Fine tuning at a higher level

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NoManches
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Fine tuning at a higher level

Postby NoManches » Sun Sep 02, 2018 7:37 pm

The easy answer to this question is to hire a tutor or find somebody who is willing to correct you whenever you make a mistake.

I'm looking for the not so easy answer...

For a while I've been at a level in my L2 (Spanish) where I hardly ever receive corrections. I wish this was because I didn't make any mistakes, but the truth is I make many mistakes. The problem is that these mistakes are usually small and don't have a negative affect on conversation or general communication. Typically, native speakers will not correct a random person speaking to them unless there is some agreement to do so.
What I'm left with is a situation where I make mistakes and never receive feedback. A lot of times I have a feeling that I said something wrong, but it's hard mid conversation to stop and look something up or to pause in order to ask for a correction (especially true if you are a tourist of using your L2 for work purposes).

I've found that loads of input hasn't made a noticeable difference, and advanced grammar study has only slightly helped. I can think of dozens of people I've talked to in my native language (English) who speak fluently with a large vocabulary, but constantly make the same small mistakes over and over again. I now see that I'm in the same position but with Spanish.

My question: What has worked for you you at an intermediate/advanced level to stop making those really small mistakes? Is verbal correction good enough to stop making those mistakes? What about written language...is having somebody correct your writing and pointing out why you made mistakes a good enough method to get you to make improvements and stop making the same mistakes?

Hopiyto get feedback, anecdotal evidence is always welcomed. Thanks!
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Re: Fine tuning at a higher level

Postby rdearman » Sun Sep 02, 2018 9:56 pm

If it were me I would record a short audio segment and ask a native to point out all the mistakes in the recording. This allows them the time to listen and to write up the mistakes in grammar or pronunciation. Although you might have to pay for that service.
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Re: Fine tuning at a higher level

Postby patrickwilken » Mon Sep 03, 2018 7:43 am

NoManches wrote:My question: What has worked for you you at an intermediate/advanced level to stop making those really small mistakes? Is verbal correction good enough to stop making those mistakes? What about written language...is having somebody correct your writing and pointing out why you made mistakes a good enough method to get you to make improvements and stop making the same mistakes?


I watched my wife go to from high B2 English to C2 in the course of about five years. What she did was fairly straightforward. She read a lot of good English (New York Times every day; good fiction) and (most importantly) wrote her doctor thesis in English. Writing a PhD is intense. You essentially write everyday for months, and (with luck) you get extensive feedback on everything you write. I also got a significant bump in my English when I did my PhD although I was already C1 to start with.

I have wondered whether I should eventually join some sort of creative writing course in my TL to really push for C2 in German at some point.
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Re: Fine tuning at a higher level

Postby garyb » Mon Sep 03, 2018 9:07 am

This seems to be one of the great dilemmas of language learning: how can one know and understand a language so well, listen for thousands of hours and read thousands of pages, speak or write it most days, yet make so many basic mistakes in production? I certainly do it in my advanced languages, most learners on here make mistakes in writing so one can only assume that they make more in speaking when there's less time to think and check, and almost all my non-native-speaker friends do it in English.

I don't have a solution, but a starting point might be to make the distinction between types of mistakes: ones you're aware of versus ones you aren't, one-off versus systematic, etc. I'm usually very aware of the basic mistakes I'm making (gender/number agreement, mispronunciation, pronouns, etc.) so having a native speaker point them out wouldn't solve much. I'm not sure what the solution is except just hundreds more hours of practice backed by hundreds more hours of correct input, and even at that one has to stay aware and avoid developing bad habits. I'm sure I also make plenty mistakes that I'm not aware of, which is where corrections would help. I find this kind easier to correct once I'm made aware of them.
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Re: Fine tuning at a higher level

Postby DaveAgain » Mon Sep 03, 2018 9:43 am

garyb wrote: I'm sure I also make plenty mistakes that I'm not aware of, which is where corrections would help.
Would double-translation help with this? Translating the L2 > L1, then translating the L1 text produced back to L2 the next day.
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Re: Fine tuning at a higher level

Postby Cavesa » Mon Sep 03, 2018 10:43 am

Hundreds of hours of input were my cure. And studying stuff like grammar.

Yes, correction can help but only under two conditions:

1.You really study the problematic points. Just being corrected over and over is absolutely useless. You don't necessarily need other people for that. You can find a surprising amount of mistakes on your own recording or in your own writing, if you put the piece aside for some time and then look at it with a fresher mind. Or tools like eLingora are a good way to get feedback, no need to immediately run for a tutor.

2.If you want a tutor: You need someone capable of such corrections and that is a problem as most tutors are simply too incapable or lazy, when it comes to advanced learners. Or they mean well and just think you have reached the ceiling of what is a foreigner supposed to achieve, which makes them just as useless and not worth a single dollar. It is not just my experience, I remember Reineke digging up some papers about the issue. And it is not too easy to tell the capable ones apart from the crowd, as it is difficult to correct their corrections. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Perhaps trying several tutors out and choosing the strictest one may work.

