A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

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Henkkles
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby Henkkles » Thu Jul 07, 2016 8:07 pm

vonPeterhof wrote:Sorry, I may have got a little carried away there...

Большое спасибо! This is exactly why I created this thread. The definition of open and closed classes wasn't even the point of my post but I'm happy to know more about the subject.
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Henkkles
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby Henkkles » Fri Aug 26, 2016 4:43 pm

I wanted to start doing videos about language learning tips, so I learned to use Shotcut a bit and hacked this proof-of-concept together, but now I need feedback. Please watch and tell me what's wrong with it!

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Basil
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby Basil » Fri Aug 26, 2016 10:45 pm

positives:
you've got a great speaking voice and it is very clear and well-enunciated. the subtitles are a nice touch. i like the fact that you give you ball-park estimates such as the different speed ratios, makes it more concrete for beginners. i like how you used a Wikitongues video as your example audio since that's a great resource for people to "window-shop" what different accents sound like.

things that you could improve:
firstly, you could expand on the "ways to find content" section such as recommending users to visit Youtube in their TL and then typing in keywords like "vlog." then, when you mention about the audio potentially having a transcript, you can also show users how to filter youtube videos in the TL Youtube for subtitles. for Polish, the word is "napisy" but even if beginners don't know the word, they can look it up or they can figure it out just based on the layout.

also, it wasn't clear to me at first that you were demonstrating how to change the speed of the Wikitongues video since the control was small and in the corner.
a quick mention like "Here I'm using the Video Speed Controller Chrome extension to lower the speed of this man speaking Breton" would make things a lot clearer.

great first draft!

edit: after thinking about it, i don't think its necessary to go to the TL youtube site, but i do it anyway because i like to see what videos are popular for that country. Just as long as the search term is in the TL, you'll be able to find subtitled videos in your target language
Last edited by Basil on Fri Aug 26, 2016 10:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby Ani » Sat Aug 27, 2016 12:18 am

You have such a nice speaking voice and accent.

I don't know if I was just being dense but it took me a second pass to understand what you meant by optimal speed ratios for transcribing. Actually, I hope I understood it. That if you understood 60% or less, transcribe at .8 speed and so on? Maybe an extra sentence would make that more clear.
And I agree with Basil's comment -- I was watching on my cell phone and I wouldn't have realized you were adjusting the playback speed if I hadn't already read it here.
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Henkkles
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby Henkkles » Sat Aug 27, 2016 12:29 am

Basil wrote:positives:
you've got a great speaking voice and it is very clear and well-enunciated. the subtitles are a nice touch. i like the fact that you give you ball-park estimates such as the different speed ratios, makes it more concrete for beginners. i like how you used a Wikitongues video as your example audio since that's a great resource for people to "window-shop" what different accents sound like.

things that you could improve:
firstly, you could expand on the "ways to find content" section such as recommending users to visit Youtube in their TL and then typing in keywords like "vlog." then, when you mention about the audio potentially having a transcript, you can also show users how to filter youtube videos in the TL Youtube for subtitles. for Polish, the word is "napisy" but even if beginners don't know the word, they can look it up or they can figure it out just based on the layout.

also, it wasn't clear to me at first that you were demonstrating how to change the speed of the Wikitongues video since the control was small and in the corner.
a quick mention like "Here I'm using the Video Speed Controller Chrome extension to lower the speed of this man speaking Breton" would make things a lot clearer.

great first draft!

edit: after thinking about it, i don't think its necessary to go to the TL youtube site, but i do it anyway because i like to see what videos are popular for that country. Just as long as the search term is in the TL, you'll be able to find subtitled videos in your target language

Thanks a lot! I'll surely make these changes (and more!) in my next version.
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Henkkles
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby Henkkles » Fri Sep 09, 2016 5:02 pm

While new video ideas are brewing, I've been playing with audio-speed as a tool for learning languages. This is what I've been up to:

1. Work through a text (read through, write down new vocabulary and expressions, the usual)
2. Read along with the audio
3. Listen at 80% speed
4. Read along at 120% speed
5. Listen at 90% speed
6. Read along at 150% speed
7. Listen at normal speed

It seems to be working, but I don't know whether it's better or worse than without fucking with the speed. You'd think it were better because it's analogous to an experiment I read about; (vague memories, bear with me)

Researchers made children practice throwing a ball into a goal. They would be tested for accuracy of getting it into the goal after some practice time (possibly something like an hour?). I think group 1 practiced throwing the ball into the goal from the same distance that they'd be tested from, and group 2 practiced all kinds of different throws, half distance, double distance, from the side, etc. and in the end, group 2 did considerably better.

