French via input training

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Tom
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Re: French via input training

Postby Tom » Wed Sep 07, 2022 7:44 am

I don't know what Krashen or Kaufmann say about hours needed, but it seems to me that 15 weeks is practically nothing, when it comes to learning a language. I've been using input to learn Spanish for like three or four years now and am nowhere close to where I want to be. However, I am significantly farther than from where I started, and I'm also confident that if I stay with it a few more years, I will likely be able to understand almost anything I hear in Spanish. I would say that if you're still interested, just try watching/listening to things you enjoy and/or are interested in, but in French. Could be TV shows, movies, youtube videos, talk radio, any native content really. That's what I do, I try to find things to watch/listen to that will hold my interest or entertain me. Sometimes I look up words here and there, sometimes I don't give a damn and just listen. Something that helped me recently is this Kaufmann video where he talks about not trying too hard to understand. It seems like with listening, you have to find the right gear, where you are trying to understand, but not trying too hard. It's kind of like hitting in baseball. If you grip the bat too tightly, you can't get a smooth swing. Anyway, good luck whichever way you decide to go with it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8oDLO7 ... lingosteve
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Re: French via input training

Postby rdearman » Wed Sep 07, 2022 10:31 am

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Re: French via input training

Postby Lawyer&Mom » Wed Sep 07, 2022 5:58 pm

I think adding a TV show would really help. It’s just so much easier to follow when you have visual cues. If sitcoms aren’t your thing, C’est pas sorcier is a fun science show for kids that is remarkably easy to follow and really quite interesting. (How do they make candy? Let’s go to the candy factory!)
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Stiv_MacRae
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Re: French via input training

Postby Stiv_MacRae » Wed Sep 07, 2022 6:04 pm

uncertaingoblin wrote:On the other thread I criticized Krashen. Here I'm going to defend him a bit. I believe he prescribes what he does because he doesn't believe most people can tolerate any kind of language program or deliberate study, nor even looking up words as they read or watch a series. People like us are the outliers. Please forgive me for chaining off of your thread to ramble about my own thoughts for a minute.
To be perfectly honest I believe that the most valid method is the one that you actually do, because even if one method is more efficient than another, it seems to me that they all take a hell of a lot of time. Back in March 2021, I set off on tracking my reading time, stopping the clock each time I wasn't reading. When my experiment stopped in May 2021, I had accumulated 114 hours of reading. That's not 300, but, I distinctly remember imagining how much of a boost I thought I would get with another hundred hours, and how much I really ended up getting from it. It was the first major step to realizing just how long my goal is really going to take me. But I wasn't disappointed - that 114 hours made a noticeable difference. Ever since then it has been dawning on me more and more just how long this is going to take, but the beautiful thing is, the more I do it, the more I seem to love it. I cannot imagine ever going back to reading novels in English. I don't listen to anything in English either, well, unless it is language learning related. I am going to guess you are the same. At times I feel frustrated, like I just want to be able to read without looking anything up anymore. Maybe that's fair and part of the experience. I also feel like I wish I could understand more, yet, it appears I am constantly inching towards my goal. I believe we are driven insane by this, so to speak, because we love it. Perhaps the things we love drive us crazy. So maybe that's why Krashen doesn't really speak to us. In one video, (Maz Jobrani's Back to School interview, I believe it was) Maz mentions he wants to pick up Italian again, and that he plans on getting a dictionary to look up unknown words. Krashen cuts in - Don't do that - he says - it's too hard. You'll lose interest. Get lots of easy, interesting content to read. Don't look things up. - Well, that might be true for someone who doesn't want to learn a language.. in fact, I think it is true. But there's a problem - people who don't want to learn languages only really need to learn one language - English. I think his advice and strategies are built around this. People like us, as Krashen calls it - the lunatic fringe - don't really need this advice. I think most of us generally want to look up words, poke around with some grammar, for many of us our dream vacation is to be able to attend a semester at Middlebury. For most people, I think our idea of a good time is torture. To be totally transparent, right now I feel like I desire an easy or lazy way to study, but that's only after enthusiastically studying my TL for the past three years.
But I think we are here because we do want to learn languages, and sometimes, we feel frustrated by what we love. We look at Krashen and think it's nonsense, perhaps that is because it is nonsense from our perspectives, as language lovers. For regular non-English speaking Joe who likes to watch sports and just wants to get through his mandatory education, I bet Krashen is a godsend. Your post inspired me to ramble. I genuinely enjoyed reading it. You're a great writer, I must say. Most of all, I want you to know that I found what you said to be relatable, and it also reminded me that I'm not alone when I feel similarly to you.
My progress in French is slow too. French is also my target language, by the way. I guess I am trying to move away from thinking about where I want to progress to, and move more towards enjoying where I am with it in the moment. It's easier said than done of course, I mostly feel like I wish I was further along, but, it's a goal of mine now.


