Language Transfer

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languist
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby languist » Fri Feb 22, 2019 11:18 pm

Breaking away from the tradition of debate which has recently engulfed this thread, I'd like to announce that I'm going to start working through Language Transfer's Complete Greek as of.... well, about 20 minutes ago. I did a few lessons from the Spanish course a while ago and really enjoyed them, and I used to listen to the Arabic lessons at random (as in; lesson 36, then 84, then 17, etc - never actually using them to study) a few years ago just because I found them relaxing and was intrigued by the teaching method.

For a long, long time, I've had a vision about creating a language learning resource (an app, really) which follows the same principles of learning a language through "thinking", and I find Mihalis' approach very helpful to me as an absolute beginner. However, I've only ever dipped in and out of lessons, so I'll post a full review of the method after I complete the series. I'm already sure that I admire his work, considering the sheer amount of effort he has put into it, his philosophy and style, and what I so far perceive as his successful execution of it. Moreover, as a teacher I find him gentle, engaging and encouraging.
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby zenmonkey » Fri Feb 22, 2019 11:30 pm

languist wrote:I'd like to announce that I'm going to start working through Language Transfer's Complete Greek as of.... well, about 20 minutes ago.


I'd love to hear your review of them once you've used them for a bit. Good luck!
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby Cainntear » Sat Feb 23, 2019 1:12 am

I thought I'd come back to this one, because it's a good example of how expressing your opinions overly strongly can lead to showing yourself up in public:
romeo.alpha wrote:although I do recommend Michel Thomas Dutch despite being attached to his name because it is good, on account of only following his template as much as was apparently demanded in the contract.

The Dutch MT course is as near a clone of his German course as you're ever likely to find. It's practically a line-for-line translation.
If you think the Dutch course is good, then you don't actually think MT's method is bad.

Which brings me back to what I'd previously said: the cognates in the Romance language courses are a bonus.

Why so much so early on? A confidence-building deceit, because Thomas knew that most learners are daunted by the idea of learning a language. It's a little white lie designed to make learning easier. What's wrong with that?

As for false friends... well that's one of the biggest mistakes you can make. If you start out with false friends and the dire warnings of teachers never to guess, you're actually disempowering learners by training them to disbelieve their assumptions about cognates. There are far more true friends than false friends, and an early focus on those with a slightly later focus on the minority of false friends (which are usually pretty common words anyway) seems to lead to better confidence with and command of a new language.
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby romeo.alpha » Sat Feb 23, 2019 11:21 pm

lavengro wrote:If I understand correctly from your comments, you have not actually worked through any learning materials involving Michel Thomas himself (I don't believe the Dutch course does, but by all means let me know if that is incorrect). You indicated you started the French course but backed out for reasons of his accent and your perception of his lack of integrity, and German because it was below your level.

Yet you confidently state as a matter of fact rather than your opinion, that Michel Thomas was not a good teacher.


Yes, I already experienced his teaching. If something starts off bad, how long do you think I need to stick with it before forming an opinion? 30 minutes? 6 hours?


I recall this from the French course. He does something similar with Spanish and Italian. I can't remember if he also took that approach with German. I recall it being empowering to learn that there was an easy on-ramp to vocabulary in a new-to-me language, based on the wretched vocabulary I had already acquired in English. With respect, from my recollection, I do not think your following comments are fair, at all: "His idea from the very beginning was that you could take your knowledge of English vocabulary and just change the pronunciation and be speaking French, with the addition of a few new words. Essentially, he's treating French as if it were a dialect of English."


That's exactly what he got upset about the student not figuring out. He'd laid out such a "simple" roadmap, and she didn't figure it out (and why should she, if etymology wasn't something that had interested her, she's starting from square zero, and needs more guidance than an extremely rough sketch).


While I don't have a sense of humour, I do have my copy of his French course, and may check out what he did say if that is of assistance, if I can squeeze it in between Fantaman! and the peppy pigs episodes.


Sure, I can take another look at it too, if you can point out something specific that you think is of value that I missed by backing out early.
Last edited by romeo.alpha on Sun Feb 24, 2019 11:22 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby romeo.alpha » Sat Feb 23, 2019 11:45 pm

Cainntear wrote:The Dutch MT course is as near a clone of his German course as you're ever likely to find. It's practically a line-for-line translation.
If you think the Dutch course is good, then you don't actually think MT's method is bad.


