Do you consume material in your TL that you'd consider beneath you in your native language?

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Sae
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Re: Do you consume material in your TL that you'd consider beneath you in your native language?

Postby Sae » Sun Dec 04, 2022 3:46 pm

Khayyam wrote:
Sae wrote:I dunno about beneath me, but certainly not my usual tastes, so for me it's music. Luckily for TV, I've found content I like for my target languages.

But I've ended up listening to music in Vietnamese that I wouldn't normally listen to, I've only found a handful of stuff in genre I listen to and in fairness, the lyrics in pop music are often quite clear because they're designed to be catchy. Although I find music I like in Mongolian quite easily, especially with how rock & metal from Mongolia is getting more attention thanks to The Hu. But admittedly, there's a few Mongolian pop songs that ended up as guilty pleasures.

Like this one, whilst this is not the sort of thing I'm into, but it just seems like a bit of fun and it kinda catchy. I know it's for a movie, maybe I should watch the movie.



I actually liked the song quite a lot. It's very reminiscent of Jamiroquai, of which I'm a big fan. Makes you feel like you're at an amusement park on a perfect summer day. If i were learning Mongolian, I'd be tempted to use it as learning material.


I enjoyed it too, and is maybe why I should try more music outside of the stuff I'm normally into. But yeah, I can see where you're noticing the Jamiroquai. But yeah, either way, it felt fun to listen to. But the I guess I'm not a fan of the pop music scene here, but it doesn't mean I won't like it elsewhere.
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Re: Do you consume material in your TL that you'd consider beneath you in your native language?

Postby Iversen » Sun Dec 04, 2022 4:05 pm

Well, textbooks... language guides... and sometimes literature, but then I have to be really desperate to find anything to read ..
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Re: Do you consume material in your TL that you'd consider beneath you in your native language?

Postby IronMike » Mon Dec 05, 2022 1:34 am

Let's put aside the issue with the word "beneath" in the question. I understand what the OP is asking.

Any time watching television and not reading or doing something else is probably wasted time, except that sometimes one needs to take a break.

So yes, sometimes I watch shows that I probably wouldn't bother to watch if the show were in English. Or YA books.

I wouldn't poo-poo Harry Potter though. I read somewhere recently (but can't find it now) that a study had found that reading the 7 Harry Potter books covers like 80% of standard/basic vocabulary. The study of course uses better vocabulary to explain what I'm trying to explain.

Edit: Found it!

Several researchers have claimed that low-achieving students, especially second language students, need explicit academic vocabulary instruction to “catch up” with their age peers (e.g., Nagy & Townsend, 2012). Two possible paths to vocabulary growth – free reading and explicit vocabulary instruction – were compared in terms of their efficiency (Mason, 2007) in words acquired per minute by analyzing data from a large corpus (1.1 million words) of young-adult novels taken from the Harry Potter series (Rowling, 2016), and from seven large-scale academic vocabulary intervention studies. The Harry Potter novels contain 85% of all the words on the Academic Word List (AWL), which is thought to include the most important word families needed for success in school. Reading all seven Harry Potter novels is predicted to result in the acquisition of between one-fifth and one-half of these AWL words. This vocabulary gain is 1.6 to four times more efficient than what has been achieved so far through explicit instruction.


From here: https://nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/item/445
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Re: Do you consume material in your TL that you'd consider beneath you in your native language?

Postby rdearman » Mon Dec 05, 2022 11:34 am

IronMike wrote:Let's put aside the issue with the word "beneath" in the question. I understand what the OP is asking.

Any time watching television and not reading or doing something else is probably wasted time, except that sometimes one needs to take a break.

So yes, sometimes I watch shows that I probably wouldn't bother to watch if the show were in English. Or YA books.

I wouldn't poo-poo Harry Potter though. I read somewhere recently (but can't find it now) that a study had found that reading the 7 Harry Potter books covers like 80% of standard/basic vocabulary. The study of course uses better vocabulary to explain what I'm trying to explain.

Edit: Found it!

Several researchers have claimed that low-achieving students, especially second language students, need explicit academic vocabulary instruction to “catch up” with their age peers (e.g., Nagy & Townsend, 2012). Two possible paths to vocabulary growth – free reading and explicit vocabulary instruction – were compared in terms of their efficiency (Mason, 2007) in words acquired per minute by analyzing data from a large corpus (1.1 million words) of young-adult novels taken from the Harry Potter series (Rowling, 2016), and from seven large-scale academic vocabulary intervention studies. The Harry Potter novels contain 85% of all the words on the Academic Word List (AWL), which is thought to include the most important word families needed for success in school. Reading all seven Harry Potter novels is predicted to result in the acquisition of between one-fifth and one-half of these AWL words. This vocabulary gain is 1.6 to four times more efficient than what has been achieved so far through explicit instruction.


From here: https://nflrc.hawaii.edu/rfl/item/445

That coverage is of English. Coverage in other languages would vary by translation. I have read all 7 books in 3 languages, and I would rather amputate a toe than ever read a -£+£; bloody -£&_(£ Harry -£&_+)# Potter book. But I remember enjoying it the first time around in English.
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