Effortless Conversations, by Lukas Van Vyve.

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mentecuerpo
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Effortless Conversations, by Lukas Van Vyve.

Postby mentecuerpo » Thu Jan 30, 2020 3:05 am

These two are having problems communicating, so I encourage them to get the conversation going.

The book could help Chato, the German boxer, effortlessly converse with native Eva, the toy Aussi Shepherd.

Great book, it introduces the concept of learning with the chunking technique.

Effortless Conversations: author, Lukas Van Vyve.
A method to understand native speakers and have fluent sentences roll off the tongue in any langauge.
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Re: Effortless Conversations, by Lukas Van Vyve.

Postby mentecuerpo » Tue Feb 04, 2020 4:25 pm

Here is Lukas, my Dutch friend (not really my friend, but a genuine Dutch). He is explaining his little book Effortless Conversations, the chunking.

The interesting thing to me is that he got his idea from his classroom German professor

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Re: Effortless Conversations, by Lukas Van Vyve.

Postby mentecuerpo » Sun Feb 09, 2020 1:54 am

On the topic of Chunking, I put a quote that I found today reading the book by Steve Kaufmann

The Linguist. The Linguist. Eine persönliche Anleitung für das Sprachenlernen
Die Fertigkeit eine Sprache zu gebrauchen besteht darin, spontan vorgefertigte Phrasen und Satzmuster verwenden zu können, die für den Muttersprachler ganz natürlich sind und für den Lernenden ebenso natürlich werden müssen.

The skill of using a language is to be able to use spontaneously pre-made phrases and phrases, which are natural for the native speaker and must become just as natural for the learner. (Microsoft Word Translator)
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Re: Effortless Conversations, by Lukas Van Vyve.

Postby Kraut » Sun Feb 09, 2020 2:31 am

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Re: Effortless Conversations, by Lukas Van Vyve.

Postby mentecuerpo » Sun Feb 09, 2020 2:57 am

Kraut wrote:http://daf.zum.de/wiki/Chunks

https://www.google.com/search?client=fi ... CAo&uact=5

https://effortlessconversations.com/method/
-------------------
It's basically old hat, the old collocations sold under a new name.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/de/wor ... ollocation


Gracias Kraut.
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Re: Effortless Conversations, by Lukas Van Vyve.

Postby Cainntear » Sun Feb 09, 2020 11:14 am

Note that over 90% of the English in the video was not in "chunks", but in novel grammar.

Fixed phrases have specific roles in language, and are not the entirety of a language. One of the core functions of fixed phrases is to fill time with content that is low on information to buy the speaker thinking time to compose the rest of their utterance. This means that we really do need to teach/learn some early on, as if even a native speaker is in need of thinking time, a beginner can't really survive without it. However, another function of fixed phrases is to convey attitude, which can be dangerous for beginners with a limited palette of expressions: I've seen the phrase "to tell you the truth" proposed as a useful beginner phrase, but it means "you won't like what I'm about to say, but I'm going to say it anyway," so overusing it at best makes you sound boring, at worst unpleasant and confrontational.

A major issue I have, though, is that the term "chunking" suggests an origin that doesn't match the way the term is being used here (and in language learning circles in general).

"Chunking" in psychology is the structuring and layering of units of information to overcome the limits of working memory capacity. The magic number is 7+/-2 -- typical people can handle up to a maximum of between 5 and 9 objects in working memory, and visually identify numbers of items up to the same limit.
The notion of "chunks" here is that you take when a basic concept is well remembered and well known, it is recalled with very little cost, and when you put lots of easily-recalled concepts together into a reusable chunk, they support each other's recall to the point where they can act as a single unit as far as the working memory is concerned.

If we apply this to language, what we are doing is building up "chunks" (fixed phrases) from known vocabulary and grammar rules, what we are not doing is what the video says: breaking up sentences into chunks. The message has been simplified and distorted over time until language "chunking" has lost the core principle of the psychological concept it was based on.

