Sprachprofi wrote:bombobuffoon wrote:(I may have to wind up just faking language skills which seems to be how everyone else does it here, i.e. learning some pre-scripted framework of sentences, and then hope to get very simple answers).
The goal is to be able to watch TV shows and understand 90%. Films also. My reasoning is that if I can understand TV shows (like reality TV) then I should be good enough to begin to converse.
Learning scripts is actually one of the ways to build real fluency, and TV show comprehension will do barely anything for it. Let me explain.
The human brain would be unable to speak any language fluently if it had to retrieve each word, apply the grammar, and then send it to the mouth. Neuron speeds simply aren't fast enough, at least not for regular conversational speed. So how do we do it? Through the magic of chunking. Chunking means storing several words and grammar as one item. For example, the phrase "I'd like a chicken sandwich please" probably consists of three chunks: "I'd like", "a chicken sandwich" and "please". 3 chunks can be retrieved vastly faster than the 6 words of this sentence, not to mention applying the conditional tense to "like", minding the shortening of "I would" to "I'd" and so on.
Right, so I think there's some context needed here. First up, me and sprachprofi are more or less contemporary -- I'm slightly older than her, but I went back to university part-time and was studying linguistics round about the same time she was. There was something called "The Lexical Approach", proposed by a Michael Lewis, that was a response to the Communicative Approach and was kind of in fashion in the 90s, so a lot of universities would have been talking about it in the 2000s. The Open University definitely were, but not really in a good way, the way I remember it. Lewis was basically following the pattern of trends before him: identify one real feature of language and treat it as the "one true king" of language.
1)
The Input Hypothesis/Comprehensible Input took the fact that people would pick up language that they had never been taught as evidence that teaching didn't work.
2)
The Communicative Approach took that as a starting point, but decided that if the problem with CI was the lack of interaction (which certainly was a problem), then interaction is the key to learning a language.
Of course, the problem with Communicative Approach classrooms is that learners can achieve mutual comprehension by... well... murdering the language. (Personally, when studying language courses with the OU, I often found myself in a tutorial with people with very weak skills, and I was aware that speaking correctly would be an impediment to understanding, and I was forced by circumstance to mispronounce things and calque expressiong and grammar over from English. This was not even a CA classroom, but the idea of practising with classmates was always there -- it was not invented by the CA!
3)
The lexical approach is a fairly short logical step from there -- if the Communicative Approach leads to unnatural, non-native patterns, then the best way to start a CA class is with fixed phrases, because if the learners are parroting native-like phrases, that overcomes the problem that errors are more easily understood than correct language.
But as I say, Lewis was overplaying chunking, and that's not the way sprachprofi's talking about it:
Chunking does not happen when watching TV. It does happen when memorising sentences or when speaking. After the brain has laboriously retrieved words often enough, it will develop these shortcuts (chunks). There is no way to develop these shortcuts without having the brain laboriously retrieve words often enough.
Indeed -- and the first evidence of this is kids' language: kids may incorrectly learn very short phrases as a single word, but when I say "very short phrases", I'm mostly meaning compound nouns. In general, though, if they haven't yet acquired the grammar used to build a phrase, they won't be able to repeat the phrase. That's a bit different from adults, because often an adult can be drilled to repeat an arbitrary sequence of sounds.
Imagine being a new piano player. At the beginning you have to look for each key and then place a finger on it and press it. After only a few hours of practice, you know the location of the keys by heart, so the process of playing a single note speeds up. After some more time, your brain has "chunked" notes together that often appear together, so that you can play transitions of 2, 3, 4 notes pretty fluently. This is what active practice does. By contrast, watching concert pianists or piano classes on Youtube will not help with this at all.
And this is a great analogy, because actually the movement from a C to a G is physical "rule", and the movement of G to A is a physical "rule". The movement of C->G->A is a physical rule formed by combining two physical rules and their relation to the "words" of C, G and A.
But this leads to a question of whether you learn those rules generally by only ever doing a specific version of them, or if you need to engage actively in a variety of uses of them, and I think the latter holds, and I believe sprachprofi believes the same. After all, she even goes on to say:
If your goal is to achieve conversational fluency, 60 hours of active practice will do more than 1000 hours of listening.
...active practice: exactly. But then again...
Just look for the "Add1Challenge" or "Fi3M Challenge" (= Fluent in 3 Months Challenge) videos on Youtube. These are people, many of them monolinguals, who wind up being able to have okayish 15-minute conversations, including in non-European languages, after studying 45-60 minutes per day for 90 days. This Youtube list includes my challenge videos for Hebrew, Russian, Croatian, Japanese, Vietnamese. I usually put in 45-60 hours in 90 days (starting from zero) to achieve those and those hours include zero TV, only vocabulary study, some initial textbook study, and a lot of 1:1 conversation practice with tutors. A lecture in which I explain more of my fast-track approach.
Isn't the concept of "chunks" used by the Fi3M sort of philosophy...? I've seen advice from the guy where that term originates advising memorising phrases like "to tell you the truth..." in order to make conversations easier.
See... I don't really get why you even brought up "chunking", as there's not really a clear connection between that and the advice you gave.
Practising actively isn't specific to chunking -- that's how we practise grammar too, and as you seem to be saying, chunking is built on top of grammar, which means we need the grammar first.
And yet your plan focuses entirely on vocabulary, with no importance given to grammar at all. If chunking is important and chunking is built on grammar, shouldn't there be grammar study in there?