I've been reluctant to even open this thread and hoping another mod would catch it if something went wrong. Now that the 6WC is over I couldn't resist anymore
And I'm typing this while watching football.
Cainntear wrote:If you teach redondo in Spanish, learners are either going to get it slightly wrong and confuse it with the cognate "rotund" or they're going to associate it with the pre-formed concept represented by the word "round".
How is the former a mistake? Do you mean assuming redondo is not the default word for rounded things? If they assume that redondo is a relatively low frequency word, I agree that it's a mistake. But no language is going to have a full equivalent to either rotund or round(ed)*. Regardless of how you initially find out about the meaning, you still need to be exposed to the idiomatic use, so both groups will start out with an imperfect assumption and their notion of the word will be slightly off until they've come across more examples (whether through input or listed explicitly in their textbook).
*Ok, not sure about Scots for example, but you know what I mean
However, another post mentioned that we don't explicitly learn the concept of "round" in L1 and while this is normally true for comprehension (barring serious neglect), kids do learn to describe shapes in kindergarten.
(I vaguely remember how part of my preparation for school was to be able to name the shape of some less obvious objects, and in the answer sheet filled in by parents, my dad wrote that strawberry is "drop-shaped" (каплевидная). Iirc, he just asked me "is it shaped like a drop?" and I said yes, which is obviously not the right way to do these tasks
Mum was not amused)
I have a few problems with that. First up, I know I'm not alone in finding it very difficult to disregard subtitles. If they're there, I read them.
In Scotland, all Gaelic television (except kids programmes and live broadcasts) is shown with subtitles that you can't turn off. Gaelic speakers got so sick of their eyes being drawn to the English that quite a few of them actually went as far a sticking cardboard or electrician's tape across the bottom of the screen to block them out. I find the subtitles particularly problematic for comedy, as the punchline is often revealed in English before it's delivered in Gaelic, and the whole role of timing and performance is undermined.
Are you able to watch dubbed movies in L1 without being distracted by the mouth movements?
Globally, tons of people are comfortable with either subs or dubs, and only English native speakers have the luxury to avoid both. The way I see it, both are skills. If subtitles were that difficult to ignore, Scandinavians would seek out content in English without subs, and it doesn't seem like it's a problem for them.
I personally can't ignore subs but when I compare the amount of subbed and dubbed media I have seen, the difference is enormous.
(I have always subconsciously put down the mouth movements to "that's just how movies are", along with how people wear shoes indoors, never use the bathroom unless that's a plot point, and don't actually speak the way real people do
) I'm pretty sure that if I wanted to learn to use subs the way Scandinavians do, this would be a matter of using them a lot more and learning to read them quickly when I do need them. I don't believe their brains are wired differently or something. (I can accept that a tiny percentage of people are really wired differently but 99% of the subs vs dubs debate is just cultural and unnecessarily moralized)
However, I do remember seeing a study by Mondria (summarised in his article on vocab myths) which showed that inferring meaning had no noticeable benefit over being given the meaning, and took longer
I don't think anyone is claiming that a single time seeing the word in a sentence is superior to looking it up in the dictionary. Unless the sentence was very memorable, of course, so that you really remember the whole sentence.
Usually when people discuss learning from extensive reading before B2 or so, they mean learning the words that come up several times, maybe without even looking them up. That's what Prof Argüelles also mentioned (known unknowns). And after inferring the meaning you need to come across the word a few more times (or many more times) before you confidently start using it.
The study you cite was testing the effect of inferring a word from ONE sentence, and retaining the meaning two weeks later. (And how many learners took part, 10? 50?) That's not the scale most input learners are talking about. Also, nobody is denying that if you need to learn one specific word, you can just look it up. The point is that you can learn dozens of words from a well chosen book, and different intermediate learners will not necessarily pick up the same words (but many will overlap of course).
Admittedly, it's pretty hard to test the effect of learning from input the way I described, also because we value learning from more than one source of input... but at the very least they should've used texts, and they should've practised the relevant techniques in advance with other words.
I cannot be engaged if I do not understand, and a truly engaging plot is going to be difficult to follow.
So you've never experienced the joy of understanding easy and predictable plots in L2 that you wouldn't enjoy in L1? For me this has faded after a few languages, but the joy of learning the grammar explicitly has faded even more. (Okay, part of that is how the grammar examples are also predictable, and often
sexist)
(for the record - no, I didn't type *the whole post* while watching football. half-time breaks exist, and now that I'm finishing the comment, there's no match on anymore)
