Spanish in 3 months....

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Spanish in 3 months....

Postby rdearman » Fri Dec 31, 2021 11:15 pm

https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/become- ... -yes/30247

I've been spending a lot of time on the Art of Memory Forum. Many people learn to memorize cards and other parlour tricks. I've been trying to apply some of these things to my Korean learning. It helps a little, but Spanish in 1 month.... I call bullshit. Even if you could memorize a few thousand words in a month, you'll still struggle with prosody and stress and pronunciation and grammar and.. and.. and..
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Re: Spanish in 3 months....

Postby Le Baron » Fri Dec 31, 2021 11:53 pm

I reckon one of those memory-feat people could probably learn enough phrases and some other bits and pieces to coast through, but then there'd be a curveball: slang, wordplay, funny accent, unknown phrase or words, and it's over. Collapses like a house of cards.

Still, as you'll probably say yourself, there's value in memory training. I could do with it,
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Re: Spanish in 3 months....

Postby Xenops » Sat Jan 01, 2022 1:06 am

Just a thought: is this community worth indulging in? We ask these questions about social media sites, but the effects on mental health could also come from more traditional online communities.

More on the topic: I'm curious to see how their listening comprehension goes. :twisted:
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Re: Spanish in 3 months....

Postby Le Baron » Sat Jan 01, 2022 1:07 am

Xenops wrote:Just a thought: is this community worth indulging in? We ask these questions about social media sites, but the effects on mental health could also come from more traditional online communities.

More on the topic: I'm curious to see how their listening comprehension goes. :twisted:

Do you mean this community, or the memory one?
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Re: Spanish in 3 months....

Postby Iversen » Sat Jan 01, 2022 1:27 am

I have not visited that particular memory forum, but when I hear og read about memory artists it seems that they primarily deal with long sequences that have to be memorized in a specific order - and they use series of prelearnt associations, memory palaces and things like that for the purpose. However raw sequence memorization are not particularly relevant for language learning. I accept that you might want to learn whole texts by heart, but that's not on my agenda, and if you do so it's probably more a matter of forming large entities with a plot and a structure and some kind of logic- at least that's how I have learned certain musical works by heart, and I suppose actors have to do something similar.

It would of course be nice to be able to scoop up a busload of words and phrases just by reading or listening to them once, but only if you afterwards can pick them out of the heap and use them individually in a relevant context. Maybe teaching a combination of rapid association formation and attentiveness could be relevant for language learners.
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Re: Spanish in 3 months....

Postby Xenops » Sat Jan 01, 2022 1:59 am

Le Baron wrote:
Xenops wrote:Just a thought: is this community worth indulging in? We ask these questions about social media sites, but the effects on mental health could also come from more traditional online communities.

More on the topic: I'm curious to see how their listening comprehension goes. :twisted:

Do you mean this community, or the memory one?


Hmmm...I meant the memory community, but what I said could be implied to mean any online community: if any of them affect your mental health, it's probably not worth it.
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Re: Spanish in 3 months....

Postby Cerebral_Arbitrage » Sat Jan 01, 2022 2:48 am

rdearman wrote:https://forum.artofmemory.com/t/become-fluent-in-spanish-in-one-month-yes/30247

I've been spending a lot of time on the Art of Memory Forum. Many people learn to memorize cards and other parlour tricks. I've been trying to apply some of these things to my Korean learning. It helps a little, but Spanish in 1 month.... I call bullshit. Even if you could memorize a few thousand words in a month, you'll still struggle with prosody and stress and pronunciation and grammar and.. and.. and..


Very true. Which is why I've fantasized about downloading languages into my brain since I saw this movie in 1999.

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Re: Spanish in 3 months....

Postby Cainntear » Sat Jan 01, 2022 7:41 pm

Having not looked at the actual materials, I can't really say anything about the course itself, but in principle...

Before I used the Michel Thomas Spanish course, I didn't believe you could really learn a language in a classroom -- I often felt more like I was learning the materials so the I could teach myself later.

For example, I might hear a word spoken, think "I've heard that somewhere before" and then look it up in my memory instead of a dictionary (or attempt to remember it at the same time as looking it up in a dictionary.

Or I'd recall a never-internalised, half-forgotten grammar rule and consciously apply it when I found myself in a situation that gave me a chance to use it.

I imagine all of us have done this sort of thing at some point, and most of us are still probably relying on it to some extent.
When I was at the beginner-intermediate stages in Scottish Gaelic, I refined my strategy to memorising a bunch or words and one or two bits of grammar before every visit to a conversation group, then make a point to use them and internalise them.

On the whole, I prefer a mixed approach -- the less you have memorised at one time, the easier it is to access it when you need it, so I'm not into too much memorisation at a time, but still...
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Re: Spanish in 3 months....

Postby rdearman » Sat Jan 01, 2022 8:02 pm

Xenops wrote:
Le Baron wrote:
Xenops wrote:Just a thought: is this community worth indulging in? We ask these questions about social media sites, but the effects on mental health could also come from more traditional online communities.

More on the topic: I'm curious to see how their listening comprehension goes. :twisted:

Do you mean this community, or the memory one?


Hmmm...I meant the memory community, but what I said could be implied to mean any online community: if any of them affect your mental health, it's probably not worth it.

TO be fair to the Art of Memory forum, its primary goal is to assist Mental Athletes to participate in things like the national and International memory events. So a significant amount of the threads there are about how to memorize decks of cards, poetry, names and faces and other events which are held at these types of competitions. However, there are some threads where people are trying to use these techniques for more realistic and daily activities. Such as learning languages. I myself have been dabbling in using some of these techniques for helping to learn Korean. It hasn't been wildly successful for me, although it does seem to stick a little more. This might be because I don't need a physical device to "walk through a memory palace". Also, my expectations are much lower than to learn Spanish in a month snake oil.

The definition of "Learn Spanish" on this site vs that one is probably more realistic here, since many of the people I see learning languages there is simply about remembering vocabulary.

But I am neither a Polyglot nor a Memory Champion, so I am probably speaking out of turn. The couple of languages I can use have taken a long time to become useful, if there was a shortcut I would love to know what it is!
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Re: Spanish in 3 months....

Postby Le Baron » Sun Jan 02, 2022 12:57 am

rdearman wrote:if there was a shortcut I would love to know what it is!

Well it just happens that I've been perfecting my new foolproof language shortcut programme. If you buy now (cash only) you get a second one absolutely free, for twice the shortcut power. Impress your friends, find true love, develop a whole new career. While stocks last.
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