Now consider this example phrase/chunk:
as far as I know
It contains very little direct meaning and takes up a relatively long time, so it performs the first function well. It also encodes an attitude (recognition of doubt or possible controversy). It's a classic fixed phrase.
But it's built entirely out of productive language items:
On a low level, we have as X as Y, adjective of distance, simple first person habitual conjugation and agreement.
Another level up, we have the frequent co-occurrence of "as X as Y" with adjectives of distance.
All of this makes the phrase trivially easy to learn, remember and recall for someone with a firm grasp of English.

But if I present it in a language you're not familiar with, it'll be much harder to remember -- here's the Scottish Gaelic equivalent:
Cho fad' 's a tha fhios agam.
OK, the fact that you don't know how to read Scottish Gaelic orthography makes it essentially impossible, but even if I was teaching you this verbally, you would still struggle, because you would not be learning a "chunk" in the psychological sense of a combination of known concepts. As far as your brain's concerned, it's just an arbitrary string of sounds, and it's very long compared to other arbitrary strings of sounds, because practically the only arbitrary string of sounds in a language are individual words... although some words are themselves chunks: desmontía = des + mont[ar] + -ía

Chunking is supposed to start with making long things easy, but if you start with fixed phrases you are making long things unnecessarily difficult.
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Re: Effortless Conversations, by Lukas Van Vyve.

Postby reineke » Mon Feb 10, 2020 8:24 pm

"Uses of Prefabricated Chunks
- "It seems that in the initial stages of first language acquisition and natural second language acquisition we acquire unanalysed chunks, but that these gradually get broken down into smaller components . . ..

"The prefabricated chunks are utilised in fluent output, which, as many researchers from different traditions have noted, largely depends on automatic processing of stored units. According to Erman and Warren's (2000) count, about half of running text is covered by such recurrent units."
(J. M. Sinclair and A. Mauranen, Linear Unit Grammar: Integrating Speech and Writing. John Benjamins, 2006)."

"Criticism of the Lexical-Chunk Approach
"Michael Swan, a British writer on language pedagogy, has emerged as a prominent critic of the lexical-chunk approach. Though he acknowledges, as he told me in an e-mail, that 'high-priority chunks need to be taught,' he worries that 'the "new toy" effect can mean that formulaic expressions get more attention than they deserve, and other aspects of language--ordinary vocabulary, grammar, pronunciation and skills--get sidelined.'

"Swan also finds it unrealistic to expect that teaching chunks will produce nativelike proficiency in language learners. 'Native English speakers have tens or hundreds of thousands--estimates vary--of these formulae at their command,' he says. 'A student could learn 10 a day for years and still not approach native-speaker competence.'"
(Ben Zimmer, "On Language: Chunking." The New York Times Magazine, Sep. 19, 2010)"

"According to Lewis (1997, 2000) native speakers carry a pool of hundreds of thousands, and possibly millions, of lexical chunks in their heads ready to draw upon in order to produce fluent, accurate and meaningful language...

[Lewis] makes a helpful summary of the findings from first language acquisition research which he thinks are relevant to second language acquisition:

Language is not learnt by learning individual sounds and structures and then combining them, but by an increasing ability to break down wholes into parts.

Grammar is acquired by a process of observation, hypothesis and experiment.
We can use whole phrases without understanding their constituent parts.

Acquisition is accelerated by contact with a sympathetic interlocutor with a higher level of competence in the target language.

Schmitt (2000) makes a significant contribution to a learning theory for the Lexical Approach by adding that 'the mind stores and processes these [lexical] chunks as individual wholes.' The mind is able to store large amounts of information in long-term memory but its short-term capacity is much more limited, when producing language in speech for example, so it is much more efficient for the brain to recall a chunk of language as if it were one piece of information. 'Figment of his imagination' is, therefore, recalled as one piece of information rather than four separate words.

In our view it is not possible, or even desirable, to attempt to 'teach' an unlimited number of lexical chunks. But, it is beneficial for language learners to gain exposure to lexical chunks and to gain experience in analyzing those chunks in order to begin the process of internalisation. We believe, like Lewis, that encouraging learners to notice language, specifically lexical chunks and collocations, is central to any methodology connected to a lexical view of language."

https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/arti ... roach-look
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Re: Effortless Conversations, by Lukas Van Vyve.