Thank you for your thoughts. Calling me a good writer is definitely the way to go. :D

Back in the 50s and early 60s when I was a kid, we were taught that when you learned something, you were supposed to teach the next kid line. For the entirely of my life, I never learned anything with the thought of passing the test. Whenever I learned something it was with the intention of figuring how I was going to explain it to the next kid in line. How could I make his learning easier? So, here I am learning French, and I'm wondering how I would guide someone else to do it. What would I do to smooth the struggle? To that end, I'm always looking for a better way. I'm always testing and optimizing. That's pretty much what this thread is about. Actually, in a broader sense, that's pretty much what forums are all about. I hope we're all sharing our experiences as we look for a better way.
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Re: French via input training

Postby Beli Tsar » Thu Sep 08, 2022 11:56 am

Stiv_MacRae wrote:My current effort attempts to execute Steve Krashen's input hypothesis within the general guidance of polyglot, Steve Kaufmann. I read Krashen's 1982 book, and I've watched dozens of his YouTube presentations. I could give that presentation, myself, if I had to. I have watched as many Kaufmann videos as I can tolerate. I try to accommodate literally every little tip and trick the two of them have offered -- studying regularly; employing interesting material; utilizing both novelty and repetition; utilizing transcripts; utilizing both intensive and extensive reading; learning vocabulary in context; avoiding grammar; etc.

A couple of years back when I first came across LingQ, I also watched a lot of Kaufmann videos. At that point, his practice and recommendation was to go through a Teach Yourself or similar textbook at the beginning, so that you had the grammatical knowledge in place to really learn from input properly. It was a bit of advice he gave quietly compared to all the other bits, but it was, he said, how he would always start a language. That was despite the fact he was already saying lots of positive things about Krashen.

Has his advice changed? Or are you just wanting to keep things as Krashenite as possible? Learning from input would be a lot easier with that extra bit of framework...
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Re: French via input training

Postby badger » Fri Sep 09, 2022 1:33 pm

Stiv_MacRae wrote:In order to comprehend the newscasts, I have to make them comprehensible. The content is at the B1-B2 level, which is about 5% above my current level of comprehension

did you mean 5%? or 50%? if the former, I would have thought you would be understanding virtually every word already. :?

I'm working my way through the X-Files in French & it's a lot more than 5% above my level, but I can still follow it, although there is obviously the added benefit of visual clues. I do, however, also read a lot, study grammar, etc. so I'm not doing it purely by input.
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Stiv_MacRae
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Re: French via input training

Postby Stiv_MacRae » Fri Sep 09, 2022 5:27 pm

I don't know how to use this Forum well enough to do multiple quotes, so let me just respond to a couple of comments informally.

A couple of people suggested that I use Anki. I consider myself a one-person study on the effectiveness on input training, so I am required to reject Anki and all other memorization methods. However, I also have to acknowledge that my doing so is probably stupid and self-defeating.

In an interesting YouTube video on LetThemTalkTV, the linguist (Gideon) discusses what he considers the best book on language learning he's ever read -- "The Loom of Language", by Frederick Bodmer. Apparently, it's considered a cult classic among linguists. Bodmer suggests that nouns and verbs across European languages are similar enough that you can often guess their meaning from context. The problem, particularly when reading a language, lies in all the little words (articles, prepositions, coordinating conjunctions, conjunctive adverbs, etc.). He calls them "particles". These usually can't be guessed from context, and they lie around like tiny land mines waiting to cripple your comprehension.

This matches my experience completely. How many times have I run into some little snot of a word that I've already looked up 100 times and which stops me cold! Gideon suggests that there are about 175 of these in any language, and they simply have to be memorized. There is no other approach. I started a list of these words in French. I'd like to learn them but I'm not sure how to do it in a way that doesn't violate the basic tenants of input training. Currently, I'm just adding items to my list as I come across them. I'm hoping for magical absorption. Or divine intervention. Might work.

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In response to the comment about Kaufmann recommending some broad introductory training prior to initiating input training, I'm aware of his comment. He's not at all consistent on that point and even rejects it in other videos. In any case, I have done several broad introductory courses. As I said in my original post, I am not a complete beginner. I have a good academic understanding of how French is structured. I'm not someone who just jumped into the deep end of the pool not knowing how to swim.