You're working with a rather loose definition of "near" and "clone" there. I've just been comparing them side by side. In the Dutch course she starts off with examples, explains what they mean, and then has you guess. Michel starts off talking about consonant shifts. That's a fundamentally different philosophy in how you're explaining the similarities. Cobie expects you to recognize patterns. Michel expects you to calculate the end result.

Which brings me back to what I'd previously said: the cognates in the Romance language courses are a bonus.

Why so much so early on? A confidence-building deceit, because Thomas knew that most learners are daunted by the idea of learning a language. It's a little white lie designed to make learning easier. What's wrong with that?


In a language like Spanish or Italian, it's perhaps not a big deal. But a language like French is unforgiving. Speakers of French are unforgiving. If you don't get the accent right, you can't communicate. They won't want to communicate with you. They say it's "mal à l'oreille" (an ear-ache). So it's absolutely essential that you start from learning the pronunciation and prosody, and mitigate any possible L1 intrusions. Starting with the written language is one way to guarantee L1 intrusions. Starting with cognates is another.

As for false friends... well that's one of the biggest mistakes you can make. If you start out with false friends and the dire warnings of teachers never to guess,


Michel is against guessing. So...

you're actually disempowering learners by training them to disbelieve their assumptions about cognates. There are far more true friends than false friends, and an early focus on those with a slightly later focus on the minority of false friends (which are usually pretty common words anyway) seems to lead to better confidence with and command of a new language.


It will lead to a false confidence. Confidence should be warranted, and nothing will shatter your confidence quicker than your first conversation with a French speaker, where you can't understand a single word they say, and they seem unable to understand you. And then they get visibly irritated and blow you off. I've talked to people who got upset having visited France, that the people there didn't even give them a chance to express themselves. And I've got co-workers (I work in a hotel restaurant) who ask me to please take care of the tables with French speakers - they can speak French somewhat, they learned it in school, but their prosody is off, and their pronunciation isn't much better.
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby Cainntear » Sun Feb 24, 2019 7:44 pm

romeo.alpha wrote:
Cainntear wrote:The Dutch MT course is as near a clone of his German course as you're ever likely to find. It's practically a line-for-line translation.
If you think the Dutch course is good, then you don't actually think MT's method is bad.


You're working with a rather loose definition of "near" and "clone" there. I've just been comparing them side by side. In the Dutch course she starts off with examples, explains what they mean, and then has you guess. Michel starts off talking about consonant shifts. That's a fundamentally different philosophy in how you're explaining the similarities. Cobie expects you to recognize patterns. Michel expects you to calculate the end result.

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.

romeo.alpha wrote:
lavengro wrote:If I understand correctly from your comments, you have not actually worked through any learning materials involving Michel Thomas himself (I don't believe the Dutch course does, but by all means let me know if that is incorrect). You indicated you started the French course but backed out for reasons of his accent and your perception of his lack of integrity, and German because it was below your level.

Yet you confidently state as a matter of fact rather than your opinion, that Michel Thomas was not a good teacher.


Yes, I already experienced his teaching. If something starts off bad, how long do you think I need to stick with it before forming an opinion? 30 minutes? 6 hours?

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.

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.

Cainntear wrote:Which brings me back to what I'd previously said: the cognates in the Romance language courses are a bonus.

Why so much so early on? A confidence-building deceit, because Thomas knew that most learners are daunted by the idea of learning a language. It's a little white lie designed to make learning easier. What's wrong with that?


In a language like Spanish or Italian, it's perhaps not a big deal. But a language like French is unforgiving. Speakers of French are unforgiving. If you don't get the accent right, you can't communicate. They won't want to communicate with you. They say it's "mal à l'oreille" (an ear-ache). So it's absolutely essential that you start from learning the pronunciation and prosody, and mitigate any possible L1 intrusions. Starting with the written language is one way to guarantee L1 intrusions. Starting with cognates is another.

That's a legitimate concern.
However, there is the counter opinion that facing the problem head-on forces the students to break the link, which brings us back to correction. However bad Thomas's accent was in French, he still made the point of forcing the students to say the "-ion" ending approximately correctly from the point of basic phonetics -- he didn't let the students get away with pronouncing the N, and (as far as I recall -- it's been a few years since I used the course) it was always made to be appropriately stressed too.

Is avoiding the problem more likely to solve it?

As for false friends... well that's one of the biggest mistakes you can make. If you start out with false friends and the dire warnings of teachers never to guess,


Michel is against guessing. So...

