leosmith wrote:I'm in the 20's in the Intermediate Course now. He keeps coming up with complicated sentences, with nuances that I would rarely use in English, so I'm a bit discouraged that I'm not learning the easier sentences.
I think you're kind of looking at it kind of wrong here. MT is not designed to have you learning sentences at all, but learning how sentences are made up of rules.
I read years ago (in fact, before I even experienced MT) a teacher saying that vocabulary learning was a massive mistake because the natural tendency to all humans is to pay attention to concrete words and neglect grammatical sentence construction -- i.e. to devolve to Tarzan speak. That immediately struck a chord with me because I was still fairly fresh out of school and the whole thing rang true with how my classmates tended to speak.
What he was arguing is that if you teach concrete vocabulary, you're basically presenting an obstacle to the acquisition of correct grammar. The logical conclusion (and I don't know if this was explicitly mentioned in the article or not) is that many teachers end up rationalising away slow grammar acquisition as normal because "grammar's hard" and "everyone finds it difficult"... but grammar's hard specifically because it is the first thing to get dropped as cognitive load increases. The end result is that many teachers end up increasing the vocabulary content continuously as they think they're making it easier for students when in fact they are only serving to make actual mastery ever harder (actually, I think this was really the explicit end point of the article). He argued that vocabulary should never be a teacher's main goal, because it was intrinsically easy, and a good teacher takes stuff that students would find hard and
make it easy.
Thinking about it, that article probably set me up to really accept MT when I finally used it for Spanish, because that's exactly what MT does. He's deliberately diverting the cognitive load to grammar by using these complicated sentences so that you're forced to acquire the grammar. Learning the easier sentences in many courses is just a matter of
memorising them, which is can be done by turning large chunks of the sentence (or even the entire sentence) into a "word" to be learned by the vocabulary system, bypassing the whole grammatical acquisition bit entirely.
