the same time.

The logic (intercomprehension) could presumably work for any closely related group of languages.

[reineke]

---

[smallwhite]

TV

That's how Chinese people of other dialects learn Cantonese. No one studies it, they just watch Canto drama and movies. I can speak Cantonese to everyone and everyone understands me. Many of them speak it comfortably, too. And I think Cantonese is more different from Mandarin/Hokkien than English is from French/Spanish.

[reineke]

---

[blaurebell]

He is still not at the level where he can hear new words and understand them in context.

You know, some people are just very visual und suck at listening comprehension in general, even in their own language. Even in German and English I find myself struggling with new words unless someone gives me a definition right away. Just from context in spoken language I get lost. I also can't follow simple directions - left, right, right, left. I will forget and get lost. I'm just one of these people who always repeats "Say again?" and "Como?" and "Wie bitte?". To the extent that it drives family members nuts! I always have to write everything down or see it written. And even then I have a notoriously bad memory. In my family that's totally common. Both my mum and my dad forget names, so they invent silly nicknames for my friends which have more context. They will remember "The dude who jumped out of the window and broke his wrists," but not his name. During university days I tried to train myself to listen really hard, but nothing worked. Basically the only way to get stuff said in lectures into my brain was to write absolutely everything down. It's not that I had the wrong technique. It's just one of these things where my brain is not braining as expected. I make up for it by reading massive amounts and this is how I pick up new vocabulary. And once I have seen them written I will recognise the new words in spoken language as well. If I have problems with listening comprehension it's usually not that I haven't listened enough - it's that I haven't read enough.

[arthaey]

Blaurebell, I'm the same!

If someone tells me a new word, or directions, or instructions, it's pretty much in one ear and out the other. If I see it written down, then I'm way more likely to remember it.

This is as true of my native English as any of my L2's.

It's nice to see that there are others like me out there.

[reineke]

---

[reineke]

---