romeo.alpha wrote:Cainntear wrote:I don't think he does, otherwise he'd have included some practice. I'll agree that it's not handled brilliantly, but I suspect his goal here was something that a few people here do as part of their own learning strategy -- get a rough overview of a concept before starting the actual learning so that it makes more sense when you come across it in practice.
That's exactly what he expects. In fact he says "try to guess it" based on those "3 strings" as he calls them, that he had presented earlier (and in the French course he said he doesn't want you to guess...).
OK, it's been a while, so you may well be right.
Well you certainly shouldn't be declaring something two 8-hour courses are completely different based on listening to the first 20 minutes of one of them. I completed the original German course and I did most of the Dutch course, and they are extremely, extremely similar. Where they diverge is more or less just where the languages diverge.
Well since you've done both, how about you tell me the exact point where they converge and become nearyl identical, or extremely similar - as you're now saying. Because that's a rather bold claim to make when they're starting out quite differently in some very meaningful ways.
It's been a good few years so I couldn't tell you exactly, and right now I'm kind of busy with a number of projects (a job and a masters simultaneously doesn't leave much time for anything else) but as I recall it, the order of introduction of grammar points and vocabulary in the Dutch is taken straight from the German course.
The core of what Thomas did is that it's what you see in the middle of the courses, and what is shared across the courses. I think it's to his credit that he made such efforts to treat each language in its own terms, rather than applying an identical rigid template to all 4 languages.
Yes, if you're comparing MT to Pimsleur, that's a strength. But Pimsleur and Glossika are the odd ones out. Most courses if they are offered across a line of languages are tailored to the language in question to some degree. Giving him credit for doing what was the norm is kind of like handing out a participation award.
Absolutely true, but I was trying to be subtle, rather than just saying
yet again that in focusing on the features that are entirely different between the courses (German's sound-change strings vs regular Latinate vocabulary transformations) you are missing what the core of what his method actually is.
You are clearly a very intelligent person, which makes it all the more baffling that you don't understand that point and continue to argue the superficial details as the core.
It's entirely fair that you personally are put off by the superficial details, but that doesn't have any bearing on whether they are the core mechanics of the method or not.
It's the prosody that's the issue. Now he's by no means unique in screwing that up (the vast majority of French courses get it wrong), but he still gets it wrong, and the other issues just compound it. When you're starting with English (ie, bad for French) prosody, you make yourself difficult to understand to begin with. Then you add in the way English pronunciation will creep its way in when you're speaking French, and you very quickly have built up two bad habits.
What in the prosody was so bad? I'll be honest: the MT French course is simultaneously the one I am least qualified to comment on and the one I consider the worst of his 4 courses. Least qualified because me French was passable before I started it and because I'd already followed the similar Spanish and Italian courses, so my experience is pretty far from the target market; worst because I think it was wrong that he deliberately taught students to underpronounce le and la, which does create problems later.
But in the case of the -ation words, I don't recall him accepting the English stress pattern ("-
ation"), so I don't see where any bad habits were given the opportunity to form...
What you need to do is actually approach each language as its own thing, not just superficially. French is a language where you need to explain the prosody, French euphony, liasons and enchaînments. You should be practicing it with foreign words, so you're not having L1 intrusions, and develop a sense of the rhythm, the melody, and just how it sounds in general.
But these
are foreign words, and he was, as I recall, fairly active in discouraging L1 intrusions. If you want to talk about habits, L1 intrusion is
already a habit, and how do you break that habit if you're not doing it? I'm not saying MT made the absolute best decision on this, but I do think you're being too rigid and absolutist.
My philosophy is to look beyond reasons why things shouldn't work, but also to look for reasons why they could work, even if I disagree, because you can't argue against a theory you don't understand. Right now, I don't see any evidence that you've tried to understand anything other than what you think is the one true path.
Once you've got everything else solid, focusing on getting the pronunciation of cognates right isn't as much of a cognitive load as it is right at the beginning. There's no way almost anyone could hope to get that right when they're dealing with so much new information. With the type of overload you're getting at the beginning it's nigh impossible to avoid falling back to the comfort of your mother tongue.
Cognitive load? But there is virtually no cognitive load in the recall of a close cognate, which frees up cognitive resource for the student to pay attention to the pronunciation.
Think about one of the tradition learner activities -- counting to ten. That's bloody hard, because numbers have evolved to be maximally distant within a language (for example, in English, you don't repeat a vowel phoneme until you hit 9). Here you've got to recall a typically unfamiliar word form alongside a phoneme or two that you still haven't encountered in any other word. If it's a disyllabic word, you might also have to overcome your L1 habits for stress placement.
But with "information", you've got a pegged out set of phoneme categories, and all you have to do is find the right French phones to fit the phonemes and remember where the stress goes. You're dealing with repeating patterns too, unlike with numbers.
So would you prefer the "honest" approach of starting lesson one with "French is a bloody difficult language with really complicated pronunciation and a spelling system almost as Byzantine as English's. You'd better keep coming back for more lessons, because it'll take you about three years of hard graft before people are happy to speak to you."?
Yes, definitely. Although if you go about it right you're looking at about 6 weeks to start having simple interactions with French speakers rather than 3 years. Maybe a bit longer for an absolute beginner who doesn't have a knack for languages. And as far as I gather, The Language Master was released in 1997, and the first MTM courses were from 2000. So it had been more than a quarter century since the FSI had released their course which showed the right way to go about teaching French.
"The right way". There's been a lot of research and literature since the New Key/Army Method/Audiolingual Approach, and... it doesn't reflect well on FSI and its contemporaries. The core philosophy was pure behaviorist psychology and that's a poor model of language. But more: what they did in their own classrooms was far more diverse and nuanced than what they wrote up on paper.