Extensive LRing - variations on the tried and true?

[Bylan]

I'm a big fan of extensive reading. Last summer I did north of 35 hours of extensive reading in Portuguese using the Harry Potter series. I only got halfway through book four or five, can't remember, before I couldn't take the story anymore, but I developed some good reading skill based on that study. However, rather than just reading the books, I adding a listening component to the study that made it a variation on extensive reading - I listened to the audio book in English. It was the opposite of watching a Brazilian film with subtitles, and it paid great dividends. Not only was I reading extensively, I was also reading quickly and picking up vocabulary in context, with a crutch. This was especially helpful for more advanced grammar patterns that had yet to sink in.

Fast forward a year and I've found a terrific source for audio books in Portuguese (PM if you're interested) and I'm finding myself gravitate towards the opposite of last summer - listening in Portuguese and reading English. It's not that I can't listen and read in PT at the same time, but I find that my comprehension in reading kicks in when I read a good bit slower than that of a native reading aloud the story. My brain just needs that little extra space to sort things out, remember words, and connect subjects with verbs. Listening to the story straight is tough, because on top of the phenomenon I described above, my ear still needs work to fully tune into the language. That is, there are phrases that I may understand completely on paper, but hearing them in real-time, with the glides and slurs and native melody, adds an extra barrier. It's something I enjoy overcoming, and did with Korean a while back (though I still run into issues with movies and certain talk shows), and I look forward to getting there with Portuguese.

Has anyone found variations on LR that they've found useful? I'm currently using John Grisham and Stephen King novels with audio in PT and the text in EN, and I highly recommend it. It's as if you have one long, uninterrupted subtitle. Good stuff!

[reineke]

Yes. I listen and I read. It works. Has anyone completed a book as described in the L/R instructions?

[IronMike]

Sometimes I'll find a book that I also can get in English, then I'll read a chapter in the L2, then read it in English, then re-read it in L2. It takes friggin' forever, but it works.

I'm doing it now with Metro 2033 (Russian) but I've found that only 40-or so pages in, I no longer need the 2nd pass in Russian.

[reineke]

You're filling in the gaps in a language you already know. LR caused a stir as a method one can use as an absolute beginner (ie. no courses, teachers etc.) and one that is supposedly superior to other methods.

http://how-to-learn-any-language.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=6366

http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/!L-R/lr_for_grasshoppers.html

[jeff_lindqvist]

Yes. I listen and I read. It works. Has anyone completed a book as described in the L/R instructions?

I think this is pretty close:
Listening-Reading experiments log

[rdearman]

Yes. I listen and I read. It works. Has anyone completed a book as described in the L/R instructions?

I think this is pretty close:
Listening-Reading experiments log

Yeah alexidsa hasn't been active since April, I was wondering how they were getting on with the LR thing.

[reineke]

Thank you. As I gather, thear person is a native speaker of Russian, working on his first Romance language.

My comments:

- He took the "quite optional" part quite literally
- He did not work on his pronunciation - that's a no-no. He misinterpreted the instructions about "active phonetic study"
- He started with the last step (translating)
- He chose a short book (9 hrs). While the book is in the list of "approved" books, the suggested length is up to fifty hours ("because of the idiolect of the author"). His total effort is worth one regular LR pass. He writes about "chapter idiolect" which does not make sense.
- He discovered that "we got L/R wrong" (he writes in bold, red letters) in that we skipped the L2 listening-reading part. This merely means that he got that part wrong. Later he does not find it "efficient in the early stages" which goes against L/R principles (and common sense).
- He was aware of the "high intensity" requirement but he barely practiced it.

Eh, it's his free time but this "experiment" is also a variation on a theme and a bad one at that. He got one thing right: "While L-R is the most interesting and promising language learning tool I've ever used, I find it highly understudied."

[rdearman]

Thank you. As I gather, thear person is a native speaker of Russian, working on his first Romance language.

My comments:

- He took the "quite optional" part quite literally
- He did not work on his pronunciation - that's a no-no. He misinterpreted the instructions about "active phonetic study"
- He started with the last step (translating)
- He chose a short book (9 hrs). The suggested length is up to fifty hours ("because of the idiolect of the author"). His total effort is worth one regular LR pass. He writes about "chapter idiolect" which does not make sense.
- He discovered that "we got L/R wrong" (he writes in bold, red letters) in that we skipped the L2 listening-reading part. This merely means that he got that part wrong. Later he does not find it "efficient in the early stages" which goes against L/R principles (and common sense).
- He was aware of the "high intensity" requirement but he barely practiced it.

