Thanks, Mork and lichtrausch.
Paul Nation’s
2014 pamphlet on language learning (PDF) has been posted here a few times. About a year ago, I downloaded it, glanced at it, and put it aside. But I’ve just now finished reading it properly, and I think I’ll be using Nation’s “four strands” as a framework. Here they are:
1. “learning from meaning-focused input” (listening and reading)
2. “learning from meaning-focused output” (speaking and writing)
3. “language-focused learning” (deliberate study)
4. “fluency development (getting good at using what you already know)”
Because ancient Greek and Latin are literary languages, I am interested most of all in reading them well. I also, however, want to have the best productive skills that I can (in part, but not entirely, because I think productive skills reinforce one’s reading ability). Looking at Nation’s four strands has helped me see a problem: for years, despite paying lip service to productive skills, I have focused on #1 and 3, and even in #3 I’ve used a very narrow range of activities. So I need to either change my goals or change the way I allocate my time.
In the past couple of days, thanks to Nation, I’ve done two things I don’t normally do. First, I used delayed copying with two passages of Latin (read a passage, understand it completely, and then copy it out a phrase at a time without looking at the original). Second, I tried to recall as much of the first passage as I could while on a walk. I had no phone, no copy of the passage; all I had was my memory. I was pleasantly surprised to find I could remember quite a bit, much more than I could have after reading it without copying it. Delayed copying followed by intentional retrieval hits strands 3 and 2, respectively, and it's simply fun.
To help keep track, I might resume regular entries here, organized according to the four strands.
Another practice to change: for years I have read multiple books at a time. More recently, I think that’s gotten out of control: I start more books than I finish and so deprive myself of the satisfaction that comes with finishing books as well as the learning benefits that come with reading a single-authored work in its entirety. The Super Challenges have encouraged me in this bad habit, since they created an incentive to read about the same amount in Greek and in Latin every day and to always be reading at least one easy work in each language to make the daily page count. (But even that eventually became too much.) Recently I read an entire book in English in about 5 days – I'm sorry to say that's unusual for me – and enjoyed both the immersion in a single subject, while it lasted, and the satisfaction of finishing a work while I still remembered its beginning. For that reason, I’ll still read something in Greek and something in Latin simultaneously, but I’ll pick one of them to finish as quickly as possible while reading only a page or two per day of the other.
I'll check back in after a week or so.
