How to make corrections stick/Learning from corrections

[betise]

hey everyone, i was just wondering how you all go about using feedback from people that speak your TL to actually improve. i sometimes go get a short text i've written corrected by french speakers, but i'm not sure where to go from there in order to learn from it best. the area that seems the hardest for me is when i haven't made an error per se, but i've said something in an unnatural way so i have to remember the natural way for next time.

thanks for any advice

[rdearman]

I get this a lot on language exchanges. The native will normally type the correct way of saying it in the chat window. I copy these into Anki and memorise them.

[eido]

When I can, I text chat with friends from other countries that speak my TLs. If they say something more idiomatic than what I’m saying, I don’t memorize but rather try commit it to memory by using it in a separate, more formal text to get corrected or using it next time we chat. I have a good memory for these sorts of things, so you’d could say I’m blessed in that regard.

I think what powers it is a genuine want to sound more Mexican, Korean, Quebecois, Icelandic, Burmese, etc. I want to fit in with those cultures’ norms and become part of those worlds. Expressing myself authentically and accurately is important to me, especially in that context, so I eat up new phrases whenever possible. I’m sure for my friends, watching my progress can be fun, since two or three years ago I was much worse at appropriately getting my words out. For instance, my Spanish tutor says despite being on the cusp of C1 (like extremely close, touching the border) I speak the most accurately out of all his students and know the most about grammar and level-appropriate speech. I think paying attention to detail has helped a lot despite the initial heap of mental effort it took. The devil is in the details, but it’s worth it.

[frank_cascade]

What I do is think of things in terms of units of knowledge. Every word you need to learn is a unit of knowledge and so is every grammar point. If I learn three new words and 3 conjugation rules then all together I have learnt 6 units of knowledge. A unit is something which you just can't workout without being told. So if you say something that is grammatically correct yet unnatural, treat is as a new unit of knowledge and practise it the same way you would practise a new word. As a learner, your study time is limited. If you have 1 hour of time, is it better for you to spend it practising new words or spending it practising how to say certain phrases naturally. In the early stages of learning a language, you get more from learning new words but in the intermediate and and advanced stages, you have quite a good vocabulary and it may be a better use of time to practise phrasing yourself naturally.

[Cainntear]

As I've recently commented in another thread, the thing I do is to pick a small number of errors to actively think about. I prioritise based on what's most frequent or most serious, and then I consciously try to correct the error each time I make it, and I also consciously try to find opportunities to practice it so as to train my brain.

I give my brain negative feedback to force it to stop making the mistake... not pain, not humiliation (these don't work)... I just make sure the brain learns that the error is an inconvenience so that it takes the efficient route by doing it right first time in future.

[mcthulhu]

I remember this coming up in a discussion about the monolingual use of Computer-Assisted Translation tools, for original writing instead of translation. The idea was to add the original and the corrected version to a translation memory (database of parallel sentences). This would allow a) having the corrected version automatically suggested if a future sentence met a given threshold of similarity, or at least b) finding the better expressions again through a concordance search. You could consider this use case for CAT tools another sort of translation, from bad writing to good writing.

This seemed like a fascinating idea to me, though it's probably not for everyone. I like tools and a database's memory is a lot better than mine, which is getting more feeble every year. I have to admit that I've never gotten around to experimenting with this myself, though I have spent a lot of time searching bilingual translation memories. Documenting your mistakes in some way, at least in a notebook, seems like a good idea, anyway.

[AndyMeg]

hey everyone, i was just wondering how you all go about using feedback from people that speak your TL to actually improve. i sometimes go get a short text i've written corrected by french speakers, but i'm not sure where to go from there in order to learn from it best. the area that seems the hardest for me is when i haven't made an error per se, but i've said something in an unnatural way so i have to remember the natural way for next time.

thanks for any advice

I'd probably go about it this way:

I would rewrite the whole text (by hand if it's short, by typing if it's too long) changing things according to the feedback I've received.

This way I'd want to get things right from the beginning so that I don't have to rewrite the whole text. This would make me pay closer attention to the corrections and be more interested in remembering them for future texts.

But if the text is way too long, then I would just focus on rewriting the sentences related to my mistakes and not the whole text because that could actually take my focus away from what's really important.

The key thing for me here is to physically rewrite (by hand or by means of typing) in the right way the things I got wrong or felt unnatural.