Did the Listening-Reading method work for you?

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Re: Did the Listening-Reading method work for you?

Postby luke » Tue Aug 17, 2021 6:21 pm

The first part:
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 42#p193442

The second and final part of the Staszek-Phi-Staszek story... (including 12 again).

google.tranlate+luke translating Phi-Staszek wrote:8. INTERPRETATION.
Because speaking English with Polish pronunciation is incomprehensible to an Englishman, neither one {the Englishman or the Pole} can learn speak, read or write without speaking;
the sound system of the English {foreign} language absolutely must be very carefully mastered.
It will save a lot of mistakes and frustration, and you won't risk being laughed at, Baby.
It is possible to learn good pronunciation - contrary to popular belief - (also for adults) and it doesn't take long if done properly.

9. Language learning is the assimilation of elements (subsystems)
- until their use is habitual -
first by exposure to texts (fastest by "listening-reading"),
playing texts (repeating in recording {shadowing}, recitation {reading aloud}, re-translation {written - you have a correct version in the translation to check yourself})
and text processing (tearing, transfer of vocabulary and phrases), {recombining or maybe internalizing?}
in order to acquire language skills so that the created texts are understandable to the recipient and linguistically correct,
and the texts were understood fully and correctly.

10. Preparation of learning materials - housing
Housing:
minimum recording,
transcript (= written text of what is recorded), literal and literary translation
+ etext (+ computer dictionary) - easily check the meaning of words and find other examples to use, good dictionaries have thousands of such sentences
+ grammar, dictionary and real-life explanations
Without an actor's recording, language learning is very inefficient and a source of a tremendous amount of error.
See the file "Sample materials" or the end of this file (same content)

11. Learning and the use of language
The entire process of acquiring language skills consists of three stages:
1. Learning = putting new content into the head (texts, sentences, words - spoken and written) =
exposition (most efficiently by "listening-reading")
2. prevent forgetting = recreating according to the forgetting curve and using what you can already know.
3. extracting from the head - recreating and using
Using = speaking and writing independently (and listening and reading non-encapsulated texts)
Use is the result of learning.
Talking is only to a small extent learning the language; you will never say more than you already know.
If you start talking too early, there are additional, unfavorable phenomena (fear, shame, automation of incorrect pronunciation, grammar, learning strategies and understanding of received texts).

12. Workload
Each skill requires an incubation period during which the right amount of data must be delivered to the brain.
During this period, the efficiency apparently does not increase, a large number of errors occur, a person feels uncertainly - keep working!

These periods for individual efficiency are as follows (average values):
a. Understanding texts by ear {natural listening}: You will understand texts with a given level of difficulty in a natural way (based only on your own knowledge and ears); if you listen to about 20-30 hours of the recording doing "listening-reading".
20-30 hours is about length of recorded texts, not the number of working hours.

b. pronunciation: you will be able to correctly repeat every recorded word and short sentences behind the tape -
30-40 hours of exercises for phonemic hearing and base (speaking, movements of speech organs {mouth, tongue, etc}).

c. speaking: you will be able to speak correctly at a given difficulty level if:
1. you pass the incubation period in listening
2. learn pronunciation
3. repeat after the tape, recite, re-translate and tear it apart
3 to 5 hours of recorded text at this level. {again, the duration of the recording, not the duration of the student's work}

All these three periods are approximately 200-250 hours of work, provided that;
you work in accordance with the "Study Plan" sheet, "A few remarks on learning",
you meet the conditions on the "We assume" card and
you do not have any bad habits. {fossilized habits, poor reading in your native language, etc}

The more difficult texts you will take to the workshop from the very beginning of learning (preferably a novel with full length),
the faster you will use a language at a higher level of proficiency.
The longer the texts for "Listening-reading", the better - because of the idiolect of the author.

Caution:
What is usually called language learning (school, course and individual lessons)
is mostly negative due to:
ineffective preparing learning materials (because the teacher explains the words and rules, and you write them down in the book)
and exposition (because the texts are of poor quality and the co-learners are Poles or other non-native English speakers, their "English" and {real} English have nothing common, and you mostly listen to them in class.
Teachers also usually do not have good pronunciation and do not teach working independent methods - this applies to almost all graduates of English and other neophilology).

