The Chronicles of An Overly Ambitious Soon To Be 20 year old.

[blaurebell]

Just a few thoughts:

Totally agreed on the monolingual dictionary front. I learned Spanish in immersion classes without translation, I then read about 5000 pages extensively, not using a dictionary at all and watched about 500h of TV. My comprehension is ok for spoken language, but I lack precision with written language. It always feels like I'm swimming and with many words I need context or I don't understand them at all. I can't listen to audiobooks ... too many words are just "some kind of landscape description" or "boat crap" or blanks.

With French I did a lot of dictionary work, used LWT and typed in every word into the database, making sure that I really understand the words precisely rather than just have a vague notion. After reading 5000 pages like that I have a lot more precision now, can listen to audiobooks just fine and extensive reading feels pretty precise and comfortable. If I wanted to gain that kind of precision with my Spanish by reading extensively I'm sure I'd have to read about 50,000 pages. Translations really speed things up a lot.

As for LingQ: I'm a big fan of intensive reading and listen, but LingQ is not quite as good as LWT and costs money! I think you also need to be careful to be clear about your goals when you criticise certain methods or tools. Of course you won't learn to produce correct grammar from reading and listening, but you'll practice comprehension and to recognise mistakes. This method isn't for everyone to be used on its own. Some people aren't really interested in native media, don't even read in their native language and just want to communicate in general. For them intensive reading would be torture and ineffective. I also have a pretty decent level of comprehension in French, but haven't really felt the need to speak it or produce any French at all. I can produce some halting French sentences and can tell when I make a mistake, but that's about it. However, I don't know what's so surprising about being unable to learn to speak from reading. It's as if you expected to learn to write from listening only.

Duolingo: I actually have a love hate thing going on with Duolingo - I hate that I can't just skip stupid vocabulary skills and keep just the grammar. For me it's just a really fast way to pick up the grammar for intensive reading. Since the Duolingo trees have been dumbed down so much it hardly requires to be able to produce TL grammar actively, one just needs to be able to recognise it. The perfect fast track for a quick grammar overview. There are languages where dealing with native content is a stretch just from Duolingo or any course for that matter - Russian definitely, German probably. In those kinds of languages real world sentences just get so much longer in books than in grammar exercises! However, that's also just a matter of practice and here a parallel text can help to clarify how these long sentences work. I don't really think Duolingo is useful beyond a quick overview, it's very limited in scope. I do find combining the reverse tree with timed practice a good method to get used to producing correct grammar quickly though.

In the end the real problem is that every one of those language learning gurus seems to be advocating their single favourite method that might not work for everyone. For Benny it's to speak from day 1, for Steve Kaufmann it's intensive reading and Gabriel Wyner focuses on pronunciation and vocabulary building with anki. I can't really figure out Luca properly ... something like two-way translation + lots of input + followed by total immersion + accent reduction? He seems the least one-sided person of the lot and his method is somewhat unclear to me. In the end there is more than one way to skin a cat in general! For me intensive reading followed by massive amounts of TV seems to be the most effective way to break through the comprehension barrier. The rest is still undecided.

As for various language learning snake oil including Benny's method: There are no shortcuts in language learning. For me it might be more efficient to do intensive reading, but it remains hard work. If you cheat too much, you have to pay it all back twice or three times over later on - fossilised mistakes are the price to pay for cheating to speak earlier for example. If you're unwilling to put in the effort of intensive reading you will need to read *a lot* more to get to a good level of precision. In the end it pays off to do it right from the start.

[Atinkoriko]

We are in agreement, blaurebell.

My criticism was directed from the viewpoint of a beginner, or at least a former beginner who had to sift through mountains of misinformation to find a few nuggets of truth.
I wonder if there was a way to automatically direct all prospective language learners to a landing page filled with lots of good information, highlighting the various approaches and possible pitfalls. I know there's a languagelearning wikia complied already, and that the former site has an excellent section which gives information on each language but that doesn't show up in the first few pages of a 'How to learn a language' Google search.

