French via input training

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badger
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Re: French via input training

Postby badger » Sat Sep 24, 2022 4:36 pm

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

I don't really pay any attention to the online polyglots, but my vague understanding is that the input is meant to be comprehensible. "grown-up, adult French" is quite a leap from A1/A2 level, especially when everything in French gets smushed together & half the letters not pronounced. :shock:

have you considered something a little more straightforward? Peppa Pig is very popular - there's a whole thread about it here: Peppa Pig Project
Furthermore, anyone who thinks they'll intuitively learn grammar this way ought to have their head examined. It's simply not possible

I properly LoL'd at this :mrgreen: I think it probably is possible, but ye gods, talk about making life difficult for yourself, just for the sake of avoiding spending a few hours learning some basic grammar.
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luke
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Re: French via input training

Postby luke » Sat Sep 24, 2022 5:04 pm

Stiv_MacRae wrote: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.

I appreciate you sharing your experience.

If I understand what I quoted above correctly, that would be the equivalent of 25 * 365 = learning 9125 words in a year. I know you've been at it "only" 4 months, but just as far as a rate at which one might could learn words, I would think one overly optimistic if they imagined they could acquire vocabulary at that rate. I'm not saying no one has ever done it, only that it would be an exceptional feat. Learning 3000 words a year is very respectable in my book. Some say we learn about 1000 words per year in our native language up to about the age of 20.

I only mention this "math" to say, give yourself a break. You set quite a task for yourself.

I'll be curious what you decide to do next.
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Re: French via input training

Postby LupCenușiu » Sat Sep 24, 2022 5:23 pm

luke wrote:Some say we learn about 1000 words per year in our native language up to about the age of 20.


That would be a preposterously low number for anyone finishing high school.
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Re: French via input training

Postby luke » Sat Sep 24, 2022 5:36 pm

LupCenușiu wrote:
luke wrote:Some say we learn about 1000 words per year in our native language up to about the age of 20.
That would be a preposterously low number for anyone finishing high school.

Maybe it depends on what one counts as a "word".

This is not the only source of the statistic, but it is one that was in a recent thread.
We learn languages by reading
The good old statistics tells us that the vocabulary size of a typical college student comes down to approximately 20 000 words. We tend to expand it with the rate of 1000 words per year, and most of these gains originate from reading.
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Re: French via input training

Postby Le Baron » Sun Sep 25, 2022 10:41 pm

There's a lot of sense in this thread and facing up to reality vs wish-thinking and general language-learning lies. That the true and actual projection for learning a language is generally quite long; especially when you're no longer so young and free. And that the '500 hours of Netflix and now I'm fluent' is just a load of crap made up by people on the internet who self-diagnose themselves as more advanced than they really are.

Stiv_MacRae wrote: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.

Anki isn't necessarily 'memorisation' in the ordinary sense like memorising a deck of cards. It's also a form of input exposure. Stuff that you are exposed to and which lingers in your brain and unconscious memory. Just a focused, concentrated dose of what you get from 'content'. Something which bolsters that content.

To me what is called 'input' is merely 'exposure', because let's not pretend that this is like some fine-tuned system where things are being entered into a system with 100% input rate. That's not happening. There is loads of inaccuracy and wastage and dead-ends. Groping around in the dark until your eyes adjust and you find the door to the tunnel which is long and the light far away in the distance. It can be speeded up a bit with a little study to help light the way.

I don't think anyone should ever set themselves these short-term targets standing in for long-term targets. If you're learning Spanish, or French like this thread, and five months in you feel you can't understand enough Spanish, it's because it takes a while. Think more along the lines of five years and then be pleasantly surprised part-way.
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Stiv_MacRae
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Re: French via input training

Postby Stiv_MacRae » Fri Oct 07, 2022 3:24 pm

Thanks for everyone's comments. I won't respond to everything. My experience is my experience; I just thought I'd share it.

I was testing Krashen/Kaufmann and have concluded that most of what they say is nonsense, at least for this particular inexperienced adult language learner. I'm one of the oldest participants on this forum. Whatever language engrams that you're supposed to have laid down when you're 12, I don't have. Also, my short-term memory is garbage. I have my address and phone number taped to my computer screen so I don't forget them.

I am particularly disappointed in Kaufmann. Almost everything he has said in his videos has proven to be untrue. He says that age doesn't matter. Virtually every piece of scientific data indicates otherwise. It's simply stupid to insist that adults learn like children. He also claims he studies 90 minutes a day and learns 140 new words. I think he's lying. That kind of vocabulary expansion is simply not possible for the average person. Finally, if it was possible to learn grammar implicitly, then everyone would know that "it's" isn't possessive.

As for ANKI, I'm a recent fan. I like it. I wish I had this in med school. Thanks for the suggestion.

What will I do next? First, I'm listening to easier material. Kaufmann's suggestion to dive right into B1/B2 material proved disastrous. I listen to a lot of InnerFrench now, and it's much more accessible. I'm also highly likely to try Lingoda, because I have come to believe that speaking is important. Knowledge that isn't applied doesn't stick around very long.
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Re: French via input training

Postby DaveAgain » Fri Oct 07, 2022 4:23 pm

Stiv_MacRae wrote:I am particularly disappointed in Kaufmann. Almost everything he has said in his videos has proven to be untrue. He says that age doesn't matter. Virtually every piece of scientific data indicates otherwise. It's simply stupid to insist that adults learn like children. He also claims he studies 90 minutes a day and learns 140 new words. I think he's lying. That kind of vocabulary expansion is simply not possible for the average person. Finally, if it was possible to learn grammar implicitly, then everyone would know that "it's" isn't possessive.
I think the definitions of "words" might be an issue here. From what I remember of Mr Kaufmann's videos his word counts relate to words looked up while reading in Lingq.com, which would count different forms of the same word separately e.g viens, vient venons etc.

The mechanism of memory formation is not as I understand it different between young and old. Young children have more plastic brains, but adults have existing scaffolding that can support language learning, you don't need to learn the concept of a car, just that car == voiture.
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Re: French via input training

Postby MorkTheFiddle » Fri Oct 07, 2022 5:44 pm

DaveAgain wrote:From what I remember of Mr Kaufmann's videos his word counts relate to words looked up while reading in Lingq.com, which would count different forms of the same word separately e.g viens, vient venons etc.

As a former customer of LingQ, I can confirm that LingQ does, or at least did, because that was more than ten years ago, define and measure words as word forms, not as lemmas or dictionary headwords. LWT the same way.
Learning 140 words in 90 minutes is possible, but that rate depends somewhat on related languages, somewhat on familiar scripts, somewhat on cognates and somewhat on repetition of words in a particular reading passage. I am sure I picked up 140 words or so in 90 minutes reading Spanish or French in LingQ from time to time, especially nearer the start, but I could never have managed that rate with say, Russian or Japanese.
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