Examples of "listening-reading" materials:
(here is a small selection, from hundreds of books recorded in many languages ​​in general)
(All books recorded by actors, in full, cover to cover, no abridgements.)


She goes on to give several examples of interlinear and parallel texts.

Examples can be seen: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 35#p176135

Then Phi-Staszek closes with:

google.translate+luke translating Phi-Staszek wrote:The description of learning several foreign languages ​​at the same time can be found in the file
«! 0! Miss Daisy sweet polyglot. »

SEVENTEEN-17. I hesitated for a long time whether to write about this ... let it finally be there, maybe it will add to someone's
cheer and courage.

(The name comes from "It takes SEVENTEEN-17 muscles to smile!".)

All my life, for as long as I can remember, I have been learning alone, with joy and excitement.
School, including universities, impeded me immensely.
Were it not for the école buissonière *
{* lit .: bush school, i.e. truancy} (the only school where I felt happy), I couldn't do anything.

I was taking my lessons because of nothing to do - I have read a lot, from various fields, in many languages.

Most of my adult life I helped brave and bright people who did not want to go to public schools (similar to Marcus Aurelius, {Thomas} Edison, {Mark} Twain, {Isaak?} Brodski).

I was something like a moral support, a back room material and quite often I helped them to study on their own:
mathematics, literature, foreign languages, methods of own work, philosophy, psychology, computer, linguistics and learning the "profession" {teaching}: efficient learning foreign languages.

It wasn't always easy, but overall I had a happy life. I wish here thank all your "students" - friends.

If I had to say anything else about myself, it would be:
I believe that the Muses live in Parnassus and that "the fauns dance in the forest".

http://www.sedefscorner.com/2011/10/ant ... es-on.html
Last edited by luke on Tue Aug 17, 2021 10:16 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: Did the Listening-Reading method work for you?

Postby german2k01 » Tue Aug 17, 2021 7:04 pm

Let me share a real example and please tell me whether I have reached "natural listening" in German.
I have been listening to German every single day for the last 16 months. 6-12 hours every day. As a part of total immersion. Listened to 70 audio dramas, a dozen of audiobooks, and watched hundreds of dubbed TV seasons. Of course, I have done L-R 8 books spanning over a couple of months, hundreds of hours. Done 50 hours of listening in 5 days etc

I am in my 30s. When I reached 2000h mark in listening. I scheduled a trial lesson for speaking over italki. It was 30 minutes long.
The tutor had a very high level of German. Every word he spoke of had registered on my subconscious mind the way a native German speaker will say it.
However, what my eyes witnessed was a work of science fiction and I could not believe my eyes what I had witnessed. He was not a native German speaker. He spoke a couple of words with the influence of his native language and my subconscious mind detected it through his lip movements. Just like the way your fingerprints match electronically.

I understand that where the author is coming from listens massively in the shortest possible time every single day in order to build a strong sound system in your head. I am more interested in the speaking part of the method

A couple of weeks ago I went to a vaccination center in Germany for getting a vaccination dose. I went through several stages where I had to meet German native speakers( 5 Germans in total). They explained all details in German. And, I understood everything even I spoke a phrase here and there. Will you consider it "natural listening"? This vaccination episode occurred right after I was done with doing L-R 8 books. Before that, I was locked up in my room every day for hours on end.

Any feedback is welcome in regards to my above case study.
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Re: Did the Listening-Reading method work for you?

Postby Le Baron » Tue Aug 17, 2021 7:23 pm

Iversen wrote:When I was new to Modern Greek I did own a few textbooks (an old TY and one in Swedish by a Mr. Mystakidis), but just a few pages into this last one I got the insane idea to learn Greek by translating a guide to Rhodos into Danish instead, only with the help of a dictionary...