As he clarifies in at least 2 of his courses, he's against guessing grammar, but if you don't know a word, just guess -- the worst that can happen is that you aren't understood, and the other person will look confused (this is an understatement of course, but the world doesn't end when you confuse tired and married in Spanish, however embarrassing it may be at the time).

you're actually disempowering learners by training them to disbelieve their assumptions about cognates. There are far more true friends than false friends, and an early focus on those with a slightly later focus on the minority of false friends (which are usually pretty common words anyway) seems to lead to better confidence with and command of a new language.


It will lead to a false confidence. Confidence should be warranted, and nothing will shatter your confidence quicker than your first conversation with a French speaker, where you can't understand a single word they say, and they seem unable to understand you. And then they get visibly irritated and blow you off.

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."?
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby romeo.alpha » Sun Feb 24, 2019 9:54 pm

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...).

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.

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.

That's a legitimate concern.
However, there is the counter opinion that facing the problem head-on forces the students to break the link, which brings us back to correction. However bad Thomas's accent was in French, he still made the point of forcing the students to say the "-ion" ending approximately correctly from the point of basic phonetics -- he didn't let the students get away with pronouncing the N, and (as far as I recall -- it's been a few years since I used the course) it was always made to be appropriately stressed too.


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.

Is avoiding the problem more likely to solve it?


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. Once you're able to utter phrases and short sentences in French that sound good, you can start working with adding understanding what you're saying to your practice. You should still avoid cognates wherever possible, let the necessary ones come in, and put extra focus on getting them right. Then once you've been practicing for a number of months, and you don't need to put too much effort into speaking in a fashion that isn't fatiguing for native French speakers to listen to, you can start increasing the number of cognates you work with. 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.

As he clarifies in at least 2 of his courses, he's against guessing grammar, but if you don't know a word, just guess


No, he specifically said he didn't want you guessing words in the French course.

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.
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby rdearman » Sun Feb 24, 2019 10:25 pm

romeo.alpha wrote:No, he specifically said he didn't want you guessing words in the French course.

No, at 1:51 minutes into chapter 03 French Foundation Course Disk 1 he tells the woman not to guess. He doesn't say don't guess the word he only says "don't guess". He is telling her that because she is trying to guess how "it is like that" is constructed. She is trying to guess grammar, not vocabulary since he has already taught them all the words required for the sentence, but she constructs it incorrectly. He tells her again to don't guess, "don't rush it, think it out". At 7:51 minutes in Chapter 4 French Foundation course Disk 1 he again tells them to "Think it out, don't rush it",

He does tell them they can guess words based on English cognates with a low chance of false friends. But he also warns them to never guess grammar, only vocabulary.
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby romeo.alpha » Sun Feb 24, 2019 11:20 pm

rdearman wrote:
romeo.alpha wrote:No, he specifically said he didn't want you guessing words in the French course.

No, at 1:51 minutes into chapter 03 French Foundation Course Disk 1 he tells the woman not to guess. He doesn't say don't guess the word he only says "don't guess". He is telling her that because she is trying to guess how "it is like that" is constructed. She is trying to guess grammar, not vocabulary since he has already taught them all the words required for the sentence, but she constructs it incorrectly. He tells her again to don't guess, "don't rush it, think it out". At 7:51 minutes in Chapter 4 French Foundation course Disk 1 he again tells them to "Think it out, don't rush it",

He does tell them they can guess words based on English cognates with a low chance of false friends. But he also warns them to never guess grammar, only vocabulary.


No, that's not what's happening. She's been learning French for all of a few minutes, and has already forgotten something. She's not guessing because she is just randomly trying to throw together the words she has learned, she's guessing because she's forgotten the word, so is trying for the ones she can remember. Which is also reflective of the shortsightedness of the method and the gimmick of being accompanied by other students backfiring. It should come as absolutely no surprise that someone who is that fresh into learning a language would forget it. But it came as a surprise to Thomas, and it's not something he had prepared for. One thing that's absolutely missing from the method is repetition (and that's not new either, Pimsleur was a popular program that made good use of it decades prior). He's throwing way too much new vocabulary at them in way too little time.
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Re: Language Transfer

Postby rdearman » Mon Feb 25, 2019 8:01 am

You realise that the tapes are shortened by the publisher and that the actual elapse time of the recordings were much longer?
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