Oh well

[Atinkoriko]

Just a few thoughts:

Totally agreed on the monolingual dictionary front. I learned Spanish in immersion classes without translation, I then read about 5000 pages extensively, not using a dictionary at all and watched about 500h of TV. My comprehension is ok for spoken language, but I lack precision with written language. It always feels like I'm swimming and with many words I need context or I don't understand them at all. I can't listen to audiobooks ... too many words are just "some kind of landscape description" or "boat crap" or blanks.

With French I did a lot of dictionary work, used LWT and typed in every word into the database, making sure that I really understand the words precisely rather than just have a vague notion. After reading 5000 pages like that I have a lot more precision now, can listen to audiobooks just fine and extensive reading feels pretty precise and comfortable. If I wanted to gain that kind of precision with my Spanish by reading extensively I'm sure I'd have to read about 50,000 pages. Translations really speed things up a lot.

As for LingQ: I'm a big fan of intensive reading and listen, but LingQ is not quite as good as LWT and costs money! I think you also need to be careful to be clear about your goals when you criticise certain methods or tools. Of course you won't learn to produce correct grammar from reading and listening, but you'll practice comprehension and to recognise mistakes. This method isn't for everyone to be used on its own. Some people aren't really interested in native media, don't even read in their native language and just want to communicate in general. For them intensive reading would be torture and ineffective. I also have a pretty decent level of comprehension in French, but haven't really felt the need to speak it or produce any French at all. I can produce some halting French sentences and can tell when I make a mistake, but that's about it. However, I don't know what's so surprising about being unable to learn to speak from reading. It's as if you expected to learn to write from listening only.

Duolingo: I actually have a love hate thing going on with Duolingo - I hate that I can't just skip stupid vocabulary skills and keep just the grammar. For me it's just a really fast way to pick up the grammar for intensive reading. Since the Duolingo trees have been dumbed down so much it hardly requires to be able to produce TL grammar actively, one just needs to be able to recognise it. The perfect fast track for a quick grammar overview. There are languages where dealing with native content is a stretch just from Duolingo or any course for that matter - Russian definitely, German probably. In those kinds of languages real world sentences just get so much longer in books than in grammar exercises! However, that's also just a matter of practice and here a parallel text can help to clarify how these long sentences work. I don't really think Duolingo is useful beyond a quick overview, it's very limited in scope. I do find combining the reverse tree with timed practice a good method to get used to producing correct grammar quickly though.

In the end the real problem is that every one of those language learning gurus seems to be advocating their single favourite method that might not work for everyone. For Benny it's to speak from day 1, for Steve Kaufmann it's intensive reading and Gabriel Wyner focuses on pronunciation and vocabulary building with anki. I can't really figure out Luca properly ... something like two-way translation + lots of input + followed by total immersion + accent reduction? He seems the least one-sided person of the lot and his method is somewhat unclear to me. In the end there is more than one way to skin a cat in general! For me intensive reading followed by massive amounts of TV seems to be the most effective way to break through the comprehension barrier. The rest is still undecided.

As for various language learning snake oil including Benny's method: There are no shortcuts in language learning. For me it might be more efficient to do intensive reading, but it remains hard work. If you cheat too much, you have to pay it all back twice or three times over later on - fossilised mistakes are the price to pay for cheating to speak earlier for example. If you're unwilling to put in the effort of intensive reading you will need to read *a lot* more to get to a good level of precision. In the end it pays off to do it right from the start.

On a slightly unrelated note, I finally managed to install LWT now. You've used it extensively for a while now and I wonder if you could give me some tips on how to use it

[blaurebell]

It's like with any topic on the internet: 95% of the information is non-sense and one needs to keep digging to get to the worthwhile stuff. I think being able to process a lot of irrelevant information and getting to the important bits is the single most important skill in our information overkill society. And of course those who peddle the language learning snake oil will do anything in their power so that the important information will not be on the first page of the Google search!

If you want to know how I use LWT for language learning, refer to this post over in my log:
viewtopic.php?f=15&t=3235&start=110#p67881

Still a draft, I don't think the Russian numbers are quite right yet, but the French numbers are accurate.