It's interesting you say this, because early on when I was learning Dutch (this would be about 5-6 months into full-on study) I did translate a book; the old way with dictionaries and pain. It was a book aimed, I imagine, at 10-14 year-olds called Als Oorlog Echt Is by Dolf Verroen. So nothing on the scale of the guide to Rhodos, but an entire book. The title itself make me think twice: was it If War is Real or When War Is Real? And I wondered if (when) there was a meaningful distinction and did this matter? I'd have to find the old 1.44MB diskette to see what I decided. :lol:

The question for me is: what did it do? Somehow I feel as though it did have some benefit. I was constantly rereading the bits I'd done, for tweaking and polishing purposes and to get back into the flow. Since the subject matter was familiar to most (WW2) it helped me to match mental images to words, though there were enough things still tripping me up. I recall vividly going down to the letterbox to retrieve the post and seeing one of the neighbours. I asked him what 'constateren' meant - since this was in the bilingual dictionary, but not the large Koenen belonging to the missus. After some trouble he said: you're better off checking the dictionary..'.

Anyway the upshot is that I think it contributed positively since anything you're actively doing over a period with something you're learning cements it into place. It is however a different thing to be embroiled in a text which you are simultaneously picking apart to render into another language, and to be just passively ploughing through a very long text waiting for recognition and familiarity to 'occur'. It's possible that some will because it's rarely instantaneous and you never really know what has actually been retained. What I would say is that I wasn't doing this as some kind of intense marathon or actively forcing it into my head on repeat. I'd say I spent two month on it doing as much or as little per day as I felt able to, among other stuff.

Was the Rhodes guide a good translation looking back? About 4 years later I translated Anton Pannekoek's Darwinism & Marxism and did a pretty good job...(I think) not needing a dictionary all that much.
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Re: Did the Listening-Reading method work for you?

Postby Le Baron » Tue Aug 17, 2021 7:44 pm

german2k01 wrote:Let me share a real example and please tell me whether I have reached "natural listening" in German.
[...]
Any feedback is welcome in regards to my above case study.


My personal opinion. You don't need to keep listening at that rate waiting for a speaking epiphany. Your issue (if I understand it correctly) is that you have trouble making the leap from what you understand to expressing it as speech. It's not uncommon. Though listening/understanding and speaking influence each other, they are separate skills. You simply must speak to be able to speak and to get better at it. It's not a knowledge issue, but a performance issue with all the associated psychological apprehensions.

I know you said you didn't want people to advise to 'just go out and speak to Germans', but that is the correct way forward. It will be awkward and you'll say wrong things or clam-up and not be able to even though you know what you want to say, but it will improve (and possibly quicker than you imagine). Getting into a discussion with someone on a topic you care about, and trying to express yourself, will do more for speaking than ploughing through another novel umpteen times.
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Re: Did the Listening-Reading method work for you?

Postby german2k01 » Tue Aug 17, 2021 7:54 pm

Thanks for sharing your thoughts if it is a performance issue then I will go and speak. I will see if I can get some preparation done beforehand in terms of asking questions and all for a conversation and see how it goes.
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Re: Did the Listening-Reading method work for you?

Postby Iversen » Tue Aug 17, 2021 8:24 pm

Le Baron wrote:Was the Rhodes guide a good translation looking back? About 4 years later I translated Anton Pannekoek's Darwinism & Marxism and did a pretty good job...(I think) not needing a dictionary all that much.


I have probably thrown it away - that's what I do with my old handwritten study materials. But I still have a complete translation of Gaspard de la Nuit by Aloysius Bertrand lying around somewhere, which I made as part of my French studies during the 70s. Part of it was even published -the only book I have ever published.

Quite generally my feeling is that if you really understand a text then you should also be able to translate it on the fly into your native language (with a small margin for words you only know in the foreign language or idioms that don't match up), and into other languages with a level of errors and lacunes that depends on the languages in question.

Because I translate in my head in all kinds of directions all the time I think I'm quite good at translating, but I can't see the point in writing my translations down - nobody will ever see the results so why bother? The only exception is when I study texts in very weak languages where I can't keep a whole sentence in my mind without forgetting something. Like Irish or Albanian.
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Re: Did the Listening-Reading method work for you?

