Re: Obsolete sections of old language courses?
Posted: Tue Feb 02, 2021 10:43 pm
But I'm already actively conversational in three other languages, one of which I use all day every day. Another several times a week among native speakers. I already know how becoming conversational works, as everyone else here does.
I'm not promoting bare-bones phrasebook learning, I'm talking about parts of courses that have next to no relation to experiences you will likely find yourself having to navigate or learn about. Also how to possibly intelligently adapt them or ignore them.
At day one when starting a language, with the view that (at least for that course) you'll come out of it in three-to-four months with a foundation upon which you can keep building, how much stuff you'll never use does a person want to spend time covering? Compare this to e.g. uselessly drilling yourself in the use of feet and inches in order to pass a Maths GCSE (or whatever it's called these days) in the UK.
And the reason I brought it up is because I know people actually use quite a lot of old courses. And I know from flitting around the internet that a lot of not-so-experienced learners see FREE! on things like the FSI courses and similar, and then start going through and encounter a situation where they've gone to an 'employment bureau' to find a maid! Although some of the sentence structure, vocabulary etc, will be normally useful and applicable, a lot won't. You really don't want to imprint on your brain things related to working for the 'colonial service' or taking up head space seeing out of date social information (like rules about holidays, work etc that no longer apply, which could be taught more efficiently alongside the language learning in a modern course as you go through).
I think the thread has failed really.
I'm not promoting bare-bones phrasebook learning, I'm talking about parts of courses that have next to no relation to experiences you will likely find yourself having to navigate or learn about. Also how to possibly intelligently adapt them or ignore them.
At day one when starting a language, with the view that (at least for that course) you'll come out of it in three-to-four months with a foundation upon which you can keep building, how much stuff you'll never use does a person want to spend time covering? Compare this to e.g. uselessly drilling yourself in the use of feet and inches in order to pass a Maths GCSE (or whatever it's called these days) in the UK.
And the reason I brought it up is because I know people actually use quite a lot of old courses. And I know from flitting around the internet that a lot of not-so-experienced learners see FREE! on things like the FSI courses and similar, and then start going through and encounter a situation where they've gone to an 'employment bureau' to find a maid! Although some of the sentence structure, vocabulary etc, will be normally useful and applicable, a lot won't. You really don't want to imprint on your brain things related to working for the 'colonial service' or taking up head space seeing out of date social information (like rules about holidays, work etc that no longer apply, which could be taught more efficiently alongside the language learning in a modern course as you go through).
I think the thread has failed really.