[Atinkoriko]

Meanwhile, in lesson 6 Perfectionnement Allemand:

'Vous avez certainement remarqué des châteaux [forts] de sable que les vacanciers allemands dressent partout sur leurs plages. N'en déduisez pas des relents de militarisme refoulé'

'You have certainly noticed the sand castles that the German holiday makers make everywhere on their beaches. Do not deduce hints of repressed militarism from this.'

Poor old Deutschland


On an unrelated note, I realise that I am actually doing intensive French reading by doing Perfectionnement Allemand with it's French base. The more the better I guess.

Everything is going smoothly, especially the active waves, but the amount of shadowing to be done is slightly starting to get to me. Oh well, 69 more days before I'm done with all passive waves.

Read a page with LWT, blaurebell, and it is indeed a fantastic application. I think I'll just load Das Parfüm into it and just toil away.

Also, one small observation. From all the logs I've read, and from my own limited experience from when I stopped language studying for two months due to exams, it seems that when a language goes passive you never really lose your ability to read quite well.
If that is true, that it is possible that someone who has read a lot in the language would have a much easier go at reactivating it when he wants than someone who focused mostly on speaking rather than reading.

Is this possible or just faulty logic on my part?

[Atinkoriko]

German
Against all odds, I have not missed a single Assimil lesson yet from the 5 courses I'm running. Whoo!!
Took a vocab test at Wortschatz and got a score of 12000 estimated words. Now that will most likely be heavily passive, so I really need to step my up reading as well as do more personal vocab work with the wordlists.

Das Pärfum is also getting easier and easier to read, with fewer lookups per page as I find myself able to guess some words from context. For such a large and complex novel, a good part of my unknown vocabulary would have been verbs but I guess my earlier verb binge[ about 800 new verbs] with the wordlists is paying off. I also read an article of Der Spiegel each morning, armed with my Instant translate chrome extension to deal with unknown vocab. However I find that most unknown vocab tend to be nouns, especially politically related, with quite few adjectives or verbs. Another plus for the wordlists. The instant translate extension instantly translates the word when I click on it and then saves it, giving me a translation history I can then use for my wordlists.

In all, alles klar on the German Front.


Spanish
Found this cheesy yet excellently well made telenovella on Youtube called 'Reina de Corazones'. Rather interesting I must say, and the subtitles helped me get along quite fine. It'd be a great show to watch for my Spanish.
However for now, the march with Assimil continues. Really interested in seeing how far Assimil without Toil will bring me, so I'm taking extra care with the shadowing and the scriptorium. Consumes a large chunk of my morning study period but it's fine as the story's quite interesting.

Read Prof Arguelles's website again and saw that he'd graduated from Uni at 22 with 'a solid foundation in French, German, Spanish, Latin, Greek and Sanskrit'. Looking back at my plans and language wishlist, it does seem quite similar to this [replace Sanskrit with Italian and add Russian] though I doubt that I'd be able to work as hard as he did or even get such a solid foundation.
Mentor confirmed? Every polyglot seems to have a pet method, and I must say that I've quite taken to his Shadowing, Scriptorium and love of Assimil quite well. Quite inspiring.


French
Browsed through some French legal journal articles today and lamented to myself yet again that my listening comprehension was much worse than my reading comprehension. Found Les Revenants on Netflix and got halfway into the first episode before falling asleep. However, I'm sure I'll like it a lot. Quite spooky and right up my alley. Can't decide between subtitles in English or in French. With the French I end up reading my way through the story while with English I can actually 'see' the french sentences in my mind as I read the English and listen to the dialogue. I think I may stick with English and watch it over again, with French subs and then with no subs at all. More hours for the Super Challenge.



Italian
Stumbled on the dubbed version of Friends and watched a few minutes, then turned it off because of fears of interference with Spanish.
Sorry Italian but you'll have to wait.

[Atinkoriko]

The French proclivity to shorten already short words is the bane of my existence.

In the Assimil Business French dialogue of today, this like 'C'est un peu plus complique que ca' gets squeezed into 'Ce ton po plu compliketsa' with the 'compliketsa' replacing 'complike ke sa' if my utterly horrid attempts at transcription can sufficiently illustrate what I mean. Learning the IPA is like learning another language so I have to make do with this.

