How Much of Your Courses and Textbooks Do You Learn?

General discussion about learning languages
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smallwhite
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How Much of Your Courses and Textbooks Do You Learn?

Postby smallwhite » Mon Jul 04, 2016 3:52 am

How much of your courses and textbooks do you learn?

Do you memorise all vocabulary? Both L1>L2 and L2>L1, spelling, pinyin and whatnot?
Do you shadow all the audio?
Do you learn all the dialogues by heart?
Do you drill all the conjugations?
Do you complete all the exercises?
Etc.
Why not??

So, how much of the vocabulary do you memorise?
How much audio do you shadow?
What do you learn by heart?
How else do you automate conjugation?
Which exercises do you do?
Etc.
Why??
Last edited by smallwhite on Tue Jul 05, 2016 12:00 am, edited 1 time in total.
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reineke
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Re: How Much of Your Courses and Textbooks Do You Learn?

Postby reineke » Mon Jul 04, 2016 4:02 am

No
No
No
No
No
...
Because I don't have to!

I don't memorize any vocabulary.
I don't shadow anything.
I don't learn by heart!
I listen to stories. Nouns and verbs are in almost every sentence, doing interesting stuff.
I don't do grammar exercises. I don't do courses. Well, maybe I'll go back to Mauger one day. But that's mostly nostalgia.
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smallwhite
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Re: How Much of Your Courses and Textbooks Do You Learn?

Postby smallwhite » Mon Jul 04, 2016 4:10 am

reineke wrote:No
No
No
No
No

But if it's "your course" that means you opened it to read. Why do you use a course but not learn anything from it?
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Ani
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Re: How Much of Your Courses and Textbooks Do You Learn?

Postby Ani » Mon Jul 04, 2016 4:12 am

As a skilled language learner I hope you answer this question for us all well, smallwhite. I am curious to see what you say.

Previously, I had only picked through text books and done scattered exercises here and there. I only used Memrise to learn vocabulary which did not necessarily correspond to to words I would see "in the wild".

Lately I have been doing textbooks to completion. I do all the writing exercises. Any unknown words are either underlined/highlighted or written in the top margin so I can quickly review by turning pages and determine whether I learned the word. Persistent troublemakers get extra markings or written by hand a few times to be sure I get them. This is all L2 to either L1 or just L2 comprehension. All my books area in L2 but I suppose when I do the active wave of Assimil I will be doing L1 to L2 for the first time.

For courses with good audio, I do shadow the audio (to death). I don't keep count but I probably listen at least 20x or more. I have really poor auditory processing so I keep going until I can speak the dialogue freely with the correct accent and prosody but this does not necessarily mean memorized by heart since I struggle with that.

I have been drilling conjugation on Memrise but I would love to see other suggestions on how people handle this.
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reineke
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Re: How Much of Your Courses and Textbooks Do You Learn?

Postby reineke » Mon Jul 04, 2016 4:32 am

I navigate through native materials. In that sense I set my own course. However I don't pile up books and resources to study from as if they were a course. I can't do otherwise. I don't need anything else for European languages. With Chinese I went straight to KylinTV but I didn't like the programming. I'll let you know when I get to Japanese but I doubt it will be any different. Heisig, Pimsleur and memrise (ie the sensible way) were a disaster.
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smallwhite
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Re: How Much of Your Courses and Textbooks Do You Learn?

Postby smallwhite » Mon Jul 04, 2016 5:06 am

Ani wrote:As a skilled language learner I hope you answer this question for us all well, smallwhite. I am curious to see what you say.

I've been asking myself recently why I'm not squeezing every last drop out of a course, why I'm not studying a course 100% thoroughly. Back in the old days when all a learner would have was 1 book+cassette set or 1 children's story book, they would study that one item back and forth from all possible angles and then actually learn the language. Why am I not doing that? The material's there. What am I waiting for?? I don't know.

Things in a course that I study thoroughly:

* Vocabulary.
* Listening repeatedly to the audio.
* Conjugations and grammar rules.
* I complete exercise books like Schaum's. I repeat sections that are most useful for speaking, usually present tense and past tense.