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In response to the question about my content being 5% above my comprehension level, let me explain the math. I print out a week's worth of NISF newscasts, which add up to about 3000 words. I find myself having to look up about 5% of them, but that's a little misleading. French comes at you in phrases, so a 'lookup' might consist of more than one word. Nonetheless, what continues to astonish me is that even after translating a passage to the point where I can understand it when I read it, I still don't get it completely when I hear it. Aural comprehension continues to evade me.

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In response to the comment that 15 weeks (300 hours) is practically nothing, I agree. It's only something when compared to the claims made by various teaching academies and accrediting institutions. I have already owned up to my naivety.

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Finally, in response to the comment nobody made about what comprehension really means, I should explain that I am a former musician. I understand completely what it means to comprehend something musically to the point that it begins to come out of your fingers. Nothing is more satisfying than hearing yourself playing something you never practiced. That requires a certain granularity in your listening ability. Just broadly understanding something isn't good enough. So, if I'm making a mistake in my language input training, it's that I'm listening too closely, because I want to hear the language come out of my mouth some day.
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Re: French via input training

Postby Stiv_MacRae » Sat Sep 24, 2022 2:01 pm

This is my last post in this thread, because I am abandoning intensive input training.

Four months have passed since I started my input program for learning French, so I thought I'd update my progress. As a reminder, my starting level was probably A1 (travel proficiency), and my level of effort has been 100 hours/month, currently totaling more than 400 hours. My goal was to comprehend spoken French. I didn't care if I could speak it at all. I just wanted to understand it.

As I previously outlined, my method involves repeatedly listening to 500-word news and magazine stories. These stories are professionally written in grown-up, adult French and clearly spoken by news readers at a comfortable speed. After an initial listen, I translate each story and listen to it daily over the course of the next two weeks. There are 14 stories in play at any one time, and listening to all of them takes 1 hour. Prior to listening to the stories, I read the entire transcript. By the time a particular story has finished its trip, I will have read and listened to it no less than 30 times.

Translating each story requires an average of 25 trips to the dictionary. I call this a 5% look-up rate, which is not bad for study material. A new story starts the listening cycle every day and an old story exits the cycle. The result is that I'm introduced to 25 new, translated words/phrases per day. If input training works, these 25 words/phrases should have been completely learned by the time the story departs the cycle two weeks after entering.

So, after 30 repetitions, have I learned these 25 words/phrases? The answer is "no", I have not. In fact, were I to take a vocabulary test, I would not do very well. I find this failure astonishing, because it runs counter to everything I've ever heard about the benefits of input training, one of which is the effortless retention of vocabulary.

Another benchmark of my progress is whether I'm required to translate fewer words. In other words, is my base vocabulary increasing? Again, the answer is "no". My look-up rate remains at about 5%. A final benchmark is the extent to which new, untranslated stories entering the cycle are becoming more comprehensible. The answer is "no". I am frequently clueless, sometimes comically so.

Pretty clearly, input training is not working, and I have no sense whatsoever that I'm making any progress. I estimate it would take me at least 1000 hours to approach A2 comprehension and perhaps ten times that to achieve B2 comprehension. Furthermore, anyone who thinks they'll intuitively learn grammar this way ought to have their head examined. It's simply not possible. I'm looking at you, Steve Kaufmann. While I have no doubt that listening is an important part of any language learning diet, it's not the whole meal. I'm missing a few courses.

This ends my thread. I'll continue with input training, but I'm going to dial it back in favor of some output training. I don't know what that will be yet.
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Re: French via input training

Postby Maengin » Sat Sep 24, 2022 3:36 pm

You should really take a vocabulary/reading/listening test. I find it hard to believe after all that in 4 months, you learned nothing/didn't improve at all. Usually in French.

I have 36 hours of intensive listening to Korean as a beginner and I have 100% improved in my listening and ability to recognize and understand basic words.
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Re: French via input training

Postby Kraut » Sat Sep 24, 2022 4:08 pm

Listening to French is different because the words always come embedded in larger units, didactitians call this chaine parlée.
"Pourquoinemastupasrepondutoutdesuite" is what you get in your brain when you listen instead of reading "Pourquoi ne m'as-tu pas répondu tout de suite". In other languages, German for instance, there are more separations of single words (via glottal stops etc).
Therefore the 30 "repetitions" don't really count as full concentrated repetitions. And 14 stories in one hour? In a row, without interruptions and repetitions to focus on a structure? This can't work.
What are you going to do with your material now? Doing bidirectional translation with it (from your script back to the original) might give you a deeper grasp of your texts.
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