Postby jeffers » Tue Aug 17, 2021 8:41 pm

Le Baron wrote:4. The 'efficiency' claim in the methodology is unfounded, it is merely stated. It might well be applicable in particular cases, but the ability to separate this out from the gains made by other exposure and learning over time will be very complicated. I don't believe anyone starting a language and using this as the chief method will learn X language in a relatively short period and that it will be 'more efficient' (for that is the claim made).

It's the efficiency claim that raises red flags for me, as a teacher. Our brains are flesh and blood, not machines, they don't work efficiently. In fact, we learn because of inefficiency: the more often and the more contexts in which we experience a piece of knowlege, the more likely it is that it will be embedded in our memory. Not that I don't believe there are better and worse ways of learning. For example, one thing that is clearly good about L-R is that it involves several elements of learning: repitition, listening, reading and speaking (if you do the shadowning/repeating part). Nevertheless, claiming efficiency over other ways of learning, as Le Baron says, is just pure speculation and adds to the impression that we are being sold a method that works as if by magic.

Le Baron wrote:Since I believe in putting one's money where one's mouth is, I am going to make an unscientific attempt with this method. I will acquire a target language translation of a book I know well, plus a closely-matched audio of the target translation (for I believe this is the method, correct?). Or perhaps it is the original text in the target language + audio, and a translation for me to be able to penetrate the general idea of it? Either way I will do the experiment and test several hypotheses. Mindless stubbornness in the face of positive results is not my thing. I am also in favour of easing any workloads and if I see that I am wrong in my assessment I will say so.


I'll be interested in seeing your experiment in action. Will you be writing about it in your log, during and after?
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Re: Did the Listening-Reading method work for you?

Postby rdearman » Tue Aug 17, 2021 8:57 pm

jeffers wrote: Le Baron wrote:
Since I believe in putting one's money where one's mouth is, I am going to make an unscientific attempt with this method. I will acquire a target language translation of a book I know well, plus a closely-matched audio of the target translation (for I believe this is the method, correct?). Or perhaps it is the original text in the target language + audio, and a translation for me to be able to penetrate the general idea of it? Either way I will do the experiment and test several hypotheses. Mindless stubbornness in the face of positive results is not my thing. I am also in favour of easing any workloads and if I see that I am wrong in my assessment I will say so.

I'll be interested in seeing your experiment in action. Will you be writing about it in your log, during and after?


People have already done experiments with this method. There are a number of threads. Probably the most well-thought-out and documented experiment is Yuurei's: https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 260#p99415
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Re: Did the Listening-Reading method work for you?

Postby Le Baron » Tue Aug 17, 2021 9:07 pm

jeffers wrote:I'll be interested in seeing your experiment in action. Will you be writing about it in your log, during and after?

Most likely upon completion, I'm not good at logging things like that in action. The only reason I'm posting extensively is because I'm 'on holiday'; in a few days I go off to a cottage for a week, so I'll look into suitable materials when I get back. I'm also going to organise it properly to make sure I don't stack an unfair bias against it.

rdearman wrote:People have already done experiments with this method. There are a number of threads. Probably the most well-thought-out and documented experiment is Yuurei's

Yes, I was made aware of that thread/post around the time I joined here. Forgive me saying so, but I would prefer to see and experience it myself. There are also things done there that I don't see myself doing, such as reading in the base language whilst following the target language audio. I can't see any valid meaningful reason to do that. I also thought the overall result looked less of a success (according to Yuurei's own description) than he/she considered. I may be wrong about that.
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Re: Did the Listening-Reading method work for you?

Postby luke » Tue Aug 17, 2021 10:12 pm

The following link looks like a concise summary the LR system by someone special (Kamlari):

https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 7994#p7994

It also has two links to more extensive documentation on the system.
L-R - Beauty is in the ear of the beholder.

The translation exercises I did above help me understand what I translated isn't the whole system. I found a Study Plan and Mr. Google did the heavy lifting again. In trying to comprehend the Plan, turned back to the forum and found lots of good Kamlari posts. The one above seems like a key to the "system".
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