outcast wrote:Perhaps many learners, including myself in my early days of language learning, made the mistake of thinking I must MASTER the basics before moving on to the next level. I had a very small tolerance for mistakes so I didn't move on if I made just a few. That was an improper strategy.
That's a very good and interesting point.
If I didn't start
Cien años de soledad until I could understand 98%, I wouldn't have read it so may times already. Comprehension improves with repetition.
I've been doing like you were saying with FSI, which is that if one answer seems a bit slow or doesn't match response, I keep the exercise on my playlist until everything is close to perfect and easy. If I lowered the bar a bit, I could move along a little faster.
I do make a distinction between Cien años and FSI, but perhaps it's artificial and I can't see forest for the trees. That is, with FSI, I think of each unit building upon all the previous units, and therefore something not mastered will haunt the rest of the course. With a difficult novel, I accept I may not understand the story very well the first few times through. I get the main storyline, but may miss some subplots and nuance. The nuance, subplots, possible deeper meanings, etc, continue to materialize as I go through it again.
I'm one of those people who would be content to discuss each chapter of The Little Prince for an hour and still think there's more there than we covered.
If I lowered the FSI perfection threshold just a bit, not sure if the course would fall apart after several more units, of if I should just accept that there will be a repeat.
In previous runs at the course, I did a lot of circle back and reviews, generally going back to the beginning. That makes it difficult to actually get to the end. This time through, I've just maintained a fairly high standard. Will have to think about this.