Lawyer&Mom, Less is More (French & German)

[DaveAgain]

And I like reading? So continue?

Forward!

(and another vote for short chapters too )

[Lawyer&Mom]

Not much to report. Still slogging through Roi du Fer and Donna Leon. Took a scouting trip to our county library, there is plenty of French and German contemporary popular fiction waiting for me.

Watched my first episode of ER in about six months. Apparently October is the start of TV season for me. Time to hibernate!

[Lawyer&Mom]

I’m pretty sure this was our second annual Columbus Day three-day puke fest. Stomach bugs like holidays I guess. Lots of naps with sick kids, no reading. I did manage to catch up on all my Duolingo in bits and bites, and I’ve finally crossed 20,000 sentences in French Clozemaster. 5,870 sentences to go! At one point I figured I’d be done by the end of the year, but even with dropping all the languages except French and German, my Clozemaster has slowed to a crawl. I still do *some* everyday, but with reading and Duolingo, it just doesn’t have my focus lately. I’m hoping to spend more time on Clozemaster and less time on Twitter going forward. News and Politics are driving me crazy, for my own sanity I need to disengage!

[Lawyer&Mom]

Went back to Amazon to confirm the dates: I ordered French in Action in March of 2016. I’ve been at this for over two and a half years. I’m sure I’d be done with FIA if I had stuck with it, but I don’t know I would have stuck with French if I stayed with FIA. I’m reading native novels. I’m 75%+ on dubbed series, maybe 50% on high-end native podcasts. In conclusion, you don’t have to do the textbook method, but non-textbook methods aren’t really any faster. You still have to eat the elephant either way.

[patrickwilken]

Went back to Amazon to confirm the dates: I ordered French in Action in March of 2016. I’ve been at this for over two and a half years. I’m sure I’d be done with FIA if I had stuck with it, but I don’t know I would have stuck with French if I stayed with FIA. I’m reading native novels. I’m 75%+ on dubbed series, maybe 50% on high-end native podcasts. In conclusion, you don’t have to do the textbook method, but non-textbook methods aren’t really any faster. You still have to eat the elephant either way.

But do textbook methods teach you all the vocabulary and phrases you'll need?

[Lawyer&Mom]

Went back to Amazon to confirm the dates: I ordered French in Action in March of 2016. I’ve been at this for over two and a half years. I’m sure I’d be done with FIA if I had stuck with it, but I don’t know I would have stuck with French if I stayed with FIA. I’m reading native novels. I’m 75%+ on dubbed series, maybe 50% on high-end native podcasts. In conclusion, you don’t have to do the textbook method, but non-textbook methods aren’t really any faster. You still have to eat the elephant either way.

But do textbook methods teach you all the vocabulary and phrases you'll need?

A textbook won’t get you all the way there. Neither will mass input. The difference is this: do you want to slog through the grammar and then struggle to learn how to listen/read, or do you want to struggle to learn how to listen/read and then slog through the grammar? In school they make you do grammar first, and it turns out grammar first isn’t necessary. But as much as you can shuffle the steps around to suit your needs and preferences, at some point you still have to go through all the steps.

[patrickwilken]

A textbook won’t get you all the way there. Neither will mass input. ... But as much as you can shuffle the steps around to suit your needs and preferences, at some point you still have to go through all the steps.

I have nothing particularly against textbooks, but I don't really agree that you need at some point to sit down and work through a whole lot of them either. I do think writing and getting feedback on the writing is important (just like at school), but that's about as far as I think it's really necessary.

But I am pretty extreme. I am just trying to learn German the way I learnt English, which took lots of years and basically involved reading lots and lots of books, watching lots of TV, speaking a lot, and in the end writing essays at university.

[garyb]

I just see straw men in this discussion. Nobody claimed in the first place that textbooks teach you "all the vocabulary and phrases you'll need" (and need for what exactly?). Most textbooks cover much more than just grammar. At some point it changed from "a textbook" to a "whole lot" of them. Even the classic "learn like a child"/"learn like you learned your native language", ignoring the role of full-time "tutoring" from parents/carers/teachers over these years, has made an appearance. The idea that school language education is "grammar first" seems a good few decades out of date (although I obviously can't speak for every school!).

There are many ways to skin the beginner-to-intermediate cat, but I'm convinced that a structured method specifically designed to teach a language and introduce things at a sensible pace and order is going to work far better and be far more motivating and enjoyable for the majority of beginners than jumping in the deep end or doing crazy DIY methods based on memorising sentences from books or films at a stage where it's almost impossible to tell how many of these sentences are actually worth learning. The latter are reasonable as experiments for experienced learners studying a language close to one they already know, but I'd hate to see them being prescribed for a typical beginner. That's maybe not the case here (to be honest I can't even tell whether the discussion here is about beginner or intermediate learning or what) but I see it come up in other threads.

To state the obvious, of course some courses and textbooks are better than others and a bad one is perhaps worse than none.

[Lawyer&Mom]

I’m not planning on doing any textbooks. But at some point I’ll need to do some formal grammar. Grammar work sheets were certainly part of my childhood, they just are a lot easier when you already know the language.

I wouldn’t say that textbooks are just grammar these days, far from it, but as a German major I did take two years and covered all of German grammar before I tried to read a novel. At the time I thought that was the natural order of things, now I know there are other ways.

[Lawyer&Mom]

Loads of family obligations this weekend and I accidentally lost a 200+ day Clozemaster streak and a 62 day Duolingo streak. It shouldn’t matter, but so disappointing.