1.8. About intensive and extensive reading/listening (and epiphanies)If you take a piece of written text or a recording and spend the time and effort of understand just about everything, looking up words, checking endings and maybe even syntax, in short doing anything to suck every drop of information from it then it is in every meaning of the word an intensive process. If it is a long text or recording then you don't have time for that so you will try to form an intuitive impression of the meaning based on whatever words or expressions you recognize, combined with circumstantial evidence. This is an extensive process.
There are two kinds of reading.
One is the
intensive reading where you try to understand more or less everything (though pondering for hours over one particularly complicated construction or an incomprehensible word may not be worth your precious time). This means that you may have to look up a number of words and maybe even consult a grammar of some sorts. If you already know the language well then it may be other things you look for, like narrative patterns or influences from other authors, but the criterion for saying that you read intensively is that you take your time to search information or ponder over certain problems in the text, even if that means that you have tio make stops or even lokk back to earlier passages.
Often when I say I study a text I do one thing more than just read it slowly with many lookups etc., and that thing is copying the text by hand. This is a very efficient way of slowing you down so that you have time to ask yourself whether you really understand everything. Besides you can jot down words you have looked up or expression you might want to remember for later use. Actually this isn't just reading, but something between reading and close study of a text sample, and I mention it to illustrate what should go through your mind when you do intensive reading without copying.
The other kind of reading is the
extensive reading. Here the goal is not to understand everything, but to acquire a kind of momentum while reading and to get through as much genuine stuff as possible. If you are a total novice and the language is far from anything you know this kind of reading is only possible when you have acquired enough vocabulary and grammar through intensive reading and other activities. But it is bound to take up more and more of the time you spend reading, simply because it is so much more pleasing.
This should be seen in the light of another important notion, that of comprehensible input (which already has been mentioned in connection with Krashen and his five hypotheses). If you are a total newbee then you have to find very easy texts AND to work hard to understand them, but soon you find yourself in a situation where you can introduce extensive reading/listening to the same very easy texts. Or alternatively you can choose more difficult texts, which you then have to take to pieces in a very intensive process. Afterwards you can hopefully read them extensively. Both strategies are relevant and useful (and should be pursued), but to me it seems simpler to combine the two extremes and choose relatively difficult texts, which you make comprehensible through the use of translations. More about this later.
The notion of intensive versus extensive study can be extended to other activities like speaking or listening. The problem with listening is of course that the sounds pass by and disappear, but this can be remedied with the help of recordings, which you can play again and again. In part 5 I'll discuss some intensive listening techniques, but by and large extensive listening will probably be more common than intensive listening. With speaking there is on the one hand the kind of activity you would do in a language laboratory, where you did pronunciation drills which were recorded and played back to you, after which you would try to say the same thing again, just better. On the other hand there is the kind of speaking you do in a conversation, where you skip difficulties and use circumlocutions if you have forgotten a crucial expression - or you may even choose to say something different to get around the problem.
In my opinion it is worth separating the two kinds of activities instead of doing something that is somewhere in the middle. You learn more facts if you don't care about the time it takes to look things up, and you become more fluent if you aren't too fuzzy about missing words and dubious pronunciations.
But maybe there is a third possibility.
In June 2007 someone called Siomotteikiru suddenly appeared like a bolt from the sky in the HTLAL universe with a message that proposed a quite original study technique, which must be classified as extensive listening with a purpose that resemble that of short intensive studies, but achieved through bulk learning instead of concentrated study of short passages: the
Listening-Reading (or LR) method:
(Quote:)
If you want to learn a language quickly you’ll need:
1. a recording performed by good actors or narrators in the language you want to learn
2. the original text (of the recording)
3. a translation into your own language or a language you understand
4. the text(s) should be long: novels are best
You may wonder: why long texts? Because of the idiolect of the author; it manifests itself fully in the first ten–twenty pages: it is very important in learning quickly without cramming.
The key factor in learning a language is EXPOSURE, that is how much NEW text you will be able to perceive in a unit of time. There is a physical limit here, you can’t understand any faster than the text reaches your brain. That is why you ought to SIMULTANEOUSLY read the translation and listen to the original recording: that provides the fastest exposure. You should ENJOY the text you're going to listen to. Texts for beginners should be long - the longer the better, up to fifty hours (e.g. The Lord of the Ring, Harry Potter, Anna Karenina, War and Peace, Catch-22). You might doubt if it is possible. I can assure you it is - you should see twelve-year-olds listening to Harry Potter.
(...)
The order ought to be EXACTLY as follows:
1. you read the translation (...)
2. you listen to the recording and look at the written text at the same time (...)
3. you look at the translation and listen to the text at the same time, from the beginning to the end of a story, usually three times is enough to understand almost everything
This is the most important thing in the method, it is right AT THIS POINT that proper learning takes place. If you’re in a position to do it right from the start, you can skip 1. and 2.
4. now you can concentrate on SPEAKING: you repeat after the recording, you do it as many times as necessary to become fluent (..)
