Reading "Crime & Punishment" in bilingual format or without it? How long does it take?

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einzelne
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Re: Reading "Crime & Punishment" in bilingual format or without it? How long does it take?

Postby einzelne » Thu Nov 11, 2021 9:18 pm

AllSubNoDub wrote:I have tried this before and it is veeery hard (for me).


Well, I'm not surprised. I think what this way of L-R in many ways mimics simultaneous interpretation from your native language to your target language. And as you know, simultaneous interpreters change each other at the regular intervals of time, otherwise their brain fries quite fast. Sure, you have the ready made translation, still you have to connect all the dots in real time.

I don't know why Arguelles promote this way of 'reading' (I would say self-torturing). Apart from him, I know nobody who practices it.
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Re: Reading "Crime & Punishment" in bilingual format or without it? How long does it take?

Postby german2k01 » Thu Nov 11, 2021 9:20 pm

Here's a third option. Your English and German are both very good. There are 4 versions of Crime and Punishment in English on Librivox, and hopefully you can find a version you enjoy. They run 22-24 hours. If you listen in English while reading in German, it should help your comprehension.


Let me give this a try, too. Let's see how it goes.
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Re: Reading "Crime & Punishment" in bilingual format or without it? How long does it take?

Postby einzelne » Thu Nov 11, 2021 9:29 pm

luke wrote:If you listen in English while reading in German, it should help your comprehension.


I would say it's a rather bad advice, given the average length of sentences in Dostoevsky and the differences in syntax among English and German, which are quite substantial, so deconstructing sentences in L1, finding the corresponding parts in L2, connecting all the dots on the fly would be quite a challenge even for a seasoned learner.
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Re: Reading "Crime & Punishment" in bilingual format or without it? How long does it take?

Postby german2k01 » Thu Nov 11, 2021 9:32 pm

I just watched that part talking about this technique. Insightful. How do you guys shadow an audiobook? Let it play on along with its corresponding text even if you do not get some words right you still get on with the narrator. With a short audio file, I can understand that you can pause and play it again until you get it right. What about doing it with the audiobook?
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Re: Reading "Crime & Punishment" in bilingual format or without it? How long does it take?

Postby AllSubNoDub » Thu Nov 11, 2021 9:42 pm

german2k01 wrote:I just watched that part talking about this technique. Insightful. How do you guys shadow an audiobook? Let it play on along with its corresponding text even if you do not get some words right you still get on with the narrator. With a short audio file, I can understand that you can pause and play it again until you get it right. What about doing it with the audiobook?

So, the point is that you can't do it at first. You will stumble, lose your place, trip over words, tire your mouth out, fail, etc. Your aim is to work these things out by doing more shadowing. Ideally, you start with short texts the way you suggested, then work your way up in length and complexity. You will have done so much shadowing in the language by the time you get to audiobooks, that it will be nothing more than the next logical stepping stone in graduated difficulty and you will continue to improve this skill like any other: practice of progressively more difficult content. I believe the ultimate goal is to be able to shadow without any text and have 100% comprehension.
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Re: Reading "Crime & Punishment" in bilingual format or without it? How long does it take?

Postby Le Baron » Thu Nov 11, 2021 10:11 pm

einzelne wrote:I would say it's a rather bad advice, given the average length of sentences in Dostoevsky and the differences in syntax among English and German, which are quite substantial, so deconstructing sentences in L1, finding the corresponding parts in L2, connecting all the dots on the fly would be quite a challenge even for a seasoned learner.

I have to say I agree with this.
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In general I have serious misgivings about the passive cross-use of languages in this way for learning. It isn't for nothing that successful immigration language courses teach you entirely in the target language. Whilst I wouldn't say that this represents the scenario for every learner in a different situation the principle surely remains the same? In reading when you transliterate (and even translate) you don't necessarily learn how to 'think' or interpret in the TL. You might become a translator, but that's different.

