Rapid passive knowledge acquisition

General discussion about learning languages
Gomorrita
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Re: Rapid passive knowledge acquisition

Postby Gomorrita » Mon Aug 14, 2017 11:25 am

Analysing the difficulty of languages always becomes an incredibly complicated task because there are too many factors to consider. The most obvious is of course the learner's background, i.e. which languages can the learner speak. But there are many others, like different learning curves (e.g. easy at the beginning, harder to perfect), different difficulties for different aspects of the language (speaking, reading, understanding speech...) or different criteria for what it means to know a language (for example, some people might say Tristano's Spanish is better than his Dutch because it's more fluent, but he considers his less broken Dutch better instead).

And all these factors are dependent with each other, creating so many combinations that it can be hard to find two learners with the same assessment of the difficulty of learning a language.

And let's not forget the factors that are extrinsic to the language itself, such as accessibility to resources, including people to talk to.

If you don't want to oversimplify it, you might need to write a 5000 word essay of the difficulty of learning a specific language, and still it would only apply to yourself. :lol:

But then comes the FSI and says "this one is Category I, this one is Category II...". Yes, ok, very useful! :P
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tarvos
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Re: Rapid passive knowledge acquisition

Postby tarvos » Mon Aug 14, 2017 11:31 am

The German prepositions are equally random and they always take the case you didn't expect them to take. No, I'll stick with Dutch, thanks. The real difference is that Germans slur less when they speak, unless they're speaking dialect of course. And also, most combinations in German are, guess what, the same as in Dutch (though they may not be equivalent semantically).
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Serpent
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Re: Rapid passive knowledge acquisition

Postby Serpent » Mon Aug 14, 2017 12:56 pm

Tristano wrote:Somehow I think that learning Romanian to fluency will improve my listening comprehension of Portuguese but won't do much with my other Romance languages.
I don't think it will help tbh. But you'll pick up some Slavic vocab :D
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reineke
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Re: Rapid passive knowledge acquisition

Postby reineke » Mon Aug 14, 2017 4:25 pm

Tristano wrote:@Reineke, I Somehow I think that learning Romanian to fluency will improve my listening comprehension of Portuguese but won't do much with my other Romance languages. But I'm curious about it. The unpleasant surprise is that I still have to study (ed io che credevo... io che speravo...).

I still have mixed feelings about German's difficulty. I must report an anecdote that I already wrote somewhere.
When I was starting studying Dutch, mainly through Michel Thomas and Memrise, I started to try to listen Dutch podcast. All what I could hear was an endless stream of weird noises not at all sounding like what I studied before. Then I tried to listen to a German podcast (Easy German or something like that). It is indeed easier than what I tried to listen to in Dutch, but I was understanding the most of what was spoken, without that I ever studied German! I was studying Dutch but I was understanding German better!
Said that, as far as I know, the only two things that are more difficult in German than in Dutch are the distinction in masculine and feminine and the cases. Yet, I think that the only pain in the *** of German is the gender unpredictability, and I don't really know if the cases of German are so much worse than the horrible and seemingly random preposition system of Dutch where you have to memorize the 'vaste combinaties' by heart. It is confusing also for the Dutch. But maybe it is a problem also in German, I don't know.

This is what Robert Lindsay says about German:
Robert Lindsay wrote:Learning German can be seen as a pyramid. It is very difficult to grasp the basics, but once you do that, it gets increasingly easy as the language follows relatively simple rules and many words are created from other words via compound words, prefixes and suffixes.


In the next 10 years I will subscribe also to the Germanic inc and the Slavic inc.

By the way, which other unpleasant surprises do you see? I expect not the interferences as that is a very secondary issue.


You are already working two jobs (ie you are using Dutch on a daily basis).

I recommended German to you before. I had good luck relaxing with German and my base was much weaker than yours. I did not "study" anything and I don't recall ever contemplating the difficulty of German. That's forum talk. In a way, I regret discovering HTLAL. Many learners have these thoughts but on forums they seem to grow disproportionately and turn into unhealthy habits.

Anyway, I'm not going to suggest that you should "just" watch TV but try to listen to something interesting or potentially interesting on a regular basis. Ideally you should hear dozens of Romanian voices every day. Listening comprehension requires rapid processing skills. If you can't process, you can't accumulate additional skills. You will need to sleep on everything you have processed a certain number of times.

Fluency is a different story. I have seen enough polyglots who can speak Asian languages and are fluent or at least capable of producing good Spanish and/or French and yet their Italian is a disaster. The conclusion you should draw from this is that nothing is free and that you will need to work hard on your languages. Polyglots are cool and they should not feel bad about practicing their languages.