If you want to give it a shot, please tell me what you thought of it.
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby Iversen » Fri Sep 09, 2016 7:10 pm

There is a lot of good advice in this thread, but I'll just comment on a few things.

The idea of constantly having some task ready which you can do without inventing something new is excellent. For me standardized tasks like doing wordlists and studying/copying short text samples can be done whenever I have a free moment (plus paper etc.), whereas the task of constructing 'green sheets' based on several grammar books is much harder to standardize.

I don't think it is possible always to separate open and closed classes, but this is not a serious problem. Even if a supposedly closed class is shown to admit new members it would do no harm at all to learn the old well-established ones through examples which exemplify their grammatical roles. For instance the preposition lists in many languages contain items which derive from infinite verbal forms or from nouns, and sometimes a creative language user tries to introduce a new example of this. Does it matter? No - you can just ignore it until it becomes common enough to be taken seriously. In practice the number of 'grammar words' will be limited enough to warrant a special treatment, and since they also mostly are among the most common words in a language you have to learn them at an early stage. But the skies don't fall down if you skip a half obsolete member of a class or fail to notice a new addition to a halfopen class.
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Henkkles
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby Henkkles » Fri Sep 09, 2016 9:18 pm

Iversen wrote:I don't think it is possible always to separate open and closed classes, but this is not a serious problem. Even if a supposedly closed class is shown to admit new members it would do no harm at all to learn the old well-established ones through examples which exemplify their grammatical roles. For instance the preposition lists in many languages contain items which derive from infinite verbal forms or from nouns, and sometimes a creative language user tries to introduce a new example of this. Does it matter? No - you can just ignore it until it becomes common enough to be taken seriously. In practice the number of 'grammar words' will be limited enough to warrant a special treatment, and since they also mostly are among the most common words in a language you have to learn them at an early stage. But the skies don't fall down if you skip a half obsolete member of a class or fail to notice a new addition to a halfopen class.

I think people got far too caught up on it; in *many* languages, especially ones that are studied often, this is a possible distinction. Theory need not be concerned.
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby Henkkles » Wed Sep 21, 2016 12:23 pm

What is language learning, or an alternate metaphor for language acquisition

Language, as I understand the term, seems to be (in essence) a system comprised of interconnected neurons, which allows humans (so far at least) to produce and parse series of stimuli, often acoustic or visual. Thus, even if speech seems to us the most obvious form of language, it is just a manifestation of this system in the world. This view was popularized by de Saussure some hundred years ago, and it is called the langue|parole distinction.

Viewed through this scope, the metaphysical concept of "language" is just the name we have given to similarities in the private "languages" of individuals. This is quite obviously a useful abstraction, as it would've fallen into obsolescence if it weren't. However, it does confuse a lot of people (myself included) in this respect: What exactly is "language learning"?

I believe the term to be somewhat inadequate, as it hides under several layers of abstraction the nature of the process. I want to update the language of language learning, and here is my somewhat whimsical proposal; language sculpting.

A "sculptor" (learner) of a language has to essentially engage in the task of creating a new language (system of neural connections) from scratch, using the learner's innate tools (brain). To do this, they use the target language as a model; the learner has to slowly chisel away at the proverbial block of marble while carefully observing the example of the target language and try to align the two systems to resemble each other as closely as possible. Rough outlines emerge first; the block starts to take shape, although it's missing all of the key details. These are akin to basic utterances, those simple acts of communication without finesse learners generally produce in the earliest stages.
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Re: A collection of my musings - comments and discussion encouraged!

Postby galaxyrocker » Wed Sep 21, 2016 4:04 pm

That's an interesting way of looking at language acquisition. How would you factor in interference from L1 into this? Saying that the sculptor tends to use their L1 statue as sort of a basis when they don't know something, and then that needs to be fixed later on?
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