Using the Listening-Reading method when reading L1 translations of works (heb, ara, grc, lat, zho, fra, rus, esp, deu)

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denouement
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Using the Listening-Reading method when reading L1 translations of works (heb, ara, grc, lat, zho, fra, rus, esp, deu)

Postby denouement » Mon Jun 21, 2021 11:18 pm

I've dabbled in several different languages over the years, without ever crossing the threshold into intermediate with any one particular language, but recently my love for reading has really blossomed into a good reading habit. I figure if I've got the kind of love for reading the L-R original poster described, I might as well give it a try. If I understand it correctly, the aim with L-R is to develop the ears to distinguish the gaps between words and the individual phonemes, and then to use that to alternate between L1 reading and L2 listening, allowing my mind to form and pick up on associations between words and roots. As long as I can be patient enough to simply listen and try to allow understanding to occur, I should gain a lot from the experience.

My reading interests are in philosophy, literature, history, and science, so there should be no shortage of material. I'll follow up with my progress when I've actually got some, but I expect to be reading from the "canons" of various languages for the rest of my life, so I should constantly have the opportunity there to tempt me into doing L-R properly. Hopefully, I can completely mitigate the need for relying on willpower to practice!
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Re: Using the Listening-Reading method when reading L1 translations of works (heb, ara, grc, lat, zho, fra, rus, esp, de

Postby denouement » Tue Nov 02, 2021 1:51 pm

I tried out Duolingo's new Stories feature with German. I'm still not sure how dedicated I'm going to be to German, but it's convinced me that one of the obstacles to Russian was how slowly I read it. I started off by getting testing into ~3 crowns for the skills in unit 1 even though I'm new to German, and that kept the lessons from being too tedious. The sentences being taught in these early lessons all make heavy use of chunking and substitution, and combining that with the stories feature allowed me to avoid translating individual words and "think in German" thanks to the chunking. It feels like my understanding of how to grow a language has grown a lot, even though that's a mostly intuitive feeling for now.

After getting some German in, I also tried to LR Harry Potter 1. I started with L2/L2 (audio/text), and thanks to the alphabet and my practice with spelling it was so much easier than doing the same in Russian. I switched to L2/L1 thinking that it might be surprisingly easy to read English and listen in German, but instead it felt a lot clearer how to get more out of L2/L2.

I'm on the verge of becoming comfortable with being paying attention to the sounds of a language even when my comprehension is low, which I think might be the biggest obstacle most people face with LR. The first proponent of LR very much seemed to be comfortable just listening to a book she loved in an unfamiliar language for hours on end and then would just enjoy the process of trying to make sense of the language during the second step. I think that's why LR isn't really a method and can't just work for anyone who tries it. It's sort of an art. I still can't prove it's real yet, but it seems less and less likely to me that it isn't.
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Re: Using the Listening-Reading method when reading L1 translations of works (heb, ara, grc, lat, zho, fra, rus, esp, de

Postby denouement » Sun Nov 07, 2021 6:48 pm

Update on my use of duolingo and experiments with LR. I've just had a flash of insight, and I wanted to write it down and think it through. This will be a bit long.

I've been growing suspicious that my approach is too "left brained", so I've been making a conscious effort to learn grammar rules after I'm already using them correctly in my answers. I also switched to typing mode early on to build my intuition for the spelling system through passively learning the words. Normally at this point I would have a jumbled mess of half-trained intuitions and memorized rules and genders competing in my head, but instead it's like I have a sharp sense of the division between my acquired and learned German. Most of the time I can tell whether I know the gender or not, know the conjugation or not, know the spelling or not. It's AMAZING. I mean, of course I am not suddenly fluent or something, but I have a crystal clear sense of my progress. I spontaneously and correctly conjugate the verbs I know when typing answers into duolingo!

The aforementioned flash of insight came by way of a two-part breakthrough in LR. I had realized that in Russian I needed to build my reading speed, and I'd noticed I was still struggling to understand German even with the aid of the text. I'd been attempting to read without quite pronouncing the words in my head because I was concerned about interference from English and because I was trying to keep up with native audio at a normal speed. I've been getting lots of spelling and listening practice, so during my next attempt to LR L2/L2, I began to match the syllables to the text, sort of pronouncing the words in my head but sort of not. It went much more smoothly right away. I began to follow the syllables with some difficulty, having to skip here and there to follow the word boundaries, but getting lots of practice reading every syllable in lots of words with the aid of the audio!

The second part of the breakthrough happened because I was trying to L2/L2 LR a book that I'm currently re-listening to in English, revisiting a favorite series of mine. I had no idea what was going on even though the book was fresh in my mind and my passive vocabulary has several hundred words. I wasn't trying all that hard to understand since I wasn't making that the point of the exercise, but I thought it would be nice if I also had the English fresh during L2/L2 reading, so I could continue to use the L2 text as an aid to understanding. I had thought that the L-R method OP had treated the L2/L2 step this way, I'm not sure whether I misunderstood or not and I haven't checked yet. But I'm pretty sure if I read a few paragraphs in English before L2/L2 then I can do a kind of "intensive reading", and then practice listening without the text to make audio materials I can understand and listen to on repeat. This is probably a form of sentence farming.