Eh, it's his free time but this "experiment" is also a variation on a theme and a bad one at that.

OK, So if I were going to recreate the experiment, and do it properly, what are the steps? I read the L-R threads, and they all seemed a bit confusing. (I always by "for dummies" books if that helps) So what is the correct way to conduct the experiment?

[reineke]

OK, So if I were going to recreate the experiment, and do it properly, what are the steps? I read the L-R threads, and they all seemed a bit confusing. (I always by "for dummies" books if that helps) So what is the correct way to conduct the experiment?

You're smarter than that, guv'nor. You can crunch through a legal document before lunch and the various "For Dummies" books are lengthier and more complex than the LR manifesto. L/R is not an experiment or necessarily for very smart people but it may work as a blueprint for various experiments. The author himself encourages people to use what works for them - partially because he has a low opinion of his readership. Volte has done an admirable job summarizing various points for "grasshoppers" but I prefer going to the source:

"I’ve been visiting language learning boards for some ten years now. I read a post or two here and there, if it’s not too long....
Language learners – categories
0. know-it-alls – usually one, two, or three people – they have hardly anything to say, but say it very loudly and actively, their posts tend to be very long, they litter almost every thread with their intellectual and scientific musings, and argue forever with anyone who’s stupid enough to argue with them
1. dreamers – they would like to, they make lists, they buy books, CDs...
2. grasshoppers – they jump here and there, they begin, they don’t finish, begin something else, don’t finish
3. soldiers – they charge, they annihilate, they memorize, they believe in self-discipline, they like military atmosphere at home, they rarely succeed, it usually ends in General Consternation, Major Disaster or Private Property.
4. teachers, translators, interpreters – they often think they are experts – but they usually aren’t, they overestimate their abilities (too many not so learned morons among them)
5. hobbyists – they are in no hurry, they usually like what they are doing, they often succeed
6. AWE riders – I’m sure I’m not the only one"

L-R is meant for hard-core learners – Awe Riders.

Why crawl if you can walk?

I’ve always been puzzled by the fact that even intelligent people learn languages in a clumsy way.

The order ought to be EXACTLY as follows:
What you do:
1. you read the translation
because you only remember well what you understand and what you feel is "yours" psychologically

2. you listen to the recording and look at the written text at the same time,
because the flow of speech has no boundaries between words and the written text does, you will be able to separate each word in the speech flow and you will get used to the speed of talking of native speakers – at first it seems incredibly fast

3. you look at the translation and listen to the text at the same time, from the beginning to the end of a story, usually three times is enough to understand almost everything. This is the most important thing in the method, it is right AT THIS POINT that proper learning takes place.
If you’re in a position to do it right from the start, you can skip Step 1 and 2. (It takes some training, but after a while it becomes second nature.) (See ‘The essence, the soul, the spirit of L-R’ as well.)

4. now you can concentrate on SPEAKING: you repeat after the recording (and recite), you do it as many times as necessary to become fluent. Of course, first you have to know how to pronounce the sounds of the language you’re learning. How to teach yourself the correct PRONUNCIATION is a different matter, here I will only mention the importance of it.

(5.) you translate the text from your own language into the language you’re learning, no need to translate everything, of course
you can do the translation both orally and in writing, that’s why the written texts should be placed in vertical columns side by side: you can cover one side and check using the other one.

And last but not least: conversing is not learning, it is USING a language, you will NEVER be able to say more than you already know.
© Ptaszek-Phi-Staszek aYa

L-R advantages
‘Listening-reading’ gives you
1. freedom from all sorts of crooks: schools, teachers, textbook publishers etc,
....

"As to its components: they have all been used separately at one time or another. Some kind of listening-reading was done in ancient Israel, long before our Almighty Sister Jesus was born."

What makes L-R different is:

1. using long novels right from the start in fully bilingual format, with bilingual etexts in vertical columns with matching cells, side by side on ONE page, recorded by professional actors
2. Step 3 (= listening to the target language while reading in a language you understand.
3. Using self-explanatory texts (= knowing the content beforehand, both the meaning and emotionally)
4. speaking and writing only after the incubation period, that is after getting to the stage of natural listening.
5. the Assault (= massive exposure in a relatively short time)
6. taking into account all the subsystems: pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and discourse (= how to produce texts), discourse in textbooks is artificial and often wrong).
7. And that's true, it IS the cheapest way of learning a language, both in terms of money and time.