Things in a course that I don't study thoroughly:

* I shadow easy material repeatedly, but never anything harder.
* I don't memorise sentences by heart.
* I don't do easy-going (non-hard-core) end-of-chapter exercises

And now, I'm wondering why I don't, and whether I should. This thread is actually related to my "How are Foreign Languages Taught in Your Country?" thread. In Hong Kong, we do a lot of drills, repetitions, rote memorisation. And we speak English, a language completely different from Chinese, reasonably well. Whereas so many English speakers say they took X years of this FSI Category I language at school but couldn't even order a coffee. So I'm wondering if I should use the Hong Kong way of learning more (drills & rote) and the Western way less (fun, reading lots).

Of course, there are courses that I don't like 100% and couldn't be bothered to study 100%, but even with courses that I'm happy with, I often skip things. Why? I don't know!
Last edited by smallwhite on Mon Jul 04, 2016 5:20 am, edited 3 times in total.
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Snow
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Re: How Much of Your Courses and Textbooks Do You Learn?

Postby Snow » Mon Jul 04, 2016 5:09 am

reineke wrote:Well, maybe I'll go back to Mauger one day.


It means you followed the series before? If so, maybe you could share here how you did things back then?
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smallwhite
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Re: How Much of Your Courses and Textbooks Do You Learn?

Postby smallwhite » Mon Jul 04, 2016 5:16 am

reineke wrote:I navigate through native materials. In that sense I set my own course. However I don't pile up books and resources to study from as if they were a course. I can't do otherwise. I don't need anything else for European languages. With Chinese I went straight to KylinTV but I didn't like the programming. I'll let you know when I get to Japanese but I doubt it will be any different. Heisig, Pimsleur and memrise (ie the sensible way) were a disaster.

I'm sorry I don't understand. I'm asking how much of your courses and textbooks do you learn. If you don't use courses and textbook then the question does not apply to you. So do you use courses and textbooks, and if you do, how much of them do you learn?

Do you understand my question?
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AlexTG
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Re: How Much of Your Courses and Textbooks Do You Learn?

Postby AlexTG » Mon Jul 04, 2016 5:49 am

smallwhite wrote:I've been asking myself recently why I'm not squeezing every last drop out of a course, why I'm not studying a course 100% thoroughly.

Probably because you're learning closely related languages and that would bore you to death. Personally I mostly just read through courses once from start to finish. I don't do the exercises, but I read through them sometimes for extra input.
Last edited by AlexTG on Mon Jul 04, 2016 5:51 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Snow
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Re: How Much of Your Courses and Textbooks Do You Learn?

Postby Snow » Mon Jul 04, 2016 5:50 am

I can only share what I do for Korean. We use the Sogang textbook in class and I study at least one chapter in advance. Each chapter follows this format:
  • grammar (with substitution exercise)
  • dialogues (substitution)
  • reading section (true/false, formulate own answer)
  • listening section (t/f, own answer)
  • 2-sentence shadowing
  • speaking exercise
  • writing exercise
  • vocabulary list

I go through almost everything except the speaking and writing exercises because I don't want to talk to myself and there's no one to correct my writing output. I write everything down in my paper notebook, highlight words that I don't know and add an English translation on top of the word. I always use English, never my L1/native language. (I don't know how to categorize my English.)

Image

For the dialogues, reading, and listening section, I transcribe the audio in my notebook. I used to pause every single word but I recently started to listen to the whole audio in one go, guess the context, listen per sentence, then transcribe. Shadowing is speaking a sentence out loud along with the audio, am I right? I think I do this but silently. I don't memorize dialogues because I have Dory-like memory but sometimes I do recall the context and the associated vocabulary.

I don't drill conjugations but maybe I should start doing that because we're starting to learn the -읍니다 / 습니다 form.
Last edited by Snow on Mon Jul 04, 2016 5:57 am, edited 2 times in total.
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