My newfound insight is that, rather than drill the language into my short-term memory so that I can understand native material, I can drill native materials into my short term memory directly so that studying gives me something to refer back to instead of the reverse. I'm going to start thinking of LR as having both intensive and extensive approaches, a la intensive and extensive reading. With intensive, I'll use the L2 text as well as the L2 audio to aid my comprehension, and I'll keep at it until I can understand everything just listening, and then I'll start listening to the familiar material on my phone on repeat. Having exposure to the language gives substance to otherwise abstract or vague explanations of rules about things which have not yet been encountered. The flipside is that a rule before demonstrating that rule is also helpful. The key thing is the interplay between learning and acquisition, not so much that learning is bad and acquisition is good.

I'll update once I have more experience doing it. I don't want to over-theorize it, I'll hopefully figure it out by doing it.
Last edited by denouement on Thu Nov 11, 2021 2:37 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Using the Listening-Reading method when reading L1 translations of works (heb, ara, grc, lat, zho, fra, rus, esp, de

Postby denouement » Thu Nov 11, 2021 2:20 am

I've started my audio playlist and this is already a lot more practice and a lot more fun than everything else I've been doing since I got started with languages. I've also started a Memrise course to expose me to the ~110 most common verbs in the form that's like sein, haben, stehen, sehen, lernen, sprechen, etc., not sure what it's called. I've listened to a lot more duolingo stories and I finished the first unit. The second unit is going more slowly because it involves more grammar. Although I do think languages are worth knowing even poorly, it's going to be a little strange if German is the first language I have "real" success in. I've never felt a strong draw toward it, but I'm beginning to now.
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Re: Using the Listening-Reading method when reading L1 translations of works (heb, ara, grc, lat, zho, fra, rus, esp, de

Postby denouement » Fri Dec 10, 2021 9:42 pm

I've continued to log lots of time with Duolingo (around an hour per day on average, but it varies a lot), and I've started watching tv series in German. I watch with English subtitles, then rewind and watch with German subtitles. My comprehension is a lot higher than I expected. I'm bored with my German playlist, but I'll fix that soon.

I've started using Duolingo as my "textbook", since I found out the German course was redesigned to align with the CEFR shortly before I started it. Units 1-5 cover materials from pre-A1 to A2. I'm around halfway done with unit 2, which is far too slow for my taste. I've begun to find a rhythm where I can gain at least one crown per day, as opposed to finding myself faced with all skills at lesson 0 of whichever level. If I can get the hang of it, maybe I'll start aiming for multiple crowns by staggering my lesson practice. Despite my reservations with Duolingo, matching my vocab and grammar practice to the CEFR is a nice prospect. It gives me a sense of what I'm aiming for. I wouldn't rely on it for my listening and speaking practice, but combined with the other stuff I'm doing, I think it should be plenty helpful for getting to A2.

I also got my hands on the old Glossika and Pimsleur, for extensive and intensive listening respectively. Pimsleur is quite slow and boring, but back-chaining is great for accurately hearing phonemes. Glossika is boring too, but it's so fast-paced and strenuous that it's a struggle to keep pace. I like that aspect a lot, but it feels more like a chore. I'm not sure it's for me, but it would be fantastic for people with better disciplined study habits than I (at least currently) maintain.
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Re: Using the Listening-Reading method when reading L1 translations of works (heb, ara, grc, lat, zho, fra, rus, esp, de

Postby denouement » Sat Jan 08, 2022 7:06 pm

I've gotten into a nice groove since my last update. I'm watching TV w/ German audio and (finally) doing a lot more LR, so my practice habits have come back into alignment with the title of this log. With LR, there's a kind of phase shift that happens, something like when you're reading a nonfiction book and you've read enough to start matching whatever you're reading to the structure of material. There's a kind of background I'm reading against, and understanding comes a lot more smoothly. I think LR will become my normal/dominant form of practice if I can learn how to do that on purpose, which should be easy enough as long as I can keep throwing myself into LR like I have been.

I'm also practicing listening even more, since my reading is outpacing my listening. I find myself spontaneously producing written German, but not spoken, so I think more listening might get me out of the silent period. This seems straightforward enough.

I also finally started some formal grammar study, which validated my efforts to hold off until I had the familiarity of the language to refer back to, as opposed to enough familiarity with the grammar to make sense of the grammar of whatever I'm reading or listening to. It turns out tenses are a lot simpler than English, and I know enough verbs in enough cases to feel enthusiastic about filling in the gaps in my knowledge of the grammar. This is also giving me the grounding/stability to do even more listening/reading.

I think I'll finish up this update by adding that I'm now convinced both directions, acquisition-learning and learning-acquisition have their uses and any good approach will use both both directions, tailored to the learner's needs at a given point in the course of acquisition/learning. I also think it's possible and even likely that we will be doing the wrong one at various points in the process, until enough practice makes it clearer when to do which is which. It's probably not very helpful to insist on one way or the other, but it probably is helpful to make a point of being familiar with both and what the difference is. This probably makes no sense without some success to even judge by, too.

Anyway, things are going great, and happy holidays and new year to any of you reading!
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