L-R Roundup

[sfuqua]

I use L-R frequently. I thought it was an old familiar strategy to everyone, so I don't always mention it in my log.
I had a fairly amazing "feeling" that my listening comprehension had improved a lot after about 50 hours of L2-R1. I didn't do any objective test of it, but the impression went away quickly after I stopped doing it.

I have never matched the original procedure in two important ways:
1. I can't stand to go through even an excellent book more than 3X no matter what variations in the approach I use.
2. I don't have several hours a day to do L-R.

I have always wanted to do a 150 hours or so of a language extensively, just doing L2-R1 and then L2-R2 in chapter long chunks. I bet you would reach a high level of listening comprehension, at least for audiobooks.

[iguanamon]

...Personally I'm not interested in solely learning a language using LR, but rather to enhance my listening comprehension along the lines of what Yuurei has achieved with Italian. https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=1721&start=260#p99415

I think it would be an excellent way to improve listening comprehension. I've done that, though not with using L1.

[Bex]

I have always wanted to do a 150 hours or so of a language extensively, just doing L2-R1 and then L2-R2 in chapter long chunks. I bet you would reach a high level of listening comprehension, at least for audiobooks.

This is exactly what I have started doing this week, 1 chapter at a time

[Kamlari]

Everything runs in cycles on the forum. LR is back. Shortcuts are always attractive.

History repeats itself. Hardly anyone is any wiser, though.

Nihil novi sub sole.
Latin Interlinear Texts - a forgotten route to language learning as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XnEKnezLXJg
Vergil - Aeneidos I - line 1 - 290 Hamiltonian interlinear read in Latin.avi
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEPvfi3r_uE

http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_ ... c346179167

By the way, LR is a tool, not a shortcut. You must be ready to use the tool. Or learn how to do it.

(Links by aYA)

[Aozora]

I tried speeding up the audio, but makes them sound like alvin and the chipmunks.

I know Windows Media Player can speed up/slow down audio without without the chipmunk/slow-mo effect (as long as you only change the speed a little). There should be other programs that can do it too.

[rdearman]

I tried speeding up the audio, but makes them sound like alvin and the chipmunks.

I know Windows Media Player can speed up/slow down audio without without the chipmunk/slow-mo effect (as long as you only change the speed a little). There should be other programs that can do it too.

I'm just trying to grin and bear it at the moment. I need to concentrate on the audio more anyway since I keep reading ahead.

[Systematiker]

Everything runs in cycles on the forum. LR is back. Shortcuts are always attractive. We seem to always be in search of the elusive "magic pill" to learn a language. Who wants to spend 2-5 years to learn a language if it can be avoided while gaining the same results? Perhaps I'm overlooking something, but in my years on the forum, I don't think I've seen anyone doing this from scratch to learn a language succeed in learning it to a high level. Does anyone know of people who've done this successfully for an unrelated language? I can see this working very well for related languages to ones already known, like Catalan after Spanish, German after Dutch (or vice-versa) and Ukrainian after Russian, but has anyone done this from scratch to learn an unrelated language like, say Polish, as a monolingual or even a multilingual with no related languages? If so, how effective was it? How much quicker was it than other, more traditional, methods for learning?

My modified version is currently doing wonders for my comprehension in weaker languages that don't have a relation to others, but whether it's any better than buckling down and studying I couldn't say (I can say that I'm more likely to do it!). It's been a huge help also to reading a couple scripts that I had struggled with before. I'm also not doing it from dead scratch, but pretty weak levels.

[jeff_lindqvist]

I don't see why reading ahead is a problem. That's a blessing. You're supposed to read faster to keep up with the sound (read and then listen to what you've read). I usually "read ahead" the whole book before I start doing L-R proper./.../
When I start L-Ring a new language the speed of audio is already too fast for me as it is.

OK, so then I suppose everything is OK. Reading a sentence in a split-second (or two), waiting for the narrator to say it, reading along a number of times, then next sentence. I'm not really complaining, I'm just saying that the two formats are quite different. You can "scan" visual content, but audio is linear.

No matter the speed (with or without chipmunk pitch), it's still linear.

[RMM]

I’ve found that reading ahead is not a problem for me (at least after the first couple of days L-R’ing a language), especially if I make sure to pay careful attention to the audio and what the book is doing language-wise. I typically try to take advantage of the time I have while the audio book plays to parse and match the languages down to the word and phrase level when possible. Often I’ll repeat a new vocab word from the audio book a few times in my head while looking at the equivalent word in the English text until the speaker moves on to the next sentence or clause. In other instances I’ll quickly use that time to notice grammatical patterns, word order choices, or idiomatic ways of expressing things.

Even when I already know all the words and grammar of a sentence, it’s still a good way to review and to focus on remembering what’s being said in the story (after I do a run through of a chapter with an English text, I do it over again with a text in my target language, so remembering what the Englist text said earlier and how it tied in with aspects of the audio can really help with comprehension). And after a while, I do this fairly naturally without having to think about it all that much. This can be much harder to do if I’ve just started a language, but usually I’m struggling so much to match up the sentences in both languages and to get any meaning out of the L2 words that I have no desire or even opportunity to read ahead—although I have noticed because I’m not deriving much meaning from just hearing it, it is a lot easier at the beginning stages of a language to forget all about the audio and ignore it entirely for a while. After I’ve picked up the basics and developed some listening comprehension, though, the extra time can be spent puzzling out and making educated guess about words and grammar, even when I’m not at all sure about it.

However one chooses to handle L-R’ing (and everyone should experiment to find out what works best on a personal level), like others on the thread have suggested, I think you need to focus primarily on what you’re hearing in your L2 and not primarily on what you’re reading in your L1. Of course, that can be different when you use an L2 text, but even then you want to make 100% sure you’re paying proper attention to the audio too—or you might as well just be reading.

It's only my opinion, but I think it’s pretty important not to read ahead further than the upcoming sentence, so you don’t confuse the meanings in your head. I’ve always figured that the point of using your native language text at all is to turn what you are hearing into comprehensible input, so the text/meaning and the audio need to match as exactly as possible in your mind while you L-R. I find L-R’ing in this manner can be very good for learning vocab easily and improving listening comprehension, but I think it would be much harder to get those benefits if I weren’t associating the words with their meanings at the same time and were just getting some broad, disconnected understanding instead. This is the time when it pays to read slowly and focus on the details of what you’re hearing.