Postby Cainntear » Tue Feb 11, 2020 1:29 pm

Language is not learnt by learning individual sounds and structures and then combining them, but by an increasing ability to break down wholes into parts.

Grammar is acquired by a process of observation, hypothesis and experiment.

These are true. But this is only useful to second-language learners if it is correct to assume that second language acquisition is the same as first language acquisition, and that's not an uncontroversial statement.
We can use whole phrases without understanding their constituent parts.

"Can" does not imply "should". You can drive a screw into a piece of wood with a hammer, but you should use a screwdriver.

While as children we may learn some language by memorising chunks with no analysis, in that case we have no choice. As adults, when we encounter new chunks in our language (eg. reboot the server, switch it off and on again/and back on again) we do so first by analysing and understanding them grammatically, with them later becoming fixed chunks through repetition and exposure.

Of course, that's all assuming kids learn by chunks to start off with. Chunking can't explain "me want", though, can it? "Me want" is a kid using a grammar than can't discriminate between subject and object pronouns, and saying something that they've never heard as a "chunk", unless the chunk is made of first-person-pronoun + verb... which is what psychology always described chunking as: nesting of structures, "units" composed of other units.


Schmitt (2000) makes a significant contribution to a learning theory for the Lexical Approach by adding that 'the mind stores and processes these [lexical] chunks as individual wholes.' The mind is able to store large amounts of information in long-term memory but its short-term capacity is much more limited, when producing language in speech for example, so it is much more efficient for the brain to recall a chunk of language as if it were one piece of information. 'Figment of his imagination' is, therefore, recalled as one piece of information rather than four separate words.

Though he's talking superficially about chunking, he's ignoring a core part of it. While a chunk is a unit, in other words a single cognitive structure, that unit is composed by linking together the pre-existing units/cognitive structures.

When recalling a four word fixed phrase -- e.g. "or something like that" (or is that a 3 word fixed phrase preceded by "or"...?) -- we recall the phrase as a unit, but the unit gives us automatic recall of the four words in a single step. The fixed phrase isn't just a "word".

In fact, the authors' use of "figment of his imagination" is kind of worrying. If "figment of his imagination" was a true independent unit, it would be easy to say "it's a figment of his imagination", but you would struggle to say "it was just a figment of my imagination" or "it's just a figment of your imagination".

A "chunk" in the sense used by psychologists ties together any sort of cognitive structures needed to make the new chunk concept work. In language, that means it ties together word concepts, ordering concepts, and the concepts of variables that we need in order to manipulate the form.
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Re: Effortless Conversations, by Lukas Van Vyve.

Postby reineke » Tue Feb 11, 2020 1:46 pm

I like the dog pictures.
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Re: Effortless Conversations, by Lukas Van Vyve.

Postby Kraut » Sat Feb 22, 2020 9:11 pm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UQ2Ft4mhJU
Lucas van Vyve - Case against isolated words - LangFest 2018 presentation

"In the village" is expressed in Lithuanian with "kaime" - a single word, since Lithuanian has no article and has locative: so instead of the three words in English, one single word in Lithuanian does the same job
Speaking with Saussure, the signifiant is three words in English for one signifié, (the same signifié needs only one word in Lithuanian (a root plus the locative suffix )
I think it is a useful concept: a chunk is a recurrent word combination that in the mind of a native speaker has been merged into one mental concept, the foreign learner of word lists and grammar chapters needs some time to merge the three words into one signifié.
An analogy: several phonemes make up a word, several words make up a chunk, word and chunk have only one mental concept each.
Does the brain really work like this, I don't know.

Another example:

Das Spiel war schlecht.
Das Spiel war war sauschlecht.
Das Spiel war unter aller Sau.

"Unter aller Sau" is one concept just like "sauschlecht" and "schlecht", there is no special effort when I say it, for a learner this is a different story.
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