Anyway, it's a awful pain to shadow, especially at that speed. However, the extra stress suffered seems to be worth it in terms of my tongue getting used to French spoken at this speed. I review past lessons everyday , as is customary for me, and I found today that I was able to read aloud the previous lessons quite smoothly indeed.

Assimil with extra pain seems to be a winning formula.

[Atinkoriko]

Still cleaning up things for my B2 push with regards to German.

I downloaded the B2 sample materials from Goethe Institute's website and was overall satisfied with what I saw. For one, my over ambition with tackling C1 German books seems to have paid off in terms of reading comprehension.
After getting lost in the middle of a das Pärfum paragraph which was masquerading as a single sentence, the relatively short B2 sentences were quite welcome to see.

In comparison

Goethe B2 booklet - 'Das wachsende ökologische Bewusstsein hat in Deutschland zur Gründung der verschiedensten Natur- und
Umweltschutzvereine geführt'

The aforementioned Das Pärfum sentence -

'Er hieß Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, und
wenn sein Name im Gegensatz zu den Namen anderer
genialer Scheusale, wie etwa de Sades, Saint-Justs,
Fouches, Bonapartes usw., heute in Vergessenheit
geraten ist, so sicher nicht deshalb, weil Grenouille
diesen berühmteren Finstermännern an
Selbstüberhebung, Menschenverachtung, Immoralität,
kurz an Gottlosigkeit nachgestanden hätte, sondern weil
sich sein Genie und sein einziger Ehrgeiz auf ein Gebiet
beschränkte, welches in der Geschichte keine Spuren
hinterläßt: auf das flüchtige Reich der Gerüche.'






The listening comprehension part went quite nicely too, with most of my wordlisted vocab turning up. 55 h of German audio visual material so far and about 20 more to go in order to complete my half SC. Feeling very positive about listening comprehension now.
The funny thing is that despite a relatively substantial vocabulary on my part, there are still some 'recommended' words that I still haven't committed to memory, or at least this is what I concluded from the perusal of one of 'B2 recommended words' lists. I shall have to go mop up those up sometime.

I suspect I'm already a passive B2 at least, but I need a lot of work in order to stand a chance of passing a B2 exam which would require better active skills than I have now.
The plan remains simple for now. Finish the Assimil courses, learn about 3,700 more words with wordlists and continue with the Super Challenge or Half SC in this case. The combination of the active waves, the new vocab and the flood of input from the SC would solidify me as a passive B2.

The next thing from there would be an Output Challenge, combined with FSI and a formal B2 preparation textbook like Sicher! Deutsche als Fremdsprache.

Good vibes

[blaurebell]

The aforementioned Das Pärfum sentence -

Phew! That's quite a sentence! I don't know whether you tried that already, but if you feel it's a bit too tough going for you I'd suggest to keep going with translations from other languages, where the sentences might be less complicated. Translations from English are usually a good start. They will still have long sentences every 1 or 2 pages, but they're usually not quite as complex in structure. A couple of adventure style translations and you should be already used to longer sentences making the jump to something like the quoted Parfüm sentence less harsh. A gradual increase would be: a translation from English (preference for short sentences), a translation from French (preference for longer sentences, but translators strive for understanding), German native material. For me Russian native stuff was just too much of a stretch - I'm already struggling with some of the sentences of a translation from English.

[Atinkoriko]

The aforementioned Das Pärfum sentence -

Phew! That's quite a sentence! I don't know whether you tried that already, but if you feel it's a bit too tough going for you I'd suggest to keep going with translations from other languages, where the sentences might be less complicated. Translations from English are usually a good start. They will still have long sentences every 1 or 2 pages, but they're usually not quite as complex in structure. A couple of adventure style translations and you should be already used to longer sentences making the jump to something like the quoted Parfüm sentence less harsh. A gradual increase would be: a translation from English (preference for short sentences), a translation from French (preference for longer sentences, but translators strive for understanding), German native material. For me Russian native stuff was just too much of a stretch - I'm already struggling with some of the sentences of a translation from English.

Hahaha, I got through it by writing it down and making a hyper literal translation. Then I read it again and again until it got clear. I've read about 10 pages of the book now and I think I may stick to it until I finish it