Verb conjugation while speaking

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tarvos
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Re: Verb conjugation while speaking

Postby tarvos » Wed Apr 12, 2017 7:07 pm

I am, if you want production to be correct. Automatic production means that you need to both properly know the conjugation patterns and their application patterns, also when you speak, and being lax on corrections is not going to help production. When you need perfection, you need a teacher that is stern enough to correct these things right away. I am exaggerating slightly, but it really is necessary to have someone push you at this stage because it's very easy to rest on your laurels.
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Cainntear
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Re: Verb conjugation while speaking

Postby Cainntear » Thu Apr 13, 2017 8:19 am

A problem a lot of lower level learners have is that we tend to teach too many words at an early stage. When the brain is overloaded, grammar takes second priority to vocabulary, so even if you "know" the grammar in class, when you're trying to create full sentences on the fly, the brain actually stops even trying to do grammar correctly because it's too busy with vocab.

A major part of the problem is, as I said, that we typically teach too many words; more specifically, we teach words with individual concrete meanings first, and typically ignore more abstract "functional" words like "him" etc. For example, I didn't learn object pronouns (me, him, her etc) in French until my fifth year of school study.

Our speech is full of these common, easy-to-process words - consider that "I asked him to do it but he said he wouldn't be able to until tomorrow" is 16 words long, but only has two words with concrete, non-context-dependant meanings -- "said" and "asked". If the things that should be easy are hard (or even unavailable) to us, how will we ever function in the language?

So learn that sort of stuff, the stuff that naturally gives us extra time to think about the other words as we're speaking.
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