5. you translate the text from your own language into the language you’re learning
And last but not least: conversing is not learning, it is USING a language, you will NEVER be able to say more than you already know.
© Phi-Staszek
As I wrote, this method is extensive by nature: you are supposed to listen for hours on end to the recording plus either the transcript or the translation, and it is not planned that you should look words up or read grammars. The impressive thing is that you can actually get something out of listening to a text in an unknown language while listening to a translation, but it is actually working – I have tried myself on a (short) Persian text. But as I said it can be a trouble to find all the necessary elements, and you must be very interested in the content to listening for the long periods stipulated for this method. So even though this method looks like it could function, I have not been able to use it according to the directives, partly because it is difficult to find long texts in parallel audio, translation and original, partly because I tend to get bored - especially with literature. Instead I have chosen to use moderately difficult original texts with translations. However listening for content while reading a transcript or translation mostly occurs when I watch TV with subtitles - and you know how bad they are.
There are roughly two kinds of language learners: those that primarily learn through their ears and those who learn through their eyes. I belong in the latter category, and what I write now may not be relevant for those who belong to the first category.
To be able to read and even more to think in a language you must of course study the pronunciation first. For some of my languages I have a solid foundation from my school years: English, German and (somewhat later) French and Latin. When I however started to learn Italian and Spanish through selfstudy as a school kid I didn't have any choice than to read about the pronunciation and then frantically try adjust my pronunciation whenever I had the chance to hear the real thing. This is essentially also what I do today, except that I now have the blessing of the internet where I can get videos, podcasts and live transmissions in just about any language I might ever wish to learn.
To build my vocabulary and grammatical knowledge I copy original texts by hand and translate them, I read about grammar, I make word lists, I try to get some modicum of fluency in my reading and last, but not least: I start combining words in my head until they form nice, more or less correct, but at least complete sentences. At this point it is important not to be too fuzzy about errors in vocabulary, grammar or pronunciation - as I've stated earlier I'm convinced that it is easier to correct those errors later when you have enough reserves of skill and confidence than it is to deal with them while you are still struggling.
As a result of this toil and labour I expect some day to wake up and suddenly be able to understand the target language in its spoken form (a so called epiphany moment). This may sound like a joke, but it isn't. The main reason that you don't understand ordinary clear speech at this stage is not that you can't follow the words (after all those listening sessions), but that you stumble over unknown words or constructions all the time and then start thinking or - even worse - translating in your head. And then you are stuck. Instead you should just try to follow the babble word for word, syllable after syllable, letting the meanings that pop up pass by without caring too much about them, otherwise you would miss the next sequence. Then some bright day you have - without noticing anything special - passed the threshold where you know to piece everything together without really making a conscious effort, just as you do with your native language. This is the epiphany moment.
Wikipedia lists several meanings of the word "epiphany", but the most relevant here is the following one (
Wikipedia quote dating from 2008) :
An epiphany (from the ancient Greek "επιφάνεια", epiphaneia, “manifestation, striking appearance”) is the sudden realization or comprehension of the (larger) essence or meaning of something. The term is used in either a philosophical or literal sense to signify that the claimant has "found the last piece of the puzzle and now sees the whole picture," or has new information or experience, often insignificant by itself, that illuminates a deeper or numinous foundational frame of reference. My guess concerning epiphany moments I think that they mostly occur for people who are global learners, as opposed to mainly sequential learners. A sequential learner starts in one corner of the language and then adds new elements until more or less the whole thing is covered. This is the way you work when you use a text book and goes from chapter one to the last chapter in the prescribed order. A global learner takes little pieces from all over the language and tries to make them fit. In the beginning this isn't possible, but when you accumulate enough of those isolated pieces you sooner or later pass a threshold where things suddenly seem to snap into place - and that's your epiphany moment.
This reminds me of the two types of JPG-images: if you have a slow internet connection and a large image file of the 'normal' type the picture emerges from the top and downwards. But there are also 'interlaced' JPGs around where the whole picture is shown from the beginning, but in a very coarse version which however becomes clearer and clearer until a certain point - at least on old slow computers. The language skills of a global learner are organized like an interlaced JPG image file on a slow computer.
For me learning - or rather conquering - the written version of a language is a slow and gradual process, and I typically don't care much about the spoken version of a language before I already can read most written sources more or less fluently. This means that MY chance of experiencing an epiphany moment is much larger with audio sources, simply because it is the oral understanding that is lagging behind and suddenly passes the stage where I have accumulated enough savvy from written sources.
In the case of Dutch it was really a case of not understanding anything one day and then understanding more or less the whole thing the next - and it happened after I had been listening to 5 hours of AVRO Museum TV in one day. The speed with which it happened proves that it wasn't a question of learning something more, but more about reorganizing the things I already had learn through my occupation with the written language. It is the same thing that can happen if you already have learnt a lot about the language at home without really getting anywhere - but then you visit a place where the languages is spoken and then you suddenly make a tiger leap forwards. But without the knowledge you had accumulated at home you wouldn't have been able to benefit from immersion.