Curious about it and I started reading more about it. And it does seem there are mixed views about it's success, mixed with studies showing better test results in students, though tests =/= learning, I was a B student in German and my German sucks and I would be curious by the quality of the speakers in those studies.
But I wonder if there is a limited capacity whereby it is useful? I read some argument how it works better for kids vs adults. And at a glance, it sounds more digestible and friendlier to people starting out.
I can maybe see some logic for vocabulary building or introducing new grammar concepts in a way you already have context you understand.
For example if I wrote:
"Cat of mine eats food tasty" you have a sentence in the Vietnamese grammar structure and you can ascertain what it means without any Vietnamese.
And you can work in words like
"Mèo of mine , ăn food ngon"
It can maybe introduce concepts without the baggage of knowing all parts. But I don't see it sustainable the more complex that language gets, because there are translations from Vietnamese into English that convey the same ideas or message without the same words and you have to learn how to think like a Vietnamese and you can't do that with English terms. However, I found references to Japanese books advertised with this method, so I guess I would also be curious how that progresses the more complicated Japanese gets or whether it would still apply English equivalency rather than thinking like a Japanese speaker.
And I saw an example where it introduced things like verb conjugation. Heck, I've seen a couple of Turkic speakers make facetious comments about Turkifying English and giving examples of how things like agglutination might work in English, which those examples reminded me of. But it may be a way of demonstrating how it works in familiar terms first.
Using a Tuvan accusative case example: "I remember my mountainsny". Then apply pluralisation, "I remember my mountainlarny", then apply possession, "I remember mountainlarymny" and the word "mountain" as "I remember daglarymny". Apply Tuvan word order, "daglarymny remember I" and then the full translation "Daglarymny saktyr men".
But I am not sure it works as a learning method because I can see potential problems already. But as a demonstrative technique to new concepts or ideas? Maybe. It does feel a little more digestible.
Cainntear wrote:leosmith wrote:L1 = I like dogs.
Diglot Weave = I like 강아지.
That's probably an even more fundamental example of the idiom/phraseology problem.
I like dogs => *yo quiero perros
Me gustan los perros => *Me find_tasty the dogs
Even French, which is close to French has the problem that "j'aime" means both "I like" and "I love".
It's one thing to switch "j'aime les chiens" to "*I like the dogs" (article error may be overlooked as it's not a social problem) but it's totally different to accidentally indicate a romantic attachment to an animal...
There's examples of this in Vietnamese too. And I think a danger to account for is that we have words with different meanings in different contexts.
Like Vietnamese uses classifier words. Animals (including humans) have a classifier of "con", so let's say:
"Anh thích con héo của anh"
It means I like my pig.
So we do
"I like con héo of mine" so we figure out "con héo" means pig.
But we also learn "I eat a banana"
"Anh ăn một quả chuối"
And you go ahah, so I can say "Anh thích ăn con héo"
And think it means "I like eating pig" and be confused why a Vietnamese person looks at you in horror.
"Con" is a classifier used when the animal is alive. It is a different classifier when it is food. It sounds you like to eat live pigs.
I guess you could combat that by showing what it is when it's food, but even then without explicitly knowing the difference you still might make the mistake because it could be interpreted as the difference between "I like eating pig" and "I like eating pork" in English where the same meaning is conveyed.
