neofight78 wrote:Cainntear wrote:Yes, a whole sentence can be a chunk. But if it is not a chunk, it shouldn't be learned as one. "I know what you mean." is a chunk, but "Can you tell me what time of year blueberries ripen?" isn't.
If someone has memorised that sentence then it is de facto a chunk. A lot of conversation is in fact scripted, and there are plenty of sentences that you would deny being chunks that I frequently reuse because they are relevant for me, not because they live in some list of collocations that someone has compiled from a generic corpus.
Well yes, we all have things that are chunks in our personal idiolect of our native language. But that's because, as you say, they are personally relevant. They aren't just sentences that we happened to learn early on when we were new speakers.
No it wouldn't be equivalent, I have made no attempts to equate aspects of chess with aspects of language. Rather I have mentioned another sphere where chunking occurs and the technique of memorisation can be used to facilitate it.
Except that in chess, the memorisation of moves is facilitated by already knowing the grammar. An expert chess player is only better than a novice at memorising board layouts when they're possible -- i.e. the rules aid the memorisation, not the other way round.
So you're talking about something that is quite simply a different thing from learning a language.
Cainntear wrote:In language, all too often teaching and learning strategies are presented that offer many dead-ends that set learners up to fail, because they don't know how to avoid the dead-ends.
That's not a problem with the strategies, that's a problem of people not being willing to experiment and try new ideas. It's a failure to
risk trying something new outside of what you know. It's also a problem of people being dogmatic when giving advice to others.
No it's not. There are plenty of people who are willing to try, and then they fail. The only "dogma" I have is that no learner should be set up to fail, and no learner should be blamed for "not doing it right" when the teaching and/or advice proves insufficient.
Cainntear wrote:The worst of these is when the most effective strategy required to complete the immediate task doesn't do anything to develop the target skill. For example, the easiest way to deal with a tricky flashcard is to memorise it -- to treat it like a chunk and stop thinking about rules and variation.
Nope, it works great for me and for others. Doesn't work for you? Fine don't use it. There's no need to exclude the possibility that it can work for other people.
I don't exclude the possibility it can work for other people. However, playing the lottery works for some people, but it would be ridiculous to suggest it as a viable strategy for making a living. Memorisation fails for far too many people to be something to recommend. Even Khatzumoto, as he eventually had to accept that the number of his subscribers who told him it didn't work was proof that his method wasn't complete.
Cainntear wrote:And notice my choice of words -- what you're doing is not memorisation, and when you describe it as such, you're encouraging people to do something different from what you do.
Yes it is memorisation.
You may be doing memorisation, but the important part isn't the memorisation.
Cainntear wrote:This is something of a "magic step" -- it's a crucial part of your process and you can't describe it, so we can't replicate it.
Nothing magical, read and understand the rule as in step 1. When you start to memorise you'll start using the rule to help your memorisation.
Still magical. There's nothing in your description at all that tells me what it means to "think about" grammar when you're working with memorised examples. It is irreproducible.
Cainntear wrote:Careful with that word "chunks", because in your context it doesn't mean the same thing as the technical term we've been using it above. A "chunk" is a unit of language that is frequently reused in its entirety. Chunks include things like phrasal verbs ("get up", "look up" (a phone number, word etc) etc) fixed phrases ("when all is said and done", "at the end of the day" etc) and the like.
I reject that definition of chunk. You've chosen to define it very narrowly, there are chunks in chess but there are no phrasal verbs or fixed phrases to be found there. Chunk is any detailed information that the brain has learned to treat as one unit.
"include things like". That was examples for the benefit of DaveBee who didn't seem to be familiar with the term.
This doesn't address the fact that there is evidence that memorisation helps with language learning. This is in addition to my own experience which you seem so keen to negate rather than reevaluating what you believe.
I have reevaluated what I believe -- your point about adding extra examples for difficult rules suddenly makes flashcards seem much more useful as a strategy, and in future, my main contribution into discussions about flashcards will be to advise people to add more examples of a problematic language point, rather than simply repeating the same card more often, as it seems a much more productive strategy.
I am not denying your experience, what I'm denying is your
perception of it.
What I reject is the notion of looking simply at the superficial activity and saying "it works for some". If it works for some but not for others, that typically means that what everyone is doing under the surface is different. That's what I mean about a "magic step" in your routine. There is something you do inside your head that makes the learning stick, but there's nothing in the process that forces another learner to do the same thing, or even points them towards it, really.
If you go into a school language class, there will be 20 or 30 kids all doing exactly what the teacher asked them to... superficially. Some will be doing more in their heads, and the only way you'll know is later on, when they are getting good marks and the others aren't. And the ones who get good marks are almost always doing something the teacher never told them to do.
Just because we're not in a classroom doesn't mean the same thing doesn't apply here -- your advice works for people who happen to do the important missing step without prompting.
What I'm really interested in is going beyond the superficial differences in our learning and finding the things that all of us, as successful learners, do the same.
Superficial differences like memorisation of sentences, verb tables etc aren't where we actually "learn" the language -- they're all just ways of keeping the language available to us up until the point when we actually do learn it.
In other words, I want to find out what that magic step is, so that it's science, not magic.