I'm not against the use of the translation for familiarising oneself with the TL of the same text because it clearly helps, but I think there's a limit to the usefulness regarding different sentence structures (including length and form einzelne mentions). At some point the translation tells you nothing and you just have to learn the structures of the TL. And re-reading these parallel texts hoping for enlightenment seems to me a vain hope.

It's marginally related, but when I was at the Archive yesterday I came across a copy of Gide's La Symphonie Pastorale and the person who had been reading it made pencil notes over certain words. I'll put an image of page one below and you can see that most of them are wrong notes. The words are contextually wrongly translated and it likely was of no help to the reader. This isn't about L-R, but I think at some point when reading you have to stop making comparisons and just read. Even if you you look up words, forget notes and markings, just keep reading. If you need to reread the book at the end that's fine. If the book is too hard or long or impossible to read that way, you're reading the wrong book and it's too hard for you.

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Re: Reading "Crime & Punishment" in bilingual format or without it? How long does it take?

Postby jeff_lindqvist » Thu Nov 11, 2021 10:16 pm

german2k01 wrote:I just watched that part talking about this technique. Insightful. How do you guys shadow an audiobook? Let it play on along with its corresponding text even if you do not get some words right you still get on with the narrator. With a short audio file, I can understand that you can pause and play it again until you get it right. What about doing it with the audiobook?


Shadowing doesn't mean that you're reading along, nor that you have to be "perfect". Still, you want to be as accurate as possible, but that's about it.

The only way you can do shadowing is by doing it. (...)if you can do a decent enough approximation of the rhythm and the intonation and the sounds of the language that you are attempting to do it in then that is proof that you are able to do it.

The only way you can do something like what I did in the previous video - when you make decent approximations and you follow the narration - is... that's the feedback. That's the green light that you have to go ahead.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XeMWp_LE6g&t=17s

If you want to do shadowing, start today. Don't overthink it. Just shadow.
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Re: Reading "Crime & Punishment" in bilingual format or without it? How long does it take?

Postby AllSubNoDub » Thu Nov 11, 2021 10:22 pm

Le Baron wrote:
einzelne wrote:I would say it's a rather bad advice, given the average length of sentences in Dostoevsky and the differences in syntax among English and German, which are quite substantial, so deconstructing sentences in L1, finding the corresponding parts in L2, connecting all the dots on the fly would be quite a challenge even for a seasoned learner.

I have to say I agree with this.
____________

In general I have serious misgivings about the passive cross-use of languages in this way for learning. It isn't for nothing that successful immigration language courses teach you entirely in the target language. Whilst I wouldn't say that this represents the scenario for every learner in a different situation the principle surely remains the same? In reading when you transliterate (and even translate) you don't necessarily learn how to 'think' or interpret in the TL. You might become a translator, but that's different.

I'm not against the use of the translation for familiarising oneself with the TL of the same text because it clearly helps, but I think there's a limit to the usefulness regarding different sentence structures (including length and form einzelne mentions). At some point the translation tells you nothing and you just have to learn the structures of the TL. And re-reading these parallel texts hoping for enlightenment seems to me a vain hope.

I believe Einzelne was just saying that this particular version of L-Ring (L1 audio/L2 text) was a bad idea, not that making something more comprehensible by using your native language was altogether a bad idea. I agree that it doesn't work for me (at least with highly comprehensible input), but if it works for someone else then I don't see it as a bad idea.
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Re: Reading "Crime & Punishment" in bilingual format or without it? How long does it take?

Postby german2k01 » Thu Nov 11, 2021 10:22 pm

What if the book is created this way I mean in the right format and with the right translation?
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Re: Reading "Crime & Punishment" in bilingual format or without it? How long does it take?

Postby Le Baron » Thu Nov 11, 2021 10:25 pm

What is the 'right' translation? Translation is an artistic interpretation rendered into another language for your ease. The point of translations is to remove the burden of total comprehension. Whilst that is useful in some way initially, it's something to do away with early. Like stabilisers on a bike (are they called 'training wheels' in the U.S?).
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