
Back to the experiment and "my beliefs". As I said in the post above I don't find learning through input to be really slower than what I call traditional approaches. At the same time I assume that my vocabulary size in French may be smaller than the one I had in Englsih after a year of learning the language. It's hard to tell though since I don't have the numbers, it's just an assumption. But no matter what the numbers might be the main difference between my French and my one-year-old English vocabulary is the quality of the knowledge. Back then with English if I knew a word that meant that I propbably knew its dictionary definition, I knew it in the form of "English word - Russian translation". Nominally I might have known more English words back then but my knowledge of the French words I know is deeper. Now if I know a word I really know it, I've seen it in different contexts, I know different meanings of that words, etc. Because often to learn a word from input you need to encounter it several times. And I don't really need to memorize words, I just remember them. Sometimes I memorize a whole phrase, if I've heard it in a series, for instance, and only later on, when I see it written somewhere I'll learn the words it consists of. In one of my earlier posts I described the process of figuring out the meaning of new words. But that's just the conscious part of the process, I can't really explain how it happens when there are not so many known words, or no visual clues like when I'm reading a book. The idea behind learning a language from video content is simple: you see a picture, hear words, contect them, and draw a conclusion. But it seems to be just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, and mostly the acquisition of new words happens subconsciously because I don't know how else I can explain what happened to me when I started reading my first French book. At first all I saw was a page full of words I didn't know or couldn't recognized because of the crazy spelling. Pronouns, probably, were the only words I could understand. I guess, if it weren't an experiment I would stop right then, but because I was doing it for the experiment's sake I continued. I just kept reading trying to figure out what was going on in the book. As I said before I knew the plot but only superficially. I knew it from an Italian mini-series that now seems to me to be rather an adaptation of a French mini-series (a rather loose one), and not an adaptation of the book. Besides, a book is a book, meaning there are lots of descriptions of places, weather, characters, also thoughts of those characters, their backstories, etc. So, all I could do in the beginning was just to read a text I didn't understand page after page. That was how my French reading started, and now I can trick the Dialang test into believing that I'm C1 in Reading

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As they say - to be continued...
