Team Me: Foxing Around

[reineke]

ITA La luna e i falò - done. Cartoons.
POL, RU - S King.
PORT - 1 cartoon, half an episode of BB
FRA - Lettres de Vincent Van Gogh à son frère Théo (1/2).

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[reineke]

VGF.jpg

Piles of French Novels Vincent van Gogh (1853 - 1890), Paris, October-November 1887

oil on canvas, 54.4 cm x 73.6 cm
Credits: Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

"This still life is an ode to modern French literature. The books with yellow covers are not immediately identifiable to 21st-century viewers. But Van Gogh's contemporaries recognised them as modern French paperbacks.

Van Gogh was an avid reader and an admirer of novelists such as the Goncourt brothers and Emile Zola. They offered a realistic, unvarnished perspective on modern life.
The open book in the foreground invites the viewer to come and read."

https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection/s0021V1962

Van Gogh as letter writer

"Without a gift for words, Van Gogh’s account of his trials and tribulations would have been nothing more than a litany of hope and struggle. It seems paradoxical, but his extremely personal correspondence rises above the purely individual and as a result has the universality of all great literature. This warrants a brief discussion of Van Gogh’s use of language, which has received little study until now, despite the acknowledged literary status of the letters...

Up until 1886 Van Gogh wrote almost all his letters in Dutch, and thereafter almost always in French. The ratio of Dutch to French is roughly 2:1. His French was very good, thanks to his contacts with Francophones and his reading. He regularly came into contact with it from the age of 16, not just from what he read but also in the daily business of the art trade. French was the language of the upper classes in Holland...

After spending a further two years living and working in Paris (1886-1888), he consequently told his sister Wil, to whom he had previously written in Dutch: ‘If you’ll let me write to you in French, that will really make my letter easier for me’ (670). He and Theo also corresponded in French, and the letters that he later wrote to his mother show that he had lost his facility with Dutch. They are wooden and less fluent.
So the answer to the frequent question as to why, as a Dutchman, he corresponded in French even with members of his own family is simple: with his keen sense of language he had been surrounded by French for so long that he had largely lost his feel for Dutch, and found French easier. That does not mean that his mastery of his second language was complete, far from it. Many people who are not French can envy him his fluency, but an analysis of his use of conjugations and stylistic registers shows that he often made mistakes. Emile Bernard preferred to overlook these imperfections, realizing that the importance of the letters was on a higher plane. ‘The errors in his French, his constant use of ici, mais, cela, en tant que quant à, maintenant, etc. Those heavy, childish, foreign turns of phrase, in which the meaning nevertheless comes through, that language, full of flashes of tenderness, grace and kindness, which sometimes seems to take wings and sometimes wallows in the coarseness of the Paris studios or the slang of its drinking-dens, that language, I say, will have every excuse and every sympathy, because, despite the ruts into which it falls, the floods of alcohol in which it is submerged, the realist prose that sullies it, it suddenly emerges into a meadow full of sunshine and flowers, a silent town on which a starry sky looks down, an unknown world in which Christ’s words ring out, and where art’s symphonies resound. … So what does it matter if his style is not correct, it is alive, and we will do well to make allowances and to pay it careful attention, as when we become aware of superior beings who cannot speak our language."...

http://vangoghletters.org/vg/letter_writer_3.html

[Carmody]

reineke

Thanks as always for your wonderful posts.

I have a question re something that I think you said a while back and I am not sure where it was. It has to do with memorizing of vocabulary and that research shows that after something like 48 hrs. we have a 50% drop off in what we have learned. At least I believe you were the one to say something like that. Did I get the gist of the quote roughly correct?

In any case, I have been thinking about it and wondering how it is that polyglots are able to speak so many languages without constantly reviewing all their words in all the languages. Or do they just have magnificent memories with no need to review?

I study my French 2-3 hrs. each and every day and find the need to review, so, I was just wondering.

Thanks.

[reineke]

I'm not a member of the polyglot community. I have bumped the thread. The gist:

We forget as much as 60 % of what we have attempted to commit to memory after 20 mins and 80 % after a week without rehearsal of the same material. Hence spaced out practice is key! BUT WHAT IS THE OPTIMAL SPACE INTERVAL? (from a thread in Global Innovative Language Teachers)

spacing out-1.jpg

G. Conti via Twitter

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Reineke:
It's been around 2 years since I consumed around 2.5 million spoken Spanish words (approx 75 pct of my total exposure to Spanish). I would not mind spending another few hundred hours on Spanish."