But even then, you need to act upon the corrections. Just being corrected over and over is a waste of time without the follow up. Your mistakes by now are unlikely to be first time mistakes. They'll either be mistakes made out of fatigue or not paying attention (and then you may still struggle to fix them, as it is hard to prevent your brain not working at 100% in some situations), or they'll be fossilised. And for fossilised mistakes, just pointing them out is not likely to have any effect.
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Re: Fine tuning at a higher level

Postby devilyoudont » Mon Sep 03, 2018 2:59 pm

I'm wondering about taking corrections that I might receive on sites like Lang-8 and trying to put corrected sentences into an anki deck. I'm not totally decided on how to layout the cards yet, or if this is worth doing, as I think native speakers don't always mark all errors, and sometimes you get one set of corrections from one native speaker, and a different set from another.
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Re: Fine tuning at a higher level

Postby Ani » Mon Sep 03, 2018 5:16 pm

NoManches wrote:The easy answer to this question is to hire a tutor or find somebody who is willing to correct you whenever you make a mistake.



Well, and I just found somebody willing to correct all my mistakes and even rewrite things (it's grammatically correct to say it that way but you should say this... Because it sounds better). I would have seriously thought this impossible two weeks ago so don't give up.

Outside that, I've seen my best improvement by writing & checking very carefully with wordrefrence + Linguee. I can just about always verify ever aspect of a sentence between these two tools. If you find a certain aspect that you can't, you could use HiNative to ask. I know that doesn't fix speech directly but I've thought (sort of backed up by patrickwilken's experience above) that writing might be our biggest gap as autodidacts -- and the reason some people can "learn nothing" in school but jump levels so quickly after whenever they started studying on their own.
Although Cavesa recommends input, I think I had a little gap where input wasn't helping me because I wasn't noticing either some of the small things they said, or just noticing what I did myself.
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Re: Fine tuning at a higher level

Postby StringerBell » Mon Sep 03, 2018 6:30 pm

NoManches wrote:My question: What has worked for you you at an intermediate/advanced level to stop making those really small mistakes? Is verbal correction good enough to stop making those mistakes? What about written language...is having somebody correct your writing and pointing out why you made mistakes a good enough method to get you to make improvements and stop making the same mistakes?


I, personally, have found being corrected in a certain way to be a big help.

For example, one day when talking to my husband he said, "you know, you always pronounce this specific word like this, which is wrong it should be like this."

For this, it's obviously necessary to have a person with whom you talk regularly, rather than asking a stranger for a one-time correction.

Now if only I could stop making the big mistakes! :D
Last edited by StringerBell on Fri Sep 07, 2018 4:41 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Fine tuning at a higher level

Postby coldrainwater » Mon Sep 03, 2018 6:43 pm

It might be a 2019 or 2020 match, but I am gently prepping for this stage in ES. My current production level is at a solid NI (needs improvement), so I can afford to sit on all these ideas before implementing. To follow on comments made by garyb, I believe recognition and awareness are very important aspects for fine-tuning. With many problems in life, including many faced to date in my language studies, I find awareness focus to be highly time-efficient. Sometimes the simple recognition of a problem is sufficient to correct it without additional steps. A slap on the wrist may not be needed where good faith and motivation reside. Tool or tutor, that is where I would place my money, recognizing said bet in writing of course. There are also valid situations where awareness goes hand in hand with challenge and leaning into discomfort (just putting that out there as an addendum, link it if it helps you).

Sometimes awareness can fade and that is why I would suggest leaving a paper trail in writing for later review. I have done this in Lang-8 to decent effect. Like Ani, I make heavy use of WordReference and Linguee and would now add Deepl to the mix since I find it more efficient in many circumstances. As long as you can identify and prioritize meaningful, non-trivial points of weakness, it should be reasonable to construct a plan of attack around each point and dedicate direct time to solving it. An approach I like is to use a habit/discipline/drilling technique to nail one weakness at a time. I don't mind thinking of it as plugging away at a target until it falls. Reminds me of how having faith that in examining a tiny, even pedantic detail can have deep, profound, and beneficial ripples. As a final point, to mesh input with output, I plan to use message forums in the TL. Registers tend to be a mix between colloquial and more formal writing, and as such very versatile, with narrow topic focus if you want, immediate feedback as you get to see message after message and compare them to your own, mistake mining along the way, etc. To make the concept more general, I would say look to see if you have any input areas that are lacking or an hour/page imbalance in that respect. Perhaps finally, look to make sure the methodologies you end up choosing fit and/or are complementary (thinking specifically about improving both speaking and writing in an additive fashion).

post datum - can we lobby to get Grammarly in all languages? The written word and world will thank you. If only I had stats on the sheer number of corrections that tool has made on my behalf.
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