How long did it take you to do "Free Flow Reading" without dictionary in your TL?

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Re: How long did it take you to do "Free Flow Reading" without dictionary in your TL?

Postby Le Baron » Thu Oct 07, 2021 9:02 am

einzelne wrote:Besides nothing stops you from asking a native speaker: "Wie sagt man das auf Deutsch?" when you don't know how to express something naturally or idiomatically. Just make sure to write it down, so you won't forget it. It's the best way to develop fluency, since we all have our own idiosyncratic ways of speaking.

I totally agree with this and the several observations about it are that:

1) It gets multiple repetitions of the standard patterns.
2) You find out that not everyone says the same things in the same way.
3) You get embroiled in conversations you can manage and signal your current position to the person.

I'm totally sympathetic to the difficulty of transferring into active, real speaking. We've all suffered with it and there's a bump to get over at a certain point which is less to do with your actual knowledge and more to do with learning how to apply it. Speaking a language really is a doing thing like swimming or riding a bicycle, where you have to get the 'knack'.
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Re: How long did it take you to do "Free Flow Reading" without dictionary in your TL?

Postby Iversen » Sat Oct 09, 2021 12:00 pm

I need not only the 'knack', but also the 'buzz' to activate a spoken language - i.e. as situation where I have got so much input that the language in question starts to buzz wildly around in my head and dripple out of my mouth as finished sentences. To a certain degree this is also the case with my understanding of speech, whereas I never have felt the same need for a similar sudden shift in my reading abilites - they have always developed gradually, probably because they represent the backbone of my language learning.
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Re: How long did it take you to do "Free Flow Reading" without dictionary in your TL?

Postby german2k01 » Sat Oct 09, 2021 1:07 pm

I need not only the 'knack', but also the 'buzz' to activate a spoken language - i.e. as situation where I have got so much input that the language in question starts to buzz wildly around in my head and dripple out of my mouth as finished sentences.


An interesting observation in regards to having a buzz in your head. Is there a way to create and sustain this buzz in your head every day?
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Re: How long did it take you to do "Free Flow Reading" without dictionary in your TL?

Postby Iversen » Sat Oct 09, 2021 2:32 pm

No - you would become a raving lunatic. The buzz is supposed to come from a relatively short burst of activity - primarily listening. The point is that your native language and other strong languages will distract you from switching to thinking in a weak language unless they themselves have been drowned by an avalanche of input in the weak language.
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Re: How long did it take you to do "Free Flow Reading" without dictionary in your TL?

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Sat Oct 09, 2021 3:23 pm

german2k01 wrote:An interesting observation in regards to having a buzz in your head. Is there a way to create and sustain this buzz in your head every day?


A topic from March 2017:
DIN hypothesis - long L2 input sessions
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Re: How long did it take you to do "Free Flow Reading" without dictionary in your TL?

Postby einzelne » Wed Oct 13, 2021 1:44 pm

Iversen wrote:The buzz is supposed to come from a relatively short burst of activity - primarily listening. The point is that your native language and other strong languages will distract you from switching to thinking in a weak language unless they themselves have been drowned by an avalanche of input in the weak language.


I don't know if I we're talking about the same experience, but at least for me this buzz happens, only in the situation when you have to speak. I never had this 'buzz' experience while simply watching tons of TV series and reading in English back in Russia. But the moment I moved to Amsterdam to do my masters there — bang! I immediately registered it. I never had this experience with German or French, although with both languages I had prolonged periods of times (several months) when I listened to audio for 2-3 hours a day + reading.
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Re: How long did it take you to do "Free Flow Reading" without dictionary in your TL?

Postby sfuqua » Wed Oct 13, 2021 7:40 pm

I've noticed the "buzz" kicking in after a prolonged session of shadowing.
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Re: How long did it take you to do "Free Flow Reading" without dictionary in your TL?

Postby rdearman » Wed Oct 13, 2021 8:02 pm

sfuqua wrote:I've noticed the "buzz" kicking in after a prolonged session of shadowing.

I noticed it after my second pint of Guinness.
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Re: How long did it take you to do "Free Flow Reading" without dictionary in your TL?

Postby german2k01 » Wed Oct 13, 2021 8:34 pm

The only german sentence I was able to speak with my university librarian because of this buzz. When I was walking from my house on the way to university this sentence was buzzing inside my head. It was so easy to spit it out. Once it was out in the public domain, this buzz died with it as well. :D Good thing is, she understood it and replied back. Seemed like everything was grammatically correct.
Prior to this, I have been listening to German for 6 hours every day.
My goal is to listen 3000h by the end of the year and I am moving towards my goal. After that, I will do 60 hours of shadowing actively. 1 hour of shadowing every day over the course of 60 days. That's my plan.
Why 3000h? To develop a strong sound system on my subconscious level so that when I get down to do shadowing I can hear the sounds of individual words clearly and this way I can mimic them better. I will start with short lessons at LingQ (most probably those ones that I have already gone through so I will not really care about the actual comprehension.)
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Re: How long did it take you to do "Free Flow Reading" without dictionary in your TL?

Postby AllSubNoDub » Wed Oct 13, 2021 9:39 pm

german2k01 wrote:The only german sentence I was able to speak with my university librarian because of this buzz. When I was walking from my house on the way to university this sentence was buzzing inside my head. It was so easy to spit it out. Once it was out in the public domain, this buzz died with it as well. :D Good thing is, she understood it and replied back. Seemed like everything was grammatically correct.
Prior to this, I have been listening to German for 6 hours every day.
My goal is to listen 3000h by the end of the year and I am moving towards my goal. After that, I will do 60 hours of shadowing actively. 1 hour of shadowing every day over the course of 60 days. That's my plan.
Why 3000h? To develop a strong sound system on my subconscious level so that when I get down to do shadowing I can hear the sounds of individual words clearly and this way I can mimic them better. I will start with short lessons at LingQ (most probably those ones that I have already gone through so I will not really care about the actual comprehension.)


This isn't a bad plan, especially if it jibes with your personal learning style. I personally like to work on sound distinction through focused phonetic training before massive listening; that way I'm just reinforcing, not letting my English brain make bad inferences and engrain bad habits. A good example of this is the Japanese /f/ sound, which I was improperly perceiving as a fricative (when I looked into the phonetics, I realized it was a labial, which doesn't exist in English). Don't be afraid to experiment.
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