New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

General discussion about learning languages
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby Le Baron » Sun May 01, 2022 11:40 pm

Did you see 'Mr Iversen' lurking in the audience there? Also the young man near the camera (is it Rawlings?) clearly wants to be somewhere else.
It's a good lecture. He's a confident speaker. It's good to be reminded that conversation requires fewer words due it being context-based. Or that you can get along in conversation in that way, as you go on learning. Whereas reading is harder because you can't alter the source. Folk can do well to remember this. Not having conquered 100% of the books, doesn't mean you won't be able to talk to someone in the meantime.
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby zenmonkey » Mon May 02, 2022 7:02 am

BeaP wrote:Thank for the video, it was well-structured and to the point. Some remarks I've made:

Understanding literature doesn't mean understanding words.

I didn't really agree with the word choices of the partially blurred texts. Also, things are never this mechanical, and it might be misleading to skip mentioning this.

I don't really like this simplified thinking, especially when it's paired up with numbers and percentages.

If you look at a difficult text in your native language, you'll see that it also contains new vocabulary


Completely agree with Bea - I think his video at the PC a few years back was more nuanced (and longer).
My thoughts are that this idea of a percentage 9y% where learning is effective and 9x% where it is not, and those being fixed, would be nonsense if taken as absolutes.
Not only do the topics, languages, and person reading the language matter but even the clustering of missing words, the sentence length, and the type of writing all influence the ability to understand a text. There are certainly lots of works where I read at an attention level where entire sentences could be missing and I wouldn't lose out on understanding and enjoyment.

I will note one thing - reading texts with a larger number of missed words means that I'm more likely to find the content boring - Arguelles mentions that as a barrier to continuing to read an author. I have not gotten to the point where I'm ok with being bored, so this matters to me. So as an intermediate step I try to stick to bilingual texts or short stories or ebooks with a tap dictionary or some method where getting the meaning without actually focusing on intensive notes, anki, etc is possible. With this in mind, I'm attacking my start of Super Challenge in German with selected readings - short stories, graded readers, etc... more as exercises in reading rather than reading for pleasure. I hope I can get to that somewhere in the middle.
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby luke » Mon May 02, 2022 11:14 am

One other thing I liked in the video was that he brought up Extensive Reading as the goal, the endpoint, so not that one should strive for or imagine that one will have 100% comprehension of difficult texts in a foreign language; but rather that if you can get to about 98% vocabulary coverage, you will have entered the "extensive reading zone", where you can dispense with the dictionary, which, in a world of paper books is a huge milestone.

Another thing I liked was his use of "1 unknown word in N" examples. Why do I like that? Let's say a book has 100,000 words and 10,000 of those are unique. Let's say you know 9,000 of those words. That's not 90% coverage. The 1,000 words you don't know are probably not very frequent in the text. That is to say, in this example, you may only come across 1 word in 100 or 1 word in 1,000 that is unknown, and therefore you have 99% or 99.9% coverage.

There's also the implicit notion that "Realistic Reading" is meant to be fairly pleasant. You're not tossed in the ocean with lead shoes. There's a life raft nearby and people in it will try to save you if you go under.
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby zenmonkey » Mon May 02, 2022 9:30 pm

luke wrote:One other thing I liked in the video was that he brought up Extensive Reading as the goal, the endpoint, so not that one should strive for or imagine that one will have 100% comprehension of difficult texts in a foreign language; but rather that if you can get to about 98% vocabulary coverage, you will have entered the "extensive reading zone", where you can dispense with the dictionary, which, in a world of paper books is a huge milestone.

Another thing I liked was his use of "1 unknown word in N" examples. Why do I like that? Let's say a book has 100,000 words and 10,000 of those are unique. Let's say you know 9,000 of those words. That's not 90% coverage. The 1,000 words you don't know are probably not very frequent in the text. That is to say, in this example, you may only come across 1 word in 100 or 1 word in 1,000 that is unknown, and therefore you have 99% or 99.9% coverage.

There's also the implicit notion that "Realistic Reading" is meant to be fairly pleasant. You're not tossed in the ocean with lead shoes. There's a life raft nearby and people in it will try to save you if you go under.


