Greasaias wrote:I always read Cainntear's post with great interest. In fact, they were instrumental in the development of my personal language-learning framework - my conversion, so to speak, to what I like to call Professor Paul Nation's Fourstrandism - and abandoning the follies of youth (Input-Onlyism). Four Strands or Death!
Thank you, Cainntear! I mean it.
Why thank you!
This time, however, what you say goes directly against my lived experience.
Except it doesn't, because...
Cainntear wrote:how do you read a translation while listening?
I don't know, I just did. (Perhaps I didn't know it can't be done at that time. *smirks Shawly*)
See, I didn't say that following the two near-simultaneously was impossible, just that simultaneous attention is impossible.
Iversen wrote:The key is the length of the time slices and one's ability to read fast. I just switched on the sound on my TV to test this, and I may lose one or two random words every time a new subtitle pops up, but I can still hang on to the speech. And I have just watched silent Norwegian rescue people with subtitles while speaking to my sister on phone. That was not a problem.
I've highlighted the key term here: time slices. Timeslicing is a real thing -- switching from one task to another on the fly.
The thing is, most of us aren't aware that we're doing it. It used to be hard to describe this, but now we can use computers as an analogy.
Computers traditionally could only do one thing at a time. Now they have multiple cores and a dedicated graphics processor, so we can think of a computer as have two "channels": the main channel and the graphics channel. The graphics channel can only do one thing at a time, and the processor might have four cores that can act as indepedent channels, but each of those channels can only do one thing. (The graphics channel may be talked about as parallel, but last I checked it was a "single instruction, multiple data" architecture which lets the processor do one thing (=action) to multiple things (=pieces of data) simultaneously.
A computer can switch between these tasks so quickly that every single frame (which might be anything from a thirtieth of a second to under a hundredth) it does a truckload of tasks. We aren't aware of its process of reading the controller/keyboard and updating you player character, working through multiple enemy AIs to make them act as naturally as possible, updating the location of numerous flying objects, fiddling the voltages to make the precise sequence of movements in a loudspeaker to realise a sound, rendering each enemy, bullet or piece of scenery into a form that can be drawn to screen, drawing them individually on top of each other, etc etc etc.
We might not be as good at timeslicing as computers, but like computers, if we timeslice effectively, the switch of attention is something that goes unnoticed. Only it's not only the outside observer that doesn't notice: we ourselves can fail to notice.
Greasaias wrote:I was listening to a recording while looking at the corresponding translation. That's what was happening externally. As of what was going on in between my ears, I'm not sure. Was I a successful polyglot at that time? No.
But you were, to some extent, a successful learner, weren't you? And maybe that wasn't something that was trained into you, in the same way it wasn't trained into me. I've said on a number occassions that I was very distressed at home difficult I was finding French: it seemed like languages were the first school subject I was bad at. But I very quickly came to realise that we had all chorused "je suis, tu es, il est, elle est, on est; nous sommes, vous êtes, ils sont, elles sont", and that the length of time it took my classmates to work out the answer was proportional to how far down the list they were. Meanwhile, I was struggling with the ones on the second half of the list (which were actually a second column during lessons, as we were using the traditional verb table pairing singular and plural conjugations) and I got to thinking that we simply hadn't used them as much. I kept an eye out after that and basically proved my hypothesis to myself: we probably only had one or two translation exercises for each plural form, compared to 4 or more for each singular form.
I became aware that I was simply learning the words individually while my classmates were memorising the list and looking them up.
My big sister would insist that doing verb tables was the right way to learn verbs because she did it and it worked for her, but it didn't work for most of the pupils in the school -- I think there were only 5 of us in the Higher French class (first year of post-16, optional schooling), because pass rates at Standard Grade (16-year-old, end of compulsary schooling) were pretty low. My sister wasn't thinking about why it didn't work for others, so she wasn't aware of why and how it did work for her. Meanwhile, my dad was a damned good science teacher, and he was always looking for why and how his students failed, so was always trying to eliminate the possibility of doing things wrong.
