aaleks's log

[aaleks]

Careful. Just let that poison into your bloodstream, and you won't be able to stop, ever

It's probably too late

[LinguaPony]

It is. I recognise the symptoms only too well

[aaleks]

I remember that when I started reading natives (English) books I looked up practically every unknown word because I was afraid that I might get something wrong. At some point I noted that I looked up not only new words but the words I already knew. Just in case. The worst thing about it was that my brain seemed to refuse to memorize new words. What for, if there always is a dictionary nearby? It seems something similar happens with my writing now. I check and overcheck almost every phrase. I guess that overchecking is something like a comfort zone for me. The funny thing is that sometimes that not only doesn't help but makes my texts worse than they could've been. Because of overchecking some of them end up looking like a bunch of unrelated sentences
I think it's about the time to at least tried to get rid of that habit and learn to swim without such a "life vest" . But only in this thread . It would be unfaire to people reading the forum to leave my posts practically unchecked.
So this entry is a kind of warning and also an example how my unchecked* writing could look like

*I checked spelling.

[LinguaPony]

With extensive reading (as opposed to intensive), dictionaries are supposed to be put away. You won't progress very fast if you look up every word, and finally you will get bored and stop. Trust me, guessing their meaning from the context is so much more fun! And they will sink naturally into your passive vocabulary, which you can later activate through writing and text-messaging. It will happen without you knowing it's happening. It's very similar to how we learn our own native language.

A year of extensive reading, and you won't believe how much progress you have achieved!

[aaleks]

LinguaPony, I was reading like that (intensive) only in the beginning. I guess, I noted the tendency I mentioned above when I was reading the 2nd HP book.
I think I'd better just quote what I wrote about that in one of my previous post here:
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 724#p85470

Somewhere about that time I came to conclusion that if I want to increase my vocabulary I need to start reading too. I knew from my previous experience with German that it will work for me. As I've written more than once I didn't use any kind of wordlists, apps, and so on. Although during my listening in the very beginning I wrote down maybe about a dozen words, but I didn't do it while reading books. In the beginning I just look up practically every unknown word in a dictionary and did my best to memorize it. Of course, in most cases I had to do so more than once or twice, but I was ok with that. Then I changed my approach a little and tried to figure out the meaning of a word before looking it up in a dictionary. Now it depends on, in short, do I want to know the word or not. Reading on the Internet all the advices about writing unknown words down, how effective it is, I had doubts about my just-look-up-words approach, and decided give it a try. Or probably I should call it a half-try because I stopped after writing down about 10 or 12 words. I just felt that my usual approach is more effective and less time consuming. I mean for me. Maybe I just deceived myself, of course.

So I assume, my reading has been rather extensive .

[LinguaPony]

Okay. I don't write anything down, as it would destroy the pleasure of reading.

Whatever works for you is great, and no, you don't deceive yourself at all. Every contact with the language counts.

[aaleks]

I've been reading some of my previous posts here (I do it sometimes as a part of learning. It helps me to find mistakes I've made) and I've found this typo:
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 724#p85304

All in all by the summer of 2017 my level allowed me to understand a very basic-level conversation, and partly understand, mostly guess a Wikipedia article.

should be 2012 (!)
I don't know why I didn't see that before
P.S. I edited that 'original' post now.

[Ольга]

I've been reading some of my previous posts here (I do it sometimes as a part of learning. It helps me to find mistakes I've made) and I've found this typo:
https://forum.language-learners.org/vie ... 724#p85304

All in all by the summer of 2017 my level allowed me to understand a very basic-level conversation, and partly understand, mostly guess a Wikipedia article.

should be 2012 (!)
I don't know why I didn't see that before
P.S. I edited that 'original' post now.

Never mind, we know you have a pretty high level.

[aaleks]

Ольга, thank you . It's my usual sloppiness . I often make such kind of mistakes even when I write in Russian .

[aaleks]

This week I've been searching something enlightening about Present Perfect on the Internet. Actually at first I thought to ask here, on this forum, but I didn't have any phrase that I could've used as an example (like when I asked about articles) so I decided to look in other places. Of course, I know the formal rule but in my case that doesn't help. I've never been able to understand grammar rules even in my native tongue. Their logic has always slipped away from me so I couldn't apply them to my writing. To me it's never been enough just to know a rule, I need to understand how it works (like in that old cartoon about the comma and Казнить нельзя помиловать). So I've been looking for native speakers' comments on the issue. In the end I've found this discussion https://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blog ... rfect.html with more than 60 comments. I can't say that now, after reading those comments, I know and understand everything about Present Perfect but it helped me to make one more step in the right direction.
Then I've decided to take a closer look at the blog, in other words, to read other posts. As result I've been reading the blog a couple of evenings now. I guess the most things mentioned there are well-known to anyone who has an interest in the subject. The thing that actually had never really occurred to me before was a realization that native materials I've used are mostly American but grammar books, and therefore grammar rules, I've been learning are British. That's probably not a big deal really; I'm not going to move in to any of English speaking country anyway. But my learning approach is content oriented, and most of that content is American. That wasn’t really a conscious choice. It just happened. At the same time I don’t have a strong grammar basis, except some basic grammar rules I've "learnt" grammar from exposure, so to speak, i.e. native materials. So I guess all those subtle differences between AmE and BrE sometimes make things even more confused for me