Assuming those 1000 words you don’t know all have the minimum frequency of once in the your theoretical text of 100,000 words (which isn’t a bad estimate of a 400 page text), then the maximum coverage is 99% and never higher - certainly not 99.9%.

Probably half the words will only appear once. So knowing something like 5000 words will be close or under 95% coverage.
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Sun May 08, 2022 4:22 pm

What Kind of Language Learning Keeps Your Brain Young?:


(I just saw that there was a new video so I haven't watched it yet.)
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby David1917 » Mon May 09, 2022 1:14 am

Wow, 75 people in the new academy in opening week.

It's what, $100/mo? So, $7500/mo x 12 = $90K/yr. That's definitely promising. This thing could certainly continue to grow.
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby jeffers » Mon May 09, 2022 10:29 am

Le Baron wrote:
luke wrote:Read aloud with feeling

I watched the whole video, but I can't recall if he said why this was to be done. As I see it - and have seen it expressed elsewhere for many years - the act of doing this impresses it as an image upon the mind. In the way that a well-acted phrase from a film is instantly repeatable. (Waddya mean I'm funny? Funny how? Funny like a clown? I amuse you?) I suppose one might have to be a reasonable actor to get best results. :lol:

When I read plays (and about a third of the input books I read are plays) this is much easier to achieve since it's all dialogue and meant to be read with such a delivery. I find this lends itself ideally to repetition and reading aloud and also to go back and 'improve the performance' as it were.


I think you're right, that reading aloud with feeling imprints the language read more firmly on the mind. But there's also another point: you can't really read with feeling if you don't understand the text. So of course this comes after looking up the selection of unknown words. So far in the process you have worked on understanding, now he is saying to do something which requires a productive skill (the "with feeling" part). One more reason, it will be a little bit less boring for you than reading in a monotone.
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Sun May 15, 2022 4:15 pm

How to Listen to Audio Books in Foreign Languages for Polyliteracy:


Duration: 23:20

Quote:
"(...)if I can sort of share my experience and get you to do the more efficient way sooner than I did, then my life has been well spent if I save you time." (c:a 3:45 minutes)
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby Le Baron » Mon May 16, 2022 1:30 pm

There are interesting points here worth discussing. I tend to keep several narratives running (like his father), though I think I could probably give my brain a rest by cycling books in the way he describes.

The point about reading a single chapter and then summarising, to clarify everything to make sure you know what is going on, is an essential step for me. I resist the temptation to just keep on going through yet another chapter until I've stopped and thought about the one I've just read. Looking up those missed key words and sentences, and then going back over the passages that contained them, helps me a lot before moving on. Not doing this builds up layers of misunderstanding and confusion as you plough on.

Lastly, the thing he said about audio books needing concentration. Totally agree. I even find it hard to listen to audio books in English whilst doing other things. I can hear it and know what's happening, but I end up skipping back because I was shifting my concentration to something requiring careful attention. When you 'multitask' I feel you're really only concentrating on one major task, and really with not as much attention as you could, and allocating a smaller amount of attention to periphery tasks. The motor tasks then run in a sort of skeleton way, sparing some details. It's probably not a great way to listen to some things and certainly not foreign languages you're learning which aren't a motor skill yet.
I find that dramatisations of books and radio programme podcasts are easier to listen to with looser attention because there is space between speech, little music breaks, and it's 99% pure dialogue. Audio books are description, written prose which is densely woven for artistic effect and different from speech. So I need to concentrate more. I already removed the audio prose books from my mp3 player. Just dialogue material on there now and podcasts. The audiobook I'm listening to currently is done at the desktop/laptop, where I can listen/read, note-take and check things out.
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Re: New Prof Argüelles Youtube Series

Postby galaxyrocker » Sun May 22, 2022 9:03 pm

Taking over for Jeff today. Hope he doesn't mind.

Audacity Tutorial for Language Learning.



Haven't watched it myself, but if he's showing how to use Audacity to cut out silent periods, could be super useful.
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