Learn it fast, lose it fast:

Relationships between independent variables suggested by skill retention theory and second language change were investigated. Language proficiency and the length of time since DLI graduation demonstrated strong correlations with foreign language change...

...there is a 25 percent probability that level 2 linguists will fall to 1+ during the first year. This probability decreases to roughly 10 percent for level 2+ linguists and 5 percent for level 3 linguists...

Near the end of the survival analysis timeline, roughly a 10-year period, the probability of an event has risen to 90 percent for level 2 linguists, 70 percent for level 2+ linguists, and 50 percent for level 3 linguists."

Modeling second language change using skill retention theory
Shearer, Samuel

ILR 3+ = Firm C1
ILR 3 = B2+/C1
ILR 2/2+ = B2/B2+

I do not intend to turn this log into a second SLA research notebook but I will also save this here from my SLA Notebook log:

Speaking of word families, here are a couple examples:

word-family.jpg

A concrete noun such as "axe" is easy to remember. You can of course get axed from a job and someone may "axe" you a question.

You will *never* learn 3 word families per day unless you're working with specific word lists (which may be an idea to try). Your learning process may be spread out over the course of several months or even years for some word families. On average though, you may learn the equivalent of three word families per day.

Aspects of word knowledge:
(Credited in the SLA Notebook)

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Aspects-of-word-knowledge.png

Input/Output, SLA and Van Gogh

'By age 5, children tend to have an expressive vocabulary of 2,100–2,200 words. By age 6, they have approximately 2,600 words of expressive vocabulary and 20,000–24,000 words of receptive vocabulary..."

"Word learning often involves physical context, builds on prior knowledge, takes place in social context, and includes semantic support. The phonological loop and serial order short-term memory may both play an important role in vocabulary development."

Wikipedia

"A five-year old child’s typical verbal output is 10,000 – 15,000 words per day of grammatically correct, meaningful communication, drawing on a vocabulary of about 5,000 words."

Early Childhood Education - Page 291
Barry Persky, ‎Leonard H. Golubchick - 1991

By the time our little native speaker reaches college, he or she may still use an average of "only" 16,000 words each day. The least talkative adult may use an estimated 795 words on average per day. If he's a Brit, he may read 533 books and 2,455 newspapers during his lifetime. The average US adult spends over 3500 hours each year on (English-language) media.

I have jokingly referred to my Italian experience as a long distance summer course. I believe I can successfully reverse engineer a conclusion that meaningful exposure to millions of spoken running words (plus visual context) over the course of several years is sufficient for successful acquisition of a second IE language. If one's starting point is the same language group acquisition should occur faster. Children may learn deeper in certain circumstances etc.

[Carmody]

Reineke

Thanks for the comprehensive answer; lots to ponder there.

My purpose in asking the question had to do with my desire to read French literature with as few dictionary look-ups as possible. I have put in 2-3 hrs. a day for the past 3 yrs. So what I do is to take all the books I have read- and it is one long list- and I go through the books that have the problem words underlined. I do this every 6-12 months to refresh my mind. I guess that is somewhat along the lines of your quote:

However, if the desired retention interval is 10 years, then the optimal interval between practices is about 1-2 years."

And yet I am not sure how the review process works for someone who knows multiple foreign languages. My sense is that the individual is totally consumed with lots of reviewing.

Many thanks for you helpful posts.

[reineke]

"No one can step into the same river twice … both river and person are ever-changing."

Heraclitus [540-480 BC] (paraphrased)

[reineke]

That is part of the beauty of all literature. You discover that your longings are universal longings, that you're not lonely and isolated from anyone. You belong.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Just a note here to mention that I found a very useful tool to help me to begin to listen without translating. …….

The tool was/is by listening/watching

Remi sans famille by Hector Malot, 1878

It is a fun depiction of a very old story.

Because the visuals and the music were so relaxing, I could genuinely start to listen without translating.

Possibly the story is too simple for everyone else but at my elementary level, it helped me to relax and to take my first steps at not translating.

It lasted 16 hours and was a real joy.

Has anything changed?

[Carmody]

Confession:
- I have seen it twice.
- And read the book twice.
The more time I put into it; the more I get out of it.

[reineke]

Words are like cockroaches. Once you start noticing them, they seem to turn up everywhere. For every one you spot there can be many more hiding and multiplying behind your back. They're hard to catch and they're even harder to "own" and command.

[reineke]