If your needs and wants remain the same and you are OK with macaroni Spanish you should be fine. Your options will never expire but you may discover that they need longer to cash in (depending on how much you're trying to "withdraw"). You can perhaps evaluate the passive equivalent of macaroni Spanish/Portuguese etc on Dialang.
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aokoye
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Re: Rapid passive knowledge acquisition

Postby aokoye » Tue Aug 15, 2017 4:26 am

Tristano wrote:... I don't really know if the cases of German are so much worse than the horrible and seemingly random preposition system of Dutch where you have to memorize the 'vaste combinaties' by heart. It is confusing also for the Dutch. But maybe it is a problem also in German, I don't know.

It's a "problem" in German as well. Nomen-Verb-Verbindungen, verbs that take specific prepositions, verbs that take specific cases (which is different than what you're talking about because of the lack of cases in Dutch), and so on.

Never mind that it's not just masculine and feminine in terms if gender but neuter as well. Then you have the weak masculine nouns that do n-declension...
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reineke
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Re: Rapid passive knowledge acquisition

Postby reineke » Wed Jun 13, 2018 5:08 am

Tristano wrote:No, how FSI classifies German and Romanian from the point of view of the monolingual English native speaker is much more interesting.


Tristano wrote:I still don't see the reason of the placement as level II languages from FSI - but is maybe the reason that I'm just getting a boost from other 6 languages I already know and the FSI chart is based on native English monolingual speakers?


FSI is about something else.

"Almost all FSI language courses would be characterized as foreign-language training (FLT), rather than second-language training (SLT)...

Our programs are not given a lengthy period in which to prepare learners to do their work. For example, students in the Russian program are expected to progress in ten months of intensive training from no functional ability in the language to the ability to read almost any professionally relevant text and discuss in detail with a Russian-speaker any and all implications of that text for Russian-American relations. Ten months of intensive language study may seem like a long time, but, in fact, it is very short when the scope of the goal is considered. There is no time to waste with nonproductive activities...

The goal of language training for FSI students is typically general professional proficiency (S-3/R-3) in reading and speaking the language, including interactive listening comprehension. This level is approximately equivalent to “superior” on the scale used by the American Council for the Teach-
ing of Foreign Languages. The mean age of language students at FSI is forty-one.

Although many of our students know more than one foreign language—in recent years, the average FSI student begins class knowing 2.3 non-English languages— most of them enroll as absolute beginners in the language they are assigned to study. Despite this obstacle, approximately two-thirds of FSI’s full-time students achieve or exceed their proficiency goals, and almost all of the others nearly meet the goals. This is due both to the characteristics of the programs and to the abilities of the learners.

Research on aging has shown us repeatedly that short-term memory declines with age, but in FSI’s students this is compensated for by increased experience, which actually helps in the language learning process...

Table 2. Approximate learning expectations at the Foreign Service Institute

...

Note: All estimates in this figure assume that the student is a native speaker of English
with no prior knowledge of the language to be learned. It is also assumed that the student
has very good or better aptitude for classroom learning of foreign languages. Less skilled
language learners typically take longer.
Although languages are grouped into general
“categories” of difficulty for native English speakers, within each category some lan-
guages are more difficult than others....

The length of time it takes to learn a language well also depends to a great extent on similarities between that language and any other languages that the learner knows well. The more dissimilar a new language is—in structure, sounds, orthography, implicit world view, and so on—the longer learning takes.

For knowledge of one language to be a real advantage in learning another, however, it needs to be at a significant level. Thain and Jackson (n.d.) and an interagency group determined recently that this kind of advantage takes effect at a three-level proficiency or better. Below that level, knowledge of a second language does not appear to make any useful difference in acquisition of a related
third language."

Lessons learned from fifty years of theory and practice in government language teaching.
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kulaputra
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Re: Rapid passive knowledge acquisition

Postby kulaputra » Wed Jun 13, 2018 8:34 am

Tristano wrote:And that is fine, unless I have a full time job, a girlfriend and a daughter,.


Find a new girlfriend who speaks your TL and speak to your daughter in it too BAM now your daughter is bilingual for free, you can thank me later. Ok this is facetious, the rest is serious though:

Tristano wrote:Go three times a week to the gym,


Do you not listen to music at the gym? Guess what, you can do that in your TL too

Tristano wrote:share the housekeeping and the parenting, cook, play piano and other stuff, so I don't have 10 hours a day, nor 3 nor 1. Still I need to get more efficient and get a passive knowledge and integrate the language, not its study, in my life.


You seem to be obstinately refusing to do exactly that though. By treating your girlfriend, daughter, gym, piano, etc., basically your entire life, as "outside" the language, you will never incorporate the language into your life. Few or none of those things are inherently outside the language, if you're a little creative.

Tristano wrote:Study 10h of a language in the beginner stage and I promise you that you will need medical attention.


It's not "studying" if you enjoy it or at least don't find it energy-intensive. Literally listen to music in your TL. It's super low effort and it will improve your passive understanding.
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