There are two new elements in L-R – the crucial ones:
– using long novels (parallel texts and audio) right from the start, even for zero beginners.
– using self-explanatory texts. I mean:
Knowing in advance the meaning of what you're going to listen to and the text being psychologically yours and relevant.
Examples:
The Bible for a Jehovah's witness or a book you've read many times since you were a child.

Each element of L-R separately does not seem so significant. If you put them together as a whole system, they become extremely effective, the most important ones being:
– AWE
– massive exposure in a short period of time
– self-explanatory texts
– parallel e-novels with good quality audio
– Step 3 (read L1, listen L2) (See ‘The essence, the soul, the spirit of L-R.’)
– learning how to pronounce properly

What you should do in STEP 3 is not just look at the translation but READ it before the matching texts in the recording reaches your brain, and try to simultaneously attach the meaning to what you're hearing, at least part of it, without stopping the tape (= audiofile) all the time. If you're not able to do it, you must repeat Step 2.

My idea of parallel texts seems to be different from yours. I thought I made it clear in my first entry:
1. An AUDIO recording by professional actor(s), in mp3 or wav format
2. E-texts in VERTICAL COLUMNS, side by side on one page
3. Texts should be long, up to 50 hours.

For beginners the ideal one is interlinear – the original above, the word-for-word translation below, but it is extremely time consuming to prepare such texts. Interlinear texts are known from time immemorial.

And it would be wonderful if you knew why the idiolect of the author is so important and why the texts should be long.
And do not forget to be passionately in love with what you're listening-reading.
The whole process is far from mechanical, it is not school. You have to use all your imagination and power of concentration.

If you still wonder why long texts are so important, I'm sure you haven't read anything about idiolect, text statistics, discourse analysis or the curves of learning and forgetting, and overlearning.

If you don't have parallel texts, do the following:
1. read a page (or a paragraph) in L1
2. listen and look at the text in L2, trying to attach some meaning to it
3. listen and look at the text in L1, trying to attach some meaning to what you're hearing.

There are two kinds of pronunciation mistakes:
1. phonematic – affecting the meaning, eg. shit instead of sheet
2. simply phonetic, sounding foreign but not affecting the meaning, eg. pussy with "p" without aspiration

The first kind is to be avoided at all costs.

Is good pronunciation important at all?
It affects your listening skills, your speaking skills, your spelling and your reading. It affects your motivation and psychological well-being. It's ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL.

grammar vs texts
There's no contradiction.

I relied on authentic texts mostly – listening and reading (through L-R)
knew L1 grammar (phonetics, verbs, nouns, etc, clauses)
first read target texts in L1, used the same novels/books to learn new languages

studied intensively, 12-16 hours a day for two weeks – one month, on holidays
then only used the languages (great fan of audiobooks, poetry and movies)

always studied phonetic systems very carefully

Never memorized vocabulary, learned through natural exposure to recorded and written texts.

Examples:
Russian – no grammars (I already knew Polish)
French – read two grammars, then started reading Simenon's crime stories
Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, English – no grammar (I already knew French)
German – read two grammars, made tables for reference, started with The Trial by Kafka
Japanese – read two grammars ..."

What L-R is not.
1. It is not watching subtitled movies.
2. It is not just listening to L2 and reading/looking at the text in L2.
3. No, L-R is NOT Assimil and suchlike.
4. Would I be doing L-R mechanically without understanding the vast majority of what I am listening to, the way some people seem to understand L-R should be done? NO (rising-falling intonation).

In a couple of weeks the LR post will be nine years old. The rest sort of grew out of it. Unfortunately the grasshopper implementation of this blueprint is rather disappointing.I find "the essence" of L/R (read L1, listen L2) unpalatable. It impedes my "awe"and my "flow". I can only act as a casual observer but overall there's a lot of good stuff here. As much as I like the approach I also believe that one can shake off all the tools. In that case it's no longer L/R or "a method". L/R should be credited for motivating people to expose themselves early in the learning process to authentic materials. I wish it were more than an occasion for a casual conversation.

[rdearman]

Maybe the Polish dude would understand. I can only act as a casual observer but overall there's a lot of good stuff here.

Is this like "He who cannot be named"? Feels like I'm in a Harry Potter novel.

So basically the "for dummies version" is listen in L2, read in L1? Rinse, lather, repeat? Shadow for pronunciation?