So yeah... my whole thinking about superficial exercise descriptions goes right back to last century.
Based on that summary and partial elucidations scattered across myriad threads, I don't think there's anything in the L-R Method, properly understood, that goes again well-established language-learning practices - as far as I know them. And as far as I 'properly' understand L-R - which may or may not coincide with the originalist interpretation.
Well there isn't really, and my biggest issue is that instead of genuinely discussing those well-established principles, they're hidden inside a pretty rigid structure. In fact, they're well-enough hidden that there isn't strictly a requirement to actually apply them, so there is a way to follow the routine to the letter without actually engaging those principles at all. By analogy to my sister's advice, she was telling people to use verb tables but wasn't accounting for the fact that the most common error is memorising them as a list... which is also the most natural, easy way to learn a table, even if it's not particularly useful. Or another example: when Duolingo gets you to transcribe a sentence in your target language (or worse: pick the words from a very limited "fridge magnet" set), there's absolute nothing forcing you to think about the meaning; and even though they give you the meaning after you've completed the task, it's down at the bottom right of your screen in small writing, so you're not even prodded towards reading it.
The way I view it is not as an absolute framework, but a point on an intensity spectrum.
Which leads to another problem: name something, and it becomes "a thing". Once something is "a thing", people will look for a clearer definition of what "that thing" is. This often results in looking back to the originator of the term. I've had this discussion a couple of times with Iversen, with regards to Comprehensible Input. He doesn't believe in Krashen's ideas, but he's happy to treat it as a useful term that means something slightly different. But if you promote the term, people will look for "the thing" that it represents, and they will then declare that they've found "the source of the thing" and then attempt to correct people who have attempted to move away from a simplistic idea to a broader, more useful one. We can't change what L-R means, because there are increasing numbers of pages going back to the source.
This is pretty anti-scientific. No-one when discussing gravity is going to correct someone talking about universal gravitation because "that's not gravity -- Newton coined the term for something that was the same everywhere." And before anyone says it, this isn't simply because Newton came up with the idea of universal gravitation himself! To get rid of the "same author problem" though, consider Newton's laws of motion and things like inertia. Should we say a fast-moving object doesn't have "inertia" because it embodies Einstein's theory of relativity? Is relativistic inertia not "inertia" because that's a term related to Newtonian mechanics? Not at all.
But that doesn't mean there's any point in changing the meaning of things like L-R -- as I say, you're talking about it as "a thing" with some kind of tangible properties, and people are going to build an effigy to worship, rather than considering the bigger picture and all the complex issues underneath
It goes without saying that the L-R as generally interpreted is a mere technique, completely insufficient by itself.
No, it does not go without saying -- it needs to be said explicitly. I think you're ignoring the quite large number of people who have put that effigy on a pedestal and are asking for the right prayers to say to it. They are looking for instructions on how to perform the rituals, rather than looking at the variables and thinking about how to personalise it to their own specific needs and desires.
And like I say, the existence of a short name defines it as "a thing", which is what we call reification.
Nevertheless, this technique itself I found to work satisfactorily, occasionally splendidly.
Oh, absolutely. But...
Fine, but what did I really do while practicing the technique? I think it was similar to using pictures to understand a story, checking a definition of an unknown word when unsure about the meaning of a sentence, reading the translation beforehand etc. Context, in the broadest meaning possible. Anything that can elucidate the meaning of the text read.
Jumping over the gap - I like to call it the hermeneutic gap - between "getting it" and "not getting it" - I can't explain. It just happens.
Or... it just doesn't happen. If I can't tell someone how to do something, it's not generally a great idea tell them to just do it anyway: when they fail, it can't be my fault because my advice is good because it worked for me, so it must be their fault for not following my advice closely enough. But if I do say something, I'm going to be fairly vague, because I'm not going to pretend to know everything... because I don't.
And when use a shortterm, whether it be L-R, Comprehensible Input, or whatever, we may not be directly giving rigid structure, but it's a fair bet that the hearer will immediately go out and look for the "personification" of the reified concept.
