Re: Learning to Listen and Listening to Learn
Posted: Tue Mar 27, 2018 11:09 pm
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We talk languages
http://forum.language-learners.org/
http://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=5698
olim21 wrote:tastyonions wrote:Because it is easy to fool yourself.
Why? You can't compare between what you hear and what you pronounce? I can.
I can't say that I have. You can always find oddballs, I guess. What I have seen very often however is comments below a youtube video telling the guy in the video how amazing he is, speaking flawlessly, with no accent, like a native, when I would have described the performance as crappy at best.
desitrader wrote:olim21 wrote:...
Hi Olim21,
I am finding your posts very thought-provoking and different from all the usual stuff one reads on language learning sites, ...
smallwhite wrote:desitrader wrote:olim21 wrote:...
Hi Olim21,
I am finding your posts very thought-provoking and different from all the usual stuff one reads on language learning sites, ...
I agree. I know LLorg is heavily biased, but when I googled things myself, I found that many sites were just regurgitating info copied from one another. You need a lot of patience to sift through the repetition to find different opinions. So I thank olim21 for taking the time to patiently explain his thoughts to us. I know it's hard, we've always been rather hostile towards non-conformers. But for members for whom LLorg forms 99% of their knowledge and expectations about language-learning, and for members for whom 99% of their academic reading about the subject comes from extracts that are extracted by reineke, including myself, olim21's participation is invaluable. Thank you again, olim21.
reineke wrote:The learning brain is less flexible than we thought
reineke wrote:“When faced with a new task, we’re finding that the brain is constrained to take the neural activity patterns that it’s capable of generating right now and use them as effectively as possible in this new task.”
reineke wrote:“When we learn, at first the brain tends to not produce new activity patterns, but to repurpose the activity patterns it already knows how to generate,”
reineke wrote:Acquiring a skill is very difficult, and it takes a lot of time and a lot of practice.
reineke wrote:By repurposing neuron patterns the brain is already capable of generating, the brain applies a “quick and dirty fix” to the new problem it’s facing.
reineke wrote:“None of us predicted this outcome,”
olim21 wrote:reineke wrote:The learning brain is less flexible than we thought
What "flexible" is supposed to mean here? Because the brain is capable to take the shape you want with the right training and time. Seems pretty flexible to me.
If it means it takes time. Then this a good thing. You don't want a brain jumping all over the place, changing immediately when you want to learn something new. Your consciousness would be very chaotic, you would think that things happen outside your control. You would go crazy very quickly.
Our brain "use" an "algorithm" that give it the ability to gradually change toward a solution. Your brain change all the time, continuously and gradually. Each time you see, hear, feel, smell, each time it receives a signal in fact, your brain change slightly, those changes are so small they are unnoticeable, but over time they add up in a particular "direction", slowly approaching some sort of solution. It works that way because nobody knows what the solution is in advance, you don't know, your brain doesn't know. So it can't jump to it.reineke wrote:“When faced with a new task, we’re finding that the brain is constrained to take the neural activity patterns that it’s capable of generating right now and use them as effectively as possible in this new task.”
Isn't that obvious? What were they expecting?reineke wrote:“When we learn, at first the brain tends to not produce new activity patterns, but to repurpose the activity patterns it already knows how to generate,”
Of course. But it doesn't repurpose, it just keeps doing what it was doing, taking new input and gradually, unnoticeably tending toward a new solution that will maybe solve the problem at hand.reineke wrote:Acquiring a skill is very difficult, and it takes a lot of time and a lot of practice.
Really, who would have thought?reineke wrote:By repurposing neuron patterns the brain is already capable of generating, the brain applies a “quick and dirty fix” to the new problem it’s facing.
So the brain is just patching itself. How amazing: an explanation with no explanatory power.reineke wrote:“None of us predicted this outcome,”
Adrianslont wrote:Thanks olim21 and others for the interesting read.
Adrianslont wrote:I personally think we shouldn’t just use a brain-computer metaphor. I think terms like store, retrieve, process and pattern matching are inadequate to describe what is going on in the brain.
Adrianslont wrote:I think they give us a framework for research and discussion but I suspect that framework is delusional.
Adrianslont wrote:I’m not so sure about mold, either, though!
Adrianslont wrote:I’m not a fan of questioning orthodoxies just for the hell if it.
Listening. I understood the easy stuff for learners and I recognized familiar words in songs but I couldn't process the language fast enough otherwise.olim21 wrote:Was it listening? Or more like hearing?
We have different definitions of training correctly.Well, there is if you trained correctly from the beginning.
Historically, people have always learned languages by speaking. See Bakunin's posts.What I'm trying to make people realize is that most of the learning happens during reading.
Depends on what you consider success. At one point I used subtitled videos to get my Spanish reading to the level of my listening. Is thatthat forum, and HTLAL before it, are full of failed experiments of people trying to learn just by listening. Is there even one success story?
I never mentioned listening without understanding. In a related language you have some understanding from the very beginning (okay there are some complicated cases like Danish).Because if you listen without understanding, what are you supposed to learn?
Still better than going through a typical textbook If you use visual clues, generally there's much more interesting video stuff than books with pictures. (and children's books are expensive and have very little text)One solution to resolve this would be to lower the amount of vocabulary tremendously and increase the amount of context and repetition. Basically trying to recreate the situation you have when reading. And in that case you will be able to learn again. It will be slow, painful and boring but it will work. However that's not how I would like to learn, looks too much like torture to me.
olim21 wrote: Since I don't know you I can't really judge and compare with what I know. But I have a few comments. I will try to be nice, however if you feel offended by some of them, feel free to ignore.Fortheo wrote:I've been able to read French books fairly easily for about a year now.
Just to be clear, here. It's not really about being able to, but more a question of level.
For example, I can read Finnish quite easily this days, but my vocabulary only cover 70-80% of the words of a random text still. So despite being able to read and understand quite a lot, my listening is still not very good, yet. I can read better, (or so it seems), because I can break some of the words I don't know into pieces that I do know, or use the context to infer the meaning of some other words, or reread to solve issues when I misunderstand.
But if you remove all the advantages that help me read better, my comprehension level is the same whether I read or listen. It has been this way from the beginning and when my reading improves, my listening improves with it.
Fortheo wrote:I've also read out loud for various French people in order for them to criticize my pronunciation
olim21 wrote:I don't know why you need someone else to evaluate your pronunciation. Can't you do it by yourself?
olim21 wrote: Because then you have to interpret what they mean. What do they mean by good pronunciation? Does that mean, they can understand you? Does that mean this is not that bad for an English speaker? Does that mean this is very impressive?